Jury of One

by David Ellis

  “He wanted a kickback,” Shelly summarized. “He got tipped off about you, presumably from Todo, and he wanted a cut.”

  Alex nodded. “So what am I supposed to say? No? He’ll bust me.”

  “You said yes.”

  “Of course I did. He said he wanted two hundred a month. Two hundred a month and he keeps his mouth shut. And he watches my back.”

  Shelly closed her eyes. It wasn’t hard to believe, especially after her meeting with the F.B.I. It was right there, for any cop with a wandering eye. And scold Alex as she may wish, she could see his view of things. What leverage did he have against a cop who had caught him with his hand in the cookie jar? She brought a hand to her face. This was precisely what she’d warned him about. One day, he’d get caught.

  “So the F.B.I. saw you with Miroballi,” she said.

  “Right. They followed me after that and caught me. Then they put me in a room and ran me through the wringer.”

  “And you told the F.B.I. what was going on,” she assumed.

  “Yeah, but seemed like they already knew. They told me I could help myself. Stay out of jail. They told me they wanted everyone connected to this. My seller. My buyers. And Miroballi.”

  “Most of all, Miroballi,” she said. A dirty cop. The only thing more inviting to a federal prosecutor than a dirty cop was a crooked politician. “Give me a time frame, Alex.”

  He looked off again. “Last summer is when Miro came to me. I think, like, July or maybe it was August. No, it was July. He gave me some time to think about it, but not much time. By August, I was dropping off payments to him. And at some point, the feds must’ve been watching. They saw me make two payments, I think. End of November, beginning of December. I was dropping off money to him, as much as I could. He was—well, he was cutting into my profit margin, let’s say.” He sliced a hand on the table. “I mean, Shelly, I was selling at most, maybe five grams a week to these couple of guys at work. Some weeks, it was two grams. I’m not exactly rolling in cash here, is my point. Two hundred a month, this guy wants. That’s fifty a week. I’m not clearing a whole lot more than that, and now I have to pay that much to this guy for starters. And then he upped it.”

  “Upped it? Increased his fee?”

  “Yeah. That would have been about November. He said five hundred was a better deal. Five hundred! Shelly, I’m not making enough to cover that. I’m dipping into my own pocket to cover that.”

  “Did you tell Miroballi—‘Miro’—did you tell him that?”

  He shrugged. “Of course I did. He wanted to introduce me to new customers. He wanted me to sell crack. He said I was missing out on a huge market. I told him I didn’t want a huge market. Crack, Shelly? Me? Selling crack to hookers and junkies?”

  Powder cocaine was no longer the preferred drug on the street. Crack cocaine was far more addictive, and cheaper. Powder remained popular among the white-collar set, where Alex worked. Officer Miroballi was trying to push Alex onto the streets.

  “I said no, thanks. No thanks.”

  “And I assume Officer Miroballi was none too pleased with that answer.”

  Alex laughed bitterly. “You assume right. He was telling me the hard time I would do if I were ever caught. He said it was him or prison. He kept saying, a nice-looking white kid wouldn’t stand a chance in the penitentiary.” Their eyes met with that last comment. It was the precise fate he was facing now.

  “You agreed to the five hundred.”

  “I said I’d think about it,” said Alex. “I figured I had some leverage, too. I had already paid him some cash, right? If he took me down, I could take him down, too. Plus I was a cash cow for him. I figured we could negotiate this a little. That’s how we left it.”

  “This was in November,” Shelly clarified.

  “Yeah. Or early December. After that meeting—the feds got me within the week.”

  Right. December fifth. “But what about Miroballi?” she asked. “He didn’t know you’d been picked up. Why didn’t he come back to you to keep ‘negotiating’?”

  Alex gave her a long look.

  “He did know,” she said.

  “Had to have known, Shelly. Had to have figured it out.”

  “So you never heard from Miroballi again?”

  “One time after that. We met at a restaurant and talked terms.” He flicked a finger in the air. “I told him I wanted to stick to the original deal. Two hundred a month.”

