Eastside

by Caleb Alexander

  None of the attorneys spoke.

  “Mr. Kaufman, can you take this case?” the judge asked.

  A tanned, trim lawyer with graying sideburns stepped forward. “Ah, yes, Your Honor. I can take it.”

  The judge nodded, handed the lawyer the case file, and then squinted. “Here, get with Mr. Robinson and go over things with him. Do it right now, while we’re all in the courtroom.”

  The lawyer frowned as he stared at the judge and accepted the case file. “Yes, sir.”

  The judge turned to Travon. “Mr. Kaufman will go over things with you, young man. I’m sure he’ll be able to answer all of your questions. This trial is set to begin thirty days from now.” The judge banged his gavel and turned to the clerk. “Call up the next defendant.”

  The deputy escorted Travon back to where the rest of the orange jumpsuit-clad defendants were, and reshackled him to the group. He then moved on to unshackle the next prisoner that had to go before the judge. The attorney walked to where Travon was seated and extended his hand.

  “Hi, I’m Gary Kaufman and I’ll be representing you for this case.”

  Travon extended his hand and gripped the lawyer’s firmly. Kaufman handed Travon a business card. It was thick, tan, and custom-made with raised gold letters. It read: The Law Firm of Schuster, Goldberg, Kaufman, Jacobs, Steinberg, and Spiel. Another lawyer approached.

  “Congratulations, Gary,” he told Travon’s attorney. “I hope that you’re appointed.”

  Three more attorneys approached.

  “Stop kissing butt, Greg,” one of them teased. “He isn’t on the bench yet.”

  “Can we still call you Gary, or do we have to call you O Great One?” another asked.

  “Will we have to bow when we approach from now on?” asked the third.

  “O Great One will do, and yes, a slight genuflection would be appropriate,” Kaufman told them.

  All four attorneys laughed and bowed.

  “Congratulations, Gary, you deserve it,” the first attorney told him.

  Another winked his eye at Travon. “The judge must like you.”

  The attorneys departed, and Travon turned toward Kaufman.

  “What was all of that about?” he asked.

  “Oh nothing.” Kaufman shrugged. “I’m on a very short list for a federal judicial appointment. I’m not even a prosecutor; I just got a call from the White House’s lead counsel, telling me that I’m the leading candidate out of the remaining three.”

  “Shit, that’s cool. So, what is all of this murder stuff about?”

  Kaufman seated himself in the empty chair next to Travon and began rifling through the case file. After a couple of minutes of silent reading, he turned to Travon.

  “Okay, the unlawful carrying is bad,” Kaufman told him. “The DA’s office should have rejected that case outright. It’s a bad search. You weren’t in the vehicle, it was parked, and you were buying a soda. There was no probable cause, no nothing. They’re just trying to stack shit on you, that’s probably what pissed the judge off and made him give me the case. He doesn’t like it when one side doesn’t play fair. They’re going to come to us and say that they’ll drop the unlawful carrying and drop the first-degree murder to a manslaughter, if we plead guilty right away and save them a whole lot of trial preparation. You know how the game is played.”

  Kaufman shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. “Well, I can tell you this, they’ll be wasting their time. For one, the judge is gonna throw this unlawful carrying so far out of his courtroom, they’ll have to send their secretaries into the parking lot to look for the case file. As for this murder charge, well, they are accusing you of shooting a Tyrone ‘Baby T’ Warfield in the face with a shotgun at some nightclub. No murder weapon, no nothing. Just a single eyewitness who saw you firing a shotgun the night of the shooting. It’s weak, but you have a gang jacket and since this guy was in a rival gang, they are betting that a jury will buy it; which they will.”

  Kaufman patted Travon’s knee. “So, we’re not gonna let this get to court, are we? The case is weak because she saw you firing a shotgun, but not who you were firing at. In other words, she didn’t actually see you shoot the guy. As your attorney I need to know, did you shoot the guy?”

  “Hell no!” Travon said. “I was there and I was blastin’, but not at him. I was tryin’ to get my cousins out of there and save my own ass. But dude got blasted by somebody else.”

