Hold Me in Contempt

by Wendy Williams

  “I can’t leave. I have to go into witness protection,” he said, cutting me off. “I won’t testify unless I’m in the witness protection program. These people are after me. Going to kill me. This is big! It’s—”

  “Wait, let’s slow down, Mr. Richard,” I said, pulling him back to the table. “Have a seat and slow down. I need to make sure I’m hearing everything you’re trying to share.”

  Carol padded in to try to refill Bernard’s empty coffee mug, but I told her to bring us both a little spring water. Bernard looked anxious, and the last thing I needed was for him to be hopped up on caffeine and apparently thinking someone was trying to kill him. I called Carol to me and whispered in her ear that she should have an officer on guard just in case we realized the threats Bernard feared were real. As could be expected, he’d been reluctant to provide any information since the bust at the Candy Shop. His interviews were distant and lacked true detail. He wasn’t sure about anything and never gave any names. I wanted to give him one more chance, to see if I could break through and get enough information to make my argument conclusive.

  During my seven years as an ADA, I’d come to know that interviewing witnesses was by far my best skill. I was a great trial attorney too, but I had a way with witnesses that made them open up to me and that gave me an edge in the courtroom. Sometimes I could make people remember things they’d forgotten, share something they were sure they could hide, or realize something they didn’t know. I always wished that could translate into my personal life.

  “I can’t go home. I won’t,” Bernard said.

  “Home. Let’s start there. You came here to meet me this morning. Did you leave from home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there something there? Something going on that made you believe you were in danger?”

  “Outside the window. My bedroom window. There was a black car.”

  “What time was this?” I asked, writing down Bernard’s responses. While I used a recorder when I interviewed people, I always took notes as well. There was something about looking at the details on the page that turned everything into a connected web for me to follow in a way that the recordings never could.

  “I don’t know. Like, seven. After seven. I was getting ready to come here,” Bernard responded.

  “Did you recognize the car? Know the driver?”

  “No, I didn’t. But I know it wasn’t the police because their black car is parked outside the living room window on the other side of the building.”

  “I understand,” I said. “And please note that seeing the police car should not be reason for panic. That’s just a part of protocol.”

  “I know. They’re making sure I don’t leave town. But that’s not what I’m worried about. That other car, it wasn’t a cop car.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It just wasn’t.”

  “Well, how do you know it was there for you? Did you see the driver? Speak to the driver?”

  “No. I just know,” he said, annoyed.

  “Mr. Richard, I’m not here to confuse you or second-guess anything you’re saying,” I explained. “I’m just trying to make sure we are both hearing the same thing. You’re not on trial here. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Now, have you experienced anything you’d consider a threat? Anything specific that I can record and pass along to the appropriate authorities so they can help you?”

  “Why can’t you help me? You’re the district attorney.”

  “I’m not the district attorney. I’m an assistant district attorney. And what you’re talking about goes beyond the legal matters we deal with here. It’s criminal. Now, if we find you need to be in the state’s witness services program, we’ll move forward with that. But I need to know there’s a real threat present for that kind of action. Now, have you experienced any other threats?”

  “You don’t understand,” Bernard whispered, looking over his shoulder at the door. “I was around the Candy Shop for a long time. I’ve seen things.”

  “Mr. Richard, Miguel Alvarez is in jail right now. And with your testimony, we’ll make sure he stays there for a very long time,” I said.

  Behind me, toward the back of the room, there was a long wall of old law texts, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, that no one ever used. Bernard looked away from me and at the wall and seemed to leave me.

  “Can I have a smoke?” he asked, reaching into his pocket without taking his eyes off the wall.

  “Sorry, this is a nonsmoking building,” I replied. “Everyone likes to blame Bloomberg, but it’s been that way for a while.”

  Bernard had already pulled the red box of cigarettes from his pocket, and he started tapping it on the table.

