by Chris Knopf
“Not according to Ross. Everything I say is funny to him.”
I heard her sigh, but she pressed on.
“There’s good news. In context, at least. Burton’s already agreed to post bail. Could be a million-dollar bond, maybe less if we get lucky with the judge. The prosecutor’s likely to try for remand, which your voluntary surrender will undermine. Which is why I worked it out with Ross, who doesn’t want a little homicide charge to get in the way of common courtesy. So I think I can keep you out of jail while they prepare the indictment.”
I turned toward her.
“I didn’t want Burton to do that.”
“I know. That’s why I worked it out in advance. It’s a fait accompli. My advice, as your lawyer, is to shut up and take it, and take a moment to thank God that one of the few people in the world you haven’t alienated is Burton Lewis.”
I went back to looking at the bay. Jackie kept talking.
“You still have to go in tomorrow to get processed. Early, so there’s time for them to check for priors and get your prints up to Albany and back, and still have the arraignment later in the day. If everyone stays with the plan you’ll never see any jail time and we’ll be able to hunker down on the case.”
“I’ve got stuff to do for Frank.”
“And you’ve got to help me save your damn life. Whether you think it’s worth saving or not.”
“Christ, Jackie. Quit the theatrics.”
She jumped out of her chair and shoved herself into me, her face crammed up next to mine. It was the second time in recent memory that a good-looking woman did that. Jackie didn’t smell as nice as Amanda. She did, however, yell as loudly.
“You think you’ve had trouble in your life, Sam? You don’t know trouble. This is trouble. Trouble that can get you locked away for the rest of your life, good as dead. I knew you were going to make this difficult. Like it’s all up to you to decide every goddamned thing. You’re such a fucking …”
I put my hands on her shoulders and gently pushed her back from my face. Then I kissed her on the forehead.
“I’m glad you’re my lawyer, Jackie,” I said to her. “I knew I’d need you some day. That’s why I gave you that buck. A big investment for me. I’m completely in your hands, and I’ll do anything you want me to do.”
She continued to fume, more out of suspicion than anger. Now that I had her face far enough away to get in focus, I was even more impressed with her plastic surgery. I’d seen that same face seconds after it had been ripped apart, so I felt entitled to savor the outcome. Even when she was yelling at me.
“Okay,” she said, slowly, “first tell me you didn’t do it.”
I heard myself snort.
“Impeach my moral credibility, but don’t insult my intelligence.”
“Why am I doing that?”
I let her go and dropped back into my reading chair next to the woodstove.
“I could care less about Robbie Milhouser. Of all the people I might want to knock off, he wouldn’t even be on the list. And if for some crazy reason that changed, I wouldn’t smash him over the head with one of my own tools. And even if that happened, through some inexplicable circumstance, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to just heave it out onto the beach. Come on, Jackie, you know that.”
“So, you’re proposing the intellectual arrogance defense. Excellent. Juries love that. Even more than judges.”
“The point isn’t arrogance. It’s ridiculousness.”
“For a smart guy, you don’t know much about criminal law. All that matters is the physical evidence, and the witnesses, and whatever past behavior is admissible. And determined cops and prosecutors, which you have aplenty in this case. It’s way not enough to just say, ‘Hell, if I was going to kill that guy I’d have been a lot smarter about how I did it.’”
“Have some more wine. It’s a sin to cork a bottle that good.”
She huffed her way into the kitchen, giving me a moment to think without distractions.
“Let’s back up,” I said, when she came back with a full glass. “Let’s assume they prove with the bar code that the stapler was sold to me. It probably was, since I bought one that looked like it when I was doing my addition. That’s why it has my fingerprints on it. And why I can’t find the one I bought.”
“You looked?”
“The day I saw Sullivan carrying it around in an evidence bag. He asked me if it looked familiar, which it did. It wasn’t in the toolbox in my trunk, or in my shed, or my shop, the only three places it would normally be.”
“All normally locked up?” she asked.
“Normally, but not always. And I don’t keep close track of a tool like that. Hardly ever use it. Could have lost it anytime between now and last fall.”
“Yours were the only prints on it.”
“Really. Interesting.”
“Especially to the DA. That and the footprints.”
“Of course there were footprints. I was over there. Lots of times.”
She made another sound of exasperation, like the deflating of a big balloon. I interrupted whatever she was about to say.
“That big idiot’s job was right on my jogging route. I watched the whole sorry spectacle. Occasionally I’d run up there after the crews were gone to get a closer look. Never once did I bring along a hammer stapler.”
“We’ll mark that down with ‘I’m too smart to get caught.’”
“Too smart to do it in the first place. Important distinction.”
“What else did you tell Ross?” she asked me, suddenly concerned.
“I didn’t tell him anything. He wasn’t exactly interrogating me. I don’t know what he was doing. Some weird version of cat and mouse.”
“Don’t underestimate Ross Semple. That wackadoodle act is at least fifty percent that. An act.”
“I never underestimate English majors. The allusions alone are enough to bring you to your knees.”
She pointed her finger at me, which she’d been doing a lot lately.
“I said this was serious.”
