Never Tell

Chapter Seven

Usually, Ellie enjoyed her time in the Criminal Court Building. She’d heard it described as “hurry-up-and-wait time.” She understood the term all too well.

Other people—usually the lawyers—ran up and down the hallways, struggling to herd witnesses like cattle. They negotiated last-minute deals, always in shorthand. ROR—release on recognizance. JOA—judgment of acquittal. SOR—sex offender registration. Stip-facts bench trial—stipulate that the facts offered in a bench (no jury) trial establish the material elements of the offense. Meanwhile, she sat and chilled on a courthouse bench, usually with some lawyer’s discarded newspaper in hand, collecting her pay—overtime if she wasn’t on shift.

But on this particular day, waiting in the hallway outside Judge Frederick Knight’s courtroom, her thoughts kept jumping back to Rogan’s look of helplessness as she’d shut the car door on him mid-sentence. She could tell her partner was pissed. The last words he said to her before she walked away were: “Should we place an over-under on how long it is before Tucker gets a phone call?”

He was probably right. The Whitmires would call their lieutenant. Or have the commissioner call their lieutenant’s captain to call their lieutenant. Or have the mayor call the commissioner—however those kinds of people managed to pull the strings that were beyond reach of the rest of the population.

But Ellie was the last person on earth who was going to make it easy for them. Nothing about their celebrity or money could change the fact that they’d raised a sad, screwed-up kid who ended it all, drunk and naked and bloody in a bathtub.

“Hey, you. I thought you said you had a callout.”

She had texted Max Donovan, the assistant district attorney handling today’s motion, on their way to the scene on Barrow Street. She wasn’t on a texting basis with most prosecutors, but this particular ADA was her boyfriend.

“Turned out to be a quickie.”

“Wasn’t aware we had quickie murder investigations these days. Oh, there was that case on Wooster last year where a guy thought his neighbor was murdering a woman, but the woman turned out to be a girlfriend doll.”

“This one had a real body, but it was a clear-cut suicide. Well, clear-cut to everyone but the family.”

The amusement fell from his face. “And you’re okay with that?”

“Any reason I shouldn’t be?”

“All right. Forget I said anything. I’m glad you could make it. Maybe time for a quick lunch when we’re done here?”

“That’d be good.”

Owing to their work schedules, they hadn’t seen each other for four days. Given the consistent routine they’d developed over the last year, four nights apart was practically a long-distance relationship.

The bailiff stuck her head out of the courtroom door. “The judge is ready.”

Ellie’s testimony took all of sixteen minutes. She was there to defend against a murderer’s postconviction motion for release. The defendant alleged that his attorney had offered ineffective assistance of counsel by allowing Ellie to interrogate him about the death of his girlfriend. The necessary information was straightforward. The defendant had been the one to call the police, claiming he’d come home and found her bludgeoned on the kitchen floor of their shared Chinatown apartment. He wasn’t in custody. He wasn’t even a suspect. His alleged “counsel” was a real estate lawyer who lived in the apartment next door and came over to offer friendly support.

It wasn’t the lawyer’s fault that Ellie noticed the tiny lacerations marking each blow on the victim’s body, or the sharp, raised edge of the defendant’s pinkie ring, or the red marks on the defendant’s knuckles. Just a single, plainly phrased question about a possible explanation for those three circumstances had been enough for the defendant to break down.

It would have been a straightforward hearing if it weren’t for the fact that Judge Frederick Knight was known throughout the New York criminal justice system as the Big Pig.

Maybe the term was unfair, a reference to his considerable weight of at least three bills. But Ellie suspected the nickname would never have come into play if the man did not strive at every second to out-misogynize Andrew Dice Clay.

The nonsense began as she rose from the witness chair after testifying.

“I know you.”

If Ellie had been at a nursing home in Queens, she would have expected the line from a patient—the really, really old one, who didn’t know anyone anymore.

“Ellie Hatcher, Your Honor. This is my fifth time here.” She rattled off the defendants’ names. She always remembered them. She could tell you the dates of the arrests, too. Probably their dates of births as well. Ellie’s brain was weird that way.

It was all a blur to Judge Knight, who shook his head with her mention of each case. “Only five times here, and I remember you? Take that as a compliment, Officer.”

Detective.

“You keep yourself in shape. That’s good. Pretty girl there, right, Donovan?”

Max didn’t miss a beat. “No one’s as fit as you, Your Honor.”

Corny, Ellie thought, but what was the right response to that question, under the circumstances?

“And what do you, Mr. Donovan, think about your witness’s attire today?”

“Your Honor?” Donovan asked.

“Off the record for a moment,” he said to the court reporter. “Only five visits to the courthouse and yet I remembered this witness. And let’s be clear here. We all know what it is about her that would have stood out in my recollection. And now here she is in these butch pants—trousers, let’s say.”

Part of Ellie wanted to tell this man that beneath her simple gray flat-front pants she wore a black thong bikini, but she dressed for court this way for a reason. She dressed this way because most judges and jurors had expectations. And they weren’t the same as Knight’s expectations.

Knight wasn’t interested in her inner monologue. He was on his own roll.

