Where Nobody Dies

by Carolyn Wheat

  What I didn’t know was whether the papers asking for a court investigation had ever been filed. I supposed not—it would have caused a major media explosion if they had—but if not, why not? Had the tenants’ group been paid off or warned off? And if so, by whom? I jotted down the names of the plaintiffs and resolved to talk to them as soon as I could.

  The last of Linda’s victims, with a tiny packet of papers to her credit, was Art’s wife Aida. If I’d felt saddened at learning the truth about Art, I felt doubly bad at reading Linda’s notes on Aida.

  Born Aida Valentin in Puerto Rico, she’d grown up in the South Bronx, worked as a secretary in a Brooklyn legal services office, and married her boss. That was the Sunday supplement version. What the papers had left out was that she had a criminal record and had once been a junkie.

  At first I wondered how the papers could possibly have missed the story. It would have added considerable spice to the fluff they’d done on the “feisty but beautiful” wife of Brooklyn’s “charismatic” congressman. Then I realized that the busts were either juvenile or youthful offender convictions. Sealed records.

  Add the fact that drug program records are about as easy to come by as CIA documents, and it became apparent how the press had missed the boat. The question was, how much would Aida or her husband have paid to keep it that way? Publicly kicking drugs may be a good way for a fading country singer to get on talk shows, but it does less than nothing for the image of a congressman’s wife.

  The only strike against Aida during the campaign had been the no-show job. Everybody has them, but for Aida her position as a member of the Mayor’s Committee on Minority Housing at twenty thousand a year had become a major scandal. For one thing, the ever-forgetful Art had neglected to put it on his financial statement, an oversight he hastily remedied. In Linda’s file were a couple of letters from the Department of Investigation asking Aida to come in for fingerprinting and financial disclosure, normal prerequisites for any city job, but she’d resigned when the storm of controversy broke.

  I stood up and took a stretch, arching my back like a cat’s and unkinking the muscles I’d just realized were coiled as tight as a spring. What the hell, I wondered, was I going to do with this mess? Put my coat on, walk out onto Court Street, and march up to the Eighty-fourth Precinct? Ask for Detective Button and turn the garbage over to somebody paid to collect it? And then what? Watch while the papers ate Art and Aida Lucenti for breakfast, lunch and dinner? Catch the eleven o’clock news to get the latest on the Blackmail Secretary?

  That stopped me cold. I stared out the window at the steel-gray sky and realized that I’d be trashing Linda’s reputation without any real guarantee that it would help Brad Ritchie. What I’d be giving Dawn would be a mother to be ashamed of, as well as a father behind bars.

  I couldn’t do it. No way could I add to Dawn’s suffering for no good reason. Whatever action I took with respect to the blackmail material, I decided, had to be for the sole purpose of presenting the police with an alternative to Brad Ritchie as Linda’s murderer.

  It meant work. It meant questioning the blackmail victims until I had something to take to Detective Button. One quick thought: I’d start with Bellfield and the Lucentis. As Linda’s employers, they were likely to show up at her funeral, where I might get a chance to talk to them with reasonable discretion.

  Having a plan felt good. The helpless paralysis that had enveloped me ever since I’d sat on Dawn’s bed and lied to her began to lift. I might not be able to comfort her in her loss or secure her a guardian, but maybe—just maybe—I could give her back her father.

  5

  What I needed was coffee. Coffee and a quiet place, far away from Kings County Criminal Court, in which to discuss Aida Valentin Lucenti with my old friend, Pat Flaherty. What I had was Part GP1 and a client named Derrick Sinclair.

  “I ain’t did nothin’.”

  I stared at him through the bars of the pen behind the courtroom. “A classic defense,” I murmured, frustration turning on my sarcasm button. Hilary Quayle could have taken my correspondence course. “Is that ‘I ain’t did nothin’, I was just the lookout’? Or, like the kid rapist I once had, is it ‘I ain’t did nothin’, I just held her down’?”

  “I told you,” Derrick replied doggedly. “All I did was ask the lady for a cigarette. Since when they make that a crime?”

  “How about when the guy you’re with goes behind the lady and rips off her gold chain while you’ve got her stopped?”

