Key Witness (72 page)

“Yep. We were.”

“Please continue.”

“I’m changing him in the afternoon. The TV’s on to the local news. They’re going on about the latest murder in this Alley Slasher thing, and he pipes up and tells me where that is. Where it happened. And not only that, he says, he was there that night.”

“The defendant voluntarily told you he was at the murder site on the same night the murder took place?” she asked with mock incredulity.

“Uh-huh. He told me the name of the club and the address.”

“Had that information been spoken about on this newscast the two of you were watching?”

“No, it wasn’t. It looked to me, watching, that they were making sure they didn’t give out exactly where it had been.”

“And it had happened the night before?”

“The night before, that’s right.”

“So he had to be telling you the truth.”

“That’s what I thought. I couldn’t figure out any other way he could’ve known, since he’d been arrested that same night and brought in.”

“Before the body of the latest victim was found?”

“Hours before,” Dwayne said.

“What did you do when he told you that?” she asked.

“Right then, nothing. He changed the subject and started telling me why he was in jail and why he was shot. Bragging on himself.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That he’d tried to rob this store and his gun jammed and the owner got the jump on him.”

“He confessed to an armed robbery? With intent to commit murder?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Why do you think Marvin White confessed to having committed a serious crime to a man he didn’t know?” Abramowitz asked.

“For the same reason every other guy in the joint does it,” Dwayne answered smoothly. “To puff himself up, look good.”

“That’s all?” she asked. This time her curiosity, although foreknown, appeared to be genuine.

Dwayne nodded his head enthusiastically. “People in jail are not smart people,” he explained to the jury. “If they were they wouldn’t be there. The most important thing to your common jailbird, generally speaking, is his status. They want to come off tough—usually tougher than they really are.”

“He told you he’d committed this serious crime to
impress
you?”

“What other reason could there be?” Dwayne asked reasonably.

Wyatt didn’t have to make a note about that remark. He knew how pathetically true it was.

“Was it because he knew that you were ‘big-time,’ so to speak?” Abramowitz continued.

“Absolutely. If I was some petty credit card scammer or dope smoker he wouldn’t have done it, because his status as opposed to mine wouldn’t be threatened.”

“He knew you were in jail for a serious crime?” she asked, nailing down the point.

“He knew I was in transit from Durban. Everyone knows you don’t pull your time at Durban unless you’re doing serious time for heavy sh—” He caught himself. “Stuff. Heavy stuff.”

Wyatt didn’t have to check this out with Marvin, either. He knew his client had shot himself in the foot.

“When the defendant gave you this unsolicited information about the latest Alley Slasher murder, as well as the crime he’d been arrested for, what did you do?”

“I told him to cool it.”

“You asked him not to tell you about it?”

“Uh-uh,” he said, shaking his head. “I told him he should be careful about who he was talking to.”

“How did he respond to your advice?”

“He made a few more remarks, and then he let it go.”

“He didn’t say anything else?”

“Not that time.”

She flipped to the next page in her file. The room was quiet; the hum of the air conditioners fighting to keep pace with the scalding temperature beating in on the windows was the loudest perceptible sound. “Did you have occasion to speak to the defendant about these crimes another time?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Dwayne answered expansively. “We talked about them on many occasions. We were together in there three days; not only during the day, but at night, too, ’cause they had me bunking down there. Three nights is a long time. He could’ve told me his life story starting from the day he was born in three nights.”

“Describe the next occasion you talked about the murders.”

“It was the next day,” Dwayne said. “I’d finished changing his behind again …” He smiled over that; a few of the male jurors did, also. “The TV was on and they were talking about those murders. You couldn’t get away from it. So we’re watching, him and me, and he starts telling me stuff about them.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“All kinds of stuff. How this delivery route of his took him by where all the crimes had been committed, how he’d seen all those sorry hookers out on the streets, how he laughed at them when they hit on him because he could get as much … can I say the word?” he asked modestly.

“Use the words the defendant used when he talked to you, as accurately as you can remember,” Abramowitz told him.

