by Jon L. Breen
It took all of thirty seconds for me to disabuse them of the notion that Jorge’s case killed Paul French. “Look,” I pointed out, “the whole family rejoiced when the kid went upstate. It meant they could keep a television set for more than a week. And he was no gang leader; the real gang-bangers barely tolerated him. So I don’t think—”
“What about Richie Toricelli, then?” The older cop leaned forward in my visitor’s chair and I had the feeling he was getting to the real point of his interrogation.
“Now we’re talking. Toricelli I could see killing Paul French. I’m not sure I see him pushing anyone out a window, though. I’d have expected Richie to use his sawed-off shotgun instead. He liked to see people bleed.”
The younger cop gave me one of those “how can you defend those people” looks.
“I was appointed,” I said in reply to the unspoken criticism. Which was no answer at all. I wouldn’t have been appointed if I hadn’t put myself on a list of available attorneys, and I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been committed with every fiber of my being to criminal defense work.
I’d long since stopped asking myself why I did it. I did it, and I did it the best way I knew how, and I let others work up a philosophy of the job.
Some cases were easier to justify than others. Richie Toricelli’s was one of the tough ones.
And if you thought he was a dead loss to society, you ought to meet his mother.
“Tell you the truth,” I said, only half-kidding, “I’d sure like to know where Rose Toricelli was when French took his dive.”
“She was in the drunk tank over on Gold Street,” the younger cop said, a look of grim amusement on his brown face. “Nice alibi, only about fifty people and ten pieces of official paperwork put her there.”
“Pretty convenient,” I said, hearing the echo of the Church Lady in my head.
“Counselor, you know something you’re not telling us?”
I dropped my eyes. A slight blush crept into my cheeks. I hated admitting this.
“I changed my phone number after Richie went in,” I said. “For a year, I lived in fear that Rose Toricelli would find some way to get to me. She didn’t just blame Paul French for Richie’s conviction, she blamed me too.”
The older cop cut me a look. Skeptical Irish blue eyes under bushy white eyebrows over a red-tinged nose. I got the message: You’re gonna do a man’s job, you need a man’s balls. Afraid of an old lady doesn’t cut it.
It pissed me off. This guy didn’t know Richie’s ma. “You look at her, you see a pathetic old woman who thinks her scurvy son is some kind of saint; I look at her and I see someone who wants me dead and who could very easily convince herself that shooting me is the best way to tell the world her boy is innocent.”
“Did she ever make threats? And did you report any of this?”
“Only in the courthouse the day they took Richie away. And, no,” I said, anger creeping into my voice, “I didn’t report it. I know what cops think about defense lawyers who get threats. You think we ask for it. And I didn’t want to look like a wimp who couldn’t handle a little old lady with a grudge.”
What really chilled me weren’t Rose Toricelli’s threats to do damage to the sentencing judge, to Paul French, to me—that was standard stuff in the criminal courts. What really had my blood frozen were the words she said to her son as they shuffled him, cuffed and stunned like a cow on his way to becoming beefsteak:
“You show them, Richie. You show them you’re innocent. It would serve them right if you hung yourself in there.”
For a year after that, I waited for the news that Richie’s body had been discovered hanging from the bars. Doing what Mamma wanted, like he always did.
But as far as I knew, he was still alive, still serving his time, which gave him an iron-bar-clad alibi for French’s death, so why were the cops even bringing it up?
The question nagged at me even after the cops left. I turned to my computer, supplementing the information I pulled up with a few phone calls and discovered something very interesting indeed.
Once upon a time, Richie Toricelli’s cellmate had been Hector Dominguez.
You remember the case. It made all the papers and even gave birth to a joke or two on Letterman. Funny guy, that Hector.
He’d kidnapped his son, claiming the boy’s mother was making him sick. A devout believer in Santeria, he accused his ex of working roots, casting spells, that sapped the boy’s strength. He said God told him to save his little boy from a mother who had turned witch.
