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 angry. 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.
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 1995. 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, ha
d 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?”
The Guilty Page 24