The Intruder (28 page)

First, his paperwork was lost at the precinct, which caused a two-hour wait in the holding pens. Then the arresting officer, Detective Marinelli, announced that one of his kids was sick with chicken pox and he had to go home. A half hour later, the new officer assigned the case decided it was time to go to lunch, and when he came back, he couldn’t find the keys to the car to drive Jake over to Central Booking.

Now Jake finds himself in a massive beige-tiled holding cell under One Police Plaza. He’s surrounded by a half dozen young Asian punks in leather jackets and rockabilly pompadours, two old drunks, and about twelve other assorted skells and lowlifes. It’s like being back in the Legal Aid waiting room, except there’s a more direct sense of menace in the air and a stink of sweat, piss, and undifferentiated body funk. His eyes begin to swell.

“Hey, come here a sec, will you?”

He looks up and sees one of the officers in charge of the area, beckoning to him from the cell door. Jake rises slowly, with the handcuffs biting into his wrists, and goes over to him.

“I could segregate you, you know,” says the guard, a squat
young guy named Giambalvo, who has a receding hairline and wears a white TB mask over the lower half of his face.

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Hey, I know you’re a lawyer and you’re in a tough spot. You’re not like the other guys back here.”

Meaning: You’re white.

The cop’s eyes drop on to the lapels of Jake’s suit jacket. “I got some holding cells in the back,” says Giambalvo. “I could put you back there with just a couple of other guys.”

It’s a tempting idea. Jake looks over at the prisoner who’d been sitting next to him on the bench. He’s now lying on his back with his legs and arms sticking straight up in the air, like a cow with anthrax. On the other hand, the “couple of other guys” in back might have just hacked up their landlord with a meat cleaver.

“Thanks,” Jake says, holding up his cuffed hands. “But I think I’ll take my chances here.”

Giambalvo’s eyes dance over his white mask. “Have it your way, tough guy.”

Jake goes back to sit with his fellow prisoners and his misgivings. As soon as he reenters the cell, though, he realizes he’s made another mistake. His eyes begin to itch and his nose clogs up. He’s definitely allergic to something in here.

Meanwhile, an emaciated bearded black guy whose skin looks like it’s been melted over his skeleton is holding forth about what he had to eat last night.

“I had me a mess of fried chicken, a chef’s salad, and a side order of greens and fries. All right? You know, them fat juicy boys they cut right off the side of the potato. But I had ‘em fry it up in this low-cholesterol shit that’s good for your heart...”

“Like saffron oil,” says a husky man with a gold earring. “What about dessert?”

“I had a sweet potato pie a la monde,” says the bearded man. “All right? That means I ate the world.”

Jake can almost feel his stomach pressing against his spine. It’s about seven o’clock. In the eight hours he’s been in the system, he’s been given just one sandwich with blue bologna meat and processed cheese. By now Dana will be on her way to meet him at
the restaurant downtown, unaware of what’s happened. He hasn’t been able to get a message to her all day. There’s no callback number to leave on her beeper and she generally doesn’t check the answering machine until she gets home. She doesn’t even know the code. And Alex has had his own phone since he was thirteen and hasn’t checked his parents’ messages in years. Susan Hoffman’s been out of reach too; her assistant says she’s been tied up in court all afternoon.

He tries to tell himself he hasn’t been forgotten and abandoned, even as he ignores the stares from across the cell and the sluggish movement of time. Remain detached and stoic. After all, the worst that can happen
is
happening and he’s surviving it. Moment by moment. All he has to do is not allow the sense of shame and disgrace to overwhelm him.

“Say, man, did I hear the guard say you was a lawyer?” The skinny bearded guy sidles up next to him.

“I was when I got up this morning.” Jake sneezes hard.

“I want to talk to you about my case. All right? Man, the DA’s saying I’m a loan shark. They callin’ me the kingpin of Lenox Ave. All right? They’re saying I broke a man’s legs because he didn’t pay my vig.”

The man has arms like a Biafran poster child, Jake notices. He looks like he’d barely have the strength to break a breads tick.

“So what kind of case do they have against you?”

“Man, it’s bullshit. All right? Pure bullshit. They’re telling me that if I take a plea to just the loan sharking, I can go home and have dinner in my own kitchen tonight.” The man leans in on Jake; he smells like the back of a fastfood restaurant. “So what do you think I should do?”

