Jury of One

34

Shelly stood at the window and pressed her face against the glass. The sun shone brightly on the street below, on the pedestrians moving along the sidewalks. It was a little early for most people to be heading home for the day. Gentry Street was a main thoroughfare for the commuters, as the train station was just to the west and south, at the edge of the commercial district.

The alley where the shooting took place was in Shelly’s view to the north, across the street. As it was perpendicular to the street, she could not see all the way through the alley to the street over to the east-Donnelly Street. She estimated that she could see about fifteen feet down the alley before the view was obscured.

“There,” she said into the cell phone as she saw her private investigator, Joel Lightner, come into view in the alley. Joel stopped in his tracks and looked up in the general direction of where Shelly was standing, in the nineteenth-floor office.

Shelly turned to the woman next to her, Monica Stoddard. “Do you see him?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay, Joel. Thanks. Come on up.” Shelly closed the cell phone. “He’ll just be a minute,” she said to the woman.

“What are you guys doing?”

“We need to know how far you could see into the alley. Joel is going to measure the distance from where you could see him to the sidewalk. That gives us an idea of how far into the alley everyone was.”

Monica Stoddard nodded absently, looked off toward the window. From the look on her face, Shelly guessed what she was thinking-that they were planning a cross-examination of this woman who had witnessed the shooting of Officer Ray Miroballi.

“It’s just standard,” Shelly said. “We weren’t there, so we need to know everything we can.”

“Well, I saw what I saw.” The woman shook her head as if to empty it of those thoughts. “I didn’t exactly enjoy seeing it, but I saw it.”

Shelly nodded and gestured toward the drawings in the corner of the room. Monica Stoddard, age thirty-three, was an architect with a small development company. The sketches Shelly saw were plans for construction of what appeared to be residential housing.

“You know the cemetery up north?” asked Ms. Stoddard. “We’re buying half the block north of it, on Kesseller. You know the area?”

“I live in that area. About five blocks north, by the lake.”

“Oh, sure.” The woman smiled. She was taller than the average woman, gangly, in fact, with the look of a former athlete. Or maybe Shelly was taking that from the plaque on her wall, which showed that she was a Division III pole vaulter in college. Shelly couldn’t even imagine leaping so high in the air with an elastic pole. “We’re looking at a lot of projects up there.”

“I’m sure.” Shelly had watched with a sense of dread as the neighborhoods around her had slowly gentrified, as old rental units had been bought up, knocked down, and replaced with expensive condominiums or single-family homes with price tags that were in the high six figures. She certainly had nothing against white people, who predominantly purchased these homes, but she mourned the loss of character to the neighborhoods as the yuppies invaded northward. Small Korean grocers were replaced with state-of-the-art, Internet-ready coffeehouses. Small Mexican diners moved out in favor of fast-food establishments.

And this was to say nothing of the fact that her rent continued to rise every year.

Joel Lightner appeared in the doorway and knocked. He introduced himself to Monica Stoddard and set down his briefcase. “Nineteen feet,” he told Shelly.

They all sat and discussed architecture for a moment. Shelly sensed that this woman was intelligent enough not to be snowed by flattery, and principled enough not to be persuaded about her account of the scene. Yet there was nothing wrong with putting the woman at ease, and there was no easier way to do so than by talking about her. Joel, more than Shelly, seemed to have a knack for the game. He spent much of his life retrieving information from people under circumstances that ranged from adversarial to shady to something other than friendly, at best. Joel skillfully segued into the facts at hand, and Shelly noticed that the woman was speaking to Joel, not her.

“I was walking by the window,” said Ms. Stoddard. “The lights were flashing. It catches the eye.”

“Sure.” Joel flipped open a notepad. “You mind? I’m no good relying on my memory.”

“That’s fine. So I looked down and I saw a boy running.”

“How would you describe him?”

She shrugged. “I saw a boy in a coat and a cap. And holding a gym bag. He was running down the street. There was a cop chasing after him. The kid had a pretty good lead. He was fast.” She looked at the window. “He went into the alley and ran out of my sight. The cop turned into the alley and stopped, where I could see him. Just a few steps, I guess. He was talking to him, it seemed like.” She tucked her hair behind her ear as she concentrated. “I mean, I couldn’t hear them, but it seemed like he was talking to him. Then it seemed like he moved closer.” She looked at Joel, then at Shelly. “It wasn’t well lit. I could only see so much.”

“No, that’s fine,” said Joel. “Can you tell us what happened next?”

“What happened next was-the reason you’re here.” She held on to that memory for a moment. Most people in their lives never saw such a thing up close. At least this woman had been spared the noise, Shelly thought, the sickening sound of a flying object penetrating the skull. Well, who was she to talk? She had never seen such a thing, either. What she did know, from years of karate, was the sound of fighting-the sound of fist to skin, foot to skull-and it was nothing like the pows and ka-blams on television.

Having gone through the entire scene once, Joel went back and covered details. Did she see the officer draw his weapon? The woman thought not but couldn’t be sure one way or the other. “The best I remember, he had a walkie-talkie in his hand, but I don’t know about the other hand.” Did she see Alex with a weapon? “I didn’t see one,” she said, “but then again, he had a bag and pockets in his coat, so it’s possible.”

Lightner asked about Miroballi’s partner, Sanchez. “He went back to the car, at first,” said Stoddard. “I wasn’t really watching him, to be honest. What was happening with the other cop and the kid sort of held my attention.” She drew a line in the air from one point to the other. “He came jogging down afterward and found his partner. He was holding him and talking into his radio. I assumed he was calling for backup, or whatever they say. An ambulance.”

Shelly regarded this witness as relatively neutral, and she wasn’t sure how to react to that. Positively, she supposed. This woman used the term “cop,” which may have been a reflection of the fact that the people interviewing her were on the other side, but it could be that she was no friend of the city’s finest, which was fine with Shelly. In any event, she did not appear to have been cowed into a story.

“Just to confirm,” Shelly said, taking a role in the conversation for the first time, “you didn’t see who shot the officer.”

Monica Stoddard looked at Shelly. “No, I guess not.”

The police report had indicated that Monica Stoddard had seen Alex shoot the cop. So this was different. She was saying she saw Miroballi shot, but she couldn’t say who did it, because the shooter was out of her line of sight. Shelly had seen that before, a cop opting for a favorable spin on the events.

This woman seemed to appreciate the purpose of the question for the first time. She had apparently assumed-everyone would assume, probably-that Alex had fired the shot. Shelly was not prepared to make that assumption, and she wasn’t sure why not. What kind of a scheme could she concoct in which Alex was not the shooter? And if Alex hadn’t pulled the trigger, why did he admit to doing so? It was one thing to deny guilt in the face of overwhelming evidence-something Shelly had seen often with her young clients-but how many innocent people claimed to be guilty?

“No eyewitnesses,” said Joel as he and Shelly left the building and walked across the street to the alley. “Unless that homeless guy saw something. And that will be marginal at best.”

Joel opened his briefcase and removed a tape measure. He marked off nineteen feet, three inches and stood facing west, as Officer Miroballi would have that night. They were going to reenact the scene again, as best they could.

Shelly sighed. “Distances and measurements are nice, but I wish we could fill in the details.”

“I’ll say again, no eyewitnesses.” There was a twinkle in Joel’s eye. “So you can fill in the details, Counselor.”