“It’s like a secret compartment. He built the wall out and made a space in there that you couldn’t see by looking. It was big. You could fit like a hundred kilos in it, not that he moved that much product at one time.”
“On the night of the seventeenth, to your knowledge, how much heroin was in the secret compartment in the closet?”
“Twenty keys, because Orlando had just got a shipment.”
“That’s twenty kilograms?”
“Yes.”
“To your knowledge, did anybody other than yourself or Mr. Jiménez know about this twenty-kilogram shipment?”
“A lot of people knew. All the workers at the spot. And anybody who worked for the connect. Word got around.”
“When you say connect, who do you mean?”
“The supplier of the drugs. He was a Colombian from Jackson Heights called Gordo. That means fat guy. All Gordo’s people knew he’d just fronted Orlando twenty keys. That’s why I always told Orlando he’s crazy, that we gonna get hit someday. But he say he’s gotta take care of his product. He’s not gonna leave it with nobody else because everybody steals. He’d rather risk his life and keep his product close.”
“But wasn’t he risking your life too, and your children’s?”
“I know.” She gave a resigned little shrug.
“Directing your attention back to what was going on inside the apartment. What happened after Mr. Jiménez ran back to the bedroom to get his gun?”
“He slammed the door behind him, but it didn’t have no lock on it and they busted it down right away. I got on my knees and crawled behind the couch, so I couldn’t see nothing, but I could still hear. Everything was crashing around real loud, and glass was smashing. Orlando kept his gun in the drawer next to the bed, so he must have been trying to get to it. Then I heard a shot, and the next second, I heard him cry out. I knew he was hit.”
“After you heard Mr. Jiménez cry out, what happened?”
“A lot of yelling. Orlando was still alive. They’re telling him he better give up the product or they gonna bring me in the room and cut pieces off me until he do. He was telling them get the fu—get out, or he’s gonna kill’em. That was Orlando. Somebody step to him, he don’t back down. But I heard’em in there tearing everything apart, and eventually one said, ‘Here it is. I found it.’ They found the stuff. After that, I knew they’d kill us.”
Gabriela stopped speaking and welled up again.
“Then what?” Melanie asked in a gentle tone.
On the witness stand, the young woman looked up at the ceiling and sighed, then swiped her knuckles across her eyes, wiping away tears.
“I heard shots. Three shots.”
“Coming from the bedroom?”
“Yes. And I knew it was done. My babies’ daddy was dead, and they gonna come for me and my kids next.”
“What made you think they would come for you and your children?”
“Because they said so. When they was unlocking the door downstairs on the street, the one with the tattoo, he say to the other one, ‘We gonna shoot her?’ and the one with the ear say, ‘Not yet.’ So I’m down on the floor expecting to die. But then the miracle happened. My angel, la Señora Marrero, she had called the police, and I started hearing the sirens. Normally in my neighborhood, there’s sirens all the time, but this was different. It was a lot, and you could tell it was right outside the building. The next thing, I heard the window going up in the bedroom. It squeaked a lot, so I knew what it was.”
“What was the significance to you of the window going up?”
“We got a fire escape there, so I knew they was running. Running away like scared little girls. The next thing I know, the cops is busting in, and I’m screaming. I’m saying, ‘Please, please, call an ambulance. They shot my man.’ But it was too late. I went in the room. There was blood and brains all over the wall. Orlando’s laying on the floor on the other side of the bed. The top of his head… it was just gone. He was dead.”
And she put her hands up to her face and started to wail.
“No further questions,” Melanie said.
And she walked to her chair at the prosecution’s table and sat down, trying not to let the triumph show on her face.
