The Wrong Kind of Money (63 page)

With his stern prosecutorial eyes glaring at the defendant, the prosecutor kept repeating the obvious: Carol's fingerprints were on the lethal weapon; there were powder burns on her right hand. And since Carol had an alcohol level in her bloodstream of .10 at the time of her arrest, he asserted that the shootings occurred in “a wild, mad, drunken rage.”

The lawyer Bathy had chosen for Carol's defense was a young man named Justin Baar. Quiet, polite, soft-spoken, and almost shy-seeming in Judge Kaminsky's presence, Mr. Baar had had little previous courtroom experience, and this, Bathy decided, would work to the defense's advantage. Because Mr. Baar refused to respond to the prosecutor's thundering oratory with much more than a raised eyebrow, the prosecutor's performance was robbed of the drama he clearly wanted. The prosecutor obviously wanted a courtroom battle, but there can be no battle when the opponent refuses to fight back. Each verbal climax on the part of the prosecution was followed by anticlimax on the part of the defense. And this tactic—as Bathy had hoped—made the proceedings in Judge Kaminsky's chambers seem decidedly unnewsworthy to the media.

There was, of course, one tricky problem. Immediately following her arrest, Carol had videotaped and signed a full confession. She and only she, she swore, had held the gun. Naturally, she did this to protect Anne, but this confession would be a major stumbling block for her defense. Mr. Baar, meanwhile, was growing tired of hearing his client described as “blind, stinking, out-of-her-mind drunk.” A .10 alcohol level in the bloodstream, Mr. Baar pointed out to Bathy, is actually minimal for intoxication; it pained him to hear his client portrayed as no better than a Bowery bum. But Bathy had an interesting suggestion. “If Carol was blind, stinking, out-of-her-mind drunk when she pulled the trigger,” Bathy said, “she must obviously have been bund, stinking, out-of-her-mind drunk ten minutes later when she taped her confession. Why would anyone believe a confession from a person in that condition?” Thus was the prosecutor's own rhetoric thrown back at him.

Anne was the final witness called in her mother's defense. And it was there that Bathy was able to execute her most brilliant move. Mr. Baar had succeeded in persuading Judge Kaminsky that because of Anne's age, she would testify as Jane Doe and not as Anne Liebling. But then—in a most unusual move, and over the most vociferous objections of the county prosecutor—he requested that Anne's testimony be heard on a Saturday morning. In no one's memory had a Manhattan courtroom been open on a Saturday; it was unheard of, the prosecutor bellowed. But in his customary shy and gentle way, Mr. Baar said, “We're only requesting this, sir, so that the young woman's studies at college will be disrupted as little as possible. Surely, this young woman's life has suffered terrible disruptions already. This testimony is going to be painful enough for her as it is. Surely you don't want her to suffer more pain and distress by having to be conspicuously absent on a school day—a day, incidentally, when she is scheduled to take an important examination for which she has been studying long and hard. We have struggled in this courtroom to preserve this young girl's anonymity and privacy, and to keep her out of the public spotlight. Please show a little human kindness, sir, by not forcing her to interrupt her valuable education. As a father yourself, wouldn't you ask the same consideration for your own teenage daughter, sir?”

Judge Kaminsky agreed, and announced that her court would go into special session on Saturday morning to hear Anne's testimony.

From her years in public relations Bathsheba Sachs knew that, except for extraordinary, fast-breaking news stories, men and women in the media never willingly go to work on weekends. Neither, as a rule, do county prosecutors, and this one was forced to cancel an important golf date.

And so, gently guided by Mr. Baar, Anne Liebling offered her tearful, truthful testimony. The prosecutor, clearly in a foul mood, declined to cross-examine her. Judge Kaminsky then declared the proceedings closed, and announced that she would deliver her verdict on Monday morning.

That Saturday, in fact, was yesterday. Now it is Sunday morning, and Bathsheba Sachs has just awakened from a vivid and disturbing dream. In it she was back at Grandmont again, that great castle Jules built of granite and French buhrstone high on a hill overlooking the Hudson. In her dream she approached the house as they all used to approach it in Jules's Pierce-Arrow, up the long, curving drive with its rhododendron hedges until the house itself appeared, its turrets and its battlements and crenels, designed in no particular style except what one critic rather waspishly described as Middle European Post Office. The house not only dominated the landscape. It loomed over it. Every window in the house was lighted in Bathy's dream, as though to welcome her home.

