And still Warren hadn’t broken. Yet. “I said everything last night.”
“Well, you don’t seem to get the picture here. We’ve got a whole pile of witnesses who are going to say Warren was part of the fight. Warren went to the other side of the bridge, and then she ends up dead. Reena’s a hundred and fifty or sixty pounds. You’ve got little Kelly who’s a hundred and ten pounds. Do you think anybody is gonna—”
“I can’t even bench-press eighty pounds,” Warren said.
“I don’t give a shit how much you can bench-press!” Bruce Brown screamed. “I can’t even bench-press seventy pounds. I don’t even care. All I’m saying is you’ve got a bunch of people in court listening to you saying you never kicked her. However, the physical evidence will show that you have her blood on your pants. Two, three, four people will say they saw you kick her. Then you’re gonna say, ‘I just went to the other side and watched Kelly. I didn’t do anything.’ But because you lied about facts we can prove, do you think the jury is going to believe you didn’t have anything to do with the murder? I don’t think so. Her pants and panties are missing. She’s either been raped—”
“As if I’m going to sexually assault her. I’ve got a girlfriend.”
“I don’t really care,” Brown sneered. “How many pictures of girls do you have in your wallet? You’ve got twenty of them. What does that say to me? That says to me maybe you like a lot of girls. So you’re not just a true-blue, one-girl man, are you?”
“I am.”
“Yeah? I don’t think so.”
“You know,” Bond said, leaning back now, folding his arms across his chest, still with alert eyes on the boy, “maybe they’ll bring in one of your friends who says, ‘Warren talks a bit kinky. He’s a bit dirty.’ They’ll bring in teachers who say, ‘Yeah, this guy has a bit of an attitude. A bit of a temper.’ And then you’ll say, ‘Oh my God. I didn’t think they’d be saying anything about that.’
“You think a jury is gonna believe you just sat there ten feet away while a murder happened? And all you’re saying is, ‘Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go.’ You didn’t really care about Reena. All you cared about was getting your own skin out of there.”
“Lots of people didn’t get out of there. I don’t even want to be where I am right now.”
“Well, you are,” Brown said. “So don’t try to wish yourself away from it, Warren. You can’t. You’re here. Deal with it. And deal with it like a man.”
“Lots of people are phoning up here now,” Bond said, practicing the technique of trickery. “And they’re saying, ‘I saw two people dragging her into the water.’ Deal with that. Hey. With your hair! I kind of like the style, but it’s distinctive.”
“It is distinctive,” Warren said.
“They’re not going to be getting you and Kelly mixed up. Hey, you’re distinctive. You’re going down. So this is the time to say, ‘Yeah. I did some shit here.’”
“I might have kicked her on the initial side, okay?”
“I know you kicked her. It’s not a case of might have. I know. So tell me something I don’t know.”
“I never did nothing on the other side of that bridge,” Warren insisted.
Bond then informed Warren about the significance of DNA.
“When we talk about DNA, this stuff is precise shit,” he said. “You didn’t pull her in? You didn’t brush up against her? You didn’t pick up her shoes? You didn’t pick up her clothes or backpack?”
“I didn’t touch anything of hers.”
“You didn’t pick up her pants? You didn’t fold her clothes? You didn’t touch any single thing of hers when you were over there?”
“Honest. I swear to God.”
“Yeah,” Brown sneered. “You were saying that last night, holding your crucifix and saying, ‘I never kicked her. I like girls. I would never hurt them. I’ve been brought up to respect women. That’s the last thing I would ever do.’ And here you are, Warren, right in the middle of a homicide.”
“Hey,” John Bond said, offering Warren another reality to contemplate. “When you have twelve people on a jury, they may convict Kelly, but I know one thing: they’re gonna be looking for a guy. Women on the jury want to see guys found guilty, and I think you happen to be the guy in this case. And if there’s nothing we can do for you, well, hey. I’ve been in the business twenty-plus years. So has my partner. Hey, big stuff. We see a lot of people go down. They get convicted. You’ve got some problems.”
