[Damien Harrington 01.0] The Alibi

by Rachel Sinclair

  She sighed. “Well, it was my fault that they were shut down. I told the girls to give happy endings. I wanted the guys to be really satisfied, repeat customers.”

  “And?”

  “And, Joey told me, when he gave me the money for the massage parlors, that I was to operate them as completely legitimate operations. No funny business, he said. No prostitution, he said. No happy endings, he said. So, when the city closed down the massage parlors, and he lost his investment, he blamed me. He almost killed me right then and there.”

  “I have to say, that makes sense. It’s kind of pointless to use a dirty business to try to clean dirty money.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Okay. So Joey lost a million-dollar investment because of you. But what does it matter if Joey gets his money now? He’s a lifer.”

  “It matters, because Joey owes a lot of money to some mobsters on the outside. These mobsters, they’re threatening to kill his family. Nothing means more to Joey than his two sons. So, yeah, it’s basically musical money at this point.”

  “I don’t understand. If Joey owes money to people on the outside, so much so that his family is in danger, than what is he doing lending money to you?”

  “Well, here’s the thing. Joey owes the money, but he wasn’t the one that actually borrowed it. It was his son, Antonio. Antonio borrowed the money. He wanted to open up his own restaurant, and he did, but he wasn’t a very good businessman, and he lost it all. I think that he gambled away a lot of it too, if you want to know the truth. The mobsters are making Joey pay it, though, because Antonio is a deadbeat.”

  “And Joey is in prison, so how do the mobsters think that Joey is going to pay it back?”

  “See, that’s where this whole round robin with the money comes in. Joey tells the mobsters that he’s going to get the money from me when I beat down the case. The mobsters know that it’s a 50-50 shot that I actually will beat down the case, but I showed them the promissory note from Enzo that showed that I was going to be $3 million richer when I’m acquitted for Vittorio’s murder, so they’re going to hold off on killing Antonio for the time being. See, everything is up in the air. All I have to do is get acquitted, and then I can pay Joey and Joey can pay Antonio’s mobsters, and everyone is happy.”

  “And if you don’t get acquitted...”

  “I don’t get the money, and Joey don’t get the money, and Antonio is dead man walking. I’m probably dead woman walking, too, because Joey will have me killed in prison. He knows people inside every prison, and my life won’t be worth nothing.”

  “So, I withdraw from the case…”

  “And Joey will rat on Nick. Simple as that. He knows that his life depends on me beating down this case, and he don’t want to chance my case to anyone but you. Nick told Joey how dynamite you are as an attorney, how many guys you managed to get freed from prison, how smart you are, and Joey wants you. So, that’s what I have over Joey. That’s why Joey will rat on Nick. He needs Nick as his insurance policy.”

  “And if I lose the case?”

  “If you lose the case, you lose it. But you gotta give it your all. You gotta fight like hell to make sure I’m acquitted. Because if I see you doing a half-ass job defending me, not your very best, then I’ll tell Joey that you threw me under the bus and you didn’t fight for me, and that will piss him off enough that he’ll rat on Nick then, too. Plus, even if you try your best, Joey’s not going to know that. He’ll only know that you lost, and he’ll blame you for losing the case. That means that he’ll want his revenge on you, which means that he’ll probably go ahead and rat out Nick anyhow. So, I guess what I’m saying is that you better not lose my case.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “In other words, in order to make sure that Nick is safe, I need to win your case.”

  “Well, yeah. I guess that’s right. You win my case, and everyone is happy. Joey is happy, I’m happy, Antonio’s happy. Everyone’s happy but Enzo, because he’s going to be out that money.”

  “Ay, there’s the rub. He’s going to be working against you. Enzo’s interest is in making sure you get convicted for this. That’s why he was in here that one day, throwing you under the bus.”

  “Right. Enzo wants to see me convicted. He’s not going to help.”

  “So, why did you tell me in the beginning that he was your alibi? You had to have known that he wasn’t going to do a damn thing for your case?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know why I told you that. It was the only thing that I could think of on the spot like that. I didn’t think about what I was going to say to you before I came in here for the first time. I didn’t rehearse it in my head or nothing like that. It just came tumbling out of my mouth. Sometimes I just can’t stop it. Once I start telling a story, I can’t stop myself.”

  She was finally telling me the truth, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t like this truth. I had a lot of pressure on me to make sure she was acquitted.

  If she wasn’t acquitted, Nick’s life was in danger.

  Chapter 16

  “Okay,” I said, “now that we’re finally straight, we need to go over strategy. Obviously, I’m going to go after Enzo. I’m going to go after him on the stand aggressively. Beat him down. Show the jury that Enzo was the one who actually killed his brother. Show the jury why.”

  Gina shook her head. “No. That won’t work.”

  I closed my eyes and counted to 20. Not to 10, but to 20. I was starting to trust her, and then she throws me for a loop. That was how it had been with us. I still didn’t entirely trust her, so I needed her to get on the same page with me for strategy. That was the least that I asked for.

  “What do you mean by no?” I asked her, my eyes closed, my teeth clenched.

  “I mean, no. You can’t throw Enzo under the bus like that.”