You can imagine how well that went over in the Dragon Lady’s courtroom. She gaveled him quiet, had him bound and gagged because he wouldn’t stop screaming at his sobbing wife. He hurled curses and threats throughout the trial, bringing down the wrath of his gods on the heads of everyone connected to the proceeding.
The day he was to be sentenced, they found the doll in his cell. Carved out of soap, it wore a crude robe of black nylon and sported a doll’s wig the exact shade of the Dragon Lady’s pageboy. Out of its heart, a hypodermic syringe protruded like a dagger.
Like I said, a lot of criminal defendants threaten the judge who sends them upstate, but a voodoo doll was unique, even in the annals of Brooklyn justice. The Post put it on the front page; the News thundered editorially about laxness in the Brooklyn House of Detention; Newsday did a very clever cartoon I’d taped to my office bulletin board; and the Times ignored the whole thing because it didn’t happen in Bosnia.
I really wasn’t in the courtroom when Dominguez was sentenced because I wanted to see the show. Unlike the two rows of reporters and most of the other lawyers present that day, I had business before the court. But I had to admit a certain curiosity about how the Dragon Lady was going to handle this one.
The lawyer asked her to recuse herself, saying she could hardly be objective under the circumstances. I could have told him to save his breath; the DL was never, under any circumstances, going to admit she couldn’t do her job. She dismissed out of hand the notion that she’d taken the voodoo doll personally; it would play no part, she announced in ringing tones, in her sentencing.
Hector Dominguez was oddly compelling when he began to address the court. His English was so poor that an interpreter stood next to him in case he lapsed into his Dominican Spanish, but Hector waved away the help, determined to reach the judge in her own language.
“You Honor, I know it looking bad against me,” he said in his halting way. “I just want to say I love my son with my whole heart. Mi corazon is hurt when my son get sick. I want her to stop making him sick. Please, You Honor, don’t let that woman hurt my boy. He so little, he so pale, he so sick all the time and it all her fault, You Honor, all her doing with her spells and her evil ways.”
The child’s mother dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, shaking her head mournfully.
The DL gave Dominguez two years more than the District Attorney’s office asked for, which was already two years more than the probation report recommended.
This, she insisted, had nothing to do with the doll, but was the appropriate sentence for a man who tried to convince a child that his loving mother was a witch.
Dominguez’s last words to the DL consisted of a curse to the effect that she should someday know the pain he felt now, the pain of losing a child to evil.
The papers all commented on the irony of a man like Hector calling someone else evil. And Letterman milked his audience for laughs by holding up a voodoo doll in the image of a certain Washington lady.
But three years later, when the boy’s mother was charged with attempted murder and the court shrinks talked about Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, the attitudes changed a bit. Now Hector was seen, not as a nut case who thought his wife was possessed, but as a father trying to protect his son and interpreting events he couldn’t understand in the only context he knew, that of his spirit-based religion.
He was up for parole, and it was granted without much ado. He was free—but his little b
oy, six years old by now, lay in a coma, irreparably brain-damaged as a result of his mother’s twisted ministrations.
By not listening to him, by treating him like a criminal instead of a concerned father, the Dragon Lady had prevented authorities from looking closely at the mother’s conduct.
He had shared a jail cell with Richie Toricelli. That had to mean something—but what?
The theory hit me with the full force of a brainstorm: defendants on a train. Patricia Highsmith by way of Alfred Hitchcock.
What if Ma Toricelli, instead of killing the prosecutor who sent her precious Richie upstate, shot the Dragon Lady—who had no connection whatsoever to her or her son? And what if Dominguez, who had no reason to want Paul French dead, returned the favor by pushing French out of the window? Each has an alibi for the murder they had a motive to commit, and no apparent reason to kill the person they actually murdered.
The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I liked it so much I actually asked a cop for a favor. Which was how I ended up sifting through DD5s in the Eight-Four precinct as the winter sun turned the overcast clouds a dull pewter.
