Never Goodbye

by Adam Mitzner

  “Who?”

  “Richie . . . he had this job when I was an ADA.”

  “When was that?”

  “I left about nine months ago.”

  “I’ve only been working here for three, so I don’t know.”

  He hands me a blue visitor’s decal with the number eight circled. Everyone refers to the DA’s domain simply as the Eighth Floor. It’s the DA equivalent of the Oval Office.

  “Please affix it to your outer clothing,” he says, then points to where the elevators are located.

  I get a similar pang of familiarity when the elevator doors open to let someone off on the seventh floor, my old stomping grounds. I crane my neck to see if there’s anyone loitering in the halls whom I might know, but then the doors shut again. A few seconds later, they part at my destination.

  McKenney greets me at the threshold to his office. Although the DA’s work space lacks the panoramic view that my father’s boasts, as well as the museum-quality art, it’s no less a kingdom. There is certainly no shortage of places to sit—four guest chairs opposite his desk, twelve others around a conference table, two sofas and three armchairs. The walls are covered with photographs of Drake McKenney and A-listers from politics and the arts. Everyone from President Trump to Jay-Z is represented in the pantheon of famous people who have shaken Drake McKenney’s hand.

  McKenney arranges himself behind his desk, then directs me to occupy a chair opposite it by pointing. When we’re both situated, he gets down to business.

  “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” he says.

  I suspect he doesn’t have the first clue as to what I’ve been doing with my life since I left the office. Like everyone in the legal community, he knows my father. Like everyone in the English-speaking world, he knows about Charlotte’s murder. I don’t flatter myself into thinking that he’s given me a second thought in the last nine months. More to the point, I doubt he gave any thought to me at all even during the years I worked for him.

  “Not every day the District Attorney asks to speak to you.”

  “Your circumstances are going to become even rarer in a moment,” he says. “People sit where you are every day and ask me for a favor of one type or another. But today, you’re going to receive such a request, because I have a favor to ask of you. And like they’re always telling me, I wouldn’t be asking if it weren’t important.”

  For years, I thought about my career path at the office. And now, after I’ve given up on being a lawyer altogether, the promotion I long dreamed about is at hand. Talk about irony.

  “I’m all ears, Mr. McKenney.”

  “Please, call me Drake.”

  “Drake.”

  “The reason I’ve asked you to come down here is that, quite frankly, when Lauren was murdered, I made a mistake allowing Dana Goodwin to handle the investigation.”

  One thing that everyone knows about Drake McKenney is that he never admits a mistake. Any failure is always someone’s else fault. Of course, it would be hard to find a scapegoat regarding his decision to put Lauren’s murderer in charge of the investigation to find her murderer. Up until a second ago, I wouldn’t have put it past McKenney to try, though. That’s why I don’t expect his mea culpa to go beyond these walls.

  “What I should have done was go outside the office and appoint a special prosecutor to handle it,” he explains. “At the time, I thought it was more important that we keep it within our family here, but . . . well, I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.”

  It takes me a moment to realize how dramatically I’ve misinterpreted his call. Thirty seconds ago, I was sure I was about to become the bureau chief of Special Vics. But Drake McKenney isn’t offering me that job. Instead, he wants me to prosecute Dana Goodwin.

  McKenney goes on to tell me that he’s selected me because I’m the finest non-Manhattan DA out there, but I’m not so naïve as to buy what he’s selling. He’s bowing to political pressure to do this by the book. But I’ve been granted this assignment for one reason, and one reason only: McKenney still wants to control the situation. Even though the whole point of a special prosecutor should be to wrest that oversight from him, he figures that, as long as he can dangle a potential bureau chief spot before me, I can be counted on to do his bidding. It’s a win-win for him. He gets to say that he appointed someone independent to prosecute the case, and yet he’ll still be manipulating the strings. It’s the exact same thinking that caused him to select Dana to partner with Gabriel, but now I’m the one playing the part of his puppet.

