Widows-in-Law

by Michele W. Miller

  “What do you suggest?”

  “You have to buy back the contract.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Bobby’s the one who can do that for you. And I’d venture to guess you’ll have to pay the face value of it or something close to it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He might help you,” Brownie chuckled. “Or you could get the people threatening you to buy it back, if you got the juice to negotiate it.”

  They sat quietly for a moment.

  Lauren leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek for the first time ever. “I’ve gotta go.”

  He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him before she could straighten up. “You be careful with those folks. Handle them with care, the ones who’re threatening you. You can do the deal to get them up off your ass … ’cause folks like that don’t just walk away once they set their minds on something … but then you gotta do something about that contract and get out again, do you hear me? Once you’re done with whatever mess drug you back down here, stay up above the sidewalk with the squares. Forget this life exists.”

  ***

  The casino closed shortly before dawn, although the Arenas were still upstairs hanging out and drinking. CB counted money at the glass desk in his dimly lit, windowless office. No knock. A man, tall and wide, filled the doorway. CB’s breath caught in his throat. He steeled his face, forcing himself to relax. “Hey, Jorge, what’s up?”

  CB continued to count the night’s receipts, although he’d lost count. He counted his breaths instead, trying to keep the air flowing. The problem with “turning state’s” was that he was terrified, all the time. Jorge Arena paced on the far side of CB’s desk, his imposing size and energy sucking away CB’s courage like an evil spirit in a folk tale. Jorge didn’t make social visits, not to CB at least. He had to fight back his paranoia before it got the better of him. He couldn’t afford any unforced errors. CB had already hit information pay dirt tonight—he prayed he hadn’t sparked Jorge’s suspicion by asking Pedro and the others so many questions.

  “I need to make a call.” Jorge sat in an armchair and dialed his cell phone. It was probably a burner phone but even Jorge’s burners were Apple, so you couldn’t tell. Jorge didn’t throw his wealth around, but he used it where it counted.

  Jorge started right in talking, resuming a conversation midthought. “Hijo, you need to stay calm. The delivery is barely late. Be a man or they’ll sense your weakness. It will be over soon.” Jorge listened, his expression grave. “Let me speak to them.”

  Like CB, Jorge didn’t have a Spanish accent unless he chose it. He wasn’t born in New York, so his school-taught English tilted formal, hinting at a British teacher, but it was otherwise perfect. Jorge had attended the best schools in the DR and wasn’t in the Life because he couldn’t do anything else. He lived off the grid for the same reason some cowboys still did. He didn’t want to answer to anybody. And he enjoyed the kill.

  Jorge growled into the phone at someone. “I’m lending you my nephew. Keep him happy or your family in Queens won’t have anywhere to hide. I know where they are. You fuck with mine, I will make Homeland Security look like Girl Scouts on a scavenger hunt …” He listened, scowling. “Girl Scouts. Fucking Girl Scouts.”

  When Jorge hung up, he turned to CB. “The cabron tells me he doesn’t know what Girl Scouts are.” Jorge sighed. “My nephew is staying in Africa, their guests.”

  CB weighed and measured each word before he uttered it. He couldn’t seem curious. He continued to count the money, a cigarette perched in the corner of his mouth. “That’s Tomás?” CB had played with several of Jorge’s nephews during long summers in the DR.

  “Yes. For now, it’s just business with these Africans, them keeping Tomás. But it may turn ugly fast. My nephew is like the margin call in the stock market. Our stock has gone down due to our delivery delay and they need additional collateral. It’s Tomás who brought me the buyers, a bunch of ISIS wannabes. He wanted a more active role in the family business. I was impressed with the magnitude of his deal, which we planned flawlessly.” Arena shook his head with disgust as if to say that a flawless plan had still resulted in a shit storm. “You know Tomás’ mother and my wife are sisters. They’ll bring in the Santería priests if they hear of this. The praying will take over my whole house.” Jorge chuckled, his mood lightening from black to gray. “I’ll have to go stay at my girlfriend’s.” Jorge pointed, “Give me a cigarette.”

