ELDREDGE STREET


My investigator blew his own cat in half with a shotgun. My client sliced her dog's throat with a razor. They belonged together. I just wanted to be left alone.

Angel, Wiz and Georgie were standing in front of 504 West 135th Street, Georgie Rivera's usual spot in the stream of drug commerce on the side streets of the Upper West Side of New York. Georgie's cousins Jesus and Alberto Rivera were also outside, in the shade of the tenement doorway. At 19 years old, Georgie Rivera was on his way up the ladder of success. His cousins and Manny K. and Wiz all worked for Georgie now. As one of the two lieutenants to the most successful and dangerous dealer in the neighborhood, Georgie commanded the respect of all. He no longer handled the drugs or money himself; he was the head of his own crew - the man on the block - and everyone knew it. No one else dared sell on Georgie's block, and trespassers paid the ultimate price. Even so, Georgie was well-liked by the regular citizens. He was as charming as he was handsome, and his "boys'" were always polite to the residents of the block. Georgie's mother and her sister had been living on West 135th for over twenty years, and the neighbors had seen Georgie grow from an infant into a young man.

Everything was perfect in their world as they stood there in the late morning of that summer like. The sun was hot and high in the sky, but not as hot as it could get in Santo Domingo and the island home that their parents had left behind. Salsa music played off the fire escapes while older men played dominos on the stoops. A few doorways down from Georgie and his boys, Eladio Valdarama sat bent over on a stool in front of his cart, selling cups of crushed ice topped with any of a dozen different flavors of colorful sweet syrups. At a quarter past twelve a battered white Toyota with one brown fender rattled its way up the street and stopped in front of 504, and Angel and Wiz watched warily as a desperate looking crackhead stumbled out of the passenger seat. Georgie turned away, too important to look at such basura. In the reflection of a ground floor window, however, he could see that the passenger was a black man, probably in his thirties or forties, with wild matted hair, wearing cheap sunglasses and a filthy long overcoat in the middle of June. Repulsed by the thought of having to smell the wretched crackhead, Georgie started to walk away past his cousins. His back to the street, Georgie did not see Manny or Wiz as they suddenly jumped to the side and shouted, because the "crackhead" had already pulled out the shotgun from under his long coat by the time that their warning shouts had registered in his brain, and by the time that Georgie Rivera had turned halfway around, he was dead, one of two young men shotgunned to death in New York City on June 10th, 1995.

Six hours after an EMS ambulance transported the corpse of Georgie Rivera to the medical examiner's office, Eric Williams' neighbors heard three loud gunshots from inside his Harlem apartment at 2078 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 128th Street. His neighbors knew that Eric was something of a player; a strikingly well-dressed black man in his early twenties, he was rarely seen during daylight hours, and he always seemed to have an attractive young woman at his side. When Betty Colyer heard the blasts, she knew better than to get involved. Almost instinctively, she made her way to her door and checked to see that the police lock, dead bolt, and door chain were all in place. Hearing no more gunfire, she took a furtive look out the peephole and saw a dark-skinned female in a black jogging suit and a beige New York Yankees baseball cap going down the staircase across the hall and adjacent to Williams' apartment. Police who responded to 911 calls found Williams lying face up in his blood, with two massive holes in his chest and half of his face blown off. They searched the neighborhood, but the woman in the jogging suit was long gone.

Four weeks after the families of Georgie Rivera and Eric Williams watched their sons' caskets as they were lowered into their graves, I was sitting at my desk across from my investigator, Truck Fowler.

"It's not all that hard, you know, killin' people," said Fowler. "Have you ever seen a farmer slaughter a pig, Andy? There's not much difference, really. I killed this old cat I had, his name was Buddy. Buddy was almost twenty years old and could hardly walk anymore. He was a handsome devil in his day, he was. I'd raised him from a kitten. I carried him out to the yard and set him down on top of an old milk crate. He didn't put up much of a fight, really. He just sat there, almost like he knew the show was over. Then I backed up about ten feet so my shoes wouldn't get covered with cat guts or anything and I fired at him. I was using a 10 gauge - the most powerful shotgun you can get. It was a helluva nice gun, too. Kicked like a damn mule though. Well, that poor animal just exploded. The blast hit him right in the middle and his heart and everything just blew up and was gone - his insides gone right out. There wasn't nothin left of him but an empty sack of fur, and not enough of that even to wrap around a man's hand. It was the first time I ever killed anything like that. You never know what it's like to kill until you kill your own."

I listened patiently, waiting for the connection.

"Your girlfriend Shinequa can kill real easy. Maybe she sees them like animals. Most likely she gets off on it. She's just a bad piece of business, that girl. She probably started young - running with a pack of bad kids and a boxcutter, maybe just taking off some little sister for a pair of earrings or a jacket. Then she got hooked up with one of the homies, maybe got herself a taste of the life and then decided she'd rather burn the tricks than turn 'em. Then she went commercial, made a business out of killing. Who knows how many bodies she's got now? She's got all the other brothers paying her to take out the trash. You want the case? It's yours, Andy boy, she likes you. Take the money. If you help her beat this one they'll get her on the next one, don't you worry about it. It never matters you know, and there's always some other kid willing to take up the slack and the cops will have someone else to chase."

It wasn't as if the charge was particularly gruesome. Just another gang-related double homicide. I'd only been practicing law for ten years, but I alread had a dozen homicides under my belt, winning most, losing some, and every time, I'd still lie awake at night, sweating and worried about some question that I should have asked the last witness, and the questions I'd be going to ask the next one. I still felt the worms crawling in my gut every time a jury went out, still felt the rush when they came back smiling, and still felt my heart sink when they didn't. I still loved what I did for a living and I had never lost much sleep over the idea that some badass client might walk because of it. I was part of the system. I would have taken the money without Fowler's blessing because I needed it. I was two months behind in the rent, I owed five figures on my charge cards, and nothing else was happening anyway. Truck Fowler was my investigator, not my therapist. But still, Shinequa Gates had been different. It wasn't only the fact that she was a very good-looking female - it was that she was smart and she was bad. And God only knows that the worst thing in the world is a smart, good-looking, woman with an ice cold heart.

My first case with Shiny was a possession charge two years earlier and I had beaten the case on a bad traffic stop after a suppression hearing in which the arresting officer testified that he'd pulled over and searched her brand new beemer because "she had made a suspicious U-turn and avoided eye contact" with the white cop - in other words, she was a hot black woman with an attitude driving a nice car. The cop probably figured her for a high-priced whore and wanted a piece of her ass. Fortunately for Shinequa, the hearing judge turned out to be an older, wiser soul brother appointed to the bench by Mayor Dinkins, and the judge had not taken kindly to a cop's-eye view - one which was probably right - that any young African-American woman who looked like Shiny and drove around in the Bronx in a ride that no cop could afford was probably a criminal. He'd tossed out the two ounces of coke and the loaded Beretta that the cop had found under the seat..

Shiny had actually been easy to deal with because she knew she was guilty, knew that the game was all just about winning, and understood that I would do whatever I had to do to win without her having to put on a whole song and dance about being innocent. If anything, her manner was downright pleasant, and she was polite and she paid her bills. I even liked it when she flirted with me. No matter that her good behavior was probably just a device, at least she had the intelligence to stroke me only when she had to, which was more than most of my fuckhead clients understood. And I had actually taken an odd kind of pride and attitude of my own when I represented her - the woman was a real head turner. But still, there some were things about Shinequa that had been just plain frightening. To begin with, she once offered to "help" with one of the police witnesses in another case, suggesting that he was quite willing to take out a cop with no remorse if it helped her: "You know, Mr. Sayles, this lyin' motherfucker po-leece-man is like a pit bull dog that clamps down on your neighbor's leg. You can't make the dog let go of the leg, and you can't make his friends understand what his kind does to us. I had a dog like that, and I killed him. I took a straight edge right to his throat. That dog let go then, he did. This cop is like a sick dog, an' he got to be dealt with."

The memory of Shiny Gate's offer back then would have been enough to justify passing on the case - that, and the mutable distance she had about her. You had only to look into her eyes to see it there. The latinos called them "ojos peligrosos" - dangerous eyes. She had an exquisite face, but she could freeze you with a glance. Shiny Gates was one very scary chick.

There were also practical reasons why I didn't want to take on Shiny's new case at that time but I certainly felt no obligation to explain them to Fowler...

"Interesting pep talk." I said " What makes you think I need encouragement, Truck?" I said defensively. "Do I sound concerned here?"

"I just hadn't heard from you, Andy. I thought maybe you were burning out on me."

"After only seven years in private practice? Hell, you cornfed cracker, I was just tired of listening to you". It wasn't the truth, and he knew it

"Anyway, you didn't come here so that we could chat about your late cat, or what I've been up to either, although I do appreciate your concern. I'm glad you did though. The money is welcome, and I'll also need some help on this one."

"They picked her up on Monday" said Fowler, "and she's being held at the Women's House of Detention. Man, it's a strange deal. They snatched her off the street without an arrest warrant - just a felony complaint charging two homicides on the word of a single unnamed and uncorroborated informant and a cross-racial i.d.. She didn't make any statements to the cops. The cops hardly even bothered to question her once they had her in custody. I got the call from a relative after Gates had already been arraigned with a Legal Aid lawyer. I don't see how this thing even made it past the initial arraignment. The case is in Part F for tomorrow."

"Okay," I said, "at this point just find out anything else that you can, and give me a call either tonight or in the morning before I get to the courthouse."

I didn't sleep well that night. New cases always did that to me. It was also an unusually warm and humid night. The city was in the grip of a heat wave, and I tossed around in the sheets to the sounds of air conditioners and the early morning sanitation trucks as they made their rounds. When Fowler called me at eight a.m. I'd already had my second cup of coffee. He had no information that was useful.

"I couldn't find out squat, Andy." he said. "None of my people know anything about it. I'll stay on it, though. In the meantime, you try to keep out of this heat, and, by the way, I may have another case for you, a kid arrested selling for possession and sale in the Southern District. Could be some good money."

"A second paying client in two days?" I said. "I'll have to think about it. I don't want to send my creditors into cardiac arrest."

Although it was not that unusual, it troubled me a little that no one at the DA's office returned any of my calls about the case. This was wasn't some poor woman getting busted for giving blow jobs - it was a homicide, and they usually returned calls. That could have meant any number of things, however, so I dismissed it from my thoughts as I headed downtown.

