Key Witness

by J. F. Freedman

  “It’s your division, Darryl,” Turner said. “What about the other intern we’ve committed to?”

  Waskie, Turner had an ongoing commitment to supply two lawyers a year to the Public Defender’s office, which was how they worked off their obligation to do pro bono defense work, a burden undertaken by most of the large law firms in the city.

  “Haven’t found one yet,” Darryl said. “We’re not known as a criminal-defense firm, so we don’t get the cream of that crop.”

  “I’ll take the job.”

  It wasn’t the way Wyatt had planned to make his announcement, but it would have to do.

  A couple of the other partners sitting around him turned to look at him, not believing what they’d heard. Darryl grinned broadly at Wyatt. “What a trooper. Anything for the firm. It’s okay, big fella, I’ll come up with someone. I think we need you right where you are.”

  Turner got up from his chair. “That wraps it up.”

  “I’ll take the job. I want it.”

  It took a moment for what Wyatt had said to sink in. Then everyone turned to look at him, fifteen heads moving in disbelieving unison.

  “I want to do criminal defense.” He looked at Turner. “I’m serious, Ben.”

  Turner stared at him in disbelief. “What’s this all about, Wyatt?”

  “I intended to tell you that I was going to take a leave of absence from the firm, starting right away.”

  “What …” Turner paused, collecting his thoughts. “I don’t get it,” he said. “You just won the biggest money case in this firm’s history. Your bonus is going to be over three million dollars off that one case alone. You can’t be serious about walking away.”

  “Maybe this is the time to walk away—while I am on top.”

  Turner came around the table so that he and Wyatt were face-to-face. “There’s no delicate way of putting this, Wyatt, so I won’t try to. This firm needs you.” He paused. “What’s the matter, Wyatt?”

  Wyatt took a deep breath. “I’m volunteering for this public-defense work, Ben, because if I don’t do something different in my life, right now, I won’t have a choice.”

  “Where is this coming from?” Turner asked.

  “I don’t know, Ben. I just won a case against the government of the United States, and I’m not convinced right now that justice was served by my winning. And I’m not happy about that.”

  “What on God’s earth are you talking about? Justice is subjective, Wyatt. Juries decide what justice is. You handled the case brilliantly from start to finish. What do you think it was, a fluke?”

  “I know it wasn’t a fluke. That’s the problem! Some poor innocent schmucks are going to be ruined because I won that case. I’m a million-dollar lawyer going up against a seventy-five-thousand-dollar lawyer. It’s David versus Goliath. And nobody likes Goliath.”

  Turner put a fatherly hand on Wyatt’s shoulder. “I understand you,” he sympathized. “I’ve been in the same position myself. You work like mad on a case that goes on forever, it’s finally over, and there’s this incredible letdown.”

  Wyatt was silent.

  “You need a vacation,” Turner continued. “Away from the office, away from all of it. Go to Tahiti with Moira, lie in the sun, drink mai tais and look at beautiful women.”

  That’s what he’d envisioned, initially, when he had started thinking this way. Not Tahiti, that wasn’t his style. More like a lot of fly-fishing, golf, sleeping in late. Reading fiction, going around the country and hitting the great jazz clubs.

  He wanted to do all those things; and he would, someday. But that wasn’t the answer to this problem.

  “No.” He turned and faced his partners. “I’m burned out, and a fancy vacation won’t cure what I need. I want a moratorium from defending huge multinational conglomerates. I need to look at the law in a different way, a fresh perspective.”

  Turner looked at him. “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to practice criminal defense. For poor people who need a good lawyer, not some kid fresh out of law school.” He turned and faced his partners, who were slack-jawed, staring at him. “I want to work the right side of the street for a while, or I won’t be able to live with myself.”

  Turner shook his head in frustration. “You’re not some wild-eyed idealist who’s going to change the world, Wyatt. We don’t change the world. No one does. It’s one of those things you learn as you get older. And our clients are big, yes—small fry can’t afford us, that’s the way life goes.”

  It was Wyatt’s turn to put a comforting hand on the older man’s shoulder. “Haven’t all of you, at one time or another, felt like you had to get out of this rat race?”

  No one answered him. Most of them weren’t even looking at him. It was as if he had announced he had some communicable disease.

  “Public Defender law,” Turner muttered. “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. Six months, a year.” He turned to Darryl. “Am I crazy?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “We can’t afford to have you out of the loop for a year,” Turner stated flatly. “Six months, we could survive that, I guess.” The color was coming back into his Irish cheeks. “This might not be so bad. Maybe we can use it to our advantage.”

  “I’m not doing this for publicity.”

  “You do it for whatever you want to do it for. Save the dolphins, work alongside Mother Teresa, whatever you want to do. I’ve got our reputation to worry about. The firm’s biggest star is leaving the lucrative field of corporate law to practice criminal defense, and not only criminal defense, but public criminal defense, the lowest of the low. We are such a civic-minded law firm that we give our best and most important lawyer to the people—for a while.”

  “You make it sound so calculating,” Wyatt protested.

