The Guilty (29 page)

Kid gloves,
he told himself.
Firm, persistent questioning, but sensitive to his tragic experience. This is going to be a hell of a balancing act.

Phillips cleared his throat and put his hand down, signifying he would try to go on, although his eyes were still brimming with tears.

“I, I crawled toward him, toward my brother, Dexter. I guess I said his name, maybe a couple of times. I tugged on his arm a bit, but I was scared to touch him more. I knew he was dead, but I was scared to touch him more…”

His voice trailed off, Parent nodded ever so slightly, and Bratt heard several throats being cleared, as well as a nose or two being blown, from the direction of the jury. Softly, gently even, Green spoke up.

“I think this would be a good time for our morning recess. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid I can only give you fifteen minutes.”

Bratt put his hands on his lower back and stretched as he walked toward the men’s room halfway down the long courthouse hall. Kouri walked next to him, silent for one of the few times since Bratt had known him.

They had seen Mrs. Campbell come in just as the trial had begun that morning, and then quickly slip out again when Green had adjourned. Once again, as had been the case since Monday, she had said nothing to either Bratt or Kouri.

They entered the bathroom and found Parent already occupying one of the three urinals there. Bratt sidled up to him, while Kouri, looking a bit embarrassed, headed for a stall.

“How do you like the boy?” Parent asked, without turning to look at Bratt.

“He’s good, I have to admit that. I don’t know if it’s real or if it’s just a put-on, but he is good.”

“
You don’t know if it’s
real
!” Parent exclaimed, offended. “After what he went through that night, what is there to doubt?”

“Take it easy, Francis. We’ve both seen stranger things in our time.”

“Really? Considering the loved ones that you’ve lost in your lifetime I would have expected a bit more understanding from you.”

He zipped up, backed away from the automatic-flushing urinal and turned toward a sink as he spoke.

“Don’t let the jury see how cold-hearted you’ve become, Robert. They’re probably feeling very protective of the young boy right about now.”

This is a tough enough job as it is
, Bratt thought, saying nothing in reply.
Getting all mushy about a witness’s misery won’t make what I have to do any easier.

Once Parent had left the restroom Kouri approached, finally ready to share his thoughts and impressions about his first murder trial.

“Boy, this is really something. I don’t know if it’s all an act or not, but a couple of times today it was all I could do not to cry.”

“Et tu, Brute?”

“What? Why?”

“Nothing, nothing. I was hoping you’d be the one person who didn’t think Dorrell Phillips was a wonderfully tragic figure, just one step away from being canonized.”

“I know what you mean. I was trying to dislike him, but it isn’t easy. And he sounds convincing when he identifies Marlon. He seems to have had a really good look at him…at the shooter, I mean.”

Now Bratt smiled his “I told you so” smile.

“Wait a minute. Is this Peter ‘Marlon is Innocent’ Kouri talking? Don’t tell me you’re beginning to have doubts about your main man. You knew what Phillips was going to say before today, so why are you having doubts only now?”

“I’m not having doubts. I’m just saying that when you hear him in person, I could imagine that the jury would find him very believable.”

“Oh yes, he is very believable. But that doesn’t change what we have to do, it only makes it harder. Come on, let’s get back before they start the show without us.”

After the break Phillips picked up the narrative when he was in the hospital, recuperating from his wounds. On June 20, a few days before he was eventually released, S/D St. Jean had shown up with an armload of high school yearbooks for him to look through. An anonymous phone call to St. Jean’s office the day before had suggested that one or both of the shooters had attended Dorset High School in the Cote des Neiges District, several kilometers north of where the shooting had occurred. The police had never been able to trace the source of this information, but they were certainly glad to have gotten it.

“I remember this was the first day they had taken the tube out of my throat, so I could talk a little,” Phillips explained. “But Mr. St. Jean still asked me to write most of my answers down.”      

“And what did he ask you to do?”

“He said that maybe the guys who shot me had no criminal records, so there would be no police pictures of them. He wanted me to see if I recognized any faces from the yearbooks.”

“So you didn’t identify anybody from the mug shots?”

“No. There was one guy who looked a bit like the tall guy, the one who shot me. But it wasn’t him. So Mr. St. Jean showed me the yearbooks, I think there were ten of them. At the time, he didn’t tell me about the call saying the two guys were from Dorset, so I didn’t know why he had chosen those books.”

“Did you ever attend Dorset?”

“No, I never lived up there. I always went to school in Burgundy.”

“So, tell us about the yearbooks.”

“I looked at them in order, from 1989, I think. There were a lot of pictures of young black guys. And in two of the books I found pictures of the guys who shot everybody in the apartment.”

“Do you remember from which years?”

“I think the tall guy was 199
5. And the short guy was in the last year, 1998.”

“Can you describe for us exactly how it happened, what you did and said when you spotted these pictures?”

“Yes. The procedure was pretty much the same for each yearbook. They handed them to me in the bed and I flipped through the pages on my own. Nobody said anything to me, nobody asked me any questions. Sometimes I made a comment, like if I maybe knew a guy or if somebody looked like somebody else. I wrote those comments down on a piece of paper that Mr. St. Jean gave me.

“When I got to 1995
, it was the same way. In the beginning of the book there were lots of pictures of school activities and stuff. Poems and stories too. Then there was the big part, which had each student’s picture. Each one said something about himself under it, you know, their best memories and stuff. That’s where I saw him.”

“Mr. Phillips, can you tell the jurors the name of the person whose picture you chose?”

“Marlon Small.”

