Jury of One

30

Officer Julio Sanchez left the police station at twenty minutes after five in the evening in civilian clothes, blue jeans and a leather jacket, a baseball cap atop his head. Shelly got out of her car and approached him. He seemed interested, looking her over.

“Officer Sanchez.”

“That’s me.”

“My name is Shelly Trotter. I represent-”

His expression went cold.

“-Alex Baniewicz-”

“I know who you are. Didn’t recognize you at first.” He stuffed his hands in his jacket. “You wanna know something? You got a lot of fucking nerve coming to a cop house.”

Shelly stopped a little short of the officer. “I need to speak with you.”

“I’m not saying shit to you, lady.” Sanchez waved at her like she was a gnat and started down the sidewalk. He was being impolite but not angry, not violent. She found that interesting.

A little early to play the card. “Please, Officer.” She tried to keep up with him, not approaching him but staying within earshot. “I’m just doing my job. I just need five minutes.”

“Beat it, lady lawyer.”

She stopped. “Okay,” she called out. She didn’t have weeks and months to play around, and she was quickly tiring of everyone shutting her out. “Maybe I’ll just go talk to Marta.”

He stopped, too, but didn’t turn.

She walked up and stood next to him, facing forward like he was. He wouldn’t respond, wouldn’t look at her, but he wasn’t walking away, either. “I know about your girlfriend. I’ve got photos. And you know what? All I ask is that you talk to me.” Her heart pounded. She was extorting a cop. Maybe that was debatable, as long as the only thing she was seeking was truthful answers from him. She hadn’t researched the legal issue. She didn’t care, in any event.

Sanchez mumbled something in Spanish.

“Threaten me if you’d like,” she said evenly. “You wouldn’t be the first cop to do it.”

“You got a lotta cajones, lady.”

She looked at him. His face was a bright crimson. What options he was considering, she didn’t know.

“I don’t care about your love life, Officer Sanchez. I care about defending my client. Besides, wouldn’t you rather hear my questions now, instead of for the first time on the witness stand?”

That seemed to make some sense to the officer. “Not here,” he said. “Not now.”

“Not here,” she agreed. “But now. There’s a restaurant on Broadway by Rosemont. Be there in fifteen minutes.” She walked away from him, to her car.

Sanchez showed up a few minutes late. Shelly had found a booth near the corner and made eye contact with him.

“I meant what I said,” she told him after he took a seat across from her. “I have no use for those photos if you help me.” It was important that Sanchez knew he had an out. The problem with blackmail was you could never trust the blackmailer. She had to let him know, if he played ball, he could sleep well at night. “If anything happens to me between now and the trial, however, those pictures go to your wife.”

“The hell you talking about? Happen to you?”

“Yeah. Any of your buddies in blue come looking for me, these pictures go to your wife.” She certainly couldn’t rule out Officer Julio Sanchez from the list of men responsible for breaking into her home. All she had seen of the men were their eyes and maybe a small hint of skin on the periphery. She’d certainly assumed they were white, whereas Sanchez’s skin was closer to coffee with cream. And he had a bit of an accent-second-generation Mexican, she guessed, comparing him to many of her clients from CAP-which seemed to further disqualify the officer from suspicion. But if he hadn’t been there, maybe he knew who was. She was covering as many bases as she could.

“Talk to me,” she said, “and live your life however you want.”

“You don’t know shit about my life.”

That was true. But Sanchez had agreed to meet with her, which meant that his wife didn’t know about Marta.

“We’re getting a divorce,” he said. “You happy?”

Interesting, that he would explain himself. Interesting, really, that he would have agreed to talk with Shelly at all. Just because she had some incriminating photos? She sensed that it must be more than that. Or maybe there was some rancor in the legal proceedings and she was hitting a sore spot.

“You got a wire under there?” he asked. “You recording this?”

“No,” she answered. “That would be illegal.” Law enforcement could wiretap, but private citizens could not record a conversation without the consent of the other party. “Even if I wanted to break the law, I’d never be able to use it in court.”

Sanchez seemed to already know the law in this area. “If he says I knew him, he’s full of shit.” He tapped the counter with two fingers. “Didn’t have a single conversation with the guy.”

He was talking about Alex. This was how he was introducing the topic, by denying that he knew Alex. His statement was loaded with inferences that Shelly couldn’t grasp.

More significantly, Sanchez was showing his hand here. This was a sensitive point for him; he seemed to be making a point of distancing himself from Alex and Miroballi. There was a reason for that.

Sanchez was growing impatient with Shelly’s silence. “Is that what he’s saying? That punk is saying I was working with him?”

