Jury of One

57

“This is Shelly,” she said into the phone.

“Shelly. Jerod Romero.”

“Hello, Jerod. Did you get the trial subpoena?”

“Sure did, Counselor.”

Shelly was in the conference room where she had spread out. She welcomed the chance to stand and stretch her legs. Her back and neck ached. She felt out of sorts physically and mentally. She had gone weeks without physical exercise, where normally she rarely went a day without breaking a sweat.

“Do you really plan on calling me?” Romero asked. “You’re calling Peters, too?”

She closed her eyes. Surely, this couldn’t be a surprise to the federal prosecutor. Which meant he had a different reason for calling. “You were the ones who grabbed Alex,” she said.

“I’m sure this guy Morphew will stipulate that we picked up Alex and flipped him,” he said.

Morphew. So Dan Morphew had contacted Romero. She would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation.

“I guess I was hoping for a little more detail than that,” she tried.

“Alex and Miroballi met a couple of times,” Romero said. “That’s about all I can tell you. That’s all we ever knew, besides what your client told us. I told you before-we hadn’t built a case against Miroballi.”

This wasn’t going well. Romero could add a little to that story if he were feeling generous. She thought she had left things with him on a positive note.

“Only, Ms. Trotter”-the tone in Romero’s voice, along with the formality, signaled a bit of tension in his attitude-“it seems that the county attorney has a different take on those meetings.”

“They’re going to say what they have to say.”

“Well, I was certainly interested,” said Romero. “Alex was an unregistered confidential informant working for Miroballi?”

“That’s not true.”

“No?” Romero cleared his throat.

“Surely,” Shelly said, “you don’t know that to be true.”

“I don’t know it to be untrue, either. And now I’m beginning to see why you wanted to get him immunity from us.”

“Jerod-”

“Your client lied to federal agents, Counselor. He made up a song-and-dance when we caught him with drugs. We spent time and resources on that kid. We redirected manpower on that kid. Your boy had us chasing our tails.”

“No,” she insisted. “That’s a load of crap. You don’t know that to be true.”

“I told you then, I’ll tell you now,” said Romero. “I knew that kid wasn’t being straight with us. The moment we grabbed him, suddenly there’s no more conversations with Miroballi. The pipeline goes dry, the moment we catch him.”

“That’s because Miroballi found out.” Now she was giving her closing argument.

“Well-that’s fine, Shelly. That’s your argument. Go with it and good luck. You ask me, was this kid being strong-armed to sell drugs for Miroballi, or was he Miroballi’s informant? I tell you, could be either one. You put me on the stand, I’ll say that. Peters will, too. These F.B.I. agents, Shelly, they don’t like being lied to.”

“Nobody was being lied to,” she responded, realizing as she did that Jerod Romero had hung up the phone.

“Well, great,” she said, holding the phone at her side. She would cross those witnesses off her list. It wasn’t a major loss. And thank God that she had gotten that immunity for Alex-his silence prior to the F.B.I. bust in exchange for a walk. That had been Ronnie’s idea, actually, she recalled, one of the few contributions the kid had actually made. Shelly was confident that the immunity agreement would hold, despite Jerod Romero’s bluster. He was free of the federal government’s reach. But if Romero’s reaction to Morphew’s argument were any indication, Alex Baniewicz might have a shade more trouble with the state’s case.