"It's not that I don't believe you," Myra said. "But if we put
Marcus on the stand and his record comes up, stuff about drug dealing, it
doesn't make you look very good by association."
"I got you," Lorenzo said after a moment. "But it's still the
truth."
"Okay," Myra said. "The police didn't arrest you until four days
after the shooting. Did you know they were looking for you?"
"I'd heard about how the five-oh be looking to snatch me up on that," Lorenzo said.
"So I kept myself on the low."
"How did they come to arrest you?"
"I finally go by my crib, see if I can get me some clothes, the
po-po be watching my place; next thing is I'm in the system. Wouldn't never have
happened that way if that white boy hadn't been capped."
"Do you know Devin Wallace?"
"Devin and I go back a ways, sure."
"And had you ever met the deceased?" Myra asked.
"The white boy?"
"His name was Seth Lipton," Myra said, a little coldly. She clearly thought Lorenzo should bother to remember the name of the person he was accused of killing.
"Never met the man," Lorenzo said. "He must've been copping."
"Why do you say that?" Myra said.
Lorenzo smiled. "He gonna have some other reason for being up in
the Gardens?"
Myra responded with a noncommittal nod. "So you and Devin, you
were friends?"
"We was all right."
"Not friends, but friendly?"
"Yeah," Lorenzo said. "Like that."
"Is that accurate?"
"We was all right," Lorenzo said again.
"How did you know Devin?"
Lorenzo fixed Myra with a careful look, then looked over at me. "How come you let her do all the talking?" he asked.
"I'm the second chair," I said. "It's Myra's case."
"That right," Lorenzo said, a slight skepticism creeping into his look now. I guessed that Lorenzo's opinion of my stature as a man had just plummeted.
"That's the way we work it," I said, feeling that I needed to cut this boys-against-girls crap off at the pass.
"I'll be involved with every aspect of your case, but Myra's in charge. I think
the question she asked you was how you knew Devin."
Lorenzo smiled at this. "We did some business together. I keep
Devin hooked up with the chronic. I'm all out of the on-the-street shit, but I
know people. I bring things together like. That's how come I'm still alive and
never went to the joint: I ain't about declaring war and shit, getting all up in
other people's business. I go along to get along."
"So you supplied Devin with drugs," Myra said evenly.
"Just with the chronic, though. I ain't touchin' that serious
shit."
Myra leaned back in her seat and let a moment pass. There was only so much admitting to criminal activity we wanted from our client right off the bat.
"Okay," Myra said. "How about this woman who said she saw you at the shooting?
Do you know her?"
"Yo-Yo?" Lorenzo said. "I know who she is from around the Gardens
and what-all, but I don't think we ever talked none."
"You don't think you've ever actually spoken with her?" Myra said, leaning forward slightly.
"Not once?"
Lorenzo shook his head. "She and I never said word one."
"But it wouldn't surprise you that she knew who you were?"
"Course she'd know who I was if I know who she was. People
know
me up there."
Myra took a beat, clearly wondering if she wanted to follow up on that. It profited a defense lawyer nothing to hear the bad news from the prosecution, or worse still, in court, rather than from our client, where there might still be time to blunt the damage. On the other hand, knowing too much of the truth could limit our options.
"When you say people know you up there, what do you mean?"
Perhaps realizing he'd gone further then he intended to, Lorenzo retreated back to his boyish charm.
"I was around, is all," Lorenzo said. "The Gardens is where I come up."
"Do you think someone like Yolanda would know that you were in
business with Devin?"
"Yo-Yo knew that, sure. Shorty was with Devin, at least from time
to time."
Myra frowned at this, locking eye contact with Lorenzo. "Are you
saying that Devin and Yolanda were a couple?"
"I don't know about no
couple
, but yeah, they was
together."
Myra shut her eyes for a second, taking this in. "The eyewitness was dating the intended victim?" she said, trying to keep her voice neutral.
Lorenzo noticed her reaction. "That some kind of shit for you to work with?" he asked.
Myra nodded slowly. "It changes things. The bad side is, the jury
might be likely to pay more attention to someone who was emotionally affected by
the shootings. It probably also changes how aggressively we can cross her. The
good news is, it potentially gives her a reason to lie, or at least to try and
seem more certain than she otherwise would, that a complete stranger wouldn't
have."
"Why does being Devin's shorty give Yo-Yo a reason to lie?" Lorenzo asked.
"It doesn't, necessarily," Myra said. "But it gives us something
to investigate. Maybe she knows who really did the shooting and she's lying to
protect him. Hell, maybe she did it. The thing is, with a complete stranger,
there'd be no way to really claim that she was lying, because there's no reason
why she would."
Lorenzo considered this. "So it helps us or it don't?" he asked.
"Too soon to say," Myra said. "But it certainly changes things.
Tell me more about their relationship."
"What you wanna know?"
"How long had they been seeing each other?"
"They was . . . let's see . . . they first got together back in
the fall, maybe October. That's the first I remember seeing her around."
"Was Devin seeing anyone else?"
Lorenzo smiled. "Devin and I weren't tight that way," he said.
