Intruder

by Peter Blauner

  The Geraldo show has returned to the screen. A therapist in a bright red dress is introduced and she comes out, giving high fives to the young meatheads in hockey shirts in the audience. John G. watches her sit between the two grandmothers and their boyfriend, dispensing sensible advice. Soon the two women are on the floor hitting each other, the therapist is jumping out of her seat, and Geraldo is standing back from the scene, looking perfectly aghast.

  “Please, please, ladies,” he says. “Violence is never the answer.”

  “Ho, that’s fucked up,” says Shitskin.

  “Okay, okay, okay. So what are you selling me instead of NA?” John looks at the man in the golf cap. “God or drugs?”

  “Neither. I’m talking about the higher power. Of the J-O-B.” He takes a card out of his wallet and tosses it onto John’s lap.

  The name on the card is Ted Shakur Jr. His company is called the Brooklyn Redevelopment and Reclamation Society.

  “This about jobs or putting up buildings?” John asks.

  “Both.” Ted Shakur starts to rise. “Think about it awhile. Then give us a call. I’ll tell you about it.”

  “What’s the matter? Why can’t you talk now?”

  “I’m not supposed to be hanging around here. The people who run this place might think I’m trying to steal away their clients and bite into their funding.” He gives a sly smile before he walks away. “There’s money to be made in poverty, you know.”

  WINTER

  60

  A gray smeary day in the city. Snow coats the sidewalks and licks the curbs. Maintenance men in orange jackets spread salt on the pavement. Christmas shoppers hurry by, expelling quick balloons of cold air. Dark birds huddle on windowsills for warmth.

  Jake sits in Susan Hoffman’s office, surrounded by cardboard boxes full of evidence just turned over by the district attorney’s office.

  His life has been circumscribed by these boxes. He no longer sees his favorite buildings and landmarks, the pretzel man on the corner, or the Peruvian flute players in the subway. There’s a force field between him and life’s normal pleasures. He closes his eyes and he sees cardboard boxes.

  Act, he tells himself. Complacency is death. This is the time to think and take charge.

  “Okay, we have a month until the trial begins,” she says. “So in cases like this, I usually find there are two things the defense has to do.”

  Jake looks up from reading the formal indictment.

  “Number one.” Susan holds up a finger. “We have to discredit the prosecution’s witness. And number two, we need to present a believable story of our own.”

  “Sounds easy when you say it like that.”

  Susan’s brow comes down like a storm cloud. “Let’s go back to number one. What do we know about their lead witness, Philip Cardi?”

  Jake pulls out the grand jury transcript. “He has two prior convictions and he’s entered into a plea agreement with the state.”

  “We need to find out more if I’m going to do a thorough cross-examination. So that’s one of your main assignments for the next two weeks.”

  “Right, teach.”

  Jake starts taking notes on a yellow legal pad. It relaxes him, to think about strategy. It reminds him of when he was just a lawyer and not a defendant.

  He doesn’t go to the office anymore. After a tense meeting with Todd Bracken and the other partners, it was determined that he would work from home until the trial is over. So as not to interfere with the final stages of the Greer, Allan merger. “Thanks for being a team player, Jake.” Todd gave him a limp handshake. “We’ll remember it later.” Yeah, right. The only reason they don’t fire him outright is because he still has Bob Berger as a loyal client and an insurance policy. Good old Bob. Keeping him out of the gutter.

  “Now what about their other witnesses?” Susan leans back in her chair, a blue pen sideways in her mouth like a tango dancer’s rose. “Who’s James Taylor?”

  “The singer?”

  She checks some papers on her desk. “I’m reading the grand jury testimony of James Taylor. Are you telling me this isn’t someone we know?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  She flips back a few pages and reads. “ ‘Question: Where were you living at the time of this incident? Answer: In them tunnels under the park. It’s easier for me to get along down there. Question: You mean, because of the disability with your arm? Answer: I mean, ‘cause I don’t pay any rent.’ “ Susan lowers the pages. “This ring any bells for you?”

