"Awright boss, what's this about?" Malik said, shrugging out of Myra's grasp and turning toward her. "Why you comin' to where I work at and calling me out like this?"
"I was talking to a lady friend of yours not too long ago, Malik," Myra said. "Cute little kid she had too. Matter of fact, kid looked a lot like you."
"Aw, man—" Malik interjected feebly.
" 'Man' is right, Malik," Myra interrupted. " 'Man' is exactly what we're talking about here. 'Cause you know what a man does when he knocks a woman up, right? I'm not talking about, you know, what you did, but I mean what a man is supposed to do in that situation?"
"It's not like that, yo," Malik said. "I provide for them the best I can. Me and Yolanda see each other. This ain't none of your damn business nohow."
"What we hear is Yolanda found herself a new friend. Only now that new friend of hers is lying half dead in the hospital, they still don't know if he's ever going to take a breath that doesn't come out of a tube. He could still flat-out die, Malik. It's already one count of murder, could go to two."
This wasn't exactly true, but clearly Malik didn't know that. He tried to force out a laugh, but he was dry-mouthed and at least a little scared, because what came out was more like a hoarse cough. "No way you jamming me up on that," Malik protested. "I heard you all already put a charge on Strawberry for that."
"We know that you and Devin had your problems, Malik."
"More like he had problems with me than the other way around," Malik said. "I just be trying to see my son from time to time, trying to do something good, man, and Devin, he don't want to hear that. Started cussin' at me, telling me I can't come see my own boy." Malik stopped himself, perhaps realizing that everything he was saying sounded potentially incriminating.
Myra had picked up on it too. "He told you not to see your own son? When was this?"
"I don't know," Malik said. "Back in March maybe."
"What'd you say back to that?"
"I spoke back to him, sure," Malik said. "We got to shoving each other some. Yolanda told me to get gone, so I did. Wasn't like we even really went at each other."
"So why would you have a problem with Devin, right? He was only keeping you from seeing your own son."
"I ain't gonna be beefing with Devin," Malik protested. "Shit, yo, I manage a store. Me on my worst day look like a little girl next to that motherfucker. You know he sling rock, right? He got all that shit. He got the rock, the powder, the chronic, that D called Bin Laden all them junkies be craving. He owns that courtyard out there in the Gardens. I beef with him, win or lose, I lose. Devin's soldiers take me out for sure."
"Of course, that wouldn't happen if you killed him and got away with it," Myra countered.
"Come on, yo," Malik said. "Not like I even got no gun. And how am I supposed to think I'm gonna get away with that? First with you, then with Devin's crew 'round the way."
"Let me see if I have this, Malik," Myra said. "You're saying you would have liked to kill Devin, maybe even thought about it a little, but you were afraid you wouldn't get it away with it?"
"Motherfucker ain't even dead, is he?" Malik said. "If I capped him, he gonna get up out the hospital one day, tell his boys what's what, it's them walking into the store and taking me out 'stead of you coming in and just giving me shit. I capped that bitch, why am I still here? Besides, why am I going to give enough of a fuck to do that?"
"He's keeping you from your child," Myra said.
"That's no reason for me to get myself killed," Malik said.
"YOU OKAY?" Myra asked once we were in her car heading back to Cadman Plaza.
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing big and existential," Myra said. "Just that this morning you seemed like you were ready to burst into song or something."
"I'm fine," I said. "Just some personal stuff's been a little fucked-up." In truth, I wasn't okay. I'd taken Melanie's rejection out of all proportion to the impact it should've had; she'd exposed to me the fraud of my pretending that I'd actually gotten my life back together.
"Well, if you ever need to talk to someone," Myra said, "I hear Isaac's a pretty good listener."
16
WE HADN'T been able to get in to see Devin Wallace as long as he was in intensive care, not being either law enforcement or family. We'd tried to see him after he'd been moved out of the ICU, but unsurprisingly Devin wasn't interested. I'd kept tabs on Devin's progress with periodic calls to the hospital, and I came to find Myra as soon as I learned that he'd been released.