"But sure ain't gonna surprise me if he was."
"You think he might have continued seeing other people?"
Lorenzo, still smiling, shrugged.
"How about Yolanda?" Myra said. "Any idea if she was seeing anyone
else?"
"Like I said, I ain't never spoke to Yo-Yo. I just knew her to see
her around."
"Did you ever see her around with any other guy? It doesn't have
to be someone you knew."
"I'm not recollecting nothing like that," Lorenzo said.
"Okay," Myra said, taking a second to consult her notes. "What about Devin's sister?" she asked.
"What was your relationship with her like?"
"Latrice?" Lorenzo said. "She a fine-looking girl. A dime for
sure."
"Did you ever have any kind of relationship with Latrice?"
Lorenzo laughed his easy laugh. "Devin ain't gonna like that. Latrice wasn't the kind to be with me anyway. Girl's got a
job
,
that kinda shit."
"Are you saying she disapproved of you?" Myra asked.
"Latrice knew what Devin's business was," Lorenzo said. "She knew
what my business was. She let it go, far as I know."
"She lived with Devin, right?"
Lorenzo nodded.
"Are they close?"
"They brother and sister," Lorenzo replied. "I'm gonna believe
they tight."
"And you talked to her when you were over to visit Devin?"
"Sure."
"Did you talk to her on the night that Devin was shot?"
"That's right," Lorenzo said.
"Okay," she said. "Now according to the police reports we have,
Latrice said you came by looking for Devin on the night of the shooting."
"I be looking for him, yeah, but that was before he got capped," Lorenzo said.
"Lookin' to find a man ain't no crime."
"Do you remember what time you went by Devin's apartment?"
"Not for sure," Lorenzo said. "Maybe like seven?"
"Why were you looking for Devin?"
"About the green, you know," Lorenzo said. "Dude owed me some
money, sure. But how he ever going to pay me if I shoot him?"
Based on what I knew from the police reports, Lorenzo's conversation with Latrice was a topic about which I'd at least half expected Lorenzo to lie. The hope was that, if he did, he would do it in a vaguely plausible way. It was always demoralizing when the client came out with some preposterous story that they expected you to sell. Instead Lorenzo appeared to be telling the truth, but it wasn't a truth that helped us.
"This was for product?" Myra asked.
Lorenzo bobbed his head, confirming through body language what we already knew.
"How much did he owe you?" Myra asked, keeping her voice neutral. We didn't care that our client dealt drugs. We did care that he'd been looking for one of the victims in order to settle a drug debt on the night of the shootings, because this made our job considerably more difficult.
"He owed me five G," Lorenzo said softly.
"Five thousand bucks?" Myra asked. Lorenzo nodded slightly, looking uncomfortable for the first time in the interview.
This wasn't good. Other than love, money was as bad as motive got. Because we were talking about marijuana, I hadn't expected that kind of number. I wondered how much pot five thousand dollars wholesale got you. We clearly weren't talking about dime bags of shwag weed. I willed myself to think past the buzz of worry that was trying to hijack my concentration.
"Okay," Myra said. "So you went over to Devin's apartment because
he owed you money, and Latrice answered the door. Do you remember the
conversation you two had?"
"I ask her if Devin there, she say no; I ask does she know where
he is, she say no; I ask if he left the dead presidents for me, she say no. I'm
like, 'That motherfucker thinks I'm playing with him.' Then I was out."
"Do you recall whether those were your exact words? 'Motherfucker
thinks I'm playing with him'?"
"I wasn't carrying no tape recorder."
"I understand that," Myra said, making a show of patience. "But I
still need to know if you think that's exactly what you said."
"Best I can remember, I say what I say I say," Lorenzo said. "What
she say I say?"
"According to the police, she said that you threatened Devin," Myra said evenly.
"I threaten him to his own sister?" Lorenzo said incredulously.
"What I do that for? Why am I going to threaten him to Latrice, then cap him a
few hours later?"
"Is it possible that you said something that Latrice took as more
threatening?"
"She can say 'motherfucker thinks I'm playing with him' be a
threat if she want to. Ain't nothin' I can do about that."
"You don't think you might have said something more threatening?"
"I didn't say no kind of threat," Lorenzo said, for the first time looking angry.
"Dude was my boy, and dude owed me money. Can't be my boy and can't pay me back
neither if he's dead. So I got me two good reasons not to cap him."
OUTSIDE THE
jail, I found myself squinting in the sudden daylight. We'd talked to Lorenzo for around two hours, circling back to his upbringing, his relationship with Devin, whether there was anything else he could tell us about Yolanda or Latrice, his alibi for that night. Even though I'd basically just sat and listened the whole time, taking notes, I felt exhausted, like my day should be done already.
It took one look at Myra to tell she felt the same. She'd lit a cigarette as soon as we walked outside, taking a deep drag. I'd expected her to have built up a shell by now, not to show fatigue or discouragement, but perhaps that had been unrealistic.
"Is it just me, or was that a mixed blessing?" I said.
