Bad Lawyer (20 page)

When Detective Sergeant Harold Knapp, his shield extended, jumped out of an unmarked Ford and strode across the street to intercept me as I approached the door of my apartment building, I flashed straight back to my mother as she’d stood in the doorway between the foyer and the kitchen of our Brooklyn home. I remembered her exactly as she’d been, one hand against her throat, the other extended, offering me the phone receiver as if it explained everything.

And I experienced that same catch in my lungs, was unable to draw a breath, felt my chest squeezed down as if by a heart attack. Knapp’s pale face swam into view. He was a middle-aged man, hat-less despite the cold night and his nearly bald scalp. I remember that his brows and eyelashes were thin and blond, that his watery blue eyes were two circular ice cubes floating beneath a pair of soft, fleshy lids.

“Sidney Kaplan?” He watched me for a moment, his stare as frankly evaluating as that of a two-year-old. “You all right?”

I nodded once, caught the glint of a reflection in the Ford across the street, became aware of a man in the car, another detective, though I couldn’t see his features clearly.

“I’m here about a man named Caleb Talbot. You know who he is?”

My breath began to come back to me, as it had come back to my mother, in little sips at first, then in a deep, sucking rush. Again, I nodded.

“Talbot’s dead.” Knapp raised his chin, looked down at me along the length of his nose. “Murdered, up in the Heights.”

When I still didn’t reply, he said, “You don’t seem surprised.”

I shrugged, turned, rang my apartment buzzer. If Julie was home, I wanted to know it. Then I realized that Knapp must have already tried the bell, that our home was empty. “You know who I am?” I asked, turning to face him again.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Your name is on Talbot’s business card. That’s how I found you.”

“Then stop with the games and tell me what it is you want.”

“We need someone to identify the body.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, rubbed his hands together. “Christ, it’s cold.”

I expected to be taken to the morgue. Instead, Detective Brown, the man I’d seen inside the car, turned left on Third Avenue and headed straight uptown.

“The M.E.’s gonna be delayed,” Knapp said. He was half turned in the front seat, watching me over his shoulder. “I figured, what the fuck, let’s see if we can find a relative, get the I.D. over and done with. By the way, you guys live together?” His fleshy mouth expanded into a smirk. “You guys roommates or somethin’?”

He continued to throw questions at me as we rode, and with no real choice, I answered. The radio squawked from time to time, its terse messages blending into the traffic noise, the hum of the tires, the occasional blaring horn. I remember closing my eyes at some point, and a powerful sensation of being sucked forward into a narrowing tunnel. As if even the pretense of volition was to be denied me.

Knapp asked me where I’d been that night and I answered. He asked if anyone else lived in the apartment and I told him about Julie. He asked where she was and I told him that I didn’t know. He asked me if I knew what Caleb had been doing in Washington Heights, if Caleb had enemies, if I knew anyone who might have a motive for murder.

I lied on each of the last three questions, answering with a simple, “No.” There wasn’t a chance in hell that he believed me, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about it. Still, he continued to chatter away, asking how long Caleb had been working for me, what it was he did, what he’d been working on recently. And I continued to answer, even as I tried to conjure up some real, actual place Julie could be except in the hands of Elizado Guzman.

The crime scene was deserted except for a single cruiser sitting with its engine running at the head of the alleyway. For some reason, I saw this as an affront, an insult to the body lying back in the darkness. Caleb needed protection, if not actual attendance. There had to be rats back in that alley, rustling through the garbage, hungry, searching for any bit of flesh.

“For Christ’s sake,” I told Knapp, “he was one of yours. He was a cop. He shouldn’t be alone.”

For the first time, Brown turned to look at me. He was a black man, tall enough to brush the car’s liner with the top of his head. His round, nondescript features were dominated by a pair of round eyeglasses, their lenses tinted pink. “He ain’t gonna mind, counselor. It’s cold in the morgue, too.”

Knapp spoke briefly to the uniformed cops inside the cruiser, firing off a series of questions to which he received short respectful answers. Yes, the crime scene unit had finished and was gone. No, the ME hadn’t shown. Yes, they’d remained in place for the whole time. No, nobody had approached the alley. In fact, the locals had been driven indoors by the cold, just as he and his partner had been driven into their unit.

Finally, at a signal from Knapp, Brown pulled forward and to the curb. “Leave it running,” Knapp said, “and leave the goddamn heater on.”

