The Trials of Nikki Hill (4 page)

Now here she was, facing the precise foe her grandmother had mentioned. She had the weapon: she was smart. Smart enough to know that what this devious and manipulative white man was saying carried a certain logic. She’d be around to dance on his tombstone.

“May not even be five years,” she said. “They might vote you out, the next election.”

“Not much chance of that,” he said. “You’d be better off wishing me dead.”

“No problem there,” she said.

Tom Gleason’s inevitable, fatal coronary had occurred near the end of her second Compton summer. The D.A. appointed by the Board of Supervisors, Seymour Kehoe, was apparently unimpressed by her superior record of convictions. Fortunately, he remained in office for only the final three months of Gleason’s term. His defeat at the polls prompted her to apply to the man who beat him, Joseph Elijah Walden, the first African-American to be elected to that post.

Weeks went by without a response. She’d just about decided that Walden had filed and forgotten her letter when he phoned. He’d been on vacation out of the country, he explained, and had read her request only that morning. He’d be happy to meet with her to discuss the possibility of reassignment.

She arrived at their luncheon meeting feeling anxious and guarded. He put her at ease almost immediately by recounting an incident that had occurred during his European trip. He’d been trying to impress a woman he’d just met, but his less-than-perfect pronunciation had led to an embarrassing confusion between the French word for fish,
poisson,
and the American word
poison.
The self-deprecating vignette was only mildly amusing, but it served its purpose in relaxing Nikki to the point where she began to feel comfortable in his company.

Their resulting conversation had been wide-ranging, moving from the frivolous to the serious and back again. She’d left the restaurant quite impressed by the intelligent and charismatic district attorney. He must have been impressed, too, because one month later she was back on the job at the Criminal Courts Building.

Now she was in the thick of it, stepping eagerly from the elevator at the third floor of Parker Center, ready to begin her first assignment as the D.A.’s new special assistant.

T
HREE

T
he interrogation of the suspect, Jamal Deschamps, a twenty-five-year-old African-American apprehended near Madeleine Gray’s body, was taking place in one of the small rooms off of the Robbery-Homicide bullpen.

A round, balding detective named Duke Wasson brought Nikki up to date while she poured herself a cup of black coffee. “Suspect’s been in custody about three hours. He cried lawyer, and his low-rent mouth just got here ’bout a half hour ago. That’s when the party started. Been goin’ on ever since.”

“Who’s the attorney?” she asked.

“Bleed ’em and plead ’em Burchis,” Wasson said, grinning. Elmon Burchis was well known for putting on an elaborate legal display until the actual date of trial, when he would invariably plead his clients guilty.

“High-level case like this,” Nikki said, “maybe Mr. Burchis will change his game plan, get somebody a little stronger to come in with him.”

“With what we got on Deschamps, they jus’ gonna be walkin’ the dog.”

“What
have
we got?”

“Proximity, motive. Dead woman’s property in his pocket. An’, oh yeah, he’s got banged-up knucks and his back looks like he’s been wranglin’ wildcats. Gotta be pieces of him under the vic’s fingernails. Goodman and Morales are in there wearin’ him down.”

“Carlos Morales?”

“None other. Know him?”

“Uh huh,” she said. “To know him is to love him.”

“Then you see what Deschamps is up against,” Wasson said.

“Who’s Goodman?” she asked.

Wasson’s expressive round face seemed momentarily puzzled. Then: “Oh, you musta met Morales back when he was partnered with Tony Black.”

She nodded.

“Good guy, Blackie.”

“Uh huh,” she said, her mind recapturing the image of Tony seated on the floor of his apartment, Bird’s huge head in his lap, both of them quietly listening to a cassette of John Coltrane and the amazing Johnny Hartman. She could hear the wistful strains of “Lush Life”...

“It’s what fuels our fear,” Wasson said. “Relaxin’ off duty havin’ a sam’ich an’ some cranked-up punk-ass comes in wavin’ a Heckler an’ takes out half the tavern. Poor Tony didn’t have a chance.”

“I’d better get to work,” she said.

“Be our guest,” Wasson said. “Al’ays happy to cooperate with the D.A.’s office.”

She took her coffee, and the memory of Tony Black, to a dreary room that hadn’t changed much in three years. The same almost-orange wooden table and three matching straight-back chairs. The new addition was a puke-green leatherette couch that looked like it had last seen duty in a women’s lounge where the women hadn’t been too careful with their cigarettes. She stared at the furniture, but she was seeing Blackie’s smile and humorous brown eyes.

