Sly Fox: A Dani Fox Novel (28 page)

“I’ll be damned,” O’Brien said, breaking into a smile. “This should be a cakewalk against a putz like Dominic.”

The next morning, Gonzales was brought to the Westchester courthouse for the first of numerous court appearances and I got to lay my eyes on him for the first time. I half expected him to look like a Hollywood gangster. In the movies evil people look evil. But the Carlos Gonzales who strutted into court was a handsome, articulate, well-groomed, physically fit, middle-aged man with a charming dimple in his chin and a quick smile. He came across as a confident businessman, and I could tell from his cocky attitude that he wasn’t worried about his daughter’s accusations—nor was he afraid of me.

In the coming weeks, O’Brien and I worked furiously to prepare Carmen and our other witnesses. We wanted our case to be airtight. Even though Carmen was a teenager, she was amazingly poised. The only witness who made us nervous was Yolanda Torres. When I first met her, Torres reeked of alcohol and the first question out of her mouth was whether I was going to pay her for testifying and for letting Carmen and her brother stay in her apartment.

As we got closer and closer to a trial date, I began feeling a funny vibe. Dominic wasn’t filing the sort of pretrial motions that defense lawyers generally filed; in fact, he wasn’t really doing anything to help his client. There were no endless motions seeking delays, no requests for a change of venue because of pretrial publicity, and when O’Brien checked the jail logs, he discovered that Dominic was not even visiting his client. Something was up.

I became even more suspicious when Dominic didn’t make any effort to contact me about a possible plea deal. Even for a lawyer as inept as Dominic, this was simply weird.

Three days before the trial, my suspicions proved true.

During what was supposed to be a routine hearing, Dominic suddenly announced that he was withdrawing as the lead defense attorney. As I watched in disbelief, Neal Kent, a well-known defense attorney from the Manhattan firm of Hart, Hammerman and Kent, approached the court and announced that he would defend Gonzales.

Kent was one of the best criminal defense attorneys in New York.
New York
magazine also had identified him as one of the city’s most eligible bachelors. He had an impeccable legal background, having graduated from Columbia University Law School and gone directly to work in the New York County District Attorney’s Office. After handling a series of sensational prosecutions, Kent had jumped sides by becoming a defense attorney. His clientele came exclusively from Wall Street and Park Avenue. If a trophy wife was accused of murdering her elderly rich husband, Kent got a call. If an investment banker got drunk in the Hamptons and drove his Lincoln into a local kid riding a bicycle, killing him, Kent got a call.

The stakes in the Gonzales case suddenly were raised. Rather than facing a pushover, I would now be going against one of Manhattan’s shrewdest attorneys.

This was no longer a “cakewalk.”

31

I felt a butterfly rush when the trial of Carlos Gonzales finally began. On the morning when I was scheduled to give my opening statement, I arrived several hours early and went to sit alone in the courtroom. I wanted to practice without anyone hearing me. I imagined what it would be like in a few hours, the drama and the horror that would unfold in that courtroom.

This was where I had always wanted to be.

I looked at where the judge would be seated. The words In God We Trust were etched on the wall. The judge would be seated behind a raised desk, known as the bench, made of highly polished rosewood. The New York State and County of Westchester flags were on the left of the judge’s chair. Old Glory was hanging, slightly higher, from a pole on the right. The Great Seal of New York was bolted on the wall directly behind the bench. Its dark blue seal had a shield in its center being supported on each side by a female. One of the women was Liberty and her left foot was firmly planted on a gold crown, a symbolic act that showed New Yorkers had freed themselves from British rule. The other woman was Justice, a symbol of impartiality and fairness. Her eyes were covered with a blindfold and she held a sword in one hand and a scale in the other. Beneath the two women’s feet was a white slash with the state motto:
Excelsior
, Latin for Ever Upward.

As I gazed at the great seal, I felt a sense of irony and destiny. Liberty and Justice were both represented in the courtroom by women. Yet there was not a single woman judge in the entire courthouse. Not one, and I was the only woman prosecutor trying cases. Good enough for display on the great seal, but not yet equal for an actual courtroom.

The witness stand was next to the bench and there were desks for the court clerk and court reporter directly in front of it. The jury box was on the judge’s left.

A waist-high barrier called “the bar” divided the room into two parts. The spectators sat in the gallery. The other side was where the judge, court officials, jurors, the prosecution, the defense, and the accused were seated. This was known as “the well.” It was extremely disrespectful for anyone who was not a court employee to “traverse the well” without the judge’s permission. What that meant was that you were not allowed to walk around the well and especially not permitted to approach the judge without being invited. The judge and court officials entered directly into the well through a separate door. The jurors entered through a completely different door near the jury box. And the attorneys came into the courtroom along with everyone else through a door that led into the gallery. The term “passing the bar” literally meant that the attorneys had to pass through the bar to enter the well and do business before the judge.

The prosecutor’s table faced the judge and was closest to the jury box on my right. The defense sat to my left. I walked to the podium where I would be delivering my statement, took a deep breath, and began reciting it. I had memorized it the night before. When I finished, I took a deep breath and left the room. I was ready for combat.

At precisely nine a.m., the bailiff Ronald Maselli announced in a booming voice that the County Court for the County of Westchester for the State of New York was now in session with the Honorable Sheldon Williams presiding. Everyone rose from the room’s hard wooden benches. His honor entered wearing a heavy black robe.