  “And you wouldn’t be willing to tell the State who, because then you’d be a snitch, right?”

  Travon nodded. “Right.”

  “If it comes down to your ass or his, we are going to give them his,” Kaufman told him. “I don’t like losing. In fact, I never have. You’re being railroaded so the judge wants me to make sure it’s fair.”

  “Yeah, me against the State of Texas.” Travon snorted. “How is that fair?”

  Kaufman shook his head rapidly. “No, no, no, my dear boy.” He laughed. “You don’t understand. We’re your attorneys now. The law firm of Schuster, Goldberg, Kaufman, Jacobs, Steinberg, and Spiel. All one thousand two hundred and seventy-three of us. Plus our secretaries, paralegals, researchers, investigators, writers, and money. The State of Texas doesn’t stand a chance.”

  Kaufman laughed again. “Now, what I need from you is a list of witnesses and a few other things. I’ll set up a motion to suppress hearing for two weeks from now, and see if we can squash this thing before it gets in front of a jury. Juries don’t like guns and gangs. I’ll get back to you in a few days; right now I’m going to go and talk with the judge and get rid of this unlawful carrying. I’m also going to get us a discovery hearing.”

  Kaufman rose. “Have my list ready when I come and see you in a couple of days. And see if you can dig up some dirt on Tyrone Warfield. I’ll get my investigators to start doing the same. We gotta make this guy out to be a real scumbag. I’ll see you later, Mr. Robinson. If you need anything, you have my card. Try not to get into any trouble in the meantime.”

  Bexar County Jail

  “Travon Robinson!” the guard shouted.

  Travon climbed out of his bunk and hurried over to the officer’s desk. “What?”

  The guard smiled at him cynically. “Pack your shit, you moving to the sixth floor!”

  “Fuck!” Travon exclaimed. “Why are they moving me again?”

  “You’re moving to the gang floor,” the guard said with a smile.

  Travon walked back to his bunk, pulled off his sheets, and folded them along with his other meager jailhouse possessions into his blanket. He then folded his blanket into a ball, tossed it over his shoulder, and returned to the officer’s desk.

  “I’m ready,” he told the smiling guard.

  “Walk to the elevator and wait,” the guard told him as he reached beneath his desk and pressed a large red button.

  The massive steel door that controlled entry into the jail pod slowly slid open. Travon walked out of the unit and down the hall to the elevator, where he stood and waited for its arrival. Soon, the elevator’s doors slid open, and Travon boarded the empty lift.

  There were no numbers to press, he noticed upon climbing on board. Only a single, steel-covered speaker mounted into the wall and a large camera encased in steel occupied the elevator with him.

  “What floor?” a gruff male voice with a deep Southern drawl asked over the crackling speaker.

  “Sixth,” Travon answered.

  The doors slid closed and soon the car began to move. When the doors opened once again, Travon was greeted by an overweight Hispanic guard.

  “Robinson?” he asked, while checking the name on his clipboard.

  “Yeah.” Travon nodded.

  “Six D.” The guard pointed. “Go down that hall, right up to the door at the end of it, and ring the buzzer.”

  Travon followed the directions given, and waited patiently as the massive steel doors next to the buzzer slid open. They were slower than the doors on the floor from which he had
just come, and seemed infinitely more ominous. Hesitantly, he entered the pod, approached the officer’s desk, and presented himself.

  “Robinson?” the guard asked, without looking up from his crossword puzzle.

  “Yeah.”

  “Take twenty-eight,” the guard told him. “It’s upstairs and it’s empty.”

  Travon turned and walked past the telephones, where all of the guys were either yelling and cursing, or talking baby talk. He strolled past the card tables where there were a variety of games being played, with guys doing even more yelling and cursing. He went up the stairs with his oversized bundle of bedding, and surveyed the numbers painted on the steel door of each room, until finally he arrived at number twenty-eight.

