Key Witness (19 page)

“But why does he have to stay in jail then?”

“Given his history, they’re afraid he’d get scared and take off. Don’t worry—he’s walking out of that courtroom on Wednesday morning. You have my word on that.”

He watched as she got on the elevator to leave. Then he went looking for Pagano. The DA was waiting for him outside the courtroom.

“What are you trying to pull?” Wyatt demanded of him.

“Calm down, Wyatt.”

“Calm down my rosy-red. We had a deal.”

“Step into my office.” Pagano put a hand on Wyatt’s arm and led him around the corner into the well of the staircase, looking around to make sure no one was watching them. “Something heavy’s come up. I need for you to play ball with us on this. I have to keep him on ice for another forty-eight hours.”

“What’s different all of a sudden?”

“Give me forty-eight hours.” Pagano leaned in. “If I don’t have what I’m looking for, he walks out as agreed. On the square. But I can’t let him go; not right away.”

“Is this about the numbers stuff? Cops on the take? My guy isn’t involved in any of that. You want to prosecute there, fine, that’s not up to me. But cut my client loose. A deal’s a deal, and I expect you to honor that.”

“There’s more to this than meets the eye,” Pagano repeated, deliberately evasive.

“Why didn’t you bring this stuff up then? This isn’t the way lawyers I’m used to dealing with treat each other,” he added, reminding Pagano of the level at which he practiced.

“You want to fight this,” Pagano answered stiffly, “go get a writ—if you can. We’ll contest it and by the time the smoke is cleared the forty-eight hours will have passed.” He paused. “You’re a good man, Wyatt. Not many in your position would do what you’re doing. I wish you well—and I don’t want to see you fall into a barrel of shit.”

He started walking away down the long corridor.

Wyatt called after him. “I have copies of those tapes,” he reminded Pagano’s retreating back. “Ten o’clock Wednesday morning, if my client hasn’t walked you’ll be watching me in front of your television set. And I’ll bet the state bar committee on ethics would be interested, too.”

Pagano hesitated in his stride for a moment; then he continued on his way without a backward glance.

“Don’t ask me to understand the machinations of the district attorney’s office,” Walcott frowned. “They have no rhyme or reason—although you can bet there’s politics involved, there always is.” He sat back in his chair, contemplating the pattern of water-damage stains on the ceiling. “You ruffled quite a few feathers with the cops and numbers stuff. This could be the surface of a very large pool and they need to use the kid.” He handed Wyatt a thick stack of folders. “In the meantime, the grass is growing.”

“D
O YOU SWEAR TO
tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

“I do.”

“State your name for the members of the grand jury, please.”

“Dwayne Thompson.”

“What is your legal address?”

“Durban State Penitentiary.”

“You are at the present time in temporary custody at this county’s main jail facility?”

“Yes.”

“For what purpose?”

“To give testimony in a case that’s in trial right now.”

“You are a witness for the prosecution?”

“That is correct.”

“And you’ve been in custody at the county jail for a week?”

“About a week, yeah.”

“For the record—did the state, in any way, directly or indirectly, offer you anything tangible in exchange for whatever help you could give them?”

“Reduction in time on my current sentence.”

“All right.” The assistant DA conducting the questioning looked at some papers for a moment. “Now regarding this information you are bringing forward today. Did anyone from our office, or any other law-enforcement agency—city, county, state, or federal—approach you for your help?”

“No. I came to you.”

“Of your own volition? Nobody coerced you?”

“I did it on my own, that’s right.”

“Okay. That’s established, on the record. Next question—did the district attorney’s office make any warranties or guarantees regarding the information you brought to our attention in this matter?”

“If what I tell you helps get a conviction I’ll get some easing on my current sentence or my pending case, something on those lines.”

“Did anyone from my office or any law-enforcement agency help you develop this information, feed you information, or in any way give you information regarding the testimony you are going to give today to this grand jury?”

“No.”