My mom was sitting directly behind me in the gallery, having come to watch her daughter’s first big trial. I spotted Will Harris among a cadre of news reporters seated on the benches. Because of the notoriety of the trial, the bailiff had held a lottery for the other seats. Courthouses attract an odd menagerie. I’d spotted two regulars who’d won coveted seats. One was a middle-aged gentleman dressed elegantly in a white linen suit. In court, he could be seen taking copious notes, and when he had first appeared, a rumor spread through the building that he was a famed New York writer doing research for a new book. But he wasn’t and no one had a clue why he was such a prodigious notetaker. The other regular was known simply as the “knitting lady.” She would sit in court with a bag of yarn and nickel-plated knitting needles. While keeping her eyes focused on the real-life melodrama unfolding before her, her fingers would furiously twist, spinning out untold numbers of brightly colored sweaters and scarves.

I’d sequestered Carmen and my other witnesses down the hallway from the courtroom.

“Please be seated,” Bailiff Maselli declared after Judge Williams had entered and plopped into his chair. Williams had not looked at any of us, but had instead immediately gone to work on a stack of official-looking papers that his court clerk had carefully left on the bench before he’d entered. With a fountain pen, he began signing them. Out of the corner of his mouth, he said, “Representing the People of the State of New York is Assistant District Attorney Dani Fox.” That was my cue to stand and face the gallery, as was the custom in New York. I immediately heard several whispers. Spectators were both unaccustomed and surprised to see a woman prosecutor. Without looking up, Judge Williams said, “Representing the defendant is Mr. Neal Kent.” The handsome Kent stood and turned to face the spectators.

The court clerk read the charges against Gonzales, and after she finished, Judge Williams finally took his nose out of his papers and asked, “Miss Fox, are the People ready?”

Rising to my feet, I replied, “The People are ready.” I walked to the podium that faced the jury box. I was wearing one of my new conservative pinstriped navy suits and had my hair pulled back. I had chosen the black pumps that accentuated my legs and made me appear taller and more imposing. Or at least I thought so.

Although Gonzales was in jail facing drug-trafficking charges, he appeared before jurors dressed in a tailored three-piece suit and crisp white shirt. I was not permitted to tell jurors anything about the U.S. Attorney’s pending charges because that would have unfairly prejudiced the defendant. The only crime that mattered was the one for which Gonzales was on trial. For all they knew, the accused was a churchgoing, apple-pie-eating, naturalized citizen who had come here to claim his piece of the American dream.

My job was to crack that facade and expose him as the monster he was.

“It is my obligation to make an opening statement to you. I welcome the opportunity to describe for you what facts the People intend to elicit in this case. An opening statement is like the table of contents of a book. The state uses it to outline the substance of the case in its skeletal form. The actual pages of this book will be written by the various witnesses who take the stand and testify and by the exhibits which are introduced into evidence.”

I paused to catch my breath and then continued. “There are many kinds of betrayal. A citizen can betray his country. A husband can betray his marriage vows by committing adultery. A businessman can defraud his partners. A friend can lie to a friend. But there is no betrayal as ugly, cruel, and vicious as a father raping his daughter. That is the ultimate betrayal. The defendant in this case, Carlos Gonzales, sexually abused his daughter beginning at the tender age of fourteen for his own perverse sexual pleasure. The evidence will show that he routinely and regularly beat her with his belt until her skin was broken and bleeding. Then he raped and sodomized her. He did not do this once, or twice, or even three times. It became a sadistic nightly ritual, an exercise in cruelty.”

I turned and looked directly at Gonzales. I wanted the jurors to realize that I was not afraid to accuse him directly to his face. “You will hear evidence that
this man
degraded his daughter in ways that even animals don’t do. After he’d raped her, after he’d beaten her with his belt until she was bleeding, lacking even strength to scream, he showed her no mercy. Remember that when you are reviewing the evidence during your deliberations, when the defense is asking you for mercy.”

Having finished, I walked back to my chair and got a thumbs-up from my beaming mom.

Neal Kent looked every bit like the successful Manhattan lawyer that he was when he addressed the jurors. Clean shaven, naturally blond, he came across as a patriarch in a thousand-dollar Italian suit and five-hundred-dollar shoes. Like me, he did not refer to a single note.

“My client,” Kent declared in a confident voice, “doesn’t want your compassion. What he wants is justice. What he wants is for you to know that he did not sexually abuse his daughter as the state has charged. He is not a rapist. He did not whip her. He is a good father. A respected businessman, a self-made man who came to our country with nothing, worked hard, and made something of his life.”

He hesitated for dramatic purposes and then said in a sad voice, “I’m sure you are asking yourselves, well, if Mr. Gonzales is innocent, why he is charged with these horrific crimes—offenses that I am now telling you that he did not commit?” Kent glanced over at me and then returned his gaze to the jury. “The prosecution just told you that this trial is about betrayal. Ms. Fox is right. It is about betrayal. Only it is not Carlos Gonzales who betrayed his daughter Carmen. It is his daughter who is betraying his love, his devotion, and the years and years that he fed, clothed, supported, and loved her. William Shakespeare said more than three hundred years ago in
King Lear
, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’ Carlos Gonzales is the victim of a serpent here. His own daughter. We will show that Mr. Gonzales was the victim of a failed extortion attempt. This is not a case of incest and rape. It is a sad tale about revenge, greed, and a psychologically impaired teenager who needs professional mental help.”