____
MELANIE CHECKED HER watch. It was a little past four, the jury had been out for over two hours, and she was hoping for a verdict by five o’clock. Normally she didn’t let herself get overconfident, but this case was more of a slam-dunk than any she’d ever seen. She had two incredibly sympathetic eyewitnesses—Gabriela Torres and the little old lady who’d seen her getting brutalized and called the police. She had the murder weapon, with Rashad Baxter’s fingerprints and clear ballistics linking it to the bullets riddling the victim’s head and upper torso. She had several cops, all African-American or Hispanic, solid and believable, who’d testified to the racially mixed jury that they’d surrounded the defendants coming down the fire escape carrying two duffel bags stuffed with heroin. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt was a tough standard, but what more could you want?
Melanie wasn’t alone in expecting a quick verdict. The two defense attorneys, who might otherwise have gone back to their offices, were hanging around in the corridor, making cell-phone calls from inside the quaint old wood and marble phone booths that were scheduled to be ripped out in a coming renovation. The courtroom deputy had poked her head into the courtroom a couple of times to report that there was nothing to report yet—something she wouldn’t have done if a long deliberation was expected. The DEA agent assigned to the case, who sat at the government’s table with Melanie, had stepped out for a cup of coffee, but promised he’d be “back in fifteen, just in case.”
So Melanie was alone in the deserted courtroom, expecting a verdict any minute, when the woman walked in. She looked to be in her late forties, heavy-set, with a close-cropped Afro dyed blond and big gold hoop earrings. She’d been in the gallery throughout the two-week trial. Based on eye contact and gestures, Melanie had decided early on that the woman was Rashad Baxter’s mother. Now she was heading down the aisle straight toward Melanie, “irate family member” written all over her face.
Melanie stood up, the better to protect herself.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” she asked in a firm voice as the woman stopped in front of her, hands on hips.
“Why’d you stand up like that? You afraid I’m gonna hurt you?”
“You’re Rashad Baxter’s mother, right?”
“I’m Danita Baxter, yes. I guess you’re afraid because you’re trying to kill my son, so you know I got cause to be angry.”
The prosecution was asking for the death penalty. That decision had been made by bureaucrats in Washington and the previous prosecutor on the case rather than by Melanie herself. But given that she’d be the one urging the jury to vote for death after they came back with a guilty verdict, it would be disingenuous to try to shift blame.
“I’m just doing my job, ma’am,” she said. “I’m sure this is very difficult for you emotionally, but there’s no point in making trouble. If you have something you want to say to me, tell it to your son’s lawyer and let him convey it.”
Melanie picked up her file and turned to leave.
“I’m his mother!” Danita Baxter cried. “He has kids! Doesn’t none of that mean nothing to you?”
“What about Orlando Jiménez’s kids? What about his mother? Rashad would’ve killed Gabriela and her children without a moment’s hesitation if the cops hadn’t shown up. You know that as well as I do. And you know this wasn’t the first time your son killed somebody either.”
“It ain’t Rashad. It’s the streets.”
“Plenty of men grow up on the streets and don’t become killers. Besides, he had you. It’s not like nobody cared about him. I’m sure you were a good mother. He chose to become what he is.”
The woman’s eyes went wild with misery. “You don’t know him! To this day he calls me every night to see how I’m doing, if I ne
ed anything. I got two of his babies living with me’cause their mother got a drug problem, and they don’t want for nothing. Not only that—he spends time with them. Those children are gonna suffer.”
“Orlando Jiménez’s children are already suffering.”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Danita whispered hoarsely. “And if you think Orlando ain’t never killed no one, you’re sadly mistaken. He killed women and children too. Ask anybody in Bushwick.”
Melanie didn’t need to ask. She knew those things to be true. Jiménez had been every bit as evil as the men who murdered him, and Gabriela Torres, Melanie’s star witness, was his knowing consort. But so what? This case wasn’t about them. If Melanie had been called on to prosecute Orlando or Gabriela, she would have done so to the full extent of the law. That didn’t make her feel sorry for their killers.
Danita Baxter sat down heavily in the front row of the spectator benches and began to weep as if her son were already dead. She’d been in the courtroom and heard the testimony. She knew what the verdict would be as well as anybody else did.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Melanie said, and turned for the door.
