Conviction

by Julia Dahl

  What did she remember about Joe? He was smart, but not street smart—at least not as much as her. That could have changed by now. Either way, he was always going to be physically stronger. So she couldn’t hesitate. She watched from the window, and when the white guy in the ball cap came across the parking lot, she pointed her gun at the door and waited for the knock.

  After the first shot, she looked through the peephole. He was down, but not out. She opened the door and took three more shots until she was certain.

  There was nothing in the apartment she couldn’t replace. She could clean for cash anywhere she could get a reference, and there were still a couple people who would help her: a cousin near Savannah; an old classmate in Jacksonville. She knew they would all look for her—the police, the reporter. And maybe they’d find her. But she wasn’t gonna give herself up. If they wanted her, they’d have to work hard, just like she’d done all her fucking life.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  I take a livery cab home from Crown Heights, get in the shower to wash as much of the blood off me as possible, then open my laptop and start writing. I write about seeing Saul’s name in DeShawn’s file; I write about meeting Ontario and LaToya, and about finding the evidence box with Judge Sanchez. I write about the Pastors Green, Dorothy and Abel, and the lovesick Legal Aid lawyer-turned-real estate agent. I find the place in my notebook where I scribbled notes from that morning’s meeting with Daniel and Saul and Naftali, and I add that conversation. I keep writing when Iris comes home, and when I’m done, I e-mail what I’ve written to Amanda.

  Want some context on the latest murders?

  About twenty minutes later, Amanda e-mails back.

  Can you come over tomorrow?

  I’m scheduled to work a 10-6 on the city desk, but I e-mail my cadre of fellow stringers and find someone to cover the shift. Everybody needs an extra $150 these days.

  I don’t sleep much, so at dawn, I start walking to Amanda’s. I don my headphones but don’t turn on any music. I feel like I have to listen to what’s happening inside me, even though I don’t know what it is. Is Joe coming for me next? Did I get those men killed? I still haven’t heard from Hunny. The consequences of what I’ve done are so vast I worry that if I stop walking I’ll collapse and never get up. Amanda brings two mugs of coffee outside and we talk on her front porch. She sits, but I can’t.

  “So how are you?” she asks.

  “Okay.”

  “Have you ever seen bodies like that before?”

  “Shot? Sort of,” I say, remembering the kids beneath white sheets on the playground in Roseville. “Not that close up.”

  A few seconds pass.

  “I can’t publish what you sent me,” she says. “I can’t give these deaths that much more attention than I give everybody else. You know? That’s not fair. But it’s amazing. I can’t believe how much you found out so fast. This shit happened decades ago. I e-mailed my friend at the Guardian, and she wants it, with some minor edits. Will the Trib let you do that?”

  “As far as they’re concerned, I’m off the story. Too close to it.”

  “Yeah, well, their loss. You’re not hiding anything with this, and it needs to be out there. But listen, I’ve got a question for you. I applied for a grant from the Open Society a few months ago, and I just heard it came through. A hundred thousand dollars to expand the scope of the Project.”

  “Wow, that’s awesome,” I say. “What’s your plan?”

  “I want to hire you.”

  “Me?”

  “I want to be able to write more about the people who die here. I’ve got all this data and all these contacts, but I’m not the writer you are. And I’m not as good a reporter, either.

  “We can work on the details, but I’m thinking, you pick a murder every week, maybe more, maybe less, and do a deep dive. And you can do issue stories, too. Look for patterns in what’s happening. Domestic violence, the iron pipeline, mental illness, gangs. How are people really dying in this city, and why? My friend at the Guardian might be interested in partnering up, so your stories could have real reach. Which is what I want. It’s hard for people to connect with maps and data. I need shoe leather. And narrative.”

  I look at her to make sure she’s serious.

  “What?” she asks. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking with that much money you could hire someone away from ProPublica, or The Times.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “But I want you.”

  * * *

  Detective Richter calls a few days after the shootings to tell me (off the record) that the gun found on the man shot to death outside Henrietta’s Atlantic City apartment was the weapon that killed Isaiah, Naftali, and Daniel.