“I know that,” Warren said, hearing about a jury looking for “the guy in this case.”
“You better deal with it.”
“On the other side, I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t even touch her.”
“So why would you go over the bridge?”
“’Cause Kelly asked me because she wanted to go talk to her.”
“And what did she say? She didn’t say, ‘Oh, I want to go talk to her.’”
“She said, I want to go talk to her,” Warren insisted, and he began to cry.
“‘I want to go and fucking deal with her’ is what she said.”
Brown said, “That sort of sounds like a plan to me. Everyone else had left. It’s just the two of you, and Kelly says, ‘Hey, Warren. I’m gonna go over there and do a number on her. I need some backup.’ Now, if that’s what she said and you didn’t actually participate in the assault, that’s one thing. But if you both said, ‘Let’s go over and fucking kick her ass.’”
“Kelly said, ‘I want to find out what really happened with her getting beat up,’” Warren said, weakly.
“She knew what was going on. She was part of the beating. She wasn’t at all confused about what the beating was all about.”
“I should have left as soon as she hit her once,” Warren said.
“You should have done a lot of things by then.”
“I should have left even that night. I shouldn’t even be here right now.”
“But you are. Don’t keep wishing it away, buddy.”
“This isn’t a bad dream,” Bond said. “You’re not gonna snap out of it. You think it’s a dream? Here, go ahead and touch me. I’m here. I’m not something that you can’t see. I’m not going anywhere. Hey, you went over the bridge. That’s the bottom line. That’s what happened. Go ahead. Tell me about the part where she’s told to take her shoes off. ‘Get your shoes off, bitch.’ Tell me about that part.”
“I already told you guys about that part.”
“I want to hear it again.”
“I’m calling my lawyer.”
“What’s your lawyer gonna do?”
“I don’t know. It’s gonna get me incriminated.”
“You are incriminated! What do you mean getting incriminated? You kicked her during this swarming, and then you and Kelly go over and kill her. Possibly rape her.”
“I did not kill anybody. I did not rape her.”
Brown spoke less sternly now, contemplatively, as if a new idea had just occurred to him. “Maybe that’s why you’re having a tough time with this. Because you sexually assaulted her. Maybe you’re disgusted with that.”
“Accuse me of whatever you want, okay?” Warren said.
“There’s no accusing of anything,” Bond said. “We’re saying we’ve figured out what happened. Your friends are lining up to say Warren did this. Warren did that. Warren did the kicking. He wore white pants. He went to his girlfriend’s place. Blah, blah, blah. But everyone seems to be on the same page: you and Kelly went to the other side of the bridge with Reena, who was alive, and when you both came back, she was dead. Doesn’t matter who threw the final punch. It’s like two people going out to rob a bank. I may be the one that talks to the teller and my partner may be the guy that drives the car. We both robbed a bank. Hey, both of you guys went over there. I think Kelly was leading you, and said, ‘Hey. I’ve had it with her. I’m tired of her shooting her yap off. I’m gonna go deal with her. Hey, come along.’ You come along as the good guy. I don’t thin
k when you went over there you necessarily thought she was gonna get killed. I think you thought she might get punched out a little more.”
“The only thing I thought was that she was going to find out everything that happened from Reena’s point of view. And what happened after, after she’d been punching her like that, that shouldn’t have happened.”
“Well, did you say stop?” Bond inquired.
“When she was dragging her down to the water, I said, at least three times, ‘Stop. Let’s go.’”
“And do you think she was dead or alive when that was happening?”
“Probably alive.”
“How far was she dragged?”
“Twenty feet. Thirty feet.”
“By her feet or by her hands?”
“By the feet.”
“So Kelly had one foot, and you had the other foot?”
“No. I didn’t even have a foot. I didn’t help.”
