Bad Blood (11 page)

“But what about the water?”

“Well, that’s it precisely, isn’t it? The compressed air I’m talking about was forced into the caissons from the top, also in tubes, meant to displace the water, meant to hold it back from coming in and drowning the men. That air was searing, like it came out of a blast furnace, like white-hot needles were pricking at your lungs and your eardrums, they used to say.”

“Nothing they could see or smell or touch,” Mike said, “but it was the compressed air that kept them alive.”

“Or killed them,” Teddy added. “You hear stories about working in the air from any of your folk from the other side?”

Mike nodded.

“Men would tell you their chests swelled to twice the size, their voices were high-pitched, if they could speak at all, and the headaches were blinding. Worst of all was what they called the caisson’s disease.”

“The bends,” Mike said.

“Crippled the joints, terrible abdominal pains, bad fever and sweats. Every shift in those boxes, only three or four hours was all they could stand, seemed a lifetime.”

“But why—” I started to ask.

“’Cause if you just got off the boat and had no way to put food on the table,” Mike said, “it’s what you did. It’s all you could do.”

“And when the air didn’t hold or the men struck a boulder fifty feet down, there’d be a great blowout spurting back the water like a geyser, and taking the workers with it,” Teddy went on. “Drowning them, squeezing them into the mud below, crushing their lungs with the pressure — hell of a lot of ways for a man to die down there, and many of them did just that.”

Teddy paused. “Work got under way on the Hudson River tunnels a few years later, our boys were digging out rock and earth — and then worst of all was when they got to the sand below the riverbed. Like quicksand it was, shifting and sinking — have you up to your neck in slime before you could count to five. They didn’t have a name for us until then. Sandhogs it was a hundred years ago and sandhogs it is today.”

Mike took his blazer off the back of his chair and slung it over his shoulder, his forefinger looped beneath the label. “There’s an entire empire built beneath New York by sandhogs for more than a century. Subway and train lines, water tunnels, car tubes, train terminals. They’re what keeps us in business, Teddy. They’re what makes this place possible. But it’s a city we don’t often think about, and it’s a city most of us never see.”

“There’s a reason for that, Mike — a good reason,” Teddy said, pushing up to leave the table. “That beast beneath us? It’s a city of death.”

Artie Tramm had been schmoozing with me since I walked into Part 83 at ten thirty in the morning. I had driven downtown, leaving my apartment at 7 a.m., although traffic aboveground was as slow as the West Side subway routes, which were tied up because of the investigation into the explosion. My normal twenty-minute ride had taken more than one hour.

“You wouldn’t catch me in one of those tunnels,” Artie said, leaning against the railing behind me, picking at something between his front teeth with the tip of a small pocketknife. “I’m a real — what do you call it? Claustrophobe? Papers say that dig is as far down in the ground as the tip of the Chrysler Building is high. Sixty stories deep. Could you stand being in someplace like that every day?”

I was organizing my files in the empty courtroom, waiting for the players to arrive so we could get on with the trial. It was Thursday, and we were already scheduled not to work tomorrow because of a personal day off that I had requested weeks earlier.

“Nope. I’m with you. Fresh air to breathe and lots of daylight,” I said, remembering my own reaction to being trapped briefly in an enclosed space during an investigation in Poe Park the previous winter. It chilled me even to think about it.

“A few years from now, we’ll be drinking water from that pipeline, wondering if those guys’ fingers or toes are still swimming around in it.”

“What guys?”

Gossip traveled through the corridors of 100 Centre Street faster than the speed of sound. I had listened to the car radio all the way downtown and heard nothing more about any loss of life in the blast.

“The poor schmucks that got blown up. The hogs whose DNA is gonna be dripping out of the HO and into your kitchen sink before very long,” Artie said, licking his teeth and folding the knife.

“What?”

“You know Billy, the captain in Part 62? He’s got a cousin whose wife’s brother is one of them sandhogs. Says there’s three guys missing. Says the cops found some pieces of flesh when they went down inside this morning.”

