Jury of One

48

“This isn’t the kind of thing we should talk about,” said Joel Lightner. They were standing on the porch of Ronnie Masters’s home just after noon. Joel removed a ring of keys from his pocket and tried a couple of them. “They don’t have an alarm, now you’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” Shelly said. She looked up and down the street.

The door opened. Shelly walked into the Masters house and moved to the couch. She reached under it and opened the book of photos she had seen Ronnie place there on one of her visits. She went through them quickly and removed two photos of them last winter, when Alex was holding up his daughter, Angela, showing her a snowman that Ronnie had made.

She went to the closet in the hallway and fished through the hangers. She went to Ronnie’s room and went through everything. She rifled through Ronnie’s drawers, went through his closet, looked under his bed, and almost killed herself tripping over a basketball before she made her way out of his room. “Stupid ball,” she muttered, thinking of the open gym from which Alex had left on the night of the shooting. She was ready to blame the City Athletic Club for holding an open gym that set this whole series of events in motion. She wanted to blame the inventor of the automobile, because it allowed Alex to travel to the west side and get dope from a gangbanger. She was ready to blame everything back to the day he was born-

Ouch.

She moved quickly to Alex’s room and gave it the same workover, going through everything, even the laundry that still remained in a ball on the floor of his closet. She stopped for a moment, but only a moment, to see the photograph taped on a mirror on the wall, a small Polaroid of Shelly that Alex had taken one day along the lake when they were walking. She remembered that day. It was winter. He had stopped behind her pretending to tie his shoe, and when she finally turned around impatiently, he hit her in the chest with a snowball.

“Okay, let’s go,” said Joel, who was eager to leave. They had been inside less than thirty minutes. He wasted no time getting back to the car they had parked down the street and speeding away.

“You want my opinion?” Joel asked. “Go with self-defense. Your client’s not going to back up anything else.”

“Probably not. But I’m not letting him rope me in anymore.”

“I wish I could be more helpful. I can’t find squat on Miroballi. Nothing funny on his finances. Nothing about drugs. Nothing about being sick. I couldn’t get the results of his urine drop at that clinic, but even if I could-what would it prove? We find cocaine in his system, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Nothing on Miroballi, nothing on Sanchez,” Shelly summarized. “I have no way of proving that Miroballi had figured out about Alex talking to the feds. I have zilch. Except the word of my client, on trial for murder.”

She realized that she was giving herself a pep talk, trying to convince herself of the reasonableness of the theory she was formulating.

“But like I said, Shelly, your client’s not going to go for this.”

“So I’ll prove it. With or without him.” She looked at the photos of Ronnie and Alex, mugging for the camera, and slipped them back into her bag.