Jury of One

60

The witness was escorted into the courtroom by armed sheriff’s deputies. That was interesting. Shelly had thought that Morphew might ask for a recess and have the witness brought in outside the presence of the jury. Dress him up, remove the shackles and armed escorts, then bring in the jury. But Morphew didn’t ask for the jury to be excused. He let them see the deputies haul in this criminal.

Yeah, she probably would have done the same thing, now that she thought about it. What better way to taint a defendant than to show, in very real terms, that his associates are criminals?

Eddie Todavia was wearing a blue jumpsuit. She didn’t know the different colors the Department of Corrections used for inmates, but she knew that he was not placed in general population. He still had the shaved head but it looked like he’d had a few days’ growth, which made his head look dirty. Still the goatee. He wasn’t a big guy but he had a menacing stare, a flat inflection to his voice that amplified the effect. A kid like that knew how to look tough. It was part of his job description.

He said his name for the record. Morphew fronted the arrest and plea agreement, the reason Todavia was here. The questions and answers provided ample detail. He was caught selling ten grams of crack cocaine to a sixteen-year-old boy on Green Street, south of Venice Avenue. City police officers and sheriff’s deputies had converged on him. Todavia showed no hint of remorse or hesitation in describing these things. It wasn’t pride in his actions but he probably saw something heroic in his arrest. She had seen that before in the kids she helped. There was a drama to the whole thing that captivated them. A badge of pride, to some of them.

He turned a little more reticent when he testified about the plea agreement. That, most definitely, was not a source of pride. Cut to the bone, this kid had gotten scared and narced.

“You’re not happy to be here, are you, sir?” Morphew asked. He was at the podium placed between the defense and prosecution tables, back just enough so that Shelly’s view of the jury was not blocked.

“Nope.”

“You understand that if you don’t tell the truth here, your plea agreement will be ripped up.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“If you don’t tell the truth, you could go away for ten years.”

He nodded.

“You have to give an audible answer, sir. You have to answer out loud.”

He cocked his head. “Yeah, I got that.”

Morphew pointed at Alex. “Do you know the defendant, Alex Baniewicz?”

“Yeah, I know him.”

“Stipulate to identification,” Shelly called out in a bored tone. She didn’t need Alex to stand up and be singled out.

“Thank you, Counsel.” The judge wrote something down.

“How is it that you know the defendant?”

“He’s a customer of mine.” They looked at each other. “I sold him coke.”

“Cocaine.”

“Right.”

“When?”

“When,” Todavia said, as if the question annoyed him. He opened a hand. “Like, ’bout January, maybe, last year.”

“January of this year? Or of 2003?”

“2003.”

That was about right. It was just after Alex’s daughter had been born, in late 2002, that Alex had decided to supplement his income through illicit means.

“How did this come about? How was it he came to you?”

“We go back. We went to high school together for a while.”

“What school?”

“Southside. I’s livin’ with my mom then. Now I’m on my own.” He shifted in his seat. He was slouching, going out of his way to seem unaffected, but it was hard to do so in the unforgiving wooden chair. “Alex comes to me, see. He says he needs some blow. He says he wants a hundo.”

This was not hearsay, technically, because hearsay wasn’t hearsay when it came from the mouth of the accused. State law exempted the admissions of a defendant from the hearsay rule, and that rule had been extended by the courts to apply to basically any word uttered by the defendant. In any event, she was likely to admit all of this anyway, when Alex took the stand.

“A hundred grams,” the witness elaborated at the prosecutor’s prompting.

“Did you give him a hundred?”

“No, man. Didn’t have no credit with me, know what I’m sayin’? I gave him fifty. He gave me enough for about half that and he owed me.” He nodded. “Boy paid me, though. Few months later. We started an arrangement.”

“Tell us about the arrangement?”

He threw up a hand. “Boy wanted it all at once. I told him, keep it slow. But he wanted it all at once. I don’t think”-he laughed-“don’t think he liked comin’ out to my ’hood.”

She thought of moving to strike the testimony but kept quiet.

“So he would purchase one hundred grams of cocaine at a time from you?”

