Dead Man's Thoughts

by Carolyn Wheat

  My voice broke occasionally with the effort of keeping Digna’s face out of my thoughts and at the same time suppressing as much as I could my hatred of Di Anci. I finally stopped, not because I was finished, but because the certainty that Digna would go to jail caught up with me. I clenched my fists under the counsel table and blinked back tears.

  “Bail stands. Court is adjourned till tomorrow morning.” He swept off the bench without a backward glance. I pulled a Kleenex out of my pants pocket and wiped my nose.

  Digna was already in the back. I hoped it wasn’t too late. I went over to the clerk. “Harry, do me a favor?”

  “Sure, Counselor. That was a tough one.”

  “Put her on suicide watch. I don’t want her to succeed next time.”

  He nodded. “I’ll get Di Anci to sign it before he goes. It’s the least he can do, huh?”

  “He couldn’t do any less, that’s for damn sure.”

  I went into the pen. Digna was calmer than I. I told her I’d try for a bail reduction, but I didn’t hold out much hope. I patted her arm and turned to go, only to notice that the gate was locked. The correction officers were joking loudly, so I called out “on the gate,” and one of them came over and opened it with his huge key. The gate swung open, then clanked shut behind me, leaving Digna’s small, serious face, like that of a cloistered nun, staring at me through the grate.

  FOUR

  I was still mad as hell when we walked out of the courthouse. I wanted to smash Di Anci’s fat, complacent face. Yet there was a weariness, too, a sense of having been here too many times before.

  “I feel as though people have been spitting on me,” I said. Nathan didn’t answer. He just squeezed my hand. Finally, I laughed. “You know,” I said, “this job reminds me of when I was a waitress. You leave with sore legs and a lousy attitude. The only difference is now I don’t have to refill ketchup bottles.”

  We walked again in silence, mine seething with pent-up anger. So it took me a while to notice that Nathan’s was a broody, thoughtful silence. Then, as we turned onto Clinton Street, a pleasant, tree-lined street of well-kept brown-stones, Nathan said, “I don’t suppose you remember the Burton Stone case.” I tried to recall the name. Then it came back.

  “Burton Stone the Fixer. My last year in law school. I was doing welfare hearings at the World Trade Center, and a bunch of us trooped over to the courthouse one afternoon.”

  “Remember who represented Stone?”

  “Yeah, sure. Matt Riordan. He did a great job—Stone lived to fix another day.”

  “The prosecution’s chief witness was a guy named Charlie Blackwell.” Nathan was talking slowly, either relishing the memory of the Stone trial or trying to remember it more clearly by savoring its details. I couldn’t figure out why we were talking about it, unless it was meant to divert me from the bitter anger I still felt at Di Anci.

  “Charlie was a skell of the highest order. Always ready to make a deal to save his ass. It’s a wonder he lived long enough to testify against Stone.”

  “From what I’ve heard, it’s certainly a wonder he lived after testifying against him.”

  “That’s another good point.” I couldn’t figure out what Nathan meant by that, so I kept listening. We were across Montague Street now, facing the high-rise building Nathan lived in. Its modern starkness was in sharp contrast to the shutters, carved doors, and garden fronts of the Brooklyn Heights brownstones that surrounded it. It looked like a medium-security prison.

  “Charlie was great on direct examination, with the prosecutor asking the questions. Beautiful.” Nathan pronounced it “beauty-full.” “Laid it out like a carpet. Stone had given him a payoff to deliver to a Judge Wallingford, who conveniently dropped dead of a heart attack before the trial. When the direct was over, that jury didn’t have to leave the box—Stone was as good as dead. Then Matty gets up to cross. He asks the usual stuff about Charlie’s criminal record, his bad habit of ratting on his friends to catch a break, and then he starts asking crazy stuff. Like ‘Didn’t you tell Joe Schmo that you took a ride in a flying saucer?’ ‘Yeah, I told Joe that,’ Charlie answers. ‘Why did you tell Joe Schmo that, Mr. Blackwell?’ ‘Because it’s true. These guys came down from Venus.… ’ Well, you can guess the rest. On direct, Charlie was Mr. Solid Citizen. More or less, anyway. On cross, he turned into a fucking space cadet. The jury couldn’t believe a word he said after the kooky stuff.”

