I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time, and so help me, I’m going to do whatever it takes to get out of this mess if it’s the last thing I do. I should be in Washington, DC, interviewing presidents, buttonholing congressmen, chasing down the next Watergate scandal. I’ve earned it after sixteen years of busting my hump for the Examiner. I did tours on the night shift, the police beat, the court beat, Bronx Borough Hall, Queens Borough Hall, City Hall, and most recently, the education beat, where I caught a school superintendent falsifying test scores and got him fired. Washington is the logical next step up for me. It’s about time I moved into a beat, where everything I write has broad implications.
If I were as good at playing politics as I am at covering it, I’d be there already. I’m not, unfortunately. I talk a good game. But, I don’t complain. I don’t make demands. I don’t threaten and I don’t have the guts to trade on favors. I know my place. I do my job better than most anyone else at this paper and I expect to be rewarded accordingly. I grew up in Bushwick. Writing for the Examiner surpasses anything that I imagined myself doing at this stage of my life. I’m eternally grateful for the opportunity, even as the editors keep fucking me out of the better assignments.
At least, that’s what I tell myself as I snake through the crowd in the marbled atrium of the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building, where the Examiner has stationed me as an alternative to the Washington bureau. I should have seen it coming. The atrium resembles Grand Central Station at rush hour, a palatial open space whose architectural grandeur is lost on the multitude of well-dressed lawyers with dueling soft leather satchels; beefy police officers, popping out of their uniforms; bail bondsmen, sniffing about like sewer rats; and the raggedy collection of witnesses, crime victims, and grieving family members who flood this place on a daily basis. The junior prosecutors gather here to run up their tally of guilty pleas, and the defense attorneys come to get their clients off with little or no prison time. They greet each other, not as adversaries but as collaborators. Except for major crimes, like murder, rape, and armed robbery, where the only possible outcomes are freedom or an eternity in jail, both sides want to avoid costly, time-consuming trials. So they swap guilty pleas to reduced charges for lower sentences, then they get a judge to bless each transaction and everybody walks away as though they’ve won something. Of course, there’s always that one idiot in a thousand who rejects the plea offer on the mistaken notion that he can b-s a trial jury into finding him innocent. But generally speaking, the haggling is designed to keep the traffic of cases flowing and prevent systemwide gridlock.
Gridlock occurs when the volume of cases increases faster than the prosecutors’ ability to keep pace with it. And when gridlock occurs, prosecutors suddenly become incredibly lenient in an effort to shrink the list back to a manageable size. Those who work in the courthouse— the cleaning crew, the secretaries, the clerks, the stenographers, the security detail, even the judges—refer to those exceptional moments among themselves as “get-out-of-jail free” days. Everyone in the building walks around with the same wily grin that you see at Belmont Race Track when word spreads that a particular race has been fixed in favor of a particular horse. If you’re caught stealing a car on such a day, you have an excellent chance of bargaining down the felony possession of stolen property charge to a misdemeanor, such as unlicensed operation of a stolen vehicle, and off you’d go on your own recognizance with only a modest fine to pay.
“Are you pleading guilty voluntarily?” the judges ask each defendant, before signing off on their deal, as if they didn’t already know the answer.
“Oh, yes, your honor.”
Here and there, as I listen in on plea negotiations, I pick up the usual smidgens of idle chatter about the aggravations of placing kids in private pre-school, golf handicaps, and the unsatisfying state of the stock market. If I didn’t already know my way around this dump, I’d be less distressed about being here. I sensed that something was up, when my city editor, Dan O’Brien, summoned me to his office last week for a chat. He had never done that before. Hank Bassett, the editor-in-chief, is typically the one who makes a big show of announcing promotions in front of the entire news staff. That’s when O’Brien told me I was going back to covering criminal court. The fat blimp actually tried to make the transfer sound like a step up—as though the paper was sending me on a special secret mission.
“This could be a big opportunity for you,” he said in a hushed conspiratorial voice. “We hear that this new DA plans to run for the Senate in two years. Hank and I talked it over and decided that we need a reporter with your skills there to keep an eye on him.”
Editors always say crap like that when they screw you.
“Gee, Dan, I kind of had my eye on the White House correspondent’s job. It’s been vacant for weeks. Why can’t I go there?”
