Brooklyn Noir 3 Page 11

  Henry was a wreck. He’d forgotten how difficult cross could be. I told him that he was doing fine and that he was doing the right thing. He was close to tears and I had to use all my professional skills to keep from joining him. I thought about the quiet, dark boxes of the confessional, where I secretly told my sins to a priest, who would absolve me by prescribing a simple penance of Hail Marys and Our Fathers. How perfect those confessions are—expiation without too much pain. God love the Catholic Church. But a public confession on the witness stand is something quite different, namely a public humiliation.

  Barry ended his cross when it was clear to all that neither Henry nor my case had any credibility whatever. All that was left were closing arguments.

  Barry led by declaring what any defense attorney would under the circumstances: Henry was a liar, a thief, and a cheat all of his life, and his “performance” in this trial was payment for his do-not-go-to-jail ticket. He called my evidence worthless, and maintained that his client was a good and honest young cop who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  All that was left was for me to make a compelling closing argument and pull the conviction rabbit out of the hat. I spun the usual prosecution bullshit: If the People wanted to make up a story to frame the defendant, we would have done a much better job of it, and Henry had nothing to gain from accusing the defendant.

  “What did he do?” I asked. “Take his own money into the drug spot and then pretend to count it out for the defendant’s share?” I worried that some jurors might be thinking exactly that.

  The judge gave instructions to the jury and sent them out to deliberate, just before dinnertime. Which I considered a nice break for me: With an extra hour or so to eat before deliberating, the jurors just might be kept overnight.

  The judge told Barry and me to be available in case of an early verdict. As the age of cell phones had not yet dawned, we gave beeper numbers to the clerk. I decided to have a bite at a local Irish pub rather than go back to the office. Some colleagues from the Special Prosecutor’s Office joined me. Foregoing food, we had a beer or two.

  As time went by, I grew convinced that I had the jurors struggling with the evidence. I thought I must have done something right and ordered another beer, convinced that the jury would retire for the night without rendering a decision.

  At about 10 o’clock, my beeper went off and I called the court—expecting to be sent home for the night. But no, there was a verdict.

  There goes my hung jury, I thought. I returned to the courthouse hoping for a miracle. I ran into Barry in the corridor and he said that I tried a good case, given what I had to work with.

  I replied, “You kicked my ass, Barry.”

  The jury returned to its place in the courtroom, with nobody giving a sign I could detect of what their decision was. The judge asked the foreperson if a verdict had been reached and she said, “We have, your honor,” and passed the verdict sheet to a clerk who gave it to the judge. I noticed no extra court officers in the room—a telltale sign of a guilty verdict.

  The judge read the verdict sheet and returned it to the clerk, who returned it to the foreperson. My heart raced as it always did right before a verdict, and I listened as the judge asked the foreperson, “On the first count of the indictment, how do you find?”

  “Not guilty, your honor.”

  Which was the same response to the remaining counts. And so, the last trial in the 77th Precinct investigation ended.

  The judge thanked the jurors for their service and I asked if I could speak with them—customary practice for attorneys who want to know how jurors analyzed the trial. I moved to the jury box, from which most good citizens had fled but a few remained. I approached an attractive young woman whom I thought had listened with close attention during my closing arguments.

  Before I could ask a question, she said to me, with some hesitation, “We tried, Mr. Hawkins, but there really wasn’t evidence.” I thanked her for at least considering the facts.

  Another juror said, “We just could not believe Winter. He is so bad.” A few others offered their thoughts and I thanked them all before leaving.

  Barry and his client were talking in the corridor as I headed for the elevators, which even during the day took forever to arrive. Normally, I would walk down the stairs to avoid running into the defendant, but tonight I waited, thinking the stairways might be locked due to lateness of the hour.

  When the elevator finally came, I entered, alone. As the doors closed, there stood Barry and his client, taking a pause from their conversation. The defendant grinned. I pointed my finger at him and said, “Get ya next time.”