“You okay, honey?”

The question came from a pale, skinny woman in jeans and a polo shirt sitting at the table, hands poised over a court stenographer’s machine, looking at her with concern.

“Jacked as can be,” Nikki replied.

The pale woman made a noise like “Hup,” and her fingers began dancing over her machine’s keyboard. She was wearing a cheap headset that was plugged into an ancient reel-toreel tape recorder on the table, doing its job slowly and silently. With fingers flying, the steno moved her head to indicate a second set of earphones on the tabletop.

Nikki recalled how surprised and disappointed she’d been the first time she laid eyes on this room, when she’d learned that those cool, comfortable shadowy spaces with their one-way secret observation windows didn’t exist outside of the movies. At least not in L.A. Maybe in New York, where they actually let the D.A.s participate in the interrogations. Here, you had to stand back and hope that the detectives asked the right questions. Which they did sometimes.

She placed her briefcase and coffee cup on the table, pulled over a chair, and picked up the headset. Satisfied that it was free from anything too communicable, she slipped it over her hair.

“. . . the hell you think you kiddin’, Ja-mal?” were the first words she heard. Morales sounded just as cocky and bullshit macho as always.

“Man, the Crazy Eights, they chased me into that alley. Like I said.”

“Then how did the friggin’ ring get in your pocket, home-y?” Morales asked, giving the final word a nasty sarcastic twist.

“I resent that tone, detective.” Elmon Burchis’s overly dramatic delivery brought a smile to Nikki’s face. She got her notepad from her briefcase, opened it, and slipped the pen from its leather holder.

“Excuse me, counselor,” Morales said. “I din’ mean to offend yo’ altar boy client, who we all know is nuthin’ but a fuckin’ street rat.”

“Sir, I am putting you on notice—”

“Everybody just calm down, now,” came a new voice. Low. Resonant. Maybe a hint of the south. It must have belonged to Detective Goodman. “We’re gonna be here long enough without the unnecessary rhetoric. Mr. Deschamps, I believe Detective Morales asked you about the object you had in your pocket.”

“I tole you that already,” Jamal Deschamps said. “I see this ring on her finger, looks like it worth some bills. So I take it. She already so dead she’s stiff.

“Can’t I go pee? My eyes got to be turning yellow. Lawyer man, don’t I got the right to pee?”

“Indeed you do. I—”

“Okay, Mr. Deschamps,” Goodman interrupted Burchis. “Detective Morales will escort you to the lavatory.”

“You escort him, amigo,” Morales drawled. “Up to me he could just piss in his pants. I’m sure it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“My God, you are a barbarian,” Bleed ’em and plead ’em Burchis exclaimed.

Nikki removed the headset and walked to the door in time to see a tall, gaunt white man leading a smaller, much younger black man past the bullpen in the direction of the lavatories. The tall man was clean shaven, with longish, graying hair that stuck up in back as if he’d slept on it. Detective Edward Goodman.

As for the black man, she’d been expecting Jamal Deschamps to be dressed in bulky gangsta clothes, but he was wearing rumpled and dirty chino trousers and a maroon silk shirt with a rip at the right elbow. He looked a lot like the brothers who’d been in her law school classes.

Morales spotted her across the room and winked at her. A solid Chicano in his mid-forties, even in his boots he wasn’t more than five feet eight, slightly shorter than she. He’d trimmed his Pancho Villa mustache since she’d last seen him. Aside from that, the years didn’t seem to have changed him at all. Maybe obnoxious behavior kept you young. She’d have to try it sometime.

He strutted to Duke Wasson’s desk, his thick torso shifting under his untucked pale blue short-sleeved shirt. He bent over the desk, his back to Nikki.

Wasson looked up, eyes shifting to her, then back to Morales. He mumbled something to the detective, who turned and ambled toward her. “Well, well,” he said, “back from bad Compton country and already special assistant to our new D.A. You two must get along pretty good, huh?” He gave her a conspiratorial wink.

“Got something in your eye, Carlos?” she asked.

“Only your beauty,” he said.

“I like what you did with the mustache,” she said. “That and those high heels. And is that a rug you’re wearing?”

“Ooohhh. Compton turned you mean, huh?”

“Mean? Little ole me?”

