Chris looked at the judge, then back at me. Nobody was ever in a hurry to plead guilty. The defendants were usually a step behind at arraignment, except for the old pros, the lifetime-achievement-award winners who were in and out of the system all the time. I cupped a hand over Chris's ear and whispered:
"You have to plead guilty to get the deal. Otherwise you have to plead not
guilty, and then we go from there."
Chris considered this, then looked back at the judge and nodded.
"You have to say the words," Judge Davis said. "Is it your
intention to plead guilty?"
"Yes," Chris said. "I plead guilty."
"And is that because you are, in fact, guilty?"
Chris nodded again, then caught himself. "Yes," he said, adding tentatively,
"Your Honor."
And it was all over but the paperwork. Once the judge had accepted the plea and the bailiff was calling the next case, Chris turned to me.
"What happens next?"
"What happens next is you leave this building, get yourself a nice
meal, and go sleep in your own bed. You've got to pay a processing fine but it
can wait, and they will contact you directly about the outpatient meetings. The
most important thing for you to keep in mind is that this whole deal blows up if
you get busted again—for anything—in the next year. The state will be able to
just tear this up and charge you all over again. You understand?"
"Yeah," Chris said absently, but I couldn't tell if he was really listening. I had no idea how many of these deals did ultimately blow up—so far as I knew, nobody bothered to keep track. Everyone too busy just keeping the system running to bother tracking whether it was actually working or not.
I walked Chris out of the courtroom, shook his hand, uttered the usual spiel about staying out of trouble and going to the required meetings. Then we were done and my shift was over and I was free to take my paperwork back to the Brooklyn Defenders and call it a day.
2
I
DUMPED MY
new files onto the sprawling pile on my desk, feeling too tired to deal with them now. My officemate, Zach Roth, was at his desk when I came in, typing up a brief on his computer. Zach was short and wiry, high-strung, perpetually tousled. He was a couple of years younger than me, but had been with the office for a couple of years longer, worked felony cases. Zach was married to a big-firm corporate lawyer who apparently didn't mind subsidizing his idealism, so he seemed likely to stick around longer than most PDs. The combination of high stress and low pay generally guaranteed a high burnout rate in our line of work.
"Hey, Joel," Zach said. "Our fearless leader was here looking for
you."
"Isaac?" I asked. "Did he say what he wanted?"
"He said he was calling you up from the minors. He said it like
you'd know what he meant."
"No idea, actually," I said. "What's up with you?"
"Just got back from wasting my whole afternoon at Rikers. Got an
armed robbery of a liquor store, referred over to us from Legal Aid after the
arraignment."
"This was your first time meeting the guy?"
"Yeah, it was my meet and greet," Zach said. "Turns out there was
a little something they forgot to put in the arraignment report."
"What's that?"
"My guy's deaf."
"He's deaf?"
"As in he reads lips and talks with his hands," Zach said. "Or at
least I assume he does those things. We didn't really get that far."
"I know what 'deaf' means," I said. "I was more just agreeing that
it seems like something they should've put in their report."
"At least I didn't have to listen to any bullshit for once.
There's something to be said for a client you don't have to listen to."
ISAAC WAS
in his late forties, with curly brown hair just showing some gray and perpetually in need of cutting, a small diamond stud in his left ear. While I hadn't changed out of my suit after leaving court, Isaac was dressed in jeans and a sweater. My office clothes were those I'd purchased during my four-plus years at Walker Bentley, and my wardrobe was considerably more formal and expensive than what most of the office's attorneys wore when they were not bound for court.
"Here's the thing," Isaac said without preamble when I walked into his office.
"It's not really that easy to evaluate someone who's doing what you're doing.
Let's face it, you don't need that Columbia law degree of yours to handle
arraignments. You've been showing up every day, you've gotten the job done,
you've been just fine. But I can't say you're some arraignments whiz. No knock
on you, I just think it's something I would never be able to say about anybody."
"I see your point," I said. "So it sounds like you need to give me
something where I can impress you."
Isaac smiled at this. "You weren't the only person that occurred to," he said.
"I'm gonna bump you up to concentrating on misdemeanors, maybe some minor
felonies. You'll still have to cover arraignments from time to time, but the
cases will be yours to keep."
"That's great," I said. "I won't let you down."
"I certainly hope not," Isaac said. "There's something else too.
