Judge Polansky nodded, absorbing everything that I had said. He wasn’t simply thinking about Cecil Bates. I could tell that his mind had started to contemplate other repercussions. A police officer had lied under oath. How many other cases had he testified in? There was potential civil liability for the city and more bad headlines.
The judge turned to the prosecutor. “Ms. Curtis, thoughts?”
“It’s a completely unfair surprise, Your Honor. We are in the midst of trial, and I have already rested. This is prejudicial and not timely, not to mention that this so-called video hasn’t been authenticated. It may be altered.”
“Altered?” Judge Polansky had become irritated. “You are digging a deeper hole for yourself, Ms. Curtis. So I suggest you take a different approach. Humbleness is a virtue, and so is admitting when you’re wrong.”
Ms. Curtis ignored Judge Polansky’s advice. “We don’t know what’s on this recording. We don’t know anything.”
“You don’t know, because you don’t want to know. Mr. Glass offered to show it to you this morning.” Judge Polansky’s voice was rising. “Unless you’re honestly arguing that a homeless man stole an envelope from the City of Saint Louis, forged a cover letter from a city clerk, and digitally altered security footage. Is that your position?”
“I’m saying we don’t know.” That was the best Curtis could do, and Judge Polansky wasn’t going to push her any further. He didn’t need to. He was the judge.
“Well then, why don’t we all watch the tape together and go from there.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
We stood as the jury came back into the courtroom. Their shoulders were slumped. Some were tired. Some were annoyed. Some were curious. Others were all three. If I had been trapped in a small jury room all morning with no explanation, I think I’d have been in the annoyed category, bordering on anger.
As the jury got to their seats, Judge Polansky instructed us all to sit down. “Thank you.” He looked down at his docket. “We are back on the record in the file 23-MD-15-2258, State of Missouri versus Cecil Bates. May I have the attorneys note their appearances for the record?”
The prosecutor stood. “Cynthia Curtis on behalf of the State.” Then she sat down. Her thunder and confidence were gone.
Then I stood. “Your honor, I am Justin Glass on behalf of my client, Cecil Bates, who is present and seated to my left.”
As I sat down, Judge Polansky turned to the jury. “You are probably wondering what is going on.” He smiled, hoping to soften them a little before they got the news. “We’ve had an evidentiary issue come up this morning, and that was the reason for the delay. I truly apologize for the inconvenience.” He paused, weighing his words. “While you were all waiting patiently, the attorneys and I were hard at work. The attorneys also had time to discuss this matter in greater detail among themselves, and they have reached a resolution. Therefore, your service on this jury is no longer necessary, and you are excused.”
The jurors looked confused. Although many may not have wanted to serve on a jury, once they were sworn and the trial began, they had become invested in the process. Their sudden dismissal didn’t feel right.
“Again,” Judge Polansky said, “I do appreciate your time and consideration, but your service is no longer necessary. I ask that we rise for the jury as they exit the courtroom. You may all gather your things from the jury deliberation room and go back home or to work, however you wish to spend the rest of the day.”
Judge Polansky then stood, and we followed his lead.
The jurors also stood and exited the courtroom. Once they’d gone and his law clerk indicated that it was appropriate for the court to proceed, Judge Polansky sat back down. “Ms. Curtis, you have something to put on the record.”
“Yes, Your Honor.” Cynthia Curtis looked at Cecil Bates for a moment, then back at the judge. “In light of the disclosure this morning, the State is withdrawing its criminal complaint against Mr. Bates.”
“And you understand that”—Judge Polansky leaned in—“since we have picked a jury and started trial, that double jeopardy has attached and that the State may no longer pursue any charges against Mr. Bates for the alleged crimes on this date?”
“Yes, Your Honor, although I don’t expect that we’ve seen the last of Mr. Bates.”
The judge let the comment slide. He turned to me. “And, Mr. Glass, any other thoughts?”
“No, Your Honor. I’m glad to see that Ms. Curtis changed her mind, and I appreciate the court’s guidance as we worked through the various issues prior to court this morning.”
“Justice is done.” Judge Polansky smiled.
Sometimes, I thought. Sometimes.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The Children’s Defense League fund-raiser started at five thirty with a silent auction, followed by dinner at six thirty and the speech at seven o’clock. I ran late, as usual. My mother, Sammy, and the Judge had been thoroughly enjoying my recap of all that had transpired with Cecil Bates after our visit to Carl’s Drive-In, and I didn’t want the good times to end. Sammy had particularly enjoyed my impression of the prosecutor’s refusal to even look at the evidence.
I was following it up with my rendition of the prosecutor’s final tortured decision to pull the plug on her dying case when I glanced at my watch. I realized that the fund-raiser had already started, and, to make matters worse, it wasn’t until I was halfway to the downtown Crowne Plaza that I figured out the ticket was still in my office.
I signaled and looped back on Thirteenth to North Florissant, then I found a spot to park and hustled inside my office. Emma had left the ticket in an envelope right in the middle of my desk. I swept it up and left in a matter of seconds, but as I was locking the front door, I noticed that lights in the Northside Roastery were still on. Usually they didn’t stay open past five. There wasn’t the business to justify staying open late.