  “Can I have some time to think about it?”

  “Of course. I realize that this will be a big-time commitment and a lot of pressure. Media attention, that sort of thing. So you should give it some thought.”

  He smiles the way I’ve seen him do at rallies. A politician’s smile.

  “Let me leave you with this, Ella. And I realize that I run the risk of seeming heavy-handed, but I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t truly believe it.” He pauses for dramatic affect. “I’m quite certain that it would make Lauren happy to know you’re the one who’s going to bring her killer to justice.”

  36.

  DANA GOODWIN

  I’d stayed away from the news and social media since my release, but it would have taken immersion in an isolation chamber for me to completely block out my case. It’s everywhere: tabloid headlines, cable news shows, Twitter. From every window of our house, I can see the reporters continuing their vigil. I know that even more will await me when I arrive at LeMarcus Burrows’s office.

  For that very reason, LeMarcus offered to meet me off-site. I declined, recognizing that being stalked is my new reality and it’s better to face it than to hide. LeMarcus coached me on how to act as I made my way into his building—look straight ahead, smile but not like I’m enjoying myself, don’t run but don’t dawdle either.

  An hour later, I traverse the press gauntlet in front of LeMarcus’s building. Reporters shout out questions that they couldn’t have expected me to answer.

  “Did you kill Lauren Wright?”

  “Were you in love with her?”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  It takes all my self-control not to run away, but I walk straight ahead into the building. Not too fast or too slow, with a half smile front and center.

  The nondescript midtown high-rise that houses the law offices of LeMarcus Burrows and Associates is one of the many buildings in this city that is more than forty floors tall, but it was built without a household-name anchor tenant or owner, so it has no descriptor. Unlike, say, the Chrysler Building or the Seagram Building, or anything called Trump.

  I take the elevator to the twenty-fourth floor. When the doors open, a sign points to the left. At the end of the corridor are glass doors with the firm’s name in large, gold letters.

  In my prior life, I never visited defense attorneys. It was a point of principle in the DA’s office that defense lawyers traveled to see us, not the other way around.

  The firm’s name also graces the entry wall, this time in silver letters each about half a foot high. Beneath them is an African American man sitting behind what appears to be an antique desk. He’s immaculately dressed in a gray, three-piece tweed suit, his tie held in place with a shiny silver tie bar. He looks like he could otherwise be a lawyer, but for the fact that he’s in the position occupied by the firm’s receptionist.

  “LeMarcus is on a conference call with a court right now, so he asked me to bring you back to the conference room,” the man says without introducing himself.

  The room he leads me to is small, with a large picture window providing a view of another building’s twenty-fourth floor across the street. The table has only six chairs, which is three times as many as we’ll need for this meeting. In the center is a single banker’s box. The side label reads: “The People of the State of New York v. Dana L. Goodwin.”

  I sit alone, staring at the box, afraid to open it as if inside lurks something dead
ly, like a poisonous snake that only LeMarcus should handle. After five minutes of me staring at it like Pandora, the door swings open and LeMarcus rushes in. He’s also wearing a three-piece suit. I wonder if it’s a coincidence or part of the uniform at the firm.

  Although LeMarcus and I were friendly when we served together as young ADAs, we weren’t the kind of friends who stayed in touch after his goodbye dinner. I’d seen him through the years, sometimes as an adversary, more often at functions honoring some judge or a fellow colleague. During those meetings we were always cordial, suggesting that we should get lunch or dinner and catch up, but neither of us ever extended an actual invitation. It was the relationship I had with nearly everyone I worked with—until Lauren.

  “I’m so glad that the bail’s all worked out,” he says while taking the seat across from me. “This will be so much easier now than if you were still inside.”

  “Yeah, I like living at home more than sharing a cell at Rikers too.”