“Then why do this to him?” Danita cried out to Melanie’s receding back.
Melanie was halfway down the hall before she realized that she had tears in her eyes. She took the elevator to the lobby and exited the building, blinking them back in the hot sunshine. At some point when she’d been working too hard to notice, spring had turned to summer. She’d found her first gray hair, and her daughter had shot up suddenly, seeming a lot older.
She found a seat on a bench in the plaza and watched the people walking by. Some nodded hello, others were strangers. Everybody went about their business, unconcerned with life’s big questions. She didn’t have time to think about those questions either. Some things were just too complicated to figure out, like where the truest morality resided in a situation like this one. Melanie put her head in her hands and practiced breathing in and out deeply to clear her mind, like she remembered from the one yoga class she’d been to, over a year ago now.
Her pager went off.
It was 4:53 when the jury filed in, and 5:10 when they filed back out, after having delivered the expected verdict of guilty on all counts. Normally, the fact that a jury had its collective eye on the clock would not have seemed remarkable to Melanie, or problematic, so she did her best to push those thoughts away. She looked around and didn’t see Danita Baxter anywhere in the gallery.
The next day, Danita testified for her son during the penalty phase of the trial and said the expected things. How he’d been a loving little boy until he was five or six years old. How an absent father, a series of abusive father substitutes, and the streets had all conspired to turn him into someone else, but how he was still a good son and father.
When Danita finished her testimony, she stood up and walked calmly down the aisle, passing right by Melanie’s table. Nothing passed between them, not a word or a glance, to suggest that they’d ever met before. They’d used up all their emotion the previous afternoon. For a split second, she even felt as if her encounter with Danita in the empty courtroom had never happened. But it was real, and it had happened. Why else, when the jury came back a day and a half later with a sentence of life without parole, did Melanie feel such relief?
RED DOG
BY ANITA PAGE
It was cold as misery in the shed, but that wasn’t why I was shivering. Mr. Davis lay dead on the floor and my mama was sharpening her ax. I had just turned fourteen that winter of 1910 and I was scared to think what would become of me.
When we heard Mr. Davis riding into the yard that night, we knew right away he was drunk. My mama used to say that when he was drunk you heard him before you saw him. She put on her shawl and went out to the barn. Even when he was sober, Mr. Davis would never put a blanket on the horse or give him hay.
While she was still at the barn he came busting into the house, yelling and swearing, where was his supper. His face was red and ugly, and he stank from drink. He threw off his coat and left it on the floor where it dropped.
When my mama came in from the barn, she told him he could stop yelling, she had his supper. While she was frying the meat, he started throwing things around the place. First the chairs, then the bread she had baked that morning. He threw two loaves right out the door and into the snow. Then he tried to pick up the frying pan from the stove and burned his hand. He started yelling that Mama had gone the length of her rope, that she was a dead woman.
I tried to stay out of his way like always, but that room was small and he took up the whole place.
He went banging into the other room, and my mama followed him. She’d hid her revolver in the patch basket that was hanging off the end of the bed. I knew she was scared he’d get his hands on it.
She’d bought the revolver to keep us safe after a man followed us from Foster’s store into the woods. Mr. Foster had just paid my mama for her eggs, so we knew what the man meant to do. We ran like the devil up to the road, even though that was the longer way home. Later my mama was sorry she bought the revolver. She always had to change the hiding place so Mr. Davis wouldn’t find it and shoot her.
Mama and Mr. Davis were yelling in the bedroom, and I went out of the kitchen onto the porch. I found those two loaves where he’d thrown them in the snow. I brought them in and got a knife and cleaned them off as best I could. I hadn’t had my dinner with him tearing up the house. All this time I didn’t pay too much mind to his carrying on because that’s how it always was when he was drunk.
Then all of a sudden I heard a crash and he yelled, “Now I’ve got it and I’m going to kill you and put you in a box.”
