Close Case

by Alafair Burke

  “Even so,” he said, “you put that confession in front of ten judges, and eight of them would let it in.”

  “Sure, but two wouldn’t. Without the confession, we won’t have much.”

  “What did the other defendant say?” he asked.

  “Trevor Hanks. He’s the tougher of the two. Been through the system a lot. He invoked immediately, but when he came out to the car, he wound up saying we’d ‘never pin that coon’s death’ on him. If I can get that in—arguably to show motive—it also just makes the guy look like a shit.”

  “So first you say Hanks wound up saying something after he invoked. Then you say if you can get it in. What aren’t you telling me? Did your boyfriend screw something up?”

  “You mean Detective Forbes? No, he didn’t mess anything up.”

  “But?”

  “Well, I happened to be in the car when Forbes brought Hanks out. Hanks asked who I was, I told him, and then he blurted out his nice little statement.”

  “You just happened to be in the car. I assume you’re giving me the edited version.”

  “I might have left out a few cuss words and some spit—his, not mine. Anyway, Hanks is the one who initiated the conversation, so I’m pretty sure we can get the statement in. But even so, I’m toast if Corbett’s confession gets kicked. Plus, I know his attorney will make a fuss about Percy sleeping with a cop’s wife. I even thought about leaving that part out of the discovery—”

  “You know you can’t do that.”

  “All I said was that I thought about it. Don’t worry, I’ll do the right thing.” The irony wasn’t lost on me. Only attorneys would see anything right about injecting an innocent couple working to save their marriage into the trial process. “It still comes down to Corbett’s confession. I’ve got to get it in.”

  “Even if you do, it’s only admissible against Corbett.”

  I didn’t need Russ’s reminder. One of the few bones thrown to criminal defendants by the current Supreme Court has to do with a defendant’s right to confront witnesses. It’s hard to confront a codefendant who invokes his right not to testify at trial, so when I tried Hanks I wouldn’t be allowed to introduce Corbett’s statement at East Precinct. I’d have to convince Corbett to testify in court against Hanks instead.

  I explained my strategy to Frist. “If a court upholds Corbett’s confession, I sort of assumed he would be willing to testify against Hanks to avoid the death penalty.”

  “Then make the deal now,” he said.

  For a second, I thought I’d misheard him. It was not like Russell Frist to start talking about deals before the defendant had even been arraigned.

  “I think you better call the doctor, Russ. Whatever you’ve got really is making you weak.”

  “I’m serious, Sam. You’re in trouble. Call the lab and press them for some kind of estimate on whether they’re going to get you any physical evidence. Unless they can tie at least one of the defendants to Percy, I think you should talk to Corbett’s attorney sooner rather than later. I doubt we’ll pursue this as a death case anyway, so if he’s willing to cooperate in exchange for taking the risk off the table, you should do it. No-brainer.”

  He was right. Duncan would make the official call later, but I doubted he’d go for the death penalty against two kids with no serious priors in a carjacking gone bad. “Still, plead it out already? What if the super at the vic’s building can give us an ID?”

  “It’s still not enough to get you beyond a reasonable doubt,” Russ said. “He didn’t see them with Percy.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Look, we almost always wind up offering a life sentence for Agg Murder in exchange for a plea. So it’s better just to wrap it up now with Corbett, flip him against Hanks, and avoid any possibility of the confession getting suppressed. You may even need to sweeten the pot beyond that, but we can talk about that later.”

  “All right. I’ll go over to the arraignment and talk to Corbett’s attorney as soon as he gets one.”

  “Good. Let me know what happens. In the meantime, I’m going to my doctor. And since you were the one who dimed me up to Alice, you can be the one to cover me.”

  “For what?”

  “A community action meeting about Delores Tompkins. It’s at the Kennedy School at eleven. And don’t say you’re busy. I already asked Alice to check the docket.”

