Black River

by G. M. Ford

  “Well, then, you’ll have skills you can fall back on if you lose this case, won’t you, Mr. Klein.”

  Klein did a bad job of suppressing a smirk. “Not gonna happen, smart guy. I’ve got that SOB dead to rights, and I’m not gonna let you or anybody else get between me and putting Nicholas Balagula behind bars. He may have subverted the justice system on other people’s watches, but he’s not going to do it on mine.”

  Over Klein’s shoulder, Corso saw Renee Rogers’s face blanch at the words. Raymond Butler looked down at the floor and adjusted his tie.

  “The only thing that would make me happier than seeing Balagula in prison would be seeing him in the electric chair, which as far as I’m concerned is where he belongs,” Corso said.

  Klein threw him a barracuda smile. “Then you’ve got a front-row seat for the game.” He reached out and tapped Corso on the chest with his index finger, three times. “But a seat in the front row is all you’ve got. “

  Corso eased his hands from his pockets.

  “It’s all I want,” he said.

  Renee Rogers felt the crackle in the air. Klein reached toward Corso again.

  “Don’t,” Corso said quietly.

  Klein’s extended finger stopped in midair, about an inch from Corso’s chest. The lawyer narrowed his eyes as he looked up. “Are you threatening me?”

  “Perish the thought,” said Corso. “I’m merely expressing my heartfelt desire not to be touched again.” Smiling now. “I mean—after all—who knows where that finger has been?”

  Raymond Butler hid his mouth with his hand and turned away. Renee Rogers was openly amused. Warren Klein looked from one to the other, nodded, as if the moment had confirmed something he already knew, and strode off. Butler threw Rogers a grin and followed along in Klein’s wake.

  “Don’t mind Warren,” Renee Rogers said. “He’s a bit overwrought. His shining moment has come at last, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with it.”

  “I hope he’s right about his case,” Corso said.

  “He’s got Balagula by the balls for the Fairmont Hospital collapse. One of his investigators turned a witness who can link Mr. B to both the faulty concrete and the falsified core samples.”

  Corso gave a low whistle. “Pity you didn’t have the guy last time.”

  She rolled her eyes. “The guy was a suspect. Ray talked to him half a dozen times. Claimed Harmon and Swanson were lying about him being part of the conspiracy.” She waved an angry hand. “And, of course, they were no longer around for rebuttal.”

  “Then out of the blue…”

  “Klein sends somebody around in my tracks, and all of a sudden this same yokel says he can put Balagula in the room when the core sample scam was discussed.”

  “Why the change of heart?”

  “He says the thought of all those dead children started wearing on him. That he was never going to be right again unless he told the truth.” She caught the bitterness flowing into her voice and clamped her mouth shut.

  Corso watched her jaw muscles flex and flutter. “Maybe it is better to be lucky than good,” he offered.

  She made a face. “Wouldn’t have mattered. Balagula’d already compromised the jury.” She arched an eyebrow at Corso. “As you so well know.”

  “I got lucky,” Corso said.

  She held his gaze. “What you’ve got, Mr. Corso, are very good sources.”

  “Gosh and golly,” Corso said, with a smile.

  “It’s not funny,” she insisted. “It’s not right that some guy who writes true-crime books should be able to come up with better and more accurate information than the Attorney General’s Office.”

  “Narrative nonfiction,” he corrected.

  “I’ll never forget when my secretary handed me that TIME magazine article you wrote. If I’d had a gun and known where to find you, I’d be in prison today.”

  Enraged by the hung jury, Corso had made it his business to find out how fourteen nameless, faceless citizens had been identified and then compromised. Fourteen souls culled from a pool of over five thousand King County voters. Jurors were interviewed from behind screens. No questions that might reveal identity were permitted. In the end, neither the feds nor the defense had known the names of those who were chosen. Twelve jurors and two alternates were selected and immediately sequestered for the duration of the trial in a downtown hotel under the tightest security imaginable, and still Balagula had managed to get to somebody. Only question was how.

