The Guilty (33 page)

“What’s the matter, Pete? You miss the place already?”

There was no immediate answer, but he heard the footsteps slowly approach his open door and pause for a second or two just outside his office. Then Dorrell Phillips walked in.

Bratt sat up abruptly, as if he were seeing a ghost. His first thought was that Phillips had come there to kill him and he hadn’t even waited until the trial was over to do it. But Phillips made no move toward him and, within a few seconds, Bratt could see that violence was the furthest thing from his mind.

The young man stood in the doorway, looking nervous and totally lost, as if he had no idea how he had gotten there, or what he meant to do. Bratt slowly relaxed, let out the breath he was holding and calmly spoke, taking charge of the situation.

“Dorrell? You shouldn’t be here.”

Upon hearing his name spoken aloud Phillips moved forward with a start, his eyes focusing on Bratt.

“I wanted to talk to you a minute. Is that okay?”

“I guess so. Strictly speaking you’re not a Crown witness anymore. But why are you here?”

“I wanted to tell you something. You’re a hell of a lawyer.”

He’s the last person I would have gone to for compliments
, Bratt thought, saying nothing in reply.
But he’s clearly got a lot more than flattery on his mind
.

“Mr. Parent was pretty pissed at me,” Phillips continued, “because I didn’t answer your questions very well.”

“He shouldn’t blame you. Getting up on the stand is never an easy thing to do.”

“You made me look like some kind of liar. Twisted everything around until even I didn’t know what was the truth anymore.”

Bratt had an uncomfortable sense of deja-vu, as he heard Jeannie accusing him of the same thing a few weeks earlier. He tried to ignore her voice in his head. Dealing with this unexpected visitor was hard enough.

“
It was my medication,” Phillips stated matter of factly, as if in answer to a question that only he had heard.

“I’m sorry?”

“In the hospital. The first week or so they had me under heavy medication, cortisone and stuff, and I couldn’t see the mug shots too well. I couldn’t think too clear either. I was real scared in court, and pretty mad at you too, and when you asked me about that picture I chose, I guess I forgot about the pain killers.”

Bratt realized that Phillips was trying to justify his performance on the stand, and to explain to Bratt what he had been unable to explain to the jury. It wasn’t such a bad explanation either, but it was too little too late.

“Listen, Dorrell, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but what you’re telling me really isn’t going to change anything. Maybe Parent should have asked you more questions about your physical condition, but that was his job.”

Phillips shrugged, regaining the sad and lost look he had had on the first morning he had testified, before his dislike of Bratt had begun influencing his answers.

“It really was Small, you know.”

“I know that you honestly believe that. I never tried to imply you were lying about it, and I’m truly sorry if that’s how it felt. Anyway, it’s not something I can discuss with you now.”

Phillips seemed to be trying to take in what Bratt was saying for a moment, before blurting out, “My brother Dexter really fucked up his life, even before Small killed him. But my dad still loved him. He was the oldest boy in the family.”

Oh God, he’s going to lay a guilt trip on me,
Bratt thought, unable to stop a lump from rising to his throat. He wondered if Phillips was supposed to be some version of the Ghost of Christmas Past.

“After I got home from the hospital,” Phillips went on, “I’d lie in bed when I couldn’t sleep at night and I’d hear my dad go by himself into Dexter’s room. My bed was right next to the door and the walls are pretty thin. And I’d hear my dad sitting there and crying, almost every night. He sounded like a girl when he cried. In the daytime I never saw him cry, you know. He was always taking care of me, protecting me. But, at night, I’d just listen to him cry for his boy that your client took away.”

Son of a bitch’s going to make me cry now too,
Bratt thought in alarm.
Get him out of here before he actually does it.

“Listen, Dorrell,” Bratt stood up, clearing his throat, “this is inappropriate, especially since the trial’s still going on. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Phillips nodded without saying another word, and turned to head back out. Bratt felt he had to say something to show that he wasn’t totally heartless.

“I’m really sorry about your brother,” he called out, as he chased after Phillips into the reception area.

