The Guilty (28 page)

Bratt pulled his winter coat on over his robes and picked up a large document case.
They headed onto the elevator with a few other tenants of their office building and Bratt let his motor-mouth idle a bit. His dissertation was for Kouri’s benefit alone. Since he had first met the young lawyer his opinion of him had changed a great deal. He no longer worried about having to be his nursemaid, and in fact enjoyed giving him the benefit of his experience on just about every topic under the sun.

Out on the street again, he picked up where he had left off as they moved briskly along the sidewalk.

“We’ll try to get you some good-looking young ladies on the panel. That’ll make the next couple of weeks a bit more enjoyable.”

“Seriously
, other than good-looking women is there anybody else we should try to get on this jury?”

“Oh, sure. But it’s unlikely we’ll get twelve of Small’s peers up there, and that’s the only thing that would make a real difference in this trial.”

They got into the courthouse and headed left from the main lobby toward the corridor leading to room 3.01. As they turned the corner Bratt heard Kouri let out a sudden rush of breath at the sight of over a hundred potential jurors crowding the hallway. He looked over and saw the nervousness etched on the younger lawyer’s face.

“Buck up, me lad. You’ve dreamed of this moment ever since you saw Perry Mason on TV. These are your future fans, so give ’em a confident smile and keep walking.”

Kouri managed a tight grin and they moved forward again, politely pushing through the crowd. Many of the jury candidates turned to look at them as they passed, several of them whispering comments to their neighbors. It was a gauntlet of sorts that Bratt had run many times. Once through it, they passed through the doors and into the arena he had once thought of as his second home.

The courtroom was quiet and empty and, as they walked toward their side of the lawyers’ benches, Bratt kept looking over at Kouri, trying to see it all through his inexperienced eyes.

I guess I’m just an old whore,
he told himself.
My first time is just a faded memory. I hardly remember if I was scared, if it hurt. I can’t even picture my client’s face, there have been so many since then.

“
What’s so funny?” Kouri asked, having noticed a little smile forming on Bratt’s face.”

“Oh, nothing, nothing. Just try to remember this day, OK? Your first time. Hang on to the memory as long as you can.”

“You’re a sentimental old fool, Robert Bratt.” Kouri smiled at him.

“So I’ve discovered. Let’s keep it our little secret shall we?”

“What secret is that?” a woman’s voice asked from behind them.

Bratt turned and was surprised to find Nancy
Morin standing there, laden with an armful of file folders. He reached out to take them from her.

“Hey lady, need a hand with those?”

“Sentimental and chivalrous,” Kouri noted, then quickly got out of the way.

Bratt turned to give him a mock-angry glare, but couldn’t suppress the smile he felt coming on as Nancy came closer and put her hand on his arm.

“That’s what I liked about him in the first place.”

“What about the second place,” Bratt asked, jauntily.

“That I won’t answer in public. I just came by before Parent got here to wish you luck, Robert.”

“Really?” Bratt stood closer to her and whispered, “Aren’t you afraid to be seen consorting with the enemy.”

She smiled and pulled back a couple of steps.

“Yes, I am. So I’m going back to the safety of the Crown bench…for now.”

Bratt smiled and restrained himself from going after her. There was a time for everything, and their time would come later, he was glad to see.

Parent made his entrance soon after her, accompanied by St. Jean, whom Bratt now thought of as the prosecutor’s guard dog. They both nodded perfunctorily in Bratt’s direction before joining Nancy.

Bratt was tempted to say something sarcastic to St. Jean in retribution for the policeman’s allegations in the bar the week before. He looked over at Nancy, who was looking worriedly at him from behind a file folder, and decided that for once he’d keep his big mouth shut.

Getting the verdict he wanted would be the best retribution he could ask for.

At 9:25 a.m.
the court clerk announced over the intercom that all jury candidates should enter the courtroom. The hundred-plus people filed in slowly, almost hesitantly, and began looking for seats.

There were not enough places for all of them in the gallery, so some of them sat next to the lawyers, others filled the jury box, and four nervous souls were directed to sit in the empty prisoner’s dock behind the
defense bench. Looking worried, they constantly glanced over their shoulders at the locked door leading to the cells where Small was being held, almost expecting him to suddenly appear and be let loose among them.

At 9:30 precisely, just as the last candidates were seating themselves, a bailiff entered and told them to rise again. Judge Benjamin Green entered immediately after him and over two hundred eyes, most of them wide-eyed with curiosity and nervousness, focused on the small, fragile-looking old man as he slowly took his place.

