Jury of One

74

The judge allowed Shelly to take the back elevator down to the holding cells, so she was able to avoid the feasting reporters outside the courtroom. Alex Baniewicz was lying on the thin cushion in the holding cell. He bounced up when he saw her.

“How are you?” He reached her and embraced her.

“I’ve got my sea legs back,” she said, patting his back. She pushed him back so she was holding his shoulders at arm’s length.

“Why you?” she asked. “Why you and not Ronnie? Coming to see me at the law school? Confronting Miroballi? Why did Ronnie send you?”

His expression softened, as if in embarrassment. She held firm on his shoulders.

“Give me one straight answer this entire case, Alex. You owe me that.”

“Ronnie didn’t send me.” Alex nodded off in the distance. “He had no idea.”

“Why you, then?”

He focused on her, gave her a look as if the answer were obvious. “Money, Shelly. I wanted money.”

She dropped her hands from his shoulder.

“Think about it,” he said. “Ronnie and I look up your birth records. We find out that his real mother is the daughter of the governor. I figured you would probably do a lot to keep Ronnie a secret.”

She put her hands on her hips. “You were going to-blackmail me?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Ronnie would’ve killed me if he knew. But, yeah.”

“So why didn’t you?”

He smiled. “Because I liked you. I went in there with a plan, I admit it, but then I got to know you. You were an okay chick.”

“I was an okay chick.”

“And then you told me about-that incident. It was about a year ago.”

“Mother’s Day, last year, to be exact,” she said.

“Oh, yeah, right.” He pointed at her. “Right. So anyway. After that, I don’t know-”

“After that, you found an even better blackmail target,” she finished.

He shrugged. “Yeah. That was part of it. Yeah. I admit it. But also-y’know, I felt like this guy should probably answer for what he did.”

“So you used that same investigator who found me to find Miroballi.”

“Yeah. This guy goes through the police records, whatever. He comes up with the name of a witness. Dina. Dina Patriannis.”

A shiver ran through her. Dina. Yes. Shelly remembered how she envied that young woman, her glamour and grace, the way a young girl romanticizes someone older.

“She knew about the whole thing, Shelly. She knew Ray Miroballi. She knew he had gone into that bedroom. When the cops came to her, she gave them his name. That’s how the cops knew about Miroballi.”

“I can imagine how the police reacted to that,” Shelly mumbled.

“Right,” Alex said. “Sure. He had two brothers on the force. They covered the whole thing up. They got you to drop it. They told Dina that you had dropped the charges.”

“God.” Shelly closed her eyes. That all made sense now. And Shelly had complicated things back then by giving Dina and her friends a fake name and age. She had given the police plenty of fodder to force her into dropping the case.

“So I went to Miroballi, after I knew all of this,” Alex continued. “I showed him what I had. The report you had filed with the cops. I even gave him some of Ronnie’s blood. I told him it was mine. I told him I was his son. I told him, test it if you want.”

And he had, Shelly now realized. That was the reason Miroballi had gone to a medical center, not the one covered by his health care. He had told his partner, Sanchez, that it was a urinalysis. But it was a blood test. He was checking his blood against the blood given to him by Alex. It was a paternity test, not a urine drop.

“What you didn’t know,” said Shelly, “was that the feds were searching around for dirty cops. So when they found you in these clandestine meetings with Miroballi, they followed you and nabbed you. They got in your face about Miroballi and drugs, and you gave them what they wanted.”

He nodded along with her narrative. “I was feeling pretty tough, y’know? I’ve got this cop who seems pretty worried about me. I thought I was the big man. Then, the next thing you know, I got federal agents breathing down my neck, and I’m shaking in my boots. What was I supposed to do? They caught me with drugs. And they were so damn sure that I was selling for Miroballi. So I let ’em believe it. Hell, if they were so sure about him, I figured maybe he was selling drugs. I was hoping maybe they’d come up with something against him without using me. I was just buying time.”

“A dangerous game,” she said.

