Lies of the Heart

by Michelle Boyajian

  Eddie turns to Donna again, eyes beckoning.

  “Mr. Rodriguez?”

  He clears his throat, a high-pitched cracking. “Yes.”

  “Can you tell us what you told him?”

  “I told him . . . I said that I bought the gun,” Eddie says, “because there were some bad men in my neighborhood.”

  “And what did Jerry say about that?”

  Eddie looks to Donna again for help. She shakes her head slightly at him, and Eddie’s hands come up to cover his face. Richard could prod him to answer again, but it’s the exact buildup he wants: the only sound that breaks in to the layered silence is Eddie’s stifled attempts to hold back his tears.

  “He said . . . he said that bad men . . . belonged in hell,” Eddie says. “He said it’s okay if I—if I shoot them. Because God would want that.”

  As Judge Hwang bangs the gavel for silence, Eddie lowers his head, the tears finally escaping. Only then does Katie realize she’s been holding her breath. She lets it out, sits straighter on the bench. This was all about Jerry’s history, his confusion about God and sin from when he was a child, she tells herself. Things taught to him by his mother, long before Katie ever met him.

  Judge Hwang calls for a fifteen-minute recess, asks the jurors to step across the hall. Katie takes the stairs to the ground floor, pushes her way outside and into the frosty morning air. She sits on the stairs, pulls out her cell phone.

  “Oceanside Realty, Elizabeth speaking. How may I help you?”

  “Paul Minsky, please. This is Mrs. Burrelli, returning his call.”

  It takes longer for Paul Minsky to answer this time.

  “Hello, Katie,” Paul says in a falsely cheerful voice.

  “Good morning. My mother said you called the other night?”

  “Yes, though I’m afraid it’s bad news.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I’m afraid that the owner simply isn’t willing to wait for your visit.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Well, it’s simple, really. Mr. Barber is motivated to sell, and there’s a list of eager people with offers already on the table. There’s virtually no chance that the cottage will stay on the market another two weeks.”

  “But you said Mr. Barber liked my husband. I thought he wanted—”

  “Yes, I did. Listen, Mrs. Burrelli,” he says crisply, “something isn’t adding up here, to be honest. Nick—your husband—never mentioned he was married when he came for his visit last spring. He . . . well, let’s just say that Mr. Barber is an old southern gentleman. Male alliances and all that. He’s a little twitchy now.”

  “Twitchy?”

  “Yes. He’s eager to sell, and he doesn’t like entanglements.”

  “If you could just send a property package, I could give it to Nick and see if he could meet with Mr. Barber right away and clear up any misunderstandings.”

  “Again, there are already offers on the table.”

  “Please,” Katie says, trying not to beg.

  She listens to the Realtor’s sigh. “Okay. I suppose that can’t hurt. But please be aware that by the time you get the package it might already be off the market.”

  “I understand.”

  A long pause, then: “Could I ask you something? I don’t mean to pry.”

  Of course you do. “No, it’s okay.”

  “Well, Nick told Mr. Barber that he needed to get away from New England. That it had become too claustrophobic?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, we were under the impression . . . well, I don’t mean to be insensitive. But he didn’t have on a wedding ring, so when you called . . .” He lets the question hang in the air for a moment. “It’s just a little confusing, because Nick didn’t mention a wife.”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Minsky, he may have been distracted,” she says, “but if you have a pen handy now, I can give you our address.”

  “Oh, of course. And please, will you tell Nick hello from both me and Mr. Barber?”

  “I will. I’ll see him in about a half an hour, and I’ll pass it on.”

  “Lovely.”

  After the SBI investigator’s testimony—long and tedious descriptions about formal protocol and the detailed measures used to confirm Jerry as the shooter—Richard calls Jan Evers to the stand.

  Jan has traded her normally hippie-chic clothes today for a blue button-up shirt and stiff black pants that swish noisily as she makes her way to the stand. Other than her short salt-and-pepper hair, which is spiked straight up in the air, there is no trace of what Nick always referred to as Jan’s “earthy-crunchy look.”

