Conviction

by Julia Dahl

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  For Mick

  PART 1

  CHAPTER ONE

  Morning

  July 5, 1992

  Crown Heights, Brooklyn

  The little boy walked to the storefront church alone, with blood on his hands and face.

  Dorothy Norris arrived early, as usual, to lift the gate and set out the worship programs she’d photocopied the night before. She found him standing on the sidewalk, eyes unfocused, feet bare.

  She bent down. “Ontario, where are your parents?”

  He didn’t answer. It was already eighty degrees, but his teeth were chattering.

  Dorothy used her key and ushered him inside, flipped the lights, and walked straight to the phone in the pastor’s tiny office. She dialed Ontario’s foster parents, but no one answered, so she called Pastor Green, and then she called her husband and told him to stay home with the girls until she knew what was going on.

  Dorothy asked and asked and asked, but Ontario wouldn’t say a word.

  Redmond Green’s wife, Barbara, answered the phone at his apartment. Red was in the bathroom scribbling last-minute sermon notes in a rare moment of solitude. Barbara sent fourteen-year-old Red Jr. to bang on the door and summon his father. Barbara hadn’t asked for details—Just go, she told her husband—and as he walked the eleven blocks between their apartment and the church, he worked himself up, convinced the metal gate had been defaced again. Since opening Glorious Gospel on Easter morning 1982, Pastor Green had been losing a battle with vandals. He called the police often, but they rarely came to take a report. He knew that most of the officers in the precinct thought his crusade silly, given the many miseries plaguing the neighborhood, but he wasn’t about to stop calling. In 1992, one year after the riots, Crown Heights was still a disaster. A battlefield and a garbage dump. It was getting hot again, and everyone seemed to hold their breath, waiting for the neighborhood to explode.

  Pastor Green found the gate up when he arrived at Glorious Gospel. Dorothy Norris was inside with Malcolm and Sabrina Davises’ foster son, Ontario. The pastor’s first thought was that the boy had been attacked on his way to church. But Ontario was wearing sleep clothes, not church clothes.

  “Something’s happened at the Davises’,” said Dorothy.

  “What?”

  “He won’t say.”

  “Ontario? Are you hurt?”

  Ontario stared at the pastor. Past him, really. Through him. Pastor Green kneeled down and touched his arm.

  “He’s freezing cold,” he said, looking up.

  “I think he’s in shock,” said Dorothy.

  Ontario’s face was smeared with red. If the pastor had to guess, he would say that the boy had rubbed his eyes with his bloody hands.

  “Is this his blood?”

  Dorothy lowered her voice. “I don’t think so. But I don’t know.”

  “Have you called the precinct?” asked Pastor Green.

  “Yes,” said Dorothy.

  The pastor turned back to the boy.

  “Ontario. Can I make sure you’re not hurt?” He took the boy’s right hand, turned it over, looked up and down his arm. He repeated the inspection on the boy’s left arm. “Is it all right if I lift your shirt?” Ontario was still. “I just want to see if there are any scratches or cuts.… Good. Looks good. Ontario? Will you turn around for me? Just to check your back.” As he turned, Pastor Green put his fingers on the boy’s neck, and then his skull. “Good. Looks like you’re okay.”

  He put his hand on his knee to straighten up, and as he did, Ontario vomited. Right on the pastor’s Sunday wingtips. The boy’s eyes widened and filled with tears.

  “Oh, honey,” said Dorothy, leaning down. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s all right, son,” said Pastor Green. “Nothing a little water won’t fix up.”

  Dorothy walked Ontario to the bathroom to wash out his mouth.

  A voice came from the front door.

  “NYPD.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Summer 2014

  New York City

  I know I didn’t get the job when Gary, the Trib’s Sunday editor, calls and asks me to come in and chat.

  “We decided to give the position to Jack,” he says the next day. Jack, a Columbia Journalism School graduate, has been at the Trib six months to my two years. He is tall and blond and dresses like he grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, even though he’s from Queens. Tucked-in oxford, leather belt, blazer. He’s one of those guys who walks on his toes; he bounces everywhere and so always seems as if he’s excited to get where he’s going, even if it’s to the bathroom. Jack plays shortstop on the Trib softball team and is apparently a “big hitter.” I’ve never been to a game.

  “Honestly,” says Gary, “we felt like he was a little more committed.”

  “Committed?”

  Gary leans back in the creaky old chair, his arms folded over his stomach. I have no idea who this office belongs to. There are framed front pages of yore hanging crooked on the wall. Headlines from when the city was bankrupt, from the Son of Sam murders, from the first World Trade Center bombing.

  “The whole Roseville thing,” he says. “Those interviews you got were a real scoop. Nobody from the town has talked to a single reporter since the shooting. And you gave it to that magazine.”

