Key Witness (26 page)

They’ve sent me to purgatory, he thought, almost breaking into laughter. Petty little shits.

“Mr. Walcott thought you’d be more … comfortable,” she said, groping for words. “Away from the others.” Smiling brightly: “I’m right next door. By this afternoon we’ll have phone service, fax, copy machine, computers. Everything we need.”

He hung his raincoat on a wire hanger, tossed the newspaper onto the corner of the desk. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

She stood in the doorway. “What do you want me to get you first?” she asked.

“Has the grand jury indictment been sent over yet?”

“Yes.”

“That.”

By midafternoon he’d filled two legal pads with notes and was well into a third. This case was going to take a lot of legwork, a lot of time. Seven separate murders, seven different sets of circumstances, with just enough common threads linking them up to pin them all on one perpetrator.

The computer guy came at three-thirty, linking him and Josephine up to the system. He took the opportunity to go down to Walcott’s office. Walcott kept him waiting a few minutes as he wound up a telephone conversation.

Wyatt didn’t beat around the bush. “I need more space.”

“I just gave you a bigger office,” Walcott responded, clearly annoyed. “What you’re used to, we don’t have.”

“My personal space is fine. I’m not talking about that,” Wyatt said. “I need space for the files, the work. I’m going to be subpoenaing police records, prison records, jail records, medical records, I’m going to be interviewing dozens of witnesses, potential alibi witnesses, there’s going to be a blizzard of paperwork to go through, and we need space so we can get to whatever we need when we need it. We’re going to—”

Walcott stuck up his hand like a traffic cop. “Whoa! Rein it in, man.”

Wyatt stopped. Calmly: “You know what this is going to take. I don’t have to tell you.”

“But there are things that
I
have to tell
you
.” Walcott picked up a thick stack of files on his desk. “Murder, arson, armed robbery, rape. All these came in the last month, like yours.” He dropped the files with a thud. “We have one hundred eighteen major felony cases currently on our docket, with more coming in every single day. They’re all important, they all need attention. We have three, count ’em, investigators to handle this entire office’s workload.” He stood up. “Let me ask you a rhetorical question. What do you think this case would cost to defend if a private firm were handling it and the defendant could afford to pay?”

“Several hundred thousand dollars.”

“Think a million, or more,” Walcott informed him. “You’d have forensic experts, DNA experts, psychologists. You would have a
team
of investigators pounding the streets, looking for needles in haystacks. Dozens of paralegals, research staff.” He paused. “None of which you’re going to get. Hell, assigning you Josephine full-time is a luxury. We hardly ever do that, but because of the notoriety of this case, we’re bending our own rules.” He shook his head. “Why do you think the prosecution wins ninety percent of these cases? We’re outmanned, Wyatt. We’re using a peashooter against a howitzer.”

“I get the picture,” Wyatt said. “I’m still going to need more space.”

“You can have some of the other vacant offices up there, as long as the fire marshal looks the other way. It’s the best I can do.”

Wyatt started to press the issue, then checked his impulse.
Don’t sweat the small stuff. It doesn’t matter.

“Don’t take this personally,” Walcott said. “I’m not punishing you. Everyone here works under these constraints.”

“That’s comforting—I guess.”

Walcott walked him to the door. “We’re going to meet once a week—progress report,” he reminded Wyatt. He stopped at the threshold. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. My door is always open.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“L
ET’S START WITH THE
basics. You do know Dwayne Thompson?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know him?”

“He was working in the infirmary when I was down there. He changed my bandages from where I was shot up.”

“Did you and he talk at all about these murders? Any conversation at all?”

“Yeah, a little. It was on the TV.”

Wyatt and Marvin were in a small, windowless room in the heart of the jail. Wyatt had wanted to bring a stenographer with him, but it wasn’t in the budget.

“Did you say anything that might have implicated you in these killings? Anything, no matter how innocuous it might have been?”

“How what-cuous?”

“Ordinary. Unimportant.”

Marvin bit his lip. “I might’ve said something like I knew where some of them took place or something like that. Shit, man, everybody in town knew that kind of stuff.”