  Weeks later, while reviewing the trial transcript, Corso came upon the precise moment when he believed the Balagula camp got its hands on the master jury list. Right at the end of the first week, everything changed. Overnight, Elkins switched his defensive strategy from an aggressive attempt to discredit and deny to a strategy of stalling for time. He flooded the judge with motions. Claimed to be ill. Claimed Balagula was ill. All in all, he managed to add what Corso figured was three weeks to the trial, a delay that turned out to be more than enough time for the defense to work its magic.

  The Balagula camp first took the list of five thousand names to Berkley Marketing, a boiler-room telemarketing firm operating out of a leaky warehouse in South Seattle. Paid them to make voice contact with every person on the list. In only three days Berkley had reduced the list to thirty-three persons whose whereabouts could not, in one manner or another, be verified.

  They then sent the names of the thirty-three possibles to Allied Investigations, an enormous nationwide security agency, who pounded the pavement for a week and reduced the number of missing persons to sixteen.

  Next up was Henderson, Bates & May, a law firm specializing in “jury profiling.” In addition to consulting with well-known mental health professionals looking for weak personalities, they also pried into everyone’s financial history through a mortgage bank they owned named Fresno Guarantee Trust, in hopes of finding a weak link, which quite obviously they had managed to do.

  The trail wasn’t hard to follow, because none of the parties had broken the law and were, at least at the outset, cooperative. When the feds turned up the heat, and it became apparent that they were into something sticky, Berkley Marketing and Allied Investigations revealed the jobs had arrived by fax and the money by mail, leaving only Henderson, Bates & May as a possible source of information. Unfortunately, attempts by the AGO to lay hands on the “juror profiles” created by Henderson, Bates & May were rebuffed by HB&M on the grounds of attorney-client privilege, an assertion that was upheld in several higher courts.

  “You ever find out where he got the jury list?” Corso asked.

  She grimaced. “Ray’s pretty sure it was a secretary in the county clerk’s office, but we can’t prove it.”

  “What’s to stop them from doing it again?”

  “Absolutely nothing. All we can do is make the jury pool as large as possible, keep them anonymous, and sequester them out of his reach. There’s nothing we can do about leaks at the state and county level.”

  “Be a good idea if this was over in a hurry,” Corso said.

  “That’s Warren’s plan.” She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “That’s why it’s a single indictment. Only the Fairmont. Sixty-three counts of murder two.”

  “Chancy.”

  “And unpopular,” Rogers added. “The good people of Alameda County want somebody to pay for their deputies.”

  “What if he wiggles out again?”

  “Then he walks. There’s no way we can possibly try him again for anything. We don’t get him this time, we don’t get him at all.”

  “And if you get him?”

  “Then he gets life plus twenty-five and everybody’s happy”.

  “Rogers,” Klein called from the far end of the mezzanine. He tapped his watch with his forefinger.

  “He sure likes to tap things, doesn’t he?” Corso said.

  She smiled. “Gotta go. Nice meeting you, Mr. Corso.”

  Corso assured her that the pleasure was his. She could
feel his eyes on her as she walked away and disappeared down the stairs.

  4

  Tuesday, October 17

  3:41 p.m.

  “Your Honor, I must again protest.”

  “That’s what you get paid for, Mr. Elkins. Protest away.”

  Bruce Elkins spread his arms and then dropped them, allowing his hands to slap against his sides in a show of disgusted resignation. “I don’t see how we can possibly go on with this proceeding, when Mr. Balagula is being denied his most basic . . . his most fundamental. . . constitutional rights.”

  “What rights would those be?”

  “His right to face his accusers. His right to make eye contact with the very people who will decide his fate.”

  Judge Fulton Howell waved his gavel in the air. “As you well know, Mr. Elkins, The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has recently disagreed with you. They have ruled that the extenuating circumstances surrounding this trial warrant extraordinary measures to ensure the integrity of the judicial process. The matter is not open to discussion. Please proceed with your case.”

