by David Ellis
And without her child.
52
Privileges
PAUL RILEY WAS leaning back in his chair reading a transcript when Shelly walked into his office.
“Been out today?” he asked.
“Yeah. This and that.”
She had spent the day walking along the lake, pondering the events of the prior evening. She thought of Alex Baniewicz showing up at her office a little over a year ago, ostensibly for legal representation on a school disciplinary matter, when in fact he’d only wanted to meet her. But why Alex? Why hadn’t Ronnie come? Why send Alex?
She had been unable, at times today, to overcome her anger as well. Did they think she was an idiot? Did they think she wouldn’t check on this eventually? Didn’t they realize that one day, she would do the same thing they had done, take a peek at the adoption records to confirm the name of her son? They thought she would spend her entire life taking Alex’s word for it that he was her child?
It had taken her the better part of an hour to answer that question. Yes, they had to know that eventually she would go to the trouble of checking the records and confirming the facts. They were just hoping that she wouldn’t have time to check until the case was over, that the magnitude of this case would distract her. They wanted her to go through this trial thinking that she had to save her son. What she did afterward was of little consequence. They wanted a desperate lawyer who would lie, cheat, and steal to save her flesh and blood from a death sentence.
When she had walked into the office late this afternoon, she had found a series of photographs that Joel Lightner had left for her, taken of Ronnie Masters walking alongside Eddie Todavia somewhere on the city’s west side. She had seen a street sign and recognized it, anyway, as Venice Avenue, a major east-west thoroughfare that ran along the A-Jar projects, among other things. Ronnie didn’t live near that neighborhood and Todavia didn’t, either.
“I need a lawyer,” she said to Paul.
He looked over the glasses perched on his nose. “You might need a priest, Shelly Trotter. Why do you need a lawyer?”
“I’m not kidding. I need a good old-fashioned attorney-client conversation.”
Paul looked her over a moment, then set down the transcript and sat up in his chair. “Okay, you’re not kidding. What’s going on?” He motioned for her to sit.
She first closed the door behind her. The last time she had done that in this office, it had been pleasure, not business, and she guessed that the same thing had just run through Paul’s mind.
“I need advice. More like confirmation.”
He opened his hands.
“Let’s say a hypothetical lawyer is defending a client on a criminal charge. That lawyer has some reason to believe that she can point the finger at someone else.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” She sighed. “Now let’s say that she has a conflict of interest. Let’s say that she might have some inherent bias in favor of that person—the one she wants to point the finger at.”
Paul’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of bias?”
“She has a reason to—to not want to point that finger.”
“What kind of reason?”
“A reason, Paul. A reason.”
Paul shifted in his seat, pushed himself back from his desk and crossed a leg. “Then she has to recuse herself. Withdraw from the case.”
“Recuse herself, and what? Not tell her client, before she leaves, about this other person?”
“No, she has a duty to tell her client what she knows. Then she gets out.”
“What if the client already knows most of it?”
“Most of it? The client has to know all of it.”
Shelly deflated. She already knew all of this, and she wasn’t entirely sure why she was burdening Paul with a rather elementary lesson in legal ethics.
Paul got up from his seat. “The lawyer has come upon some evidence that implicates a third party. She has a conflict with regard to that third party. She has to tell her client what evidence she has uncovered and then get out.”
“Unless the client waives the conflict.”
Paul cocked his head. “As long as the client is fully informed of the conflict.” He lingered on that point, because, she knew, he was going beyond the hypothetical. He wanted to be “fully informed” himself.
“I would also tell that hypothetical lawyer,” he continued, “that if she came into another lawyer’s office and asked for legal advice that is protected by the attorney-client privilege, then she should not feel constrained to keep things hypothetical. She should tell her lawyer what the heck is going on. Because he would be forbidden from repeating it.”
She dropped her head. “Not necessarily.”
Paul moved to the window and looked out over the lake. She assumed he caught her meaning. The one hole in the attorney-client privilege was that a lawyer could not keep quiet about future criminal conduct that a client might commit. Past crimes, fine. But a lawyer could not stand idly by and listen to a client explain a crime she was about to commit and do nothing. He was obligated to report it.
“Shelly, be careful,” he said.
The thought ran through her mind again—why had she come here? She didn’t need him to explain the rules of conflicts of interest. She watched this man, in a bit of conflict himself, and she scolded herself for placing him there. And then she felt her mouth open and heard words come out.
“Ronnie Masters,” she said. “Alex’s brother? Or kind-of brother?”
Paul turned to her.
“He’s my son. He’s a boy I gave up for adoption seventeen years ago. I found this out last night. I saw the birth certificate myself.”
Paul stood frozen against the window. She sensed a look of surprise, of course, but also relief. She imagined what he had been thinking—that this hypothetical “third person” was someone with whom she’d had a romantic relationship.
“And I think Ronnie killed that cop. Or at least had a big part in it.”
