Seraphim

by Joshua Perry

Genres: General Fiction; African American; African American Mystery & Detective; Mystery; Hard-Boiled

Synopsis

"Seraphim is a thrilling page-turner, as well as a deeply humane investigation into the many forms of justice. It will make you look at the world differently---as much as a book could hope to do.” - Jonathan Safran Foer, author, Everything is Illuminated

From a former New Orleans public defender comes a gritty and thrilling interrogation of crime, violence, and the limits of justice in the chaotic times after Hurricane Katrina…

A 16-year-old confesses to the murder of a local celebrity—a hero of New Orleans’s shaky post-storm recovery... The boy’s father, doing life in prison on the installment plan for a series of minor offenses, will do anything to save him...

Enter Ben Alder, a carpetbagging attorney (and former rabbinical seminary student) who has drifted down to New Orleans. He winds up defending them both. 

Ben and his partner, Boris, are public defenders obsessed with redeeming their case history of failures, and willing to do anything to protect their clients. As Ben tries to disrupt a corrupt and racist criminal justice system that believes an inexplicable crime has been solved, he confronts his own legacy of loss and faith. And as the novel hurtles towards its tragic, redemptive conclusion, Ben finds himself an onlooker and a perpetrator where he thought he was the hero.

A riveting and propulsive story about loyalty and grief, Seraphim is also an unflinching cross-examination of a broken legal system; a heartbreaking portrait of a beautiful, lost city, filled with children who kill and are killed; and a discomforting reflection on privilege, prejudice, and power.

Release date: July 23, 2024

Publisher: Melville House

Print pages: 272

Sample

1.
Apprehension
 
They used to put dogs on the boys. Maybe they still do. The prisoners would shuffle in—leg shackles, handcuffs, belly chains, by the dozen—and there would be some kid with arm or side or neck in bandages, dirty after just a few hours at the jail, stained red-brown with seeping blood. It smelled like the kid was already losing something, like rot had already set in.
 
Ben and Boris once went to a yard off Claiborne Avenue where a kid had gotten himself arrested. The police said he’d broken into a school to shoot basketballs in the dark gym. He ran when he heard the squad cars and hid under a filthy mattress in the summer-hot back bedroom of a shotgun, empty now for two years since the storm. The police cordoned off the block and sent dogs in. Afterward there was blood on the mattress and blood all over the ankle-deep trash and shit on the floor. At First Appearances the kid had staples in his cheek, ear, hand, leg.
 
Boris said:
 
“He needs to see a doctor.”
 
The judge said:
 
“He was in good enough shape to run. Fifteen thousand dollar bond, cash or surety.”
 
“It’s a misdemeanor and he’s eighteen, in school, he’s not a flight risk—
 
“Not anymore.” Laughter from all the free men assembled. “Fifteen thousand dollars, cash or surety.”
 
The police, in their glory—the brave first responders, the ones who stayed. The city was theirs. So they kicked the boys and men until they broke, beat them up against the hoods of cars. The blank windows like nobody was watching, a city without the constraints of society. The only record of their depredations was in their reports, filled with strange empty words in the shape of language but without any meaning: We relocated to the sideyard whereupon Officer Bronco alerted and assisted in the apprehension of the Black male. The dogs got names and the boys didn’t.
 
It was always the boys who were dumb enough to run, through unsettled blocks, between abandoned garages, over broken fences, into vacant houses. There were hiding places everywhere. The joke was that the police didn’t even need the dogs. They could have just waited. Boys only hide for a little while. Boys always run home in the end. 

2.
Perp Walk
 
Robert held the gun in his hand the whole way home. Nobody—at least nobody who would come to court—saw him running and no cameras caught it either. He didn’t throw out his sweatshirt but slept in it that Saturday night and wore it the next day when the story was all over the news and was still wearing it Monday morning when the police came to get him at school. It was, after all, his only sweatshirt.
 
Ben would check, last thing every night and first thing every morning, for the passing of old clients and the advent of new ones. It started like this: Black Male Shot on St. Bernard Avenue. By the next news cycle: Shooting Claims Life of 16-Year-Old. That night they’d put the kid’s name in the papers, but usually someone would already have called Ben. He’d go see the mother with an aluminum tray of wings or whatever he could buy at the closest corner. The front room of the house filled with relatives and neighbors and friends. He’d pick up some money on the way over because the family was always trying to figure out how to pay for the funeral. A couple days later if he had the courage to swing back by, the family would still be sitting around the living room with the blinds closed, trying to dream up money.
 
That Monday morning after someone murdered Lillie Scott—Recovery Leader Shot on Kerlerec—Ben and Boris were up in their office catty-corner from the courthouse getting costumed up in their ties like grownups.
 
