Unreasonable Doubts

by Reyna Marder Gentin

  Ms. Wellington’s face sagged, and her nose began to twitch; she looked like someone had just run over her dog. “Your Honor,” she said, “unfortunately, the district attorney has come to the same conclusion. My boss doesn’t believe that a conviction won under those conditions would withstand appellate scrutiny, and he doesn’t wish to risk a second reversal. Our office is declining to prosecute.”

  Silence followed. Even Justice Martin, who always had something to say, sat woodenly, staring at the attorneys. Then he turned to the court reporter—“Marci, we’re off the record”—before focusing his attention on Mr. Shea. He leaned over the bench, the lights in the ceiling bouncing off his bald head.

  “Well, Mr. Shea, it appears that in a few moments, you will walk out of my courtroom a free man. I severely regret the part that I played in making that come to pass. You may have almost fooled the jury, but you didn’t fool me. You have your excellent appellate counsel, Ms. Cohen, to thank for your second chance—or maybe it is your third or fourth chance—at leading a law-abiding life. But listen to me, and listen to me good: if you so much as touch another woman without her express written consent, I’ll lock you up for so long you won’t even know what your wiener is for if you ever get out again. Do you hear me, Mr. Shea?”

  “Loud and clear, Your Honor.”

  “Back on the record, Marci,” the judge said. “Case dismissed.” Panning the room with one final look of disgust, the judge left the courtroom.

  Across the aisle, Ms. Wellington sat looking at her feet for a moment and then turned toward Liana. “I had the facility allow Mr. Shea to dress in his regular clothes, and they’ve also got his personal belongings—wallet, cell phone, keys, whatever. He can pick them up in the probation office downstairs on his way out,” she said softly.

  “Thanks,” Liana said, still unable to believe what was happening.

  “Are you happy now?” Ms. Wellington asked, her voice choking with emotion. Liana looked at her, marveling at the level of investment in her mission that would prompt her opponent to ask such a question with such intensity of feeling.

  “Ms. Wellington, I’m doing my job. I’m not happy or unhappy. Trial counsel fucked up, and I took advantage of that for my client’s benefit.” Liana picked up her briefcase and walked to the back of the courtroom, where Bobby was chatting predictions for the upcoming baseball season with Shea.

  “Can you speak with the court reporter about ordering a copy of today’s minutes? I think we should have a record of what went on here. I’ll meet you out front,” she said to Bobby. When Bobby had walked to the front of the courtroom, Liana reached out to shake hands with Shea.

  “Wow,” he said, his handshake firm. “This is unbelievable. And you were unbelievable, Liana,” he said.

  “I’m glad things worked out,” she said, using all her powers to maintain eye contact without revealing anything more. “Okay, well, I’m going to go back to the office with Bobby now. If you have any questions, you know how to reach me.”

  “Hang on. You just got me my life back. You aren’t going to buy me a cup of coffee?” he asked. Liana was so startled at his nerve she laughed out loud. She looked at Danny Shea and noticed, for the first time, the utter joy on his face. It was irresistible. And why shouldn’t she be happy for him? She wasn’t a defense attorney automaton after all—his case had proved that to her, even if it wasn’t always in a way the Boss would have advocated. She had just done something really good for someone.

  I hope to God he deserved it.

  “Don’t you think you should be the one buying the coffee?” she said.

  “You got it, Counselor. First I need to go down to probation and get my stuff,” he said, clearly pleased that she had agreed to spend a little time with him.

  “Do you know where the Starbucks on Montague is? I’ll meet you there after I ditch Bobby,” she said.

  Liana made up something about needing to pick up an order at the Appellate Division across the street and told Bobby she’d meet him back at the office.

  “Do you want me to tell Gerry what happened, or do you want to tell him yourself?” Bobby asked.

  “You can tell him; I’ll be back in an hour,” she said. She had already moved on in her mind from the courtroom and was propelling herself toward a drama of a different sort.