“Sounds like they’re kind of anxious to make a deal,” says Jake, sneezing again and rubbing his eyes. “It might not be a bad idea for you to sit here a while and see what kind of evidence they have.”

Though Jake could not sit here for one second longer than necessary himself. He feels raw and exposed, like he’s just been shipwrecked on a hostile island. The cell door flies opens with a bang. Giambalvo the guard shoves in a new prisoner. A flyweight
Puerto Rican kid wearing a red do-rag on his head, skin-tight jeans, and a flannel shirt with a leather vest over it.

“Yo, man,” he says. “I’m a career criminal. I just saw my motherfuckin’jacket. They be callin’ me a career criminal now.”

He struts around the perimeter of the cell like a little rooster, head high, chest out. Trying to show everybody how dangerous he is. Jake notices a bloody piece of gauze taped to his right ear. Uh-oh. The kid probably caught a little beating in the squad car on the way to the precinct. Now he has something to prove.

“Like I don’t got youthful offender status no more, bro’,” he says, clenching and unclenching his fists. “I’m seventeen now. The DT say I’m gonna do one and a third to four for this bid. So I don’t give a fuck, mama.”

Territorial pissing. Marking his plot. The other older prisoners move away from him a little. They don’t want any trouble. They just want to do their thirty days on Rikers and get back out on the street.

At just that moment, Jake’s allergies reach a new peak. His eyes begin to water and a maelstrom of dust kicks up in his sinuses. Before he can stop himself, he sneezes all over the boy walking by.

“Yyyo!” The boy’s voice goes up and he looks appalled. He begins wiping frantically at the front of his shirt. “What’s up with that shit?!”

“Sorry.”

“What the fuck’s the matter with you, man, you blowin’ all your stuff on me?”

The boy is staring at Jake with abject fury.

“Hey, I said I was sorry.” Jake’s eyes continue to water.

“You crying, man?” asks the boy, zeroing in on a potential weakness.

“No, I just have allergies. I don’t know. It might be the disinfectant they use here.”

How many times have his clients outlined this very scenario to him? The new fish always picks on the guy least likely to be able to defend himself. It’s a way of making a point to the other prisoners.

“Allergies, huh?” The boy wags his chin dubiously.

Jake puts his hands over his face and sneezes again. “I guess nobody in here has a Kleenex, right?”

The kid starts to close in on him. The other prisoners form a semicircle around them. Another ritual: when somebody’s going to catch a beat-down in a holding pen, other prisoners crowd around so the guards can’t see it.

All right. Stay cool. Don’t let him know you’re scared.

“Look, I didn’t sneeze on you on purpose,” Jake says.

The boy looks down at his shirt like it’s stained beyond repair. His nose twitches. He’s not interested in evasions. He wants to prove he’s a man and he wants to do it by spilling Jake’s blood on the cell floor.

The two of them are less than three feet apart.

“You know, I ain’t afraid to put a hurtin’ on you, man,” says the boy. “There’s a bodega guy in my neighborhood who’s been in a coma two years ‘cause of me. And his son’s my best friend. So don’t be thinkin’ I ain’t got the heart.”

Jake tries to hold himself very still. He can feel chains of tension wrapping themselves around his spine. He tells himself the kid can’t hurt him that badly with his hands cuffed. But then he remembers all the holding pen injuries he’s heard about. Detached retinas, skull fractures, noses with the ends bitten off.

In the old days, he might not have been afraid to go head-to-head with this kid. He had his share of brutal fights in the neighborhood. But something has come between him and the way he used to be. Maybe it’s success, or age, or love of family. But time has made him vulnerable.

All of a sudden, he sees himself being carried out of here on a stretcher. His eyes swell and water once more.

“Look, guy, I don’t want to fight you,” he tells the boy as he tries to wipe the tears away.

“Why, you afraid of me, man? You scared, faggot? You crying ‘cause you scared?”

The boy starts swinging his cuffed hands around, like he’s holding a heavy club.

“No, I’m not scared.”

“Then come on, man. Let’s do this right now.”

The other men in the semicircle move back to avoid the boy’s swinging arms. The cell light catches rust around the sharp edges of the cuffs. The kid means to do serious damage, even if it means just cutting Jake across the eyes.

“Stop with this foolishness.” A voice from the perimeter.

Jake doesn’t dare turn his eyes to see who it is for fear the Puerto Rican boy will lunge at his face with the rusty cuffs.

