Key Witness (33 page)

“I’d like a list of the names and addresses of the customers Marvin made deliveries to on the days of the murders,” Wyatt said. “I’m sure you have records of that on your computer. We could punch them up right now, I’ll bet.” He started to move toward Livonius’s desk.

The big man danced around him, blocking his way. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. My customers don’t want to get involved, like I told you. Screwing the colored delivery boy, I don’t think they want anyone to know that. Especially their misters.”

Wyatt took a step back. “Mr. Livonius. I don’t want to cause you any problems. And I appreciate your having seen me on such short notice, especially under these circumstances. But those records could be important to our case, and I need them. Now you can let me look at them with you—unofficially—or I can get a warrant for them. And if I have to do that, it will become a public spectacle. I’m sure your female customers won’t welcome that.” Whether or not he could obtain a warrant for this fishing expedition was dubious, but this man wouldn’t know that, he guessed.

His hunch was right—Livonius glowered, then gave in. “I’ll go back through my records and make up a list for you of whatever I can find. Give me your fax number.”

Wyatt hadn’t memorized his new fax number yet. He had to look it up on a card he had in his wallet.

“I’ll get it to you tomorrow,” Livonius promised him grudgingly. “I’ll work on it tonight, after I close up. Right now I’m too busy.”

“Sure, that’s fine. I appreciate this, Mr. Livonius. And so does Marvin.”

Livonius coughed derisively. “Marvin. He don’t appreciate nothing. He stole from me, in case you forgot. His own boss, who treated him good. No, sir. Marvin screws up everything that comes across his path. That’s why he’s in this trouble.”

S
ECURITY WAS ULTRATIGHT. THE
jail personnel knew who Wyatt was, but he nevertheless had to show his driver’s license and another piece of ID, sign in, have his briefcase pawed through, clear a metal detector, then pass two sets of chambers with locked doors at either end to get to his client.

Except for when he would have to make an appearance in court, Marvin was now confined to the cellblock on his floor. He got to exercise one hour a day, watch television two hours a day, take a ten-minute shower every other day, and talk on the telephone as much as he wanted, but only to approved callers: Wyatt; Walcott and other designated members of the Public Defender’s office, including Josephine; his mother and siblings; and a small group of friends whose names had been submitted to the court and cleared by Judge Grant. Wyatt, other people on the PD staff, and his mother were the only visitors he could see whenever he wanted. All others had to be approved in advance for each individual visit.

Surprisingly (to Wyatt), Dexter had been one of the friends approved to send and receive telephone calls.

“It’s because he doesn’t have a record as an adult—yet,” Walcott had explained to Wyatt when the two of them went over the list. “And let’s get real—Grant isn’t going to be a prick on the small stuff. He’ll save the shitty rulings for where it’ll really hurt us.”

Wyatt had spent a few minutes with Walcott that morning, filling him in on what he was doing. The briefing went well, considering their somewhat adversarial relationship. As Wyatt was wrapping it up he mentioned his trip to Sullivan Houses, which had led to his meeting with Dexter and pointed him in new directions. But when Walcott realized that Wyatt had actually gone down there his countenance darkened, and he became visibly upset.

“What was the point of that?” he asked, his voice and body language showing a lack of sympathy for the undertaking.

Wyatt was taken aback. “To talk to the mother on her home ground. And to get the lay of the land. This is not the kind of world I live in, not remotely. I can do a better job for my client if I know where he’s coming from.”

“You’re a lawyer, not a social worker.”

“I know that. Do you have a problem with my going down there?”
And if you do, so what? It’s none of your business—I’m his lawyer, not you.

“You need to prepare his defense. You don’t need to become a part of his life. You’re his lawyer, not his fairy godfather.”

Wyatt looked at him. “Is there a hidden agenda I don’t know about? What’s your real objection to what I did?”

Walcott squared his shoulders. “We’re swamped in this office. You start working this extracurricular stuff, it gets around. Then every petty criminal will want that kind of attention, and we don’t have the manpower to provide it.”

