Under the Bridge (25 page)

“I didn't even get close to her.”

“People saw you kick her,” Brown asserted.

“You kicked her,” Bond confirmed.

“I told you … ,” Warren muttered, before John Bond loomed toward him, a stocky, commonsensical man, with his voice full of warning.

“Hey,” Bond said. “You want me to say it to you real nice and close?” He was close enough now that Warren could see the faint lines in the pouches under his eyes. “You're going down. You're going down big time. We were the nice guys yesterday. Hey, we didn't really have the script figured out yesterday morning. A few hours of sleep, a bite to eat. I know the script now. You've got big, big problems. You have got to tell your side of the story damn quick.”

“Because you know what happens?” Bond continued, leaning back in his chair. “As a kid, you ever gone to a birthday party where there's lots of kids and not too much cake? If you get through the door a little late, there's no cake for you. It's like that here. Everyone's getting in to tell their story nice and quick. You're sitting on the fence. You haven't been too quick. By the time you wanna get your story out, it may be just too late for you. Hey, there's people that have you kicking her on the other side of the bridge.”

“You got blood on your clothes,” Brown reminded him. “You say, ‘Oh, I got this blood on my clothes 'cause I just happened to be standing so close that it splattered on me.'”

Bond then pulled out a hidden dagger. He brought up something that might unsettle Warren more than being called a rapist or going down big time, and this something he brought up now was very powerful. Call it a boy's first love. “Your girlfriend, your cute little girlfriend that works at the fish and chip shop, you think she's gonna lie to twelve people on a jury, eight or nine lawyers, CHEK-6 television, the newspapers? She's gonna say, ‘Yeah. He came home with blood all over his clothes.'”

“There wasn't blood all over my clothes,” Warren said wanly.

“You've got a problem. Your girlfriend is gonna say she washed your white pants. Hey, do you think this is a magic show? How did I know that you were wearing white pants? How did I know that you were kicking her?”

“I told you guys that last night,” Warren said.

“Everyone's
telling us. You're saying it. They're saying it. Yeah, you're a kicker. Welcome to the party. You kicked. You're going to jail big time.”

“I know what I saw,” Warren said.

“What do you mean ‘what I saw'?” Bruce Brown said, stiffening. Every sentence of the two partners fell forward like a particularly strong and lashing blow.

And still Warren hadn't broken. Yet. “I said everything last night.”

“Well, you don't seem to get the picture here. We've got a whole pile of witnesses who are going to say Warren was part of the fight. Warren went to the other side of the bridge, and then she ends up dead. Reena's a hundred and fifty or sixty pounds. You've got little Kelly who's a hundred and ten pounds. Do you think anybody is gonna—”

“I can't even bench-press eighty pounds,” Warren said.

“I don't give a shit how much you can bench-press!” Bruce Brown screamed. “I can't even bench-press seventy pounds. I don't even care. All I'm saying is you've got a bunch of people in court listening to you saying you never kicked her. However, the physical evidence will show that you have her blood on your pants. Two, three, four people will say they saw you kick her. Then you're gonna say, ‘I just went to the other side and watched Kelly. I didn't do anything.' But because you lied about facts we can prove, do you think the jury is going to believe you didn't have anything to do with the murder? I don't think so. Her pants and panties are missing. She's either been raped—”

“As if I'm going to sexually assault her. I've got a girlfriend.”

“I don't really care,” Brown sneered. “How many pictures of girls do you have in your wallet? You've got twenty of them. What does that say to me? That says to me maybe you like a lot of girls. So you're not just a true-blue, one-girl man, are you?”

“I am.”

“Yeah? I don't think so.”

“You know,” Bond said, leaning back now, folding his arms across his chest, still with alert eyes on the boy, “maybe they'll bring in one of your friends who says, ‘Warren talks a bit kinky. He's a bit dirty.' They'll bring in teachers who say, ‘Yeah, this guy has a bit of an attitude. A bit of a temper.' And then you'll say, ‘Oh my God. I didn't think they'd be saying anything about that.'