  “How did he respond to that?”

  “Well, that’s the thing.” Alex licked his teeth. “He didn’t fight at all. He just said, ‘Oh, okay,’ like it was no big deal.” He looked at her. “You’d have to know the guy, Shel. He wasn’t a guy who took something like that easily. But he did. He just went along with whatever I said. He just wanted the conversation to be done. I think he was testing me.”

  “Were you wearing a wire?” She couldn’t believe that she was asking Alex questions like this. But she imagined that Miroballi had had the same thought of Alex.

  “No,” he answered. “I couldn’t wear a wire. Miro would check for it.”

  “Was the F.B.I. listening?”

  “Don’t know. They didn’t exactly share their every move with me, Shelly.”

  Fair enough. “But Miroballi seemed overly compliant with you. And that made you think he was on to your situation.”

  “He must have been. He must have, Shelly. I didn’t hear from the guy again. He’s getting regular payments from me, then he’s upping the fee, then all of a sudden he’s being all agreeable, and he disappears off the face of the earth? Of course he knew. He knew the feds had gotten to me.”

  She sat back in her chair. Oh, the tangled webs. Alex had been caught and turned into a drug peddler by a dirty cop, then caught by legitimate law enforcement and flipped into a government informant. All of this, for a kid who just had an arrangement with a couple of guys at work for recreational drugs. She hadn’t approved of his side business, but God—surely he hadn’t deserved this.

  “The feds are telling me that I won’t be able to prove that Miroballi was working with you,” she said.

  Alex waved a hand in anger. “Bullshit. Shelly, they knew. If not, how would they ever know to find me? How would they even know who I was? They only found me because I was working with Miro.”

  “I didn’t say they didn’t know, Alex. I’m talking about proof. Did they have proof?”

  He pursed his lips, stared at the wall. “Can I prove that Miroballi knew I had been caught by the F.B.I.? Other than the fact that he tried to blow my head off? No, I can’t read the guy’s mind. I can’t prove it.” He looked at Shelly plaintively. “He disappeared the moment I was picked up by the feds, reappears one time and barely says a thing, and he tries to kill me. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “I believe you,” she said. She couldn’t possibly say that with confidence.

  He shook his head. “Next time I see that cop—well, you know.”

  “The next time you saw him was the day of the shooting.”

  Alex nodded yes. Shelly had arrived at the moment, but she wouldn’t ask the question yet. She wouldn’t ask him whether he pulled the trigger.

  Alex inhaled and looked over Shelly’s head, working his jaw. “See, Shelly, Miro never just walked up to me in the open like that. He didn’t just get out of his squad car and say, ‘Hey, bud, where’s my money?’ I’d drop it somewhere and he’d pick it up after I left.”

  “So that day, when he got out of his squad car—”

  “Oh, yeah, this guy”—Alex adjusts in his seat, animated now—“he gets out of his car and comes after me—I know what this guy’s doing.”

  “You think he wanted to kill you.”

  Alex’s eyes fell to the table, a haunting expression on his face. “Shelly, I swear to you—Miro knew. He was going to take me out right there. People think just because a guy’s a cop, he doesn’t do bad stuff.”

  “People don’t think that,” she said. At least, she certa
inly didn’t. She reached across and put her hand on his.

  11

  Deliberations

  SOMETIMES SHE WATCHES him in court. He is a prosecutor, and today he is talking to the jury. He is tall and strong and speaks very confidently. If she were told that he was king of the world, she would believe it. They are drawn to him, she can see, the jurors, the spectators, even the judge. Daddy is prosecuting a man who held up a gas station in Bakerstown and killed the attendant. Felony murder, she has heard him say to Mother.

  The defendant was convicted two weeks ago. This is the sentencing phase. Her father is asking the jury to sentence the defendant to death. She can see the defendant and she’s read about him in the papers. There weren’t many murders in Rankin County, so everyone knew about this. He’s a famous killer but she’s not watching him. She’s watching Daddy.

