A House on Liberty Street

by Neil Turner

  I pause a beat to let the jury absorb Sandy’s assessment before asking, “Officer O’Reilly was being abusive to Mr. Valenti?”

  “Oh yes, I’d say so. Very. Andy shouted, ‘Looks like you messed with the village one too many times, old man.’” Sandy blushes and looks into her lap when she swears. “‘Only a dumbass wop right off the boat is stupid enough to keep pissing them off. You’re gonna pay now,’” she adds. “Something like that.”

  “What did Mr. Valenti do then?”

  “Well, I don’t know what he did. I told you I couldn’t see.”

  Feeling foolish, I ask, “How did Mr. Valenti respond?”

  “He didn’t say much. Andy called Mr. Valenti a dago and told him to go back to Italianoland, then started yelling at him to open the door. ‘Open the fucking door!’ he shouted.”

  “Did Deputy O’Reilly say why Mr. Valenti needed to open the door?”

  “Yes. Something about having to give him papers so they could throw his wop ass out of the house. Then he screamed at Mr. Valenti to quit jerking him around or he’d rip the door off its hinges and come in after him. The banging started again, but louder and sharper, like maybe Andy was kicking the door or hitting it with something hard. He said it was about time the village ran Mr. Valenti’s wop ass outta town.”

  “He seemed to like that expression,” I observe, ruing the fact that I’d never get the chance to stuff O’Reilly’s words back down his throat.

  “That was Andy O’Reilly. Loud and rude and obnoxious. From the day he was born until the day he died.”

  “Objection!” Dempsey shouts. “Do we need to keep abusing the memory of this poor man, Your Honor?”

  “I think you’ve made your personal feelings about Officer O’Reilly abundantly clear, Mrs. Russo,” Mitton tells her quietly. “There’s no need to do so again.”

  Sandy blushes slightly and nods.

  “You can continue to tell us what you heard O’Reilly say and do,” I tell her. “Did Mr. Valenti start yelling, too?

  “Not really. Mr. Valenti’s a pretty easygoing guy. He likes to play the stern patriarch role but he’s pretty soft under all that. He’s a marshmallow with the kids.”

  I smile. The jury should like that. I decide to keep quiet and see where Sandy leads us.

  Her voice takes on an angry edge. “Andy said some real nasty things about Mrs. Valenti. Called her an old bitch who shoulda learned to mind her own business. Mr. Valenti got a little angry then. He told Andy not to speak ill of his dead wife—Mr. Valenti’s wife, that is. She passed away last summer.”

  She looks up at me with a sad smile. “Real nice lady… but you know that.” Then she seems to remember where we are and blushes.

  I noticed a few jurors wince at O’Reilly’s comments about my mother. “Did O’Reilly say anything else about Mrs. Valenti?” I ask in hopes of stoking their anger.

  Sandy’s brow furrows in fury. “Andy said he was happy when he heard she died. He joked that maybe the real estate developer poisoned her to help clean up the neighborhood.”

  I’m glad Papa shot the bastard. Too bad someone didn’t do it years sooner.

  I let the ugliness of O’Reilly’s comments hang in the air for a moment. “How long were you outside listening to this, Mrs. Russo?”

  “I can’t say for sure. I almost missed dessert by the time I went back in. Maybe as long as five minutes.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I remember Andy shouting that he was gonna turn the door into scrap metal.”

  “Did Mr. Valenti sound afraid while this was going on?”

  “He did,” Sandy replies. “Who wouldn’t? Andy just went on and on shouting obscene, ugly words. He kept yelling at Mr. Valenti to open the door and calling him awful names and that he’d teach him not to mess with the cops. He said he was coming in and that Mr. Valenti would be one sorry wop when he did. God, it went on so long!” She pauses with a distraught expression and sounds stricken when she adds, “Then I heard what sounded like metal screeching and glass breaking.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Andy shouted ‘I’ve got you now, you little prick!’ That just chilled me, you know? It sounded like he was going to do something awful to Mr. Valenti. I was thinking I should do something—call 9-1-1 or something. Mr. Valenti shouted for Andy to leave, to leave him alone. Then, almost right after that, Andy shouted, ‘What the hell is this? That’s it you little fuck, you’re dead!’”