“You may be seated,” the bailiff said, and everyone sat down at once, with an almost palpable sense of relief.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,
” Green sain in a somber voice, “and thank you for being here. As you know twelve of you will be chosen to form a jury in the trial we are beginning today. Now, being on a jury may seem like an inconvenience to some of you, and we all understand that. However, it is also one of the most important civic duties that you will be called on to perform in your day-to-day lives.”

Bratt half-listened to Green’s traditional welcoming speech. The actual words mattered little to him, but he felt a sense of comfort at the familiarity of the occasion. He was always a little nervous before the start of a trial, and doubly so when the stakes were so high. But it was a happy nervousness, one that reminded him of what it was that he loved about his work. 

He let slip a small smile at the realization that he had been able to use the “L-word” about his job again, something he wouldn’t have thought likely a week or two earlier.

He looked across at Parent, who seemed to be wrapped up in Green’s words, but was probably making a last-minute review of his own strategy in his head. As much as Parent disliked him personally, Bratt knew the prosecutor had a healthy respect for his courtroom skills. He didn’t reciprocate the feeling entirely, but he wasn’t taking the veteran prosecutor lightly either.

Green came to the end of his short speech and asked all the potential jurors to step out into the hallway. This allowed Nancy to recover her now-vacated seat next to Parent and sit down directly across from Bratt, from where she kept her attention focused on the judge.

Those candidates who wished to seek exemptions were called in next, to give their reasons why they should not have to serve on the jury. Only once this sometimes-lengthy proceeding was over would the actual jury selection begin
.

As the first candidate re-entered the courtroom, Bratt looked across at Nancy to see if she would continue to avoid eye contact with him. He was sure she looked at him occasionally from the corner of her eye, and he was equally sure that a small movement on her lips from time to time was a smile meant for him. Happy memories of their cross-courtroom flirtation during the lengthy Hall trial came back to him, and he was more optimistic than ever about the way the next two weeks would unfold.

One by one, men and women came in to petition for their release from the burden of jury duty. Some looked defiant, while others were obviously intimidated by the moment, but it seemed like everybody was looking for a way out today.

It took over two hours to listen to the litany of reasons for exemption and for the judge to rule on them.
The morning crawled to an end with less than half the jury selected. Everyone got up and stretched, then went for lunch. Kouri looked a bit disappointed that his first murder trial had gotten off to such a stuttering start. He had been looking forward to some dramatic action. Bratt smiled and reassured him that things would pick up soon enough. He would have to be just a little more patient.

“This is just the salad,” Bratt said. “They make you wait a bit for the steak.”

To Kouri’s chagrin, the main course was not served until Wednesday morning, March 15. Up to that point the trial’s preliminaries unfolded pretty much as expected.

On Monday afternoon the last jurors were chosen with little fanfare. Only one candidate had been refused for having read about the shootings the previous summer and forming an opinion as to the guilt of the accused. Soon after Parent gave his opening statement to the jury and Bratt found it somewhat uninspired.

“Young men with guns,” Parent had intoned in the gravest of voices. “Children, almost, playing at grown-up games with toys that kill. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the sad story that you will be hearing in this trial.”

Bratt noticed that Jennifer Campbell made her first appearance at the trial that afternoon. She listened to Parent’s opening speech from the back of the room, staring coldly at his back. She had quietly slipped into the room during jury selection and then left quickly when court broke for the day, without saying a word to Bratt. He felt no particular need to speak to her either, but he couldn’t help wondering why she no longer seemed to need to speak to him.

As for Small, he behaved as well as could be expected. He
didn’t glare menacingly at anyone in the room, although the expression on his face was less than friendly. Most importantly, he listened attentively to Bratt’s instructions and did what he was told.

The first witness, the crime-scene technician, was called on Tuesday morning. He filed into evidence three small albums containing a hundred-odd pictures of the shooting site, including some fairly graphic ones of the two deceased lying in pools of their own blood. Several jurors of both sexes squirmed at the sight of these photos and cast quick, awed looks in Small’s direction, seemingly amazed that he possessed the ability to commit such mayhem.

The witness presented a floor plan of the apartment, with distances and angles of fire that had been determined by the location of bullets found imbedded in the walls and in the victims’ bodies. This map was key, Bratt thought, as he hoped it would show that from where the surviving victim, Dorell Phillips, had sat he couldn’t have had as good a look at his assailant as he had claimed.

The rest of Tuesday had been spent listening to two young patrolmen who took turns describing in detail how they had been first on the scene of the crime, had secured it to prevent the loss or destruction of evidence and had stayed with Phillips, placing pressure on his bleeding wounds until
Urgences Santé
had arrived.

Phillips’s injuries had prevented him from speaking at that point, they said, or they surely would have gotten a description of the gunmen from him. As it was, they made it clear that their timely arrival had saved his life.