“So you did talk about them. And what you knew.”

“Well … yeah, but it wasn’t no secrets or nothing.”

“Did you know that Dwayne Thompson is a convicted felon, and that he is currently doing a stretch at Durban?”

“Yeah.”

“He told you?”

“Yeah.”

“Did he tell you what he was doing down here in the county jail?”

“Said he was gonna be a witness in a trial.”

“He didn’t tell you he was a snitch?”

“Say what?”

“A stool pigeon. An inmate who works with the police in exchange for favors.”

Marvin came out of his chair. “Shit, no!”

“You didn’t know the reason Dwayne Thompson was down here was to be a state’s witness and that he would get some benefits out of it?”

“Shit, no!” Marvin cried out again. “I didn’t know nothing about that!”

“Sit down and calm down,” Wyatt ordered Marvin.

Marvin slouched into the plastic chair. He started biting his nails. Wyatt noticed the cuticles were gnawed raw on most of Marvin’s fingers. The kid had huge hands.

“Tell me what you told him,” he said to Marvin. “Everything you can remember.”

Marvin started whining. “The thing is, it was different times and I was in the middle of getting my bandages changed. …” He didn’t want to tell his lawyer, this rich white man, that he’d been worried about Dwayne taking sexual liberties with him. It didn’t seem manly somehow, like he couldn’t take care of himself, or worse—that he had been thinking about that at all, like the lawyer might think he was interested in that kind of shit.

“Time out.” Wyatt reached across the table and took Marvin’s jaw in his hand, forcing Marvin to look him hard in the eye. “Do I have your attention?” he asked.

“Yeah, man.” He tried to twist away from the hand that was holding him like a vice. Damn, this white dude was stronger than he looked.

“There’s one thing, Marvin,” Wyatt said in a firm tone of voice, relaxing his grip. “You don’t bullshit me, okay? I’m your lawyer and my job is to get you off. And the way I do that is for you to be absolutely straight with me. No games, no con, no jive. Do I make myself clear?”

Marvin’s memory was hazy about what he’d said to Dwayne, and when—they had talked about the killings more than one time; first when there was something about them on television, then later when Dwayne had brought the subject up.

“So you did tell him you knew where this latest killing took place. You knew where the location was?”

“Yeah. I knew where it was.”

“How would you know that? That’s not a club you frequent, you’re underage.”

“My delivery route. It went by there.”

Wyatt leafed through his notes from the first meeting he’d had with Marvin, when the charge had been attempted armed robbery, not multiple murder.

A thought came to him. “This club. Is it close to the store you were going to rob?”

“Yeah. Pretty close.”

“How far?”

“Two blocks. Three.”

“That’s not good.”

Marvin was silent.

“Were you in that alley that night?”

“I was
by
it.”

“
By
it?”

“I walked by it. On my way to the store.”

“On your way.” He glanced at their previous discussion again. “Which time? The first time or the second time?”

“The first or second time what?” Marvin looked confused.

“You were going to rob the store,” Wyatt said, referring to his notes of their earlier meeting, “but it was too crowded, so you left and went somewhere for a smoke, and then you went back. So which one of those times was it you were by the alley, the first time or the second?”

“Umm … it would’ve been the second. Between them.”

“So I’ve got it straight: you left the store, you walked by the alley, then you went back to the store.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you go
into
the alley?”

“I went through it.”

“You went
through
it.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if you went
through
it, that means you were
in
it.”

“Yeah. I went through it.”

His client was in the alley the night the killing took place. Around the same time. “What were you doing there?” he asked Marvin.

“Chillin’.”

“I mean why there? That specific place?”

“It was quiet. Dark.”

“So you went through the alley so you wouldn’t be out on the street where you might be seen?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that where you smoked your cigarette?”

Marvin shook his head. “I only took one puff off it. I don’t smoke tobacco. That shit’s no good. I just lit up ’cause …” He shrugged his shoulders.

