Page 3 of To Have and to Hold
My witness screwed me.
I tucked her files under my arm and pushed through the galley’s gate just behind the defense attorney, Carl Sandoval.
“Nice try, bud,” Sandoval said as we merged into the courtroom shuffle. “Gotta say, you’re doing more than I did at your age.”
“Eyes forward, counselor.” I muttered, “If not today, I’ll get him eventually. ‘Cause you know there will be a next time for your psycho client.”
Sandoval chuckled, then turned out of the courtroom doors and was gone.
I glanced back at the defendant before exiting, a hulking form currently being cuffed and taken into temporary holding until the trial could resume after an hour recess. But Max Torro’s size wasn’t the only thing separating him from the salt-and-pepper seasoning of his lawyer. His suit was department-store bought, not luxury, and the deep slashes of skin on either side of his mouth told of a rough upbringing. Throughout the morning’s proceedings, Torro sat, seeming to all the jury to be a down-on-his-luck guy who was dragged in here in the middle of a hard working day. He exuded little else when clothed in a rumpled suit with day-old stubble and a hard-worn, fatigued stare that bore into the grain of the table in front of him. It was carefully crafted, a specific devotion to the right expression at essential times. Beautiful manipulation at its finest, and if he weren’t such a lethal asshat I’d give him due credit. My victim fell for it and the jury box may very well, too, unless I could crawl out of the sink-hole my star witness just put us in.
I made my way to the trial bureau in the New York County district attorney’s office. After my first years of working in the Office where I prosecuted misdemeanors like DUIs, drug possession and simple assault in Criminal Court, I was moved to more specialized felony cases in the Special Victims Bureau in Supreme Court. I found myself drawn to the Domestic Violence Division where the victims, vulnerable and exposed, brought the type of tempered rage in me that led to determined wins. I came to know these women, children, and men who were reduced to an understanding of humankind that most of us thankfully didn’t have to recognize daily. I was only meant to prosecute abuse and assault cases, but with Max Torro’s current victim, Delilah Marks, I dug deeper, and what I found sent it to the top of the pile.
Delilah was dragged into the elevator of her building by a dark-clothed man after dropping her groceries and slamming him in the gut with a gallon of milk. As she was fighting, the woman manning the door of the luxury high-rise condo rushed to her aid, but couldn’t get to her before the elevator doors slid shut. The woman did catch a glimpse of the gun, however, and the face of the man holding it.
That woman, Cerise Watts, was my ticket. Emphasis on was. She initially ID’d my victim’s boyfriend, Max Torro, as the assaulter. However, come court time, she’d conveniently stated she got the face wrong, that it was someone else who lived in the building that shot Miss Marks.
Torro had a litany of offenses against him, not the least of which stemmed from his heroin transportation business run under the guise of importing timber from Canada. He was also a known abuser of women, with multiple ex-girlfriends filing—and then withdrawing—charges against him. Never had he decidedly maimed his significant other, but since he’d likely used the threat of forcing my witness’s baby brother into the drug trade to get her to change her testimony, there was no question that instead of dumping a woman to get her out of his life, he should try to kill her.
This attempted murder would become the biggest case of my career.
I walked the few blocks from Supreme Court to the Office, passing a small park on my right, resembling a large, skeletal traffic median as cars paused at the intersection and crept along the salt-crusted roads. The proximity of my work to the courthouse also led to arrogance—I figured a three-block jaunt wouldn’t require a ski jacket, scarf and full-blown wool face mask, and my Nordic heritage should’ve prepared me for New York City turning into a giant concrete iceberg; but now I found myself eyeing all the smarter men and women who passed me, their noses peeking out of their puffed pillowy warmth.
At the stoplight, my goddamned indoor fancy-suit shoes skidded into a familiar defense attorney.
“Shit, sorry man,” I said, clapping him on the back (but actually using him to maintain balance).
“Yo, Spence,” he said through the scarf over his mouth. “I see you’re doing the tough-guy ADA no jacket thing again.”
I gave him the fake guffaw he was looking for when the light changed. “See ya 'round, Arjun.”
Strands of sandy hair glued to my eyeballs from a particularly gusty breath of Jack Frost, and I cursed as my lack of sight had me skidding again across an iced-over pothole in the sidewalk. The front of my grey suit prickled with snowflake dandruff. So much for the smoothed-back look of a lawyer ready to put bad guys in jail.
Once in the building, I thawed, my exposed skin going from bone white to a plump red. I gave the requisite greetings in the elevator and in the hallways, nodding into cubicles and saluting the ADAs I was more familiar with. From 8 AM onwards, it was a rare occurrence to ever enter this building alone. Lawyers, civil servants, criminals and witnesses accompanied one through every doorway, their shouts, ringing phones and slurps of coffee combining into a cacophony of city noise that urban commuters could recognize anywhere.
“Hey man,” a voice said from inside my office once I reached it.
I shut the door and stepped over various boxes of case files. Once seated, my friend Anthony Knox could be seen through the hodgepodge of paper skyscrapers I’d created on the desk.
“Heard you had a hell of a morning,” he said.
“Already?” I tossed Delilah Marks’s folder into my mini-city, leaned back in my chair, and rubbed my face.
“You got one of New York’s most slippery tar importers on an attempted murder charge. NYPD scuttlebutt latches onto that kind of thing.”
The light brown skin under Knox’s blue-green eyes creased as he smiled. His face had the kind of even, angular proportions that led one to believe his parents had to be good-looking. It was amazing he still retained that kind of toothpaste smile considering what he’d seen in the last three years since he’d made detective, but it was all in his posture. In my peripheral vision, he read cop. The tall, slightly stiff pose, the close-cropped hair, the investigatory strut. It was only when I had him in front of me that the scuffed shoes, the scar across his left eyebrow and his habit of rubbing his neck would remind me of my college buddy. Word was, he’d be promoted to the Major Case Squad of the NYPD sometime soon.
“Especially juicy gossip. Sucks it’s going this way,” he said.
“But you’re not surprised.” My cheeks stretched as my fingers slid their exhausted trip down. I’d registered the spray of sticky notes stuck to my office phone, especially the three missed calls from my girlfriend, but chose to pretend this was a stage set office and the curtains would close any moment and I could go to bed instead.
“You have to admit, there’s no way Torro or his uncle would’ve made it easy for us,” Knox said.
“As detective on the case I would’ve hoped for a little more anger,” I said. “We had this guy in the act of putting a bullet in his girlfriend’s chest, and he still might walk.”
Knox shrugged, his broad shoulders nearly touching his ears. “What can I say? I’m jaded. People are assquakes.”
“Beautiful prose.”