“Uh, assaulting a police officer.” Zach sounded embarrassed. “It was an accident. I was upset. Someone grabbed my arm and I jerked back. My elbow hit an officer in the face and I gave him a bloody nose. I feel bad, but obviously I didn’t do it on purpose. I had no idea he was even behind me.”
“Was this at, like, a bar or something?” I asked.
“A bar?” Zach sounded confused, and I felt my cheeks flush. It was a weird leap. A bar wasn’t where most people’s problems started. “Um, no, not a bar. It was at our house in Park Slope.”
“Park Slope?” That was my neighborhood, or close to my neighborhood. Technically, we lived in Sunset Park.
“We moved to Brooklyn from Palo Alto four months ago,” he said. “I sold my company, stepped away completely. I’m launching a venture here. Entirely new territory.” His tone had turned wooden.
Zach had always been that way, though, a bit awkward. A weirdo, my law school roommate Victoria used to call him, and worse, in her less charitable moments. But I’d liked Zach. Sure, he was a little nerdy, but he was dependable, smart, a good listener, and refreshingly direct. He was also as relentlessly driven as me, which I’d found comforting. Zach and I had other things in common, too. When I arrived at Penn Law I was still emerging from my grief-hardened shell, the one I’d been tucked inside since I’d lost both my parents at the end of high school. Zach had lost his father, too, and he knew what it meant to pull yourself up by your working-class bootstraps. At the University of Pennsylvania Law School, not everyone did.
“I live in Park Slope, too,” I offered. “On Fourth Avenue and Nineteenth Street. What about you?”
“Montgomery Place, between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West.”
Of course. The only time I ever went to that wildly expensive part of Center Slope was to browse (and browse only) at the equally overpriced farmer’s market at Grand Army Plaza.
“Why were the police at your house?” I asked.
“My wife—” Zach’s voice caught. He was silent for a long moment. “Amanda was, um, at the bottom of the stairs when I got home. It was really late. We’d been at this neighborhood party together earlier in the night, but we’d left separately. Amanda got back before me and when I walked in—Jesus. There was blood everywhere, Lizzie. More blood than—I almost threw up, honestly. I could barely check for a pulse. And I’m not proud of that. What kind of man is so scared of the sight of blood that he can’t help his own wife?”
His wife was dead? Shit.
“I’m so sorry, Zach,” I managed.
“I got myself to call nine-one-one, luckily,” he pressed on. “And then I did try CPR. But she was already—she’s gone, Lizzie, and I have no idea what happened to her. I told the police that, but they wouldn’t listen, even though I was the one who called them, for Christ’s sake. I think it was because of this one guy in a suit. He kept eyeballing me from the corner. But it was this other detective who tried to pull me away from Amanda. She was right there on the floor, though, and I couldn’t just leave. I mean, we have a son. How the hell am I going to—” His voice cut out again. “I’m sorry, but you’re the first friendly voice I’ve heard. Honestly, I’m having a hard time holding it together.”
“That’s understandable,” I said, and it was.
“Anybody there could have seen how upset I was,” he went on. “They should have given me a minute.”
“They should have.”
The fact that the police hadn’t was surely a harbinger of bad things to come. They must have already suspected he was responsible for his wife’s death. What better way to keep track of a potential suspect than to lock him away in jail on a lesser charge?
“I really need your help, Lizzie,” Zach said. “I need a good—a great lawyer.”
This was not the first time a former law school classmate had called for help with a criminal issue. It wasn’t easy to find top-flight criminal defense lawyers, and few Penn Law School graduates practiced criminal law. But people usually wanted help with small matters—DUIs or petty drug possession charges, occasionally white-collar offenses—and always for a family member or friend. They were never calling for themselves, and certainly not from Rikers.
“I can help with that, for sure. I have connections to some of the best criminal defense lawyers in—”
“Connections? No, no. I want you.”
Fuck. Hang up. Right now.
“Oh, I am not remotely the right lawyer for you.” And, thankfully, that was the absolute truth. “I only started working as a defense attorney a few months ago, and all my criminal experience is in white-collar—”
“Please, Lizzie.” Zach’s voice was awfully desperate. But he was a multimillionaire, with countless lawyers at his disposal, surely. Why me? Now that I’d thought about it, Zach and I had drifted apart long before graduation. “You and I both know what’s happening here—I’m probably going to end up fighting for my life. Don’t they always end up blaming the husband? I can’t have some slick suit standing next to me. I need someone who gets it—who knows where I came from. Someone who will do what it takes, whatever it takes. Lizzie, I need you.”
Fine, I felt a flush of pride. Being singularly driven had always been my defining characteristic. I certainly wasn’t the smartest student at Stuyvesant High School or undergrad at Cornell or law student at Penn. But no one was more focused. My parents had taught me the virtue of raw determination. My dad especially, it was true. And our diligence had served us similarly: it was the rope we used to pull ourselves up—and also to hang ourselves by.
I still wasn’t taking Zach’s case.
“I appreciate the compliment, Zach. I do. But you need someone with homicide experience and the right connections at the Brooklyn DA’s office. I don’t have either.” True, all of it. “But I can get someone amazing for you. They can be down to see you first thing in the morning, before your arraignment.”
“Too late,” Zach said. “I was already arraigned. They denied bail.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s, um, surprising on an assault charge.”
“Not if they think I killed Amanda,” Zach said. “That’s got to be where this is headed, right?”
“Sounds plausible,” I agreed.
“Obviously, I should have called you before the arraignment. But I was so … in shock after everything happened, I guess. They gave me a public defender,” he said. “He was a nice enough guy, seemed reasonably competent. Earnest, definitely. But if I’m completely honest, I was kind of checked out during the actual proceeding. Like if I pretended the whole thing wasn’t happening, it wouldn’t be. That makes me sound like a moron, I know.”
And now was the moment I could have pressed for details—when was he arrested exactly? What was the precise sequence of events that night? All the questions Zach’s lawyer would ask. Except I wasn’t his lawyer, and the last thing I wanted was to be drawn deeper in.
“Checking out is a totally human response,” I offered instead. And in my experience, being accused of a crime did do something to even the most rational people. And being falsely accused? That was something else entirely.