I learned nothing that hadn’t been reported in the papers, and I was ready to pack it in, ready to admit that even if Ma Toricelli had done the deed, she’d covered her tracks pretty well, when one item caught my attention.
The neighbor across the street had seen a Jehovah’s Witness ringing doorbells about twenty minutes prior to the crime. He knew the woman was a Witness because she carried a copy of the Watchtower in front of her like a shield.
This was a common enough sight in Brooklyn Heights, where the Witnesses owned a good bit of prime real estate, except for one little thing.
Jehovah’s Witnesses traveled in pairs. Always.
One Jehovah’s Witness just wasn’t possible.
My heart pounded as I read the brief description of the bogus Witness: female, middle-aged, gray hair, gray coat, stout boots. Five feet nothing.
Ma Toricelli to a T.
I wasn’t as lucky with the second set of detectives. I was told in no uncertain terms that nothing I had to say would get me a peek at the Paul French reports, so I left the precinct without any evidence that Hector Dominguez could have been in the municipal building when French took his dive.
Still, the idea had promise. I had no problem picturing Rose Toricelli firing a gun point-blank into the judge’s midsection and I was equally convinced that in return for the Dragon Lady’s death, Hector Dominguez would have pushed five district attorneys out a window. But proving it was another matter.
I pondered these truths as I trudged down Court Street toward home. The sidewalks wore a new coat of powder, temporarily brightening the slush of melting gray snow. Dusk had arrived with winter suddenness, and only the snow-fogged streetlights lit the way. I was picking my way carefully in spite of well-treaded snow boots, my attention fixed on the depth of the chill puddle at the corner of Court and Atlantic Avenue, when the first shot zipped past my ear.
I didn’t know it was a shot until the guy in the cigar store yelled at me to get down.
Get down where?
Get down why?
I honestly didn’t hear it.
I couldn’t even say it sounded like a car backfiring or a firecracker. And I didn’t hear the second shot either, although this one I felt.
A sting, like a wasp or a hornet, and blood coursing down my cheek. A burning sensation and a really strong need to use a bathroom. I was ankle-deep in very cold water and couldn’t decide whether to keep making my way across the street or run to the shelter of the cigar store. While I considered my options, a black SUV swerved around the corner, straight into the icy puddle, drenching me in dirty, frigid water.
That did it. I turned quickly, wrenching my knee, and hoisted myself onto the curb. I slid at once back into the puddle, landing hard on my backside. A couple of teenagers stopped to laugh, and I suppose it would have been funny if I hadn’t been scared out of my mind. Limping and holding my bleeding cheek, I slipped and slid on my way to the amber-lighted cigar store on the corner.
Tobacco-hater that I am, I’d never been inside the cigar emporium before. The scent was overwhelming, but so was the warmth from the space heater on the floor.
The counterman met me at the door, a solicitous expression on his moon face. He was short, with a big bristling mustache and two chins. He reeked of cigar smoke, but I didn’t mind at all when he put an arm around me and led me into the sanctuary of his store. He seated me on a folding chair and offered the only comfort he possessed. “Want a cigarillo, lady? On the house.”
I started to laugh, but the laughter ended in tears of frustration and relief.
I was alive.
I was bleeding.
I’d been shot at.
The cops were on their way, the cigar man told me, and then he proudly added that he’d seen the shooter’s car and had written down the license plate.
The cops, predictably enough, talked drive-by shooting and surmised that a gang member might have been walking nearby when the shots rang out. Since my attention was fully absorbed in not falling into the puddle, King Kong could have been behind me on the street and I wouldn’t have noticed.
The second theory was the Atlantic Avenue hotbed-of-terrorism garbage that gets dragged out whenever anything happens on that ethnically charged thoroughfare. Just because Arab spice stores and Middle Eastern restaurants front the street, everything from a trash fire to littering gets blamed either on Arab extremists or anti-Arab extremists.