  “It is what it is. Besides, what counts is action and results, not words, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Turner declared. “Six months.” He turned to Darryl. “You’ve got a new pro bono lawyer in your division. And this meeting is adjourned,” he stated as he turned on his heel and left the room.

  VIOLET GOT THE CALL at home. The ringing startled her out of a dark morning dream. Her hand fumbled toward the night table and reached for the phone, knocking it off the cradle onto the floor.

  “Hello?” she answered, once she managed to grab hold of the receiver and bring it to her mouth, her voice thick with, sleep. She hadn’t drunk so much last night, but that last vodka tonic was two more ounces of alcohol than was good for her. She smelled of cigarette smoke—it was in her hair, on the clothes that lay in a heap on the floor. She’d been so wiped out when she got home, from the exhaustion of work, dance, and drink, that she had dropped everything on the floor, item by item, where she stood.

  She would do a load of laundry before she went to work. Get the acrid smoke smell out of her clothes. Wash her hair.

  Before falling into bed she had remembered to put in a Super Tampax, and had worn a pad as well, but she had still soaked through, staining the sheet underneath her.

  “Yes?” she managed into the phone, swinging her legs to the side and sitting up on the edge of the bed. Her feet scrounged underneath for her shower clogs.

  “What?” She listened for a moment. Breathlessly: “When?”

  Another brief moment went by. She felt a chill coming on suddenly, and a numbness in her fingers and toes, spreading up into her arms and legs.

  “Yes. I’m coming in. Right now.”

  She hung up. For a short while she sat motionless on the bed. Then she got up and staggered into the bathroom.

  Already, her face was dripping wet, the tears flowing down her cheeks. She didn’t know when she had started crying.

  The police were at the slaughterhouse when she arrived. Peggy was, too. Violet still smelled of cigarette smoke in her hair—she hadn’t showered, or put on any makeup. In a trance she had splashed cold water on h
er face, put in a fresh tampon, thrown on jeans and a sweatshirt, and driven down.

  Her face was puffy from crying. Peggy’s was, too. The two women fell into each other’s arms. The tears came again.

  The police detective interviewed her and Peggy in her supervisor’s cubicle. On the other side of the partition, her fellow employees looked at them through the glass half windows.

  “I’d say about … ten-thirty?” Peggy said, answering the detective’s question. She looked at Violet, who nodded in agreement.

  It was assumed that they had been the last people to see Paula alive. Except for whoever killed her.

  “How long was she gone before you noticed she was missing?” the detective asked them. He was an old pro, his people a couple generations removed from somewhere in Eastern Europe, Violet guessed, in his late middle age. Comfortably rumpled. He had introduced himself but his name hadn’t registered with her, she’d been too distraught. “Ten minutes, fifteen?” he went on. “Longer?”

  “I’m not sure,” Violet answered for both of them. “We were dancing, talking. You know. You don’t keep track of time.”

  He nodded. They were the victim’s contemporaries: friends, not parents.

  “It could have been as much as half an hour,” Peggy said. “Like Violet told you, we were up dancing, several numbers in a row. When we sat back down she wasn’t there. The ice was melted in her drink, I remember that. How long does that take?”

  Long enough to get murdered. They all knew that—it didn’t have to be said out loud.

  “Was there anyone there she knew?” the detective asked, keeping his interrogation as gentle and low-key as he could. “Any man, especially?”

  They looked at each other, shook their heads.

  “Did she meet anyone? A man, I’m talking. Out of the ordinary, strange? Funny—funny odd, not humorous.”

  “There’s always oddballs at places like that,” Peggy answered. “Strange guys that ask you to dance, then rub up against you. Just strange guys.”

  “Did she dance with any strangers? Or get asked to, and turn them down?”

  “No.” Violet paused. “I did.”

  “Danced with a man who you didn’t know?” He started to flip his notepad open.

  “No. A man asked me, but I didn’t.”

  “White or black? The man.”

  “White.”

  “Did he do anything? Other than ask you?”

  “No. We were all sitting at our table, he asked me, I turned him down, he went away.”

  “Did you see him later that evening?”

  She thought for a second. “No, I didn’t.”

  “How long was that before your friend went outside?”

  “I don’t know. Not right before.”

  He laid the notepad back down on his knee without writing on it. “If you can think of anything else,” he said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call.” He took two of his cards out of his wallet, handed one to each of them.

  Violet glanced at his card: Joseph Pulaski. Detective-sergeant.

  She was half Polack herself—her mother, God rest her soul. Her instinct about him had been right, not that it mattered. She slipped the card into her back pocket.

  In a corner of her mind, something jiggled.

  “There is one thing that happened,” she spoke up, remembering what it was. “It was kind of upsetting, at the moment.”

  He leaned forward in his chair, the notepad again at the ready. “What was that?”

  “I went outside before Paula did, to the parking lot,” she said, feeling a slight blush coming on. “I … my period started, unexpectedly. I had to go out to my car to get a Tampax out of my car trunk.”

  “Uh-huh.” He had no reaction to the mention of her female troubles.

  “There was this kid near my car,” she continued. “This young black kid. I mean a man, a young man, he was older than a kid.”

