by Adam Mitzner
“The partners are going to want to know what just happened, Sam.”
“For Christ’s sake, look around you, Don. They already know.”
SURE ENOUGH, THERE ARE a dozen or so reporters in front of Cromwell Altman’s building, and each one shouts at Sam Rosenthal as he enters.
“Did Aaron Littman kill Judge Nichols?”
“Was he having an affair with her?”
“Was it going on while he was representing Eric Matthews?”
“Did Nicolai Garkov hire him to influence Judge Nichols?”
Rosenthal doesn’t even say no comment as he pushes past them. When he enters the lobby, there’s an odd silence, broken only by the rhythmic clacking of his cane against the marble floor. The lone security guard seems oblivious to the commotion outside, saying hello to Rosenthal as he passes, without even a reference to the fact that Rosenthal’s entering the building at 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night wearing a tuxedo.
When Rosenthal steps off the elevator on the fifty-seventh floor, Margaret, the firm’s weekend receptionist, is not so in the dark. She looks positively panicked.
“Mr. Rosenthal, thank God you’re here! The phones have been ringing nonstop. Not just the general number, either—I can hear the office phones ringing too. It’s like someone is calling every lawyer in the firm. I’ve seen online that Mr. Littman . . .” She doesn’t finish the thought, as if saying it out loud would be some type of offense.
“Did you say anything to anyone?” Rosenthal asks.
“No, of course not.”
“Good. I need you to go office by office and tell anyone who’s here to go home immediately. No exceptions. I don’t care what they’re working on. Tell them those are my orders, on penalty of immediate termination. Also tell them that I said they are not to talk to the press, but to go straight home and come back on Monday morning. The same goes for you, Margaret. As soon as you’ve finished your rounds, go straight home. There are some reporters outside, but I want you to just walk right past them without saying a word. If they follow you, just ignore them and keep going. Thank you . . . good night.”
Rosenthal leaves the stunned receptionist in his wake, knowing she will do his bidding without question. A minute later, he’s behind the closed door to his office, ready to spring into action, battle to the death as he’s done so many times behind this desk, when he realizes that there really isn’t anything for him to do.
Aaron will be booked, and then he’ll be sent to a holding facility for the night, all of which means the earliest Rosenthal can see him is tomorrow morning. Rosenthal could work the phones right now, harass a judge to hear Aaron’s application for bail tomorrow, but he already knows that’s not going to yield success. None of his buddies on the bench are going to go out of their way to spare Faith Nichols’s accused murderer at least a night in jail.
Rosenthal dials Fitz’s cell number. He’s not surprised when it goes directly to voice mail. Fitz is probably working on his remarks for tomorrow’s press conference and doesn’t want to be disturbed.
“Goddamn you, Fitz!” Rosenthal shouts after the beep. “It’s Sam! If you have any decency at all, you’ll call me back tonight! Do you hear me?! So help me God, if I don’t get a call back from you, I’ll do everything I can to make sure that this is the last fucking job you ever have in this city!”
After slamming down the phone, Rosenthal sits in silence. His heart goes out to Aaron. He can only imagine what must be going through his mind.
And then he realizes there is something he can do. He dials Elliot Dalton.
38
It takes Rachel less than ten minutes to walk from the Met to the Littmans’ building, but when she arrives, there’s already a large police presence erecting a barricade to hold back the press. The reporters must think that Rachel’s a resident because they shout: “Did you ever see Judge Nichols in the building?” and “What’s your reaction to the news that one of your neighbors might be a murderer?”
She rushes past them but is stopped by the doorman at the threshold. “No press!” he screams at her. “I’ll get a cop in here right now!”
“I’m a friend of the Littmans,” Rachel says. “I’m here to visit Cynthia. I’m also their attorney. Call upstairs, and tell Mrs. Littman that Rachel London from her husband’s office is here.”
The doorman makes the call, although he mangles the message. “Let me talk to her,” Rachel says, and reaches for the phone.
“Mrs. Littman, this is Rachel London. I’m a partner at Cromwell Altman. Sam Rosenthal asked that I come over. It’s very important that we talk.”
Rachel hands the phone back to the doorman. He nods a few times before saying, “Of course,” into the receiver, and then telling the second doorman, “Take her up.”
The elevator has no buttons, only a lever that the second doorman operates. When they reach the ninth floor, the doors open into the apartment, and Rachel is face-to-face with Cynthia Littman. She’s wearing sweatpants and a man’s white T-shirt, is without makeup, and looks as if she’s been crying. At least that means she already knows what happened, Rachel thinks.
Rachel has met Cynthia a handful of times. She came away from each interaction with the distinct impression that Aaron’s wife was not at all pleased to be in her company. Rachel didn’t begrudge Cynthia her suspicions. She understood all too well the threat she posed.
“Mrs. Littman, thank you for seeing me. I don’t know if you remember me. I worked with Aaron on the Eric Matthews trial.”
“I know who you are, Rachel.”
Rachel decides not to read too much into Cynthia’s harsh tone. Her husband has just been arrested for murdering his mistress, after all. That is more than enough to make any woman angry.