"It's never good when the client admits that the victim owed him
money on a drug debt and that he'd gone looking for said victim the night he was
shot. The alibi based on a dealer doesn't exactly help us."
"I guess the good news is, if he was going to lie to us he'd
presumably have come up with something better than that."
Myra looked over at me, grinning. "You have a point," she said.
"Not that it helps. We can't present a preposterous defense and then ask the
jury to acquit based on how implausible our defense was."
"Are you sure?" I asked. "Have you ever tried it?"
"Why don't you test it out on a misdemeanor and get back to me?"
"Five grand sounds like a fuck of a lot of pot."
"You'd be surprised," Myra said. "Weed's become a high-end
business in New York. First-rate hydro can retail out in the neighborhood of
five hundred or more an ounce. Wouldn't shock me if five grand wholesale was
just for a pound."
"I knew I was in the wrong line of work," I said. "What about that
Devin was sleeping with the witness to his getting shot? That didn't turn up in
any of the police reports."
"Like I said to our guy, I think it cuts both ways," Myra said.
"It maybe gives her a reason to lie, which helps, but it might make her a lot
more convincing on the stand. She's not some passerby who's not really paying
attention; she's watching her boyfriend get shot."
We had crossed through the parking lot and reached Myra's car. "So what do you think?" I asked as I waited for Myra to unlock my door.
"What do I think about what?" Myra asked.
"You think he did it?"
Myra looked over at me from across the top of her car. "How the hell should I know?" she said.
6
I
HAD JUST
arrived at the office the next morning and was still settling in when Myra came over to my desk.
"You have anything important scheduled for right now?" Myra asked.
"I was just grabbing a chance to go over my new batch of files," I said.
"There's a bunch of misdemeanors I haven't even looked at. What's up?"
"Come with me," Myra said. "We need to go on a mission."
"Where to?"
"The scene of the crime," Myra said.
We took the 2 train from Borough Hall out to its last stop in Brooklyn.
"You ever been out here before?" I asked once we were seated. The train was pretty empty; the commuter rush was mostly over, and we were heading in the opposite direction of most commuters.
Myra shook her head. "That's the point of the mission," she said.
"It's important that we have at least some kind of feel for the place where the
shootings happened."
We got out at the Brooklyn College stop, onto Flatbush Avenue, a street that was to Brooklyn what Broadway was to Manhattan: it traveled through virtually the entire borough. But this stretch of Flatbush looked noticeably different from the stretch that passed a half block from my apartment. It felt as though we'd gone back in time a little, the store signs all looking like they'd been put up in the 1950s.
The commercial strip appeared lively enough, however, with fast-food stores, delis, clothing shops, everything open for business. Virtually everyone on the street but us was black. We walked aimlessly for a couple blocks, just getting our bearings, cutting over on Avenue I, then turning onto Bedford Avenue.
The neighborhood changed completely as we did so. Now it was Orthodox Jews who occupied the sidewalks, which were lined with detached houses with yards and garages.
Eventually we came across the campus of Brooklyn College. There were security guards at every entrance to the campus, which we made no attempt to enter. We hit Flatbush again, turned right, then left onto Avenue H. The fast-food restaurants and stores of Flatbush dropped away, the number of people dropped and scattered, and soon we were walking alongside Glenwood Gardens.
As Lorenzo had said, the Gardens was the kind of project New York didn't build anymore, a series of identical towers sprawling across several square blocks. Even in the late morning it possessed an aura of dilapidated menace.
I found myself hesitating when Myra turned from the street into the project. She turned back to me, offering a tight smile.
"Anyone looking at us is going to think we're cops, lawyers, social workers, the IRS, something," she said.
"They'll leave us alone."
Myra turned out to be right: the people we passed stared at us hard, but nobody said anything. We took a quick walk through, slicing across the middle of the project, between where the shooter had stood and where the victims had been. I had a hard time taking anything in, too worried about catching someone's eye in the wrong way. The courtyard was fairly empty; just a cluster of young men standing outside the doorway of one tower, a young woman watching a small child playing in the middle of the yard.
We crossed through the main courtyard of the project and turned right onto Avenue I, heading back to Flatbush.
"So," Myra said, "I guess that's the Gardens. What'd you see?"
I glanced over at her, wanting to convey a little resentment that she was giving me a test, but also wanting to know if she'd seen something I hadn't.
"The whole place is like a fortress," I said. "The courtyard is completely cut
off from the street."
"That's true," Myra said. "But it isn't cut off at all from the
project itself. There must be a couple of hundred windows that look out onto
that courtyard."
"Sure," I said. "But our crime happened a little after midnight.
Could be nobody was looking."
"Could be," Myra said. "They would've heard shots, but people in a
project probably aren't all that likely to go stand in front of a window when
they hear shots. But I still find it hard to believe nobody else saw anything.
Even if they did, though, it doesn't necessarily mean we want to uncover what
they saw."
"Because they might have seen our client?"
"You never know," Myra said.
"Okay," I said. "So that was educational. Now can we get out of
here?"
"Not yet," Myra said. "We've still got to meet the neighbors."