  He’s not moving as he stands before the jury. His hands are clasped behind his back. He can be animated, but he’s not now. He is speaking quietly.

  He’s telling the jury about the gas station attendant. His name was Davey Humars. He was twenty-two and was engaged to be married. He liked to watch baseball. He liked to fish.

  It has been two days since she left the clinic. She was discharged shortly after she came out of anesthesia. She was provided transportation from the clinic through a covert route to the train station to get her home. She never even saw any of the protesters marching outside. And they never saw her.

  Davey Humars had a life, Daddy tells them. He had a life and he was entitled to it. What do we stand for, he asks them, if we do not stand for the sanctity of life?

  Her eyes well up but she will not cry. She’s cried enough. She imagines the day she will tell him. She was attacked. She got pregnant. She will tell him about the abortion clinic.

  He will know. A day from now or thirty years from now. And he will never look at her the same again.

  12

  Family

  SHELLY LIVED ON the north side of the city, in a neighborhood generally described as a “developing” community, which meant, as far as Shelly could tell, heavily populated by minorities but getting whiter. She had lived here since she graduated law school. She was near the lake and the park, near a bus line that got her downtown in less than half an hour. It was a rental neighborhood primarily, mostly young gay men and Latino families with kids. It was well-lit, quiet, and affordable.

  Her apartment was in a four-story brownstone in the middle of the block. It was about a thousand square feet stretching long and thin, with exposed brick walls and old hardwood floors. She got decent light from the southern exposure and a large bay window. She had no patio per se but a landing for the fire escape, overlooking the alley to the rear of the building, served the same purpose when it was warm.

  She arrived home that night at nine. It had been four days since Alex was arrested. She had represented him at his bond hearing, in which the court took all of thirty seconds to order Alex held without bond. She was still waiting to hear from Jerod Romero about working out a plea for Alex. In the meantime, she was struggling to find a lawyer for Alex, someone who worked on homicide cases on a regular basis. She had visited fourteen lawyers in three days, all the while trying to keep up with her regular work at the law school.

  She was beginning depositions in a case tomorrow, a lawsuit the Children’s Advocacy Project had filed against the city’s board of education, seeking to increase money and resources to education for the deaf. The board said the time and manpower was needed to teach the mainstream pupils, and forcing resources elsewhere would hurt the majority to benefit the few. Shelly was stretching constitutional principles to argue that deaf kids should be “mainstreamed” with the general student population but given the necessary extra resources. The answer from the city was always the same—no money, no people, no space. Shelly was not unsympathetic. The city’s position was not unreasonable, but it was unacceptable. She filed suit in federal court, where the life-tenured judiciary was far more willing to knock the city around, but even then, any remedy would take years to implement. So much work, to wait so long for what most likely would be only an incremental improvement for deaf and hearing-impaired children.

  She was sitting on her bed with the television on. It was primary election day in the state, and results were beginning to pour in after ten o’clock, three hours after the polls had closed. Along the bottom of the screen, numbers were scrolling along. It was a big election primary because all of the constitutional offices—governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and the others—were in play. The gubernatorial primary on the Democratic Party side had been particularly contentious. She was watching a tape of the acceptance speech of the incumbent Republican governor, Langdon Trotter, who had not been challenged in the G.O.P. primary. Still, he had decided to hold a victory rally to get the free airtime.

  “We will continue with our goals,” he told a raucous crowd. “We will not back down. We will not change our positions from the primary to the general election.”

  The governor was referring, she gathered, to one of the Democratic Party candidates, who previously had espoused pro-life views while in the state senate but, while running for governor, changed his stance to the more conventional Democratic Party position.

  “We are pro-life and we are proud of it!” he proclaimed. “We will not turn our backs on the innocent unborn!”