My curiosity piqued, I walked down the block to make sure everything was OK.
Looking in the window, I saw Hermes on his knees. He had a wrench in one hand and a sheet of instructions in the other. Around him was a collection of metal parts, screws, and pieces of some type of equipment.
I tapped on the window to get his attention.
Hermes turned, saw me, and smiled. He got up, came to the door, and welcomed me inside.
“What are you working on?”
“Oh . . .” He looked at the instructions in his hand and then at the pile of parts on the floor. “New refrigeration unit, hopefully.”
“Gonna stay late?”
Hermes nodded. “Need to get this done. Nikolas also here, too, so I not want to leave him alone.”
“In the back?” I looked past Hermes to the opening leading to the storage area and the little office where Nikolas had a desk and multiple computer screens surrounded by a mess of wires and hard drives. “Mind if I go back there and say hello?”
Hermes shrugged. “No problems to me. Emma say you had a big day in court.”
“Absolutely.” I wished Hermes luck in assembling his refrigerator and then walked through the curtain to the back of the shop. At this point, I knew I was going to be late to the fund-raising dinner, regardless. A few more minutes wasn’t going to change that, and something had been nagging at me since I first heard about the security video footage and Emma’s insistence that it was fine.
I knew the video wasn’t fake. It was time-stamped and everything. The letter that had accompanied the disc and the envelope that held them were real, too, but something about the process was off. Maybe Nikolas would tell me, now that the trial was over.
He had his back to me, whacking away on a keyboard. I knocked on the door frame. “I know I’ve already asked, but now do you want to tell me how you did it?”
He turned around. “Excuse me?”
I stepped farther into his little office. “How you did it?” I asked again. “I’m not going to be mad. It’s done. I’m just curious about how you made it happen.”
Nik
olas grunted and shook his head. “Emma warned me about you.” He waved me away. “She says you’re smarter than you let on. Pretending to be a regular guy, but not regular guy.”
There wasn’t an empty chair, so I crouched down to put us at the same level. “I know you did something, but I want to know how. Why not tell me?”
“Don’t know what you are talking about.” Nikolas held his hands out wide, feigning innocence. “I’m but a humble computer salesman. Give you good deal on eBay.”
“I don’t believe that for a second, and I’m not leaving until you tell me.” I stood, leaned against the wall, and crossed my arms.
Nikolas tried to go back to work but couldn’t concentrate. “You gonna be there all night?”
“Better than a chicken dinner in a hotel ballroom.”
Again Nikolas tried to work, and again he gave it up. “OK, OK.” He shrugged. “But don’t tell Emma I said anything. You do not want that woman mad at you, believe me.” Another shrug. “I do nothing illegal.” He hesitated and then revised his last statement. “Perhaps I do nothing really, truly illegal.”
“That’s a start.”
Nikolas sighed. “OK, like I said, it’s no big deal . . . So Emma comes over here. She tells me about this case and your client who won’t shut up about the video. He drive her nuts. Every day, he call her about the video. Not shutting up. So she says to me, can you help? And I says, for you and Mr. Justin, OK.”
“And then . . .”
“I figure out who handles the requests at the city, and I see that the requests are logged and kept in an electronic queue.”
I left alone for the moment the question of how Nikolas happened to unearth this list, which I couldn’t imagine was posted on the city’s public website. “But this electronic queue,” I said, “it’s no good?”
“Correct.” Nikolas nodded. “The list has Cecil Bates like . . . at the end. Be a year before they get to him. So I bumped him to the top of the list.”
So he’d not only accessed this queue, he’d manipulated it. The arrival of the miracle video was losing some of its miraculous patina. “And that’s it?”
Nikolas seemed confused by my question. “You want that to be it? If you want—it can be all I do. It be it. Finished.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I want to know whether you did anything else.”
“Sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said, although I really wasn’t.
“Well last week, Emma says the trial is coming, and we’re running out of time.”
“And . . .”
“So help the city along a little more.” Nikolas considered his words. “I make them more efficient. Here. I show you.”
It was unclear how Nikolas entered the city’s computer system. A blur of keystrokes, and the screens in front of him started to flash. Text and binary numbers scrolled as Nikolas toggled between them. “Takes a few minutes.” He typed something when a cursor began to flash, then did the same when another screen changed color.
“What is all this?”
Nikolas didn’t hesitate or stop working as he responded to my question. “The network.”
“The city’s network?”
“In a sense, yes.” Nikolas continued to type on his keyboard and move his cursor from one screen to the next, explaining. “You see, all the pretty graphics and buttons on your regular computer . . . it’s an illusion. Skin on the body.” He stopped, looked at me, and pointed back at the various screens. “These are the guts. This is everything happening behind what you see.”
He looked at a yellow Post-it Note on his desk, then typed in a username and password. Text scrolled down the screen, and then he reviewed a list of subfolders. “The security videos are here.” Nikolas pointed at a folder named ZZ, and then he pointed at a file about halfway down the list, identified as VID10283740283-ZZ-7-BB-2015. “That’s the one. Each traffic or park camera on the street has a letter identification. This is camera ZZ, and then each day has its own file. So I open it like this.” He pressed a button. “You see how I now find the video, here, and then I send it via e-mail to the clerk who is responsible for the data requests.”