100 Centre Street is the civic toilet for the City of New York. Built in 1940, the center and south sections of the old criminal court building houses the crowded misdemeanor and arraignment parts on the lower floors and the Supreme Court parts on the higher floors. At the north end of the seventeen story building there is another section that is separated from the rest of the aging institutional structure by an extra foot of cinder block and steel. Officially, this section is referred to as the "Manhattan House of Detention." Those who know it well call it The Tombs, and it is where the City of New York houses its population of special guests who have business pending and can't make bail. As grim as it is, The Tombs is often the preferred choice of jails among criminals in New York City, as the alternative is Rikers Island - a lepers' colony of gang violence and razor wire on four hundred acres of rocks and landfill in the upper East River that is New York City's own vision of post-apocalyptic hell. Rikers sits 100 yards off the end of the northwest runway at Laguardia Airport. The constant roofshaking roar from jets taking off serves as extra punishment for Rikers' miserable inhabitants - young men and women alike.

The State Supreme courthouse up the street in Foley Square, with its grand columns and broad marble steps, is a monument to the power and grandeur of the great city. The criminal court, two blocks to the north on Centre Street, is a symbol of disgust. It's a direct sewer line into which the city dumps and processes its wasted lives by the busload. On its lower floors the restrooms were long ago ceded to the street culture; their walls are a Babel of hardcore graffiti, and the stale air is thick with the stench of cigarette smoke and human waste. The urinals are so grim that you cannot use them without wondering what might swim upstream. The bare hallways of the building ring with a metallic din of multilingual anger and misery as accused, accusers, and relatives of both file in and out of the crowded criminal court parts throughout working hours, shouting and crying, while lawyers in sweat stained suits holding dog-eared folders weave through the crowd searching for clients who are missing or late. On the upper floors, the Supreme Court parts, the restrooms are cleaner and the halls quieter, due in large part to the fact that most of the defendants there are incarcerated, unable to make bail, and their families have tired of the endless adjournments in which nothing ever seems to happen.

In addition to the courts and the House of Detention, 100 Centre Street houses a catacomb of stone and concrete cells in the basement deep beneath the streets of lower Manhattan. These are the holding cells for the arraignment courts and a few other parts, including Part F. The holding cells were renovated in the early 90's after a federal district court judge presiding over a class-action suit brought by the Legal Aid Society found that the existing facility constituted a public health hazard that was contributing to a resurgence of tuberculosis in the city. TB had hardly been the worst of it, however. Although renovating the ventilation and sewage and water systems had reduced the immediate threat to the public, there was no ordinary act of man that could scrape off the ghosts of fear and violence that fifty years of conflict and suffering had embedded in the walls. Each pen holds up to forty prisoners, all waiting for their cases to be called. Dangerous cliques form in the briefest periods of time, and the weak often lose their jewelry, their clothes, and occasionally, their blood. The women's cells weren't as violent; most of the women detained there were prostitutes and petty criminals.

Under New York State law, a person accused of a crime must be brought before a judge no more than 24 hours after he is arrested. Bail will be set or the accused will be released in his own recognizance ("ROR"). If the defendant is charged with a felony and bail has been set too high for him to post, or if no bail has been granted at all, the People must either consent to a preliminary hearing or obtain an indictment from a grand jury within one hundred and twenty hours of the defendant's arrest, or the accused must be released, pursuant to New York State Penal Law Section 180.80. Even in cases involving murder. At just after 10:00 a.m. on Friday, July 7, 1995, still drenched in sweat from the subway, I stepped out of the heat into 100 Centre and flashed my attorney I.D., bypassing the line at the metal detectors, and climbed one flight of stairs to the second floor where I threaded my way through the crowded corridor into Part F. I stopped at the rail and signed my name in the log book so that my client's case would be called, and took a seat in the first row of hard oak benches, the row that was reserved for lawyers and cops. It was 180.80 day for Shiny Gates.

It looked to be a long, hot day in Part F. There were two hundred names on the calendar, two hundred bodies that had to be processed by the system. A dozen or so other lawyers had already signed in, and all else being equal, it would be at least forty-five minutes before the bridge officer called Shiny's case. I settled back to negotiate a truce between the rigid bench and my sweat-drenched shirt back in anticipation of the long wait as the bridge officer opened the proceedings with his loud call:

"All Rise! This is New York County Part F. The Honorable John Torres presiding. Put all reading materials away and turn off all beepers and any cell phones. The first case is from the pens, the People versus Shinequa Gates."

Leave it to Shiny to find a way to be called first. She always found a way. When the NYPD homicide detectives rousted her from her sister's apartment four nights earlier, she had nothing on but her sneakers, blue jeans, a tee shirt and her ojos peligrosos. By the time the corrections cops brought her up from the basement pens for her court appearance she had acquired three two gold rings and a platinum ankle bracelet.

"Good Morning, your Honor, Assistant District Attorney Kathleen Flanigan for the People."

I glanced over at my adversary. She looked anything but Irish. Black hair, blue eyes. A stunner. Nothing average about this one.

"Good morning, judge," I said, "Andrew Sayles, 870 Broadway, for the defendant."

" Is there an indictment?" said Torres, waiting for the assistant DA. "No." she replied tersely.

I jumped right in. "Your Honor, the defense most respectfully requests that the defendant be released pursuant..."

"to CPL Section 180.80" she said, cutting me off at the knees. "Your Honor the People are moving to dismiss without prejudice and of course we consent to the defendant's release."

Shinequa glanced across at the young DA. If Shiny was feeling any relief, she wasn't giving it away. I did my best to appear unruffled, nodding at the assistant as if I had been expecting this all along.

We left the courtroom together, client and counsel, the two of us strolling down the middle of the room between the two sections of benches and out the doors.

When we got to the corridor, Shiny turned and offered me a casual low five. "You know I really didn't do this, Mr. Sayles. I'm always glad you're my lawyer, but this? No. All these people think I'm crazy and I'm bad, but that's just what they hear. It isn't true. I didn't do this."

"We'll talk about it my office." I said.

I ran the facts through my head: they had gone to the trouble of arresting a suspect without a warrant for a murder and had not even tried to get a statement out of her. They had detained her at the Women's House of Detention. Then they had allowed the 180.80 clock to expire and then moved to have it dismissed on their own motion, as if it were some chump change bodega stickup instead of a shotgun murder. And the assistant had seemed... what? smug? like she was thinking,"I know something and you don't?" It didn't add up.

I was still wondering about it as we walked toward the stairs together, Shiny talking to me about some Knicks trade or something, while I tried to keep up without revealing my concern. We walked down the single flight of stairs to the main lobby, then past the long line of people still waiting to enter at the metal detectors, and outside through the appropriately revolving doors. And then before we had noticed anything, suddenly there were four of them. Four plainclothed DEA types, clean cut young men in pressed jeans and sneakers holding badges. Guns holstered inside the waist or in the small of the back, but ready.

"Mr. Sayles?" said one of them, "Ms. Gates?" he said, looking at Shinequa, "I am Special Agent Eckersley from Group 22 of the Joint High Intensity Drug Enforcement Task Force and we have a warrant for Ms. Gates's arrest from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York."

"What is she charged with?" I said, struggling to recover.

"Murder in Aid of Racketeering," said Eckersley "and a few other things that you and your client can read about in court."

Shiny shrugged, offered her hands out for the inevitable steel cuffs, and walked with the agents to a black SUV that was idling at the curb.

It was barely mid-morning and I had my hands full. I had to follow Shiny's progress through the federal pre-arraignment process, and I had a new client to see, Angel Cabrera, the dealer whose name Fowler had given me. Fortunately, both cases were in the Southern District. Unfortunately, the fact that Shiny's case had gone federal meant that the marginal $10,000 down payment on the retainer fee that I had been paid by her "friends" for what I'd thought was a state murder case now looked painfully inadequate.

It was not coincidental that I had also agreed to take $10,000 to represent Cabrera, who was charged in a run of the mill narcotics conspiracy. Federal law requires defense attorneys to file reporting forms to the IRS whenever we receive a cash payment in excess of $10,000. We have to report the name of the person whom we are being paid to represent, as well as the name of the person who is paying the bill. The law has withstood constitutional challenges right up to the Supreme Court and it is still widely despised, as it makes defense attorneys inform against own clients. The only way around it is to limit cash fees to $10,000, or to cheat. One prominent defense attorney who refused to file on ethical grounds, citing attorney-client privilege, was fined $25,000 by the IRS. Nevertheless, I was satisfied with the fees. I would soon have $20,000 in cash - more than enough to pay my outstanding bills, and that was nothing to sneeze at.

Eckersley and the three other DEA agents brought Shiny down the street to the garage entrance of the old federal courthouse at 40 Centre Street, where they took her fingerprints and processed her for arraignment. They did not bother with trying to elicit a statement from her because they knew that she was represented by counsel, which meant that her Sixth Amendment right to counsel had attached, barring any questions other than basic pedigree information. For the same reason they also didn't bother to read her Miranda warnings, but they also knew that Shiny Gates was too smart to say anything and that she would blow them off.

"No questions for me?" Gates said, politely. "No, Miss Gates," said Eckersley, "We don't need your help, but by all means, say anything you want. You are going down, sweet potato, and we are going to fry you."

"Kiss my black ass, bitch. Just do whatever you gonna do and take me to the judge," was all she said.

"The magistrate won't be back on the bench until two", retorted Eckersley, " Enjoy the view from the pens until then."

"Right," she shot back, "just make sure I get my lunch."

I knew that Shinequa would not be brought to court until the afternoon, so I walked behind the courthouse to the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center to interview the new client that Fowler had sent me, Angel Cabrera.

Compared to the Tombs, the Metropolitan Correctional Center was like the Waldorf Hotel. Built in the 1970s, it was clean and well-staffed. All of the inmates were pre-trial detainees, and the average age was at least ten years older than that of the city's prisoners. While the city jails held a mix of street criminals that included murderers, muggers, rapists, and street dealers, the MCC was populated by an amalgam of international wrongdoers. It was a virtual United Nations of crime. Every country in the world was represented there, from Palestinian terrorists, South American drug lords, and American bank robbers, counterfeiters, racketeers and drug dealers, to Asian sex slavers and Nigerian dope smugglers and con men. Some of them were just hapless people who made mistakes; others were just bad people who came to America in droves, the dark side of the American dream, all seeking to snatch, bleed or carve out their own piece of the great golden pie. At the bottom of the barrel there were drug mules who were willing to risk a horrible death by swallowing fifty or more condoms filled with cocaine or heroin - Colombian campesinos who had never owned a pair of shoes and who might end up gutted in a dumpster if a condom burst in transit. At the top of the heap were the Sicilians, the Russians and the terrorists - men with bad intentions who killed for business or the glory of God. It may have been the superior staffing and control, or the age difference of the inmates, or the sheer diversity of the population, but for whatever reason, there was a minimum of violence at the MCC. There was one thing, though, that every prisoner knew or learned quickly: information was the currency of the courthouse, and every other inmate was a snitch.