  “How’m I s’posed to know he gonna do that?” Derrick countered, his eyes measuring me.

  “Might I suggest a little light reading?” I asked with a laugh. “Starting with your rap sheet. You and this guy Ralph Salazar have been busted twice before for the same thing. You’d better start carrying your own smokes, Derrick.”

  “Those cases was squashed,” Derrick replied with all the confidence of a jailhouse lawyer.

  “Oh, my God,” I groaned. “If I had a dollar for everybody whose cases were ‘squashed,’ I’d …” I broke off, aware that I’d lost Derrick’s already minimal attention.

  “In the first place,” I said waspishly, “nothing’s ‘squashed.’ I’m trying to work out a deal here to cover the whole package. In the second place, ‘squashed’ or not, a guy who keeps getting busted in the company of a known chain-snatcher is going to have a hard time selling a jury on the idea that he just stood there with his thumb in his mouth while his buddy grabbed the chain. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  I let Derrick think about it while I dashed to the door to make sure my quarry was still waiting to be flushed. I’d done a lot of juggling to arrange an accidental meeting with Pat Flaherty and I didn’t want to lose him to another courtroom.

  To say the least, it had been a shock when Pat’s name leaped out at me—on about the fourth reading—from Aida Valentin’s application to a Phoenix House in Brooklyn. She’d listed him as a reference. It took me a minute or two to recall that before coming to Brooklyn Legal Aid, he’d been a juvenile rights lawyer in Bronx Family Court. It seemed a coincidence made in heaven—somebody who could clue me in on Aida’s past and maybe pave the way for me to talk to her without scaring her half to death.

  Pat stood before the bench, his humorous Irish face solemn as he spoke on behalf of his client, a guy who looked as if he’d been around the block so many times he’d worn a groove in the pavement. In the old courthouse phrase, he wore his yellow sheet on his face.

  “My client, Your Honor,” Flaherty boomed, “is now ready to submit himself to the discipline of a residential drug program. He’s ready to—”

  “Mr. Flaherty,” Judge Diadona’s dry voice interrupted. His lightly ironic tone was helped by the slightest of Spanish accents.

  “Your client,” he went on, “felt ready in 1982, in 1980, and in 1977. He entered drug programs in each of those years, promising each and every judge who put him there that now would be the time he would conquer his drug habit and face the world as a law-abiding citizen. May I remind you, Mr. Flaherty”—the judge was near a smile, but it was the grin of a predator about to pounce—“that in none of those cases did your client last in the program for even one month. So kindly do not give me”—this time the ‘r’ had a full Spanish pronunciation—“‘ready.’” The lawyers in the front row cracked up, but Flaherty looked pained, as though Judge Diadona had told a dirty joke at a funeral. That was Flaherty’s strength as a criminal lawyer, I thought appreciatively, watching him work. He conveyed an air of utter sincerity, of deep concern for each of his clients, that was only partly an act. It seemed suddenly odd and touching to think of a younger Pat Flaherty using these talents on behalf of the South Bronx teenager who’d grown up to become the beautiful Aida Lucenti.

  I turned and went back into the pen. “Derrick,” I called softly through the bars, “what’s your friend Ralph’s nickname on the street?”

  A puzzled frown accompanied the answer. “Speed,” Derrick replied promptly.


  “Oh, he’s a druggie,” I said innocently, “he does amphetamines.”

  Derrick snorted, “He ain’t do no drugs. He be called Speed on ’count he fast.”

  “He’s fast.” I pretended to think about it. “You mean, he spots the gold, he snatches the gold, he runs with the gold—that kind of fast?”

  I could picture it. The victim startled and a little alarmed by Derrick’s coal-black bulk looming in front of her, then Speed’s cardsharp-quick hands reaching for the gold cross, then running with the prize. It wasn’t the Olympic version of “going for the gold,” but what the hell, everyone who entered won something. We Buy Gold/Compramos Oro stores had sprung up like mushrooms in the ghetto; no one seemed to care that the gold chains they bought were invariably missing a few links.

  “I ain’t the one took the gold,” Derrick persisted, his eyes wide with innocence. “I asked the lady for a cigarette. I ain’t even touch her chain.”

