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 nutshelclass="underline" Welcome, and watch your back.
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 Hilclass="underline" 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.