  “With all due respect, Your Honor—”

  The judge waved him off. “As we discussed at length this morning, Mr. Elkins, the court will not be party to any unnecessary delays. Either proceed with your case or I will appoint another attorney to represent your client.”

  Elkins had been at it for over three hours, claiming that every piece of the prosecution’s case was, in some manner or another, a breach of his client’s rights and, as such, should not be introduced as evidence. He was prospecting for reversible error, forcing the judge to rule on so many motions that some higher court somewhere would be bound to disagree with at least one of the rulings and thus create grounds for appeal.

  Elkins was good. Animated and theatrical, he accepted the stream of negative rulings from the bench with a show of profound disappointment, like a kid on Christmas morning who finds there’s nothing under the tree with his name on it and tries to be brave. What Elkins knew for sure was that, one-way glass or no, after a while the jury was going to start feeling sorry for him.

  Nicholas Balagula watched it all with an expression of bemused detachment. A man of the people in a cheap suit and a Timex watch, he sat sipping from a glass of ice water, which he periodically refilled from the government-issue plastic pitcher on the defense table.

  “Proceed, Mr. Elkins,” the judge said again.

  Elkins returned to the defense table, where he extracted a document from one of the brown file folders that littered the top of the table. He held the piece of paper at arm’s length and by a single corner, as if it were septic.

  “Surely, Your Honor will agree that last-minute additions to the witness list must be considered prejudicial to the defense.” Judge Fulton Howell’s face said he didn’t agree to any such thing. Undaunted, Elkins waved the document and began to play to the jury box. “After twice having failed to prove my client guilty of so much as a misdemeanor, after nearly three years of litigation and the squandering of untold millions in public funds”—he spun quickly, waving the document in the direction of the prosecutors—“these people would have us believe they can suddenly produce a witness whose testimony is sufficiently compelling as to permit his last-minute inclusion on their witness list. Sufficiently earth-shattering as to justify the blatant disregard for the most basic rules of evidence and discovery.”

  Klein was on his feet now. “Your Honor—”

  Elkins raised his voice and kept talking. “As if the malicious and mean-spirited persecution of Mr. Balagula were not travesty enough—”

  “That’s enough, Mr. Elkins,” the judge said.

  “As if the emotional damage and financial ruin visited upon Mr. Balagula and his family were not a blot on our system of justice—”

  “Your Honor!” Klein again.

  The judge’s jowls shook as he banged the gavel three times.

  “That’s quite enough, Mr. Elkins,” he said.

  Now Elkins looked contrite. Caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He used his manicured fingernails to flick the document in his hand. “Victor Lebow is a disgruntled employee, Your Honor. A man with a grudge. A man with a score to settle.” He raised a finger and played to the crowd. “A man, I might add, who was facing the very real possibility of spending the foreseeable future in a federal penitentiary, until…” He paused for effect, his face a mask of righteous indignation.

  “Your Honor,” Klein pleaded.

  “…until these people agreed to give Mr. Lebow total and complete immunity from prosecution, in return for his testimony against Mr. Balagula.”

  Klein’s face was red. “If I may,” he began.

  “A man who”—Elkins walked to the rail and confronted the invisible jury, invisible behind the one-way screen—“…a man who is being paid for his testimony.”

  Judge Fulton Howell leaned forward in the seat, resting his forearms on the bench. He heaved a sigh and waved his gavel at the jury box. “The jury will disregard Mr. Elkins’s outburst.” He got to his feet and checked his watch with an air of sadness and then pointed the little hammer at Elkins and Klein. “Mr. Elkins, Mr. Klein: in my chambers.” He checked his watch and sighed again. “Court is adjourned until ten o’clock tomorrow morning.” Bang!

  Corso watched as Klein and Elkins followed the judge through the door behind the bench. To the right, Raymond Butler pulled a cell phone from his coat pocket and wandered over to the wall. Renee Rogers began sorting papers and putting them back in their proper folders. When he swiveled his head the other way, Corso saw Nicholas Balagula and Mikhail Ivanov whispering together and staring intently in his direction.

