The Occupied Page 7

  He spoke first. “I’ve got nothing to say to you, Trevor. About your dead wife. Or anything else. So let me pass. By the way, I’ve dismissed you as my lawyer. I’m meeting with my new legal counsel right now.”

  “Then you’re not my client anymore,” I said. “Which makes it easy for me to do this.” I dropped my briefcase, took a step toward him, and punched him in the face.

  Bradley crumpled against the side of the elevator and slid down to the floor, not moving. He was out for only a few seconds, and then he slowly came to, whimpering and grabbing his nose, which was gushing bright-red blood. He screamed something after me, but I didn’t much care what it was.

  I plodded through the sea of people in the courthouse hallway, wading through this world as I had known it: fretting lawyers, harried clients with puzzled looks, impatient witnesses, bored jurors heading to courtrooms where they would be impaneled for jury trials, vagrants off the street, clerks with stacks of files, and court-curious retired folks reading the paper and looking for some juicy litigation to view.

  None of it made much sense to me at that moment. I was suddenly aware of the grime on the floor, the ugly institutional aesthetics of the government building, and the miserable cynicism, selfishness, and punishing aggression that populated this place. Why was I there? I was on my way to plead the cause of a man who may well have cut the heart out of a nineteen-year-old runaway.

  Something was happening to me.

  13

  I made a heroic effort during the hearing, arguing for Dunning Kamera’s release. But the judge had no use for it. Bail was revoked and my client was ordered to be detained in jail until trial.

  My pitch to the court had been straightforward: that we didn’t lie in our argument in the original bail hearing about Kamera not having a passport. In point of fact, he actually didn’t have one.

  What I didn’t know, because my client hadn’t bothered to tell me, was that before the murder he had applied for a passport and was waiting for it to arrive in the mail. But in the end, none of that made any difference. Kamera had been ordered not to leave the country as a condition of bail, the judge pointed out. He was then caught trying to slip across the Canadian border. It was a clear violation.

  But there was more bad news for my client’s case. I knew that the prosecution might try to inject the whole sordid event into the trial as evidence of an accused’s attempt to escape from the country—flight as an implied admission of guilt. I had to now prepare a motion in limine to keep that out. More damage control.

  As Dunning Kamera was led away in his jailhouse jumpsuit, he turned around and threw me this strange look while lifting up his manacled wrists and spreading out his hands, as if he had a question. At the same time, the grin on his face seemed to tell me that he already had the answer, even if I didn’t.

  I wasn’t sure why, but that last view of Dunning Kamera triggered something in my head. About the photos.

  After passing through the doors under the Gothic spires and gargoyles of the Woolworth Building, I made my way up to my office. The first thing to do was to pull out those crime scene photos of Heather, the victim. Especially the one that most clearly showed the horrible, ragged cut beneath her breast and slightly to the side, where her heart had been removed. That was when something jumped out that my subconscious must have caught, though I had missed it before.

  On the extreme left of the photo, there were the faint edges of red strokes on her belly. I had to stare at them for a long time before I decided what they might be. All that was visible was part of an arc and a dot beneath it. It looked like someone had painted a red question mark on her flesh, perhaps with her own blood, but the photograph had caught only the extreme border of it. Perhaps intending to exclude it altogether. There had to be more photos showing her entire torso and what had been written on her. If that was a question mark, then what was the question? The prosecution had been holding back.

  I needed to demand the rest of the photographs. Another motion had to be prepared. I would have my law clerk do the legal research and my paralegal put together a rough draft of the motion papers. But I still needed to supervise the effort. Edit it. Do some of my own research. Redraft it. I would have to force myself.

  I knew that on the exterior I would be going on cruise control. Like a droid. While on my inside there was a black hole growing, like some catastrophic cosmic event, swallowing up everything in its gravitational pull and sending it all to that place from which no light could escape.

  When Catherine buzzed me on the intercom, it broke me momentarily out of the darkness that I was in. An overnight FedEx letter had just arrived. She said it was marked confidential, so I told her to bring it into my office.

  Inside the envelope was the letterhead of a local attorney I didn’t know. A guy named Carson Tunney. The letter said he had just been retained by Bradley Yelsin to represent him and confirmed that I had been discharged as his attorney. Then the kicker. I was being reported to the New York State Bar Association for unprofessional conduct in having committed serious battery upon the person of Bradley Yelsin, a former legal client. I clenched my teeth and did the man-up thing by making light of it and telling myself with chagrin that at least there was a little good news: the beating had been ranked as “serious.” Considering the fact that he probably supplied my wife with the cocaine that took her life, that was some consolation.

  But in the logical part of my cortex I was aware that things were starting to fall apart for me. Swirling into oblivion.

  I fought against it. There was the inclination that I could simply keep my head down and push through. The option of grinding on. Even if the gears had no oil. Thinking, All of this will pass.

  Another part of my brain, emanating from who knows where, but just as cogent, and equally plausible, told me that I needed to take a chance. Find some meaning in all of this. Make a change. Perhaps I had been sailing through life on a skiff made of balsa wood and tinsel. But now that the rogue waves were coming, it was time to look for an island. One that had a harbor.