  “Will you introduce yourself to the jurors, please?”

  “My name is Jan Evers,” she says. “I’m Jerry’s work supervisor at the Warwick Center.”

  “Could you please describe your duties as a supervisor at the center?”

  Katie has informed Richard about Jan’s talkative nature, her need to overexplain a natural by-product of working with a mentally handicapped population. Richard stands quietly by the jurors and listens as Jan explains, in excruciating detail, the simple factory work the clients perform, not trying to reel her in. Given free rein, Jan starts to relax—sitting forward, smiling a little as she launches into another anecdote about putting labels on boxes. Richard takes advantage of one of her pauses, steps toward her.

  “Ms. Evers, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I understand that Jerry left his workstation to attend a speech-therapy group the morning of the shooting?”

  “Yes, he did,” she says eagerly, then seems to catch herself.

  “And what was his behavior after that group meeting?”

  “He was a little quieter than usual.”

  “Actually, according to your initial statement to Officer Devine,” Richard says, picking up a piece of paper from his desk, “he seemed ‘very troubled,’ didn’t he?”

  “Oh. I guess so.”

  “And what happened next?”

  Later, Jan tells the courtroom, Nick returned from an individual session to see if Jerry would like to have lunch with him. Jerry’s reluctance to join Nick for lunch, she says, was such a surprise to both of them.

  She stops at this point, looks over at Donna as if she’s said too much.

  “And why would both you and Nick be surprised if Jerry didn’t want to have lunch with him?”

  “Well, Jerry and Nick, they were pals. Jerry loved Nick, adored him.”

  Richard pauses thoughtfully, turns to the jurors. “But maybe not on this day?” he asks lightly.

  Judge Hwang sustains Donna’s quick objection.

  “Ms. Evers,” Richard asks, “did you have to convince the defendant to have lunch with Nick?”

  “I did. I spent some time encouraging him, telling him how fun it would be.”

  “Before this day had you ever been in the position where you had to actually encourage the defendant to spend time with Nick Burrelli?”

  “Oh. Well, not that I can recall, but—”

  “Thank you,” Richard says, walking over to the jurors. “Now, Ms. Evers, you also saw the defendant when he returned from lunch with Nick. Could you speak about that, please?”

  Jan visibly wilts on the stand. “He came back and went straight to work.”

  “Well, did he appear angry to you?”

  “Angry?” Jan sits up a little straighter. “No. Not at all.”

  Richard looks at Jan as if he’s confused. “He didn’t seem angry?” he asks with a hint of surprise in his voice.

  “No,” Jan repeats, “not at all.”

  Richard contemplates this for a moment. The jurors watch him pace away from them, pace back, unmistakably distracted. “Okay, well could you tell the jurors what happened next?”

  Jan is more relaxed now that it appears she has caught Richard off guard; she explains how Jerry worked diligently for the next hour, placing earrings into cardboard backings with ease.

  “Pensive,” she says, turning to the jurors. “Jerry s
eemed pensive, but not angry, no.”

  “Not upset, or irritated?” Richard asks.

  “Not in the least.”

  “ ‘ Not in the least,’ ” Richard repeats thoughtfully, and now Katie can see that Jan’s insistence that Jerry wasn’t angry is exactly what he expected—what he wanted. “And after the shooting, when he was out in the parking lot, Ms. Evers. Did he seem angry then?”

  “At that point I suppose so.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Evers. Nothing further.”

  Donna spends an inordinate amount of time asking Jan to describe Jerry’s usual behavior in the work program. Jan is only too happy to tell the jurors how, in the last three years as his supervisor, she has never had to speak to him once for inappropriate behavior.

  “Not once?” Donna asks.

  “No.”

  “Never had to confront Jerry for outbursts of anger or anything like that?”

  “Never,” says a smiling Jan.

  “Now, Ms. Evers, according to your earlier testimony, Jerry adored Nick. Is that correct?”

