“I’ve got a lot of cases involving the police department,” Jake says. “I’m not sure which one you want to discuss.”
Seifert puts his hand on Jake’s right shoulder. “Hey, listen,” he says. “You know what I want to talk to you about. We know about what happened in that tunnel.”
Jake can feel the grip of the detective’s fingers go right through his shoulder and down into his heart.
They know. This is the beginning of the end.
Who could have said anything? He tries to figure it out but the wires won’t connect. Philip couldn’t say anything without incriminating himself. But who else could it be? All right, stay cool. Jake straightens his tie. Find out what’s going on.
“So what do you know?” he asks the detective.
“Hey, I live in this city, just like you. I know what goes on with these bums in the street.”
Seifert looks over at a legless man in a wheelchair on the corner, ostentatiously displaying his stumps at people walking by.
“If one of these pieces of shit got anywhere near my daughter, I’d beat his fuckin’ brains in with a baseball bat too,” says Seifert. “Seriously.”
Right. Like we’re just talking man-to-man, here. Don’t worry about it. You can trust me. We’re all regular guys here. Sure. Probably works great on sixteen-year-old chain snatchers at the precinct.
Jake draws away from him a little. “Detective, are you a fan of award shows?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, do you sit at home and watch the various award shows that are broadcast live on TV? You know. The Academy Awards, the Emmys, the Grammys, Country Music Awards, NAACP Image Awards. You watch some of those, right?”
“I guess.” Seifert’s eyes narrow, not sure where he’s going with this.
“So are you aware of any award given for the stupidest attorney in Manhattan?”
“Okay, look—”
“Well, if you’re not aware of any award like that, then I can’t think of any reason why I should talk to you. ‘Cause I’m not getting anything out of it otherwise.”
“Hey, let me give you a little insight into your situation, Mr. Schiff.” Seifert puffs out his chest and hitches up his belt as he gives Jake a crooked smile. “We have sworn statements from witnesses putting you at the scene of this crime. We have sworn statements from people indicating your predisposition for violence against homeless people. And we have physical evidence from the crime scene.”
“Bullshit,” says Jake.
“Well, if it’s bullshit then you can accompany me to the precinct so we can get a set of prints off you and clear this up right away.”
“All right,” says Jake, not believing half of what he’s just heard. “Let’s not have any more of this ex parte communication. If you got something you want to ask me, you call my lawyer.”
He takes out a small notebook, jots down Andy Botwin’s number, and then tears out the page. Goddamn Andy. Why didn’t he take care of this?
Seifert takes the number and looks at it almost sorrowfully, like a man handling his own bill of divorce. “You’re making a big mistake.”
“Am I under arrest, detective?”
“No, not yet.”
“Then I don’t think we have anything else to talk about.”
Jake turns and walks away, losing himself in the battalions of fresh-faced young bankers and lawyers marching down Fifth Avenue, foot soldiers trying to take over a beleaguered city.
44
The next day, Francis O’Connell walks into the DA’s office with a slightly yellowed newspaper clipping. He puts it on the desk before Norman McCarthy and stands back.
“What is this?” says the DA. “It’s that goddamn article about Jake Schiff from three years ago. Do I have to read about him calling me a martinet again?”
“Look at the twelfth paragraph.”
Norman McCarthy puts on a pair of half glasses and starts counting. He’s been up since four this morning with the baby. God, he’s too old for this.
“It’s just a bunch of nonsense about how he worked for the Queens DA one summer and didn’t like it.” He frowns.
“There’s our fingerprints,” says Francis.
“What?”
“Everyone who works for the DA gets fingerprinted. So we already have Schiff’s fingerprints on file. This case is coming together. All we have to find is that last witness.”
45
A Detective Marinelli called the house this morning, wanting to talk to you,” Dana says on Saturday afternoon, two days later. “Any idea what he wants?”
Jake shrugs, but his eyes look tired. “Probably some old case I haven’t thought about in a year.”