  Nice work, Dennis. Very professional, especially since the system worked exactly the way it’s supposed to: I brought a case I could not prove beyond reasonable doubt and the jury found the defendant not guilty.

  There I was, playing the Dirty Harry version of a prosecutor and making threats to a kid who smiled his awkward smile because he was relieved and didn’t know how to relate to the guy who just tried to send him off to jail.

  It may not have been the last time I acted like an asshole, but it’s the time I remember best.

  The next day, Barry called to ask what the district attorney’s office planned to do about the other indictments. I told him that we would have to review the situation. (We ultimately dismissed those indictments and referred the cases to the Police Department for administrative hearings. I was told that Gil resigned before those trials.)

  “And Dennis,” Barry said, “you really shouldn’t have said that to my client.”

  “I know, Barry, I know. Would you please tell him I’m sorry?”

  Ah yes, confession is good for the soul. As is an appropriate apology. But some confessions do not absolve the guilt.

  Gallagher’s partner wrote page after page of confession in the hours before he killed himself. Henry Winter confessed his sins three times over while sitting in the witness box. Some years later, he hanged himself at his home in Valley Stream, Long Island.

  Today, I still carry their confessions with me, along with my own smaller sins, but sins nonetheless.

  And I remember what Joe Hynes said to the New York Times some years ago on the subject of investigating cops: “[It] is the saddest job I’ve ever had. It destroys lives. If you enjoy it, you’re sick. If it gets to you to the point where you have trouble sleeping at night, you ought to be out of it.”

  Thank God I’m out of it.

  THE BODY IN THE DOORWAY

  BY PATRICIA MULCAHY

  Fort Greene

  I never saw the body. I found out that Vladimir the antiques dealer, a.k.a. Bobby from Russia, had been shot in the head at point-blank range in the doorway of his shop at Vanderbilt and DeKalb because the drums were talking. This is how it went in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in the mid-1990s.

  Friends called friends to alert them to the fact that there’d been another mugging in Fort Greene Park, or gunshots heard from an unknown source on Adelphi at 3 a.m. A mention of Fort Greene on the news usually meant that another four-year-old had been shot tragically in drug-related violence in the Walt Whitman Houses. Myrtle Avenue was referred to as “Murder Avenue” by all and sundry. The local citizenry protected each other with all-points alerts about crime in an area labeled up-and-coming, yet still on its way to that elusive goal, whatever it meant to anyone who wasn’t a real estate broker.

  Burnt out on tourists, nonstop street spectacle, and rising prices in Greenwich Village, I’d moved to Brooklyn in 1990, thrilled by the beautiful architecture, the wide, treelined streets, and the warm and generous spirit of the people who lived here. Hell, I got a free dessert the week I moved in. Christine, a Caribbean woman who ran a bakery at the corner of Carlton and DeKalb, told me, “Watch out going by the park after dark,” as she welcomed me with a delicious rum pudding. No one had given me free anything in the twelve years I’d lived in Manhattan. This was Fort Greene in a nutshell: Welcome, and watch your back.
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br />   Taxi drivers told me I was crazy to live in a neighborhood like this. Unspoken was the fact that I was white and the area was predominantly African American. Perhaps I was naïve, but I didn’t worry. In the nine years I’d lived on Jones Street between West 4th and Bleecker, I’d been mugged in broad daylight in the lobby, burglarized by a guy who called on the phone a week later to let me know he could come back anytime he wanted, and terrorized by a drug-and-booze-addled jazz musician neighbor whose friends I passed shooting up in the hallway on my way to work. How much worse could it be in Brooklyn?

  It was tough in New York then, and things could happen anywhere: This was the common wisdom passed from one nervous neighbor to another. Watching your back was a way of living, the price of being in the big city, with all it had to offer. The worst thing that happened to me in Fort Greene was being labeled “white meat” by a bunch of teenaged boys eager to look tough for their cohorts. But if I stayed out late I hoped and prayed I would find a parking spot close to my apartment. Muggers exercised equal opportunity in their choice of targets.