He cocked his head to one side and said, “It did do something to you,
chica.
An improvement, I think.”

“We shall see.”

“How you like our radio show so far?” he asked.

“I think you’re ready for TV.”

He smiled broadly, white teeth gleaming under the mustache. “Yeah. Us an’ Maddie Gray. You ever watch her?”

“Once or twice.”

“My wife was a big fan. Usually had it on at dinner. Mad-die looked pretty fine, but she was a real ball buster. I never much cared for her.”

“Maybe we should check
your
alibi.”

“Now, Nikki, you know we got our killer. You prosecutin’ this
pendejo?
”

She shrugged. Yesterday, she wouldn’t have thought such a thing possible. But today...“That decision won’t be made for a while,” she said.

“Maddie had lots of fans. They gonna want our Jamal strung up by his
cojones.
”

“I think they stopped that particular form of justice a few years ago.”

“Too bad. The mess he made of that woman, gas is too good for him.”

“Assuming he did it,” Nikki said.

“Yeah,” Morales said, grinning. “Assumin’ that.”

F
OUR

B
y seven
A.M.
, when Nikki made her second call to D.A. Walden, several other facts had surfaced to strengthen the case against Deschamps. He’d previously been arrested for assaulting a young woman named Irma Childs. His day job, delivering and picking up mail for a production company in the San Fernando Valley, had taken him often to the studios where Madeleine Gray’s series was taped.

Detective Morales eventually got Jamal to admit having met the deceased on the lot. He had, in fact, delivered scripts to her on at least two occasions that he could recall.

“She was a nice woman,” he told the detectives. “Wacko, like all of ’em, but nice.”

“All of whom?” Goodman asked.

“TV, movie people. All wacko.”

“Wacko how?”

“You know. Kinda wired. Nervous, like.”

“She gave people a hard time on her show,” Goodman said. “Probably gave people she worked with a hard time, too.”

“Not me, man. She was nice.”

“Give you a big tip?” Morales asked.

“Tip? Hell, they never tip.”

“But she was nice?”

“Yeah. Friendly.”

“How friendly?” Morales asked. “Pet your pony for ya?” “Jesus, man,” Jamal said indignantly. “She smiled. That’s all. Always real busy, but she took the time to smile.” “Maybe it was a special smile, huh?” Goodman asked. “Naw. Just a smile.”

“You’re a good-looking young man,” Goodman said.

“Woman smiles at you, what do you think?”

“Lots of women smile at me,” Jamal said. “That don’t

mean I’m gonna go beat ’em to death.” “What makes you think she was beaten to death?”

“I saw the way her body looked. I just assumed—”

“You were saying that lots of women smile at you, Jamal.

But you don’t beat ’em to death.”

“Right. I mean, of course I don’t.”

“What made this one different?” Goodman asked. “What? Huh?”

“Like you said,” Morales pushed him, “the others you

didn’t beat to death. Just Maddie Gray.” “What? Shit, that’s not what I said. I didn’t beat anybody.”

“Detectives—” Burchis began.

“Well, there’s... wha’s her name? Irma.” “You twisting everything. I didn’t touch Madeleine Gray.

Didn’t touch her, understand? Didn’t really know her. Didn’t beat her. Sure as hell didn’t kill her.”

Nikki’s steno roommate tapped her on the shoulder and waved good-bye. Her replacement was taller but otherwise the same—a drone doing her job in the hive.

In the interrogation room Morales once again took Jamal through his whereabouts on the previous night, going hour by hour. Lawyer Burchis blustered that the questions had been asked and answered.

Nikki was yawning when the door to the room opened and a tall familiar figure limped in. He glared at her, nodded as if he’d achieved a goal he’d set for himself, and gestured for her to remove the headset. “You can go, Hill,” Raymond Wise said. “I’m taking over.”

Wise, who had retained his position as head deputy district attorney during two administrations after Tom Gleason’s death, had reestablished their relationship her first day back from Compton. She’d bumped into him in the hall.

“Hi, Ray,” she’d said. “Want to go grab a hot dog?”

“I never expected to see you here again,” he had told her. “If Joe Walden had bothered to consult me about it, you wouldn’t be here now.”

“Kehoe asked you about me?”

“He did,” Wise had said, “and, while I kept our filthy little secret, I could not in good conscience recommend a foolish and naive young woman who plainly didn’t have what it takes to make the hard decisions.”