  I went for the second option. Compelled to do so. I found myself balling up my fists as my eyes filled with tears of regret, rage, guilt, and despair. I mirrored the Jimmy Stewart scene out of It’s a Wonderful Life where he sits hunched over the bar at Martini’s, praying. I pleaded with God, wherever he was, to give me some help down here. I thought back to Elijah White. As I did, a flood of the homilies that he had shared with me over the years came pouring back and took shape—the fall of man, and Jesus, and a blood-soaked cross, all of it—and the truth suddenly lit up my brain, so I prayed all of that too, and as I prayed, I meant it, every word.

  I’d never poured out my soul, not even to my wife, so as I sat at my desk—the oval, vintage, mahogany number with the inlaid leather surface I had ordered from London—I had no preconceived notion what might happen next. Certainly no anticipation that some pleasantly bumbling angel out of a Hollywood script would show up, trying to earn his wings. And none came.

  Yet I realized that, without even knowing how I got there, I had just been at a crossroads. Taken one route, and not another. And there was something numinous yet real going on. The kind of thing that could raise the hair on the back of your neck.

  And despite the way my rational brain tried to scream that only the empirical mattered, that only the sensate was reliable, I couldn’t deny what was going on. Invisible, yet overwhelming.

  I sat in my leather executive chair for a long time, collecting myself. I was basking in a moment of relief. Able to actually feel my body, down to my fingertips. But suddenly aware that I was more than that. And that something began dwelling with me that had not been there the day before.

  I gazed over at the framed photo of Courtney that was on my credenza. Then I reached over on my desk and picked up the silver blues harp that I had hung on to from my days in The Assault and had been using as a paperweight. The traces of things past.

  At the same time there was the feeling t
hat something else had happened. Something altogether new.

  But just as quickly, another thought came filtering in. I dismissed it at first, but it kept returning. Like a spoiler at a wedding, where the couple is in love and meant for each other and everything seems right with the world, but the spoiler whispers that one of them is unfaithful and it’s not going to last.

  The spoiler was whispering to me about Elijah White, who had been busted on cocaine charges years ago. How did I know that he was really clean? He had called me the night before Courtney’s death, delivering his doomsday message. Then the next day my wife was found dead in her car from a cocaine overdose. I didn’t want to think about Elijah that way, but I couldn’t help it. Humans do horrendous things and sometimes they claim that God told them to do it. I had handled a few cases like that myself. I needed to figure out how Elijah and his phone call fit into all of this.

  I looked back at the grisly photos on my desk. The forensic pictures of the dead nineteen-year-old girl, Heather. And the one photo with the faintest edge of a bloody question mark. The evidence of dark deeds done by a heart of unimaginable cruelty.

  But I had to stop looking at the photos, because of something in the air.

  That exact moment was the very first time that it happened for me, though it would not be the last. There was an actual scent. One that I recognized immediately, even though I hadn’t experienced it in decades. The Manitou landfill incinerator that was out on the edge of town, and how on Fridays they would burn garbage and waste, and dead animals. For miles around, you could smell it. The faint scent of smoke, incineration, and death. That exact same odor was in my office. And the tingling feeling on my skin, an eerie sensation that someone was there in my office with me, even though I was alone.

  I jumped up from my desk and searched for a fire. Maybe something electrical. A short circuit in one of the lamps. But there was nothing.

  And then the alarm sounded. A fire alarm in the ceiling above my head, screaming with an obnoxious wail. Catherine bolted into my office. “Where’s the fire?”

  “Can’t you smell it?” I yelled. “The smoke from a fire?”

  She shook her head. “No, not really. The alarm battery must be on its last legs.” She disappeared, ran down the hall to the storage cabinet, and came back with a new battery. I dragged a chair over to the spot and climbed on it, reaching the alarm, which was still sounding. I popped off the cover and yanked out the old battery. The wailing continued.

  I snapped in the new battery. More screaming from the alarm.

  I was stumbling into a rage. So I yanked the wires clean out from the side of the alarm. Catherine was watching the whole thing, wide-eyed. But the alarm was still wailing, even after that. There was no earthly explanation for it.

  “Can’t you smell the fire?” I yelled again over the screaming siren.

  Catherine just shook her head no.

  I jumped off the chair, grabbed a heavy brass bookend from my bookshelf, got back on the chair, and smashed the ceiling alarm, busting it into shards that fell to the floor. The alarm finally went quiet. But I could still smell the powerful odor of the Manitou landfill fires.

  Turning to the doorway, I noticed my partner Hal Tobit standing there in his shirtsleeves. His client conference had been interrupted by the alarm. He looked up at the ceiling and down at the remnants of the alarm on the floor, and then focused on the big bookend clutched in my hand. “Trevor, what in blazes are you doing?”

  “Fire . . .” I started to say. “Hal, tell me you can smell it.”

  He screwed up his face and said, “I don’t smell anything. You need to get ahold of yourself.”

  After Hal left, I heard him remark to someone out in the hallway, “Obviously he’s not ready to come back.”

  I thought to myself, Wait till he finds out what I did to Bradley Yelsin.