We've got a big one I want to bring you in on. As you presumably know, Myra's
got a new murder, and it's a red-ball."
I nodded. The lawyers in our office were grouped into small teams, the idea being to ensure as much brainstorming and collaboration as possible. My team consisted of myself; our team leader, Michael Downing; Myra Goldstein; my officemate, Zach; Julia Sangrava; Max Watkins; and Shelly Kennedy. We generally met for lunch once a week, kept one another up to speed on our cases, shot the shit, and debated strategy, and although Myra was a rare and reluctant participant in these meetings, I was well aware of her new high-profile case. The death of a college senior, an honors student, who'd been gunned down in the projects was the rare Brooklyn murder that actually made its way into the newspapers.
"The white kid from Brooklyn College who got killed out in Midwood," I said.
"It's trouble. Black defendant from the projects, white victim
from campus. Plus we've got a second victim who's still hanging on, though I
gather he's touch-and-go. The press is sniffing around; the DA's office is
putting their A-team on the case. I think Myra could use a second chair."
Isaac had taken me aback. This was far more of a break than I'd been expecting.
"Happy to do it."
"I'm sure you are. I should warn you that Myra's used to doing
things her own way—she's not in the habit of having another lawyer with her on a
case. But I think she could use the help on this one."
"So you want me to provide effort."
"I figure you've been living on Eager Street for a while, you're going to have some effort to give," Isaac said. He paused, leaning back with his arms folded, making a point of studying me.
"You want this, right?"
"I do," I said, and I very much did.
3
I
SAAC'S FAVOR
in assigning me to a high-profile murder case was nothing compared to the biggest favor he'd done me: giving me a job in the first place. After I'd served out the six-month suspension of my law license, none of the first-tier firms in the city—places that would normally hire someone with my résumé virtually as a matter of course—had even invited me in for an interview. I'd tried the second tier, then the third, undistinguished firms I never would have considered out of law school. I at least got a few interviews, but they'd proved skittish too. A lawyer with a documented drug problem and a spectacular flameout was just too big a risk, no matter how sterling my credentials. I understood that, but understanding didn't make it any easier. I'd kept working as a legal temp, doing cite checking and document review, floating around the big law firms that would no longer consider hiring me as a proper lawyer.
I had never denied that it was all my fault. Plenty of people dealt with the same mix of pressure, boredom, and long hours without turning to drugs. While it was easy for me to look back at Walker Bentley and see the aspects of my life there that had driven me to be so self-destructive, how did I then explain that I alone, out of all the firm's hundreds of attorneys, and the thousands more at similar places in Midtown and Wall Street, had wound up where I did? At the end of the day, there was no escaping the role my own character (or lack thereof) had played in what happened.
Like many law school graduates who went to a corporate law firm, I'd had only the vaguest idea of what I was getting into. It hadn't taken any time at all for me to realize I'd made a big mistake. Big New York City law firms were notoriously unpleasant and unhappy places to work, and it was no secret that the more prestigious the firm, the worse it treated its associates, expecting that in exchange for a six-figure salary and the prestige of having its name on our résumés, we'd be at the firm's disposal all day, every day.
Walker Bentley was an old-fashioned firm in many ways. It was almost a century old, named after WASP partners long dead. Unlike many such firms, it still maintained at least a pretense of the law being a profession rather than just another global business. This played out in somewhat schizophrenic ways: many of the older partners were patrician conservatives, while the younger associates tended to be liberals put off by the aggressively commercial stances of many of our rivals.
But like the rest of the profession, the firm's traditions were quickly falling victim to the bottom line. The steady drumbeat of rising profits required more hours billed, larger cases, an increased sense that the young lawyers were little more than fungible billing units serving to line the partners' coffers.
The firm was explicitly elitist, with the majority of its associates coming from a half dozen or so law schools, of which Columbia was one. Although it was more a meritocracy than an aristocracy, in my experience the line between the two is seldom very clear, and the assumptions of shared privilege played themselves out constantly, just as they had everywhere I'd gone since leaving my hometown.
The first year had been the worst, the weeks of working seventy or more hours, the constant shuffling between tedium and extreme pressure, the presumption of incompetence from the firm's partners. My friendship with Paul had been forged during those late nights at the office, the bullshit sessions over expensive delivered dinners eaten with plastic silverware in a conference room on the thirty-sixth floor of a Midtown office building. I'd figured I'd go the normal route—put in a handful of years at Walker Bentley, then head to a boutique or get an in-house job, but sometimes I wondered if I'd even make it through a year.
