Where Nobody Dies (5 page)

“I told you,” Terrell's voice was high with anger and denial, “I ain't
takin
' no flea bargain. What you think my grandmother payin' you for? Huh?” He snorted his contempt, rising from his chair with a gesture of finality. “What kind of lawyer you be, makin' me plead guilty for somethin' I ain't did?” He slammed his way back to the iron door, banged on it, and shouted to be let back in. “I'm
fin
ished with this here lawyer,” he announced in ringing tones.

I gathered up my things and followed him. As I walked the length of the room, I met amused or commiserating glances from all the lawyers who'd been in my shoes and contemptuous stares from the other defendants, convinced I was trying to sell Terrell out. That guantlet was a minor one compared to the one I passed after I got into the pen area. I had to avert my eyes in case someone was taking a leak, and I had to ignore the obscene shouts and whistles that followed me down the corridor. I breathed a sigh of relief as I got to the other side of the clanging doors, and wondered how the corrections officers stood it. For eight hours a day, they were as much prisoners as the men they guarded.

Terrell's grandmother waited patiently in the hall, holding the brown paper bag full of clothes she knew full well she wouldn't be permitted to give him. She brought it every time, a symbol of her caring.

“How is he, Miz Jameson?” she asked. “How they treatin' my boy back there?”

“He seems fine, Ms. Hopkins,” I answered. I wanted to tell her the truth, that the best thing she could do for Terrell was to lessen her fierce belief in him, to allow him to face the reality of his guilt and cut the best deal he could get. But I had the uneasy feeling that her faith in him was the only thing Terrell had, the only rock in a stormy sea, and that he couldn't bear to let it go even if it meant seven extra years in prison.

I looked into Ms. Hopkins's eyes, their hopeful luster dimmed not a bit by the cloudy cataracts through which she saw the world. No, I decided, let Terrell tell her the truth himself. If he could. As to the fee, I decided it could wait.

I went from Terrell Hopkins to Tito Fernandez. Where Terrell had only one person who cared for him, Tito had a whole corridor full of supporters, slapping his back, poking him, laughing with him. They all wore their colors, against my legal advice. I really think a gang member would rather go naked in January than appear without the jacket that proclaims his affiliation.

They called themselves the Unknown Homicides. Like other gangs, they stuck together out of a need for community and protection in a harsh urban world. They needed both more than most kids do. They were deaf.

I walked up and greeted him with a smile and the one sign I knew—the two-finger salute that meant “Hi.” The official sign-language interpreter wasn't there yet, but Frankie, who was only partially deaf, offered to translate for me.

“How's it going, Tito?” I addressed my client, a kid of eighteen whose Colombian parents had had enough trouble learning English, let alone taking on Ameslan. They could communicate with their son only in the most rudimentary fashion. As soon as he met the Homicides, Tito had left his family and moved into the semi-abandoned building they called home.

Unfortunately, sombody'd lit a fire in the tumbledown building, starting with Tito's mattress, and the cops had arrested him on the complaint of the super, a hostile type who objected to the “dummies” taking over his building and who claimed Tito and another gang member had threatened to burn down the building earlier in the week.

I'd talked to the guys many times about the day of the fire, but I'd always had the feeling, born of ten years in the system, that they were holding something back. I knew I'd better find out what it was before the trial.

I turned to Frankie. “Tito says he was with three other guys in Julio's room, right?” Frankie signed and Tito nodded; his hands started rapid movement, his mouth miming words. Frankie turned back to me and said in the dull monotone of the deaf, “Tito says he was with Julio, Marco, and Randy.” Here he pointed to a tall black kid with cornrows. Unlike most gangs, the Homicides were integrated. Deafness was the only entrance requirement.

“What were they doing there?” I faced Tito as I spoke, even though I knew his lip-reading ability to be nil. “And I don't want any bullshit!” I said, pointing and scowling as I spoke. “I want the truth!” I punctuated my words with a forceful gesture, then turned to Frankie and repeated it. Whenever I talked to Tito, I found myself using exaggerated gestures and facial expressions to make up for the lack of words. I felt like a silent-movie actress.

