The Case Against Michael

At about midnight, I walk out to the courthouse steps on Schermerhorn to bum a cigarette and swap stories with Michael. Thursdays are always busy, and I’ll be in late at arraignments, and he’ll drop a message with the bridge officer that he’s coming down. I tell the clerk I’m taking a break and head outside. 

It's odd. Speaking to the clerk, the sound of my own voice is startling. In the buzz and bustle of the courtroom the last half hour, waiting for my case—absolute silence. Locked in the anechoic chamber in the interior of my own mind.

Tonight, it’s not freezing or anything, but the November wind comes screaming up from the river and I have to pull up the flaps of my pea coat. Michael swaggers toward me, all teeth. We both know we could be fired for the conversation we’re about to have. Our supervisors wouldn’t even blink before firing us. Stoic math. The City is like that.

Michael shakes my hand, pulling me into his mile-wide grin and hugging me by the shoulder. “Tell me what this son-of-a-bitch Sanchez is doing stabbing her. What do they think you guys are going to do, slap him on the back and say she had it coming?” Michael used to want to help out these second-generation immigrant perps. To hear him talk about the way the system let them down, I’d start questioning myself. Now he just clocks in. 

These talks are our penitence. You can only live in the trenches so long, dealing day-in, day-out, with the depraved and hateful portion of the human plight before it starts to live inside you. It’s hard to explain our morbid fascination with batterers, the ironic cocktail of violence and intimacy. 

“Here’s the latest on Charlie Thomas. So Cassandra wouldn’t press charges. One of those, ‘wants to make it work’ cases. He still got processed. She made the arraignment and dissolved the order. So he was out ROR, and by the time he gets word she’s staying at her sister’s place, he’s riding high on rock and Jim Beam. An hour after he gets the news he shows up at her sister’s house with a .357 magnum. He’s got no weapons charges on his sheet, just a lot of 120s. So there he is. Nothing to stop him. The little girl hears them yelling and comes out of the living room. Charlie points at their child in common and shoots. It is an act of God. The gun explodes in his hand. The gun dealer sold him the wrong plus-p ammunition. He beats Cassandra with what’s left of the sidearm, and before it’s irreversible the kid’s screams get to him and he runs. She’s down at Lutheran Medical Center, and we’re out looking for the scumbag now.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Michael says. How could it? It is the same thing over and over. Men from disparate cultures, marooned on this concrete island, taking out all of their frustration on their women. Michael is what we call a true believer. He is the bringer of second chances and the vindicator of the innocent and the wicked repentant alike. He was doing the Lord’s work. I do the impression to remind him of how he used to be before it started to get to him.

“I know, it’s a shame,” I say, and without thinking I blurt out, “There’s no helping these people.” He nods. I take offense at his cynicism. 

I light his Marlboro Red for him, and we stand there looking out at these doomed buildings and people scurrying under street lamps, adding to the dusty air with those little whiffs of tobacco-induced peace. A few tiny specks of snow sleet float down and glint in the streetlight. We try to push off the slackness of all that nicotine and coffee keeping us alive through these pointless hearings. We are savages. 

I can feel it in my gut, my body getting beaten by the pressure of too many cases, too many to even read. Just going by gut instinct and first impressions—too often wrong. And somewhere inside of me, I can’t even locate there is a hole that all the feelings drain out of.

Then the call comes in. The DI gives it to me like he’s reading the weather report. Cassandra slipped into a coma at eleven seventeen, the cerebral swelling hit the motor cortex and she stopped breathing. They defibrillated for three minutes and pronounced her. So, just like that, I’ve got my first murder one. Michael listens to the call and knows what it means for both of us. 

Liz is going to kill me. Neither of us had set foot outside the City since the bar exam.   City winters can crush you. One cold night, three weeks ago, in a snowstorm, trapped in my little 500 square foot walk up, over a cheap bottle of red wine, we’d made plans. With the first snow of the season coming down hard, knowing we’d have the day off, we had conspired to get away. We had somehow gotten outside of the orb of striving, responsibility, and obligation, into our own circle. We signed up for a little Mexican getaway in Riviera Maya, right then, online. 

Intoxicated with the rush of an escape, in a frenzy of laughter, we finished two more bottles, made love, and spent the whole next day in bed, ordering in, half-watching a Humphrey Bogart marathon while talking about all of the things we could do on our trip. Liz got off of teaching at John Jay and surprised me by making me an Italian dinner when I got home and walked in the door. 