  “I thought the Chinese were the problem.”

  Jorge peered into CB’s eyes. CB’s heart plunged.

  “Pedro talks too much.” Jorge dragged on the cigarette, relaxing again. “Lucho made a bad situation worse, but I can’t begrudge him. Andy Chow is the military leader of the Mott Street Tong. He’s a cagey maricon, but he’s a naturally rude person, talks too much shit. It’s important to remain polite when everyone is well armed. He pushed Lucho too far. Now Chow is very pissed about what Lucho did. But if we get the money to their client, hopefully everything will be forgotten. It’s all about the money as the saying goes.”

  CHAPTER 29

  The streetlights still glowed outside Brownie’s, but the sky had become sepia. A cold wind hit Lauren. A well-dressed group—men and women in black, wearing sunglasses although it was barely dawn—passed her as they entered Brownie’s. Lauren paused, hearing birds singing in the park’s trees. She remembered how much she’d hated that sound in the old days when she left Brownie’s after an all-nighter of booze and coke. The morning birds rising before she’d gone to bed had been proof that her life was upside down.

  She grabbed the cab the group of partyers had exited. The gray sky ripened into pink and orange as she rode downtown. Twenty minutes later, after a pit stop at McDonald’s, she walked through the doors of 100 Centre Street. The normally bustling, fifteen-story criminal courthouse was eerily quiet. She passed an open concession stand, which offered coffee and magazines, the clerk nowhere in sight. Two court officers manned a long wooden table and metal detector. Lauren held up her attorney ID.

  “Morning, Counselor,” one officer said and signaled her through the metal detector, its alarms blaring and echoing in the cavernous lobby. The empty main lobby spanned the equivalent of a full city block, taking up the front half of the building’s ground level.

  “The Arraignment Part’s that way?” Lauren asked the court officer as she pointed toward the second of three elevator banks, nearly a half block from where she stood. “It’s been a while since I’ve been here.”

  “Yeah, walk past the elevators to the back lobby. Misdemeanor Part’s on your left, Felony Part’s on your right.”

  At the relatively small lobby area at the backside of the building, an officer sat behind a plexiglass window. A few worried families milled about. The two Arraignment Parts worked twenty-four hours a day. The arraignment provided defendants with their first shot in front of a judge after arrest, which often ended in a quick dismissal or a “time served” sentence but could also lead to an extended stay on Rikers Island.

  Lugging her gym bag and two McDonald’s bags filled with coffee, orange juice, breakfast sandwiches, and home fries, Lauren turned right toward the Felony Part. Emily would have eaten nothing but stale bologna-and-cheese sandwiches since her arrest. Lauren had brought extra food, knowing Emily and Jessica would need to share with any bullpen allies. That was the way it worked in the bullpens. Lauren’s throat tightened. She just couldn’t fathom how and when Emily crossed the line from Happy Meals to adult jails. Terrified at the trouble that had homed in on them, she pasted on a rigor-mortis half smile. If she was going to be effective today, she had to come off like an attorney, not a desperate mother.

  She pushed open one of the heavy double doors to the Felony Part and scanned the large room, very different from the child-friendly Family Court. A dozen long, dark pews—scarred and worn like an old-fashioned el
ementary school desk—lined each side of a center aisle. Parents, girlfriends, and an occasional husband filled the pews. A wooden railing separated the gallery from the working part of the courtroom.

  The Arraignment Part wasn’t like courts people saw on TV, where everyone in the courtroom sat quietly while the judge handled the court’s business. Here, people were doing all sorts of things within the front half of the room, walking around, negotiating, and maneuvering, even while cases droned on at the judge’s bench. Harried Legal Aid attorneys and assistant district attorneys reviewed their case files and talked quietly into telephones at paper-cluttered tables that dominated the left side of the area. On the right side, two uniformed cops and a corrections officer sat at a table, reading the New York Post and chatting quietly. At the center, in front of the tall judge’s bench, were traditional, scuffed defense and prosecution tables.

  Presently, two prosecutors stood before the judge. One assistant DA in his late twenties was breaking in a newer female ADA. He whispered to her before each sentence she haltingly delivered.

