“You’ve got your job, I’ve got mine. Judge Amador won’t be happy if I don’t get my videos.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
Against my better instincts, I tried again to shoot straight with him. “I know the GSR evidence looks bad, but it was only on his shirt. If he was smart enough to wash his hands, he could have changed clothes. If we sit down and talk—”
“I only called because I respect you, Olivia. You’re backing the wrong horse on this one. The case is tight. I asked around, by the way, after you called me down to the precinct. I talked to Jacqueline Meyers from the drug unit.” I recognized the name from my law school class. “She told me that you and Harris were engaged.”
I saw no reason to hide the truth. “In case you’re wondering, I already checked whether there was an ethical conflict. If you’re even thinking about moving to remove me as counsel—”
“Whoa, stand down, Olivia. I wasn’t going there. My whole point was, maybe you should ask yourself why you’re so sure this guy’s innocent.”
“I know him, Scott. He didn’t do this.”
“No, you knew him twenty years ago.” I let the line be silent. “Just take a fair look at the evidence as it comes in, okay? I have a feeling we’ll be talking about a plea at some point.”
When I hung up, I closed my eyes again and ran through everything I knew about the case against Jack. That damn GSR. I had witnesses who could testify that Jack was at the gun range, but it was a full month before the shooting, and I had no proof it was for research instead of target practice. And I had seen Jack’s closet; he owned a lot of shirts. At least when I knew him, Jack never re-wore a shirt without washing it.
I had called Scott after Jack’s arrest for a reason. I trusted him.
I wiggled my computer’s mouse and pulled up the Paperfree website’s log-in page. I checked my notes for Madeline’s e-mail address: [email protected]
I had Jack’s standard password committed to memory: jack<3smollybuckley
The account and/or password information is incorrect.
What had I been expecting?
Still, the fact that I had bothered to check whether Jack’s habitual password might open “Madeline’s” e-mail account meant that Scott’s words had gotten to me. So had Ross Connor’s: It’s like to your face, he’s all honest and thoughtful . . . But there’s a dark side there.
Which brought me to the simplest explanation of all: maybe Jack tested positive for GSR because he shot three people hours before his arrest.
The padded envelope waiting on my desk was two inches thick, delivered by messenger. I could see from the label that it was from Gary Hannigan, the civil attorney in the Penn Station lawsuit.
Inside was a spiral-bound copy of the transcript of Hannigan’s deposition of Malcolm Neeley. The case had not proceeded far enough for Neeley’s lawyers to have deposed the plaintiffs, so I didn’t need to worry about a written record of anything Jack may have said. But I wanted to make sure there was nothing in Neeley’s deposition that indicated any kind of personal confrontation with Jack.
Twenty pages into the transcript, I could see that Hannigan believed in the “what did you eat for breakfast” approach to depositions. Some lawyers—Hannigan clearly included—believed that asking witnesses left-field questions could lead to areas of inquiry the lawyer would otherwise have never pursued. As a criminal litigator, I didn’t have the luxury of that kind of meandering. I could only question witnesses in front of the jury, where every answer needed to be one I could predict in advance.
Some topics of the deposition were obvious: Neeley’s knowledge of his son’s increasingly erratic behavior and social isolation, his failures to follow up on numerous suggestions that the boy get mental health treatment, his decision to buy Todd guns and encourage shooting as a hobby. But Hannigan also asked Neeley open-ended questions about his work, occasionally interrupting to ask how he was able to act as a father to Todd and his brother Max while building a successful hedge fund. Though the questions seemed general and conversational, the strategy was remarkably effective. While Neeley’s attorneys had prepared him to give rehearsed and controlled responses to the obvious questions, when he was allowed to go off script and talk about himself as a financier and a father, the results were damning. He was a selfish, crappy parent.
