But then the darkness breaks and he sees he’s made a terrible mistake. Another train is sitting directly in front of him at the station. The white-on-red number 3 on the last car grows like a bloodshot eye. He reaches for the emergency brake but it’s too late. He’s going to crash. A screech like a buzz saw cuts through his ears. Lights go out in the car behind him. Bodies whiplash against the sides. Voices cry out. In the nearing distance, he sees people backing away from the edge of the platform.
They’re thinking subway crash. They’re thinking bits of twisted metal, torn concrete, and body parts found among the debris. They’re thinking last moments before life slips away amid terror and confusion.
But at the last possible second, he throws the brake and the mechanical track arm hits the trip cock on the undercarriage. Instead of stopping short, the train slows and bumps hard against the back of the number 3.
There’s a jolt and the whole train shudders. John G. looks up and sees a shrunken old Asian woman staring at him from the back window of the 3 train. She looks less scared than sad, as if she somehow understands what’s driven him to this point. The radio bleats.
“What the fuck happened there?!” asks the voice from the master control tower.
“There was someone down on the tracks,” he says.
There’s a pause and then static. In the car behind him, he hears people straightening themselves up and weeping in relief, trying to adjust to life at an angle. The voice on the radio comes back again.
“Eight-one-five, there’s no report of anyone on the tracks,” it says. “You been seeing things?”
John G. says nothing. He tries to picture the figure he saw on the local side, but there’s no afterimage in his mind. Only black space. He knows now he can no longer control himself.
“Eight-one-five, you just missed killing about two thousand people,” says the voice on the radio. “I hope you’re happy.”
He stumbles numb out of the cabin and looks around. The scene in the car is a low-budget disaster movie. No one looks seriously hurt, but some people are still on the floor crying. Others are trying to clamber back into their seats with bloody noses and disheveled clothes. The guy with the weak chin stands by the door with his glasses knocked sideways, ready to get off and go about his business. John G. stares hard at him and then ducks back into the cabin. He finds the picture of his wife and daughter on the floor. He puts it back in his wallet and walks the length of the train back to where the Hispanic lady in the striped dress is sitting with her daughter. They’re cowering in the last car under an ad for Audrey Cohen College. It says: It’s never too late to become what you might have been.
He kneels before them and looks into the child’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says.
The woman cannot speak. The child tries to bury her head under her mother’s arm. John G. rises and opens the back door. And without another word, he drops down onto the tracks and disappears into the darkness beyond.
2
You’re losing them, Jake thinks. Absolutely losing them. Especially the lady in the front row of the jury box. With the frizzy blond hair, the Chanel scarf, and the Upper East Side address. Barbara something. She doesn’t want to hear some fat probation supervisor explain the reporting system. That’s not how you’re going to win her over, Jake tells himself. She wants that human touch. She wants drama. She wants someone she can root for. You’re thinking Court TV. She’s thinking L.A. Law and As The World Turns.
So Jacob Schiff for the defense plants his feet by the balustrade on the left side of the courtroom and tries to find a way to psych himself back into this trial.
The witness, a coagulated puddle of a man named Jack Pirone, has just blown a hole through the middle of Jake’s case.
“So according to your records, Mr. Pirone, my client showed up for his appointment as scheduled, December thirteenth. Is that correct?”
“I have the date right here,” says Pirone, chewing hard even though he doesn’t appear to have anything in his mouth.
There goes the alibi, thinks Jake. He’d just put a girl named Shante on the stand to say she was with his client that day in Virginia; therefore Hakeem Turner, potential NBA rookie of the year, could not have been the one firing the shots from a red Jeep Wagoneer that killed a young drug dealer on East 129th Street.
“A moment, please, Judge.”
Jake circles back to counsel’s table, looking for something.
“He lying,” mutters Hakeem, who somehow looks even larger and more threatening in a green Italian suit than he does in shorts on a basketball court. “He’s a lying motherfucker. Kill ‘im. Tear his heart out.”
Jake puts a hand on Hakeem’s thick shoulder. Cool it. Something hard moves under his palm. Jake picks up the yellow legal pad covered in red scrawl about Pirone’s grand jury testimony.
“Rip his throat out,” Hakeem murmurs.
Jake tries to smile reassuringly as he returns to the podium. Remember: chin down, mouth relaxed. When you smile, you’re a handsome dog, his wife tells him. When you frown, you look like a pit bull.
“Now, Mr. Pirone,” he says, setting his feet as if he’s about to try a three-point shot himself. “It’s true, is it not, that as a supervisor you don’t actually see the clients who come into your office, do you?”
Pirone, who must weigh at least 280 pounds, shifts the fedora and files on his lap. “I know what’s going on in my own office, Counselor,” he says. “I been with this agency almost twenty years.”
“Well, then you’re aware that my client had a special exemption allowing him to go out of town. Like on days when his team was playing in other states. Right?”
“Yeah, but this wasn’t one of those days.” Pirone’s jaw keeps working. “Not according to my records.”
“And your records are always correct. Is that right?”
“Far as I know.” The left side of Pirone’s mouth turns up.