  “Why, pray tell? After all, Enzo did it. Plus, he’s a known sex offender. He raped those women. Do you think that he’s going to stop doing that? He needs to be behind bars for that reason alone.”

  “Sorry, but I can’t let you get Enzo in trouble like that. He’s already told me that he’ll kill me if I finger him, and if he don’t kill me, one of his friends will. Enzo is connected. He says that he’s not, but he is. He knows plenty of mob guys who will do me in. You have to figure out a different defense.”

  I took a deep breath. “Here’s the thing. I know the truth about what happened. I know that you know the truth, too. I can’t possibly put you on the stand unless we go with the truthful defense, which is that Enzo killed his brother.”

  She shrugged. “Come up with something different.”

  I hung my head. “Okay, I guess that I never really explained all this to you. In defending murder, you have several defenses. One is that you killed the person, but it was in the heat of passion. You didn’t really think about it, you just did it. That doesn’t excuse the murder, but it does possibly lower the charge to manslaughter. Two is that you killed the person, but it was justified. Self-defense and defense of others comes into that calculation. Three is that you killed the person, but you have an excuse. Insanity is a good example of that. Once again, you don’t go scot free in that scenario, but you probably would end up in an institution for the rest of your life. Another way that I can defend a murder case is that my client didn’t do it.”

  “I know all this-“

  “Now, obviously, I’m going to defend you using the fourth method, which is to show the jury that you didn’t do it. I usually use what is called the SODDI defense – some other dude did it. What that generally means is that I have to show the jury who that other dude is. Now, I could go ahead and use the SODDI defense without giving the jury an alternative suspect. Sometimes that works. But, usually, when you do a SODDI defense, you should have some kind of plausible other person that did it. Otherwise, it’s hard to get an acquittal.”

  “I don’t care. I know what you’re saying, but you can’t get up there and tell the jury that Enzo did it. You’re just go
ing to have to think of some other way of getting me off.”

  I nodded my head, regretting that I even asked Gina for the truth. If she didn’t tell me, then I would feel better about actually using a different defense that I knew wasn’t the truth. Not that anybody would ever know that I knew the truth about what had happened. I was just going to have to go with a defense that I knew was a lie. I was going to have to sell the jury on a known lie.

  “Okay. Well, then, I guess we have our work cut out for us, don’t we?”

  She nodded her head. “I guess you do.”

  “You have me in a box, you know that, don’t you? You’re telling me that if you’re convicted, and Joey doesn’t get the money he needs to get his son out of trouble, he might rat out Nick because he’ll want revenge on me for losing the case.”

  “No, I’m saying that he probably will go ahead and rat out Nick if you lose the case. Not that he might, but that he’s probably gonna.”

  “Okay. Yet, goddammit, we have the perfect defense, and I can’t use it.” I made two fists and raised them to my face. “The perfect defense. We get the women on the stand testifying that Vittorio raped them, we get them to testify about the scar on the back, we show the autopsy pictures that show that there’s no scar, we get Coretta to testify about going to the cops. It all becomes clear as to what happened. Man, we have such a neat and tidy defense.”

  “And you can’t use it. How many times do we have to go over this? I know that we got a good defense. I know that. But if you breathe a word to the jury about Enzo being responsible, I’m a dead woman. And, by the way, if that happens, and Enzo kills me, he’ll do it before I’m able to collect my bond money. That means that Joey won’t get his money, either, if Enzo kills me. That means that Nick is going to lose his parole hearing, because Joey’s gonna know the reason why I’m dead, and he’s gonna blame you. I don’t know why you can’t understand what I’m trying to tell you. Find a different defense.”

  I nodded my head. “Okay. Well, I guess that’s what I’m going to have to do.” I was going to have to do something that was slightly unethical, and that was that I was going to have to present the jury an alternative suspect that I knew wasn’t responsible for the murder. That was the only way I was going to win Gina’s case.

  What that meant was that my alternative suspect, whoever it was that I chose to present to the jury, was going to be under suspicion for Vittorio’s death. That was how it worked. One person is acquitted for a murder, and the cops keep on looking for the actual murderer. The first place that they look is the person who I presented on the stand as being the likely suspect.

  I didn’t really see any other choice in the matter. I had to present somebody as a likely suspect. Perhaps I could simply get away with telling the jury that Vittorio had many enemies because of the fact that he was a known sex offender, and leave it at that. That was still unethical, in my opinion, because Vittorio wasn’t a known sex offender. He was an innocent party. I knew the truth about that, too. I was going to have to tell the jury a lie, tell them that Vittorio was killed because he was raping women and threatening them, and, apparently, one of the women that he raped had had enough. That was going to have to be the story that I was going to go with. It was a bald-faced lie, and I knew it, but I had no choice. At the moment, that was the only defense that I could think of.

  Unless…

  “Okay. We’re going to have to figure this out. I have two ways that we can play this. One is, we try to show that Vittorio had a host of enemies, mainly the women that he allegedly raped. This could work, because, well, these women had reason to kill him. There’s no doubt about that. However, this is a strategy that probably won’t work for two different reasons.”

  “What are those reasons?”

