by Adam Mitzner
At a quarter of five, we got word that the jury had reached a verdict.
There is nothing like awaiting a jury’s verdict. The days the jury deliberates are spent doing nothing, holed up in the courtroom, knowing full well that if you leave the building for any reason, you’ll be accosted by reporters. Arrival in the morning, leaving in the evening, and the back and forth from lunch are like running a gauntlet.
And if the waiting wasn’t bad enough, when word comes back that the jury has reached a verdict, it’s a thousand times worse. The fifteen or twenty minutes sitting at the counsel table in anticipation of the jury’s arrival, followed by the judge asking aloud for the jury’s verdict, the handing of a piece of paper from the foreperson to the bailiff to the judge and back again, the formality of the judge asking the defendant to rise and the foreperson to read the verdict, is like no other kind of pressure I’ve ever experienced. And I say that as defense counsel. I truly cannot imagine what it must be like for the defendant, knowing that in a matter of moments, freedom will either be returned or taken away.
“Madame foreperson, please read the jury’s unanimous verdict,” Judge Ringel asked.
The foreperson was a young African-American woman. She stood and declared in a shaky voice that the jury had voted “Not guilty.”
I wish I could say that I had mixed emotions for my role in putting a rapist back into society, but I didn’t. Sadly, my only thought was that with those two words—not guilty—my career, no, my life, was made.
How wrong I was.
Two days later my wife and daughter were killed.
I know that most people would view it as nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence, but I don’t. In the law, there’s a doctrine called the fruit of the poisonous tree. It holds that evidence rightfully obtained isn’t admissible at trial if it was acquired as a direct result of evidence that had been improperly seized. So if the defendant confesses to the murder and also tells the police the names of his coconspirator, and the coconspirator later confesses, too, neither confession comes into evidence if that first confession was illegally obtained.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s the prism through which I have always viewed Sarah’s and Alexa’s deaths. They didn’t die because I represented a man I knew to be a rapist and got him acquitted, but if I hadn’t done that, maybe everything in my life would have been different. Maybe if I’d stepped out of the case when I learned Macy was guilty, I would have been with them in East Hampton, and the accident would not have happened.
I know that the answer is that there are a lot of maybes in life. Maybe I would have been with them and an asteroid would have fallen on our house. I know. I’ve said it all to myself already. But when you help a rapist get acquitted and your wife and daughter are killed two days later, it’s awfully hard to convince yourself that karma doesn’t exist.
17
Assistant District Attorney Lisa Kaplan’s promise in court to produce discovery before Christmas translated to 4:59 p.m. on Christmas Eve. It arrived in two banker’s boxes. Apparently the DA’s office had never heard of a thumb drive.
The production was 7,417 pages, each neatly numbered in the bottom right-hand corner with the legend “Patterson/People’s Discovery.” I gave Nina the first box and started to flip through the documents in the second one.
It didn’t take long to realize that most of it was filler. Pages upon pages of irrelevant stuff—computer printouts of various searches that showed no hits, or notes of interviews of witnesses who didn’t know anything pertinent to the crime, or if they did, it was information that had already been in the press.
After about an hour of review with nothing to show for it, Nina blurted, “Whoa, hang on. I’ve got something here.”
“What?”
“This is really weird. If I’m reading it correctly, they produced a criminal record for Nelson Patterson.”
“The Nelson Patterson that doesn’t exist?” I said. “The one that Matt Brooks made up?”
“Maybe he does exist. I mean, whoever said that Brooks was the paragon of truthfulness?”
It’s funny how easily I believed that my clients all lied. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Brooks might be the liar here.
“But if Brooks created Nelson Patterson,” Nina said, “he must have also made up a charge for gun possession. And look here, a mug shot.”
