Where Nobody Dies (7 page)

I turned and went back into the pen. “Derrick,” I called softly through the bars, “what's your friend Ralph's nickname on the street?”

A puzzled frown accompanied the answer. “Speed,” Derrick replied promptly.

“Oh, he's a druggie,” I said innocently, “he does amphetamines.”

Derrick snorted, “He ain't do no drugs. He be called Speed on 'count he
fast.”

“He's fast.” I pretended to think about it. “You mean, he spots the gold, he snatches the gold, he runs with the gold—that kind of fast?”

I could picture it. The victim startled and a little alarmed by Derrick's coal-black bulk looming in front of her, then Speed's cardsharp-quick hands reaching for the gold cross, then running with the prize. It wasn't the Olympic version of “going for the gold,” but what the hell, everyone who entered won something. We Buy Gold/
Compramos Oro
stores had sprung up like mushrooms in the ghetto; no one seemed to care that the gold chains they bought were invariably missing a few links.

“I ain't the one took the gold,” Derrick persisted, his eyes wide with innocence. “I asked the lady for a cigarette. I ain't even touch her chain.”

I sighed and walked back to the pen door. I wanted to make sure Flaherty was still in the courtroom, and I needed time to think out a strategy. Part GP1 was the last place to cop a plea before indictment; it was Derrick Sinclair's only hope of avoiding jail.

“Judge Cornelius,” Judge Diadona was saying in a tone of weary exasperation, “may he be watching us from heaven, put this man on probation. But your client, Mr. Flaherty, has an atrocious sense of direction. He did not manage to find his way to Adams Street, to speak to his probation officer, once in the entire period of his probation. Can you explain that counselor?”

“My client tells me, Your Honor, that he had every intention of keeping his appointments but never received a letter to go to probation. A simple mixup, Your Honor,” Pat shrugged, flashing a winning Irish smile.

“Perhaps the Probation Department
was
at fault,” Judge Diadona agreed with suspicious affability. “Perhaps they
did
run out of engraved invitations.” I closed the door on another laugh from the front row.

I marched back to the cage and called to the eight prisoners, “Okay, who wants to play ‘People's Court'?”

“Hey, I seen that on TV,” one kid cried delightedly.

“What we gotta do?” another asked, his voice wary.

“Just listen up,” I answered, going into my spiel. “Two dudes are walking down the street. One dude's name is Speed. The other dude stops a lady and asks her for a cigarette. Speed goes behind the lady, grabs the chain, and runs. The other guy just happens to knock the lady down. Now the question before this jury is: Did the first dude know that Speed was going to grab the chain, or did it come as a big surprise to him?”

One kid snorted, “Huh, you shittin' me, lady?”

“'Course he knew,” his friend agreed.

“What he
there
for, man,” a tall kid with a pencil mustache exclaimed. “He the block.”

“They be robbin' together,” a dark man with sleepy methadone eyes pronounced. “They trying to get paid.”

“What they offerin' you, boy?” A West Indian lilt cut into the babble. The middle-aged man with the gray-flecked dreadlocks hadn't joined my impromptu jury, but he now shared his opinion with Derrick, who stood, eyes bulging. “Whatever it is, you'd better think serious. You'd better pay heed to what your lawyer says.” He fixed me with a sardonic grin. “She's one smart lady.”

I bowed and smiled. “Thank you, sir” I replied, matching his courtliness. “
That
was a jury of your peers,” I explained to Derrick, “
not
a jury like the one you'll actually see if you go to trial.
Those
people will be white, middle-aged, and scared to death of people who look like you. Now—what happened?”

“Me and my crimee,” Derrick mumbled, “we rip the lady chain off. I block her, he snatch her.”

Back in the courtroom, Pat's client was speaking for himself.

“I done turned my life around, Your Honor,” he pleaded, his voice breaking. “I got a good woman now and a son I got to stay straight for.” I felt a surge of sympathy, in spite of my better judgment.

“Don't you think that would be more impressive, Mr. Flaherty,” Judge Diadona asked in dulcet tones, “if your client had not been arrested for assaulting the mother of his child?”