  “One, I need to narrow it down to one likely suspect. That would mean that I would be shining suspicion on somebody that I know is innocent. Two, there’s the issue of the gun being registered to you. If we find some other suspect for this case, then I’ll have to establish to the jury how it was that she got ahold of your gun. So, that’s another roadblock.”

  Gina nodded her head and crossed her arms in front of her. “That’s one way of defending me. What’s another way?”

  I took a deep breath. I was going to throw out something that went against every ethical boundary that I knew about. I didn’t really see any other way out, however, except to ask her to lie. Either way, I was going to be perpetuating a fraud on the jury. If I chose to throw somebody under the bus, I would be perpetuating a fraud. If I chose this next avenue, I would not only be perpetuating a fraud, but it would be incredibly risky. I was just going to throw it out to Gina and see if she bit.

  “Another way is justification. He was going to kill you, so you killed him first.” I closed my eyes, knowing what I was going to have to do to make this work. She was going to have to take the stand and lie, and I was going to know she was lying. I swallowed hard. I had never suborned perjury before, at least, not knowingly.

  Then again, I had never been in this position before. I had never been asked not to tell the court the truth before. Usually, in a position like this, it was easy – I tell the truth, and that usually worked. But the truth was something that I was forbidden to use. This was a first for me, so I was going to have to get creative. In this case, “getting creative” meant telling a bald-faced lie.

  “He was going to kill me, so I killed him first? How’s that gonna work?”

  I stood up. “Here’s how it’s going to work. You went to the cops before when he beat you, isn’t that right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I called the cops twice, and they came out and talked to Vittorio, but they didn’t charge him with nothing.”

  “Did you ever file a restraining order?”

  “No. I never filed a restraining order.”

  “I guess we’ll have to live with that. I mean-“

  “Listen, the cops questioned me, and I didn’t say nothing about using self-defense. I didn’t say nothing about Vittorio coming after me and me killing him to keep him from killing me first. I don’t see how that excuse is going to work.”

  “Not excuse, justification. Excuse is something that merely mitigates the sentence. You still have to serve time for murder if you have an excuse, but you might serve less time. Or you might be convicted of a lesser crime. Justification gets you an outright acquittal, which is what we need right now. Now, you’re right. You didn’t tell the cops that you killed Vittorio in self-defense. So, maybe you tell the court that you didn’t tell the cops that because…” I shook my head. “Let me review your statement to the cops again. Maybe I can figure this out.”

  I opened up the file and saw Gina’s statement to the cops. They took her in for questioning right away, and she did the right thing – she asked for a lawyer right up front. They didn’t get the chance to question her, really. She just said to the police that she wasn’t going to talk until she got an attorney in there.

  Good, good. “I think that we’re okay on that. You didn’t tell the cops that you killed Vittorio in self-defense, but you didn’t tell them anything else. So, we can still go with that defense if we wanted to.”

  Gina was looking at me with suspicion. “Okay. So-“

  “So, he was coming at you with a belt. He put that belt around your neck and pulled on it. You started to lose consciousness, but you were close to your gun, and you shot him.” I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “This could work.”

  “What happens to me, if the jury buys it?”

  “If the jury buys it, then you’ll be found not guilty. Self-defense is an absolute justification, which means that you will be not guilty of murdering Vittorio. We can also use the women that he allegedly raped as good evidence. It will show that he was a violent man.”

  I felt like crying. I was not only going to suborn perjury, making an entire defense up from whole cloth, but I was going to keep on perpetrating a fraud by presenting women who thought
that Vittorio raped them, when it was actually Enzo. Lies piled on top of lies.

  I had never in my life done something like this. Yet, I didn’t see any other way. I couldn’t possibly implicate an innocent person, so SODDI was out. Anyhow, if I did implicate an innocent person, I would still be lying. I couldn’t use the truth, because Gina was restricting me, and using the truth could very well end up with her dead and Nick in prison for the rest of his life. It might even result in Nick getting the death penalty for killing Ward Johnson.

  One thing was for sure. I wasn’t going to admit to Harper or anybody else what I was doing. If something happened, and this all blew up in my face, and I lost my license to practice law, I certainly didn’t want somebody else involved in it. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that maybe Harper, if she knew that I was going to suborn perjury and perpetrate a fraud, might have a legal obligation to turn me in.

  “Alright,” Gina said, nodding her head. “We tell the jury that Vittorio had a belt around my neck and was strangling me. I was gonna black out, but I was close to my gun, and I shot him. That probably could work.”

  I nodded my head. “It could work. Vittorio was shot at close range, your fingerprints are on the gun, because it’s your gun, and there is a record of abuse. There’s also a record of rape – don’t forget, we can question the cops who questioned Vittorio after Coretta turned him into the cops. Well, didn’t turn Vittorio in, but you know what I mean. It could work.”

  I sighed. What was I getting myself into?

  Chapter 17

  The arraignment was scheduled for the next day, and I went to that with Gina. As Harper had indicated before, the case was assigned to Division 33, Judge Reiner. That meant that it was probably going to be put on the rocket docket, and the case was going to be tried within a matter of months. I also told Ally of my plan to use the justification of self-defense for Gina.