As Fowler had laid it out for me, Angel Cabrera's case was nothing out of the ordinary. The feds had arrested Cabrera a few days before Shiny, but there was no connection between their cases as far as I knew. The government had charged only that Angel and three of his buddies were selling crack out of a tenement in Washington Heights, and they'd been busted with a kilo of unprocessed cocaine in the apartment, along with the baking soda and equipment necessary to cook the mixture into crack. If the warrant was good, the feds had them dead to rights. The magistrate had ordered him detained at the MCC, and Angel was unhappy with the federal defender who'd been representing him.

I spent about an hour with Angel, just enough time to get acquainted with him. He had already been arraigned and ordered held without bail. I wasn't going to spend a lot of time in a concrete cubicle talking to the kid until someone came through with the money.

"I don't know any of these people." Cabrera told me. "I'm innocent, Mr. Sayles, I swear."

"I understand, Angel, and I will do my best to get you home."

"What about bail?" said Angel, "Can you get me out? They got me detained."

This was a tougher question. Under the strict federal bail statute, the law presumed that anyone accused of a narcotics felony would flee instead of risking a long jail term. Had anyone asked me I would have had to concede that the law probably made sense, given that the choice was between twenty years in the Caribbean or twenty years in a cage, but that was not something I would ever say to a client.

"Have you been arrested before? Ever been convicted?" I inquired.

"I been arrested three times," Angel answered, "they got me two times for sellin' and one was dismissed, but I'm not part of this, not this time. Oh man I swear please help me. I don't even know these people."

"Did you ever miss a court date?" I asked him.

"No, no, I always came to court," said Angel.

"Do you have anybody who can sign a bond for you?"

"Yeah, my sister is a corrections officer, she'll sign, and I got a cousin who will sign for me."

"Does anyone own any property that they would be willing to post as security for a bond." I asked.

"Yeah, yeah, my aunt owns a house, she'll sign."

"Okay," I told him, "we'll see what we can do after I'm retained on the case."

In the criminal defense business, you don't sign for the check until the lettuce is on your plate, and I hadn't seen the waiter yet. But that kilo of cocaine had cost someone a lot of money, and that usually meant that I could count on being paid at least the initial retainer. And besides, I knew the waiter.

I made it upstairs to the US magistrate's court at half past one. Truck was waiting for me outside on an oak bench outside the courtroom, reading the Daily News.

"I have something for you." he said, and slipped an envelope out from under his jacket.

"Federal Express?" I asked. He didn't get the joke or didn't find it amusing.

"Here's the ten thousand for Shinequa." he said. I didn't know whose money it was, and I didn't ask.

I had met Truck through his daughter, Daphne. She and I had dated when I was a law student, and she'd introduced me to him at graduation. I hadn't seen Daphne in seven or eight years, after she'd moved back down to Kentucky to work for a matrimonial lawyer in Louisville.

"How's Daphne these days?" I asked him.

"Fine. Daphne's fine, I'll tell her you asked. I told Angel's people to meet you at your office at six with the other ten thousand."

Angel Cabrera was not unlike many of the street dealers that I had defended. He'd dropped out of school in the eighth grade and started hustling nickel and dime bags of dope and vials of crack on the street for another dealer. It was hard to get a straight answer out him, and I assumed that his claim of innocence was bullshit. Shinequa Gates was an entirely different piece of work. She never spoke about her past. I knew that she had come from a broken home, although it might be more accurate to say that she came from a home that barely existed. She grew up in the crime-plagued Brownsville housing projects. A probation report described her parents as "inattentive and often absent." The truth is that her mother was a hard-core crack addict who spent most of her time in the bed of any man with good enough coke to keep her happy, and her father was a drunk who spent whatever money that he earned from his job at the Transit Authority on women and wine. Shinequa's parents weren't inattentive; they were never there at all. Despite it all, though, despite the poverty and the absence of anything that might pass for parental love, Shinequa had a special fire that could not be extinguished, and as Shiny flowered into a young woman, she became mysterious and magnetic.

Unfortunately, she hadn't been able to work any of her magnetism on the marshals, who locked her in a holding cell in a far corner of the complex. No problem. I would wait. With ten thousand bucks stuffed inside my briefcase, I went out for a quick lunch of curried chicken and sticky rice at the Thai restaurant behind the courthouse.

At just after 2:30 pm, Flanigan slipped into the courtroom. I watched her, sitting with the other assistants. We nodded at each other. After a half-hour they called Shinequa's case.

We went on the record, announcing our appearances. Flanigan had been cross-designated as a special assistant U.S. attorney to prosecute the RICO case in the Southern District. Although she was officially required to share the responsibility - and unofficially, the glory - with another AUSA, my guess was that her partner wouldn't see much of the action.

The indictment named Shinequa and seventeen other defendants in the racketeering conspiracy. There were two counts that charged Shinequa with having committed the Rivera and Williams killings. She was said to have been an enforcer for the gang, whose leader was a Dominican named Lora. It struck me as unusual that a macho Dominican would use a woman as an enforcer, much less an African-American woman, but Shiny was an unusual girl.

"The government moves for a permanent order of detention based on the indictment," said Flanigan, "the defendant was positively identified by a confidential eyewitness in a lineup, your honor, and we have reliable information from a confidential informant that the defendant was the shooter in both murders. Although the defendant has no prior convictions, Miss Gates has been implicated in other several murders and we believe that she is an extremely violent individual who has been involved in this drug conspiracy along with several others that are still being investigated. Accordingly, the government moves to detain the defendant."

Gates had been brought before United States Magistrate Arlene Karas for arraignment, which included the government's position on bail or detention. Although a "permanent" order of detention under section 3142 of title 18 of the United States Code ostensibly means detention without bail until the end of the case, most of the time it meant almost exactly what it sounds like - permanent detention for years. This was one of those cases. Kathleen Flanigan would have been happy to send Shiny Gates to a federal prison right then, right there. So long Ms. Gates. It was my turn to speak.

"Your Honor, I understand that the return of an indictment against Ms. Gates establishes probable cause, but in terms of bail this is one of the weakest cases I have ever seen. The identification procedure employed by the agents was a cross-racial lineup using five fillers from some homeless shelter who bore absolutely no resemblance to Ms. Gates. The agents saw to it that Ms. Gates was dressed differently from the fillers and that she wore clothing that roughly matched the description that was given to the police by the eyewitness. They placed a Yankee baseball cap on Ms. Gates' head. My client has extremely strong roots in the community and has no history of flight. I have no access to the government's informant, of course, nor do I have the identity of the alleged eyewitness, but I suspect that the informant's information is as questionable as the lineup procedure that was employed by the police. Moreover, the government's proffer concerning her "suspected" pattern of violence is the kind of empty claim that we often have heard here before, designed to improperly sway and intimidate the Court."

I was trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and the hat had a hole in it. There are very few United States magistrates in the Southern District who are willing to stand up to the government. Every magistrate dreams of elevation to the rank of full district court judge. Life tenure, good pay, free parking. Magistrates don't get promoted by bucking the government. The best I could hope for was information, and Flanigan knew it.

"Ms. Flanigan," said Karas, making a token show of judicial independence, "how reliable is your informant? What is the source of his information?"

"Your Honor, " she answered, "Mr. Sayles's description of the line-up is not correct. The government is also willing to make an ex-parte offer of proof in camera to the Court regarding the informant, but as we said, this defendant is an extremely dangerous individual and the government is concerned that disclosure at this point would expose the government's informant to an unreasonable risk of harm. We ask that she be detained because of the danger to the community and because there are no conditions of bail that would ensure her return to court.

That was enough. Welcome to America in the 1990's. You were only presumed innocent until someone secretly said otherwise. "All right," said Karas, "I will enter a permanent order of detention." No surprise there. The magistrate's deputy reached into a octagonal wooden box that contained cards with the names of the district court judges who accepted criminal cases. "The case is assigned to Judge Stillwell." This was not good news.

Judge Steelwall. Judge Illwell. Frank the Crank. There were all accurate. Judge Franklyn D Stillwell was a Republican blue-blood appointed early during the Reagan administration, a genuine Scull and Bonesman out of Yale. He was a lifetime member of the old boys' network, so feared and hated even by his partners at the white glove law firm he was working at that they had him nominated to the federal bench just to get rid of him. He viewed the criminal defense bar as a disappointment to humanity. We were unpleasant obstacles to the swift incarceration of the Presumed Guilty. If he knew that you had graduated from Harvard or Yale Law School you enjoyed a slight chance that you would be treated civilly, although with enough visible disdain just to let you know how he felt that you'd chosen a career path that was unseemly for an Ivy Leaguer.

I nodded to Flanigan, acknowledging her professionalism, and I followed Shiny back to the holding cells where I explained to her our options.

"I trust you, Mr. Sayles, I know that you gonna fight for me."

"Listen Shiny," I said, "I've known you for a couple of years now. Why don't you call me Andy."

"Okay, Mr. Sayles" she said. I took her hand through the cell bars and promised her that I'd see her at the MCC that night.

It was just after four when I flagged down a taxi outside the courthouse and headed back to my office near Union Square. I had agreed to meet Angel's family at my office at six o'clock. The taxi driver followed the loop around Park Row and up the Bowery through the advancing edges of Chinatown and past the lighting retailers and wholesale restaurant supply stores. until he came to Houston Street where he stopped for a traffic light. It wasn't the shortest route back to the office but he'd taken it anyway. I was lost in thought and I didn't ask why. When the light turned green I had him turn right and we pulled over at the corner of a street that I had not walked down for fifteen years.

They opened the doors every morning of the week at nine a.m. "Banker's hours" was the running joke among those of us conscious enough and well enough to laugh. For a time, at the end of the 70's and into the early 80s, Eldredge Street was the retail heroin and cocaine market of New York. We would line up, sometimes ten or twenty deep: bankers, lawyers and artists, street people, prostitutes and welfare mothers, all waiting for the doors to open to sell us foil-wrapped squares of cocaine and heroin. Five and ten dollar slivers of the white powder of choice. Sealed sets of works at a buck apiece for the shooters. They sold their wares in empty tenement buildings that had been boarded up for years. It was a single block-long drug bazaar that operated on the lower east side in full view of the police. What had been in my parents' day street level tailors and grocers and butchers run by successive groups of immigrants had become street level dope fronts. They let us in, one at a time, and we would show them our tracks to prove that we were not undercover police even though everyone knew that the police only made their periodic sweeps to keep up appearances. Although I only "shopped" there for the last few months of one year, it was long enough that I had time to learn and recognize the names and faces on both sides of the battered steel doors that were always being broken down and immediately repaired. Bob the banker, the one eyed pregnant woman, Jose from the red door. I knew them all. I can still taste the metallic taste and the silvery rush of the cocaine, and the embracing warmth of the heroin that set me down gently afterwards. The dope was always good on Eldredge Street and no one ripped you off if you stayed on the block. It was a matter of principles. Reputations were at stake.

