Conviction

by Julia Dahl

  The prostitute took her clothes into the bathroom and he heard the water running. She was dressed when she came out.

  “No,” he said. “We’re not done.”

  He told her to take off her clothes and sit on the sofa. He told her to open her legs so that he could see what was there. He looked, intrigued and appalled.

  Afterward, he gave her twenty-five dollars, five more than she had told him it would cost.

  “Next week at the same time.”

  The woman nodded. “I’m Hunny,” she said.

  “Joe.”

  A week later, he was back on the street with the patrol group, this time paired with a small, bespeckled man named Lazer, with whom he quickly became exasperated. Just fifteen minutes after beginning their patrol, the pair spotted two skinny, filthy men huddled in the doorway of an abandoned storefront on Brooklyn Avenue. They were smoking crack. Joe began to jog toward the men, but Lazer grabbed his sleeve.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I am going to tell them to move or we will call the police.”

  “They could be dangerous. Avi says, don’t start trouble.”

  “I’m not starting the trouble. They’re the ones doing drugs.”

  He shook Lazer off and pulled the metal pipe from his waist. The men in the doorway did not see him until he was standing just a few feet away, and when he kicked one in the stomach, the other was so startled he didn’t even run. Joe kicked the man again, and then brought his pipe down on his ribs. The man vomited blood.

  “Stop!” screamed the second crackhead, throwing himself toward Joe’s feet. Joe stepped back calmly, disgusted at the display.

  “This is my neighborhood,” said Joe. “I will kill you if I see you again.”

  The men nodded frantically, like children. The friend took the injured man’s hand and together they lumbered north. Joe watched the men go, their pants falling off their skinny hips, their sneakers scratching along the sidewalk. When they disappeared around the corner of Bergen, Joe turned and waved Lazer over.

  “You have a kit?”

  At first, Lazer appeared not to hear him. He looked to Joe like one of those tiny dogs the Puerto Ricans kept; twitchy and useless.

  “Lazer!”

  Lazer dug into the knapsack slung across his chest and handed him a pair of work gloves and a small broom and dustpan. Joe swept the glass from the broken pipe into the plastic dustpan. He handed the dustpan to Lazer, then, when his partner turned to dump the glass in a garbage can, Joe picked up a tiny plastic bag with what he assumed were two pieces of crack cocaine inside. Rocks, he had heard them called. He put the plastic bag in his pants pocket, and later that night, he gave the bag to Hunny and asked her to smoke one before they had sex.

  He didn’t have to ask her twice. She pulled a glass pipe from her purse—it was just a little tube, really—put the rock at the end, and flicked a lighter. The smell was chemical and sour, and Joe was impressed with the white cloud of smoke she blew after her inhale.

  “How does it feel?” he asked her.

  She leaned back on the sofa and spread her legs. “It feels like I wanna get to fucking.”

  The next day, Joe dozed off in his morning Hebrew class. The droning of the students’ recitations entered the dream: he and Hunny were walking in Bushwick. It was summer and he was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, flip-flops: the clothing of his childhood. The men in black hats were all around them, crowding the sidewalk, their mouths moving, moving, moving. He had to push them aside like overgrowth in a forest. First with his hands, then he had a pipe. Smack. The instructor’s hand on the desk where his head lay. Joe startled awake, felt the cold wet of drool on his chin. The instructor stared down at him, performing disgust for his obedient, obnoxious pupils. Joe didn’t think, he just swung: fist to chin, and the man fell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  December 1991–February 1992

  Crown Heights, Brooklyn

  Daniel brought the news of Joe’s expulsion to Isaiah. The second floor was busy that morning. A Lubavitcher couple and a black woman sat on folding chairs in reception, and the secretaries darted around, apparently unable to find whatever paperwork was necessary to attend to them. Isaiah yelled from behind his desk and when Daniel poked his head in, the landlord said he would have to wait. An hour later, Daniel closed the door behind him and relayed what the yeshiva’s principal had described.

