by Adam Mitzner
When you’re in law school, you spend a lot of time in legal ethics classes discussing how everyone is innocent until proven guilty and therefore entitled to a lawyer. You read To Kill a Mockingbird, for maybe the third time, and think someday you’ll be a hero lawyer like Atticus Finch, representing unpopular causes, either because you believe in them, or just because you have that obligation.
It took about five seconds after I’d joined Taylor Beckett for me to realize that’s not the way it works at a large law firm. Although everyone may be entitled to a lawyer, you couldn’t hire one at Taylor Beckett without paying a six-figure retainer. And even then, Taylor Beckett had a committee that reviewed every new representation to ensure that the firm wouldn’t lose future business by taking on an unpopular client.
My most famous client, Darrius Macy, was a case in point. There was resistance from certain partners to the firm representing an accused rapist. The head of the corporate group laughed—actually laughed—when I tried the everybody-is-entitled-to-a-defense line. “Maybe so,” he had said, “but everybody’s not entitled to Taylor Beckett representing him.”
“You really think this guy’s innocent?” I asked Nina.
“I do,” she said without even a flicker of doubt.
“Statistically speaking, it’s the boyfriend or husband like seventy percent of the time, and in a hundred percent of those instances, the boyfriend or the husband hasn’t written a song explaining how he was going to commit the murder.”
“Are you stuck on the song still?”
“Me and everybody else in the English-speaking world.”
Nina sighed. “I told you this last night,” she said, and then quickly added, “but I’ve got to remember that means absolutely nothing to you. I’m going to start treating you like the guy from that movie who has no short-term memory. I’ll let Legally Dead explain it, but the song isn’t about Roxanne at all.”
She smiled at me, and was it ever a smile. It actually felt as if it generated heat. It also reminded me that it had been a long time since I’d been in the company of a woman who didn’t look at me with abject pity.
“So tell me, what’s in this for you?” I asked.
“You mean aside from wanting justice to prevail?”
She flashed that smile again.
“Yeah, aside from that.”
“I’d like to second seat.”
“Will your firm . . . where did you say you were at again?”
“Martin Quinn.”
“Right. Will they let you do that?”
“No,” she said with a self-satisfied grin. “But I’m going to quit.”
“Really? You’ll quit a big law firm job in this economy?”
“You obviously have forgotten what the life of a third-year associate looks like,” she said. “My days are filled staring at a computer screen reviewing—and I kid you not—something like sixteen million emails. My job is to sort through all the garbage, all the ‘all hands’ notices about team meetings and corporate-speak and whatever else, and make sure that there’s no email that could possibly suggest that the client knew that his thingamabob would explode if it was ever placed on a radiator.” She stopped, and then added, “And, of course, the partner in charge made it abundantly clear to me and my fellow document grinds that if we miss anything, we’d be fired. So, the way I figure it, this is a win-win for me. I get out of an intolerable work situation, I get to represent someone I believe in, and I get some real lawyer experience.”
“So is this something of a job interview?” I said with a grin.
“If you’d like. I don’t have my résumé here, but I’m law review out of Columbia, three years of big-firm experience, I know the case, and the client loves me.”
And the client loves her, I thought. Of course he did. He was a man locked away with other men, and then someone who looks like Nina comes to visit and says she believes his story. Who wouldn’t love that?
“Well, you are the first candidate I’ve spoken to,” I said, playacting the role of an interviewer.
“If you’re thinking of hiring me, that at least means you’re seriously thinking of taking the case, doesn’t it?”
She was right. I was thinking about taking the case. I had to admit that it felt good to be a lawyer again. A lot better than the other one-word descriptions that would have applied to me over the past eighteen months—widower, drunk, bum.
3
A few moments later, Legally Dead entered the room on the other side of the glass. He was wearing the jail’s standard-issue dingy gray canvas jumpsuit, and his gait was lethargic. He was taller than I had expected, as tall as the guard who accompanied him, who I pegged to be about six foot two. He looked strong, too. Even in the baggy clothing, you couldn’t help but think it was possible for him to have beaten a woman to death.