“He said he could get as much pussy as he wanted. He was beating the ladies off with a stick. He had no need for whores … he said ho’s, the way black guys do on the street. He was contemptuous of them. Very contemptuous.”

“Go on,” she prodded Dwayne. Not that he needed it.

“He said he’d been where all them ‘bitches’—his term—had been murdered. The specific streets and alleys. Then he started bragging about his status—that the delivery route was a cover for his real business, which was dealing drugs. He was making thousands of dollars a week dealing drugs, and he had a Jeep Cherokee on order, and all kinds of crap.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Not about the big-time dealer stuff. A big-time dealer doesn’t pull a holdup, no matter how much money’s at stake.”

Wyatt caught Dexter’s stare from the second row. Marvin’s best friend was shaking his head in sad agreement.

“What about the other things he told you? About his delivery route, his prowess with women, things like that.”

“That sounded real to me,” Dwayne said. “He was on sure ground when he said those things. And like, I was changing his bandages, down there by his private parts. I got a look at his package—I couldn’t avoid seeing him. He has the goods, for sure. He’d be real popular in prison, I can tell you that.”

Marvin groaned, sitting next to Wyatt.

“What about his connections to the murders?” Abramowitz asked. “Did you think he was truthful talking about them? About his connections, what he knew?”

“I was skeptical at first,” the informant admitted. “Guys are all the time copping to crimes they haven’t done. Status, like I said. In prison, status is all.”

“What changed your mind?”

“When he started telling me things that no one who wasn’t close to those murders would know. Either he’d been there, seen them when they were committed, or he had heard about them from someone who was.”

“You’re saying he either had committed the murders himself or knew who did.”

“From all the things he told me, I couldn’t see any other explanation.”

“Go on.”

“So then I got to probing. Let’s face it, I’m an informant. I’ve done this before. I know how to get guys to open up.”

“How do you do that?” she asked. “Get men to confess their crimes to you?”

“It’s easy,” he told her. “Anyone can do it. All you need is to show them that you care. And you give them the impression you’re sharing your secrets with them. That’s how you get them to trust you, even though anyone with a brain in his head would know not to, that there’s spies everywhere.”

Marvin had spilled his guts out all over the floor of that infirmary. Wyatt knew that for a fact—he didn’t dispute that. It was
what
he’d told Thompson, and what he
didn’t
know, that he
couldn’t
tell—that was the crux of all this.

“So he said to you, ‘I’m the Alley Slasher, I committed all those murders they’re talking about’?”

Dwayne shook his head like she was a schoolgirl asking a dumb question. “No. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Describe to us how it does work.”

“You lead him into it. Nice, easy talk. You talk about the crime you know he did—the armed robbery—and you move on from there. ‘You’re shitting me, man,’ you josh him. ‘Give me a real piece of information that you know about that hasn’t been all over the newspapers.’ ”

“And he did.”

Dwayne nodded in the affirmative.

“What was the first piece of information he gave you that hadn’t been publicized.”

“The name of the club and the street location where the last victim was found.”

“Which was not public knowledge at the time.”

“I didn’t know it. And he’d been in there with me all that time, so if I didn’t know it, he couldn’t, either.”

“But he saw that location on television, so he could have known where it was from prior knowledge.”

“That’s true,” Dwayne admitted.

“What was the first thing he told you that he couldn’t have known from prior knowledge, couldn’t have seen,” she asked. “That only someone who was there at one of the murders, or knew someone who was there, could know?”

“He told me that victim number three was a transvestite.”

A low murmur rippled through the room.

“He told you that?” she asked.

“Yes. And he described some articles of clothing the transvestite was wearing.”

Marvin grabbed Wyatt’s pad and scribbled ferociously on it. Wyatt read the note: “I never tell him nothing about no clos.”

Wyatt knew that already. He irritably pushed the pad away, keeping his attention on Dwayne.

“What was the piece of information the defendant told you,” Abramowitz asked, “that made you believe he could be the murderer? What convinced you?”