  “Does he deny it?”

  “No,” said Daniel.

  Isaiah raised his eyebrows.

  “What do you think of him?” Isaiah asked.

  “Think of him?” Daniel considered this. He was reluctant to say that he didn’t really know Joe any better now than he did when they were introduced in August. His mentee was friendly and articulate. He was polite and he expressed reasonable opinions about the Talmud and the neighborhood and the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe, but every time they interacted, Daniel couldn’t help feeling as if they had just met. They ate meals together, worked together, walked the streets of Crown Heights together, but there was no intimacy between them. Was that abnormal? Daniel didn’t know. They were from very different backgrounds, after all.

  “Were you surprised when you learned what he’d done?” Isaiah asked when Daniel did not seem to be able to come up with an answer.

  “No,” said Daniel. “I have seen him be aggressive. But against blacks.”

  Isaiah nodded. He explained that he was getting pressure from his partners in the UK to turn a bigger profit on his buildings and may have to start evictions in order to replace his current tenants with people who would pay more.

  “I need someone to accompany me on what are occasionally unpleasant visits.”

  Daniel understood. “I think he would be good at that.”

  * * *

  The next day, Isaiah summoned Joe to his office.

  “Would you like to stay here in Crown Heights?”

  “Yes,” said Joe.

  “Good. I have been looking for someone with a certain skill set. As you know, some of the people who live in my buildings are very different from you and I. They do not understand what it is like to have to make a living. They do not understand the responsibility of owning something.” He paused. Joe sensed Isaiah needed a nod, so he nodded. “Of course, we always conduct ourselves as best we can. We try not to draw attention.”

  “Of course.”

  Isaiah paid Joe a month’s wages upfront, in cash, so that he could rent a furnished apartment. With a job and a place to stay he did not have to go home. With a job and a place to stay he could deflect his parents’ anxious inquiries. With a job and a place to stay he could live exactly as he pleased.

  Typically, Isaiah was vague about what he wanted. He told Joe that the building on Bedford had only three apartments still occupied, and that without heat it would be very difficult for the remaining tenants to stay through the rest of the winter. So Joe went to the building and took a wrench to the boiler. When the tenants called to complain, the women at the office took a message. By spring, the building was empty.

  And then Malcolm Davis came along.

  At first it was just phone calls requesting a meeting.

  “Is he a tenant?” Isaiah asked the receptionist one morning when she informed them that there was another message on the machine overnight.

  “No,” said Goldy. “He says he is calling on behalf of someone on St. John.”

  “On behalf?”

  “Listen to the message, why don’t you!”

  “Press the button,” said Joe.

  This message is for Mr. Isaiah Grunwald. My name is Malcolm Davis and I have called several times on behalf of Roberta Wilcox. Ms. Wilcox has a ten-year-old son with asthma and the mold in the apartment is making him very sick. She is going to begin withholding her rent until the problem is fixed. She will be filing a complaint with the Department of Housing.

  “Let her complain,” said Isaiah. “If she does not pay her rent, we will e
vict her.”

  Two weeks later, Isaiah got a call from Gabriel Sachs, the son of a fellow former IDF solider. Gabe worked in planning at the city’s housing department.

  “There is a woman here who is trying to convince my superiors to open an investigation into your business,” Gabe told Isaiah.

  “A woman?”

  “Her name is Sabrina Davis. She is a secretary. Apparently her husband works with children and some of their families have made complaints.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “Possibly. Most complaints never trigger an inquiry, but much of the time it is haphazard. You don’t want someone bringing up your name constantly.”

  “And that is what she is doing?”

  “Yes.”

  That afternoon, Isaiah informed Joe that the Davises seemed to have become fixated on him.