“You think a jury is gonna believe you just sat there ten feet away while a murder happened? And all you're saying is, ‘Let's go. Let's go.
Let's go.' You didn't really care about Reena. All you cared about was getting your own skin out of there.”

“Lots of people didn't get out of there. I don't even want to be where I am right now.”

“Well, you are,” Brown said. “So don't try to wish yourself away from it, Warren. You can't. You're here. Deal with it. And deal with it like a man.”

“Lots of people are phoning up here now,” Bond said, practicing the technique of trickery. “And they're saying, ‘I saw two people dragging her into the water.' Deal with that. Hey. With your hair! I kind of like the style, but it's distinctive.”

“It is distinctive,” Warren said.

“They're not going to be getting you and Kelly mixed up. Hey, you're distinctive. You're going down. So this is the time to say, ‘Yeah. I did some shit here.'”

“I might have kicked her on the initial side, okay?”

“I
know
you kicked her. It's not a case of might have. I know. So tell me something I don't know.”

“I never did nothing on the other side of that bridge,” Warren insisted.

Bond then informed Warren about the significance of DNA.

“When we talk about DNA, this stuff is precise shit,” he said. “You didn't pull her in? You didn't brush up against her? You didn't pick up her shoes? You didn't pick up her clothes or backpack?”

“I didn't touch anything of hers.”

“You didn't pick up her pants? You didn't fold her clothes? You didn't touch any single thing of hers when you were over there?”

“Honest. I swear to God.”

“Yeah,” Brown sneered. “You were saying that last night, holding your crucifix and saying, ‘I never kicked her. I like girls. I would never hurt them. I've been brought up to respect women. That's the last thing I would ever do.' And here you are, Warren, right in the middle of a homicide.”

“Hey,” John Bond said, offering Warren another reality to contemplate. “When you have twelve people on a jury, they may convict Kelly, but I know one thing: they're gonna be looking for a guy. Women on the jury want to see guys found guilty, and I think you happen to be the guy in this case. And if there's nothing we can do for you, well, hey. I've
been in the business twenty-plus years. So has my partner. Hey, big stuff. We see a lot of people go down. They get convicted. You've got some problems.”

“I know that,” Warren said, hearing about a jury looking for “the guy in this case.”

“You better deal with it.”

“On the other side, I had nothing to do with that. I didn't even touch her.”

“So why would you go over the bridge?”

“'Cause Kelly asked me because she wanted to go talk to her.”

“And what did she say? She didn't say, ‘Oh, I want to go talk to her.'”

“She said, I want to go talk to her,” Warren insisted, and he began to cry.

“‘I want to go and fucking
deal
with her' is what she said.”

Brown said, “That sort of sounds like a plan to me. Everyone else had left. It's just the two of you, and Kelly says, ‘Hey, Warren. I'm gonna go over there and do a number on her. I need some backup.' Now, if that's what she said and you didn't actually participate in the assault, that's one thing. But if you both said, ‘Let's go over and fucking kick her ass.'”

“Kelly said, ‘I want to find out what really happened with her getting beat up,'” Warren said, weakly.

“She knew what was going on. She was part of the beating. She wasn't at all confused about what the beating was all about.”

“I should have left as soon as she hit her once,” Warren said.

“You should have done a lot of things by then.”

“I should have left even that night. I shouldn't even be here right now.”

“But you are. Don't keep wishing it away, buddy.”

“This isn't a bad dream,” Bond said. “You're not gonna snap out of it. You think it's a dream? Here, go ahead and touch me. I'm here. I'm not something that you can't see. I'm not going anywhere. Hey, you went over the bridge. That's the bottom line. That's what happened. Go ahead. Tell me about the part where she's told to take her shoes off. ‘Get your shoes off, bitch.' Tell me about that part.”

“I already told you guys about that part.”

“I want to hear it again.”

“I'm calling my lawyer.”

“What's your lawyer gonna do?”

“I don't know. It's gonna get me incriminated.”

