Jury of One

by David Ellis

  They crossed Bonnard Street and headed southbound on Gentry, on the east side of the street, tracking the path Alex took. “About here,” said Joel. He had reviewed Shelly’s notes, taken from her several conversations with Alex. He was carrying a gym bag, presumably because Alex was carrying one on the night in question. “Give or take, this is where the squad car kicked on its lights.” They both stopped and looked around. Gentry Street, between Bonnard and Newberry, extended the length of a traditional city block, one-eighth of a mile. Shelly and Joel were standing almost equidistant from Bonnard Street to the north and the alley where the shooting occurred, to the south.

  “About midway down,” Shelly concurred.

  “Miroballi calls it in,” Joel continued. “White male, holding drugs.”

  “Alex keeps walking.” So they began to walk as well. “He hears a car door open and close. One of the cops has gotten out. Miroballi.”

  “Sanchez’s report says they both got out.”

  “Whatever. Alex keeps walking a few steps, then runs.” She broke into a decent jog. She couldn’t replicate the speed of Alex’s stride, she was sure, and would not attempt to do so anyway in the middle of the day downtown.

  “By now,” said Joel, keeping up with her and breathing with some effort, “Miroballi’s giving chase—and telling dispatch that—and the other cop has returned to his squad car.”

  They jogged into the alley. They both saw the blood stain, cleaned up to some extent but still very present. Shelly stopped before it. “Alex falls,” she said, going to her knee. “He gets up”—she turned to face Gentry Street—“and turns and sees Miroballi standing there.”

  “Miroballi’s just called in that the suspect is armed,” said Joel. “Right about when he reaches the alley.”

  “Alex puts his hands up.” Shelly followed suit. “He starts to backpedal.”

  “Miroballi’s walking toward him.”

  Shelly and Joel, walking backward, passed the blood stain and kept moving. Joel stopped a few feet from that spot. “No closer than here,” he estimated. “We know Miroballi was there,” he said, pointing to the blood stain. The principal amount of blood hitting the pavement came after Officer Miroballi had hit the ground, falling backward. Much of it had spilled on his person and soaked into his uniform. Some of it had sprayed forward and to the side when the bullet hit his nose. Not all of this could be seen now, weeks after the shooting. But knowing where he fell, from the principal blood stain, meant knowing where he had been standing. The question was, where was Alex standing?

  “I’d say about eight feet from the cop,” said Joel. “Shoot a guy in the nose, blood’s gonna spray everywhere. But they didn’t find much on Alex. A little blood in his hair, right? And a couple specks on his sweatshirt. But his jacket was clean. So for the most part, he wasn’t hit with the blood. About eight feet.”

  “Medical examiner will tell us.” Shelly looked around. “So he pulls the gun and shoots him?” She mimicked the act herself, using her hand for a gun. “Shoot-out at the O.K. Corral?”

  “Miroballi saw a gun,” said Joel. “So I assume Alex had it in his hand, or stuffed in his belt or jacket.” He shook the gym bag he was holding. “Not in here.”

  “Neither of the witnesses saw Miroballi pulling a gun.” Shelly looked up at the Forrester Insurance Building on the west side of Gentry, where the witness Monica Stoddard had been working that night. “So that means, I assume, that Alex had his gun, Miroballi reached for his, and Alex shot first.”

  Joel looked up, as if he were trying to retrieve data. “Yeah, Miroballi’s weapon was holstered when he was found.”

  “That’s no good,” she said. “That doesn’t sound so much like self-defense.”

  “What has Alex told you?”

  “He hasn’t.” She paced in a circle, looking around. “I haven’t asked him.”

  “You pleaded self-defense, I thought.”

  “You can comb these walls, Joel? For bullets? Take some pictures?”

  “Sure. Shelly, you pleaded self-defense without knowing whether Alex even shot him?”

  “Yes.” She walked along the wall and looked. The bricks were in terrible condition, but to the naked eye, there were no signs of lodged bullets that would have come from Miroballi’s angle, past Alex. That was consistent with all the police reports and forensics, which showed that Miroballi had not fired a weapon, and that only one gunshot had been heard. But she was certainly not going to limit her knowledge to what the police had told her.

