Conviction

by Julia Dahl

  “I can try,” I say. “I was going to call her again today or tomorrow. I don’t want to be too pushy, you know. She’s scared of this guy, Joe.”

  “Joe. Could you get a more common name? And it’s probably not even his name. She thinks he’s Hasidic?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Well, at least that’s how she said he dressed. Black hat and the whole thing.”

  “Unreal. Do you have any idea why the Hasids might have been interested in the Davises?”

  “No,” I say. “But I’m going to call their friends at the church and ask.”

  “Good,” she says. “Keep me in the loop.”

  When I call in for my assignment, the Trib receptionist transfers me to Mike, who tells me there is mail waiting for me in the newsroom.

  “It’s from the Coxsackie Correctional Institution,” he says. “This for a story?”

  “Maybe,” I say. I didn’t want to give a convicted felon my home address, so I had DeShawn send everything to the Trib. This, I realize now, was stupid. I haven’t mentioned the story to anyone at the office because I’ve been working on it in the hopes that the Center might give me a grant. But I can’t tell Mike that. “It’s sort of preliminary. A possible wrongful conviction on a triple murder in Crown Heights back in 1992.”

  “Oh, yeah? Morgan’s been asking about investigative stuff. He wants us all to bring ideas to a meeting on Friday. Can you have something for me by then?”

  “Um, maybe?”

  “Give me the gist.”

  “The guy who the packet is from was only sixteen when he got convicted. He says the detective on the case manipulated him into confessing—you know, like the Central Park Five?”

  “That’s it? Everybody says that.”

  And then my ego gets the better of me.

  “I actually tracked down the key witness who flat-out told me someone paid her to lie to the cops.”

  “That’s on the record?”

  “No,” I say. “Not yet. She’s scared of him. She changed her name and moved, but she’s worried she’ll get in trouble for lying if she comes forward now.”

  I can hear Mike typing.

  “Mike. It’s not on the record.”

  “What?”

  “You’re typing.”

  “I’m taking notes, Rebekah.” More typing. “Okay. Things are a little slow. Come to the office and see what he sent. I might have to send you out, but you can work on this in the meantime.”

  I hang up the phone and head to the bathroom. The conversation has alighted my anxiety and when it hits these days, it always hits in my guts—literally. Iris knocks on the door.

  “Should I do my makeup in the living room?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I call out. “Sorry. I might be a minute.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “I told Mike about Henrietta, and now he wants to pitch the DeShawn story to Morgan on Friday. I don’t trust him not to, like, exaggerate what I’ve actually got. Which is nothing—at least not on the record.”

  I finish in the bathroom, light a match, and get dressed. Iris and I ride the F train into the city together and just as I’m about to push through one of the four revolving glass doors into the midtown high-rise where the Trib’s newsroom is, Aviva calls.

  “Hi,” I say, plugging my ears against an ambulance screaming up Sixth Avenue.

  “Rebekah? Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. I’m in midtown. Are you still in the city?”

  “Yes. I am driving back to New Paltz today. I would like to talk to you. Can we meet?”

  “I’m working all day,” I say. “What’s up?”

  “I would like to see you in person.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I would rather discuss it in person.”

  What doesn’t she get about I’m working?

  “I can probably take lunch,” I say. “But if something comes up and they send me out, I have to go.”

  “I understand.”

  We agree to meet at a deli around the corner from the Trib building at twelve thirty. As I ride the elevator upstairs to the newsroom, I dig through my bag for my bottle of anti-anxiety pills. For twenty-three years my missing mother existed exclusively inside me. She was a feeling: a fist around my heart, quicksand in my stomach; real, but not real. And she had tremendous power. I always figured that if I met her I could take that power back. That it was the mystery of who she was and why she left that debilitated me. But now, as I pop a pill to dull the dread of seeing her in a few hours, I have to confront the idea that having her in my life creates as much hurt as it heals. And all that hurt, the new and the old, it isn’t like some tumor I can just excise. The fact that it didn’t just drop out of me when I learned the secret of where she’d been and who she was means it’s wormed its way into all my corners and pockets. It’s in my body like a virus.