I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t move, just sat their dumbly, my hands jammed in my pockets, until Knapp finally opened the door from the outside, snapped on a flashlight, shone it briefly in my face. “You ready, Mr. Kaplan?”

The wind hit me like a slap and I ducked my head instinctively, pulling my exposed neck down into the collar of my coat. Knapp nodded, smiled, turned the flashlight to the mouth of the alley.

“Way I figure it,” he said, “Talbot was shot somewhere else and ran into the alley to get away. You see this here?” His light flashed to a black pool. “That’s blood.” The light swung forward. “There’s more of it, here and here.” He was walking now, swinging the flashlight from side to side as he went. “That garbage can was knocked down when I got here. Most likely, he stumbled against it. There’s a palm print on the wall where he must’ve leaned. See the blood?”

As we moved forward, as Knapp rattled on and Brown watched me from behind, I felt myself tightening down. There’d been times in my life when I’d lived on defiance alone, on the pure refusal to submit. In that space, anger was sustenance, misery a badge of honor. Caleb would have understood, of course. Julie as well. Knapp, on the other hand, was after something entirely different. He wanted a murderer.

“Well, this is as far as he got.”

My head jerked up, following the beam of the flashlight as it swung quickly forward. I picked out the skeleton of a rusted shopping cart, a tilted, doorless refrigerator, a stack of paint cans against the wall. But I didn’t see Caleb, even when I looked at the dark circle in the center of the light.

“You wanna get a little closer, Mr. Kaplan? We gotta be sure it’s really your roommate here.”

What I wanted to do was turn and run, hit the nearest bar, drain a bottle of scotch. And I might have done it, too, if Knapp and his partner weren’t there to witness my shame. I flashed back to my grandfather, seeing his tiny round eyes in the darkness, his shy, sincere smile. “In dem days, Sidney, we was all tough guys. We had’a be.”

I stepped forward, sliding my feet as if on skis. Caleb was wearing a black coat, lying in a puddle of black blood; his round body seemed to flow into the larger shadow and for a moment I couldn’t locate a top and bottom. I could find neither his head nor his feet.

“Way I see it,” Knapp said, crossing the blood with the flashlight beam, “your buddy musta bled out. Exsanguinated. That’s what the ME will say in court. Exsanguinated.”

I slid up next to him, looked straight down his arm at Caleb’s unmarked features. Caleb was lying on his side, with his open left eye locked on his hand which lay, palm up, in front of his face. I wanted to touch him, felt it was somehow expected, but Detective Brown, as if he’d been lying in wait, yanked me back to reality.

“The guy’s frozen. Gotta be. Like a rock. The ME’s gonna have to nuke him in a microwave before they do the autopsy.”

They took me downtown, from the crime scene on 185th Street and Audubon Avenue, to the headquarters of the Manhattan North homicide squad on West 52nd Street. It was still early, barely ten o’clock, and the Upper West Side was just gearing up for its nightly run at oblivion. As we drove (and while Sgt. Knapp groused to his partner about a woman named Iris, a cop groupie who hung at his favorite bar, but wouldn’t give him the time of day) I stared into the windows of the bars and the nightclubs, drawn to the shadows, the glow of neon, the imagined hum of sexually charged conversation.

For most of my life, I’d walked into bars like an animal in search of a den. The best ones enveloped you, smothered you in quiet and safety, in the mixed odors of alcohol and tobacco, in the protective cloak of your personal fantasy. I could be whatever I wanted, even a big shot lawyer who won cases by day, partied until the break of dawn, never looked back to see who or what was gaining on him. Now, I’m not sure there was ever a time when I could sustain that life, that I wouldn’t have been a better (though less amusing) attorney if I’d stayed at home with a cup of cocoa.

They gave me a mug of coffee after we settled into chairs around Knapp’s desk, and offered me an oozing jelly doughnut which I refused. As before, Knapp asked most of the questions while his partner fixed me with what was surely meant to be an intimidating glare. Unfortunately, the tinted glasses only drew attention to the watery, allergic eyes behind them, so that Brown’s gaze had a tentative, almost pleading quality to it.

“Awright.” Knapp took a microcassette recorder from a desk drawer, held it up for my inspection. “Just for the record, this interview is being recorded.” Speaking very clearly, very slowly, he stated the day, the date, and the time, then my name, his own, his partner’s.

