Dead Man's Thoughts

by Carolyn Wheat

  But even with Puckett under control, the case was a loser. He’d been found by the cops on the premises, burglars’ tools in his pocket. Burg Three was a lousy offer, but if we couldn’t win at trial, not one we could afford to turn down, not with a mandatory jail sentence after conviction for Burglary Two.

  “I ain’t meant to do no stealin’,” was all he would say.

  I shrugged. It was his decision, though I’d hoped to spare him the jail time. I wrote his next court date on one of my cards, handed it to him, and made sure he put it in his pocket. I had half a mind to pin it to his coat, the way kindergarten teachers pin notes to their kids. Then I watched his dignified weave back down the corridor toward the elevator.

  Next stop, criminal court. I was hoping to get Thomas Boynton’s case dismissed. Then I’d beard the D.A. lions in their den on Digna’s behalf. Her case wasn’t on the calendar, but if I could get a supervisor to agree to a misdemeanor plea for her today, it would be smooth sailing when the case was on.

  As I sat in the front row in Jury One, waiting for Boynton’s case to be called, I found myself thinking back to my last night with Nathan. “I know I can’t save them all,” he had said, “but if I can get one kid into one program.…” It made sense. I couldn’t change Digna’s life for her, or get her kids back, or stop her being poor. All I could do was keep her out of jail. And if I did that, it would be enough. There was no point in wishing I could do more. I couldn’t.

  Boynton came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. “When they gonna hear my case?” he asked, for the third time in about fifteen minutes.

  “Mr. Boynton, please just sit down and wait. There’s nothing I can do till they call it, okay?”

  “I don’t want to be comin’ back here no more,” he grumbled. “Ain’t nothin’ but a waste of time.”

  While I waited, I thought about Del Parma. Winthrop’s Voice article had come out early this morning, Wednesday. I’d read it over breakfast. It really blew the lid off, I reflected admiringly. He’d laid out everything he’d told me about the cases botched by the Special Prosecutor’s office, and he’d topped it off with what I’d told him about Riordan, Nathan, and Blackwell. He was within the bounds of the libel laws, but just barely. Parma would have some tall explaining to do to the congressional committee.

  And to Detective Button, I hoped. The article should at least get Button thinking. Parma’s motive to murder Blackwell stood out a mile, and Winthrop had made the link between Charlie’s death and Nathan’s very clear. So clear even a cop could understand it.

  The bridgeman called Boynton’s case. Dismissed. I told Boynton so with a smile, but if I was hoping for thanks I didn’t get it. “’Bout time,” he muttered, stalking away. “Waste of my fucking time.”

  Maybe. Maybe not. He’d at least learned how serious his wife was about wanting him to move out and leave her alone. I doubted that anything short of being locked up could have impressed it on him so forcibly. So in a roundabout way, rough justice, Brooklyn-style, had been done. Then why did it leave such a bitter taste in the mouth?

  I thought at intervals about Parma throughout the day. A double-agent of crime, playing both sides of the street? So panicked at the thought of what Charlie could do to him that he set the little man up for death, engineering his murder by paid assassins? Maybe with help from court personnel? Somebody, after all, had tampered with Charlie’s yellow card. Could Red or Vinnie or even Maria Watson be on Parma’s payroll? Or somebody at the Brooklyn House?

  As for Nathan’s murder, that was easy. If Parma was the killer, he’d learned that Charlie had talked to Nathan because Nathan had called Parma. Personally, as an old friend. But would Nathan call Parma, knowing Parma was the fixer of the Stone case? Maybe out of friendship, to give the man a chance to explain. That would be like Nathan. The only question was how Parma could have known enough to frame Paco. Maybe the same court officer who’d fixed Blackwell’s card.…

  It was a great theory. There was only one flaw in it. A fatal one. At 4:40 P.M. that afternoon, Del Parma was pushed under a moving subway train. He died instantly.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The next day was Paco’s sentence date on the misdemeanor. As I waited for Pete Kalisch, I reflected that a lot of water and not a little blood had flowed under the bridge since that night in arraignments when Nathan had told me about his plans to get the kid into a program. I wished to hell he had. Maybe none of it would have happened, or at least not so easily, had there been no Paco to hang the rap on.