They’re jogging around the reservoir in Central Park. It’s the kind of brilliant autumn day that makes children and real estate people think they can possess all of New York. The grand old buildings look like a mountain range along the edge of the park. The Dakota. The Beresford. Ten-forty Fifth Avenue, where Jackie Onassis lived. Even Trump Tower looks pretty in the distance.
She feels the spring in her legs as she comes along the northern curve and catches sight of Belvedere Castle through the trees and foliage. This is the mythic city she dreamed about when she was a little girl. She still remembers her parents bringing her and her brothers in from Connecticut for the occasional Broadway musical when they were kids. She can still see the white tablecloths and smell the men at the next table smoking cigars at the fancy steak houses where they’d eat before the shows. Her father in an expansive mood, not even scolding her when she ordered the surf and turf and didn’t take a bite of it. Her mother having a drink or two and feeling giddy, singing “The Impossible Dream” as the station wagon sped past the bright gaudy marquee lights and the mysterious silhouettes of street people.
The black gravel grinds under her sneakers as she thinks about how she found the city a cold and frightening place when she moved here a dozen years later to go to college. Every week, it seemed, there were stories in the newspapers about the horrible fate befalling some hopeful young girl like herself. There was the Harvard girl raped and stabbed to death on the rooftop by the super’s son. The shopgirl gunned down inside a Columbus Avenue boutique by a junkie stickup man. The investment banker they’d found hacked up in a trunk.
She’d taken to staying home at night, studying and watching old movies on television, while her roommates partied the night away with obnoxious premeds at the uptown bars. She was already thinking about moving to some anonymous half city in the Midwest after graduation, where she could lead a secure if slightly dull life full of children and car pools and unacknowledged yearnings.
But then she met Jake. She’d let a friend talk her into going to a party at a broken-down prewar building on West 106th Street, and before she knew it some drunken jock named Larson had her cornered in the kitchen. She’d made the mistake of sleeping with him once before and he was after her again, not taking no for an answer and calling her a cunt when she tried to walk away. At one point he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her a little. And then there was Jake, getting in the guy’s face, telling him to back off, defending her honor without even knowing her.
“Weren’t you scared?” she asked later.
“He’s an Ivy League nose tackle,” Jake said, brushing it off. “That’s an oxymoron. It’s like a compassionate dentist.”
She wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but she liked it. She liked him too. She liked his hardness, his brash attitude, his pugnacity, his lack of pretension about his working-class roots—neither hiding them nor making too much of them.
What she didn’t expect was to fall in love with him. But in a strange way, she’d come to think about Jake the same way she thought about Central Park. As a sanctuary and oasis in the middle of a harsh, unforgiving city. As in the park, there were unexplored places of serenity and even beauty inside of him. He was a great father and a selfless, mature lover. He’d go around the corner to get a carton of milk
and bring her back flowers. Lying next to him in bed sometimes was like lying in the middle of the Great Lawn on a quiet starry night, feeling the enormity of the city around them and the strength of his heartbeat within it.
She puts on a burst of speed and pulls alongside him as the Guggenheim Museum appears above the tree line to her right.
“So why’d he call the house instead of calling you at the office?” she asks Jake.
“Who?”
“The detective.”
“I don’t know,” he says a little irritably, clutching two five-pound weights as he runs. “Maybe his shift is today.” She pauses, deciding to let it go at that.
“So I was thinking of going to the antiques show at the pier tomorrow morning,” she says, breathing hard and feeling a little tightness in her chest. “Pick out an armoire for the bedroom. We can give Alex the one we have. Any interest?”
He keeps his head down, maintaining a steady determined stride. “Can’t do it, babe.” Bap, bap, bap. One foot after the other, like stakes driven into the dirt.
“Why not?”
Pausing to catch his breath. “Got a business meeting.”
“Who wants to meet with you on a Sunday?”
Bap, bap, bap. The stakes going into the gravel a little harder and a little faster. Not quite running away from her, but no longer matching her stride.