When all else fails, change your lawyer. Rule number one in the skell survival manual. Flaherty's client announced in ringing tones that he wanted a new lawyer; Pat had never visited him at Riker's Island. Judge Diadona defended Pat's skill (the only time a defense lawyer hears anything good about himself from the bench is when his client wants to dump him), but to no avail. Finally, Flaherty himself asked to be relieved, a look of weary resignation on his bearded face.

It was a confession of defeat. Exhausted and pained, Flaherty walked over and plopped his bulk next to me on the front bench.

“The very skelly are different from you and me,” he sighed, as the judge announced a fifteen-minute recess.

“‘Skells will break your heart,'” I replied, quoting the words Flaherty himself had used to me when I was a rookie Legal Aid lawyer learning the ropes from the old master. In those naive days, I'd used the word
skell
to refer to anyone behind bars. Now I knew better. Now I knew the term was reserved for the utterly conscienceless, the sociopaths, the users.

Another sigh, this one longer and tireder. “What you've got,” I said, trying another arrow from Flaherty's own quiver, “is the four-thirty I've-been-kicked-in-the-balls-again blues. By tomorrow,” I went on brightly, “you won't even remember your client's name.” As I talked to Pat, I felt a surge of warmth run through me. Since leaving the easy camaraderie of the Legal Aid Society nine months before, heart-to-heart talks with people who understood what I did for a living had been few and far between. It felt good to share the frustration again.

Flaherty turned hurt blue eyes on me. “Do you know how many phone calls I made for that guy? How many drug programs I begged before I found one that would take him? How much schmoozing I did with Probation before they'd agree to give him one more chance?”

“Pat, that skell used up every coupon in life's book of chances years ago.”

“Yeah,” the agreement came reluctantly, a near-grunt. We sat in silence, Pat obviously brooding, me trying to figure a way to introduce the name Aida Valentin into the conversation.

Finally, Pat spoke. “‘Mother may I?'” he said. “That's the skell's-eye view of life. You want probation—just say ‘Mother may I?' You want a drug program—‘Mother may I?' Don't worry about the fact that you don't mean a word you're saying. Hell, these guys don't even know what words like ‘sorry' and ‘love' mean! Did you see”—Pat's blue eyes burned with anger—“the way that slime tried to use his own kid to get himself out of jail? A kid he probably never sees and certainly never supported, by the way. But he knows that the rest of the world—the ducks, the suckers—think kids are special, so when he's in a bind, he bleats ‘my kid, my kid' and hopes he pushes someone's sympathy button.” Pat, one of the world's great fathers, was clearly outraged.

“I just represented a kid,” I said, pointing to the pen door, “who sees other people solely as sources of revenue. ‘If it moves, grab its gold chain' sums up his view of life. But that's skells,” I pointed out. “If they think you're sincere about having any values higher than self-interest, they see you as a fool, someone they can manipulate.”

“Speaking of manipulation”—the blue eyes were suddenly shrewd—“what is it you want to talk to me about?”

I opened my mouth to protest, then realized denial would only make things worse. “The court officers?”

Pat nodded. “Hank told me you'd put your case off three times, waiting for me to come down for mine. So—what's up?”

“It's about an old client of yours,” I began, looking around to see whether anyone was listening. Fortunately the lawyers who'd been sitting in the front now all had clients to talk to before the judge returned. Even so, I lowered my voice. “Aida Valentin Lucenti.”

Pat shook his head. “She wasn't my client,” he said. “I knew her, though. She was the co-defendant when I represented Nilda Vargas.” The name rang a bell. Then I remembered I'd seen it on Aida's rap sheet. Flaherty continued, “But you don't want to hear about her. What's going on with Aida?”

I told him. I did better than that. Slipping my hand into my leather briefcase, I pulled out the slender packet that held Aida's criminal record and the reports from the drug program. I pointed to the box where Aida had clearly printed Pat's name as the person who'd referred her to the program.

“So even if you weren't her lawyer,” I concluded, “you had some impact on her life, seeing to it she got off drugs.”