  “So? The guy was a flake. Did he have a mental history?”

  “A couple 730s. Charlie’s a nervous guy. Of course, if you spent a lot of time informing against fairly heavy people, you’d be nervous too. The shrinks at Bellevue didn’t see it that way, though. Whenever they see Charlie, they write down ‘paranoid schiz’ and find him fit to proceed. Anyway, long story short, a lot of people were wondering just how Riordan knew to ask Charlie about the flying saucers. It’s not exactly standard cross-examination technique.”

  “I see what you mean. You don’t ask questions like that unless you know what the answer’s going to be. And Riordan wouldn’t know the answer unless he got to Charlie?”

  Nathan opened the gate to his apartment compound; it clanked shut behind us automatically. “On the gate,” I murmured.

  “That’s the theory,” Nathan went on, “but Charlie had been in. protective custody for four months. Nobody could get to him—supposedly. But the Special Prosecutor, then and now, would give a lot to know just how Riordan got that information.”

  Nathan was opening doors and collecting his mail as he talked. We walked past a bored desk attendant, pushed the elevator button, and waited.

  “What brings all this to mind tonight?”

  “Charlie Blackwell was in the pens tonight. On a drug rap. He wouldn’t say a word about that case. All’s he said was, ‘I got something the Special Prosecutor would be interested in.’”

  I digested the implications of this as we rode up in the elevator. We came to Nathan’s door; he unlocked it, switched on the hall light, and plopped his mail on a small table in the hall.

  “This could get heavy,” I finally said. “Do you think he wants to give the Special Prosecutor the dope on Riordan?”

  “I don’t know what he has to say. Charlie can keep his mouth shut when he wants to. He’s still paranoid as hell; insisted on administrative segregation, so I got him on suicide watch. Only in his case, it’s more like murder watch.”

  “That sounds a little melodramatic,” I protested. “I mean, what can the guy really do? Nail some middle-level hood? He wouldn’t have anything on Stone himself, would he?”

  “Like I said,” Nathan answered, “he wouldn’t talk. In fact, when I tried to approach the bench to get Di Anci to give him the suicide watch, he didn’t want me to go up. But of course, I had to say something to the judge to get him put in segregation.”

  “If he won’t talk—” I began.

  “I’ll go to the Brooklyn House tomorrow or Wednesday and get the story,” Nathan answered. “Then if he’s really got something, I’ll call Del Parma. He’s an old buddy of mine from my D.A. days. Hell, I knew him when he was still Delos Parmaklidis.”

  “I keep forgetting you used to be with the enemy.” I smiled when I said it.

  “Long time ago. Besides, the way Mike Ponce ran that office, it was the best D.A.’s office in the country. None of the shit Del’s doing now. Special Prosecutor, my ass. Special Persecutor. Your buddy Di Anci used to work for him.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. He had to learn how to be a pig somewhere.”

  Nathan went into the kitchen, opened his bronze refrigerator, and pulled out a bottle of Beck’s. He opened it, drank deeply, and passed it to me. I tipped it back and let the crisp, bitter brew flow down my dry throat. It tasted wonderful. We finished the bottle in thirty seconds flat. Nathan took out two more bottles and we carried them into the living room, dumping our coats on a chair as we went.

  Nathan opened a sandalwood box on the battered coffee table an
d took out a joint. The half-beer I’d drunk had barely touched the surface of my tension, so I swallowed the smoke greedily, trying to suck in peace and tranquillity as quickly as possible. I passed the jay back to Nathan and drank more beer. I could feel myself unwinding, and I rolled my head around to unkink my neck. I was slowly turning back into a person after a night as an arraignment machine.

  Nathan reached over and put his hand on my neck, kneading the tight muscles. I sighed gratefully and rolled my head around again. That plus a couple more hits on the jay and finishing the beer brought me down a few more notches.

  I panned around the rooms, trying to see it as though for the first time. A photographic exercise, deliberately making the familiar new. If I were to photograph the room so as to reveal the character of its occupant, I wondered, what would I shoot?

