Twenty

by James Grippando

“Some ignoramus racist who hates Islam, that’s who.”

  Jack collected his thoughts, trying not to push Amir into a corner. “First, let me say I disagree with you that al-Qaeda is yesterday’s news. They’re on a comeback.”

  “So you’re not only a crackerjack criminal defense lawyer, but also an expert on international terrorism, is that it?”

  Jack did know more than most people, but he didn’t want to bring his wife into this discussion. “You and I just disagree on that point.”

  “Yes, and we also disagree on the best strategy for my son. I forbid you or whoever defends him to make the argument that Xavier was radicalized.”

  “I’m sorry, but—”

  “No, I’m sorry, Mr. Swyteck. Molly and I did not raise a terrorist. We raised a Muslim. Your strategy plays right into the hands of racists who think every child who is raised in a Muslim household is a terrorist threat. If a white supremacist shoots up a synagogue, not all white people are white supremacists. But as soon as a Muslim opens fire, all Muslims are terrorists.”

  “That’s not the argument.”

  “That is the argument. And it’s the same argument the public defender wanted to make. Thankfully, that lawyer is off the case. I hope we don’t have to fire you.”

  “You can’t fire Xavier’s lawyer.”

  “I can fire anybody I want.”

  “No. Your son is eighteen. Only he can hire me. And only he can fire me.”

  “Xavier will do as I say.”

  “No, he won’t!” Molly shouted.

  The room went silent. If Molly wasn’t about to snap, she was darn close.

  “Listen to me, Amir,” she said, her voice tight but racing. “This family is never going to be the same. Our lives are never going to be what they used to be. But we have to do what we can do to make things a little better. Talitha is eight years old. I don’t want her to be a senior in high school having to deal with the fact that her brother is front-page news again because after ten years of legal gymnastics he’s finally being executed. If there is a lawyer on this planet who can convince the state attorney that the death penalty is the wrong decision and that this needs to end now, life without parole, you are looking at him. I will not let you interfere with that because you have a chip on your shoulder as big as the entire fucking Middle East!”

  The f-bomb was lost on no one, but not a man in the room said a word.

  “Do you understand me, Amir?”

  Her husband didn’t answer.

  “Amir. Do you—”

  “You sort it out,” he said, getting up and storming out of the room. Jack and Theo sat in stunned silence, not sure what to say. Molly was about to cry.

  “Are you okay?” asked Jack.

  She dabbed away a tear from the corner of her eye. “No, I’m really not. I’m sorry. Amir has a bit of a temper. More than a bit, since this happened.”

  Jack heard little footsteps in a hallway. A young girl dressed in her nightgown took a timid step into the room and stopped. “Mommy?”

  Molly smiled. “Come here, honey.”

  The girl hurried across the room, and Jack was struck by her beauty. She was blond, like her mother, with olive skin and a natural waviness to her hair that hinted at her father’s Lebanese ancestry.

  Molly wrapped her daughter in her arms. “Why are you awake?”

  “Why were you and Daddy yelling?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that, honey. We were just talking loudly. Say hello to Mr. Swyteck and his friend Theo Knight.”

  Jack leaned forward, speaking eye to eye. “Hi, Talitha. I’m Righley’s daddy. She’s in kindergarten.”

  Talitha smiled. “I know Righley. I was her reading buddy in library studies last week. I like her. She’s funny.”

  “Yeah, she is funny.”

  “Are you going to help my mommy?”

  “Help her?” asked Jack.

  “Uh-huh. I heard Mommy say things are never going to be like they used to. But you could help make it better.”

  Molly smiled awkwardly. “Kids are all ears, I guess.”

  “Are you going to help?” asked Talitha.

  “Well, I have to think about it.”

  “Why?”

  The question made Jack squirm. “Why do I have to think about it?”

  “Yeah. When somebody needs help, why do you have to think about helping them?”

  Why? Because I’m a big-shot lawyer, son of Florida’s former governor, and I’m worried what people might think if I take this case. Because you’re eight years old, toxic, and don’t deserve a chance in life because of something your brother did. Because your mother didn’t think twice when Theo needed help. Because I’m a piece of shit.