“
Did you know Mr. Small before?”

“No sir.”

“Had you ever seen his face anywhere before?”

“Yeah. The day he shot me.”

“Yes, of course. I meant before
that
date, had you ever seen Mr. Small’s face?”

“Oh, no. Never.”

Parent coolly reached his hand out to Nancy and she handed him a thin green book, with some sort of gold inlay on the front of it. He showed it to Phillips.

“Mr. Phillips, do you recognize this book?”

“Yes. It’s the 1995 Dorset yearbook.”

“Can you open it to the page that’s been marked and tell the jury what you see there.”

“It’s the picture that I ID’ed.”

“What is written under it?”

“The handwriting part? I wrote that. It says, ‘guy who shot me.’ And I signed my name and the date, June 20, 1999.”

Parent slipped the book from Phillips’s hands and handed it to the court clerk.

“Please file this under Exhibit P-7.”

He stepped back a few steps from Phillips now, so that the jury’s attention would be focused entirely on the witness.

“Mr. Phillips. I’d like you to look around this room and tell us if you see the person whose picture you identified for the police last June 20.”

Phillips began turning his head slowly around. When his gaze came to Small it stopped and held there for a few seconds. He turned back to face the jury and stretched out his right arm, pointing straight at Small in the prisoner’s box.

“Him. He shot me.”

Parent turned to the judge, a serene smile on his lips, and bowed.

“We have no more questions for this witness, My Lord.”

Green turned to address the jurors before Bratt had a chance to say anything.

“Considering the time, I think we’ll put off the cross-examination until after lunch. Two-fifteen, Mr. Bratt.”

Bratt stood and politely bowed. He said nothing, not wanting to give the jurors the impression that he felt in any way unnerved by Phillips’s identification of his client, as if he had ever doubted it. He could see the jurors’ eyes passing from him to Small, and the question they all seemed to be asking in their hearts came through loud and clear:

“What do you have to say for yourselves now?”

That afternoon, Bratt’s cross-examination took Phillips through his story once more, making sure the witness stuck to what he had testified to that morning. Phillips never backtracked. He insisted on every fact as if it had been set in concrete, and that suited Bratt just fine.

“I’d like to go back to the moment the two gunmen entered the apartment,” Bratt said as he
walked over to the floor plan on the blackboard.

“If you wanna talk about it again.”

“I’ll try not to bore you. You said you heard the door slam and you turned your head to look at the group that was standing just inside the doorway.”

“Yeah,” Phillips replied, showing some irritation at having to go over the facts yet again.

“You pointed to this sofa and said you were sitting at the near end, here. I believe you said you were leaning your head on the back of the sofa.”

“
That’s how most people watch TV.”

“I gather the TV show didn’t have you sitting on the edge of your seat.”

“No, it didn’t.”

“You didn’t lean forward at all? Not even when the door slammed?”

“No,” Phillips answered with a shake of his head, not even trying to hide his exasperation now. His soft, hesitant attitude of that morning had disappeared quickly once the cross-examination began.

“Fine, fine. Now you drew an ‘X’ next to the door where the taller of the two assailants was standing when he shot Indian. Standing right over his head.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And from the pictures in P-2 we can see Indian’s body, and where his head is in regards to the entrance, and your ‘X’ is really very accurate.”

Parent stretched his long frame up and raised his hands, as if pleading for mercy, toward Judge Green.

“My Lord, is my colleague planning to get to some sort of point?”

“Why,” Green growled, “do you have a train to catch?”

Parent was clearly surprised at the judge’s response, but not nearly as surprised as Bratt was. Bratt looked at Green’s face and thought,
The old fart’s caught on. Now if only I haven’t lost the jury yet.

“Go on, Mr. Bratt,” Green said.

“Thank you, My Lord. Mr. Phillips, would you be so kind as to take this ruler and draw a straight line from where your head was as you sat on the sofa to where the taller of the two assailants was standing.”

Phillips hesitated and looked over to Parent, suspecting some sort of trap, but the prosecutor did not return his look. Shrugging, the witness took up the ruler and the pen with which he had been marking the floor plan and did as Bratt asked. He then stepped back and looked indifferently at his questioner.

Bratt couldn’t resist letting a little smile come to his lips as he saw an expression of discomfort appear on Parent’s face.

“You must have X-ray vision, Mr. Phillips.”

“Huh,” Phillips responded, turning to look again at the floor plan. Then he looked confused, as if someone had changed the picture without his noticing. The line he had drawn passed from his position on the sofa and through part of the living room wall, before ending at the “X” near the apartment door.

“You did say that as soon as you heard the door slam you just turned your head and saw the taller one push Indian down and then shoot him?”

“Yes,” Phillips replied, hesitating slightly now even though this was the fifth time that he had been asked some variation of that same question.

“And you also said you never leaned forward, nor sat on the edge of your seat. Yet, as you can see on this very accurate floor plan, from where you were sitting this wall sticking out here would have totally blocked your view of the entrance. Isn’t that puzzling?”

Phillips’s hand reached out to the floor plan and he ran his finger along the straight line he had traced, looking for some sort of explanation.

“I know what I saw, okay?”

“So you say. What I want to know is how you saw what you say you did?”

Phillips didn’t answer, but just folded his arms across his chest, half in defiance, half as a defensive reflex.

“You’ve told the jury that you had a perfectly clear view of the taller assailant’s face from the moment he entered the apartment. You said you could see his face when he spoke, when he pushed Indian to the ground and when he stood over his head and shot him. Is that not what you have been saying all day?”