A Cure for Night Read online

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."

  "Do you?"

  "Not at the moment. But I will."

  "I'm sorry about the Gibbons verdict," I said, realizing I hadn't seen Myra since it'd come down.

  "What do you know ab
out the Gibbons verdict?"

  "I know it didn't go our way."

  "That's for sure."

  "And I know you don't think he did it."

  Myra shook her head. "It's not a question of thinking. I know he didn't do it."

  "The jury thought so."

  "Yeah well, the jury didn't know as much about crime as I do. The big thing was that Terrell had confessed."

  "That's a problem."

  "It was, yes."

  "But you don't think it was legit?"

  "I know it wasn't. They were in that room for about fourteen hours before Terrell confessed. He never stood a chance."

  "You think they convicted just on the confession?"

  "There wasn't any direct evidence. The only other thing the police had was the word of a supposed coconspirator, which they couldn't have brought in if Terrell hadn't confessed. The confession is what did him in."

  "You have good grounds for appeal?"

  "Nothing great, no. But you never know."

  "Sorry. That must be tough."

  "More for Terrell than for me. Anyway, we're here to work on Lorenzo Tate. So I made a copy of the file, what there is of it at this point, which is almost nothing. We've got the incident reports, a summary of the witness statements, some paperwork coming out of the actual arrest."

  "What should I be doing?"

  "First thing, of course, is we need to go talk to our client. I represented him at the lineup and arraignment a few days ago, but didn't get a chance to really talk to him then, other then to tell him to keep his mouth shut until he saw me again. We've got a meeting at Rikers set up for nine a.m. tomorrow. Where do you live?"

  "Bergen Street, between Fifth and Flatbush."

  "I'll come get you around eight fifteen," Myra said. She picked up a couple of large bound documents and handed them to me. "These are two pretrial omnibus motions from other cases. We'll steal as much as we can from these in assembling our motion papers, so you should read through them to get a feel for how we'll proceed."

  "Anything that needs doing now?" I asked.

  Myra shook her head. "It'll take you a while to read the file and look at these omnibus motions. You can do that between now and tomorrow morning."

  4

  OUR CLIENT, Lorenzo Tate, was twenty-six years old. He'd been arrested on the basis of two witness statements. The sister of the surviving victim, Latrice Wallace, had told the police that Lorenzo had come looking for her brother earlier on the night of the shooting and had made threatening remarks. There was no statement from that victim himself, Devin Wallace. I figured this could either mean that his condition was still too serious for him to talk, or that he wasn't cooperating with the police. The eyewitness to the shooting, Yolanda Miller, had said that while she didn't actually know the shooter, she'd seen him around the neighborhood, and had identified him by a street name, Strawberry.

  It was after seven by the time I had finished going through the file. Suddenly finding myself working a murder had charged me up; I felt an excess of energy combined with being at loose ends, not a great combination for someone coming off a serious heroin flirtation. A cornerstone of the way I lived now was in how I structured my time, always knowing in advance what I was about to do, first breaking the day down into little pieces, then building it back up again with defined activity. I fought a vigorous campaign against dead air, and finding myself in an unplanned moment was enough to send me into a panic.

  I needed to make a plan. Nothing better coming to mind, I called Paul at work.

  My years at Walker Bentley had conditioned me to get straight to the point when talking to someone who billed out his time in six-minute intervals. "I just sort of got promoted," I said. "And I'm at loose ends tonight, thought I'd see if you wanted to get dinner."

  I noticed the pause before Paul spoke. "Sure, pal, but it's going to have to be on the semi-late side. How's ten?"

  "Fine," I said, trying not to think about the hours I'd have to kill in the meantime, trying instead just to focus on the fact that I had carved some order into my night. "Sure. Meet at Blue Ribbon, get the Black Angus for two?"

  Paul laughed. "You can't afford Blue Ribbon anymore," he said.

  "You're right," I said. "Steak's on you."

  BLUE RIBBON Brooklyn was on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, walking distance from my apartment on Bergen. I'd gone home first, changed out of my suit. I was still living in the apartment I'd rented back when I made a corporate lawyer's salary, a spacious one-bedroom with exposed brick walls and a marble fireplace that no longer worked. It was an irony of the New York real estate market that it was financially easier to stay in an apartment that I couldn't afford than it was to pay the broker's fee and moving costs to go somewhere cheaper. I'd had nearly a hundred grand invested and saved when I'd left the firm; much of that money was gone now, and more drained out with each passing month that I lived beyond my present means.

