Conviction

by Julia Dahl

  “She lied then,” says Aviva.

  I look at her. “She says the man who paid her threatened her. She said he put a gun in her mouth. She also said he was Hasidic.”

  Aviva rolls her eyes. “Of course she said that.”

  “What do you mean, of course?”

  “I mean the blacks hate us.”

  “‘The blacks?’”

  “Oh, please, Rebekah. Don’t you see she’s just trying to stir up trouble? It is trendy to make the police look bad now. And anti-Semitism is a very big problem. Have you been reading about what is happening in France? The Jews are all having to leave! Just like before the Holocaust.”

  My mother has gone from Henrietta to Hitler in two sentences. I look at Saul. “Is that what you think, too?”

  “I have no way of knowing.” He looks at the file again. “The boy confessed.”

  “Right,” I say. “But he says the detective—this Olivetti guy—coerced him. That’s what happened with the Central Park Five kids, right? And you know there’s been a lot of research about how common false confessions are, especially with teenagers. DeShawn was only sixteen. I can’t tell if he had a lawyer present, but—”

  “I don’t know about any research,” says Saul, interrupting me. He closes the file and takes off his glasses. “How much money are those Central Park boys getting? Millions, right? I’m sure there are a lot of people in prison who see that and think, maybe I can get some, too.”

  “You don’t think they deserve some compensation for spending ten years in prison for something they didn’t do?”

  “They may not have done the rape, but those kids were up to no good in the park. We know that.”

  “Up to no good? What does that mean?”

  “I mean that the officers didn’t just pluck them out of thin air. They were running around the park, assaulting bicyclists, terrorizing people.”

  “But…”

  “I know, Rebekah,” he says. He takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I don’t like what happened to those boys any more than you do. But things were very, very different in New York twenty-five years ago. I don’t think it’s even possible for you to imagine what it was like. Every single day there were at least five murders. Five! Now we go days, sometimes a week, without even one. And murder was just part of it. Stabbings and shootings and rape and robbery and assaults. Constantly. Constantly. People could barely keep a business open in parts of Brooklyn for all the smash-and-grabs and the fires and the drugs. We were working fourteen-, sixteen-hour days. It was a tidal wave. Nonstop.”

  I wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that he is reacting defensively to my looking into an old case, but I can’t help being a little disappointed. When I met Saul last year all he seemed to care about was justice: a woman had been murdered and he believed that her insular religious community would cover it up. He wanted to get to the truth, no matter the cost. Is it possible he doesn’t think the Davis family deserves the same thing? What kind of person does that make him?

  “Okay,” I say. “I hear that. I just … what does that have to do with whether this guy—or anybody—is innocent or not? I mean, it makes sense that with so much coming at you things would get … mistakes might get made. Right? I mean…” I trail off, hoping he’ll agree, but he doesn’t. “I talked to DeShawn a few days ago and he said their family was getting threatening letters. And there’d been some vandalism at their house. That’s another lead. Do you remember that?”

  Saul sniffs, wipes his mouth with a paper napkin, and sets it down. For a moment I think he’s about to leave the table.

  “Everything pointed to this boy,” he says, and begins ticking points off on his fingers. “He was a messed-up kid. He had a history of arrests. He ran from us when we tried to interview him. I don’t think he had an alibi.…”

  “I actually talked to a woman who says she was his girlfriend,” I say. “She says she was with him all night but that the police didn’t believe her.”

  “I don’t recall a girlfriend. But how do you explain that this witness picked him out of the lineup?”

  “She told me she saw him in handcuffs and figured he must have done something wrong.”

  Saul is trying to appear unmoved—his back is straight, stiff, as if to project confidence—but he’s not looking at me. There is doubt somewhere.

  “She’s not taking the easy way out saying all this now,” I continue. “She basically admitted to lying to police, and lying to the court and sending a kid to prison for the rest of his life. She could face a lot of shit for what she did.”

  “People say a lot of things,” says Saul. “Maybe she is looking for attention. She was a drug addict, am I right?”