  “I’m sorry. I almost forgot I was in the ‘Smoke-Free Apple.’ Guess I was thinking of those cop shows where they always let the people smoke before they confess their crimes.”

  “Do you have anything you need to confess?” I asked carefully.

  “I don’t know.” He paused. “Maybe. There was this girl—just a girl, a black girl—I never really knew her name. I think Miguel called her Yellow a few times, but he was always calling people colors when he was high,” Bernard added slowly, still tapping the little red box on the table. “She was a dancer at one of the clubs near the pier, and she started selling a little meth for him. I knew she didn’t have it—you know, she wasn’t like the other girls who sold his shit in the clubs. She was just some kid. Probably a college kid. Dancing to pay her cell phone bill. She had that look. Good skin. Hair. Nails.” He paused and looked at me. “She sold for a little while, but then, just like everybody else, she got hooked.”

  “She started using meth?”

  “I was there when Miguel confronted her about it. He just asked her. Just like he did everybody else. She said no. But it was obvious. You know the look. She was skinny. Nervous. Clothes were dirty. Nails dirty. Hair dirty. It seemed like it only took a week for that to happen to her. I’d seen it all before, but there was something about her. Something different. She didn’t belong there,” Bernard said. “I pointed that out to Miguel, but it was like a joke to him—boxing her into a corner. He gave her more to sell. A bagful. It was wrong. He knew she was using. She’d mess up. I tried to stop him, I knew what was coming, but he ignored me. Anyway, like a week after that, here Yellow comes again. One tooth missing in the front. Holes in her cheeks. Hair in patches. Miguel and I were sitting on a couch in his living room. He made her stand in front of us. Asked about the money. Asked about the meth. She had no answers. Just shrugged and said she had nothing. Offered to sleep with him. Miguel laughed and flipped my legs from off of his lap. ‘I like dick. If you don’t have a dick under that dress, we’re both in for a surprise if we end up in the bedroom together,’ he said. ‘You got a dick, darling?’ he added, laughing as she shook her head. ‘Sure you don’t. Sure you don’t.’ He got up and walked into the kitchen. I was going to follow him, but I stayed in there and told the girl to leave. She just stood there—right there. She said she needed more. Just a little. She offered to have sex with me. Then Miguel came back into the room behind her and threw her to the floor. He started hitting her, punching her in the back, the arms, everywhere. I went to get him off of her, but I couldn’t. He was losing it. That’s when I saw the cheese grater.”

  “The what?” I was sure I’d heard him incorrectly.

  “He had the cheese grater from the kitchen in his back pocket.” Bernard dropped the cigarette box and looked at me. “I tried to grab it. I knew what he was about to do. I just knew. But I was too late.”

  “What happened?” I asked, gripping my fingers into my left palm really tight. Over the years, I’d learned so many horrors and knew when one was near. And each time when I had to follow along, imagining the look on some poor soul’s face, I saw eyes that looked like my own. Just aged and lost someplace where I couldn’t find her.

  “He ran the grater up her back, so fast, so hard, and the
skin tore right off like Swiss cheese piping into the little holes. The skin went from brown to white. She screamed so loud. There wasn’t anything I could do. I kept trying to get that grater out of his hand, and then I was trying to get her away from him, but I couldn’t.” Bernard wiped a tear from his eye and tried to regain his focus on the bookshelves.

  “What happened to her?”

  “He beat on her some more. Yelled. Threw her out into the street without a shirt. Like trash. I went looking for her the next day. Went to the clubs. All of them. But I couldn’t find her. I never saw her again.”

  “Did you call the police? Tell anyone?”

  “You don’t see someone do something like that and call the police. I was afraid. If he could do that to her, who knew what he would do to me. Some HIV-positive fag runaway from Alabama he fucks for tricks. If she was trash, what am I?”

  “Mr. Richard. Look at me.”

  He turned from the bookshelves and looked into my eyes. “Yes?”