  Jake concentrates hard and pulls Philip’s flashlight beam up from the recess in his brain. He puts himself back in the tunnel that night and sees the man with one arm hunched over a shopping cart, squinting into the light. He can even hear his voice: “Come the fuck out, man. These people want to see you.”

  “I think that’s probably the guy who identified me in the lineup.”

  “He’s a real problem for us,” Susan warns him.

  “Why? This is a guy who takes drugs and lives next to a set of railroad tracks. If I was cross-examining him, my main concern would be not taking him apart too quickly so the jury doesn’t feel sorry for him.”

  “That may be,” Susan sighs. “But he can still put you on the scene in the tunnel that night.”

  “So what?” Jake scratches his wrist. “Their whole case is built on the testimony of Philip, who’d be my codefendant if he hadn’t cut a deal, his cousin Ronnie, and this guy Taylor, who’s a dwarf on crack.”

  “Don’t forget that baseball bat with your prints on it. That may have been what gave them the confidence to go ahead and indict.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  It took Jake a while to figure out how the prints got there. “Here, hold this.” Philip handing him the bat with the taped handle while he tied his shoe. It’s those thoughtless little Kodak moments that can ruin your life.

  “I still can’t even believe the DA brought this case to the grand jury. It’s just because that cretin’s got a hard-on for me.”

  “Do me a favor. Do not refer to Norman McCarthy as a cretin in public. All right?”

  “Well I don’t see how he puts these clowns in the witness box with a straight face,” Jake says. “Why don’t we make another motion to dismiss?”

  Susan looks at him with wistful indulgence, as if he’s a child who finally needs to hear the truth about Santa Claus. “You’re missing the larger picture. Yes, it’s true you can pick apart individual witnesses, and it’s true you can argue the physical evidence, but what they can give the jury is an overall pattern.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She massages the bridge of her nose. “What they can do is demonstrate that Jacob Schiff is a man obsessed with homeless people. It’s not just the newspapers getting it wrong. They have the sergeant from the precinct where you first filed a complaint about Alex being harassed. They have the minutes from the Mental Hygiene hearing at the hospital where you tried to have a homeless man committed.” Her voice rises to emphasize each point. “Then they have Philip Cardi saying you came to him, asking him to help you solve the problem. They even have checks you wrote him.”

  “For fixing my door and my chimney!”

  “And to top it all off,” says Susan, keeping her voice above his, “they have this Taylor saying he saw you in the tunnel and they have your fingerprints on the baseball bat used to commit the murder.”

  Jake becomes very quiet. “I still think a jury might sympathize with me.”

  “You are an officer of the court,” Susan tells him in the stentorian tones she used when she was a prosecutor. “If they believe you were involved in the commission of a major crime, they will show you no mercy.”

  Jake gets up and goes to look out the window. A small dark car is trying to nudge its way through the snowy intersection of Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. From this high up, it looks like a bug trying to make its way across a vast bowl of white rice.

  Hanukkah has been and gone. C
hristmas is coming up in a little over a week. He should be out doing last-minute shopping for his family.

  “I could testify myself,” he says, still looking out the window.

  “Then you could get on the stand and talk about all the little child killers and drug dealers you got released as a lawyer and how you went crazy when some lawbreaker showed up on your own doorstep. That’d be good. And then you could try lying when they ask you on direct if you were there in the tunnels that night. So you could perjure yourself and lose your license even if we do manage to win this case.”

  “I could say I tried to stop Philip from killing the guy.”

  Susan shakes her head gravely. “I don’t think so, pal. I haven’t made up my mind whether to have you testify or not.”

  “It’s my call, Susan.” He starts tracing a tic-tac-toe board on a fogged-up part of the window.

  “And I’m your lawyer.” She leans over her desk with poochy eyes and a wised-up mouth. “It’s your neck, but I’m trying the case. Right?”

