A Cure for Night: A Novel - Hardcover

Peacock, Justin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 038552580X ISBN 13: 9780385525800

Publisher: Doubleday, 2008

Synopsis

“That’s what the criminal law is: it’s how the day tries to correct the night’s mistakes. Most of my cases, people have done something they never would’ve dreamed of doing in broad daylight.”

“What does that make us?” I said. “The night’s janitors?”

“We’re absolutely that,” Myra said, sipping her cosmo. “What else do we do but clean up after it? That’s why we’ll never run out of work. Not unless someone invents a cure for night.

In Brooklyn’s criminal courts, justice often depends on who has the better story to tell.

After a drug-related scandal ejects Joel Deveraux from his job at a white-shoe law firm, he slides down the corporate ladder to the Public Defenders’ office in Brooklyn, where he defends the innocent and the guilty alike, a cog in the great clanking machine that is the New York City justice system. When his boss offers him the second chair to the savvy Myra Goldstein in a high-profile murder case, he eagerly takes it. The defendant is Lorenzo Tate, a black pot dealer from the projects who is charged with the murder of a white college student in a street shooting; and the tabloids have sunk their teeth into the racially tinged trial.

In this twisty and overwhelmingly authentic journey through the real Brooklyn, Justin Peacock paints a portrait of the law as a form of combat where the best story wins—but who’s telling the truth and who’s lying are matters of interpretation. And of life and death.

This compelling debut novel announces Justin Peacock as a writer who enters the territory of Richard Price and Scott Turow with a fresh new take on urban crime and punishment.

About this title

About the Author

JUSTIN PEACOCK received an MFA from Columbia University and a law degree from Yale. Prior to attending law school, he worked as an online producer at the New York Times. His legal experience ranges from death-penalty defense to First Amendment cases. He lives in Brooklyn.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
I sat in the tiny interview room, the back legs of my metal chair scraping against the brick wall behind me, waiting for my next client to walk in. A file--such as it was: a manila folder containing a badly typewritten complaint (I suspect that cops are virtually the only people left in the country who still routinely use typewriters, and they are apparently unaware of the existence of Wite-Out)--lay open on the metal table in front of me, but I hadn't bothered to do more than glance at it. I needed to have some idea of the police version of what'd happened, but there was no reason for me to have it nailed down in my head, confident from past experience that the words on the police forms would have little relation to the story I would hear when Chris Delaney walked into the room.

I spent my working days in the criminal courthouse on Schermerhorn Street, walking distance from the Brooklyn Defenders' office on Pierrepont. I'd been handling arraignments for about six months, five days a week of working out of the aging courthouse's dark and narrow rooms across from the holding cells, conducting five-minute interviews, then heading down the hall and up to the courtroom, where my clients would enter their initial pleas. Many minor misdemeanor cases ended then and there, a plea of guilty in exchange for time served, plus maybe a small fine or community service, perhaps a treatment program if it was a first-time drug bust. These pleas meant the defendant's main punishment was the twenty-four hours or so he'd just spent locked up waiting to be brought before a judge. Even after half a year this still bothered me: the system took somebody who'd just spent a more or less sleepless night on the floor of a giant holding cell, fifty other guys in the room, the court officers feeding him maybe some bologna with a drooping slice of American cheese pressed between a couple of wilted slices of white bread, and then along came a lawyer like me, telling the exhausted, scared, and hungry defendant that the whole thing could be over by copping a plea, the main punishment the experience just endured. That and a criminal record. What tired soul wouldn't accept that deal in exchange for getting to go home, sleep in his own bed?

There was a knock on the door. "Yeah," I called out after a second, a little thrown by the knock: many of my visitors, old hands at the game and naturally assertive to boot, didn't bother. The door opened and a young white man shuffled in. A user, no doubt about that, skin the color of dirty soap, bruise-colored puffs under both his eyes. His hair was curly and uncombed, spiraling down his face. Guy'd blow me for a fix, I thought, feeling an immediate sharp dislike for my newest client. This happened to me at least once a day, sometimes more. I had never mentioned it to another public defender, never asked if it was just part of the job, because I was afraid that it wasn't. I was afraid it was particular to me, especially with someone like Chris Delaney, a type I recognized in an instant, a type I'd narrowly escaped becoming myself, if I had indeed escaped it. He'd ended up where I'd been heading in the weeks before Beth's death. Of course, the cost had been high for me too, and a year later I was still paying.

"Have a seat," I said, picking up the file and making a show of looking at it. "Chris Delaney," I said. "That your name?"

The kid nodded. I put Chris's age at twenty. "I'm Joel Deveraux," I continued. "I'm with the Brooklyn Defenders'. I'll be representing you at your arraignment. Ever been busted before, Chris?" I asked.