  “I don’t know, Russ, that sounds pretty important. Are you sure you trust me to go?” I asked sarcastically.

  “You’ll be fine. Just tell them how bad off I am and that the grand jury’s scheduled for Friday. Don’t make them any promises. We’ll be presenting the evidence and letting the grand jury make the call.”

  “I think I can handle that.”

  “Believe it or not, Kincaid, you’ve actually got pretty good people skills—until someone pisses you off.”

  8

  I called Raymond Johnson midmorning for an update.

  “Good timing,” he said, when he recognized my voice. “I’m just leaving Vista Heights. I am pleased to report that the seriously hung-over Peter Anderson has just identified Todd Corbett and Trevor Hanks. Picked them both out of the throw-downs. I also showed him a picture of the dad’s Jeep, just in case, but no luck there.”

  Russ’s words still rang in my ear. “But Anderson didn’t see them near Percy, right?”

  “You never cease to amaze me, girl. I rope you a cow and you’re, like, I want the whole damn herd.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I just want to make sure I know where things stand.”

  “No, he didn’t actually see them do the deed, but you already knew that. He says he saw a couple kids in the parking lot. His best estimate when I first talked to him was a little after ten o’clock at night. The ME puts time of death between nine and midnight, so we’re looking pretty good.”

  “Did Anderson see a bat?”

  “No. But if they brought the dad’s car up here, like we think, they probably had the bat in the back while they were scoping out the possibilities.”

  “And then they saw Percy come in with his shiny car, and they followed him,” I said, completing the logical sequence.

  “Right.”

  “So will this Peter Anderson guy make a good witness?”

  “I think so. He seems pretty straightforward.”

  “Did you run him yet? Any priors?”

  “He’s got some issues.”

  “So you’re telling me he’s got priors?”

  “No convictions, but let’s just say you wouldn’t want to marry the guy. There’s a pattern of domestic calls culminating in an arrest two months ago. The wife didn’t pursue the case. She moved out. She got a restraining order two weeks ago, claiming he was harassing her on the phone. No problems since.”

  “All right. No impeachables?” You know you’ve become a trial attorney when you don’t think twice about a star witness who beats his wife. According to the rules of evidence, a witness’s prior convictions were admissible to impeach his credibility only if they were felonies or involved crimes of dishonesty. Anything else, I didn’t need to care about.

  “Nope. We’ve got a law-abiding citizen who picked the defendants from a throw-down. It’s about as good as it gets.”

  “But it only puts them in the parking lot. The defense will say they went up there as part of their other mischief and had nothing to do with the murder.”

  “That’s where the confession comes in.” Right, I thought, if it comes in. “You need anything else? I need to catch some serious z’s.”

  “You have a number for the victim’s parents?”

  “Yeah, hold on a second.” I cringed at the thought of him half asleep, on the phone, looking through his notebook while he maneuvered the turns down the hill from Vista Heights. He rattled off the number. “Larry and Patricia Crenshaw. You might have missed them, though. I think they were planning on coming up here today.”

  “OK, thanks.” I wished him sweet dreams, hung up,
and dialed the bureau’s crime lab. I learned that John Fredericks was handling the Crenshaw evidence and asked to be transferred to his line.

  “Hey, John, it’s Samantha Kincaid. How’s the game going?”

  “Wet.”

  Fredericks was a transplant from the Las Vegas Police Department and a rabid golf addict, despite the rain. We were on the same team for last year’s Guns, Gavels, and Gurneys tournament, the annual golf gala for cops, prosecutors, and medical examiners. I chalked up the win to John’s long drives and my wicked short game, but the sore losers accused us of cheating. Our unfair advantage? We played sober.

  “I’m working on the Percy Crenshaw case. What are the chances you’re going to find me some blood evidence?”

  He exhaled loudly, then clicked his tongue a few times before he spoke. Not a good sign. “I’m not real hopeful right now. The car’s definitely clean. Well, not exactly clean, but nothing that helps the good guys. The back was full of old boxes and papers, so a bat dropped in there wouldn’t have touched the carpet fibers. I didn’t find blood when I ran the black light through.”