Myra nodded and stood. "You realize we're wasting our time, right?"
"In what sense?"
"He's not going to talk to us," she said.
"Probably not," I agreed.
"But I do always like meeting a man who's worth shooting," Myra said.
MYRA LED the way to Devin's building. We passed corner boys, dead-eyed kids looking nowhere as we passed, their bodies tense with the possibility of hassle.
The elevator was broken, a piece of cardboard with not working scrawled on it stuck to the door, so we took the stairs five flights. The walls of the stairwell were covered with graffiti, trash strewn around the stairs. I noticed a used condom on the third-floor landing.
Devin's door was opened by an attractive black woman, maybe twenty-five, dressed only in a bathrobe. She ignored Myra, stared at me with blank hostility. "What you want here?" she demanded.
"We need to speak to Devin," Myra said. "Since I don't think he's up for coming out, you'd better let us in."
"What you want with Devin?"
"What's your name?" Myra countered.
"Ain't no call for you getting up in my business," the woman answered.
"Then the least you can do is get out of mine and let me in to talk to Devin."
The woman hesitated, still standing in the doorway. "Who that?" a male voice demanded from inside the apartment, the timing keeping the woman from feeding us some line about Devin not being here. Myra smiled at her slightly with one side of her mouth and arched her eyebrows, letting her know that there was no percentage in her trying to give us a story.
"Why you always gotta be hassling us?" the woman muttered, moving out of the way, Myra instantly through the door and into the apartment, me in her wake. There was no sign of Devin's sister.
Devin Wallace certainly looked the worse for wear for having taken two bullets in the back. He glared up at us weakly from his bed, a glassy daze in his eyes, presumably from painkillers. Even in his present condition I could tell that he was a good-looking, powerfully built man. He was light-skinned, with cornrows and a gold hoop in his left ear. His bedroom, like the rest of the apartment, was expensively furnished, but with a level of adolescent garishness not found in the living room: there was an Xbox 360 hooked up to a flat-screen TV, a framed Beyoncé poster on the wall. No doubt many a white teenager's Upper East Side bedroom looked much the same.
"That your nurse you got out there, Devin?" Myra said as we moved into the room. "I like how you make her feel right at home. She bring the robe herself, or you supply that?"
"I already told you all, I ain't talkin' to no five-oh," Devin said. "You ain't got no right to come up in my crib like this."
"Yet here we are," Myra said. "That Yolanda Miller's robe your nurse is wearing?"
"Ain't like I'm fucking nobody just now," Devin said. "I can't even hardly breathe, dog."
"You see who shot you, Devin?"
"Shit, yo," Devin said. "I got shot in the goddamn back. I don't got no eyes in the back of my head."
"You didn't get any kind of look?"
"Ain't like I'd be telling you if I did," Devin said. "I solve my problems my own self."
"Who wanted you dead, Devin?"
"I knew the answer to that, I'd be takin' care of it," Devin said. "No need for me to be lettin' you into my business."
"Are you saying you wouldn't tell the police who shot you even if you knew?" I asked. Regret grabbed me the second I said it. I knew
better by now than to get in the way when Myra was doing an interview. Devin fixed me with a look, his brows furrowing, his mouth opening, but not in a smile.
"You ain't five-oh," he said to us.
"You're refusing to cooperate?" Myra asked.
"Yo, who are you, man?" Devin said. "I wanna see a badge."
"Why would I show you a badge?" Myra said. "You already said you wouldn't cooperate."
"SORRY ABOUT that," I said. "Me and my big mouth."
We were walking through the Gardens again, on our way back to the subway. I was furious with myself for blowing our cover.
"Don't worry about it," Myra said, not even trying to sound like she meant it. "I think we'd got what we were going to get."
"Nothing."
"Not nothing," Myra said. "We got that Devin isn't cooperating with the police. Anything he knows about who might have shot him, he's keeping to himself and his crew."
"So what do we do with that?" I said.