Or not, as I’m sure Nina would have argued.
The guard on his side of the glass pointed to the seat across from us. Legally Dead did as he was told, slowly settling into his seat and then even more slowly reaching for the phone. He wiped off the receiver with the sleeve of his jumpsuit before putting the phone up to the side of his face.
Nina took the phone on our side off its hook. “Hi,” she said excitedly. “How have you been holding up?”
Legally Dead mouthed what I thought began with “fine,” but then went on to something else. I got the impression that part of what he was saying was to ask just who the hell I was.
“This is Dan Sorensen,” Nina said, “the lawyer who represented Darrius Macy. I spoke with him yesterday and told him that you wanted to meet him. I want to tell you up front that Dan’s not sure he wants to take your case, so be your usual charming self. Okay?”
Nina flashed her smile, and I was beginning to see that she used it like a wand, getting the recipient to do what she wanted. It seemed to work, because Legally Dead reciprocated with an equal-size grin.
Then she handed me the phone.
Even through the heavily scratched glass, I could see that Legally Dead was a handsome man. His skin was a dark chocolate color, and his head was shaved smooth, so much so that there wasn’t even a shadow where hair had once been.
“Hey, man,” he said. “Thanks. For meetin’ me. Really appreciate your time.”
Legally Dead’s tone and demeanor surprised me. Everything about him suggested a gentle nature. The smile, the softness of his voice, and even the sadness in his eyes, which reminded me a little of a lost boy, were all incongruous emanating from the man who had graced the cover of People magazine under the headline: “The Most Hated Man of All Time.”
Even though the man on the other side of the glass didn’t match my preconceived impression, it’s the oldest lesson in criminal defense law that looks can be deceiving. If you’re coldhearted enough to kill someone—especially someone you were romantically involved with—you’re capable of anything, even faking human decency.
“Nice to meet you, too,” I said. “Before we start talking about the case, what should I call you?”
“What?” he said, as if he’d never been asked the question before.
“I know your given name is Nelson. Should I call you that? Or . . . Legally?”
“L.D. That’s what my friends call me. L.D.”
“L.D. it is, then,” I said with a smile, trying to suggest that we’d already accomplished something significant. “So, tell me about you and Roxanne.”
“Not much to tell,” he said. “Roxanne was my girl, you know? She was everything to me.”
You can tell a lot about how a client will do on the witness stand by the way he answers open-ended questions. Some find it an invitation to tell you everything that pops into their heads on the subject. Others answer with the most limited amount of information they can get away with.
Legally Dead was apparently in the latter group. As far as testifying went, that was the better group to be in. But it made getting information from your client that much more difficult.
&
nbsp; “L.D.,” I said, “even though I’m not committed to be your counsel yet, this conversation is still subject to the attorney-client privilege. So I need you to be comfortable telling me the truth. And I need to hear it all, okay?”
“A’ight,” he said, which made me smile because it was the way the drug dealers talked on The Wire. I wondered whether the TV show copied it from real life, or if it was the other way around.
“So how long had you and Roxanne been together?”
“Few months. After I upped with Cap Pun, befo’ my first track even dropped, Matt Brooks calls me up and axes if I can do him a favor. He says Roxanne’s still got ten shows to do, but her opening act was all fucked up on some shit, so will I open fo’ her? You know, he don’t have to ax twice. Imma go from fucking nowhere to playing twenty-thousand-seat arenas. Sign me up, man.”
L.D. didn’t explain who Matt Brooks was, but there was no need. Even someone as removed from the rap world as me knew that he owned Capital Punishment Records. The Silver Svengali they called him, on account of his hair and the unqualified devotion exhibited by the acts he signed. He stood out in the rap world by his age (mid-fifties) and his race (Caucasian), but otherwise he had the accoutrements you’d expect from a music mogul—a $250,000 car, Gulfstream jet, Hamptons estate, and supermodel wife . . . another person who went by only one name: Chiara.
