False Convictions

by Tim Green

  Marty bobbed his head vigorously.

  “Happy to help,” the chief said. “Just a little old-fashioned is all. We’ve got a warehouse out on State Street. Marty knows. Sergeant Stittle is my man out there and he’ll give you all you need. I’ll call him to make sure. When’s good?”

  Casey looked over at Marty and smiled. “Right now would work.”

  The chief slapped his hands on the face of his desk and rose up to show them the door. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss Jordan. I didn’t see it, but Marty tells me they made a movie about you.”

  Casey glanced at the young lawyer, who blushed again and studied his shoes.

  “It was a couple years ago,” Casey said, “and you know how they twist things around.”

  “Right,” the chief said as they left him. “Of course, no one ever made a movie about anybody I know.”

  ***

  The Auburn police stored their evidence in an old concrete warehouse that had once been the endpoint for a railroad spur. A crumbling factory, sheathed in undergrowth, rose up beyond the warehouse, and Casey could only just make out where the old tracks lay in their bed of waist-high weeds. A rusted chain-link fence surrounded the place, but the gates hung wide open at angles that spoke of their disuse. Three vehicles, one of them a police cruiser with its trunk open, sat parked in the back of the building beneath a loading dock with a dozen tractor trailer-size garage doors.

  Casey mounted the steps with Marty in tow, knocked on a green metal door she presumed was the office, then walked right in. Three men in uniform looked up from a card table positioned beneath a naked bulb. Monopoly pieces lay scattered about a board. One of the men, hugely fat with sweat on his cherry brow despite the damp coolness, wiped his face on a sleeve and rose up, huffing with the effort. In one hand were two orange five-hundred-dollar bills.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, scowling.

  “Chief Zarnazzi sent us. I’m Casey Jordan.”

  “Oh,” the fat man said, his face falling, “I thought Casey was a guy. I’m Sergeant Stittle.”

  Casey looked down at herself and held up both hands. “We’re here to get the evidence.”

  “We got plenty of that,” the sergeant said, his mouth a slit in the dough of his blank face.

  Casey glanced at Marty and said, “From the Hubbard case. Dwayne Hubbard.”

  The big man scratched his head while his two cop buddies smirked at him.

  “You got an index number for that?”

  “Didn’t your chief just call you?”

  “Said some Casey guy was coming and to help him out,” the sergeant said. “Happy to give you what you need, but you got to tell me what you need.”

  “Don’t you have this stuff listed by case name?” she asked, angling her head toward the yawning doorway that opened into the bowels of the warehouse, where row after row of boxes rested on shelves stretching to the twenty-foot ceiling.

  “Sure, what year?” the sergeant asked.

  “Nineteen eighty-nine,” Casey said.

  Sergeant Stittle sighed and nodded at a metal shelf jammed with heavy white three-ring binders. “In there, you could find something by the name, but it ain’t on the computer that far back.”

  Casey felt warm, even in the cool, moldy office.

  “Do you mind if I look?”

  “Chief said help,” the sergeant said, nodding at a beaten and moldy refrigerator, “so you can get a chair and a Diet Coke if you like.”

  “How about two chairs?” Casey said, nodding toward Marty.

  “Coming up.”

  With Marty’s help, Casey dug through three of the thick case binders, page by page since the cases weren’t cataloged by name but by date. The three men rattled dice, skipped around the board, and bought up properties as if she wasn’t there. The second page of the fourth binder held her case.

  “Got it,” she said, loud enough to disturb the game.

  Sergeant Stittle heaved his bulk up from the chair with a squeak of metal and a groan of flesh. He peered over Casey’s shoulder and planted a sausage finger next to the index number with a meaningful nod. In his other hand, he fingered a little red plastic hotel from the game board.

  “Hmm,” he said.

  “Hmm, what?” Casey said. “You can find it, right?”

  “If it’s still here,” he said, straightening with a heavy sigh.

  “What’s that mean?” Marty asked.

  “Means you’re getting close to the wrinkle in time,” Stittle said.