This is a crucial moment in the case. So far the state is way ahead on points. The prosecutors have been able to establish that Hakeem not only knew the victim, a nasty punk named Soledad Nelson, but also had a reason to want to kill him, since Soledad allegedly threw Hakeem’s cousin Ruthie out a window when she told him she was pregnant, causing her subsequent death at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.
Now, with Pirone on the stand rebutting Jake’s witness, the prosecutors are inches away from proving that Hakeem had ample opportunity since he was in the city that day. This is Jake’s last chance to introduce an element of doubt and save his alibi defense.
“So you trust your officers to always tell you the truth about report days, right?” Jake says. “You never think anybody would take part of an afternoon to go to the bank or go to the doctor and say they were there anyway?”
“Never happens.” Pirone shakes his jowly head. “It’s all on computers now.”
“And the computers are infallible, right?”
“Just like the pope, Counselor. They don’t make mistakes.”
Jake glances over at Barbara again, in the first row of the jury box. She’s not going to be a problem. The problem is the guy next to her. The ex-marine in the electrician’s union. Jimmy Sullivan. With the red face and buzz-cut white hair. He was brought up to follow orders. If the state says this kid is guilty, lock ‘im up and melt the key.
“Another moment, Your Honor.”
Jake goes back to the defense table and picks up his own Day-Timer appointment book. Then he double-checks the computer printout with the probation schedules. Hakeem looks up, puzzled.
“Now, Mr. Pirone,” Jake says, on returning to the podium. “I notice my client’s previous appointment with one of your officers was on November twenty-ninth. Is that right?”
“That’s what it says here. So it must be.”
Jake looks down at the appointment book. “Are you aware the twenty-ninth was a Saturday?”
Pirone’s piggy little eyes widen. He never saw the shot coming. A minor silence settles over the co
urtroom. And Barbara in the first row of the jury box is leaning forward, as if he’s finally got her attention.
“Objection.”
Francis X. O’Connell, the bright young guy from the DA’s office, is on his feet. Francis with his ruddy cheeks and his blue rep tie. He looks about twelve with his Beatlemania haircut. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But make no mistake, Francis is a comer. Especially in this case, where the judge, Jeffrey Steinman, was his law professor at Fordham.
“Your Honor,” says Francis. “Mr. Schiff is clearly going beyond the scope of this case with his questions. In pretrial conferences, we agreed to stay within a specific time frame. Now he’s trying to take us on a fishing expedition so we’ll lose sight of the issues.”
Steinman waves with his two short flipperlike arms for both sides to join him at the bench. Jabba the judge.
“What about it, Counselor?” he asks Jake. “You driving somewhere or just taking us for a ride?”
“The witness opened up the whole can of worms. He’s the one who said they never make a mistake with their schedules.”
“Is it important?” From the saturnine look on his face, the judge is clearly hoping the answer will be no.
“Your Honor, my client is twenty-two years old and he’s looking at twenty-five to life here.” Jake puts his hands in the pockets of his brown Hugo Boss suit jacket. “Everything is important.”
“I’ll give you just a little bit of rhythm here,” says Steinman. “But don’t make me regret it.”
Jake goes back to the podium and catches Hakeem’s eye. Twenty-two years old. He thinks about that for a second and in his mind’s eye, Hakeem metamorphoses into his own son, Alex, who’s just six years younger. Alex, the shining star on his horizon, the repository for his hopes and dreams. His heart. He imagines his son talking to him through a smudged pane of Plexiglas in a Rikers Island visiting room, while various motherfuckers, child molesters, and machete murderers await him on the other side. So there’s inspiration. Jake decides he will go down in flames if he has to during this cross-examination, and he will take Pirone with him.
“Now Mr. Pirone, we’ve established that Saturday the twenty-ninth appears in my client’s record as a date when he was at your office. Can you tell us why that is?”
“Our office is often open on Saturdays,” says Pirone, who’s used the time to collect his thoughts.
“I see. And you’re telling me that you’d use that time to see clients, instead of taking care of paperwork that’s built up?”
Pirone blinks twice. “We would sometimes.”
Now Jake is sure he’s lying. But how to get at him? Jimmy Sullivan, the ex-marine, is sitting with his arms folded across his chest in the jury box: Prove it, he seems to be saying. Jake flashes on being back in the courtyard outside John Dewey High School in Bensonhurst. Buddy Borsalino bouncing his head off the asphalt. A group of kids jeering at him. How’s he going to get up?
He flips back a few pages in the Day-Timer, looking for something. Jurors stir impatiently. Any more delays and they’ll start to blame him and take it out on his client. But then Jake turns back one page and finds what he needs. It’s like looking up at Buddy Borsalino and seeing just enough daylight between them to get a good punch in.
“Mr. Pirone,” he says, gripping the podium with both hands. “I’d like to direct your attention to my client’s previous appointment.”
“The twenty-ninth?”
“No, the one before that.”
“Okay.”
“I see the date listed is November eleventh. Is that correct?”
“If I say it then it’s so, Counselor.” Pirone tries to cross his right leg over his left knee, but he can’t quite get it over the railing.
The judge raises his eyes slowly, fed up and about to cut Jake off. Even Hakeem at the defense table seems restless with this line of questioning.
