Page 9 of The Accomplice
Soon as they saw Otto’s car the lights flared on the TV cameras and the chants grew louder. He had been filmed and photographed at the pre-trial hearings and it was well known who he was representing. They crowded around his car. One of the protestors, a woman with a thick pink scarf around her neck, spat on Otto’s windshield. He hit the wipers and followed us through the gates, slowly, making sure he didn’t accidentally run over a protestor or a reporter.
‘Jesus, that’s tough to live with,’ I said.
‘Otto told me Carrie is barely hanging on. She’s had hundreds of death threats and last month she got a letter signed by every one of her neighbors asking her to move out.’
The development had houses of various sizes, although they were all mansions to my mind. Harry looked at one house with a pool to the side and whistled his admiration. Yet, this was the poor side of Old Westbury to some residents. Old New York money that needed a palatial home with grounds and gardens moved out here. The Vanderbilts, the Phippes, the Whitneys, Du Ponts and others who had more money than sense. And they built grand, twenty-bedroom palaces that looked like they’d been plucked from rural England, possibly with an inebriated lord still inside, and lovingly deposited in Old Westbury. The homes on this side were modest by comparison, but I would never be able to afford one – not even if my lottery numbers came up.
Bloch stopped outside a brick house in a colonial style with a red front door. We got out just as Otto parked his Mercedes behind the Jeep. I took a moment to admire the neighborhood. The properties were set wide apart, their football-field lawns adding to the sense of distance and space. Carrie Miller’s house backed onto a clump of oak and copper beech trees.
Otto leaned over his car, examining the body work.
There was a deep scratch all along one side of it.
‘That looks bad,’ I said.
‘Doesn’t matter, really. It’s the third time this month. It’s nothing compared to what Carrie has to deal with. She’s almost a prisoner here. The reporters and the protestors normally go home around ten, when it gets really cold. I usually schedule my appointments at six a.m. or after ten at night, when there’s no one at the gate.’
‘How has Carrie dealt with all this ?’ I asked.
Otto dropped his head for a moment, when he looked back at me I could see the picture written on his face.
‘For the first two weeks she hardly spoke. She cried all the time. Lost her voice. I called a doctor and he gave her some pills that basically knocked her out for a few days. After that she was able to talk. The pills only numbed things for a while. She was just devastated, Eddie, in every way possible. She was betrayed, and alone, hated by the entire country, facing a multiple-homicide charge – look, at one point I thought she was just going to check out. I had to give her meds to her daily. I was frightened to leave the whole bottle. You know what I mean ?’
I nodded.
‘But she’s still here. She’s strong and she has a reason to keep on going. She wants people to know that she’s innocent. In some ways, I think the trial is what has kept her here. She wants to fight it. But whatever strength she had is starting to leave her. The strain is back, now that the hearing is about to begin. You’ll see.’
‘And what do you think of her ? Really ?’
‘I remember my first month of law school. You read cases and you know the law can work wonders, but it can crush innocent people just as easily. It’s a terrible thing, the justice game. She reminded me of that. And this is why you’re here. You’re a much better trial lawyer than me, and I don’t want law students to read about her case in twenty years’ time and pick apart all the ways I failed her.’
Even with the thousand-dollar suit and the top-of-the-range car, and all the power and money Otto projected, right then he was scared. Scared in case he let Carrie down. That’s what trial work can do to you. In fact, you should be scared. It’s a good sign. It means you care, and it means you’ll do the work, and you’ll fight hard. Lawyers care about the innocent clients. The ones who need the system to work. These are the cases that keep us up at night, covered in sweat. This was Otto’s first taste of that kind of work.
‘I know you won’t let her down, Eddie,’ he said.
He led the way up the path of marble paving stones. We followed, and by the time we got to the entrance the door had been opened by the woman I recognized as Carrie Miller. When I’d first seen her picture on the news, she was coming out of the court building at 100 Center Street into a hail of reporters and camera flashes. It was a familiar sight, but this picture was different. I’ve led clients out of that same building in similar media-hungry circumstances. Usually, my client would wear a hat, or sometimes put their coat over their head, unwilling for their image to be captured in this moment of high drama when they were at their most vulnerable.
Carrie Miller had strutted through the phalanx of reporters in a navy business suit with her chin high. A look of determination in her eyes. It was because of her confidence perhaps that the reporters broke their lines to let her through to a waiting car. There was a certain poise in her movement, in her look – something approaching grace.
Standing at her front door, now, all of that was gone. Whatever image she had been advised to portray to the media – the reality was very different.
She wore violet jeans and a black tee. She could barely raise her head to look at Otto. Her shoulders slumped, arms wrapped around her fragile frame and her eyes were locked on the floor, only occasionally glancing upward with great effort. The skin around her neck was blotchy and red with scratches, and her mouth turned down. It looked as though an elemental force was dragging her lower and lower, into the earth. Even her dark hair had thinned and traces of gray shot through it.
‘Carrie, these are the lawyers I told you about, and this is their team. Miss Kate Brooks, Harry Ford, their investigator Miss Bloch and this is—’
‘Eddie Flynn,’ she said, locking her eyes on me.
I could see the strain and the look of the lost in those green, bloodshot eyes.
‘Please, come in,’ she said, and turned to lead us inside.
A curved staircase with a brass rail dominated the entrance hall, and I followed my team into the room on the right. A lounge with two couches facing each other. The room looked minimalist, with only a white marble table separating the couches, and a fireplace in the back wall. A single picture of a gold bull hung on one wall, the other taken up by a large window overlooking the front lawn. It was a masculine room. If I didn’t know Carrie lived here, I would’ve assumed it was a bachelor’s place.
There was a display unit for a large TV, but no television sat upon it. I didn’t ask where it had gone. If I had to see my face on TV every night, and listen to people who didn’t know me call me a murderer, then I’d throw the damn thing in the garbage too.
Carrie and Otto took one couch, Harry, Kate and Bloch the other.
I remained standing.