  “What’s that?” Marty asked.

  “You never heard of A Wrinkle in Time?” Stittle asked. “Got no kids? Nah, you’re too young. Missy here knows what I mean.”

  “I have no idea,” Casey said.

  Stittle chortled, jolting his belly so that a tail of his shirt sprang loose from the waist of his pants. “Kids’ book. They get a wrinkle in time and, whoosh, what was there one second is gone the next.”

  “I don’t have kids,” Casey said.

  Stittle gave her a disappointed look and said, “We keep evidence as long as we can, but after a while, we gotta make room for the new stuff. You can’t believe the shit they make us hang on to these days-pardon the French, but last week they gave us a whole damn couch that smelled like cat piss.”

  Casey shook her head. “No, wait. You threw away evidence from a murder case to make room for a couch?”

  Stittle shrugged and headed for the doorway, his fingers fondling the plastic hotel. “We can take a look, but I’m pretty sure we threw out the last of the 1989 stuff in March and I’m a good ways into 1990, but that stuff in the back gets kind of jumbled.”

  Casey glanced at Marty and they followed the big sergeant into the gloomy warehouse, their feet scuffing through the dust. When they reached the last row, Casey could see that the boxes, brown bags, and thick envelopes at the beginning of the row bore crisply printed labels with bar codes. Halfway down the aisle, the various containers had been spilled onto the floor. Beyond the clutter, the boxes and envelopes sagged inward, faded and dusty.

  “Yeah,” Stittle said, sorting through several of the spilled boxes and envelopes. “These are all ninety. I don’t see anything from eighty-nine, but help yourself. Also, you could check in the Dumpster.”

  “Wait,” Casey said, the numbers on a box across the aisle catching her eye.

  She planted a finger on the date of a box resting eye level. “This says 1988. So does this. All these.”

  Casey poked her finger at the dates on boxes and envelopes all up and down the area across from the mess.

  “Yup,” Stittle said. “That’s eighty-eight, but I thought you said eighty-nine.”

  “I did,” Casey said, trying not to raise her voice, “but why would eighty-nine be gone before eighty-eight? You can’t have gotten rid of eighty-nine. You still have eighty-eight.”

  Stittle looked from one side of the aisle to the next, his hands hanging flat along the slabs of fat, the plastic hotel pinched between thumb and forefinger. He rubbed his right finger under his left eye and nodded and said, “Yeah, I don’t know.”

  Casey planted a fist on either hip and asked, “Why would you get rid of one year before the other?”

  Stittle slowly wagged his head. “I guess ’cause they’re on the other side of the aisle?”

  “You guess?” Casey said. “You’re the one who threw this stuff out, right?”

  “To make room.”

  Marty cleared his throat. Casey looked hard at him and he shrugged apologetically.

  “You’re welcome to look,” Stittle said, his little eyes shifting under Casey’s gaze.

  “Right,” Casey said. “I can look. I can dig through the shit in your Dumpster and pull every box and bag down off the shelves in this aisle, but you know-and I know-that everything from 1989 is already gone, right?”

  “Some stuff might be around,” Stittle said, using his thumb to roll the little hotel around in his palm.

  “Right, because
you’re doing such a half-ass job, something from a 1989 case just might be around somewhere,” Casey said, the pressure building behind her eyes. “But we both know that the evidence to this case, my case, is already gone. Don’t we?”

  Stittle made a stupid face and shrugged.

  “You got a Get Out of Jail Free card?” Casey asked.

  “A what?” Stittle said, scowling.

  “Monopoly,” Casey said, nodding at the red plastic hotel in his hand. “Get Out of Jail Free, you got one of those?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Too bad,” Casey said, turning to go. “When I’m finished, you’ll wish you did.”

  8

  CAN YOU DO a brief?” Casey asked, turning around in the front seat of the Lexus so she could see Marty’s face.

  “A what?”

  “A brief. A legal brief,” she said. “They taught you that in law school, right? Can you do one?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, nodding vigorously. “Of course.”