Phillips turned to him with a look that questioned his sincerity.

“I really am,” Bratt repeated. “Whether Small did it or not, I know what it’s like to lose someone you love, and I do feel bad for you and your father.”

Phillips looked at him for a few more seconds before speaking again.

“It ain’t normal for a father to bury his son,” he said, then turned and left Bratt standing there,
feeling angry, but unsure who he should be angry at. He had no idea why Phillips had decided to come see him, and he didn’t know what it was supposed to change.

Maybe it was just to remind me that sometimes I don’t like this job
after-all,
he told himself, turning back and stomping toward his office. He violently kicked a metal trashcan that was in his path, sending it crashing into the wall behind it, leaving a nasty gash in the plaster.

Shit, it’s like Jeannie at the courthouse all over again,
he raged wordlessly.
I thought I was past all that. I didn’t need to hear this crap right now.

In his office he fell onto his sofa, looking helplessly at the desk where he had been sitting, happily daydreaming about becoming a judge only minutes before. Those few moments of happiness, that feeling of self-worth that he had regained over the course of the trial’s first week, were gone now. They had been stolen by Dorrell Phillips and the vision of a father mourning his murdered son.

“Goddamn Dorrell Phillips and his father,” he said out loud, and slammed his fist into the sofa’s soft cushions. “Goddamn Marlon Small! And goddamn
me
!”

Early that Monday morning Bratt lay on the sofa in his office, trying to get a grip on the simmering anger that had often threatened to overtake him during the weekend. For two days he hadn’t been able to shake the mental image of Dorrell Phillips’s father, sitting alone in a darkened bedroom, mourning his oldest son Dexter. And the more he thought about it, the angrier he had become.

At first he was angry with Dorrell for having given him the image in the first place. It had taken away what little pleasure he had been able to derive from his work in the trial. Eventually, his anger turned toward Small, for perhaps having been involved in the killing of the young man, as well as for just being such an unlikable client. Every now and then his anger was even aimed at Jeannie for having triggered his uncharacteristic soul-searching in the first place, without which stories like the one Dorrell Phillips had told him would have just been shrugged off as so much melodrama.

Running like an undercurrent throughout this river of bitterness, he was mostly angry with himself. He knew he should never have let Dorrell’s obvious emotional manipulation affect him the way it had, and he derided himself for his weakness. But he also blamed himself for being willing to work for people like Marlon Small in the first place.

He tried to imagine a job, a life, where interacting with murderers and rapists wasn’t part of his everyday routine. Was there really such a world beyond the walls of the courtroom? And had he become so used to his world, so enured to the pain and suffering that filled it, that he had lost the capacity to be affected by it? If he had ever thought this might be the case, these past few weeks had
proven him wrong.

He had no idea how long he had been laying there, trying to clear his mind so that he could concentrate on the trial he was supposed to fight that morning, when John Kalouderis knocked on his door and walked in without waiting for an invitation. Bratt lay unmoving, his eyes covered with his forearm.

“Christ, you’ve gone and turned into me,” Kalouderis said as he flopped into Bratt’s chair and put his feet up on the desk. “Does this mean I have to go win that murder trial for you?”

“If you’re not too busy,” Bratt mumbled in reply, his eyes still shaded from the light streaming through the window.

It occurred to Bratt, with only a small pang of regret, that if he really had turned into his friend he might at least have had the cold comfort of some alcohol to get him through the past two days. As it was, he hadn’t had a drink since their binge nearly two weeks earlier. He had spent the weekend stone cold sober, keeping company only with the disembodied voices of Jeannie and Dorrell Phillips, both of whom seemed to have taken up permanent residence in his head and his apartment.   

“Pete says the trial’s going pretty well so far,” Kalouderis said.

Bratt sighed and slid his arm off his face. He slowly got up into a sitting position and rubbed his face. He looked at his friend, but said nothing in reply.

“Am I missing something here?” Kalouderis asked. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing happened. The trial’s going about as well as I could have hoped for. I’m just tired, I guess.”

