A Case of Redemption (3 page)

“L.D. it is, then,” I said with a smile, trying to suggest that we'd already accomplished something significant. “So, tell me about you and Roxanne.”

“Not much to tell,” he said. “Roxanne was my girl, you know? She was everything to me.”

You can tell a lot about how a client will do on the witness stand
by the way he answers open-ended questions. Some find it an invitation to tell you everything that pops into their heads on the subject. Others answer with the most limited amount of information they can get away with.

Legally Dead was apparently in the latter group. As far as testifying went, that was the better group to be in. But it made getting information from your client that much more difficult.

“L.D.,” I said, “even though I'm not committed to be your counsel yet, this conversation is still subject to the attorney-client privilege. So I need you to be comfortable telling me the truth. And I need to hear it all, okay?”

“A'ight,” he said, which made me smile because it was the way the drug dealers talked on
The Wire
. I wondered whether the TV show copied it from real life, or if it was the other way around.

“So how long had you and Roxanne been together?”

“Few months. After I upped with Cap Pun, befo' my first track even dropped, Matt Brooks calls me up and axes if I can do him a favor. He says Roxanne's still got ten shows to do, but her opening act was all fucked up on some shit, so will I open fo' her? You know, he don't have to ax twice. Imma go from fucking nowhere to playing twenty-thousand-seat arenas. Sign me up, man.”

L.D. didn't explain who Matt Brooks was, but there was no need. Even someone as removed from the rap world as me knew that he owned Capital Punishment Records. The Silver Svengali they called him, on account of his hair and the unqualified devotion exhibited by the acts he signed. He stood out in the rap world by his age (mid-fifties) and his race (Caucasian), but otherwise he had the accoutrements you'd expect from a music mogul—a $250,000 car, Gulfstream jet, Hamptons estate, and supermodel wife . . . another person who went by only one name: Chiara.

“Okay, so that's how you meet Roxanne. What happens next?”

“Use your imagination 'bout what happened next.” He laughed, and then, as if he realized that humor was severely misplaced under
the circumstances, he stopped himself abruptly and said, “I'm not gonna disrespect the girl, you know. It wasn't like that. The thing is, I really loved her.”

Not just him. Everybody, it seemed, loved Roxanne. She'd been the It girl for three years running. Her popularity was based on the usual post–Britney Spears factors—a virginal face, torrents of blond hair that were almost certainly extensions, the figure of a Barbie doll. But if he thought that by telling me how much he loved her I'd be less inclined to think him capable of murder, he was off by 180 degrees. Call me a cynic, but I would have been more convinced of his innocence if he'd told me he really didn't give a damn about her.

“Where were you on the night Roxanne was killed?” I asked.

“My crib.”

At least I understood what that meant. He said it flatly enough to suggest the answer to my next question, but I still had to ask it.

“And I take it you were home alone?”

“Yeah. Roxanne wouldn't come to my hood, you know?”

No, I didn't know. “Where do you live?”

“Brownsville, man. Tilden Houses projects.”

Well, that explained why Roxanne never visited him. Brownsville was probably the most crime-ridden neighborhood in the five boroughs.

“Can anybody give you an alibi?”

“You think I'd be sitting in here if somebody could?”

“I just thought that, I don't know, you'd have an entourage or something with you at the time.”

“You mean like Vince and Turtle and Drama? Fuck, no. I ain't Hollywood, man. 'Sides, you gotta remember, when this shit happened my record had just dropped, and it wasn't on the way to goin' platinum or nothing, neither. All I'd done was opened a few shows for Roxanne and was, you know, wit her and such, but I wasn't getting any money out of it. Shit, I still haven't seen a fuckin' nickel from Cap Pun, you know?”

I looked over at Nina, but because I was the one on the phone, she apparently hadn't heard Legally Dead's claim of poverty. I wondered if her commitment to the cause included working for free.

“Marcus Jackson was representing you pro bono?” I asked.

“Pro what?”

“For free. You weren't paying him?”

“Can't give the man what I don't got.”

“So why do you want to switch lawyers? Marcus is a very well-respected guy, and he's not charging you.”