  She shook her head and looked back down at her notes. She had been reviewing deposition outlines prepared by the law students. CAP was part of a legal clinic, which meant that students did much of the litigation work. Shelly would often try the cases herself when they went to trial, but she usually had at least one student working with her. For the deaf-ed lawsuit, two of her third-year law students would take most of the depositions.

  The portable phone rang. She considered avoiding it but picked it up off her nightstand.

  “Shelly.” It was her brother Edgar on the phone. Edgar, clear-eyed and serious, whose hair never moved, even as a child, whose posture never strayed from erect, who worshipped and mimicked their father. “So you’re there.”

  “So I am,” she said. “Very busy time for me,” was the most she would apologize.

  “Yes, I’ve heard. You’re taking the cop killer, I see.”

  The news must have reached the papers. Shelly didn’t read the news on a daily basis anymore. Or maybe Edgar just had the information by virtue of his job.

  “He’s my client, yes.” Probably not for long, if it were up to Shelly, but she didn’t see the need to relieve her brother’s agitation. Seven years her senior and the opposite gender, Edgar had found little common ground with Shelly over the years. He doted on her as a child, truly loved her, she believed, but Shelly had found it difficult to return the affection. The love was there—it was there for all of her family—but there was no connection, no warmth. Edgar was no different from Mother, giving her little credit for original thought or substance. She would grow up like Mother, raise some kids. Oh, a law degree? How cute! She’ll meet a nice lawyer.

  “Shel, really—a drug-dealing cop killer?”

  “I don’t think we should be discussing this. I believe it’s called a conflict of interest.”

  Edgar was the superintendent of the state police force. He had received the appointment three years earlier.

  “I’m still your brother.” He paused. “I just can’t believe—Why do you spend your time— Shelly, really, is this why you got a law degree? I thought you were helping schoolkids. What happened to that?”

  “I do help schoolkids. I helped Alex once. He needs my help again.”

  A sigh from the other end. “Okay, little sister. I don’t understand it, but okay.”

  “I have your permission?” Shelly tightened her grip on the phone.

  “Boy, you get a bug up your ass. I’m worried about you, Shel. Can’t a big brother look out for his little sister?”

  She closed her eyes.

  “This stuff will
eat you alive. This is going to be a capital murder case. And he’s going to lose. You understand that, right?”

  “I understand the stakes and the odds, Edgar.”

  “Listen, little sister. Another thing. This is a cop killing.” He paused, as if Shelly were supposed to understand. “I control state police. I don’t control city cops.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, drive the speed limit in the city, okay?”

  She shuddered. The same thought had occurred to her—retaliation from the local force. “I always obey the laws.”

  “I put in a call to Fran Macey.”

  “Who?”

  “Francis Macey. Superintendent of the city police.”

  “Did you now?” Her blood was boiling. “So now he knows to call off his goons?”

  “Shelly, cops wake up every day not knowing if it’s their last. They approach every pulled-over vehicle wondering if there’s a shotgun waiting for them. We do the shit work so everyone can sleep safely at night. So when one of their own—”

  “Edgar, I know what cops do. Lawyers defend people accused of crimes. That’s what I’m doing.” She left out her best line, the one about Edgar never spending a single day in uniform himself. “I won’t give the police any excuse to harass me. I will drive the speed limit and I will only cross at crosswalks when it says ‘Walk.’ If the light changes and tells me to dance on one foot, I’ll do it. Okay?”

  “Jeez, Shel.”

  “And thank you, once again, for assuming I can’t take care of myself.”

  A small chuckle from her oldest brother. He mumbled something off the record. “At least call Dad tomorrow, would you?”

  “I’ll try,” she said. She hung up the phone.

  On the taped address on television, Governor Langdon Trotter was calling for stricter terrorism laws, for an expansion of the death penalty to include those who sell drugs to our children. She placed the portable phone on the bed and watched the governor complete his short speech, then wave to the crowd. His family gathered around him. His wife, Abigail, kissed him lightly on the mouth. His two sons patted his shoulders and hugged him when it was their turn.