Jury of One (7 page)

“You and Ronnie have a nice talk?” she asked. Alex gave her a look, as if she had said something challenging. Maybe she had. It was probably the wrong way to start, under the circumstances, but she had less information than anyone and knew that had to change.

“Well,
I
had a nice talk,” she added. “With the F.B.I.”

Her client looked exhausted. His skin had a yellowish tint that gave the impression of illness. His eyes were sunken, surrounded by dark rings to the point that he almost appeared to be wearing makeup. His reaction to her words was slow, two unfocused eyes eventually meeting Shelly’s. She tried to shake the thought that she might lose this kid before it was over.

“I wish you’d told me when it happened,” she said. “Instead of shutting me out.”

Alex coughed quietly.

“This cop—Miroballi—you knew him.”

Alex nodded.

“He was coming after you, Alex?”

He stretched his arms—with some effort, considering his hands were shackled to the table—and cracked his knuckles. “That’s what they’re saying?”

“They seem to think it’s a possibility, yes. Alex, if you shot him because you thought he was going to shoot
you,
you acted in self-defense. You know that, right?”

“You said
if
I shot him.”

“Right.
If
you shot him.”

God, did he look awful. His hair showed no attempt at order, matted in some spots and sticking up in the back like he’d just awoken. His face was sweaty and unshaven. He ran his tongue against his cheek and stared, with some newfound intensity, at the table.

“The feds are worried about us blowing their operation,” Shelly said.

Alex reacted with a humorless laugh.

“Why don’t we talk about that?” Shelly suggested. “When the feds arrested you.”

His shoulders hunched, his eyes closed, Alex answered quietly. “I—don’t really know. I have my place where I keep—you know.”

The large quantity of cocaine, he meant. Broken down into packets of one gram each.

Buy in bulk,
he had told her.
Cut down on visits to my supplier.

True,
she’d responded.
But then they catch you with a bigger stash.

They won’t catch me.

On its face, his scheme made some sense. He would buy a large quantity of drugs and keep it hidden in the trunk of a beaten-down Chevy he’d bought for a couple hundred dollars. To keep the car off the street, he’d rented a parking space in an alley a couple of blocks from his home. He never drove the car. So there was no chance he would be pulled over by the police, or that the car would be ticketed or towed. Each Friday, he visited the car and removed a small quantity of cocaine to sell to the bankers at work.

“They were all over me,” he explained. “I closed the trunk and didn’t even make it out of the alley. A guy walked up to me and whispered to me. He tells me he’s F.B.I. He points to a black car down the street and he tells me not to run. He takes me to the car and it’s all over.”

“How much did you have on you?”

“At the time? Four grams. I was going to take it to work. It was a Friday.”

“They were waiting for you.” Shelly could imagine how it happened. “They were looking at the cop as a suspect and they found you with him. They followed you, sat on you for a while, and then busted you.”

“That seems to be how it happened,” he agreed. “They whisked me away in that black car of theirs and took me to some building. Bunch of them stayed back and—well, they found the whole load.”

Seventy-four grams, to be precise. “They didn’t want to publicize their catch,” she added.

“I guess not.”

“So what did they say to you?”

His face played, almost into a smile. “They were very interested in what I did with that cocaine. Who I sold it to, who I got
it from.” He looked at her. “They were very interested in a certain cop, too.”

“Raymond Miroballi,” she said. The cop he shot. She stirred at the mention of the name. There was so much to learn. “Tell me about him. How you met him.”

“Miro came to me.” Alex shrugged. “I figure he got my name from Todo.”

“Todo,” she repeated. “This is the guy who supplied you.”

He nodded. “Eddie Todavia. Used to go to high school with me. Anyway. So this cop—Miro—he comes to me one day and says he knows what I’m up to. Says he knows Todo is selling me drugs, and he knows what I’m doing with them. He says it’s cool with him, he’s not looking to bust me. He just wants a piece. A ‘taste,’ he says to me.”

“He wanted a kickback,” Shelly summarized. “He got tipped off about you, presumably from Todo, and he wanted a cut.”

Alex nodded. “So what am I supposed to say? No? He’ll bust me.”

“You said yes.”

