“But isn’t it risky? I mean, what if something comes up and he needs to go back to the Capitol to get a ruling?”
“We can go to the Federal District Court. But we’ve also got a partner firm on standby up in DC.”
“But I thought Mr. Sedaka went there in person to argue the motion? He was on the TV outside the court afterward.”
“Yes, he went there for that because that was the last-chance saloon as far as the court proceedings were concerned. But if anything new comes up that the District Court can’t or won’t handle, we’ve got another firm on standby to file a motion and even argue it if it’s called for.”
The young man shook his head.
“That seems like kind of a strange way to operate – for a big case like this.”
“You have to remember that until recently we didn’t have any cases as big as this.”
“What about that case with the girlfriend of the drug baron?”
“Estella Sanchez? That wasn’t really a big case in terms of workload.”
“People magazine called it ‘a landmark case.’”
“The media like to exaggerate. I suppose it did set a precedent, but the same could be said of any case that goes before the Supreme Court – or at least every successful case.”
“Still … it must have taken some serious work to win it.”
“All we really had to do was file the certiorari motion and one well-written brief. That hardly puts it in the same league as murder with special circumstances. We’ve never dealt with a capital case before.”
Juanita knew that time was ticking by. This was originally supposed to be a short lunch break. But she sensed that she was making some progress here, even if the flow of information so far was going from her to him. It was almost as if he was pumping her for something. But she knew that she was getting somewhere, and she had to hang in there. She had to find out what he was looking for.
“So why did you take on a capital case this time?”
“We didn’t so much take it on as inherit it. The white-shoe firm that had it before us saw it as a sure-fire loser and were looking to unload it.”
“You didn’t have to take it on.”
“Oh there’s kudos even in losing - if you put up a brave enough fight along the way.”
“Brave enough and public enough.”
Juanita smiled.
“Touché”
“So why did the big league firm want out?”
“They got cold feet.”
“And you were the only ones who wanted to touch it?”
“ Oh no, plenty of others were ready to pick it up.”
“Then how come you beat the competition – if you’re such a small outfit?”
“It was Burrow’s decision. I guess he heard about the Sanchez case and decided we were flavor of the month.”
“So the client came to you – you didn’t ambulance chase?”
“Certainly not! But I think Nat was kind of enthusiastic about.”
“Nat?”
“Nathaniel Anderson, our legal intern.”
“Why would he want it?”
“The follies of youth.”
Jonathan looked confused.
“Nat’s an idealist,” Juanita explained.
“He thinks Burrow is innocent?”
“I wouldn’t say that. But he believes that even a sucker deserves a break. Like I said: he’s idealistic.”
“So how come he isn’t in the office?”
“Who says he isn’t?”
“Well I didn’t see anyone else back there in the office.”
Juanita felt a tingling sensation, as she remembered how Jonathan had looked round in the office. Was he spying on them?
14:41 PDT
Getting stuck in traffic is a pain in the ass at the best of times. But when you’ve got a client on death row, with the execution scheduled for just over nine hours’ time, it was a nightmare. That was the position in which Alex found himself now. He was still in Marin County and the bridge wasn’t even in sight.
Plus – and this was the kicker – he felt as if he wasn’t making any progress with Burrow either. The logjam that his car was stuck in seemed, in some way, like paradigm for the case. His client was as stubborn as ever and seemed determined to die. Burrow was putting on a brave face. But Alex could sense that he was scared. The only question was, if he was scared, why didn’t he take the bait? Why didn’t he grab the lifeline that the governor had thrown him?
Was he protecting his mother? He’d have to talk to Nat and find out what he’d got from Sally Burrow. He was about to call the office when his cell phone rang. It was his daughter.
“Hi, Debbie,” he said.
“Hi, Dad,” she replied through clenched teeth. He was the only person in the world who could get away with calling her Debbie – and live. To everyone else, she was Deborah. It was nothing personal, more of a professional requirement. When you’re a hotshot corporate lawyer with a leading Wall Street firm, you can’t afford to be taken anything other than seriously.
“Are you calling from work?”
He knew that two thousand seven hundred miles away she was smiling.
“Dad, I’ve been at my desk since quarter past seven.”
“Sorry.”
He knew that she’d probably been there since half past six. She was ambitious and she worked hard. Like father like daughter.
“Listen, I…” She trailed off. There was always an awkwardness between them. It had been there since long before his wife died, but the killing had been a blow from which their fragile relationship still hadn’t recovered. Melody had been the bridge between them.
“I just wanted to wish you … good luck. With the Burrow case.”
He wondered if she had heard about the clemency offer and if he should tell her about Burrow’s unexpected rejection of it. He decided not to. He could consult her about it as a lawyer – if she had any relevant expertise to contribute – but he couldn’t tell her as his daughter.
“Thanks.”
He didn’t know what else to say. He often thought about things he wanted to talk about when they next talked, but somehow he always seemed to dry up and forget what had been on his mind when one of them picked up the phone and the conversation actually took place.