  Nathan’s desk—not a desk really, but an old-fashioned library table with a shelf over the writing surface, handy for stacking papers or books currently in use. Only Nathan, in addition to stray bills, magazines, legal briefs, and other papers, had cluttered it with family photos. Of himself as a teenaged debater, the short haircut of the period flattening his curls and making him look all nose. Of his two sons—one at age three, blowing out the candles on a birthday cake; the other, aged about eight, with a bat and glove, a Yankee cap over his long hair. Of himself at four on a pony, his mother in a housedress by his side. Of his father amid a group of solemn-faced men at a union picnic. And one of the two of us, holding hands on the Promenade, taken by a passing Japanese tourist. Nathan was wearing an open sport shirt, his deep tan emphasizing the vigor of his wiry body. I had on an Indian-print sundress, my brown hair cut short for summer, a sunburn warming my usually pale cheeks. We were both squinting into the sun; the Japanese was a lousy photographer.

  The bookshelves—books on Zen philosophy next to a pictorial history of the Lower East Side I’d given him for his birthday. Tolstoy, Isaac Bashevis Singer, J. D. Salinger, The Great Gatsby. Books on running, on art—lots of those, big coffee table books, but looking well-used. Some of the books everyone gives a lawyer—My Life in Court, The Brethren, The Art of Cross-Examination. Lots of science fiction, but the few mysteries were all books I’d either given or lent him.

  In between the books were records that had been played and not put back. Pete Seeger. The Weavers. Baez. Fiorello. Propped up against the books and records were mementos—a woodburned plaque that said World’s Greatest Dad, a pottery chalice, the king from a now defunct ivory chess set. A framed Get Out of Jail Free card from a Monopoly game.

  For the paintings, I reflected, I’d have to change my mental film from black and white to color. A Hopper-style rendition of a country highway, checkerboard farms in primary yellows and greens, sliced by a two-lane blacktop. A scene at a masked ball, lurid and mysterious, disturbing in its implication that anyone could remove a mask and be revealed as someone entirely new, totally different from the person who had originally entered the room. And my favorite—a huge painting in washed blues and greens, repeating over and over again, in varying sizes, the cryptic message: NON-WORD. I had no idea what it meant, but something in me responded to its cool, cerebral quality. Concentration and compassion.

  Nathan went out to the kitchen for more beer. I sighed, leaned back on the couch, and looked out the huge picture window at the Brooklyn Bridge. It was lovely, a giant, sparkling necklace strung between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I had picked up a guy in arraignments who’d stolen a bicycle on that beautiful bridge. At gunpoint, from a twelve-year-old kid.

  Nathan came back, put down the beers, and sat close to me, his strong arm around my shoulders. I began to drift and drowse in a haze, my senses taking over from my mind. We sat a while in silence, just touching, each in our separate yet companionably shared world.

  I was the one who broke the spell. “Boy, do we need baths,” I said. “We both reek of the pens.” It was true, if unromantic. You can’t spend several hours sitting with people who’ve been locked up for two days and not smell pretty raunchy. Nathan went first, since he takes showers. When he came out, drying his hair with a huge yellow bath sheet, I went into the bathroom and filled the blue tub with water as hot as I could stand it. A little baking soda for softness, and I was all set.

  It was ecstasy. Bilbo Baggins was right; Water Hot is a noble thing. I eased myself into it inch by inch, shuddering as the heat tamed my aching muscles. The steam curled up around my head, and I closed my eyes and felt deeply relaxed and at peace.

  When I came out, I went straight to the bed where Nathan lay. I was naked and steamy, and he ran his hands over my soda-softened skin.

  I groaned as his hands roved, touching me with delicate, cool strokes. I began to glow, my mind floating deliciously on sensual awareness like a dragonfly skimming over a still pond. He increased speed and pressure. My body began to sing inside, louder and louder, climbing an invisible peak of pleasure until climax. I turned and smothered Nathan’s body with my own. We coupled, then lay exhausted in each other’s arms.

  As we drifted into sleep, I heard Nathan murmur that he wanted to talk to me. “In the morning,” I murmured back. Then we slept.

  I woke first. The plastic alarm clock said 7:45. I lay in bed wondering what to do. I was late. I had things to do at work, and I still had to go home and change.