  “The guy didn’t have an ID, so we’re still confirming he’s who we think he is. Joseph Weiss has exactly zero paper trail since 1994.”

  I ask her about Henrietta, and she says they’re still looking.

  “We didn’t find anything personal in her apartment. Even her boyfriend says he didn’t know her real last name. Her prints are in the system, though. Eventually, she’ll show up.”

  Or not.

  The Sunday desk assigns Jack Owens to look into Joseph Weiss’s background, but the only story he does is about Weiss getting kicked out of the Army in early 1993. Jack tells me at a happy hour a couple weeks later that he tracked down Weiss’s former cellmate from military prison, but the Trib didn’t think it was worth sending him to Indiana where the guy is incarcerated. So far, I haven’t seen any reporting on the last twenty years of his life, except that his parents told the Associated Press they got a phone call from him once a year, on Yom Kippur.

  The Trib and the Ledger and half a dozen other city news outlets send reporters up to Aviva’s house in New Paltz where she and Saul hole up after the story of the corrupt Jewish cop who covered up for the Jewish murderer goes live. All three cable news networks cover the triple murder in Crown Heights, but Saul’s involvement is too “inside baseball” to make waves nationally. Several papers contact Pete Olivetti, retired and living in Sarasota, but the best quote anyone gets is “Katz seemed like a straight shooter to me.” Sandra Michaels maintains she is “looking at options” for charging him with something, and the NYPD calls him a “bad apple” at every opportunity, but Saul tells me his lawyer assures him the statute of limitations for anything that he did in 1992 has long expired. And even if DeShawn decides to sue, the lawyer says he’ll almost certainly sue the city, or maybe the state, not Saul personally. The Kings County DA’s office creates a “task force”—which consists of two people working a couple hours a week—to examine all of Saul’s old cases. So far, they haven’t found anything.

  The people Saul helped lock up over two decades, however, are getting lawyers. And Aviva blames me. I hear nothing from her for weeks after the murders, and then early one Sunday morning she calls.

  “All these crazies! Lawyers coming by the house! Letters from prisoners!”

  “What?” I had been deep in a dream about my first apartment in Gainsville. The one Iris and I shared with two other girls sophomore year. In the dream we were throwing rocks into the pool from our concrete balcony. It was dusk and the pool light was on. There was something in the water we were trying to kill.

  Saul’s voice in the background: “Aviva!”

  “She should know!”

  Saul comes on the line.

  “Rebekah, I’m sorry. This is … we need to have a discussion.”

  “What?”

  “Your mother is very angry.…”

  “You are angry, too!” shouts Aviva.

  “Aviva, stop it!”

  “Are you okay?” I ask. “Is she okay?”

  “Yes. This has gone on long enough, Aviva.”

  “Where are you guys?” I ask.

  “We are in Brooklyn. We drove back late last night. Your mother hasn’t slept.”

  I look at the time on my phone: 5:18 A.M.

  “We will
come to you,” he says.

  Iris won’t be up for hours, so I tell Saul to meet me at a park near my apartment. The sun is just up and the air is lighter, the pavement cool. This early, it’s a different population in Park Slope. There are the runners—on their way to or from Prospect Park, smartphones velcroed to biceps, T-shirts commemorating the most recent race; and parents—men and women pushing strollers, wearing sunglasses, flip-flops, and drinking Venti coffee. I pick up my own coffee at a bagel shop. The woman next to me is wearing a baby strapped to her chest. The child is astonishingly blond and chewing on a plastic corn on the cob with the words JOHN DEERE printed across. I smile. If Iris were with me, we’d laugh and add the scene to our list of hipster details. Someday, we’re going to write Legally Blonde: Brooklyn, get Reese to sign on as a perky pro bono lawyer for senior citizens being gentrified out by people like us, and make a million dollars. It feels like the first time I’ve smiled in weeks. It’s hard not to think that a whole bunch of people would be alive today if it weren’t for me. DeShawn is probably going to get out; he has one of the best exoneration attorneys in the country. But my mind keeps going to this: is his life worth three other people’s? I know it’s completely unanswerable, and the wrong question, and obviously unfair, but I can’t stop thinking it. Iris and my therapist and my dad say it’s crazy to blame myself. But the Davis murders were a case sitting in a dark room until I switched the light on. Would I have started making calls on DeShawn’s letter if I had known how Joe Weiss was going to tie up loose ends? And if the answer is no, does that mean I made the wrong choice?

