Rafael had been placed in a block of seventy-five prisoners. It was split roughly evenly between blacks and Hispanics, plus a handful of white guys. During the afternoon their individual cells were unlocked and they were allowed to hang out in the common area, which was basically a stretch of brightly colored plastic chairs, with a small wall-mounted TV on either end. People generally clustered around the tables near the TVs, blacks around one, Hispanics the other. There were four phones in the common area, which were also divided up by race. A white guy who wanted to use the phone had to pick his spots, and make it quick.
There was a delicate balance of power between the black gangs and the Latino gangs; from the phones to the cafeteria tables, pretty much everything was controlled by one group or the other. Segregation was virtually complete: everyone stuck with their own kind; doing otherwise risked violence. The racial hostility was far worse than anything Rafael had ever experienced.
Rafael got the bitter joke that what was keeping him relatively safe in jail was that as an accused murderer he was considered too dangerous to be put in the general population. But on the other hand most of the people in his cell block were facing charges on a violent crime, and the peace that endured was tenuous and uneasy.
The man in the cell next to his, Luis Gutierrez, was also Puerto Rican. Luis was in for armed robbery. He was a few years older than Rafael, short, but with a wrestler’s build, a spiderweb tattoo on the side of his neck. Luis clearly wasn’t someone that anyone with any sense would ever want to fuck with.
At first glance Rafael had been worried about Luis, but instead the man was friendly from the jump, calling Rafael his brother, introducing him to other Puerto Ricans on the cell block. Rafael couldn’t help but appreciate it, but he also knew not to let his guard down.
Other than meals, showers, and exercise, the only time Rafael left the cell block was to work in the jail’s laundry room. He’d been hoping to get assigned to work in the kitchen, but no dice. Nobody accused of a violent crime was allowed to work there; the kitchen had more actual and potential weapons than anywhere else in the jail. Instead he spent most of his time preparing the setups for new prisoners. These consisted of a blanket, sheet, towel, soap, toothbrush, and toothpaste. He wrapped everything together in the blanket, creating a little bundle, which he then piled on carts.
He’d spent the morning in the laundry room, his shift ending at noon. From there he went straight to the cafeteria. Like most of Rikers, the dining area was full of bright primary colors—the pastel greens and yellows making Rafael feel like he was stuck in some sadistic version of a preschool. He’d managed to find a seat at the far edge of a table, nobody right near him.
Lunch was a meat loaf so brutally awful Rafael suspected the kitchen of deliberate sabotage. It crumbled, dry as burned toast, and tasted like it had been made out of cardboard mixed with cigarette ash. Rafael was halfway finished eating, forcing the food down, chewing as little as possible to keep actually tasting it to a minimum, when a man sat down directly across from him, looking right at him as he did so. He was a compact Hispanic man, mid-thirties, with buzz-cut hair and a small goatee, a prison tattoo on his right hand. But the striking thing was his direct, friendly look: eye contact with strangers was a rare and potentially dangerous thing at Rikers.
“Buenos días,” the man said.
“What’s up?” Rafael replied, instinct telling him to reply in English. He didn’t know who this guy was or what he wanted, which meant he wasn’t to be trusted. Answering in Spanish would have created some slight bond between them that he was not willing to concede.
“You don’t speak Spanish?” the man asked, looking surprised. His English was good, but with a heavy accent, not that of a native speaker. “You Rafael, right?”
Rafael didn’t like it that the man knew who he was. He nodded curtly.
“I’m Armando. Where you come from, Rafael?”
“The Alphabet projects.”
Armando cocked his head. He hadn’t touched the food on his plate. “No, amigo, I mean where you come from.”
“I’m Puerto Rican.”
Armando waved his hand dismissively, apparently finding that only a statement of the obvious. “Where in Puerto Rico?”
“Vieques,” Rafael said. It was basically just a name to him, not a place he had any real sense of connection to.
“My people are in San Juan,” Armando said. “We keep track of our own up in here, you know.”
“You keep track of all the Ricans in here?” Rafael said. “Must be a busy man.”
Armando looked surprised for a moment, then chose to laugh. “It’s true they got a lot of us in here, but that’s not no joke. You’re in here for shooting a white man.”
His lawyer had told him not to talk to anyone about his case. Rafael didn’t understand how Armando knew so much about him, how he’d come to be on the man’s radar. “What you in for?” Rafael said, adding some street to his voice.
“Because I’m a brown man who knows our people got to do for themselves. That makes me a threat to them who run this country.”
Rafael tilted his head, not wanting to show too much skepticism, but not buying this either. “They got you in here for representing?”
“They got me in for something they want to call racketeering,” Armando said. “But that’s just their way of making it into something they know how to deal with. You come up from nowhere, try to get your own for you and your people, they call you a criminal. You go to one of them Ivy League schools and do it, they gonna call you a businessman.”
“Got that right,” Rafael said. He was pretty sure he saw where this was going, and was confident Armando posed no immediate threat. But that didn’t mean Rafael wanted to make an enemy out of him.
“You recognize that we’re a people with our own country, right?”
“I grew up here in New York,” Rafael said.