I dropped the bread and ran into the bedroom. Mr. Davis had torn that room up, knocked over the stand, pulled the quilt off the bed. He was calling my mama names and waving the revolver around. He could hardly stand up, he was so drunk. My mama had her back to the wall. She yelled to me, “Run up to the Ernhouts’.”
I was too scared to do that. The Ernhouts were almost a mile up the road. If Mr. Davis shot my mama, he’d come after me, not to shoot me, but to do the things I knew he’d been thinking about for months, ever since I became a woman. I ran to her and hung on to her because I didn’t know what else to do.
The truth was, I hated my mama, though not as much as I hated him. He told her to give him money, and she gave it. He beat her, dragged her around the house by her hair, and she stayed on, knowing that tomorrow would mean another beating. If I was a grown woman, I’d live like an animal in the woods before I’d stay with him. But that night I hung on to her. She was all there was between me and him.
He just looked at me and laughed and said, “Okay with me if I kill you both.” He was coming toward us, still swinging the revolver around, when he stumbled forward and dropped it. Tripped on his own bootlace is what I think happened. Then there was a struggle for the gun. He was stronger, but he was drunk, and when the revolver went off he got it right in the throat. He fell to the floor with blood spurting from his neck.
Mama grabbed my arm and pulled me into the kitchen. We shut the door and leaned against it, listening to hear if he was dead or alive. Then we heard a thump and my mama said, “He’s a red dog.” That’s the way old-time Catskill Mountain people say it when someone is killed.
He was on the floor when we went into the room. Mama got some rags and wiped down the gun and put it away. There was a place where the mattress came open, and that’s where she put it. After she cleaned up some of the blood, the two of us wrapped Mr. Davis in the summer quilt. Then we dragged him out to the shed. My mama was a big woman, almost as big as Mr. Davis, but it was hard going, dragging him out of the house and all the way around back.
When I asked where we were going to bury him, my mama said, “Use your head, Lucy Ann. How can we bury him when the ground is froze up solid?” Then she sent me running to the house for the lantern.
I brough
t it back and watched her take the ax from the wall. Her hair had come undone and it tumbled down her back, black as night in the light from the lantern. As soon as she started to sharpen the ax with the whetstone, I knew what she was going to do. I’d seen her butcher hogs. She looked up and saw me shivering. She told me to go fire up the stove, get it as hot as I could, and then fill the bucket and start scrubbing the floor, get all the blood up from the floor.
That’s how we spent the night, me scrubbing up the blood, my mama going back and forth from the shed to the house with the big tub she used for washing clothes. I wouldn’t look to see what she was throwing into the stove, but you couldn’t get away from the smell of it.
When dawn came up, our work was pretty much done. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired. My arms hurt like they were going to fall off and my knees felt like needles were sticking into them. All that was left of Mr. Davis were his bones. Some of the bones my mama pounded up fine and put in a box. She said she’d give those to the chickens. The rest she threw into the dirt cellar that was under the barn. The ground wasn’t frozen there and my mama said that’s where she’d bury them. But that was going to wait for another day because she was too tired to move.
Then we cleaned ourselves up as best we could and fell into the bed. When we got up, the sun was low in the sky. It’s the only time in my life I ever slept from sunup to sundown instead of the other way around.
____
THE DAYS THAT followed were peaceful with him gone. But every time I heard a noise outside, I was afraid it was the sheriff come to ask about Mr. Davis. If people asked where he had gone, my mama and I were going to tell them he was over to Denville buying a cow. After a while, when he didn’t come back, my mama would say that he’d gone off with another woman. That had happened before, that he had another woman, so it could have been true.
After about a week, Mr. Ernhout rode over to our place looking for Mr. Davis. He said Mr. Davis owed him money for the horse he’d gotten off him, that he was paying for a little each month. When I heard my mama tell Mr. Ernhout the story we had agreed upon, I didn’t think he believed her. My mama was a truthful woman and a lie coming out of her mouth sounded like what it was. After he left I said to her, “Mama, I think he knows you were lying.”
Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests Page 23
