Key Witness (59 page)

She shook her head. “That’s not true.”

“If you can forgive this quickly, you are.”

“I have to, Dad. She’s my mother.”

Behind his back he could hear Moira sobbing.

He put a hand on his daughter’s forehead, and she leaned down and hugged him fiercely.

J
OE GINSBERG’S BAR EXAMINER
friend called Wyatt at the office.

“I snuck a look at that score you’re interested in,” he said over the phone. “Which you don’t know I did.”

“I appreciate that.”

“It was a seventy-six, like you thought.”

Wyatt cursed to himself.

“It puts her in the eighty-five percentile,” the examiner said.

“That’s hard to believe.” He had met Doris Blake, spoken with her. She had given no indication of being that smart, or even close.

“It is awfully high,” the examiner agreed. “One of the highest we’ve ever had from a part-time law student. Usually it’s the cream of the Harvards and Yales who get those high scores.”

Wyatt had been in the top ten percent of his class at Yale, twenty-five years earlier. He’d scored a seventy-four, which was considered very respectable for someone of his exalted position. This convict-fucking shlub had outscored him. He couldn’t believe it.

“Is there any chance the score was misrecorded?” he asked, throwing himself a lifeline.

“One in a million.”

“Bad odds.”

“If you want, I could cross-check it against her test book, to be sure. It is an elevated score, and her class standing doesn’t merit her doing that well. But stranger things have happened, as we all know.”

“I’d appreciate it.” He was grasping at straws but he had to be one hundred percent sure.

“It’ll take me a few weeks. Right now we’re rereading the sixty-nines and sixty-eights.”

A score of seventy percent was passing. About half of those who took the twice-yearly exams passed each time, scoring seventy percent or better—mostly in the seventy to seventy-two percentile. Test scores that had just missed the mark were reexamined to see if another point or point and a half could be squeezed out of them. The trauma of taking the bar exam was extreme—your entire career hung in the balance. To fail by a point or less could make someone suicidal. Wyatt had heard of people who’d taken the test a dozen times and never passed. He would have figured Blake for that category before he put her in the upper echelon.

“What about her knowing her score before it was officially posted?” he asked the examiner.

“That’s serious,” the man said, “and we will look into that Leaking scores could ruin the credibility of these tests.”

“If you find anything out I’d appreciate knowing that, too,” Wyatt said.

“I’ll be getting back to you.”

So Blake had found out about her bar exam score before she was supposed to. It wasn’t kosher, but as Josephine had pointed out, people were always finding things out they weren’t supposed to. The important thing was that she’d passed with flying colors; and that meant he had one less piece of ammunition to use against her.

S
CHOOL WAS OVER. SUMMER
was officially less than two weeks away. Already the mercury was climbing into the high eighties and nineties, with the humidity correspondingly brutal. And the trial of the
People v. Marvin White
was coming like a runaway freight train. Wyatt was going to have a long, hot summer.

He was going to be spending it alone. Moira and Michaela weren’t going to be home for the summer.

“I’ve rented a house on Martha’s Vineyard,” Moira told him. “Michaela and I are going to spend the summer there. It’s too hot in the city.” Stating the obvious: “And she can’t work.”

“When did you decide that?”

“Last week. After the session with Roberta.”

He nodded. “I wish you’d told me.”

“Would it have mattered?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t feel we needed permission, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”

That stung. “I don’t own your life, Moira.”

“No,” she said, more aggressively than he would have liked. “You don’t.”

That stung, too.

“We’d be a drag on you.”

He shrugged.

“It’s true.”

“What about your bookstore? It’s opening soon.”

“Cissy can handle it while I’m gone. This is more important. Michaela and I being together.”

“Maybe it’s for the best.”

“Michaela and I have to work our stuff out,” Moira said. “And you can think about what you want to do.”

“I want to work. On us.”

“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t,” she answered with brutal honesty. “But that kind of work is full-time, and you don’t have that kind of time. I understand that. But that is the truth.”

