The Occupied Page 5

  I’d given in to the flesh. The sensual. The experiential. The supernatural. I didn’t consider any of the revelry to have been extraordinary, blind to the fact that I had already opened a door to a realm that I didn’t understand.

  It seemed harmless enough at the time. In retrospect, it looks different now. Back then I didn’t know if there was such a thing as hell, and I hadn’t the faintest idea that there could be hell to pay for things done, or undone.

  8

  The law offices of Tobit, Black, Dandridge & Swartz were tucked inside the Woolworth Building on Broadway. The one-hundred-year-old skyscraper was an icon of Gothic design, a commercial tower with the kind of ornate, brooding architecture, complete with spires and gargoyles, that would have made it a perfect setting for Ghostbusters. I spent twelve to thirteen hours a day in that office suite or at the courthouse, immersed in my criminal defense law practice. The courtroom was my altar, and I suppose it was the closest thing to a religion that I had.

  My three fellow partners all did commercial transactions and estate planning—the civilized, white-glove stuff—and it was left to me to represent the scoundrels. Occasionally, though, I would get a few clients who, for all the world, looked like they might actually be innocent. I don’t mean merely not guilty in the legal sense. But truly innocent. Those were the scary ones. You’d lose sleep when you handled those cases.

  At the very earliest stage, that was where my head was at in the Dunning Kamera case before I started to dig into it.

  I had already heard things on the grapevine about the Kamera case even before my senior partner, Hal Tobit, gave me the nod. As it turned out, Hal was an old friend of Dunning’s father, Slovan Kamera, who’d had a respectable career on the New York City Supreme Court until health problems pushed him into early retirement. The distraught judge called up Hal and said that his son had been indicted for the grisly murder of a prostitute, and Hal recommended me, of course. After I was retained, and when the papers got ahold of the story, the news splattered through the city like sand in a wind tunnel.

  I conducted a short jail conference with Dunning. Following that, he shuffled under armed guard into the courtroom wearing cuffs and leg irons and sat next to me at the counsel table. When the case was called by the clerk, I made my pitch to the judge for release from custody.

  During the bail hearing, the assistant DA, Betty Verring, practically went apoplectic as she argued why my client ought to be held without bail pending trial. I was aware that there had been a string of call-girl murders and the district attorney’s office was catching heat for not bringing the culprit to justice. At the same time, they had to know that the son of a local judge would make a lousy suspect.

  More to the point, as far as the bail hearing was concerned, Betty was a good prosecutor who had to know that the odds were against her. Dunning Kamera made a great candidate for bail, even aside from his father’s stellar standing in the legal community: Dunning was a local man, with numerous ties to the community, gainfully employed, no prior record, and no flight risk. He didn’t even own a passport. Predictably, I prevailed. The judge set reasonable bail for him, despite the sensational nature of the crime.

  As I was strutting out of the courtroom, feeling the momentary rush of invincibility, Betty handed me a manila envelope. “Here’s a little present for you, Trevor.”

  I smirked. “Thanks, Betty. And I didn’t even have to file a discovery motion to get this. You’re tops.” A few minutes later I was in the parking garage, having eased myself into the soft leather comfort of my Aston Martin DB9 coupe. I clicked on the reading light and opened the envelope. As I studied the contents, things got serious very quickly. I could see why the ADA had been in a hurry to make sure I had copies of the forensic photographs of the victim, a nineteen-year-old runaway named Heather who was turning tricks to support her coke habit.

  I never had a weak stomach, but this case got to me. Heather’s throat showed extreme bruising. The autopsy protocol would later explain that her larynx had been crushed; incredible pressure had been exerted. But after viewing the rest of the photos I knew that wasn’t the worst part. Not even close. I had to talk to Dunning about these pictures.

  On the other hand, the evidence laid out in the indictment showed only a gossamer-thin connection between my client and the crime. In fact, only one piece of evidence created the circumstantial link. My job would be to smash that link like I was wielding a ball-peen hammer, banging it until it broke. And I was good at my job. My acquittal rate at trial was 65 percent, which was impressive considering how deeply the deck is stacked against the defense. The prosecution always has the upper hand, especially at the start, when they can put their case together quickly and efficiently, marshaling police investigators, forensic experts, you name it. Most criminal defendants are actually guilty of something, whether or not they’ve been charged for it. Aren’t we all? And most clients on the other side of a metal mesh or a thick pane of glass aren’t eager to divulge the facts that have put them there. It usually took some cajoling and a heavy dose of threatening before I could get them to come clean. Even when they did dump the real facts on me, my cases often sagged under the weight of incriminating evidence like a garbage bag loaded with bricks.

  The Kamera case looked like it would be another for the win column. But first I needed to size up my client.

  A few days later, we were seated in my office while Dunning Kamera, a thin, thirty-four-year-old man with pale skin, extolled the aesthetics of my decor—the rich walnut paneling, my original art, and on and on. I interrupted him, sliding the pictures across my desk toward him, and asked him to study them.