“You saw that woman. In the Marigny.” 
 
Ben, cleaning something white and flaky from his sleeve with saliva and a gray paper towel: “Maybe it was a boyfriend?”
 
Loop and through, with a red silk number that looked expensive. Boris had been a fancy lawyer before New Orleans.
 
“It was one shot in the chest. Some kid fucked up a robbery.”
 
“No arrest?”
 
“Not yet.”
 
Ben tucked two disposable pens in an inside pocket, one for himself and the other in case a client needed to sign something. He chewed his pens and didn’t want to give a client something he’d drooled all over. Or put something in his mouth that a client had held. He said:
 
“This one’s yours.”
 
“I covered for you last week, my dude.”
 
“I was in trial. Which I lost. Pity me.”
 
“I bought you a drink.”
 
So there was Ben when the arrest was announced later that day—7th Ward Arrest in Scott Killing—and the van pulled up outside the jail’s sally port. The thick-bodied deputies in the special transport unit moved the kid slow and the reporters crowded around. The public wanted to know. In January of 2008, the city was in one of those periods of painful sensitivity to its endemic violence, like waking with a start at midnight suddenly alert to the sounds in the darkness. It was worse though than just a regular murder. The dead woman was a daughter of the city’s Creole royalty. She’d been walking home from her restaurant, one of the first new places to open after the storm. The Hot Potato went out of its way to hire people who were down on their luck: Just back to town, from the storm or from prison.
 
Ben stopped short when the scrum broke and he saw who the kid was. He had his job to do, though. He swam through the reporters and talked directly into the kid’s ear. 
 
“I’m coming to see you. Don’t talk to anyone until I get there.”
 
The gate rolled open and the deputies and reporters paused for more shouts and camera snaps. The TV people smelled like talcum powder.
 
“Can you hear me?”
 
His head hanging down. Ben, his lips inches from the boy’s ear:
 
“Robert, it’s Ben Alder. Robert. Remember me?”
 
Robert looked up. Ben had once gone into a jail cell and found a ten-year-old in handcuffs. The boy cried until Ben brought him coloring books. That’s how it was.
 
“Where’s Mr. Boris?”
 
“I’m your lawyer.”
 
Imagine a kid, on public display for his evil, looking more dejected just because he found out you’re his lawyer. Ben said:
 
“At least for right now.”
 
Quiet and dry:
 
“Okay.”
 
“Listen. You can’t use the phone. It’s all recorded.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“Not to your mom, not to anyone, until I see you.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“Say it back to me. Are you going to talk on the phone?”
 
A headshake you could barely see:
 
“No.”
 
“Are you going to talk to anyone about your arrest?”
 
“No.”
 
“What are you going to do if someone asks?”
 
“I could tell them I don’t know what happened.”
 
“That’s talking.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“I want my lawyer. Nothing else. That’s all you can say.”
 
Robert had given what the papers called a confession and Ben called a statement. Anyhow he’d told the police, on tape, that he killed Lillie Scott. Murder was life in prison, and life meant life. A kid with wide, dark eyes. They pulled Robert away and took him in through the gate with his head down again and walked him across the driveway to a loading dock, the sheriff’s front door. There they stood for ten minutes, a deputy on each of Robert’s elbows, Robert with his head below his shoulders, waiting for someone to open up. Like everything else at the jail, it was built for scale and efficiency but operated by whim and chance.
 
After the reporters had cleared, Ben sat down on some steps and called Boris.
 
“Did you get him out?”
 
“He’s on his way to Disneyworld.”
 
“Then this one doesn’t count. You get the next one too.”
 
“It’s Robert Johnson.”
 
“My Robert Johnson?”
 
“Ours.”
 
The sheriff had a special juvenile tier. That’s where they kept Robert, in double-bunked cells where the boys went naked from the waist up so nobody could pull their shirts over their heads and blind them in a fight. It was just a few minutes’ walk from the public defender’s office, past the police headquarters and a couple blocks of flooded-out jail buildings and empty lots. The faded teal and beige of the sheriff’s insignia stenciled on warehouse walls; weeds climbing chain-link fences; broken streets verging into fields of uneven green, a layer of sediment over everything. Pocked by pools of standing rainwater and banked by unkempt tumbles of razor wire. Over against the highway: Rusted school buses and new dump trucks parked on a vast, cracked concrete slab where something incalculably heavy and indescribably awful had been lifted or scoured away.
 
