A Cure for Night
Page 5
"What you wanna know?"
"How long had they been seeing each other?"
"They was . . . let's see . . . they first got together back in the fall, maybe October. That's the first I remember seeing her around."
"Was Devin seeing anyone else?"
Lorenzo smiled. "Devin and I weren't tight that way," he said. "But sure ain't gonna surprise me if he was."
"You think he might have continued seeing other people?"
Lorenzo, still smiling, shrugged.
"How about Yolanda?" Myra said. "Any idea if she was seeing anyone else?"
"Like I said, I ain't never spoke to Yo-Yo. I just knew her to see her around."
"Did you ever see her around with any other guy? It doesn't have to be someone you knew."
"I'm not recollecting nothing like that," Lorenzo said.
"Okay," Myra said, taking a second to consult her notes. "What about Devin's sister?" she asked. "What was your relationship with her like?"
"Latrice?" Lorenzo said. "She a fine-looking girl. A dime for sure."
"Did you ever have any kind of relationship with Latrice?"
Lorenzo laughed his easy laugh. "Devin ain't gonna like that. Latrice wasn't the kind to be with me anyway. Girl's got a job, that kinda shit."
"Are you saying she disapproved of you?" Myra asked.
"Latrice knew what Devin's business was," Lorenzo said. "She knew what my business was. She let it go, far as I know."
"She lived with Devin, right?"
Lorenzo nodded.
"Are they close?"
"They brother and sister," Lorenzo replied. "I'm gonna believe they tight."
"And you talked to her when you were over to visit Devin?"
"Sure."
"Did you talk to her on the night that Devin was shot?"
"That's right," Lorenzo said.
"Okay," she said. "Now according to the police reports we have, Latrice said you came by looking for Devin on the night of the shooting."
"I be looking for him, yeah, but that was before he got capped," Lorenzo said. "Lookin' to find a man ain't no crime."
"Do you remember what time you went by Devin's apartment?"
"Not for sure," Lorenzo said. "Maybe like seven?"
"Why were you looking for Devin?"
"About the green, you know," Lorenzo said. "Dude owed me some money, sure. But how he ever going to pay me if I shoot him?"
Based on what I knew from the police reports, Lorenzo's conversation with Latrice was a topic about which I'd at least half expected Lorenzo to lie. The hope was that, if he did, he would do it in a vaguely plausible way. It was always demoralizing when the client came out with some preposterous story that they expected you to sell. Instead Lorenzo appeared to be telling the truth, but it wasn't a truth that helped us.
"This was for product?" Myra asked.
Lorenzo bobbed his head, confirming through body language what we already knew. "How much did he owe you?" Myra asked, keeping her voice neutral. We didn't care that our client dealt drugs. We did care that he'd been looking for one of the victims in order to settle a drug debt on the night of the shootings, because this made our job considerably more difficult.
"He owed me five G," Lorenzo said softly.
"Five thousand bucks?" Myra asked. Lorenzo nodded slightly, looking uncomfortable for the first time in the interview.
This wasn't good. Other than love, money was as bad as motive got. Because we were talking about marijuana, I hadn't expected that kind of number. I wondered how much pot five thousand dollars wholesale got you. We clearly weren't talking about dime bags of shwag weed. I willed myself to think past the buzz of worry that was trying to hijack my concentration.
"Okay," Myra said. "So you went over to Devin's apartment because he owed you money, and Latrice answered the door. Do you remember the conversation you two had?"
"I ask her if Devin there, she say no; I ask does she know where he is, she say no; I ask if he left the dead presidents for me, she say no. I'm like, 'That motherfucker thinks I'm playing with him.' Then I was out."
"Do you recall whether those were your exact words? 'Motherfucker thinks I'm playing with him'?"
"I wasn't carrying no tape recorder."
"I understand that," Myra said, making a show of patience. "But I still need to know if you think that's exactly what you said."