I walked around to Nina’s side of the table and bent down over her shoulder. There it was, a rap sheet, complete with photo. The fifteen-year-old in the picture could have been L.D., in that they shared a similar bone structure and coloring, but the skinny-looking kid from the picture certainly bore little resemblance to the scowling thug that was Legally Dead’s public persona.
I flipped through some of the paperwork. It was a juvenile arrest, which under other circumstances should have been under seal. There were fingerprints attached to the file, which should have settled the question whether Nelson Patterson was our L.D. Of course, that raised an even bigger question: Why would Brooks lie to us, especially about something that was so easily verified?
“The charge was criminal possession of a firearm, which was a class D felony,” Nina said, reading aloud. “It was pled down to an A misdemeanor. It looks like whoever this actually is served a year in juvenile detention.”
When she made eye contact with me, Nina asked, “Do you think it’s just a coincidence? They just pulled the wrong Nelson Patterson’s sheet?”
“Didn’t you just say that you thought Brooks lied to us?”
“I’m looking at different possibilities,” she said with a shrug.
I scanned the arrest documents over Nina’s shoulder. “It’s standard operating procedure after an arrest to fingerprint the suspect and run the prints through all the various criminal databases. If you want to go with the Brooks-is-telling-the-truth theory, the only explanation I can come up with is that when they scanned for L.D.’s prior arrest, they must not have retrieved any matches. And although that should have been the end of it, someone at the DA’s office must have thought to look at sealed cases, and that’s where they found the juvenile arrest of this kid named Nelson Patterson.”
“But why would they think that this Nelson Patterson was L.D.? There must be lots of Nelson Pattersons out there, and the fingerprints must not match.”
I had no answer, which put me back in the Brooks-is-lying camp. But as I continued to read, a theory came to mind.
I extended my finger to show Nina where I was looking on the report. “Look here,” I said, still thinking it through as I read about the circumstances surrounding the arrest. “This kid was shot four times. Maybe someone manually reviewed ten-year-old arrest records trying to find when a guy named Nelson Patterson was shot four times. They found this and figured it must be our Nelson Patterson. Of course, for that to make sense, you also have to believe they didn’t bother to check the prints. Or maybe they figured there was some type of mistake in the old prints.”
“I hear you,” she said, with the same tone of disbelief I use when uttering the phrase.
We resumed the document review, and it wasn’t long before I came upon the holy grail of criminal discovery—the CSU findings and the pathology report of Roxanne’s murder. The analysis was crammed with technical jargon about fibers and fingerprints, but the long and short of it seemed to be that there was nothing connecting L.D. to the crime scene.
“There were two sets of fingerprints in Roxanne’s bedroom, aside from Roxanne’s,” I said, reading as I spoke, “and neither of them matches L.D.”
“Who do the other prints belong to?” Nina asked.
“It looks like they never made a match. So at least we have some reasonable doubt on that. We’ll claim that they belong to the real killer.”
“Mr. Soddi,” Nina said with a grin.
I quickly flipped through the scientific study explaining how the conclusions were reached. It didn’t take me long to realize that deciphering that stuff would requ
ire Popofsky’s help.
But then I came upon photos of the crime scene. You didn’t need a medical degree to know what they said. Grisly is the only word that sufficed.
“Jesus. You should see these,” I said.
This time Nina came to my side. When she bent over to view the pictures, she noticeably recoiled.
“Oh, God.”
“I know.”
The first was of Roxanne’s bedroom, shot as if you were entering, with the bed as the focal point. Beside it was an enormous mirror, obviously intended to reflect sexual activity for the enjoyment of the participants. Nina gave me a raised eyebrow and a smirk when she saw it.
My eyes were drawn to the blood, however. Deep purple, like a cabernet, and soaked into every surface—the headboard, the sheets, globs on the wall. There was even a spiderweb-like design visible on the mirror.
The next photo was from the other angle, capturing the fireplace that was opposite the bed. Above the mantel were two brackets, with nothing lying on top of them.