“Dangerous, yeah. But what am I supposed to do? And I couldn’t exactly go back to Miroballi at that point and demand cash from him. They were watching. And I had told them that he was the one who contacted me.”

“They thought you were working for Miroballi,” Shelly summarized. “Turns out, you were blackmailing him.”

“Yeah.”

“And Miroballi didn’t know about Ronnie?”

Alex shook his head no. “He didn’t know there was a Ronnie. He thought I was his son.”

She accepted that. It made sense. Alex had done the same thing with Shelly, assuming Ronnie’s identity. “Ronnie knew nothing about this?”

He blew out a sigh. “Ronnie knew I had met you that first time. He thought that was the only time. He thought I just went because I was curious. And he had no idea I was talking to Miroballi. He had no idea I found out who his father was. You know him, Shelly-he would’ve kicked my ass. But after I was caught by the feds, I told Ronnie. My back was against the wall. So I told him everything. After that, he followed me around like a puppy. He was worried that Miroballi might come after me. Which is exactly what he did.” Alex pointed to his head. “That boy, he’s got a good brain on him. He was exactly right about that.”

She tried to digest all of this. She walked along the cell. “Let me ask you the sixty-four thousand dollar question.”

He raised his eyebrows. A kid his age probably didn’t even understand the reference.

“Why, Alex-why in God’s name didn’t you tell me all of this?” She waved her arm. “All of this misdirection and deception? I’m looking at Ronnie. I’m looking at Todavia. I’m thinking about Miroballi and drugs. I understand why you bluffed the F.B.I. But why me?”

“Because you would have used it,” he said easily.

“Because-” She stared at him. “What?”

“You would have had to tell everyone you were raped.”

She drew back. “You were trying to protect me?”

He raised his shoulders. His eyes suddenly filled. “All the time I’ve known you, Shelly, you only asked me for one thing. You asked me to keep one secret. After everything else I had done, I thought it was one thing I could do right.”

She put a hand on her forehead. “Alex, I think I would have made an exception where you were looking at a death sentence.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. It sounds ridiculous.” He looked out through the bars. “This whole thing was my fault, Shelly. I was the one who did all of this. I got caught up in drugs because of that stupid thing with Todavia’s car. I got greedy looking to blackmail you, and then Miroballi. I got caught by the F.B.I. I just kept screwing things up because I was doing the wrong thing. I thought I could get this one thing right. I felt like I owed you.” He looked at her.

“I guess.” She drew a circle on the floor with her shoe.

“Besides,” he added, “we had a pretty good defense, right? The F.B.I. thought Miroballi was making me sell drugs. You did, too. Why couldn’t we convince a jury of that? I thought we could.”

“Okay.”

“Any other questions, Ms. Trotter?”

She scratched her head. “I can barely process what you’ve already told me.”

“Then I have a question for you,” he said.

“Shoot.” She winced at the pun.

“You asked me the other day about me hurting my knee that night. How’d you know about that? I never told you.”

She looked at him.

“Ronnie told you, didn’t he? Must have been him.”

“It was.”

“All casual-like, I bet.” He laughed. “You see what he was doing.”

“Actually, no,” she conceded.

“He was trying to draw you to him. He wanted you to wonder how I had gotten so far away from the alley in such a short time, on a bad knee.”

“You’re saying he wanted me to think that he had helped you,” she said. “He wanted me to suspect him.”

Alex nodded. “He really wanted you to put him on the stand, so he could do exactly what he did-tell the whole world the truth. He wanted someone to put him on the stand, whatever it took. And you weren’t going to call him as a witness. He was doing whatever he could to get your attention.”

“He could have told me the truth.”

“I wouldn’t let him. He probably figured I’d sabotage it if he tried. He wanted to give you no choice but to call him.”

“I’m not sure I would have.” She sat down on the bed. “I struggled with it more than you could know.”

“Because he was your son. That’s why he didn’t want you to know that. He didn’t want you to feel loyal to him. He wanted you to accuse him.”

She recalled Ronnie’s reaction when she confronted him on that point, told him that she knew he was her son. His anger, his frustration.

