Jury of One (3 page)

S
HELLY RACED FROM
the courthouse to her car and found the jail where Alex Baniewicz was being held. She approached the police station and assumed an air of confidence. So much of being a lawyer was presentation, and she did not anticipate a warm reception.

The interior of the police station had been remodeled. The reception area was spacious, with white walls and a long bench on each side of the door. The rest of the structure was cordoned off from the reception area by a wall with a secured door. Visitors were directed to the one division along the wall, a window covered by bulletproof glass, behind which sat a uniformed officer busying herself with paperwork. Above the thick glass was a sign in black, bold letters,
ALL VISITORS ARE SUBJECT TO SEARCH
, with the same words written in Spanish beneath it. Shelly walked up to the window and spoke into the small microphone embedded in the thick glass. She felt like she was buying a movie ticket.

Shelly gave her name to the officer. “I’m an attorney here to see Alex Baniewicz. I understand he’s being detained here.”

The uniformed officer glanced over the glasses perched on her nose. The thought passed in and out of Shelly’s mind, the women always got the traffic duty and reception jobs. The woman looked over a sheet before suddenly looking up at Shelly. It registered with the officer now. Baniewicz. The one who had killed the cop. Now came the runaround—
You’ll have to wait, he’s not available
right now, maybe you should come back later
—which Shelly had been through before with a number of her clients held on juvie beefs, when the cops wanted more time to interrogate their suspect. The police were supposed to stop talking to the accused once a lawyer was requested, but the Supreme Court had goofed it up and ruled that any equivocation on the suspect’s part was open game to continue the interrogation, notwithstanding the request for counsel. And if the suspect hadn’t asked for a lawyer, the police weren’t required to tell the suspect that a lawyer was waiting outside, trying to get in. So Shelly was accustomed to being insistent. In this context, she reminded the officer of the high-profile nature of the case and promised her that she would be taking down the names of every officer who prevented her from speaking with Alex Baniewicz. Right now.

Her presentation seemed to buy her something with the officer. Shelly sat on a bench and made a point of looking at her watch. But her mind quickly drifted from the cop to her client. What had happened to Alex in the last few months? How could it have come to this?

A small classroom on the second floor of the law school, doubling as a conference room for the Children Advocacy’s Project. He was seated in a chair, looked no different from any tenth-grader learning English or math or science. Appropriately dressed in a white shirt and khaki trousers, with a long black wool coat folded in his lap—better dressed, in fact, than most of her clients. Well developed for sixteen, a strong neck and broad shoulders, a square jaw, thick curly hair. His eyes were large and expressive, something like amusement playing on his face as Shelly walked into the room.

According to his file, he had been involved in a fight in the hallway at Southside High School. No weapon, no racial epithets, and while it was not his first offense, it was far from a pattern of misbehavior. A brief suspension and nothing more, Shelly had figured.

He was white, which separated him from the majority of her clients. Most of the children she represented were younger and, from what she could see, poorer, and overwhelmingly Latino or African American.

“Alex?” she asked.

“Alex Baniewicz.” He lifted himself from the chair that barely contained his frame. “Nice to meet you.”

They sat in the chairs. “Your mother isn’t here?”

He shook his head as he looked Shelly over. It would not have been the first time a young student leered at Shelly, but she did not recognize lust in the stare. It was more like curiosity.

“You’re prettier than I thought you’d be,” he said.

The security door on the wall buzzed. A man stepped out, wearing shirtsleeves. His belt held a weapon, handcuffs, a cellular phone. He was Hispanic, tall, relatively lean, with a long, worried face. He put his hands on his hips and looked at Shelly. “I’m Detective Montes,” he said to her. The detective led Shelly through the squad room, refurbished like the rest of the building. It looked surprisingly efficient. High ceilings, large thick windows, steel desks, high-powered computers on some of them, typewriters on others, bulletin boards listing cases by the victim’s name with assignments to various detectives, with categories for “Pending” and “C / P”—whatever that meant—and “Closed.”