  Housed in the ground floor of a brownstone, with exposed brick walls and comfortable furniture, the Starbucks experience in Brooklyn Heights gave the illusion of drinking coffee in someone’s living room. When Liana came in, she found Danny Shea sitting on a couch in the corner, sipping a chai tea latte, looking to all the world like a handsome hunk who happened to have a brisk March day off from his job as a male model. Only a nervous tic near his left eye and the way he occasionally looked over his shoulder toward the door, as though he expected to be hauled off to the slammer at any moment, gave away his anxiety at being cut loose.

  “I think I’ll buy my own coffee,” Liana said, feeling that somehow that would restore the balance of power.

  “Suit yourself, Counselor,” he said.

  When she got to the counter, Liana was overcome with nerves. She had never had any urge to fraternize with any of her clients before; she even preferred letters over telephone calls to keep the contact to a minimum.

  What am I doing here? Am I crazy?

  But really, Shea wasn’t a client anymore—he was a former client. And she had something she still needed to ask him.

  Agitated, Liana turned to the barista, a cute little blond thing named Simone, and said, “I’ll have a small coffee with room for milk, please.”

  “You know,” Simone said, “here we call that a ‘tall.’ Using the right lingo makes you seem younger, more clued in.”

  “And you do realize how asinine that lingo is?” Liana said, her voice rising. “Why would you want to be a part of a corporate culture that forces you to substitute the word ‘tall,’ which would seem to indicate that the coffee was large, for ‘small,’ which in every other coffee establishment in the country gets you a twelve-ounce cup of coffee? Doesn’t that strike you, a young, clued-in person, as bullshit?” She was close to hyperventilating now, clearly a deranged woman in an out-of-style black suit who had lost her marbles. Liana was trying to block out the gawkers as she waited for Simone to hand over her coffee when she felt the pressure of Shea’s hand on her back, the heat of his touch burning through the fabric of her jacket.

  “Okay, everyone, chill. There’s no problem. My friend and I are just going to sit down now,” he said smoothly and guided her to a large sofa chair opposite the couch where he had been sitting a moment before.

  “Sorry,” Liana said. “It’s a pet peeve of mine, and I guess I’m on edge.”

  “It’s okay,” Shea said. “I’m a little freaked out myself. Didn’t exactly expect to be getting out today. I need to call my uncle—I think I can crash there,” he said, more to himself than to Liana. She was glad to hear he had somewhere to go, and she knew from her conversation in December that Liam O’Flaherty would do whatever he could for Shea.

  “What will you do now?” she asked. The scene could not have been more surreal, but something about Shea’s self-assuredness in the face of what must have been both an exhilarating and terrifying moment for him calmed her.

  “I hope to pick up where I left off. Get back to school and work. I was only eight credits short of graduating when this all went down,” Shea said. They were quiet for a few minutes, sipping their drinks, absorbed in their own thoughts. Liana envisioned the rooftop again, seeing in her mind’s eye the dancing and the kissing; then she watched the divergent versions, like the old Japanese movie Rashomon from 1950 that her dad loved, playing out to the—almost —climax.

  “Can I ask you something, Mr. Shea?” Liana said.

  “You can ask me anything, Liana, if you call me Danny.” He was challenging her, she knew, but her question was too important to get hung up on etiquette.

  “Okay, Danny,” she said, e
xaggerating his name. “Who is Alba Velez?”

  Danny sat back on the couch and looked at Liana directly, his glance never wavering. When he spoke, his voice was steady and strong.

  “Alba Velez was my first real girlfriend in high school. We started dating in the tenth grade, when we were both sixteen. She was a nice girl. I helped her with her English homework; she helped me with geometry.” He paused, unhurriedly took a sip of his tea. “We were each other’s first sexual experience. Once we got things figured out, we had a pretty good time together.” Liana tried, in vain, to conjure up her first time to divert her from imagining the lithe body of a sixteen-year-old Shea, but the cadence of Danny’s voice was too compelling to picture anything other than the story he was telling.

  “We went out the whole school year, but as it got toward summer, I got restless. I figured it might be more fun to be free, play the field while school was out. We went to the beach in Far Rockaway one night in late May, and we had sex there. And then I told her it was over. It wasn’t gallant, I admit, but it wasn’t a crime either.”