  Pete came in about five minutes later. He went up to the bridgeman, signed in to have the case called, submitted a notice of appearance, and then asked for the probation report. I could see the bridgeman shrug, then hand the papers to Pete. He brought them back to the first row and let me read over his shoulder.

  I read quickly, trying to pick out the items the murderer could have gotten from the report to use against the kid. Like the fact that he was nicknamed “Paco.” That was in the first line. So you didn’t have to be his bosom buddy to know that if you wrote him a note it should be addressed to “Paco,” not “Heriberto.” Also the kid’s criminal history was outlined. He’d started hustling at school, putting out for the older boys’ lunch money. He’d even been the complaining witness in a Family Court petition against one of those older boys. But the charges were dropped when Paco failed to show up in court.

  From school, Paco had graduated to the street, showing up primarily in the Village. There was a string of Manhattan Family Court petitions charging him with petty larceny. A watch. A ring. A wallet. All from tricks. Just as he’d said, a little extra payment to take away the shame. He’d been lucky on the cases—ACDs, fines. Apparently the judges hadn’t liked the complainants. Chicken hawks don’t get much respect in society.

  It was all pretty sordid and pretty routine. Until I saw an adult arrest that sickened me. It started out as the usual trick-plus-ripoff bag, but the victim had caught Paco leaving with his gold cigarette case and there had been a struggle. According to the report, Paco had gone berserk and beaten the guy to a pulp. The probation department deplored the violence, but they never did get Paco to explain to them why it had happened. He refused to talk about it.

  I was writing it all furiously into my notebook when a voice penetrated my funk of concentration.

  “What’s going on here? What’s the meaning of this?” I looked up to see Di Anci framed in the doorway of the robing room. He was livid, his face distorted with anger, almost spluttering as he went on, “Ms. Jameson, who told you you could look at that report?”

  Pete stood up. “I did, Your Honor. Ms. Jameson is consulting with me about the case. Her office represented Mr. Diaz prior to my appointment as counsel.”

  Di Anci’s voice grew deceptively soft and patient. Anyone who knew him would have known he’d all but passed the bounds of reason. “I don’t care, Mr. Kalisch. I don’t care what you thought you were doing. The statute is very clear. First of all, I am still the judge in this courtroom and I decide who can see that report. Not,” he glared at the bridgeman, “not the court personnel.”

  “But Judge, you told us before—” the bridgeman began. I could have told him to save his breath. Di Anci shouted, “Silence!” at the top of his lungs. Then he turned to me. “Ms. Jameson,” he said in a voice of deadly calm, “I am not going to let this matter drop. I am not only going to take it up with Mr. Jacobs and your bosses at Park Row, but I am going to seriously consider filing a grievance against you with the Bar Association. You have violated the defendant’s right to privacy, you have engaged in a serious conflict of interest, and you have violated the Criminal Procedure Law, which gives the right to see this report to defense counsel only. Which you are not. And for the record, I don’t believe for one minute what Mr. Kalisch said about your helping him with the sentence. What you were doing, Ms. Jameson, was snooping. Pure and simple. And I won’t have it in my courtroom.”

  He paused. I guessed it was my turn to
launch into a spurious apology, so I did so. Di Anci had no choice but to accept it, but it was obvious to everyone in the room that neither of us meant a word we were saying.

  After Di Anci stormed back into the robing room, I went up to the bridgeman. “I’m sorry, Phil. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

  “You shouldn’t of looked at it, Counselor,” he said in an aggrieved tone. “You know you got no business lookin’ over Pete’s shoulder like that. It wasn’t right.”