“This is a capital case. I’m going to turn over every rock I can,” Wyatt said. “I’m building trust by going down there, and making valuable connections I couldn’t make otherwise. This boy Dexter would never have come to the office, but when he saw me in his own backyard he decided he could confide in me. These people are suspicious of us; you know that. Anything I can do to alleviate that, I’m going to. It can only help.”

Walcott threw up his hands. “Do it your way. You’re going to whether or not I approve. But if any of this backfires on you, you’d better be ready to take the blast. Alone.”

A small concrete-walled dayroom at the end of the cellblock, painted a washed-out puke green, had been requisitioned for use as a visiting room, specifically for Marvin. It was a windowless room and the door was solid steel, with only a peephole at eye level for guards to look in. There was a television camera positioned high in one corner with a fish-eye lens to capture the entire room, but sound was not recorded.

The first time Wyatt saw the camera he flashed back to the one he had discovered in the Korean market that Marvin had tried to rob. Anticipating his objection, since he was new to the criminal-justice system, one of the deputy wardens explained the reason for the camera. “We have to make sure nothing funky goes on, for your protection as much as ours. We’ve had family members or friends slip inmates drugs, weapons, everything you can think of. Lawyers, too. The camera keeps everyone clean, removes temptation. There’s no sound, an outside agency sweeps the place every week. The last thing we want is to get some scumbag’s conviction thrown out because we violated his rights.”

Wyatt and Marvin sat across from each other at the small metal table in the center of the room.

“What about this woman?” Wyatt asked his client. “Do you remember her name?”

Marvin shook his head. “Nah, man,” he mumbled.

Wyatt cocked a dubious eye. “How many women on your route did you spend the night with? There couldn’t have been that many.”

“There wasn’t. I just don’t remember. It was like, what, a year ago or more? I can’t remember these different women, they’re just … you know … women. I fucked some of them. So what?”

“So what? We’re looking for an alibi witness for you, Marvin. If you were with a woman when one of these murders took place, that gets you off that murder, don’t you get it? If you’re off one, you’re off them all. This is important, Marvin. Crucial. Think! Now. A name, an address. Anything.” He was losing his temper, but he didn’t care. Something had to wake this kid up, and fast.

Marvin shook his head, his eyes on the pocked tile floor. “I can’t, Mr. Matthews. They all blur into each other.”

He stopped talking for a moment, his mind working; then he looked up, the first time he was making clear eye contact with Wyatt. “I never saw them, you know? I looked at their faces, but I didn’t
see
them, you understand me? I didn’t want to see them, because they didn’t exist for me as people. Like I didn’t exist for them as a person. I was something to make them feel like a woman, like they had some sex appeal left in them. They used me and I used them back. It was business. It wasn’t about what their name was or what they looked like.”

T
HE CASE OF
PEOPLE
v. Walter Malone
was being tried in courtroom C, one of the regular-sized courtrooms. There were forty-eight seats for spectators, but although it was a murder trial the room was only about half-full, with most of the attendees being reporters. There wasn’t much sex appeal to this case; it was four years old, and there were no big players involved. The accused was a lowlife petty habitual criminal, the murder victim was a petty lowlife loan shark, and nobody, except for the prosecutor’s office and the accused himself, had any stake in the outcome.

The meat of Alex Pagano’s case was the confession that Walter Malone had made to Dwayne Thompson at Durban prison the previous year, when both men were briefly cellmates. In his insinuating, inimitable fashion, Dwayne had played on the con’s need for absolution and had gotten poor Walter to spill his guts. Walter, of course, had never dreamed that a fellow con would turn against him. Like all men, he had needed to tell someone about what he had done, because if no one knows, there’s no acclaim, no status; and also, it’s a hard thing to keep inside you forever, that you killed a fellow human being. In the old days the chaplain served that purpose; except criminals rarely went to see the chaplain, except in Pat O’Brien movies.

Dwayne had been outfitted in a decent sports jacket, white shirt, tie, slacks. Nothing fancy or flashy—presentable, neutral. He had a fresh haircut, square-style, combed back on the sides in a modified ducktail, held in place with Vitalis. He sat upright in the polished oak wooden captain’s chair, hands resting lightly on the arms, one leg crossed nonchalantly over the other. He was at ease—he’d been here before.