We called them speedballs - intravenous cocktails of heroin and cocaine cooked up in a bottle cap or a spoon and injected into our hungry veins. A dozen shots a day, day after day. I lost all interest in sex. I ate only when it was necessary. I was too stoned to care about my life, and I pawned it for a nearly a year, copping and cooking until I ran out of money.

From the day that I pulled myself out of that nightmare I had always wondered whether people knew what I had done. Could they tell just by looking at me? Was there some feature in my face that hinted at my self-destructiveness? I would look at people I knew, at strangers, at teachers, at other lawyers in court, and wonder whether they shared my recklessness. I certainly hadn't told anyone. Neither my law school teachers, employers, or colleagues knew about the dark sabbatical I had taken from life. As far as anyone knew I was a bright, good-looking kid from the suburbs with a great future. I believed most of it myself.

Two of Angel Cabrera's people were waiting for me when I got back to the office at six. A male and a female, both in their early twenties.

"We are here for Angel." said the male in a Dominican accent. "I am his brother, Carlos, and this is Angel's Aunt Arecelys."

It was hard not to stare at aunt Arecelys - the woman was practically bursting out of her clothes in a seriously provocative way.

"What can you tell us about his case."

"I can't tell you much at all yet." I told them. "All I know is what Angel has told me and I can't share that with you unless Angel tells me so."

"What guarantees can you give us that you will get him out." his brother asked. This was something that I often heard. You would have thought that I was selling them a used car.

"The only guarantee that I can give you is that I will do everything that I can to get Angel out of this." The woman frowned at this. They always did. "Lawyers cannot give guarantees." I explained, the way I always did, "We have no control over the government."

I explained to them that if there was any shot at getting out of jail we needed someone to co-sign a bond. Angel's "aunt" then took out ten stacks of twenty dollar bills out of the canvas bag that she had been carrying and laid them on my desk.

"Do you want to count it?" said Carlos.

"No, that's okay, I'm sure it's all there." I said, "

A defendant whose family cheats his lawyer is not going to be have a very happy lawyer. The money is always all there. "Then can we have a receipt?" "Of course, and if you call me in a few days I may be able to tell you more about the case." I gave them my card with 'received $10,000' written on the back of it, knowing that I would never see them again, whoever they were.

After Angel's relatives left I put all of the cash in my briefcase. I would deposit most of it the next day, along with the money that I'd gotten from Fowler for Gates. I would report all of it on my taxes, of course, including the extra few thousand that I'd put aside for special use. Then I called my ex-wife, Carla, at her office and told her that I would be on time with the money that I owed her.

It had not been her fault that our marriage failed. When we married neither of us knew the size of the sack of shit I carried, and when the truth became apparent, it was I who drove her out, unable to deal with what I was.

For months she protested in earnest, reminding me of the love we'd shared and the vows we had taken together, but I was convinced that we had no future togther, and when she finally realized the extent to which my sense of worthlessness had poisoned any chance of happiness together, she reluctantly released me, lending me enough cash to move out. That, and my law license, was all I had. It was a rough time for me. It was a rough time for both of us.

It was a rough time for Shiny, too. As tough and streetwise as she was, Shinequa had never done any time, and she was now in a different world. After they processed her, she was sent to the women's unit at the MCC.

***

"I'm Jolaife," said the Nigerian, "why you here?" Gates had been assigned to a cell in the women's dorm on the fifth floor of the MCC with a Nigerian smuggler named Jolaife Odabenjo. Odabenjo was the talkative type.

"They say I bring in drugs. It's a lot of lies. I did not do anything. I am a nurse. I come here to buy medicine to sell in Nigeria, and they say it was drugs because the man I was going to buy the medicine from told them I was there to buy drugs, but it is a lie. These people they lie. All of them. Why are you here?" Odabenjo repeated.

The name is "Gates." she said, "Shinequa Gates" nodding slightly at her new cellmate.

Shiny waited for the woman to continue with her story. She was almost certainly a snitch - she'd been in the cell with Shiny for all of two minutes and the African was already telling Shiny her life story.

"I have a legal aid lawyer," said Jolaife. "He is the third lawyer I have had. If I had money I would hire a private lawyer, but I have no money because I am innocent. It is not fair. The Legal Aid lawyers are too busy, they have too many clients, they are no good. Who is your lawyer?"

Shiny remembered what I had warned her. Tell them nothing. Talk about lawyers if you want, talk about judges, talk about the jail, but never talk about the case. Shiny knew the drill. She could take care of herself. But she felt lonely already.

"You can call me Shiny", she said, "and my lawyer is Andrew Sayles."

***

I took the R train from 14^th Street to Chambers Street that night and walked down Chambers past the old federal courthouse and over to the MCC behind it. The attorney visiting room on the third floor was busy, with lawyers milling around in the small common area waiting for their clients to be brought down. I was a relative newcomer to federal practice. It was a small fraternity. The turf belonged to the older mob lawyers and federal defenders. The MCC was where John Gotti had been locked up before the government finally managed to convict him in 1992. I'd seen them hugging in the common room. The OC lawyers and their clients. Kissing Gotti's cheeks after he'd murdered Paul Castellano. The new boss. The common room pulsing an unspoken pride of dark glamour.

I had heard all kinds of interesting stories about the goings on at the MCC. One of the mob lawyers had been banned from the place after he smuggled in a pork chop for his client. Another lawyer had been caught getting a blow job from one of his female clients in a corner cubicle.

They brought Shinequa down at half past seven, and we sat down across from each other in one of the small painted cinder-block interview rooms. The guard outside the room gave me a wink when he led her into the room. I ignored him.

Shiny and I talked for an hour or so. I explained the federal system to her and we talked about the case.

"Look, I did a few things for Lora, mostly carrying his drugs around and stuff like that, but this whole thing about my being an enforcer? I don't know how all that got started. Okay, so I waived a gun around a few times, but I never shot anyone. They just think I'm some kind of super-bad soul sister.

I figured she was lying. They all did. But I went along with it. "Did you do it?" I said.

"I'm telling you the truth, Andy. I never shot anyone, except for one time, and he deserved it."

"What do you mean, he deserved it? Who are we talking about about?

She looked down at the floor, avoiding my face.

"It was this big fat man that my mother took home. He was buying her crack and they was always high. One day she was out somewhere and the man laid hisself on top of with me with his big fat stomach. There was nothing I could do. I was afraid to tell her about it."

"When did this happen?"

"I was twelve years old."

I didn't know whether to believe her or not.

"So how did you shoot him? When did that happen?"

"They had a fight about something and she threw him out, but he was always around the projects. One day I saw him sitting outside, and I went upstairs and got my brother's gun, and I shot him. That's when I started doing things, you know, I became sexually active. That's how it is."

"And this happened when you were twelve?"

She looked at me, and I took her hand across the small table in the room.

"I'm so sorry, Shiny. It must have been a terrible thing."

We talked some more about the new case, and I gave her a little hug before they took her away.

On July 13^th I was in court with Angel, trying to get bail. The AUSA on the case was a freshman by the name of Miller. I didn't know him and I didn't want to. Because of the "presumptions" written into the federal Bail Reform Act, the magistrates were required to assume that anyone charged with a drug offense posed an unreasonable risk of flight, as well as a danger to the community. The deck was stacked against me. I repeated everything that Angel had told me about his record, his previous cases, and so on.

"Your Honor, I understand that it is our burden to show that there are conditions of bail that can ensure that Mr. Cabrera will return to court and that he will not pose a threat to the community, and I am certain that we can meet that burden. Mr. Cabrera has only been arrested three times, and one of those cases was thrown out. He has advised me that he is innocent of the charges and barely knows the codefendants in the case. He never missed a court date on his previous cases, and his sister is a corrections officer who will co-sign a bond. His sister also owns her own home."

"Your Honor," said Miller, " Mr. Cabrera has an extensive criminal history and he has used three aliases. He also has a history of bench warrants, and his sister is a former corrections officer who was thrown out of the Department of Corrections after testing positive for cocaine use in routine testing."

I flushed with embarrassment. Never listen to your client without checking the facts, I told myself for the umpteenth time.

"All right, I've heard enough. Unless you have some property to post as security your bail application is denied, Mr. Sayles," said the magistrate.

After the hearing I solemnly expressed my disappointment to Angel at the magistrate's unfair decision, and Angel solemnly apologized for having forgotten to tell me about the other five arrests and the bench warrant. He expressed his deep surprise and concern regarding his troubled sister.

"We'll just have to fight the case from inside." I said.

Very few clients are candid with their lawyers. The typical dynamic that operates between a federal criminal defendant and his newly retained lawyer is a delicate thing. Your client is in deep shit, he knows he's in deep shit, and you know he is in deep shit. Naturally, then, you talk about everything except the size of the shitpile, no matter how bad the stink is. "We'll fight the case or do whatever we have to," you say, "just don't discuss it with other inmates." You pretend not to see the swarm of flies buzzing over his head. Then you start introducing him to reality, one messy detail at a time: "Of course, the confession is a problem, but it was probably coerced" or "the prints on the gun will be an issue, but it's not insurmountable."

You leave them an opening. "They made me sign it, I didn't tell them anything, and I only touched the gun to look at it." "I believe you, just don't discuss it with other inmates."

After a few weeks of bad jail food, your client might then begin to tell you about half of what really happened: "I told the police that I didn't know my friend was going to use the gun. It was my gun, but I let him hold it just because I didn't want it around." "I believe you," you answer, " if we can win, we will win, We will explore all our options. In the meantime, don't discuss it with other inmates."

After a few more weeks or so your client will have discussed his case with most of the jail population, and he will be ready to tell you what you already know. Under no circumstances do you point out the fact that he has been lying to you all along: "Ten years ago this would have been an easy case, but now, with the sentencing guidelines and the mandatory gun penalties, its gotten harder. We can fight it, of course, but the safe bet is the other option." "You mean like cooperating?" he will ask."Yes," you answer, "if that's the best way, or else we just wait it out and hope that their witnesses screw up, or we just work out some kind of a deal."

In the federal system, cooperation is the currency of the courthouse. Ninety-five percent of every arrest ends in a guilty plea, with or without cooperation. For those who roll the dice and go to trial, the deck is stacked in favor of the government, and even the conviction rate is high.

I suspected that Angel was going to be that kind of client - not particularly bright, someone easily manipulated. I also figured him for a pussy and a whiner, but it was too soon to be sure.