I skimmed over the part Hannigan had recorded where Neeley talked about showing up to the help’s house unannounced, young Max in tow, to teach him to appreciate the wealth he’d been born into. Neeley must have gotten a warning look from his lawyer that made him realize that other people didn’t think much of his great parenting story. When he finished telling it, he immediately began listing more traditional efforts he had made to be close to his sons. I flipped pages as Neeley made himself sound like a regular Ward Cleaver: fishing at a camp in Pennsylvania, golf lessons at the country club in Connecticut, coin collecting, teaching the boys how to spiral the pigskin, spring breaks scuba-diving in the Caribbean. I stopped and flipped back a page, hoping I hadn’t actually seen what I thought I’d just read.
No. No, no, no.
I pulled up Buckley’s cell phone number and she answered immediately. “Olivia, hi. Do you want me to get Dad—”
“No, just a quick question for you. The files that your father had about the civil case—would he have had a copy of Neeley’s deposition transcript?”
“Deposition?”
“When the families’ lawyer, Gary Hannigan, got to ask Neeley questions under oath.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. The lawyer sent us everything he thought was important. He calls it—what did he say? A client-focused approach to lawyering or something. Anyway, we kept it all in the file cabinet.”
Right, the file cabinet filled with documents that Jack said he never really paid much attention to.
When I hung up, I looked again at the transcript open on my desk.
A. I met Todd every single Wednesday morning at the park by my office to work on passes. Seven AM, like clockwork. No matter how busy I was, we always did it.
Q. You don’t think that was a little rigid that you kept your hobbies with Todd on a timed schedule without exception?
A. Routine was good for Todd. And football was the only sport he ever showed any interest in.
Q. Other than shooting, you mean.
A. I mean physical sport. Todd said he wanted to be able to play football in high school, the way I did, and the way his brother did. I knew Todd wasn’t good enough or strong enough or fast enough to play on any kind of team, but he liked it. And I liked teaching him. Those were probably the best times we ever had. Even now, I still take my coffee to the football field on Wednesday mornings, just to keep the schedule. To take a few minutes and remember the best of my son. I was a victim that day, too. I know your clients will never accept that, but I lost my boy, just like they lost their families—
Q. Let’s talk next about your son’s move from the Dutton School to the Stinson Academy.
It was the fifth school Todd would attend in seven years, but that’s not what interested me. I wheeled my office chair over to the smaller desk where my computer lived, and then wiggled the mouse to wake up the screen. I typed “Sentry Group” into the search window of the browser, hit Enter, and then clicked on the Map function.
Malcolm Neeley was shot at approximately 7:09 in the morning on a Wednesday, at a football field only seven blocks from the building where his hedge fund occupied the nineteenth and twentieth floors. And somewhere among the four file cabinets of material seized by the police from Jack’s apartment was a piece of paper that proved Jack knew exactly where the man he blamed for the death of his wife would be at precisely that time.
I slapped a Post-it on the side of the page where I had stopped reading, closed the transcript, and threw it across the room.
JACK ANSWERED THE DOOR WEARING a loose Columbia University T-shirt and cargo shorts. His hair was damp, and his face was unshaven. He looked good—relaxed and
healthy, a completely different person from the one I’d seen the previous afternoon. He even smelled good. I remembered how much I used to love tucking myself into the crook of his arm at night. I fit there perfectly, and he always seemed to smell like soap and cedar.
“Hey, if I’d known you were coming, I would have changed. And straightened up the apartment.”
His version of messy was clean for me. “No problem,” I said with a smile. “I’m the one coming by unannounced.”
“Guess you knew I’d be here,” he said, gesturing toward his ankle monitor. “Is everything okay? The judge didn’t change his mind, did he?”
“No, of course not.” It was all the reassurance I could offer.
Once we were seated in the living room, I asked if Buckley was home. She was at a movie with her friends.
“Are you sure everything’s okay? You’re kind of freaking me out, Olivia.”