  He nods at my joke, but it apparently only merits a thin smile. I take LeMarcus’s demeanor to suggest that he’s not going to get more attached to me than any other accused murderer who pays him to set them free.

  “I’m going to get right to it,” he says, “if that’s okay with you.”

  “Please do. I’ve read that they have Lauren’s iPhone, but is there anything else linking me to her murder?”

  “I’ll get there in a second. Before I do, I wanted to get some preliminaries out of the way. The first is to discuss the pros and cons about our pulling Judge Gold.”

  The book on Arthur Gold goes something like this. Back when I was in middle school, he was a personal-injury lawyer of limited success, which caused him to seek the pay raise the state judiciary had to offer, even though for most lawyers a judge’s salary—which amounts to less than large law firms dole out for last year’s law-school graduates—is a disincentive to taking the bench. He might not have had a chance but for the fact that he was openly gay in 1987. This endeared him to the Greenwich Village Democratic Club, and they used their growing clout to make him a judge.

  Since the first day he donned the black robe, Judge Gold has been one of the system’s outstanding jurists. One of the few—maybe the only—whom both defense lawyers and prosecutors are equally glad to appear before. Defendants take comfort in his jaundiced view of police power that only comes with having experienced discrimination firsthand, and prosecutors like that he doesn’t fall for the games defendants try to play, including endless adjournments and novel legal theories to reduce responsibility. Fair, decent, thoughtful, and smart are the usual words used to describe him.

  Gay never comes up. Not anymore, at least. Strike that. It hasn’t come up for years. But once the media hears his name rolled out of the wheel to preside over my case, I have little doubt that in some media circles he’ll be rebranded as “Gay Judge Gold.”

  “My advice is that we stick with him,” LeMarcus continues. “But I do have some reservations. I have enough respect for Judge Gold to know that he doesn’t engage in identity jurisprudence. At least not on a conscious level. But if some of that does seep in, he’s going to bend over backward to seem strict so people don’t think he’s favoring you because of the perception that you share a sexual orientation. I say that without any disrespect, but as a black man, I think I get some latitude here. Judge Gold’s years on the bench have made the fact he was the first openly gay judge at most a footnote. And he likes it that way.”

  I’d surmised this much on my own. I’d also concluded that there was very little I could do about picking my own judge. Even if LeMarcus objected to Judge Gold on the grounds he knew Lauren personally, every judge in New York County fit that bill. Maybe the chief judge of the court would assign someone from one of the outer boroughs, but that was even a bigger wild card. Besides, if we objected and Judge Gold decided to stay on despite our concerns, my fate would be in the hands of a judge who knew I didn’t want him.

  “I’ve never lost in front of him,” I say.

  “But you’ve never lost, period,” LeMarcus says, this time with a real smile. “I’m zero and two with him, but neither was a triable case.”

  Triable case is a defense-lawyer term. Most of the people who seek defense services are not only guilty, but are swimming in overwhelming evidence for conviction. A guy who sold drugs to an undercover cop, or someone that has laid out the particulars of a crime on wiretaps. For that reason, defense lawyers don’t put much stock in their overall win-loss record. Rather, the subset of how they do in triable cases is all that matters.

  A case is triable when there’s something they can tell the jury in furtherance of a not-guilty verdict. I’ve always found the term amusing because it makes clear that guilt or innocence is beside the point.

  “Is my case triable?” I ask.

  “The evidence they have is solid,” he says, looking me straight in the eye and now without any smile. “I’m not going to lie to you about that. I don’t know if it’s enough all by itself for a conviction, but it’s close. So, to answer your question, as far as I know right now, yes. You have a triable case. But that could change in a hurry. If the prosecution gets anything else—and I suspect they’re hard at work looking for it—it won’t be triable. And, as I’m sure you know, I don’t expect them to offer a plea.”