  “They were probably smart enough to dump whatever was next to the bat when they got rid of it,” I suggested.

  “Right. And so far there’s nothing on the clothes, either.”

  “Not even the jean jacket from Hanks?”

  “Nope. Denim’s always tricky because of the density, and Hanks probably scrubbed it down before he washed it. I’ve got one more test to run, but usually that’s only good for isolating something testable when I’ve already got a potential sample. I don’t even have a sample yet. Like I said, I’m not hopeful.”

  “How is that possible? They beat a man to death. I would’ve thought they’d be covered in blood.”

  “You should talk to the ME. It depends on how the fight unrolled; I’ve seen cases without a single drop of blood. You’ve got a confession, though, right?”

  Once again, it all came back to that.

  The Kennedy School is just one of the fifty-two links in a microbrew chain owned by the McMenamin brothers. They started years before the microbrew craze with hippie hangouts catering to Deadheads craving Hammer-head ales, Terminator stouts, and gutbuster sandwiches like the Stormin’ Norman. But a few years ago, they started using the beer money to create a local entertainment empire of pubs, theaters, restaurants, hotels—even a winery and a golf course. It was a brilliant move.

  Of all of the McMenamins’ clever ventures, the most impressive might just be the Kennedy School. Until the two beer-brewing brothers stepped in, the former elementary school was shut down and boarded up. Where the children of North Portland had once studied their three R’s, hookers turned tricks and addicts shot up until police chased them out, reboarded the place, and resumed the cycle again the next day. But then the city struck a deal to transfer the building to the brothers for one dollar. In exchange, the neighborhood got a hotel and an entertainment complex that not only attracted a new demographic to North Portland but also contained open meeting rooms available to the community.

  By the time I walked into the meeting about the Delores Tompkins “incident,” as the bureau referred to it, others were taking their seats around a conference table. The meeting wasn’t what I had pictured. Other than me, there were only three other women and a man in the room, and they all seemed to know each other. I was the only non-African-American.

  I soon learned that an action meeting was more like the planting of a grassroots effort: Only community activists who were most directly involved had been invited. As the participants explained it, they were brainstorming ways to keep pressure on the public, the police, and my office to remember Delores Tompkins, to learn from her death, and to make sure that nothing like it happened again. And they didn’t call it an incident, they called it Delores’s murder.

  We started with introductions. The man was the Reverend Byron Thomas, pastor of First United Baptist, one of the larger churches on the north side. He looked to be in his mid-forties, wore horn-rimmed glasses, and probably made church a lot more fun than I remembered it. Janelle Rogers was the president of the Buckeye Neighborhood Association. She was about the pastor’s age and made a point of telling me that she was a regular participant in the bureau’s community policing efforts. Sitting next to Janelle was Selma Gooding, an elderly woman who must have been something of an institution in this neighborhood. For her introduction, she simply said, “And I’m Selma Gooding. I…well, I guess you’d say I’m Selma.” I smiled, but the rest of the group giggled knowingly.

  Rounding out the group was a woman who looked to be Selma Gooding’s biological age, but she seemed much older in spirit. I soon learned why when Selma introduced her. “This fine woman beside me is Marla Mavens, my dear friend since we were in middle school at Harriet Tubman. Marla is Delores’s mother,” she said, looking directly at me.

  I muttered something about how sorry I was for her loss, realizing how hollow it sounded. I had to give Russ some credit. He must have been doing a good job with the bedside manner to have been included as part of this small group.

  I’m not much better with people names than case names, so I came up with a quick mnemonic. The minister was easy; the priest at my church growing up was Father Thomas. Janelle Rogers was the youngest of the other women; JR for junior. Delores’s mother, Marla Mavens; M is for mom. And Selma Gooding. S is for senior citizen, and she seemed like a genuinely good person. Silly tricks, but they’d help my short-term problem.