“Sam Rosenthal asked me to come over right away. He wanted someone from the firm to tell you what happened, which I gather you already know.”
“The phone started ringing about twenty minutes ago,” Cynthia says in a slow voice. “The first reporter, somebody from CNN, I think, said that Aaron had been arrested and would I care to comment. I just hung up on him and turned on the TV. There was nothing about Aaron, and so I went online . . . and it was everywhere.”
“Did you talk to anyone?”
“No. And I unplugged the phone. It started ringing nonstop pretty quickly. The girls are out tonight at a friend’s house. I called over there and explained it to them . . .” She shakes her head, fighting back tears. “I thought it was better if they stayed there for the night. There were already reporters downstairs.”
Rachel nods, having passed that gauntlet herself. “Can I sit down?” she asks.
“I’m sorry,” Cynthia says, actually sounding contrite. “Of course.”
The Littmans’ living room is enormous, maybe fifty feet long, with at least ten windows looking west onto Central Park. There are two separate seating areas, and Cynthia shows Rachel to the one closest to the fireplace.
Once seated, Rachel is about to continue, but Cynthia’s eyes are shut tight, as if she’s trying to block out everything around her. When she opens them, she stares hard at Rachel, almost as if she’s trying to bore into her thoughts.
“So. Were you also fucking my husband?”
Cynthia has said this without emotion. Not an accusation as much as a simple question. Like, Can I get you something to drink?
“Excuse me, Mrs. Littman?”
“I believe you heard me. The least you can do is give me an answer.”
For as long as she could remember, Rachel wished it to be so, and yet she’s suddenly glad that she can answer Aaron’s wife honestly. “No, ma’am,” Rachel says.
“Please don’t call me ma’am. It’s not flattering to either of us. You’re not married, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“And you’re what . . . thirty?”
“T
hirty-three.”
Cynthia shakes her head with a look of disgust. “My my, you must have really turned some heads tonight in that dress. I bet the partners’ wives thought you were this year’s arm candy with that asshole Donald Pierce, and then they find out, oh no, she’s a partner. She’s with our husbands every day.”
Cynthia laughs, and right then, Rachel realizes what she didn’t before. Cynthia Littman is very drunk.
“Are you okay, Mrs. Littman?”
“Mrs. Littman is hardly better than ma’am. If you are fucking my husband, the least you can do is not to refer to me like I’m some goddamn old lady.”
“Cynthia,” Rachel says with a soft voice, looking into her eyes in an effort to ascertain just how inebriated she is, “there’s nothing going on with me and Aaron. I don’t know what happened between him and Judge Nichols, but Aaron needs you now.” She pauses, and even though there’s nothing she wants to say less, Rachel adds, “Cynthia, I think you’ve had a little too much to drink.”
“Of course I’ve had too much to drink. Wouldn’t you?”
Rachel laughs. “Yeah, I guess I would.”
This coaxes a smile from Cynthia, and Rachel decides not to let the shared moment between them go to waste. “Sam Rosenthal thinks that the FBI might try to execute a search warrant, and he wanted me to—” Rachel catches herself. Not knowing where Cynthia is going to come out in all of this, she doesn’t want to say what she’s there to do. The irony isn’t lost on Rachel that while she’s certain of her own loyalty to Aaron, she’s looking at his wife with suspicion.
“You can tell Sam not to worry. There’s nothing incriminating here.”
Rachel wonders if Cynthia meant to include herself among the things in the apartment that wouldn’t potentially hurt Aaron.
“Are you sure?” Rachel asks. “Have you searched his clothes for blood? His e-mails? His phone for texts? Anything linking him in any way to Judge Nichols?”
“Yes. There’s nothing. Believe me. Aaron thought he was so clever that I would never know about them, but a wife always knows . . .”
Rachel wants to ask Cynthia what that means but decides that now is not the time to cross-examine her. Cynthia Littman needs to be contained. God forbid she wanders downstairs drunk and starts talking to the press about Aaron’s cheating ways.
“Cynthia, here’s what I’d like to do. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to stay here tonight. In the morning, we can talk more about what the next steps are going to look like, but right now, I suggest that you go lie down and try to get some sleep.”
Cynthia squints at Rachel, seemingly uncertain of what to make of the offer to babysit. “I’m glad she’s dead . . . you know that? I don’t deny it. How could I? That bitch deserved to die.”
After making this sweeping pronouncement, Cynthia Littman stands up and walks to the bedroom.
39
Booking is one of those things that defendants do alone. Not completely, of course, as the FBI agents conduct the process and stand guard during it, but the suspect is denied the presence of counsel.
Aaron wonders if Sam Rosenthal made the request that he himself made a thousand times: to stay with his client through the booking process. Not that it matters. If Rosenthal did, Agent Lacey would have given him the same answer Aaron had heard each time: no.
Aaron’s escorted down a long corridor, turning into a room with the acronym JABS on the door. A sign in the room spells it out—JOINT AUTOMATED BOOKING SYSTEM.