But I did make it, and in the process began to get used to the things I'd initially hated. During the course of my second year I felt that I'd gone a long way toward making my peace with the firm, and while I was still looking forward to leaving, the urgency of my dislike had faded.
It was toward the end of my third year that I'd met Beth. I'd been assigned to a new case—an interesting one, as such things went—a Fortune 500 company facing both a federal indictment and an SEC investigation involving accusations of accounting fraud and insider trading. The indictment had made the front page of the
Times
, accompanied by a photo of our client's CEO doing his perp walk, flanked by the firm's lead attorney handling the case. The firm had four partners on the case, plus nearly a dozen associates and a handful of paralegals.
There were two distinct kinds of paralegals at Walker Bentley. On the one hand were the lifers, people who'd been working as paralegals for years and were making it a career. On the other were recent college grads testing the waters for a year or two before either heading off to law school themselves or dropping the idea entirely and moving on to something else. Beth belonged to the second category: twenty-two years old, fresh out of Barnard College.
I was in thrall even before we'd formally met; just seeing her across a conference room, one of a couple dozen people at an initial team meeting. Not just because Beth was beautiful, though she was certainly that, a thin pale blonde. But there was something else that had drawn me: a sense of apartness. She struck me as someone who was doing a carefully observed impersonation of a normal human being.
I told myself that acting on my attraction was not an option. For one thing, I was essentially her boss. For another, she was twenty-two; I was twenty-eight—not a huge gap, but a noticeable one. I also quickly got the distinct feeling that Beth was trouble.
All these things served only to stoke my desire. I supposed boredom added fuel too—Beth as a possible way to trade the life I had for a more interesting one.
I'd compensated for my attraction by creating a distance between us, teasing Beth, flirting through aggression. I got the feeling that she understood what I was doing, and that she was comfortable playing it that way.
After getting off to an impressive start in her first couple of months on the case, Beth quickly became erratic. She seemed to grow even paler, her complexion turning waxy and sallow. She began turning up later and later, one day calling in sick at eleven a.m.
I hadn't had to deal with this sort of thing at the firm before, and didn't really know how to deal with it now. It made my life difficult if I couldn't rely on her: a couple of times I'd had to go digging through her office for documents, which wasn't a good use of my time. I considered simply passing the situation up the chain of command, but the fact was, I didn't want Beth to get in trouble. And it wasn't the sort of headache a partner would want to be bothered with; part of my job was to deal effectively with support staff.
A few months after she'd started Beth received her LSAT scores. I heard about it in passing from another paralegal: Beth had scored in the top two percent. I wasn't surprised; I'd known she was smart, and I imagined that Beth wasn't surprised herself. However, I wasn't sure how to reconcile this fact with her recent work habits. It was past time to address the situation, I decided, and this gave me the perfect cover.
I sent Beth an e-mail, subject line,
Congratulations
, and asked her to come by my office when she had a minute.
An hour later she arrived, eyes downcast, looking far more embarrassed than proud.
"Hi," she said.
"You weren't even going to tell me?" I said.
"Why do you care?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked. "Of course I want you to
succeed. What schools are you looking at? Assuming your grades are strong, you
should have a good shot anywhere."
Beth still hadn't looked at me. She shrugged. "I'm not really sure I want to go," she said softly.
"What are you talking about?"
"If you had it to do over again, would you?"
There wasn't an easy answer to this question, I realized, my hesitation no doubt giving this away.
"You can go to law school and not end up where I'm at afterward," I responded.
"Listen, we need to talk about some other stuff too—can I buy you a drink after
work?"
I wondered if Beth could hear my thudding heart in the silence that followed. The idea had been to take her out to gently confront her about her declining work habits, but something had shifted; it wasn't clear even to me if instead I'd just asked her out on a date.
"What else do we need to talk about?" she said at last, finally looking at me now that I could barely look at her.
"Well, frankly, I'm sorry to say this, but we need to talk about
your recent job performance. You've been a little hit-or-miss as far as
dependability, and it concerns me."
"It
concerns
you?" she repeated, mocking my words in a way I didn't quite understand.
"It does," I said. "I need to be able to rely on you. If you're
going to go on to do this for a living, people are going to continue to need to
rely on you."