She had gone out and bought sundresses and at least five pairs of new shoes she couldn’t afford. Big gaudy ‘look at me’ shoes with different colors on their bottoms, one fancy pair for dancing, and various others for every activity we had thought of doing while on the island. We were supposed to leave on Monday for a full week.

So, this would be the second time I blew our vacation, the second time we’d had to eat the money. I thought, maybe she’d go without me, but I knew that wouldn’t work either. We hadn’t signed up for this when we turned down jobs at big firms. We were going to live life on our own terms. 

We were going to live free and have clear consciences and thumb our noses at the race for wealth and position and prosperity going on all around us. It hadn’t turned out like we thought. Our consciences were plenty heavy. Our bank accounts were nearly empty. Most nights we didn’t like ourselves very much and had trouble breaking the spell of anxiety and connecting like we had when we were young, with the world ahead of us, when we were happy. 

We only caught a little bit of the old magic on the days one of us came back with a good story to tell – and those days were like Christmas – but, even then it was mostly self-importance and honoring ourselves, and even then, we still doubted we were the ones with the white hats.

After a time, Michael looks at me and says, “I guess we better go in.” To our surprise, they caught up with Charlie Thomas. When they bring Charlie Thomas in with his hands behind him in handcuffs, he thinks he’s up on another assault, Penal Law 120. That’s normal procedure for him. He thinks he’s going home tonight. After the incident with the gun and the beating he gave her, he might not get bail, or she might insist on an order. Worst case, he does a little bit or maybe stays with his mom for a few weeks. 

He’s got no idea that he just orphaned his daughter and that a rep from OCFS is telling her that she’s going to be a ward of the state and she’s going to a group home. Charlie has a little bit of beard growing in. He’s all chin to the judge, and I can see from the counsel table that little wad of flesh on the back of his neck, beneath his shaved head.

It’s just routine. I’m the prosecutor saying he’s a flight risk and Michael is the dutiful defense attorney going on about ties to the community, the mother in Red Hook, his carpentry job. It is scripted theatre we know by rote. None of it means a thing. There’s no chance this guy is going ROR. Little chance he ever sees the light of day again. Judge Miller used to run the DA’s office, and somehow he is on arraignments tonight. Bad break for Charlie. He’s the Supervising Judge. Even if anything Michael said could resonate with Judge Miller, there’s no way Miller’s taking a chance of having the Daily News up his ass if Charlie gets on a flight back home to the Dominican Republic or worse.

On Friday, I take the R down to Red Hook to see Charlie Thomas’s mom. This is another one of those things I can get fired for. A DI should really be out here, or I should have someone with me. 

She answers in a fog, opening the door slowly, unaccustomed to guests. She’s a powerful woman. Diminutive, defiant—strong. Her back is a little hunched. Her shawl smells of Marlboro 100’s and her hair is up in an old-fashioned bun. She lives in an Asian neighborhood, but there’s kind of a divide and she’s at it. When she’s at the door, I lie and tell her I worked with her son at a carpentry place where he was working last. She’s surprised. My Spanish is no good.

I’ve been down at the senior center a few blocks down on other cases, and the older Chinese sit around all day playing mahjong. They are loud and mostly only speak Chinese. When we get there, there’s a whole pack of them shuffling and shouting, shuang, shuang, and smiling. I decide I'll take Ms. Thomas out there. I just want to know what she thinks we do with her granddaughter.

There is one part I can’t get around. She tells me she knows they had a little girl, but doesn’t even know her name is Elizabeth. She tells me she’s never met her. At least that’s all I can make out without a translator. 

The thing is, in the last three years working this gig I’ve noticed one thing that’s always bugging the hell out of me. When these beaters go on the lamb, we always pick them up at the mother’s house. It is the eeriest thing. If it's summer they’ll be out on the porch having iced tea together, waiting for us. In the winter, it’s inside with coffee. We don’t even bother going anywhere else. It’s always the mother’s house. 

The next time I see Michael is Monday morning. We run into each other in line, both getting egg wraps at Mr. Tozt at the Fulton Mall. I get a huge travel mug full of coffee to get me through the calendar call. Michael says, “So how do you like the case you have against Thomas.”

“I’ve got ballistics on the misfire, photos from the hospital, a coroner’s report, and I’m thinking I won’t even need to call the girl.”

“Nonsense. She’s the only witness. How do you feel about intent?” he says. This is his way of angling for murder two instead of murder one.

