Key Witness (13 page)

He was going to have to meet the mother. Find out what she knew, what was going on with her son in general, and enlist her to support Marvin. A strong family front would help with his defense.

“Have you ever been arrested before?” The file only contained Marvin’s juvenile offenses, nothing as an adult.

“Shit, yes.”

“As an adult, not a juvenile.”

“How could I be? I just turned eighteen, you already know that. What difference does it make?”

“If you have no record as an adult, that works in our favor.”

Marvin nodded. “This was my first one. As a adult,” he added.

“Tell me about it,” Wyatt said. “From the beginning.”

Marvin looked at him. “From the beginning like how?”

“Everything that happened from the time you decided to do it until the time you were caught.” He paused—was he supposed to ask whether or not Marvin had tried to rob the store? In his own practice he never directly asked his clients if they were guilty because he wanted to conduct the most aggressive defense he could, and knowing a client was guilty hurt the cause—ethically you couldn’t put him on the stand to say he didn’t do it. But he didn’t know how that worked in this field.

He wished Josephine was here now, so he could quiz her. He’d better save that question for later.

Marvin broke his chain of thought. “Like when I first started thinking about it, or when I set out to actually do it?”

That statement in itself was a quasi admission of guilt, Wyatt thought. “Let me put it another way,” he said. “Tell me about what happened that day—from the time you first went by that store.”

Marvin’s brow furrowed. Whether he was trying to recall what had happened, or, on the other hand, deciding whether or not to confide in this strange man who had all of a sudden shown up and said he was his lawyer, Wyatt couldn’t tell. “You a private lawyer?” Marvin asked.

“Yes.” Wyatt explained: “I’m working for the Public Defender’s office. Private lawyers do that, because there aren’t enough staff public defenders to handle all the clients—like you.”

Marvin’s face lit up. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“I didn’t think of it. Does it matter?”

“Hell yes, it matters!” His smile broadened. “I got me a private lawyer. All right!”

“Does that mean you’ll talk to me now? Tell me what happened?”

“Yeah, man. I’ll talk to you.”

Marvin began laying out what happened, from when he had first noticed the store, on his delivery route. That had been about a year and a half ago, when he’d begun his job. How it looked like a busy little store, with shitty security. And then later, when he’d figured out it was a numbers drop and that the cops on the beat were in on that, they knew it was going down and they let it ride, even played a number themselves from time to time, and ate free.

This is good, Wyatt thought, writing it all down. If this was true and he could document it, it could be embarrassing to the police and the prosecutor’s office, and help in structuring a good deal with the DA.

He hadn’t thought anything about it for a long time, Marvin went on, because he didn’t have a weapon to use, and also because it was right in the middle of his delivery job and he could get spotted in the neighborhood. But then his homie had given him the stolen gun, and he had been fired from his job. A bullshit firing—he had done right by his boss, his boss had scapegoated him because he—the boss—had fucked up, and he needed to blame someone, and Marvin was low man on the totem pole.

Wyatt jotted a note to find out about the gun, which was now in police custody. And he would interview Marvin’s former boss to get his side of the story to see if the boss had anything good to say about Marvin.

So now he had a gun, and he wasn’t going to be in that neighborhood anymore, it wasn’t his territory, he didn’t like it around there, too many damn Asians with shitty attitudes. Do the deed and vanish into the crowd.

“So I checked it out,” Marvin said, “and I figured the best day to do it. Night, I had to do it at night, when it wasn’t crowded and I could get away easier. So then I went down there and looked it over again, to make certain. You got to have a plan with shit like this, you can’t just go running in someplace and start waving a gun around.”

A plan, Wyatt thought. Pretty sad plan if this is how it ended up.

“Okay,” he prodded. “Go on.”

“I went in and bought a pack of smokes, checking it out inside one more time. It was more crowded than I wanted, I didn’t want nobody in there, ’cause I didn’t want nobody to get hurt. Except the Korean behind the counter, and I didn’t want to hurt him, either. But if he made a play, then I was prepared to.”

“If it was too crowded, then why did you try it?” Wyatt asked.

“I didn’t—right then. I paid for my merchandise and walked away.”

“Where did you go?”

“Walked away a couple blocks. So I wouldn’t be loitering right outside the store and get the guy suspicious.”

“So you smoked a couple of cigarettes. How long did that take?”