  “You know what, Talitha? I’ve made up my mind. I am going to help you. And your mommy.”

  Chapter 9

  At nine p.m. the criminal courthouse was dark, but the lights were burning across the street—Lucky Thirteenth Street, as it was known—at the pretrial detention center. The multistory facility housed roughly 170 inmates awaiting trial on charges that ran the legal gamut, from traffic offenses to capital murder. Among them, in Protective Custody Level One, was Xavier Khoury.

  Jack parked in the jury lot, which was empty for the night. With him was Theo Knight.

  “Ah, memories,” said Theo. He may have been the only innocent man Jack had ever defended on death row, but Theo had grown up no choir boy. He wasn’t kidding about his “memories” of the stockade.

  “Seems like a lifetime ago,” said Jack.

  “Yeah, to you,” said Theo.

  They went in through the visitors’ entrance on the ground floor. Normal visitation hours had ended, but visits by attorneys—who were apparently something other than “normal”—were allowed anytime. Jack gave his name and his Florida Bar card to the corrections officer seated behind the glass window at registration.

  “I’m here to see Xavier Khoury,” said Jack.

  The corrections officer answered from inside the booth, speaking into a gooseneck microphone. “You his attorney?”

  Technically, not yet. The Public Defender’s Office had filed the motion to substitute counsel recommending Jack. But Jack had not accepted, and Xavier had yet to say anything to anyone since his arrest, let alone designate replacement counsel.

  “Prospective counsel,” said Jack.

  “Who’s he?” he asked, meaning Theo.

  “My investigator,” said Jack.

  The officer shook his head. “I’ll let you go, Mr. Swyteck. But until you’re officially retained as counsel, no nonlawyers can go with you.”

  It was a rule that he seemed to be making up on the spot. Jack wanted Theo with him because, in Jack’s experience with past clients facing the possibility of the death penalty, there was no better icebreaker than a former death row inmate who swore that he owed his life to Jack Swyteck. But this corrections officer from his throne inside the glass booth had the power to keep Jack waiting for hours, if he chose, so Jack didn’t fight the no-Theo edict, however arbitrary. He and Theo took a seat in the waiting room. After about fifteen minutes, a guard escorted Jack to the attorney-client conference room, where Xavier was waiting for him. Jack entered. The guard closed the door and locked it from the outside, leaving Jack alone with someone who didn’t look at all like a mass murderer.

  Jack introduced himself and offered a handshake. Xavier didn’t move or speak. They were surrounded by windowless walls of glossy white-painted cinder block, bathed in the bluish-white hue of LED bulbs that lent the room all the warmth of a workshop. Jack sat opposite him at the table.

  Xavier looked nothing like his little sister. Never in her life would Talitha and her golden locks have a problem with airport security. Xavier was the guy who came to mind during media reports of dark-skinned young men who claimed they were being profiled by the TSA. As the father of an only child, Jack was forever amazed how children from the same womb could be so different.

  “How are you
holding up, Xavier?”

  No reply. It was a fundamental problem—the client who would talk to no one, not even his lawyer—but Jack had encountered it before. The only way to handle it was to let the monologue begin.

  “You’re in deep shit,” said Jack. “You need a lawyer. The public defender is withdrawing. I may be willing to step in. But that’s hard for me to do if you won’t talk to me.”

  Xavier remained mute.

  “The first thing I’d like to do, if I were your attorney, is to have a criminal psychiatrist evaluate you for a possible plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.”

  No answer.

  “It’s nothing to get your hopes up about. It’s a very low-percentage strategy. Nationwide, about one out of every one-point-two million felony cases that go to trial end with the defendant not guilty by reason of insanity. Florida’s legal test for insanity is stricter than most states, so the odds are even worse here. Last time I even attempted an insanity defense was for a client whom the cops dubbed the Fiddler on the Roof. You ever heard of that case, Xavier?”

  No answer.