  He glanced through the photos like someone paging through an issue of National Geographic, with mild curiosity and interest, but no discernible disgust, although he did take the time to shake his head slowly at each photo of Heather’s murdered corpse. When he was done, he spoke.

  “Yes?” he announced, more like a statement than a question.

  I asked him, “Did you know this girl?”

  “No.”

  “Never met her, even casually?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? Why are you sorry?” It was time to shake things up a little. So I added, “Did you do something to feel sorry about?”

  He smiled. “Just a figure of speech.” Dunning Kamera looked unperturbed.

  I decided to press him on his alibi. “You say you were at the movies that night. Right? The Cineplex was only about four blocks from where they found her body in the dumpster.”

  According to the indictment, the medical examiner had concluded that Heather had been dead for only an hour or two before an apartment building super found her body in the trash.

  “Yes, at the movies,” he answered, pulling something out of his top pocket. It was the stub of a ticket for the movie he saw that night. He said that he went to the theater alone. The film ran two hours and ten minutes, and it ended about twenty minutes after Heather’s body had been discovered. He handed me the ticket stub. His alibi defense was that at the moment of death he was several blocks away, in a movie theater, but with no witnesses that he knew of. Far from a perfect defense. Still, I’ve had cases that were a lot tougher.

  “These pictures of the victim, did you notice anything unusual?”

  “She looks dead.”

  “Other than that?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nothing else?” I asked.

  He shook his head no, a second time, with a questioning look on his face. Then he added, “Why do you keep asking about the photographs?”

  “Just wondering,” I said. “Because they show that the killer cut her heart out of her chest.”

  9

  I can’t say exactly why I decided to cut my workday short, but I did. I left immediately after my office conference with Dunning Kamera and headed home to my condo on the Upper East Side and to my wife, Courtney, a beautiful, curvaceous redhead who had a taste for parties and the
good life.

  Courtney had been my secretary earlier in my law career, which is how we originally met. She knew that when it came to the law, I was highly disciplined, certainly; but more than that, in terms of wanting to win my cases, I was like a man possessed.

  But then again, I was also a full-blooded male. After working with her at the law firm for only a few weeks, I fell for her quickly. She responded just as quickly and said she would be more than happy to adjust to the demands of my law career. We waltzed into a wedding six months later. Courtney was never timid about flaunting her obvious assets, and I became the envy of my legal colleagues.

  Courtney knew full well about my slavish work habits and my long hours, and the schedule that I kept. I worked at the office until eight and got home around 8:45. The only exceptions to my regular 8:45 arrival time were Friday nights, when I would occasionally take her out to a play or a concert, or maybe a movie, unless I happened to be locked in a jury trial, in which case I might be staying at a hotel close to the courthouse. We always ate late. Occasionally I would call ahead so we could rendezvous at a restaurant. Otherwise, Courtney would order out for food and have it delivered to the condo so it would arrive just about the time that I walked in the door. To her credit, she had it down to an art. My schedule was as predictable as the constellations in the sky. And maybe that was part of the problem.

  On that evening, I pulled into our parking space in the passkey underground garage very early, around six o’clock. I turned off the ignition but didn’t exit my Aston Martin at first. Instead, I just sat there, thinking about Dunning Kamera and those photos. And about Heather, the victim. Criminal defense lawyers do think about the victims. The thing is, when we talk to the juries about them, while we express honest remorse about the senseless killings, we usually find ourselves arguing something like, “You need to acquit my client so the police can find the real killer, because he is still out there. Convict my client, and the real culprit will never be found.”

  As I had many times before, I silently rehearsed all the rationale for adversarial law. The system only works when both sides punch it out, and spill blood, and put everything into it, like the whole world depends on it. Then, and only then, can an attorney sleep at night because, regardless of the verdict, your client got everything you could give and you played your part in making sure that a rough-hewn kind of human justice had been achieved. Besides, I told myself, who really knows, in the final analysis, who is guilty and who isn’t? God only knows.

  And all ideology aside, losing sucks. I don’t know a criminal defense lawyer who doesn’t feel the same way. Judging ourselves by our wins in the courtroom, not our personal integrity. Hence the long, salt-mine hours, and the obsession. And the drive for the perfect defense. Often at the expense of things that matter. Sometimes the things that matter most.

  But as I sat in my parked car that night, a vehicle that cost more than a lot of the houses in the Bronx, I was not thinking like a defense attorney. Something else was going on. Something metaphysical. I wondered, regardless of whether it was my client Dunning Kamera or someone else who committed the crime, how the murderer could have acted so savagely toward a forsaken street waif like Heather. Where does that kind of evil come from? Of course I knew the psychological explanations. I had used so many psychiatric experts in my cases, I was practically a lay expert in the field. I knew most of the diagnostic labels in the DSM backward and forward, as well as the presenting psychological symptoms that characterized each of them. But the textbook answers didn’t address the ultimate, underlying question.