  “So what? She’s clean now. She’s got a job and an apartment, and she’s just living her life like the rest of us. And she’s fucking scared, Saul. There’s some crazy Hasidic murderer…”

  “Rebekah!” says my mom.

  “What? Oh, now you’re all protective? This is exactly the kind of shit I thought you guys hated. You don’t think it’s possible she’s telling the truth? Why? Because she’s black?”

  Saul sighs and looks at the sky. “Rebekah…”

  “Don’t patronize me, Saul. I don’t deserve it. I may not be a cop but I’m not an idiot. If DeShawn didn’t kill his family someone else did. Someone else walked into that home and shot three people—a little girl—in bed. That is a person that needs to be locked up. That is a person who has probably killed again. Right?”

  Saul doesn’t say anything. Part of me wants to storm off. But storming off is juvenile. Storming off won’t make anything better. And I could really use Saul’s help.

  “People make mistakes, Saul,” I say. “It doesn’t mean you were a bad cop.”

  “Of course he wasn’t a bad cop,” says Aviva.

  I ignore her, look at Saul. “You know what I’m saying.”

  “Yes, Rebekah.”

  “What if she’s telling the truth? Without her ID the case would have been a lot weaker, right? I mean, maybe that confession would still have convinced a jury and the appeals judge, but maybe not. And just the idea that a Hasidic man paid her to lie—that’s a real lead. I mean, was there any indication the Davises even knew people from the community?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “That opens up a whole line of investigation. If she’d told you this back then you would have at least tried to find out who this guy was, right?”

  “Yes.”

  I can tell by the way he says yes that I’ve made my point.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  August 1991

  Crown Heights, Brooklyn

  Joe arrived in Crown Heights one week after the riots. His mother watched the coverage on the evening news and read the articles in the newspaper out loud to him.

  “They are literally killing Jews there,” she said. “Why would you want to walk into that?”

  Joe didn’t tell her that he was excited to be walking into what the paper called a “war zone.” In their Shabbos talks, Shimon told Joe that Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, the revered leader of the Lubavitch-Chabad movement, said a Jew must be a master of his emotions, that the mind can channel and control the passions of the heart. Emotions are like oxen, Shimon explained. They are unruly and destructive when left alone. But yoke them and they can plow a field. Joe knew his emotions were unruly and destructive. He tried to yoke them with his mind, but his mind was just as disorderly. Perhaps what he needed was a place to channel them. He was ready to get out of his quiet California neighborhood and into the fires of Crown Heights.

  But once he got to Brooklyn, Joe was stuck in a classtoom. The yeshiva kept the boys busy. He spent his days improving his Hebrew and learning to read Aramaic—endeavors that quickly became tedious. Shimon had advertised the yeshiva as the place where the brightest young Jewish minds went to discuss big ideas. But Joe was stuck doing grammar exercises. The first time he was able
to go even five blocks from the Eastern Parkway headquarters was when Daniel Grunwald, the neighborhood mentor he’d been matched with, invited him to Shabbos dinner with his family. At that dinner, Joe met Daniel’s uncle, Isaiah. Isaiah Grunwald, Joe learned from his new friend, had been born in Israel and fought in the Six Day War. This impressed Joe. When they discussed politics or even the Holocaust, Shimon always reminded him that the Rebbe taught his followers to use their voices, not their hands, to respond to violence. Joe found this edict frustrating: would the six million have perished if they had taken up arms? Shimon never had an answer that satisfied him.

  After dinner, Daniel and Joe and Isaiah lingered at the Shabbos table.

  “How are you getting along with your studies?” Isaiah asked.

  “He is bored,” Daniel answered.

  “I was speaking to Joseph, Daniel.”

  “It’s true,” said Joe. “I thought I would be doing something.”

  “Would you like a job?” asked Isaiah.

  “What kind of job?”

  Isaiah explained that he owned about a dozen buildings in Brooklyn and that Daniel sometimes helped him evaluate complaints and do light maintenance work.