She saw only two women out of the nine detectives, and nothing but cool glares from all of them, regardless of gender. They took a seat at his desk, which told Shelly that she was about to receive a pep talk—the strength of the police’s case, the importance of getting out in front of this steamroller, giving Alex’s side of the story before things went too far and the death penalty was the only option. She wasn’t in the mood, was in a hurry to see her client, but she also wanted to see the government’s hand. “Your client’s a drug dealer,” said the detective. “If he’s calling you for help, I assume you already know that.”

“You sell drugs,” she said to him. “You don’t walk around with a roll like that working part-time at McHenry Stern.” It was always best to say it as fact. If she had a dime for every denial she’d heard from a young client on issues of drugs and weapons, she could retire from the nonprofit legal profession.

“Your client was carrying drugs and a weapon in a gym bag,” said the detective. “Officer Raymond Miroballi, a guy I’ve met,
by the way”—he met her eyes when he said this; a cop shooting was personal to any detective, even more so if he was an acquaintance—“Officer Miroballi approached your client and your boy ran. Eventually he’s cornered in an alley and your guy shoots the officer in the face. We have the officer’s blood on your client’s clothes and hair.”

No. Not this fast. Blood was found, maybe, but not blood that could be identified as belonging to the slain officer or anyone else, for that matter. Not in less than a day. This guy was jobbing her.

“We have another cop who’ll positively I.D. your client. And we’re scooping witnesses right now from the area. Eyes and blood, Counselor. He’s done. Finito. So tell your client that if he helps us, maybe he can avoid the gas chamber.”

She took all of this without comment. There was no need for debate, and the police wouldn’t turn over evidence to her this quickly anyway, so she saw no need for a fight. In any event, Shelly knew that there was probably a strong case against Alex Baniewicz.

“You make it sound so bad.” Alex grimaced but did not contest the accuracy of her statement. He was different, Shelly thought, more comfortable with himself, more willing to open himself to Shelly than most teenage clients she had. “I mean, it’s not like you think.”

They were at a celebratory dinner—Alex’s idea—after Shelly had represented him at his disciplinary hearing. As it turned out, Shelly felt that her presence had hardly been necessary; the school administrators were quite fond of Alex and simply wanted to give him a brief, in-school suspension for his hallway fight.

“What’s it like, then?” she asked. “How is your method of drug dealing different from everyone else’s?”

Shelly expected hemming and hawing, rationales and excuses, reluctantly imparted nuggets of information. But Alex, without hesitation, laid out his story for her. There were a couple of guys at work, he said—professionals, investment bankers at McHenry Stern, where Alex worked as a runner, a mailboy. “Smart, educated, rich guys,” he said. “More money in a week than I’ve ever seen.” They partied, these gentlemen, did some
cocaine on the weekends as recreation. “Five, six grams a week, tops,” Alex promised. “It’s side money for me. That’s it. It’s not like I work the streets or anything. I don’t sell it to junkies or children or anything. I’m, like, a middleman.”

“That’s an awful risk,” Shelly said, “for a little side money. What do you need that money for?”

“For Angela,” he answered easily.

“Angela’s your girlfriend?”

“Angela’s my daughter.”

The door to the room was solid wood, inscribed with the block letter C. Detective Montes pushed it open and allowed Shelly in. The detective walked over to a wire cage inside the room, where Alex Baniewicz sat on a steel bench bolted to the floor. The bench was centered so that one couldn’t use the wall as a backrest. There was little opportunity for comfort, which, apparently, was the point.

When Alex stood, she got her first full look at him and drew back. It was what she expected but it wasn’t, in some way; maybe there was no way to prepare oneself. His face, typically cast in an amused grin, was now clouded in grief and pain. Everything, in fact, was off—the coloring of his face, the life in his eyes, the line of his mouth, his posture. He was pale. His hair was oily and disheveled. He hadn’t shaved, probably hadn’t bathed since his arrest. He looked entirely out of place.