  “Hey, what can I say?” I told him. “If I’d known Di Anci was going to come down on us like that, I wouldn’t have done it. It just came out of the blue.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “you got a point there. You never know where you stand with that guy. One day he says, ‘Give the fuckin’ reports’—oh, excuse my language, Ms. Jameson—‘to the lawyers and don’t bother me.’ The next day it’s, ‘I’m the judge and you can’t give ’em nothin’ without I say it’s okay.’ Never know where you stand. Just wish he wouldn’t yell on me in front of the whole courtroom. Makes it kinda hard to tell people what they’re supposed to do if they seen me get chewed out like that, you know?”

  Pete stepped up, finished with the report. “When do you think you’ll be able to call it?” he asked.

  “We’ll bring him down right away. We’ll call him after the first calls. Gotta do my first calls first, you know that, Pete.”

  Pete, himself a former court officer, nodded. That gave us about half an hour. I suggested coffee. And a long talk about the case.

  We went to the New Deal Coffee Shop, across the street from the courthouse. It was small and dingy, the perfect place to duck into for a quick conference.

  “Was it worth it?” There was a hardness I didn’t like in Pete’s tone. Not for the first time, I found myself wishing I was working with Paul. An old friend instead of a disapproving stranger.

  I looked straight into his hazel eyes and decided to answer coolness with coolness. Though I felt anything but cool.

  “Yes, it was, as a matter of fact. I learned some very interesting things. Like the fact that the nickname ‘Paco’ was right there for anybody to see. And his pattern of ripping off his tricks. Not to mention the time he nearly killed one of them, who happened to come upon him when he was about to make off with his cigarette case. All of which information would have been of immense help to whoever framed him.”

  He looked at me appraisingly. “Okay. That makes sense. So you think what—that the murderer just happened to read the probation report and called the kid and pretended to be the guy from the job program? How would the murderer know about that, by the way? It’s not in the probation report, since they recommended jail.”

  “It’s noted on the court papers. I saw it when I arraigned Paco. The judge put it down as the reason for the adjournment.”

  He nodded. “All right. But it still seems far out to me, that someone would go to all this trouble.”

  “Look at it this way. If someone did, then it paid off. The cops never gave a second’s thought to any other possibility. Once they knew about Paco, he was nailed. They never gave the Blackwell thing a chance.”

  “It’s going to be a real bitch to sell to a jury,” Pete said gloomily, staring into his coffee.

  So he was human after all, worrying about the coming trial just like any other lawyer. I gave him a smile. “That’s why we got the best lawyer we could find,” I said sweetly.

  He smiled back. “Flattery will get you everywhere.”

  “Everywhere?”

  “Well, it’s good for a cup of coffee, anyway,” he said, putting a quarter on the table and picking up the check.

  Meanwhile, back in the courthouse, the prisoners were down. Pete and I slipped in to the pens without going through the courtroom. One Di Anci tantrum per day is my limit.

  Paco stood in a corner, smoking a cigarette. I went over to him. “Hi, Paco. Remember me?” He nodded.

  “So what’s doin’ today?” he asked belligerently. “How come I gotta be in court again? This is the third time this week they wake me up at five in the morning to come to court.”

  Pete explained. “This is your sentence date on the old case. The one Mr. Wasserstein represented you on. The other times you were in court were on the murder case. But you won’t be back here again. Today you’ll be finished on the old case, and from now on you’ll be in Supreme Court on the murder. Understand?”

  Paco nodded knowingly. “Goin’ upstairs. I never been upstairs before.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re goin’ up the hard way, kid.” Pete’s voice was harsh. “Most people work their way up to murder. You started at the top.”

  Pete talked to Paco for about half an hour. The iron gates clanged open and shut as the other prisoners went into the courtroom and came back again. Pete didn’t learn any more than I’d already told him, but I didn’t grudge him the right to hear it first-hand. Finally, he turned to me and asked if I had any questions.

  I did. “Don’t get mad, Paco, but I have to ask you about this. What about the guy you beat up in the Village last year?”

  He looked blank. I tried again. “You know, the guy who caught you taking his cigarette case, so you beat the shit out of him.”