The JABS room is ten by ten with battleship-gray walls. A machine occupies the center of the room with chairs on either side of it. For a moment Aaron thinks it might be a polygraph, but then he realizes it’s a high-tech fingerprint machine. The only other things in the room are a sink and a three-foot bench with a metal bar behind it on the wall, the kind you might see in a handicapped shower stall.
The youngest of the three agents, the one who read Aaron his rights in the SUV, unlocks Aaron’s right handcuff and reattaches it to the metal bar. He’s identified himself as George Kostopolous, and Aaron figures he’s no more than thirty. Everything about him screams meathead—his thick neck, shaved head, and suit that pulls across his pumped-up physique.
“I’ll do the pedigree,” Kostopolous calls out. He reaches into the single drawer under the table upon which the computer sits, and then turns to Agent Lacey and asks, “Is he a safekeeper?”
Aaron doesn’t know what the term means. He’s tempted to ask but resists, reasoning that his questions should be reserved for moments when the answers really matter.
“Yeah. I’ll work the phones,” Lacey says, and then leaves the room.
Kostopolous pulls up a metal chair so that he’s beside the bench where Aaron sits cuffed to the bar. “Okay,” he says, “I’m going to ask you some questions, and even though you’ve been Mirandized, you need to answer truthfully.” He doesn’t wait for an acknowledgment before he begins. The first question Kostopolous answers himself: “Name . . . Littman, Aaron.” He looks back at Aaron. “You got a middle name?”
Aaron’s initial reaction is to refuse to respond. He could say something like, I invoke my rights against self-incrimination. When my counsel is present, he may choose to instruct me to provide fuller responses. There’s no doubt that’s the answer he’d advise a client to give.
Aaron doesn’t take his own advice. “Lewis,” he mutters.
“Lewis,” Kostopolous repeats. “Date of birth?”
“July eleven, nineteen sixty-four.”
Kostopolous scribbles it down. “Seven-eleven,” he says, as if it’s meaningful.
In response to Kostopolous’s questions, Aaron next provides his address, social security number, and home phone number.
“You’re married, right?” Kostopolous asks.
Aaron hesitates for a moment, as if the answer to this question might somehow incriminate Cynthia. Then, realizing that couldn’t possibly be the case, he says, “Yes.”
“You got any drug dependencies? On any prescription meds? Anything like that?”
“No.”
Kostopolous fills in some information that apparently doesn’t need Aaron’s input before asking, “Do you have any scars or tattoos, or any other distinguishing features or peculiarities?”
Aaron can’t hide a slight smile as he contemplates what constitutes a peculiarity. “No,” he says again.
“Any prior arrests?”
Another question that probably shouldn’t be asked without counsel present. “No.”
“Employer?”
“Cromwell Altman Rosenthal and White.”
If Kostopolous is impressed, he doesn’t show it. Then he proves the name means nothing to him by asking, “Can you spell that?”
Aaron slowly spells out all four names, including White, even though he suspects Kostopolous will think it’s a smart-ass response.
If Kostopolous is insulted, he doesn’t show it. Instead he does a little more scribbling on the intake form and then reaches for the phone.
“He’s ready,” Kostopolous says into the receiver.
A minute or so later, a skinny man wearing jeans and a flannel shirt enters. He introduces himself as “the tech” but doesn’t give his name.
Kostopolous unlocks the handcuffs, but not before he makes a point of telling Aaron that the door will be locked from the outside. Aaron rubs his wrist, thankful for this brief moment of freedom.
The tech says, “The good news is that we don’t fingerprint with ink anymore. We did up until about two years ago. Now it’s all computers.”
He grabs Aaron’s wrist. One by one he places each of Aaron’s fingers on the machine, then each palm. Finally, he tells Aaron that they’re going to do “the roll” and demonstrates by rolling his own hand over the machine. After Aaron does likewise, the tech walks over to the door and knocks twice.
Aaron sits there for more than an hour with a single thought going through his head: How are Cynthia and the twins coping? He can imagine the girls in tears and Cynthia trying to remain calm in order to comfort them.
The last thing the girls said to him was that he looked hot in his tuxedo. Sure, they said it in the sarcastic way of teenagers, but he still thought that they meant it as a compliment. Their way of telling him that they were proud of him. And now, he would never be the same man to them again. There would always be a before and an after. Perhaps with Cynthia, he had already breached that divide when he told her about Faith—or when he started his affair—but for the girls, tonight will be the night when they lost their innocence about their father.
When Kostopolous finally returns, he says, “There’s no judge on call now. The Saturday judge went home at three and no one sits on Sunday. That means you’re going to be a guest of the federal marshals for the next two nights. We’re looking for an open bed somewhere. Usually Nassau County helps us out, so it’s possible you’re going to be heading out there. As soon as we know who’s going to take you, we’ll move you, but it may be a while. So sit tight, and don’t go anywhere.”
Kostopolous says this with a smile, and Aaron wonders how many times he must have made that joke.
After another hour alone, Aaron assumes that they’ve forgotten about him. He lies down on the bench, figuring that it could well end up being his bed for the night.