The door that led to the judge’s chambers opened and Gertz came in, lifting his robe up over his shoulders as he took the bench shortly before eleven o’clock.

Lem Howell followed him into the empty courtroom and perched on the edge of my table. There was no use complaining about whatever ex parte conversation he had been having with the judge. Their friendship went back longer than mine, and they would both deny that their conversation had included the Quillian case.

“Artie, how many jurors have we got?”

“Nine, so far.”

“Any of the missing call in?”

“Yeah, number two,” Artie said as he approached the bench. “She got as far as Penn Station on the IRT, then she had a panic attack while the cops were stopping kids all around her to search their backpacks. I told her to get out and take a cab and we’d reimburse her. The others must be stuck underground, Judge. The radio’s reporting lots of delays.”

“So, Mr. Howell, how do you propose we pass the time? Miss Cooper?”

Lem liked to use the subterfuge of personal chitchat to stick his nose in my pile of papers, hoping to pick up some clues to the nature of the evidence I’d be presenting in days to come.

“I’m hoping, Your Honor, that Ms. Cooper will tell us how she pulled that sleight of hand last night. Whatever
did
you do, girl, to create that midtown miasma? My Kate Meade moment lost in the headlines to this commotion in some big ol’ hole in the ground. I know Alexandra had something to do with it.” Lem lifted a blue folder from the table and waved it over his head. “Right here, Judge, it’s her ‘dirty tricks’ file.”

“The first of many, Mr. Howell. Something stayed with me from those early days under your tutelage,” I said to Lem before responding to the court. “Do we have a stenographer? Would you be willing to hear argument now, Judge, on the domestic violence expert I plan to call?”

“Good idea. Artie, see if the court reporter is in the hallway.”

Lem walked up to the bench and tried to sweet-talk the judge before we resumed the formal proceeding. “Seems to me there’s nothing beyond ordinary understanding that these jurors need to hear. We’re not talking scientific methodology, are we? She has no business calling an expert on this issue. Alexandra doesn’t have a scintilla, not a shred, not a speck of medical evidence suggesting any violence in the Quillian relationship. No injury, no police reports.”

“Help me make my argument, Lem. That’s precisely part of the reason I need this witness.”

Artie Tramm returned with the official stenographer, who carried her compact machine and its tripod toward the front of the room.

Lem was wise to ask for an offer of proof to try to knock my witness out of the case. By forcing my hand early in the trial, I would have to give the judge — and the defense — a preview of the points I hoped to make. If I lost the argument, it would be a major blow to the case I was trying to mount.

“Let’s have the defendant,” Gertz said, waving his robed arm at Tramm again. “Bring him in.”

Now, without jurors or spectators present, the court officers opened the door on the far side of the bench and I could see them unlocking Brendan Quillian’s handcuffs as they led him from the holding pen. He was compliant and cooperative with his jailers, unlike most felons being brought to court, offering up his wrists to them like a gentleman and thanking them as they freed him to enter the room.

Jonetta Purvis called the case into the calendar, the judge made a record of the reason for the late start to the day, and I rose to begin my argument. The legs of Quillian’s chair scraped the floor as he positioned it to look at me, and as I picked my head up at the sound of it, I fixed briefly on his cold, dead eye.

“Who’s this expert you want to put on the stand, Ms. Cooper?” Gertz asked.

“Her name is Emma Enloe. Dr. Enloe. She’s a physician with the New York City Department of Health.”

“I thought you told Mr. Howell the deceased was never treated for any injuries?”

“That’s correct, Your Honor. Dr. Enloe neither met nor examined Amanda Quillian. Her expertise is the subject of intimate-partner violence.” The law had come late to respect and recognize this area of specialty. In most courtrooms all over America, as recently as the 1980s, domestic assaults had most often been considered private matters. Husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, ex-lovers whose quarrels had escalated to physical abuse were told by prosecutors, police, and judges to go home and work out the problems between themselves. Rarely was the known assailant considered the same risk to the victim as a stranger, and rarely was any attempt made to consider the lethality factor — the potential for future harm — in setting bail or issuing a protective order.