I had a late afternoon sentencing scheduled in the Eastern District. I left the Southern District courthouse and took a cab across the river on the Brooklyn Bridge. I drifted off under the warm sunlight flickering through the weft and warp of braided steel between the granite shoulders of the old bridge. The nap was all too brief. My client, Luthor Toogood, was one of three men who had tied up a couple of Colombian drug dealers in an apartment in Jackson Heights, shot each of them once in the head, and fled with a pile of coke and either a quarter million or over a half million in cash, depending on whether you believed the defendants or the agents who had stolen half of the dough that was recovered.

Toogood was a slightly built man in his late twenties. The first time I met with him in the jail, they brought him into the room in an orange jumpsuit, his hands pinned beneath his belly in bright steel handcuffs. I nodded to the guards and they unlocked the cuffs, leaving me alone with him in the painted cinderblock visiting room.

"Have a seat", I said, "let's get started.

The charge was murder.

"Man is an immortal, spiritual being," he said, "his experience extends well beyond a single lifetime. His capabilities are unlimited, even if not presently realized -- and those capabilities can be realized. He is able to not only solve his own problems, accomplish his goals and gain lasting happiness, but also achieve new, higher states of awareness and ability."

"Well Luthor, it's good to meet you, nothwithstanding the unfortunate circumstances."

He rested his hands on the small table that separated us and splayed his fingers apart, his palms flat against the formica surface. His fingers were long and slender, almost elegant, but there was something about them that suggested violence. I imagined his forefinger curled around the trigger of a 9 mil, squeezing off rounds into the backs of his victims.

"Tell me about yourself, Luthor. How did you end up in here?"

"I'm a Scientologist," he said, "the goal of Dianetics is a new state for the individual never before attainable in man's history. This state is called "Clear." A Clear possesses attributes, fundamental and inherent but not always available in an uncleared state, which have not been suspected of man and are not included in past discussions of his abilities and behavior."

Uh-huh.

"The Clear is freed from active or potential psychosomatic illness or aberration and self-determined. The Clear is vigorous and persistent. The Clear is unrepressed."

"I see", I said to him, "but tell me what happened."

"The Clear is able to perceive, recall, imagine, create and compute at a level high above the norm. The Clear is stable mentally, free with his emotion, able to enjoy life and to reason swiftly."

"Who is the The Clear?" I asked politely. "Did The Clear have something to do with the shooting?"

"You mock me, but that's okay, it doesn't matter. The Church will prevail."

"The Church? I don't understand", I answered.

"I'm a Scientologist," he said, "Dianetics are the scientific principles that guide us to a better path. A path that addresses the part of the mind that operates below the conscious level, exerting a hidden influence that causes you to react irrationally, say and do things that aren't you, and have inexplicable emotions and ills that hold back intelligence and ability. It all resolves with Dianetics."

"Well Luthor, that's very good to hear, but we need to talk about your case."

Luthor didn't respond. He only wanted to talk about Scientology.

My own view of Scientology is that it is a disease of the middle class. You won't find too many Scientologists in Darfur or sub-saharan Africa. They are too busy starving and hacking each other to pieces. But who was I to ruin Luthor's day?. If he wanted to believe in Scientology, that was his business. I was there to defend him, not to discourage him.

" One of the most fundamental breakthroughs of Dianetics is the concise statement of the goal of life itself", said Luthor, "this, the dynamic principle of man's existence, was discovered by L. Ron Hubbard. From this fundamental discovery many hitherto unanswered questions about man and life were resolved. The goal of life can be considered to be infinite survival. That man seeks to survive has long been known, but that it is his primary motivation is new. Man, as a life form, can be demonstrated to obey in all his action and purposes the one command: SURVIVE! SURVIVE! is the common denominator of all life, and from it came the critical resolution of man's ills and aberrations. Survival is not only the difference between life and death. Nor does it mean merely existing. It encompasses things like ideals, love and art as vital aspects. The better one is able to manage his life and increase his level of survival, the more he will have pleasure, abundance and satisfaction. Pain, disappointment and failure are the result of actions which do not promote survival. Dianetics addresses these moments of pain and threat to survival, and it provides a precise technology to increase your ability to survive and live a happier, healthier life."

"Are you living a happier, healthier life now, Luthor?" I asked politely.

"You can say what you like" he said, "but I am The Clear."

Luthor was clear, alright. Clearly out of his mind. He spent the next fifteen minutes rattling on about Operating Thetans and E-meters, telling me that I should become a Scientologist. I wasn't interested. I don't roll that way.

"Did The Clear pull the trigger?" I asked him. "Will The Clear tell us the truth?"

Luthor shook his head and pointed a bony forefinger at me.

"The dude was a rat", Luthor replied, "I capped his ass and he deserved to die. All three of them deserved to die."

If Luthor was any indication of what Scientology was about, I didn't want any part of it. I was perfectly content not being The Clear.

After a few months in prison, Luthor became a government snitch and pled guilty. While awaiting sentence, Luthor was caught dealing coke inside the MCC. As was not unheard of, his mother had smuggled the stuff into the jail by hiding it inside her vagina. She'd been keeping her son very well supplied. The government eagerly accepted his additional cooperation regarding the jailhouse drug dealing, and Toogood also gave up the names of every inmate whom he had sold to, as well as several whom he probably hadn't. I was amazed and disgusted. Despite the fact that Toogood had a previous conviction for attempted murder and two priors for robbery that had been pled down to misdemeanors, the government still went to bat for him. That's how the system worked.

Although I could barely hide my contempt for Luthor, I had prepared carefully for the sentencing. I would deal with the jailhouse trafficking by discussing his "lifelong problems" with narcotics. I would lean heavily on his invaluable assistance in taking dangerous killers off the street. "Who knows how many other men Mr. Toogood's codefendants would have killed if Luthor Toogood had not come forward, your Honor?" I had a rule of thumb for cooperators: if you cooperated in a drug case you could generally expect a sentence of about one-third of the sentencing guideline. A good snitch in a murder case could walk away with as little as five or ten years in some cases.

Although I had in my possession a letter of recommendation from the government, I was sure that the judge would be so displeased by Toogood's conduct in jail that Luthor would have to be extremely lucky to get off with less than twenty. He certainly deserved it.

"Does the government wish to be heard?" said the judge. "Yes, your honor. Mr. Toogood has provided more than substantial a ssistance to the government. Without his efforts two extremely dangerous men would be free in the streets today. These violent men had to be stopped, and Mr. Toogood helped us do exactly that. Although he suffered a relapse while in jail, the government recommends that the Court grant him leniency...."

"Mr. Sayles, do you wish to be heard?"

Judge, my client is a lying, murderous piece of filth. He planned the murder of three men. He lied about who actually shot these men and ensured that the two jerks whom he recruited to help him would spend the rest of their lives in jail. He also sold drugs in prison while waiting for you to let him off, and he can't wait to get out so that he can spend the two hundred and fifty grand that you don't know about.

"Yes your honor. I agree with the government that Mr. Toogood has provided extraordinary cooperation. Suffice it to say that we can all feel safer now that you have sentenced his coconspirators to the imprisonment that they deserved. The government's characterization of the drug incident in the MCC is appropriate. I also agree with the government that Mr. Toogood has earned the mercy of this Court. I ask that you sentence him to time served."

" Does the defendant wish to be heard?" asked Judge Sackett.

Do you really want to hear this one's bullshit, judge? The average federal judge in the Eastern District conducts over a hundred sentencings every year. Hundreds of excuses and explanations. Every story, every excuse a variation of the same crap the no one believes. We did the dance. I had prepared Luthor well, and he looked directly at the judge with the eyes of an innocent child:

"No your Honor, just that I appreciate all that you have done for me and that the government and Mr. Sayles have done for me, and I will not disappoint your honor, no matter what."

A pause, then a tear.

"I'm sorry that I let everybody down. I know I hurt my family."

I offered him a tissue and he dabbed at his eyes. The judge's deputy, Paula, looked at me and raised an eyebrow. Who does this puppy think he's fooling? I pretended not to see.

"Mr. Toogood," the judge said, almost whispering, "you have committed the most serious of crimes, and I should sentence you to spend the rest of your life in prison. However, you have provided the government with valuable assistance, without which law enforcement would be unable to protect us from the most violent armed offenders. I therefore follow the recommendation of the government and sentence you to a term of four years in prison. You must also pay a surcharge of one hundred dollars."

I thanked the judge and shook hands with the assistant U.S. attorney.

"Why do I have to pay a hundred dollars?" my client whispered in my ear before they lead him away.

"It's unfair, I know" I whispered back apologetically, and I ran to the men's room and threw up in one of the stalls.

After Luthor's sentencing I was tired and wanted to head for home. I called my office to check for messages. Gloria, the receptionist I shared with the other lawyers in the suite, had left for the day. The answering machine picked up my call. There was one message on it, from Truck.

"Hey Andy, how you doin today boy."

It wasn't hard to recognize Fowler's voice, even as the scratchy message played back over the line from the payphone I'd used to call into my answering machine.

"I got some news for you, Andy. Give me a call when you get a chance, awright?"

I wasn't in the mood to have a conversation with Truck but it sounded important. I dropped another quarter into the payphone and pressed in his number. "What's up Truck? I got your message." I said.

"Hey Andy. Listen, they busted Pedro Lora. I thought you'd want to know that."

According to Fowler, Pedro Lora ran the organization that had engaged Shiny's services as an assassin.

"This is the guy who's named in Shinequa's indictment?" I said

"Yep, that's him. His girlfriend called me this morning." said Fowler.

"You sure are busy, Truck. Obviously I can't represent him, since I already represent Shinequa." I said.

"Well, we both know that, Andy, but Lora needs a lawyer, and I'm sure you have a friend you can bring on the case, and maybe your friend will show his gratitude in some manner." said Truck.

"Uh huh, Truck, you are a piece of work," I said, "I'll call around. I'm sure I can find someone willing to take his money."

"Awrahht,." said Fowler, "Let me know who you find, brother,"

I called Freddy Humbolt, a friend I had worked with in the past, and explained the situation. Freddy would take on Lora's case for twenty five grand, which one of Lora's people would drop off at my office. I was getting five for my trouble.

The cab ride back to Manhattan over the bridge was grim. I'd barely recovered from Toogood's sentencing, and after having had a few too many the night before my head was still pounding. I threw up again somewhere between the middle of the bridge and lower Manhattan. The cab had no air conditioning, and the lingering taste of my own vomit sharpened the stink from the driver's body odor and tobacco smoke. A pungent reek drifted back over the plexiglass partition from some kind of middle eastern food. There were spots next to me on the passenger seat that looked suspiciously like cum stains. I looked at the hack's license on the plexiglass partition; the driver, a Palestinian named Ahmed, kept staring at me in his rear view mirror and looked as if he'd just left a car bomb at the embassy. "Now I have to clean up your mess, too, " he complained to me through the partition opening.

