by Joel Goldman
“Jury’s been out a while.”
“Five hours and twenty-two minutes,” Alex said without looking at her watch.
“Any bets?”
She set her glass on his desk. “Should we be talking about the case without Tommy being here?”
“Oh, hell,” West said, grinning, “we’re not talking about the case. We’re just sipping whiskey.”
Glad to have the chance to build a more personal relationship, she took another sip, hoping it would pay off down the road. “The longer they’re out, the better I like my chances.”
“That was a hell of a thing you did with Jameer Henderson. Might be enough to make the difference.”
“Hope so.”
“You really put poor Bradshaw in a box, forcing him to attack his star witness on redirect. He tried every way he could to get Henderson to stick with his original story, but Henderson wouldn’t budge. I thought you and he were friends.”
“We are. Good enough friends to know what happens in the courtroom stays in the courtroom.”
“Well, I hope for the sake of your friendship that Tommy agrees, because that was painful to watch.”
“What else could Tommy do? Henderson was the money.”
Judge West grunted. “The money. That’s what I called it when I was trying cases.”
“I know. I heard you use the term at a seminar on trial tactics right after I joined the PD’s office.”
West studied her before emptying his glass. “Takes the edge off a long day.” He set the glass on his desk. “Interesting thing about a trial like this, a lot of times you end up knowing less than you knew when it started.”
“Like what?”
“Like why would a scumbag like Kyrie Chapman go to so much trouble to nail a scumbag like Dwayne Reed? If he wanted to get even for your client killing his cousin, seems more likely he’d kill Reed himself instead of jumping through all those hoops to get Reed convicted.”
Alex wasn’t surprised at West’s disregard for judicial impartiality. But she was surprised that he was being so candid with her, knowing that she could use his comments to support an appeal based on his bias against her client. She knew she should try to steer the conversation away from the case, but she didn’t want to discourage him from giving her more ammunition. So instead, she drained her drink.
“It makes sense if Chapman killed Wilfred Donaire and was trying to frame Reed for the murder. That’s what I argued in my closing, except for the scumbag part.”
“Are you trying to tell me your client didn’t kill Donaire?”
His question, dripping in disbelief, was more evidence that he’d made up his mind about Dwayne’s guilt. She wondered how far he’d go and why he was going there.
“If you’re asking me if my client confessed, you know I can’t answer that question.”
The judge smiled. “And I wouldn’t want you to since I’m probably going to have to pass sentence on him.” He picked up the bottle of Scotch, swirling the contents, then set it down and inched his chair snug against his desk. “What do you suppose is going to happen if the jury lets your client go?”
Alex shrugged. “He’ll be a free man.”
“Will justice have been served?”
“Yes. That’s the way the system works. That is justice.”
“Even if he gutted Wilfred Donaire like a catfish and fed him his own dick?”
Alex blinked, ignoring the judge’s crudeness, and stayed focused on his question. “Which is the greater evil? An innocent man wrongly imprisoned or a guilty man set free? Tommy Bradshaw and I argued about that the first day of our criminal procedure class.”
“I can guess what Bradshaw said. Better to keep an innocent man in jail than to free the guilty man, because the guilty man will probably commit more crimes. A small sacrifice for the greater good.”
“You got it,” Alex said.
“And I can guess what your bleeding heart said. Incarcerating the innocent undermines the whole system, and that’s worse than letting a guilty man go free.”
Alex laughed. “Yes, and I had the same argument last night with my girlfriend.”
“How is Dr. Long? Still running the ER over at Truman Medical Center?”
“Bonnie is fine, and yes, she’s still at Truman. In fact, she says to tell you hello. You charmed her at the Bench Bar gala last year.”
Judge West and Bonnie had gotten drunk together at the annual party for lawyers and judges, Bonnie telling her on the way home what a great guy West was, Alex answering that he had hit on her because she was so good-looking and he was too drunk to remember that she was a lesbian.
“She still nagging you about the way you dress?”
Alex blushed, resenting her body’s involuntary response, ducking her head. “She says that I’m old enough to know that there are more colors than black, gray, and white and more styles than pants and jackets.”
“Well, don’t listen to her. You always look just fine when you’re in my court. Professional all the way.”
“Thanks, Judge. I’ll be sure to cite you as my fashion authority the next time Bonnie tries to talk me into wearing a dress.”
Alex wondered why she was getting his charm treatment. They weren’t drunk and she wasn’t pretty like Bonnie, whose blond hair, sapphire eyes, and lush body placed her securely in the one percent. Alex saw herself as part of the ninety-nine percent, her features and shape ordinary, no matter how often Bonnie told her she was extraordinary.
“So what’s Bonnie’s take on all this free-the-guilty or condemn-the-innocent business?”
“She says there’s no good answer, both are equally bad, and that she’d rather make a life-or-death decision in the ER than serve on a jury in a death penalty case.”
“That’s why she’s the doctor and you’re the lawyer. It’s been a long time since you took criminal procedure. What do you think now?” Judge West asked.
