A Cure for Night Read online

  "I guess that help has paid off," I said instead, instantly regretting it, knowing I was overcompensating for my own vulnerability. Chris looked down sharply, like he'd been slapped.

  "Okay," I said quickly, not wanting to let the unpleasant moment I'd created linger. "Here's what's going to happen now. We'll go before the arraignment judge, who'll ask you for a plea. From what I have here, their case against you isn't perfect, but it sounds like that's just laziness and that they can easily fill in the gaps if they have to. You plead not guilty, you get a trial, but you also face the risk of actual jail time. You plead this out, no prior record, a college student, jail's off the table. Depending on the judge's mood, we should be able to get you into a treatment program. This would mean you'd have to do NA meetings as an outpatient at a treatment center. There's a catch to this prize, though: assuming you plead to a B misdemeanor, you'll also be on probation for a year. If you don't go to your meetings, or if you get busted within the next year, they can reopen the charges, put you in jail. You follow that?"

  Chris answered with his own question: "What about my student loans?"

  "You won't be eligible for federal loans based on a drug conviction," I said. "But your priority right now should be staying out of jail."

  "I can't afford to go to school without the loans. My dad's on disability; my mom works part-time. This is going to ruin my whole life."

  "Your life is going to be a lot more ruined if you actually go to jail," I said. "There're other loan programs out there. You might have to pay more interest, but that really can't be your focus right now. This is an easy case for them to make. It's your call how to plead, but you said you wanted to get help, and getting help is going to basically be your main punishment if you plead out. So that's what I strongly suggest you do."

  Ten minutes later the two of us were standing before the judge, the bailiff reading charges. Part of my job working arraignments was to keep the easy cases from going forward. The system relied on disposing of many cases at arraignment; it would break if most arrests in New York City proceeded past that point. In the vast majority of cases, a defense attorney's job was really just to convince his client to take a plea. Actually going to trial was primarily reserved for those rare cases where guilt was really called into question.

  I had grabbed the prosecutor in the hallway outside the courtroom, made my thirty-second pitch about how this Delaney kid had no record, was ready and willing for treatment, ripe for time served and some sessions as an outpatient. The ADA, a smug little prick named Diaz whom I had been dealing with at least once a week for the past half year, stared off into space as I spoke, and then said he'd see what seemed reasonable.

  Another lawyer from my office, Shelly Kennedy, was doing an arraignment—an indecent exposure on a subway flasher—when I walked into the courtroom. There was a steady drone of voices from the back of the room, which was nondescript and worn, the only decorations being the words "In God We Trust" behind the judge and a half dozen of the ugliest chandeliers I'd ever seen in my life. The courthouse had been built in the 1930s and was coming apart at the seams.

  Tired, I shut down a little during the lull as we waited, feeling a second of disorientation when Delaney's case was called. I picked up the file and walked toward the podium, nodding at Shelly as we passed, the familiar stage fright causing my heart to pound a little and my palms to sweat, as it always did, but it didn't bother me: I knew I'd be fine once I started talking. I looked down at the file as I walked, furrowing my brow as though sifting through conflicting evidence, when really I was just double-checking my client's name. I had a pathological fear of calling a client by the wrong name. I'd never actually done it myself, but I'd seen it happen more than once. To me, this was the bluntest possible reminder of the assembly-line nature of the work we did here, and I didn't think I'd be able to stand it if I ever made that mistake.

  Two court officers brought Delaney over to stand beside me. One stood behind him, the other next to him. Delaney held his hands behind his back like he was handcuffed. ADA Diaz stated his name and office for the record, and I did the same. Then Diaz did his spiel, which I barely bothered to listen to, using the time to prepare what I was going to say.

  "Your Honor," I began when my turn came, my voice going a half octave deeper, as it always did in court. "My client has never before been charged with any crime. He is willing to concede that he has a problem with substance abuse, and he would very much like to receive help for this. This is not a case where any term of imprisonment is warranted. If the state will agree to a B misdemeanor plea for probation and entry into an outpatient program, not only will justice have been amply done, but my client will have been genuinely helped."

  Judge Davis looked over at Diaz, who was reading his own file on the case. "Counsel?" she said, wanting to see if the state would agree.

  A long moment passed. At last the ADA looked up at the judge. "This does seem like a case where probation and outpatient could be warranted," he said.

  Judge Davis nodded, turning her attention toward Chris. "Mr. Delaney, is it your intention to plead guilty to the charges against you in order to get the sentence just discussed?"

  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

  ISAAC'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 ind
ictment 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.