Paul closed his mouth and made a noise. “Ronnie’s your—”
“It was hushed up at the time. I got pregnant, moved downstate to live with my grandmother, and my father and his team of lawyers worked out some confidential attorney adoption. I never even knew the gender of the child. I never laid eyes on him. I don’t even know how they found the Masterses. Older people can’t do traditional adoptions so they go through lawyers. They skip the agencies. Or maybe my dad just wanted it hush-hush.”
She stopped herself. She was gushing. Too much. Overload. She felt Paul’s hand on her shoulder and she recoiled. He held up his hand tentatively, wounded, probably, and moved back to the chair behind the desk.
She took a moment to compose herself. Paul was giving her the floor here. Finally, she continued, staring at the floor at first. “I told you about Officer Sanchez? The partner? He says Miroballi was trying to make a big bust or something—”
“He was trying to make a high-profile drug bust on the Cannibals’ turf,” Paul said. “He was using Alex to do it. And Miroballi thought that Alex had tipped off the Cannibals. Which was why Miroballi wanted to talk with Alex that night.”
Shelly nodded. “Now I’m thinking that Alex didn’t knowingly tip off anybody. I think he confided in Ronnie, and Ronnie told the Cannibals.”
“Why would Ronnie do that?”
“I don’t know. But Joel Lightner has been following Ronnie, and we’ve seen him with the guy who supplied Alex the drugs. A guy we’re pretty sure is a Cannibal himself. Maybe Ronnie works with them. I don’t know. But you see what I’m saying?”
Paul shrugged, as if his answer was no.
“I can put Ronnie at the scene,” she continued. “I think Ronnie was there. I think he and Alex switched the clothes they were wearing afterward. Ronnie gave Alex his clothes, so the blood and gunshot residue wouldn’t show up. Ronnie drove away and left Alex there. Because Alex was going to get busted anyway. Sanchez would identify him in a heartbeat. But t
his way, Alex doesn’t look as guilty. No gun, no blood spatterings, a negative residue test—”
“But I thought they found some blood.”
“Yeah, in his hair. A little on his shirt. That just means that they didn’t do a good job of cleaning up. It doesn’t make me wrong.”
Paul stared at the ceiling a moment. She had to admire his focus after the bombs she had just hurled. But it mattered to her, obviously, he could see that, and he was doing his best to come through for her. “I’m not sure you can put all those things together and say for sure—”
“For sure?” she interrupted. “No. But that’s not the standard. That’s the thing. I have more than credible evidence putting Ronnie in the soup on this. I can make a pretty damn good argument that he was there, that he played at least some role, and I can put him next to the Cannibals. Add that up with what Sanchez will say and I have an empty chair. I have a great person to point the finger at.” She opened her hands. “This is far and away the best thing I can come up with for reasonable doubt. I can’t walk away from this.”
“No, you can’t. What does Alex say?”
“Alex.” She laughed, of all things. “If I’m right, then obviously Alex knows all of this. The fact that he hasn’t breathed a word of this should tell you what he thinks. He won’t go along with it.”
“He’ll testify to the contrary,” Paul surmised.
“Sure. He’ll fall on the sword. That’s what he’s done so far.”
“Then you don’t call him,” he said. “Take five.”
“But he’ll insist on it,” she said. “If he sees me at trial pointing the finger at Ronnie, he’ll either fire me on the spot or he’ll demand to take the stand. He’ll say it isn’t true. It will just get worse for him then. I don’t know what it is with him, but he wants to be a hero.”
“You have to tell Alex that Ronnie—” Paul caught himself. “Oh. Alex knows that you’re Ronnie’s mother.”
“Of course. Yeah. He doesn’t know I know.”
“Well, you have to tell Alex that you know. And you have to tell him the evidence that you have against Ronnie. And you have to tell him that you plan on relying on that evidence to clear him of these charges.”
He was right, of course. She left the chair and moved into the center of the room. She turned back to Paul. “Hey, you know—I realize I’m coming in here like a hurricane. Lots of fun new information about Shelly Trotter today.”
He held up his hands. “Go do your job. Don’t worry about me.”
She smiled at him.
“But hear me on this, Shelly. Sounds like you don’t know these boys as well as you thought. Don’t think, if things go south, they won’t turn on you. Cover yourself here. Full frontal disclosure. Don’t lose your law license over this.”
She raised her hand in acknowledgment. She was beginning to wish she had never obtained a law license.
53
Round-up
SHELLY GRABBED THE newspaper on her way to work the next morning. It was a stand-alone newspaper stand by the bus stop—insert the change and open the door. She liked seeing these things around the city. These little contraptions were the last bastion of the honor system. The Daily Watch was trusting purchasers to take one and only one paper. Good for them. A little trust never hurt anybody.
This was her favorite time of day, unlike most people. She grabbed a paper and, getting on the bus as early as she typically did—around seven—and being as far north as she was, she always had a seat. Among the bumps and car horns and crowds of people as the bus headed south, Shelly found a tranquility diving into the news of the day. The Internet was fine, but put a paper in her hands any day of the week.
She saw the headlines through the glass before she had dumped the coins in:
FEDS NAB COPS IN DRUG CONSPIRACY
PARTNERSHIP WITH STREET GANG ALLEGED
She threw in the coins and pulled on the handle to no avail, finally having to remove the change and try again after almost yanking the stand off the ground.