  Of course. A couple months ago, a magazine called American Voice published a long article I wrote about the aftermath of a mass shooting in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Roseville, New York, last year. It’s not The New Yorker, but it’s respected, and they paid me two thousand dollars, on top of the three-thousand-dollar fellowship I won from an organization called the Center on Culture, Crime and the Media to report the story. A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The Washington Post tweeted that it was an “important” read, and I got invited to be a guest on a podcast out of Baltimore that focuses on healing after violence. I had fantasies that the article might lead to, say, a job offer from The New York Times.

  So far, however, no go. I’m still working shifts at the Trib. I’m freelance, even though I work full-time, so I don’t have any obligation to alert them if I’ve gotten work elsewhere—unless it’s a competitor, like the Ledger or even The Times. When I finally told Gary and Mike, the city desk editor, about the fellowship, I said the Center had already set up publication with American Voice. But that wasn’t completely true. The woman who approved my fellowship gave me the American Voice editor’s e-mail address, but I spent weeks crafting a pitch, then had to write the entire draft on spec to convince the executive editor that a reporter from the Trib with “no feature experience” could produce something to meet “the standards of American Voice.” I didn’t tell Mike and Gary any of this, but they aren’t stupid and they probably guessed the truth, which was that the Trib was my last choice for publication. I am prouder of what was printed in American Voice than anything else I’ve written—by far. It had context, depth, and even a little art in it. If I’d
given the piece to the Trib it would have been a quarter as long and they would have played it like an exposé (“EXCLUSIVE! INSIDE THE ROSEVILLE MASSACRE”) instead of an essay (“After Roseville”). So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised they’re passing me over for a staff position. I don’t bother protesting to Gary that I didn’t have control over the execution of the fellowship. Like I said, he’s not stupid.

  “We might not be American Voice, but we break news here. Evan Morris beat The Times on the name of the officer in the Kendra Yaris shooting, and his history of excessive force complaints.”

  “I know.”

  Kendra Yaris was shot and killed by police in the East Village last week. Kendra was a line cook at the Dallas BBQ on Second Avenue and was on her way to the 6 train at Bleecker Street when the two plainclothes officers mistook the twenty-two-year-old gay woman in a Brooklyn Nets hat and baggy shorts for the “young black man, slim build, ball cap” who had just held up a bodega on St. Mark’s. Kendra, who had been attacked by three drunken frat boys two weeks earlier, was carrying a knife. She noticed the men following her and began to run. When the officers caught up, she whirled around with her knife—and took four bullets to the chest. The shooting occurred five days after two cops on Staten Island tried to arrest an asthmatic man named Eric Garner for selling loose cigarettes, and ended up killing him in the process; and a month after a cop shot and killed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in the middle of a Ferguson, Missouri, street. Within twenty-four hours, #Justice4Kendra joined #ICantBreathe and #HandsUpDontShoot as an internationally trending hashtag. The NYPD withheld the name of the officer who killed her, but Evan Morris, who used to cover Manhattan courts for the Trib and recently moved to writing features for the Sunday section, got a tip that he recently cost the city $150,000 after the family of a man whose arm he broke during an arrest on Avenue D in 2013 sued. Morris did a little digging and discovered that Detective James Womack had a long history of civilian complaints of excessive force. That, plus the fact that Womack and his partner chased and shot not just the wrong person, but a person of the wrong gender, made the story national news, and up until yesterday—when the NYPD finally confirmed Womack’s name and the exact sum of the recent settlement—every news outlet in the country credited the Trib when they reported the story.

  “So,” says Gary, getting up, “we’d still like you to write for the section. Pitch me ideas anytime.”

  We walk out of the office, and before I head to Mike’s desk to get my assignment for the day, I duck into the bathroom to call Iris. She picks up on the first ring.

  “So?”

  “Nope,” I say.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “You kind of expected it, right? And did you even really want that job?”

  “It would have been better than what I’m doing now.”

  “Maybe. Or it would have kept you from looking for something at a better publication. Maybe you’ll meet somebody tonight who’s hiring.”

  Tonight I am attending a cocktail party hosted by the organization that gave me the fellowship. It’ll be the first time I’ve met any of the other journalists who’ve gotten support from the Center, and, yes, I’ve been fantasizing that I’ll make a connection that might provide a path out of the Trib.

  “We’ll see,” I say.

  “Don’t get all down about this, okay? It’s not like you lost out on your dream job.”

  In the past two years, Iris has been promoted twice at the fashion magazine where she works. She’s humble about it; she says it was just lucky that she happened to be there when people left, but I know she’s also proud of herself. And she should be. Iris wants to be the editor-in-chief of a magazine by the time she’s forty. Her dream is Vogue, of course, but I doubt they could get Anna Wintour out of that job with a shovel.

  “I know,” I say.

  “Good. Hey, did you call that guy yet? Is his friend having people out again?”

  That guy is Wyatt Singer, a twenty-six-year-old assistant director—or director’s assistant, I don’t remember—that I made out with at a pool party in the Hamptons two weeks ago. Iris dragged me to the land of the Kardashians when one of her colleagues had to bail on a prepaid weekend “share.” The house was a poorly maintained seven-bedroom monstrosity. There were more than twenty people sleeping there, and by the end of the weekend two of the bathrooms were unusable. All the female occupants were related to fashion in some way, and the males were mostly in TV or movies.

