Bad Lawyer (12 page)

I waited patiently for him to continue, but that, apparently, was as much as he was prepared to say. “And how long,” I finally asked, “does my client get to consider the state’s generous offer?”

“If she doesn’t take the plea before arraignment, the deal is off.”

“Carlo, you
goyishe
bastard, if you think I’m gonna go down to the holding pens, talk to my client through the bars with every mutt in the system listening, you must be living in a dream.”

The epithet seemed to ripple through his short black hair. For a moment, I thought he was going to come over the desk, settle the issue of guilt or innocence with his fists, but he finally calmed. “I’ve arranged to have the defendant brought into the empty courtroom next to Part 81. You can talk to her there. If that’s all right,
Sid
ney.”

Ten minutes later, I was sitting next to Priscilla on a bench in the center of room 1545. An armed court officer stood at the exit to the judge’s chambers, another lounged against the door leading to the hall. Priscilla slipped her finger around my palm and gripped tightly.

“It almost feels like freedom. I haven’t seen this much empty space in a long time.” She was wearing a standard orange jumpsuit, though she could have appeared in street clothes. The decision had been made at the last minute over the telephone; it fit nicely into my warts-and-all defense, and made her seem more like a victim.

“Priscilla, the one thing that
isn’t
on today’s agenda is freedom. Buscetta offered me a deal. If you plead to the top count, you get the minimum, fifteen-to-life.”

“Sounds like the same deal he offered a week ago.”

“Last week it would have been the maximum on the homicide, twenty-five years.” I fumbled a pack of cigarettes out of my jacket.

“No smoking,” the officer by the judge’s chamber called out. “No smoking anywhere in this building.”

“That a joke?” I shouted back to him. The no smoking signs in the hallways of justice were universally ignored, but if he wanted to be a prick, there was nothing I could do about it.

“No smoking,” he repeated.

I put the pack away, let go of Priscilla’s hand, stared into her gray eyes. “The way Buscetta tells it, Byron attacked you because you were skimming drug profits.”

“That’s bullshit. I …”

“The thing about Buscetta,” I interrupted, “is that he’s got the personality of a wolverine. Juries sense it and they don’t like him. So what he does is compensate with a thorough presentation of his case. That means he’s got at least two individuals willing to swear you were stealing from Byron. And don’t be surprised if one of them comes out of Rikers. Jailhouse informants are a Buscetta specialty.”

She flushed, the sudden burst of color accenting the faded bruises on the side of her face. “Do you really believe that I spoke about my case to anyone but you?”

“How is that relevant?”

“I guess it isn’t.” Priscilla curled one edge of her mouth into a half smile. “I guess it isn’t.” She crossed her legs, tucked her fingers between her thighs. “So tell me what I’m supposed to do about the plea.”

“My advice is not to take it, that the deal will get better as we get closer to trial. Buscetta’s not running the show here. There’s a plea board in the D.A.’s office made up of supervisors. Buscetta has input, but the board makes the final decision. I think what they’ll finally offer is manslaughter with a seven year minimum.”

“Seven years?” Priscilla glanced around the courtroom. “Christ, I could use a cigarette.” She pulled her hands free, looked at them for a moment, then folded her arms across her chest. “I can’t wait seven years to start my life. Just can’t. No, what I want to do is throw the dice. All or nothing.”

Her eyes betrayed neither fear nor defiance. They were dead, flat, as if she was looking at something or somebody invisible to the rest of the world.

“I think it’s time I told my story,” she said. “Such as it is.”

“I
T TOOK ME A
long time to understand that Byron was two people, one who loved me and one who hated me. It sounds trite when I say it out loud. Like I should have understood it in tenth grade when I read
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I can remember Mrs. Kaufman explaining the part about Mr. Hyde being in there all the time. Invisible—or at least unacknowledged—but definitely there, like an evil genie waiting for Aladdin to rub the lamp.

“But I never got it. Not until the very end, until I was holding the gun in my hand. It was heavy and hard, that gun. There was no give to it, nothing to let you off the hook. No lie you could tell yourself.

“I’d heard somewhere that guns have safeties on them. That you have to do something to make them fire. So I pushed this little bar on the side of the gun and the cylinder popped out. Byron thought it was funny. The way I jumped.