“The thing is, Marcus be tellin' me that I gots to plead guilty. Don't matter how many times I say I'm innocent, he keeps sayin' that Imma get convicted, and I gots to make a deal.” Legally Dead shook his head, lamenting the injustice of it all. “I know that some of this shit don't look good, but I didn't kill her. I swear I didn't.”

“I hear you,” I said, the lawyer's noncommittal response. I wasn't saying that I agreed, just that I understood the words he was saying.

Legally Dead was apparently smart enough to recognize the distinction. He turned away from me, staring at the floor, shaking his head again.

So I decided to throw him a bone. “For what it's worth, L.D., I was home alone that night, too, and I don't think I could get anyone to alibi me either.”

Of course, I wasn't Roxanne's boyfriend, nor had I written a song describing how I'd murder her if she ever got out of line. But for the moment, those were pesky details, and I wanted to gain his trust, if for no other reason than to try to get the truth from him. Or whatever his version of the truth might be.

He resumed eye contact. It was enough encouragement that I continued.

“I have to confess, I really don't know much about the hip-hop world—”

He interrupted me. “I do rap. Hip-hop and rap ain't the same thing, man. That's lesson number one.”

“What's the difference?”

L.D. chuckled. “You ax a hundred people, you get a hundred answers. But fo' me, it's simple. You can hear the difference. What I do is rap. Spoken poetry to music. Eminem, Fitty, Dre, Snoop, that's rap. Damn if I know what's hip-hop, but I know what I do ain't it.”

I smiled back at him. “Fair enough,” I said. “Where I was going with this, however, is that, from what I understand of it, mainly from Nina and what I've read in the press, the prosecution's theory goes something like this: you were her boyfriend, which put you at the top of the suspect list, right off the bat.” I realized the unfortunate word choice as soon as I'd said it, but decided it would only make things worse to call attention to it. “Second, you wrote the ‘A-Rod' song, in which you talk about killing a singer by beating her with a baseball bat, and the forensics folks are saying that the murder weapon was a baseball bat.”

Both Nina and L.D. started talking at the same time. “Hold on,” I said to L.D., and put up my index finger as I pulled the phone away from my ear to listen to Nina.

“They don't know the weapon for sure,” she said. “They never found it. They're assuming it was a bat because Roxanne had a bat in her bedroom from singing at the World Series or something, and now it's missing. And because of the song, it obviously helps the prosecution if the murder weapon is a bat.”

I gave Nina a not-too-subtle eye roll, although I was careful to turn my head sufficiently so Legally Dead didn't see it. “But I'm assuming that the wounds Roxanne suffered are consistent with a baseball-bat beating, right?” I said. “I mean, I get that the murder weapon could be a two-by-four and not a Louisville Slugger, but it's not a knifing case.”

“Right,” she said, conceding my point.

I wasn't sure how much of that L.D. heard, but when I turned back toward him, he looked more agitated than he had before. “The song ain't fuckin' about Roxanne!” he shouted into the phone. “I
been saying that from day one, but nobody's fuckin' payin' it no mind. You gotta listen to the lyrics.”

Apparently recognizing that his flare-up had not helped his cause, he smiled again, but the damage had already been done. If nothing else, L.D. had revealed himself as the kind of man whose emotions could turn on a dime.

He began to rap, swaying from side to side as he did, as if he were onstage before screaming teenagers, rather than behind a bulletproof glass wall talking to a lawyer.

“We were blood bros and now this;

the ultimate dis.

Gonna stop you when you sing,

gonna give it til you scream;

don't like what you said,

gonna go A-Rod on your head.”

When he was finished, he looked at me as if that resolved everything.

“I'm sorry, L.D., you're going to have to explain what you mean.”

“The song ain't about no shorty, it's about a fuckin' dude.” He rapped again: “ ‘We were blood bros'—
brothers
. It's 'bout these gangbangers and one wants outta the game, and the other guy says if you talk shit about me, I'm gonna go A-Rod on your head. So everybody be sayin' that because the lyric is
sing
it's gotta be about a singer like Roxanne. But no fuckin' way. It's about . . . you know, like them old movies and shit, when people talk to the cops and they be singin' like a canary.”

