For a man like Jay Gladstone, who prided himself on his essential decency, this was an unbearable burden. Whatever acts of contrition, or self-abasement, or restitution he performed, the stain was indelible. He would pay the moral wages of that night for as long as he lived. The ghost of the life he took would be with him always and its presence a prison from which he could never escape. An image from Tolstoy visited, from an essay he had read as a young man: In a bottomless pit, he dangled from a delicate branch cantilevered over the nothingness, tongue extended toward a drop of honey that, like hope, had miraculously appeared. But his fingers lost their grip, and he tumbled into the abyss.
“What happens now?”
“We wait to hear from the DA’s office,” Doomer said.
Jay obtained Brittany Maxwell’s number and called to offer condolences. She did not pick up the phone so he left a message requesting she reach out to him if there was anything he could do. He could not weep for D’Angelo Maxwell and he could not weep for himself. The days since the accident had bled him. The only sensation he felt was the hollowness that seemed to be expanding inside him, pushing against his ribs, splitting him open and revealing not lungs, liver, and twisted intestines but only emptiness. If Jay Gladstone was a killer, then the self that Jay thought he knew no longer existed.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Christine Lupo was in her White Plains office working on a speech to be delivered at a Girl Scouts of America banquet that evening when Lou Pagano gusted in. He had been negotiating a plea bargain with the lawyer of a man who had committed wire fraud when his phone vibrated with a notification. He told the attorney he’d be right back and nearly ran down the hall to his boss’s office. The DA and her deputy were blitzed by the news. They had planned to prosecute Jay Gladstone for vehicular assault. Neither had expected the victim to die, and this would only ratchet up the already intense scrutiny on the case. Pagano asked how she intended to proceed, expecting a quick answer. To his surprise, the DA said she wanted to think about it.
He said: “What’s to think about?”
She said: “Jay Gladstone is a human being and I want to take my time with this decision. We’re not going to throw him to the wolves.”
Pagano mumbled unhappily and retreated.
Christine considered her options. To bring murder charges would cause the biggest splash but that would involve proving intent to kill. The hate crime designation was already a reach. She was surprised the whole racial angle of the case had blown up the way it had and shocked by the vilification Jay Gladstone was experiencing. She would not have predicted the public could turn on someone so viciously, but attitudes evolved, certainties became notions, firmly held opinions became I don’t know. In the social circles the DA traveled, ten years earlier gay marriage was anathema. Last summer she attended a colleague’s gay wedding. As a politician, it was her task to apprehend the mood of the public, but in the case of Jay Gladstone she had not been prescient. Accounts of the violence that had occurred at Sanitary Solutions Arena astounded her. Voters yowled for red meat. To raise the charge to murder would only add to the clamor.
Participating in marriage counseling with a licensed psychologist had heightened Christine’s self-awareness and recently she had begun to explore why, on a personal level, she chose to prosecute certain cases. How did her own psychology insinuate itself into her decision-making? As she pondered The State of New York v. Jay Gladstone, she wondered whether the antipathy she felt toward the defendant, powerful, heterosexual, white, was in some way a residue of the negative feelings she had toward Dominic Lupo. Like her husband, Gladstone was smooth, successful, and unconstrained. The urge to destroy him nearly overwhelmed her. But she recognized that perhaps this impulse had something to do with what was going on in her personal life and, further, that it made her less than impartial. This was troubling. As a public servant, she took great pride in the intellectual rigor she brought to bear on her office. She was raised in an overheated, emotional household. Married a man—she realized too late—with the disposition of an opera singer. What had attracted her to the law in the first place was the constraint it placed on passion. It was imperative to Christine’s sense of self that she not let her decision be influenced by the manner in which her marriage ran aground.
That evening Bebe came to see Jay at his apartment. He had gone there directly from Doomer’s office and had not touched food, or had anything other than water to drink. It was around nine and they were seated on a sofa in the living room. A box of macaroons Bebe had brought from the Carnegie Deli lay unopened on the coffee table. She had been there for several hours and they had barely spoken. Jay’s mind flitted from what he had done to Dag’s family to his own uncertain future to his father and how much he would have liked to hear from him now. Because Jay was not a member of a synagogue, there was no rabbi to talk to, no one who could ease his burden with pertinent servings of spiritual wisdom. What did the prophets say about those who accidentally killed someone? He would have to investigate that when his ability to concentrate returned. Perhaps he would find some comfort in scripture, although he doubted it.
Bebe asked him if she could do anything.
“There’s nothing to do,” he said. His voice was hoarse, pensive. “We had the best doctors, and it didn’t matter.”
Bebe would not allow her brother to succumb to self-pity. She reminded him of their father’s maxim: “March forth, Jay. Be a moving target. Don’t let this define you.”
“But it does, don’t you see?”
“You’re not the ogre they’re making you out to be. It was a terrible mistake, but you’re an honorable man.”
“Am I?” There was no hope in the question.
As the night wore on, he asked variations of: What can I do to atone? How does a person get past this? Will anyone ever forgive me?