Tito and Frankie signed back and forth and finally both turned to Ray, the leader. Ray stared at me with the impassivity I had come to expect from him. He was in his mid-twenties and had an acne-scarred face. He made a living selling cards printed in the sign-language alphabet on the subway. I asked Frankie to explain that if I was going to help Tito out of this jam, I was going to need the truth. While I spoke to Frankie, I deliberately locked eyes with Ray. He stared back coolly. He was a born leader, Ray, and I couldn't help but wonder what he could have been had he been born rich or hearing, or both.

After Frankie finished relaying my message, he looked at me with a steady, appraising glance. I willed myself not to blink. Finally he nodded, a single nod that sent all the fingers in the group flying as the Unknown Homicides proceeded to breach the wall of silence and tell me what had really happened.

“We was in Julio's room,” Frankie translated. “We was gettin' high.”

I nodded. I had expected something like this. “Tito was helpin' Marco find a vein,” Frankie went on, pointing to a skinny, curly-haired kid of about fifteen. “He got skinny arms, and we was pokin' him to get the vein to pop.” Frankie illustrated as he spoke, pointing to his own arm, pulling the tourniquet, searching for the vein. “Then Randy smell smoke.” Frankie lifted his head and made a sniffing motion. It was such perfect mime, I could almost smell smoke in the courthouse corridor. “We didn't think nothin',” Frankie went on, making a brush-off motion, “but then it got stronger and we all run out.” Tito was acting it out now, using his whole body to show how he ran downstairs, opened his apartment door and then recoiled from the flames.

“Stop!” I held up a hand. “Ask him why he went to his room. Why not straight outside?”

Signs flew. “He wanted to get his stuff out,” Frankie explained. “But there was too much fire.” His hands encompassed a conflagration.

The rest I knew. The super, perpetually angry at the Homicides' invasion, had told the police the boys had lit matches in front of his face. In his view, this had been their way of announcing their plans for the building. This the gang emphatically denied.

“So if you guys didn't do it, who did?” I asked, although I already knew the answer. Their answer. According to them, any rival gang, any Hearing gang, could and would have done it. “They always down on us for bein' deaf,” Frankie said in his eerie voice, pointing to his ears. “We always gettin' crap from Hearing,” added a plump black kid, whose huge earphones almost but not quite put him in the Hearing world.

Some wonderful defense, I thought as I signed the case in on the clerk's sheet and walked toward the front row of the courtroom. Gang vengeance by an unknown gang for an unknown reason. And my kids no angels in spite of their handicaps. The Homicides might not have lived up to their name, but there were burglars, shoplifters, and drug addicts among them, just as there were among the Hearing.

I needed a postponement. This case just wasn't ready for a jury, not if I wanted to win. I found myself wishing Linda's help had paid off. When I'd first picked up the case, I'd asked her how to go about locating the building's owner to see whether the fire might not have made him a profit. She'd given me advice from her days in a real-estate office, and I'd done my share of sending letters and subpoenas. None of it had borne fruit; the fire had been minor and no big insurance payoff had been made. It was just one more fire in a neighborhood gradually being destroyed by arson.

Still, I felt as though there were things I should know and didn't. Plus I had to see the building, something I'd been unable to arrange due to a heavy trial schedule. When I asked for the adjournment, Judge Kaplan gave me her Dragon Lady smile and asked, “What's the matter, Counselor, afraid to take this case to a jury?”

“Of course,” I answered. “Any lawyer who's not afraid to hold a kid's life in her hands is someone I don't even want to know. Especially,” I added with a smile, “when the case isn't ready. I'm owed a few things by the DA's office and there are subpoenaed items that haven't come in yet.”

Over the prosecution's strenuous objection, I got my adjournment, as well as the fire marshal's report I'd been waiting for. One week in which to work a miracle.

The only person less thrilled by the delay than ADA Bergen was Tito Fernandez. Angrily gesturing, the Homicides demanded to know why they couldn't have the trial today and “get it over with.” I tried to explain that “getting it over with” was not the first objective of a good defense lawyer, but they walked away disgusted. There are few things in life less rewarding than addressing the retreating back of a deaf person, but I did it anway. “For guys who don't trust Hearing,” I muttered, “you're pretty anxious to put Tito's fate in the hands of a Hearing jury.”