The assistant DA, a tough veteran named Neil Riordan, began taking Dwayne through the story—how, why, when, where. Dwayne answered the questions directly and simply, without embellishment.

There were two spectators seated in the back of the room, on opposite sides of the aisle as far away from each other as they could get, who were watching these proceedings with more than the idle interest of the press or the normal courtroom groupies. Wyatt was one of them. He sat in the last chair in the back row, close to the window, watching and taking notes. He wasn’t paying attention to what Dwayne was saying, the particulars—he didn’t know anything about this case and had no interest in it. His attention was on Dwayne the man, the witness. How he presented himself, how cogent and precise his responses were, how truthful they seemed to be. Most importantly, how the jurors were responding to him.

It’s hard to read a jury, he knew; they can be paying close attention to a witness, hanging on every word he says, taking notes, everything a jury is supposed to do, and afterward, when a verdict comes in, you discover they didn’t believe a word he said. Conversely, a jury can be inattentive, collectively skywriting in their heads, their notepads under their seats, even seemingly dozing off; yet later they will report that was the most convincing witness of all those they had heard.

Dwayne Thompson, in Wyatt’s opinion, was doing a slam-bang job. He had his facts down cold, and the way he talked about how Walter had spun his yarn, the two of them sitting in a lonely prison cell late at night (Walter was doing time for shylocking and pimping, and was looking at another two years maximum on this particular stretch) had the ring of truth to it. Dwayne was a storyteller, and dangerously believable.

Sitting on the other end of that aisle, in the closest seat to the door, Helena Abramowitz was also watching and taking her notes. From time to time she would glance over at Wyatt, who was studiously ignoring her. She had been wondering about him since she had come on this case. He was an unknown. He had a great reputation in the corporate law world, but he had no experience in this side of the law, none.

Why he was doing this she had no idea, but his
being
disturbed her. Her gut instinct told her she should try to psyche this guy out. Push him hard from the get-go, try to keep him on the defensive.

She turned her attention back to Dwayne. He was a great prosecution witness. To watch him, to listen to him, you wouldn’t know he was a savage, a mad dog sociopath. He came across as a criminal, yes; but also as a man with human values, a conscience.

If anything was disturbing to Helena it wasn’t Dwayne’s demeanor or anything about his performance on the stand. It was his actual testimony that was causing her discomfort, in a vague, undefinable, but very real way. Her concern was how Dwayne had gotten Walter Malone to confess his crime—to a total stranger. She knew that jailhouse informants had been around forever. Her problem was the way that Dwayne presented his story. It was too polished. Too many specifics, too many facts that were exactly on the money. It didn’t smell clean, totally clean. Dwayne didn’t know his story well enough; he knew it
too
well.

When Dwayne had finished testifying for the day she was going to get a transcript from the court reporter and go back to her office and compare it with the original facts—the police reports and depositions and so forth—in the Walter Malone case, and then compare both to Dwayne’s prior testimony to the grand jury in that case. She wanted to see how good the fit was. If it was perfect, that would be a problem for her. Like the almost too perfect fit between the confidential police reports and Dwayne’s incriminating testimony in her case, the case of the decade.

D
WAYNE’S KEEPERS ESCORTED HIM,
in handcuffs, waist chain, and leg-irons, back to the jail, where he changed into his prison-issue and returned to work in the infirmary. He had done well; he always did well. This one was a no-brainer—he’d be on the stand with this prosecutor another day, two max, then the defense lawyer would take a whack at him, which would take a day, maybe spill over a little. The defense attorney wouldn’t lay a glove on him. He’d seen the fear in the man’s eyes from up on the witness stand. The poor bastard looked like a deer caught in the headlights. By the end of the week this would be over and done with.

He was glad he was doing this trial. It was like a tune-up for the main event. He could feel the juices flowing, the blood rushing. You could get a hard-on doing this shit—there was a strong sexual component to it.

Having Helena the DA sitting in the back of the room catching his act didn’t hurt with the sexual energy-flow. Her eyes had been riveted on him all day long.