First degree (4 page)

LAURIE IS WAITING
FOR ME WHEN I ARRIVE AT
the office. It is no surprise that she is fully briefed on the media's version of the arrest; when it comes to Alex Dorsey, she is command central.

The arrested man's name is Oscar Garcia, a twenty-seven-year-old Puerto Rican immigrant living in Passaic. He is described as a handyman by trade and is said to have a few drug arrests, though no convictions, in his apparently less-than-illustrious biography.

While Laurie's awareness of the news was to be expected, her take on it is not. "There's no way Garcia did it, Andy," she says. "I know this guy."

"You do?"

She nods. "He's a small-time dealer who hangs out in Pennington Park introducing kids to the glories of cocaine. I busted him once."

"The radio said he's been arrested but not convicted."

She nods, unhappy at the memory. "As moments go, that was one of my lowest."

"What happened?" I ask.

"A friend of mine, Nina Alvarez ... I went to high school with her. Garcia got her fourteen-year-old daughter started on pot first, then a quick move to crack. Nina tried everything, even had her in a lockdown facility for a while. Finally, she decided to try and deal with the source, and she came to me."

"To get Garcia?"

She nods. "Right. It took a while ... the creep was pretty careful. Then one day I was in court testifying on a case, and that's the day my partner caught him carrying. We booked him, and I thought that was the end of it."

"But it wasn't," I say, fulfilling my function to wander the earth, stating the obvious wherever I find it.

"He walked two days later. His lawyer convinced the judge there was no probable cause for the search."

"And you never got him again?"

"No," she says. "The Dorsey thing blew up, and I left the force."

"What about your friend's daughter?"

"She ran off a few months later and seems to have never looked back. No doubt learning the joys of life on the street. Fourteen years old ..." She struggles to get the words out without crying, and the look of pain in her eyes is tangible. On some level she feels responsible for her friend's losing a child in this horrible manner.

This incident is obviously something that has incredibly strong emotional importance to her, yet I knew absolutely nothing about it. What else is there about her that I don't know, what deep personal pains that she hasn't seen fit to mention on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday nights? And how could I be feeling shut out for not having been told something that I've just been told?

I move the conversation back to the matter at hand. "Why can't you buy Garcia for the Dorsey killing?"

"Dorsey worked undercover for fifteen years, Andy. I was with him after that time, but I got to know him very well. He was a tough, dangerous guy who could see any kind of trouble a mile away. I can't picture anyone killing Dorsey, but there is no way a little twerp like Garcia could have done it. If you tied Dorsey to a tree and gave Garcia a bazooka and a tank, Dorsey would skin him alive in thirty seconds."

What I want to say is, "Congratulations, you're right again, Laurie! The guy who's really guilty sat in that chair yesterday! Show her what she's won, Johnny!" The fact that I can't say it is frustrating, but obviously something I'm going to have to get used to.

"I assume the cops know what you know," I say, "but they must have something on him, or he wouldn't have been charged. Maybe he's graduated to the big time since you were after him."

She shakes her head. "He hasn't."

The conviction in her voice surprises me. "You
know
that?"

She looks me in the eye and says quietly, "I
know
that."

There are implications here that I decide not to go near. Our conversation eventually expires from lack of new information, so Laurie goes off to gather some more. It leaves me alone to think, which in this situation is not a particularly good idea.

I must at least perceive a client as innocent in order to take on his defense. This rigid attitude tends to reduce my caseload, but I've accepted that reality. Of course, I almost never really know that a client is innocent. All I have is a distrust of the facts the prosecution presents, and a faith and belief that the client is telling me the truth. And, with the Willie Miller case as a notable exception, even in a best case I can't prove innocence; I simply hope to establish reasonable doubt of guilt.

This situation is far different. I can be positive that Garcia is innocent because I know who is guilty. Which leaves me with a lot to think about, and the way I best do that is by taking Tara to the duck pond. That is what I am about to do when Edna tells me that my eleven-fifteen meeting is here. Since I have no clients, her designating it as the "eleven-fifteen meeting" is overkill. Just "meeting" would suffice. In any event, I had no idea I had any meeting scheduled, never mind an eleven-fifteen one.

