A Case of Redemption

by Adam Mitzner

  I’d been checkmated. There were simply no more moves to play.

  “L.D.’s going to be one unhappy camper if we tell him that he’s not testifying,” I said.

  That was an understatement. If there had been one constant in L.D.’s story, it was that he wanted to tell the jury he was innocent.

  Unfortunately, that was virtually the only thing he’d been consistent on.

  47

  Legally Dead walked into the visitors’ room with his usual wide-eyed grin, but it vanished the moment he caught my expression. He knew instantly that he had a serious problem.

  Without even exchanging pleasantries, I said, “We met with Benjamin Ethan yesterday. He wanted to take one last shot at talking us out of calling Matt Brooks. And he gave us this.”

  “What is it?” L.D. asked without even looking at the envelope.

  “They’re photographs of you having sex with a man.”

  The muscles in his face tightened, but beyond that he didn’t show any emotion. He methodically opened the envelope and slid out the photos, glancing quickly at the first one—the one where only his tattoo was visible. He lingered slightly longer on the second, and then flipped to the final picture, all without a change of expression.

  “How’d Brooks get these?”

  “So they’re real?” I asked.

  “Any chance we can claim they’re not?”

  Nina’s expression was what I’d expected. He’s such a goddamn liar, it said.

  “Benjamin Ethan told me that they were checked out by one of his people and they’re legit,” I said. “We can do a check ourselves, but I think it’ll be a lot easier if you just tell us the truth. For once, I mean.”

  He nodded. “So that’s Brooks’s response—he’s going to tell the world I’m gay? Fuck him. I really don’t care anymore.”

  “It’s not that simple, L.D.,” I said. “Brooks told us that if he testifies, he’ll say that you killed Roxanne to keep her from outing you.”

  “What?!” L.D. said with utter shock on his face.

  Nina told L.D. what Brooks had said, laying out the way the testimony would come in if we put Brooks on the stand. She also explained the risk that if we told the jury about Brooks’s affair with Roxanne, Kaplan would call Brooks as part of her rebuttal case, and then he’d hammer us that way.

  When she was finished, L.D.’s face was a picture of murderous rage.

  “Can’t you see what’s actually going on here?!” he said, his voice rising with every word. “Brooks fucking killed her and he’s setting me up! Roxanne knew I was gay. I told her. And she didn’t care, and she sure as shit wasn’t going to out me. Christ, half her fans and practically all her backup dancers are gay. The idea that Roxanne and I were dating—that was all Brooks’s. He said it would be good for both our images—soften me up and give her some edge—so we went along. You’re not that fucking stupid that you believe what Brooks is saying, are you, Dan?”

  “Calm down, L.D.,” I said.

  “You never believed me! You talked shit when we first met, but you never really believed that I didn’t kill her!”

  I wanted to scream back at him. To shout how much I needed to believe in him, and how utterly impossible he made it for me to have that faith. All I had riding on him, and how his conviction would be a tragedy for me, too.

  But I caught myself. In a soft voice, I said, “L.D., I don’t believe what Matt Brooks is saying. I don’t. But whether it’s true or not, he’s going to say it if we put him on the stand. So the question for us is: If that is his testimony, how bad will it be for us? And I’m not sure there’s any other conclusion but that it’s going to be pretty fucking bad. Remember, he’s going to come off as someone who was a friend to both you and Roxanne, and so what reason does he have to lie?”

  “What fucking reason? Dan, he’s lying because he killed her. He was the one fucking her, not me.”

  “I know. I know. But we don’t have any proof of that. All we have on the affair is that he was in South Carolina over Thanksgiving, and she visited his room. Brooks is going to say it was for business, and we have nobody who’s going to contradict that.”

  Nina came in for further support. “We should rest our case now. We shouldn’t even put Popofsky on. They’ve already conceded Roxanne’s lack of pubic hair at the time of the murder, and that’s all he was going to say anyway. Dan will make the other points we have—about ‘A-Rod’ not being about Roxanne, about there not being any credible evidence that you two even broke up—during his closing. We think that’ll be enough for reasonable doubt.”

  “No, you don’t,” L.D. said. “You just think I’ve got no shot the other way, and this way I got . . . I don’t know, a fuckin’ prayer.”

  That pretty much summed it up. None of us said anything for a good minute. We all just sat there.

  “Just answer me this, Dan,” said L.D. “Honestly. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you think I’m innocent and Brooks is guilty?”

  I thought about saying that what I thought didn’t matter. Then I thought about saying that what I thought shouldn’t matter to him.

  “Yes” was what I said instead.

  When I turned to Nina, she looked away. Clearly she disagreed.

  More silence followed.

  “It’s my choice, right?” L.D. finally said.

  “What is?” I asked, although I knew.

  “Testifying. If I say I’m going to do it, you have to put me on, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I got to do it. I gotta tell them that I didn’t kill her. I don’t give a fuck about Brooks, but I just can’t let the jury decide without them hearing me say that.”

  Nina was now staring at me, imploring me to say something to change L.D.’s mind. It came as something of a surprise to me, but I realized, in that moment, that I didn’t want to change his mind.