“Look, I know you’re busy today. But if you need to – if you want to talk to anyone - I’m here for you.”
A soft center inside a hard shell – the exact opposite of her mother.
“Bye, Dad.”
“Bye, Debbie.”
He felt a desolate loneliness as he pressed the red button on the cell phone. But it wasn’t just Debbie he was missing; it was her mother. He wondered if Melody had felt fear when she looked down the barrel of the gun.
She had been working the graveyard shift at A&E in the hospital nine months ago when the two gang members were brought in. Normally they try to separate gang members from rival gangs and don’t bring them in to the same hospital. But when a gang shootout left two victims – one from each side – knocking on death’s door, time was of the essence. So fate would have it that Hector Ramirez and Esteban Delgado were brought in to the A&E Department of St Mary’s Hospital, without any one of the overworked doctors so much as knowing that it had been Delgado who shot Ramirez, before getting shot himself.
All Melody Sedaka knew was that Esteban Delgado was a seriously injured man and it was her professional duty to save him. But while Melody succeeded in her duty with Delgado, Hector Ramirez was pronounced dead on arrival.
She had been warned that with Delgado behind bars and thus inaccessible to the rival gang, she might be targeted instead for revenge – for saving the man who had killed Ramirez. But she had refused to let it interfere with her work. Even the normal security escort to her car had been given short shrift by Melody. So – one week after Thanksgiving – it had been relatively easy for one of Ramirez’s homeys to sneak into the parking lot and gun her down as she was about to get in
to her car.
Shortly after that, sixteen-year-old Eduardo Rivera was stopped in a Jeep Cherokee because of a busted tail light. When the cops radioed in to check the license plate, they found that the jeep had been seen driving away fast from a shooting. A search of the jeep revealed a Glock, and Rivera was arrested on the spot. Then the evidence technicians went in. Ballistics matched the gun to the bullets and cartridges from the Melody Sedaka killing, while fingerprints – albeit on the barrel, not the stock – linked the gun to Rivera. He also had gunshot residue on his left hand, but not on his right. The fingerprints on the barrel were also from his left hand.
The Public Defender – who was representing Rivera – pointed out that his client was right-handed and that the lack of right-handed prints on the stock or gun residue on Rivera’s right hand suggested that the boy was merely driving the getaway car and dumping the gun.
This was what his lawyer was saying. Rivera himself was saying nothing. He had invoked his right to silence and stayed schtum ever since. In the absence of any denial or explanation from Rivera, the cops and DA had concluded that this was Rivera’s initiation for gang membership: “Kill the bitch who saved the man who killed our brother and you’re in.” They pointed out that negative results from the gun residue test to the right hand did not prove conclusively that he had not fired a gun from that hand and he might have wiped the prints from the stock while holding the gun by the barrel.
There were, however, some in the DA’s office who had their doubts.
Alex knew all of this, but had been in too much shock to process the information. He had no idea whether Rivera was guilty or not, and frankly he didn’t care. That was perhaps why the DA had thought it an ideal time to try and persuade Alex to abandon his one-man law firm and join the DA’s staff. So far Alex had refused. But the DA wasn’t yet ready to stop trying.
Ironically, while Rivera was still trying to prove himself a man, Delgado was now busily re-branding himself as a returning Catholic and campaigner against gang violence. Alex had wondered if this was a ploy to reduce his prison sentence. But maybe his brush with death had really changed him into a better man. The jury was still out on that one.
Strangely, one of the factors that had given Alex pause was a visit from a young Hispanic woman who introduced herself to him as Eduardo Rivera’s cousin. She had never been part of the gang culture, but she came to him to personally apologize for what her cousin had done. She offered no excuses and when he was initially rude to her, she had taken it all in her stride.
By then it was his turn to apologize to her and – over lunch at a nearby deli – it emerged that she was attending night school for a law degree and was a fast typist with good shorthand skills. One week later, the young woman – Juanita Cortez – started work for him as his secretary.
He remembered now that he had been about to call Juanita when Debbie had phoned. He reached out to the cell phone in its hands-free cradle.
“Alex Sedaka’s office,” Nat’s voice answered.
Alex was surprised.
“Oh hi, Nat. Where’s Juanita?”
“She’s out for lunch.”
“Out?”
Now that really was a surprise.
“I think the pressure’s getting to her.”
“Do you know when she’ll be back?”
“Any minute I’d guess. Shall I get her to call you?”
“No, it’s actually you I wanted to talk to. I was wondering how it went with Burrow’s mother.”
“Well I didn’t get much. I think I kind of offended her by some of my questions.”
“That’s hardly surprising. What was it, like: ‘How dare you accuse my poor boy of doing anything bad? That bitch had it coming.’?”
“Oh, no, if anything it was quite the opposite. She’s written him off - disowned him completely. It was more like, ‘I’m not to blame for the way my son turned out. He’s just a bad apple.’”
“Yes, but did the apple fall far from the tree?”