  “I’m not calling the random guy I hooked up with in the Hamptons.”

  “Why not!”

  “Because I hate people who go to the Hamptons.”

  “So does he!”

  “He only said that because he knew that’s what I wanted him to say.”

  “How is that not a good thing? He was being intuitive.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “How long has it been since you slept with anybody?”

  Creeping up on a year. Van Keller, a ridiculously good-looking sheriff’s deputy from Orange County, New York, came to the city for a friend’s birthday last fall, and we ended up spending the night together. We met last spring when I was investigating the death of Pessie Goldin, a Hasidic women found dead in her bathtub in Roseville, and were together when we heard about the shooting. The sex was great—urgent but unhurried, lots of kissing and locking eyes—but when he called a couple days later he said he didn’t think we should do it again. I think I’m too old for you, he said. What he meant, though, was I think you’re too young. I think you’re too immature. He’s on Facebook, and in June someone tagged a photo of him with his arm around a beautiful black-haired woman with freckles. She has a kid, I think.

  “A while,” I say to Iris. “Too long.”

  “Exactly, so let’s fix that. His friend has a share and I literally cannot spend another weekend in this city. I basically had to bathe in the bathroom sink when I got into work this morning.”

  “When did you become such a pussy? The humidity was worse in Florida.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t have to dress up in Florida. My thighs stick together under this skirt. And the subway is so bad. I one-hundred-percent had my face in this dude’s armpit all the way over the Manhattan Bridge this morning. There wasn’t even enough room to turn my head. I could see the white chunks of deodorant in his armpit hair.”

  “Gross.”

  “Oh, it was horrible.”

  I hang up and go into one of the stalls. I don’t want to spend my entire career at the Trib, but alienating the editors at a paper with a million readers—the only place that offered me a job when I moved here two years ago—is a bad move. I probably could have found a way to turn at least one of the stories I found in the past year interviewing the people of Roseville into a piece for the Trib. It just wasn’t a priority. I started thinking of the fellowship as a way out the minute I got it. Does that make me a snob? The anxiety buzzing in my stomach, making me sweat in the air conditioning, tells me I’ve made a mistake. I’ve been in talk therapy, and taking daily antidepressants and the occasional antianxiety pill for a year now. The regimen controls the worst of it. I’m not running to the bathroom with the frequency I was last year, but my body still screams at me sometimes. Interacting with my mother sets it off, as does, apparently, the kind of self-doubt (or, as Iris would probably call it, self-flagellation) that losing a job I disdained ignites.

  I pass Jack on my way toward the city desk and congratulate him.

  “Thanks!” he says, chipper as always. “I read your piece in American Voice. Wow! That’s, like, the byline of the century!”

  I smile. “Thanks. On to the next, I guess.”

  Mike, as usual, is bent over his computer at the city desk.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He lifts his head before his eyes. “Oh, good, you’re in a dress.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s not … I mean, I can send you someplace professional,” he stammers. Unlike some of the red-faced, thrice-
divorced men in the newsroom, Mike is not a flirt, and he’s so clearly flustered by my insinuation that I forgive him immediately. Plus, it is somewhat remarkable that I am wearing a dress. I borrowed it from Iris this morning for the party.

  “Someplace professional?”

  “Sandra Michaels is speaking at an event at the Plaza. We can get you in.” Sandra Michaels is a Brooklyn prosecutor and, according to a fawning cover story in last week’s New York magazine, the presumed next district attorney of Kings County. Her boss, seventy-nine-year-old DA Stan Morrissey III, was diagnosed with stage two melanoma last month and Michaels is the one running the office—which means she is the one deciding whether to indict James Womack for killing Kendra Yaris. But my guess is that neither of these things are what the Trib wants me to ask her about. “Did you see the story about her ex this morning?” Mike asks.

  I did. I picked up a copy of the Trib at the bodega above my subway stop and went through it on the way to the office. On page five there was a story headlined “Exclusive: Next DA Is a ‘Deadbeat’ Mom.” That article featured Michaels’ ex-husband telling a Trib reporter that after their divorce in 2000, she missed three months of child support payments.

  “I don’t think she’s qualified to be the DA if she didn’t follow the law herself,” said Tom McGinty.

  “It’s doing really well on the Web site,” says Mike. “We want to get a response from Michaels for a follow.”

  It’s the cheapest kind of tabloid story. If I’d gotten the Sunday job I might be able to spend a day or two working on a story about how much the city paid out each year to people who accused cops of misconduct, but as a runner on the city desk, I just have to go where they tell me.

  * * *

  At just before noon, I climb the red-carpeted steps to the Plaza Hotel where the New York Women’s Law Coalition is holding its annual awards luncheon. I’ve never been here before, and it’s less grand than I imagined. Wallpaper a little faded, lights a little too bright. But worst of all, the air conditioning seems to be on the fritz. It’s easily eighty-five degrees in the lobby.