“Of course I did. He said he wanted two hundred a month. Two hundred a month and he keeps his mouth shut. And he watches my back.”

Shelly closed her eyes. It wasn’t hard to believe, especially after her meeting with the F.B.I. It was right there, for any cop with a wandering eye. And scold Alex as she may wish, she could see his view of things. What leverage did he have against a cop who had caught him with his hand in the cookie jar? She brought a hand to her face.
This
was precisely what she’d warned him about. One day, he’d get caught.

“So the F.B.I. saw you with Miroballi,” she said.

“Right. They followed me after that and caught me. Then they put me in a room and ran me through the wringer.”

“And you told the F.B.I. what was going on,” she assumed.

“Yeah, but seemed like they already knew. They told me I could help myself. Stay out of jail. They told me they wanted everyone connected to this. My seller. My buyers. And Miroballi.”

“Most of all, Miroballi,” she said. A dirty cop. The only thing more inviting to a federal prosecutor than a dirty cop was a crooked politician. “Give me a time frame, Alex.”

He looked off again. “Last summer is when Miro came to me. I think, like, July or maybe it was August. No, it was July. He gave me some time to think about it, but not much time. By August, I was dropping off payments to him. And at some point, the feds must’ve been watching. They saw me make two payments, I think. End of November, beginning of December. I was dropping off money to him, as much as I could. He was—well, he was cutting into my profit margin, let’s say.” He sliced a hand on the table. “I mean, Shelly, I was selling at most, maybe five grams a week to these couple of guys at work. Some weeks, it was two grams. I’m not exactly rolling in cash here, is my point. Two hundred a month, this guy wants. That’s fifty a week. I’m not clearing a whole lot more than that, and now I have to pay that much to this guy for starters. And then he upped it.”

“Upped it? Increased his fee?”

“Yeah. That would have been about November. He said five hundred was a better deal. Five hundred! Shelly, I’m not making enough to cover that. I’m dipping into my own pocket to cover that.”

“Did you tell Miroballi—‘Miro’—did you tell him that?”

He shrugged. “Of course I did. He wanted to introduce me to new customers. He wanted me to sell crack. He said I was missing out on a huge market. I told him I didn’t
want
a huge market. Crack, Shelly? Me? Selling crack to hookers and junkies?”

Powder cocaine was no longer the preferred drug on the street. Crack cocaine was far more addictive, and cheaper. Powder remained popular among the white-collar set, where Alex worked. Officer Miroballi was trying to push Alex onto the streets.

“I said no, thanks. No thanks.”

“And I assume Officer Miroballi was none too pleased with that answer.”

Alex laughed bitterly. “You assume right. He was telling me the hard time I would do if I were ever caught. He said it was him or prison. He kept saying, a nice-looking white kid wouldn’t stand a chance in the penitentiary.” Their eyes met with that last comment. It was the precise fate he was facing now.

“You agreed to the five hundred.”

“I said I’d think about it,” said Alex. “I figured I had some leverage,
too. I had already paid him some cash, right? If he took me down, I could take him down, too. Plus I was a cash cow for him. I figured we could negotiate this a little. That’s how we left it.”

“This was in November,” Shelly clarified.

“Yeah. Or early December. After that meeting—the feds got me within the week.”

Right. December fifth. “But what about Miroballi?” she asked. “He didn’t know you’d been picked up. Why didn’t he come back to you to keep ‘negotiating’?”

Alex gave her a long look.

“He
did
know,” she said.

“Had to have known, Shelly.
Had
to have figured it out.”

“So you never heard from Miroballi again?”

“One time after that. We met at a restaurant and talked terms.” He flicked a finger in the air. “I told him I wanted to stick to the original deal. Two hundred a month.”

“How did he respond to that?”

“Well, that’s the thing.” Alex licked his teeth. “He didn’t fight at all. He just said, ‘Oh, okay,’ like it was no big deal.” He looked at her. “You’d have to know the guy, Shel. He wasn’t a guy who took something like that easily. But he did. He just went along with whatever I said. He just wanted the conversation to be done. I think he was testing me.”

“Were you wearing a wire?” She couldn’t believe that she was asking Alex questions like this. But she imagined that Miroballi had had the same thought of Alex.