“Look around you, yo, you see America here? You think this is what America look like to the white boys with all the money? Who you think they put in here? We’re the people they don’t want out in the street. That includes you, amigo, because you’re sitting here same as me. A man’s gotta know where he’s from, because it’s only your own people who’ll have your back. Not too many can get through this place by themselves.”
“I been okay in here. Don’t take no shit, don’t give no shit—same as out on the street.”
“Same game as the street, sure, but motherfuckers play it harder up in here. And it ain’t just being safe. It’s about doing together with your people.”
“I hear you,” Rafael said.
“That’s all I’m talking, my brother, just listening. Maybe you can learn something about where you belong in this world.”
Rafael knew the worst mistake he could make in jail was to get on the bad side of his own. Word would spread that he was unprotected, and the black gangs and the skinheads and every other racist dumb ass would want to take a shot. But he also knew that this was all a sales pitch, and that what Armando really wanted was to recruit him. “I’m doing all right on my own in here,” Rafael said. “Going to keep my head down, do my time.”
Armando smiled slightly, although his eyes didn’t change. “You’re going to need your brothers here,” he said. “Everybody does.”
16
YOU HAVE a lovely home,” Candace said to Dolores Nazario. This wasn’t quite true: all the careful decoration couldn’t disguise the fact that the building itself was falling apart. She’d accepted Dolores’s offer of coffee; the two of them were seated in the living room.
“I live here for fifteen years,” Dolores said. “I make it the best place I can.”
Candace was talking to Dolores because her initial research into Jacob Riis had failed to uncover any hook between the transformation of the project and the murder of the security guard. She had the lawyer, Riley, but that was clearly nowhere near enough, as her editor had made clear. The obvious place to look for the connection w
as the murder itself. She knew Riley wouldn’t talk to her, and getting in to see Rafael at Rikers was going to be a long shot at best. That left the grandmother.
“So as I said on the phone,” Candace said, “my focus isn’t on the shooting that happened, but on what’s going on with all the changes they’re making around here. How did you and Rafael end up facing eviction?”
Dolores told the story of the security guard, Fowler, claiming to catch her grandson with a joint, and Rafael’s arrest and guilty plea, which then led to the eviction. Candace tried not to show her skepticism, but the story didn’t quite add up. “I know how it sound to you,” Dolores said. “But I raised Rafa not to lie. He tells me something, swears it’s true, then I believe him.”
“How did you end up with Duncan Riley as your lawyer?”
“Through my church, they told me to go to this place that helps people with free lawyers. They say they have volunteer lawyers who are helping people. They got us to Mr. Riley.”
“Did Mr. Riley tell you that he’s also the lawyer for Roth Properties, the developer who’s behind all the changes here?”
Dolores looked uncomfortable with the question. “He tells us that he do work for Roth, yes, but Mr. Riley say that is no problem because it is the city who is against us.”
Candace wasn’t going to pretend she understood the nuances of legal ethics, but Riley’s involvement with the Nazarios still felt wrong to her. “Roth is one of his firm’s biggest clients.”
“Mr. Riley, he been working hard for us, taking our side. He went to court, got the case thrown out. Now he trying to get my nieto out of jail, doing that for no money.”
Candace got the message: she wasn’t going to get between Dolores and the lawyer who was trying to get her grandson off a murder charge and herself from being kicked out of her home. Candace was still skeptical that was what Riley was actually doing. “What about the Alphabet City Community Coalition?” Candace asked. “Did you reach out to them about the eviction?”
“I know other people who have gone to them, but nothing happens. I needed a lawyer to help us, not someone to make a protest.”
“Other people who were getting evicted had told you the coalition wasn’t helpful?” Candace asked, Dolores nodding. “Do you know a lot of other residents who are facing eviction?”
“These security guards, they like to bother people here. Rafa’s not the only one.”
“What do you think of the idea of what they’re doing to Jacob Riis more generally? Mixing market-rate and affordable housing? Couldn’t it make things better for the people who live here?”
“It could be good, sure, less crime,” Dolores said. “For those of us who get to come back maybe, though how many that will be I don’t know.”
“You don’t think they’ll bring everybody back?” Candace asked, not surprised that such rumors would be running rampant at the project.
“They need to make room for the new people, the ones with money. That’s why they’re getting rid of people like us.”
This got Candace’s attention. “What do you mean?”
“Like how they’re doing with Rafa and me. The security guards, always making up reasons to throw people out of their homes.”
Candace leaned forward, unsure what Dolores was getting at. “Are you saying that the security guards are planting drugs on people so they can evict them?”
“Like they did with Rafa, yes. I hear there are many others.”
“Do you have proof that this is happening?”
Dolores shrugged. “Me and Rafa, we are proof, yes?”
17
DUNCAN FOUND himself buying Professor Nathan Cole an expensive meal. He hadn’t been intending to do so, had thought he was just coming to the professor’s office, but when he’d arrived Cole had immediately suggested they talk over lunch.
Duncan had obediently followed Cole off of the John Jay campus and over to Eighth Avenue, at which point they’d cut down a few blocks, then over to Gallagher’s, one of the city’s better steak houses. “I’m not sure we can just get in here,” Duncan said.