“I smoked one cigarette, man. Didn’t even finish that. I don’t smoke tobacco, it was something to buy, so’s he wouldn’t get suspicious. I only lit that one up so I’d have something to do with my hands.”

“You were scared.”

Marvin flared. “Fuck, no, I wasn’t scared. Scared of some jive-ass Korean? No. I was nervous. There’s a big difference. You want to be a little nervous when you do a job, so you’re on your toes.”

Wyatt was making notes. “Keep going,” he said.

So Marvin went back, and this time the store was empty, of customers, and it was time to do or die. He went in, showed his weapon, told the storekeeper it was a robbery, and got him to take the money out of the register.

So much for worrying about his guilt or innocence. He’s laying it all out—for the prosecution.

It was certain now that this case would never go to trial. He couldn’t put Marvin on the stand. If they were lucky, they could make him a halfway acceptable deal with the DA.

“And then?” he asked. “How is it he came to shoot you, if you were holding a gun on him?”

“I told him I wanted the numbers money he kept hidden. He wouldn’t give it up. It was like if I didn’t shoot him for it, I wasn’t going to get it.”

“So you turned and ran.”

Marvin shot up in his bed. “Fuck, no! My piece jammed. I’d’ve done that motherfucker in a heartbeat!”

“Shh,” Wyatt cautioned him. “Keep your voice down. When did he fire his shotgun?”

“How should I know, man? I was running for my sorry-ass life. I never did see it.” He paused, then grimaced. “I heard it, and felt it. But I never did see it.” He rolled his eyes toward Wyatt. “I should’ve done the fucker. The next time, I’ll have me a gun that works.”

Count your blessings, Wyatt thought as he packed up his notes. A load of shot in the ass is a lot easier to recover from than a charge of murder.

D
WAYNE EXCHANGED HIS JAIL
issue for. hospital whites. Immediately, he felt better. He looked good in white.

“You’ve done hospital work before, I assume?” the head nurse, a civilian, peevishly asked Dwayne. The head nurse was a pencil-mustached prissy little twerp who ran a tight ship. He didn’t like the idea that some new inmate, who was only going to be with them for a couple of weeks anyway, had not only been assigned to “his” infirmary, but would be sleeping in it. But he wasn’t about to buck Lieutenant Blake’s orders. He was physically afraid of her, as were many others, inmates and deputies alike.

“Yes,” Dwayne answered calmly, not responding to the gibe. “I was a lab tech in the army.”

“Have you been trained to change dressings? Clean infected wounds?”

Dwayne nodded.

“Well, I guess we can find some use for you,” the head nurse grudgingly allowed. “Make sure you stay out of the pharmaceutical supplies,” he warned Dwayne. “I run a tight inventory. If anything is unaccounted for, I’ll know it.”

“I’m clean there,” Dwayne assured him.

For the next hour, wearing latex gloves and a facial mask, Dwayne swabbed cuts, sores, and abrasions from sick inmates and transferred them to petri dishes, two to a dish. He also made cultures from sputum and sperm. Containing the spread of VD (HIV being the most deadly, along with common clap, herpes, and syphilis) was one of the jail’s primary health missions.

“You’re okay with cleaning and changing an open wound?” the head nurse asked Dwayne again, after the last of the cultures had been finished and put in the refrigerator.

“No problem,” Dwayne answered.

“There’s one in the back who needs changing,” the head nurse smirked. “You’ll find the supplies you need in the cabinet over the sink.”

Dwayne got a package of sterile bandages, some cotton swabs, a tube of salve, and a bottle of antiseptic from the cabinet and walked to the back, the bed ward. The lone inmate, a young black kid, was lying propped up in bed, watching a Roadrunner cartoon on the small black-and-white television that was bolted high on the wall.

“Afternoon, stud,” he said to the kid. “Time to change your dressing.”

Marvin looked up at him, startled at the intrusion. He loved the wily roadrunner and that dumb-ass coyote; it was one of his favorite cartoons.

“It don’t hurt. I don’t need no changing,” he protested.

He wasn’t afraid of the physical act of having his dressing removed and the wounds cleaned—there wasn’t much pain anymore. It was a man touching him on the ass, the possibility of hands grazing his pecker, that he didn’t like. He especially didn’t like the looks of this honky. Whiter than white, he looked like he drank bleach. Tattoos all up and down his arms, even coming out from the top of his T-shirt onto his neck. And his eyes—they looked like a snake’s eyes, a rattlesnake or a cobra.