“It’s hard to say. She’s a bitch. But I wouldn’t say she was evil.”
“In what way a bitch?”
“The sin of indifference. She didn’t bring up her son. She got on with her life and let him grow up all by himself.”
“Maybe if she’d given him a bit more attention, he would’ve turned out different.”
“That’s exactly what I said.”
“Not to her face, I hope?” The moment of hesitation lasted too long. “Oh you didn’t?”
“‘Fraid so,” said Nat, sheepishly.
Alex was forced to smile at Nat’s shoot-from-the-hip approach.
“And how did she take it?”
“She chased me out of the trailer park with a 12 gauge pump action – figuratively speaking.”
“Well thank the Lord she didn’t have a real one.”
“Ay-men!”
“Okay, is anything else going on? Any more crap with those reporters outside?”
“No, they left after you brushed them off.”
“Well when Juanita gets back, get her to call me.”
“Will do.”
Alex pressed the red button and returned his attention to the road, wondering how Nat knew about him brushing off the reporters.
14:46 PDT
“I tried to put up a fight, but he just beat the crap out of me.”
“I guess that makes it kind of hard for you to accept what we’re doing.”
“Not really. I mean you’re just doing your jobs. The law says a man’s entitled to a lawyer when he’s accused of a crime. And you’re just giving him his legal rights.”
They were walking back to the office now. Juanita felt that she had made as much progress with Jonathan at the deli as she could. And it was quite obvious that he wanted to go back to the office with her. Whatever it was he was interested in, it was something at the office.
Maybe he thinks we leave files lying round, Juanita thought. If so, he was liable to be very disappointed.
In the meantime, Juanita was determined to turn the tables and get some information out of Jonathan.
“So how old were you at the time?”
“Well Clayton and Dorothy were seventeen and I was five years younger than Dorothy, so I guess I would have been twelve.”
“You must have hated Clayton Burrow a lot.”
“Not half as much as he must have hated me.”
“Why? I mean, if Burrow beat you up, wouldn’t he have been satisfied after that? Why would he bear a grudge?”
“Because he got kicked out of school on account of it.”
“How did that happen?”
“He beat me up in front of a dozen other kids. I wasn’t one to snitch, but it got back to the principal and he got canned.”
“So you think that Burrow blamed your sister for telling the principal about him beating you up and killed her to get revenge?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“But why wait so long? I mean, why wait until the senior prom?”
“I guess he’d seen Carrie. He probably did it for dramatic effect.”
“But it’s not like he humiliated her in public like in Carrie. Your sister just vanished on the night of the prom. No one saw her again.”
“Clayton Burrow wasn’t the brightest button. He’d’ve probably done something more dramatic if he could. He wouldn’t have had the brains to pull it off. He probably just bundled her into a car, drove her off to a quiet location and killed her.”
“So what did he do with the body?”
“I guess he buried her.”
“Buried her well enough that the body was never found?”
“I guess so.”
“Can you think of any reason why he’d refuse to reveal where the body was buried now?”
“Why should he? He’s still claiming he’s innocent.”
“But if his life depended on it. He could save himself by – ”
“So it’s true?”
Could this h
ave been all he was after?
“Let’s say it is true. Does it make sense that he’d keep quiet even when he could save his life by spilling his guts?”
“I guess not.”
They had arrived back at the office building. Jonathan held the door open for Juanita. She smiled a polite thank you and walked through.
“There was something else that had us puzzled.”
“What?” he asked as she pressed the elevator button.
“Well we have evidence that Dorothy bought an airline ticket a week before she disappeared.”
He seemed startled by this. She was watching him carefully and although he had tried to hide it, she had noticed.
“Where to? The ticket, I mean.”
She debated telling him that they didn’t know. But this would give him the advantage. If he thought they already knew, he might be less inclined to hold out with whatever he knew.
“We were hoping you could tell us.”
This was good cross-examination technique, she realized. Now he couldn’t be sure whether they knew where the ticket was to or not. Alex would have been impressed, just as she had been impressed by him. The important thing was that now Jonathan would be wondering if she was just trying to test him. The elevator arrived and the doors opened. Jonathan waited politely for Juanita to enter first.
“I don’t know anything about it,” said Jonathan, stepping in behind her. “Did she get the flight?”
The doors closed behind them.
“Can you think of any reason why she wouldn’t?”
They heard the familiar hum and felt that heavy sensation of being inside a rising elevator.
“Apart from the obvious one,” said Jonathan, “no.”
“It’s just that if she did fly,” said Juanita, “then that would explain her disappearance. Maybe she left and never came back.”
Jonathan shrugged.
“Or maybe she came back and was killed after that,” he said.
Juanita wondered if this statement was just a theory or a reflection of personal knowledge. But she didn’t want to show how desperately she needed to know the answer. That would put Jonathan squarely in the driver’s seat. She was saved by the whirring halt of the elevator and the opening of the doors.
You think you know me pretty well (an Alex Sedaka thriller) Page 10