“All the information came from a source or sources you pursued and developed yourself?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” The assistant DA stepped back, leaving Dwayne center stage. “Tell the members of the grand jury what you know about a series of killings that have been referred to in the press as the ‘Alley Slasher Murders.’ ”

“I was down there, starting to work in the infirmary,” Dwayne began, “which they had assigned to me, since I have experience doing that, and they’re shorthanded. There was this patient in there who’d been shot up during a robbery, and I had to change his bandages. And they were playing the news on the TV, about this serial killer they call the Alley Slasher, and this guy and I started talking about it. He knew the area where all the killings had happened real good—he worked there, his job took him all over where these women had been murdered. And as we were talking—not that one time only, but whenever I had to change his dressings, and other times, too, most of the time we were the only two men in there, when it wasn’t hospital hours, since he was the only inpatient in the infirmary—as we were talking I could tell he had things he needed to talk to someone about. Things that were troubling him that he needed to talk about, share with someone. It’s like going to confession—people that’ve done something bad need to get it off their chests, ’cause it’s too heavy a burden to live with by yourself. And the thing about me is, people find it easy to talk to me. ’Cause I’m a good listener, probably. I know what it’s like, being on the wrong side of the law myself at times, I’ve got sympathy for someone in a similar situation that a regular person on the outside, a police officer or a priest or whatever, just can’t have, ’cause they ain’t never walked in those shoes, you know what I mean? So what I did was, I listened to this prisoner, Marvin White is his name, and he started talking to me, more and more, I couldn’t shut him up he wanted to talk to someone so bad about what he’d done. And before I knew it he’d told me his whole story, everything that had been going on with him over the last two years. And what had been going on with him was, he’d been doing some very terrible things.”

V
IOLET WALESKA WAS ON
her way out the door when the phone rang. She was running late for work; she was a punctual person and prided herself on her punctuality, but in the days since Paula had been killed she hadn’t been able to keep to a schedule. For a moment she debated letting the answering machine take the call, but she was unable to let a phone ring without answering it unless it was something completely inconvenient, like making love—not that she’d had any occasion such as that in recent memory.

“Hello?” She listened. “Yes, this is she.”

“This is Sergeant Pulaski,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “Do you remember me?”

“Yes, I remember you.”

“I hate to bother you, but something’s come up that we need help on. Would it be possible for you to come down to police headquarters, today?” he asked politely.

“What is it?” she asked. Her throat was instantly constricting; she could barely swallow. “Have you found out who killed Paula?”

“This is all preliminary, ma’am. But you might be able to help us.”

She was in a dimly lit viewing room, facing a wall that was all glass. On the other side of the glass was the lineup room. It featured bright fluorescent lights, a platform raised about three feet, lines marking height on the wall behind. Numbers on the front of the platform were spaced out for people to stand behind.

In the room with her and Sergeant Pulaski was a man who identified himself as a representative of the district attorney’s office, a police stenographer, and two other people, a man and a woman, whom Pulaski introduced as police detectives.

“We’re going to bring some men in,” Pulaski told her. “They’ll stand against the wall and look straight out. You look at them and tell us if you’ve ever seen any of them before. This is one-way glass”—he rapped his knuckles on it—“so they can’t see you, they don’t know you’re here. They don’t know who’s in here, or even if there is anyone or not. We do some of these identifications on tape now,” he explained, “without anyone present, but in this case we think a firsthand ID would be better. We’re taping it, too, for backup.”

He escorted her to the middle seat of the front row and sat down next to her. The deputy DA took a seat one row behind them.

The female police officer stood at a small podium that had a microphone attached to it. “Bring in group A,” she announced over the mike.

A uniformed officer inside the lineup room opened a door at the side of the platform and six black men entered. They were dressed in civilian clothes. The men mounted the platform, each man standing in front of a number.

“Recognize anyone?” Pulaski asked.

She looked at them. “No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. I’ve never seen any of these men.”

“Take your time. If there’s anyone you want to get a better look at we can ask him to step forward.”