I wasn't listening to Ahmed. Almost a month had passed since the feds had arrested Shiny Gates, and while I knew that Shiny had once done some "favor" for Pedro Lora, I should have known that something was up. For one thing, Fowler's voice was strange on the phone when he'd told me about Lora, and though I couldn't put my finger on it, there was definitely something in the air besides the smell of my own puke. For one thing, there were enough conflicts of interest that I couldn't keep them straight. Shiny was my client now, but I suspected that Lora was also Angel Cabrera's padrone. Lora clearly had some kind of relationship with Truck, and Truck had must have brought me into case after Lora learned that Shinequa had been arrested. If Angel worked for Lora, I might be conflicted out of the case. And that was for starters.

Notwithstanding all of my concerns, for the next month or so it was business as usual, or so it seemed. At the first scheduling conference Judge Stillwell designated the Lora case, which also included Shinequa Gates as a co-conspirator in the murder counts, as a "complex case" - a move that allowed the judge to set a discovery and motion schedule six months long with another five or six months before trial. "That's cool, Andy," Shiny whispered in my ear, "I can do that."

I wasn't so sure of that. On August 10^th, three days after the scheduling conference, I had to see my doctor, Larry Hutchins, for my monthly visit, and I didn't get home until after five. There was an urgent message from Shiny on my home answering machine.

"Andy, it's me, they put me in the SHU."

The SHU is the Special Housing Unit. The inmates call it the hole. The Bureau of Prisons uses it to segregate inmates who are particularly violent or as extra punishment for those prisoners who have violated the rules. At the MCC, the SHU consists of three wings of four by eight concrete cells. The inmates in the SHU are locked in 23 hours a day. They are allowed one shower each week and one hour of recreation each day. Inside the SHU is yet another special cell that they call the box, and that's exactly what it is - an even smaller four by four cinder-block box that is used to punish the punished. I'd never heard of a woman being sent to the SHU before.

I ate some takeout leftovers and took the C train downtown to the Chambers Street exit. I walked down Duane Street to Foley Square and over to the MCC, getting there just past seven. The prison guards took their time bringing Shiny down to the counsel visiting room, so I cooled my heels there for the next hour and a half, stretching the bad vending machine coffee with M&Ms from the other machine. At a quarter to nine they brought her in, dressed in the bright orange jumpsuit worn by all SHU prisoners.

She sat across from me in one of the small visiting room cubicles, shaking her head in disbelief.

"So?" I said.

"Man, these people are crazy," she answered, "they have these lines painted on the floor, and the inmates are supposed to stay between the lines at all times. You line up for laundry, you line up to eat, you line up for work."

"I've seen the lines", I said.

"They didn't bring me back from court on Friday until late, and it was already supper time when they brought me back. I got on the food line like I was supposed to do, and it couldn't have been five minutes before this guard I had never seen before came over to me and started yelling at me. That woman was screaming was yelling so loud that I thought she was gonna bust a vein in her red neck. BOTH FEET BETWEEN THE LINES, she was screaming, BOTH FEET BETWEEN THE LINES. I looked down, moved my feet together, and the next thing I know I'm being thrown against a wall by three guards with helmets and clubs."

"That's it?" I said, "That's all you were doing?

"Well you know, I mean I took my time about doing it, moving my left foot over."

"How much time?" I said.

"Maybe five seconds, just enough to let her know what's what."

"Ahh, I see," I said, "a violent escape attempt." We nodded at each other..

"They gave me a shot for insubordination. There was a hearing that night, and they gave me thirty days in the SHU. Now you know that ain't right."

In prison argot, a shot is a disciplinary form - a charging document handed to inmates that specifies the rule that was violated. There is a hearing, usually within a day or two, and in almost every instance, the hearing officer finds against the inmate. If Shiny Gates was telling me the truth, she had been set up for discipline over a ridiculously minor violation, and sent to the SHU.

"Okay, I can't do anything tonight, but I think I know how to put a stop to this bullshit, Shiny."

"All right, Andy, please do what you can for me. I hate it in here."

At exactly nine a.m. the next morning I filed a Section 2255 petition alleging that Shiny was being illegally detained in solitary confinement. I didn't expect Stillwell to give us a hearing for a few days, but surprisingly, I received a phone call from chambers within one hour. I was to appear with Ms. Flanigan in courtroom 1201 at three thirty. Flanigan was ordered to produce Shinequa for the hearing.

I walked into courtroom A, room 1201, at exactly three fifteen. Flanigan was already there, along with another AUSA named Bill Gorn with whom I had done business on a number of occasions.

"Hey Bill, how are you doing?" I said."

"I can't believe you're wasting time on this Andy," he said, "your client gets a thirty day ticket and you're filing for writs? You do realize that the judge isn't going to get involved with this?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. But it seems to me that thirty days is a bit excessive, and Stillwell must be interested or he wouldn't have had us come in so fast."

"Do you know about the fish?" Gorn asked.

"The fish?" Are there fish here I don't know about"?

"My father told me about the fish," he said, "He used to take me drift fishing on the open boats out of Sheepshead Bay."

"Sometimes you see them," my father told me, "men with ten or twenty fish in their buckets, when nobody else has more than two or three. Son, I'm going to tell you something that a few men have known about for thousands of years. Not everyone knows about it, though. Only some. It is a secret that they know. It has to do with the fish. The men who know the secret will not admit that they know it. They will not admit that the secret even exists. Some will deny that it exists at all. Some will just give a little laugh and turn away. But they know the secret. It's passed on from father to son, from brother to brother. Not every father who knows it tells his son. Not every man who knows it tells a brother. No woman has ever heard it. It is just passed on between some men, the right men, at the right time. It's not a skill that you learn. It has nothing to do with the mechanics of how you bait the hook, or how you cast the line or hold the rod. It's not in any book. You can't find information about it anywhere. It's as if the secret didn't exist at all, but it does. According to legend, the first man who learned it heard it from a dying fish. It's as if the fish know the men know it, and because the men know it, the fish will come to them and jump on their hooks happily. I don't know how it works. I only know that the secret is real, that it has been passed on, and that these men will not admit it exists. "

Gorn was a funny guy when he wasn't busy putting people in jail. I waited for the punchline.

"Sometimes I think federal practice is like a club with a secret that they only tell some people," he said, leaning over in his chair, "the Judges disappear into their chambers and joke about their great secret. I can imagine them talking to each other in the back: "Hey Willy, some schmuck actually said "Stare decisis" in an argument in front of me, can you believe that? They think we follow the law."

"That sounds very cynical coming from an Assistant US Attorney, Bill, not very encouraging for the bar." I didn't say anything, but my guess was that Gorn would be leaving for the private sector very shortly.

"Who cares, said the assistant, it works" We both laughed.

It sounded like something that Truck Fowler could have come up with.

"Very good, Bill," I said, "lets ask Stillwell about it." Kathleen Flanigan was not amused. She was all business.

The hearing took no more than fifteen minutes. Stillwell came in, sat down, and three Marshals immediately entered through the holding cells with Shiny in tow.

Stillwell's clerk ran a tight ship indeed. Although I'd denied the charge made by the guard, I did not spend much time on it; Federal judges give the BOP extremely wide latitude and they will almost always accept the statements made by the guards as God's truth. If you lose on credibility, you embolden the assholes.

"Your Honor", I said, "assuming that the guard was truthful, it is both excessive and troubling to me that Ms. Gates was literally gang tackled, beaten, and hauled away into a concrete cell to be held there for a full month because she took a few seconds to respond to an arrogant demand while standing on line with her hand in her pockets."

Stillwell looked at the two assistants: "Mr. Gorn?"

It was Flanigan who answered. "Your Honor, the government has alleged this defendant to be an extremely dangerous individual. The Bureau of Prisons must be given wide latitude to maintain a safe environment for the guards as well as the other prisoners. The law on this in this Circuit is well established, as opposing counsel is well aware."

"The government is of course correct as far as the law applies to discipline, your Honor, I replied, "but that is not what this is about. It is not even about standing on a line for a meal. I believe that this matter has nothing to do with rule infractions and everything to do with raw intimidation."

I didn't want to push this too far. The prison guards didn't like Shinequa Gates because she wouldn't be pushed around. It was as simple as that. She had been made an example of and everyone in the room knew it. It was an unprovable truth that was better left unspoken.

"All right", grumbled Stillwell, "you'll have my decision in the morning."

What I expected from Stillwell's decision didn't matter. I'd made my point. The moving of pretrial detainees involves a number of steps. Papers have to be filed with the U.S. Marshals. A team of Marshals has to be assembled to move the detainee to the Courthouse holding pens. Another team has to be assembled to transport the detainee to the courtroom. If the underlying charges are violent, yet more marshals have to be assigned. While they work closely together, the U.S. marshals are not part of the Bureau of Prisons. The result is predictable. When one bureaucracy does something that increases the workload of the other, people become cranky. Phone calls are made. If I was right, Stillwell had taken one look at Shinequa and correctly sized up the situation at the MCC. A very bright man, he knew exactly what the truth was, and he'd had that in mind when he'd directed his clerk to bring us in on short notice.

Everyone involved had been made to run around and shuffle papers. We had already won the skirmish just by filing the petitition, but the next day brought a small gift. Stillwell ordered the time reduced to seven days. Five days later, Shinequa was back in her regular cell on the women's unit.

The last two weeks of August were quiet. The courts were all but closed, and every New Yorker who could afford it either left for the hills or the Hamptons. I had nowhere to go and no one to see except my few incarcerated clients, so I made the rounds and sent out discovery requests and prepared a few motion papers.

After Labor Day weekend, things started to happen.

* * *

On Tuesday morning, Cabrera's "aunt" Arecelys called to ask me for an appointment. I was somewhat surprised. I'd figured her for a ringer and assumed I would never see her again. Unlike our first meeting though, her clothes seemed to fit when she came in the next day.

"Do you think you can get Angel out?" she asked.

"It can be hard to persuade these judges," I said, "What can you raise...for Angel's bail?."

"We have a home worth at least three hundred thousand."

"Okay," I said, "that might be satisfy the court."

"I have an appraisal from a real estate agent and all of the papers from the bank," she said, reaching into her pocketbook.

She handed me the appraisal and title documents. They looked authentic enough.

Cabrera's case was also now before Judge Stillwell. There were more than thirty judges in the Southern District who heard criminal cases. I wondered if it was just a coincidence that Stillwell was on both Angel's case and Shiny's but it wasn't all that unusual so I dismissed the thought from my mind.