“Sorry, it’s all fine. I just need to talk to you about a couple of things you’d probably like to leave in the past. We’ve never talked about it because—well, we never talked. But I know about the year you spent getting counseling.” I was trying hard to avoid any mention of our breakup, Owen’s death, or the “hospitalization” word. I started to reach a hand toward his knee, but stopped. “Charlotte finally told me after I called her nonstop for a month.”
“I don’t talk about that with anyone, Olivia. It’s over. I went through—it was a bad time.”
We went from being engaged to never speaking again, but all he wanted me to know was that it was a bad time. “Well, you need to talk about it with me. The prosecution will probably find out, if they haven’t already.”
He was staring at his hands, folded in his lap. “I don’t want to talk about that night. If I’d wanted you to be the person who helped me through all that, I would have come back home.”
He’d been so relieved to see me when I got to the precinct. Now we were having a version of the conversation we might have had if I’d ever bumped into him at a coffee shop over the years. “But we both know you did more than not come home. That’s the part I need to know about. Where were you?”
When he looked up, I saw a flash of resentment.
“The hospital, Jack. I need the name.”
He finally gave in, telling me he spent a year at the Silver Oaks Psychiatric Center in Connecticut. I wrote the name down on my notepad. “I had what they call a psychotic break. It’s temporary psychosis—”
“I know what it is.” I had used it as the basis for an insanity claim in an aggravated assault case two years earlier. An acute onset of temporary psychosis could be triggered by extreme stress, like the death of a sibling. Or perhaps, the dismissal of a lawsuit against the man responsible for the murder of a spouse.
A psychotic break could be marked by behavior ranging from severe depression to violent outbursts, or swings between the two. I asked Jack what version his was.
“I was a basket case. I was nearly catatonic for the first month. I wouldn’t move or speak or eat or drink.”
“Violence?” I pictured Jack tearing up that agent’s rejection letter in the lobby of our apartment building.
He shook his head. “I basically ceased to exist for a year. Charlotte was the only one who knew where I was. I’m surprised she broke down and told you. Everyone else thought I was at a writer’s retreat in Wyoming, trying to get going on that novel I was always fiddling with. When I got out of the hospital, I basically started over again. Meeting Molly helped, and then Buckley changed everything.”
“Jack, I’ve never had the chance to tell you this, but I’m so sorry about . . . everything. I was being a coward. And being cruel. And that was bad enough. But Owen—” I let the sentence drop, because I wasn’t sure how to finish it.
“I never blamed you, Olivia. God, you were always convincing yourself that you were such a bad person, and that I was a saint. It took me a long time to realize it, but I get it now: I smothered you. I kept trying to make you be someone you weren’t ready to be. I made it impossible for you to leave me.”
“It doesn’t excuse what I did—”
“You want to know who I blame for Owen’s crash? Me. Saint Jack, as you used to say. I’m the one who called Owen after I . . . well, after everything in the apartment.”
We were both being so damn careful about calling it what it was. I had cheated, and I had lied. I took something that was sweet and good and made it ugly. I was the bad one. I always had been. It’s okay. Go ahead and hate me.
But instead, Jack was taking the blame. “I’m the one who kept buying round after round. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.”
He was falling into the same old pattern: I had done something destructive, and Jack was trying to look past it. This time I did reach for him, but Jack pulled away.
“I really don’t like talking about this. You said this was about the hospital, for my case.”
I placed my pen against my notepad perfunctorily. Back to business. “So you spent a year at the hospital. Who was your doctor?”
“There were a bunch.”
“The one who knew you best.”
“The primary one was Dr. Scheppard. Robin Scheppard.”
“Is he still there?”
“She. I have no idea, but if I had to guess, she wasn’t even forty at the time. I don’t know if she’d still be at Silver Oaks, but she’s probably still in practice at least.”
“Good, that’s helpful. I mean, if we need her—I doubt we will. Any continuing treatment?”
“Twice a week therapy at first, then once a week, but only for the next year and a half or so.”
