A Case of Redemption
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Authors: Adam Mitzner
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For my wife, Susan
Gonna stop you when you sing,
gonna give it til you scream;
don't like what you said,
gonna go A-Rod on your head.
âL
EGALLY
D
EAD,
“A-R
OD
”
F
ROM THE SONG
“A-R
OD
,”
LYRICS AND MUSIC BY
L
EGALLY
D
EAD
(
REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM
C
APITAL
P
UNISHMENT
R
ECORDS,
I
NC., ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
)
“W
here should I start?”
This is what my clients would say, back when I had clients. And they'd say it with the utmost sincerity, as if they truly didn't know how to explain the circumstances that gave rise to their seeking out a criminal defense lawyer who charged a thousand bucks an hour.
It wasn't that they didn't know when the facts concerning the crime began, but they wanted to emphasize that there was a context, a preface to all that followed. By telling me they didn't know where to start, they were indicating that something came before they crossed the line into criminal conduct, and that was important, too.
So, where should
I
start?
Everything in my lifeâthe one I have nowâstarts at the same point. Nearly two years ago, my wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. I've learned it's best to just come out with it like that. No amount of prefacing prepares people for the shock, and so I say it straightaway. I also tell them that the other driver was drunk, because if I don't, they invariably ask how it happened. And to cut off the next question, I volunteer that he also died at the scene. I keep to myself that the driver's death is but small solace, because it was instantaneous, which means that the son of a bitch didn't suffer.
Shortly after, I calculated how many minutes I'd been alive up to the exact moment of the accident. I used the calculator on my phone to go from the 1,440 minutes in a day to 43,200 in a thirty-day month, and then to the 525,600 in a nonâleap year. My forty-one
years, three months, four days, six hours, and twenty-nine minutes meant that I'd been alive for 21,699,749 minutes at the time of the accident, and up until that point nearly everything in my life had gone exactly according to plan. I'd gotten good grades, which led to acceptance at an Ivy League college, then a top-ten law school, a coveted judicial clerkship, employment at a top-tier law firm, and then the Holy Grail of partnership. My wife was beautiful and whip smart, and my daughter was, in a word, perfect.
And then, in the 21,699,749th minute, my life was shattered. Broken so utterly that it was impossible to know what it had even looked like intact.
That is the context, although obviously not all of it. Suffice it to say, when I met Legally Dead, the up-and-coming hip-hop artist accused of murdering his pop-star girlfriend, I was legally dead, too, and looking for someone or something to put life back into me.
T
he siren felt like it was inside my brain. My first thought was that it must be the vestige of a nightmare. That's how I normally wake up these days, in a cold sweat. But then I felt the aftereffects of at least two drinks too many. My tongue felt coated, my throat hoarse, and my eyes drier than both. And seeing that I'm not usually hungover in my dreams, I concluded that I must be conscious, although perhaps just barely.
The god-awful sound wailed through my head again. It was only then that I realized it was the ringer on my phone. I must have at some point changed it to the horrible all-hands-on-deck emergency sound. I wouldn't have answered it at all, but I desperately did not want to hear that shrillness again.
“Hello,” I croaked.
“You sound like you were hit by a truck,” said a woman's voice.
“Who's this?”
“It's Nina.” Then, after a slight pause, “I was calling to say that I'll be there in fifteen minutes, but it sounds like you might need more time than that.”
“Nina?”
She laughed, a soft lilting sound that struck a chord of recognition.
“Rich's sister,” she said, just as I recalled it myself. “We talked last night at the party. I told you that I'd be coming by your place today at nine.”
I squinted over at the clock on the cable box. Eight forty-five.
“I'm sorry,” I muttered. “I didn'tâ”
She laughed again. “No apology necessary. You're doing me the favor.”
Favor? It felt like trying to reconstruct a dream. Shards of recollection were out there, but I couldn't pull them together in any type of coherent way.
Neither of us said anything for a moment, and then, as if she had just gotten the punch line of a joke, she laughed for a third time. “You don't remember anything from last night, do you?”