The following day, Jay walked to Central Synagogue on Lexington Avenue. Absent any pressing reason to go to the office, he found himself drawn to the historic temple. He had attended weddings and bar mitzvahs there but had not been inside for several years. The ornate and exquisitely maintained Moorish Revival sanctuary was spacious and light. On the side walls, twelve two-story stained-glass windows. At the front of the room, the ark. Several people sat in pews carved from walnut and ash, deep in private meditation. No one looked up when Jay entered. He found a seat near the back and settled in, gazing straight ahead. The interior of the landmark synagogue had a timeless quality. Jay felt as if he might have slipped into the skin of an ancestor a hundred years earlier in Prague, or Warsaw, or Budapest. Although he had never particularly enjoyed attending religious services, being in a contemplative setting had a soothing effect. A wave of fatigue engulfed him and he briefly closed his eyes.
On the back of the pew in front of him was a rack that contained several prayer books. He opened one and leafed through it. After a few moments, he found what he was looking for. On the right side of the book was the Hebrew, and on the left side the English transliteration.
Quietly, Jay began to recite Kaddish for Dag.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Trey Maxwell was inconsolable. But his sadness at his brother’s passing was shot through with fury so raw it surged through his veins and took over his body. He sobbed and he trembled. The inside of his head felt like the fall of Fallujah, a forest of outstretched arms reaching to a smoke-blackened sky, shrieks, grinding engines. Trey’s mind burst with fevered images of childhood pickup games, Dag’s college recruitment, draft night (when he became an NBA lottery pick), the time Dag bailed Trey out of jail after he had mouthed off to a cop at a traffic stop in Houston and how the two of them had gone out for beers on the way home and laughed about it. They were pure brothers, straight down the line, none of this half, or step, or any other category that might have weakened the connection that had come to define Trey’s existence. He was Trey Maxwell, for sure, a straight-up baller in his own right, a fri
end and a son, but when boiled down to his essence Trey was D’Angelo Maxwell’s little brother. Imam Ibrahim Muhammad had said Dag was the mighty oak tree in whose cool shade Trey stood. The younger sibling failed to appreciate it at the time, perhaps because he recognized how true it was and did not like being reminded. But when he thought about it now, he suddenly felt as if the years had been torn away and he was flung back through time to when he was small and vulnerable, and Dag hovered in the air like a funky genie. All that was over now. Aloneness overwhelmed him, and vulnerability fueled his rage. When Lourawls put a well-meaning arm around his friend’s shoulder Trey reflexively swiped it off and tried to push him away. Trey quickly apologized. Berated himself for his reaction. Then he hugged Lourawls and held on to him for a long time as Babatunde rubbed his back and tried to comfort him.
Trey had never been called upon to arrange a funeral before but he took it upon himself to organize Dag’s. Church Scott offered to help but Trey insisted on there being no involvement from his brother’s team while Jay Gladstone owned it. Imam Ibrahim Muhammad’s proposal to preside over the service at the largest mosque in New York was briefly considered but, given that Dag was not a Muslim, Trey did not believe that to be appropriate. Instead, it was to be held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
In the three days before the funeral, Trey wandered the house in New Jersey. Lourawls and Babatunde stayed out of his way. In every room, he felt his brother’s presence. The food Dag liked to eat was in the refrigerator. His trophies and plaques lined a wall. During the intervals between the endless logistical phone calls, Trey did not have the concentration to watch television or play video games and his new spiritual calling meant that he could not smoke weed. The only place he was able to focus his attention was on the religious tracts the imam had given him. He sat in the backyard and became familiar with the idea that there is no God but God, Muhammad is his messenger, and his word is revealed in the Quran. The imam had given Trey a copy and he tried to read it but gave up after ten minutes. For the time being he decided to stick with the pamphlets. If he had questions he could go on the Internet. Unlike the Jihadi vision peddled by the western media clearly intended—according to his new teacher—to fuel the bottomless appetite for American wars in Muslim nations, Islam, as far as he could tell, was peaceful, tolerant, and inspiring. It was the quickest route to a fair and just world. In one of the pamphlets, this passage caught his eye: “The Quran says, ‘We sent aforetime our messengers with clear Signs and sent down with them the Book and the Balance that men may stand forth in Justice’ (Quran 57:25).”
That sounded right.
He brooded over the death of his brother and became obsessed with the idea of justice and whether it would be done. The court system was notoriously unpredictable. Trey believed justice was rarely impartial, especially when it came to people of color. A promising middleweight fighter named Hurricane Carter served eighteen years for murder, the Central Park Five did serious time for a gang rape. None of them were guilty. Then, there was that white bitch everyone believed killed her three-year old daughter who went free. The American jury system was a crapshoot.
Bingo Gladstone used to say he never attended the funeral of someone who was not a saint and so it was with D’Angelo Maxwell.
