Then the fourth boy, who he’d thought he’d dropped, came tearing down the cross street in front of him, a gun in his little hand. They knew the neighborhood and they had cut him off.
He was trapped.
He stopped and threw up his hands. His breath came out in painful gulps and he bent over double, trying to force air back into his lungs. Seeing that he was cornered, his pursuers slowed down. They were sucking wind, too.
“Whatever you want,” he gasped. He threw his car keys onto the ground. “It’s worth fifty thousand dollars,” he said. “Take it.”
The lead kid, who was also holding a gun, advanced on him, shaking his head. There was blood in his eye, in all their eyes. Wyatt stripped the watch from his wrist and held it out. “Here, take this, too. Take everything. Whatever you want.”
“You lost that chance,” the boy said. “Back there.” He spoke with the cold authority of a man. He came closer to Wyatt, his gun held at waist level.
“Don’t shoot me! For God’s sake, you don’t have to do that!”
The boy raised his pistol, the business end pointing at Wyatt’s gut.
“No. God’s sake, no!” Wyatt reflexively fell to his knees in supplication. If he had to beg for his life, he would do it. Whatever they wanted.
“Get up, sucker. I ain’t gonna shoot you while you’re down.”
“No.” The word came out choked.
“Get up, you fucking pussy! Don’t make me shoot you while you’re on your knees.”
A sudden flash of light shone up the night. A car turned the corner down the block and headed for them. The driver blinked his bright lights.
“Fuck!” The boy reached down and grabbed Wyatt by the collar, jerking him to his feet. “Get the fuck up, you punk!” He started to pull Wyatt out of the way.
The car, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, came to a stop in the middle of the street, its bright lights still shining, illuminating them like a searchlight. Wyatt saw Dexter get out. Two other men got out with him. Big, solid men. Both held guns in their hands, bigger guns than the one the man holding Wyatt had. He had seen these two before, in the courtroom and Sullivan Houses. One was the fellow who had warned him about using the alarm on his car.
Dexter walked over. Coolly, like nothing out of the ordinary was going on, he looked at Wyatt, nodding in recognition. “What’s happening, little bloods?” he asked.
“He knocked Ricky over,” the leader said. “Bruised him all to shit.”
“Yeah? What was Ricky doing in front of him?” He glanced at Ricky, who didn’t seem to be the worse for wear.
“Trying to get him not to go nowhere.” The boy smirked for the benefit of his friends.
Dexter pondered this. “If Ricky tried to make me not go nowhere, Thomas, I likely would do the same thing. Especially if I disagreed with Ricky’s intention.”
The smirk turned ugly. “Ricky’s intention ain’t none of your business, Dexter. This is 44th Street territory. This punk is ours. You’re encroaching on our turf. So chill.”
Dexter looked at the boy named Thomas. Then he walked over and slapped the boy as hard as he could across the face. The boy screamed and Dexter grabbed him by the neck. “You know who you’re fucking with here, fool?” he said, pointing to Wyatt.
“Fuck no. And I don’t give one shit, neither,” Thomas said defiantly.
“Well, you ought to, you ignorant little shit. ’Cause if you waste this dude you’re going to go down as the dickhead who shot Marvin White’s lawyer.”
The boy gaped; then he took a step back. The others with him gawked at Wyatt. “No,” he said. “You’re trying to run a number on me.”
“No, I ain’t. This is the only man standing between Marvin and the hangman.”
“Well, shit.” The boy turned to Wyatt accusingly. “Why didn’t you say so, man?”
Wyatt would have laughed if the situation hadn’t been so perilous and ludicrous simultaneously. “I don’t recall the opportunity arising,” he managed to say.
“Go home, Thomas, you dumb little bastard punk,” Dexter told the kid harshly. “And take these pieces of street shit with you,” he added, indicating the other three.
“Hey, man, it was a mistake.” Thomas was saving face as fast as he could. “People make mistakes.”
“See to it you don’t make this mistake again,” Dexter told him sternly.