"We don't do anything with it," Myra said. "It just means we know the police aren't getting anything from Devin either."
A PACKAGE from ADA Williams was waiting for me when I got back to the office. Inside was a brief, innocuous letter from her, saying that the enclosed represented additional Rosario material accumulated by the prosecution since their initial disclosure. I assumed they were doing this in order to provide cover for the photo array, make it appear to have been turned over as part of business as usual. Their ploy seemed too obvious to be effective, but I supposed they saw this as better than just turning it over by itself.
There were about fifty pages of documents that I flipped quickly through—I needed to review it all carefully at some point, but for now my focus was on finding the photo array, which was at the very bottom of the pile. I glanced at it, not expecting the array itself to have much interest, when something caught my eye. I picked up the page, which was a photocopy, fuzzy and in black and white, and brought it close to my face, squinting at the photos. Looking more closely, I realized what was strange: every one of the six men in the photo array had a birthmark on his face like Lorenzo's. In fact, the birthmarks all mimicked Lorenzo's: someone had clearly drawn them on. It looked like they'd done a decent job of tracking Lorenzo's actual birthmark, though it was hard to tell for sure on the poor-quality copy we had.
I decided this was something Myra would want to see right away.
"They added birthmarks to the photos?" she asked incredulously, as I handed it to her.
"Ever seen them do anything like this before?"
Myra shook her head, not looking up from the photo array. "There's not anything wrong with them doing it, I guess, except then they should have followed through at the lineup. This photo array highlighted Lorenzo's birthmark, which made it as easy as could be for Yolanda to pick him out at the lineup. And, of course, I didn't know about it at the time like I should have, which kept me from being able to raise it to challenge the lineup."
"Maybe that's why they didn't turn the photos over," I said. "They knew they'd made the birthmark a big deal, and they didn't want to play that up."
Myra was still staring at the photos. "Sounds plausible to me," she said. "Of course, I'm not who we're going to have to convince."
17
TO MY surprise, I'd come to share Shawne Flynt's optimism regarding the case against him in the weeks since he'd first become my client. I'd assumed there'd be something—an informant, a flipped defendant, an undercover cop who'd made a buy—that would directly tie Flynt to the drug dealing on the corner of Grand and Putnam. But as I'd studied the so-called evidence that had been gathered by the police, all I saw was proof that somebody had been dealing drugs on that corner, with nothing linking my client to the dealing other than his physical proximity.
Perhaps the cops had hoped they could flip up the food chain the dealer they'd caught red-handed, or maybe they'd been content to make arrests they knew full well wouldn't ultimately stick, wanting to send a message that they were taking back the street and directing the business elsewhere. Or maybe they just hadn't made their arrest numbers for the month, were padding their stats by bringing in everybody they could find. Whatever the reason, this was a bullshit case, and I doubted any self-respecting DA would proceed with it.
None of which was to say that I thought Shawne Flynt was innocent. I had absolutely no doubt that he was a drug dealer, and that he was captain of the crew that had been swept up in Clinton Hill. But not being innocent didn't make him legally guilty.
I'd scheduled a four o'clock meeting with Shawne in my office, to which he arrived almost half an hour late. He didn't apologize, or even mention his tardiness. I told him that unless something changed I didn't see how the prosecution could go forward with the case against him.
"I done told you that back in the day," Shawne said. "This ain't no thing."
"I don't think the DA will even want to present this to the grand jury," I said. "If they toss it themselves it's on the police department for not making a good collar. If they present it and can't get an indictment then it counts as a loss, as far as the DA's office is concerned."
"Ain't even nothin' to drop," Shawne said. "They never caught me doing shit."
I was well past the point of expecting to be thanked on those rare occasions when I delivered good news to a client, but I was nevertheless surprised by Shawne's complete lack of worry. Even a bullshit charge was enough to make people nervous; if anything, this was even more true in the case of actual criminals, who generally believed the police wouldn't hesitate to manufacture evidence that would put them away. But I'd never detected even a moment of concern from Shawne.