  “Right.” Jake draws an X in the center square and begins filling in the rest of the board.

  “So that brings me to our second point: having a story of our own to sell the jury. It would be much more convincing if there was somebody else to corroborate the fact that you tried to break up the fight, don’t you think?” She peers over, not quite getting his full attention.

  Jake draws a diagonal line through his three X’s and then wipes away the board. He’s left staring out the window again, as if he’s looking at a picture of life without complications.

  “So can you think of anybody like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Somebody in the tunnel who could back up your version of the story.”

  He starts to draw another tic-tac-toe board and then thinks better of it. “Not unless Johnny Gates wants to say a few words for me.”

  “Who’s that? The homeless guy who was bothering you in the first place?”

  Jake half smiles and hangs his head. “Yeah. I don’t think he’s looking to do me any favors. He’s dead.”

  “What makes you say that?” Susan pulls a file out of one of the boxes. “The police only found one body in the tunnel.”

  Jake blows on the windowpane and draws a zero. It isn’t that he hasn’t considered the possibility. But after replaying the scene in his mind, he’d concluded that either the police hadn’t located the body or that Gates had gone somewhere else to die. There were no reports of him turning up anywhere else.

  “All right. So maybe he’s alive. So what?”

  “Do you think he saw what happened?”

  “I guess.” Jake coughs, wondering why Susan’s looking at him so intently. “But he’s crazy. He’s a crackhead.”

  “So’s their witness. The one who isn’t an accomplice, at any rate. They’d cancel each other out.”

  Jake comes back to his chair and sits down. He notices the crease isn’t as sharp on his suit trousers since he started taking them to the cleaners once a month instead of once every two weeks. But with the bail bond hanging over him, plus Susan’s fee, the mortgage, and Alex’s school bills, he’s learning to economize.

  “I don’t even know where to start looking for Gates,” he says. “He’s probably in jail or a state mental hospital, if any of them are still open. Or back out on the street. For crying out loud, he harassed my wife and attacked my son. Now he’s supposed to save my neck?”

  “When you have lemons, make lemonade,” Susan says. “Ancient defense lawyer’s maxim.”

  Jake finds himself actually visualizing lemons and he bites his lips in distaste. “But I don’t even know where to begin looking for this guy.”

  “Can I make a suggestion?” Susan puts her feet up and tips back in her seat.

  “What?”

  “You have less than a month. Try.”

  61

  Don’t look at the cue ball, John G. tells himself. Whatever you do, don’t look at the cue ball.

  He’s in the rec room of the Brooklyn Redevelopment and Reclamation Society, being interviewed for admission by Ted Shakur. Behind them, two other homeless men are playing pool on a green felt-top table. The room is clean almost to the point of characterlessness. There are no slogans on the walls, no bars on the windows, and the new color TV in the corner is turned off. Nevertheless, John is still having a hard time screening things out.

  He keeps looking at the smooth white cue ball instead of concentrating on Ted’s questions.

  “Are you now drug free?” asks Ted, pinching his white left nostril and his black right nostril. Ted Palomino Nose.

  “Uh, yeah. Basically. I haven’t done anything except the medication.”

  “What kind of medication?”

  The cue ball knocks a solid red ball into the upper left-corner pocket. It’s funny the way that little white ball moves the others around, scattering them across the table, sending them spinning into their rightful holes.

  “I said, ‘What kind of med-i-ca-tion?’ “ Ted asks in a loud voice.

  John G. realizes he must have missed the previous question because he was distracted. He tries to bear down and control the shit storm in his mind.

  “Just the Haldol the doctors prescribed,” he says, showing Ted the orange bottle and trying to sound sure of himself.

  Ted strokes his salt-and-pepper beard and gives John a searching look. “You know we’re not supposed to be taking that many people with psychological problems. We only have room for a couple like that.”

  “I know, I know. But I’m getting better.”