“Doctor’s orders,” Dwayne told him. “It ain’t my decision, I do what the man tells me to do, and when. I’m an inmate here like you, so don’t cause me grief. Roll over.”

Reluctantly, Marvin turned onto his stomach. Dwayne pulled the sheet down below Marvin’s knees, exposing the bandages that covered him from midthigh to the small of his back. Putting on a fresh pair of sterile gloves, he deftly cut away the bandages, revealing the raw flesh underneath.

“You really caught a load,” he commented.

Marvin twisted on the sheets, trying to keep his Johnson under his leg so it wouldn’t hang out. Dwayne took notice of the kid’s squeamish modesty and laughed to himself. Modesty was a luxury you gave up fast, once you were inside. This kid had some painful lessons to learn, if he got convicted.

Pouring antiseptic onto a gauze pad, he cleaned the wounded area thoroughly, gently prodding the pinpoint reddish holes to make sure there weren’t any pockets of pus forming.

Marvin squirmed in discomfort. “Shit, man, not so hard.”

Dwayne continued the steady probing. You better hope they don’t send you to some hard-core joint like Durban, he thought. The boys there would eat you for lunch and wipe their ass with the remains, especially with a pecker the size of yours.

“Your wound looks pretty good,” he said as he finished his cleaning. “You’re healing up okay.” He patted them dry with a clean pad. “How did you wind up with your ass shot full of bird shot?” he asked casually.

“Gun jammed,” Marvin grunted.

“How did you get shot if the gun wasn’t working?”

“My gun. There was two guns, mine and his. His worked fine.”

“That’s a bitch,” Dwayne commiserated. He spread salve on the infected area, preparatory to bandaging. “What happened?”

Marvin looked at Dwayne over his shoulder. “How come you asking so many questions?”

“Friendly, that’s all. You got to make friends in here, pal, or it’s a long, lonely ride.”

“Yeah?” He thought for a moment. “What’re you in for?”

“Murder,” Dwayne answered flatly.

Marvin’s eyes widened. He flicked his lips with his tongue. “No shit.”

“No shit.” Dwayne laid cotton pads on the wounds, started bandaging over them.

“Where?” Marvin asked, unable to hold back his curiosity, even though he knew that wasn’t cool. “When?”

“Six years ago. Downstate. No big thing.”

“Jezuss!” Marvin whistled. He thought for a second. “How’s come you’re in here? Don’t murderers do their time in the state pens?”

“I am,” Dwayne said. “Durban.”

Marvin nodded respectfully. This fucker had to be pretty bad if he was doing his time at Durban. Only the toughest hard-core felons were sent there. A few gangbangers from his hood had been sent up to Durban. Nobody had heard from them in a long time. “Why are you down here?”

“I’m a witness in a trial.” Dwayne didn’t elaborate.

Murder.
Marvin chewed that over in his head.

“I’ve never killed anyone—yet,” he confided to Dwayne, trying to impress this big-time con, pump up his own status. “But I would have, if that motherfuckin’ gun hadn’t jammed up on me.”

“Yeah, that’s too bad. Who was it you were going to shoot?”

Marvin told him his story of the botched robbery, skewed to make him look good—as good as he could. He described how cool he was, how scared the storekeeper was, how the storekeeper was begging him to spare his life. When he got to the climactic part he really laid it on thick, how his gun had jammed and the storekeeper had pulled out his shotgun and blasted him. Even so, with a humongous shotgun pointed at his stomach, he had almost managed to pull the weapon out of the owner’s hands, but the owner had lucked out and managed to pull the trigger just before he could wrestle it away from him.

You don’t get shot in the back if you’re fighting over a gun, Dwayne thought. He kept the thought to himself.

He finished rebandaging Marvin’s ass. “You’re all set.”

“Thanks, man.” He carefully rolled over onto his back.

On the TV the Roadrunner had been replaced by Deputy Dog. “Do you mind if I change the channel?” Dwayne asked. “I like to keep up with the news.”

Marvin liked Deputy Dog almost as much as he liked the Roadrunner, and he didn’t give a shit about the news; he had never read a newspaper in his life, and the only time he saw the news on TV was when it was about something hot like the O. J. Simpson trial—but he wasn’t about to say no to someone of Dwayne’s stature. “Nah, I don’t mind. I like to keep up with the news my own self.”