  In truth, I learned that for all its tough-talk swagger and reputation, Brooklyn had a big, warm heart. Living in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill felt like being in a village where everyone knows your name and people stop on the street to exchange pleasantries along with the latest news on tire slashings. We even had a plant thief on Washington Avenue who was fencing window boxes somewhere in South Brooklyn. My next-door neighbor, a divorcée with a BMW, a very active social life, and no visible means of support, left town one day and never came back, taking with her a baby who’d arrived under mysterious circumstances. Later, I found out that she had tried to sell the child back to the doctor who delivered her. There was never a dull moment.

  Which brings us back to Bobby, shot dead in the doorway of an emporium crammed to the rafters with lovely chests of drawers and old Tiffany-style lamps and antique dining tables. The tall, rangy Russian, who was in fact from the Republic of Georgia and usually wore a broad-brimmed leather hat, à la Crocodile Dundee, was one of the many “gentlemen friends” who’d been seen coming and going to the house next to ours. I doubted that he was the one who threw a rock through the window at 6 a.m., necessitating a visit from a patrolman, or the one who set the fire in the foyer. But who knew?

  At the time of the murder, rumors flew up and down the streets of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill: Bobby had been shot by his former brother-in-law, with whom he’d been in business until recently; it was someone from the Russian mob in Brighton Beach, from whom he’d borrowed money; it was the husband of one of his paramours—my next-door neighbor was just one of many.

  Tillie Asnis, the landlady, had discovered the body in the doorway of the store. I met her when she was selling furniture, emptying the place for a new tenant. As I recall, she said little about the murder itself that day, and instead gossiped about the Russian’s way with the local ladies. That, too, was typical of the neighborhood then: Once a crime had been broadcast on the local grapevine, it was rarely discussed further. Better to keep a lid on things.

  A frizzy-haired woman of Russian Jewish ancestry who’d moved to Brooklyn from the Bronx, Tillie lived above the shop with her children and grandchildren. A two-pack-a-day smoker, she reminded me of the characters on The Honeymooners, with her husky voice and no-nonsense demeanor. After running a dry cleaning store on the premises with her late husband for many years, she’d let the space to her son-in-law for a bike shop and a locksmith’s business before leasing it to Vladimir. Given his untimely departure, she was back to square one. Life went on, as did the need to pay the bills.

  Though horrified by the manner in which the store had been vacated, I asked Tillie about the rent on the space after buying two chairs for fifteen dollars. At the time, I was a book publisher with no experience running restaurants, though I’d worked as a waitress in a country club, a truck stop, an icecream parlor, and an Italian restaurant in high school and college. The oldest in an Irish Catholic family with six children, I was as chronically overscheduled as the West Indian characters in the old Saturday Night Live skits.

  In an effort to meet people in my new neighborhood, I’d volunteered as a writer and editor for a local quarterly called The Hill. A look at back issues alerted me to the previous existence of an espresso place in an old carriage house on Waverly Avenue run by students at Pratt, an art school situated in the neighborhood. What a brilliant idea for a shop in an area full of graphic and fashion designers, architects, and other people who worked at home and had no place to hang out other than the local Greek diners. And the corner of Vanderbilt and DeKalb was just three blocks from the Pratt campus. Didn’t art students and their teachers need cappuccino to fuel their creative efforts?

  Though I loved working with writers, I was becoming increasingly disenchanted with corporate publishing, which had its own version of sword-and-knife play. In addition, I had come to relish my involvement in the Fort Greene community, and wanted to make a contribution to a place I felt had a bright future in so many ways, with its diverse population, its proximity to Manhattan, and its history-filled beauty. And if I didn’t take the space, it might become yet another real estate office, of which we had a plethora already.