“Ah, it’s just some pain-in-the-ass thing. You don’t wanna know.” He turns his head slightly and the last syllables drift away in the passing breeze.
She’s been noticing more and more moments like this lately. Tense silences, brooding looks, unexplained absences. It’s impossible to ignore it anymore. Something is going on. Spaces are opening up between them.
Again, she gets ready to confront him and ask what’s going on. But when she looks up, Jake surges ahead of her on the track and disappears around the bend twenty yards away.
For some reason, she’s reminded of the afternoon a dozen years ago when she made a wrong turn walking home through the park after dropping Alex off at nursery school. Somewhere beyond the Loeb Boathouse, she’d lost her way and found herself in an unfamiliar setting: a wild untended field surrounded by a grove of thick trees and hedges. There was a rustling of bushes and then a man stepped into the clearing. At least she thought it was a man, at first. He was like a Cro-Magnon. Naked except for a long mangy red beard and a mass of curly body hair. Another naked hairy man followed him out and she’d felt her heart stop. Obviously she’d interrupted some act of sexual congress, and they stared at her with animal loathing. For a moment, she was unable to move. Then one of the creatures grunted and she bolted, not allowing herself even a small scream until she’d run all the way home and poured herself a tall stiff vodka.
Now, as she puts her head down and races after her husband of twenty years, she wonders if parts of him, like parts of the park, are off-limits to her.
46
I wanted to see you,” says Jake on Sunday afternoon, “because a couple of detectives from Midtown North have been trying to talk to me.”
His eyes focus on a run in Susan Hoffman’s stocking. Actually just a small hole right above the knee, revealing a quarter inch of pale flesh amidst the dark hose. It’s visible just over the top of her cherry-wood desk when she crosses her legs. It bothers him that she doesn’t seem to notice that hole. He hopes she isn’t that sloppy when it comes to her clients.
On the other hand, Andy Botwin never forgets a child’s birthday and he hasn’t picked up the phone once since Jake came to see him.
“So why do you think they’ve been doing that?”
“Huh?” He catches himself wondering why she’s wearing hose and a skirt on a Sunday anyway.
“Why do you think these detectives are seeking to question you?” asks Susan.
Right. Straighten up. You are the defendant here. Tell your potential new lawyer what she might need to know.
“Well, one of them told me he had sworn statements and physical evidence linking me to the scene of a homicide. Maybe two homicides.”
He sits back and waits for the whistle or the sharp intake of breath. But after fifteen years prosecuting murderers and sex offenders at the Manhattan DA’s office, Susan Hoffman doesn’t rattle that easily. In 1940s movies, they would have called Susan a tough broad. But she looks less like Barbara Stanwyck than a debauched math teacher. A smoker’s prematurely wrinkled face, small eyes, and a tight bitter mouth. She’d whipped Jake soundly twice in one year in state court. Once when he was at Legal Aid representing a Haitian marijuana dealer and then six months later after he’d gone into private practice, representing a petulant twenty-six-year-old stockbroker named Paul Martin III, who was running a cocaine business on the side. The cops lied blatantly in both cases, but each time the juries were out for less than half a day.
So when Susan bumped into Jake at Alison on Dominick earlier this year and said she was going into private practice, he told himself that if he was ever in trouble, she’d be his second choice to be his lawyer after Andy.
“Have you spoken to anyone else about this?” she asks.
“Well, Andy Botwin was supposed to be looking into it for me, but I guess he’s a little preoccupied these days.”
“Andy Botwin.” She lights a cigarillo and snorts two jet streams of smoke out of her nose. “Was he too busy going on the Letterman show?”
“It was a disappointment. Particularly since it’s a matter of some urgency.”
Susan looks distracted for a moment. “You know, goddamn it, I’ve had this hole in my stocking since this morning and I haven’t had a chance to change them.”
“What are you all dressed up for anyway?”