“What’s to know about it?” Gertz asked. “The crime is the same on the books — homicide, assault, rape — whether the bad guy is married to the victim or never saw her before.”

“It may read that way in the penal law,” I said, “but the fact is that most people don’t treat victims of domestic abuse in the same manner. Not in law enforcement, not in the criminal justice system, not in the medical community — and not in the general public, the people who make up our jury pool.”

“So what’s this lady going to tell us?”

“Mumbo jumbo,” Lem Howell said. “Gibberish. She’s not going to tell you anything you don’t already know.”

“Dr. Enloe issued a formal report two years ago, which was the result of a research project conducted under her supervision. Scientific research, if that makes Mr. Howell any happier. She used a four-year period before that to study the causes and manner of death of every woman murdered in New York City.”

“How many was that?”

“More than twelve hundred killings in just that time range — femicides — all women over the age of sixteen. And in more than half of those cases — the ones that were solved — they were able to establish what the relationship was, stranger or acquaintance, between the victims and their killers.”

The landmark report had been front-page news in the
New York Times
and widely disseminated in the legal community, but Gertz cocked his head and looked at me in a way that suggested he hadn’t read it.

“Go on, Ms. Cooper.”

“Half the women in the study had been killed by their husbands or boyfriends. Fifty percent of them.”

“I think the judge knows that fifty percent is half, Alexandra,” Lem said.

“I’m not done, Mr. Howell,” I said. “This isn’t psychobabble, Your Honor. Enloe’s findings are based on autopsy reports, crime-scene photographs, toxicology, and ballistics. It’s completely fact-driven.”

“What’s the relevance here, Ms. Cooper?” Gertz asked.

“There is a lot of information in regard to domestic violence — a number of things that are well beyond the general knowledge of the jury, or, may I say, most respectfully, even of the court.”

Lem was pacing behind his client now, trying to distract the judge from the points I wanted to make. He chuckled in a blatantly artificial way. “Something the court doesn’t know? I taught you a long time ago never to dis the judge like that, Alexandra.”

“First of all, while the rate of every other violent crime in this city decreased steadily throughout the years of the study, the rates of domestic homicides did not.” I checked my notes to begin my list of the project’s findings. Effective community-policing efforts cut down street crimes and crack dealing with enormous success, but were useless at reaching beyond the closed doors of an intimate relationship.

“Last year, the NYPD responded to 247,000 incidents of domestic abuse — that’s almost seven hundred calls a day.”

“But Mrs. Quillian never called the police nor did she report any crime. Not last year nor any other year. I’d object, Your Honor, to Ms. Cooper even bringing that useless little factoid to the jury’s attention.”

“Well, then, I’ll move on to something about which Mr. Howell, in his opening — and in his cross-examination of my first witness — made a big fuss. Something
he’s
put at issue in this case. That’s the fact that Brendan Quillian has no criminal history, no known violent behavior prior to this arrest. In Dr. Enloe’s study, in thirty percent of the murders the offender had exhibited no previous physical violence.”

Judge Gertz rested his chin in his left hand and started to take notes with his right.

“Women are actually murdered in different ways than men,” I went on. “Male victims of homicides are most often shot or stabbed to death. They are killed on the street or in the workplace or in any kind of public space, while women are attacked inside the privacy of their homes. When women are killed by a partner, it’s usually in a very personal manner — hands on, if you will — exhibiting far more force than necessary to cause death, and far more rage. They are beaten and burned and thrown out of windows,” I said, glancing at the defendant. “And they are most frequently victims of strangulation.”

Quillian took advantage of the jury’s absence to smirk at me. His good eye cut through me like a laser.

“In addition, Your Honor, Enloe’s study identifies two times in intimate relationships when women are at greatest risk of victimization. These findings have been confirmed, in fact, by all of the data available nationally.”

“Let’s have them,” Gertz said.

“The leading cause of death for pregnant women in America is homicide, Your Honor — which is a fact not generally known—”

Lem Howell stepped up to the table and slammed his hand against it. “That has nothing to do with this case, Judge. Nothing at all to do with my client or Amanda Quillian.”