Actually, Alex had said exactly what Sanchez was saying-they didn’t know each other. But she didn’t need to tell Sanchez that.

“Because he’s a fucking liar,” said the officer. “If he said that, he’s a liar.”

“Maybe he is a liar.” She smiled helplessly, opened her hands. “You know how it is with these clients, Officer. They lie all the time. That’s why I’m here. I don’t want to hear it from Alex. I want to hear it from you. In your own words, not his, tell me what role you played.”

“‘Role,’” he snorted. “I didn’t have a role. I didn’t even know what they were doing, those two.”

That point, Shelly figured, was debatable. The problem was that Sanchez had to say he had no idea, because knowledge of illegal activity by one’s partner obviously had to be reported. This was the jam Sanchez was in, guilt by partnership.

“Ray was an okay guy,” he said as he looked out the window of the diner. He was a bit odd-looking, a thin man with a head that was disproportionately large, a skinny neck cropping up from an oversized leather jacket, a baseball cap that seemed too big. “I think he just got too full of ideas.”

Coffee arrived, and he smiled at the waitress. Shelly had the thought that perhaps Julio Sanchez was a decent sort, an honest cop partnered with a different sort of officer. Just because he smiled at the waitress? No, you couldn’t judge someone so simply, but still, it was the small gestures that said so much.

“The Cannibals,” he continued. “They run A-Jar. You know A-Jar?”

Shelly nodded. The Eduardo Andujar housing project on the west side, he meant. He was referring to the Latino gang that controlled A-Jar. The Columbus Street Cannibals took their name from a speech delivered by the former mayor about ten years ago, who referred to gangs on the west side as “cannibals” who preyed on their own.

What was Sanchez talking about?

He put his hands around the coffee mug. “He was having a tough go of it,” he said. He was jumping out of order, from Shelly’s perspective. She was more curious about what he’d just said about the Cannibals and A-Jar. “The last few months. He’d been moody. Edgy.”

It was as if he were talking to himself. She wanted to go back to the Cannibals and A-Jar. But she would let him dictate the topics for now. “When did that start?” she asked. “The moodiness and agitation?”

His eyes glazed over. He was playing images over in his head. “Christmas. Before that. The holiday season, I guess.”

Shelly felt a surge in her chest. Alex was nabbed by the feds on the fifth of December.

“I asked him what was wrong. Ray, he just says he’s got family problems. I figure, he’s arguing with the wife or something. One of his kids is acting up. Or maybe he’s sick. Or maybe the department’s coming down on him. How do I know?”

“Tell me what you did know.”

Sanchez coughed, brought a fist to his mouth. He didn’t look well. Shelly had no idea if Sanchez was a good cop or not, but if he was, he might become an innocent victim, forever tainted by association with a cop who would be accused, postmortem, of corruption.

“He was stressed out, I guess.” Sanchez sighed. It occurred to Shelly that Sanchez had probably already talked to Internal Affairs, which meant he was free to tell her whatever he told them. The question was whether he’d go further. “He kept saying, ‘I’m a good cop, right? I don’t live in a mansion. I don’t drive a Ferrari.’”

“Did you know why he was saying those things?”

He shook his head no. “I figured someone was looking at him. But he wouldn’t say.”

“What makes the Christmas season stand out in your mind?”

Sanchez nodded to himself. “Ray always liked Christmas. He dressed up as Santa and all that for his kids. Said it was getting harder to fool the little one.”

Shelly nodded, prodding him along, trying to ignore the sudden discomfort. It was easier to think of Miroballi as pure evil, not a doting father.

“But last year,” Sanchez continued, “he kept saying, ‘Merry fucking Christmas.’”

Good. This was good.

“At first, I thought he was sick,” he said.

He had mentioned that earlier. “Sick? Why?”

The officer cocked his head. “Dropped off a urine sample once. Wasn’t his normal doctor. We have the same one. Lot of us go to the same guy. Y’know, same medical plan.” He motioned off in the distance. “One day, he has me pull over by this medical center. Says he needs to drop off a urine sample. Had it in a paper bag.”

A urine sample made her think of drugs. She got the name of the center from Sanchez and would follow up. “He didn’t say anything else?”

“Nope. I was a little worried about that.”

“You guys are drug-tested, right?”

“In the station, though. Not some center. It’s not on our medical, that’s the thing that got me. He’d have to pay out of his own pocket.”

Now she would definitely follow up, though she realized it would be exceedingly difficult to get information from any medical center on a patient.

Was Miroballi taking drugs himself?