“Don’t forget. DNA, fiber, trace fiber,” Bruce Brown said. “Do you know about the Atlanta child murder case? The guy, Wayne Williams, they found his fibers on his victim’s clothing weeks after.”
“I know.”
“You’ve read about him?”
“No, I know though, even a small bit, just a hair….”
“You’ve got some problems here.”
“I know,” Warren conceded, at last. “I know.”
“I think your story has got the room to improve in certain parts,” Bond confided with an instinct that Warren was about to stop “calibrating” his story. “You’re not being totally clean. But some of it makes sense. Kelly was leading the attack on the other side. You weren’t. She was the one that wanted to get things done. When you said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ if you would have went and phoned 911, well, all you would have had to say was, ‘There’s a girl that’s been beat up and she’s at the beach.’ You wouldn’t have even had to give your name. And when you went to court, you know what they’d say? Maybe the guy didn’t deal himself in to kill this poor girl. But now what they’ll say is two people go over the bridge with Reena, she ends up dead. There’s no effort by you to do anything. It doesn’t matter if you ended up punching her in the head or you dragged her in the water. The bottom line is, you’re gonna be held accountable for—”
“Her murder,” Warren said.
“That’s right. There’s one spin you can put on this thing right now. You should say, ‘Bruce. John. I haven’t been quite up front with you. This is what happened. Hey, this thing went crazy. It went sideways. It happened so quick.’”
“What happened under the bridge,” Warren said softly, “it was crazy.”
“Oh, I know. There’s so many people that want to tell us about what happened under the bridge that I’m running out of goddamned tapes. That’s not the thing. You’re lined up for that. That’s a no-brainer.”
“You see, what happened on the other side, Kelly,” Warren paused, “beat her up, okay? I’m calling her. She was puking.” He began to sob. “And choking on blood. And Kelly was….” His words were muffled by sobs. “Kelly might be a small girl, but she is strong.”
“Do you think Kelly’s gonna get up in court and say, ‘Yeah. I went over there and personally punched the shit out of her ’til she was throwing up and puking and then I dragged her in the water and tried to drown her. And Warren, my friend, was saying, ‘Hey, let’s get out of here. This isn’t right. Let’s go.’”
“When she was dragging her in the water, I said, ‘Let’s go.’”
“But prior to that, when she was getting beat up, they’re gonna say, hey …”
“Why didn’t I offer to come and help?”
“Oh,” Bond predicted, “Kelly and her lawyer are going to be eating you alive. You think this is ugly? Hey, we might as well be having a cup of tea here. It’s gonna get uglier for you because Kelly’s got some highflying lawyers now, and they’re gonna say, ‘Hey, my client was there, but this kid Warren, he’s got the bad temper. He’s tough. He’s lean. He’s quick.’ It’s going to be half-true, half-false, but it’s going to be enough for the jury.”
“It’s going to be a lot of b.s.,” Warren said.
“Oh, I know. They’re just gonna do a number on you like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Kelly doesn’t have any blood on her clothes,” Bond said.
“You go check her Calvin Klein jacket.”
“Okay. We’ll try and help you out and come up with this jacket. But do you think she’s gonna end up taking the whole rap for this? What do you think?”
“She’s gonna point the finger at me.”
“Yeah,” Bond agreed, his voice suddenly sympathetic. “So let’s make sure we get the portions of liability right. The person that did the bulk of it should take the lion’s share of the punishment. The person that just played a 10 percent or 20 percent role should make sure they get their story told. Because the hardest part is dealing with this in court. It’s not dealing with Bruce and me. We’re easy guys to deal with.”
“You’re nice guys. I know that.”
“Hey, Warren,” Bond said, as if speaking to a good friend, “if she’s done the bulk of this and you’ve done a little bit of it, tell us right now what you’ve done so we can assess and just see how much trouble you’ve got yourself in here.”
“The shoes,” Warren admitted. “I put them with the jacket. So there’s gonna be two fingerprints right there.”
