Web of Justice

by J J Miller

  “Who the hell are you?” He delivered the words like a jab, his deep voice belying his youth.

  “I’m Brad Madison. I was a friend of your father. We were in Afghanistan together.”

  “Killing sand niggers. Or getting killed by them. But you got your ass outta there good enough.”

  I’d seen this a lot in younger men in jail. The “can’t break me” posture was an automatic survival response. Show no weakness, no vulnerability. It was actually a sign that they’d have a chance of gaining respect. The need for a hard, protective shell applied just as much in juvenile detention as it did in prison.

  “Well, yeah. I made it back. That was years ago now, but your dad and me were good friends. I saw you at his funeral, eight years ago.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  There were a few seconds of silence. Demarco pushed his shoulder off the wall and turned to me square on. He then folded his arms. The skin from wrist to sleeve cuff was covered in tattoos.

  “So, you’re going to get me off this bullshit charge, is that right?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “How you gonna do that? The way I see it, my ass is fried.”

  “At least let me try. You’ve been arrested on suspicion of murder. You’re going to need a good attorney.”

  “Maybe this is my destiny.”

  I was confused. I was expecting the silent treatment from Demarco or, if he talked, a vehement denial of guilt mixed with a tirade against the cops. Not philosophy; not something that sounded awfully close to surrender.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean, maybe this is what God wants for me.” He shrugged his shoulders and took a seat, leaned forward and rested his arms on the table. “These past few years I’ve done some bad shit. Maybe this is karma coming back to bite me in the ass.”

  “I’m not following you. This is something that needs to be fought. You don’t just go with the flow when you’ve been arrested for murder. If their story’s not right, you, me—we—have to get the truth out. We fight this thing with your truth.”

  “My truth? My truth is that God delivered me here. So it must be what he wants for me. This is the path He chose for me. It’s the path I have to take.”

  I was glad Demarco was talking, but I was disturbed by the words coming out of his mouth.

  “Sorry, we need to back up a little here,” I said. “Tell me exactly what happened yesterday.”

  “Yesterday I listened to God, I followed his word and it led me here.”

  “God told you kill someone?”

  “Not exactly. And I didn’t kill no one.”

  “Okay that’s a start. So how did you end up standing over a dead man who had just taken two bullets to the chest?”

  Demarco leaned back in his chair.

  “You ain’t gonna believe me. No one is.”

  Hell, he was afraid of sounding stupid—just like any kid.

  “I will believe you, Demarco. I just want you to be honest with me. What on earth were you doing at VidCon?”

  “I went to deliver a message from God.”

  “What does that mean? I need specifics.”

  He adjusted himself in his chair, uncomfortable. “I was at the mission.”

  “The mission?”

  “The Los Angles Mission.”

  The homeless shelter in Skid Row. It was run by volunteers trying to save people from getting lost in the wasteland of drugs, crime, insanity and prostitution.

  “I’d seen too much shit with the Sintown Crips and wanted out. A friend of mine, older than me, started looking out for my ass. I respected that dude, and when he started telling me I had to get out and make something of myself, I began to listen.”

  So he did inherit some of his old man’s smarts after all.

  “Anyway, after a couple of good friends got killed, I kinda took this dude’s advice to heart. But I was doing it tough. Eventually, I came downtown to the mission.”

  “And what happened there?”

  “They were good to me. I stayed for a few weeks, and in that time I found God. And on the day I truly believed, I walked out of the mission and got a direct sign from Him.”

  “You got a sign from God? What kind of sign?”

  “That I was chosen to serve Him.”

  “What was the sign?”

  “A dude outside the mission asked me to deliver a message that would help a sinner repent.”

  “Please, go on.”

  “He asked if I wanted to serve God. ‘Yeah,’ I said. And he said, ‘Well how about you deliver this message and I pay you a thousand bucks?’ And I was like, ‘You shitting me.’ And the guy goes, ‘Five hundred now, five hundred after you’ve delivered the message.’”

  “He offered you a thousand dollars to run an errand?”

  “That’s right. So I said, ‘Yeah, sure thing.’ It was like God giving me a kickstart for my dream.”

  “What dream, Demarco?”

  “I was gonna get my shit together. I was gonna join the Marines. Just like dad. I’d been out of the gang for a year and I needed to get my life on track. I wanted to enlist, but first I had to go back to school, get my high school diploma.”

  That was a big ask given where he was starting from, but I admired his ambition. Actually, I could have hugged him. I could only imagine how touched Tank would be.

  “You decided you wanted to join the Marines?”

  “Yeah. I had no money to get myself cleaned up. I didn’t want to go live back home in Pomona because the gang’s there. So I needed money, I needed a job, and I needed to finish high school. And to me this grand was a helping hand from God just reaching out to me.”

  “So then what happened with this guy?”

  “He showed me a photo of the dude I was supposed to give the message to.”

  “Did he give you the photo?”

