by Linda Wolfe
Roberts let him have it. He spun the wooden box, pulled out a name, and it was Judge Howard E. Bell, a black judge held in disdain by some of the men and women with whom he worked. Ding-Dong Bell, he was called behind his back.
Judge Jeffrey Atlas, who had helped set up the wheel system, was in his courtroom when, about twenty minutes after Judge Bell’s name had been drawn, Litman and Fairstein came barging toward his bench. Atlas got a knot in his stomach. Could he have been selected for Chambers? Well, if he had been, it would make the court reporters happy, even if it gave him a stomachache. His court reporters loved a big trial. The minute they heard he was on one, they started seeing the cash registers going, started dreaming about all the movie producers who would be asking to buy extra copies of the trial record. At three dollars a page, a big trial could net these guys fifty grand or more.
Alas, his court reporters were going to be disappointed. Bell had been chosen as the trial judge, Fairstein and Litman said. But if that was the case, why were they here? Just to find out about Bell? “Bell’s a very nice man,” Atlas told the two lawyers. “A very gentle man.”
They shrugged and asked if they could speak to him in private. He led them into his jury room. And there they astonished him. They asked, “Would you consider taking the Chambers case?”
“I’m not going to break the rules I helped create.” Atlas was getting irritable.
Litman did most of the talking. “We can understand your reluctance,” he said. “You’re worried how it might affect your relationship with your colleagues.”
“I’m not talking about jealousy,” Atlas snapped. “I’m talking about principle.”
But Litman went on arguing. “Suppose Mr. Morgenthau spoke to the administrative judge? Then would you take it?”
Atlas was tempted. Of course it was flattering to know he was wanted. And Chambers was going to be a big, juicy case. But he conquered the temptation, kept on saying no. Bell’s name had come out of the wheel, and it was Bell who should try the case no matter what the two lawyers thought or felt.
Judge Howard E. Bell had no idea about the lawyers’ reaction. Even if he had known, it probably would have made no difference to him. He was a man who had long ago learned that life was heavy with rejections and hardships.
Bell had been born some sixty years ago in segregated Norfolk, Virginia. He’d been the youngest of six children. His mother had had only a high school education. His father had quit school after the third grade. The prospect of Bell’s becoming an educated man, let alone a judge, was remote indeed when he was a boy. But the Bell family, despite lack of schooling, placed great emphasis on education and encouraged Bell to do the same. He still felt grateful to his parents for that. To his father in particular. The old man—who had made his living as a building contractor—had taught himself to read by buying a nine-volume set of books called The History of the World and devouring every single word in the set. When his father died, Bell wanted those books more than anything in the world, but the family house caught on fire. The books went up in smoke.
Pushed by his parents, Bell went to Virginia Union University in Richmond. And while he didn’t feel he’d gotten the best schooling in the world—to this day he often made self-deprecatory remarks about his knowledge and ability to comprehend complexities—he’d learned enough by the time he was nearly through college to realize he was capable of law school. So he’d come north and gone to Brooklyn Law.
It was during his law school years that he’d faced some of his most painful rebuffs and difficulties. And learned at firsthand that racism wasn’t restricted to the South. In order to keep body and soul together while studying law in Brooklyn, he tried to find a decent-paying part-time clerical job. Every night before he went to sleep in his tiny room in Harlem’s YMCA, he read the want ads in the New York Times, and every morning he got up at the crack of dawn and visited the employment agencies that had placed the ads. But no matter how early he arrived, the jobs he applied for were already filled.
New York had a Fair Employment Practices code, so the employment agents he spoke with were polite and gave him lengthy applications to fill out. But they didn’t send him out on interviews. And sometimes they told him, Howard, if you’ll take a dishwasher’s job, we can accommodate you.