“No,” he answered. “I couldn’t wear a wire. Miro would check for it.”

“Was the F.B.I. listening?”

“Don’t know. They didn’t exactly share their every move with me, Shelly.”

Fair enough. “But Miroballi seemed overly compliant with you. And that made you think he was on to your situation.”

“He must have been. He
must
have, Shelly. I didn’t hear from the guy again. He’s getting regular payments from me, then he’s upping the fee, then all of a sudden he’s being all agreeable, and he disappears off the face of the earth? Of course he knew. He knew the feds had gotten to me.”

She sat back in her chair. Oh, the tangled webs. Alex had
been caught and turned into a drug peddler by a dirty cop, then caught by legitimate law enforcement and flipped into a government informant. All of this, for a kid who just had an arrangement with a couple of guys at work for recreational drugs. She hadn’t approved of his side business, but God—surely he hadn’t deserved this.

“The feds are telling me that I won’t be able to prove that Miroballi was working with you,” she said.

Alex waved a hand in anger. “Bullshit. Shelly, they knew. If not, how would they ever know to find me? How would they even know who I was? They only
found
me because I was working with Miro.”

“I didn’t say they didn’t
know,
Alex. I’m talking about proof. Did they have
proof
?”

He pursed his lips, stared at the wall. “Can I prove that Miroballi knew I had been caught by the F.B.I.? Other than the fact that he tried to blow my head off? No, I can’t read the guy’s mind. I can’t prove it.” He looked at Shelly plaintively. “He disappeared the moment I was picked up by the feds, reappears one time and barely says a thing, and he tries to kill me. That’s all I can tell you.”

“I believe you,” she said. She couldn’t possibly say that with confidence.

He shook his head. “Next time I see that cop—well, you know.”

“The next time you saw him was the day of the shooting.”

Alex nodded yes. Shelly had arrived at the moment, but she wouldn’t ask the question yet. She wouldn’t ask him whether he pulled the trigger.

Alex inhaled and looked over Shelly’s head, working his jaw. “See, Shelly, Miro never just walked up to me in the open like that. He didn’t just get out of his squad car and say, ‘Hey, bud, where’s my money?’ I’d drop it somewhere and he’d pick it up after I left.”

“So that day, when he got out of his squad car—”

“Oh, yeah, this guy”—Alex adjusts in his seat, animated now—“he gets out of his car and comes after me—I know what this guy’s doing.”

“You think he wanted to kill you.”

Alex’s eyes fell to the table, a haunting expression on his face. “Shelly, I swear to you—Miro knew. He was going to take me out right there. People think just because a guy’s a cop, he doesn’t do bad stuff.”

“People don’t think that,” she said. At least, she certainly didn’t. She reached across and put her hand on his.

S
OMETIMES SHE WATCHES
him in court. He is a prosecutor, and today he is talking to the jury. He is tall and strong and speaks very confidently. If she were told that he was king of the world, she would believe it. They are drawn to him, she can see, the jurors, the spectators, even the judge. Daddy is prosecuting a man who held up a gas station in Bakerstown and killed the attendant. Felony murder, she has heard him say to Mother.

The defendant was convicted two weeks ago. This is the sentencing phase. Her father is asking the jury to sentence the defendant to death. She can see the defendant and she’s read about him in the papers. There weren’t many murders in Rankin County, so everyone knew about this. He’s a famous killer but she’s not watching him. She’s watching Daddy.

He’s not moving as he stands before the jury. His hands are clasped behind his back. He can be animated, but he’s not now. He is speaking quietly.

He’s telling the jury about the gas station attendant. His name was Davey Humars. He was twenty-two and was engaged to be married. He liked to watch baseball. He liked to fish.

It has been two days since she left the clinic. She was discharged shortly after she came out of anesthesia. She was provided transportation from the clinic through a covert route to the train station to get her home. She never even saw any of the protesters marching outside. And they never saw her.

Davey Humars had a life, Daddy tells them. He had a life
and he was entitled to it. What do we stand for, he asks them, if we do not stand for the sanctity of life?

Her eyes well up but she will not cry. She’s cried enough. She imagines the day she will tell him. She was attacked. She got pregnant. She will tell him about the abortion clinic.