  At seven o’clock I find Saul and Aviva sitting on a bench. She stands up when she sees me. He stands up after her.

  “Thank you for coming,” says Saul. He’s a couple days past a shave, which is unusual.

  Before I can even ask what the fuck? Aviva steps close to me and says, “I think you did this to Saul to get back at me.”

  I look at Saul.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Would you admit it?” asks Aviva. Her voice is tight and her stare fierce. “I don’t think so.”

  “Saul? Can you get in here, please?”

  “I am asking you a question, Rebekah.”

  “And I answered it, Aviva.”

  “See! She is so angry!”

  “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say.”

  “I want you to tell me the truth.”

  “You want me to tell you the truth, but you don’t want me to tell other people the truth.”

  “This is not about other people.”

  “No,” I say, “it’s not about you. It’s about three dead people in Crown Heights. And a cop who fucked up. And an innocent kid who wasted his life in prison. And a man who’s probably been running around murdering people for twenty years.”

  “And you are so special you get to decide?”

  I know she is barely my mother. I know that the connection we have is little more than biological. I know—or, I guess, I am beginning to realize—that my fantasies about a future of tender friendship between us were foolhardy. She doesn’t get me. She barely even wants to. Fine. I can accept that. But the way she asks me if I think I’m special pinches at my heart. If my dad were here he’d stand up for me. He’d say, yes, she is special. She is one of a kind.

  “All I did was tell the truth,” I say quietly. “I’m not going to apologize for that.”

  “Why do you have to make everything so public?”

  “Because I don’t like secrets, okay! You gave me that. You left us with nothing but questions. If we don’t fucking admit what really happened—if we pretend—the world just keeps getting shittier and shittier.”

  “And it is your job to change the world? Let me tell you something, Rebekah: the world will always be the same. There are bad people and they will do bad things and there is nothing you can do to change that.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I say.

  “Neither do I, Aviva.”

  We both look at Saul.

  “Rebekah is a reporter for the same reason I was a police officer. We believe we can make a little difference. And we believe it is our duty to try. I think you used to admire that about me.”

  “Well, look where that has gotten you.”

  “Aviva,” Saul says, sighing. “You have to stop this. I made a mistake. I did the wrong thing. Your daughter, Rebekah, she did the right thing. You can yell and scream all you want, but you won’t change that. And I can’t imagine why you would want to. Look at this young woman you created. Look at her. If you don’t see something beautiful…”

  His voice cracks and I know he is thinking of Binyamin. Here we are, mother and daughter, both alive and healthy, pushing each other away like we will always have time to repair the damage we are doing.

  Aviva looks at Saul. She sees it, too.

  “I only want for things to be … easy between us,” she says finally. “We have, all of us, been through so much. I just don’t see why we should bring more heartache.”

  I could say that things will never be easy between us. And I could say that she is the one who made it so. I could even say that she doesn’t doesn’t deserve an easy relationship with me if she can’t bring herself to at least attempt to understand what I’ve devoted my life to. But instead I put my hand on her arm and say, “I know.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  November 2014

  Coxsackie Correctional Facility, Coxsackie, New York

  DeShawn was snapping green beans when the CO with the terrible breath and the earring came to bring him upstairs.

  “Perkins, you got an emergency call.”

  It was two days before Thanksgiving, and they were deep in the weeds with prep. His boss, Manny, was grumpy because Charles had, once again, neglected to label the jugs of vegetable oil (“It’s obvious what they are!” / “That’s not the point!”), and everyone was on edge waiting for the judge’s ruling in DeShawn’s case.

