A Naked Singularity: A Novel

by Sergio De La Pava

  Of course so famous have these warnings become that it seems they’re no longer really heard in any meaningful way so that although someone with a gun is pointedly telling you you have the right to remain silent, that is, you have the right to make their job harder, to make it more difficult for them to accumulate evidence and later proof against you, the right to decrease the chances that you will end in jail, you will still almost invariably decline to exercise that right. Instead when someone like me later asks you if you spoke you’ll affirm then say things like: he said I would get out if I made a statement or they knew I wasn’t the shooter so he said I would get a misdemeanor if I told them about the robbery or maybe I had to tell my side of the story or my mother said to tell them what happened or else I told them what happened but I didn’t write it so it’s not a statement right? or even they said once I got a lawyer there was nothing they could do for me and other similar, painful nonsense. You tell me these things and my chin drops because I’m not interested in what’s good for your soul only what’s good or bad for my case and your statement is bad for it.

  And in what is possibly another mini-digression, here is, more specifically, why your statement is always bad or at least your classic no-win deal, regardless of its content: Realize that if what you said was good for you, you can reliably expect that it will never be repeated because the prosecution needn’t present it at trial or even tell anyone about it. On the other far more likely hand where what you said damages your prospects, then you likely just reduced me to arguing that the cop misinterpreted or improperly influenced the content or, worse, just made it up out of whole cloth. Only I’m arguing this in Manhattan not the Bronx or Brooklyn meaning a substantial portion of the listening jury has graduate degrees and nannies and they don’t think Police Officers do things like that and aren’t about to be disabused of that notion by a criminal like you. So thanks. All by way of saying that statements are good evidence for the prosecution so the cops know to get them and thus do, with occasional help from an assistant district attorney sitting in front of a bargain videocam if the case is serious enough.

  Back to that paperwork the A/O’s filling out with you in a nearby cell. He’s scribbling and hunting and pecking while asking you the occasional question (these are mostly pedigree questions like name, address, etc., which everyone in a robe agrees don’t require preceding Miranda warnings) and you may not know it but your future’s in them pages, those police reports. Because those reports are Rosario material and as such must be turned over to your attorney at some point, usually seconds, before trial. And even at that late stage believe me that these reports are usually his only true friends within the cruel, lonely world he operates in. Friends because in all their babblative beauty they make claims early and often that the cop now has to mirror perfectly or else gift him the inconsistency so that if it suits you he will stand there at trial and wave them at the cop like holier verity was never written boy. And the Rosario List that comes with the material will look substantially like this (well, without the explanatory parentheticals):

  1. Online Booking Sheet: (mostly pedigree info but also details your capture including specific time and place).

  2. UF61 or Complaint Report: (principally useful for the narrative of events it includes as relayed by the cop and/or those pesky civilian eyewitnesses).

  3. Sprint Report: (transcription, in scarcely legible form, of all communications made via 911 operators and police radios including the infamous one-under that signals your descent into The System).

  4. Memo Book Entries: (every uniformed cop has to record in a little pad everything of note that happens during his shift).

  5. Aided Card: (only if someone was hurt requiring medical attention).

  6. Vouchers, Property Clerk Invoices, Invoice Worksheets: (about any property recovered and most importantly by whom and from where).

  Only longer.

  Now the paperwork’s complete and you’re on the move because the A/O is taking you to Central Booking. Central Booking is located at One Police Plaza and is the first of three post-precinct levels you must inhabit before meeting an attorney who will guide you through the final formal steps by which those who stay in are separated from those who get out. (Speaking only figuratively, these levels are concentrically circular and either expand while ascending or constrict while descending, depending on your vantage point). On this first level, you are handed off to cops previously, and likely disciplinarily, extracted from the street to work desks. They take charge of you while the A/O leaves to meet with one of the assistant district attorneys working in the Early Case Assessment Bureau, or ECAB, or Complaint Room, of the District Attorney’s Office. Here, the newly-assigned DA, after interviewing the A/O, writes the criminal court complaint that formally charges you with a specific crime(s) and which includes a short narrative of the incident written in law-enforcementese and signed by the swearing cop. Note that this is why I earlier called precinct charges something like informal even though nobody else calls them that, my justification being that these arrest charges don’t really amount to much in the final analysis since this DA is actually the one who decides what crime to charge you with or whether to even charge you at all. Consequently, it’s the most common thing in the world to see charges that were inflated and overly optimistic, from the officers’ standpoint, reduced to something far more realistic by the party actually being asked to prove the damn thing, making these arrest charges something more along the lines of a recommendation really. Anyway, the DA additionally fills out a DA Data Sheet that also becomes Rosario and that includes more facts about the case and what his colleague’s bail request should be at the upcoming arraignment.