  “The yeshiva won’t like it,” said Daniel. “You are not supposed to be doing anything except studying, especially your first year.”

  Joe shrugged. “I don’t have to tell anyone.”

  “It is dirty work,” warned Isaiah. “Many of my tenants live like animals. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  In Los Angeles, Joe saw crime on the news, but in Brooklyn it was up close; the smells and sediment of it inescapable. Police vehicles rolled down the streets, but the officers stayed in their cars, ignoring the men openly imbibing liquor and smoking marijuana, the prostitutes propositioning every passing pedestrian, the boys spraying their gang names on buildings and tossing glass bottles into the street, the drunks urinating into gutters, onto buildings, behind Dumpsters. It was the dirtiest place he’d ever seen. It was lawless.

  Isaiah started Joe in the office. The landlord had a file on each tenant and kept them in two drawers: one for addresses south of Eastern Parkway, where Jews lived, and one for his other properties, which were, he told Joe, mostly populated by blacks. Joe’s first job was to go through the latter pile and use red flags to mark the files of tenants who were behind on their rent or had paid late more than once. When people in this pile called to report problems—clogged toilets, mold, broken radiators, vermin—Isaiah would know that fixing the issues was not a priority. Those tenants, Isaiah said, were taking advantage of his generosity. Isaiah understood that sometimes money was tight, but his Jewish tenants at least respected his property. In Isaiah’s opinion, if you could not pay your rent and you treated the home your landlord was providing you as a dump, you were not entitled to have the owner of your building—the owner who you might as well have been stealing money from—attend to all the problems you caused.

  * * *

  And there were, Joe learned quickly, lots of problems with Isaiah’s buildings. Every day there were calls. Rats were the biggest complaint, but nonfunctional toilets and sinks, as well as crumbling ceilings and walls were common. Raisa, the woman who answered the phones, spoke with the tenants and passed their messages to Joe. Joe identified the tenant by his or her file and informed Isaiah of the day’s complaints. Isaiah had a small group of handymen—a mix of goyim and Jews, including Daniel—who worked for him, and several mornings a week the men came to the office to receive a list of repairs they were to accomplish. Isaiah tended to prioritize issues that, if left untouched, could further degrade the value of the buildings. Roaches and rats he shrugged off as either encouraged by the tenants’ poor sanitation habits or an inevitable part of urban living. Burst pipes always got attention, as did crumbling façade—anything that could fall and harm a passerby and spark a lawsuit or a visit from one of the city’s agencies.

  About two months after he began working, Isaiah suggested that Joe accompany Daniel to a building where the tenants were complaining of a leak in the ceiling. The building was in Bushwick, a barren, industrial wasteland where Isaiah owned two four-story buildings across the street from a Department of Sanitation garage. They parked in front of a fire hydrant and Daniel told Joe to take work gloves and a paper mask from the box behind the driver’s seat. A line of garbage trucks, apparently awaiting repair, stretched down the block, fetid juice dripping from their exposed bellies. The door to the apartment building was propped open with a shoe, and inside the hallway Joe smelled cooking grease and feces. He covered his nose and mouth.

  “What did I tell you?” said Daniel. He knocked at apartment 1F, and a dark-skinned woman wearing a dress three sizes too small answered.

  “It’s about time,” she said. There was a gap between her two front teeth and a gold cross pendant inside her massive cleavage. Joe felt a surge of blood to his groin. None of the girls in his high school were interested in him after he began wearing his yarmulke, and the girls he met at the Chabad House were saving themselves for their husbands. For a while, he convinced himself that sexual discipline was an important part of his new identity. If he was to belong—and he wanted to belong—he had to live by the rules, even if they meant nothing to him. He didn’t crave intimacy, so porn magazines sufficed. But standing in the doorway that afternoon, inches from this woman whose clothing said, clearly, come and get me, he decided that he would no longer force himself to suppress his desire to do just that.