They slogged on. Marvin had talked about the killings with Dwayne, and plenty. Everything he knew or had heard; and he’d embellished his knowledge, trying to show the experienced con that he, Marvin, was also a badass.

It was getting late, after four. They hadn’t broken, not even for lunch; a couple piss calls, that was it. Wyatt needed to wrap this up—Marvin was going to be in court tomorrow morning to be formally charged, and he had more homework to do in preparation for that. Over the next few months they would be spending plenty of time together.

“One last thing.” He took the female witness’s statement out of his briefcase, skimmed through it rapidly. He had read it the night before. It was a damaging document. “When you were in that alley, where the latest victim was discovered. Did anyone see you? Think hard. This is important.”

This witness had positively ID’d Marvin in a police lineup as the man she had seen in the parking lot shortly before Paula Briggs had gone out there. But Marvin wouldn’t know that; he wouldn’t know that anyone had testified to that.

Marvin cracked his knuckles backward. It sounded like rifle fire, sharp and loud. Then he bit at a cuticle that was already bleeding from his worrying it.

“Yeah,” he allowed, obviously reluctant to admit to it. “There was this woman, saw me for about a second.”

“White or black? Or was she Latino, or Asian?”

“She was a white bitch.” He remembered her, all right. She had ranked him out, hassling him about looking in her sorry-ass car. “It was dark out there, man, she couldn’t have got no good look at me.”

Good enough to pick you out of a lineup, Wyatt thought glumly, and corroborate the testimony of a man you have admitted you discussed the murders with.

This witness was another element he would have to check out. Maybe she had been there, but the police could have seized on that and pointed her in the right direction. It wouldn’t be the first time.

At least the kid hadn’t lied about it. That was encouraging.

He crammed the papers into his briefcase, stood up. “That’s it for today. I’ll see you in court tomorrow morning. Your mother is going to bring some decent clothes to the jail for you to wear at your arraignment. Make sure you clean up. Shave, shower, wash your hair. You want to make a favorable impression—there will be a lot of media present, we want them to see a clean-looking young man, not some scruffy-looking hood, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Marvin mumbled. “I’ll have my act together.”

They shook hands. “We’re in this together,” Wyatt promised Marvin. “I’m there with you. All the way.”

T
HE FORMAL ARRAIGNMENT WAS
scheduled for eight-thirty in the morning. By seven the area in front of the courthouse was packed with reporters, camera crews, and other various and sundry media personnel. The two local papers had over a dozen representatives between them, while the city’s four TV stations were on board with full crews—reporters, camera, sound. In addition, there were contingents from the
New York Times,
the
L.A. Times,
the
Washington Post, USA Today.
National television—ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN—was present in force. They jockeyed for position on the courthouse steps, spilling down into the street and along the sidewalk for a solid block in both directions. Across the wide boulevard, which was one of the central arteries for the city, vendors had already set up stalls, selling coffee, hot dogs, and T-shirts with pictures of Marvin White silk-screened across the fronts.

The police had barricaded the street for two blocks down on either side. Only officially sanctioned vehicles could get in and out. A squad of mounted cops, riding up and down, kept a semblance of order, aided by dozens of officers on bicycles who joined them in providing crowd control.

Walcott had telephoned Wyatt at home shortly after six to warn him of the scope of the situation. It was arranged that Wyatt would park in a private lot behind the courthouse and be escorted in through a back entrance, which was blocked off to everyone except those who had to be inside. The same procedure would be in place for Marvin’s mother and siblings.

Even so, as Wyatt approached the area surrounding the courthouse he was astonished at the size and energy of the mob. It was a creature unto itself, live and pulsating. Wyatt wasn’t sure how this kind of energy would play into the proceedings, but he knew it would have a role, not only at this hearing but all down the line. No one was immune to it—not jurors, judges, prosecutors, or defense lawyers. They would feel the heat of the public. The TV stations and newspapers would chronicle their triumphs and defeats on a daily basis, issuing scorecards of who won on a given day, and more importantly, who lost.

He showed his ID to the policeman guarding the entrance to the parking lot. “This is pretty amazing,” he commented.