The wide green lawns swept down to the riparian wall, which obscured the New York Central's tracks from view. Mr. Vanderbilt's railroad had tried to ruin the Hudson's eastern shore, but it had not succeeded at Grandmont, where only the river itself was visible. The river is nearly a mile wide at this point and still tidal; the Indians called it the River That Flows Two Ways. Across the river, on its west bank, twinkled the lights of the village of Sneden's Landing, tucked against the shoreline in the first drop in the Palisades, and to the north the mercury lights of the Tappan Zee Bridge glowed like a chain of garnets.

Up the river steamed the night boat to Albany, and there was laughter and music from her decks. Outside slept the animals in the family's private zoo—a llama named Llewellyn, a tame zebra called Honey, a baby elephant named Baba au Rhum, and Cyril's beloved Potto, the bush baby.

But suddenly into the peaceful dream came the voices—voices from the village, and even from the corridors of the Ingraham Building itself—whispering voices:

“Isn't it a scandal? His wife's own sister! How does his wife put up with it, do you suppose? She
must
know. She must be some kind of saint. It's been going on for years. How she must suffer … and yet she never lets on … but then, what can you expect from people like that? … With Jules Liebling's background … a bootlegger … He had people killed….”

Bathy had learned to ignore such talk, to shrug it off, to laugh it off, because she knew that the truth was much different from what people thought it was, and that if people had known what the real truth was, the scandal would have been much greater. So why, in her dream, had these voices still not lost their power to hurt her?

Then, in the dream, a carousel of images appeared across her sleeping consciousness like color slides projected on a screen.
Click.
There was little Noah in a blue and white sailor suit and white cap, dressed that way by Hannah perhaps because she was remembering the young seaman who had been the one true love of her life.
Click.
There was Hannah herself, looking strong and purposeful in the garden with her pruning shears and a wicker basket over her arm.
Click.
There was Cyril, trying to make his father love him, holding out his arms to Bathy, asking for her to comfort him for some punishment he'd been given for some misdeed he'd committed in his father's eyes.
Click.
There was Cyril's little sister, Ruth, lively and pretty in those days, dreaming of becoming a movie star, much to her father's dismay.
Click.
There was the children's aunt Settie Kahn, who was killed by a swan, looking wan and stooped and bitter. Settie was always dropping by Grandmont on some excuse or other, mostly to get away from her husband, Bathy always supposed. After Settie died, Hannah reinvented Settie as some ethereal and beautiful creature, “too good to live,” as Hannah used to say, one of Dr. Marcus Sachs's Three Graces—Settie, Hannah, and Bathy. But to Bathy, Settie was always a troublemaker who carried tales, some true, some false, between members of the family. Settie was always jealous of Hannah because Hannah had married a man much richer than Leo Kahn, and because Hannah had had children while Settie was barren. At the same time, Settie treated Jules in a haughty and condescending way, often referring to him behind his back—though she'd never have dared to do so to his face—as “the Polack.”

Whenever Bathy thinks of Settie, she doesn't think of her stoop. She thinks of her sneer. The sneer was in her dream.

Click.
Then, at last, came a picture of Jules himself, looking stern and disapproving and disappointed and disgusted, and other words beginning with the letter d. And in her dream his mouth suddenly flew wide open, as if he was about to roar, and she strained to listen to what he was about to shout out to her. It seemed to be some sort of accusation, that he was trying to say she hadn't forgiven him enough, though the words didn't seem to come. Then she knew that the letter d was important, that the word began with the letter d, and that the word was
do.
“Didn't I
do
enough for you?” she cried out to him. “Didn't any of us
do
enough for you?” The cry woke her up, trembling, and frightened and in a cold sweat. Because Bathy Sachs almost never has dreams like that—dreams that begin in tranquility and light, and end in terror and disorder. A word that begins with d.

And now she lies in her bed on this sunny Sunday morning, and her thoughts are filled with him. Why?