  * * *

  The packet DeShawn mailed to the Trib is thin. I pull out the paperwork and the handwritten note attached:

  Dear Ms. Roberts,

  Here is everything I have on my case. I got it all from the office of the woman who did my appeal, Theresa Sanchez. I had a friend in here who found information in the prosecutor’s file that wasn’t given to his defense attorney, so in 2009 I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get my file from the Kings County DA. I waited and waited and when they wrote me back they said my file was burned up in a warehouse fire in 2001.

  Thank you very much for taking an interest in my case. I am innocent of this crime. Somebody else shot my family. Someday, I hope I find out who.

  Sincerely,

  DeShawn Perkins

  Aside from the confession and Henrietta’s statement, which DeShawn already sent to Amanda, the packet contains mostly copies of motions filed by his attorneys, including a request for a delay after his first attorney died (denied by the judge), and a motion requesting that DeShawn’s confession be thrown out (denied by the judge). There is a short summary of an interview with someone named Virginia Treble, who apparently lived above the Davises; boilerplate motions about DeShawn’s appeal and the judge’s ruling (the original verdict stands); the Kings County DA’s response to DeShawn’s FOIA. No crime-scene photos or sketches, no ballistics reports, no autopsy reports, no more interviews.

  I call Judge Sanchez and give her the inventory. “DeShawn says he FOIA’d the DA for their copy, but they told him it was destroyed in a warehouse fire.”

  “Huh,” she says. “I guess that’s possible. There’s definitely more than what he sent. He said he got it from my office?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re supposed to send everything, but honestly, back then the office was ridiculously understaffed. It still is, but now there aren’t quite as many cases. Whoever filled his request was probably rushing and figured they’d cut some corners at the photocopy machine. I’ll tell you what. Let’s go to the courthouse. I can’t do it tomorrow. Can you meet me first thing Wednesday?”

  “I think so,” I say. I’m scheduled to work a shift, but I’ll figure something out.

  “I’ll call and ask them to get the file up from storage if they have it. Meet me in records—it’s on the fourth floor.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Thank you, Rebekah. Most people don’t give a shit about guys like DeShawn. We chew them up and spit them out every day. I’ve lost sleep thinking about what kind of defense the people I represented could have gotten if they’d been able to pay for it. And once you’re convicted that’s pretty much it. Reporters are the ones who’ve done the work getting people out. Well, reporters and lawyers. But honestly, I like reporters better.” She laughs. “Not much of a compliment. I like you better than a lawyer.”

  “I’ll take it,” I say.

  I spot Aviva from across the street. She is standing outside the deli on Forty-Sixth Street wearing the same shorts and T-shirt as she was at Saul’s, plus dirty white running shoes and socks with little green balls at the h
eel. Her red hair, brighter now that she started using drugstore color to cover the gray, is drawn back in a rubber band. As I wait for the light to change, I watch a woman wearing filthy clothing far too heavy for the weather approach her. The woman speaks and Aviva listens, then she reaches into her purse and hands the woman a dollar.

  “Hi,” I say. Neither of us moves to hug the other.

  “Saul was very upset after your visit.”

  “Okay.”

  “I do not know if you know this, but Saul was going through a divorce when this case you are talking about happened. It was the worst time of his life. His wife was very angry and spiteful and she used his son against him. Those memories are very, very painful now that his son is dead. Saul feels he did not do enough. He feels responsible for his son’s death because he chose to leave the community.”

  “I know.”

  “I understand that you are doing your job,” she continues, “but perhaps you can find a different story?”

  I lift my hand to shade my eyes from the sun. I want to say, I don’t have time for this, but instead I sigh. “Can we go inside, please? It’s too hot.”

  “All right.”