  The woman let them into the apartment and pointed them to the bathroom, which was the first door past the living room off a narrow hallway. The carpet was soaked halfway back toward the bedrooms, and an inch of filthy water pooled around the base of the toilet and sink. Someone had used towels to try to keep the damage contained to the bathroom, but they lay, soaked through and useless, on the floor. Part of the ceiling was open—melted, apparently, by a cascade of water from upstairs. A cascade now turned to a trickle, browning the wall behind the toilet.

  “You know I’ve been calling about this leak for a month, right? If y’all had come the first time—”

  “We’re here now,” said Daniel, cutting her off.

  The woman put one hand on her hip and one hand in the air. “Don’t you even get mouthy with me,” she said. “I pay my rent. I got rights. I should be calling the city to report your asses.”

  Daniel told the woman they would be back, and when they left her apartment he whispered to Joe that she was a prostitute and wouldn’t be calling any authorities.

  A mentally retarded man answered the door at the apartment upstairs. His head lolled sideways and his tongue hung between his lips. There was food on his chin and the zipper of his pants was open. On the sofa behind him was a middle-aged woman attached to an oxygen tank. The galley kitchen was swarming with flies; food containers and dishes were piled on every surface, and bags of trash covered the floor, rendering the room unusable. Applause and laughter and ringing bells screamed from a game show on the television. The volume was turned up far too loud.

  “Turn that down,” Joe said to the woman.

  “Uh-uh,” said a voice from down the hall. “You don’t get no say in how Mom watches her TV.”

  A shirtless man appeared from inside one of the bedrooms. He had, judging by the creases on the side of his face, just woken up. He buttoned his jeans and ran his hand through his hair. His chest and arms were muscular and there was a tattooed image of a praying woman on his left bicep and a Puerto Rican flag across his pectoral muscle. Joe could smell marijuana coming from either the man’s breath, or the bedroom.

  Daniel did not argue with the man; instead, he turned his attention to the bathroom, which was worse than the kitchen. The toilet was full of paper and feces; days’ worth without a proper flush. Someone had actually defecated on top of the clogged pile. The tile that had presumably once lay between the base of the toilet and the tub was gone and the floor beneath rotted a
way. Joe knew from his time spent with the files in Isaiah’s office that his boss had only owned these two Bushwick buildings for three months. How long had these people been living like this? It was a disgrace. Renting an apartment owned by someone else was a privilege. These people were guests. The woman should be in a hospital, the retarded man should be in a home, and the drug-smoking shirtless man should be in jail. And yet here they were, standing around useless as Isaiah paid Daniel and Joe to fix their mess.

  “We been calling,” said the shirtless man. Daniel ignored him and kneeled to examine the hole in the floor. “This isn’t something we can fix today.”

  “When you gonna fix it then? Shit!”

  Daniel stood up and began to leave the bathroom. The man stepped closer to him, got in his face.

  “I want this shit fixed today.”

  The man didn’t expect Joe to push him, and just a shove sent him tumbling, his bare feet useless on the slick floor. He fell spectacularly, stumbling first into the tiny vanity, his tailbone landing audibly on the tile, his arm splashing against the mountain of shit in the toilet.

  They were all silent for a moment. The man was stunned, shaking his head. Before he could get up, Joe and Daniel left. Neither spoke for the first half of the ride back to Crown Heights. When they crossed Eastern Parkway, Daniel asked, “Do you think he’s hurt badly?”

  “No,” said Joe. “He just slipped.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I call Judge Sanchez first thing Monday morning to tell her about Henrietta.

  “I can’t believe it,” she says. “I mean, I can believe it. I do believe it. That poor boy. I tried to argue that she wasn’t reliable because of her drug habit, but … I should have sent someone to scour her neighborhood. She wasn’t even in Crown Heights! We might have found that roommate if we’d tried. Fuck.”

  I almost say, it’s not your fault. But I don’t.

  “But she won’t go to the cops?”

  “No, at least not yet.”

  “If you could get her to write down what she’s saying and sign it … it might not be admissible. But it might be enough for the DA to at least take a second look at the case. They’re starting to do that—reexamine old cases.”