The service was held on a Friday morning and over one thousand people packed the cathedral. Speakers were set up on the sidewalks so the overflow crowd could hear the service. The three young men who encountered Jay at the Celtics game, and Dag on Striver’s Row in Harlem, cut their classes at Riverdale Country Day and stood across Amsterdam Avenue near the schoolteacher Gloria Alvarez. She had called in sick and was clutching the goggles Dag had worn during the eclipse like a holy relic. Church Scott and the entire roster were there. Every NBA All-Star whose team was playing on the east coast that day flew in, along with several coaches. In the front row, Brittany Maxwell and her three children, escorted by Jamal Jones. Mayor House of Newark sat with Mayor Bloomberg of New York. Alicia Keys sang “Amazing Grace” and the commissioner of the NBA gave a eulogy in which he declared D’Angelo Maxwell to be a “mensch.” Church Scott and several of Dag’s teammates shared memories. Imam Ibrahim Muhammad chose not to say anything during the service, preferring to sit in the congregation and comfort Trey. On the sidewalk afterward, he addressed the media and extolled Dag as a great humanitarian who deserved a statue in front of the new arena.
Nicole thought about going but decided against it. As much as she would have liked to pay her respects to Dag, her attendance would cause a massive distraction. She had not been feeling well for the past few days and was not sure whether to ascribe it to nervous tension or something physical. Whatever it was, she chose to hole up in the Pierre that morning.
Jay wanted to attend the service. He knew there would be many who would not welcome him yet he held that it was the moral thing to do. Bobby Tackman insisted he stay away, believing his presence might incite something similar to the riot that had broken out at Sanitary Solutions and to make sure his client obeyed watched the Internet live-stream of the service with him from the relative safety of Jay’s apartment.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Church Scott informed his players that he had received assurances from the league office that the team would be sold and so a boycott of the first playoff game was avoided. Jay instructed Tackman to issue a press release saying he intended to fight it in court but this had no effect one way or another on the team. The media treated the announcement as the pathetic raving of a deluded white man who refused to acknowledge he had lost more than a legal skirmish. According to the Internet, Jay was: “out of touch,” “schizo,” “a loser.” On Sunday afternoon, he watched from his apartment as his team (and they were his team until a court ruled otherwise) were routed by the Chicago Bulls 113-91 in Chicago.
After Dag’s death, Jay became a prisoner in his apartment, only going out for evening walks on side streets. He did not visit the synagogue again. Meals were sent up, but barely touched. Boris and Bebe visited but he did not want to talk so they played poker and gin rummy. He wondered if he would hear from Aviva but she did not call. Neither did he hear from his cousin Marat, nor from the commissioner, which meant the wily Ukrainian had decided not to stick his neck out. What a fool’s errand that had been. Jay added having beseeched Marat to the increasingly long list of behaviors he lambasted himself over. Franklin and Marcy sent a cellophane-wrapped gift basket from Zabar’s with a note that said: Your luck has to improve! Jay interpreted this as a taunt.
The nights were endless. He took sleeping pills but would wake hours before dawn and thrash from side to side oscillating between uneasy dreams and fraught wakefulness, seized by a torpor that bordered on nullity.
One night Jay thought about suicide. He had read that if you jump from a great height you lose consciousness before splattering on the sidewalk. Was the building tall enough? He could take pills and chase them with liquor, hang himself in the bathroom, slit his wrists. Then everyone would talk about how Jay Gladstone had allowed himself to be driven to suicide. No one wanted that in his obituary. Like King Kong clinging to the Empire State Building, he swatted at these thoughts as if they were dive-bombing airplanes and one after another batted them away. Jay could never take his own life because it would represent an admission of defeat foreign to his constitution, a weakness of character he was congenitally unable to admit he suffered. Whatever happened, he would persevere because, like Martin Luther King, Jay believed that the arc of the universe bent toward justice. He thought about how Dr. King had inspired him as a young man, how brave the civil rights leader had been in the face of adversity, the famous Letter From Birmingham Jail—Jail! That wrenched his mind back to the possibility of prison, and what awaited him there, and so the night staggered on.
Before dawn he climbed out of bed and stared down at the empty streets. The alienation from the city he had undergone as a result of the trials visited upon hi
m was intolerable, an exile he did not know if he could endure. But the Gladstones were survivors. This lesson was imparted by Bingo from the time Jay was a child and it was in his bones. Because of this, Jay believed he was unbreakable.
March forth.
On Monday morning Herman Doomer called.
“They’re going to charge you with murder.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
This information would have sent him reeling a week earlier but Jay had steeled himself, and he recovered quickly. He asked what it meant on a practical level.
“It’s a negotiating tactic,” Doomer said. He informed Jay that he had arranged for the two of them to meet with the district attorney in person that afternoon.
Jay put on a suit and tie and examined himself in the mirror. Other than the dark circles under his eyes, he looked surprisingly unbowed. The misery diet had already caused five pounds to disappear, and the contours of his face were less curved. Although the whites of his eyes were still striated with red, the facial swelling had gone down. He threw his head back, thrust his chin out. He was accustomed to charming public officials to get what he wanted.
Doomer arrived in a Volvo sedan and Jay got into the passenger seat. As they cruised uptown, Doomer informed him that the DA had wanted to revoke bail (based on his foreign holdings, they deemed Jay a flight risk), but the lawyer, citing openness to a plea deal, had successfully argued against that. Doomer had been bargaining with the DA’s office all morning and gotten them to agree to a reduction in charges if Jay would accept a plea.
“Do you think I should?”
The Hazards of Good Fortune Page 52