“Right. ’Bout every six months, he pays me for what he couldn’t at first.”

“So how often did he purchase this amount from you?”

“Twice, man, is all. First time, like I say, it was fifty then another fifty. Second time, I give him all hundred at once.”

And he was caught with 74 grams of it. The cops had never found it, in their searches of his house and automobile, because it was sitting in a federal warehouse.

“When was that?”

“September or October, seems like. Last year.”

That was also accurate. It was in November of last year that the feds caught Alex.

“Did you and the defendant ever talk about cops? Law enforcement?”

“Once.”

“Where was this? When?”

Todavia rolled his neck. He was doing his best to look bored. He pursed his lips and looked up at the ceiling. “January,” he said. “Six months ago.”

Shelly froze. This was new, too. She looked at the state’s disclosure of Todavia as a witness. It said that the witness would testify about Alex’s relationship as a confidential informant with Miroballi. She had no basis for objecting to this, other than her general objection that the witness was disclosed too late, which she had made again before the witness even entered the room.

“January of this year?”

“Yeah. He comes to my house. Says he’s got a problem.”

“Judge.” Shelly got to her feet, which she normally preferred not to do unless she wanted to be noticed, but she had an extended objection. “I don’t want to keep interrupting. I want to make a running objection to the hearsay.”

“Fine, Counsel. That will be overruled. Mr. Morphew?”

“What was the problem, Mr. Todavia?” Morphew asked.

“He says he’s got a cop on his tail,” said the witness. “Says this cop is tryin’ to put a hole in the Cans.”

“The Cans. The Columbus Street Cannibals?”

“Right.”

“That’s a street gang.”

“Right.”

“Are you a member?”

“Yeah, I’m C-Street.”

“So go on, Mr. Todavia.”

“Man, he says he’s got this cop lookin’ to be a hero, y’know? Says this cop is puttin’ a pinch on him.”

“Explain that to the jury, Mr. Todavia. A ‘pinch,’ if you would.”

Shelly looked at the jury. She hadn’t been watching them, entranced as she was by the witness’s testimony. That had been a mistake. Always watch the jury with one eye. Theirs was the only opinion that counted.

Hard to read them, as always. Other than the high points, it was hard to know what was going through someone’s head. She could say this much-they did not appear to be on the verge of inviting this kid over for tea. They saw him for what he was. Part of the problem. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t believable.

“He says to me, this cop has busted him. I say, okay, then take the hit and keep your mouth shut. But Alex, he says no, no. ‘This guy wants me to help him,’ he says.”

“He’s lying,” Alex said to her, his volume somewhat above a whisper. She saw two of the jurors turn toward him.

“He says this cop is looking to take down the Cannibals. Y’know, make a name for hisself. He says this cop wants him to be, like, an informant or some such.”

Morphew put out his hands as if framing the perfect summation. In doing so, he was highlighting the importance of the question. “The defendant told you that a certain police officer was trying to get his help to make a drug bust against the Cannibals?”

“That’s what I’m sayin’. He was all upset and shit. He kept sayin’, ‘What am I gonna do? The guy’s got me pinched.’”

“What did you say to him?”

“Told him to keep his mouth shut. Don’t do it. Take the hit.”

“And can you tell the jury what the defendant said to that, Mr. Todavia?”

Shelly steeled herself. Morphew had told Todavia to “tell the jury” for a reason. It was a device to get the jury’s attention; this was something he wanted to be sure they heard. She could guess what was coming at this point, more or less.

Todavia wet his lips and looked at the jury. “This boy Alex, he says to me, ‘I gotta get rid of this cop.’”

The gallery reacted to that. The jury did, too, scribbling in their notebooks.

“‘I gotta get rid of this cop.’ That’s what the defendant said?” Morphew asked.

Shelly didn’t write the words down, because she didn’t want the jury to see her giving them any credence whatsoever. She rolled her eyes, in fact, but she knew the jury wasn’t watching her. She noticed Alex was sweating.

“It’s okay,” she whispered to him, and nodded for emphasis. She was hoping to convince herself as much as him.