“I’m sure.”

Pulaski nodded to the detective at the podium. “Thank you, gentlemen,” the detective announced. “Next group.”

The lineup-room officer led the group out. A second group of six came in.

Violet looked them over, shook her head. “No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

Pulaski nodded, glancing over his shoulder at the assistant DA, who shrugged. The podium detective dismissed the group and asked that the third set of men be brought in.

She recognized him. The fourth one in, third from the left. She leaned forward, staring intently through the glass, her heart pounding.

“You recognize one of them?” Pulaski asked, keeping his voice calm.

“The young, tall one.”

“Have each man step out in turn,” Pulaski instructed the detective with the microphone, “stand there for five seconds, and return.”

The detective called the men out, starting from the right. When the man she had ID’d stepped forward, Violet jerked back in her seat.

“That’s him,” she said, her voice quivering with fear and excitement. “That’s the man I saw.”

“You’re absolutely sure.” Pulaski exchanged another quick look with the DA, who was on the edge of his own seat, his arms on the back of Pulaski’s.

“Would you be willing to swear to that, under oath?”

“Yes,” she said with rock-solid conviction. “That is the man.”

S
OME OF THE MEN
in those lineups were prisoners. The rest of them were cops, or civilians who worked the jail complex—cooks, janitors, computer operators, etc. The cops and day-giggers went back to their jobs; the prisoners were returned to their cells.

Except for Marvin. Two jail deputies took him to a special wing on the top floor: the maximum-security unit, where prisoners under indictment for the most serious crimes were kept in individual cells, under twenty-four-hour-a-day watch. Men accused of capital crimes, for which the death penalty is a definite option, often the preferred one.

Most of the cells on the floor were empty. It was a bitch keeping prisoners in this unit. The expense was three times that of maintaining a normal inmate. One man to a cell, no exceptions. No contact with any other prisoners, which meant they each exercised separately, showered separately, were fed in their cells. Inmates had to stay in their nine-by-six-foot space except for exercise time, shower time, and when they had visitors—family members or, more commonly, their lawyers.

“What’s going on?” Marvin asked as the elevator groaned past the floor he’d been staying on.

The guards didn’t answer him.

“Where we going?” he asked.

“Your new home,” one of them answered, giving him a small break.

“What new home?”

“They didn’t tell you?” The same jail deputy. The older one.

“Nobody’s told me shit.”

They exited the elevator and entered the high-security ward, passing through three separate sets of locked doors. It was scary, being in such a quiet cellblock after the deafening noises of where he’d been. There had been comfort in that noise: you were one of many there; if you stayed out of other people’s ways you could get lost, sort of. Up here, it was like a tomb.

“When?” he asked. “Will they tell me?”

“Sooner or later.”

They put him in a cell at the far end, as far away from the elevators as they could. His meager array of personal effects—toothbrush, toothpaste, bar of soap, hand towel, deodorant—was already there on the freshly made bunk, waiting for him.

The cell door slid shut behind him, clanging loudly. From where he was, looking out through the heavy bars of his door, he couldn’t see a soul.

“Hey!” he called out. “Hey! What am I doing here?”

His voice echoed up and down the long corridor. All the walls and flooring were concrete: sound carried and reverberated over and over, loud and hollow.
Hey hey hey hey hey!

Nobody answered him. The guards on this floor were cocooned in a sealed control booth that had video surveillance of everything, in every cell.

“Hey!” Marvin shouted. “I ain’t supposed to be here. I’m getting out tomorrow!”

The only sound that returned was the echo of his voice. It had a mocking ring to it.

W
YATT DITCHED WORK AT
the stroke of five. He didn’t run, or practice his trombone—instead, he took Moira to an early dinner at Edgemont, their golf club, an easy twenty-minute drive from their house. The food was good for what it was, and Moira enjoyed the comfortable ambience, where she knew everybody and there was no stress. Her parents had been members for over forty years; her father had sponsored Wyatt, two decades ago.