“The Washington bureau isn’t ready for you yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“Frank, it’s not always the best reporter that gets the promotion. It’s the one that serves our needs at the moment; and, right now, we need you in the courthouse.”
“What’s the matter? Are the Washington guys afraid I might show them up?”
“Noooo. But the job requires a team player who will look out for the paper’s interests, and as we both know, you tend to go rogue on us from time to time. We don’t think Washington is the right place for you yet. You’ll get your chance one day.”
“When, Dan? I’m here sixteen years already.”
“Drop it, Frank. Nothing you say is going to change the decision. So why don’t you just play the hand that’s been dealt you and be thankful you have a job.”
Until that moment, I never seriously considered the limits to my career at the Examiner. I have joked from time to time about how decades from now when I’m old and feeble the powers-that-be at the paper will put me out to pasture on the obituary desk or at some other dead-end beat where old and feeble reporters go to die. It startles me to think now that my banishment to the courthouse is the Examiner’s way of telling me without warning that I’ve hit my limit.
“Frank, are you okay?”
“Okay?” I said, as if awakening from a trance. “I really don’t know, Dan. Am I?”
“Tell you what, take the rest of the week off and do whatever it is you do to relax and take your mind off the job. You’ll get over it by Monday.” I dragged myself out of the newsroom, head slung low, avoiding eye contact as I passed the reporters, who were peering solemnly at me over their desktop computers. I went home; prayed for O’Brien and Bassett to be sucked into a running wood chipper; I cried over my fate and rammed my fist through the bathroom mirror, then cried some more; and here I am, headed for my first meeting with interim district attorney, John Kettering III, freshly plucked out of Greenwich, Connecticut, by Gov. George Sutton to fill in for the recently deceased
Victor Batista. I ride the courthouse elevator to the eleventh floor and enter a passageway that leads to the reception area of Kettering’s office in an adjoining building. A third adjoining building, the twelve-story Manhattan Detention Center (also known as “The Tombs”) sits on the opposite side of the courthouse, allowing for the easy transfer of prisoners from their jail cells to the courtrooms by way of another series of connecting passageways. The stale odor of ancient mahogany wall panels vaults into my nasal passages as I enter the reception area to Kettering’s office. Some things never change. I feel like a man who has been forced to move back in with his parents after squandering all his money.
As prosecutors go, Kettering is no Frank Hogan or Robert Morgenthau. Rumor has it that he’s never even been inside a courtroom. He’s a pure-bred corporate attorney from an upper-crust family that put a ton of money into Gov. Sutton’s last reelection campaign, which gives his appointment, however temporary, at least the appearance of impropriety. Yet, a glowing editorial in the Examiner said the governor was “wise” to select someone with no previous ties to the city’s political establishment as Batista’s short-term replacement.
There’s a woman in black, seated at the desk that guards Kettering’s office door. She’s a bit on the plus side, late twenties to early thirties, with the right curves in the right places. Her cheery eyelashes dance like butterfly wings and there’s a gold crucifix sunning itself on the left breast that’s snow-coning over her neckline. A large pair of gold hoop earrings peek out from behind her black satin waterfall of hair. She keeps a little flag of Puerto Rico in her pencil cup. A framed photo of her with a lookalike toddler at her side stands next to the cup. I see no photos of her with a man and she’s not wearing a wedding ring. She reminds me of the party girls I hungered for as a kid in Bushwick. “Girls like that are no good,” my mother would say. “If you want to get out of this stinking place, stay away from them. Get your education.” I picture this woman behind the desk with a GED, perhaps a year of community college, and a seemingly endless string of temp jobs before finally landing a full-time government position with health benefits that she’s trying hard not to lose for the sake of that kid in the photo.
“You must be Mr. Palomar from the Examiner.”
“Rumor has it,” I say. “And you are?”
“Angie, Angie Camacho.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Angie.”
Angie picks up the receiver on her desk phone and informs “District Attorney Kettering” on the other side of the wall behind her that I have arrived. She pauses briefly to listen, then in a surprisingly snobbish tone she says, “District Attorney Kettering asks that you kindly have a seat. He’ll be ready for you in a minute or so.” She’s obviously a new hire, perhaps repeating Kettering’s exact words. Her annoying way of calling him “District Attorney Kettering,” as if she were saying “His Highness,” adds to my frustration with this new assignment. Imagine having to listen to that every day. Then there’s the waiting. A “minute or so” turns to five, which turns into ten. I kill time by counting the pimples on the alternating green and beige porcelain tiles at my feet. A short alcove to my right leads to an oak door with the words “District Attorney John D. Kettering III” painted in gold leaf on a frosted glass pane.
