Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [45]
“No way!” I squealed.
“Yes way, José,” my pretty porcelain-skinned friend, Mary Ann Pontano, said as we bear-hugged. “Thank God. I just might be able to get through conference hell after all.”
I laughed as I hugged her again.
She’d been my first New York friend. She was my next-door neighbor in the crappy apartment I’d gotten on 117th Street in Spanish Harlem two weeks after I’d gotten off the Greyhound at the Port Authority.
Being the only single women and non-Spanish-speaking people in residence, we gravitated toward each other. Especially when we had to do laundry in the Silence of the Lambs–style basement laundry room. She’d helped me find a waitressing job and a pediatrician for Em. She was actually the one who’d encouraged me to become a paralegal all those years ago.
“It’s been way, way too long, Mary Ann,” I said.
Mary Ann smiled. She still looked more like an Iraq War news anchorette than a combat Iraq War vet and ex-NYPD cop. She’d parlayed her toughness and good looks into a plum international-law-firm investigator job.
“That’s fine,” Mary Ann said. “I know you greedy, capitalist corporate-lawyer types. Not a minute to spare counting all that filthy lucre. No time for the peasants.”
“Well, Mary Ann,” I said. “We can’t all be keeping it real in the hood up there in Scarsdale with our dentist husband and two toddlers.”
“It’s Bronxville, OK?” Mary Ann said. “Get it right. Bronxville eats those soccer-mom bitches from Scarsdale alive. Anyway, what are we doing here again?”
“We’re here to save some lives, that’s what,” said a short, friendly-looking man with an unruly mop of black hair, who burst into the conference room with a legal box.
“Welcome to Mission Exonerate NYC, everyone,” he said, dropping the box onto the table with a tremendous thud. “Since time is money, I won’t waste any. I’m the initiative cofounder and director, Carl Fouhy. You are the brightest legal minds in New York City, I take it. Or at least, New York’s currently most dispensable legal minds. Whatever the case, I need you and, more important, the men and women who are right now facing imminent execution need you even more.”
He hit the lights as a bright PowerPoint board hummed out of the ceiling.
The faces of tough yet defeated-looking men and women began to slideshow.
“You would not believe the amount of witness misidentification and forensic-science misconduct that we’ve found in some of these capital cases,” Fouhy explained. “That’s even before getting into some of the flat-out shitty defense lawyering we’ve uncovered.
“There are cases of counselors failing to investigate witnesses or call experts. Of defense lawyers actually being intoxicated and falling asleep during trial. That’s where you folks come in. You will level the playing field for these mostly poor, mostly uneducated men and women.”
He lifted the lid of the box, took out thick yellow envelopes, and began to drop them one by one in front of us.
“These are your assigned cases. You can open them momentarily, when you leave. On the first page, you will find the accused’s current attorney. We want you to work in conjunction with him. Your job is advisory, to go and do a face-to-face with each defense attorney. See that everything has been covered, the police report, the appeals. We’re looking for mistakes, people. Catching a mistake may save someone’s life.
“Now, if someone will hit the lights, I’ll go over a couple of test cases in which we’ve overturned executions. We’ll review the process and then, basically, you’re on your own. Any questions, myself or the initiative’s policy advisers, Jane Burkhart and Teddy Simmons, can be reached. Otherwise, I’m confident you guys will figure it out. Improvise and overcome, people. Save a life!”
Chapter 56
“AND I THOUGHT speed dating was fast,” Mary Ann said as we unloaded at Starbucks on Third Avenue half an hour later with Jane Joyce, a lawyer at Mary Ann’s firm.
“On your mark, get set, go,” I said as we all pulled out our assigned cases.
I flipped through a thick mound of pages. My case concerned a man