  “The second gun,” she said. “The .38 on the ground.” The other gun, besides Miroballi’s, that was found at the murder scene but which had not been fired.

  “Serial number scratched off, of course.” Joel rubbed his cheek, then moved his hand around to the back of his neck. “And they never found the murder weapon.”

  “The question is, who’s the second gun belong to? And why leave it?”

  “The why-leave-it part is easy.” Joel shrugged. “Shit happens. This is no career criminal. He shoots, he wigs out and runs. That happens every day of the week.”

  “But that’s the thing, Joel. He took the gun he shot with.”

  Joel conceded the point. He walked over to the spot where the gun had been found at the crime scene, approximately ten feet from the dead body in the direction of Alex’s flight. “Looks like it fell off Alex, or he dropped it, as he was running away. Same with the coke, right? Right about the same spot?”

  Shelly nodded. The two packets of cocaine had been found near the gun, all of them in the direction that Alex fled after the shooting, ten feet to the east of Miroballi’s body.

  “Could be intentional or accidental,” said Lightner. “That stuff could’ve fallen out of his pocket when he ran. Maybe he just wanted to dump the illegal contraband.”

  “Except the murder weapon,” Shelly repeated.

  Joel wiped his mouth. “Murder weapon could’ve had his prints on it. Could be, in a moment of panic, he thinks it’s just better to keep it with him.” Joel removed a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He looked at Shelly. “You don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it.” She put her hands on her hips. “Not sure I believe it.”

  “We should go.” Lightner tapped his watch.

  They walked to Joel’s car, parked in a lot near Shelly’s office. “When did you leave the force?” she asked.

  “Ninety-five,” he said. “Eleven years in E.P. Four here in the city.”

  Joel Lightner had been the chief of detectives for a suburban police department when the Terry Burgos murders took place in the late ’80s. Mansbury College, the site of the killing spree, was within the county but outside the city, in the rather diminutive town of Englewood Park. Lightner had been the lead detective on the Burgos case. He was the only law enforcement officer, as far as she knew, who ever interrogated Burgos. That case, presumably, was how he and Paul Riley had met.

  “Do you know the Miroballis?” she asked him as he started the car. It was a towncar with creamy leather seats and plenty of accoutrements. The private sector seemed to be treating Joel Lightner well.

  “Not really. Ray, no. Reggie—he was the second-grade, right?”

  “Right,” she said. Reginald Miroballi was a detective, second-grade. The middle child at forty-two, four years older than Ray. Anthony Miroballi, at forty-four, was a lieutenant.

  “Heard of Reggie but didn’t know him. Tony, I met once. Political guy, from what I heard. Ass-kisser.”

  Shelly looked out the window as they drove along the west side. Once you left the commercial district and headed west, things changed in a hurry. The west side was the poorest of the city’s poor. The streets looked like the objects of target bombing. Scattered throughout every block were humble but well-kept homes, but every third lot was empty or had a house on the verge of collapse. It was the result of home-mortgage fraud, in which unscrupulous lenders gave out high-interest loans for home “purchases” that vastly exceeded
the true value of the home—thanks to fraudulent appraisals. The “buyers,” in on the scheme with the lenders, bought the house but pocketed the remainder of the proceeds—say $200,000 for a home worth maybe forty—while the lender sold the mortgage on the secondary market to an unsuspecting lender who jumped at the prospect of a high-interest loan. By the time the new holder of the loan was the wiser, the buyer had skipped town, and the loanholder’s only recourse was to foreclose on collateral that did not even come close to covering the loan amount. Yes, sometimes the new loanholder went back to the originator, but with the vast numbers of loans bundled on the secondary market, it was becoming just another cost of doing business. One out of every hundred will be bogus. Factor it into the cost, like a department store factored in the cost of shoplifting.