That was not entirely true. I recalled showing up at Rich and Deb's annual Christmas party in jeans and a sweatshirt, unshaven, while everyone else was dressed to the nines. I didn't care about looking more or less like an aging hipster, however. I hadn't wanted to go at all, much preferring to spend the evening as I did most nights, in the company of my closest confidant these days, Mr. Johnnie Walker. But Deb had been Sarah's closest friend since middle school, and that gave her a sense of familial entitlement to invoke Sarah's will, claiming that my deceased wife would be very disappointed in me if I didn't attend her best friend's annual Christmas party.
So, there was that.
And I remembered meeting Nina. Although what we'd discussed was still a mystery, a clear image of what she was wearing came into viewâa low-cut, sparkly silver cocktail dress, three-inch pumps that brought her to eye level, and a pendant hanging midway through her deep cleavage. But, let's be honest, even a dead man would have remembered that.
“Rich warned me that this might be the case,” Nina said, sounding somewhat amused by my hangover. “Last night you agreed to come with me to visit with Legally Dead. He's being held at Rikers.”
I didn't have the faintest recollection of even discussing Legally Dead, much less agreeing to visit him in prison. But at least now I knew the what. Unfortunately, the why was still a mystery.
I was tempted to just ask herâafter all, she said I was doing her the favor here. But I decided the better course was not to let on how little I remembered from the previous evening, just in case something I'd said or done was too far over the line.
So I offered her the most noncommittal-sounding “Okay” known to man.
“Jesus, you really don't remember, do you? How much did you drink last night, anyway?”
There's no good answer to that question, and so I said nothing.
In the voice you'd use to talk to a second grader, she said, “Okay, let's review. I'm a third-year associate at Martin Quinn. We do work for Capital Punishment Records. That's Legally Dead's label. With me so far?”
“Yes,” I said, trying not to sound either annoyed or embarrassed, although both emotions were coursing through me.
“Good. So, at one of the team meetings, I heard that Legally Dead wanted to switch counsel, and that he wanted the guy who represented Darrius Macy. That would be you. Remember, I told you that story about how Legally Dead first said, âGet me the dude who represented O.J.' And when he was told that Johnnie Cochran had been dead for about ten years, he said, âThen get me that guy who got Darrius Macy off.'Â ”
I had no recollection of that story at all. Fortunately, Nina didn't wait for me to acknowledge my alcohol-induced amnesia before continuing.
“Steven Weitzen, he's the big hitter in the litigation group at Martin Quinn, called over to Taylor Beckett, and someone there told him that you'd left the firm and that you weren't practicing anymore. End of story, right? But I knew that you were Rich and Deb's friend and I'd see you at their party. At first you were trying to make excuses, everything from thinking he must be guilty to you, and here I quote, not being a lawyer anymore, but I explained, rather persuasively, I thought, about how there was no evidence against him and how this
is mainly a racial thing. White pop princess, black rapper. And you agreed.”
And I agreed?
I must have drunk even more than I thought. Even as far removed from life as I'd been lately, I still wasn't in deep enough to believe that Legally Dead's arrest for murdering the pop star known by the one-name moniker of Roxanne was mainly a racial thing. All you needed to do was turn on a radio for fifteen minutes and you'd hear “A-Rod”âa song written and performed by Legally Dead in which he rapped about beating a singer to death with a baseball bat. Coincidence of coincidences, that was precisely how Roxanne was murdered.
I'd never declined taking on a client before because he was guilty. In fact, in my previous life, I would have jumped at the opportunity to insert myself into a high-profile case without a moment's hesitation. Now, however, I saw a million reasons to decline.
“Listen, Nina, I'm really flattered, but I can't even think about taking on something like this . . . I'm . . .”
I didn't finish the thought. There were so many words that might have completed the sentence that I found it hard to pick just one: depressed, suffering, in pain, mourning, and how about just plain old drunk a lot of the time.
“I'm not having the same conversation we had last night all over again,” Nina said forcefully. “I heard all your reasons then, and after you heard mine, you said you'd come with me today. That, my friend, is known in the law as a binding contract, and I'm holding you to it. Besides, as I told you last night, and as I'm sure you don't remember today, I've met with Legally Dead a couple of times already. He's a very sweet guy, and I absolutely believe him when he says that he's innocent.”