“He was telling me different things about different ones,” Dwayne said, “all of which were ‘insider’ type information, but things a street-smart person might have heard—although he knew an awful lot about all the crimes. You wouldn’t expect someone to pick up that much secret information about so many of them unless he was close to them.”

“But the specific piece that convinced you,” she pressed. “Was there one specific piece of information that pushed you from thinking he
might
know who did it to your thinking it was him?”

“Yes.”

“And what was that?”

“He told me something about the last victim, which nobody could have known about, except the actual killer.”

“And what
exactly
was it he told you about the last victim, Paula Briggs, that only the real killer could have known?”

“He said he had raped and killed her deep in the alley, in a hidden doorway, where nobody could see them. Then after he’d killed her, he was all hyped up, excited. From doing it, you know, and also because he wanted to go out and rob that store he’d been waiting on. So he had a smoke, to calm his nerves. And when he finished he wiped the butt off on the hem of her dress, to get rid of his fingerprints, and shoved the cigarette butt up her … up her behind. Kind of like a calling card, you might say. Before he dumped her body in the trash can.”

“He told you that?” she asked, her voice almost choking with shock.

Dwayne nodded. “That he did.”

“What did you do? What did you think?”

“I looked at him, kind of bad guy to bad guy, you know, like we’re both down for the count, we share all our secrets, and I said to him, kind of sly and casual, like it wasn’t no big thing, ‘ ’Fess up, man. You’re bullshittin’ me, ain’t you.’ Because at the time, nobody knew about that. And it sounded so weird and preposterous. I figured it had to be a shuck. And he looked at me and said, ‘You’ll see, Dwayne. It’s true. I did it.’ ”

In the pandemonium that ensued Grant hammered his gavel for quiet and called for a half-hour recess.

Abramowitz spent the rest of the day and all of the next walking Dwayne through the seven murders. Like an idiot savant who has memorized verbatim the entire unabridged
Oxford English Dictionary,
he recited, chapter and verse, everything he said Marvin had told him. The most minute details were remembered—how many hair barrettes victim number five wore, and what color they were. That victim number two’s bra was a front-fastener, rather than one that hooked in the back. The peach-colored rayon underpants victim number three, the transvestite, was wearing (size large). On and on, an encyclopedic catalog of the rapes and murders.

Wyatt listened intently, cross-checking Dwayne’s statements against those he had given to the grand jury. He wrote Marvin a volume of questions: Did you tell him this? This? This?

“No,” Marvin answered. “I didn’t tell him none of that.”

Wyatt believed Marvin. Not only because he thought his client was innocent, which he did, but because of the incredibly specific and often arcane nature of the information. It wasn’t just that Marvin wouldn’t have remembered such details; he wouldn’t have noticed them in the first place, particularly at night, in dark, unlighted places. To observe and analyze and recall such details took time and an analytical mind, and Marvin possessed neither of those qualities. He was pure immature impulsive, acting before thinking out the consequences of his actions.

The botched robbery was a prime example. A smart, analytically inclined man would have test-fired his weapon prior to using it, to make sure it worked properly. Marvin White couldn’t remember what he’d had for breakfast three days ago, let alone the color of a skirt worn by a woman he had allegedly raped and killed eighteen months before.

He watched the jury’s faces. They weren’t thinking what he was thinking. They were thinking this was a great witness; a convict, to be sure, but not such a bad person—he had gotten his college degree with honors, hadn’t he? He—Dwayne—was trying to reclaim his life, do the right thing. Dwayne Thompson was giving them dozens, hundreds, of good, logical, convincing reasons to lay their doubt aside and do the right thing themselves.

At 5:15 on the second full day that Dwayne had been on the stand, Helena Abramowitz turned to Judge Grant. “We have no further questions for this witness, Your Honor.”

Grant didn’t have to look at the clock on the wall to know that enough was enough. He gaveled the session closed. “Cross-examination will begin tomorrow morning at nine o’clock,” he informed Wyatt.