  “Absolutely. He worshipped him.”

  “And on the day of the shooting, besides a reluctance to have lunch with Nick, did Jerry show any outward signs of malice toward him?”

  “No, he just seemed upset, but definitely not angry.”

  During this easy back-and-forth, Katie thinks of Richard’s brief update this morning—We need to end with a bang this afternoon, so the jurors have an entire weekend to ruminate over what they’ve heard.

  “Thank you for your time, Jan.”

  “Prosecution?” Judge Hwang asks.

  “Yes. Thank you, Judge.” Richard says. “Just to clarify, Ms. Evers, when Jerry returned from his lunch with Nick, he went straight back to work? He was ‘pensive’ and ‘diligent’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. No further questions.”

  The sight of Alicia, an assistant who worked part-time at the Warwick Center last spring for college credit, sends a thrill of fear through Katie. She hugs her arms around her body, steeling herself against what this girl will reveal to the jurors. It’s okay, she tells herself, none of this is news to you.

  Alicia settles herself on the witness stand, her face full of adolescent insolence; she sits primly in the chair, chin raised slightly, and watches Richard flip through the pages of his notepad.

  Richard uses an overly deferential tone as he questions Alicia about her relationship with Nick, and Alicia, guarded look firmly in place, describes the way Nick encouraged her in her studies, how he was a mentor to her.

  “And a friend, too,” Alicia adds, “a good friend.”

  A lengthy discussion follows about Alicia’s job at the center; Richard locks his hands behind his back and nods respectfully, murmuring his appreciation at all of Alicia’s responsibilities until Alicia’s body language slowly transforms. After ten minutes, there is no trace of the defensive college student anymore—Alicia leans forward, eager to answer his questions, almost vibrating with enthusiasm under the watchful and supportive eye of Richard.

  “So part of your duties at the Warwick Center included assisting your friend and mentor Nicholas Burrelli?”

  In a self-important voice, Alicia explains that while she didn’t attend any of Nick’s sessions, her responsibilities included typing up his notes for individual sessions and weekly group-therapy meetings. She was going to be a speech pathologist one day, too, so she made it her business to know everything that took place behind closed doors with his clients—everything.

  Donna lets out an audible sigh of frustration, shakes her head.

  “Speech pathologists also do group work?” Richard asks.

  Yes, she tells Richard, part of a speech pathologist’s job is to also help the clients simply express speech with their peers. Sometimes they work with cue cards to get the clients to express emotions verbally—showing a picture of a woman’s angry face, or someone who looks happy or sad, and then asking the clients to verbalize to each other what the person is feeling. Or they employed a social-functional story, one of Nick’s favorites, as a way to express speech in a social setting using full sentences.

  “Nick would set up a story, like, suppose a client went outside to throw away garbage and a stranger approached them asking for money? He’d ask them what they would do and what they would say to the stranger. Things like that.”

  “And can you recollect if Nick used this story technique on the day of the shooting?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And can you tell us the topic?”

  You know this already, this isn’t a big deal, Katie admonishes herself. But her body is trembling.

  The girl hesitates a second under Richard’s steady gaze. “It was about love and marriage,” she says. “And sex.” She raises her chin, manages to keep her glance level with Richard’s.

  There is some shifting and movement across the aisle as the line of questioning becomes more apparent, but Katie barely hears it, because the fear is singing through her body again—in an instant she sees Jerry’s flushed, determined face, one of her shoes mangled and torn inside his hands, but then she pushes the image away. This isn’t about me, it’s about his mother, she tells herself sternly. His mother.

  “With Jerry’s history—” Richard begins.

  “Objection,” Donna says, rising.

  Richard turns to Judge Hwang. “I haven’t asked a question yet, Your Honor.”

  “If I’m correct,” Donna says, “Mr. Bellamy is going to ask this witness about my client’s history, and as a temporary, part-time secretarial assistant she is in no position to discuss that sort of information.”