A flash of dread. I wondered whether there was any kind of trail that could lead back to me. “You sent it to her?”
“Yes and no.” Nikolas shrugged. “Figured out who does this at the city, and I use his e-mail account to send it to her. Once she got it, she sends it to Cecil.”
“You helped them along.” By illegally accessing a public employee’s e-mail account and using it to forward a file you plucked from the city’s servers. “Very efficient.”
Nikolas smiled. “Exactly. I helped. I make them very efficient for you. Very American.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The ballroom at the Crowne Plaza was filled to capacity; probably five hundred people were in attendance. In the back, there was a cash bar and tables for the silent auction. The tables were filled with sports tickets, restaurant gift certificates, celebrity autographs, gift baskets, and bottles of wine.
On the other end, there was a stage, two giant screens, and Judge Danny Bryce at the podium. He was a thin man with an athletic build.
His keynote address had already started, and nearly everybody else, except me, was seated politely at their assigned tables.
Rather than make a scene trying to find my table, I instead went to the bar. “Gin and tonic.”
The bartender nodded and went to work. I put my money down, and he handed me the drink. When he made change, I told him to keep it, then turned and listened to Judge Bryce.
He was a charismatic speaker. I’d looked into him a little. Appointed young, he had fifteen years on the juvenile bench well before his fiftieth birthday. He was passionate about kids and had been the presiding judge over the juvenile division for years.
He took the microphone off its little stand and walked away from the podium with it, pacing the stage like a preacher. His image projected even larger on the screens. “Every day,” he said, “I see kids with nobody. Thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-old kids charged with serious crimes.” He shook his head. “I look down from the bench, and I see lawyers and probation officers, but I often don’t see a parent with these kids. I don’t see a grandma or an aunt or a cousin. I don’t see anybody. This kid is there, all alone in the courtroom—and the system is supposed to fix that.”
Judge Bryce ran his hand through his hair. “Let’s be honest with one another: the system can’t fix that.” He took a moment, taking a deep breath and letting it out. “But you all can. The people in this room. You’re the educated. You’re the powerful. You’re the elite, and you can make a difference in the lives of the at-risk kids in our community.”
Here his voice intensified. He gripped the mic with both hands. “But I’m telling you—however hard this is to hear—I’m telling you it has to happen before those kids ever set foot in a courtroom or are placed in the back of a squad car. Once they get involved in the criminal justice system, our likelihood of success—our likelihood of any kind of meaningful intervention—plummets.
“Back in the 1990s I was very young—a baby judge. I created a new model. We brought together folks from all different disciplines—social workers, psychiatrists, doctors, teachers, community mentors, cops—and we wrapped ourselves around the kids entering the system. And we had tremendous success. People called it a miracle. But that was well over twenty years ago. Times have changed. The types of kids we’re dealing with have changed. They’re harder. The wraparound works, but it’s not as effective as it once was. There are certain kids that are too far gone for the system to reach—ever. Once they’re in, they’ll continue to be in and out of correctional institutions for the rest of their lives—a life sentence, on the installment plan—and they’ll leave a trail of victims along the way.
“I’ll keep doing what I can on my end, but let’s not wait for miracles. Let’s act. Support the Children’s Defense League and help these kids before they c
ome to me. We need to focus on the younger ones, ten and under. That’s where we’ll be successful. We have to act to save the kids who can be saved.”
The man really is a firebrand, I was thinking, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
It was Annie. She smiled.
I smiled back. “Madame Mayor.”
“Mr. Glass.” She turned and ordered a glass of wine from the bar. “Heard you might be coming to this.”
“And how’s that possible?”
“Power has its privileges.” She took the glass of red wine from the bartender and paid. “I have spies everywhere, you know?”
“Should’ve known that.”
“Feeling better about your brother?”
I didn’t respond right away, because I wasn’t sure how to answer. With the trial and Sammy and the Lost Boys, I’d been too busy to think much about it. “I guess.”
“Well”—she took a sip of wine—“I think you made the right decision.”
“Figured you’d say that.” I quietly laughed and shook my head. “Because you didn’t want to share me with anybody else. Keep me on the down-low.”
Annie nodded. “Perhaps.” We listened to Judge Bryce a little longer, and then Annie leaned in closer. “Got plans for later?”
“Don’t know.”
She paused, thinking over my response. Then she reached into her clutch purse and removed a small envelope from the hotel. A room number was written on the outside. A key was inside. “If you’re available, maybe we could meet.” Annie slid the envelope with the key into the front pocket of my suit jacket.
She touched my shoulder. Then Annie walked away.
As most of the crowd gathered their things and filed out the door, I worked my way up to the stage. There were a half dozen people gathered around Judge Bryce. I waited along the wall for the various well-wishers to say their words of thanks and praise.
Eventually Judge Bryce was alone, and I walked up to him. He was in his midfifties but looked younger. He had a full shock of hair, and his face was lean, like a runner’s.
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