“Looks like you haven’t been getting enough sleep. You and that lady cop make up, finally?”

“I wish,” Bratt said, unwilling to tell Kalouderis the cause of his sleepless nights. “I guess I’m just not finding this case to be much fun.”

“Come on, what’s not to like? A juicy double murder, all the papers talking about the way
you ripped into that Phillips kid. It should at least take your mind off J.P., if that’s what’s got you down.”

If Kalouderis’s words were intended to raise Bratt’s spirits, they had the opposite effect. Considering what Dorrell Phillips had suffered the previous summer, the last thing he had needed was to be ripped apart on the witness stand. Having given way to that thought Bratt couldn’t help but dredge up the memory of Claire Brockway and what had happened to her in court.

Why the hell do I keep going back to her?
As if it isn’t bad enough that I blame myself for Marlon Small’s crimes. Do I have to feel bad about what all my clients may have done?

“Shit,” he exclaimed, and jumped up from the sofa.

A surprised Kalouderis also jumped up, uncertain what had come over his friend. Bratt gave him no explanation, putting on his coat in preparation for the walk to the courthouse. He knew he had to get a grip on his racing thoughts or he’d drive himself crazy. Moping around wasn’t doing him any good, not with a trial still to fight. As for the voices in his head that were castigating him, they would just have to wait their turn and keep the damn volume down in the meantime.

If Dorrell Phillips had the universal sympathy of everybody who had listened to his tragic story, Marcus Paris would have been lucky if he was just intensely disliked.

Every prosecutor who ever had to make a deal with one criminal in order to catch another
knew he was really making a deal with the devil. That morning, as Paris stood in the witness box before them, several jurors may well have wondered if, in fact, the prince of darkness himself hadn’t incarnated in front of them. Even Francis Parent stood at a certain remove, looking at his young witness as if he was afraid to catch the plague from him, while he questioned him about the events of June 14, 1999.

The slightly built young man had testified about his arrival at the apartment in Little Burgundy, allegedly with Marlon Small. After describing the shooting of Indian, he came to the point where he had come across a stoned Dexter Phillips coming out of the bathroom. Then Parent asked the question that Bratt had been waiting for all morning.

“And what did you do then, Mr. Paris?”

“I got the guy down on his stomach and I shot him in the back
of the head.”

Bingo,
Bratt thought, looking over at the jurors, most of whom now sat with their mouths agape.
The Crown’s honorable witness is a cold-blooded murderer, ladies and gentlemen. Maybe Dorrell should be here to get a look at the guy who actually shot his brother, instead of dumping his heartbreak on my back.

“Can you describe how you shot him, Mr. Paris?”

“I was standing by his feet and I shot him three times, just above the neck.”

Several jurors shifted uncomfortably in their seats and continued to stare openly, both at Parent and Paris. Even Judge Green was now looking at the two of them with an obvious expression of disdain.

Bratt wondered what the jurors found more shocking: that Paris admitted he had killed Dexter Phillips as casually as if he were stepping on a bug, or that Parent had called him as his witness? The prosecutor had asked them to keep their minds open and believe Paris when he implicated Small as his accomplice, but by the looks on their faces, Bratt didn’t think they were going to cut him a lot of slack. 

He should have been enjoying his rival’s predicament, just then, but joy was no longer a feeling that he could call up at a moment’s notice. Instead, he had found a new target for his anger.

“What happened after that?” Parent continued.

“Nothin’. Brando kicked him to make sure he was dead, then I heard some people running around out in the hall, and we just booted it by the back door.”

“Did you take anything with you when you left the apartment?”

“Nah, we had to get out of there too fast. The whole thing was a big waste of time.”

Bratt glared angrily at Parent, feeling as if it was his own child’s pointless death that was being talked about in such a trivial fashion.

Your wonderful witness just described shooting three innocent people as a big waste of his time,
Bratt wanted to yell at Parent.
Hope this makes you feel as shitty as I have these last two days.