“I made us a reservation,” Cole said. He was a short man with a bad comb-over, wearing corduroys and a blazer, looking like he dressed to ensure that everyone who saw him made him for an academic. “Lunch was the only time I could fit you in.”
Duncan understood what Cole was up to: sticking the firm for an expensive meal, the professor taking a little perk from his position as expert. Although he didn’t like being taken advantage of, Duncan couldn’t get too worked up: the bill would be coming out of the firm’s pocket, not his. He’d seen other experts pull similar stunts, snatch every fringe benefit they could get while moonlighting in a lawsuit. Besides, Duncan liked a good steak as much as the next guy.
“So,” Duncan asked, after they’d ordered—a filet for Duncan, a rib eye for Cole. “Have you had a chance to look over the gunshot residue report I sent?”
Cole nodded, taking a deep sip from the glass of California old-vine zinfandel he’d ordered. He’d suggested sharing a bottle but Duncan had demurred, citing work. “Do you understand what gunshot residue is?”
Duncan grinned. “For purposes of this conversation, let’s pretend I don’t.”
“Gunshot residue is distinct because it’s a fusion of three elements that otherwise don’t have occasion to meet: lead, barium, and antimony. When you fire a gun you’re essentially making a little explosion that sends the bullet on its merry way. That explosion fuses those three elements and sends a microscopic cloud of them out onto the hand of the person holding the gun. You grab somebody right after he shoots a gun and he’s going to have hundreds of these particles on his hand. The thing about those CSI shows is all that home-run forensic shit might be true if you caught the guy five seconds after the murder and he was still standing at the crime scene. But once time and distance come into play it’s a different story.”
“They arrested Rafael about an hour after the shooting,” Duncan said. “Are you saying that all the gunshot residue would’ve worn off?”
“That’s one way to look at it. The stuff we’re talking about is like talcum powder—it’s dust. If you wash your hands thoroughly you might get rid of it.”
“What jumped out at me was that the report said the particles were found on Rafael’s left hand. He’s right-handed.”
“That’s actually not as significant as you might think. Most people have both hands on or near a gun when firing. Plus it could easily get transferred from one hand to another, or if he held the gun in his nondominant hand for a second after it’d been fired, like while opening a door or something.”
“The report says they found six particles on his hand. Given the time and distance, is that a lot, or a little, or what you’d expect?”
“It’s not a lot under any circumstance. The point is that a handful of particles—that could well be incidental contact. Was your guy ever in the back of a police car after he was arrested?”
“Yeah.”
“You ran the back of the typical NYPD squad car, you’d easily find a few particles of gunshot residue sitting around in the carpet fibers. With a handful of particles your guy could have picked them up from letting his hand touch the seat cushion just as easily as he could’ve from shooting a gun. Police stations are also highly likely to have gunshot residue floating around. There’ve been several instances in which the GSR testing room itself was shown to be contaminated.”
“So would your view be that this amount of GSR is inconclusive in terms of showing that my client had actually held a gun?”
“If they’d found a hundred particles, then no way, he’d almost certainly been in contact with a fired gun. But the few particles they found? It could easily be contamination.”
“That’s great,” Duncan said.
“What you need to get is the actual lab notes,” Cole said. “They’re going to tell you a lot more than the final report does.”
Duncan nodded. “So you’re say
ing we really have legit grounds to challenge the GSR evidence?”
“I’ve learned never to underestimate the extent to which judges are in the DA’s pocket. But with anybody who’s actually doing their job, then yeah, we’ve got a fighting chance.”
“You think the DA’s office realizes that it’s weak?”
Cole laughed at the question. “You’re at Steven Blake’s firm, right?”
“You know Steven?”
“I’ve seen his name in the paper. I know you guys do all that clash-of-the-corporate-titans stuff. This is what, pro bono for you?”
Duncan stiffened at what he took to be condescension. “We’re putting the same resources toward this case as we would any other.”
“That wasn’t my point,” Cole said pedantically. “What I’m saying is, how often do you think a defendant like yours gets to have somebody like me double-check the forensics? What happens is, the DA says they’ve got gunshot residue on the guy’s hands, his public defender tells him he should plead out; plead out he does, and everybody goes home. The reason they don’t worry about getting this stuff right is because nine times out of ten nobody checks whether or not they do.”
“And you think we can really keep them from bringing it in?”
“Give me a fair-minded judge with an IQ over ninety and I like my chances,” Cole said. “So in the New York criminal courts, I’d put it at fifty-fifty.”
ALTHOUGH HE’D done his best not to show it over lunch with Cole, Duncan was buzzing from what he’d learned. He was a practitioner of massive, slow-moving, often tedious cases in which success was generally measured by victories so incremental and complex that even other lawyers could scarcely be bothered to understand them.
This was something else. Eliminating the key physical evidence in a murder case—there was something viscerally exciting about it. Of course, even if Cole was right and they could get the gunshot residue thrown out, the police would still have an ex-cop eyewitness and a clear motive. It wouldn’t mean in itself that Rafael would walk, not even close, but it would change the momentum, and it would certainly change plea-bargain negotiations.
Justin Peacock Page 14
