A clerk drops some papers into the judge’s basket. A phone rings in the background.
“Anything else, Ms. Hoffman?” asks the judge.
“Not unless you got any good ideas,” says Susan.
“So on a scale of one to terrible, how do you think we did?” Jake asks, trying to catch his breath and get the feeling back in his arm in the hallway afterward.
“Almost completely terrible.”
For the first time, Susan is starting to look depressed. Dark circles ring her eyes and her lips look dry and ragged.
“If I were Francis, I might even skip the cross-examination,” she says. “He’s already made it to the barn. The judge sees Gates is a space cadet. All Francis has to do is put his homeless guy, Taylor, up on the stand and have him avoid saying he’s Gandhi.”
“You think he’ll leave it at that?” Jake asks.
A knowing, wary smile cracks the dry lips. “No way. I’ve worked with guys like Francis all my life. Everything’s win, win, win and football metaphors with them. It’s not enough for them to make it into the end zone. He’s gotta spike the ball and do the dance.”
“Good,” says Jake. “Then we stand a chance.”
Francis begins his questioning coolly. He asks Gates about his history of arrests, drug taking, and sessions with psychiatrists. He even breaks out the transcript of the Mental Hygiene hearing and the police complaint Jake swore out against him. Oddly, the more hostile questions are, the more focused and aware Gates seems.
“Why do you think he would call you a menace?” Francis asks.
“Maybe he didn’t really know me,” Gates says with the beginnings of a sweet smile.
This kind of comeback doesn’t sit well with Francis. He somehow decides Gates isn’t respecting him, so he steps up the attack.
“Isn’t it true that when you were living on the street, you went around telling people you were being pursued by parasites and flesh-eating ghouls?” Francis asks, studying a new sheath of papers.
“Just parasites.”
The judge laughs out loud. Francis grows rigid and tight lipped.
“Didn’t you almost cause a major subway collision because you thought you saw someone standing on the tracks?”
“That was before I started taking my medication.”
“Well, Mr. Gates,” Francis says. “You’ve already testified under oath that you’ve been a crack addict, a mental patient, and a person who’s experienced hallucinations when you fail to take your medication. Why should we believe your account of what went on in the tunnel the night of September fifth?”
“Because I’m telling the truth.”
“I see.” Francis turns away, running his tongue over his upper lip. “Did it ever occur to you that you might not know what the truth is?”
Gates gives the judge a quizzical look as if to say, This is all getting too metaphysical. “Could you repeat the question?”
“How would you know what the truth is?” says Francis, spreading out his hands and making it as simple as possible.
Gates just stares at Francis’s hands and doesn’t speak for a long while. A side door squeaks. Jake looks at the empty jury box and then glances back at Dana, thinking you can never tell what’s going to happen in a courtroom.
“I never lie,” Gates says.
“Never?”
“I’ve eaten out of the garbage, I’ve slept on the street, I’ve robbed old ladies to get money for drugs. But I don’t lie.”
“I see.” Francis smiles thinly. “So did you take money for your daughter’s shoes and use that to buy drugs too?”
“No, I never did that.”
“But did you continue to take drugs after she was born?”
“Yeah,” Gates says sheepishly. “But not that many then. Just some speed to stay awake when I was doing double shifts and maybe a joint once in a while.”
Francis is pacing back and forth in front of him, lost in a kind of vicious rhythm. Jake recognizes it as the state he’d work himself into while he was trying to destroy a witness with hammer and tongs.
“So I guess you’d just steal grocery money to buy drugs and that wasn’t lying,” says Francis.
“No. I always told my wife when I was stealing it.”
The judge gets a laugh out of that, taking it as a Willie Sutton kind of line. For Gates, though, it’s just a matter of simple conviction. Francis’s posture grows ever more tense and resentful.
“Mr. Gates,” he says, drawing himself up with sneering disgust. “Would you have described yourself as a good father while your daughter was alive?”
Gates seems depressed by the question. “Yes. I guess so.”
“Even though you were taking drugs from the time she was born?”
“Yeah.”
Francis hitches up his pants and throws a half sneer at Jake. Watch me now, sucker. “Tell me, Mr. Gates, is it not a fact that you told city staff psychiatrists that you blamed yourself for her death?”
Gates stares down at his knees. “I felt that way for a long time.”
“And do you still feel that way?”
“I guess.”
Jake hunches his shoulders and glances back at Dana. She shrugs. She’d always suspected that was part of what was botheringjohn G., but he’d never told her so outright. Francis’s notes must be from a shrink who interviewed Gates right after he left the MTA. Damn, Jake thinks. Francis did his homework on this witness.
“Can you tell us why? Why you blame yourself?”
Gates’s mouth twitches the way it did when Susan was questioning him. “It’s . . . it’s kind of hard to explain. I don’t know if it makes sense.”
“Why don’t you give it a try?” Francis smiles as if he’s doing John G. a favor.
Jake leans forward in his seat. Where is Francis going with this? Is he going to try to impugn the witness by blaming him for his own daughter’s death? It’s a risky strategy that might backfire with this judge.