  “He can’t get to you now. He won’t,” I said. “No one should ever have to go through that. To see that. But if you run and hide now, if you don’t share your story, what happened to that woman, the woman whose name you don’t even know, will happen to someone else. That’s what I’m trying to stop. That’s why we’re here, and that’s why I need you to testify.”

  I reached over the table and grabbed his hand.

  “It’s time for you to stop being afraid. Right now,” I added. “If you don’t do it for you, do it for her. Tell your story.”

  Bernard sat quiet for a long while. And then he turned and looked at the books again.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “We can start with the dealings in the basement of the Candy Shop,” I said. “I need you to be honest with me about what you saw there. The more information you give me about what Miguel Alvarez did and what you did and what you saw, the closer we get to stopping this thing.”

  “Okay,” he said with new tears rolling from his eyes. “I’ll do it.”

  While I was confident Bernard didn’t need any police protection, I ordered a police escort for him. Sometimes the fear witnesses feel in cases like this one comes more from guilt than from reality. Testifying about someone else’s actions was also an indictment of his inaction, and in his mind he had to create some kind of punishment for that. If the police weren’t coming for him, then someone else had to. The story he’d told me, and probably even the evil in the ones he’d kept hidden, would keep him up most nights for the rest of his life looking for payback behind tinted car windows outside his apartment. Sometimes the prison sentence in the mind was worse than the real thing.

  “Paul’s been down here twice looking for you,” Carol said, popping her head into my office after Bernard was gone and I was editing my notes from his interview.

  “Twice?” I repeated. “What did he want? Did he say?”

  “Said he wanted to come down here himself to congratulate you on last week,” Carol said, grinning. “Said he was impressed. Good news, right? Coming all the way from the top!” She pointed up toward the district attorney’s office. “That’s pretty rare. Him down here just to speak to you. But then again, you were really great last week. Everyone’s talking about it.”

  “Sure,” I answered flatly before delivering a weak smile to let Carol know I wanted to be alone.

  Carol took the hint and turned to walk out.

  “Hey, Carol,” I called. “Can you do me a favor?”

  “Sure. What do you need?”

  “Can you close my door,” I said in a low voice, “and if Paul comes back down here, tell him I had a doctor’s appointment.”

  “But your appointment was this morning. Right?” Carol looked confused.

  “I know. I’m not really leaving. I just want you to say that. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Carol frowned at me awkwardly before pulling the door shut.

  “And Carol,” I added just before it closed behind her, “thanks for saying I did great.”

  “No problem at all. You always do.”

  The Tuesday before, I’d delivered the closing argument in a case that we were sure we’d lose. While I started in my ADA class focusing on what we call rackets—basic economic crimes, arson, racketeering—after my first year it was clear that my best work was in cases that involved small-business corruption with illegal drug operations, so the DA put me on Special Prosecutions. In my last case, the owner of a small vegan bakery on the Lower East Side had been growing marijuana in his apartment and transporting it to his shop, where he baked it into cakes and brownies and even croissants. It was becoming a common New York setup for the kinds of drug operations I was set to bust down: illegal pill dispensaries and marijuana factories operating out of the basements, back rooms, and kitchens of legal business fronts that allowed the dealers to function day in and out without worry. For the vegan baker, while the business itself was failing, through investigation we discovered that his drug-laced baked goods earned him upward of eighty thousand per month. He was shipping orders throughout the state and had a special baked-goods delivery service. The case seemed pretty cut-and-dry until it came out that he was only selling the baked goods to cancer patients, most of whom delivered tear-filled testimonies on his behalf during the trial. There was a teenage boy with leukemia who testified that he would’ve killed himself months earlier if it weren’t for the weekly brownie deliveries he received from the bake shop. A broken law was a broken law, but a bleeding heart is a bleeding heart, and looking at the jury during the testimonies, I knew it was filled with bleeding hearts that might let the baker go free or settle for lesser charges. My boss hated to lose, and he despised lesser charges. I knew the verdict would come down to me. What I said during my closing could save our record and my reputation.