  Catherine was still standing in my office with a sympathetic but helpless look on her face. I was about to ask her yet again about the foul, burning odor that still lingered in my office, but I caught myself.

  She said, “I’ll get a dustpan and clean this up.” I cut her off and told her it wasn’t necessary. I made the mess, and I would pick it up. I asked her to close the door to my office behind her. Then I dropped into one of my tufted leather client chairs.

  A tangle of thoughts and a cast of characters were racing through my head like the second lap at a NASCAR event. Courtney, of course. Bradley Yelsin. Dunning Kamera. Elijah White.

  But others too. The reminder of Manitou had stirred them. The landfill fires had kindled something from way back. Suddenly I was thinking about faces from high school. Marilyn Parlow. How long had it been? And there were still others. My friends from those days so long ago—Dan Hoover, the guitar virtuoso. And Bobby Budleigh, and Augie Bedders.

  But enough. I had to force myself out of those memories and back into the present moment. To that file on my desk, and to the murder case that was my task. Assuming mistakenly that my past had nothing to do with any of that or with what was about to happen.

  But this I knew: I had the urgent need to find my way. To separate the light from the darkness. And to choose the one and not the other. Choices like that were becoming clear.

  14

  I went to bed early that night, again in the guest room. But this time I slept hard and long.

  As I pried my eyes open the next morning, the same first thought came crashing in. It had recently become routine: Courtney’s dead.

  Then the avalanche of emotions. The feeling that I had failed her. My trial practice had sucked much of the life out of me. So when I would finally be off the clock on the weekends, when I should have spent more time with Courtney, instead I pursued my own indulgences: the Saturdays with my collector’s edition Browning Belgium twelve-gauge shotgun at the skeet-shooting club in Hyde Park. Or trying to improve my miserable golf game at the Pound Ridge Golf Club. Or all those sport-fishing jaunts and drinking binges with friends, and with the wealthy clients of my partners.

  But that morning, following my spiritual ablution of the day before, there was something else: a feeling like a window had been opened, and a fresh breeze was ventilating my insides. Even in the middle of my shock, loss, and professional maelstrom, I had a strange calm. Having lacked peace for longer than I could recall, maybe always, I hardly recognized it at first. There was clarity of mind, too, even in the swirl of internal pain.

  Yes, I had failed Courtney. I could see that. And somehow I would have to sort all of that out. The true regret would be if I were unwilling to learn from what had happened. That would be the double tragedy.

  Only two things were on my schedule for today: a conference with Dunning Kamera in the holding cell in the courthouse, immediately followed by a short status conference with the judge on his case. Perfunctory. Routine.

  Before I left for the jail, I turned on my cell and went through a few messages. The only important one was from Detective Dick Valentine. He was a veteran of the NYPD with a solid reputation and a no-nonsense approach. Valentine had been the investigating officer in two of my other cases. He didn’t play games, and he had no patience for prosecutors or defense attorneys who did.

  He said in his voice mail that he was calling about Courtney because he had been assigned to investigate her death. That was a shocker, as he had already been tapped to take over the police work on the Dunning Kamera case after Detective Dutch Alreider screwed it up with his illegal search of Kamera’s apartment.

  It was highly unusual that Valentine would be permitted to investigate my wife’s death, while at the same time posing as the point man for the police department on a murder case where I was counsel for the defendant. Didn’t he realize that I could object and scream bloody murder about it being an investigatory conflict of interest, and demand that he be removed from one or even from both of the cases? I would wait to get back to him. I needed to think that one through.

  When I arrived at the courthouse, I went down to th
e basement level and checked in with the jailer, telling him that I had an appointment to meet with Kamera. My client was already in a holding cell, but I would have to wait for a jail escort. Ten minutes later, a corrections officer showed up and walked me down the holding cell corridor, where I was treated to the usual torrent of obscene catcalls from other inmates, their voices echoing through the concrete tunnel and ricocheting off metal doors.

  The jailer unlocked the holding cell and let me in, and then locked it after me. Kamera was waiting for me there, looking even paler than usual, dressed in his jail jumpsuit, sitting quietly with his hands folded, free and unmanacled, on top of a metal table. For reasons that seemed obvious, the legs of the table in the holding cell were secured to the cement floor with large machine bolts.

  I greeted my client, but didn’t shake his hand, and instead dropped my briefcase in the corner. By this time the full case file had grown considerably, filling up three brown ten-inch, expandable folders and a thick trial notebook that was taking shape. But I’d brought only one file that day, my working file.

  Right out of the gate I told him I had some questions about the bloody handkerchief. I told him I would be filing a motion to suppress it from evidence because it had been obtained by the police illegally, and that I would announce my intention to the judge when we appeared before her shortly. Kamera grinned and nodded. He could see he was as good as acquitted.

  I figured I might as well press the issue while he was in a good mood. “Mr. Kamera, there’s one detail I need to know about.” His grin faded a bit. “The blood on your handkerchief—where did it come from?”

  Dunning Kamera looked away. “It was a few nights before the . . . incident. I met a young lady at a singles bar, and we got together. For a date. In the course of the evening, she had a nosebleed, and I naturally offered her my handkerchief.”