She removed the paper and started reading. She was vaguely aware of a bus stopping but she was too absorbed to think of it.
The United States Attorney, Mason Tremont, was pictured standing with authority before a bank of microphones. In the background, according to the caption on the front page, was the F.B.I.’s special agent-in-charge in the city, as well as the profile, out of focus, of Assistant United States Attorney Jerod Romero. The headline was supported by three separate stories covering the police officers, the federal investigation, and others caught up in the federal probe.
According to the story, late yesterday, federal agents arrested six officers on the city police force, along with a number of others allegedly involved in a wide-ranging conspiracy to promote and protect the drug trade on the city’s west side. The charges against the officers would range from providing a safe harbor for the narcotics traffic, to receiving kickbacks, to outright selling the drugs themselves.
She swept the coverage looking for the critical names—Raymond Miroballi; Alex Baniewicz; Miroballi’s partner, Julio Sanchez; Eddie Todavia; even Ronnie Masters. She finally found a bullet-point list of individuals picked up in the sting. There were six police officers but she did not recognize any of their names. There was one sergeant and five patrol officers. The paper listed sixteen other people, whose roles in the scheme were not detailed. In some cases, because they were juveniles, their names were not even listed. Some of them—many of them, probably—had been smaller players who were busted and flipped. Many of them were undoubtedly members of the Columbus Street Cannibals.
It was a wide-scale scheme to distribute crack cocaine on the west side. That made sense, if you wanted to sell drugs on the street on a volume basis. Cops were skimming off the top in drug busts—if not stealing the entire stash—employing runners to do the selling, helping out the bad guys when they got picked up, tipping off their cronies, even recruiting buyers. The implicated police officers came from more than one precinct on the west side. Shelly didn’t know one precinct from another. She’d have to consult with Joel Lightner or Paul on that point.
By the time she walked into her office, she had read every article twice and used a pen to mark relevant portions. Another copy of the front page was sitting on her chair, courtesy of Paul, no doubt. She put in a call to Joel Lightner and left a message on his cell phone.
She looked again at the photograph of United States Attorney Mason Tremont. He was the first African American named to this jurisdiction as the top federal prosecutor. He was appointed by, and served at the pleasure of, the president, like all U.S. Attorneys. But in reality, the rule was that the president turned to the highest-ranking member of his political party in the state to give the nod. It was a courtesy extended in nearly every jurisdiction in the country by both political parties. And because the two state senators were Democrats, the Republican president turned to Governor Trotter to suggest all federal judges and United States Attorneys.
Tremont was the governor’s guy, or one of many. He was a former federal prosecutor who had made a nice career for himself in white-collar criminal defense and commercial litigation. But his greatest attribute was fund-raising. It was estimated—because such things could not be directly attributed—that Mason Tremont had been responsible for raising as much as three million dollars for Lang Trotter’s gubernatorial campaign in the 2000 race.
She looked at her watch. She was supposed to see Alex this morning, but that might have to wait. She went to the copier and made duplicates of the articles.
She was twelve days from trial and she had a lot of people to interview, or at least try to interview. She would have to revise her witness list based on this “newly discovered” development. It was not new to Shelly, of course, at least not entirely. The judge would not be happy with her. But she would explain the necessity of her silence, and the judge at least would have to let her add the arrested police officers to her list, because she never knew their na
mes until now. That was really all she needed. If the judge did not allow her to call the federal investigators and prosecutors as witnesses, that would be acceptable to her. They didn’t seem too thrilled in helping out Alex, anyway.
The key was she could not let the judge move the trial date. This was, more or less, what she had wanted. A big splash of publicity, talking about city cops on the take, illegal and rough stuff, only days before her trial started. It made her chances of showing self-defense all the easier. The jurors from around the county would not exactly be bowled over with shock when she told them Ray Miroballi was a drug-dealing cop.
Assuming she was going to say that. Assuming she was pleading self-defense.
That particular theory was looking better and better the more she read the stories. There would be follow-ups. Hopefully—though not likely—even a guilty plea or two before Alex’s trial started. Cops admitting they were on the take.
The only person more excited than she, Shelly assumed, was Jerod Romero. This was his baby, and what a baby it was. Public corruption cases were the top-selling ticket in this town. Yes, this would make for excellent drama. The public—the jury in Alex’s case—would be in the mood. Suburbanites in the county would only feel validated in their already tainted view of the city’s finest. The city dwellers on the west and south sides would be outraged. There was no one, in fact, who wouldn’t feel either disgusted or more disgusted.
She had a winner. Right?
Right. It sounded better today, with this news, than ever before. Ray Miroballi was a dirty cop who forced a kid to sell drugs. Miroballi was getting nervous about Alex, because Miroballi had discovered Alex was working with the feds against him and he needed to silence him. Alex shot him in self-defense. Miroballi’s partner, Sanchez, says differently? That’s because he was a part of it. He was a dirty cop, too—like those other cops you read about in the papers, she would not be able to directly say.