“When I first joined the bench, I heralded the first wave of lady litigators. They always wore skirts. High heels. Silk blouses. And then came the menswear trend, and these women started showing up in trousers and oxford shirts. Now the gals have it back to the way it was. Dresses. Skirts. Legs. Heels. Except for you, Officer. Hatcher, you said? You’ve got your best assets covered up. You look like a boy. Not to mention, my clerk tells me that you and Donovan here are quite the item. I mean, what if Donovan showed up here tomorrow in a dress? How would you feel about that?”

She saw Max looking at her. Willing her. Begging her. Don’t. Do. It.

“I would like to see that, Your Honor. But ADA Donovan was just telling me he wore out his best red silk number modeling it for you.”

Max was doing his best in the hallway to appear annoyed, but he couldn’t help breaking a smile.

“Red silk? Really? Seems a little hoochie-momma.”

“Oh, you’d be much classier as a lady fella, I’m sure. Brooks Brothers. Burberry. All those blue-blood labels. Sorry, I sort of lost it with the Big Pig.”

“Whatever. The motion’s a slam dunk. Even the defendant’s own allegations make clear he was playing the grieving boyfriend at the start. Besides, there’s no way for the state not to be all right with Knight. He sides with the prosecution like he’s on autopilot. I could tell him the court should enter an official finding of alien invasion, and he’d do exactly as I said.”

“I’m praying I’ll still get home at some reasonable hour tonight. You?”

He let one hand wander to her waist. “As soon as I’m done here, I have to go out to Rikers. Gang shooting. Guess a few weeks in a cell has someone second-guessing his loyalty to a coconspirator. I’ve got to hammer out the cooperation details.”

“Could the good citizens of New York please stop fucking killing each other for a night?”

“Do you at least have time for that lunch? I’ve got a few minutes.”

“Depends. You still got that red silk dress?”

“Those pants are a little butch.”

“Not underneath,” she said. He returned her smile. When her cell phone buzzed at her waist, she tensed up at the sight of Rogan’s name on the screen. He had predicted a shitstorm to follow their walking away from the Whitmires’ townhouse. Apparently it had taken little more than an hour for Julia’s parents to work their way through their network back to her cell phone.

She held up a finger while she took the call. “Yeah?”

“We shouldn’t have left. You told me yourself Donovan didn’t really need your testimony.”

“I take it Tucker tore you a new one?”

“It’s not just the Lou. We should have at least gone through the motions. Like I said: Protect the crime scene, talk to the friends, do what we do.”

“Like I said, it’s a waste of time.”

“That’s why I let you convince me to leave. But we screwed up.”

“And how exactly did we do that?”

“I’ll tell you when I get there. Meet me out on Centre Street. I’m three minutes away.”

Neither one of them said goodbye.

Three hundred and seventy-five miles northwest of the city, in Buffalo, New York, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sugarman took a call from the front desk. “There’s a James Grisco here to see you.”

“Okay. Send him back.”

She had heard all the terms used to describe the other stars in the office. Dan Clark was a natural born trial lawyer. Joe Garrett was a genius in front of a jury. Mark Munson was a courtroom machine.

Munson? Really? She’d popped in on him in trial one day to see what the fuss was all about, only to hear him argue that the defendant’s story was all an “elaborate rouge.” He even touched his fingertips to the apple of his cheek, just in case she was wondering if she’d misheard the word that was supposed to be “ruse.” An elaborate rouge. What an idiot.

Jennifer Sugarman? Ask around the office, and they’d say she was a hard worker. Diligent. Detail oriented. Conscientious. Burns the midnight oil. When men were good, they were born that way. If she was just as good—better, even—it must have come by way of tremendous effort.

She didn’t mind those descriptions, though. She’d made it out of misdemeanors into felonies faster than any ADA on record and was now first-chairing murder cases after only five years in the office. Rumor was she’d be named a unit chief in the next round of promotions. And when the big boss finally retired, her reputation for working hard would come in handy. Voters liked to know they were getting their money’s worth with public employees. She planned to be Erie County’s first female district attorney.

And she was, in fact, harder-working than most. Take the call she got from the jail this morning about Grisco, for instance. Most of the ADAs would have blown it off. At most, they would have passed the information on to the parole officer and forgotten about it.

But she had been the one to negotiate Grisco’s release from prison, and she knew ex-cons feared the official power of a prosecutor much more than they feared the often-empty threats of parole officers. If there was some reason for a person to call the prison inquiring about Grisco’s whereabouts, she wanted Grisco to know she hadn’t forgotten about him. She wouldn’t hesitate to pull his ticket if it came to that.

He removed his baseball cap when he entered her office. It was a good sign he knew who was in charge. She told him about the call that had been made to the prison that morning. She reminded him of his release conditions, going so far as to read them aloud from his file.

“You don’t need to remind me, ma’am. I got no plans of messing this up.”

“Good to hear, Jimmy. I stuck my neck out for you.”

“Yes, ma’am. I appreciate it.”

She shook his hand and walked him to the hallway. As she watched him make his way toward the exit, she found herself hoping he might actually find a decent life for himself. He wasn’t even forty yet.

It wasn’t until she returned to her office that she realized she should have covered up the note pad on her desk, the one on which she had scribbled the information she’d received from the prison. It was a stupid mistake, but Grisco hadn’t seemed to notice. His eyes had remained on his shoes the whole time, anyway.

She flipped the pad to the next page. It was nothing. She was certain of it.