“He said, ‘Poor little Prissy. Life don’t wanna work for you. Must be something you did in a prior incarnation. Somethin’ you gotta work out.’”

“I remember the first time Byron hit me. The two of us were living on the Lower East Side and we didn’t have shit for money. Or maybe shit was
all
we had. The toilet in that apartment backed up every other day. I thought poverty was virtuous back then, but this place was really unlivable. There were shooting galleries on every floor, dopers nodding in the halls. The local winos used the lobby for a toilet.

“What I did was get on Byron’s case about moving out. I was waiting tables in Leshko’s, the Polish hashhouse on Avenue B, and Byron was putting my wages up his nose. Chasing the coke with pints of apricot brandy. Me, I was very young, and very clean, and very stupid.

“I said, ‘Byron, I have to get out of here. The junkies are grabbing me on the stairs.’

“‘Yeah, baby, we’re gonna get out. Just give it a little time.’

“I said, ‘We’ve been talking about it for six months.’

“Byron put the bottle in his mouth, finished it off real slow. Then he licked the last drops off his mouth and grinned at me.

“I said, ‘I’m not joking this time. My folks are willing to let me stay with them, at least temporarily, and that’s what I’m gonna do.’

“Byron came off that chair like he was spring-loaded. Punched me full force in the head. When I woke up a few minutes later, he was pressing a cold towel against my face. ‘Baby, baby, baby, baby …’ There were tears on the ends of his mustache. I could feel them dropping onto my throat.”

“I did my first lines of coke that night. It was wonderful, perfect; I’ve never felt as good, before or since. Byron loved me completely and I wanted him just as much as I wanted the next line. As if we were now joined forever, united by his fists and his dope.”

“Two months later I was running into Leshko’s bathroom every half hour for a little snort. You know, just to keep my head up so I could finish my shift. A month after that, I stopped going to work altogether. What was the point? I hadn’t been making enough money to support Byron’s habit and now I was matching him line for line.

“So we did what every middle-class coke junkie does. We started dealing to our friends. Buy a quality half, shave a few grams, make it up with cut, pass it on. It worked for almost a year, until our habits outgrew our customer base. Then we moved up to ounces, began dealing to people we barely knew. Always breaking the units down, skimming off the top, putting out those lines from dusk, when we got out of bed, till dawn. The parties didn’t start until after we closed the bars.”

“I wish I could say that I hated the life, but I didn’t. For the first few years, I don’t think I even minded Byron’s slapping me from time to time. We weren’t dealing on the street. Our customers were mostly freaks of one kind or another. Performance artists, mad poets, painters with beards that dropped to their belts, uptown rich kids with enough bank to feed the monkey. Those kids didn’t give a damn about anything. Not as long as they were stoned and had daddies to bail them out.

“Then I got popped the first time. I was walking along Broome Street, on my way home, and this undercover forced me into the lobby of an abandoned building, found a couple of grams in my bra. Later, when he testified before the Grand Jury, he swore he’d eye-balled me tossing a package into the gutter.

“Maybe the jurors didn’t believe him, because they indicted me for a misdemeanor instead of a felony and I pled it out in return for probation. Then, six months later, I caught another case. Same deal, probation, but the judge started making noises like he was tired of seeing my face. Like if it happened again, he might have to get serious.”

“As time went on, Byron’s hands got heavier and heavier. I think it was the juice, not the coke; he was buying vodka by the case. And then I got pregnant, which just made it worse, because I cleaned myself up, didn’t even smoke cigarettes, and he hated me for it.

“It wouldn’t be the first time a woman kicked a habit in the interests of her child. I kept telling myself I wasn’t going back to drugs, but I didn’t leave Byron, so I guess there has to be a lie somewhere in the mix. It all became meaningless anyway, because the baby only lived a few days and I was stuffing powder up my nose before the funeral was over. Thinking it was my fate, what I deserved,
all
I deserved.”

“For a long time after that, more than a year, I couldn’t bring myself to care about anything but cocaine. Humiliation became a way of life. Petty arguments were ended with a casual slap; the serious beatings came closer and closer together. I thought he was going to kill me and I thought it would be okay. I wanted him to just do it. Do it and get it over with.