"So how you getting along with Strawberry?" Shawne asked.
It took me a moment to understand the question. Grand Avenue was a fairly long way from Glenwood Gardens, and Lorenzo struck me as too small-time to have a reputation outside of his home turf. Either I had underestimated him, or else I'd underestimated the extent to which Brooklyn's drug dealers from different neighborhoods kept track of one another.
"You know Strawberry?" I said, stalling.
"He tell you he capped Devin Wallace?"
"You know I can't talk about what my clients tell me," I said, trying to keep my voice light.
"It was me that was where Strawberry's at, I'd be thinking how I might be better off doing twenty-five upstate than going back out on the street."
"What are you saying, Shawne?" I asked, my heart starting to pound a little. The threat seemed clear enough; what I didn't understand was where it was coming from.
"I'm just saying, yo, way I hear it, Strawberry ain't even got hisself a crew. He want to take out Devin by ghosting up on the G's back, that shit ain't gonna fly more than once. Strawberry ain't gonna get no second try, you feel me?"
"Are you threatening Lorenzo Tate?" I asked.
"Naw, man," Shawne said, leaning back and barking out a laugh. "What I be doing that for? That shit ain't got nothing to do with me."
"But you're saying it might not be safe for him out in the world if he gets acquitted?"
"The streets take care of their own," Shawne said. "That's all I'm saying. You ain't need me to tell you that."
While Shawne was stepping back from actually threatening Lorenzo, the implication was clear. I could think of only one person on whose behalf Shawne could be speaking. "Do you know Devin Wallace?" I asked.
"How 'bout you?" Shawne said, not even bothering to acknowledge my question. "Who's making you well?"
I wasn't keeping up with him, and there wasn't much sense in my pretending that I was. "Look, Shawne, the reason we're here is to talk about your case—"
"You told me you got that shit covered. I'm figuring you came correct on that."
"That's true, but we really don't have anything else—"
"You get yours on the street, or have you learned to move past that? Smart motherfucker like you, bet you got somebody who comes to you."
"I don't know what you'
re talking about," I said, although of course I did. It was hard to stay in my chair; everything in me wanted to bolt from the room. I could feel beads of sweat forming on my brow.
"It's all right," Shawne said softly, leaning forward now, the faintest smile on his lips. "You don't got to cover from me. Dope really fucked shit up for you, though, huh? You was a real lawyer back in the day."
"I don't know what it is you think you know about me—"
"Now, why you gotta disrespect me like that?" Shawne said, his demeanor shifting: all of a sudden I was face-to-face with the young man who ran a corner. "Don't you be stepping up to me and calling me a liar when we both know nothing I said been no kind of lie."
It was clear that Shawne really did know something about my past. I had no idea how he knew, or why he was raising it, what he was trying to get. What I needed was time to think, but I didn't see how that was going to happen.
"What does any of this have to do with you, Shawne?"
Shawne smiled, easing back again, putting aside the threat. "We just two motherfuckers in a room talkin' some shit. Ain't nothing else. You looking a little warm, homey. Want me to open you a window or something?"
"You did some homework," I conceded, brushing sweat off my forehead with my fingertips. "Or somebody did. So what is it you want?"
"I'm just trying to make sure you're well, yo," Shawne said. "You getting what you need?"
"I don't need anything."
"Some needs just don't play that way. Some needs, they get into you, they ain't never going away. I don't got to be telling you this shit."
I couldn't contain myself anymore. I stood up and opened my office door. "I think we're done here," I said.
Shawne stayed in his seat, looking up at me impassively. "That how you want it, that'll be how it is," he said finally, standing. "Thought you might be looking for a friend is all. You change how you feel, you know where I am."
AFTER SHAWNE left I went to the men's room, ran cold water in the sink, cupped it in my hands, and splashed it on my face. I did it again and again, trying to cool myself down. When I caught my reflection in the mirror I hated what I saw: I looked ashen, disheveled, strung out even. I didn't look like the person I thought I was.
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