by Jon L. Breen
He looks surprised, but he puts the wallet away and grasps the door handle. His jaw’s set. I can see he thinks it’s a case of mistaken identity and he may have a lucrative harassment suit if he can make himself disagreeable enough. Then his face changes again. He’s looking at the uniform.
“You’re pretty far out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you? This area is patrolled by the county sheriff.”
I repeat myself a second time, and this time I draw my sidearm.
“Fuck you, fake cop,” says he, and floors it.
But it’s a gravel road, and the tires spin for a second, spraying gravel, bits of which strike my legs and sting like hornets, which gives me the mad to make that lunge and grab the window post with my free hand. Just then the tread bites and the Jag spurts ahead and I know I’m going to be dragged if I don’t let go or stop him.
I don’t let go. I stick the barrel of my revolver through the window, cocking the hammer for the effect, and who knows but it might have worked, except my fingers slip off the window post and as I fall away from the car I strike my other wrist against the post and a round punches a hole through the windshield. Hollis screams, thinks he’s hit, takes his hands off the wheel, and that’s the last I see of him until after the Jag plunges into a tree by the side of the road. The bang’s so loud if you even heard my revolver go off you’d forget about it because the second report is still ringing in your ears thirty seconds later, across a whole fucking field of wheat.
I get up off the ground and sprint up to the car, still holding the gun. The hood’s folded like a road map, the radiator pouring steam. Hollis’s forehead is leaning against the cracked steering wheel. I look up and down the road and across the field opposite the stand of trees. Not a soul in sight, if you don’t count a cow looking our way. Just as I’m starting to assimilate the size of my good break, I hear moaning. Hollis is lifting his head. Lawyers are notoriously hard to kill.
His forehead’s split, his face is covered with blood. It looks bad enough to finish him even if it wasn’t instantaneous, but I’m no doctor. I guess you could say I panicked. I reached through the window and hit him with the butt of the revolver, how many times I don’t know, six or seven or maybe as many as a dozen. The bone of his fore-head started to make squishing sounds like thin ice that’s cracking under your feet, squirting water up through the fissures. Only in this case it wasn’t water, of course, and I know I’m going to have to burn the uniform because my gun arm is soaked to the elbow with blood and gray ooze. Finally I stop swinging the gun and feel for a pulse in his carotid. He wasn’t using it any more. I holstered the revolver, took his head in both hands, and rested his squishy forehead against the steering wheel where it had struck. The windshield’s still intact except for the bullet hole, so I look around and find a fallen tree limb and give it the old Kaline swing, smashing in the rest of the glass from outside. I settle the limb back into the spot where it had lain among the rotted leaves on the ground, take a last look to make sure I didn’t drop anything, get into my car, and leave, making sure first to put the jogging suit back on over my gory uniform. And only the cow is there to see me make my getaway.
For the next few days, I stay clear of Nola. I don’t even call, knowing she’ll hear about it on the news; I can’t afford anyone seeing us together. I guess I was being over-cautious. Hollis’s death was investigated as an accident, and at the end of a week the sheriff tells the press the driver lost control on loose gravel. I guess the cow didn’t want to get involved.
I was feeling good about myself. I didn’t see any need to wrestle with my conscience over the death of a sexual predator, and a high-price lawyer to boot. As is the way of human nature I patted my own back for a set of fortunate circumstances over which I’d had no control. I was starting to feel God was on my side.
But Nola isn’t. When I finally do visit, after the cops have paid their routine call and gone away satisfied her beef with her employer was unconnected with an accident upstate, she gives me hell for staying away, accuses me of cowardly leaving her to face the police alone. I settle her down finally, but I can see my explanation doesn’t satisfy. As I’m taking off my coat to get comfortable she tells me she has an early morning, everyone at the firm is working harder in Hollis’s absence and she needs her sleep. This is crap because Hollis was absent almost as often when he was alive, but I leave.