“Don’t worry ’bout that.” Thomas turned to Wyatt. “Sorry, man. How were we to know?” He stuck his gun in his belt. They started to leave.
Dexter stopped them. “Give,” he ordered.
Thomas stopped. Then he reached into his pocket and handed Wyatt his watch and car keys, which he had picked up earlier.
“Anything else?” Dexter asked.
Wyatt shook his head. “This is everything.”
Dexter made a dismissive sweeping motion with his hand: “Get the fuck out of here.”
Thomas didn’t need to be told twice. He and the others in his set vanished into the night.
The street had become preternaturally still, as if all the air had been sucked out of the area for blocks around.
“Your car back at the 7-Eleven?” Dexter asked. Wyatt nodded. “Hop in,” Dexter said. “We’ll take you back.”
They climbed into the Jeep. Wyatt sat next to Dexter. The other two climbed into the back. “This here’s Mr. Matthews,” Dexter told his friends. To Wyatt: “This is Louis and Richard. Friends of mine, and Marvin’s.”
“Glad to meet you.” Very glad.
They drove down the street. “You get lost?” Dexter asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s easy to do around here, if you don’t know where you’re at.”
“I know that now.”
“You drive all the way down here from where you live?”
“No. I’m staying at the Four Seasons. My family’s out of town.” He didn’t need to tell Dexter where he was staying, or why, but he wanted to—he wanted to fill the void, and he felt that the connection they had established justified it. He turned to Dexter. “How in the world did you happen to be around here? Not that I’m complaining, but it sure was a lucky coincidence for me.”
“Nuh-uh. Luck had nothing to do with it,” Dexter answered emphatically. “We been keeping tabs on you, man.”
“What?” He was floored. “You’re spying on me?”
“Not spying, nothing like that,” Dexter corrected Wyatt. “Not around your work or home or nothing. But like, when you’re down in our ’hood, we like to know that. Your life is your own, man, but this part of the city? Shit happens, you know?”
Of course he knew—a ton of it had just fallen on him.
“Here’s the thing, man,” Dexter went on. “Something happens to you, you can’t stay on the case working for Marvin, he’s gonna be screwed, you know? ’Cause these other suckers, them lawyers with the Public Defenders, they’re burned out. See, brothers go down all the time for shit, and they get these Public Defender lawyers, or else the court assigns some lawyer to them, which is usually worse, ’cause to them it’s a lost cause and they can’t make any money and so it’s like another nigger gets thrown on the scrap pile, no big thing. But you, you give a damn, and you’re good, too. So the thing is, we need you, man. Not just Marvin—everybody that knows Marvin. His family, us, whoever. ’Cause that blood is gonna get railroaded right into death row, somebody don’t get in the way of it. And you are that somebody, Mr. Matthews. So it’s up to people like me to make sure you stay healthy.”
This was blowing his mind. Dexter and his friends might be young in years, but in handling their lives they were veterans. “So how did you ‘keep tabs on me,’ as you put it, tonight?”
“A friend of mine—the cover-charge girl at the Jazz Table? She made you. And she knew you and me were working together, I mean that I’m trying to help you out. She called me up and told me you were hanging there, so I thought I’d cruise by and check it out, but I got tied up on business.” He looked behind hi
m in the rearview mirror at his friends, who giggled. “By the time I got that piece of nonsense straightened out and swung by the club, you’d left, so I started driving around, me and these guys. Then we heard the police call come over the scanner—the brother back at the 7-Eleven called it in.” He pointed to the police radio under his dash. “I figured maybe we should check that out, just in case.”
“It was awfully lucky for me that you did.”
“For you—and Marvin.”
They pulled up in front of the convenience store. Wyatt got out. Dexter looked over his shoulder. “I’ll ride back with him to his hotel. You follow us.”
The cross streets whipped by, a blur of lights. There was no activity on the pavements, almost no traffic. The Jeep tailed close behind, its lights a beacon in his rearview mirror.
He pulled up in front of the hotel. A valet came out and handed him his claim check. He and Dexter got out. The Jeep was parked at the curb, waiting.