  “How old?”

  “Late teens, I’d guess. It was dark, not real dark, I got a decent look at him, but he was a man, not a kid.”

  “How tall?”

  “Oh, pretty tall, over six feet, easy. He had a good build, what I could see, I mean he looked strong. I wasn’t paying that much attention to what he looked like,” she went on, talking faster than she wanted to, she didn’t want this cop to think she’d been checking this kid out—not a kid, a man—“I was more worried that he might be thinking about breaking into my car. He was standing near it and looking in the rear window like he might be thinking about breaking in.”

  The detective wrote something in his notepad. “What happened?” he asked. “What did you do?”

  “I told him to get away from my car.”

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “He stepped back. He looked at me for a minute. He didn’t seem scared, or shook up or anything, so then I thought I’d misread what was happening, that he hadn’t been thinking about breaking into it, he was just hanging around like young guys do.”

  “So … and then?” he prodded.

  “He walked away. He left—walked down the street, went away.” She turned to Peggy. “I didn’t say anything to you guys because it didn’t seem like anything.” She turned back to the detective. “Do you think …?”

  “He might’ve been the one who killed her?” he finished. “No. If this was the same man who’s been committing these murders he wouldn’t have drawn attention to himself by hanging around someone’s car suspiciously.”

  “But what if it had been him, and I hadn’t warned her?” Violet fretted.

  “Don’t beat yourself up about that,” the detective assured her quickly. “The one had nothing to do with the other, I’m sure of it.” He looked from one to the other. “Is there anything else? Anything that might help us?”

  “She was looking for a man,” Peggy told him, her voice breaking. “She was hoping to meet someone.”

  “That’s the problem,” the detective said, folding up his notepad and putting it in his jacket pocket. “She did.”

  AFTER BREAKFAST, A STEAM-TABLE meal of powdered scrambled eggs, toast, juice, and coffee, which was served off carts that rolled down the cellblocks and was served into the individual cells—like most high-volume jails, they had stopped using the common eating area years ago; it was easier to maintain control by feeding the inmates in their living space—Dwayne was escorted downstairs to the visiting area, where his lawyer, Edwin Galeygos, was waiting for him. Galeygos was a short dark-complexioned man who dressed in padded-shoulder western-cut suits, wore bolo ties with turquoise tie holders, and slicked his hair back with Brylcreem. He got his cowboy boots mail-order from Tony Lama in El Paso, but he had never been there; he had only been in the state of Texas a couple of times, having to do with his legal work.

  In the hierarchy of lawyers Galeygos was of that breed known as “trash-can lawyers,” attorneys who take out ads on public trash cans and above the seats of city buses. He did, in fact, show up at hospitals and funerals, offering his services as a personal-injury lawyer, and he also hung around the courthouse, trolling for accused people who were without counsel and were cowed and bewildered by the whole system, people who had been brainwashed into believing that any privately hired lawyer, no matter how pathetic his credentials, was better than a government-appointed one, a fear that lawyers like Galeygos were quick to exploit. Quite a few of his clients came to him that way.

  He would never fit into a big, respectable law firm—not that any large establishment would ever make him an offer. He didn’t have the polish. But he knew his way around the courtrooms, and the entire criminal-defense system in general, because that’s where he lived.

  Dwayne and Galeygos sat across a scarred wooden table in one of the small windowless conference rooms off the visiting area. In prison, when Dwayne talked to anyone from the outside, including a lawyer, it was over a telephone, the parties separated by plate glass. This old jail, perennially underfunded, still hadn’t converted all thei
r attorney-client meeting rooms into separate warrens.

  “You don’t look all that bad,” Galeygos backhand-complimented Dwayne by way of introduction. “Considering how long you’ve been living in a hole this time.”

  “I’m getting by.”

  “You’re good at that. About one of the few things you are good at.”

  Both men had known each other a long time. There was no reason for Galeygos to try to pump Dwayne’s hopes or expectations up—they both knew where Dwayne had been and where he was headed.

  “Their trial got fucked up so you’re going to be bunking here awhile. You’re going to be the last witness the prosecution puts on the stand.”

  Dwayne shrugged. “I figured as much.” He sat up straighter. “I’m the strongest part of their case, you always save the best for last.”

  “Don’t be coming on too cocky,” Galeygos admonished him. “They want your testimony, that’s true, but they have a decent case without you this time, so they’re not going to be cutting any kind of killer deal”

  “Then maybe I should call the whole damn thing off. If there ain’t something worthwhile in it for me.”

  Galeygos shook his head. “You can’t do that, it’s too late. You fuck them over now, they’ll stick it so far up you you’ll choke to death.”

  “So what’re they offering?”

  “Another year shortened on top of your good-behavior time.”

  Dwayne stared at him. “Come on, Galeygos, you’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “I wouldn’t shit you, Dwayne, you’re my favorite turd.” He chuckled at the hoary joke. “But seriously. You’re not their whole case this time, so they don’t have to deal as much. But I can probably get you another year off, on top of the one. That’ll put you back on the street in what, less than three years now: That’s not so bad.”