I felt like saying:
Well, with an explanation like that, I'm surprised they even arrested you,
but didn't think I could summon enough sarcasm to give the thought justice. It was apparent I'd need to study not only the “A-Rod” lyrics but the entire Legally Dead songbook.

I had a momentary vision of translators in the courtroom debating the meaning of the lyrics, the way it sometimes happens when you have foreign-language interpreters arguing over the nuance of language in different regions of the country.
No, it's
phat
with a
ph,
so it means cool, not obese.

I did a recap in my head. No alibi. Check. Sketchy, at best, explanation on the song. Check.

Next on my agenda was motive.

“How were things between you and Roxanne on the day she died?”

“We all good.”

“What I've read is that the prosecution thinks Roxanne had recently . . .” I searched for a word that was gentle, and then decided that my offending him was the least of his worries. “She dumped you. Right before Thanksgiving. They claim that you couldn't handle the rejection and so you killed her.”

He shook his head, as if the theory was so ludicrous as not to warrant even a response. It came off arrogant, and I made a mental note that he'd have to work on that expression if he was ever before a jury.

“So what's the story there?” I asked.

We stared at each other for a good thirty seconds. It was obvious we were taking each other's measure.

He blinked first.

“I saw my baby girl over Thanksgiving. I was never gonna go to Roxanne's mama's house.”

“Baby girl?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Another girlfriend?”

He laughed, a real from-the-belly laugh. “You think I'm talkin' a whole different language, don'tcha? No, man. Baby girl. She a real baby. My daughter, Brianna. She's five.”

This took me by surprise. Nina hadn't mentioned that part.

L.D. was showing me his broadest smile yet, framed by two perfect dimples. I recognized it all too well as a father's smile. There was no
doubt in my mind he was telling me the truth, at least about this. He had a five-year-old daughter.

“You got any kids?” he asked.

It's a question that I still don't know how to answer. Technically, I suppose, the answer is no, but that would suggest that I've never experienced fatherhood. Sometimes I give a fuller explanation—
I had a daughter, but she died
—but in situations where I don't want to discuss it, I go with one of the two shorter options, both of which seem equally true and untrue: yes or no.

This time I said, “Yes.”

“How old?”

“Six,” I said, which would be the answer I'd give for the rest of my life. And then I added, “A girl.”

“Good,” he said. “Then you know why I gotta get outta here. Think about it fo' a second. How'd you feel if you gonna be separated from your little girl fo' the rest of your life fo' somethin' you didn't do?”

I didn't answer, but instead looked over to Nina. From the sadness in her eyes, I knew she understood what we'd been discussing.

O
n the subway back from Rikers, I shared with Nina Legally Dead's portion of the conversation. I did it without invoking his name or saying anything that would reveal privileged information about the world's most notorious murder suspect to the other riders on the train. It's something lawyers become quite adept at—speaking in pronouns and euphemisms, so someone eavesdropping has no idea what's being discussed.

The first thing I raised with her was the money.

“He doesn't have a pot to piss in. Apparently, his employer never paid him. Are you still up for doing this pro bono?”

The disclosure didn't seem to surprise her.

“It won't be pro bono, Dan. He'll have money. He just doesn't have it right now. I hate to say it, but he's going to earn millions from . . .” She looked around the train. “On that one thing alone.”

She meant the “A-Rod” song.

“Blood money,” I said.

She shrugged. “Not if he's innocent.”

It was ironic, albeit in a tragic way, but I didn't care about the fee because I was living off my own blood money. At Sarah's insistence, when Alexa was born, we took out a large life insurance policy on both our lives. It made sense to insure me that way because we depended on my income, but going back to work wasn't in Sarah's short-term plans, and in any event, magazine writers just didn't pull in the kind of money that mattered to maintain our lifestyle. But Sarah insisted that the policies be of equal amount, and made
me promise that if anything ever happened to her, I'd leave Taylor Beckett and take a job that permitted me to spend more time with Alexa. “I want you to be the richest lawyer at the ACLU,” Sarah would joke every time I groused about paying the premiums to insure her life.