“Okay, that matches up,” Bond said, encouragingly.
“And where did you put them?” Brown inquired.
“Right by the white schoolhouse.”
“She was ordered to take the shoes off, wasn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“And who was doing the ordering?”
“Kelly.”
“Did she resist?”
“No. She said, ‘Take them.’”
“And what did Kelly do next?”
“She started beating her up again.”
“So why didn’t Reena resist taking her jacket or shoes off? Was she injured from the fight earlier?”
“She had a little bit of blood on her face.”
“A little bit?”
“But she was still talking fine. She was walking fine.”
“What did she say to you?”
“She didn’t say anything to me.”
“I’m sure there were some things said there.”
“But she didn’t even know us. I don’t know that girl. That was the first time I met her in my life. And the last.”
“Well, you won’t be meeting her again,” Bond said gravely. “I agree. That’s the last time you’ll meet her because she’s dead.”
He paused. The men were quiet, and so was the boy. Bond watched Warren attentively. He looked at the clock, and let some minutes go by. He then spoke, his voice friendlier, even more respectful, than it might ever have been. Anyone listening might have thought he was speaking to a person whom he greatly revered: “Warren, I can tell right now that you’re about thirty seconds from saying, ‘Guys, this is eating me up. I just want to tell you my involvement. Something happened that was bad. I wasn’t the one that caused the most grief.’”
“I wasn’t.”
“I know you’ve got something to say to us right now about what happened down by the beach and you want to say it right now. I can tell that right now.”
Warren sighed, and because he felt understood, even accepted, for the first time, by the two men, the nice guys, he said he would speak now, if only they turned off the tape. Bond’s instinct had been correct. Warren was ready.
He told his story then, through tears, in a whisper.
“After Officer Hodginson came, we left Shoreline. We turned left. We went under the bridge. Everyone was down there and there was all this screaming noise. I was close enough that….” He began to cry. “Twice.”
He paused, as if overcome by the darkness of memory.
“After that, everyone left. I don’t know if
she was unconscious but she was sitting up. She was down by the water. They all left. Kelly’s like, ‘Well, we’re gonna talk to her. I want to find out exactly what went on tonight. I want to find out if that Reena girl is sorry for all the trouble she caused.’ So we went over the bridge, and then we stopped to order her to take her shoes and jacket off. When she took them off, I threw away her jacket and put her shoes on the steps. And then beat her up more until she was woozy, and Kelly grabbed her head. Her head was smashed against a tree.”
“Smashed against a tree?” Brown said, incredulously.
“Yeah. So there’s probably blood all over the tree. And then … then she started kicking her in the head and the ribs. I didn’t kick her when she was on the ground. And then she, she started choking on blood. And that’s why, Kelly….” Still sobbing, he looked down at the wood table, away from his interrogators. “I dragged her for about nine or ten feet, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to drag her. I said, ‘No. Let’s go.’ At least three times. I was telling Kelly, ‘Come on.’ At least three times. Why don’t we leave. ’Cause I don’t want to do any of this. And then I’ll have to deal with it right now … but there’s no way I can get rid of it….”
“Hard to do, huh?” Brown asked.
“I can’t,” Warren said, still sobbing.
“Well,” Bond said, “with what you’ve told us, you know, you could be charged with being part of the homicide just because you were there. And first-degree murder is when someone is sexually assaulted and then murdered, but I don’t think that’s the case here.”
“I didn’t murder her. And sexual assault? I mean, that’s sick. Seriously sick.”
“So where’s all her clothes now?” Bond asked.
“They were right by her.”
“Did you go down later and pick up the clothes because you were worried about fingerprints?”
“No.”
“Who have you told about this?”
“I didn’t tell other people about it.”
“Well, you told somebody.”
“I didn’t tell any friends. I didn’t tell anyone.”
“You know exactly who you told.”
“I may have told Maya.”
Under the Bridge Page 19