Ultimately, however, he found work. Not in a white company, of course. The NAACP hired him as a mail clerk. In their offices he met men like Roy Wilkins and Walter White, Thurgood Marshall and W. E. B. DuBois. Giants: men he would never forget and whose achievements filled him with awe. Inspired by their examples, he eventually made it through law school, worked for the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Board, made political connections, got appointed to the Civil Court, and ultimately was elected to the State Supreme Court.
But even by the time he was selected to try the Chambers case, he still knew what it was like to be scorned. One day just a few weeks earlier he had boarded a Central Park West bus, his eggshellcolored fedora tilted nattily over his forehead and a sleek black umbrella tucked under his arm, only to hear the driver slam on the brakes and see two police officers scrambling up the bus steps. There must be a thief on the bus, he’d thought, and then suddenly one of the cops began pushing him toward the back of the vehicle and shouting at him to get off.
“Tell me what this is all about,” he demanded as soon as he’d been herded off the bus.
“A woman across the street saw a man with a knife in his hand get on the bus,” one of the cops said coldly. “A man wearing an eggshell-colored hat.”
Bell grew indignant. “My umbrella,” he said. “She must have thought the handle was a knife.” Then he said, “I’m a Supreme Court justice.”
The officers didn’t believe him. “You got any identification?”
He had nearly blown up. But he’d realized the cops were within their rights to ask him for ID. He produced it, they were chagrined, and that was the end of the incident. Except for his anger. And his embarrassment. Those didn’t go away. And he couldn’t help thinking how ironic it was—not just that a Supreme Court justice had been dragged off a bus like a common thief, but that the man the police had gone for was the only person on the bus wearing a jacket and tie, let alone a hat.
By Wednesday, September 24, two days after Bell had been selected as trial judge, Litman and Fairstein were reconciled to the draw. They had made inquiries about Bell, learned that although he had many detractors he also had admirers, people in the judicial system who viewed him as fair and hardworking. And on that Wednesday they came before him for the first of hundreds of appearances—this time for a hearing on whether or not Robert should be granted bail.
Litman had prepared elaborately for the hearing. He had submitted to Bell a lengthy bail application motion and forty letters gathered by the Chamberses, attesting to Robert’s character. Some of the letters were from friends of Robert’s. A girl named Francesca Coloma wrote that Robert was “a sweet and sensitive young man. An example of his sensitivity is reflected in a conversation I had with him two weeks ago. He said he was very upset because he had just seen a man run over a cat. As he said this, he had tears in his eyes.”
A girl named Nicole Breck wrote that Robert had always helped her with personal and family problems. “Twice he has waited outside my school for me in order to walk me to work because he knew otherwise I might have called in sick. I have called him repeatedly very late at night with certain problems. Not once has he told me to call back at a reasonable hour. He simply woke up and talked to me until I felt that everything was worked out.”
Some of the letters were from friends of the Chambers family. John Dermont wrote somewhat frivolously that, “if possible, I would substitute myself for incarceration in Robert’s stead should the court see fit to release him on any grounds pending court appearances.”
Eve Murphy, the neighbor whose apartment Robert had agreed to paint during the summer, wrote that she had given him a set of keys to her place. “He was aware of my financial
situation, knew where my stocks, bonds, credit cards, and sometimes large sums of money were kept,” she remarked, but “at no time was anything missing from my apartment.”
There were letters, too, from teachers who had known Robert when he was a boy at St. David’s. He had been a “dream student” when he was in the seventh grade, wrote Michael A. Imbelli, his home-room teacher at the time, and “a first-rate photographer, skilled in the darkroom.” “While at St. David’s,” wrote Frank Mahoney, who’d taught Robert in seventh and eighth grades, Robert “helped organize a fund drive at Thanksgiving to help the poor of a parish in Harlem.” The school’s headmaster, David D. Hume, wrote that Robert had been put in charge of the school’s soda vending machine. “This required handling a reasonable amount of money,” he explained, yet Robert had done so in an impeccably trustworthy fashion.