“Again, thanks for everything,” Wyatt said.
Dexter looked at him. “Do you know why I’m doing all this shit for Marvin?”
“You’re his friend.”
“It goes deeper than that.” He took out a pack of cigarettes and a Dunhill lighter, fired up without offering one to Wyatt. “Here’s the good things about Marvin,” he said. “He’s big, strong, handsome, great with the ladies. Now here’s the bad things about Marvin: he’s big, strong, handsome, great with the ladies, and dumb. He’s so dumb he thinks all you need to succeed is the desire. He don’t know from the work, and even if he did, he couldn’t do it. Not at the level he wants to—like me.”
Wyatt nodded. He knew that. Standing outside his hotel with the young drug dealer who had saved his life, he felt a swirl of conflict going on inside of him. Despite his revulsion for Dexter’s illegal business, his admiration for the young dealer was growing. With the right guidance and some gentle nudging, Dexter could be a positive force instead of a negative one.
“I’ve got to protect Marvin,” Dexter said.
“I understand. You’re his friend, and he needs someone like you.”
Dexter shook his head. “That’s petty shit. There’s a deeper reason.” He took a deep drag from his Camel 100. “I’m a couple weeks older than Marvin, but he was always the one protected me, when we were little. Let’s face it, I ain’t no Hercules. And when you’re growing up where we did, little guys get their ass kicked, regular. But I never did—because Marvin never let it happen. Now the shoe’s on the other foot, like they say. So it’s my turn to do the protecting, whatever I can.”
Wyatt nodded.
Now that Dexter had bared his soul, he was embarrassed—he covered it by making a show of checking the time on his Rolex. “I’ve got to go. See you around,” he said. “And from now on, if you want to go down to my part of town, call me up first? So’s I can give you an escort. Make everybody’s life a whole lot easier.”
“I will. And thanks for saving my life.”
“You’ll make it up to us.”
The lobby was deserted, except for the cleaning crew. In the elevator, riding up to his floor, he started shaking. He thought he might collapse, he was shaking so hard. He had almost been killed tonight; another minute and he would have been dead. Dead.
He knew this would be part of him for a long time—probably forever. You wanted a change in your life. You wanted some excitement. Well, you got enough excitement tonight to last you a lifetime.
There were three miniature bottles of Scotch in the room minibar, two Chivas Regals and a White Horse. He emptied them all into a water glass and drank the mixture down in one swallow. Then he lay down on the bed in his clothes, trying to will the shivering to stop.
He was never going to tell anyone about this. Especially Moira. If she heard about what had happened it would break their marriage—he’d promised her he’d never go back down there. This was a secret he would take to his grave; thank God he hadn’t taken it there tonight.
“WHAT TRUCK DID YOU step in front of?” Josephine wisecracked.
It was almost eleven the following morning. Wyatt had drifted off to sleep at dawn, and didn’t wake up until the room maid came in and found him sleeping on top of the bed, still fully clothed. He’d showered, shaved, and put on a fresh change of clothes, but he had black circles around his eyes as big as a raccoon’s and his face felt raw, like it had been scrubbed with a wire brush. And although he had brushed his teeth and gargled with Listerine and brushed his teeth again, his mouth tasted like a herd of elephants had taken a collective dump inside of it.
“A big one.” He didn’t elaborate, and she was wise enough not to pursue it.
He thought about going over to the courthouse and watching Dwayne Thompson testify some more, but Dwayne’s testimony was going to drag into next week; he’d go back when Dwayne was being cross-examined, to see how he held up. So after lunch (lunchtime—he didn’t feel like eating anything, his stomach was still emotionally churning from the events of the night before) he went to the jail to see Marvin.
He and Marvin sat across from each other. His notes were spread out in front of him on the table.
“Agnes Carpenter. She lives on Westmont Street. Pickup on Mondays, delivery on Thursdays. Do you remember her now?”
Marvin stared at him dully. “Yeah, I know Mrs. Carpenter.”
“You slept with her? On a regular basis?”