After the first hour, Brown left the room to check my alibi and I stopped paying attention. I’d already established the most important point, that my time was accounted for, and I wasn’t going to mention Guzman or his threats, not until I knew more about Julie’s situation. In truth, I was still holding out hope. Thinking maybe she’d gone out to interview a witness, or to visit an old lover. Maybe there was a note back at the apartment, stuck into the hall mirror, the proper place for notes in our household. Or maybe Julie was there now, afraid for her family, wondering where I was.

Brown was in a much better mood when he returned. “Hey, good news, counselor. I checked out your alibi and you come up clean as a whistle.” He bit into a doughnut, swallowed. “Yeah, I called that reporter, Morris. She says you were with her every minute. Course, bein’ as the public has the right to know, I had’a tell her what happened to ya buddy. She’s headin’ uptown with a photographer even as we speak.”

I sat down, shrugged my shoulders. “Is there something else we have to do here?”

He took me back over the same ground: what were Caleb’s duties, what was he working on when I left the office, did he keep a log of his activities, did I have any clients or witnesses who lived in Washington Heights, why didn’t I want to help the police find my roommate’s killer?

“Maybe what I should do,” he said after thirty minutes of verbal sparring, “is hold you as a material witness while I get a warrant, search your office.”

It was so stupid, I didn’t bother to reply directly. “The problem with cops is that they only have room in their heads for one idea at a time. You have no reason to believe that …” I hesitated, unable, for a moment, to say his name. “… that Caleb Talbot’s presence on 185th Street was work related. Maybe he was up there visiting a friend, maybe he was the victim of a street mugger, maybe your line of inquiry is pure bullshit.” I took out a pack of cigarettes, lit one up. “Better get out the Visine, Brown,” I told Knapp’s partner when he protested. “You want me to stay, I gotta access my nicotine delivery system.”

In the end, I promised to go through Caleb’s desk (this after refusing Knapp the same privilege on the grounds of client confidentiality), and pass along any piece of information specifically related to the day’s activities. I also gave them Caleb’s lover, Ettamae Harris, who they were going to find sooner or later. Ettamae lived in Harlem, the neighborhood directly south of Washington Heights.

“What I’m gonna do,” I told him as I stood up, “is call Ettamae, tell her what happened. And what I’m hoping is you’ll let me notify her before you knock on her door.”

“Hey, no problem,” Knapp said. “Everybody knows me, knows I’m a sensitive guy.”

I walked into a dark empty apartment and went directly to the phone in my office. I was determined to put it simply, get it over with: “Ettamae, Caleb’s dead.” But when she picked up, when I heard her sleepy, Southern voice mutter a querulous, “Helloooo,” I couldn’t get past the first word.

“Ettamae …” Again, something in my chest, some previously undiscovered organ, squeezed into a tight ball. My eyes filled, overflowed, my nose as well. I heard my own grunts—“Uh, uh, uh”—from so great a distance I couldn’t be sure I was making the sound. Nor, for a moment, when Ettamae’s wail exploded in my ear, was I sure the cry hadn’t come from my own throat.

Eventually, I managed to convey the two essential facts: dead and murdered. Eventually, Ettamae decided that she would inform the family. Eventually, I agreed to deal with the ME’s office, to retrieve the body after the autopsy, to have Caleb’s butchered remains transported to an unnamed funeral home.

Then I was alone, sitting in my swivel chair, the smoke from a cigarette spiraling upward, from control into chaos. I heard a siren outside my window, soft at first, then louder, more intrusive, as it came up Third Avenue. Though it might easily be coming from a fire engine or a police cruiser, I imagined it an ambulance, imagined Caleb’s body inside, still dressed, still bloody, in the final stage of its journey from an uptown alley to the morgue a few blocks away.

I’m not sure how long I sat there, lighting one cigarette after another, before the phone rang. I know I didn’t retrieve the messages on the answering machine, though I’m not sure why. Maybe I just wanted a little space, a few minutes of zombie calm before I began tilting at the windmill of New York violence.

The first call was from Phoebe Morris. Always the journalist, the consummate professional, she wanted my reaction to Caleb’s death. I refused, told her I wasn’t ready to make a statement, hung up when she persisted. The second, third, and fourth calls, which followed in quick succession, were from various television and print journalists whose names and affiliations were forgotten before they were off the line.