There were also letters from people who had known Robert when he was in the Knickerbocker Greys. Robert had had “a high Esprit de Corps,” wrote the organization’s former commandant, Thomas J. Hayes.
Robert had given him extra instruction in pivots and rifle maneuvers, wrote Daren Jaime, the first black member of the Greys.
Robert had asked to borrow her husband’s tuxedo, wrote Elizabeth Kratovil, a former board member, and “not only returned the tuxedo promptly and in good shape, but also had thought to have it professionally cleaned.”
In addition, there were letters from priests. Robert had often been “around collection money and altar wine,” wrote Monsignor James Wilders, who had known him when he was an altar boy at St. Thomas More. Yet he’d “proved to be most trustworthy and reliable.”
“I have always judged Robert to be a responsible person,” wrote the Reverend Charles McDonald, assistant pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and a cousin of Phyllis Chambers. “In November 1985 I was in town for a few days and was willing to let him use my car… . He said, ‘Thanks anyway, Father Charlie, but I’d rather have things like that on my own head.’”
Above all, there was a letter from Theodore E. McCarrick, the archbishop of Newark. Robert possessed “a true respect for his neighbor and an unwillingness to cause pain,” he wrote, and expressed the hope that the court would find his letter of recommendation helpful.
McCarrick was a heavy gun. It wasn’t often that a judge received a letter from such a high dignitary as an archbishop. Bell was impressed. “When I receive letters from a person of that stature,” he announced at the bail hearing, “I do give them consideration. It’s hard for me to believe that an archbishop may not know what he’s talking about.”
Litman, princely in a European-tailored suit, leaned back in his chair, a small smile playing about his lips. He had packed his side of the courtroom with friends and relatives of Robert’s, including a priest in full clerical garb and, for ethnic balance, two dark-skinned young men who had known Robert in the Greys. The priest was Monsignor Leonard, who had taught him religion when he’d been in the second grade. Litman had personally supervised the monsignor’s seating, placing him in a front row alongside one of the black youths, and he had proposed to Bell that if he granted bail the kindly-looking priest would make himself personally responsible for Robert’s future court appearances. Bell seemed interested in the idea.
Fairstein was ardently opposed to it. As far as she was concerned, Robert was bad news. She’d been checking into his background, and she’d discovered he’d been a longtime drug user and petty thief. She’d also discovered that the police file on the burglaries he’d committed with David Fillyaw was still open—and that since his having been booked and fingerprinted for killing Jennifer, sufficient evidence to indict him for the burglaries had turned up. One of his fingerprints matched a print that had been lifted at one of the buglarized apartments. “Robert Chambers is a thug and a murderer,” she declared. And she said that she strongly suspected that many of the letter-writers didn’t know Robert well, or hadn’t town him since he was a boy.
Bell listened to her arguments. But he kept coming back to the archbishop’s letter. “Of course, we all can make mistakes,” he said, musing over the document. “When letters like this one from the archbishop come in, you read and you say, ‘Does he really know the man he’s writing about?’”
“Your Honor,” Fairstein called out. “I’d like to ask the archbishop the same question.”
Bell told her he’d give her until Monday. But, he said, “As of this moment, I’m inclined to grant bail.”
Fairstein wanted to fly out of the courtroom to get to the archbishop before Litman did. But her progress down the crowded aisle was impeded by her rapier-like high heels, and for a moment she cursed the vanity that had made her wear them. Remembered how her father, whom she had adored above all men until his death the year before, used to tease her about her footgear and tell her, “Linda, sometimes I think you’ve got more shoes than you’ve got brains.” But she put the memory out of her mind and pushed her way forward. And in what seemed like only seconds she was at her desk and on the phone. “May I speak to the archbishop?” she was saying to a secretary at the archdiocese in Newark.
“He’s in a meeting,” the secretary said.
“Can you get him out of the meeting?” Fairstein asked. “It’s important.”
“I’ll try.” The secretary put the phone on hold and disappeared. Two minutes later she was back on the wire. “I can’t find him,” she said.