  The blank look was replaced by a look of animal wariness. “Yeah. Whatchou want to know?”

  “I want to know what went down. Why you came down so hard on the guy.”

  “Like you said, I took the cigarette case and the dude seen me, so I gotta fight with him. No big deal.”

  “No big deal! Paco, you stomped on the guy. He was in the hospital for three weeks. He lost a fuckin’ kidney. And you’re tellin’ me no big deal.”

  “Yeah, I done time for that. They can’t go throwin’ that in my face no more. It’s finished, man.” As if to prove to himself just how finished it was, he walked away from me, to the other side of the cell.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the court officer assigned to the pen tense up. Next to me Pete murmured something. Probably telling me to leave his client the hell alone.

  But I couldn’t let myself deal with either of their concerns. The story was another nail in the kid’s coffin. Proof that he was a hothead who would strike out viciously when confronted by a ripped-off victim. Unless there was more to the story. Something that would show why he’d attacked that particular guy. Some personal thing between him and Paco which would have no bearing on his relationship with Nathan.

  “Paco, listen to me,” I said. “I’m on your side. But that story is a killer. All a jury has to know is that you beat up this guy with no reason, just because he saw you with his stuff, and they’ll believe you murdered Nathan for his watch. You want that to happen? You want them to convict you without leaving the fucking box? Look, man, you could have hit that guy once and gotten away. Why did you do a number on him?”

  “You wanna know?” Paco shrieked, “you really wanna know?” He turned toward me, face contorted. People started rushing into the room. Court officers, lawyers, I recognized Bill Pomerantz. There was a lot of shouting, very little of it making sense. Some of it seemed to be directed at me, trying to get me out of the room before there was trouble. I had no intention of leaving.

  “Yeah, I wanna know, Paco,” I shouted back above the din. “I wanna know why you nearly wasted that dude. Did it make you feel like a big man, beatin’ up on a faggot?”

  “You bitch!” He screamed it with all his might, then turned to the wall, clutching his head in his arms.

  The court officer turned on me. “Will you for Christ’s sake stop tuning him up! We don’t want any trouble in here. Let him get calmed down before you talk to him.”

  “I don’t want him calmed down,” I said between clenched teeth. “I want him like he is.”

  He was about to argue, maybe even throw me out of the pens, when Paco crumpled in his corner, sliding to the floor with his arms still wound around his head. Huge sobs racked his body. He rocked himself back and forth on the hard fl
oor like a blind child.

  He cried for about five minutes. Pete and I stood and watched. The court officer hustled everyone else out of the pen. Finally, Paco subsided and in a muffled voice said, “He called me names.”

  “What kind of names, Paco?” I asked softly.

  “He said I was—” The voice broke. “He called me his lover. Said how could I steal from him when he loved me and I loved him.”

  “And that’s what made you want to kill him? That he said he loved you?”

  Paco raised his tear-stained face. “He ain’t supposed to love me,” he said sullenly. “Just fuck with me. I ain’t got no men for lovers, that’s for sure.”

  Well, I had done a wonderful job. For the prosecution. Before we had had a story which could have given a little boost to the theory that Paco had killed Nathan for the gold watch. Now we had Button’s theory on a silver platter. Paco had tried to kill one man who thought he could be his lover. What if he thought Nathan felt the same way? I was sick. I’d been trying to help, but all I’d done was make things even worse.

  I went back into the courtroom and sat in the first row. I scarcely noticed what was happening at the bench. Paco stood at the counsel table, head bowed, thin wrists clamped into handcuffs. I woke up and paid attention when the sentence was pronounced.

  A year. The maximum. And a self-satisfied little smile from Di Anci to tell me it was his way of paying me back for reading the report. Now even if I managed somehow to clear Paco of the murder, he’d still be in jail. And there’d be nothing I could do about it. Di Anci had seen to that.

  Only one thing could have made me feel worse. On the way into Supreme Court, I ran into Button. Almost literally. He came bounding out of the revolving door just as I was about to go in.