  Even though I arrived at the restaurant a few minutes late, Paul wasn't there yet, which wasn't a surprise: he was usually late, just as I had been when I'd worked at Walker Bentley.

  I ordered a martini, up with olives, and settled in at the bar to wait. The restaurant was crowded, loud; even the bar was full. Paul came bustling in ten minutes later, wearing a suit but no tie, making his way easily through the packed room. He was tall and thin, with carefully sculpted hair, the first faint signs of encroaching age starting to show on the outskirts of his face. He apologized for being late in the offhand manner of someone who always was.

  "I do miss this," I said after we'd been seated and ordered our dinner.

  "Miss what?" Paul said.

  I gestured out at the restaurant, filled with well-dressed, attractive people eating expensive food. "The money," I said with a laugh.

  "Don't worry about the bill—pay whatever you can afford; I'll cover the rest."

  "I appreciate that," I said. "But I don't like it. I mean, in the sense that I don't like not being able to pull my end."

  "We're friends and it's money," Paul said. "So who gives a fuck? At least you get to do something sexy. I've been practicing for over five years and I've spoken in court one time. That's when they sent me to a status conference to inform the court that we were not opposing the other side's motion for an extension of time. I can quote my entire speech: 'Your Honor, the defendant has no objection.' "

  "Trust me," I said. "What I've been doing for the past six months has not been sexy."

  "You get to hang out in court all day," Paul said. "Like the lawyers on TV."

  "That's where the similarity ends," I assured him.

  Paul raised his glass in a toast. "So, more important, congratulations on your new case. Skipping all the way to murder—you can't tell me that's not sexy."

  "The murder isn't really my case—another lawyer's going to be the first chair. I'm just there to do research, that sort of thing—I assume, anyway. I'm going to be handling misdemeanors with most of my time—minor stuff, really."

  "Fuck it, it's still sexy. All crime is sexy. I mean, you know the kind of shit I do all day. If I'm not careful, I'm going to officially become an antitrust lawyer. I can't even figure out my own taxes."

  "You always seemed to like it okay," I said. "You always seemed to like it more than I did, anyway."

  "More than you did isn't too hard to pull off, pal," Paul said. "But it does get empty. You know, the 'is that all there is' blues. Lately I've been seriously thinking of going back to church."

  "Back to church?"

  "When I was a kid I went to church," Paul said. "I wore a clip-on tie, went with my folks."

  "And why are you thinking of going back?"

  "I don't know," Paul said. "I want to be better."

  "You're going to start going to church to get help being better?"

  "That's what church is all about, right? How to be good?"

  "You've got a whole lot of better to explore before you get to good," I said.

  Paul gave me a
look, narrowing his eyes while trying to suppress a smile. "I mean, no, I'm not in danger of pulling some variation of that prolonged cry for help you launched, but I know why I do it. I do it for the money, and because I failed to come up with anything more interesting to do. That's not really something I'm super proud of."

  "Well," I said, "I guess you could say that I'm not super proud of how I've ended up where I am, either."

  "You didn't get there the easy way," Paul agreed as the waiter brought us our steak. "But I do believe that in some way you got where you were supposed to go. And that's good enough for a fucking celebration."

  WE ATE our steak and drank our wine, and after the meal we each had an Oban, straight up. I hadn't realized how tense I was until the alcohol relaxed me. I liked the camaraderie of eating steak and drinking scotch. Paul's company relaxed me too; I enjoyed his aggression, his thoughtless will, his attempt to bully the world.

  Afterward, we stepped outside into the crisp spring air. The breeze was just enough to make me aware of the fact of weather. I heard Paul inhale a breath, taking in the night. When I glanced over at Paul he was smiling. "Let's go see if we can find some trouble," he said.

  5

  MYRA'S CAR was already parked across the street when I went out to wait for her the next morning; she honked as soon as I stepped out of my building on Bergen Street. I'd overslept a little; Paul and I had ended up spilling whiskey at the Gate until a little after one a.m. I wasn't at my best; my stomach was clenched and sour, and I could still taste the scotch in the back of my throat.

  "Morning," I muttered as I opened the door of her aging Volvo.

  "Just throw that shit in the back," Myra said, pointing at the jumble of papers in the passenger seat. I scooped them up and tossed them onto the backseat. Myra was smoking a cigarette, had an old Sleater-Kinney song blasting on the car stereo, both of which were a little much for me first thing on a hungover morning.

  "You've been out to Rikers before, right?" she asked as she pulled onto Flatbush.

  "Actually, no," I said.