The Four-Night Run (15 page)

“It sounds like you dream about him.”

“Not him. His wife.”

“How do you figure someone like her with someone like him?”

“The power of intellect.”

“It’s a good thing then, Scrbacek, that you’re so good-looking. It’s a tough road, criminal law. It’s hard to get established.”

“All it takes is one case, one great case.”

“That’s what we’re all looking for, the holy grail, one big case to finance the rest of our careers. Maybe we can work together. Ling and Scrbacek.”

“Scrbacek and Ling.”

“Whatever. I’ll do civil, you’ll do criminal. Making gads of money in the public interest.”

“All we need is one big case. DeLoatch said he’d help.”

“DeLoatch?”

“I talked it over with him, the criminal law thing. He’s not so fierce up close. He actually said he wasn’t surprised. He said when I get out, he’ll steer some work my way.”

“Are you sure?”

“That’s what he said.”

“No, about taking his help. I mean, criminal law is cool and all, nothing hotter than a self-righteous public defender, but I’ve heard things about DeLoatch. How he’s gotten a little too close to his clients.”

“Empathy.”

“How he sometimes advises as well as represents, how he becomes their friend, lives their lifestyle, arranges their deals.”

“Malicious rumors.”

“Shares their drugs.”

“As long as he shares.”

“Don’t emulate too much.”

“Don’t worry. I know where the line is, and I won’t get anywhere near it. But I like the idea of representing those in the direst circumstances, those with the biggest need.”

“Now you sound like me.”

“Except I’m going to get rich as sin doing it.”

“Well, see, there you go. My friends are right after all. You are a Republican asshole.”

And after the end, with all its savage hurts and bruised emotions, it wasn’t the bitter aftertaste of the sarcasm or the fights that remained most deeply embedded in his memory. It was that patch of skin, and the dance of sex that it promised, a dance that seemed to transcend the physical laws that strapped them to the mattress, or the wall of the shower stall, or the dark stretch of lawn in the park at night.

Her body seemed to change in the very act, to twist and swell, to elongate and then shrink as his hand gently brushed the length from her hip to her shoulder. Her neck, her thigh, that perfect patch of skin. And from that singular touch, they would dive together, soar together, land gently or roughly, their tongues twisting like red stamens, their legs twining like hardy vines, grinding together in slow twists, banging into each other with fierce violence, oblivious to the sky, the temperature, the phone ringing in the background, the quick snapping bark of a dog, the phone, oblivious to the phone as they grew and swelled and arched, the phone, the phone . . .

Scrbacek woke from the ringing of the phone and the sound of footsteps up the stairs.

He was still lying on his back, in the robe, but the robe was parted and he was ludicrously erect. He sat upright and covered himself as Jenny, still in her lawyer clothes, hurried into the room and answered the phone. She smiled at him as she said hello into the receiver.

Palsgraf jumped onto the bed and started sniffing Scrbacek’s crotch, as if searching for a bone to worry. Scrbacek pushed the dog away.

“No,” she said. “Everything’s fine . . . Still, yes, but he’s just about ready to leave . . . I don’t think so, no, not tonight. I’m going to spend it with Sean . . . I appreciate that, yes, but I think Sean needs some time . . . I’ll call you . . . No, not tomorrow night either. I’ll call you . . . Okay . . . Yes . . . Me too . . . Yes . . . Bye.”

She hung up and looked at Scrbacek, sitting up in the bed in the robe, his hands crossed on his lap, still fighting to keep the dogged Palsgraf away, and she shrugged.

“Dan,” she said.

“I figured. He seemed nice enough.”

“He’s a waste. You look rested.”

“How long have I been sleeping?”

“Most of the day. I was able to get out a little early.” She pointed her toes, slipped off her shoes, first one then the other, and arched her back as she took off her tight little jacket. “Your name is still all over the news. There are reports that you burned down a house on Ansonia Road.”

The dog sat beside Scrbacek on the bed and let him ruffle the fur beneath his chin. “I was there,” said Scrbacek, looking at the dog, “but I didn’t start the fire.”

She rested one knee on the bed and leaned close to Scrbacek to examine his face. The heat of her body and the scent of her perfume pressed against him. “Your face is a mess. You need someone to look at that cut on your nose.”

“Eventually. Not now.”

She sat down beside him, her legs stretched out in front of her.

“That boy who was killed in your car, was he your intern?”