“I was working all these double shifts,” Gates begins slowly. “Because we were gonna move and needed the money. I started doing a lot of speed so I could stay up all the time. Also—you know, I’m trying to be honest here—I still kinda liked getting high ...” He stops and puts a hand over his chest.
“Go on.”
Francis seems pleased with the way the witness is rambling. There’s a destination, though, and he’s leading Gates there.
John G. blinks to rouse himself. “So my wife,” he says, “she was getting all stressed because she was the only one with the baby most of the time and she was still working a few days a week at the DMV. And instead of day care, she ended up leaving Shar with her sister Jo once in a while. Because it was family.”
“Her sister was a junkie. Is that correct?”
“Yeah.”
“She was present with you at the time of your daughter’s death. Isn’t that right?”
Gates closes his eyes and then opens them, as if there’s something he doesn’t want to see in front of him. “Yeah.”
“For which you blame yourself. Correct?”
Long pause. “I blame myself.”
He sits in the witness box, with his head thrown forward and his shoulders shaking slightly.
The judge looks at Francis sideways, as if to say, All right, you’ve made your point.
The accident, Jake thinks. We should have thought more about the accident. Rolando had only discovered the truth about it within the last few days. Gates and his wife left their daughter at her sister Jo’s apartment in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. They must have known it was a bit of a risk, but they were both working, and in the later reports the Child Welfare people agreed the sister was a good soul within the narrow parameters of junkiedom. What happened wasn’t really anyone’s fault.
They were just crossing the street at dusk, that was all. Going from one side of Bailey Avenue to the other, where her daddy was waiting for her after work. The light was green and then it turned red. The litt
le girl let go of her aunt’s hand and went running to her father. And a Pechter Fields bakery truck going forty miles an hour knocked her down. That was all. Just an everyday accident. The little girl insisted on getting up and trying to walk again before she collapsed again. She died from internal injuries at North Central Bronx Hospital. The aunt killed herself with a drug overdose three months later.
Up on the stand, Gates is absolutely coming apart. The shaking shoulders have given way to crying. His fingers wriggle on the railing. And his face turns bright red.
“See what happened was, the light was green before it turned red,” he says, trying to continue. “And I keep thinking maybe if I’d just gone then and crossed the street, I could’ve gotten her. But instead I just stood on the corner. ‘Cause I was watching her and thinking how lucky I was. She was so beautiful. My life was so beautiful . . . And then it was over. I had her in my arms and then she slipped away.”
Tears are streaming down his face. Jake looks back and sees Dana is crying too. Maybe they should just ask for a recess before the witness completely self-destructs.
But Francis has come up with a unique way of finishing the job without pissing off the judge. Instead of using dynamite, he’s decided to smother the witness in velvet.
“So,” he says gently, “looking back, from your current medicated vantage point, how realistic is it that you could have saved your daughter?”
“I don’t know.” Gates sniffs.
“Well, it was an accident. Right?”
“I don’t know. I keep thinking maybe if I did one thing differently that day, she wouldn’t have died. Like if I hadn’t stayed at work to make a phone call. Or if I’d run my train closer to schedule. Or if I hadn’t shaved that morning. I would’ve been standing there on the corner a little earlier and then I would’ve been the one to cross the street first. And she wouldn’t have had to come running to me like that. And I would’ve taken her by the hand and we would’ve gone on with our lives the way they were.”
“So you still feel it’s your fault your daughter is dead. Right?”
“Sometimes I think about getting in front of a train or a car myself,” Gates says, wiping his face with a Kleenex and fighting hard to get control of himself.
“But you know that’s not going to make a difference. Right?”
“It’s how I feel.”
“But you know there’s a report from the police and Child Welfare saying no one was at fault. Don’t you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Gates says, drawing himself up rigidly. “It’s still the way I feel.”
“So sometimes the way you feel is more important than the reality of a situation. Is that correct?”
“Sometimes,” Gates says before Susan can object.
“Then why should this court believe you when you say you know what happened the night of September fifth in the tunnel under Riverside Park? You don’t seem to have a very firm grip on reality, do you?”
The fingers stop wriggling on the railing. The jaw sets. Gates takes a deep breath, as if he’s reaching down deep inside himself for something he’s never been able to find. Then he looks Francis right in the eye.
“I know what happened,” he says in the steadiest voice Jake has ever heard him use. “I saw that man”—pointing to Jake—“step between my friend and the guy with the bat. I heard him say, ‘All right, guys, let’s leave.’ And then I saw them knock him down and hit him when he tried to take the bat.”
There’s dead quiet, except for footsteps outside and the echo of a door closing down the marble hallway.
After all these years trying cases, Jake is amazed the cliché still holds: the sound of truth is unmistakable in a courtroom. It’s like hearing a gunshot for the first time. You may not be able to describe it exactly, but you know it when you hear it.
Francis whirls on the judge. “I move that his answer be stricken as unresponsive.”
“You opened the door and invited him in, Mr. O’Connell.” Frankenthaler shrugs. “It’s too late to pull back the hors d’oeuvres tray.”
“Isn’t this burst of recovered memory rather convenient?” Francis asks Gates, his voice dripping with acid sarcasm.