“Is that your son in the photo?” I ask Angie.
“Yep, that’s my little man, Ricky.”
“How old is he?”
“He just turned five.”
“Is he in school yet?”
“Preschool. I pick him up at my mother’s place after work. You got kids?”
“I have a girl, Veronica. She’s ten.”
“Divorced?” It occurs to me that I’m not wearing a wedding ring either.
“Uh-huh. Veronica lives with her mother.” Angie’s desk phone buzzes.
“District Attorney Kettering will see you now.”
“Thank you, Angie.”
The door opens before my fingers touch the brass knob and there’s Kettering in a tailored navy pinstripe and flawlessly tousled brown hair with a touch of grey at the temples. He neither shakes my hand nor looks me in the eyes. He waves me in with a sweep of this arm.
“Pleased to meet you, Frank.”
I sense an impatience to check me off his to-do list and move on to more important matters.
“Pleased to meet you too.”
I cross the threshold and suddenly I’m in a wonderland of photographs, canvass paintings, and sculptures, all neatly mounted over waist-high bookcases stacked with law books. My layman’s grasp of fine art only recognizes the Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock paintings, and a two-foot-high wooden abstract by Louise Nevelson, on which a vintage flannel New York Yankees baseball cap hangs irreverently. The floor space is divided into quadrants. A carved antique mahogany desk with a high-backed leather office chair occupies the furthest corner to my right. A fifteen-foot-long teak conference table with matching chairs stretches out from my immediate right. And a pair of bright yellow love seats mirror each other across the two quadrants to my left. Gauzy white panel curtains cover the four arched windows on the far wall, letting in daylight while masking the view of The Tombs. I half expect the furnishings to jump up and do a Walt Disney musical number. For someone who’s projected to be here no more than eighteen months, Kettering wasted no time in making himself at home.
He motions me to sit on the sofa that faces a wall of 8 x10-inch photographs of him posing with very important people in ways that suggest he hangs out with them on a regular basis. Every politician I know keeps an office photo gallery. The galleries reveal as much about the politician as they do about how he or she wants to be perceived. The man-of-the-people types prefer photos of themselves surrounded by constituent groups such as the local seniors’ club members on bingo night or a congregation of black Baptist churchgoers on a Sunday morning. Others display themselves behind a series of podiums, delivering inspirational speeches. Then there are those who want to be seen in the company of other politicians of equal or higher rank to show that they’ve got juice. But the photos they all crave the most are the ones of them dedicating a new building, any building, because it’s the only concrete proof that they’ve accomplished anything while in office.
Kettering sits across from me on the opposite sofa with his back to the gallery. I can’t resist peeking past his shoulder to measure where he falls in the spectrum. I see Kettering with Nelson Mandela, with Roger Federer and Serena Williams. Kettering with Justin Trudeau. Kettering as a boy on Muhammad Ali’s knee. Kettering with Gloria Steinem. With Oprah. With Jane Fonda. And—as if I needed any more grief today— Kettering with his arm draped over the shoulders of Byron Lloyd, the publisher of the Examiner, like a pair of old college chums.
I pretend not to notice the Lloyd photo. I doubt Kettering placed it there for my benefit. It’s easy to see how he and Lloyd might travel in the same social circles. Lloyd inherited the paper from his father, who inherited it from his grandfather, who inherited the paper from his great-grandfather about one hundred years ago. Kettering leans back on the sofa and swings one lanky leg over the other, exposing his argyle socks and a pair of raisin-colored loafers with little tassels on the vamps.
“The floor is yours, Frank. What do you want to discuss?”
“I just wanted to introduce myself, since it seems we’re going to be interacting a lot for the foreseeable future.” I try to sound as though I’m tickled to be here again.
“That’s it? No trick questions?” Kettering grins as he rocks his raised leg restlessly.
I grit my teeth and smile. If I had balls, I would ask him about the black girl from New Haven that his parents paid off to abort his baby back when he attended Yale Law. Byron Lloyd’s smiling face warns me that I better not. Officially, the abortion never happened. Although I have it on good authority that the girl signed a confidentiality agreement allowing the family lawyer to witness the procedure before handing her the check.