“Ethan Brummel. Yes. He was a good kid.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I went to pay my respects to his parents. His mother acted like I killed him myself.”

“It must be so hard. I can’t even imagine it.”

“I tried my best to comfort her.”

“I’m sure you did fine.”

“I quoted the Constitution to her.”

“You didn’t.”

“And now they think I was planning to kill her too, if her son told her all the terrible things I was doing.”

“The Constitution? Jesus.”

Scrbacek leaned over to Palsgraf and grabbed the dog’s face and rubbed the sides of his muzzle. The dog’s head lifted, and he grimaced a smile and let out a long satisfied sigh. “I didn’t realize how much I missed this guy.”

“The papers say the case against you is growing stronger by the hour,” she said, “and that an indictment is expected shortly.”

“Surwin’s indomitable.”

“I’ve always found him pretty fair. Hard but fair.”

“He wants to fry me. He’ll be fair about it, sure, but still I’ll fry.”

“Cirilio Vega’s come out saying you’ve come unhinged.”

“Good old Cirilio. It’s nice to have friends, isn’t it?”

“He hit on me once toward the end of when I was still with you.”

“He always had taste.”

“I told him he was a smarmy piece of shit, and he laughed and thanked me.”

“And then?”

“He’s an asshole.”

“Objection. Answer was nonresponsive. Anyway, he’s representing Breest now, so whatever he says about me he’s just doing his job.”

“Did you do it, J.D.? Did you kill that boy?”

He stopped rubbing the dog and turned to face Jenny. “No.”

“Good,” she said, nodding. “I knew, I just wanted to hear it. So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see the big picture yet, and until I do I’m running blind. Still, I have no choice but to keep running. If I don’t, they’ll kill me. Remember that Remi Bozant?”

“The dirty cop in the Amber Grace case?”

“He’s the muscle, but somebody higher up is paying him.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long are you going to keep running?”

“Until there’s no place left to go.”

“You have to do something.”

“I know,” he said. “Something.”

And as he said it, he couldn’t help himself. He had to do something, and so what he did was reach out his hand and gently touch her blouse, on the side, beneath her bra, touch that small patch of skin beside the bottom curve of her breast, that magical place that lived still in the recesses of his own damaged heart, and somehow, against all odds, still represented for him the last desperate refuge of his dwindling hope.

25

A
MBER
G
RACE

“What the hell are you doing?” said Jenny Ling, pulling abruptly away from his touch.

“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about you.”

“You’ve been thinking about me?”

“About you, yeah, and remembering us, in this room, sitting on this bed just like this, side by side.”

“You’re lying on my bed in my robe with a poorly disguised hard-on, thinking about us? Are you mental? Are you a mental case?” She rapped his head hard with her knuckle. “Paging Doctor Freud.”

“Jen.”

He reached out again for that spot, but before he could touch her she was off the bed.

“Five years ago you stroll out of my life, and since then there’s not been so much as a Christmas card.”

“The restraining order.”

“The order expired thirty days after issuance. You were using, you were scary, I needed you to cool off and dry out. And once you cooled off and dried out, you totally disappeared from my life. Five years. Which was fine. Your choice. Time to move on. But now, when someone’s hunting to kill you and Surwin’s just aching to indict your sorry butt, you show up with a bruised expression and your little hard-on to say you’re thinking about us?”

“Jen.”

“Where have you been for five years, J.D.? Which asylum?”

“I was lost. I came back here, and I remembered the way we were.”

“Somewhere in the distance I hear Barbra Streisand singing.”

“We need to talk.”

“No, we don’t.”

“There are things we need to talk about.”

“No, there are not. There is nothing we need to talk about, not a single damn thing.” Her expression was as fierce as a warning. “All we need is for you to get dressed and get out. Your clothes are in the dryer downstairs. Try to keep your manhood in check while I bring them up.”

“I miss you, Jen.”

She stopped on her way out the door and backed up without turning. “It’s been too long a time, J.D. It’s not worth even saying now.”

“Still, it’s true. I’ve thought about you a lot over the years, but I’ve always been too afraid to do something about it.”

“Sometimes it’s best to listen to our fears.”

“What happened to us, Jen?”

She spun around at that and spit out a derisive “Fuck you.”

“Jen.”

