Authors: David Ellis
Her second impression, always, was that she was going to lose this case, and he was going to end up incarcerated anyway. She had theories. She would tell a story that would be supportable, but at the end of the day, a police officer was shot and there was no particularly strong evidence—that she had seen so far, at least—to justify that act. She thought she had a decent chance of beating the death penalty and maybe even getting a reduction
down from murder in the first degree, but outright victory seemed so far from her reach at the moment that it was hard to even consider. And yet that was all that she was doing, looking for the smoking gun or the magical piece of evidence that would irretrievably alter the course of this case.
“What’s wrong?” Alex asked, which was an interesting reversal of roles.
Shelly sat in the chair next to Alex’s chained position at the edge of the table. She did not hug him or even touch him. The rules of contact, since the change in their relationship from friends to mother-son, had not been defined. “How are you doing?” she asked. She knew how she would answer that question.
“Hanging in there,” he said. His voice was weak. His expression indicated exactly what she had feared—hardened features, lifeless eyes. Alex was apparently no more optimistic than Shelly about his future.
“Alex, I think it’s time for us to stop dancing. I’ve been afraid to ask you some questions, and you have been unwilling, for some reason, to be straight with me.”
“I haven’t been straight with you?” he asked.
She tapped the table lightly. “Alex, you have to understand that I am your lawyer first. And as your lawyer, I don’t judge. I simply look out for your best interests. If you’ve done something you’re ashamed of, or you wouldn’t want anyone to know, you still can tell me. I don’t care. But I—”
“Shelly, come on. Cut to it.” Alex seemed to lack the energy for speeches.
Fair enough. “I think there is more to the story than you’ve been telling me. I think someone else was there with you that night. I think maybe someone else pulled the trigger, even. And I want to know why you won’t tell me about it.”
“Oh, Christ.” He looked away with a pained expression.
“Are you a Cannibal, Alex?”
He dropped his head and made a noise that could indicate laughter or a punch to the gut. “A Cannibal, Shelly? Do I look Mexican—”
“Cut the shit, Alex. You know what I mean. Were you working with them? Do they have something to—”
“No!” His voice cracked. “Jesus Christ, Shelly, a Can? Are you out of your freaking mind?”
“You sell drugs,” she said calmly. “You travel to the west side to get your stuff. That’s the Cans’ turf. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that your supplier, Todavia, is a Cannibal. And I can find that much out without your help. So it makes me think, hey, maybe the Cans sunk their claws into you.”
Alex shook his head.
“You said Miroballi found out about you from Todo. You said that, Alex.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So if Todavia is a Cannibal—and I’ll bet my life he is—that means there’s a connection. And Miroballi knew about it.”
“So? So the fuck what, Shelly!” She recognized the look on Alex’s face. She had seen it a hundred times. It was the expression of a boy in a corner, out of smart ideas.
“Miroballi’s partner said that Miroballi was looking to make a name for himself. He said Miroballi wanted to make a bust on the Cannibals’ turf. And he was using you to do it. He was using
you
to get at them.”
“Me.” Alex grunted a pained laugh. He was going with the obvious response—he was a white kid from the white part of town, a small-time dealer not working the streets. What in the hell use could
he
be to a cop taking down a drug empire on the west side?
And no, she didn’t have a response for that, exactly. Miroballi could use Todavia to get at the Cannibals, but he already had Todo—he didn’t need Alex for that. She was missing a piece of the puzzle. But that didn’t make her wrong.
“Miroballi’s partner—Sanchez—he says Miroballi was worried that you had tipped off the Cannibals. And I’m thinking, maybe the Cannibals
did
know about Miroballi’s plan to go after them on his own. So
they
took him down, Alex. Not you. But you’re afraid to give them up. You think they’ll hurt your family. They’ll hurt Angela. And I’m here to tell you, I won’t ever let that happen.”
“Oh, good.” Alex clapped his hands together. “I tell you, Shelly, I had my doubts, but now that you make that promise, I
tell you, I don’t have a care in the world.” He fixed on her. “I really hope you can come up with something better than that. Really, I’m willing to go with something that works. But that is the biggest pile of shit I’ve ever heard.”