  “No, I just had to remember this guy. And I didn’t need a photographic memory to do that. He had punk hair and nose ring and shit. There was no doubt I’d recognize him if I saw him. And so I went with this dude, he dropped me off, gave me a pass and told me to follow the other guy into this concert and then tap him on the shoulder and give him the message.”

  “You didn’t think this was odd?”

  “Yeah, of course, but he gave me five hundred bucks just like that.”

  “Did he tell you anything else?”

  “Yeah, he said he was going to be filming it all. He said this is what he wanted to do for a living. Filming pranks where famous people get punked by strangers off the street. They get a cream pie in the face or something like that. But he said the dude would be shocked by the message.”

  “Why would he be shocked by this message.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “We got in his car and headed over to Anaheim.”

  “Did this guy have a name?”

  “It was Toby, or something like that.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “White, tall, skinny dude. Had a Lakers cap on.”

  That didn’t exactly narrow it down, but it was a start.

  “Go on. What happened next?”

  “He dropped me off outside the center and told me to go on in.”

  “What about the rest of the money?”

  “That’s what I said: ‘What about the other five hundred?’ But he told me to chill—that he’d find me as soon as the filming was done.”

  This was one of the weirdest stories I’d ever heard, but if Demarco was making this up, he was a damn good liar.

  “So then you go find this guy. It’s Luke Jameson, I assume?”

  “Yeah, that’s the name. So I make my way in. Security look at me like I got no business being there, but I flash my pass, they check it out and then put a wristband on me and I’m through.”

  “Then what do you do?”

  “I try to find my way to the theater. Toby said the Luke dude would wait until
everyone was in before going in himself. He was going to make an entrance from the crowd. That was his thing. He said I should wait at the door. Toby said the dude would be wearing a hoodie or something like that to hide his face. But I picked him easily enough.”

  “Did Toby tell you why Luke was a target.”

  “He said he’d turned his back on God and that he needed to heed God’s word again. That was part of the message.”

  “What was?”

  “I had to say to him, ‘You’ve been served by God’.”

  “Right, so he was a lapsed Christian?”

  “I don’t know, something like that I guess.”

  “So then what happened?”

  “I got in right behind him when he walked in.”

  “He didn’t see you?”

  “No, it was real dark.”

  “Was there anyone else with him?”

  “No.”

  Maybe a posse would have blown his cover. That made sense. Kind of.

  “And?”

  “And so I follow him through the crowd, the music comes on and he stops. Then I tap him on the shoulder. He won’t turn around. I tell him, ‘You’ve been served by God’, like I was told. But he still won’t turn around. So I say it again a couple times, louder, and then he swung around. He was pissed and I didn’t really take a shine to him either. But then BAM a gun goes off right beside me and this guy goes down. Then it all went batshit crazy.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Some light from the stage comes on and everyone turns around and sees him on the ground. They all start screaming and running for their lives.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “I’m standing there. I couldn’t move. I wanted to run too, but people were looking at me like I’d shot him. I thought other people might think I was chasing them if I ran too, so I stayed put. I bent down to check on the dude, but he was dead. I watched him die right in front of me.”

  I was thinking how this story would go down in front of a jury. It wouldn’t fly. The prosecution would tear it to pieces.

  “Are you telling me the truth, Demarco?”

  “I swear to God.”

  “Yeah, I know, but this story is out there. What did you tell the cops?”

  “I told them pretty much what I told you.”

  I was surprised he talked to the cops. Most gang members know that if you’re ever arrested you keep your mouth shut. Maybe that was a good sign—that Demarco wasn’t afraid he’d get caught out explaining his side of the story.

  “Okay, but from now on you keep your mouth shut. Don’t open your mouth to anyone at all in here, you understand me?”

  “Who you think you’re talking to?”

  “It’s just something I have to say, Demarco. You’ll be facing murder charges soon. And with your history, it’s going to be a big ask for anyone to accept that you were there on some Christian mission to help a fallen angel.”

  “So, like I said. Maybe this is what God wants from me—this is my challenge. No one said it would be easy.”

  “Well, it’s my challenge now too. I’m going to defend you, Demarco. So you are going to have to help me as much as you can. That means I need to you to be one hundred percent honest with me, understand?”

  “I have been.”

  “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

  6

  After leaving Juvenile Hall, I made some calls. I needed to confer with my secretary Megan and my investigator Jack Briggs. I asked Megan to get together all of Demarco’s priors and I briefed Jack on my meetings with Jasmine and Demarco. Then I dropped in on the cops to get a copy of the arrest report. It was midday by the time I got back to the office. Jack and Megan were seated in front of my desk. Jack was re-reading Demarco’s rap sheet.

  “You really going to waste your time on this case?” he said by way of a greeting, holding up the offending document.

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because it looks like your boy is full of it.”

  “How so?”

  “All that born-again, message-from-God crap he fed you? I mean, the kid’s been running with the Sintown Crips, not selling boy scout cookies.”

  “He admits he’s done things he wasn’t proud of.”

  Jack slapped the rap sheet with the back of his hand.