  Back at Central Booking, your rap sheet returns from Albany and the cops check it to see if there are any outstanding bench warrants, arrest orders judges issue whenever a defendant stands them up at a court date. Now you can graduate to the next level located across the street in the building where this entire mess will come to fruition. This intermediate level is buried beneath your ultimate pre-arraignment destination and is colored to make you feel you’re inside a lime. Here, you sit in a cell and wait to meet a representative of the Criminal Justice Agency who wants to interview you to produce a CJA Sheet. This sheet informs the judge of the extent of your community ties and thus presumably the likelihood of your return to court, a critical factor allegedly used by the judge in determining whether or not to set bail on your case and if so how much. What you’re rooting for here is a CJA verdict of RECOMMENDED VERIFIED TIES although that doesn’t exactly guarantee you anything either.

  When this and other delays have been exhausted you’re ready for the pens directly behind the arraignment courtroom. To get there you’re walked down a perfectly symmetric hall that overhead, every eight or so paces, has metronomically intermittent, dimpled-plastic rectangles containing two tubes each of flickering light that end well before the dark base of the stairs. At the top of those stairs is a short hallway that leads to those two identical but transposed cells where you are told to wait until a lawyer like me calls you ad nominem into one of the six interview booths.

  And on bad nights like that night with Manos you will scarcely have room to move as a great many other bodies wait there with you, the cell walls straining against the immured humanity; the number of bodies held therein so great you would not think so many could simultaneously do wrong. A teeming multitude with its components angling desperately for their just portion of the surrounding air and now you’re ready to declare Hobbes victorious over Rousseau with scant need for further deliberation. Because people sleep face-down on the sticky floor, the ones who aren’t too pained from active withdrawal, and you’re handed a small carton of milk with an unsealed plastic bag of white bread squeezing baloney and cheese to bleed solar-yellow mustard while you smell those alien body parts you least wanted to smell, watch dirty hands tremble to hold bloody scabs, feel beset by voices indistinctly grouped in throng and in the corner, as if
on display, is an uncovered toilet next to a payphone available to any member of that preterite crowd capable of inserting a quarter and willing to make a phone call while watching someone take, or more accurately give, a shit. But worst is that every time a body goes out to see the judge it comes right back in shaking its head and it doesn’t take much to deduce that you will soon be doing the same. That’s where you are, where You ended up.

  Where I was, by contrast, was fifteen yards away staring at an empty basket and praying it wouldn’t fill with more yellow (felonies) and blue (misdemeanors) papers describing additional bodies I would meet under duress so they could lie to me. But it did fill and the filling compelled me to action. And I’m going to start start here because I met Dane for the first time that night; that meeting and consequently the many subsequent ones a pure product of arraignment-schedule chance. We stared at the basket then each other and I realized that to that point he had said maybe five extra-judicial words. Consistent with that he absently grabbed an unfairly large share of the cases and went off to interview them without a sound.

  Linda was a battle-scarred veteran of double digit years who had mastered the expected art form of appearing to be quite busy while doing little of value and was therefore nowhere near the basket. I took what remained, mostly yellow some blue, and went to the back to do the interviews. I planned to do them with extreme velocity too because I had done about a quillion already and wanted desperately to get the hell out of there. The first case I looked at was Darril Thorton, a yellow back charged with Sex Abuse in the First Degree (PL §130.65). I called his name softly, hoping he wouldn’t answer, but he immediately moved in, a let’s-get-this-over-with look on his face. He spoke first, obviously yelling but still creating only a barely audible signal:

  —noise background,

  My getting out or what?!

  My money’s on what, followed by a pause long enough to be uncomfortable.

  Oh c’mon I didn’t do nothing man! This is bullshit you got to get me up out of here on the double yo, she’s lying on me!

  Easy, hold on, let’s start at the top. Here’s my card. My name’s Casi, I’m going to be your attorney. Let’s see, well, you’re charged with Sex Abuse in the First Degree, that’s a Class D violent felony.

  Wait let me see this, holding the ivory rectangle up to the bar-streaked light and nodding negatively, uh-uh.

  What uh-uh?

  I don’t want you man, starting to walk out but not really.

  Why? What’s the problem?

  Because man, sitting back down, I wanted an 18B, only thing you guys ever did for me is send me upstate man. No offense but that’s just keeping it real on your ass, pointing but not at it.

  Well, whatever, you’re sort of stuck with me so let’s just see how it goes for a bit okay?

  No.

  Who’s Valerie Grissom?

  Man you all right. Okay, she’s a crackhead. That’s what I’m trying to tell you officer, I mean lawyer. She’s making up some crazy stuff, everybody knows she’s a fabricator and a confabulator. Everybody knows it!