She doesn’t answer her phone for two days after that. When I go to the apartment her bell doesn’t answer and her car isn’t in the port. I come back another night, same thing. I lean against the building groping in my pockets, forgetting I don’t smoke any more, then Nola’s old yellow Camaro swings in off Jefferson and I step back into the shadows, because there are two people in the front seat. I watch as the lights go off and they get out.
“If you’re that afraid of him, why don’t you call the police?” A young male voice, belonging to a slender figure in a green tank top and torn jeans.
“Because he is the police. Oh, Chris, I’m terrified. He won’t stop hounding me this side of the grave.” And saying this Nola huddles next to him and hands him her keys to open the front door, which he does one-handed, his other arm being curled around her waist.
They go inside, and the latch clicking behind them sounds like the coffin lid shutting in my face. Nola’s got a new shark in her school. I’m the chum she’s feeding him. And I know without having to think about it that I’ve killed this schnook Ethan Hollis for the same reason Chris is going to kill me; I’ve run out of uses. So for Chris, I’m now the sexual predator.
That’s why we’re talking now. It’s Nola or me, and I need to be somewhere else when she has her accident. I’ve got a feeling I’m not in the clear over Hollis. Call it cop’s sense, but I’ve been part of the community so long I know when I’ve been excluded. Even Carpenter won’t look me in the eye when we’re talking about the fucking Pistons. I’ve been tagged.
Except you’re not going to kill Nola, sweetie. No, not because you’re a woman; you girls have moved into every other job, why not this? You’re not going to do it because you’re a cop.
Forget how I know. Say a shitter knows a shitter and leave it there. What? Sure, I noticed when you reached up under your blouse. I thought at the time you were adjusting your bra, but—well, that was before I said I’d decided to kill Hollis, wasn’t it? I hope your crew buys it, two wires coming loose in the same cop’s presence within a couple of weeks. I’ll leave first so you can go out to the van and tell them the bad news. I live over on Howard. Well, you know the address. You bring the wine—no Jack and Coke—I’ll cook the steaks. I think I can finish convincing you about Nola. Like killing a snake.
Carolyn Wheat
“The Only Good Judge”
One of the most talented of the many lawyers-turned-crime-writers is Carolyn Wheat, whose Brooklyn advocate Cass Jameson appears in several novels and only a few short stories. In 2001, Wheat edited an original anthology of legal mysteries. They’re a distinguished group, but her own contribution may be the best of the lot.
What do you say to a naked judge?
I said yes. Averting my eyes from the too, too solid judicial flesh.
I mean, the steam room is a place for relaxation, a place where you close your eyes and inhale the scent of eucalyptus and let go the frustrations of the day—most of which were caused by judges in the first place, so the last thing you want to do while taking a schvitz is accept a case on appeal, for God’s sake, but there was the Dragon Lady, looking not a whit less authoritative for the absence of black robes, or indeed, the absence of any other clothing including a towel.
She’d been a formidable opponent as a trial judge, and we at the defense bar breathed a sigh of relief when she went upstairs to the appellate bench. The Dragon Lady was one of the great plea-coercers of her time; she could strike fear and terror into the hearts of the most hardened criminals and have them begging for that seventeen-to-life she’d offered only yesterday.
Yes, I
said she “offered.” I know, you think it’s the district attorney who makes plea offers while the judge sits passively on the bench. You think judges are neutral parties with no stake in the outcome, no interest in whether the defendant pleads out or goes to trial.
You’ve been watching too much Law & Order. The Dragon Lady made Jack McCoy look like a soft-on-crime liberal. She routinely rejected plea bargains on the ground that the DA wasn’t being tough enough. She demanded and got a bureau chief in her courtroom to justify any reduction in the maximum sentence.