  “You understand that you’ll have to testify truthfully?” I said. “About everything? The gay stuff. That you were never shot four times. All of it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. When you take the oath, you’ll tell them that your name is Calvin Merriwether?” He nodded that he would. “Then I’ll ask you a couple of questions about why you called yourself Nelson Patterson, and you’ll answer them truthfully. From there, I’ll ask you about your relationship with Roxanne, and what will you say to that?”

  “That we were friends, but not lovers. That Matt Brooks asked me to go on tour with her, and I did.”

  “And why did you pretend to be her lover?”

  “Because Matt Brooks said it would help my sales.”

  It was actually going pretty well so far. Better than I had expected, in fact.

  When I looked over at Nina to see if she shared my reaction, however, it was clear to me that she did not. She was sitting with her arms crossed and a dissatisfied expression. Not too dissimilar to when I decided to cross-examine Roxanne’s mother.

  “Then we’ll do ‘A-Rod.’ You’re okay on that.”

  “I’ll say that if you listen to the entire lyrics, you’ll hear that it’s about men. Gang members. That the singer in the song isn’t Roxanne. The reference is to someone who’s a snitch to the police.”

  It wasn’t lost on me that he sounded like an entirely different man. The street lingo and profanity were gone. In their place were the measured phrasings of a man who was focused on the job at hand.

  He just might be able to pull this off. More than that, it just might be true what he was saying.

  “Where were you on the night Roxanne was killed?”

  “I was home alone. No one can alibi me, but that’s not surprising since I lived alone. I was home alone the night before she was murdered, too, and I can’t prove that, either.”

  “Nina,” I said, “do you want to do some cross with L.D.? See if you can shake him.”

  She nodded but looked defeated even before she began. “You claim that ‘A-Rod’ is about killing a man wit
h a baseball bat?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you don’t deny that you wrote a song about killing someone with a baseball bat, do you?”

  “No, but I’ve written a lot of songs, and most of them have some violence in them. Just like a horror movie. People die in all sorts of ways in my songs. That one involves a baseball bat.”

  “And so it’s just a coincidence that you wrote a song about a singer getting killed by a baseball bat, and that Roxanne, a singer, had a baseball bat in her room that is now missing, and she was killed by being beaten, most likely with that bat. Is that what you want this jury to believe?”

  L.D. didn’t answer at first, and then he smiled. It reminded me of the first smile I’d seen, that day in the jail, through the glass. Dimples popping on both sides.

  “No, it’s not a coincidence,” he said in a steady voice. “Matt Brooks killed Roxanne, and he’s been setting me up to take the fall. He’s the one who insisted that I put ‘A-Rod’ on the album. I never thought the song was any good. He’s also the one who told me to go on tour with Roxanne, and then he said we should pretend to be a couple. I couldn’t see it then, but I do now. He wanted me to pretend to be Roxanne’s boyfriend to throw his wife off the scent, so she’d think Roxanne had someone else, you know, other than him. Then when he decided that he couldn’t be sure Roxanne would stay quiet about the affair, he killed her, and he did it in a way that would throw blame on to me, by using a baseball bat.”

  When he was finished, L.D. smiled at me. It was obvious it felt good for him to get all that off his chest.

  • • •

  That night, I had a sense that something was wrong. Even though Nina’s actions belied that she was upset—she let me work on my direct of L.D. in peace, even going so far as making a supermarket run so that she could cook while I worked—she was uncharacteristically silent all evening.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked when we got into bed. “You’ve barely said two words to me tonight.”

  “I was letting you work.” She looked back at me.

  I shot her a suspicious look. “Since when have you ever let me work?”

  “I’m nervous,” Nina conceded.

  “You and me both. Tomorrow’s going to be some day.”

  “And then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, with us?”

  “What’s gotten into you?”

  “I’m just worried that . . . when the trial is over . . . everything will change.”

  “I hope so,” I said with a smile. “I hope it gets even better. Think about how great it will be when we’re not working twenty hours a day.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise,” I said, and kissed her.

  And then, as we did every night, we made love, which only reinforced in my mind what I’d said. I never wanted to spend another night away from Nina.

  48

  Judge Pielmeier took the bench at exactly nine thirty, the time court is supposed to start each day. If that wasn’t enough to make me think something was amiss, she immediately said, “I’d like to see all counsel in my chambers.”

  My first thought was that there must be an issue with one of the jurors, and that would be a big problem for us. The next alternate, and the two alternates after her, for that matter, were all undesirables from our point of view.

  Unlike the last conference, this time there were enough chairs for everyone in the judge’s office. We all took our seats—the prosecution sat to the judge’s left and us to the right, just like we line up in court.

  In a slow and steady tone, Judge Pielmeier said, “A few minutes ago, I was informed that just before your client was to be transported to court this morning, he was involved in some type of altercation with another prisoner. I’m sorry to be the one who has to tell you, Mr. Sorensen and Ms. Harrington, but he was stabbed to death.”

  It felt like when I’d heard that Sarah and Alexa had been killed. That it just couldn’t be true. I was waiting for Judge Pielmeier to laugh and say she was only kidding, but, of course, she didn’t.