“You are incriminated! What do you mean
getting incriminated?
You kicked her during this swarming, and then you and Kelly go over and kill her. Possibly rape her.”

“I did not kill anybody. I did not rape her.”

Brown spoke less sternly now, contemplatively, as if a new idea had just occurred to him. “Maybe that's why you're having a tough time with this. Because you sexually assaulted her. Maybe you're disgusted with that.”

“Accuse me of whatever you want, okay?” Warren said.

“There's no accusing of anything,” Bond said. “We're saying we've figured out what happened. Your friends are lining up to say Warren did this. Warren did that. Warren did the kicking. He wore white pants. He went to his girlfriend's place. Blah, blah, blah. But everyone seems to be on the same page: you and Kelly went to the other side of the bridge with Reena, who was alive, and when you both came back, she was dead. Doesn't matter who threw the final punch. It's like two people going out to rob a bank. I may be the one that talks to the teller and my partner may be the guy that drives the car. We both robbed a bank. Hey, both of you guys went over there. I think Kelly was leading you, and said, ‘Hey. I've had it with her. I'm tired of her shooting her yap off. I'm gonna go deal with her. Hey, come along.' You come along as the good guy. I don't think when you went over there you necessarily thought she was gonna get killed. I think you thought she might get punched out a little more.”

“The only thing I thought was that she was going to find out everything that happened from Reena's point of view. And what happened after, after she'd been punching her like that, that shouldn't have happened.”

“Well, did you say
stop?”
Bond inquired.

“When she was dragging her down to the water, I said, at least three times, ‘Stop. Let's go.'”

“And do you think she was dead or alive when that was happening?”

“Probably alive.”

“How far was she dragged?”

“Twenty feet. Thirty feet.”

“By her feet or by her hands?”

“By the feet.”

“So Kelly had one foot, and you had the other foot?”

“No. I didn't even have a foot. I didn't help.”

“Don't forget. DNA, fiber, trace fiber,” Bruce Brown said. “Do you know about the Atlanta child murder case? The guy, Wayne Williams, they found his fibers on his victim's clothing weeks after.”

“I know.”

“You've read about him?”

“No, I know though, even a small bit, just a hair….”

“You've got some problems here.”

“I know,” Warren conceded, at last. “I know.”

“I think your story has got the room to improve in certain parts,” Bond confided with an instinct that Warren was about to stop “calibrating” his story. “You're not being totally clean. But some of it makes sense. Kelly was leading the attack on the other side. You weren't. She was the one that wanted to get things done. When you said, ‘Let's get out of here,' if you would have went and phoned 911, well, all you would have had to say was, ‘There's a girl that's been beat up and she's at the beach.' You wouldn't have even had to give your name. And when you went to court, you know what they'd say? Maybe the guy didn't deal himself in to kill this poor girl. But now what they'll say is two people go over the bridge with Reena, she ends up dead. There's no effort by you to do anything. It doesn't matter if you ended up punching her in the head or you dragged her in the water. The bottom line is, you're gonna be held accountable for—”

“Her murder,” Warren said.

“That's right. There's one spin you can put on this thing right now. You should say, ‘Bruce. John. I haven't been quite up front with you. This is what happened. Hey, this thing went crazy. It went sideways. It happened so quick.'”

“What happened under the bridge,” Warren said softly, “it was crazy.”

“Oh, I know. There's so many people that want to tell us about what happened under the bridge that I'm running out of goddamned tapes. That's not the thing. You're lined up for that. That's a no-brainer.”

“You see, what happened on the other side, Kelly,” Warren paused, “beat her up, okay? I'm calling her. She was puking.” He began to sob. “And choking on blood. And Kelly was….” His words were muffled by sobs. “Kelly might be a small girl, but she is strong.”

“Do you think Kelly's gonna get up in court and say, ‘Yeah. I went
over there and personally punched the shit out of her 'til she was throwing up and puking and then I dragged her in the water and tried to drown her. And Warren, my friend, was saying, ‘Hey, let's get out of here. This isn't right. Let's go.'”