“Then, one day, about a year later, I came close to getting my wish, this time in public. I was in a bar, having a drink with a dealing buddy, when Byron showed up, ripped me off the stool, beat me so bad I was sure I was going to die. The bartender—his name was Lance—pulled Byron off and called the cops. They took one look at me and placed Byron under arrest.

“I stayed in the hospital for two days. Long enough for the social worker, a woman named Miriam Farber, to convince me to press charges. I didn’t have any faith in the system, but the way it turned out, Byron’s eight months in Rikers scared the piss out of him. Remember, Byron’s folks were middle-class and for all his tough-guy attitude, Byron had been a good boy for most of his life, just like I’d been a good girl.

“I still ran into him from time to time, at parties or in the bars. He was always so, so sorry. It was very convincing, very real, and I might have taken him back even then, but fate intervened when the cops busted Johnny Fabriello, an old friend. Fabriello traded his time for mine by introducing me to a narc and I got taken down a few weeks later.”

“Once I understood the politics, prison was actually good for me. In order to survive, I paired up with a dyke, a lifer named Latisha Freemason. The sex was pretty ugly, but Latisha convinced me to pull my life together. Or at least to make the attempt.

“She told me, first of all, that I
had
a life and that it was mine. I was entitled to it, responsible for it. She told me that my life was my baby, that I had to treat it the way I would have treated my child.

“‘You got
family,
girl. Family that’s willing to help when the board cuts you loose. So don’t be makin’ no excuses ’bout how you gotta go right back to the life. This is all about you doin’ it to
you
.’”

“You’ve been to see my boss, Sid, and you know that I made my parole visits on time, that I was clean. You’ve got the letters, too, so I won’t get into why I let Byron move back after he was released from Sing Sing except to say that if I could redeem my life, why couldn’t he?

“I’ve read those letters again and again, looking for a clue. Because Byron didn’t revert after he came out of prison. No, prison was a great leveler for Byron; it reduced him, eliminated any trace of the good Dr. Jekyll. He took those group sessions, all right, the ones on coping with violence, but he did it to impress the parole board and it must have worked, because they cut him loose as soon as he was eligible. I was the second prize, like the peanut inside the M&M.

“Byron made his trip to Panama a week after his release. The fact that he could be remanded for leaving the state without permission didn’t bother him for a second. He was a master at manipulating his PO, skipping sessions, showing up late, always going to the edge without slipping over. He kept a bag of clean urine strapped to his belly, a bag with a tube on the end that he held against the side of his penis when he had to pee in the bottle.

“‘Funny thing,’ he once told me, ‘is a white man doesn’t really wanna look too close at a black man’s dick. Not unless he’s planning to suck it.’

“There was no pretense at sophistication, no more bohemian parties. For the first time, there were guns in the apartment. The people we dealt with, buying and selling, had razor-blade eyes. Byron could still be sweet when he was in the mood, but he made the deal plain to me early on.

“‘I own your ass. There’s nothing more to it. You try to leave before I’m finished with you, I’m gonna hurt you before I kill you. And I don’t give a shit about what happens afterward. You do thirty months, you can do thirty years.’

“I tried anyway, that time with my parents. The neighbor, Mr. Cassadina, saw it, too. Byron didn’t give a damn. He was going to be a player in the drug world; he was going to have the yachts, the offshore accounts, a villa in the British Virgin Islands. If he had to leave a trail of bodies in his wake … well, that’s what comets are all about.

“It was such a joke. Byron was just a flunky. Yeah, he dealt in weight, but he was getting the cocaine fronted to him at an outrageous price and he was cooking base at the rate of an ounce a day. When his connection demanded payment, he was always short. Then he’d grin and shuffle, beg for a little more time, accept a slap in the face like it was a kiss. After they left, of course, he’d take it out on me.

“Byron used me in another way, too. Most of the time, when there was a pickup to be made or he needed to move coke around the city, I was the mule, the one who carried it. This happens all the time in prison. The weaker convicts ferry weapons and contraband through the institution; if they get caught, they take the beating and do the time in the box. Believe me, especially in prisons for men, the alternative is far worse.”