  “Like vicious assault. Like auto theft. And that’s just what we know about. The Sintown Crips are just another mafia—seven homicides pinned to them in the last two years alone. They deal ice, crack, coke, heroin, weapons, you name it. And this kid, who’s probably just carried out their latest homicide, says he just so happens to have left the gang cold, found God, and decided to go back to school and enlist? I’m not buying it. It says here he’s already done two stints in juvie. But what I want to know is what his rap sheet doesn’t tell us. Was he in the car when those Crips did a drive-by? Was he standing watch while someone got knifed? What was the real shit he actually got away with?”

  Jack had never been a straight-up gun for hire, so to speak. He had a mind of his own and enough money from his IT business and tech stock trading to retire. Add to that the looks of a matinee idol and the drive to keep himself supremely fit and you had a fully-fledged alpha male for whom work was basically an optional extra. He liked investigating because it was interesting and real, and he liked working for me because we kept innocent people out of jail. But he was not at all interested in helping me let the guilty walk.

  “Have you ever heard of Ramon X?” he asked me.

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “Well, these past couple of hours I’ve been busy putting together a picture of your boy, and from what I’ve gathered so far, it ain’t pretty. This guy Ramon X, like your boy, comes from northwest Pomona. He’s only twenty-four, but he’s moved high up in the Sintown Crips, and no Dudley Do-Right gets to scale that chain of command. But he did, and fast. And in his downtime, he’s a talented rapper.”

  “Still, I’ve never heard of him.”

  “He just founded Hemlock Records, but that ain’t all—he’s what you might call an entrepreneur.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s got a YouTube channel with twelve million subscribers.”

  “Twelve million? What kind of money do you make from that?”

  “The plenty kind. The guy’s loaded. Probably stinking rich from YouTube alone.”

  “How so?”

  “YouTube pays a certain amount for views and then there are ads, product placement and merch.”

  “Merch?”

  “Merchandise. With a captive market of millions of people around the world, you can sell anything. Create a sideline business that’ll earn you as much as the channel.”

  “So what’s this got to do with Demarco?”

  “Well, my guess is that he and Ramon X were tight.”

  “No,” I said. “Demarco said he left the gang.”

  “I know. But come on. He would say that. And if they are still tight, that’s of concern to you, because Ramon X and the dead guy—what’s his name? Luke Jameson. They were open enemies.”

  “What, warring YouTubers?” I laughed.

  “It’s no joke, these two have been at each other’s throats, waging a YouTube version of battle rap. You know, dissing each other in the videos they post. And there was also the matter of a stolen channel.”

  “A stolen channel?”

  “A while ago, when these two were more palsy, they joined forces to trade off each other’s celebrity and make some extra cash. Within a few days their new channel had a million subscribers. But then Jameson decided to take it for himself, so he changed the access password to lock Ramon X out and kept the revenue all to himself.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s possible it was in response to something Ramon had done.”

  “How serious did their hostility get? Don’t tell me—a boxing match.”

  “Close. That’s actually what many fans wanted to see, but
Ramon X’s idea of getting square was much darker than that. He made no secret of the fact that he wanted Jameson dead.”

  “Did he ever make that threat explicitly?”

  “Who knows what he said to the guy face to face, but on YouTube he was careful. You know, keeping it within their guidelines so he didn’t get his channel shut down. But on other social media platforms he didn’t hold back. He came right out and said he wanted to see Jameson dead.”

  “So you’re thinking...”

  “I’m thinking your boy has fed you a load of crap. I’m thinking he’s decided to earn himself some coin and some gang kudos by doing Ramon X a favor. Any young Sintown Crip gangbanger would want to earn Ramon X’s respect. The dude’s got an entourage almost as big as Floyd Mayweather Junior.”

  “You have been busy. So your theory is Demarco volunteered to be a gun for hire?”

  “Look at his record, Brad. What the hell was this gangster from Pomona doing at VidCon? He wasn’t there collecting autographs, I know that much. He went there to kill.”

  “I’m not sure you’re right, Jack.”

  “Who knows what’s right? But one thing I do know—this stinks like a dead cat. It’s a lost cause. Why waste your time on it? Can you imagine what the cops and prosecution are going to do with this case if he pleads innocent? They will destroy him.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Demarco’s old man is a buddy of mine. At least he was. Tank Torrell was my closest friend in the Marines. I loved and respected him, and we looked out for each other. Until the day he got killed.”

  “Right. I see. And let me guess: you’re doing it pro bono?”

  Jack had assumed right. I wouldn’t be taking a cent from either Demarco or Jasmine.

  “You got it, but that doesn’t mean I expect you or anyone else to work this case for nothing. I owe it to Tank to do my best to look out for his boy. And my gut tells me he’s telling the truth—as preposterous as that may seem to you. But think about it: if your theory is right, then it was a suicide mission. Why would Demarco commit a murder that he was almost certainly going to be caught for?”

  Jack shrugged his shoulders.