“No, it’s not. It’s kindergarten. It’s reductio ad absurdum. None of it matters,” I said.
“Don’t get all nihilistic on me.”
“That’s not what I mean. What matters isn’t all this ludicrous evidence. It’s that it exists at all. And that everything points right at me. That’s the staggering significance of the whole thing.”
“Why so staggering?”
“Because I didn’t do it.”
She started to point at me again, then thought better of it. “I was an English major, too,” she said. “But I can’t allude for shit.”
“If it live in your memory, begin at this line: let me see, let me see.”
“New rules. No jokes, no poetry.”
After that I avoided the topic at hand so hard I tired her out. The expensive pinot helped. Jackie always was a cheap date. Either way, I got her out of my house without pissing her off or turning her sentimental, always a delicate balance.
She told me it was crucial to get an arraignment in the early afternoon. So I had to be dressed and in a civil mood by six-thirty the next morning so we could go over to Hampton Bays and get me properly entered into the criminal justice system, or in my case, renew an old acquaintance.
So I dressed as promised. In a suit and tie, for good measure. The civility of my mood was the greater question. Especially if you accepted Jackie’s rendition of the subsequent proceedings.
SIX
“I CAN’T FUCKING BELIEVE that fucking Veckstrom. And you,” said Jackie, swatting my shoulder with the back of her hand. “You do know he’s one of the people officially in charge of ruining your life?”
I didn’t answer right away, which failed to shut her up, more the pity. I was trying to avoid all conversation until I got a cigarette lit and a decent cup of coffee from the diner down on Montauk Highway. I’d been at the Hampton Bays Police HQ on several occasions, but remembered it to be longer on amenities. T
his gave weight to the theory that murder suspects receive a different standard of hospitality than casual drop-ins.
When we walked into the squad room that morning, composed in our shroud of surrender, Jackie stopped suddenly, grabbed my arm and pulled me back.
“That’s Lionel Veckstrom,” she hissed in my ear. “He’s assigned to your case. You do not talk to him.”
Veckstrom was a slender, pretty-faced guy deeper into his forties than the dye in his hair would want you to think. He stood at the door of Ross’s office with his shoulders sloped forward, sculpting a shell where his chest should have been. As we approached, I had an urge to grip him by the neck and straighten out his posture, though Ross would have likely shot me before my hand could wrinkle the guy’s suit jacket. A very expensive jacket with a perfectly coordinated handkerchief and tie. His glasses were the thinnest horn-rims I’d ever seen. When he talked to Ross he waved a ballpoint pen made of burled wood that he gripped like a pointer. I noticed his nails were more nicely manicured than Amanda’s.
“We’re here on a voluntary basis,” said Jackie as we closed in. “No interrogation. Just the usual print ’em, shoot ’em, plead ’em and release ’em.”
“I like the shoot ’em part,” said Veckstrom, offering Jackie his hand.
She shook it, I’m sure with a grip Veckstrom felt the next day.
“Ross, we need to move to processing immediately,” she said.
“I agree,” said Veckstrom. “Shouldn’t encourage violent behavior.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jackie asked.
“Your client is well known to engage in brawls. Like the one with Robbie Milhouser the night of April fifth in front of a restaurant on Main Street in Southampton.”
“You’re planning to characterize what your own police report describes as a man slipping on a curb, and then accidentally hitting his head on the front of a parked vehicle, as a brawl? Interesting.”
“Witnesses claim otherwise.”
“After the fact. No mention of it in the report. Revisionist history.”
“You want us to believe that a former professional boxer threw not one single punch in the midst of a street fight?”
“If you call that a street fight, better steer clear of the real thing,” I said.
“Oh, experienced in that, are we?” asked Veckstrom. Before I could answer back, Jackie kicked me in the shins, right out where everyone could see.
“What did I tell you?” she said.
“He addressed me,” said Veckstrom to Ross, obviously for the record.
“Don’t address him,” Jackie said to me. “Ross, we process right now or we start talking police misconduct.”
“Go ahead,” said Veckstrom. “It’s not going to change the fact that Acquillo had motive, malice and means. Confirmed by forensics and eyewitnesses.”
“The witnesses are the victim’s asshole buddies at a street fight that didn’t happen and one half-blind old lady,” said Jackie, warming to the taunt, “who thinks she saw somebody who looks like Sam running at night.”
“Twenty-twenty with her glasses on. Which in fact doesn’t matter. Your client has already admitted to jogging past the murder scene.”
“But never at night,” said Jackie.
“His memory could be faulty.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my memory,” I told him. “For example, I remember hearing you’re an asshole.”
Veckstrom smiled at me, but not endearingly.
“We’ve stipulated that Sam runs on Bay Edge Drive,” said Jackie, reaching for my arm again, but missing. “But hadn’t been in the vicinity of the Milhouser project for at least a week.”
“At least a week?” asked Veckstrom. “Do you mean seven days or five, or twenty? Or do you mean a single day?”
Ross picked that moment to light up the cigarette I wasn’t allowed to have. Cheap psychological torture. So I spoke to him.