  “We need to avoid an investigation.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The follow-up story on Sandra Michaels withholding evidence isn’t much. Just a “no comment” / “we’re looking into” placeholder. Jack Owens got a quote from a defense attorney whose client was exonerated in 2013 after serving twenty-eight years for a murder (“Some prosecutors will do anything to get a conviction”) and on Monday morning the office issues a statement announcing that ADA Michaels has been taken off the Kendra Yaris case “pending investigation into allegations of past mishandling of evidence.”

  Mike calls and directs me to Crown Heights to get reaction from the Yaris family. But just after I get off the subway at Nostrand, Judge Sanchez calls.

  “I’m at Felicia’s office,” she says. “They think someone slipped that evidence we found into the file recently.”

  “What makes them think that?”

  “Apparently somebody came in asking about the same file a couple days before we did. And they have him on surveillance video.”

  Forty minutes later, I’m in ADA Felicia Castillo’s office with Judge Sanchez and Richard Krakowski, the DA’s spokesman.

  “Before we go any further, we need to set some ground rules,” says Krakowski. “Our official statement is that the prosecutor who tried this case did not have the evidence you uncovered—the letters and the police report—at the time of the trial. We are actively investigating whether what you found is authentically part of the case and, if so, how—and when—it was put into the case file.”

  I scribble what he’s told me into my notebook.

  “Now, we’re going off the record,” says Felicia. “I want you to know, I would never—never—give this kind of access to a reporter if Theresa were not involved.”

  “I told her I want someone outside this office—someone outside the court system—to see this,” says Judge Sanchez. “If this video disappears…”

  “It’s not going to disappear,” says Felicia.

  “It better not.”

  The four of us gather around Felicia’s desktop computer. Krakowski opens a plastic CD case and slips a disk into the drive. He clicks open the icon that appears and up pops a black-and-white image with a time and date stamp in the corner. The camera is mounted above the doorway leading into the storage room Judge Sanchez and I were in together.

  “We don’t get a lot of people asking for paperwork this old,” explains Krakowski. “I talked to the clerk this morning, and it turns out she was sick early last week. She asked her people and was told that a man came in on Monday looking for the same file. Her replacement had an assistant escort him downstairs, and the assistant told me he brought the box down for the man, but left him alone after he showed an ID from the PBA.”

  “The police union?” I ask.

  Krakowski nods, then clicks the video image, and after a few seconds we watch two men walk into the room. Because of the angle of the camera, we can’t see their faces.

  “That’s the assistant,” says Krakowski, pointing at the first man.

  The two disappear out of the camera’s range. About a minute later, the assistant appears again—he’s facing the camera, so we see his face—and walks out the door. Another minute passes, and the second man walks back into the frame.

  “That’s him,” says Krakowski, pausing the video. “In the sunglasses.”

  Mirrored aviator sunglasses. It’s Saul.

  “Do we think he’s a cop?” asks Felicia.

  “If he’s not a cop he was pretending to be one,” says Richard.

  “If he’s a cop, though, why show a PBA card? Why not his shield?”

  Because they took his shield away, I think.

  “What does the assistant say?” asks Judge Sanchez. “It looks like he wasn’t alone long.”

  “Long enough to slip something into the box,” says Krakowski.

  “How many people have seen this?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady.

  “The clerk and the assistant. And ADA Michaels.”

  “And nobody recognizes him?”

  “The sunglasses make it hard, but we’ll print up a still image and start asking around. I’ve got a call in to the original detective on the case.”

  For a moment, everyone is silent, staring at Saul’s frozen image.

  “This doesn’t show anybody actually slipping anything into the file,” I say.

  “No,” says Krakowski. “But obviously, we need to talk to this man.”

  Yeah, I think. So do I.