  I wait quietly for the conclusion I’m sure is coming.

  “That’s when I heard the shots,” Sandy says with haunted eyes. “I didn’t hear anything after that, so I went back inside and called 9-1-1.”

  The courtroom has been deathly silent throughout Sandy’s testimony, but a subdued buzz now surges through the courtroom. I let it settle before continuing. “You told the police all of this the morning after the shooting?”

  “Pretty much,” Sandy replies. “Maybe in a little less detail. They didn’t seem interested, to be honest. They didn’t seem surprised or much concerned about Andy’s behavior.”

  “You never heard from the police again?”

  “Not until they gave me a ride here this morning.”

  I lock eyes with Mike Williams across the room. He nods.

  I smile at Sandy. “Thank you for coming forward, Mrs. Russo. Nothing further, Your Honor.”

  Dempsey’s cross-examination fails to damage Sandy or diminish the power of her testimony. The judge calls for a recess.

  I catch up to Sandy in the hallway after we leave the courtroom. Her husband and parents are with her, but she slides a few feet away from them when she sees me coming. We exchange greetings, albeit stiffly, and then I ask why she decided to quit fighting us.

  “Aside from being hauled down here by the police?” she asks. She does so without rancor.

  “Besides that.”

  “Phil wanted me to. So did Mom and Dad.”

  “I’m glad they did.”

  “That’s not all,” she says. “There were my memories of Amy and your mother. I imagined my father in your father’s shoes. Seeing you take down those jerks from Titan made an impression, too. Maybe you do care about Liberty Street.”

  “I really appreciate it, Sandy.”

  “This will sound selfish,” she says with downcast eyes, “but part of it was O’Reilly’s kid getting arrested. I realized I could get up and tell my story without that little monster taking it out on my daughter. I’m sorry I almost let that get in the way of doing the right thing. I apologize for that.”

  “All’s well that ends well.”

  “Is this going to end well?”

  It’s a good question.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Mike and I head for his office to map strategy.

  “I guess you were right, after all,” he says after we sit down. “The stage is set for Francesco to tell his story.”

  My mind’s eye conjures up a vision of Dempsey asking my father if he’s ever attacked or hurt anyone and Papa relating the story of killing his sister’s kidnapper. How do I walk back my argument that he should testify without telling Mike about Papa’s secret?

  “Hey,” Mike says when I don’t respond. “You okay?”

  “I don’t want to put him on the stand.”

  Mike studies me for a long moment. “Why the change of heart? Cold feet?”

  “I think we’ve made our case. Quit while we’re ahead?”

  Mike ponders that for a long moment. “Having the jury see and hear Francesco tell the story he told us might seal the deal, Tony. Like I say, the stage is set for that.”

  “What if Dempsey trips him up? What if Papa stumbles when he gets up there?”

  “Did he have trouble telling you the story again last night?”

  No. He told me a different story that I can’t share. I shrug, not wanting to lie. “There were differences. He was a little shaky. I think the risk of things going wrong on the stand outweighs the
upside. We’ve made the case for self-defense, Mike.”

  He takes a deep breath, steeples his fingers, and stares up at the ceiling for a good two minutes before his eyes drop back to mine. “Maybe you’re right.”

  Maybe I’m not, I think while a crushing weight of responsibility settles over me.

  “You sure about this?”

  I swallow and nod.

  He slaps a hand on the desk. “Okay then, my friend.”

  We turn our attention to our closing argument, which we’ve been assembling in bits and pieces for the past day. With the screen door photo and Sandy Russo’s testimony in hand, we’re no longer playing for favorable sentencing on a reduced charge.

  “I like it,” Mike announces after we work for a half-hour. “Hits the high points, casts a shitload of doubt on the prosecution’s case, and sets us up to win this thing.”

  “I think we’ve got it right, so long as Dempsey hasn’t saved any surprises for rebuttal.”