“Just fuck you. What kind of gall do you have to ask me what happened? You know what the hell happened. You won your big case, J.D., the one you were itching for since law school. You popped Amber Grace out of death row and became a star. And the clients came pouring in—the pimps and the mobsters and the big-time drug dealers with their stacks of cash and rolled-up hundred-dollar bills, like the ones in your boot. And the nights got later, and the partying got hotter, and you started taking powder in lieu of money for your fee. You lost control, with your guns and your drugs and your paranoid rants. And when I wouldn’t go along on that sick little ride and told you to clean up your act or get the hell out, you left me cold without a word or a glance back and hightailed it for the greener pastures and less demanding women in Casinoland. That’s what happened to us.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Oh, no? You didn’t start representing anyone with the cash to pay? You didn’t stop coming home at night? I didn’t find you sprawled unconscious on the floor of that very bathroom, lying in your own vomit, your face covered with your fine white powder, the gun you had waved in my face stuck in your belt? You didn’t leave for a new office and new life in Casinoland without a single note of regret? You didn’t find a string of cocktail waitresses to wet your wick without the muss or fuss of something so inconvenient as a relationship? Tell me it’s not true, J.D. Tell me.”

“It wasn’t like you said.”

“Then tell me sometime how it really was,” she said. “But not now. Now just get the hell out of my house.”

Before he could say anything in response, she was gone. Scrbacek watched her go and then faced the dog. The dog stared balefully at him for a moment before jumping off the bed and following his mistress out the door, leaving Scrbacek to try to remember. To remember the way it really was.

Which meant remembering Amber Grace.

Amber Grace.

She had been sentenced to death for the murder of a pimp named Lucius Haste, a grisly murder that had left a hole in Lucius’s chest the size of a volleyball, and his face looking like half a blood orange squeezed already of its juice.

Amber and Lucius had been more than lovers, they had been business associates. Amber worked the highways and byways of the old resort town while Lucius cruised the night in his gold Lexus to keep track of her and the rest of his string. But Lucius had heard that Amber was holding some of her hard-won wages back, and he had been swearing in the Crapstown bars that she wouldn’t get away with it. “I’m gonna get that bitch, you understan’ what I’m sayin’? She’ll earn those bills she been slippin’ down her bra. You know what I’m sayin’? You understan’? You know what I’m sayin’?” And Amber, for her part, didn’t like the attention Lucius was lavishing on the new girl, just off the bus, with the lank blonde hair. They had been arguing, loudly, Amber and Lucius. There were records of visits by Amber to the emergency ward, a nose broken, an eye swollen shut. And then they found Lucius Haste’s body in an alley with a sawed-off shotgun by his side, the very shotgun that had put the hole in Lucius Haste’s chest and afterward had battered him featureless.

The evidence showed Amber Grace’s fingerprints to be on the barrel of that sawed-off shotgun, just where she would have been holding it if she’d swung it like a baseball bat against Lucius Haste’s head. The evidence showed Amber Grace to be in that very neighborhood a short time before the killing. The evidence showed Lucius Haste to be no model citizen and the killing to be well deserved. But still the color photographs presented to the jury showed his face looking like half a blood orange squeezed already of its juice.

Amber Grace could have pled to a milder charge than murder one. Or she could have argued self-defense at the trial, revealing to the jury the sordid details of her relationship with Lucius Haste. Even if the twelve didn’t buy that she was rightfully afraid of imminent harm and used only the force necessary to defend herself, they still wouldn’t have convicted her of anything rawer than manslaughter. She would have been out in seven to ten, with a third off for good behavior.

But her defense attorney at trial had taken a different tack. He put Amber Grace on the stand to testify that she did not kill Lucius Haste, that she loved Lucius Haste, that they had intended to be married. She blamed the murder on a cop named Remi Bozant. Bozant had arrested her for prostitution a few years back, she claimed, and instead of booking her, had forced her into a sexual relationship that had continued against her will for years, with Lucius’s grudging assent because of the protection it promised. She testified that Bozant eventually turned abusive, battering her eye, breaking her nose. That when Bozant sent her to the hospital the last time, Lucius Haste publicly threatened to rip for him a new asshole: “You know what I’m sayin’? You understan’? You know what I’m sayin’?” That shortly thereafter, Bozant had brought the shotgun into Amber’s bedroom, told her to hold it for a second while he tied his shoes, and then taken it himself to kill Lucius Haste. All of this was what she stated, under oath, to the jury deciding her fate.

She had blamed it on a cop.

