Judge & Jury - James Patterson [10]
The silence was suddenly orchestral.
I went into the bedroom and took off my tie and jacket, then checked in the study for a fax. There was a long brick wall covered with bookshelves. Most of the books were from my days at school, and there were a few of Ellen’s medical texts. The desk was piled high with briefs from Cavello’s trial. On the wall there was a large framed black-and-orange banner:
PRINCETON 1989 IVY LEAGUE FOOTBALL CHAMPS
I had bones that still ached just thinking of those days.
I took the pasta and some wine into the living room and sat there with my feet propped up on an old steamer trunk that acted as a coffee table. I picked up the book I’d been reading, Clinton’s My Life, and found the page where I’d left off, on the Camp David Middle East peace talks. I thought about turning on the Knicks game. After a few minutes I lifted my eyes without reading a single page.
Did I love her? Was this going to work? Ellen was terrific, but right now we were just going in different directions. And this trial wasn’t going to help.
Are you going to fight for this, Nicky?
I reached for Popeye. “C’mon, you look like you could use a date.”
I grabbed my old college alto sax from the corner and, with Popeye in hand, went up to the roof. This was where I worked it out sometimes.
It was a cold, clear night. The stars were out over Manhattan. The Empire State Building was lit up red, white, and blue. Across the river, Jersey City might’ve been Paris, it so dazzled with lights. So I sat there, a few days before the most important trial of my life, Ellen’s cat purring at my feet, and played.
Clarence Clemons’s riff from Springsteen’s “Jungleland.” A clunky version of Coltrane’s “Blue Train.” I came to the conclusion that there was a hole in my life, and no matter how long I put Cavello away for, I wasn’t going to fill it.
You either fight for it or you don’t, Nick. You fought for everything. So why won’t you fight for Ellen Jaffe?
Chapter 9
I TOOK MY PLACE in the front of the courtroom on Monday morning. My blood was pounding. It always did on the first day of a trial, and this one was huge.
The lawyers for both sides filled up the first two rows of the courtroom. Joel Goldenberger was the government’s lead prosecutor. He was younger than he looked, maybe thirty-three, tall, self-assured, with light, bushy hair and an agreeable smile. But inside he was a fighter, a real believer. Everyone was talking about him as a future star in the Justice Department. He had already won three well-publicized Wall Street trials.
On the other side sat Hy Kaskel, paging through his notes. The Ferret stood no taller than five five in lifts, with short boxer’s arms, but he resembled his nickname in every way when it came to discrediting a witness. Today he wore a dark navy pinstripe suit and striped club tie, a pair of fancy gold cuff links peeking through the sleeves.
In the front row of the gallery I saw Cavello’s family. A plump, pleasant-looking woman in a plain but tasteful suit, needlepointing away. And a grown daughter, with wavy, long blond hair, sitting loyally by her mom. Security at the courthouse was tighter than I’d ever seen it before. Hell, I was probably responsible for half of the fuss. Every bag was being opened, every juror’s pass double-checked, every press credential checked back against a photo ID. Armed cops were manning the barricades all over Foley Square.
Cavello was being brought through an underground passageway from the Manhattan County Jail two blocks away, where he was being held in his own wing on a maximum security floor. From there, he was transported to the seventh floor in a guarded elevator.
I only wished we had sequestered the jury. This was the biggest organized crime trial in years. But the judge wanted to make a name for herself. Miriam Seiderman had her eye on the state supreme court.