  “Maybe you’re too young. It got a lot of press. My client was arrested at the murder scene. Above it, actually. He was found sitting on the roof of the house. Masturbating.”

  Xavier still refused to speak, but Jack had actually drawn a reaction from him. The Fiddler on the Roof was eighteen-year-old boy humor, an icebreaker.

  “I’m not going to lie to you, Xavier. Evidence of guilt is strong here. Maybe overwhelming. Other than a long-shot insanity defense, my brain isn’t bursting with ideas of how to convince a jury that you’re not guilty. But if I become your lawyer, it’s also my job to keep you alive. Now, you might be sitting there thinking ‘Screw you, Jack, I don’t want to live.’ I’ve had clients like that before. But guess what?”

  Jack leaned closer, trying to get Xavier to look at him more directly. “When they finally get shipped up to Florida State Prison, and they get assigned to a solitary cell on death row, and they start moving down the line one cell at a time, until there’s no more cells between them and the gurney and a needle in their arm . . . that’s when a lot of them change their mind.”

  Jack poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher. He poured one for Xavier, too. Jack drank. Xavier didn’t.

  “I’m going to ask you a few questions, Xavier. If the answer is yes, just sit there and say nothing. If the answer is no, speak up and tell me no. Got it?”

  Silence.

  “Good. Here we go,” said Jack. “Do you understand that the state attorney is seeking the death penalty in this case?”

  More silence.

  “Are the Marlins going to win the World Series this year?”

  Even de minimis baseball knowledge was enough to recognize that as a joke. It drew a hint of a smile from Xavier, like Fiddler on the Roof. Jack seized on it.

  “Your mother doesn’t want you to die. Does that matter to you?”

  All traces of a smile faded.

  Jack pushed a little harder. “Xavier, I’m asking: Does that matter to you?”

  Xavier sat quietly for almost a full minute. Jack waited. Finally, his client shrugged. Jack smiled on the inside.

  It was a start.

  Chapter 10

  Just south of the day school campus, two blocks from the river, was a public playground. Andie had stopped there many times with Righley to push her on the swing. “Higher, higher, Mommy!” she’d shout, hair flying in the wind, toes pointing to the sky. Just when Andie was ready to put her foot down and tell her “That’s high enough,” Righley would shriek in delight and say, “I see it, I see it, Mommy!” At the high point of her path, at the tip of the invisible arc that stretched like a giant smile from one side of the swing set to the other, Righley could peer over the treetops all the way to her classroom windows. The classroom she loved. A place where, Andie had told her, she would always be safe.

  That evening, fifty-some hours after the shooting, Andie went to the park without her daughter. But she was not alone. More than a thousand people had gathered for a candlelight vigil.

  “Where’s Jack?”

  It was Rolanda Suarez, one of the mothers from Righley’s class. Dozens of high school students had turned out for the vigil, but for the lower grades it was just parents. Andie, Rolanda, and several others were standing near a chain-link fence that had been transformed into a makeshift memorial laden with so many flowers, crosses, and teddy bears that it might have collapsed of its own weight if not for the support of countless helium balloons of orange and white, the school colors. A sea of glowing candles flickered in the warm night air between Andie and the amphitheater. On stage at the podium was a grief-stricken father with a microphone. His son, Scott, was in the ninth grade, the shooter’s first victim. The man said he wasn’t sure if he’d told Scotty he loved him that morning. “My job is to protect my children,” he said, his voice quaking. “I screwed up. I sent my kid to school.”

  His words hit Andie hard. It could have been any father up there. It could have been Jack.

  “Jack couldn’t come,” Andie whispered.

  “I heard a rumor,” said Rolanda.

  School gossip was the extracurricular activity of choice for certain mothers at Riverside. Andie had no use for it, and it bugged her that Rolanda seemed to think it was okay even at a vigil.

  “I heard he might be the lawyer for the shooter,” said Rolanda.

  “He’s—” Andie stopped herself. It didn’t seem like the right time to tell Rolanda or anyone else that Jack was at the shooter’s house. But she wasn’t going to lie. “He’s thinking about it.”