  The real victims were the neighborhoods. Abandoned houses on the verge of demolition became crack houses, or dangerous playgrounds for children, and in any event an utter blight. Property values remained depressed, and any attempt at revitalization was thwarted. The deregulation of the ’80s was paying dividends, in spades, in the new millennium.

  “Shelly, just so you know,” said Joel. “This is business to me. Yeah, a cop was killed and I used to be one, but don’t count me out of the inner circle here. I got one and only one loyalty, and that’s to you. You need someone you can trust.”

  She wondered if he was referring to Alex in that last comment. A former cop would naturally have plenty of skepticism built up. She looked at him. “I pleaded self-defense for many reasons,” she said. “One is that I think Alex may be in danger.”

  “Retaliation.”

  Close enough. She wasn’t sure whether she should share the undercover drug operation with him yet. “So now, anyone thinking of going after him will have to think twice. There will be a lot of questions now, if something happens to him.”

  “Good enough.”

  “Plus, I’m throwing the state off the scent. They think I’m conceding the facts, or at least most of them. They think I’m conceding Alex shot him, and just arguing the details. That may be true. But it may not be.”

  Yes, he was right. She had to trust someone. She removed the photograph she took of the boy—Manuel, he called himself—who had helped the armed intruders get into her apartment.

  “What the heck’s this?” Joel asked, holding up the photo as he drove. “Junkie porn?”

  She would laugh, under different circumstances. “This kid came to my house and told me he had information about Alex. I made him strip down to his undies to make sure he wasn’t armed. What he didn’t tell me was that he had brought some friends.”

  Joel glanced over at her.

  “They gave me a little pep talk about not smearing Ray Miroballi.”

  “No shit.”

  “I don’t know if they were cops, Joel. But it’s the best guess.” She pointed at the photo. “They rousted some junkie and used him to get in.”

  “You want me to find this kid.”

  “If it’s possible. It’s probably a needle in a haystack.”

  “I’ll start with the morgue.”

  The thought had occurred to Shelly as well. Whoever used this boy, if they were ruthless enough, might dispose of “Manuel” once his role was over.

  Joel pulled his car into the lot across the street from the criminal courthouse. They went through a detailed security process and made their way to the fourth floor, home of the County Attorney Technical Unit. The CAT Unit had been set up about ten years ago, after one too many questions about one too many cases, amid accusations of evidence tampering by the city police. The county’s criminal investigation procedures were revamped, and the county attorney took over crime-scene work.

  “Nothing great on the background,” said Joel as they left the elevator. “I don’t see anything dirty about Miroballi at all. Or his partner, Sanchez. But I’m working on it.”

  “I need to talk to Sanchez next,” she said, as much to herself as him.

  “Ask him how his girlfriend is doing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s got a thing on the side. He’s married. Got a hot little mama on the sly.” He cast a glance at Shelly. “It’s my guys’ bread and butter. That stuff pays the bills while I handle these highfalutin cases that Riley shoots me. They got some photos, even, if you want them.”

  They reached the door. Joel Lightner knew several of the people inside. Their familiarity with a former colleague seemed to be sufficient for the officials to leave Joel and Shelly alone with the physical evidence, in a small room that had been prepped for them. Nice, she thought, to be with someone on the inside. And funny, she noted, that the daughter of the most powerful man in the state considered herself an outsider.

  “The .38,” said Joel, pointing at the weapon wrapped in plastic. Next to it in similar wrapping was Officer Miroballi’s firearm. Hanging from a metal, stand-alone hanger set was the black leather jacket Alex had been wearing. The thought passed in and out of her mind, that she had never seen this jacket, which only reminded her of how little she knew of this boy.

  “No blood spatterings on the jacket,” said Joel, putting his nose almost against the plastic. He touched the next item, Ray Miroballi’s uniform top. “Plenty of it here.”

  “The gunpowder residue test was negative,” said Shelly, referring to the test performed on Alex the night of the shooting.

  Joel uttered a dismissive grunt. “That’s not uncommon,” he said, “if you were getting your hopes up. Doesn’t mean Alex didn’t shoot the firearm.”

  Doesn’t mean he did, either.