Nobody likes jail. I don't even like to stay in the place for more than two hours when I go there to visit my clients. I called AUSA Miller and we discussed Angel's proposed bail package. Miller said he'd run it by his supervisor and we called Judge Stillwell's deputy to schedule another bail hearing for Angel on that Friday. The day before the hearing, Miller called me and told me that the Government was willing to work out release conditions for Angel.

Judge Stillwell's manner was consistent with his reputation. He spoke to you in a raspy whisper, so that you had to lean over and strain to hear him excoriate you. He was a mean as a snake, and he didn't care what you thought of him. He had a lifetime job and he knew it.

"I understand that there is an agreement with respect to Mr. Cabrera."

"Yes, judge, the Government has agreed to release Mr. Cabrera on a three hundred thousand dollar personal recognizance bond cosigned by two of his relatives."

"The Government has agreed to this, Mr. Miller?"

"Yes, your honor." said Miller.

"I'm not sure that I agree with it Mr. Miller," said Stillwill. "You've claimed that Mr. Cabrera is a drug dealer. A grand jury has voted an indictment, which means he probably IS a drug dealer. Is there some reason why I should go along with this?"

"Mr. Cabrera will be under very close supervision, and he'll have to report twice a week to the probation department for supervision." answered Miller, who was flushing visibly.

"Well Mr. Miller, he may be under close supervision, but I am going hold you personally responsible if there are any problems." Stillwell was an equal opportunity kind of prick. He got his jollies from needling the assistants almost as much as he enjoyed putting it to the defense bar.

"Your Honor, my client has lived with his family his entire life. He has no previous history of any serious offenses. I believe that the evidence against Mr. Cabrera is extremely weak, and notwithstanding the presumption of flight in drug cases, he has no passport and no ties to anyone, anywhere other than in New York City."

"Mr. Miller?" said Stillwell, "is the Government going to let everyone go today? Perhaps you would like to consent to the release of a few others. Perhaps we should send them all home for the weekend. Well, I tell you what, I am going to order Mr. Cabrera released on his own signature."

"Thank you your honor," I said.

"That will be all, counselors." said Stillwell. I explained to Angel that the marshals' would release him downstairs and told him to come to my office on Monday morning for an interview. I left the building with a smile.

I decided to take the IRT back up to Union Square. With the Gates matter, I now had at least one case that would go to trial. Angel was also still asserting his innocence, which was fine with me, although I'd have preferred to be in another borough with his case if it actually went to trial. It was bad enough that I was stuck with Frank Stillwell, but in the Manhattan jury pool, almost every juror works for or is related to a lawyer. In the Brooklyn jury pool, every juror works for the police or is related to a cop. In the Bronx jury pool, every juror has either been arrested or has a brother in jail. Too bad this wasn't in the Bronx. Still, Angel was out, and that was a good thing. I hated the visiting any joint, even the federal detention centers. I hated the doors slamming behind me, one set after another. It may be the most depressing noise in the world. I hated the confinement, the over-cooled air, and worst of all, the crappy vending machine coffee. I wished that there was some way I could have gotten Shiny out on bail too.

As I descended into the subway station at City Hall and down the second set of steps to the uptown train platform, I couldn't stop thinking about Shiny. I had no doubt that Flanigan had been either misinformed or was simply lying about the lineup, but I had no way of proving anything at the time. The truth was very different from what she had told Magistrate Karas, and even more deliberate than I'd guessed. Four weeks after Eric Williams was murdered in his apartment, detectives from the twenty-sixth precinct brought Betty Colyer to the precinct detective unit to view a suspect in a lineup. The first thing that Mrs. Colyer noticed when she was taken into the PDU was the three white men, in their twenties or early thirties, milling about in the room. Although she knew that they were probably plainclothes detectives, they seemed out of place in their faded jeans and wornout college sweatshirts. The detectives then took her into a small room with a one-way mirror. On the other side of the mirror stood six black females holding numbered placards. They all appeared to be in their early twenties to early thirties, and all of them looked haggard and unkempt. All of them except number three. Number three looked healthy, even beautiful, with perfectly even features and intelligent, although vaguely forbidding, eyes. All of the women except one wore plain baseball caps. Number three wore a dark black cotton shirt and a Yankee baseball cap. "I'm not sure," she told the detective standing next to her, "I only saw her going down the stairs." "Do the best you can Mrs. Colyer." he answered. Mrs. Colyer, an elderly white woman, looked again at number three, the clean one in the dark black shirt, and said "It could be number three." "Could be isn't enough, we need your help, we need you to say you are sure." Tired and intimidated, Mrs. Colyer looked down and whispered quietly, "three, number three." "Witness positively identified subject three," Eckersley wrote on his pad, "Shinequa Gates."

If I was going to win this one, I had to find out how it had gone down. I needed to find that witness in order to get a hearing on the line-up, but Kathleen Flanigan wasn't giving out names without a court order, and Stillwell wasn't about to give me one.

I made a note of the questions that I wanted Truck to ask the residents of Eric Williams' building while I waited for the express train. Assuming, of course, that they would talk to us at all. Most people do not want to get involved with murder cases. People don't want their neighbors to think they've been snitching, and they'll do almost anything to avoid having to deal with cops and lawyers. But if there was anyone I could count on to find the answers, it was Truck.

The express trains were running late. An aging #6 train screetched into the City Hall station just before noon. I sat down, lost in thoughts that wandered to another time and place as the train went north.

It was a cold morning, January 3, 1988, and in the newspapers there had appeared numerous stories of people who had been infected but asymptomatic for five years or more.

In eight years I had not had anything more serious than a brief bout with the flu, and an odd white spot on my tongue sometime back around 1980 that my doctor thought was a yeast infection that I'd picked up from a girlfriend. The doctor gave me Monistat tablets to suck on. The tablets tasted like pasty chalk, but the yeast infection, or whatever it was, quickly went away.

Nonetheless, the passage of time was no longer the assurance that it had been. Even though the last time I'd used IV drugs was in late 1979 and into the early days of 1980, and I thought that it was unlikely that I'd been infected, I had taken the test because we wanted to have children. Just to be sure. I pulled over at a parking meter and waited awhile, and at five minutes to nine, I pushed two quarters in the coin slot and walked into the Health Department building.

A young woman standing near in an open door looked out me. I gave her my patient number and she told me to have a seat. I watched her pull a manila folder from a metal cabinet.

"There's no one in yet, you'll have to wait," she said.

It was hard to imagine a more depressing place. The walls were covered in dirty celadon green tiles, and spikes of old straw stuffing poked through the row of cracked and faded orange vinyl seats that lined the hallway. The smell of industrial floor cleaner pinched the back of my throat. After fifteen minutes watching civil service employees and tired volunteers drift into the nearby rooms, I looked into another office where two women spoke quietly while looking at me. It could not have been more obvious, and although I could not understand it at that moment, neither Carla nor I would ever have another innocent day without worry of death or pain or loss.

I left the clinic and drove to court in Brooklyn, where I'd been assigned to represent a defendant who had AIDS. I can still remember his face - gaunt and grey as a ghost. The court officers refused to touch him without wearing rubber gloves. His name was Juan Figueroa.

Figueroa was dying, and I had asked the judge to dismiss the case in the interest of justice so that Figueroa could die a free man. The judge ducked the issue, adjourning the case every thirty days for a decision that never came. I drafted a motion that I was going to file in the Appellate Division, hoping to force the judge to make a decision, but I was too late. Figueroa died alone and all but forgotten at the AIDS ward of the Rikers Island prison hospital. I never forgot Juan, and I doubt that I ever will. I know that I will never forget the name of that judge, either.

After I left the courtroom that day the enormity of it all swept over me, and I retreated to a phone booth and called my wife, sobbing in a corner of a courthouse in Brooklyn. A few days later, my doctor tested me for Hep C, and I discovered that I was coinfected with that virus as well. It has now been 28 years.

The subway car lurched to a sudden stop, jarring me back into the present, and I looked up at the cherubic face of Dr. Zizmor, a local dermatologist whose unblemished cheeks adorned an advertising card posted above the opposite row of seats. If you were going to be a dermatologist, you couldn't have been blessed with a more ironic surname.

The train doors opened at Union Square and I exited. The Union Square station was still in poor condition in those days. It had only been a year since a #4 train operator named Robert Ray jumped the tracks in his speeding train and killed five people, piling up the bodies and twisted wreckage against the steel pillars beneath the streets. The accident closed the entire Lexington Ave line between Brooklyn Bridge and 86^th Street for days afterwards.

I cut through the Union Square park on my way to the office. Like the station below, the park had been poorly maintained by the City and it was frequented by addicts and the homeless when the weather complied. I had the feeling that someone was following me, but it was probably a panhandler looking for some change, so I ignored him and hurried up Broadway to my office to meet with Truck.

"Mr. Fowler is waiting for you in the conference room." Gloria, our receptionist, disliked Fowler, but I never understood why. Truck was such a likeable guy that he could put a smile on a snapping turtle, and Gloria was a sucker for that type. Gloria could spend a half hour chatting with our postman about paper clips, but whenever Truck tried to talk her up she'd shut him down.

"So what's the plan, Truck," I said, "do you think we'll have any luck finding witnesses?

"Not likely, but we'll go bang the drum and see who marches to the music. I'm sure it will be the usual closed door treatment - four inches open and four inches closed."

I had to agree with his assessment of the situation. People just don't want to get involved. Bodybags and bullets tend to have that effect.

They'd been investigating the Lora conspiracy since last April. The wiretaps were authorized on April 10^th , which meant that their informant was probably someone who'd been arrested a few months before that. Whoever he was, he didn't know that Rivera and Williams were going to be hit, and when the killings went down, the government moved in early. Shiny wasn't on any of the tapes, either. Lora's group didn't do much business on the phone anyway. The government hadn't turned over all of the phone company records yet, so I didn't know if there were calls to Shiny's beeper around the time of the killings. There was a lot I didn't know.

"I'll check the court records for all of the co-defendants," said Fowler, "do you want to go up to 139^th Street with me?"

"How about Monday? Angel Cabrera is coming into my office at ten, and we can leave after I meet with him."

"Monday it is. If you want me to see Miss Gates at the MCC again, I'll go, but I don't think she likes me very much and she hasn't told me anything."

Truck wasn't doing too well with the women in my life.

* * *

"So what's going on, Andy? How was your week?"

"Better than yours, I'm sure. I've said this before, Shiny, but I don't know how you do it. I can't stand to stay inside these jails for more than an hour; you've been here for almost two months and you never complain."

"I know that I'll be out of this place soon. I believe in God," she answered.

"You might be better off believing in Andy."

"How do you think I found you, Andy? It was God's doing."