  Scotty’s father put down the microphone, walked slowly off the stage, and nearly fell into the arms of his grieving wife. Silence came over the crowd, except for the sobbing.

  Rolanda looked at Andie in disbelief, but it was the mother right behind them who verbalized it.

  “Why on earth would you let Jack do something like that?”

  Eavesdropping was second only to gossip in the school-mommy skill set. The chain of whispers hopped from one mother’s ear to the next, as Andie’s confirmation of Jack’s new client spread out of control. Andie felt the urgent need to get away. She excused herself and walked toward the baseball diamond on the other side of the amphitheater, weaving through a mostly silent crowd of parents and teenagers, past a church group embracing in quiet prayer, stopping as she came upon a group of teenage girls dressed in softball uniforms. Riverside had been regional champions two years running. They’d lost their star pitcher in the shooting. The only way her teammates could turn tears to smiles was to tell people about her, tell anyone who would listen.

  “She was our MVP,” said one.

  “She had a ponytail all the way to her butt,” laughed another.

  “She’s not a bragger,” added another girl, clinging to the present tense. “She makes us all better players.”

  Andie moved along, then stopped as a woman stepped in front of her and said, “Agent Henning, I’d like to ask you a question.”

  Andie didn’t recognize her.

  “We were in the recreation center with you,” the woman explained, and only then in the glow of burning candles did Andie understand the “we” reference. It was a group of women from the rec center, and Andie’s read of the body language was that this was not a friendly visit.

  “What’s on your mind?” asked Andie.

  The woman folded her arms, making the body language even clearer. “We’ve been talking among ourselves a lot since that morning. All of us wondering if there’s something we could have done.”

  “That’s a natural reaction to any tragedy,” said Andie. “But trust me, there’s nothing anyone could have done.”

  “Well, that’s mostly true. But what about you?”

  “Me?”

  “We all heard the shots right outside the door. You’re right. There’s nothing we could have done. We’re not FBI agents. You are. No offense, bu
t why didn’t you act like one?”

  The No offense but qualifier, three words that somehow made it okay to say the most offensive things imaginable. “What is that supposed to mean?” asked Andie.

  “I’m just saying. If I’d had a gun and was trained to use it—”

  “I was unarmed,” said Andie. “I was off duty.”

  “You were off duty?” said another woman, offended. “That’s why you did nothing? Because you were off duty?”

  “Oh, my God,” groaned another mother.

  “You’re not listening to me,” said Andie. “I said I didn’t have a gun because I was off duty.”

  It was too late. The gossip chain was growing link by link.

  Did you hear what she just said?

  I can’t believe it.

  No wonder she’s best friends with Molly Khoury.

  Did you hear about her husband?

  Others quickly piled on, and although Andie couldn’t overhear all of it, she somehow knew that she was being compared to that notorious armed security guard at the Parkland shooting in 2018, who’d cowered outside Building 12 and done nothing to protect the children being massacred inside. The distinction Andie was trying to draw—that she was prohibited by law from carrying her weapon onto school grounds—was valid. But no one seemed the least bit interested in hearing it.

  Andie hurried to the parking lot, found her car, and headed home, her tires squealing and the glow of burning candles fading in the rearview mirror as she exited the park. She was speeding down the expressway toward Key Biscayne but didn’t care. She couldn’t get away from that place fast enough. Andie told herself that those women weren’t being malicious—that people were so broken and devastated that they just needed to direct their anger at someone. But it still hurt.

  Andie was almost home, and Key Biscayne stretched out before her as she reached the very apex of the bridge that arched across the bay from the mainland. She rolled down the window, welcoming the fresh sea air. Questions clouded her mind, and not just the question that had chased her from the vigil. She, too, had been second-guessing her actions that morning. Instinct and adrenaline had propelled her down the hallway to Righley’s classroom. But why didn’t she rush the attacker? She had a pretty clear memory of at least one momentary pause in the semiautomatic gunfire that must have been a magazine change. In hindsight, that would have been the time to rush him. Maybe she could have saved someone else’s child.