"Best I can remember, I say what I say I say," Lorenzo said. "What she say I say?"
"According to the police, she said that you threatened Devin," Myra said evenly.
"I threaten him to his own sister?" Lorenzo said incredulously. "What I do that for? Why am I going to threaten him to Latrice, then cap him a few hours later?"
"Is it possible that you said something that Latrice took as more threatening?"
"She can say 'motherfucker thinks I'm playing with him' be a threat if she want to. Ain't nothin' I can do about that."
"You don't think you might have said something more threatening?"
"I didn't say no kind of threat," Lorenzo said, for the first time looking angry. "Dude was my boy, and dude owed me money. Can't be my boy and can't pay me back neither if he's dead. So I got me two good reasons not to cap him."
OUTSIDE THE jail, I found myself squinting in the sudden daylight. We'd talked to Lorenzo for around two hours, circling back to his upbringing, his relationship with Devin, whether there was anything else he could tell us about Yolanda or Latrice, his alibi for that night. Even though I'd basically just sat and listened the whole time, taking notes, I felt exhausted, like my day should be done already.
It took one look at Myra to tell she felt the same. She'd lit a cigarette as soon as we walked outside, taking a deep drag. I'd expected her to have built up a shell by now, not to show fatigue or discouragement, but perhaps that had been unrealistic. "Is it just me, or was that a mixed blessing?" I said.
"It's never good when the client admits that the victim owed him money on a drug debt and that he'd gone looking for said victim the night he was shot. The alibi based on a dealer doesn't exactly help us."
"I guess the good news is, if he was going to lie to us he'd presumably have come up with something better than that."
Myra looked over at me, grinning. "You have a point," she said. "Not that it helps. We can't present a preposterous defense and then ask the jury to acquit based on how implausible our defense was."
"Are you sure?" I asked. "Have you ever tried it?"
"Why don't you test it out on a misdemeanor and get back to me?"
"Five grand sounds like a fuck of a lot of pot."
"You'd be surprised," Myra said. "Weed's become a high-end business in New York. First-rate hydro can retail out in the neighborhood of five hundred or more an ounce. Wouldn't shock me if five grand wholesale was just for a pound."
"I knew I was in the wrong line of work," I said. "What about that Devin was sleeping with the witness to his getting shot? That didn't turn up in any of the police reports."
"Like I said to our guy, I think it cuts both ways," Myra said. "It maybe gives her a reason to lie, which helps, but it might make her a lot more convincing on the stand. She's not some passerby who's not really paying attention; she's watching her boyfriend get shot."
We had crossed through the parking lot and reached Myra's car. "So what do you think?" I asked as I waited for Myra to unlock my door.
"What do I think about what?" Myra asked.
"You think he did it?"
Myra looked over at me from across the top of her car. "How the hell should I know?" she said.
6
I HAD JUST arrived at the office the next morning and was still settling in when Myra came over to my desk. "You have anything important scheduled for right now?" Myra asked.
"I was just grabbing a chance to go over my new batch of files," I said. "There's a bunch of misdemeanors I haven't even looked at. What's up?"
"Come with me," Myra said. "We need to go on a mission."
"Wh
ere to?"
"The scene of the crime," Myra said.
We took the 2 train from Borough Hall out to its last stop in Brooklyn. "You ever been out here before?" I asked once we were seated. The train was pretty empty; the commuter rush was mostly over, and we were heading in the opposite direction of most commuters.
Myra shook her head. "That's the point of the mission," she said. "It's important that we have at least some kind of feel for the place where the shootings happened."
We got out at the Brooklyn College stop, onto Flatbush Avenue, a street that was to Brooklyn what Broadway was to Manhattan: it traveled through virtually the entire borough. But this stretch of Flatbush looked noticeably different from the stretch that passed a half block from my apartment. It felt as though we'd gone back in time a little, the store signs all looking like they'd been put up in the 1950s.