3.
Investigation
 
At the beginning Ben had almost nothing from the police, just the same two pieces of paper they gave him for every arrest. On top was the face sheet, with a blurred little picture and some demographic and charge information. Behind the face sheet was the gist, because it gave just the gist of what happened, according to the detective who made the arrest. A paragraph written in longhand and signed to attest to its truth, such as it was. On January 12, 2008, Lillie Scott, B/F, age 36, found on Kerlerec Street with a single gunshot wound to the chest. Victim DOA. On January 14, the undersigned received information that led to the development of a suspect, Robert Johnson, B/M, age 16. Robert Johnson was questioned and, upon being advised of his rights, gave a recorded confession. Ben needed to run all the rest down himself. It could be months before the police told him anything more about the case, and even then they couldn’t be relied on to tell the truth or turn over all the evidence. Because they were harried and didn’t have time, or arrogant and thought it was all wrapped up, or corrupt and deliberately hiding things, or just bad at their jobs.
 
He went to see Robert that same night after the perp walk. Robert was handsome: Tall and square-shouldered and square-jawed. He had hair on his upper lip; a pencil mustache, not like the ratty scruff of other kids. A thin scar on his forehead, across his right temple. They sat down across from each other in the juvenile unit, plexiglass between them. Robert still mostly looking down.
 
“It looks like we’re going to have to fight, Robert.”
 
Robert leaned back just a little bit.
 
“I’m sorry. Not against each other. On the same team. We’re going to have to fight hard to try and beat these charges.”
 
Robert nodded and didn’t say anything. You could have mistaken him for slow, but he wasn’t. This was just the way some kids got. It was just shock. 
 
There was no reason to ask if he’d killed Lillie Scott. The police thought he had. Ben only asked about the things he needed to know, and innocence wasn’t one of them. How did Robert get picked up? They came to his school and talked to him and then arrested him. Where had he been the night of the shooting? Down Bourbon, into the Seventh Ward—the Marigny? Yeah, the Seventh Ward, you know?—then back home. Ben didn’t ask why Robert had been out there. Kids always heard why as an accusation. What other people did Robert see that night? Nobody. He’d been alone all night. That didn’t sound right—what kind of a kid goes out alone to the French Quarter on a Saturday night?—but it wasn’t time to push him. Did Robert have anything else he needed to ask, or say? I need to talk to my dad. Your stepdad? My real dad. Where can I find him? He’s not always in the same place. What are his places? He has a lot of places. What’s his name? I have his name. Robert Johnson? Johnson’s my mom. McTell is my dad. McTell? That’s your dad? Robert McTell? You know him? No, no. The name sounded familiar, that’s all.
 
Of course it didn’t really go like that. But everything is entered into evidence through a witness, and every witness has his biases. A witness doesn’t see or hear or say things exactly as they are but instead as he is. That’s a truism. Robert Johnson wasn’t the witness. That was Ben Alder, a Jewish guy from a college town in Massachusetts, former seminarian, child to a linguist since passed on and an employment lawyer who was proud of the work that Ben did for those unfortunate people in New Orleans. Robert was one of the unfortunates. He didn’t talk like Ben. But some things you can’t really even bear witness to, because they’re not yours to see, and some words you can’t say because they’re not yours to speak. It’s just what’s possible and what isn’t.
 
Ben didn’t try and talk to the boy’s dad, at least not just then. Instead, the next night he and Boris went to Bourbon Street at the same time Robert Johnson himself had walked down the street before the shooting. They could talk to the bouncers, the dealers, the beggars, whoever might have been out there and seen something. The street was neon and shadow, the air orange and lime green, the revelers like actors on a stage walking through pools of light and darkness. Three kids, fifteen or sixteen, tap-danced outside a restaurant. It was after curfew, around 10:30 p.m. One of the kids did a row of backflips on the cobblestones. A small, tipsy crowd applauded and threw money in the kids’ top hats. Ben waited until they stopped for a minute and went to lean against the wall, mopping their foreheads. 
 
“I’m with the public defender’s office.”
 
Blank looks. But Ben wanted to build sympathy:
 
“I work for a young man about your age who got arrested. I’m his lawyer.”
 
The kids looked at each other. One said:
 
“We don’t know anything about that.”
 
“I’m trying to help him. He was arrested Saturday night. Were you out here then?”
 
“The police already asked us.”
 
“I’d like you to tell me about that.”
 
The kids looked at each other. They seemed to shrug without using their shoulders.
 
“I told them the same thing I’m telling you,” said one of the kids. He put down his water bottle. “I don’t do that.”
 
“I’m not asking you to snitch—”
 
“I mean, sir,” said the kid, talking louder, “that I don’t perform sexual favors in exchange for monetary remuneration.”
 
“He’s just a child,” said another of the kids. “Don’t proposition him, sir!”
 
Very loudly. A couple of people walking by looked in their direction. Ben took a step away.