This was checkmate. The only thing that trumps the police is the constitutional right to counsel.
The other detective looked like he wanted to take a swing at me, but Lynch seemed to understand that the power dynamic had shifted.
“We’ll be right outside,” he said.
I led Nicky into the guest bedroom. When Anne and I first got the tour of the house, Carolyn had made no pretense about this space being earmarked to become a nursery. The moment we entered the room, Nicky crumpled onto the bed. His hands immediately came up to his face, almost as if he were trying to hide. Then he began to cry, his body convulsing with each sob.
In short order, a knock came on the door. I was opening it when a push came from the other side.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Detective Lynch said, “but Detective Mercado and I need to finish taking Mr. Zamora’s statement.”
“Okay,” Nicky said, wiping his eyes.
I moved slightly to the side, allowing the detectives to face Nicky. At least now they weren’t going to ask me to leave.
Had I truly been wearing my lawyer hat, I would have shut down the interrogation. But despite what I’d told the detectives, I was there as Nicky’s best friend, not his lawyer. That Carolyn’s death might lead to a criminal charge was the furthest thing from my mind.
Detective Lynch resumed the questioning. “Mr. Zamora, did you call 911 as soon as you woke up, or did some time elapse between when you got up and saw your wife was not in bed with you and when you made the call?”
Carolyn’s workday typically started early, especially after they’d moved to the suburbs and she’d tacked an hour on to her commute. Nicky’s job, on the other hand, had a starting time of five o’clock, when he began tending bar at a dive in Murray Hill. I had no idea what time he began working what he’d always referred to as his “real” job, writing during the day, but I doubted very much it was as early as Carolyn’s workday began. All of which meant that Nicky being asleep after Carolyn had already left their bed was hardly surprising and certainly no reason for him to call 911.
Still, Nicky seemed baffled by the question. “When I woke up, Carolyn wasn’t in bed. I don’t know what time it was, but I remember thinking that she was probably already at work. I got out of bed and went into the bathroom to . . . you know, brush my teeth. And . . .”
He resumed the position he’d been in before—hands cupping his face—and he let out a wail.
It was a sound I previously couldn’t have imagined coming out of Nicky, and I flinched visibly at it. But the detectives didn’t budge. Instead, Detective Lynch continued his line of inquiry.
“Were you home last night?”
Nicky needed a moment to answer that too. “Yes. I don’t work on Sundays.”
“And after you saw your wife in the bathtub, what did you do next?”
“I . . . I pulled her out and started doing CPR,” Nicky said.
The mental image made me wince again: Nicky vainly trying to blow air into Carolyn’s lungs.
“Did you think your wife might have taken her bath in the morning?” Detective Mercado asked.
“I don’t know.”
“So you don’t recall if she took a bath last night?”
The question implied the answer. Carolyn must have drowned the night before, which meant that she had been dead for hours when Nicky pulled her from the tub and administered CPR.
Nicky didn’t respond. It seemed as though the question hadn’t registered.
Detective Mercado asked it again. “Did your wife tell you she was taking a bath the night before?”
“Tell me what?”
“Do you remember your wife telling you last night that she was taking a bath?” Detective Mercado asked slowly, leaving a beat between every word, as if talking to someone with a mental defect.
“She did take baths at night. That way she could sleep later in the morning.”
Detective Lynch: “Did she take a bath last night?”
“Yes . . .”
Detective Mercado: “So she went in the bath last night, and you discovered her this morning, and yet you still thought that she might be alive?”
“Is she alive?”
Nicky sounded hopeful, as if everything he had experienced up until that moment might have been wrong. I shuddered at the thought that the detectives would now be forced to tell him again that his wife was dead. It would be like him hearing it for the first time.
Better that it come from me.
“Nicky,” I said softly, “Carolyn’s dead. She drowned in the bathtub. The detectives are asking you how she looked when you first saw her this morning.”
I turned to Detective Lynch to gauge whether my paraphrase of his question was what he was trying to ascertain. He didn’t give me any reaction. His focus remained solely on Nicky.
Nicky shook his head slightly, as if pushing away something negative—the horror of what he’d seen, perhaps. Then his face dropped back into his cupped hands.
2.
I first met Carolyn at a bar in midtown Manhattan. It was in late September 1985. The last vestiges of Hurricane Gloria were leaving the tristate area. The storm’s impact had been less severe than predicted, but the rain was still coming down hard enough that I was drenched by the time I stepped inside.
Despite the understated surroundings, I suspected that every patron had a six-figure income. The dress code for men seemed to require bold-colored braces and power ties, and a sizable percentage wore blue shirts with contrasting white collars.
We were all coming from work, but our uniforms were as varied as our professions. I was wearing a suit and tie, all of it purchased from a discount men’s store. Carolyn also wore a lawyer costume, but hers was more expensive than mine: padded shoulders and pinstripes, befitting an era when Dynasty set the tone for woman’s fashion. Nicky was in his standard starving-artist getup—faded blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater.
When Nicky set up the meeting, I assumed Carolyn was just another one of his sexual conquests. Someone who would burn bright for a few weeks and then go the way of the dodo bird. Many who came before her had followed exactly that trajectory, and I assumed there were many more to come.
“You’ll like her. She’s a lawyer like you,” Nicky had told me.
In point of fact, Carolyn McDermott was a lawyer nothing like me.
She was a third-year associate at Martin Quinn, one of the biggest law firms in the country. An associateship there was the brass ring of the legal profession—at least until you came up for partner in the next decade. Even in the mid-1980s, they paid law school graduates $65,000, which was more than twice what I earned, and I’d already been practicing for four years. You didn’t get hired there without a perfect résumé. Nicky’d boasted that Carolyn had an Ivy League education and a clerkship with a well-respected federal judge before joining Martin Quinn.
My own pedigree had afforded me a path through the relative underbelly of the legal profession. Undergraduate and law school at St. John’s, which was second-rate in every way but its basketball team. Despite the fact that I’d gotten pretty good grades, no law firm would have me upon graduation, so I’d joined the Office of the Federal Defenders of New York—the FD, for short. For the next four years, I represented the vilest form of scum imaginable—drug dealers, wife beaters, rapists. When I left the office, my win-loss record at trial was 7–28. Although those were hardly Hall of Fame stats, nobody else among the office’s sixty-seven lawyers had even won twice.