“No trick questions,” I say.
I’m here to make nice. So I sit there, lunged forward, in a rumpled khaki suit from JCPenney’s and day-old stubble on my face, babbling through my escape from the badlands of Bushwick—single mother, public school, welfare, gangs, drugs, and a few lucky breaks—to the comforting arms of the New York Examiner, along with a short review of major stories I wrote that he might be old enough to remember. I have discovered that people of Kettering’s pedigree love it when common homo sapiens like me overcome adversity and rise above our level. They can express sympathy, while clinging to the belief that they’re a morally superior species. When I’m done with my spiel, I fully expect Kettering to proudly stick out his chest and remark how wonderful it is that we live in the land of opportunity, rather than compliment me on my personal achievements. To my surprise, his eyes glaze over. I’m clearly not the first drudge that has ever tried to impress him with my struggles.
“I’m sorry. Am I boring you?”
“No, not at all,” he says. Then, out of nowhere, he adds, “I’m just curious as to why you haven’t touched upon the Ramón Valdez case.”
The mention of Ray Valdez makes me cringe, and judging from the smug little glint in Kettering’s eyes, that’s exactly what he wanted to do. The Valdez case is buried so far beneath the landfill of things I’d rather forget that my mind shakes it off sometimes, as though it never happened. Kettering must have been in high school, when I wrote about it. So—as if I don’t have enough to worry about already—why is he bringing Valdez up now?
“I’d be more inclined to talk about it if Valdez had gone to jail. But he didn’t.”
I discovered Valdez years ago while I was on the night shift. cleaning up scraps left over by the dayside reporters and waiting for the mythical next plane to hit the Empire State Building. He was the brains behind a little known Democratic political club in the Bronx, where I found out that people named to high-ranking city jobs, judgeships, and building contracts had quietly delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars in payoffs disguised as party donations. O’Brien and Bassett went so nuts over what I wrote that they enshrined my stories on Page 1. After two weeks of this, the former district attorney announced an investigation and empaneled a grand jury. Our readers ate it up. Valdez became the poster boy for corrupt city government and my star at the Examiner was rising. Then a funny thing happened. The grand jury refused to indict Valdez. The prosecution had failed to produce evidence that he had pocketed any of the money. As far as the grand jury was concerned, the payoffs were lawful political contributions.
Kettering won’t let it go.
“Why so bitter? You’re not to blame for what the grand jury did.”
“Thanks, but I’d rather my name not be associated with the fish that got away.” My voice grows increasingly strident. “When you invest that much ink on someone you know in your bones is corrupt, it had better result in a lengthy trial and, preferably, a guilty verdict. It keeps readers glued to the paper for months. Anything less is failure, as far as I’m concerned. What else would you like to know?”
Kettering shakes his head quickly and backs off.
“Good,” I say. “Now, would you tell me what exactly Governor Sutton said to you when he approached you about taking this job? It must have been a fascinating conversation.”
Kettering smiles. His leg rocks like the handle of an old ground water pump, as his brain formulates a response. “Not at all,” he says. “The governor called me up one day and asked if I would like to be district attorney for eighteen months. I thought about it and said yes. I figured—Why not?—putting bad people away could be fun.” He shakes his fists like a timid child pretending to be a boxer. “Besides, it gives me something noteworthy to be remembered for.”
“Just like that? Hi, John, would you like to be district attorney?”
“More or less.”
“Did your lack of experience come up at all?”
“No. Why would it? I’m only here a short while, and we have a perfectly capable staff of attorneys here to advise me on the legal stuff.”
“So what do you plan to do when you’re finished here? Run for office? Go back to drawing up corporate contracts?”
The leg swings even higher. The glint in his eye reappears. “I have no idea, but I’m open to any and all possibilities.”
I don’t buy any of it. But I hesitate to press him further, while Byron Lloyd is watching. I remind myself that I’m here to make nice. There’ll be plenty of time to grill him later. After a painfully long silence that may have revealed my feelings on the matter, Kettering changes the subject. “So how is this interaction between you and I supposed to work, Frank?”
“It depends. It can either be hostile or cooperative. Ideally, I would have direct access to you by cell phone at any time day or night for when I need answers in a hurry and can’t get them from your deputies.”