And Remi Bozant, unfortunately for Amber, was not your average potbellied nose-out-of-joint always-on-the-make beat cop. He was a member of an elite unit sent to the roughest areas of Crapstown to fight the most brutal crimes. His record was rife with citations and honors. He had a loving wife and an adoring daughter, and every year he dressed as a clown to entertain kids in the cancer ward of the hospital, dancing and singing, telling jokes in funny voices. Once, he had saved a boy on a bicycle who had been hit by a stray shot in a botched drive-by, had raced to the scene, performed CPR, and restarted a heart that had stopped. There was a picture in all the papers showing Bozant, with his bright-red hair, visiting the boy in the hospital, both of them smiling for the cameras, a picture that was passed around the jury box as Bozant sat on the stand and denied that he had ever had sex with Amber Grace, denied he had ever fought with Lucius Haste over Amber Grace, denied he had shot Lucius Haste in the chest, denied, in short, everything.

She had blamed it on a hero cop.

Let’s just say the strategy didn’t go over so well with the jury. Murder one. A sentence of death. Her appeals to the higher courts all denied. Case closed and locked shut. End of story. Until someone showed up at the jailhouse door.

Knock knock. Who’s there? J.D. Scrbacek.

He had his own pathetic office by then, hanging out his shingle while he hung out at the courthouse, hoping for a case to be flipped his way like a loose coin. The public defender’s office was underfunded and could represent only half of the indigent defendants in the system. The rest were farmed out to criminal defense attorneys willing to take the cases for the prescribed meager fees: twenty-five dollars an hour for trial prep, thirty-five dollars an hour in court. Scrbacek, still trying to make his way, still waiting for the help promised him by Professor DeLoatch, still waiting for the one big case that would make his name, was more than willing. Prostitution, drug distribution, assault with a deadly weapon, grand theft auto, DUI—Scrbacek handled them all, all but murder. You had to have experience in murder cases to be assigned a murder case, and since he had never been assigned a murder case, Scrbacek was not on that list.

And then, out of the blue, a judge sent him the Amber Grace file.

She had already lost all her appeals, the warrant for her execution had already been signed by the governor, a date certain for that execution had already been set. But in a handwritten letter, Amber Grace, seven years already on death row, had asked the judge to review her case. And the judge, so as not to be unduly burdened, had given it to a young, inexperienced lawyer who could be expected to do the minimum investigation, file his pro forma habeas motion, and, when it was denied, cash his check and move on to more promising material.

Habeas corpus, the Great Writ, a staple of Anglo-American law since the fifteenth century, explicitly guaranteed by Article I, Section 9 of our Constitution. Habeas corpus, which literally means “thou shalt have the body,” and which technically demands that the state bring the prisoner to court and defend the legality of her continued detention. Habeas corpus. J.D. Scrbacek.

He was appalled at the file, not just by the full-color pictures of the pulped face of Lucius Haste, but by the strategy of Amber Grace’s attorney. The case should have been pled out to a lesser charge, the lawyer should have argued self-defense, should have argued mitigation. How was it possible that a whore killing her abusive pimp could end up as capital murder?

It was as obvious a case of ineffective assistance of counsel as Scrbacek had ever seen.

“It wasn’t my damn idea,” said Bertram O’Neill, an old codger with a red-veined nose who had glad-handed his way through four decades in both the legal and corner bars. “I told her she should plead, but she said no. I told her she should tell the jury the man had beaten her, but she said no. I told her they were going to try to kill her, but she said the truth was the truth. I told her I didn’t know what planet she was from, but this was state court where the truth more often than not died of starvation.”

“Couldn’t you at least keep her from testifying?” said Scrbacek.

“They see enough TV, they all want to take their shot on the stand. I could have sat down with the prosecutor, had a few drinks, cut a deal, and she would have been out in three. I begged her to let me, but she wanted to have her say. How long has she been in now?”

“Going on seven.”

“Stupid cow. Blaming it on Bozant. Remi Bozant is one of the few cops in this town you can actually believe on the stand.”

“Was there anything you found to back up her story?”

“Not a thing, though it wasn’t like I had the funds to check up on everything, not at twenty-five an hour. Her alibi witness was out of town, and we had no idea where. All her corroboration turned out to be smoke and shadows. But hell, you ask me, I didn’t find anything because it wasn’t there to be found. She thought she could clever her way out of it, but if she was that clever, she wouldn’t have been a whore in the first place.”