“I think it’s not my job to decide guilt or innocence. That’s up to the jury. Innocent people get convicted. We know that from all the ones who were later exonerated. So I have to assume that guilty people also go free.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Of course it bothers me, but I can’t let it bother me too much. Otherwise, I couldn’t do my job. Besides, no one ever claimed the system was perfect, and no one has ever come up with a better one.”
Judge West refilled both their glasses. “Maybe you could do your job a little differently and it wouldn’t have to bother you.”
Alex squinted, trying to parse his meaning. “I don’t follow.”
“Due process does not require that every conceivable step be taken, at whatever cost, to eliminate the possibility of convicting an innocent person.”
“Justice Byron White wrote that in his majority opinion in Patterson v. New York. I know the case. But that’s not what we’re talking about. The public defender’s office is so strapped we practically have to bring pencils from home. We’re lucky if we can take half the steps we think we should, let alone every conceivable step.”
“It’s not just how many steps you take; it’s which ones. That’s the trick, isn’t it?”
Alex stared into her glass, trying to decide what the judge meant. “I do the best job I can for my clients with the resources I have. I can’t do any less than that.”
Judge West leaned back in his chair, holding his glass. “You know who asked the best question during the whole damn trial? Jameer Henderson. Poor bastard. ‘What am I gonna do now?’ That’s what he asked you when you got through with him. Tell me, Counsel, how are you going to answer his question if your client walks out of here a free man? You said it yourself. It’s not healthy to be a snitch.”
“Jameer Henderson is not my problem. I didn’t subpoena him and I didn’t make him lie to the jury. He knew what he was doing and he knew the risks he was taking.”
“Spoken like a true believer.”
“Spoken like a lawyer who knows her duty to h
er client.”
West raised his glass, saluting her. “Here’s to doing our jobs.”
Margot Bates knocked and opened the door. “We have a verdict.”
Chapter Six
“YOU WON,” BONNIE SAID to Alex, “but you look like you lost. I’ve seen longer faces on a funhouse mirror. What’s up with that?”
They were in their den in their matching easy chairs, feet on their ottomans, a wedge-shaped table stacked with books and magazines between them. Quincy, their Wheaten terrier, was asleep in his dog bed in front of the fireplace. Bonnie was still in her scrubs. Alex had taken off her suit jacket. It was their winding-down ritual, chasing the highs and lows of their day with a glass of wine.
“I don’t know,” Alex said, turning on her side, facing Bonnie. “Guess it’s just the post-trial letdown.”
“The last time you got a not-guilty verdict, you wanted to go dancing. You saved a man from death row today. How can you possibly have a letdown after that? If anyone should be moping, it’s Tommy.”
She had introduced Bonnie to Tommy early in their relationship, telling him that she was the one. It wasn’t long before Tommy told Alex that she was right.
Alex swung her feet onto the floor. Quincy stirred, stretched, and trotted to her side, his tail wagging. She buried her hand in the fur behind his neck.
“Tommy’s last witness was the money,” she said, and told Bonnie how she’d dismantled Jameer Henderson. “I talked to the jurors after they came back. They all said that Henderson’s testimony created reasonable doubt. They had to acquit.”
“But . . .”
Alex looked at Bonnie, loving how the lamplight bounced off her hair and the way her eyes sparkled. She loved everything about her. Top to bottom, front to back, inside out, she liked to tell her. They’d been together seven years, long enough for Bonnie to know when there was a but at the end of her sentence.
“But they didn’t want to. They were ready to convict before Henderson ever opened his mouth. They said Tommy blew it by putting him on the stand. They were mad at Tommy and they were mad at me.”
“Mad at you? For what? Doing your job?”
Alex rested her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. “Yeah. Some of those people live in my client’s neighborhood. Every time they see Dwayne Reed on the street, they’re going to think he got away with murder.”
Bonnie sat up and scooted onto her ottoman. “I’m more interested in what you think. Did he get away with murder?”
“I’ll never know for sure.”
“Are you going to be okay with that?”
Alex shook her head. “What choice do I have?”
Bonnie folded her arms across her middle, eyebrows crunched, studying her. Alex recognized the look as the one she reserved for the patients who stumped her.
“You think I have a choice?” Alex asked. “And why are you giving me your what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-this-patient look?”
“No, I don’t think you have a choice. But there’s something else you’re not telling me. What is it?”
Alex rose and paced the room, Bonnie and Quincy watching and waiting. She stopped at a portrait hanging on the wall that they had posed for a year ago. The photographer had taken it in their backyard. They were on a bench beneath a sun-dappled tree, hands intertwined, Quincy between them, sitting on his hind legs.
Bonnie’s makeup and nails were perfect, her outfit a designer’s ensemble. Alex had consented to a light dusting of makeup at the photographer’s insistence but had refused to wear anything other than chinos and a polo shirt. The photographer, a gay friend, told them to face the camera as he joked that Bonnie looked like a debutante and Alex looked like her escort. They both laughed, the photographer catching the moment.
Alex loved the portrait. It showed them for who and what they were—a family. She brushed her fingertips across the image of Bonnie’s face, unable to imagine ever losing her, certain that she’d do anything to protect her.