“When the trial’s over …”

“We’ll see.”

Their flight was called. He hugged them both, hard. They hugged him back. Michaela had tears in her eyes; Moira was resolutely dry-eyed. “I’ll call you tonight,” she said briskly.

“Good-bye, Daddy,” Michaela said. “Take care of yourself.”

“I will, sweetheart. You, too.”

One last dry kiss from Moira. Then they were handing their boarding passes to the flight attendant and walking down the ramp, disappearing into the fuselage.

He stood at the window, watching the plane taxi out onto the runway. It took off, picking up power, the flaps lowering—then it began climbing, up above him, banking away from the terminal and heading into the sun.

He watched until the plane was out of his line of sight. Then he walked out of the airport, got into his car, and drove home to an empty house.

W
YATT WOKE UP IN
his hotel-room bed at three-thirty in the morning and knew he wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, so he threw on shorts, a T-shirt, and his Nikes, and went for a run. The streets were deserted except for delivery trucks, street-cleaning vehicles, and an occasional cop car cruising by. This section of town was considered safe—it was the hub of both commerce and tourism, so the police patrolled it stringently: hookers, purse snatchers, drug dealers, and other criminal types were roughly removed and relocated to scuzzier environs.

Even though it was the apex of the night, the heat and humidity, so viscid it felt like he was moving through a film of oil, hung over the city, giving him the feeling of being inside an immense Turkish bath. The air was dead still. Discarded dog-pissed-on newspapers lay limp in the gutters, and the faint perpetual smells of garbage and sewage rose up through the street vents and manhole covers like the aromas of a devil’s stew cooking far underground.

The city at rest, he thought, with all its age and imperfections exposed, an old dame way past her glamour years who somehow, before the break of every day, manages to get up and get dressed and put on her makeup so that she can display a presentable face to the world.

Wyatt loved his aging city. He knew her smells and wrinkles and curves and secrets. His forays into the huge uncharted sections inhabited by the African American population had clearly shown him some of the things he didn’t know—but he was learning. What the city was; and what it wasn’t.

He was keyed up and at the same time he was calm, much calmer than he’d expected he would be. So much had gone down in these last few months, personally and professionally (the two pretty much intertwined), that all the anxiety had been driven from his system and replaced with clarity, self-belief, and power. He had been preparing for this day all his life, from the day he graduated law school. He was going into a courtroom to fight for another man’s life.

H
E WAS AT THE
courthouse by a quarter to seven, the first party from either side to arrive, driving in unnoticed via the back subterranean entrance to the underground parking lot. The proceedings would commence at nine, but he wanted to be there early. For the next several weeks this was going to be where he lived, and he wanted to become as comfortable here as possible.

On the street in front of the courthouse, as well as in the central downstairs rotunda, the media circus was beginning to set up its tent, camera crews already jockeying for the most advantageous positions.

He thought about how slow the first few weeks would be. Judge Grant’s opening remarks and the selection of the jury would take at least two weeks. For the principals, however, jury selection would be crucial. By the time the jury was selected, the case would be well on its way to being won or lost. Trying to find twenty men and women (twelve jurors plus an ample alternate pool) who had not formed an opinion about Marvin’s innocence or guilt was going to be close to impossible because it was a given that everyone in the city had heard or read or seen something about Marvin White and these killings. Something bad. Wyatt and his team had to ferret out the few people from the jury pool who had any kind of open mind, because there was no residue of goodwill built up around Marvin, whose profile was that of men, particularly black men, who in situations like this were convicted ninety-eight percent of the time.

Because of the notoriety and the sheer numbers of the murders, Wyatt had made a pretrial motion to separate the cases, a normal procedure, especially since some of the prosecution’s evidence was based only on the circumstances of the final murder. Grant had denied it—he felt the connections were strong enough to warrant one trial for all seven. That it would be prohibitively expensive to conduct seven separate murder trials went unspoken, but everyone knew that was a big factor.