“Dead to rights, Mikey. I figure he stopped at some van and picked up that pistol that day. He wasn’t registered. He wasn’t going for target practice. That’s intent.” This is how I tell him I’m not getting a black eye in my unit for dropping the ball on my first murder, and we’re not taking any light pleas. 

He nods his head and looks down at the Jamaican girl at the counter who takes my money. Then he looks up and says, “Good luck proving that. What are you going to do, call the gun runner?”

Walking back to the courthouse Mike says, “What if he got robbed two nights ago out in the Hook by one of those Asian gangs. Say he picked up this thing because he was sleeping on the streets on account of not violating his order, that he was scared for his safety. What if he was strolling around his old block and saw Cassandra coming out of the corner bar with some sleaze-ball, and he followed the two of them to the apartment. What if he confronted them and the sleaze-ball got the hell out of there. What if I say "heat of passion?" Say, I’ve got the sleaze-ball as a witness? What then? Voluntary, fifteen to twenty-five?”

“Life, Mikey, life.”

“You don’t have the sister,” he says. “Don’t overreach. I’m not some kid you can push around.”

All day I’m thinking over what happened at Mr. Tozt. I should be feeling something about the way Michael spoke to me. Somehow, in the hazy Brooklyn streets under the glow of the cheap storefront lighting on Court Street, I am flat. Everything is flat. It is like I want to want to feel something strongly, but I’ve completely lost the ability to see things in human terms. 

It is there in the way we talk at the office about what a case is worth as if the charges are no different than blue-chip stocks bleeping up and down in the wake of evidence of the profits for the quarter. 

I bite into my egg wrap and feel the flaky egg and gooey cheese on my tongue, finishing the whole thing and tossing the wrapper in a trash bin outside the Criminal Justice Part on Schermerhorn. Eating is just texture and ritual. The food has lost its salt. I only eat out of habit, but I am not nourished by it.

That night, I take Liz out to dinner at a Tai place down Atlantic. Her eyes fixate on all the quaint details; the mats on the floor, the table settings at knee height, and the antique hookahs in the window. I tell her I love her and I’m sorry. She makes a thing with her face and takes my hand, but I am not forgiven. 

All she wanted was for me to say I wouldn’t cancel the trip, to say it was her call. Somehow that becomes apparent to me in the instant when it is too late for the knowledge to do me any good. I don’t know who I am anymore when I am with her. We eat quietly.

Then the call comes in from Scott. It sounds like he’s underwater the way he tells me in a flat voice: “Michael came down to the station an hour ago. He came down himself. Terri called it in. We sent a patrol for her, but she said she was walking to the precinct to drop it. We tried to reach you… to talk to her… see what you could do. She said she won’t press charges. But, you know what the statute says.” I see the math, the angles, the consequences, instantly – knowing how it will all go, down to the smallest detail. 

The statute says they can’t ignore a DV call. The statute demands an arrest. Seven years of higher education. Six-figure student loan debt. What does he do now? When Scott says statute it kind of sticks in my ear, even after the call ends. I think the statute wasn’t written for guys like Michael. But, the City is like that. Stoic math.

I walk out of the Tai place, through the cheap storefront lighting, the wind cutting down the side streets with an eerie howl. When I walk into the precinct, I see Michael in the detention cell, sitting on the floor with legs bent and head lowered, not wanting to look up at me. He still has on his grey suit from earlier. He’s looking ahead without seeing anything. So, this is how Michael’s career ends, I think. Scott comes to the front of the detention area. He says, “What will you do with him?”

“Full order, offer up an adjournment and anger management. See where he’s gonna stay.”

“Why don’t you process him?”

Here I am doing something I’d definitely be fired for. But, there’s a brotherhood among cops – and we are second cousins to them – and no one will ever know. I look into the cage and tell him to get up. He walks over to me. 

I take him out, take the cuffs off from the back, and turn him back around. I press his fingers one digit at a time across the electronic reader and watch the lines appear on the digital screen. As I hold his index finger down against the reader, I look into his eyes, but what I see is not shame or remorse—it is something I’ll never be able to fit neatly into a word or contain in an idea, but which will always trouble me when I deliver closing arguments from now on. 

After the prints are sent to Albany, we walk outside the precinct into the rainy Brooklyn night and I can hear sirens coming down Joralemon. It has been a wet winter. I give Michael a Marlboro Red, and we stand out there, silent for a moment. We are left alone with the peace of nicotine and fear. 

“Michael, where are you going to stay?” He looks at me and smiles for maybe the last time for a long time.

“I guess I’ll go back to my mom’s house for a while, and then in a week I’ll call and see if she’ll have me back.”