“That what she say?” He squirmed in his chair, fidgeting, his eyes roaming around the room, looking at everything but his lawyer.
“She’s given me a sworn statement that on the night of one of the murders you’ve been charged with you spent the night at her house. The entire night. Do you remember that?”
Marvin’s shoulders lifted and dropped. “If that’s what she say …”
“No, Marvin. Not what she says.” He was losing patience. “I want to hear what you have to say about that. Were you fucking this woman and did you ever spend a night at her house? Neither of those things should be hard to remember.” Dealing with Marvin was like slogging through hot tar. The kid was his own worst enemy.
“Yeah,” Marvin finally copped. “I screwed the old bitch, here and there. She paid me,” he added forcefully, “good money. I wasn’t fucking her ’cause …”
“Because why?”
“… because I wanted to. I didn’t find her sexy or nothing. She paid me, man. Hell, she’s old enough to be my granny. It was for money. Good money, too,” he repeated.
“What about spending the night? Do you remember that?”
Marvin picked at his nose. “I might’ve,” he said grudgingly. “I don’t think about shit like that, I put it out of my mind as soon as it’s over.”
Wyatt leaned forward, his weight on his forearms. “Listen to me, Marvin. You’re not helping yourself here. Mrs. Carpenter is willing to take the chance of blowing off her marriage by going on the stand and swearing under oath that on the night of one of those murders you were with her. All night long. In her bed. Now if she’s willing to put herself in that kind of jeopardy for you, the least you can do is remember it, and admit it straightforwardly. And act sure about it—‘Yes, I did.’ We’ll research the dates, we’ll find ways to refresh your memory for you. But you’ve got to change your mind about how you’re dealing with this. You have to be positive and aggressive.”
Marvin looked away. “Yeah. If you say so,” he mumbled. “You’re the lawyer.”
Wyatt ran his fingers through his hair. He was feeling shitty anyway, from the trauma of the night before. Coddling someone accused of seven counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances wasn’t a condition he felt like putting up with—not today.
“Marvin,” he asked in an impatient voice that he didn’t try to conceal, “what is your problem with this? Would you mind filling me in? I am your lawyer, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Mrs. Carpenter?”
“Yes?”
“She’s gonna stand up at my tri
al and say this?”
“If we need her to.”
“That I was fucking her?”
“She’ll say ‘make love’ or words like that, but yes.”
“And spent a whole night there? In the same bed with her?”
It suddenly hit him—so that’s what this is all about. “Are you going to be embarrassed that this older woman is going to tell the world that you were her lover?”
Marvin rolled his eyes. “What the fuck you think, man?” There was a fear in his voice, almost a pleading. “People are gonna think I’m pathetic, screwing some old woman like that.”
Wyatt exploded. “For God’s sake, Marvin! The state, wants to execute you! Is worrying about what some of your friends might think about you more important than your life?”
Marvin looked at the wall.
Wyatt took a calming breath. Then he stuffed his notes in his briefcase, stood up, and punched the button by the door to signify that he wanted out. “The next time I come down here, you’d better have had an attitude adjustment, Marvin. You hear me?”
No reply.
“Did … you … hear … me?”
“Yeah,” Marvin barked. “I hear you.”
“About the way you deal with me, about the way you face what’s in store for you if you don’t change. Because if you bring this kind of attitude into the courtroom the jury will hang you, and I won’t be able to do a thing about it.”
Marvin nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I hear what you’re saying.”
“Good. So to tie this up for today: you were having a sexual relationship with Agnes Carpenter.”
In a low voice, as if the world were eavesdropping: “Yeah.”
“And you did spend at least one night with her in her house? One entire night, until morning-time or later.”
Marvin nodded. “But it was for the money. That’s all.”
“That’s fine,” Wyatt agreed. “We’re not saying you were in love with her. You were performing a service that she requested.”
“Yeah.” Marvin’s face lightened up a little bit. “That’s what I was doing.”
The door on Wyatt’s side swung open. He was going back to the free world, unlike his client. Marvin would go through another door to get to where he was going.
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