  “Go ahead,” said his boss, Manny. “God bless.”

  DeShawn took off his apron and squinted, red-faced and teary from the sting of the onion air and the heat of eleven ovens. He had been bringing in the articles for months: the withheld evidence; the dead Jewish killer; the still-missing ex-hooker. But nobody was getting their hopes up. The men on the kitchen staff knew that the system that put them in their cages was designed to keep them there. Prosecutors didn’t admit mistakes if they didn’t absolutely have to. Judges looked for any reason to reject your appeal. If your motion wasn’t just so, if the legal rationale not in exactly the right vernacular: denied. Justice had nothing to do with it. It was a game of language and egos, and if you couldn’t afford a good lawyer—even a good jailhouse lawyer—you didn’t stand a chance.

  For more than ten years after his conviction, DeShawn was angry about this. They gonna lock me up for nothing? I’m gonna make ’em regret it. He fought over nothing and got locked in the box and got even angrier. And there was a lot to be angry about. He never got a letter, never had a visitor. There was a hundred dollars in his account every month, but nobody could tell him where it came from. Was somebody fucking with him? He spent the money on little things—a sweatshirt, a decent razor, snacks—and hustled a little more cash where he could. But a good hustler was friendly, and DeShawn had turned into a man people tiptoed around. He never shook who he wanted to be, though. He never shook Malcolm. So when Manny chatted him up after DeShawn transferred from Sing Sing to Coxsackie in 2004, he let the lifer from Flatbush draw him out.

  “You from Brooklyn, right?” asked Manny one night after dinner. Manny was pushing a seven-foot metal cart of food trays through the dining hall, and DeShawn was dawdling, checking out flyers for jobs in the laundry and the library, notices about upcoming movies, warnings about contraband and HIV.

  “Yeah,” he answered.

  Manny pointed to another tray cart. “Wheel that back for me?”

  Manny was a talker. He’d killed two people in a home invasion in 1
983 and knew he was going to die behind bars. His kids visited a couple times a year, and he had people he could trust inside. He was part of the Brooklyn crew at Coxsackie, and for as long as anybody could remember, Brooklyn ran the kitchen.

  At first, DeShawn just listened. But because they were always talking about cooking, pretty soon he told a story about Sabrina.

  “She used to give me and the other kids assignments. She’d be like, here’s a recipe, now figure out how to make twice as much. Or half as much. She was trying to teach us math, but, you know, be fun about it. One Christmas we were gonna make this gingerbread house, and I was all excited because I was gonna take it to school. I told everybody. But I did something wrong with the baking soda. Or maybe I used baking soda instead of baking powder. So the walls and shit came out all soft and you couldn’t stand ’em up to build the house. I cried and Sabrina was like, it’s really hard to be good at baking. She said, ‘Cooking is an art. Baking is a science.’”

  “That’s true,” said Manny.

  “So that was like a challenge to me, you know? Like, I’m gonna be a scientist.”

  Manny and Charles exchanged a look.

  “Charles been wanting to get out of bread and cake. You game?”

  DeShawn shrugged.

  “I’m getting pretty sick of watching you shrug, DeShawn,” said Manny. “You just gonna shrug the next fifty years of your life away? I don’t know. Shit.”

  “Fine,” said DeShawn. “I’m game.”

  It was an easy fit. DeShawn loved the bakery. He loved the smells from the oven—sweet in such a sour place. The crunch of sugar in buttery batter and the way the flour tasted in the air. Some guys inside sold drugs, some sold their law knowledge, some sold tattoos—DeShawn sold cakes. Mostly birthdays and parole, but the cakes tasted so good guys started creating occasions: Danny from the Bronx benched a record; Woodstock Steve finally cut his stupid fucking braid. The endeavor gave his brain something to focus on. He could charge more for lettering on the frosting, or carrot cake instead of plain yellow. And the more creative he got, the more people ordered. If he got everything done for the kitchen and they had leftovers—which they always did—Manny was cool with it. The CO’s, too, as long as DeShawn dropped everything to whip up something pretty for an almost-forgotten anniversary.