He never told her that he loved her. She thought she knew why. It was because to have done so would have been an act of betrayal to Hannah. If that was the case, she admired that in him. For the same reason she never told him that she loved him. It was as though they had a silent pact, always to leave those words unspoken. For Hannah's sake.

The most romantic thing he ever said to her was when he once said, “You're one person I can always count on. Miss Fix-It.” Not
the
one person. Just one person. One thing he could always count on her to do was to forgive him. She did, even though they never made love again after that morning at Grandmont when Noah burst in on them together.

His greatest disappointment, of course, was Cyril. He never really got over that. A famous psychiatrist named Dr. Edmund Bergler once told Cyril that his problems with homosexuality stemmed from his hatred of his father. Dr. Bergler recommended that Cyril buy a gymnastic punching bag, pin a picture of his father to it, and “work out his rage” there. This always struck Bathy as an absurd notion. Cyril didn't hate his father. To be sure, he didn't always see eye to eye with him. Indeed, there was a long and painful period when Cyril did not see his father at all. Cyril didn't always see eye to eye with his mother, either, for Hannah has always been a woman who wanted to have her cake and eat it, too, and who has usually managed to do so. Hannah has always been a woman whom it is difficult to feel close to. And Hannah certainly did not handle the Cyril situation well. Though Hannah would never admit it, there were a number of situations that Hannah did not handle well. But Bathy thinks—playing devil's advocate—when Jules was alive it was difficult for anyone else to handle
any
situation! It wasn't until after Jules's death that Hannah began to come into her own. She proved herself to be a woman of many talents. But being a mother was never one of them.

Dr. Bergler also suggested that Cyril hated Noah. Not so, Bathy thinks. True, Cyril was often jealous of Noah, because he became so clearly his father's favorite. But Noah was too kind and sweet to hate. Cyril loved Noah. He loved his parents. He loved them all unbearably, for isn't love that is not returned the most powerful, cruel love there is? Bathy thinks so.

The kidnapping episode has always struck her as a case in point. It was certainly a bungled enterprise from the outset. It was originally the brainchild of Joey Fernandez, a youth with whom Cyril made an unfortunate acquaintanceship. Ruth had recently eloped with the Brazilian named Antonio Fernandez-Just, and there was much published about this in the press, due to the wide discrepancy in the couple's ages. The similarity of the names—they were obviously not related—caught the eye of Pal Joey. Also in the press was the notation that Sr. Fernandez-Just was the heir to a copper fortune estimated at 2.5 million dollars, but that this was “little more than lunch money to Jules Liebling, the billionaire booze baron.” With Joey, Cyril had tried to conceal the fact that his father was rich. But now the cat was out of the bag, so to speak.

Joey Fernandez's rationale was this: “If your sister can latch on to two-point-five million dollars just by marrying some spic, why don't you deserve the same amount? And my brother and I are two spics who'll help you get it.” And so the kidnapping plot was hatched. Since Cyril's cooperation was essential to the endeavor, the plan was for Cyril to receive half the ransom money, while the other half was to be divided between the brothers. Cyril went along with the scheme, as he explained to Bathy later, for two reasons. For one, he had made the mistake of falling quite madly in love with Joey Fernandez. But even more important, he was curious to see whether his father, into whose disfavor he had increasingly fallen, would actually pay that much money for his life. Was Cyril's life worth that much to Jules? Cyril felt he had to know. Was Cyril worth Jules's lunch money?

Of course, the answer to that question will never be known, since the money, when it was delivered—with the exception of a few hundred-dollar bills placed on the tops of the packets as decoys—consisted of cut-up newspaper stuffed into garbage bags by Jules, Hannah, Kevin Shaughnessy, and Bathy.

Of course, the whole scheme was badly botched from the beginning. But as Bathy once suggested to Jules, “I wonder whether Cyril didn't really want it to be botched—perhaps unconsciously. Unconsciously, he really wanted the plot to fail. He didn't really want to extort money from you. He just wanted to see how much you loved him.”

“Bullshit” was Jules's reply.

Today, Cyril strikes most people as a very silly man. But, Bathy thinks, what most people don't realize about Cyril is that his silliness is calculated. Silliness is his defense, his only remaining weapon against the world, his mask. Behind the mask lurks a shy and sensitive and deeply hurt man whom Bathy has always cared for very much.