  I’d spent days working on the argument. I’d typed it, memorized it, and practiced it, had it ready to be performed like I was Dr. King stepping up to the podium on the Mall in DC. But when it was time for me to deliver, I choked. I forgot the entire thing, and for a second I stood there looking at the jury trying to remember any word on the iPad I’d left sitting at the prosecution’s desk. Then it came to me. I had to admit that the baker’s actions were likely coming from a place of goodwill. I said that he could’ve been helping those in need, but he was also cheating the system. He was lying to his community. He was involved in vigilante justice that threatened a system that operated on the idea of change. If he wanted to change the system, he needed to work within it—not compromise it. Not take medical matters into his own hands. I went down a list of medical-marijuana champions who’d done just that. Those who’d achieved victory. I added that he detracted from their victory and lessened the power of their fight. His criminal behavior cost us more than it may have benefited the few he served. For that he needed to be prosecuted.

  No matter what a counselor says, there’s just no way of knowing which way a jury will go after a case is closed. So when the jury left the courtroom to deliberate, I followed my class’s ritual of going out for scotch and cigars. After two days, they came back with a verdict for the wayward baker: guilty of all charges.

  I stayed in my office working on the Candy Shop case a little later than I anticipated. When I got home, the bottle of wine was still sitting on the coffee table in the living room. I kicked off my shoes, picked up the bottle, and walked it into the kitchen, cursing myself for the late-night boozing that I was sure added, like, ten pounds to my body each year. I vowed to pour the little bit that was left down the drain and never ever bring a bottle of wine into the house again . . .  ​a promise I knew instantly was a lie.

  I was cursing aloud and lying some more to myself about trying to find more time to go to the gym when there was a single soft knock at the door. I never had company I wasn’t expecting, so I stood in the kitchen listening for a second to be sure the knock was actually at my door and not coming from downstairs or next door. But then there was a secon
d set of three quick knocks.

  “Who is it?” I called, walking to the door.

  There was no answer.

  I looked through the peephole. There was someone I definitely wasn’t expecting and didn’t care to see.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Open the door.”

  “I told you not to come here anymore,” I said, looking at a bright smile in the little blurry glass hole in the door.

  “I know.”

  “So?”

  “You’re going to make me stand out here forever? Come on, Kim. I just want to talk.”

  Against my better judgment and probably for a few reasons I couldn’t admit, I undid the three locks, removed the doorstop, and let Paul in.

  “Damn, you got cold on a brother fast,” he said, walking in and reaching for me.

  I pushed him away and walked into the living room.

  “What do you want, Paul?” I asked. I folded my arms over my chest and planted my feet firmly on the floor to let him know he was not staying. “I’m sure the DA of New York County has more to do than make uninvited house calls.”

  “I’ll start with a seat,” he joked, and sat down on the couch without an invitation. “Maybe a little wine.”

  “Fresh out of wine,” I said. “And now I wish I didn’t have a couch.”

  “Kiki Mimi! You mad? Why you so mad?”

  “Don’t call me that. I told you not to call me that. That’s only for family.”

  “I’m like family.”

  “No, you have a family. In Westchester. With your wife. Kids. The golden retriever. Remember?”

  Paul exhaled dramatically and threw his head back to rest it against the couch. He was still in his work clothes, but his tie was missing and his shirt was unbuttoned. From four feet away, I could smell his cologne.

  I never meant for anything to happen with Paul. When Ronald and I broke up after the accident, I was in the hospital for weeks and Paul came by a few times just to check on me. When I was released from the hospital, he continued to text me to send me well wishes and keep me updated on my cases. I thought it was kind, thoughtful, but when I told Tamika about it, she laughed in my face and told me we were setting a “thing” up. “He’s fine as hell. You know what you’re doing. Just be a big girl and admit it,” she said. I denied it, but then everything became too clear. His visits and flowers, the texts way after office hours and updates I was already getting from Carol—he was coming on to me.