“No psych treatment at all since then?” I asked.
“I went back to therapy for about six months after Molly first died, but it wasn’t like before. I didn’t shut down or anything like that. I think the coping skills I learned at Silver Oaks probably helped me get through it. Plus I had to take care of Buckley. The only time I’ve seen a shrink in the past two years was to go with Buckley when her counselor thought a family session was in order. Is the prosecution really allowed to use this against me?”
I told Jack I wouldn’t put it past them, but the threat of the government discovering his hospitalization wasn’t actually why I was here. If anyone was going to use this evidence in court, it would be me, to try to make out an insanity defense. But for now, I wasn’t thinking about the trial. “I need you to sign these forms so I can access your treatment records.”
“That’s not necessary—”
My response was firm. “It would be malpractice for me not to pursue this. We can’t be caught off guard.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Olivia. It was so long ago, right after we broke up. I said some things—”
“This isn’t about us. I’ve got a million things to do for your defense other than scour twenty-year-old medical records for your comments about our relationship.”
I handed him my pen, but he didn’t take it.
“Jack, it’s no big deal. I just need to have this stuff ready to go if the prosecution happens to brings it up.”
He took the pen and signed the most expansive medical release I keep on file. I could get whatever information I wanted. I could find out exactly how sweet, sensitive, fragile Jack responded when things went really bad.
I MADE IT TO LISSA’S in time for the post-lunch, predinner lull. An older couple read the New York Times together at a corner table. The only other customers were both regulars, perched at opposite ends of the bar. “Where’s the boss?” I asked.
“Ran downstairs,” one explained. “I’m minding the store, so feel free to whip up your own drink; I’ll add it to your tab.”
I was tempted, but Melissa’s martinis were better than mine despite years of attempted replication.
Melissa appeared hugging three bottles of Hendrick’s to her chest. Once the bottles were safe on the counter, she leaned over the bar for a quick kiss on the cheek. “Must be so
me kind of psychic connection that made me grab all that gin.”
“Just set aside one of those bottles and write my name on it. I’m about to get drunk.”
I gulped down half of a martini in three sips while she topped off the wineglasses of the two regulars. When she came back to me, she was carrying yesterday’s edition of the Daily News. “You probably already saw this, but I saved it for you. Maybe I should hire you as my marketing person.”
The News front page was the first since the shooting that had used one of Jack’s publicity head shots instead of his booking photo. With his green eyes staring straight into the camera and a half smile, he looked impossibly harmless. HARRIS CRIES FOUL, COMES OUT SWINGING. Although I had already skimmed all the local coverage of the case since the bail hearing, I opened to the full article to take another quick read while Melissa summarized. “The reporter even interviewed a John Jay professor who says the state’s in trouble if all they have is the gunshot residue.” Melissa tapped her finger on the third paragraph. “He says it won’t be hard for—quote—a legal team as sophisticated as Ellison and Randall—unquote—to create reasonable doubt. We’ll see just how sophisticated you are by the time I’m done with you,” she said, starting to shake another drink for me. “So does the fact that you’re here getting drunk mean that Jack got settled into his apartment okay?”
She knew I’d been nervous about something going wrong with his release at the last minute. “No problem.” Except he might actually be guilty and I just tricked him into waiving his privacy rights so I could get a look at the side of him he never wanted me to know.
“And his kid?” Melissa asked.
“Buckley? She’s fine. I thought she was sort of bratty when I first met her, but she’s basically a daddy’s girl.”
“That’s good. Didn’t seem like Jack to raise a brat.”
I thought about Ryan texting me the other night, saying it “wasn’t like me” to go to bed early. It was just a saying, but he didn’t know what I was like, and Melissa and I didn’t know what Jack was like. Not anymore.
I took a big sip from my second glass and finally got to the subject that had me drinking so eagerly. “He had pictures of me in his closet, Melissa. In an old box.”
The Ex Page 14