  I put my nest egg where my heart was: Hands shaking, I wrote Tillie Asnis a check for a security deposit and set out to convert an old antiques store into a cozy neighborhood café named in her honor. While I was out of town on a publishing trip, the Jamaican contractor and his Trinidadian crew performed a ceremony involving white rum and chicken feathers to purge the space of any bad spirits left over from the murder of the previous tenant. Despite the Caribbean version of an exorcism, predictions of failure were as common as rain in April. Word on the street was that no one in this neighborhood would pay $1.50 for a cup of coffee when they could buy it across the street at the diner for sixty cents. At the time, DeKalb Avenue had just one restaurant, the beloved Cino’s, a red-sauce fixture since the 1950s, and Starbucks was just beginning its retail march from sea to shining sea.

  Fast-forward to the new century. I’d left publishing for freelance life. We’ll move right through the years of light foot traffic, employee theft and subterfuge, and near-bankruptcy at the store. Nothing I’d done in my life had elicited such an honestly enthusiastic and truly grateful response: Area residents stopped me on the corner, in line at the grocery store, and in the post office to tell me how much they loved my shop. Even in Manhattan, people I’d never met called across subway cars, “Hello, Tillie!” By the time we celebrated our tenth year in business in 2007, Tillie’s was considered a neighborhood institution, which made me feel both proud and definitely older.

  Though friends and family members saw me as a Pollyanna when I opened the store, the survival of my risky venture validated my view of the neighborhood as a place filled with genuine potential, despite its dicey reputation. I wasn’t getting rich, but nor was I spending my days listening to my boss cavil about so-called “big books.”

  By then, many more restaurants and coffee joints had opened not just on DeKalb, but all over the area, and real estate prices in Fort Greene had increased by such leaps and bounds that the New York Times real estate section could barely keep up. In 2006, a photo of the side of Tillie’s illustrated an article in the New York Times magazine about the death of bohemia and the invasion of the stroller brigade. How far we’d come from the days of Bobby the Russian’s sad demise.

  Fears of rapid change—of the Manhattanization of Brooklyn by condo and office tower—now fuel the local rumor mill. Friends call friends to discuss not the latest shooting, but the sale prices of houses and coop apartments, and whether or not the area will change irrevocably for the worse when the Atlantic Yards development is built. After years of peace and quiet, there’s been a recent blip upward in the local crime rate, as the “have-nots” eye this newly fertile hunting ground of “haves.” Still, the neighborhood remains positively bucolic in comparison to the bad old days, which some
longtime residents refer to with a sense of rueful regret. Though no one condoned burglary or car theft, there was a sense then that we were in it together, battling for a better future. Now that it has arrived, we aren’t all sure we like the way it looks. Fairy tales don’t start with bodies sprawled in doorways.

  References to the Borough of Kings now connote not working-class pride or even street style, but a certain kind of city life that is artistically astute, relatively well-off, politically correct, and, yes, self-satisfied. For a taste of the old ways, you have to go further into what friends call “deepest Brooklyn,” where even in an era of drastically reduced crime all over the metropolis, there are still bodies on the ground, almost all dark-skinned.

  At the funeral of one of our first customers, Frank Giaco, who sat in front each morning sipping coffee and smoking a smelly cigar, I nearly lost it when I saw a Tillie’s card in his coffin: Buy ten, get one free. In the best Brooklyn tradition, we hang on.

  PART III

  DEATH STEP

  In which players who are not faint of heart assemble atop a structure of any sort—a fence, low building, rock, etc. One by one, they step forward to the edge and close their eyes while those behind give a sudden shove. As the game continues by round, the ultimate winner is the one player no longer afraid to take a blind leap.

  SNAPSHOTS

  BY TIM MCLOUGHLIN

  Kings County Supreme Court

  I have worked in the New York City courts for more than twenty years. All of that time in Brooklyn. All but one year in Criminal Court or the Criminal Term of Supreme Court.

  My coworkers and I have borne witness to a generational slice-of-life of the criminal underclass. One of the things we have learned is that siphoning the antisocial actions of any individual through the filter of a government bureaucracy— however well-intentioned—turns even the most evil behavior into mundane drama.