“Ah, my niece’s wedding tonight. Who ever heard of a wedding on a Sunday night? I have to meet Babs at six and go over to the temple.”
From the offhand way she says “Babs,” it’s clear she’s talking about a longtime girlfriend. Jake had never considered that Susan might be a lesbian before. Now he notices a certain butch cast to the decor: heavy brown furniture, thick navy curtains, and pictures of Susan mountain climbing next to her degrees on the wall. On reflection, it doesn’t matter. He just wants a lawyer with six sets of teeth.
“All right, let’s establish some ground rules,” says Susan, snapping him back to attention. “I know you’re a good lawyer and I do want your input, but in this office, you’re the client. Understand?”
“Of course.”
Her mouth turns into a skeptical squiggle. “I’m going to need information from you. If you can’t tell me the truth, don’t tell me anything. You got that? I don’t want to hear the sky is green or the moon is made of Gorgonzola. Because that will only come back to haunt us in front of a jury, if God forbid this business ever comes to trial.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Jake tells her.
“I’m sure you have.” Her sharky little smile makes it clear that she hasn’t forgotten some of their sharper exchanges. “Do you still have that detective’s card?”
He takes it from the back pocket of his jeans and gives it to her, noticing his hand is shaking a little. Up until now, it’s all been lawyerly bantering. But now that she’s about to pick up the phone, he feels his guts revolting again, just as they did when he was talking to Detective Seifert on the sidewalk. This is not a joke. He’s being investigated for murder.
She lifts the receiver and he has to fight the urge to ask her to put it down. Is it too late to turn back and return to the life he had before? He realizes that he must have had a few hundred clients who’d asked themselves the same question at this very moment.
She dials the number, holding the cigarillo between her middle and index fingers, and asks for Detective Marinelli in a voice used to giving orders. When the detective gets on the line, she introduces herself with a kind of stern familiarity. Jake wonders if she might have worked with this cop before. His heart lightens. Maybe there’s a way to work this out without the investigation go
ing any further. He’s glad he came to this office.
“Detective, I understand you’ve been attempting to speak to Mr. Jacob Schiff,” she says. “You mind telling me why that is?”
A pause. Susan drums her short wrinkled-up fingers idly over the hole in her stocking. She blows a line of smoke at the ceiling and her eyes rise dreamily to follow it.
“Look,” she says abruptly. “This can be a short friendly conversation or we can make it difficult. What do you have?”
There’s a series of short “uh-huhs” out of Susan and then a long grim look across her desk to Jake.
“Well, be advised that Mr. Schiff now has a new lawyer and you’re not to try speaking to him unless I am present. You’re not to try calling him directly or showing up at his house ...” She frowns in concentration as she listens to the detective’s reply. “Yes, of course, I understand it’s a criminal investigation. Who do you think you’re talking to?”
Jake’s heart has turned into a bowling ball, slowly sinking down toward his stomach.
“And the same to you, I’m sure, sir,” says Susan, slamming the phone down.
The rush of confrontation has brought a glow to her cheeks and warm life to her blue eyes. She puts her feet up on her desk and rubs her ankles together. Jake wonders if arguing is a turn-on for her.
“I’ll send him a follow-up letter, repeating what I just said,” she tells Jake. “I always find it’s better to put these things in writing.”
“Right,” he says numbly.
“The detective says they want to talk to you in connection with the killing of a homeless man in Riverside Park.”
“He only mentioned one?”
“He only mentioned one. My impression is a grand jury may have already been convened. Can you tell me anything about it?”
“Perhaps.” Jake hesitates, not sure where to begin.
As a lawyer, he’s had to browbeat his clients into learning a basic lesson: never discuss the details of a case directly, even with your attorney. Never say, “I killed the bitch.” Always: “The police say I killed the bitch.” Keep your lawyer out of ethical trouble and avoid committing perjury if you’re called to testify. But Jake finds he just can’t get comfortable on this side of the fence.
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