  Inside were two empty bunks made of steel, bolted to a steel wall. There was a sink and a toilet built together out of a single piece of steel, bolted to the corner wall just to the right of the door. A steel desk and a built-in stool occupied the left side of the room, where it was also bolted to the steel wall.

  Travon threw his linen on the top bunk, and proceeded to make up the bottom one. When this was done, he ventured out of his room, and down the stairs to examine his new surroundings.

  At the card tables inside the day area, the prisoners were playing dominoes, tonk, spades, blackjack, and gin. Other prisoners were standing around talking, some were reading books. Travon spied the book cart to his right, and it was there where he headed.

  Most of the books on the cart were old, which mattered little because he had done little reading in the last year or so. This would be the perfect time to catch up. He lifted The Color Purple and Whore Son from the book cart, and turned to go back to his room to begin his reading, but was surprised by two familiar faces that had been standing just behind him. Alonzo and Lil Texas.

  “What’s up, Tre?” Lil Texas greeted him with a smile. “I knew that we would run into each other again. That was some fucked-up shit you pulled in the Courts that time.”

  “Whatever,” Travon told them. He brushed past them and walked back up the stairs to his room, where he fell onto his bed and opened the first book. A shadow danced across the page of the book, causing him to leap up. Lil Texas was standing in his doorway.

  “When you least expect it, expect it,” Lil Texas told him, and then turned and walked away.

  Travon took the small bag of personal hygiene items that he had been issued and poured them out onto his bed. He took the shaving razor and bit the plastic until he could remove the blade from the plastic handle. Then he used the razor to carve the end of his toothbrush into a sharp point. Travon took the sharpened toothbrush and began scraping it against the concrete floor of his cell.

  After an hour of scraping, Travon took his newly created weapon, placed it beneath his pillow, and returned to his novel. If they tried anything, he would be ready for them, he told himself. If they tried anything, he was going to kill Lil Texas.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Bexar County Courthouse

  Two Weeks Later

  “Your Honor, our suppression issue is intertwined with our discovery motion,” Kaufman told the judge. “Unless we have full disclosure, how can we prepare? The whole case revolves around this witness they say exist. We need to be able to investigate this witness in order to examine her credibility. We don’t know if she wears glasses, and if she does, how old the prescription is? We don’t know whether she’s on some type of medication, and if that could have impaired her vision on the night in question. Was she drinking, and if so, how much? What was her exact location at the scene, and how does that affect her perception of what really happened? Is she in a rival gang, and does she have some type of grudge against my client? There are many things we have to know, and the State has provided us with absolutely nothing.”

  The State’s Attorney rose. “All of that can be obtained under direct examination, Your Honor. The State has to protect the witness. Mr. Robinson is a member of the notorious BSV gang. Her safety is our primary concern.”

  “She is going to testify for the State, Your Honor, so she will have to come forward eventually,” Kaufman told the judge. “If she is in fact in such grave danger, then why have her testify at all? My client is incarcerated, he can do no harm. He has never professed to being a member of any gang, nor does he have a history of violence. In fact, he has never been convicted of anything!”

  Kaufman pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Your Honor, we don’t want to know what she’s going to say, we only want to know about her judgment on that night. There was a lot of panicking going on all around her. People were trampled, there was shooting going on all around; was she panicking? Was she running around? Your Honor, it is imperative that we be able to depose this witness. If she proves to be not credible, then her testimony should not be allowed, and furthermore, the statement she gave to the police should be suppressed.”

  “Your Honor, her credibility is for a jury to decide,” the State’s Attorney said. “It’s obvious that Mr. Kaufman does not want our witness to get in front of the jury to tell her story. He wants to depose her, so he can tear her down and destroy her credibility. He’s reaching, Your Honor. He’s trying all of his fancy lawyer tricks so that his client can go free and kill again.”

  Kaufman bolted from his seat. “I object to that last remark, Your Honor! In fact, I object to Mr. Coonts’ last statement!”