  Except it was. It is sexual misconduct to have even consensual sex with someone under seventeen, an A misdemeanor. Not a very serious crime and rarely charged when the other party is also a teen, but a crime nonetheless.

  “So what happened?” she asked. Liana realized that Judge Simon was right; in the real world—if not the legal one—the thing that mattered most in figuring out Danny Shea was whether he had raped Alba Velez or not.

  “Well, I should have known better than to be messing around with a cop’s daughter. Alba’s dad is Charlie Velez—maybe you’ve come across him. He was some kind of brass in the Sixty-Eighth Precinct in Bay Ridge, where we grew up. Alba came home upset that night because I had broken things off—undoubtedly called me some terrible names, which I probably deserved. And when Charlie found out that his little girl wasn’t a virgin, he went ballistic.”

  “You don’t have to tell me all this,” Liana said, feeling guilty now that she had asked and not sure she really wanted to know anymore.

  What does it matter now? This is the last time I will ever see this man.

  “Yes, I do,” Danny said. “I’m sorry if it’s hard to listen to, but I need you to know. So Charlie flipped out. He made Alba go through the whole humiliating process as though I’d raped her—made her talk to cops and the DA’s office, have a rape kit done at Downstate, the whole nine yards. He turned her into a victim, even though she’d never claimed I’d done anything wrong. I got arrested, and I had to give a DNA sample. I didn’t deny that I’d had sex with Alba that night—we both told the police we had been having sex exclusively with each other for a few months. I got charged, but my Uncle Liam had some extra cash at the time, and he didn’t want me to have a record at sixteen; he hired a lawyer who worked out a youthful offender adjudication—no criminal conviction, no time, sealed record, you know the drill—but that DNA hit to Alba is still out there. Well, you know that part.”

  Liana hadn’t taken her eyes off Danny while he spoke. He didn’t look in the least bit nervous—he didn’t fidget or sweat or struggle for words. Just sober and sad, as if he had gone over all of this in his mind for a good long time and somehow come to terms with it.

  This guy is either ridiculously unlucky in love or a pathological liar.

  Somehow, she believed him.

  “Well, I appreciate your sharing that with me, Mr. Shea.”

  “Please, don’t go all formal on me and put that distance between us, like I’m just some client,” he said. “You’re my angel, Liana.” He said it quietly, without any pretense.

  “Danny, I was doing my job,” she said. Liana found that each time she repeated that phrase, its meaning became more elusive.

  “Can I explain something to you that I’ve thought a lot about? You know, I’ve had a lot of time to think lately,” Danny asked, smiling sadly. When she didn’t answer right away, he continued. “Are you a religious person?”

  “That’s a pretty personal question, Danny—I’m not sure that we should have that kind of conversation.” She felt as if she was in way over her head already; a theological discussion seemed like a very bad idea.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “You don’t need to answer that now. But here’s what I believe.” He put down his tea and sat forward on the couch so that their knees were almost touching.

  “Sometimes in life you encounter an angel. You may not even know it at the time. It could be a person who says a kind word to you and lifts your spirits at an important moment. Or it could be someone who points you in the right direction at a crossroads. But sometimes there’s no mistaking it. You’re my angel, Liana. And I need you in my life.”

  He was mesmerizing, more so in person even than he had been on the printed page, but Liana managed to stammer out, “Don’t you think I’ve done enough already?”

  Danny chuckled. “I think you’ve done enough for today. I’ll let you drink the rest of that coffee in peace. But I’ll wait for you for as long as it takes, Liana. I’m not asking for anything in return. I just want to spend time with you.” He touched her knee lightly as he got up from the couch, and then he bent down over her and softly kissed the top of her head. Before she could breathe again, he was out the door.

  Simone, who had been wiping off tables nearby, approached Liana, still sitting in her chair, dazed. “He dumped you, huh?”

  “Not exactly,” Liana said. Then she not so accidentally knocked over her small coffee cup, which she had drained save for the last few drops at the bottom, spilling the dregs on the floor.

  “Oops,” Liana said, “I’ve made a tall mess.” She got up and walked out without looking back.