So what was she doing asking me, as a personal favor, to handle a case on appeal? I almost fell off the steam room bench. I was limp as a noodle well past al dente, and I’d been hoping to slide out the door without having to acknowledge the presence of my naked nemesis parked on the opposite bench like a leather-tanned Buddha. It seemed the health club equivalent of subway manners: you don’t notice them, they won’t notice you, and the city functions on the lubrication of mutual indifference.
But she broke the invisible wall between us. She named my name and asked a favor, and I was so nonplussed I said yes and I said “Your Honor” and three other women in the steam room shot me startled open-eyed glances as if to say, who are you to shatter our illusion of invisibility? If you two know one another and talk to one another, then you must be able to see us in all our nakedness and that Changes Everything in this steam room.
They left, abruptly and without finishing the sweating process that was beginning to reduce me to dehydrated delirium. I murmured something and groped my way to the door. I left the Dragon Lady, who’d been there twice as long as I had, yet showed no signs of needing a respite; like a giant iguana, she sat in heavy-lidded torpor, basking in the glow of the coals in the corner of the room. She lifted a wooden ladle and poured water on the hot rocks to raise more steam.
I stumbled to the shower and put it on cold, visualizing myself rolling in Swedish snow, pure and cold and crystalline.
The frigid water shocked me into realizing what I’d just done.
A favor for the Dragon Lady.
Since when did she solicit representation for convicted felons?
Four days later, she was dead.
My old Legal Aid buddy Pat Flaherty told me, in his characteristic way. He always said the only good judge was a dead judge, so when he greeted me in Part 32 with the words, “The Dragon Lady just became a good judge,” I knew what he meant.
“Wow. I was talking to her the other day.” I shook my head and lowered my voice to a whisper. “Heart attack?”
A sense of mortality swept over me. The woman had looked healthy enough in a reptilian way. I’d noticed her sagging breasts and compared them to my own, which, while no longer as perky as they’d once been, didn’t actually reach my navel.
But give me ten years.
“No,” Flaherty said, an uneasy grin crossing his freckled face. “She was killed by a burglar.”
“Shot?”
“Yeah. Died instantly, they said on the radio.”
“Jesus.” At a loss for words—and believe it or not, considering how much I’d resented the old boot when she was alive, annoyed at Flaherty for making light of the murder.
Good judge. It’s one thing to say that about a ninety-year-old pill who dies in his sleep, but a woman like the DL, cut down in what would be considered the prime of her life if she were a man and her tits didn’t sag—that verged on the obscene.
The big question among the Brooklyn defense bar: should we or should we not go to the funeral?
We’d all hated her. We’d all admired her, in a way. I loved the fact that she used to wear a Wonder Woman T-shirt under her black robe. She was tough and smart and sarcastic and powerful and she’d been all that when I was still in high school.
But she’d also been one hell of an asset to the prosecution, a judge who thought her duty was to fill as many jail cells as possible and to move her calendar with a speed that gave short shrift to due process of law.
In the end, I opted to skip the actual funeral, held in accordance with Jewish custom the day after the medical examiner released the body, but I slipped into the back row of Part 49 for the courthouse memorial service two weeks later.
What the hell, I was in the building anyway.
I was in the building to meet Darnell Patterson, the client she’d stuck me with. It had taken me two weeks to get him down from Dannemora, where he was serving twenty years for selling crack.
Twenty years. The mind boggled, especially since he wasn’t really convicted of the actual sale, just possession of a sale-weight quantity, meaning that someone in the DA’s office thought the amount he had in his pocket was too much to be for his personal use. Since he’d been convicted before, he was nailed as a three-time loser and given a persistent felony jacket.
“It’s like they punishing me for thinking ahead,” he said in a plaintive voice. “I mean, I ain’t no dealer. I don’t be selling no shit, on account if I do, the dudes on the corner gonna bust my head wide open. I just like to buy a goodly amount so’s I don’t have to go out there in the street and buy no more anytime soon. I likes a hefty stash; I likes to save a little for a rainy day, you hear what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re the industrious ant and all the other users are grasshoppers. The law rewards the grasshoppers because they bought a two-day supply, whereas you, the frugal one, stocked up.”