Josephine arrived at 7:15. She had a sheaf of telegrams from friends and supporters, almost all of them other criminal-defense lawyers.
“Illegitimi Non Carborundum”
was the general sentiment. The Missouri renegade prosecutor Brent Bollinger’s was more specific: “Break that son of a bitch Dwayne Thompson down. He’s the key.”

Innocence or guilt was not their concern—most of those who sent telegrams figured Marvin White was guilty as charged. They were supporting Wyatt because they were part of a small, beleaguered fraternity, fighting a rising tide that proclaimed the credo “Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” was only words on paper, no longer to be taken seriously in the real world.

By 7:30 the other members of his team had drifted in. Walcott, Darryl (in an unofficial, cheerleading capacity), and Freida Berman, his jury consultant.

Berman was a jury specialist, a sociology professor from the University of Chicago. Wyatt had brought her on a month ago, when the questionnaires from the jury pool had been returned and needed to be analyzed by an expert. Freida’s fee was $250 an hour, a low price for someone well qualified in the field. Wyatt had petitioned the court for money to pay her. The prosecution had their own team of consultants; their bill would run close to $10,000, more if they needed it. He should have equal access to expert advice, he argued.

Judge Grant awarded the Public Defender’s office $2,500, a ludicrously low amount. On his big billion-dollar corporate case Wyatt and his team had spent $150,000 on jury consultants alone. Wyatt had complained about the paltry award but Walcott had given him the facts of life, lesson 97, the same lesson as numbers 1 through 96: the courts are not about to help you out. You fly on a wing and a prayer.

He couldn’t operate that way, not with a life and his reputation at stake, so he paid Berman an additional $5,000 out of his pocket—out of the firm’s pocket. Ben Turner wasn’t about to let his star go into combat without some ammunition. “We’re not a bottomless pit on this,” he told Wyatt, “like we would be if we were defending a deep-pockets client, but we’re not going to let a member of the family drown, either.”

Berman had reviewed the questionnaires, marking the candidates who appeared to be the most promising. There weren’t many. Most of those available were middle-aged and older, and more than half of them were not African American. A large percentage were people who formed their opinions through a narrow prism and held strong, uncompromising attitudes about right and wrong. These prospective jurors would be highly predisposed to believe what the police and prosecutors told them.

Wyatt and Freida separated the candidates into three broad categories: pretty good, barely possibly, and NFW (No Fucking Way). This would change when they saw and questioned the individuals face-to-face, but it was a start. There were twice as many NFWs as the other two categories combined.

Their big concern was black men, especially younger black men. Of the fourteen black men (out of two hundred jury candidates) on the list under the age of forty-five, six had been arrested, and three others had had some kind of trouble with the criminal justice system. Being arrested wasn’t in itself grounds for disqualification, but Wyatt was afraid the prosecution would try to make it one, and he was concerned that Judge Grant would let them.

Wyatt’s bottom line was one young black man on this jury. It was paramount. He would prefer someone from the streets, a true peer to Marvin, but any black man would be better than none, even a college graduate who might want to put the ghetto shit behind him, or pretend it didn’t exist.

“Ready?” Walcott asked.

Wyatt smiled. “I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” he said.

“Good luck. I’m not going to be here much,” Walcott told him, “but I’ll always be reachable. So give ’em hell.” The head of the office gave him a firm punch on the shoulder as he left.

Wyatt sipped from his coffee mug. “Finger-lickin’ good, as usual,” he complimented Josephine. “You’ll be close behind me?”

“Every inch of the way.”

He could go to the bank on that. She would be doing most of the legwork during the proceedings.

“Thanks for coming,” he told Darryl.

“I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” Darryl smiled his devilish smile.

He’d thought about bringing Darryl in to sit second chair: having an experienced defense lawyer by his side, who happened to be black, like the defendant, was a tempting notion. In the end, though, he’d decided not to. He had left the security of workplace and home to do this, and it was his to do alone.