“Okay, so that’s how you meet Roxanne. What happens next?”
“Use your imagination ’bout what happened next.” He laughed, and then, as if he realized that humor was severely misplaced under the circumstances, he stopped himself abruptly and said, “I’m not gonna disrespect the girl, you know. It wasn’t like that. The thing is, I really loved her.”
Not just him. Everybody, it seemed, loved Roxanne. She’d been the It girl for three years running. Her popularity was based on the usual post–Britney Spears factors—a virginal face, torrents of blond hair that were almost certainly extensions, the figure of a Barbie doll. But if he thought that by telling me how much he loved her I’d be less inclined to think him capable of murder, he was off by 180 degrees. Call me a cynic, but I would have been more convinced of his innocence if he’d told me he really didn’t give a damn about her.
“Where were you on the night Roxanne was killed?” I asked.
“My crib.”
At least I understood what that meant. He said it flatly enough to suggest the answer to my next question, but I still had to ask it.
“And I take it you were home alone?”
“Yeah. Roxanne wouldn’t come to my hood, you know?”
No, I didn’t know. “Where do you live?”
“Brownsville, man. Tilden Houses projects.”
Well, that explained why Roxanne never visited him. Brownsville was probably the most crime-ridden neighborhood in the five boroughs.
“Can anybody give you an alibi?”
“You think I’d be sitting in here if somebody could?”
“I just thought that, I don’t know, you’d have an entourage or something with you at the time.”
“You mean like Vince and Turtle and Drama? Fuck, no. I ain’t Hollywood, man. ’Sides, you gotta remember, when this shit happened my record had just dropped, and it wasn’t on the way to goin’ platinum or nothing, neither. All I’d done was opened a few shows for Roxanne and was, you know, wit her and such, but I wasn’t getting any money out of it. Shit, I still haven’t seen a fuckin’ nickel from Cap Pun, you know?”
I looked over at Nina, but because I was the one on the phone, she apparently hadn’t heard Legally Dead’s claim of poverty. I wondered if her commitment to the cause included working for free.
“Marcus Jackson was representing you pro bono?” I asked.
“Pro what?”
“For free. You weren’t paying him?”
“Can’t give the man what I don’t got.”
“So why do you want to switch lawyers? Marcus is a very well-respected guy, and he’s not charging you.”
“The thing is, Marcus be tellin’ me that I gots to plead guilty. Don’t matter how many times I say I’m innocent, he keeps sayin’ that Imma get convicted, and I gots to make a deal.” Legally Dead shook his head, lamenting the injustice of it all. “I know that some of this shit don’t look good, but I didn’t kill her. I swear I didn’t.”
“I hear you,” I said, the lawyer’s noncommittal response. I wasn’t saying that I agreed, just that I understood the words he was saying.
Legally Dead was apparently smart enough to recognize the distinction. He turned away from me, staring at the floor, shaking his head again.
So I decided to throw him a bone. “For what it’s worth, L.D., I was home alone that night, too, and I don’t think I could get anyone to alibi me either.”
Of course, I wasn’t Roxanne’s boyfriend, nor had I written a song describing how I’d murder her if she ever got out of line. But for the moment, those were pesky details, and I wanted to gain his trust, if for no other reason than to try to get the truth from him. Or whatever his version of the truth might be.
He resumed eye contact. It was enough encouragement that I continued.
“I have to confess, I really don’t know much about the hip-hop world—”
He interrupted me. “I do rap. Hip-hop and rap ain’t the same thing, man. That’s lesson number one.”
“What’s the difference?”
L.D. chuckled. “You ax a hundred people, you get a hundred answers. But fo’ me, it’s simple. You can hear the difference. What I do is rap. Spoken poetry to music. Eminem, Fitty, Dre, Snoop, that’s rap. Damn if I know what’s hip-hop, but I know what I do ain’t it.”