  “Sorry,” Casey said. “I don’t mean to be a bitch. Those fucking morons just really got to me. Do they always act like that?”

  “Pretty much. I’d never met Stittle before. He was a real piece of work.”

  “We’ll drop you at your office,” Casey said, turning back around, facing the road. “I want you to put together a brief on the illegality of destroying evidence like that. Get me the statutes. Get me the case law. Get me the penal code. Make it short and sweet, but I want to walk into Barney Fife’s office tomorrow morning and make him sweat bullets. I’ll pull this whole damn town down around me.”

  “Barney Fife?” Marty asked, sounding confused.

  Casey looked at Ralph. He wore Oakley wraparound sunglasses and his face showed nothing. She turned back around and saw confusion and even a little fear in Marty’s expression.

  “In other words, a real dumb-ass,” she said, drawing another blank.

  “Everyone likes the chief,” Marty said quietly, going for his ear, then dropping his hand when he saw she was looking.

  “That’s okay,” Casey said. “He’ll get over it.”

  Marty directed Ralph to his family’s law offices on Genesee Street and got out in front of a sandblasted redbrick building with tinted glass windows and a wooden sign that read BARRONE & BARRONE in Old English characters.

  Marty got out and rapped a knuckle on her window. Casey rolled it down.

  “You don’t think I should go with you to the DA’s?” Marty asked. “He can be a little rough.”

  “I’ll get along fine,” Casey said.

  “He can’t hear out of his right ear so don’t talk to that side,” Marty said before she could get the window closed.

  Casey just stared.

  “Something you should know,” Marty said. “I just thought. I don’t mean to…”

  She nodded and signaled Ralph to go. The DA kept his offices just up the street in the old Cayuga County Courthouse, a towering Greek temple with half a dozen three-story Ionic columns. Casey climbed the steps and passed through a metal detector before she was directed to the DA’s offices. A marble bench rested outside the door and Casey ran her hand over the smooth curve of its armrest as she turned the handle. A secretary appeared at the front desk and led her through a maze until she came to a large corner office. The secretary asked if she’d like coffee before she let Casey in and Casey declined. The DA, Patrick G. Merideth, sat working at his desk with a nail clipper and a small file. He dusted his fingers against his gray suit and shook Casey’s hand, offering her a large wing chair beside an unused fireplace.

  “Marty parking the car?” the DA asked, taking the chair on the other side of the fireplace and accepting a saucer and cup of coffee from his secretary.

  “Marty’s working on a brief,” Casey said.

  “Should we wait?” the DA asked.

  “I think I can handle it,” Casey said. “We can talk.”

  The DA sniffed and nodded. He was a short round man with a crooked nose and even more crooked teeth.

  “This is a courtesy call,” Casey said, “so I apologize up front if I don’t sound very courteous, but we’ve got a major problem already.”

  “You’re trying to set a convicted murderer and rapist free after twenty years,” the DA said, taking a fussy little sip of his coffee. “A teenage girl bleeding to death in her daddy’s arms. Didn’t you expect some major problems?”

  “My problem is your problem, too,” Casey said. “You’ve got a police department destroying evidence.”

  The DA stiffened and furrowed his brow and said, “Evidence from twenty years ago, or last week?”

  “You know I’m here for the Hubbard case,” Casey said. “It wasn’t on your watch, so I thought we could cut through the usual bullshit. I’m not here to hurt anyone or cause trouble. My job is to correct an injustice from a long time ago. I’ve got a man whose defense lawyer didn’t even subpoena his alibi witness. No one looked into a white BMW my client saw near the scene. Things that smack of racial profiling and a black scapegoat. This didn’t have anything to do with now, or you, or anyone’s career. That was, until I went down there today and found out those clowns destroyed the evidence from this case.”

  “And lots of others, too,” the DA said, replacing his cup with a clink and setting the saucer down on a side table. “There’s no requirement in this state to preserve evidence once the appeals run out.”

  “Too bad they targeted this case,” Casey said.