Jake closes the appointment book and fixes Pirone with a level stare. “Did you know, Mr. Pirone, that November eleventh was Veterans’ Day?”
Pirone says nothing. But a small gagging sound escapes from his throat and his eyes move from side to side.
“So do you mean to tell me, sir, that your office was open on Veterans’ Day?” Jake continues.
Now Sullivan, the ex-marine in the jury box, is looking at the witness with his arms folded across his chest. Obviously not appreciating civilian personnel who don’t know when his holiday is. Things are turning around.
“Maybe a mistake was made,” says Pirone, struggling to recover. “It’s the computers. They make errors.”
“I suppose that’s true.” Jake unbuttons his jacket, signaling to the jury that he’s ready to relax and start enjoying himself. “Especially since you also have my client stopping by to drop off papers on Lincoln’s Birthday.”
He slams the Day-Timer down on the defense table for emphasis. Hakeem is smiling. Barbara is crossing her black-stockinged legs and rubbing her lips, as if she’s suddenly finding all of this very stimulating. Even the court officers are nodding with mulish glee.
“Objection.” Francis rises automatically, like a man at the end of a seesaw. But his heart isn’t in it. “I don’t see what relevance any of this has.”
The judge calls him up to the bench with Jake.
“The relevance is he just took a sledgehammer to your witness,” he says with a special hint of admonishment a once proud teacher reserves for a student who’s disappointed him. “I’d say Mr. Schiff’s alibi witness just started looking a lot better.”
It’s one of those subtle but unmistakable junctures when the momentum of a trial shifts. Defense counsel suddenly seems much more witty and interesting to the jurors. The defendant younger and more sympathetic. And everything the prosecutor says is subject to a new cold scrutiny. In some unconscious way, the case has already been decided.
Jake returns to the podium, feeling very much in his element. He’s hitting his stride now, like an athlete in his prime. Botta boom, botta bing. Here’s a guy who knows his way around the courtroom.
“So, Mr. Pirone,” he says, turning back for the coup de grace. “Is there any reason to believe these records of yours are accurate?”
“They usually are.” Pirone chews his lower lip as if he’d love to get Jake alone in the John Dewey schoolyard with a crowbar.
“Thank you. That will be all.”
The judge calls a recess for lunch and as Jake returns to the defense table, Hakeem rises to his full seven feet and gets ready to chest-butt him as if Jake just executed a triple-reverse chocolate thunder slam dunk. Jake touches his arm and accepts a handshake instead.
“Good going, Counselor,” murmurs Francis, the prosecutor, as they walk out into the hall together. “Next time tell your client not to do it.”
“He didn’t do it, Francis.”
“Norman’s not gonna be happy if we lose this one.”
The district attorney, Norman McCarthy, has despised Jake for years without being able to pin so much as an unpaid parking ticket on him.
“Norman’s never happy.” Jake starts to head into the bathroom, leaving Francis at the elevators. “At his age, I’d suggest Metamucil and tango lessons.”
“I don’t know, Jake. He hates losing these high-profile cases.”
“I care,” says Jake. “But not that much.”
Francis glances back at the half dozen reporters staggering out of the courtroom, scribbling frantically in their notebooks. “Listen, you make him look like an asshole for bringing this to trial, he’s going to make somebody pay,” he says quietly.
“Ah, he’ll get over it.” Jake shrugs it off and pushes the bathroom door open. “You get over almost everything.”
SUMMER
3
I lost my way. I lost my way. I was in a dark wood and I lost my way.
The words keep repeating themselves in John G.’s mind as he pushes a baby stroller full of soda cans across the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. The stars and clouds look like dots and sp
latters of white paint thrown carelessly against the dark sky. The apartment houses and skyscrapers along Central Park South and Fifth Avenue rise up in the mist.
These last three months have been a long, inexorable slide. He’s still not exactly sure how he became homeless. He just knows it happened a step at a time. Everything only makes sense in light of what came just before it.
The job went first. Right after the near collision, there were ten days of administrative hearings, overnight psychiatric evaluations, and drug tests before the MTA finally got around to firing him.
He was divided by the news. A side of him was angry and defiant, not ready to give up. But another part was secretly grateful and relieved.
The next morning, he sat on his bed with the shades drawn and the day stretching out before him like a long road without signposts.
What was he going to do with the rest of his life? Everything looked the same. His wife’s makeup compact was still in the bathroom medicine cabinet; her herbal teas were still in the kitchen cupboard. But he felt utterly alone and confused. Cookie Monster lay on the blue carpet in the middle of his daughter’s empty room, like he’d been cast adrift on a cold sea. The Little Mermaid toys and the wooden railroad tracks John bought for her were heaped in a corner.
When he closed his eyes, he pictured her waving to him from across the street. The light turns red.
I lost my way. I’ve lost my way. I was in a dark wood and I lost my way.
He should have gone downtown and applied for unemployment right then. But he wasn’t ready to face the long lines and the questions about failing his drug test.
Instead, he turned on the television and watched Regis and Kathie Lee awhile. He had to get on top of his situation. Find a way to deal with the stress.
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