I smiled back at him. “Fair enough,” I said. “Where I was going with this, however, is that, from what I understand of it, mainly from Nina and what I’ve read in the press, the prosecution’s theory goes something like this: you were her boyfriend, which put you at the top of the suspect list, right off the bat.” I realized the unfortunate word choice as soon as I’d said it, but decided it would only make things worse to call attention to it. “Second, you wrote the ‘A-Rod’ song, in which you talk about killing a singer by beating her with a baseball bat, and the forensics folks are saying that the murder weapon was a baseball bat.”
Both Nina and L.D. started talking at the same time. “Hold on,” I said to L.D., and put up my index finger as I pulled the phone away from my ear to listen to Nina.
“They don’t know the weapon for sure,” she said. “They never found it. They’re assuming it was a bat because Roxanne had a bat in her bedroom from singing at the World Series or something, and now it’s missing. And because of the song, it obviously helps the prosecution if the murder weapon is a bat.”
I gave Nina a not-too-subtle eye roll, although I was careful to turn my head sufficiently so Legally Dead didn’t see it. “But I’m assuming that the wounds Roxanne suffered are consistent with a baseball-bat beating, right?” I said. “I mean, I get that the murder weapon could be a two-by-four and not a Louisville Slugger, but it’s not a knifing case.”
“Right,” she said, conceding my point.
I wasn’t sure how much of that L.D. heard, but when I turned back toward him, he looked more agitated than he had before. “The song ain’t fuckin’ about Roxanne!” he shouted into the phone. “I been saying that from day one, but nobody’s fuckin’ payin’ it no mind. You gotta listen to the lyrics.”
Apparently recognizing that his flare-up had not helped his cause, he smiled again, but the damage had already been done. If nothing else, L.D. had revealed himself as the kind of man whose emotions could turn on a dime.
He began to rap, swaying from side to side as he did, as if he were onstage before screaming teenagers, rather than behind a bulletproof glass wall talking to a lawyer.
“We were blood bros and now this;
the ultimate dis.
Gonna stop you when you sing,
gonna give it til you scream;
don’t like what you said,
gonna go A-Rod on your head.”
When he was finished, he looked at me as if that resolved everything.
“I’m sorry, L.D., you’re going to have to explain what you mean.”
“The song ain’t about no shorty, it’s about a fuckin’ dude.” He rapped again: “ ‘We were blood bros’—brothers. It’s ’bout these gangbangers and one wants outta the game, and the other guy says if you talk shit about me, I’m gonna go A-Rod on your head. So everybody be sayin’ that because the lyric is sing it’s gotta be about a singer like Roxanne. But no fuckin’ way. It’s about . . . you know, like them old movies and shit, when people talk to the cops and they be singin’ like a canary.”
I felt like saying: Well, with an explanation like that, I’m surprised they even arrested you, but didn’t think I could summon enough sarcasm to give the thought justice. It was apparent I’d need to study not only the “A-Rod” lyrics but the entire Legally Dead songbook.
I had a momentary vision of translators in the courtroom debating the meaning of the lyrics, the way it sometimes happens when you have foreign-language interpreters arguing over the nuance of language in different regions of the country. No, it’s phat with a ph, so it means cool, not obese.
I did a recap in my head. No alibi. Check. Sketchy, at best, explanation on the song. Check.
Next on my agenda was motive.
“How were things between you and Roxanne on the day she died?”
“We all good.”
“What I’ve read is that the prosecution thinks Roxanne had recently . . .” I searched for a word that was gentle, and then decided that my offending him was the least of his worries. “She dumped you. Right before Thanksgiving. They claim that you couldn’t handle the rejection and so you killed her.”
He shook his head, as if the theory was so ludicrous as not to warrant even a response. It came off arrogant, and I made a mental note that he’d have to work on that expression if he was ever before a jury.