The commercial strip appeared lively enough, however, with fast-food stores, delis, clothing shops, everything open for business. Virtually everyone on the street but us was black. We walked aimlessly for a couple blocks, just getting our bearings, cutting over on Avenue I, then turning onto Bedford Avenue.
The neighborhood changed completely as we did so. Now it was Orthodox Jews who occupied the sidewalks, which were lined with detached houses with yards and garages.
Eventually we came across the campus of Brooklyn College. There were security guards at every entrance to the campus, which we made no attempt to enter. We hit Flatbush again, turned right, then left onto Avenue H. The fast-food restaurants and stores of Flatbush dropped away, the number of people dropped and scattered, and soon we were walking alongside Glenwood Gardens.
As Lorenzo had said, the Gardens was the kind of project New York didn't build anymore, a series of identical towers sprawling across several square blocks. Even in the late morning it possessed an aura of dilapidated menace.
I found myself hesitating when Myra turned from the street into the project. She turned back to me, offering a tight smile. "Anyone looking at us is going to think we're cops, lawyers, social workers, the IRS, something," she said. "They'll leave us alone."
Myra turned out to be right: the people we passed stared at us hard, but nobody said anything. We took a quick walk through, slicing across the middle of the project, between where the shooter had stood and where the victims had been. I had a hard time taking anything in, too worried about catching someone's eye in the wrong way. The courtyard was fairly empty; just a cluster of young men standing outside the doorway of one tower, a young woman watching a small child playing in the middle of the yard.
We crossed through the main courtyard of the project and turned right onto Avenue I, heading back to Flatbush. "So," Myra said, "I guess that's the Gardens. What'd you see?"
I glanced over at her, wanting to convey a little resentment that she was giving me a test, but also wanting to know if she'd seen something I hadn't. "The whole place is like a fortress," I said. "The courtyard is completely cut off from the street."
"That's true," Myra said. "But it isn't cut off at all from the project itself. There must be a couple of hundred windows that look out onto that courtyard."
"Sure," I said. "But our crime happened a little after midnight. Could be nobody was looking."
"Could be," Myra said. "They would've heard shots, but people in a project probably aren't all that likely to go stand in front of a window when they hear shots. But I still find it hard to believe nobody else saw anything. Even if they did, though, it doesn't necessarily mean we want to uncover what they saw."
"Because they might have seen our client?"
"You never know," Myra said.
"Okay," I said. "So that was educational. Now can we get out of here?"
"Not yet," Myra said. "We've still got to meet the neighbors."
7
YOLANDA MILLER was not happy to see us. Not that I'd expected her to be, but the degree of her immediate hostility took me by surprise.
She was talking to us from the doorway of her apartment, making no move to let us in. I felt exposed and vulnerable standing in a hallway in the Gardens, but tried to put such thoughts out of my mind.
"I don't got to be talkin' to you," Yolanda said once we'd introduced ourselves. "The DA told me I ain't got to say nothing to you if I don't want to."
"If necessary we can subpoena you," Myra said. "Did the DA tell you that?"
"What's that gonna do?"
"If we subpoena you it would mean you'd have to come down to court and talk to us under oath," Myra said matter-of-factly. "If you didn't show up the judge would issue a warrant for your arrest."
"You gonna arrest me now? For what?"
"I'm not saying we're going to arrest you, Yolanda," Myra said. "I'm simply telling you what would happen if we were forced to subpoena you and you didn't comply with the subpoena. I don't want to have to subpoena you at all. We only have a couple of questions."
"I ain't got nothing to say that's going to help you all. I saw Strawberry shoot Devin and that white dude."
"I'm not going to try to get you to say anything other than the truth," Myra said. "I'd just like to know exactly what you saw, step by step. Let's start with where you were."
"I'd just come out my building to go to the Arab mart down on Avenue J."
"What's the Arab mart?"
"It's just a deli," Yolanda said with a shrug. "Everybody be calling it that because it's run by these Arabs. They the only Arabs around here, what with all the Jews."