  The judge waved his hand in a settling motion. “What are you objecting for?” He waved his hand around his nearly empty courtroom. “There is no one here. The Motion to Suppress is fair game, counselor, you know that. You can say what you want, just like the State can say whatever it wants. But I warn both of you, in my courtroom, when that jury is seated in that little box over there, you’d both better watch what you say!”

  “Your Honor, the State wants to put their witness up on the stand and let her cry her heart out to the jury,” Kaufman argued. “We won’t be able to question her about gang affiliation, because then they will be able to bring that gang stuff into play. They are going to say, ‘Well, since you brought it up,’ and they are going to use that to prejudice the jury against my client. They say that I’m the one using fancy lawyer tricks? My client won’t stand a chance in hell then. Gang affiliation is another crime in and of itself and it has no reason being brought into this trial.”

  The prosecutor leapt to his feet. “Wait a minute, you want to question the witness about her gang affiliation and now you say that it has no reason to be brought up? Which is it, counselor? We plan to bring forth witnesses to testify to that fact that Mr. Robinson is a gang member, and that this was a gang-motivated shooting! Bexar County Sheriff’s Department records indicate that Mr. Robinson and Mr. Warfield were both gang members. Rival gang members.”

  The prosecutor seated himself with a smile on his face that would make the Grand Canyon seem like a crack in the pavement of a quiet residential street.

  Kaufman rose. He harbored a rather large smile of his own.

  “Mr. Coonts, I’m glad that you agree with me,” Gary Kaufman told the State. “This was a gangland murder, and all of the participants are possibly gang members. It is imperative that we be able to question your witness as to her knowledge, motive, and gang affiliation. That’s what this entire trial is basically going to boil down to, isn’t it? That’s what you’re basing your entire case on; using gang affiliation as the motive. So what gang is your witness affiliated with, and what is her motive?”

  Kaufman turned and winked at Travon. “These are the things we would like to find out, Your Honor. And to play this out in front of a jury would only confuse matters. This issue is a loose cannon, and it really needs to be resolved beforehand.”

  The prosecutor turned beet red. “Your Honor, our position is simple. The defendant and his fellow gang members are a threat to society, and to our witness in particular. We feel that her life would be in danger if we bring her forward.”

  The judge cleared his throat and leaned forward.
“There are many confusing issues in the trial, and one thing in particular is most bothersome and confusing to me,” he told them in his high-pitched, nasal tone. He turned toward the prosecutor. “So, let me see if I understand this correctly. The State is saying that the witness is in danger if she testifies at this hearing, but that she is not in danger if she testifies at the trial? She will be okay after the trial? These gang members are dangerous now, but they will not be dangerous during or after the trial? Or, is the State saying that after she testifies, it no longer cares if she is in danger?”

  The judge frowned, Kaufman smiled, and the two DAs turned even redder.

  “That’s not what we’re saying, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said, as he rose from his seat. “The State is concerned about the safety of all its citizens. That is why we are here today, trying to get Mr. Robinson off the streets.”

  The second DA rose. “Your Honor, we do feel that her life is in greater danger now, if she comes here and testifies. Studies have shown that the danger subsides substantially after the person has been convicted.”

  “There are remedies, Your Honor,” Kaufman told the judge. “We can close the courtroom while she testifies, for one.”

  The judge turned to the DA. “How do you feel about that? I think that it is logical, if you are worried about her safety. And we won’t use her real name. The defense gets to depose the witness, we protect her identity, and everything is fine.”

  A clerk approached the judge and whispered into his ear. The judge nodded and leaned forward again.

  “Gentlemen, another matter has come up, that demands my attention. We’ll have to reschedule this hearing, how does Monday look? No, make that Wednesday of next week. If your calendar is full for that date, call my office and let the clerk know. I want this out of the way on Wednesday though, so you’d better be ready. Keep in mind that this is a murder trial, and because it is, I’ll be granting wide latitude to both sides, to let each of you prove your cases.”

  The judge eyed the attorneys sternly. “But before anything is said out of line in front of the jury, I want you to think carefully. I want to see every piece of evidence and know every witness’ testimony, beforehand. No wild and loose stunts from either of you.”