“You got that right,” he said with a broad smile. “I think you and me’s gonna get along fine, counselor. You just tell that to the pelican court and they’ll knock down my sentence.”
It was conservative economics applied to narcotics addiction. Maybe I could get an affidavit from Alan Greenspan on the economic consequences of punishing people for saving instead of spending. I could hear my argument before the appellate court:
“Your Honors, all my client did was to invest in commodities. He wanted a hedge against inflation, so he bought in quantity, not for resale, but to insure himself against higher prices and to minimize the number of street buys he had to make, thus reducing his chances of being caught. Punishing him with additional time for his prudence is like punishing someone for saving instead of running up bills and declaring bankruptcy.”
The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. The appellate judges—“pelicans” in defendantese—had heard it all. They were unlikely to buy the “mandatory sentences suck” argument and they had no interest in hearing the drug laws attacked as draconian, and they sure as hell didn’t give a damn about my client’s lousy childhood. Supply-side economics had the advantage of novelty.
When I walked out of the ninth-floor pens, I still had no idea why I’d been asked to take Darnell’s case. The sentence was a travesty, of course, far outweighing whatever harm to society this man had done, but what was new or unusual about that? And why had the Dragon Lady, of all people, taken such an interest in a low-level crack case?
With her dead, I’d probably never know.
I had no inkling of a connection between the case and her untimely death.
It took the second murder for the connection to become apparent.
The deceased was a district attorney we called the Terminator; that quality of mercy that droppeth as a gentle rain from heaven was completely absent from his makeup. So once again, there were few tears shed among us defense types, and, in truth, a lot of really bad jokes made the rounds, considering how Paul French died.
He fell out a window in the tall office building behind Borough Hall, the same building that housed the Brooklyn DA’s office, but not the actual floor the trial bureau was on. Which, in retrospect, should have told us something. What was he doing there? Had he fallen, or was he pushed? And had the Dragon Lady really died at the hands of a clumsy burglar who picked her house at random, or was somebody out to eliminate the harshest prosecutors and judges in the borough of Brooklyn?
His own office called it suicide. Word went around that he was upset when someo
ne else was promoted to bureau chief over him.
Bullshit, was what I thought. I knew Paul French, tried cases against him and was proud to say we were even— three wins for him, three for me, which in the prosecution-stacked arithmetic of the criminal courts put me way ahead as far as lawyering was concerned. And I knew that while he might have enjoyed cracking the whip for a while as bureau chief, it was the courtroom he loved. It was beating the opponent, rubbing her nose in his victory, tussling in front of the judge and selling his case to the jury that got his heart started in the morning. He might have gotten pissed off if someone else got a job he thought should have been his, but no way would that have pushed him out a tenth-story window.
The suicide story was bogus, a fact that was confirmed for me when two cops rang the bell of my Court Street office and said they wanted to discuss Paul French. I invited them in, poured them coffee—Estate Java, wasted on cops used to drinking crankcase oil at the station-house—and congratulated them on not buying the cover story. The man was murdered; the only question was which of the fifty thousand or so defendants he’d sent up the river could legitimately take the credit.
The larger and older of the cops opened his notebook and said, “You represented a Jorge Aguilar in September of 1956, is that right, counselor?”
It took a minute to translate his fractured pronunciation. It took another minute to recall the case; 1995 might as well have been twenty years ago, I’d represented so many other clients in so many other cases.
“Jorge, yeah,” I said, conjuring up a vision of a cocky, swaggering kid in gang colors who’d boasted he could “do twenty years standing on his head.” Despite his complete lack of remorse and absence of redeeming qualities, I’d felt sorry for him. In twenty years, he’d be broken and almost docile, still illiterate and unemployable, and he’d probably commit another crime within a year just so he could get back to his nice, safe prison. He could do twenty years, all right. He just couldn’t do anything else.