  Once introductions were over, Janelle Rogers thanked me for coming. “In light of what happened at the protest on Sunday, we were hoping as a group to have a more open channel of communication with the authorities. An officer from the community policing department was supposed to join us today, but I got a very late phone call saying he couldn’t be here. I’m disappointed, to say the least.”

  I started to offer up a list of possible excuses for this anonymous officer, but thought better of it. “I know Russell Frist was very sorry he couldn’t make it. I spoke to him myself this morning, and he sounded terrible. Sicker than Gary Busey on a bender, is how he described it.”

  That got a good solid chuckle from Dr. Thomas and Mrs. Gooding, who spoke up next. “We had invited Mr. Frist, hoping he could give us some indication of what we could expect in the days to come. We’d like to know whether or not your office intends to bring charges up against Officer Hamilton.”

  I told them about the upcoming grand jury date and gave them an overview of the process. Seven adults gathered in a small meeting room would hear the evidence presented by Russell Frist regarding the shooting without the formalities of a trial. No defense attorney, no judge. Grand jurors could question witnesses. They also had the power to subpoena additional witnesses and evidence. Once the grand jurors believed they’d gathered sufficient information, they would decide whether or not to indict Officer Hamilton and, if so, for which charges.

  That should just about do it, right? After all, the statement was exactly to Russ’s specifications. Lesson number one: When someone suckers you into doing something simple, you can be sure it will be anything but.

  “I very much appreciate the legal background,” Dr. Thompson said with his lilting voice, “but we’d like to know what your office plans to say to those grand jurors before they make the decision. We’ve known enough boys to go through the system to recognize the realities, you understand?”

  I made another attempt to stick with Russ’s message. “Like I said, Russ Frist will be the one in the hearing. But I’m confident he’ll make sure that the grand jurors understand the required elements for any potential charges. He’ll certainly go over the statutes that define a police officer’s right to use force, including the requirement that the force has to be reasonable.”

  As I found myself rambling about the definition of reasonableness, I surveyed the response in the room. I do the same during closing arguments, gauging my audience’s reaction as I’m speaking, taking note of who I
’ve got in my corner and who’s still on the fence. In trial, I don’t sit down until I’m sure I’ve persuaded them all.

  Good thing I was already sitting, because this crowd was not convinced. Byron Thomas shook his head in disappointment. Janelle Rogers rolled her eyes. I heard a serious tsk escape Selma Gooding’s lips. And Marla Mavens’s glance fell to the table, her lips pursed as if she should have known not to get her hopes up.

  A hostile audience makes me nervous. Worse, it makes me stray from my prepared points. Once that happens, I never know what will pop out. In one of my first trials in the office, I was taken by surprise when the jury appeared doubtful about my drug case. Before I knew it, I was comparing the defendant’s unlikely explanation for carrying drugs to a new paisley-print skirt I had just purchased—it looked good by itself but it didn’t match anything else in the closet. Needless to say, the analogy between clothing and evidence didn’t go over very well, and the jury handed me my ass with its verdict sheet: Not guilty. And we didn’t care for that prosecutor.

  So far, this gang of four didn’t seem to like me any better. My natural unpopularity detector kicked in, and, sure enough, extemporaneous thoughts began tumbling out. Before I knew it, I was babbling; about what, I can’t even remember. At one point I decided to be as straight with them as I knew how. And I do know how to be straight. I remember telling them they needed to understand that most people start out with a presumption in favor of police. I know I said something about people viewing a shooting differently when it’s committed by an on-duty cop and not a regular citizen.

  And I said we’d probably never see eye to eye about many of the confrontations that police have with members of their community. I told them that when a person runs from a police officer or resists an arrest, I tend to support the use of some force. I even think I said something about not paying police officers to lose fights. Janelle Rogers looked alarmed about that.