  We enter the deli and I walk straight back past the hot-and-cold lunch bar, stuffed with fifteen long feet of salad toppings and rubbery pasta and steaming fruit cobblers, to the first metal table I see. It was stupid of me to suggest we meet somewhere with food; seeing my mom makes me queasy enough.

  “I’m sorry this is tough for Saul,” I say when we sit. “Really. But, honestly, it’s a lot tougher for this man who’s been sitting in prison for twenty years for something he didn’t do. He’s been locked up more than half his life, and I’m the only person who’s taken the time to actually do anything.”

  “I just don’t see why it’s your responsibility.”

  “It’s not my responsibility,” I say. “Did Saul ask you to come talk to me?”

  “No. I am looking out for him. You have not had the kind of hardship in your life that he has, and I think it is important that you understand how terrible this time was for him.”

  This is the second time my mother has asked me to lay off reporting on someone she loves. Last year, she didn’t want me to tell my editor that her brother might have been involved in a shooting. She pleaded that he endured miseries I couldn’t possibly understand because I grew up in such a loving, stable family. Since then, I’ve had imaginary conversations with her in which, instead of silently acquiescing, I say that while it might make her feel better to focus on my father’s strengths and the family he built in her wake, I grew up battling some pretty significant psychological and emotional trauma, too. Trauma she caused when she decided to slip out the back door while we slept.

  “Like I said, I’m really sorry this happened when things were bad for Saul. But he had a job to do. Being a policeman is a powerful position. It’s a responsibility. You can really screw with people’s lives if you don’t do it right. I’m not saying he did anything wrong on purpose. But if he has to endure a little bit of discomfort in order to help get an innocent person out of prison, I think that’s an okay trade-off.”

  “I think you are being very selfish, Rebekah.”

  Oh, you have got to be kidding me.

  “Look, if you knew me at all—which you don’t because you bailed on me before I could speak—you would know that there is literally no fucking way that I am going to not report a story because you think it’s going to hurt your boyfriend’s feelings.”

  “Rebekah…”

  “This is what I do. Okay? This is who I am. I am a reporter. And guess what? I’m good at it. It’s a hard job—it’s an important job—and I’m good at it. Most moms would be proud of their children for doing the kind of work I do.”

  “I’m not…”

  “Right, I know. You’re not really a mom.”

  I stand up and walk out, though I can barely feel my legs. When I get outside I start walking north toward Central Park. I need shade. I need a bench. I need a place to cry.

  * * *

  I spend the rest of my shift doing rewrite, and just as I am about to head into the subway to go home, my phone rings.

  “Hi, this is Rebekah,” I say.

  “Rebekah, this is Bob Haverford. You called me last week about someone I represented back in the nineties. DeShawn Perkins.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “thanks for getting back to me.”

  “I’m sorry about … how I reacted before. Listen, I’m in the city. Do you have time to meet right now?”

  An hour later, I meet Bob Haverford at a café in the West Village. He is there before me, sitting at a tiny bistro table on the sidewalk. I recognize him from his photo on the Haverford & Haverford Web site: ashy blond hair with a boyish but sun-worn face. He is wearing a striped oxford shirt, dark blue jeans, and expensive-looking European-style loafers. A nearly empty martini glass sweats on the tabletop.

  “Bob?” I say.

  “Rebekah, how are you?”

  “Good,” I say, dropping my purse under the table and sitting, carefully, on the chair beside him. Our entire setup is atop the metal door into the basement. I’ve been avoiding even walking over these things since we did a story in June about a woman who died after an improperly latched one on Second Avenue gave way beneath her; she broke her neck falling down the concrete stairs below. Hopefully that won’t happen this afternoon.

  The waiter comes and asks what I’d like. “The coldest beer you have,” I say.

  Bob makes a noise like a chuckle, but can’t muster a smile.

  “I basically haven’t slept since you called.” He presses his thumb and forefingers into closed eyelids, wincing. “I want to help you but.… Can we talk off the record?”