There was a funny look on Pat's face as he looked at the badly Xeroxed application form. “I don't remember talking to Aida about her addiction,” he said slowly. “Don't get me wrong—she was a nice kid and I'd have liked to see her get straight, but my memory is that she'd already flunked out of NACC. That,” he explained, “was the old Rockefeller program.”

I nodded; it took a scorecard to keep up with New York's ever-changing drug laws. The program Pat was talking about had been the fullest flowering of rehabilitation theory. When it failed, as it was programmed to do, Draconian measures replaced programs.

“Besides,” Pat went on, “we were in the South Bronx. Why would I recommend a program in Brooklyn? How would I even know a program in Brooklyn?”

“Are you saying she lied when she put your name down?”

He shook his head. “I really can't remember. Maybe I gave her a list of programs and she picked that one. It was a long time ago.”

“What about the rest of the stuff?” I gestured at the faded reports and evaluations from Phoenix House.

“The history's right,” he said. “The stuff about her coming to New York from Puerto Rico with her junkie boyfriend. I saw him in court a couple of times and she admitted to her lawyer that she stole and tricked to keep them both in drugs.”

“It's so hard to believe,” I said. “She seems so together now.”

“‘The Beautiful Aida,'” Pat said wryly, quoting her press nickname. “She's come a long way baby, that's for sure.”

“And it started here.” I tapped the reports. “When she first came to the program, they sent for her school records. She'd been classified as borderline retarded, yet once she got off drugs, she finished her secretarial course at the top of her class.”

Pat shook his head. “It happens a lot,” he explained, “kids underevaluated due to language and cultural barriers. Not to mention the effects of drugs. You can't test too well if you're high all the time.”

“This bothered me,” I said, pointing to an early report. “The social worker claimed Aida wasn't honest with her about her drug use or her criminal record. I was hoping you could help me figure out which is true—what they said or what Aida said.”

“Sorry,” Pat replied. “But a lot of junkies are into denial about the extent of drug use. She did well in the program later, didn't she?”

“Well?” I laughed. “She was the star. She kicked the habit and went straight as though her life depended on it. I guess in a way it did. Everything she became later she owed to that drug program.”

“You want to know something?” Pat demanded, his eyes intent. “This isn't a total shock, Aida's being blackmailed.”

“You mean you knew …”

“I knew something was wrong,” Pat replied, his humorous Irish face troubled, “when I saw her at a fundraiser this fall. I've been active in the Brooklyn Independent Democrats for a few months now,” he explained. I nodded, and Pat went on. “So when I saw Art and Aida at this party, I went over to say hi. Just a friendly gesture from a Park Slope poll-watcher. Or so I thought. But Aida looked at me as though she'd seen a ghost, to coin a phrase, and the next thing I knew she and Art were saying a very hasty good-bye and the word went around that she had a migraine headache.”

“And you think you were the headache?”

“What else could I think? Especially if she was being blackmailed about her past and there I was, a living reminder of the old days in the Bronx. Not,” he added with a sad smile, “that I'd have been so crude as to bring that up to her. But I guess Aida's a little short on trust these days.”

While we both brooded about that, Judge Diadona retook the bench. “The Nilda business,” Pat murmured as if to himself. “That wouldn't do her any good either. Even if it
was
a long time ago.”

I heard the name Derrick Sinclair. “Later,” I whispered, then marched up to the bench to do battle. By the time I'd worked out a plea, Pat was gone.

I went from one Irishman to another. Matt Riordan was Flaherty's opposite in almost every way. Where Pat was genial, red-haired, and generous, Riordan was a driven Black Irishman who'd clawed his way to the top of the dirtiest and most dangerous segment of criminal practice. More than one of his clients had been fished out of the East River.

I caught him on a break in the trial of a court clerk accused of taking bribes. As usual in Riordan's cases, press people filled the first two rows.

I hopped up on one of the window ledges, crossing my legs. Fixing Matt with a look that I hoped would tell him I meant business, I began to talk about Ira Bellfield.

Matt shook his head. “The guy could be desperate,” he said. “Word on the street is that a secret grand jury is investigating him. He's had one too many fires, and some of the tenants' groups in his buildings have gotten a lot of ink lately. Those tapes of yours could be just the clincher the DA needs.”