“Somebody tell this dickhead that a week is seven days. At least a week means seven days, plus a couple more. How many’s up for grabs. I’ll let you pick a number.”
This time Jackie got a good grip on the sleeve of my jacket and yanked me down the hall toward the room where you got photographed and fingerprinted and filled out forms. The administrative cops who handled this stuff were friendly and chatty, not unlike nurses who took your blood pressure or gave you a cup to piss in. We didn’t see Veckstrom after that, which I was glad for. Too hard a load on the Zen mantras of patience and forbearance.
——
As the coffee from the diner soaked in I started to hear what Jackie was saying from the Grand Prix’s front passenger seat, which to be fair was pretty far away.
Ross was in a patrol car escorting us to the arraignment at the Town courts in Southampton Village. I’d offered to bring out some of the same coffee for them as well, but they demurred. A wise choice.
“My experience in criminal defense amounts to about a half dozen cases, only one of which had any substance,” said Jackie, referring to her defense of Roy Battiston, “but even I know sometimes police officers, especially hard-ons like Lionel Veckstrom, use overt antagonism as an investigative technique to provoke idiot suspects into incriminating themselves. Easy to do with a hothead whose lack of self-control likely got him in the situation in the first place. Wouldn’t work with everybody. Not your well-educated corporate executive types. Cool as a cucumber, those guys.”
“It’s hard to be cool with a tie on. Squeezes all the blood out of my brain.”
“Then loosen that top button. Because if you pull that shit in front of the judge I swear to God I’ll plead you guilty and leave you there and go work for clients who actually deserve to be saved.”
“I’ll be cool. As well as nattily turned out.”
“No. You’ll be silent. Neutral. No looks, no noises, not one tiny little peep.”
“Okay, but my stomach’s been growling all morning. This shitty coffee doesn’t help.”
I burped to prove my point.
“Unbelievable.”
——
The arraignment was an interesting theatrical performance. Jackie’s role was righteous defender of civil liberties. Deferential, while exuding confidence that the issue at hand would be easily and promptly resolved as soon as the wise and distinguished judge had a chance to merely glance at the ludicrous proposition the prosecutor was peddling as a pathetic excuse for a case. The Assistant District Attorney equaled Jackie’s confidence, but was more sparing in her commentary, as if patiently indulging Jackie’s childish flights of fancy.
Any of the third-graders sitting in the back of the courtroom, victims of a civics lesson gone terribly wrong, could see the judge was playing along with various fictions created by people for whom he had little or no professional regard.
The ADA was a tall young woman with translucent skin like Jackie’s, though with none of the ruddy blush or seditious fields of freckles. In fact, her flesh tone was so uniform it looked applied with a spray gun. Her blonde hair was thin, longer than it would be ten years from now and securely restrained behind a hedge of hairpins that pulled the edge of her scalp tight against her skull. Her legs, on the other hand, were very nice, and she filled her light blue suit the way fashion magazines wanted every woman to think she could.
The only time she looked over at me I winked at her. She instantly flicked her eyes back to the judge.
My timing probably wasn’t all that good because that’s when she entered a charge of second-degree murder.
“Your honor,” she said, “Mr. Acquillo clearly went to Mr. Milhouser’s work site with the intention of causing him bodily harm. Transporting to the scene a construction tool that could be easily adapted to lethal purpose.”
Jackie jumped in there with a flurry of counterarguments. The judge listened as if he was trying to read The Daily News on a subway while Jackie blared a boom box. All I remember of the exchange was the prosecutor’s riposte.
“The People are willing to concede to Ms. Swaitkowski’s assertions if she can prove that a hammer stapler is common accoutrement among joggers plying the sand roads of North Sea,” she said, the word “accoutrement” spoken in what I fancied to be perfect Parisian French.
After that the judge cut Jackie off mid-sentence and ruled that they could hold me over for trial. Then the discussion shifted to the prosecution claiming I was poised to zip off to Brazil immediately following the proceedings, countered by Jackie’s rather poignant description of my voluntary surrender, my reduced financial circumstances, my devotion to my daughter in the City—which I wished Allison was in the audience to hear—and other proofs of my general compliance, incompetence and ineptitude, which rendered flight from prosecution not only unlikely, but sadly impossible.
The kicker to Jackie’s argument was that Burton Lewis, a towering figure in the legal profession of New York State, was standing by with his checkbook and personal assurance that I’d show up for all scheduled appointments with the court.
I must have been the ADA’s only case that day, because she quickly packed up her stuff and left the courtroom as soon as the judge passed down the weary opinion that he was happy to hold Burton’s million bucks in lieu of providing room and board to another worthless miscreant.
Jackie was also eager to get out of there, so we got to follow the leggy blonde up the long aisle. As we walked along, Jackie saw where I was looking and gave me another hard smack on the arm.
“Un-goddamn-believable,” she said.
——
After we left the parking lot Jackie wanted to talk about the evidence against me, examining in detail the content and style of the prosecutor’s delivery. I tried to pay attention, but all I really wanted to do was have a cigarette and feel the wind blasting in through the yawning window of the Grand Prix.