  The new ADA scanned paperwork in front of her. “The prosecution is hereby providing notice of the defendant, Craig Simmons’ statement: ‘I didn’t cut the bitch. She had it coming for smoking the package.’”

  The defendants, three of them, sucked their teeth then whispered intently into the ears of their court-appointed lawyers.

  The judge ignored them and addressed the new ADA. “What’s your bail offer, Counselor?”

  The male prosecutor whispered into her ear again. She looked at the judge. “Forty thousand dollars each, Your Honor. The defendants have a long criminal record including prior assaults.”

  After a pointless argument by one of the defense lawyers, the three men were led, muttering, toward a door several feet to the right of the judge’s bench.

  The case over, Lauren approached a court officer who stood at the railing between the front and gallery. “I want to get down to the female bullpens.” She showed her ID and signaled toward the door the three men had just gone through. “Is that the way?”

  He unhooked the chain link between two halves of the wooden railing and stood aside. “You bet, through that door, the staircase to the left.” He looked down at the McDonald’s bags. “Special delivery?”

  “If possible.” Lauren knew to ask, not demand, while so far from her familiar Family Court. Every court had its own system of doing things that went beyond the law books. Her biggest job today would be learning how to make the wheels turn here, so she could get Emily and Jessica out as quickly and cleanly as possible.

  He shrugged. “Ask the corrections officer downstairs. She’ll probably let you. No glass bottles?”

  Lauren looked down at her bags. “No.”

  “Good.” He signaled toward the door with his head.

  She crossed between the defense table and lounging police officers and pulled open the door. As it closed behind Lauren, an oppressive gray surrounded her. She descended the metal stairs to a set of bars that separated her from the female bullpens. The bars and the cinder-block walls were all gray. In the distance, women milled behind more gray bars, sat on gray metal benches and lay on dirty cement floors. More than fifty women were packed in the first bullpen, its bars forming a corridor between the bullpen and the outer gate where she waited.

  The correction officer’s keys jangled on her thick hips as she came to open the door for Lauren. “What’s your client’s name?”

  “Emily and Jessica Silverman.”

  “Okay.”

  “Matron, matron,” a bedraggled woman put sore-ridden arms through the bars of the first bullpen.

  “Go to sleep, Sylvia, your prints aren’t back yet.” The CO swung the outer gate open for Lauren. “She calls me matron like in those old women’s prison movies, thinks it annoys me. She’s back here once a month, busted again, telling me ‘matron, matron.’ You’d think she’d be the one annoyed. Of course, she knows better than I do how long it takes for fingerprints to be processed and the DA to prepare the case.” The CO pointed Lauren down the corridor. “That way, speak to the officer at the desk.”

  Lauren glanced through the bars of the first pen as she passed, checking to see if Jessica and Emily were in among the horde of prostitutes, addicts, and huge, masculine women. The scent of industrial-strength pine cleaner, unwashed bodies, and stopped-up toilets flared Lauren’s nostrils.

  A second heavyset CO hung up the telephone as she approached her desk. “Can I help you, Counselor?”

  “Emily and …”

  “Mom!”

  Lauren turned to a bullpen half the size of the other, within sight of the CO’s desk. Emily stood at the bars, eyes darkly circled, hair matted. Looking haggard and skinny, Jessica leaned against the bars at Emily’s left. On Emily’s other side was a sink with a metal shelf above it. A deranged-looking woman with a multidirectional afro lay on the shelf. She scratched herself then stretched her legs until her filthy socks extended over the edge, close to Emily’s head.

  Emily turned and shouted at her, “Move your feet, damn.”

  The woman sat up. Lauren’s muscles tightened, ready for anything, imagining the woman launching herself at Emily with Lauren unable to help. How long would it take the CO to get in there? Lauren held her breath, but Jessica snatched Emily and switched places with her. Jessica glared at the woman.

  The woman sucked her teeth and muttered, “Stupid bitches.” She rolled over and went back to sleep.