The kid, this Chris, shook his head. "This will be more productive if you use words to communicate with me," I said, letting some irritation show. Despite all the talk in the trade about client empowerment, how you should make your clients feel that they were in the driver's seat, in my opinion that was just issuing an open invitation to a festival of bullshit. I didn't think letting clients try out an increasingly preposterous series of variations on reality was productive for anybody. It saved everybody some time and aggravation if the client understood from the beginning that I was in control.

"No," Chris said.

"But you've been using for a while," I said, not putting much question into it.

Chris looked at me, his eyes begging. He was clearly so spent, so sick, that it was hard not to feel a tug of sympathy. But pitying junkies was like crying over every death that took place on this earth: it would be a bottomless ocean of grief. Chris seemed genuinely humiliated, though, and didn't answer.

"I'm in this room every day, Chris," I said. "I can tell a junkie from a day-tripper a mile away. You may have been a dilettante once, a 'recreational user,' but that time has passed. It's all over your face."

Chris still just looking at me, resentment seeping in and mixing with the pleading in his eyes. "Why does it matter?" he said.

"It matters because I'm going to try and get you help," I said. "Are you ready to be helped?"

Chris appeared to really consider the question. "I don't know," he said softly, looking at the floor. "I hope so."

I glanced down again at the scant file in my hand. "Says here they snagged you up on the street. You know why?" Phrasing the question so that it didn't assume guilt.

Chris shrugged. "I think they must have been watching from a rooftop or something. They picked me up two blocks away, put me in a van with, like, six other people. After they caught a couple more they drove in--like, a whole bunch of them, cops, I mean--and rousted the dealers."

I wrote a summary of this down, not for any good reason, just to be doing something, make Chris feel like he was talking to a lawyer. "Cops say anything to you about testifying against the dealers?"

"No one said shit to me," Chris said. "Never even read me my rights. Isn't that illegal?"

"They don't really need to Mirandize you if they don't ask you any questions," I said. "So why don't you tell me what happened? From the start."

"Do you want me to tell the . . . you know, the bad stuff?"

"Anything you tell me is confidential, of course," I replied. "And even at this stage, the more I know about what the other side is going to know, the more effective I can be."

Chris nodded at this. He wanted to tell, I thought: often they wanted to tell. Sometimes to confess, sometimes to brag, sometimes a mixture of the two.

"I was down at the projects at Avenue H and Ocean Avenue, looking to score. There's some guys I'm pretty regular with. Everything seemed, you know, business as usual, until I got back up to Flatbush. Suddenly these two cops are right up behind me, digging in my pockets. They just came out of nowhere, far as I could tell."

"So when you bought, that was right on the street?"

"They deal out of the project, but they realize guys with my skin color don't want to go in there. That place is like a fortress or something. So they work it where you can order right on the street, even though they keep the shit in the Gardens. They take your order; then you go to this pay phone that doesn't work and pretend to make a call. Somebody else comes out with the shit."

I resisted the urge to nod. I knew the playbook, but that had nothing, I told myself, to do with this. "And when the cops grabbed you, you said they reached into your pockets?"\
Chris nodded again, with some force now. "They were both yelling, saying how they knew I had it and where was it; all while they were grabbing at me. They didn't ask for permission to search or show a warrant or anything." The kid again looking to suggest he'd been the victim of some constitutional violation he knew about from TV.

"You in school, Chris?"

Chris nodded. "At Brooklyn College."

"You get federal loans?"

Chris nodded again.

"That can be a problem," I said. "For next year, anyway."

"What's going to happen to me?" Chris asked, his voice cracking slightly.

"You got any kind of criminal record at all?"

"You already asked me that."

"Yeah, well," I said. "Some questions are worth repeating."

Chris shook his head. "I'm not a troublemaker. I'm on a scholarship, taking five classes, working twenty hours a week sometimes to get by. I just need some help winding down sometimes, you know?"

I had never spoken to a client about the events that had led me from graduating from one of the country's top law schools and making over two hundred thousand dollars a year as a corporate litigator at a big firm to making under fifty thousand doing rookie PD work. There was a moment here when I was tempted, thinking that hearing it would benefit Chris, but it passed.

"I guess that help has paid off," I said instead, instantly regretting it, knowing I was overcompensating for my own vulnerability. Chris looked down sharply, like he'd been slapped.

"Okay," I said quickly, not wanting to let the unpleasant moment I'd created linger. "Here's what's going to happen now. We'll go before the arraignment judge, who'll ask you for a plea. From what I have here, their case against you isn't perfect, but it sounds like that's just laziness and that they can easily fill in the gaps if they have to. You plead not guilty, you get a trial, but you also face the risk of actual jail time. You plead this out, no prior record, a college student, jail's off the table. Depending on the judge's mood, we should be able to get you into a treatment program. This would mean you'd have to do NA meetings as an outpatient at a treatment center. There's a catch to this prize,...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 038552580X
• ISBN 13: 9780385525800
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 341