Then, finally, on Wednesday morning the jurors got what they had been waiting for: Dorrell Phillips himself, with two small mounds of flesh protruding from the lower left side of his neck, where the miraculously non-fatal bullets had exited his body, took the stand.  

He was in his early twenties, with a short, wiry build. His eyes, behind his rimless glasses, flitted about the courtroom nervously when he first took the stand. However he quickly fixed them on an imaginary point on the countertop in front of him. When he answered questions he rarely looked up from that point to face his questioner, and he spoke with a soft, sad voice, as if retelling the story was something he would have preferred not doing. 

The faces of the jurors betrayed their evident sympathy for him. He had passed within millimeters of losing his life and then regained his consciousness just in time to find his older brother’s bullet-riddled body. That he should have recovered, at least physically, from such a trauma merited him that sympathy, Bratt had no doubt. He only hoped that it didn’t render his testimony beyond reproach in the jury’s eyes. 

Parent began the young man’s testimony by guiding him through a detailed description of how he had spent the day of June 14, 1999, letting him get comfortable on the stand, while allowing the jury to observe him and get to know him as a person. Phillips described whom he had been with and what he had done in the hours leading up to his arrival at the apartment on Carrier Street, where he had gone looking for his brother Dexter.

He had found him there that night, getting high on crack cocaine, as he knew he would. He wanted to take his brother home before their father went looking for him. Even though Dexter was his senior by three years, it was Dorrell’s lot in life to be his brother’s keeper.

“Now, Mr. Phillips,” Parent said, sounding like a solicitous
maitre d’
directing a client to his table, “please tell the jury what happened next. And please let me remind you to speak loudly, so that everyone can hear your testimony.”

“Well, at that point I told Dexter that I’d had enough. I wanted to get home because I knew my dad was going to be angr
y. He said he had to go take a…go to the bathroom first, so I sat on the sofa, waiting for him.”

“That sofa we see here, in the living room, on Exhibit P-3,” Parent noted, pointing at the floor plan of the apartment that had been taped up on a blackboard for all to see.

“Yeah, right here on the near end. Indian was sitting watching TV, next to me, here. Then somebody rang the bell from downstairs. I didn’t even pay attention, ’cause there were people coming and going there all the time.

“So Indian went to the door, it’s to the left side of the living room, and buzzed them up. Then, he opened the door to see who it was.”

“You saw him do this?”

“Yeah, kinda outta the corner of my eye, ’cause mostly I was looking at the TV. After a bit I heard him talking to somebody at the door. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Indian sounded angry. I really wasn’t paying much attention up till then.”

“Go on.”

“So, suddenly I hear the door slam real loud. I turn to look right away and I see Indian standing inside the door and there’s two other guys with him. Indian looks surprised, and one of the guys, the taller one, grabs him by the shoulder and pushes him face down onto the floor. That’s when I notice that these guys, not Indian I mean, these two other guys, they had guns in their hands.”

“Do you remember in which hand they carried the guns?”

“I remember the tall one. I know he had it in his left hand, because he pushed Indian down with his right hand. So he was waving it around in his left hand.”

Bratt knew, as Parent surely did, that Small was left-handed. He scribbled a note and slid it over to Kouri.

“I thought left-handedness was a sign of genius.”

Kouri gave him a wide-eyed look, shocked that Bratt would be passing notes in the middle of the trial. To Bratt’s amusement, he slid the note furtively into his pocket.

“Now, tell me, Mr. Phillips. Did anybody say anything at this point?”

“Yeah. The tall one spoke. When he pushes Indian down he yells out, ‘I’m here for your shit, so nobody fuckin’ move.’ That’s exactly what he said. I’ll never forget that.”

“No,” Parent nodded solemnly, “I’m sure you won’t.”

“Thing was,” Phillips went on, “it made no sense, ’cause as soon as Indian was down on the floor he shot him. So, I mean, why did he tell us not to move? Nobody moved, nobody had time to do anything, and he killed us.”

Phillips paused, head now hanging even further down, and wiped a tear from his eye. Bratt could only look on admiringly.

“He killed us,”
he thought.
That’s a pretty good turn of phrase. I wonder if Parent came up with it. 

As for Parent, he looked on quietly while his witness composed himself, a priest waiting patiently for a penitent to unburden himself.

“When you’re able to continue, Mr. Phillips.”

The witness nodded, sniffling softly, then turned his red eyes up to the jurors.

“Like I said,” he continued, “as soon as Indian was on his stomach the tall guy shot him twice. Bang, bang! Real fast.”

“Could you describe how the two gunmen were standing and exactly what they were doing at that point.”