  “It’s no wonder they believe in God,” Nicholas Balagula said. He looked around the courtroom with thinly disguised contempt. “What else but divine intervention can explain how such fools as these could have prospered?”

  Mikhail Ivanov leaned closer, hoping his proximity would encourage Balagula to keep his voice down, but it was not to be.

  “How else can they justify this silly legal system?” Balagula waved a hand in anger. “It is for children and fools. It punishes only those foolish enough to put themselves at its mercy.”

  “They have more people in prison than the rest of the world combined,” Ivanov reminded him. He could feel the eyes of the jury on them.

  “They have the coloreds and the poor in prison.” Balagula shook his big head, as if in disbelief. “In Russia, we lock people up for their politics. Here, they lock you up for your class. For your culture.” He looked Ivanov in the eye. “Marx was right.”

  Desperate for a change of subject, Ivanov nodded toward the far side of the room. “Our Mr. Corso is in attendance again.” Few subjects got so predictable a rise out of Nico as did the subject of Frank Corso. Despite years of glaring media coverage, Nico rarely took offense at anything generated by the media storm. The dogs of capitalism, he called them, and neither read the papers nor watched the news. Mr. Corso, however, was another matter. Anything written about him by Mr. Corso he wanted to see immediately.

  “He looks like some…some hippie.”

  “Don’t be fooled, Nico,” Mikhail Ivanov whispered. “He’s a most dangerous man.”

  Nicholas Balagula curled his thick rubbery lips. “And we are not?”

  Ivanov sighed. All too often lately, Nico seemed to feel as if he were invincible. As if the pair of hard-won mistrials had somehow guaranteed his future infallibility.

  “That’s not the point, and you know it,” he said. “What’s the point of baiting the bear unnecessarily?”

  “He’s been nipping at our heels for years. Harrying us. All those stories and articles. I want to take his measure for a moment.” He hunched his shoulders and spread his big hands. “A little talk. That’s all.”

  “A little talk is often a dangerous thing.”

  Nicholas Balagula emitted a short dry laugh. “If danger was what I had in mind, Mikhail, I’d send Gerardo and Ramón,
and then our nosy Mr. Frank Corso would know what danger is all about.”

  Ivanov opened his mouth to object, but it was too late. Nico was already on his feet, already stepping out from behind the defense table and walking across the silent courtroom. His hands swung at his sides as he strolled toward the lone spectator at the other end of the room.

  Behind his stone face, Ivanov inwardly grimaced and then began moving in the same direction, vowing, as he walked, that when this was over and they were both finally free and clear, he would retire to his villa in Nice. Maybe take a mistress. Perhaps a woman with children, upon whom he could dote in his old age.

  At the far end of the room, Raymond Butler stopped talking and pressed the phone hard against his chest. Renee Rogers stood statue-still as Nicholas Balagula walked past the prosecution table and then began to veer toward the rail…toward Corso.

  Balagula stopped at the rail, six feet from the chair in which Corso sat.

  “You would be Mr. Frank Corso,” he said.

  Corso got slowly to his feet. He was four inches taller than Balagula but gave away at least fifty pounds to the older man. “Yes,” he said. “I would be.”

  “You’ve been making quite a hobby out of me,” Balagula said.

  “In your case, I like to think of it as a job,” Corso replied.

  The pair of bailiffs who flanked the judge’s bench began to move toward the men.

  “I am but a poor émigré to your country. I have—”

  Corso cut him off. “In your country you were a murdering piece of shit, and now you’re a murdering piece of shit here.”

  Balagula pressed his thighs against the rail and leaned toward Corso. “I have used better men than you as if they were women,” he said.

  Corso smiled, took a step forward, and leaned down into Balagula’s face. “And afterward, they sent flowers. Right?”

  “You should learn to mind your own business.”

  “Like those babies in Fairmont Hospital?”