  “How would they even know you were coming?” the DA asked, incredulous.

  “Small town, right?” Casey said. “You think Marty Barrone didn’t spill the word about the Freedom Project on its way here? The cops caught wind and they went to work.”

  “Pretty serious accusation,” the DA said.

  “That’s why it’s your problem.”

  “What makes you say they targeted your case?” he asked.

  “This case got tried in 1989,” Casey said, “before DNA was used. There was a knife they found, allegedly with the victim’s blood. The type was a match, but if we’re right, that knife would clear my client. Half of the evidence from that year was destroyed. The problem is that 1988 is still on the shelf.”

  The DA raised his eyebrows.

  “I’d like you to begin a formal investigation of the officers involved as well as the chief himself,” Casey said.

  A smile curled the right corner of the DA’s lips as he stood. “That’s not going to happen. Now I’m beginning to see why Marty isn’t here. I know you’re a famous lawyer from Texas-everything’s bigger in Texas, you mix it up with senators and serial killers, I know-but this is a small town and we are a little old-fashioned. You don’t come in here and start dictating. You save that for your next movie of the week. If there’s no evidence, then there’s really nothing anyone can do. There isn’t a judge living or dead who’d overturn a conviction on a missing witness or a phantom BMW. I’m sorry you wasted your time coming up here. We had the district attorneys’ national convention in Dallas two years ago, so I know it’s a long haul.”

  Casey stared hard at the DA for a moment before she calmly said, “You know, I just found out I have an interview with American Sunday at seven o’clock tonight, and they want to talk about this case. You want to play it like this with me? Fine. Get ready for a shit storm.”

  Casey stood up.

  “Thanks for the courtesy call,” the DA said, striding to the door and flinging it open and waving her through with sarcastic drama. “And tell your husband good luck.”

  “My husband?” Casey said, passing through and turning to face him.

  “He’s suing you for slander, right?” the DA said with a smirk. “Yeah, my wife gets People magazine. I guess he says you’re a real bitch, but after meeting you I find that really hard to believe.”

  Casey’s ex-husband had filed a lawsuit against her and Lifetime for their portrayal of him in the movie of the week that seemed to haunt Casey, a movie about her
successful defense of an old law school professor, a serial killer who she later helped capture.

  “A bitch?” Casey said. “I just might cry. You better get your shit together, Merideth. Come tomorrow, you’ve entered the big leagues and that diploma up on the wall from Touro College won’t help a bit.”

  9

  IF JAKE CARLSON COULD have gotten off the plane, he would have. If he didn’t have a contract coming up in four months and if his son, Sam, wasn’t at sleepaway camp until the end of the week, he would never have agreed to fly up to Syracuse in the first place. But Jake had recently had a run of stories that, while interesting to him, had fallen flat with the network executives, and the president herself was hot for an American Sunday profile on Robert Graham. As they finally took off on a bumpy ride through the thunderclouds, Jake wondered whether it was the turbulence or the thought of Graham that was making him queasy.

  After they landed, Jake helped the woman next to him with the bag that had managed to crush his jacket during the flight, then bolted for the rental car counter. He took the GPS, even though he knew the surrounding area pretty well, having spent some of his earlier years in television in the local market and more recently having broken a national story on a corrupt politician and his ties with the Albanian mob operating out of central New York. By the time he arrived at the Holiday Inn in Auburn, it was just past nine. His field producer, Dora Pine, waited for him in the front with her cell phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Jake pulled the big Cadillac into one of the ten-minute unloading spots and got out, smoothing the wrinkles in his jacket before buttoning up his shirt.

  “How do I look?” he asked.

  “You look like you need a shower,” Dora said, running a hand over her short curly hair, “and you’ve got time. We lost our girl and I don’t know when she’ll be back.”

  “Come again?” Jake said.

  “Don’t give me that look,” Dora said, stomping out her cigarette under the combat boots she wore beneath her army fatigues. “I kept her for over an hour, sitting there with her BlackBerry and looking at her watch before she blew out of here bitching about wasting her time.”