  “I want you to deliver our closing argument,” Mike says after a sober pause. “You’re better up there than I am.”

  What the hell has gotten into him? I shake my head emphatically. “I don’t think so.”

  “Seriously, Tony. You’re damned good in front of a jury. The way you dismantled Molly O’Reilly was a friggin work of art and your handling of Sandy Russo was dazzling.”

  “Dazzling?” I laugh. “Who the hell says that nowadays?”

  Mike’s eyes twinkle. “As in ‘I was positively dazzled by the brilliant oratorical skills of my skinny-assed understudy,’ my friend.”

  “You opened, Mike. You close. That’s tradition. This is no time to mess with the natural order of things.”

  “Tradition don’t mean shit to me, Tony. Let me make a final point and then we can arm wrestle or something to settle this.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A son standing up there arguing for the life of his father would be some powerful shit.”

  “That’s straight up emotional manipulation,” I retort. “A lot of folks hate that. Me, for example. It may play well with some jurors, but it could backfire spectacularly with others.”

  “Good thing you’re not on the jury then, huh?” he replies with a grin. “I like the idea of you standing up there.”

  “You’re selling yourself short,” I reply. And way overselling me. “Your opening was terrific and you’ve bonded with the jury. You’re just the man to seal the deal.”

  Mike excuses himself for a bathroom break, leaving me alone at his desk with a six-inch mountain of case files. I wonder if I could do what he and his colleagues do. The system is stacked against most of their “clients” from the day they’re born. Too many are guilty of nothing more than being born with the wrong skin color and living in the wrong neighborhood. All too often, pretty good kids unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time become easy pickings for lazy policing and a justice system fixated on meeting arrest quotas and clearing cases. A lot of Mike’s clients are guilty of everything they’re accused of; after all, there’s a percentage of bad apples in any demographic. My time in the business world and corporate law taught me nothing if not that. But it’s also enabled me to recognize the disconcerting differences in how criminality plays out between different social milieus. Whereas a bad seed born to parents on Chicago’s Gold Coast or the tonier suburbs goes to the best schools and learns how to perpetrate white-collar crime as a Wall Street bankster, the same kid born into poverty on the South Side becomes a two-bit gangsta in the hood. The white-collar crook hides behind the best legal defense money can buy; the kid from the wrong side of the tracks gets an overburdened and underfinanced public attorney. As a rule, the public defender is woefully outgunned by a richly funded justice system that devours the poor and then trumpets its supposed successes and commitment to achieving law and order. The more I learn, the more it disgusts me. I realize with a start that Papa’s case is a variation on that theme.

  Mike startles me when he drops back into his chair. “Where have you been?” he asks with a smirk. “Imagining yourself wowing our jury with your closing statement?”

  Actually, my little reverie had pounded home the point that he has a wealth of experience arguing for people’s lives. I, on the other hand, have exactly none. “Nope. I’ve been imagining you up there having your very own Perry Mason moment. You’re closing, Mike.”

  He starts to roll up his shirtsleeve and clears some papers out of the way before he settles his elbow in the clearing with his hand up in the classic arm-wrestling pose.

  I chuckle. “Not happening. No more discussion—you’re delivering our closing argument.”

  “Aw shit, man, you ain’t no fun,” he grumbles, giving up easier and more gracefully than I expect him to.

  We get into a discussion about Brittany’s long-term plans on our way back to court; should she stay in Europe or should she come home? As for the short-term, Michelle is flying through O’Hare this evening and Brittany has a ticket to join her on the trip back to Brussels.

  In a speak-of-the-devil moment, Brittany and Pat exit a cab in front of the courthouse when Mike and I are a half-block away. We catch up while Pat pays.

  “Hey!” my daughter exclaims when I wrap my arms around her from behind.

  “Good lunch?” I ask.

  “Burgers and fries at Portillos,” Pat replies. “What’s not to like for a kid on her way back to the depravities of Europe?”

  We all file back into court. The judge arrives and summons the jury.

  “Mr. Williams?” he asks.

  Mike stands. “The defense rests, Your Honor.”