It had already been leaked to the press that Roxanne’s housekeeper told the police she was sure the baseball bat was above the fireplace on the day of the murder. Now the crime scene photos showed that it was gone when Roxanne’s body was discovered. Even if the police never found the bat, it would have been awfully hard to convince a jury that something else was the murder weapon. And with the “A-Rod” song, it was damn near impossible.
Toward the bottom of my box were seven eight-by-ten color photographs of Roxanne taken after her death. I’d only ever seen dead bodies at funerals. Even Sarah and Alexa were made available to me only after the mortician had cleaned them up. Morticians always make the deceased seem angelic, masking death’s gruesomeness beneath white shrouds and waxy makeup. Roxanne’s face, however, was bruised and covered in blood, and her hair was matted on top from where the blood had congealed. Her eyes were wide open and vacant.
“I have the autopsy photos,” I said. “Not very pleasant.”
Nina cringed when she saw the top one.
“Worth a lot more than just a thousand words, right?” I said.
She nodded. “So what do the words say?”
“That if someone beats you over the head a half a dozen times, you die.”
“Seriously.”
I began to read from the autopsy report. “Blunt force trauma to the cerebellum. No illegal drugs in her system. A little bit of alcohol. Roxanne color treated her hair, so in case you thought she was a natural blonde, she wasn’t. She was on antianxiety medication, but apparently no birth control. No foreign fluids inside her.”
I hesitated, not fully believing what I was reading.
“What?” Nina said.
“I think I got something from the crime scene report . . . but . . .”
“But what?”
“Apparently they found some hairs on Roxanne’s bed. And if I’m reading this right, they’re pubic hairs.”
“So? L.D. left his pubic hair in her bed. It happens, Dan.”
“They’re not L.D.’s, though. They can’t tell whose hairs they are because there was no follicle. So they couldn’t do a full DNA analysis. The microscopic tests can only tell that it’s pubic hair from a Caucasian.”
I rolled around in my head what this meant, and kept coming back to the same conclusion. Roxanne had a lover who was in her bed right before she died. Maybe the evening she died.
“Nina, this is huge for us. Our SODDI guy might have just as well left his business card in her sheets.”
“Is it definitely a man’s hair?”
Damn. I hadn’t thought of that. I scanned the report again, hoping that there would be some indication that the hair could not be from Roxanne. There wasn’t.
“No,” I said dejectedly. “All they could tell was that it’s a Caucasian pubic hair. So it could be a woman’s.”
“You know that Kaplan’s going to claim that it’s Roxanne’s,” Nina said. “You’ve heard of Occam’s razor, right?”
“Yeah, the simplest answer is usually the correct one. My mother used to tell us to think horses, not zebras. Same thing.”
“So the most logical assumption is that Roxanne left behind her own pubic hair in her bed,” Nina said, as if that ended the matter.
“But we used to always tell my mother that sometimes it is a zebra,” I countered. “Zebras do exist, after all. Some people have seen them.”
“Maybe at the zoo,” she said with a chuckle. “But not in a pop star’s bed.”
18
For lawyers, there’s probably no worse day to visit a jail than Christmas. At least I assume that to be the case, as this was my first Christmas visit behind bars.
There were lots of children and elderly people at Rikers that morning, which somehow made the surroundings even more depressing. The extra visitors also meant that the wait entering the facility was twice as long as usual. Nina and I were delayed another half hour or so because the prison officials literally flipped through every page of the document production we’d brought in to make sure there wasn’t any contraband stuck to anything.
As counsel of record, we were now able to meet in a room without the glass barrier. The room they put us in, however, looked like a bus station bathroom, but without the facilities, and half the size. The tile was once white, but now would pass for gray. In the center of the room was a small metal table. The chair, also metal and without a cushion, was the most uncomfortable one I’d ever sat in. Needless to say, there were no windows.