As the gang passed through the metal detectors, I saw Tito turn toward me. The one-finger sign he flashed me needed no translation.

4

As I surveyed the rack of brightly colored size-four dresses that hung in Linda Ritchie's closet, I recalled some lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Give away her gowns

Give away her shoes

She has no more use

For her fragrant gowns
.

I couldn't remember the middle, so I jumped straight to the end: “‘Sweep her narrow shoes/from the closet floor,'” I recited to myself.

It seemed too soon. Linda wasn't even in the ground yet. But I had to admit Marcy was right. Dawn needed her school clothes and tennis things, and there was no reason some charity shouldn't put Linda's wardrobe to good use. And of course there was the fact that I needed the rental income from the top-floor apartment. I would have had to find a new tenant anyway, I reflected, once Linda had made her move to Washington. With that, plus the extra office I'd been trying to sublet, I was beginning to feel like a real landlord.

I looked around, trying to decide where to start. The cops had left things pretty much as they were, which meant a mess. The blood had been cleaned up as well as possible, and there was a film of dusting powder on tables and windowsills. The place had definitely been tossed. Brad looking for proof of an affair, the police had thought. Whoever had done it hadn't found what he came for. I didn't know at first where that certainty came from, only that the impression was strong and instinctive. Then I remembered the “safe.” Linda and I had joked about it when she'd first moved in. Brownstone houses with working fireplaces cost more than I could afford; the fireplaces in my building had elaborate mantels under which were ornate gratings, meant to look like real hearths. Behind the grating on each floor was an empty hole just large enough to use as a hiding place. Whatever Linda had hidden—if anything at all—would be there.

I went to the fireplace, pulled back the grating, and found a manila envelope crammed with papers. I took it out, walked over to the window seat and sat looking at it. It was an ethical dilemma.

I finally decided that the contents of the envelope were part of Linda's estate and that I should, as Marcy's lawyer, open it. And besides, I was curious as hell.

I hadn't liked Linda Ritchie. After reading the contents of the envelope, I knew why. She'd been moonlighting as a blackmailer.

The papers were well-organized, held together with giant paper clips. One clip per blackmail victim, plus a bankbook with regular entries—all deposits.

First victim: Ira Bellfield. It was no longer a secret how Linda had gotten the job in his real-estate office. Right on top was a Xerox copy of Norma Bellfield's file card showing that she'd been treated at the Safe Haven, the same battered women's shelter Linda had sought refuge in. Ira Bellfield was a wife-beater.

Linda hadn't wasted time once she started work. She'd learned everything she could about Ira's business, and what she'd learned hadn't been too savory. I began to see why Jack Newfield had named Bellfield as one of his Ten Worst Landlords. Linda had lists of his buildings showing apartments to be burglarized, fires to be set—all to encourage recalcitrant tenants to leave so the building could be flipped to a new owner at a profit. There were tapes wrapped in yellow legal paper and bound with a rubber band. I left Linda's apartment, went downstairs to my office, and put one of Linda's tapes in my cassette player. Then I pushed the button for “play.”

“This fuckin' coffee's gonna kill me,” a voice on the tape said.

“You think you got troubles,” a higher-pitched voice answered. “I gotta eat dinner again when I get home or my wife's gonna think I been out screwin' some broad.”

The conversation wasn't moving; I pressed “fast forward.”

“I want that guy whacked,” the high-pitched voice ordered. “He's been giving me nothing but trouble, him and that fucking tenants' association.”

“You want a fire or what?” The tone was bored, as though the men were discussing plumbing supplies. “I mean,” he went on, “we done a lot of fires over there, Ira. We maybe oughta try a new tack.”

“You let me worry about that,” came the answer. The high-pitched voice carried more authority than I would have thought possible. “We got coverage on the fires—and I'm not talking Mutual of Omaha.” He laughed, a snigger that went with the voice. “But what the hell, maybe you're right. Maybe we could just hurt the guy. Not even kill, give him a break. Hurt him for life.” His voice grew intrigued with the possibilities. “A fuckin' vegetable,” he concluded.