  “Do they know who did it?” I asked.

  “No,” Judge Pielmeier said, with a shake of her head. “They’re doing a full investigation down at Rikers, but I’m told that unless a guard sees it, which wasn’t the case here, it’s very difficult to find out what happened in a prison fight.”

  I walked back into the courtroom in something of a stupor. There was a buzz that immediately fell silent upon our entry. The somber looks from the gallery were all I needed to realize that word of L.D.’s death had already leaked out, at least to the press.

  It seemed to take an eternity for the jury to enter the courtroom and then assemble in the jury box. When each was finally in his or her place, Judge Pielmeier took a deep breath and repeated to them what she’d told us in chambers.

  Almost as a collective, the jurors gasped. The relative quiet from the gallery, however, confirmed my initial suspicion that news of L.D.’s death was by now widespread.

  “As a matter of law, Mr. Patterson is not guilty of these charges,” Judge Pielmeier said, sounding almost as if it mattered. “And so, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the people of the state of New York, I thank you for your service. You are no longer under my jurisdiction and so you are free to talk with whomever you wish, including members of the press. If you choose not to do so, the guards will ensure that you can leave the courthouse without being accosted.”

  Then she gaveled twice and said, “We’re adjourned.”

  I stood as the jury made their way out for the final time, but Nina did not. She seemed to be in another world.

  “Stand up, Nina,” I said. “The jury’s leaving.”

  She slowly came to her feet. When she did, I could see she was weeping.

  49

  L.D.’s funeral was a mysteriously arranged affair. Perhaps that was poetic justice, given how enigmatic a life he’d lived.

  I received a call the night before from a man who claimed to be L.D.’s relative, without specifying the actual relation. He told me the particulars of the funeral, the where and when, and then asked if I’d be good enough to inform Nina. I told him that I could speak for her as well, and that we’d both be in attendance.

  As soon as I hung up, however, Nina told me that I’d been wrong in my assumption about her inclination to pay her respects.

  “I just don’t think I can handle it,” she said. “One day we’re talking to him about testifying, the next day he’s gone. I’ve never known anyone who died before. I mean, even my grandparents are still alive. So I’m more than a little freaked out by everything.”

  I understood what she meant. Many people had expressed similar sentiments about Sarah. That she was the first friend of theirs who’d died, and how it made them face their own mortality. That kind of thing. It was something that I was well past, however. I knew how fleeting life could be long before L.D.’s death.

  • • •

  At the cemetery’s main entrance stood a small, African-American man dressed in a black suit, bright white shirt, solid black tie, and a gray fedora. He looked like a civil-rights leader from the 1960s, like one of the men standing beside Martin Luther King Jr. in a history book photograph. I pulled my car beside him and lowered the window.

  “Mr. Sorensen,” he said, as if we’d met before, even though I couldn’t imagine how he recognized me.

  “Yes,” I said tentatively, and then added, “I’m sorry but Nina Harrington sends her regrets.”

  “That’s quite all right,” he said. “We’re glad that you could pay your respects.”

  He handed me a map of the grounds. The route to the grave site was highlighted in yellow.

  He said, “Please, go on ahead. We’ll be starting soon.” Then he stepped back from the car window.

  L.D.’s plot was as far away from the entrance as you could get, and I wondered if the remote placement was intentional. But even though the map made it seem as if
I was driving to the next county, it was barely a minute before I came upon a lineup of cars. Up the hill were about a dozen people surrounding the burial plot.

  In the center of the group was an older man. He was tall and thin, looking too frail to be out in the cold for even the twenty minutes or so I estimated the service would take. Upon closer inspection, I saw that he was wearing a clerical collar.

  The priest was flanked by two even older-looking African-American women, both of whom were crying, which led me to make the obvious assumption that they were relations of some sort. Next to them were men of about the same age, husbands, most likely.

  Off to the side was Mercedes. A little girl was hiding between her legs. Brianna, I assumed. Seeing L.D.’s daughter brought an instant smile to my face, even as I recognized it was a misplaced emotion. There’s nothing about a girl losing her father that’s worth smiling about, but it felt like I was looking at L.D., just for a second.

  On the opposite side from Mercedes stood Nuts, looking as defiant as the time I’d visited him in Brownsville. If he recognized me, he didn’t show it.

  I scanned the rest of the mourners. The only white face I saw belonged to Matt Brooks. He was flanked by Jason Evans, his wardrobe-size chief of staff.

  Brooks smiled at me when we made eye contact, that son of a bitch.

  The priest delivered a short sermon in which he spoke about loving God even in times of grief. He referenced Brianna, saying that L.D. would live on through her.

  “I did not know Calvin,” the old priest said, using L.D.’s real name, “and so it’s appropriate that the man who knew him best say a few words.”

  And with that, Matt Brooks stepped forward and began to speak.

  “L.D., your family and friends are here today to say good-bye,” Brooks said as if he was speaking to the man and not to his mourners, “and while we all are saddened that your time on earth was much too short, we take comfort in the fact that through your music, you will truly be immortal, and someday your musical genius will be recognized.”