We waited forty-five minutes for L.D. to arrive. When he finally appeared, he was wearing the same gray prison garb he had on the last time we’d visited Rikers, and he was shackled around the ankles and handcuffed behind his back, just like when he entered and left court. The guard who accompanied him into the room, a large man whose only visible hair was a black goatee, unlocked the handcuffs, but, again, just like in court, the ankle shackles remained in place.
“I’m going to be right outside the door,” the guard said to me.
“Thank you,” I replied, probably not the proper response, given that Nina and I shouldn’t be afraid to be in a room alone with our client.
After the guard left and shut the door, L.D. extended his hand to me. “Merry Christmas,” he said with a broad smile. “I’m so glad that I got to see you guys today. I’m hoping Mercedes brings Brianna, but I know she ain’t gonna. Christmas in here ain’t fuckin’ Christmas, you know what I mean?”
Nina and I each nodded, although it was obvious that neither of us really had any idea what it was like to spend Christmas in jail. At least not from the inmate point of view.
“Really nice for you to visit me when you got your own families. Did your little girl like her presents?”
My initial impulse was to continue the lie. A simple “yes” would have done it, but then I would be locked in to lying about Alexa for the duration, and I didn’t think I could do that.
“I should have told you when we met the last time, L.D. My daughter died in a car accident. About eighteen months ago. Her mother, my wife, died too.”
I could see the shock on his face, which caused me to smile at him, my effort to ease his pain and mask my own. With L.D., it didn’t seem to work as it usually did with others. L.D.’s eyes actually welled up.
“Fuck,” he said, and then he wiped his eyes.
Here he was, clad in the canvas gray prison jumpsuit, his legs chained together, denied his freedom, perhaps for the rest of his life—and if he was to be believed, all for a crime that he did not commit—and yet he felt sorry for me. And then I realized that he was right to do so. Certainly, if given the choice, I’d trade places with him in a second, all too glad to be imprisoned if it meant that Sarah and Alexa were alive somewhere—even if it meant that I had no idea where they were on Christmas.
“We have some things to discuss with you that are quite serious, L.D.,” I said, perhaps too abruptly. The thought of my circumstances being worse than his was simply mo
re than I could bear, and I wanted to get back on surer footing.
“First thing is that we met with Matt Brooks. He told us that your real name is Calvin Mayberry. That the whole Legally Dead backstory is a work of fiction.”
L.D. chortled. “Fucking Brooks, can’t even remember my goddamn name. It’s Calvin Merriwether.”
Damn. Our client was the liar. A little Occam’s razor right there.
With all the seriousness I could muster, I said, “L.D., this isn’t funny. You have to tell us the truth. About everything, okay? Or we can’t represent you effectively.”
“I know. I know. You gotta understand, and I know it sounds like some crazy shit, but I ain’t Calvin no more. And I get that I should have told you because you guys are my lawyers and so I need to tell you everything, but ain’t no thing. Everybody in show business uses a made-up name. You think Eminem is that dude’s real name? Or Fitty’s?”
“This is different, though,” Nina said. “Those guys didn’t also change their real names. Fifty Cent is Curtis something, right? And Eminem called one of his albums Marshall Mathers.”
“That shit is all Brooks,” L.D. said. “He said Calvin’s gotta be dead and I gotta start over from scratch. Otherwise, you know, somebody would figure it out.”
“Let me make sure I have this right,” I said. “The rapper Legally Dead, who survived four gunshots, is really a kid from the burbs who never got shot? And you’re saying that this was all Matt Brooks’s doing?”
“Look,” L.D. said, now sounding as serious as me, “it’s true that I was never a gang member, and I was never shot and left for legally dead. But I am an artist and a musician, and as a part of my art, I play that role. And I do it twenty-four/seven.”
“This is a major problem for us,” I said with a shake of my head. “The prosecution thinks you’re Nelson Patterson.”
“So?”
“So the prosecution produced a juvenile detention record for Nelson Patterson,” Nina said.