  Ted still looks suspicious. “You ever try and kill yourself?” His eyes scan John’s arms and wrists.

  John G. takes a quick mental inventory. Has he ever really tried to kill himself? He wants to be honest. Truthfulness is the one thing he’s held on to on the street.

  “No, I’ve thought about it,” he says, remembering that bleak morning on the subway platform and the times he’s looked into a pair of oncoming headlights, “but I haven’t actually gotten around to trying it.”

  He’s starting to mind-trip again, despite all his best efforts. The white ball slams into the eight ball.

  Sunlight fading. Shar waving from across the street.

  I love you, Daddy.

  She died in his arms.

  John G. grips the table, trying to hold on to the present. The past is the past.

  Ted is still talking to him. “So what I’m saying is if you get accepted in this program, you’re gonna get your urine tested regularly. You got a problem with that?”

  The white ball slams a purple striper into the side pocket and then rolls back just a little, to avoid following it down.

  “No, that’s all right,” John G. says, struggling to focus and meet Ted’s eye.

  “ ‘Cause a lot of guys don’t like another man handling their piss. They get kinda sen-si-tive about that.”

  For a second, John is lost in a daydream. He sees himself perched on a ledge with Ted’s scarred hand reaching out to him from above. He’s afraid to take it. Afraid to move. Afraid he’ll fall.

  Oh my daughter, forgive me, for I have sinned.

  Would she forgive him? Her smiling toothless face floats in front of him, framed by yellow hair.

  One side of his mind says he should cry out to her, ask her to absolve him again. But the other side tells him it’s just an illusion, the light fixture hanging at a certain angle. The past is the past.

  “No, I don’t mind the piss tests,” he says finally. “What’s gone is gone. It’s not like it’s in you anymore, is it?”

  SLAM! The yellow-striped ball rolls into the lower right-hand corner. The cue ball backs away.

  “Okay,” says Ted, adjusting the kente-cloth hat on his head and making a note to himself. “Now if you get accepted into this program, you’re gonna be turning your life over to us. For the next few months, you’re gonna sleep in this shelter, eat with other men in this shelter, and go to work with
them in the morning. We get you a job with a construction crew helping build apartments for other homeless people. You get a hundred and seventy dollars a week, and sixty-five of that goes back to us to cover your rent.”

  Blam! The solid blue hits both sides of the lower left-corner pocket and then bounces away. The cue ball keeps rolling, though, stopping maybe an eighth of an inch before it falls in.

  “You ever swing a hammer before?”

  “I used to drive a train. I was a motorman.”

  Ted writes that down, duly impressed. Slam! Green solid in the side pocket.

  “You’ll learn,” says Ted. “That’s what we’re about. Teaching you a trade. Giving you a struc-ture you can fall back on. Can you handle that?”

  “I need it,” John tells him. “I need it the way other people need water.”

  The cue ball goes flying into the lower right-hand pocket. It disappears with a gulp and starts rolling along the lower deck of the table.

  John straightens up. “When do I start?”

  “Well, you haven’t been accepted yet.” Ted makes another notation. “Though to be honest, we have a couple of slots open right now and you may qualify. I have to talk to the administration.”

  “I’m ready,” says John.

  But in truth, he’s not sure he is. He just knows it’s time to move off the ledge he’s been on. If he stays at the Interfaith Volunteers Center he’ll start having fights with Ms. Greenglass and begin using drugs again.

  “I hope it works out. We’ll be glad to have you.” Ted Shakur stands up and offers him his hand. A big dry bear paw with scabs across the knuckles and calluses on the fingers.

  John takes it gratefully and squeezes it.

  62

  Over the next few days, Jake and the private investigator hired by Susan, Rolando Goodman, divide up the work. Jake concentrates on trying to track down John G. while Rolando looks for information to undermine Philip Cardi’s credibility.

  On a brisk Tuesday morning, Jake shows up at the 241st Street Dispatch Office, looking to talk to Gates’s former coworkers.