Linda Fairstein: Final Jeopardy

“Hey, I wouldn’t miss this one for the world. You think I’d rather be stepping over dead bodies in a Harlem crack den or killing cockroaches back at the precinct? This isn’t exactly combat duty. Besides, I told the chief I didn’t even have to go home I could go right to your place because I had left some clean underwear there last month.”

“Mike, you didn’t say…”

“Relax, kid. You can’t lose your sense of humor over this.”

He rounded the corner onto Hogan Place and parked a few feet from our building entrance on the south end of the criminal courthouse – not a lot of competition for spaces at six-twenty in the morning.

“You’ve got a lot of friends and every one of them is going to help you through the next few days.”

We got out of the car and headed for the steps.

“What does lover boy have to say about all this?” Mike asked, as he held open the door and we moved into the dingy lobby of the District Attorney’s Office, nodding hello and showing our IDs to get past a security guard and the metal detectors.

I wasn’t even aware that I frowned as I tried to form an answer to that question, knowing that Mike was never short on opinions about guys I had dated over all the years we had known each other. I liked to think that some of it was because he was a little jealous. It was an easy topic for ridicule, so he often took aim at the ‘white collar wimps’ he met at office parties and courthouse bars. Jed Segal, investment banker, didn’t escape Mike’s strike, even though he was not in that category. Jed had first had a brilliant career practicing law, which led to a stint in Washington, before he returned home to California to make an unsuccessful run for the Senate last year. To my good fortune, a tempting corporate offer had lured him to New York earlier this year, when I met and started to date him.

“He’s not back from Europe yet. I, uh… I tried to reach him but, you know, with the time difference and all. I’ll tell him when he calls today.”

“That’s what you really need, Cooper, a guy who’s always there for you when trouble strikes just an ocean away.

Another deal to close. Then he’ll come back to comfort you one of these nights and he’ll be all wet and slurpy and I’ll be keeping you both safe with my trusty six-shooter by my side, sitting in your living room watching reruns of “I Love Lucy” while he gets consoled on your big brass bed.

If only the Police Academy gave MBAs – I coulda been a contender, know what I mean?“

“No, then you’d be an investment banker, too, Mike,” I said as we got off the elevator on the eighth floor and turned into the corridor toward my office, ‘… but you’d still be an asshole. Leave me alone on this.“

“I hit a nerve, blondie, didn’t I? Maybe even deep enough for root canal, huh? Lover boy’s off limits. I understand.”

I unlocked the door to my office, flipped on the light and sat at my desk, while Mike settled himself at the post in the anteroom where my secretary worked. He had indeed hit a nerve. It was one of those moments when I didn’t want to be the tough litigator who could solve everyone else’s problems and separate the emotional baggage from the realities of any situation. I wanted to stay curled up at home on my sofa, with Jed holding me in his arms, caressing me and assuring me that everything would be all right. But I wasn’t at home and it would probably be days before Jed would be there to make love to me, and the best I could hope for was that the business of a hectic day in the office would temporarily distract me from the nightmare that had so suddenly enveloped me.

Manhattan ’s Criminal Courts Building is a massive, ugly, gray structure, the facade of which unconsciously reflects the rumor – not true that it was built during the Depression as a WPA effort. The usual maxims about the search for truth and justice are chiseled into its exterior columns and above its entrances which stretch the length of several city blocks. But its even more grim interior houses the cramped work cubbyholes of the thousands of worker bees who do the everyday business of the criminal justice system: judges, assistant district attorneys, Legal Aid Society lawyers, and probation officers. The northern end of the complex – the only piece of it to have been remodeled in more than half a century is named the Tombs, the cells in which prisoners are held before arraignment or during trials, connected to the courthouse by the Bridge of Sighs.

Mike liked to call the prison Landin Lounge, after the federal judge who ordered it rebuilt because of the overcrowded conditions that had prompted riots and lawsuits a decade ago.

“Yeah, build those scumbags a first-class joint.

Give ‘em private rooms and color tubes and a gym so they can pump themselves up so they can run faster next time I’m chasing ’em. After all, they’re killing each other to get in there, might as well make it comfy for them. Oh, and showers, six showers on every cellblock.

Remember Devon Cranston? The homeless guy who lived in Riverside Park and stabbed four people to death? How often did he shower in Riverside Park? You bet your ass he showers twice a day now in Landin Lounge. Meantime, he was fond of saying, ‘if I put my sandwich down on your desk for a minute, forty-three roaches swarm out of your filing cabinets and devour it. There’s asbestos leaking out of your water fountain and lead paint chips falling off the ceiling into Battaglia’s coffee cup. But start with the prisoners first.

That’s a judge who’s really got his priorities straight.“

Despite my tenure in the office and my administrative position, the room in which I work is no fancier or larger than that of any of my colleagues. It’s a cubicle about eight by fourteen feet with a single window that faces another dreary government building across the narrow side street.

My efforts to cheer it up with photographs and prints are outweighed by the drab collection of battered pieces of furniture: a desk, several unmatched leather chairs, one bookcase, and an array of tall five-drawer file cabinets which like most city-issued supplies, including a very worn strip of stained carpeting are a dull shade of gray.

Today, like most other days, there is additional clutter which includes exhibits from complex investigations and completed trials. They document the violent landscape of the city over which my colleagues and I have jurisdiction: maps and charts of rooftops, parks, housing project stairwells, and elegant apartment interiors waiting to be marked as evidence at trial or shipped to the archives in the basement of the cavernous courthouse for storage until all the defendants’ appeals in each of the cases are exhausted.

The top of my metal desk is covered with a bright red blotter, rarely more than a sliver of which is visible because of the accumulation of manila folders and white legal pads that pi leon top. They house case files and witness interviews, police reports and memoranda from unit prosecutors, laboratory analyses of body fluids and blood types, mug shots of suspects being sought, medical records and DNA profiles of rape survivors, and every other form of detritus of the world of criminal law.

I walked from my office down the hallway to the conference room to fill the pot for the first round of coffee, while Mike double-checked to confirm that Piggy was still in the nuthouse at Bellevue.

“That would have been much too easy,” he said, ‘so let’s figure out where to go from there.“

“Battaglia wants us to review every pending sex offense complaint, all of my closed cases that resulted in serious time, and the lists of guys released to parole recently. My paralegals will help you put that stuff together when they get in the files are all in their office, down the hall near the Appeals Bureau.”