  * * *

  Outside the courthouse in the blazing sun, I stare at my phone. Who do I call first? Mike, to tell him we have an exclusive on the fact that the DA suspects someone—someone only I know was one of the officers who arrested DeShawn—slipped crucial evidence into the Davis file two decades after the case was closed? Or Saul, to give him a chance to explain? But what possible explanation could he have for being in that storage room the day after I came to visit other than to fuck with the file? And if he did fuck with the file, that’s a crime. It might be a bunch of different crimes. Even if Henrietta never comes forward, what Saul did might be enough to get DeShawn’s conviction overturned. If that happens, the DA is going to shout Saul’s name from the rooftops. DeShawn and some lawyer will sue the shit out of him. He might even go to prison.

  And maybe he should.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Saul was taking his daily walk along the boardwalk when he received Rebekah’s text about the landlord: Just got a tip that Malcolm Davis may have had some sort of conflict with a Jewish landlord before he died. Do you remember anything about that?

  He put his hand on the railing and found a bench. How could he have been so stupid? He closed his eyes and saw Fraidy’s spiteful face; he heard Binyamin’s voice saying “I don’t want to see you anymore;” he smelled the mildew in the lonely room in Coney Island. He had come so far from the misery of that time. But what he had done—and what he had not done—lived on. Rothstein wanted that file for a landlord. And he gave it to him. No questions asked.

  Until he received the text, Saul had forgotten about the favor entirely. What sent him to his basement storage locker was what Rebekah said about the eyewitness. Her identification made it easy to do what he had done.

  The Ziploc bag was inside a cardboard box of mementos from his life on the force. A certificate from the academy; a photograph of Saul shaking hands with the commissioner at graduation; a ribbon for placing in the NYPD 5K; his white dress gloves; a letter from a rape victim whose attacker he’d helped convict. He brought the box upstairs. Aviva was back in New Paltz and he had the apartment to himself. What would she think of what he’d done? Probably she would understand. Her daughter, on the other hand, would not. Aviva’s moral code was less rigid that Rebekah’s. Perhaps it was a function of her age. Saul once thought he had a rigid moral code. It was that code, ironically, that told him putting the letters and the police report in the Ziploc bag was the right thing to do.

  It was a week after they handed the Davis case to the ADA. Saul was sitting at a desk in the precinct, going over his statement about why and how he had shot and
killed a twenty-seven-year-old named Eric Overland the day before. Overland was the suspect in the double stabbing that he and Olivetti had been called to on Park Place. The scene was more gruesome, even, than the Davises’. The mother, forty-five-year-old Pauline Rodriquez, died in the apartment. Her daughter, Lisa—who had been dating Overland—was nineteen, and died at the hospital. Both had been tied up, sexually assaulted, and stabbed and slashed so badly that pieces of their bodies were severed. They found Pauline without nipples. Lisa arrived at Kings County Hospital unconscious, the four-month-old fetus inside her exposed by the gaping wound in her abdomen. Olivetti and Saul tracked Overland to his cousin’s house on Staten Island three days later.

  “Keep your hand on your weapon,” Olivetti had told him before they stepped out of the car. “This guy is a sneaky motherfucker.”

  What they’d learned about Overland was that four years earlier he’d been acquitted in the choking death of his seventeen-year-old girlfriend. When Saul talked to the ADA who prosecuted the case, he said the defense created reasonable doubt by introducing love letters from one of the girl’s classmates. Overland’s attorney speculated that it could have been this lovesick high school boy—not the girl’s older boyfriend—who’d murdered her out of jealousy. If not for those stupid, harmless letters, Overland would have been in prison, and Pauline and Lisa Rodriguez would be alive.

  Before they even knocked on the cousin’s door, Saul sensed this arrest was going to go badly. The front window was open and he heard shouting, then a crash, like a piece of furniture being knocked over. Olivetti drew his weapon; Saul did the same.

  The detective banged his fist on the front door.

  “NYPD!”

  Heavy footsteps, and then the door swung open. A man held his hands up and said, “He’s upstairs.”

  Olivetti pulled the man onto the home’s little front porch.

  “Cuff him,” said Olivetti. Saul obeyed.