I have to admit, I was slow. Even I didn’t think the shooting had anything to do with my visit to the Eight-Four precinct.
That didn’t happen until the next day, when I learned that the car whose license plate the cigar man wrote down belonged to one Marcus Mitchell.
Marcus Mitchell had been royally screwed by Paul French in one of those monster drug prosecutions where everyone turned state’s evidence except the lowest-level dealers. People who’d made millions cut deals that had the little guys serving major time for minor felonies, and Mitchell was a guy who had nothing with which to deal.
My own client gave up the guys above him and walked away with a bullet—that’s one year and not even a year upstate, a year at Riker’s, which meant his family could visit him and—let’s be honest here—he could still run a good bit of his drug business from his cell. I know, that sucks, but French was only too happy to get the goods on the higher-ups and made the deal with open eyes. All I did was say yes.
All Marcus Mitchell did was keep his mouth shut, and he did that not out of stubbornness but out of sheer ignorance. He’d been the poor sap caught with a nice big bag of heroin, but the only thing he knew was that a guy named Willie handed it to him at the corner of Fulton and Franklin and told him not to come back until it was all sold.
For this, he got twenty to life. Released after three years on a technicality, but by that time his wife had left him, he’d lost his job, and his parents had died in shame. He had plenty of reason to want Paul French dead.
But why had he taken a potshot at me?
I had taken the day off work, called in shot. It was in the papers, so the judges bought it and told me to take all the time I needed to recuperate, then put my cases over a week. I sipped Tanzanian Peaberry while I felt the blood ooze into the gauze bandage on my cheek and reconsidered my theory.
It was still sound, except for two little things.
One: there were three, not two, defendants on a train.
Two: Ma Toricelli’s chosen victim wasn’t Paul French—it was the defense lawyer she blamed for her son’s conviction. Me.
It went like this:
Ma Toricelli kills the Dragon Lady for Hector Dominguez.
Dominguez kills Paul French for Marcus Mitchell.
Marcus Mitchell tries to kill me for Ma Toricelli.
This time the cops listened. This time they questioned everyone in the building where Paul French died and found sev
eral witnesses who described Hector Dominguez to a T. Add that to the description of the bogus Witness, squeeze all three defendants until someone cracked, and the whole house of cards would tumble down.
I went to the arraignment. I was the victim, so I had a right to be there, and besides, I wanted to see firsthand the people who’d tried to end my life in an icy puddle.
When the time came for Ma Toricelli to plead for bail, she thrust her chin forward and said, “She was supposed to be my boy’s lawyer, but all she did was look down on him. She never did her job, Your Honor, not from the first day. She thought Richie was trash and she didn’t care what happened to him.”
I opened my mouth to respond, then realized it made no difference what I said. Even if I’d been the worst lawyer in the world, that didn’t give Rose Toricelli the right to order my death. And I’d done a good job for Richie, a better job than the little sociopath deserved.
Perhaps my mental choice of words was what caught my attention.
If I really thought Richie was a sociopath, had I done my best for him? Or had I slacked off, let the prosecution get away with things I’d have fought harder if I’d truly believed my client innocent? It was a hard question. There were cases I’d handled better, but I honestly didn’t see Richie getting off if Johnnie Cochran had been his lawyer. Still, my cellside manner could have been improved; I could have at least gone through the motions enough to convince Richie’s mother that I was doing my best.
The letter came in due course, as we say in the trade. It was enclosed in a manila envelope with the name of a prominent Brooklyn law firm embossed in the left corner. I had no clue what was inside; I had no business pending with the firm and no reason to expect correspondence from them. I slit the thing open with my elegant black Frank Lloyd Wright letter opener, the one my dad gave me for Christmas two years ago.
Another letter with my name handwritten on the front, no address, no stamp, fell into my hands.
This one’s return address was the Appellate Division, Second Department.