Little outward signs of a physical struggle. His cheek was bruised, his hands were scraped, but that wasn’t bad for someone accused of shooting a cop. Shelly thought that she’d like to see his ribs. Cops greatly preferred the midsection. Less visible and easier to explain away. That was one of the advantages of a one-piece jumpsuit like the one Alex wore—it would be difficult to take stock of bruises to the body. She could imagine their reaction when they came upon Alex, the boy they were sure had killed one of their own. She’d heard each officer was entitled to one “free one” if a suspect fled or resisted, a pop to the side of the head or the stomach; her mind raced at what might be fair game for a suspect who shot a cop.

“If we could get some privacy,” said Shelly to Detective Montes.

The detective reached for Alex and put him in a chair, locked his handcuffs down onto a small metal ring bolted to the steel table. “I’m ten feet from this door,” he cautioned. She wasn’t sure if the point was to warn Alex or assure Shelly.

She took the other chair, across from Alex. She fought back emotion, looking at a shadow of the boy she’d grown to like so much. A boy with so much potential, a young father with plans for college, a job—so much hope, suddenly looking at no future at all.

He was stopping. He’d promised.

“Alex,” she said softly. “You didn’t talk to them, did you?”

He shook his head no, without looking at her. That was something at least, that Alex had kept his mouth shut. Most of the kids Shelly represented were accustomed to talking their way out of jams and took every opportunity to explain their situation to the police, almost always worsening their position in the process. She recalled Simien Carlyle, who at age fifteen was the driver for three older boys who held up a convenience store and shot one of the clerks in the process. Simien explained to the police—truthfully, in Shelly’s opinion—that he didn’t know his co-conspirators had a gun, much less that they planned to use it. By the time Shelly reached the boy, it was too late to explain to him that, by virtue of the law of accountability, Simien’s admission to being the driver was the same thing as admitting he’d pulled the trigger.

“Not a word?” Shelly confirmed. “There was never a tape recorder or video camera? You never talked even to someone in another cell or anything?”

“I didn’t say anything,” said Alex, looking at her. “I’ve seen enough television.” He smiled briefly, and Shelly’s heart ached. This boy did not belong here. Not this one.

Shelly didn’t know where to start. Her throat was full. She swallowed hard and thought about what she could say. Her options ranged from asking him how he was holding up to offering him a mint. Nothing seemed to make sense.

“I’ll help you any way I can,” she said quietly.

Alex remained still, his eyes downcast. When he spoke, his voice was drained of the typical resonance, the enthusiastic inflection. It was the shaky, weakened, deflated voice of a boy who
had been beyond terror and back. “Talk to Ronnie,” he said. “And Mary Ellen. Can you do that? Tell them I’m—basically okay. Ronnie must be flipping out.”

She had so many questions. He was walking the streets with drugs? A weapon? He shot a police officer?

“Do you want to tell me?” she asked.

“Not now.” That was not a surprising answer.
Not now
had become Alex’s slogan of late, at least with Shelly. She didn’t know what had happened. They had been friends. He had confided in her. He was going to quit. He was going to find a way to support his daughter and attend college at the same time. And then—nothing. He shut her out. Didn’t return phone calls. Heartfelt, probing conversations replaced with distant small talk. What had happened over the last few months? Could she have helped him? Could she have prevented this?

“I want you to listen to me,” she said, trying to overcome a tremble in her voice. “There is no such thing as casual conversation in here. Everything you say, they are listening, and they will use it against you. Don’t talk to the guards. Don’t talk to someone in the cell next to you. They’ll try all those tricks, Alex, and they’re allowed to do it.”

“Don’t talk,” he repeated. “I can handle that.”

“I’ll go see Ronnie. And we’ll figure something out.”

After a few choice words for Detective Montes, reminding him that her client now had a lawyer and would not answer questions, she made it out of the police station. She exhaled as if she had been holding her breath for the last hour. She felt so helpless and confused. This simply didn’t make sense. Alex Baniewicz—if she knew this boy at all, if she had even the slightest ability to read a person’s character—could not have shot a police officer or anyone else.

There were a handful of reporters outside the police station. Print media, she thought; they weren’t made-up and had no microphones. They knew her name, which meant that they had contacts inside who gave up the name of the lawyer who had signed in to visit the cop killer. She begged off comment, which was tougher than she’d have thought.