“You make me guess, Alex, I’m going to guess. You want me to keep shooting in the dark? Keep me there, and I’ll keep shooting. I’ll probably miss. Hey, it’s only your life.”
Alex grabbed at his hair with both hands, squeezed his eyes shut. She was being hard on him but she felt she had no choice.
“Alex, understand that you have control here, not me. If you don’t like what I’m going to say in court, you can fire me. I can’t force a defense on you. Tell me the truth and I’ll tell you what I intend to do. If you don’t like it, fire me. And I’ll keep what you say confidential, either way. Get what I’m saying? There’s no down side to telling me the truth.”
Alex appeared to be on the verge of losing his composure, but he slowly deflated and lowered his hands. “Don’t ever talk about the Cannibals again,” he said. “They don’t have anything to do with this. You start nosing around there and you
will
get my family in danger.”
“Tell me who shot Miroballi, Alex.”
“Why, Shelly—why in the hell don’t you think it was me?”
“The gunpowder residue test was negative.”
“You said that doesn’t prove I didn’t shoot the gun.”
“It doesn’t prove you did, either.”
“I shot him,” he said. “I shot him I shot him I
shot
him.” He patted his chest. “Want me to announce it to the whole city?” He dropped a finger on the table. “Stick with that, okay, Shelly? Okay, lawyer? Stick with that and figure out this fucking self-defense plan. I wasn’t this guy’s snitch. This guy wasn’t some crusader. This guy was a scumbag and I will swear on my mother’s grave”—he stopped on that comment, glanced away from Shelly—“I will swear that this guy was going to take my head off if I didn’t do it first. Or just—” He turned away from her. “Or just walk away and forget the whole thing.”
Walk away
again,
he meant. And she certainly had no response to that.
J
OEL
L
IGHTNER AND
Shelly drove along the city’s west side, past the graffiti-laden buildings and the residential areas that tugged at her heart.
“I’m just not getting much,” said Joel, referring to his attempts to dig up information on Officer Ray Miroballi and his partner, Julio Sanchez. “If Miroballi was working the drug trade, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to deposit huge sums in his bank account.”
She looked at him. “What would you do?”
“I’d either spend it, bury it in my backyard, or hide it in a safe-deposit box.”
Shelly considered that. “Maybe I should subpoena the bank to see if he has a safe-deposit box. Most families do.”
“He does.”
“He does? Then I’ll issue—”
“Not worth your time,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Not worth your time, Counselor.” He looked at her.
Oh. Okay. How Joel Lightner had managed to get a look inside Miroballi’s safe deposit box was not something she cared to know. She might not approve of his tactics generally speaking, but she was heartened to know that she was working with a pro.
“That other thing we discussed,” he said. “Should have an answer soon.”
“Thanks, Joel.”
“I showed Alex’s photo around the open gym at City Athletic,” he said. “Some of the guys knew him. You can imagine, it’s a different group every week. You never know who’s playing when. Used to play there myself, about a thousand years ago.”
“What did they say about Alex?”
“Nice kid. Quiet. Doesn’t call pussy fouls.”
“Good. I’ll try to work that into my opening statement.”
She felt her heartbeat increase as the car pulled over to a curb. Joel nodded down the street to a house with tarnished aluminum siding and a front porch that looked like it had lost a fight with a bulldozer. Joel raised a cell phone to his mouth. “We’re here, Teddy.” Joel waved his hand in exaggerated fashion, and Shelly saw two men in a sedan down the street wave back. Joel listened to the response, which Shelly could only faintly hear through the phone. “Good. Alone? Good. Yeah, sit tight.”
“Our backup,” she assumed.
“It’s probably nothing, Shelly. But why be stupid?” He put away his phone. “Especially if Riley’s footing the bill.”
“Don’t remind me. I feel bad enough.”
“Oh, c’mon now. Riley’s loaded. Besides”—he nudged her—“not for nothing, but I think Paul would hire a small army to protect you.”
“Oh, yeah?” She looked at him. “What’s it to you?”
He held up his hands innocently. “Hey, nothing, ma’am. I just work here.”
She reached for the door and Joel caught her. “Hey, Counselor, for real now. You never know what’s behind a door, know what I mean?”