  Ugh. “Okay.” Build trust, I think. Build trust and the quotes will come.

  “That case, DeShawn—it was the low point of my life. My wife was leaving me. She was the whole reason I’d started at Legal Aid to begin with. We were dating and I did it to impress her. Make myself look like I was some do-gooder. Which I’m not. I mean, I’m not a bad guy. But you have to be a saint to do the shit I was doing. We had, like, thirty cases at a time. And it wasn’t as if we had money to hire investigators or spend any time actually researching anything or tracking people down for interviews. Most of the time we just pled shit down as best we could.

  “Anyway, we’d only been married two years, and she basically came home one day and was, like, I’m not sure if I was ever in love with you.”

  “Ouch,” I say, but I doubt I sound terribly sympathetic. Aviva is trying to get me to excuse anything Saul might have done wrong because it was a tough time in his life, and now this guy. Tell it to DeShawn, I think. Tell it to his dead family.

  “It was all I could do to get out of bed.”

  The waiter brings my beer, and as he sets out a napkin, Bob finishes his martini.

  “I’ll take another,” he says.

  I sip my beer and Bob blows an exhale like he’s trying to expel something ugly, and rubs his hand over his mouth.

  “I should never have been assigned the case to begin with. They always give homicides like that to people with a lot of experience. But the original attorney had a heart attack about a month before trial and they had to divvy up all his cases really fast. I tried to get the trial postponed but the judge wasn’t having it. The whole system was backed up. I mean, every day we each got another five or six clients. Seriously. And this was a tough case to begin with, okay? The kid had a record, and the cops had an eyewitness and a confession. That’s basically insurmountable. Or it was back then. They didn’t have much in the way of physical evidence. They never found the gun. But, honestly, DeShawn wasn’t a lot of help. He kept getting into fights at Rikers. Twice I went to see him and they turned me away because he was in segregation for some infraction.”

  “What about the girlfriend?” I ask. “She said she was with him the night they died.”

  “I think she flip-floppe
d. Told the cops she wasn’t with him, then said she was. She wasn’t reliable. Putting her on the stand wouldn’t have helped DeShawn.”

  “The jury believed the witness,” I say, “and she was a crack addict.”

  “Yeah, but at least she told the same story the whole time.”

  I nod. “Did you check it at all?”

  “Her story? Not really.”

  “I just visited her in Atlantic City a few days ago. She told me she lied. She wasn’t even in the neighborhood that night.”

  Bob’s eyes go wide, his mouth slack. He takes a deep breath and rests his head in fingers.

  “I brought up the fact that the woman had a record. But like you said, the jury believed her. I guess, to tell you the truth, I believed her, too.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  September 1992

  Crown Heights, Brooklyn

  When his wife and children were not at home, Naftali Rothstein often ate Shabbos dinner with the yeshiva students in the basement cafeteria of one of the dorms just south of Eastern Parkway. He was inspired by their youthful energy and enjoyed engaging in the impassioned discussions about Talmudic law. When his father died suddenly of a stroke, the then twenty-year-old Rothstein had cut his formal studies short to begin earning money to help support his four brothers and sisters who were still living at home. He couldn’t bring himself to completely leave yeshiva life, however, and found work first as a secretary to the man who coordinated visas and housing for students coming to Crown Heights from across the United States and abroad. Rothstein quickly established himself as an enthusiastic advocate for the community. He was a natural multitasker, and if the phone cord was long enough, he could photocopy, file, and type up meeting minutes while reminding a skeptical mother that, yes, the area surrounding the yeshiva was dangerous, but sending her son into the fray—as it were—was a mitzvah. But in 1986, when a student from London was robbed and beaten so badly he spent three weeks in a coma—a story that made international news in part because the young man’s father was a cousin-in-law of Shimon Peres—Rothstein began to wonder if the future of Chabad was actually imperiled by the “bad” neighborhood in which Rebbe Schneerson had planted his flag.