Another silence. I wondered which of us was more uncomfortable. I suspected it was somehow still me.
"Sure," Beth said at last. "You can buy me a drink; we can talk."
That night I learned that Beth's father was Leon Winthrop, one of those elite Washington lawyers who bounced effortlessly between prestigious positions in government and lucrative private practice, and that Beth had been groomed for a career in the law essentially since birth. I also learned that she was using heroin.
It'd made sense, in retrospect: her pallor, her waifish appearance, her ghostly, tardy manner. The only reason it hadn't occurred to me, I thought afterward, was because I'd never met a junkie before, and didn't expect to meet one at a place like Walker Bentley. She'd told me as a secret, making me promise I wouldn't tell anyone before I knew what she was going to say. Curiosity crowded against my disapproval.
We'd stayed in the bar for a couple of hours, Beth nursing a single drink. She said she didn't have a taste for alcohol, which I found somewhat amusing under the circumstances.
"So," Beth said in parting, "we can hang out sometime. If, you know, you're up
for an adventure."
It was only in retrospect that I came to understand her honesty that night for what it was: a sales pitch. Beth had been in search of a new partner in crime, someone to share her bad habit, and she, for reasons I would never know, had picked me as a target.
It wasn't like I was a virgin when it came to drugs: I'd smoked more than my share of pot in high school and college, done coke a few times, had also been known to crawl into the office with a wicked hangover on occasion. But it had all fallen into the category of recreational, nothing where I'd ever felt at risk of losing control. Not until this.
I'd known as soon as Paul had told me that Beth was dead that my own future was at risk. If anything, I'd underestimated my exposure. While the firm had managed to keep Beth's death from becoming a public scandal, Beth's father had flown to New York and started calling in favors. The next thing I knew, I was being cast as Beth's corruptor, facing utterly false accusations that I'd turned her on to heroin. An investigation was opened and I was interviewed by two detectives, but ultimately it didn't even go to a grand jury.
While the criminal investigation had been halfhearted and fleeting, Winthrop had also filed a formal complaint against me with the bar, alleging that I had procured the heroin that had killed his daughter. As best I could tell, Winthrop's only basis for this was his own need to believe it, but it wasn't an accusation I could easily disprove either. By then I had resigned from Walker Bentley to avoid being fired; I'd hired a lawyer with my own money to defend me before the bar investigation. Disbarment had been a real possibility, so much so that my six-month suspension for admitted drug use actually came as a relief.
I had been so swamped with my own troubles that I'd never properly mourned Beth. I hadn't attended her funeral, certain that I would not be welcome. Worst of all was the ugly fact that her death was, in part, a relief: there was a real sense in which I didn't miss her at all, that I felt myself lucky, an escapee. In my bitterest moments, I thought that Beth had died before she could finish totally ruining my life.
I pushed these thoughts from my mind. It was over, done with; I was where I was. I went to find Myra.
MYRA GOLDSTEIN
had been a public defender ever since law school. Given our office's turnover rate, a half dozen years was enough to make you pretty senior, and Myra now worked exclusively on serious felonies. Even though we were on the same office team, I hadn't really gotten to know her. I'd always found her aloof and a little condescending.
The door to her office, which she now shared with our newest lawyer, Shelly Kennedy, was closed, which was unusual around here. I knocked, waited, knocked again. I thought I heard a voice on the other side of the door but couldn't make out what it was saying.
After a moment Myra yanked the door open. She was a brusque, angular woman in her early thirties, with dark, unruly hair that just barely snaked past her shoulders, and bulky hipster glasses. She was pale, with light green eyes that softened the slight harshness that the rest of her conveyed. While Myra was attractive, she appeared either not to know or not to care. She smelled of tobacco more than perfume.
"I said 'Come in,' " she said.
"I couldn't hear you through the door."
"You're here on the Tate case," Myra said, moving back behind her desk, stepping lightly around the piles of paper that filled much of the floor of the office.
"Right," I said, standing awkwardly until I realized that Myra was not going to suggest that I sit, at which point I took Shelly's chair. The office felt especially cramped because of the disarray on Myra's half, which spilled well over into what should've been Shelly's territory.
"Isaac wants me to have a copilot on this one, I guess."
"He seems to think it's going to be a big one."
"Murder cases are all big ones," Myra said dismissively. "Isaac's
just worried I don't have my head in the game."