  Alicia unmistakably bristles in her seat and flicks indignant eyes from Donna to Richard. Richard gives Alicia a look of sympathy and support, and the girl, eyes locked on Richard, squares her shoulders.

  Judge Hwang turns to Richard. “Mr. Bellamy?”

  “Your Honor, this witness was privy to all of Nick Burrelli’s therapy notes, which naturally included some of the defendant’s history at times. I’m not going to ask her for interpretations or explanations, just some basic information she typed up for him.”

  “I’ll allow it, but be careful,” she says, touching the rim of her glasses.

  “Did you ever, in the course of typing Nick Burrelli’s case notes, come across information that spoke directly of the defendant’s past abuse?”

  “I did come across quite a bit,” she says, nodding.

  “And so you were aware that the defendant struggled with his past abuse and that Nick thought that some of his speech issues might be connected to that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it make sense to you, then, why a discussion about sex might upset, or might even enrage, the defendant?”

  “Your Honor—” Donna says, rising.

  Alicia leans forward, defiant: “I can definitely see why he’d become totally infuriated—”

  “Your Honor, this witness is a student and not an expert on physical abuse or behavior!”

  “Sustained.”

  At this point the jurors can’t possibly understand Richard’s intentions or what Jerry’s anger about sex entails, but they sense the importance of this testimony: all twelve heads are bent over their pads, their pens moving quickly across the pages.

  You weren’t there when Jerry was incited, and you couldn’t have stopped it. This is what Richard’s staff told her in the days following the shooting, what they believed. What Katie so urgently needed to believe then—what she needs to believe now, as the panic continues to pulse through her body.

  Detective Mason’s initial testimony centers exclusively on describing proper procedures, the collection of evidence, the confirmation of testimony given by other officials at the scene—a necessary process that drags out for over an hour. The courtroom doors open and close constantly, and each time most of the jurors turn to cast longing glances at the back of the room. Richard’s intention to end the week with
a bang is suddenly failing; he should have ended with Alicia, because Detective Mason’s testimony is slowly putting them to sleep.

  Katie checks the clock at the front of the room: only twenty minutes left until they adjourn for the week—he’s running out of time.

  “Detective Mason, you were the one who processed the defendant at the Warwick Police Department?”

  “Correct.”

  “And part of this procedure is to videotape the arrest interview?”

  “Yes.”

  Some of the jurors perk up at the mention of a videotape. As Richard and one of his paralegals set up the video equipment, Judge Hwang informs them that the sound on the tape is of poor quality and requests that the jurors speak up if they need the volume adjusted.

  The footage looks like it was shot from a distance, probably a ceiling camera, and is too grainy to capture facial expressions. Detective Mason and a stocky female officer sit on either side of Jerry, who slouches down in his chair, his arms hanging dejectedly by his sides. Detective Mason reads the arrest report to Jerry, who is completely nonresponsive at first: chin tucked under, body so still it would look like a freeze-frame if he were the only one in the room. But as Detective Mason reads the list of charges—breaking and entering, felony theft, first-degree murder—there are little movements from Jerry: a sudden jerk in the neck, shifting in the chair, hands meeting on the table, knuckles bulging. Jerry mumbles something unintelligible on the tape, and a hand is raised by the elderly juror in the back. But before the intern can turn up the staticky sound, Jerry is rising out of his chair on the screen, ripping the report away from Detective Mason, crushing it into a ball with his hands. He hurls it across the room with his whole body, clutches the table as though he will flip it over—Detective Mason and the policewoman are by his side in seconds, struggling to pry the table from his grip, and then they are all falling to the floor, the policewoman’s arm hooked around Jerry’s neck. From the back of the room, out of the camera’s view, a string of officers file in—they join the melee of arms and legs on the floor, partially hidden by the table. Through the gasps and mutters of the jurors, and the muffled static of the struggle, one sound is crystal clear: Jerry’s infuriated screams echo inside the small interview room and into the shocked courtroom.