“Don’t you know this man’s a lawyer?”

There’s no mistaking the voice this time; it’s the emaciated black guy Jake was talking to before. In effect, he’s just signed for Jake’s hospital bed. Now that everyone in the cell knows he’s an attorney, they’ll all want to kill him. Lawyers are the pointy-nosed white men who send them upstate.

“You really a lawyer?” the Puerto Rican kid asks, feigning left and then right with his head.

“Yeah.” Jake raises his cuffed hands protectively and sneezes twice.

“Well back off a sec, man, I wanna ask you somethin’.”

Jake keeps his hands up. “What?”

“If somebody was like a juvenile and then they got like arrested and charged as an adult, would all them other cases count against him?”

Jake takes a moment to size up the situation. The more he counsels this punk, the better his chances of getting out of here with the end of his nose still attached.

“No, the cases wouldn’t be added up. It’s like two separate systems. Family Court and Criminal Court. If they wanted to charge you as an adult before, they could have done it. Otherwise your juvenile records are sealed.”

“Damn!” The boy spits on the floor. “I told that fuckin’ lawyer not to plead me out.”

Sage nods and a general burble of agreement from the village elders in the semicircle. Jake is aware that the atmosphere is changing. But he still can’t quite believe he’s out of danger.

“It may not be too late,” he says. “You might want to withdraw your plea. Especially if you think the witnesses against you won’t show up.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The boy gets a faraway look and lowers his hands. “That
maricon
don’t have the nerve.”

“So why sell out?” Jake asks. “Be a man about it. Stand your ground.”

A hammy old bit of Legal Aid posturing, but the crowd loves it.

“That’s what I like to hear!” says the emaciated guy. ‘Stand your ground.’ If I’d a had a lawyer like that, I wouldn’t have done no stretch in Greenhaven.”

“Hey, you got a card, chief?” asks the husky one with the earring.

Instead of a semicircle, the men have fallen into a kind of informal line.

“Step off, man.” The Puerto Rican kid turns on them with his hands raised combatively. “I was talking to him first.”

Jake is about to tell them that he doesn’t practice that kind of law anymore, but why blow a good thing?

“I wanna talk about my parole violation,” says a voice from the back of the line.

“One at a time,” Jake calls out.

He sneezes three times in a row. The Puerto Rican boy reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wad of Kleenex.

“Here, man. Blow your fuckin’ nose already.”

51

Dana has been waiting since quarter past seven.

That’s what time Jake was supposed to meet her here at the restaurant called Marmalade on Duane Street. The waiter brings over another hard roll and asks if she’d like another glass of chardonnay.

“Maybe you’d like to buy a bottle,” he says. “We’re charging you six-fifty a glass.”

“Uh, I don’t know.” She looks at her watch. Ten to nine. “I don’t want to end up drinking the whole thing myself. Do you sell it by the half bottle?”

His actorish smile says he’s more suited for light comedy than heavy drama. “Maybe I could get you a carafe of the house white.”

“That would be very nice. Thank you.”

It doesn’t make sense, really. In more than twenty years of marriage, she can count on her fingers the number of times that Jake’s been more than a half hour late. It’s one of the most exasperating things about him. She’s always rushing breathlessly up the stairs while he sits drumming his fingers on a tabletop. “Malcolm X wouldn’t even talk to somebody who didn’t wear a watch,” he likes to say.

“But you’re a Jew,” she usually answers.

The waiter brings her another glass of wine as she sees Roberta
Futterman and her husband, Jeffrey, settling in at a table across the restaurant. Parents of one of Alex’s school friends. White Jews, Jake calls them. They’re always off to Cape Cod or Canyon Ranch. They even look like Presbyterians with their dry smiles and their perfect teeth. The one time Roberta came over to the old apartment on West End Avenue to pick up their son Graham when he was twelve she made a point of sniffing and saying it was too bad Dana didn’t have somebody to help her keep the place clean.

Dana hopes they don’t see her and come over to ask why she’s sitting alone.

She hates doing things alone. She’s never even been to the movies by herself. It’s not that she’s one of those women who can’t handle problems or thinks she’s nothing without a man. But somehow she doesn’t feel complete unless she’s part of a unit, a family. Maybe that’s why she struggled so hard to keep her mother alive after the doctors said it was a lost cause. Just to hold on to that feeling of being part of something bigger. That sense of not being alone.