  CHAPTER 18

  “Did you know that according to the new Pew survey, only sixty percent of American Jews attend a Passover seder, down from ninety percent only twenty years ago?” Irv asked. They were sitting in the dining room of Jakob’s parents’ house, about to start the evening’s rituals. The table was set with fine white china and silver cutlery, and the wine goblets were filled with Manischewitz Extra Heavy Malaga. Liana’s mom, Phyllis, had asked if she could bring Irv, the man with the nice fingernails whom she had met on the first day of her class at the JCC. Although he was undeniably well-groomed, Liana had yet to figure out what Phyllis saw in him. But they’d been spending more and more time together since January. They’d taken a film noir seminar at the New School, and sometimes after class they went out for dinner. Liana worried on the nights when her mother got home late.

  “What do you make of that, Irv?” Jakob’s father, Stan, asked.

  “Well, I think young people today have no allegiance to anything greater than themselves. They think the world revolves around them, and there’s no need for community or religion. It’s sad really. This whole phenomenon of social media has made this generation feel that they’re all connected and there are endless possibilities, but they’re missing out on making the real bonds that last a lifetime.” In an uncomfortable role reversal, Liana felt protective of her mother, as though she were a teenager making her first forays into the dating scene. Liana was skeptical of everything that came out of Irv’s mouth, but she found herself nodding in agreement.

  “Liana and Jakob go to an Orthodox synagogue,” Arlene ventured, as if to counter Irv’s attack on the youth of America.

  “We go occasionally, Mom, but we aren’t religious like the regulars there. We go because Liana likes the rabbi,” Jakob said.

  “You like the rabbi too!” Liana protested. To change the subject, she turned to Irv and asked, “Irv, do you follow baseball?”

  “Sure. Who doesn’t? I try to make it to a couple of Yankees games every year. That Jeter is really something else, isn’t he? I don’t like A-Rod much, though.”

  Liana glared at her mother, silently reprimanding her—What gives, Ma? How could you bring a Yankees lover to the table?—but her mother didn’t seem to notice. The Cohen family had always been serious Mets
fanatics, especially Liana’s late father. They bled orange and blue. Now here was her mother, just a few years after Artie was gone and mere days away from the start of a new baseball season, canoodling with a Yankees fan. And not even a true fan, which Liana could at least respect, but a lame one. But Phyllis was oblivious. She patted Irv’s knee and smiled at him. Liana was incredulous.

  “Maybe we should get started,” Stan said. He lifted up the seder plate and began to explain the different components—the matzo, the egg, the shank bone—and how each related to the holiday, reading from the worn yellow-and-red Maxwell House Haggadah that they had used for years. Irv suddenly reached for the raw horseradish, unquestionably phallic in appearance, and held it by the bulb, shaft pointing upwards.

  “Well,” he said, grinning like a schoolboy, “we certainly know what this represents! And it’s happy to see us too!” Phyllis tittered, almost girlishly; everyone else just stared. Liana turned away, wishing she were anywhere else.

  When they got to the section of the “four questions,” traditionally recited by the youngest person at the table, Rebecca protested. “I’m going to be eighteen in September. You can’t make me say the four questions.”

  “Until there are grandchildren, you’re it, Rebecca,” Arlene said.

  That could be a while.

  At the juncture when the leader was supposed to explain the story of the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt, Stan rose dramatically from his seat. He adopted his professorial attorney stance and addressed the assembled guests.

  “Tonight we tell the story of how the Jews went from slavery to freedom, from bondage to redemption. Although it’s a story rooted in history, and Egypt is certainly a physical place where the Jews were made to endure hard labor, it’s also a story of how a people learned to leave behind a slave mentality that had held them back from achieving greatness. The Jewish people were trapped by their Egyptian slave masters but also by themselves—by their inability to take risks, to reach for the stars, to broaden their own horizons and take control of their own destinies. And we too, as modern-day American Jews and as individuals, must constantly ask ourselves if we’re being self-limiting—if we’re holding ourselves back out of fear and insecurity from the greatness we could achieve. We must all remember that Egypt is also a state of mind.”