"What were you going to get from the deli?" Myra asked, apparently uninterested in exploring Yolanda's lack of political correctness. "What you care about that for?"
"I don't, really. I just want to make sure I have a full picture, that's all."
"I got me a little boy. I needed to pick up some milk."
"You were going to get milk?"
"And I needed me some Newports," Yolanda said, drumming the fingers of one hand against the pocket of her jeans while the other hand held her front door.
"So you were going to get milk and cigarettes?"
"True that."
"Did you make it to the deli?"
"I didn't get out the Gardens."
"Okay. So what happened when you left your building?"
"I saw Devin across the way," Yolanda said.
"Did you know Devin?" Myra asked, playing it straight—we needed to know what story Yolanda was going to tell about her relationship with Devin.
"Me and him is together," Yolanda said, not making much out of it. While she was still hostile—her arms folded across her chest, her face tight and expressionless—she seemed to be reasonably forthcoming. But there was something jittery about her too, a nervous energy that seemed to go beyond the fact that we'd barged into her life and started asking questions.
"You're together?" Myra said, feigning surprise. "Meaning you're dating?"
"Like that, sure."
"I see. How long have you and Devin been together?"
"Few months now," Yolanda said dismissively.
"What was Devin doing when you saw him that night?"
"He was talking to the white dude that got hisself killed."
"You saw the two of them talking together?"
"They was just across the way."
"Could you see Devin's face when you spotted him?"
"Naw," Yolanda said. "I could see the white dude's face, enough to see he was white, anyway."
"What happened after you saw Devin and the white guy?"
"I was gonna go over there, talk to Devin. Just as I started walkin' was when Strawberry started shootin'."
"Did you see the shooter before the shots?"
Yolanda shook her head. "I wasn't looking 'round after I saw Devin. Then I heard a gat sparking, saw Devin and the white dude both go down. That's when I seen Strawberry. He come running by."
"That's when you first saw the person who'd been shooting? After the shots had been fired?"
Yolanda was getting a little
more agitated, but not as much as I would've expected. While it was obvious that she didn't like talking about the shooting, she was able to do so without losing her composure, which was more than most people would've been capable of. I suspected she would make a decent witness for the prosecution. "He come running right by me."
"He ran past you?"
"That's right."
"How far away was the person who ran past you?"
"It was Strawberry," Yolanda said, raising her voice slightly. "I seen him. He wasn't no more than ten feet away."
"Did he still have the gun in his hand when he ran by you?"
"Yeah."
"He did?" Myra said, tilting her head slightly. "You saw the gun in his hand when he ran by?"
"Where else was it gonna be?" Yolanda said heatedly. "He wasn't gonna leave it there."
"What I'm asking, Yolanda, is whether you actually saw the gun in his hand," Myra said, keeping her own voice even and speaking slowly, clearly trying to defuse the conversation a little.
"Sure, I saw it when he run by."
"Which hand was it in?"
Yolanda glared at Myra with open hostility. "You trying to trick me."
"No, I'm not," Myra said. "I'm simply trying to understand what you saw. Now, if you saw the gun as he ran past, it had to either be on the side nearest to you or the side farthest from you. Do you remember which it was?"
"You ain't never been around when a gat went off," Yolanda said dismissively. "The whole thing happen in, like, one second, the shooting, seeing Devin go down, seeing Strawberry run past me. I wasn't looking for no kinda shit like what hand he got the gun in."
"So what did you see of the man you saw run by?"
"I seen his face."
"And you'd seen Strawberry before?"
"I'd seen him around here. He do business with Devin."
"What kind of business?"
Yolanda's glare grew even sharper. "You can ask Strawberry that your own self."
"And had you ever spoken to Strawberry?"
"I ain't got no cause to speak with him. But I seen him in the Gardens. I seen him enough to recognize him."
"Where specifically had you seen him?"
"I seen him over at Devin's crib."