“Sure. The little guy was just in the corner, all kind of squeezed into it, like he didn’t want to be there. He didn’t point his gun at Indian. He kind of held it at his hip, pointing straight, but not really at me or anybody.

“The tall guy was standing over Indian. His feet were next to Indian’s head, one on each side. When he shot, he pointed the gun straight down, between his feet, at Indian’s head. Like I said,
he took two shots, real quick.”

“Go on.”

“Then he looks up at me, and I’m still sitting on the sofa.”

“You didn’t get down on the floor when he told you to?”

“No, I was too surprised. I didn’t know if it was really a hold-up or just a joke, or what. He just yells it out and I’m still thinking, what’s he mean by that? Then suddenly, bang, bang, he’s shot Indian. And I’m still sitting there ’cause I can’t believe this is real. I never saw nobody die before. I didn’t think it was so easy. I wasn’t even thinking that he might want to shoot me. I don’t know what I was thinking.

“Then he pointed the gun at me and began walking at me, staring at me. And he yelled, ‘Get the fuck on the floor or I’ll shoot you too.’ That’s when I got off the sofa. I didn’t even think that he was probably gonna shoot me when I’m lying down anyway. I just got down real fast.”

“Which way were you facing?”

“
I lay down straight ahead of me, with my feet at the sofa, on my stomach.”

“Could you get a good look at him at this time?”

“Oh yeah. He was looking straight at me when he walked this way, pointing the gun. Then, when I lay down, I sorta got on my knees first, then on my stomach, and the whole time I was looking at him over my left shoulder.

“When I lay down I turned my face so I was looking right into the carpet. I couldn’t see him or anything then. I thought maybe if I don’t look at him he’ll just go away.”

“But he didn’t go away, did he?”

“No sir. I heard footsteps coming at me. Then from just behind me I heard him ask me if I got
a gun. At the same time, I felt somebody pull on the back of my pants, on the belt, like they wanted to check if I hid a gun there or something. That’s when I turned my head and looked up at him again. He was down low, leaning over me and I could see his face from real close. He was grinning and I saw there was something wrong with his teeth.”

“What do you mean, ‘something wrong’?”

“On the bottom, the middle teeth were all sorta bent, like an opening between them. That’s how I knew for sure that it was him when the cops showed me his picture.”

“Yes, good. We’ll get to his picture later. Please continue with what happened after you saw his face.”

“That was it.”

“That was it?”

“Yeah, that was the last thing I remember. After a bit it was like I was waking up from a dream. I felt my head really hurting me and I had trouble breathing. I was swallowing something hot each time I took a breath. The doctor told me later it was blood from where the bullet come out of my throat.”

Phillips tentatively reached up and touched the protrusions at the side of his neck, like a doubting Thomas checking to see if the wounds could possibly have been real. Parent’s eyes followed Phillips’s hand as it lightly touched his neck, a look of approval on his face.

“Did you hear anything else at that point?”

“No, I don’t think so. I remember hearing some footsteps running further away, maybe in the hall going to the kitchen. But I’m pretty sure that was just before I got shot, or, at least, before I blacked out.”

“Of course. You didn’t hear the gun go off when you were shot, did you?”

“No, I don’t remember hearing anything after he asked me if I had a gun.”

“And did you feel it when you were struck by the bullet?”

“No, nothing, until later when I woke up.”

“I see. And this corridor to the kitchen, is that the way your brother Dexter had gone when he went to the bathroom?”

“Yeah. I think the bathroom was down the same hall. When I woke up, I didn’t even know I was shot, I just knew my head hurt a lot. Then I thought of Dexter, ’cause I didn’t see him when the two guys came in. I wanted to know if he was OK, and I remembered the footsteps, so I tried getting up and kinda crawled across the floor to the hall.

“There’s a little corner there, where you go out of the living room, and when I went around it, that’s when I saw him. He was lying face down next to the bathroom door. There was blood on him everywhere. I couldn’t see his face, because of the blood.”

Phillips swallowed hard and stopped his recitation. He bowed his head again and put one hand over his eyes, as if to block out the sight of his dead brother. Bratt didn’t look toward the jury, but he could sense how their breathing had quieted and their note-taking had stopped. They were clearly hanging on every word of Phillips’s testimony, and more than likely were sitting forward on the edge of their seats.

A minute or two passed while Phillips sobbed quietly into his hand. Bratt wanted to feel true pity for the young man who was mourning his brother, and he hoped that his face showed at least a trace of it. His mind, though, was darting around the room, trying to pick up the reactions of both the judge and the jury, weighing how their obvious sympathy for the witness would affect his eventual cross-examination.