“What if I don’t want to be identified as your source for this information?”
“Simple. You tell me everything you know off the record. Then you point me toward a secondary source or any paper document that confirms what you say without my having to name you in my story. Just don’t lie or withhold information. I’ll find out eventually.”
Kettering stares me down grimly.
“And what happens if there’s nothing to support what I tell you?” If there’s no backup source you’re probably lying, I want to say.
“Then you’ll have to really persuade me that I can’t confirm the information elsewhere before I credit it to Mr. Anonymous. Almost everything we do leaves a trail of some sort. It’s just a matter of finding it.”
Kettering rubs his forehead and mulls over what I’ve told him.
“Sounds acceptable,” he says. And with that, he pulls a business card from his breast pocket and hands it to me. “There’s my cell number.”
He seems to want to keep things friendly. I rise to shake his hand and get the hell out of there before he changes his mind about working with me.
“Thank you. I won’t take up any more of your time.”
Kettering, still pondering, looks down at my outstretched hand and ignores it. Anyone would think I was diseased. Thank goodness I no longer let things like that bother me.
“One last thing,” His eyebrows suddenly scrunch with concern. He gestures me to sit down again. “Let me see how I can phrase this,” he says. “On a purely hypothetical basis, how do you think the city would react if Mr. Valdez were investigated and charged again?”
“Charged with what?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I was speaking hypothetically. I’m sure we can find something.”
Three chilling thoughts converge in my head: that Kettering is a bit too hung up on Valdez, that he’s remarkably unaware of Valdez’s power, and that the last thing I need right now is to get caught up in reliving the past.
“Look,” I say. “Most people in the city are okay with Valdez being shady. He’s supposed to be shady. He’s a political boss. His job is to pull strings for people. So, to answer your question, charging him with a crime will not be well received, even by people who think he’s guilty. You’d be hard pressed to find twelve jurors who either don’t owe him a favor or aren’t related to someone who does. Welcome to New York.”
Kettering closes his eyes and takes a deep meditational breath, then pastes on a weary smile.
“As I said, I was speaking hypothetically. Please, don’t read anything into it.”
“Fine. Are we done?”
He rises. Another sweep of his arm invites me to leave.
“It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Frank.”
On my way out, I notice that Angie has the wary-eyed look of someone who expects to be horsewhipped at any moment. I turn back to whisper into Kettering’s ear: “Would you do me a favor and tell this young lady—what’s her name again?”
“Angie.”
“—Angie. Would you please tell Angie here that it’s okay to call you ‘Mr. Kettering,’ instead of District Attorney Kettering all the time? It makes you seem unapproachable.”
Kettering thinks about it a moment.
“Point well taken.”
I manage to make it back to the atrium, dizzied and gasping for air, as if I’d spent the last hour under water. I steady myself against the railing of a winding marble staircase that leads to a row of shabby offices for a variety of probation, social service, drug rehab, and anger management programs that freed defendants must register with as a condition of their plea deals. It sickens me to think that a week ago I was cruising the internet for DC-area apartment rentals in my price range, only to find myself back where I started, babysitting a fill-in district attorney with no talent for the job.
I rush out of the courthouse and vanish into the crush of lunchtime pedestrians headed toward Chinatown. I duck behind a Dumpster reeking of rotten seafood in the alley next to Chengdu’s Restaurant on Mott Street to speed dial a call that I don’t want overheard.
“If it isn’t the Honorable Frank Palomar. To what do I owe the privilege of this overdue telephone call after—what—a year and a half?”
“Hi, Ray. How are you and the family?”
“Good. But that’s not why you called. What’s up?”
“You and I need to have a private conversation as soon as possible.”
“What about?”
“I’ll tell you when I get there.”
I hear a long sigh that sounds like the wheeze of a subway train after it grinds to a halt.
“Tuesday, ten thirty. The usual place.”
“See you then.”
David Medina has authored four short stories. In addition to “Pleased To Meet You,” they include “Sofie The Warrior Queen” (34th Parallel Literary Review, 2018), “The Tickle In His Tail” (Raconteur Fiction Anthology, 1995), and “Sweatshop” (El Boletin Magazine, 1993). He spent the bulk of his career as a news writer, editor, and columnist at five different newspapers. He has dedicated himself to full time fiction writing since 2016 and takes master classes at The Writers Studio in New York City.