  You know that for a fact?

  What, that she confabulates?

  No, that she’s a crackhead.

  Everybody knows!

  How do you know? You smoke with her?

  I don’t smoke man but I seen her smoke.

  So she has a record?

  Man she been popped tons of times, laughing but still managing to sound angrier somehow.

  You know her date of birth?

  Na man, I ain’t know her like that.

  She married, kids?

  Kids somewhere I think but they ain’t around.

  What’s your relationship to her.

  Man we ain’t related. Shit, what the fuck you think?

  I mean how do you know her?

  Just from the neighborhood man, everybody knows her she’s always up in everybody’s business.

  How long you known her?

  A few years man!

  Just relax a bit. She’s saying that two weeks ago at 322 West 119th Street . . . that where she lives?

  She’s sort of homeless but I think she stays there a lot with a friend of hers.

  She’s saying that you forced her down on the bed—

  What?!

  Let me finish. She says you threw her down on the bed, put your forearm across her neck and forced your fingers into her vagina.

  How many fingers?

  Just says fingers.

  Can they do that?

  Not specify how many fingers?

  Yeah.

  Yes.

  Well that’s crazy man. That’s a complete and totally utter lie, I’ve never even been in a bed with her! What bed are they saying? I can’t believe this! It’s a total set up. Total. Set. Up. You have to get me out of here.

  You ever had a sexual relationship with her?

  Never.

  The truth, Darril.

  Never, I swear!

  Well did the two of you have some kind of argument over something?

  I haven’t even seen her in like . . . let me see . . . two months?

  So what’s going on?

  You tell me.

  Well you’re saying this woman with whom you’ve never had more than a casual relationship and haven’t even seen in two months suddenly decided to falsely accuse you of essentially raping her. Does that make any sense? If the two of you have no beef and you’ve never been more than just acquaintances why would she possibly make this up?

  I have a theory but I can tell by looking at you, which he then did exaggeratedly, that you will not accept it. I can see that in your eyes.

  What’s the reason?

  Your eyes.

  What’s the reason she’s lying?

  Fine, The Hater.

  What?

  The Accuser.

  The what-user?

  The fallen and rebellious angel himself.

  The hell you talking about?

  The Prince of Darkness man. You heard of him right?

  Okay I have heard of him but what does that have to do with this?

  Look I found the Lord okay? I’m about to become a minister as a matter of fact. And one thing I’ve learned, in my studies and etceteras, is that the Dark Prince gets into people man. Now I’m trying to get my life together. I been out of prison twenty-three months. You see I been reporting to parole and working as a mechanic right there on 118th Street. Why would I do this? Tell me that. I would have to be crazy to do that insertion and whatnot. I’m trying to stay clean but The Evil One sees that man. He sees that and he says I’m taking this man down, this righteous man who hath turned to the good book must now falleth. And that’s why this is happening. But all I know is I never touched that woman. It’s a lie, she’s a false witness being brought to bear.

  Well, whatever the reason, she’s saying you did this and—

  I done told you the reason, the very archenemy of God has—

  Okay whatever stop. The bottom line is that as a result of her statement to the police you’ve been charged with this and we’re about to go in front of a judge who’s going to decide what your bail is.

  Bail?! But I’m innocent, they have to release me.

  I doubt they’ll see it that way.

  So what exactly my looking at here man?

  Numbers?

  Yeah man, what else?

  You been upstate?

  I’m a mandatory persistent man. That’s what you’re going to see when you look at my raps so I’ll just up and save you the time.

  Okay then you know the deal.

  What kind of charge is that? Abuse?

  D violent. Yeah, I see two prior violent felonies. Two to four on a rob two and you’re currently on parole after doing five to fifteen on a manslaughter right?

  First of all, that was an accident man. It was just a fight and I was defending myself. Second of all, both of those cases were before I found the Lord.

  They still count. That’s two
violent felonies and this is another one so you are a mandatory as you said—

  I know.

  Which means you’re looking at a minimum here of twelve to life and a max of twenty-five to life—

  Fuck.

  Right, so this is no joke and you’re going to figure out Darril that the only way I’m going to possibly be able to help you is for you to start leveling with me a lot more than you have so far.

  I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t do this.

  Listen, I don’t have all night. There’s got to be more to it than this. You’re not giving me any possible credible reason why she would make this up.

  I told you, the Archfiend.

  By credible I mean a reason that doesn’t involve him . . . so that it?

  Anything else?

  I’ve told you everything I know. I didn’t do this.

  How can I get in touch with her to interview her? She have a phone?

  I don’t know. But she still stays in that building last I heard.

  Okay, any questions?

  What are my chances? Am I going home?

  No.

  No, just like that?