  I sighed and walked back to the pen door. I wanted to make sure Flaherty was still in the courtroom, and I needed time to think out a strategy. Part GP1 was the last place to cop a plea before indictment; it was Derrick Sinclair’s only hope of avoiding jail.

  “Judge Cornelius,” Judge Diadona was saying in a tone of weary exasperation, “may he be watching us from heaven, put this man on probation. But your client, Mr. Flaherty, has an atrocious sense of direction. He did not manage to find his way to Adams Street, to speak to his probation officer, once in the entire period of his probation. Can you explain that counselor?”

  “My client tells me, Your Honor, that he had every intention of keeping his appointments but never received a letter to go to probation. A simple mixup, Your Honor,” Pat shrugged, flashing a winning Irish smile.

  “Perhaps the Probation Department was at fault,” Judge Diadona agreed with suspicious affability. “Perhaps they did run out of engraved invitations.” I closed the door on another laugh from the front row.

  I marched back to the cage and called to the eight prisoners, “Okay, who wants to play ‘People’s Court’?”

  “Hey, I seen that on TV,” one kid cried delightedly.

  “What we gotta do?” another asked, his voice wary.

  “Just listen up,” I answered, going into my spiel. “Two dudes are walking down the street. One dude’s name is Speed. The other dude stops a lady and asks her for a cigarette. Speed goes behind the lady, grabs the chain, and runs. The other guy just happens to knock the lady down. Now the question before this jury is: Did the first dude know that Speed was going to grab the chain, or did it come as a big surprise to him?”

  One kid snorted, “Huh, you shittin’ me, lady?”

  “’Course he knew,” his friend agreed.

  “What he there for, man,” a tall kid with a pencil mustache exclaimed. “He the block.”

  “They be robbin’ together,” a dark man with sleepy methadone eyes pronounced. “They trying to get paid.”

  “What they offerin’ you, boy?” A West Indian lilt cut into the babble. The middle-aged man with the gray-flecked dreadlocks hadn’t joined my impromptu jury, but he now shared his opinion with Derrick, who stood, eyes bulging. “Whatever it is, you’d better think serious. You’d better pay heed to what your lawyer says.” He fixed me with a sardonic grin. “She’s one smart lady.”

  I bowed and smiled. “Thank you, sir” I replied, matching his courtliness. “That was a jury of your peers,” I explained to Derrick, “not a jury like the one you’ll actually see if you go to trial. Those people will be white, middle-aged, and scared to death of people who look like you. Now—what happened?”

  “Me and my crimee,” Derrick mumbled, “we rip the lady chain off. I block her, he snatch her.”

  Back in the courtroom, Pat’s client was speaking for himself.

  “I done turned my life around, Your Honor,” he pleaded, his voice breaking. “I got a good woman now and a son I got to stay straight for.” I felt a surge of sympathy, in spite of my better judgment.

  “Don’t you think that would be more impressive, Mr. Flaherty,” Judge Diadona asked in dulcet tones, “if your client had not been arrested for assaulting the mother of his child?”

  When all else fails, change your lawyer. Rule number one in the skell survival manual. Flaherty’s client announced in ringing tones that he wanted a new lawyer; Pat had never visited him at Riker’s Island. Judge Diadona defended Pat’s skill (the only time a defense lawyer hears anything good about himself from the bench is when his client wants to dump him), but to no avail. Finally, Flaherty himself asked to be relieved, a look of weary resignation on his bearded face.

  It was a confession of defeat. Exhausted and pained, Flaherty walked over and plopped his bulk next to me on the front bench.

  “The very skelly are different from you and me,” he sighed, as the judge announced a fifteen-minute recess.

  “‘Skells will break your heart,’” I replied, quoting the words Flaherty himself had used to me when I was a rookie Legal Aid lawyer learning the ropes from the old master. In those naive days, I’d used the word skell to refer to anyone behind bars. Now I knew better. Now I knew the term was reserved for the utterly conscienceless, the sociopaths, the users.