It turns out that my eleven-fifteen is with Edna's stock-broker cousin, Fred. Agreeing to meet with cousin Fred was one of those things that I say I will do, as long as it's in the future, and I somehow assume it will never come about. But here it is, and I'm trying to figure out if I can make it out the window when in comes Edna and the man she considers the perfect caretaker for my twenty-two million dollars: cousin Fred.

It's no surprise that Edna has a cousin up to this task. She seems to have the largest extended family in the Western Hemisphere; they cover every occupation ever invented, yet somehow have managed not to overlap jobs. Cousin Fred handles the financial markets.

Fred is about my age and decked out in a three-piece suit. He shakes my hand, and I have a vision of the scene from Woody Allen's
Take the Money and Run
, when Allen's convict character is caught attempting to escape. As punishment, he is locked in a cellar with an insurance salesman from Dayton, and they shake hands as they descend into the hole.

This meeting would be a form of torture in any event, but right now I want to get away and think this Dorsey thing through, and it's going to be tough doing that while talking puts and calls with cousin Fred.

Much to my surprise, Fred turns out to be a normal human being, and one who shares my general distrust of people who claim to understand the stock market. My view is that no one has any idea whether the market will go up or down. Commentators come up with coherent, logical reasons for the market's behavior at the end of the day; it's the morning's pre-opening predictions that are a tad less reliable.

Fred and I talk the same language. As much as I like to gamble on football and basketball, in the stock market I want to be careful, cushioning myself against disaster. Fred advocates the exact same strategy, and most important, he voices that opinion before I do. That is how I know he is not just telling me what he thinks I want to hear.

Even though I'm conservative on these financial decisions, I'm also quite impulsive. Fred seems as good as anybody I've met, so I agree to let him handle eleven million dollars of my money. I expect him to grab on to my leg and whimper his thanks, but he handles it as if it's good news but nothing he didn't expect. I tell him to coordinate everything with Sam Willis, then I call Sam and alert him that Fred is going to be stopping by. Moments after Fred leaves my office, I hear Edna shriek with glee; she's not quite as reserved as her cousin.

I am finally free to leave, so I pick up Tara and take her to the duck pond in Ridgewood. It is a wonderfully peaceful place, especially since it's still chilly, so parents and their screaming children aren't out in force. Tara is always mesmerized by the ducks; she can sit quietly and stare at them for hours. We bring a loaf of bread to feed them, and Tara knows it's theirs and doesn't compete for the food. Tara and I both do some of our best thinking here.

I feel like I am facing a dilemma, yet it is totally of my own creation. Ethically, there is nothing I need to do; in fact, there is little if anything I am allowed to do. The rules of my profession call for me to behave as if Stynes never sat in my office and confessed. All I should be doing is feeding the ducks, petting Tara, and trying to come up with a charity to support, just in case cousin Fred doesn't lose all my money.

Garcia is a slime. Laurie said so, and I totally trust her judgment. The problem is that our system doesn't and shouldn't convict an innocent suspect of a crime just because he must have committed other crimes, which couldn't be proved. Make-up calls are for NBA refs, not our courts.

So an injustice may be committed. So what? I'm aware of injustices all the time, which I can't do anything about. The world is full of them; putting away Garcia is a fairly mild example.

And who said he'll be put away? If he didn't do it, which he didn't, then how strong can the evidence be? The prosecution won't be able to prove its case, he'll walk, they'll catch the real murderer, and all will be right with the world. My job is to feed a couple of dozen ducks and have a nice afternoon with Tara.

I've just got to drop this Garcia thing. Wipe it from my mind.

I can't.

I leave Tara back home and go down to the courthouse. The court clerk, Rita Golden, is on a lunch break that her secretary tells me should be over in ten minutes. I position myself in the hallway outside her door, and she comes back two minutes ahead of schedule.