Fairstein was annoyed. “I thought you said he was at a meeting.”
“He is,” the secretary replied testily. “But it’s somewhere in this building, and I don’t know where.”
Fairstein didn’t hear from the archbishop until several hours later, and then only in a message. The archbishop knew about Robert’s drug use and the burglary charges, the message said, and his position hadn’t changed.
Litman got to him first, Fairstein was sure. She was descendent.
Still, she kept after the archbishop, called him first thing the next morning and insisted on speaking with him in person. She got him. He told her that he hadn’t seen Robert in three or four years, except for the day of his installation in July.
Just as she’d suspected. “At your installation?” she asked. “When there were hundreds of other people around?”
“Yes,” said the archbishop. But he still refused to withdraw his support of Robert and his statement that the boy had “a true respect for his neighbor.”
It was a difficult weekend for Bell. On Monday he would have to deliver a decision about Robert’s bail, and he knew that whichever way he ruled he risked making himself vastly unpopular. The eyes of the city were upon the Chambers case. On Sunday he sought strength from God, going to the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on 132nd Street in Harlem where he always worshipped and where for many years he had been a trustee. He went upstairs to the gallery where he always sat. It had been in the gallery of a Methodist church in Philadelphia that the idea of the African Methodist Church had been born over a hundred and fifty years ago. The founder, Richard Allen, had helped renovate the church in Philadelphia, but when the work was done and he came to services, an usher made him leave the church proper and go upstairs. He did, but even in the balcony they wouldn’t let a black man worship. As soon as he knelt down, another usher told him he couldn’t pray there. It didn’t matter that he’d built the gallery they were in. Allen had left the white men’s Methodist church and in a little blacksmith’s shop had started the A.M.E.C.
Perhaps it was to commemorate Allen that Bell always chose to sit in the gallery. Or perhaps it was just because, as he told worshippers who asked him why he bothered climbing the stairs, “Upstairs is where religion is.” Whatever the reason, he was sitting in his familiar upstairs pew when the minister, an old friend of his, told the congregation in a booming voice, “When you come to the altar this morning, I want you to mention someone’s name in your prayers. He’s a very religious man. He comes from a deeply religious family. He’s got trouble a
nd needs your prayers.”
Bell hook his head. Poor man. Who was he? And what were his troubles? Then suddenly the minister boomed, “The man is Howard Bell. How many of you know his name?”
Two-thirds of the congregants’ hands went up.
“Don’t worry,” the minister said. “Nothing’s happened to him. He hasn’t done anything bad. But he’s involved in a very difficult case, and he has some hard decisions to make. I want you all to pray for him.”
That night Bell called the minister to thank him for the prayers.
“I hope I didn’t embarrass you, Howard,” the minister said. “I don’t know why I did that, except that I woke up in the middle of the night last night thinking about you, and I just wanted to pray for you.”
Bell reassured him. “It was fine. Who doesn’t need prayers?”
There were prayers for Robert that weekend, too. On the East Side of Manhattan a Catholic charismatic church at which Phyllis had sometimes worshipped held a candlelight vigil, and across the river the pastor of the nondenominational Brooklyn Tabernacle Church directed his congregation to beseech God to help Robert. The pastor had read about Robert in the papers, where he often learned about people who needed God’s help. And he’d said to himself, Let’s pray for this young boy in trouble. We have a lot of young people in our congregation.
On Monday morning, over Fairstein’s continued objections, Bell granted Robert bail, setting the sum at $150,000 and making his second-grade religion teacher responsible for his court appearances. “Monsignor Leonard must know where you are at all times,” he said. “You must report to him.”
Litman jumped to his feet. “The bail is too high,” he began arguing. “I’m not even sure the family can come up with it.”
Jack Dorrian visited Phyllis at her apartment the next afternoon. He found her crying. “I don’t have enough money,” she said. “For the bail.”