  Another sigh, this one longer and tireder. “What you’ve got,” I said, trying another arrow from Flaherty’s own quiver, “is the four-thirty I’ve-been-kicked-in-the-balls-again blues. By tomorrow,” I went on brightly, “you won’t even remember your client’s name.” As I talked to Pat, I felt a surge of warmth run through me. Since leaving the easy camaraderie of the Legal Aid Society nine months before, heart-to-heart talks with people who understood what I did for a living had been few and far between. It felt good to share the frustration again.

  Flaherty turned hurt blue eyes on me. “Do you know how many phone calls I made for that guy? How many drug programs I begged before I found one that would take him? How much schmoozing I did with Probation before they’d agree to give him one more chance?”

  “Pat, that skell used up every coupon in life’s book of chances years ago.”

  “Yeah,” the agreement came reluctantly, a near-grunt. We sat in silence, Pat obviously brooding, me trying to figure a way to introduce the name Aida Valentin into the conversation.

  Finally, Pat spoke. “‘Mother may I?’” he said. “That’s the skell’s-eye view of life. You want probation—just say ‘Mother may I?’ You want a drug program—‘Mother may I?’ Don’t worry about the fact that you don’t mean a word you’re saying. Hell, these guys don’t even know what words like ‘sorry’ and ‘love’ mean! Did you see”—Pat’s blue eyes burned with anger—“the way that slime tried to use his own kid to get himself out of jail? A kid he probably never sees and certainly never supported, by the way. But he knows that the rest of the world—the ducks, the suckers—think kids are special, so when he’s in a bind, he bleats ‘my kid, my kid’ and hopes he pushes someone’s sympathy button.” Pat, one of the world’s great fathers, was clearly outraged.

  “I just represented a kid,” I said, pointing to the pen door, “who sees other people solely as sources of revenue. ‘If it moves, grab its gold chain’ sums up his view of life. But that’s skells,” I pointed out. “If they think you’re sincere about having any values higher than self-interest, they see you as a fool, someone they can manipulate.”

  “Speaking of manipulation”—the blue eyes were suddenly shrewd—“what is it you want to talk to me about?”

  I opened my mouth to protest, then realized denial would only make things worse. “The court officers?”

  Pat nodded. “Hank told me you’d put your case off three times, waiting for me to come down for mine. So—what’s up?”

  “It’s about an old client of yours,” I began, looking around to see whether anyone was listening. Fortunately the lawyers who’d been sitting in the front now all had clients to talk to before the judge returned. Even so, I lowered my voice. “Aida Valentin Lucenti.”<
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  Pat shook his head. “She wasn’t my client,” he said. “I knew her, though. She was the co-defendant when I represented Nilda Vargas.” The name rang a bell. Then I remembered I’d seen it on Aida’s rap sheet. Flaherty continued, “But you don’t want to hear about her. What’s going on with Aida?”

  I told him. I did better than that. Slipping my hand into my leather briefcase, I pulled out the slender packet that held Aida’s criminal record and the reports from the drug program. I pointed to the box where Aida had clearly printed Pat’s name as the person who’d referred her to the program.

  “So even if you weren’t her lawyer,” I concluded, “you had some impact on her life, seeing to it she got off drugs.”

  There was a funny look on Pat’s face as he looked at the badly Xeroxed application form. “I don’t remember talking to Aida about her addiction,” he said slowly. “Don’t get me wrong—she was a nice kid and I’d have liked to see her get straight, but my memory is that she’d already flunked out of NACC. That,” he explained, “was the old Rockefeller program.”

  I nodded; it took a scorecard to keep up with New York’s ever-changing drug laws. The program Pat was talking about had been the fullest flowering of rehabilitation theory. When it failed, as it was programmed to do, Draconian measures replaced programs.

  “Besides,” Pat went on, “we were in the South Bronx. Why would I recommend a program in Brooklyn? How would I even know a program in Brooklyn?”

  “Are you saying she lied when she put your name down?”

  He shook his head. “I really can’t remember. Maybe I gave her a list of programs and she picked that one. It was a long time ago.”

  “What about the rest of the stuff?” I gestured at the faded reports and evaluations from Phoenix House.

  “The history’s right,” he said. “The stuff about her coming to New York from Puerto Rico with her junkie boyfriend. I saw him in court a couple of times and she admitted to her lawyer that she stole and tricked to keep them both in drugs.”