  My gaze wandered around the bedroom. Less decorated than the living room, it still had touches of Nathan’s personality. The pictures on the walls were mine, photographs of a fall hike we’d taken on the Palisades. Variations on a theme—silver river, colored leaves, jutting stones. There was also a framed artist’s sketch of Nathan as a fiery trial lawyer—the kind they show on TV in lieu of camera shots of the actual trial—given to him by the artist.

  I got up, stiff with cold, and padded into the bathroom. Sleeping naked makes me feel vulnerable; in the cold light of early morning, my body seemed white and gross.

  When I came back from the bathroom, Nathan, lying in bed as soft and sweet as a child, almost tempted me. I nearly pulled off the blanket and snuck in to cuddle up to his warm back.

  But that would mean being late for work. If I’d known—but I didn’t.

  I leaned over and kissed him awake. He stirred, barely conscious, and I whispered, “Bye, love. See you at work.” I ruffled his surprisingly soft gray hair and dashed out the door to catch the IRT.

  I never saw him alive again.

  FIVE

  “Traffic cop with the Iceman,” Sylvia Mintz remarked. “Better you than me.”

  Traffic cop is what you do on the third day after you work arraignments. All your jail cases are on anyway, so you might as well answer the calendar. It’s called traffic cop because you’re supposed to make order out of chaos. I was traffic cop this Thursday morning because my—and Nathan’s—cases from Monday night dominated the AP4 calendar.

  We were waiting for the elevator in Criminal Court. Sylvia was on her way to the tenth floor, where she was on trial. A drug case. Cocaine. The undercover cop was due to testify, and she was pessimistic.

  “I can’t believe I’m trying this case,” she grumbled. “They’ve got everything but a movie of my guy selling to the undercover.” She was dressed for trial. Navy suit and gray blouse, a far cry from her usual bright colors and far-out designs.

  “Cheer up, Syl,” I said. “In a couple of days, it’ll be all over, and you can go back to spending your afternoons shopping at A & S.”

  “Kiss the Iceman for me,” she retorted sweetly, crowding into an elevator.

  Kiss the Iceman. Fat chance. The Hon. Perry Whalen wasn’t called the Iceman because he had the milk of human kindness in his veins.

  I pushed into the next elevator and closed my eyes. Some day I’m going to go berserk in a Criminal Court elevator from the lack of air and the smell of crushed humanity. I’ll lose control and bite the neck of the person in front of me, and they’ll take me away to a nice place with a big green lawn and adult-sized swing sets.

&n
bsp; But not this time. The doors opened; I stepped out onto the sixth floor, and headed for AP4.

  I was already late. The Iceman was a stickler. He didn’t even waste time chewing me out, just glared at me over the tops of his rimless glasses and went on with the calendar.

  The case before the bench was People of the State of New York v. Gaylord Squires, a.k.a. Maverick Kent, a.k.a. Junior Butts. The defendant looked like every other black street kid you ever saw. Skinny. Jeans. White T-shirt. Felony Flyers. But there was something in him that wasn’t dead yet. You could see it in his outrageous aliases. Gaylord Squires, for God’s sake. As if he owned a country seat and rode to hounds in an impeccable hunting jacket.

  But the future was clear. Someday the system would burn him out too. Someday he’d come through and give his name as Junior Butts, and it would be all over from then on. He’d be as dead, as defeated, as most of my clients.

  Digna Gonzalez’s case was up next. The Iceman didn’t even bother bringing her down from the pens. He denied my bail application pro forma, which means as a matter of course. For him it was a matter of course to keep people in jail, no matter what the circumstances. I was angry but not surprised. How many headlines do you read that say “Frightened Girl Denied Bail Hangs Self in Jail,” compared with those that read, “Judge Frees Killer”?

  Boynton was out. His boss had put the bail up for him. I was trying to explain to him why he had to come back to court even though his wife didn’t show up, when Judge Di Anci wandered into the courtroom. He was looking for a D.A. attached to the Sex Crimes Unit.

  “Must be important,” Mario Richetti remarked. “Di Anci the Lazy actually left the bench to do his own D.A. hunting.”

  “Maybe he wanted the exercise,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s that female D.A. with the big tits,” Mario answered.

  Paculo, Vinci, and Dennehy were up next. The two defendants who had been released stepped out of the audience, freshly dressed and looking sheepish. Dennehy, still dirty and truculent, still wearing the clothes he’d been arrested in, was brought out of the pen.