"God didn't put me on the A train this morning, Shiny. He didn't wake me up and tell me what to do, or how I can get you out of here."

"I'm surprised at you. For such a smart man you can't see the bigger plan."

"And that plan is...?"

"Andy Fowler, do you like music?" she asked me.

"Sure. We all like music," I said, "why do you ask?

"We all like music. We like music because it's part of us. When we hear music it makes us move. God is like that too. He is part of us, and we are part of him."

"And all of the bad things that have happened to you Shinequa?"

"He doesn't plan the details, but I know he's there. That man who did that to me, God didn't make him do it, he made up his own mind, and I made up mine. What he did to me wasn't right, and I wasn't right to shoot his ass, but it's part of who I am, and I'm here for a reason, just like you," she said.

"Let's hope you're right." I didn't want to engage Shinequa in a discussion of my personal religious beliefs. I didn't have any.

"Tell me how you got involved with Lora," I said. I didn't want to press her on the killings. She'd already told me that she wasn't the shooter.

"It's like I told you," she said, "After that all happened with that man I started running in the streets and smoking weed and cigarettes and everything. I used to get in fights in school and then I shot that man and everybody started being a afraid of me. Then one of the boys in the building who was selling crack told me that I could make money working for him so I did."

"Don't be offended, Shiny, but I understand how it works in the projects. I assume you were getting high with them and everything?'

"No, I'm not like that. I mean, sure, I did all that stuff for a little while, but that life wasn't for me. I got out of there."

"And now you're in here."

"And now I'm in here."

We had talked about alibi witnesses the first night that I saw Shiny at the MCC.. She had none. She'd been at home, chilling out alone when Georgia Rivera and Eric Williams were killed. She'd spent the day reading and hadn't made any phone calls. She hadn't seen any of her neighbors. I didn't know whether to believe her or not.

After I left Shiny I spent the day at the great lawn in Central Park. The warm September sun felt comforting, and I slipped off my shoes and socks and slipped my hands and feet through the soft grass, watching the ball players and their friends and familes. The park was my backyard, the place where I went in the temperate months to forget that I was slowly dying inside. I saw a woman lying nearby on a beach towel glance in my direction. I wondered if she would have looked at me at all if she knew, or whether she would have viewed me as a specimen of shame.

When I tested positive, when Carla was still with me and the blood wounds had not yet set, I found a support group, or what passed for one. There were seven of us - six gay men and myself. I heard their stories and learned about a world that I had only known through crude jokes and simplistic suppositions. Although we were different in so many ways, we were all stumbling through the same bleak forest. They're all gone now. One by one they fell. I'm the last man standing.

The woman on the towel turned away, leaving me alone again, and I left.

When I got home, I sat down and scanned the classified ads. I wanted some company that night, if even only for an hour or two.

After I tested positive and Carla moved out, I had begun to see escorts. A paid performance is a sorry substitute for love, but it was the best I could expect. I scanned the magazines and papers for upscale call girls and clubs. I became an expert of the incall and outcall. I knew all of the right questions to ask on the phone to separate the wheat from the city's sexual chaff. I was always careful, as much as for my own safety as for theirs; the last thing I needed was another STD to add to my personal alphabet soup of viral acronyms, and I certainly didn't want to infect anyone else.

I hooked up with a girl who called herself "Ashley." Ashley, Krystal, Amber - they were all a/k/a's to me. I never asked what their real names were and they never gave them. If one of them ever told me her real name I'd never have believed it.

"My real name is Karen," she said, "and believe it or not, that is really my name."

"Well Karen, nice to meet you, my real name is Andy."

I didn't tell Ashley that I was HIV positive. It was a difficult issue. When people have sex for money, they assume the risk because the underlying assumption throughout history has always been that men and women engaging in paid sex have no obligation to their partner other than a measure of respect. Business is business and when we do business, it's caveat emptor, babe. The same holds true for the buyer as well as the seller. Neither has ever had the right to expect the truth. It was just another risk.

Karen was a good-looking girl. She explained that she was a student - she'd gone back to college after a few years trying to get work as an actress. There were thousands like her in New York, working to get by, hoping to break into show business. She'd gotten one gig on "Law & Order"playing a murder victim.

She seemed to be a decent person. She was probably telling the truth about the Law & Order gig. Half of the actors on television these days had been on Law & Order at least once. For a few hours that night, Karen made me forget how alone I really was. She kissed me on the cheek on the way out. I liked her.

* * *

Angel was slumped over on the leather sofa in our waiting room when I walked into the office on Monday. He was definitely stoned. Gloria looked at me and shook her head in disgust.

He followed me my office and dropped himself into the chair across from me. His pupils were as small as pinheads. It knew that look. There was a time that I'd worn it too. He moved one of his arms and dropped it, drifting in and out of semi-consciousness.

"I wasss up all night. I couldn't sleep," he slurred.

"Do you think you can tell me about the case?" I said.

He told me the same story that he'd told me when we first met at the MCC - He was only in the apartment with the crack because his friends lived there and he was visiting. He had no idea they were selling drugs. I knew this was utter nonsense. There was nothing living in that apartment besides rodents and roaches. The only furniture in the place was a table and a filthy mattress.

Angel wasn't bright enough to tell me the truth. He was clearly full of shit, but it wasn't my job to confront him. I was his lawyer. If he wanted to make my job more difficult by keeping me in the dark that was his decision to make. I'd told him the rules. If he chose to ignore my advice, that was his risk to take. If he wanted to get high and violate the terms of his bail, he'd be just another client to visit at the MCC.

I asked him a few questions and suggested that we might have to negotiate a plea. He didn't seem to notice; he was somewhere else.

After Angel left I called Truck. His SUV was idling at the curb when I walked out of the elevator, and we drove uptown. I had no reason to think that we would ever find a witness who could identify Georgie Rivera's killer. If the feds hadn't found one it was unlikely that we would. The Williams killing was another matter. Whoever it was that had identified Shiny probably still lived in the building. If I had any chance of finding that witness, Truck was the man who could pull it off.

We circled the block for what seemed like an hour until someone pulled out of a spot. The meter was broken, its crescent window scrawled over with magic marker. We walked down to the building where Eric Williams met his killer. It was a four-story brownstone in Harlem on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street. The building, like most of its residents, had seen better days. Its dark hallway reeked of urine and human waste. Its worn stairs were uneven and chipped. I didn't want to be there and I was happy to let Truck do the talking.

As Truck had predicted, the residents were less than welcoming. If they opened a door at

all, it was quickly slammed shut. On the third floor, we heard shouting and the muffled sound of breaking glass behind one of the doors. A young latino opened it a with shattered pipe stem in his hand. His eyes were wild and the sweet burnt plastic smell of crack was unmistakable.

"Easy, friend," said Fowler, raising his palms up, "we're not police."

"What the fuck you want man?" he glared at us.

"We'd like to ask you about Eric Williams, the young man who was killed down the hall a months ago," said Truck..

"Fuck you," he answered, and slammed the door shut.

"I think we upset him. Should we try again?" Truck laughed.

"Let's try the next floor," I answered.

We trudged up to the next floor and rapped on the first door to the left. No one answered, and we were about to move on when we heard an elderly woman's voice from behind the door.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," she said.

She was a white woman, in her late 70's or 80's. We introduced ourselves, and she invited us in.

"I'm Betty," she said, "Betty Colyer." As soon as she said her name, I realized who she was.

Homer Collyer and Langley Collyer were two reclusive brothers who became famous in the late 1940's because of their compulsive hoarding. Although they were said to have been among the richest men in New York City, they were rarely seen and regarded as deranged. Their neighbors would observe the two brothers picking through garbage in the dead of night, taking home with them everything from broken furniture and musical instruments, discarded newspapers and other trash. To discourage intruders, the two men set booby traps through the narrow pathways between the junk that filled the house from floor to ceiling. Several years before their death, Homer Collyer had began to go blind, and Langley cared for him, ferrying trays of bread and oranges through the collected detritus to his brother.

Eventually, the neighbors noticed the brothers' absence from their nightly forays into the world and reported them as missing. When the police arrived, they had to break down the front door. What they found there became legendary. A solid wall of refuse blocked all access into the brownstone. The police and fire departments had to dig out a path to enter. Eventually, one officer who made his way through the maze of objects came upon the dead body of Homer Collyer, smothered in the refuse that the brothers had collected. It took the police four days to tunnel through the waste to the body of Langley Collyer, who had apparently starved to death. Betty Colyer was a niece of the two men from a branch of the family that had dropped on "l" from their last name. She had inherited the building - the last living relative of the infamous Collyer brothers.

She told us about the lineup, about not being certain who it was that she saw running down the stairs after she heard the gunshots, and about having pointed out suspect number three, Shinequa Gates, after seeing her dressed differently from the other suspects. "They told me it was one of them," she said. Truck nodded at me. Betty Colyer was the government's witness. Colyer's tainted identification was the only evidence keeping Shiny behind bars. That, and the claims made by their unnamed informant.

By Monday night I'd drafted up motions to suppress the identification and dismiss the government's case against Shinequa. I didn't expect Stillwell to let her go, but I hoped that he'd at least consider reducing the bail. I filed the motions the next day and walked behind the courthouse to the MCC to tell Shiny the good news.

When they brought her into the visiting room Shiny seemed to be in an oddly happy mood even before I gave her the news.

"You see, I knew that God would help me."

"Yeah, we talked about that last week," I said, "I know you love God."

"Why do you have such a hard time with that?" she asked.

It wasn't my habit to engage my clients in discussions about their religious beliefs, but Shiny had opened the door.

"I just don't believe that there is some percipient being up there in the ether, keeping score and watching who plays the game."

"You don't have to believe that," she answered, "it's not about a him or a her, it's about all of it, all of this, and what we do. That's God to me. I talk to God because that's my way, but it doesn't matter how you believe, or what you believe, or what church you go to, or if you don't go to church at all. It matters how you live your life. That's what God cares about. And while he may not pull all the strings all of the time, we're all part of his music."

I wasn't going to argue with her. Whether Shiny's religious view were right or wrong, it now seemed that she had at least a shot at bail, and that was a victory. If Stillwell let her out it would be mean one less client whom I'd have to face across a table in a concrete room. Judge Stillwell ordered an immediate hearing, just as he had done when they put her in the SHU.

We were back in court the next day.

* * *

"What am I to do with you, Mr. Sayles?" Stillwell said dryly, steepling his hands as he leered across the bench. "Your client has been indicted for a murder. That means she's probably a murderer. Shall I order her released so that she may be more comfortable until we have our trial? I'm not releasing her. She has been indicted. And I'm denying your request for an expedited hearing. You will have the opportunity to question the government's witnesses soon enough."

I should have seen it coming. Stillwell was that kind of a judge.