I like Rita. She lets you know exactly where you stand, all the while doing her job with total efficiency. That job is to keep the court schedule running smoothly and protect the judges from pain-in-the-ass lawyers like me.

Rita talks about two things: the court and sex. She does this simultaneously and creatively and lets me participate. For instance, when she sees me standing by her door, she says, "Andy, is that a gavel in your pants, or are you happy to see me?"

"I'm always happy to see you, you hot little clerk you." She's clearly better at this than I am.

"Then why don't you come into my office, and I'll conduct a direct examination?" she says. "I'll be the aggressive lawyer, you can be the hostile witness. There won't be anyone around to object."

"Alas, my heart belongs to another. But you can have everything else."

She laughs, then gets down to business. "What's up?"

"I want to know if Garcia has representation," I say.

She enters the office and I follow her in, talking as we go.

"That would depend on who Garcia is," she logically points out.

"The guy they arrested for Dorsey," I say.

"Oh, right, another of the wrongly accused." She reaches her desk and looks for the information on the list. "PD," she says, which means the case has been assigned to the public defender.

"Thanks, Rita," I say, and turn to leave.

"Don't tell me you're scrounging around for clients," she says. "Not with your money."

"Money isn't everything."

She nods. "You're right. Sex is everything. And if the money's right, I'll prove it to you."

I barely get out of there with my male dignity intact, and I head down to the public defender's office. Movies generally portray public defenders in one of two ways. One version has them as courageous defenders of our precious rights, fighting on despite a horrible work over-load, a woefully inadequate budget, and working conditions straight out of
Oliver Twist
. The other view has them as incompetent hacks who couldn't make it anywhere else and who guarantee their poor clients a life in prison due to miserable representation.

In this jurisdiction, neither portrayal is accurate. For the most part, PDs are tough, competent lawyers who do a damn good job. They are in fact overworked, but the system provides them with an adequate budget to represent their clients. It wouldn't fund the dream team, but if an expert witness is needed, it gets paid for. As far as office space goes, it's a hell of a lot nicer than mine. Of course, as Edna would point out, that ain't saying much.

The head of the Public Defender Division is Billy Cameron, nicknamed Bulldog, not because of his considerable tenacity on behalf of his clients but because he played wide receiver for the University of Georgia. Legend has it that he caught eleven passes for four touch-downs to beat Auburn. I would have been about five years old at the time, so of course, I don't remember the game, but I probably bet on Auburn.

"So, Andy," he says when I walk in, "I hear you've got three dollars more than God."

"Only because he's made some bad investments lately."

He nods, having reached his rather low banter tolerance already. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I've come to offer my humble services as a barrister," I explain.

He's immediately distrustful. "Why?"

"Why? Doesn't the word 'civic responsibility' mean anything to you?"

"That's two words," he points out.

"All the more reason for you to accept my gracious offer." He looks dubious, so I push on. "Come on, Billy, the big firms send you their inexperienced losers for pro bono work, and you lick their faces. I'm giving you a chance to get the one and only Andy Carpenter. So what's your problem?"

"Because they're doing it to look good in the community by impersonating decent human beings. Your motive isn't quite as clear."

"You've got a client I think is innocent," I say, "and I thought it would be nice for all concerned if I proved it."

"And this client is ... ?"

"Oscar Garcia."

He looks up sharply. "Oscar Garcia?"

"The very one." I can see Billy's mind working. Oscar is someone no lawyer in his right mind would want as a client, yet here I am applying for the job. Billy knows I can get as many clients as I want. So if I want Garcia, he's thinking, then he should want him as well, but he has no idea why.

"And you think he's innocent?" he asks. "How did you come up with that theory?"

"Somebody told me there's no way he could have done it," I say. "That he never could have gone up against Dorsey."

Billy laughs a short, put-down laugh. "That's it? That's your evidence? Who told you that?"

"Laurie Collins."