  Lauren turned to the corrections officer who smiled, sympathetically. “Your daughter, eh?”

  “Yeah. Can I give them food?”

  “No bottles?”

  “No.”

  “Go on.” The CO pointed toward the pen. “We’ve been keeping an eye out, spotted them right away. But they’ve been handling themselves fine, all things considered.”

  “Thank you. How long do you think until their cases are called?”

  “It’s been a little busy, always is before elections—probably make court by nine or ten tonight.”

  Lauren took a harsh breath.

  The CO shrugged and raised her palms. “Not my doing.”

  Lauren smiled, grimly. “I know.” She walked to the crowded square pen. Nearly thirty women sat on its three benches, some sleeping with their heads on their knees, some staring into space. Another half-dozen women slept on the bare floor and still others stood and leaned against the bars. Lauren put her hand through the bars to the back of Emily’s head and kissed her forehead.

  Emily whispered, “Get us out of here.”

  “You’ve gotta hang on. It’ll be a while.”

  “I can’t, please.”

  “Just hang on, baby, you have to. It’s going to be at least another twelve hours.”

  Emily sniffed back tears, keeping her face from dissolving in front of her cellmates, many of whom now watched the unusual bullpen visit between lawyer and daughter. “But you’re a lawyer.”

  “You have to wait for the fingerprints to come back and for the DA to put the paperwork together.”

  Jessica sunk against the bars, as if losing her strength at the news of the hours still ahead.

  Lauren turned to her, furious, even more so at the sight of her weakness. “Need I ask what my daughter is doing in jail, charged with a felony?”

  “Need you ask why we’re both in here for hacking. I had no idea what she’d planned,” Jessica spit.

  Lauren turned to look at Emily, “What?”

  Tears pooled in Emily’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Jessica.”

  Jessica whispered, “She hacked Brian’s computer. I had no idea.”

  “I’m sorry, really, Jessica. I didn’t mean—”

  Lauren whispered, “I’m afraid to even ask what you two are talking about. They didn’t charge you with hacking … not yet. Burglary and criminal t
respass, that’s it.”

  Jessica sighed with relief. She reached for Emily, holding her. “I could have stopped you. I wanted to know too. I’m just scared.” Jessica spoke softly to Lauren again, “Then building security must have called the police. I bet they checked with someone—namely that bastard, Steve—to see if we were authorized to be there. I still can’t understand why he’s doing this.”

  Lauren nearly shouted the truth: because your low-life husband was fucking Nicole, that’s why. But she pulled herself back from that brink. She looked at Jessica, who was afraid for her life, disheveled, and exhausted. Lauren took in the sight of the exposed toilet in the corner of the bullpen. What a nightmare it must be for Jessica to use it in front of two dozen people, let alone these bunkmates. Yet, despite everything, Jessica was keeping her wits about her, trying to figure out what was going on and, most of all, trying to protect Emily no matter what Emily had done. Seeing Jessica put herself between Emily and the crazy woman, who outweighed Jessica by at least fifty pounds, had struck Lauren.

  “Why did you go back there after we agreed?” Lauren asked.

  “I didn’t think we could get into any real trouble by just being there,” Jessica said

  “I convinced her,” Emily whispered through the bars. “Daddy was sending messages to someone on the PlayStation about Tortola, and he was in Tortola the day before he died. I found a thumb drive of his, but I needed his office computer. Daddy had an encryption app on his work PC. I needed to get the IP address to clone the app and get his encrypted document.”

  Lauren stared at Emily, stunned, trying to keep up with her.

  “I convinced Jessica to take me. It’s not her fault. I didn’t even tell her. We got this. Here.” Emily pulled out a folded sheet of paper from her back pocket. “I stuffed it down my pants when the police came. They didn’t care about it when they strip-searched me at the precinct. I took it out first, and they must have thought it came from my pocket. They weren’t watching too carefully.”

  Lauren cringed at Emily’s matter-of-fact description of the strip search but took the paper. “This was your dad’s list?” she whispered. “So these are safe-deposit box companies. Brian went from New York to Tortola then to Miami—the money could be in one of these.”