“Judge West said that Jameer Henderson asked the best question of the whole trial,” she said, telling Bonnie about their conversation in his chambers. “He made it sound like I was responsible if anything bad happened to Henderson and his family.”
Bonnie crossed the room to Alex, taking her hands. “That’s not right. You were doing your job. He shouldn’t put that on you.”
“I know. I know, but I can’t stop thinking about them. What if something horrible does happen to them because of me?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to them, and if it does, it won’t be because of you. It will be because of the choices Jameer Henderson made and the actions of other people over whom you have no control.”
Bonnie wrapped her arms around her and Alex rested her head on Bonnie’s shoulder. They stood like that until Quincy nosed his way between them, reminding them he hadn’t eaten. They didn’t talk about it again, fixing dinner, turning on and ignoring the television until they went to bed.
Bonnie fell asleep right away, while Alex replayed her conversation with Judge West, parsing it for meaning. She kept coming back to the same conclusion. Justice required that the guilty be punished. No argument there. The trick, Judge West had told her, was figuring out what steps she should take. To do what? Represent her client? No, that wasn’t what he’d meant. And then she knew—to protect the innocent, even if that meant protecting them from her guilty clients.
Could he really mean that? Did he truly expect her to throw her clients under the bus to make certain the guilty didn’t go free? She could no more imagine a judge suggesting that she do so than she could imagine doing it. That would violate everything she believed in, not to mention innumerable laws and ethical standards.
And Judge West hadn’t said that, at least not directly. Nor would he have if that were what he’d really meant. Plausible deniability was critical just in case she filed a complaint against him or, worse, did what she though he had suggested, got caught, and claimed it was all the judge’s idea. Deciding she’d had too long a day and too much wine, she dismissed the whole notion as a product of an overly tired mind and soon was asleep.
Chapter Seven
ALEX’S CELL PHONE RANG at four o’clock the next morning. She flopped her hand across her nightstand, struggling to find her phone, eyes closed, hoping she was dreaming. When she found the phone, opened her eyes, and saw Kansas City Police Department displayed on the caller ID, she knew she wasn’t. Opening her phone, she padded out of the bedroom and into the hall to avoid disturbing Bonnie. Quincy, who had been sleeping at the foot of their bed, followed her.
“Who’s this?” she asked.
“It’s me, Dwayne.”
“Dwayne? Dwayne Reed? Are you kidding me?”
She recognized his deep voice, but her brain didn’t want to admit it. Not at this hour.
“Shit, yeah, woman! How many clients you got named Dwayne?”
“Why are you calling me from the police department? You should have been released right after the jury came back.”
“They let me out, all right. That ain’t the problem.”
Alex leaned against the wall and slid to the floor. Quincy plopped down next to her, his head in her lap. “Christ, Dwayne! You couldn’t stay out of trouble for twenty-four hours?”
“You know how it is.”
“No, Dwayne. I don’t know how it is. What happened?”
“I ain’t sayin’ nuthin’ over the phone, ’specially when it’s five-0’s phone. Get on down here and you’ll see what’s what.”
She tilted her head to the ceiling, rubbing her temple with her free hand. She was still his lawyer, but only for the Wilfred Donaire case. Bradshaw could file a motion to set aside the jury verdict, which meant that the case wasn’t technically over. If Dwayne had been arrested on a new charge, someone from her office would be appointed to represent him. Until then, she couldn’t leave him there to be worked over by the cops. Too many people confessed to things they didn’t do when their lawyers weren�
��t there to protect them.
“What’s the charge?”
“Same bullshit as last time. Murder.”
Fully awake and focused, she shared his concern about who might be listening to their call.
“I’m on my way. Keep your mouth shut until I get there.”
She hung up and took a moment to rub Quincy behind his ears, stopping when she realized what Reed had left out. He hadn’t said he didn’t do it.
She and Bonnie lived in Crestwood, a middle-class midtown neighborhood a fifteen-minute drive from downtown. At that time of night, it was ten minutes, long enough for her to imagine whom Dwayne Reed could have murdered in the twelve hours since he became a free man. Of all the images that came to mind, the one that she couldn’t shake was of Jameer Henderson in the courtroom, holding his children in his lap and comforting his wife.
In a violent world where gangs were more heavily armed than police and teenage boys didn’t expect to live long enough to become old men and treated a stretch in prison as an inevitable rite of passage, revenge was both an ethic and a necessity to maintain street cred. Henderson had made himself and his family targets. That she had been complicit in exposing them to harm was a cruel irony that ate at Alex, her insistence to Judge West that their fate wasn’t her problem a boast she could no longer back up.
Her fear for the Henderson family was enough to make her detour to their house before going to police headquarters. They lived on the east side, a part of Kansas City where the name of one of the long-defunct homeowners associations, Forgotten Homes, told the story of too many people who lived there. The promises of generations of politicians to root out the crack houses, revitalize the economy, and protect the law-abiding citizens who got caught in the crossfire had been broken more often than they had been kept.
She drove east and north, passing rundown retail strips barricaded behind iron bars, untended and abandoned houses, and vacant lots choking with weeds and trash. The bright spots—well-tended homes, churches, schools, and businesses ready for the coming day—were muted in the darkness.