  Mitton glances at Papa in mild surprise, as if he’d expected him to take the stand. The judge recovers quickly and turns to the prosecutor. “Please deliver your rebuttal, Mr. Dempsey.”

  The prosecutor looks as surprised as we had been when he rested. He turns a hungry gaze on Papa, then asks for another recess.

  “We just came back in,” Mitton says. “I’ll give you five minutes to get organized.” Then he turns to the jury. “Keep your seats, folks. Sorry for the delay.”

  Mike dips his head and mutters out the side of his mouth, “I wonder how much time Alex spent preparing to rip into Francesco?”

  A lot, I’m thinking after seeing the predatory look Dempsey gave Papa. Maybe I was right about keeping Papa off the stand. Imagine that.

  “We may have dodged a bullet there,” Mike whispers.

  I slide my chair back when Brittany summons me. “What happens now?” she asks.

  I explain that the prosecution will offer any rebuttal witnesses they can muster to challenge the evidence we introduced in our case. “After that, Mike and Dempsey will deliver their closing arguments. Then the judge will give the case to the jury.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Judge Mitton will instruct them—explain how they should go about making a decision, point out what their options are, offer some suggestions to help them work through the evidence. Then he’ll send them off to reach a verdict.”

  “Does that take long?”

  “It shouldn’t,” Pat says airily. “Our guys kicked their asses.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Brittany says. “It’s gonna suck big time if I have to fly to Belgium without knowing what happened.”

  “What time’s your flight?” Mike asks.

  Brittany looks to Pat for the answer. How would she have gotten through this week without Pat?

  “You’ll need to leave for the airport no later than five or so,” Pat replies. “Things might be tight. Looking on the bright side, you’ve got that fancy new cell phone to keep in touch until your flight leaves.”

  That would be the fancy new $750 cell phone Pat and Brittany charged to my ABA credit card last night.

  The prosecution’s rebuttal, such as it is, lasts all of sixty-three minutes. I’m not surprised that Dempsey doesn’t want to dwell on the gaping holes we drilled in their case. Judge Mitton,
who is anxious to finish the trial this afternoon, makes Dempsey come right back to deliver the prosecution’s closing argument after a twenty-minute recess.

  The gist of Dempsey’s forty-minute closing argument is that Papa broke a cardinal rule of civilized society by attacking a law enforcement officer carrying out his duty. He recaps the State’s evidence in an effort to rebuild their case and bolster the narrative the prosecution wants the jury to carry into their deliberations. In Dempsey’s telling, Papa’s actions were the tragic culmination of a pathological killer’s years-long battle to cheat the Village of Cedar Heights out of a few thousand dollars. He darkly hints that the very underpinnings of peaceful society will be undermined if Francesco Valenti is allowed to escape “the ultimate punishment for his assault on the law and order we all cherish. Do not allow Sheriff’s Deputy Andrew O’Reilly to have been taken from us in vain!” he thunders righteously. “We ask that you, the jury, serve justice by convicting this murderer and sentencing him to death—as he sentenced Sheriff’s Deputy Andy O’Reilly to death.”

  What a steaming, hypocritical load of shit, I think after Dempsey sits down.

  Mike lays a hand on my shoulder when Judge Mitton calls on us to deliver our closing statement. “Mr. Valenti will do our closing,” he announces while sliding our closing argument notes over to me.

  My eyes shoot to his. What the hell do I do now? Argue with him in front of the judge and jury? I lean in close and angrily mutter, “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Just remember that you’re not on a basketball court,” he says with a trace of humor in his eyes.

  Sure. Big joke. How dare he put Papa’s fate in the hands of a mediocrity like me? “What if this stunt costs Papa his life?” I seethe quietly.

  “This stunt is designed to keep that from happening, my friend.”

  “Mr. Valenti?” Mitton prompts impatiently.

  I gather my thoughts and take a few deep breaths to settle my nerves while I get to my feet, slip into my learned lawyer character, turn my attention to the jury, and begin, “I’ll bet every one of you has seen movies, read books, or seen television shows about crime and courts and the police. Am I right?”