Or maybe this is not the case at all. Maybe he is triumphant. Maybe he is raw with joy. Maybe he feels strong and justified. Perhaps he did this to avenge his daughter and her children, their poverty, their sadness, their loss of their father, the sins of their mother. Perhaps there is something entirely congratulatory in the way he walks back down the boardwalk, past the carnival grounds, under the twinkling lights. Perhaps he feels that he should do the same with the son of the man he killed. Perhaps he is thinking, Fuck you, Elliot Mendelssohn, you’re next.
It is happening, as the poet says, and it is going to happen.
Pedro will be arrested six days later. He will be charged. He will plead not guilty. His daughter will make bail for him. The State will offer. Pedro will not take it. The State says it will go all-out: second-degree murder. Pedro’s lawyer will say he should take a lesser charge, manslaughter perhaps, but Pedro will say no, he is too old for jail, he would rather fight it. He will go to trial almost a full year later. It will be up to a jury to decide. In a high-ceilinged room on Centre Street in lower Manhattan they will weigh it all up. Sift through the evidence. Disregard. Reinstate. A form of excavation and rebuilding. They will look for the one moment of revelation that might eventually turn to truth.
There will be doctors and paramedics and cardiologists and blunt-trauma experts, one who will say that Mendelssohn was killed by the punch, another who will say that he died when his head hit the ground. There will be two forensic video analysts who will ask for the courtroom curtains to be drawn. They will carefully analyze the footage for the jury using six flat screens: one for the judge, one for the prosecution, one for the defense, three for the jury. They will discuss compression, resolution, blurring, time stamps, frame rates, comparative analysis. They will show the angle of the fall. They will point out the brief appearance of the assailant. They will crop in and zoom out. They will focus on the cap and the jacket. They will argue about unique characteristics, the known and the unknown. They will not be able to show a recognizable face. They will, however, show the footage of the kitchen argument of Dandinho and Pedro. They will count through the minutes and seconds of Pedro’s bathroom visit. They will show Pedro returning to the giant sinks beneath the Brooklyn Cyclones poster. They will freeze him there a moment, plunging his hands into warm water.
Are those hands cold? Are those hands tormented? Are those hands simply doing their chores?
The prosecution will call on Elliot Mendelssohn to testify. He will tighten his jacket and stride to the front of the courtroom, then slide into the witness box. He will try earnestness, rage, prolonged silence, even tears, but the judge will cut him short. His voice will crack on cross-examination. He will say he never met the accused in his life. He will showcase his habit of raising his forefinger when answering a question. A little tremble will animate his neck. He will say that the death of his father has left him bereft. He will look at his hands as if to check that what he just said was correct. He will say that he will never recover from the shock. He will plead and cajole. He will glance once at Pedro, then quickly away. He will step down from the dock with two ovals of sweat appearing even through the cloth of his jacket. At the rear of the Centre Street courtroom he will look at his cell phone as if the answers to all the questions can be found there.
The days will go on.
They will call on the restaurant manager, Christopher Eagleton, and the waitress, Rosita Oosterhausen. Rosita’s testimony will be curt and polite. She will say that she helped Mendelssohn into his coat at the door. She will say that he was a sweet old man, and she has no idea who would choose to hurt him, or why. She will say that the trauma made her give up her job. She will say that she never saw such a pointless death. She will step down from the witness stand, furtive, coiled, as if embarrassed by her testimony. She will flick a quick look at Pedro, though he will not return her glance. Christopher Eagleton will appear nervous, as if anything he might say will affect the business of his restaurant. He will loosen his tie and say that he is very sorry for the loss of his favorite customer and he really has no clue why the attack might have occurred. He was present in the restaurant, yes, and he heard a commotion outside. He ran out to help, but did not see the assailant, or even the shape of the assailant, and really there was little more that he could say. He bent down to Mendelssohn, who appeared already dead. It all seemed entirely senseless to him. Certainly he never heard Pedro say an errant word about anyone, least of all Mendelssohn. He will leave the witness stand, head bowed, fists thrust into his jacket pockets.
The court will be told that the whereabouts of Dandinho are unknown, he is thought to be in Rio de Janeiro with a wife and three children, although it is also possible that he was spotted working in a restaurant in Toronto, and he may also have been seen in a barbecue restaurant in South Carolina. They will hear that all attempts to contact him after the initial interrogations were impossible. The defense will claim that without Dandinho there is no case. The prosecution will say that the evidence is clear-cut, and Dandinho clearly aided in the crime, underlined by his subsequent disappearance. The court will call on Sally James who will have just returned from Tobago for a week with her nephew to settle her financial affairs. She will be polite and confused and she will carry a little handkerchief to dab her eyes. They will call on Maria Casillias who will testify to the fact that, yes, she is currently in the process of bringing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Barner Funds, though settlement is imminent. She will say that, yes, she told her father about losing her job. She will admit that, yes, she mentioned Elliot’s name. But she will say that, no, she never told him of the affair. And she will say that he never displayed any anger, she has never seen him raise a fist to anyone, least of all an old man, there is simply no way her father could have done such a thing. She will say that it’s much more likely that Elliot came out of the snow and punched his own father, he is that sort of man. The court will hear an objection. She will say that, even if it wasn’t Elliot, the old man probably slipped, that is the logical thing, it was snowing, can’t you see that he slipped, didn’t they say he had two glasses of wine? The judge will instruct her, quietly, to limit her emotions. She will step down from the stand, glancing at her father, and then turn away when her ex-husband emerges from the gallery to hold her hand.
The court will call on Pedro who, on his attorney’s advice, will not testify. He will sit in the courtroom, stone-faced, gentle, unmoving, a hard man to read. The jurors will wait and they will listen. They will weigh up notions of truth and lies — the truth with its border emptiness, and lies with their standard narrative conventions. They will trawl through the vast compendium of facts and figures and conjecture. It will be, to them, like trying to mine for light in the darkness, working in shafts, pockets, seams, chutes. The judge will instruct the jury members of their responsibilities and they will retire to deliberate. They will watch — once again — the footage of Mendelssohn’s fall outside the restaurant. They will watch, too, the footage of Pedro and Dandinho in the kitchen. They will ask to see it again and again: each time it appears to them differently. They will freeze Mendelssohn in midfall and that image itself will become the screensaver upon their imaginations: they will wake with it for many days, weeks, even months afterward.
Twelve days of testimony, then the verdict. It is captured on video of course. A high angle designed not to include the faces of the jurors. The wood-paneled room is airy and spacious. The judge is seated high at the front. The Star-Spangled Banner on one side of him. The New York State flag on the other. The court reporter to the judge’s right. The lawyers set up on opposite sides of each other. A sense that the room has been here forever, set down in aspic, a place that will never change.