“You can try tearing me down or pulling me apart.” Gates raises his chin, as if he’s daring Francis to take a swing at it. “You can’t take any more from me than what’s already taken. I’m still a man. I know what I saw.”
For a split second, he looks past Francis and past Jake at the defense table to Dana in the front row. Something seems to pass between them, but it’s gone by the time Jake turns around to look at her.
“Any further questions?” the judge asks Francis before looking down to sign some papers.
“No. That will be all.” He nods to the stand. “Thank you, Mr. Gates.”
82
Two days later, Philip Cardi goes to see his attorney, Jim Dunning.
He finds his lawyer pacing back and forth in a cramped, windowless lower Broadway office, a filterless Camel burned down to the nub in his right hand. A poster on the wall shows a huge finger pointing and says SOMEONE TALKED!
“You know how there are times when people say, ‘Relax, don’t worry, things will work out okay’?” says Dunning, dragging hard on his butt. “Well, this is not one of those times. Okay? This is a time for concern. This may even be a time to be anxious. In fact, if you considered getting an ulcer before, this may be the time to develop one.”
“Why?” says Philip, trying to settle into an uncomfortably narrow seat with a maroon vinyl cushion. “What’s going on?”
“Is this me talking? Or is this them talking?”
“Whoever. What are they saying?”
“You know. They’re pissed. They’re asking for a dismissal on recommendation for the case against Schiff. Apparently their bum blew our bum out of the water at the Wade hearing. Our guy Taylor couldn’t even make a positive ID of Schiff. He showed up in court high on angel dust.”
“So why is that my problem?” asks Philip, noticing his left armrest is loose.
“Philip, they’re talking about throwing out the case and starting over with you as the defendant.” Dunning stubs out his cigarette. “They don’t just want to throw the book at you, they wanna throw the whole friggin’ library.”
“How can this happen? I was their lead witness.” Philip sags to his right and the other armrest breaks.
“Well, you’re not anymore. They’re probably going to charge you the day after tomorrow.”
Philip finds himself gasping for air. The walls and ceilings of the room seem to move a little closer, SOMEONE TALKED! A hundred years before, sweltering immigrant hordes had suffocated and rotted from disease in tight airless rooms in this neighborhood; today he’s the one dying.
“So what kind of case do they have?” Philip asks.
The lawyer sits down at his desk and looks at the file, the fingers of his right hand splayed across his ruddy forehead. The posture of the professional man about to deliver bad news.
“They’ve already got this homeless guy Gates saying you did it. And I understand from Francis that your cousin Ronnie isn’t exactly steady on our side.”
“Figures,” Philip grumbles. Ronnie has a line of drool where his spine should be. He’ll go whatever way the wind is blowing.
“But what’s really going to kill us is they’re probably going to get Schiff to testify against you.” Dunning takes off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubs his eye sockets. “And I have to say, he’s going to make a very powerful witness.”
“But—”
“They’re pissed off, Philip,” his lawyer interrupts. “They think you screwed them. The girl in particular, Fusco. She’s very upset. With the way you misled them. This is them talking. It’s not me.”
Philip starts cracking his knuckles. “What’s gonna happen?”
“Looking at it objectively, your situation is not good.” The lawyer frowns and puts his glasses back on. “The DA’s not interested in taking a
plea from you since you’ve apparently lied to them already. Schiff’s people have the name of a girl who they say you almost killed in a warehouse about twenty years ago. That’s a crime you didn’t tell them about, which effectively scotches your plea agreement.”
“They say anything about my uncle?”
“No. So you might still have a little leverage there if you agree to testify against him immediately. But you’re still looking at serious time for this murder in the tunnel. Just a bit less time if you roll over on Carmine. Francis’s best offer is still eight and a third to twenty-five.”
Philip becomes very still.
“I can’t do prison time,” he says.
“I understand how you feel. Maybe we can knock this down to manslaughter. It sounds like there was provocation.”
“You don’t understand. I cannot do prison time.” Philip’s eyes remain steady. “I will slit my own throat before I spend another day locked up.”
“Why? What’s the big deal? You already have a record. You’ve been away before. You must know people inside.”
Philip doesn’t say anything for a minute. He has the look of a truck driver who’s seen too many white lines go under his wheels.
“I did a stretch when I was younger,” he says quietly. “And some things happened to me in there.”
“Yeah, like what?”
“Things I don’t like to talk about.”
Philip crosses his legs and folds his arms in front of his chest. He can’t go back. Going back means he’d have to become what he can’t accept.
“So what are my options?” he asks his lawyer.
“Options? What options?” Dunning looks down at his desk as if all the papers had suddenly changed places on him. “I just told you. They have three strong witnesses against you, physical evidence, and an office full of prosecutors who think you made them look like assholes. Pack your bags, my friend. You’re going.”
SOMEONE TALKED! The finger on the poster is pointing right at Philip.
“There’s gotta be another way.” He pulls on his ear.
“Philip, I have to be honest with you. You’ve lied to them and now they’re going to get you for it. As long as they can pin this tunnel murder on you, they’re going to put you away for as long as they can. You have to start preparing yourself.”
Intruder Page 33