  I trudged through the parking garage, then took the cement steps to the lobby, where the elevator carried me up to our condo. When I walked in, the place looked disheveled. I found Courtney in the shower. It was 6:15 p.m., and we had no plans that evening, but I quickly conjured up an explanation in my mind, hoping for the best. Until I detected the scent of a man’s cologne around the place. I fished around in the kitchen, looking for more clues, and I found them in the wastepaper basket. Two Marlboro butts. It was like a dagger in the guts.

  When she came out dressed only in her robe, she looked flustered, gave me a peck on the lips, and then, like a waitress in a cafe after the meal who asks the perfunctory question about dessert, asked me whether I wanted to make love.

  On any other day that would have been an easy question to answer. But not tonight. “No,” I said. “I’d rather have dinner. And then a talk.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. About your day.”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary in my day.”

  “Even so,” I said, “let’s talk.”

  “Okay. But I am feeling a bit tired.”

  “Why is that?”

  She tilted her head. “Trevor, I don’t know. Just am.”

  “Oh,” I shot back, “I think you do.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” When I didn’t respond she added, “Why am I feeling like a witness in one of your trials?”

  “I didn’t intend that.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You make me feel like I am being cross-examined. Always. Every time we talk. I don’t like being attacked.”

  “You’re kidding,” I shot back. “All I did was ask a legitimate question—”

  “A nasty little question. Insinuating something . . .”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” she retorted. “Maybe that I don’t have any reason to feel tired. That I don’t work like you do. Whatever. I really can’t go through this again.”

  Nice head-fake by Courtney. Once again, the banter was falling into the same conversation we had been having for quite a while. Way before that evening. Like two electrical fields that couldn’t get close without a shower of sparks.

  I gave a shot across the bow. “I know you have something you need to tell me. So let’s get it out in the open. Or don’t you have the guts to name names?”

  But Courtney didn’t reply. Instead, she turned and strode into our master bedroom. Then there was the dull click as she locked the door behind her.

  I downed a couple stiff drinks and eventually skulked into the guest room and mindlessly popped on the TV, but paid little attention to it as I skipped through the channels on the remote, feeding my silent outrage. Underneath, there was another emotion. The restless despair that had become the hallmark of our marriage.

  I toyed with the idea of banging on the master bedroom door and bringing it to a head right then. Asking Courtney straight up who the guy was in her life, and how she could do that to me, and whether she was ready to beg me for forgiveness; because if she didn’t, then I was ready to kick her out of the condo that night, along with her thirty-four pairs of designer stilettos, from the Jimmy Choos to the Christian Louboutins.

  My phone buzzed on the end table to alert me of a voice mail. Must have just missed the call when I stepped out to mix myself another old-fashioned. I nearly ignored it, but as a defense lawyer, I had a complex about full discovery. As if there was something on my cell about my wife, Courtney. A smoking gun. Something I needed to know.

  Instead of that, what I heard was the voice of Elijah White, a former client of mine.

  “Trevor Black. Hey, man. Been thinking about you abundantly. But this isn’t about me. Or my parole either.”

  Elijah was a black man in his early fifties who had been in and out of prison on drug charges. Then, while serving his last sentence, something happened. The rumor was that he had found religion, and he became a model prisoner, got his GED, and was released early on parole. A minister from Harlem had hired me to represent him at the parole hearing that ended up springing him from prison. Thereafter Elijah began volunteering at his church, a place that sounded like it was full of the Holy Ghost and rock ’n’ roll. His day job had him working as an intake person at a drug rehab center.

  In his voice mail he sounded even more excited than usual, with “usual” being along the lines of someone who’d won a medium-size lottery or jus
t witnessed a bank robbery.

  “Okay, listen. I had this dream,” he started out. “Twice. Same dream. Actually, more like a nightmare. Not about me. About you. You, man. So you have to talk to me, ’cuz this is heavy stuff.”

  Against my better judgment I decided to return Elijah’s call. I almost hoped I’d get his voice mail, but instead he picked up.

  After our initial greeting, there was a little pause before he said, “I read in the papers how you signed onto this Dunning Kamera case. Listen up, I’m here to warn you. This is what the Spirit is telling me. I was told it in a dream. As clear as a bell ringing. Now, I’ve got only one question for you: is there something in your retainer agreement with Kamera, anywhere in that lawyer-client contract, about your soul?”

  Then he laid it on me. “I’m of the opinion that the dark prince of the air, he’s going to sift you and winnow you. Shuck you like an ear of corn, and that is no joke. So you better stay safe.”

  I groped for words. I regretted calling him and tried to get him off the phone with an edge to my voice, telling him, “Look, Elijah, I know you meant well by calling. Just don’t do it at night like this. If you need to tell me something, do it during office hours.”

  “Just remember. You know where you can find sanctuary. I know you do.” After that, Elijah hung up.

  I never made it into the master bedroom that night. I told myself it was because I needed to cool down and think things over. Give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe even give some thought to my failings as a husband. While there was truth in all of that, I stayed put for a different reason. It was because of my telephone chat with Elijah.