  This I do know. Limiting the damage by accepting responsibility in exchange for receiving a reduced sentence—say pleading down to manslaughter in the first degree, which carries with it a penalty of ten to thirty years—thereby leaving some possibility, however remote, that I could be out in time to see Jacob graduate from high school, is not a possibility. Not for killing an ADA. A guilty plea now and a guilty verdict after trial are going to lead to the same result: twenty-five years to life, the maximum penalty for murder in the second degree in New York. I only avoid mandatory lifetime incarceration because murdered ADAs aren’t defined as “peace officers” under the statute. Kill a cop and you’re charged with murder in the first, but an ADA only merits a second-degree murder charge. Lucky me, I guess.

  “The reason they made the arrest is because they cracked Lauren’s phone,” LeMarcus continues. “Gabriel Velasquez confirmed to me what’s in the press—that on the night Lauren was killed, you texted her asking to meet you in the park.”

  I begin to reply, but LeMarcus puts up his hand, instructing me to stop. “I should have said this before we began because it’s part of my standard spiel. I thought you might have found it patronizing, but it’s important that you not tell me anything that I haven’t asked. I don’t want you to taint me with information that makes a particular defense outside the ethical boundaries. Understood?”

  I nod that I do. He wants to leave open the possibility of presenting a defense that doesn’t conform with what actually happened. In other words, he is open to my committing perjury so long as he’s not guilty of suborning it.

  “Good. Aside from the phone, they also have evidence corroborating the affair,” LeMarcus says rather solemnly. “Gabriel didn’t tell me exactly what they had, but I’m guessing it’s surveillance footage at the hotel that captures you and Lauren together. It’s also likely that one or more hotel clerks remember you. Two women checking into a single hotel room regularly is semimemorable. Even in New York City.”

  In my head, the loop plays of what this is going to look like in court. Stuart sitting in the gallery’s first row, hearing people testify about my weekly appearances at the Best Western hotel, hand in hand with Lauren.

  “Let’s talk for a second about the gun,” LeMarcus says. “As you know, it was registered to Detective Gregory Papamichael. The good detective is no longer with us, but I’m sure they’re trying to find a connection between you and him. If they do, that’ll be another bridge we need to cross. But until they disclose what they have, I don’t want to hear anything from you about it. Papamichael was on the force a lot of years. He must have worked cases with a lot of ADAs, and so my working assumpti
on is that he never gave you a Glock Nineteen.”

  I want to affirmatively deny that Papamichael ever gifted me the gun, but I hold my tongue. In part that’s to follow my counsel’s directive not to say anything he hasn’t expressly asked me to impart, but the primary reason is that I know he’s not going to believe me. He’s probably never had a client who didn’t swear innocence, and my bet would be that every single one of them was guilty.

  “Also, they have your current phone. The one they took from you when you were arrested, but it has nothing on it that predates the murder. I know that’s because your communications with Lauren were on your prior phone, and you lost that.”

  I’m amazed LeMarcus is able to keep a straight face. I can’t even imagine the number of defendants who told me that some vital piece of evidence had been lost or conveniently stolen—guns, cars, credit cards.

  “What’s their theory of motive?” I ask.

  “They haven’t said. Can I assume from your question that there is nothing on Lauren’s phone that indicates a recent breakup, or a fight of any kind?”

  I recognize the carefulness of the wording. He doesn’t want to know if Lauren and I actually had a fight or had broken up. He only cares about whether there’s proof the prosecutor can find of either on her phone.

  “That’s right,” I say. “There won’t be anything on her phone like that.”

  “Good. That, in a nutshell, is what makes your case triable: the age-old question of why.”

  37.

  ELLA BRODEN

  I step outside McKenney’s office in a post-dreamlike state. Part of me wonders if I just imagined the entire encounter. To make it real, I call Gabriel.

  “You’ll never guess who I just met with,” I say.

  “Oprah,” he replies without hesitation.

  “Drake McKenney.”

  Gabriel doesn’t say anything back. That’s his standard MO—to stay quiet until I get to the point.