  “When the fuck’s the coroner gonna do the autopsy?” he asked.

  “No idea.” In a case like this, where cause of death was so obvious, autopsies were not necessarily of primary import. The only critical issue, as far as Shelly could tell, was the distance between Alex and Miroballi when the shooting occurred.

  “Pardon my French, by the way.” Joel moved away from the hanging rack. “Back in my old haunts, I get my old mouth back.” He wiped his hands, for some reason. “Actually, in this case, I don’t know how much the distance matters. Closer the better, I suppose, if you’re thinking self-defense. Especially if he never drew his weapon.”

  He walked back over to the table. Shelly was looking around, too, but not with expert eyes. She felt more like an escort than a technician. Joel pointed to the plastic baggie containing the two grams of cocaine. “No prints,” he said. “But on a night like that, Alex was probably wearing gloves. Or he was smart when he packaged it.”

  “Or,” Shelly offered, “they weren’t his drugs.”

  “The ol’ drop-and-plant.” Joel smiled. “Drop the perp, put a gun and some drugs in his hand. We used to do it all the time.”

  She assumed he was kidding but didn’t respond. “That would make the .38 his, too. Miroballi’s, I mean.”

  Joel cocked his head to allow for the possibility. He didn’t seem to think too much of it.

  “And Alex wasn’t wearing gloves,” she added.

  “You mean they didn’t find him wearing gloves.”

  “You think he dumped them?”

  “Certainly a possibility, Counselor. Same place he dumped the gun.” Joel reached into his gym bag, his briefcase for the day, and removed a camera to photograph all the evidence. “They’ll find that gun, by the way,” he added. “They found him—what—a half mile away? That’s a very workable radius.” He closed an eye and started photographing items one by one.

  “You’re assuming he shot him,” she rejoined.

  “So are you.” He moved the camera from his face. “Until you ask him.”

  29

  Schemes

  IT WAS AFTER another week, courtesy of an extension she had provided him, that Jerod Romero had delivered a copy of a plea bargain to Shelly’s attention at the law firm. It had arrived in an 81⁄2-by-11 envelope, emblazoned with the seal of the Department of Justice, United States Attorney’s Office. A letter a
greement, already signed by Jerod Romero at his line. A yellow Post-It note had been stuck to the agreement with the words, You get the discovery when you sign this.

  She’d looked it over. The U.S. Attorney had agreed not to prosecute Alex Baniewicz for any offenses, including but not limited to possession of not less than fifty grams and not more than one hundred grams of cocaine with intent to distribute, on December 5, 2003, as previously referred to in a letter agreement dated December 6, 2003. In consideration of said promise, neither Alex Baniewicz nor his counsel, Michelle Trotter, Esquire, and/or any counsel that may join or succeed her would disclose any facts relating to an undercover federal operation probing the activities of city law enforcement in the distribution of controlled substances until such time as the matter of People v. Alex Gerhard Baniewicz, Case Number 03 CR 4102, commenced trial.

  More details. She’d taken her time with it, spent a day looking it over for loopholes. In the end, she had been satisfied. She had secured full immunity for Alex. She’d taken the agreement to Alex for his signature, a meeting she’d cut short under the pretense of needing to get it immediately to the federal prosecutors, and then did just that, delivering a fully executed copy of the agreement two nights ago.

  She looked over the agreement again now with butterflies in her stomach, now that it was fully executed, waiting for the word or phrase that she had missed the first six times around and that would suddenly doom her client. But she was satisfied and felt content. On its face, there was little reason to break out party hats. Alex was looking, at most, at maybe a year and a half in a federal camp, a rap on the knuckles compared to the death penalty that state prosecutors were seeking. It was the terms of the agreement she appreciated. No conditions on his further cooperation with the feds, who no longer needed him anyway. No condition of truthfulness. It gave Alex wiggle room. It gave Shelly, as his lawyer, wiggle room.

  And it gave her indigestion, at how little she trusted Alex’s word, that she found it necessary to cover him through this agreement from any lies he may have told. This was, after all, her son she was talking about.