Shelly had probably visited as many of these homes as Joel. Maybe not under precisely the same circumstances, but she knew what it meant to be unwelcome in these parts.
Joel, who was licensed to carry a firearm, kept one hand near his jacket and looked over the home as he approached. The sun had fallen behind the housing projects to the west, leaving this dilapidated neighborhood in darkness. The temperatures had warmed over the last few days but it was still dropping to near freezing outside.
Joel removed his credentials from his pocket and held them out as he gingerly took the three steps onto the porch. Shelly followed
and mimicked his movements. Joel banged on the door with no hesitation or caution, as if he were selling encyclopedias door to door.
Shelly had expected a peek through the window, or a question through the door, but the door opened a moment later. The words that came to mind when she looked at the young man were
tough
and
hard.
He had a wide, lanky frame with tight but small biceps that emerged from a sleeveless shirt. His head was shaved bald, the only hair an erratic goatee and bushy eyebrows. He had a fierce stare, narrow eyes, an intense frown.
Joel held up his credentials, which Shelly hadn’t seen. He was a licensed private investigator, of course, but that hardly held sway. She assumed he had something that gave the impression he was still a cop. “Need to talk to you, Eddie,” he said.
“No hablo inglés,”
he answered with no expression.
“No?” Joel put down his badge, such as it was. “You ‘hablared’ okay when you went to Southside.”
Eddie Todavia had gone to Southside High School briefly with Alex. It was, as far as Shelly understood it, how they had met.
As far as she understood it,
these days, had become quite the qualifier.
“Let us in, Eddie. I need a couple of minutes.”
“
What
-choo need?” he asked, and for the first time he looked at Shelly, spreading his gaze up and down with no embarrassment.
“Eddie, let us in or we come back, and we don’t ask so nice.” He looked at his watch as if he were annoyed and didn’t have time to quibble. “I don’t give a shit what’s inside.
No me importa lo que está adentro.
Okay?
Solamente para hablar.
”
Todavia did not look particularly concerned, save for his instinctive reaction to anything remotely related to law enforcement. He was, after all, a drug dealer. But Shelly had had dozens of clients from these neighborhoods, and out here, in the minds of these boys, there was a presumption of guilt, not innocence. She assumed Todavia was assessing his options, which ranged from zero to none. Presumably, he wasn’t so stupid as to have a mountain of cocaine sitting on his kitchen table.
Joel walked past the boy without invitation, and Shelly followed.
“Sit,” he said to Todavia, pointing to a couch with dirty laundry spilled onto it. The young man—Shelly knew from a police report Joel had obtained that he was nineteen—complied. Shelly and Joel sat on the opposite couch.
“Alex Baniewicz,” Joel said. “Tell me what you know.”
“No lo conozco.”
“Eddie, you speak one more word of Spanish to me and you’ll be wearing a cop’s baton up your ass.”
“You ain’t no cop.”
“Used to be,” said Joel. Shelly hadn’t been sure if Joel would lie about that fact. “I have friends on the force, pal.
Amigos.
One phone call.” He held up his cell phone.
“Don’t know him, man.”
“You sell him blow. I don’t care about that. I want to know his story.”
“Man, his story.” Todavia leaned forward and laughed. “He was born in a castle and he kissed a frog or something. You mean like that?”
Joel stood up slowly. He eyed the table that was between them, a small wooden thing holding sports magazines and two plastic cups from fast-food restaurants, each of them partially full of soda. “No, that’s not what I mean,” he said. He put the toe of his shoe on the table and tilted it up, so that the contents began to shift toward Todavia.
“Man, why you gotta be like that?”
With those words—or more to the point, with Todavia’s lack of a physical reaction—Shelly could see that Joel had established the upper hand. The boy believed, and probably correctly so, that Joel could make life difficult for him, cop or not.
Joel tilted the table so that everything slid off, including the two cups of cola. Then, for good measure, he pushed the entire table over, so that it toppled at the feet of Eddie Todavia.
Shelly felt her body tense. She assumed that a physical confrontation would not come about, but things had escalated. Truth be told, she wouldn’t mind a shot at this kid. He was the first falling domino that cascaded down to Alex being held for Miroballi’s murder.