“He finally figured out a way to get the prosecutor to call him,” Alex continued. “He came to visit me in that interview room and shouted all kinds of bad stuff to me. He was hoping that the government was watching.”

And they were. Dan Morphew had eaten it up. In one fell swoop, Ronnie Masters had gotten himself immunity for any role he played and, more important, had been given the forum he had badly craved to announce the secret to the entire world.

“He’s a smart one,” said Alex. “It must be the good genes.”

“No doubt.”

“That boy would do anything to protect me.”

Shelly thought through the last couple of weeks. “Ronnie went to see Eddie Todavia a few times,” she said. “Why?”

“Same reason.” Alex shook his head, smiling. “Trying to draw someone’s suspicion. Hoping someone, anyone, was watching. I’ll bet he was obvious about it. He was in broad daylight with Eddie, right?”

She recalled the photos Joel Lightner had taken. It was true. Ronnie was walking down the middle of the street with Todavia. She laughed. “He couldn’t have been more obvious.”

Alex tapped his temple. “Smart, I’m telling you.”

“What about this other guy he went to see, Alex? Robert El-something. What was-”

“Robert Eldridge. He went to see him?”

She looked at Alex.

“Robert Eldridge,” Alex explained, “is Dina’s ex-husband. That witness from way back? He was trying to find Dina to help tell the story all over again.”

“Or hoping that we’d follow him and make the connection ourselves.”

“You or anyone else,” Alex said. “If it had come down to it, I’m sure Ronnie would have just marched into the judge’s chambers and spilled the whole thing. But I don’t think he trusted the legal system. He always complained about the rules. If he just went to you, or to the prosecutor, he was afraid that he wouldn’t be allowed to testify. That someone would say that the rules of evidence prevented it or something. Better to make one of you call him, put him on the stand, and then tell a room full of reporters and the jury the truth. Then, nobody could stop him. Any excuse he could come up with, just to get into that courtroom.”

“Right.”

“I pulled all this shit, Shelly, and Ronnie saved me. You got a good kid there.”

She did have a kid. She had always known it, and was even able to put a face and name to the concept over the last few months. Now, for some reason, as things were coming to a close, the notion seemed to have more meaning. Something she couldn’t put her finger on, that stirred her emotions in a way that she had never felt.

The tears surprised her, how quickly they came. She was in a fragile state in every way, but still. She wasn’t a crier. She wiped at her face.

“So-what’s gonna happen now, do you think?” he asked.

She composed herself after a moment. She walked over to him, placed a hand on his shoulder. “We’re not on tomorrow. The prosecutor and I are going to see what can be done.”

“You think they’ll drop the case?”

She sighed. “Honestly?”

“No, lie to me.”

“I don’t think they’ll drop this case, Alex. And I don’t think the judge will throw it out, either. The heat is too great. There’s politics. There’s a dead cop.”

Alex seemed to deflate. He apparently thought that things would change with this revelation.

“Get some sleep,” she told him. “Let me be the lawyer. I’m going to talk to Ronnie, and I’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll get prepared for the rest of this.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “But you’re the one who needs sleep.”

She kissed him on the cheek and left him in the cell. She reached into her bag for her cell phone, which had been turned off. When the screen lit up, it told her she had four messages. She listened to her voice mail as she waited for the elevator to the courthouse lobby. The reception was less than perfect, but she had no trouble making out the callers, because all four messages, spread out over the last hour and a half, were from the same person.

Maribelle Rodriguez, the chief of staff to Governor Langdon Trotter.

She could imagine the chaos in the state capital, or wherever he was. It would have taken the press all of two minutes, after the revelations in court hours ago, to hunt down the governor and ambush him with questions. And she hadn’t called to warn him. Never mind that she had been lying unconscious on a courtroom floor. That was a distinction that would be lost on an elected official, in the heat of a re-election campaign, who suddenly had a great deal of explaining to do. He would want to coordinate his comments with Shelly, and perhaps add a few private comments of his own.

Well, he’ll have to wait, she said to herself.