“What I really think it was-I think he had a thing with his brothers. He was the baby. I think he thought he was going to be stuck in patrol his whole life. His oldest brother’s a lew, Reggie’s second grade, and Ray’s thinking he’s always gonna be in uniform. It bothered him.”

“But Ray was the youngest,” she said. “Of course he was lower rank.”

“Yeah, but they moved up faster. He seemed to think he wasn’t on the way up. I think that’s what it was with the Cans.”

The mention of the gang again. He was saying it as if Shelly knew what he was talking about. He was assuming that Alex had told her. She had to let him keep believing that, while she extracted the information from him. Was he saying that Ray was bitter and turned corrupt as a way of rebelling? He was getting into drug dealing with the C-Street Cannibals?

With Alex’s help?

“I think he just wanted to talk to him,” Sanchez said, looking at Shelly. “I think he thought Alex was fucking with him or something.”

Now he was talking about the shooting. God, he was all over the place. She could see that Sanchez was pained, maybe with guilt, over what had happened. He probably had been asking himself the same questions about his partner, with a slight variation, that Shelly had asked herself about Alex. Maybe if he had talked to Ray more. Maybe if he’d gotten Ray to open up. Shelly had to use blackmail to get Sanchez to talk, but once he started, he was spouting information.

“Ray radioed in that Alex had drugs on him,” she said. “Did you see that?”

“I didn’t, no. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t carrying. I think he just wanted to talk to him. He was scared, I think.”

“Ray was scared.”

Sanchez nodded. “I think he thought Alex had given him up.”

Shelly nodded. It was as if a bomb had detonated in her stomach. These were the words she had wanted so desperately to hear. Miroballi thought Alex had flipped on him. Would Sanchez say this in court?

“Ray said that?” she asked cautiously. “That Alex had given him up?”

Sanchez shook his head no. “He never said the words. But that’s always the fear in something like this. We’re talking about the Cans here. You know them?”

She did. A few of her clients, over the years, had been Cannibal recruits. Young kids, who often were used for the roughest stuff for the very reason that they were juveniles and couldn’t be prosecuted to the same extent as older kids. And all she had ever done for these kids was keep them in school. It was putting a bandage on a gaping wound.

“I think Ray just wanted to talk to Alex,” he said again.

“He was afraid of the Cannibals,” said Shelly. Not the federal government?

Sanchez blurted out a laugh. “He thinks with one big bust, he’s going to make detective. He wants to be this cowboy.” Sanchez looked at her. “I didn’t know the details. Ray said he was working on it. But then, he starts thinking maybe this kid-Alex-he’s getting smart. Too smart. That’s always the fear with C.I.’s. They’re playing both sides, right?”

Shelly replayed the words she had just heard. She felt as if she were sliding down a hill she had just climbed.

C.I., he had said. Did he mean-

“I told him to register him,” said the officer. “But Ray, he wanted the whole thing to be a big surprise.”

“Alex was Ray Miroballi’s snitch,” she said. She tried to say it as fact, not a question. “An unregistered confidential informant.”

“And not a very good one, to hear Ray.” Sanchez looked out the window again. “Yeah, they met a couple times at a park. It was all secretive. Alex was real careful about being seen. Ray would be off-duty so you couldn’t tell he was a cop. I just watched from a car. Y’know, watching his back.”

“Alex was helping Ray take down the Cannibals,” Shelly said, unable to get past that point.

Sanchez looked at her; it seemed to dawn on him that Shelly might be learning this for the first time. “This is news to you?”

She raised her hands. “No, I just want to hear it in your words.”

Sanchez raised a finger. “One word from Alex to the Cannibals, and Ray’s toast,” he said. “One word. Those guys have killed a cop over less.”

She was suddenly claustrophobic in her seat. She wanted to leave and run. Run to another state, another country. Run to her client, her son, and grab him by the hair.

“Just to be clear,” she said, trying as best as possible to pretend that she hadn’t been blindsided here. “Officer Miroballi was planning a drug bust on the Cannibals’ turf. Something big. Alex was giving him information. They would meet at a park”-this was the one thing Shelly already knew-“and you were there, too, watching from your car.” She paused. “Miroballi thought Alex had switched sides and given him up to the Cans. And you think that’s what Ray was doing that night. Checking on his snitch.”

Sanchez nodded. “Ray said he was a smart kid,” he said. “I mean, he could be telling Ray one thing and telling the Cans another. Y’know, playing both sides off the other. How hard would that be?”

Shelly felt the air deflate from her lungs. Not hard at all, she thought to herself. Not hard at all.