Parent’s own face showed his revulsion at Paris’s cavalier attitude toward his crime. He lowered his eyes to the papers in front of him and shuffled them around as if looking for something important. From Bratt’s vantage point, though, he could tell that the prosecutor was just trying to compose himself after his witness’s last remark. Nancy, sitting beside him, seemed equally unnerved by the heartless young man.

Parent didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get back to Paris and he kept shuffling his papers until Green finally spoke up.

“Mr. Parent, did you lose something?”

Yeah,
thought Bratt.
His self-respect.

Parent looked up, his face flushed, and cleared his throat before turning back to face Paris.

“Did you do anything particular after leaving the apartment?”

“Yeah. We ran round the corner and threw both guns into a big garbage bin, behind some
warehouses near there.”

“You say “we”. By that you mean…”

“Me an’ Brando. Marlon Small. We both threw our guns away there. That was the plan from the beginning.”

Parent turned to a table behind him and opened one of a half-dozen cardboard exhibit boxes that were on it. He pulled out two plastic evidence bags, each containing a handgun, and laid them in front of the witness.

“Do you recognize these, Mr. Paris?”

Paris looked at them indifferently, then pushed at the smaller of the two with the forefinger of his right hand.

“That’s the one I shot him with, the snub nose.” His tone was flat and emotionless when he spoke. “Brando, he used the automatic.”

Bratt went through the chronology of events in his mind: the cops had found the guns the morning after the shooting, just before the week’s scheduled garbage pick-up. Paris’s fingerprints were all over the small revolver, but, as he had no record, they hadn’t been able to match them to him at first. The prints on the 9mm automatic were too smudged to be of any use, though, so there would be nothing to connect Small to that gun except Paris’s say-so.

Once Dorrell Phillips had selected Paris’s picture out of the 1999 Dorset High yearbook, the police quickly brought the suspect in. His prints matched those on the gun that fired the bullets found in Dexter Phillips’s skull. With that evidence in hand there was no need to be concerned that Dorrell’s identification might be faulty. Paris was cooked and he had known it.

That the Crown had agreed to let Paris plead guilty to second degree murder in return for his testimony meant that someone on their side doubted their ability to convict Small on Dorrell Phillips’s evidence alone. So, Francis Parent, that holier-than-everyone paragon of virtue, found himself allied with an unfeeling killer on this Monday morning, and he clearly didn’t like it.

Bratt watched with great interest as Paris testified, outlining the minimal planning that had gone into the robbery/murder, and demonstrating to everyone how little effect the violent deaths had had on him. Bratt was amazed at how easily the decision to kill had been made. He had no doubt that the jury would care very little for this witness, but they could still believe his claim that Small was his accomplice.

Parent came to the end of his direct examination just before the court was to adjourn for lunch, and the expression of relief on his face was obvious. As for Paris himself, he seemed to pay him no heed as the prosecutor gladly handed him over to Bratt for cross-examination. He had hardly looked Parent’s way through-out the first half of his testimony, and he didn’t seem to be overly concerned at the prospect of being questioned by Bratt.

Bratt reflected on the cold indifference that Paris was displaying and wondered if it was all just an act. He would get the chance to find out at the outset of the afternoon session, but he sincerely hoped that it wasn’t.

“He looks like a tough nut to crack.”

Kouri stated the cliché as if it was the result of some deep analysis. Bratt just continued to lean back quietly on the metal bench outside the courtroom as they waited for a constable to come unlock the doors.

“I don’t know that you’re going to be able to shake him up,” Kouri continued, still looking for a response from the senior lawyer. “I guess you’ll have to spend a long time with him.”

“Heaven forbid,” Bratt answered, although he sounded as if he were speaking to himself.

Kouri said nothing in reply, but clearly looked puzzled. Bratt turned to him and smiled, although there was no sign of happiness in his eyes. Kouri’s expression showed even more befuddlement now.

“What? What am I missing?”

“How important a witness is he?” Bratt asked, sitting up and gaining a little spark now that he had decided to impart his wisdom to his assistant once more.

“Well, I would have thought pretty important.”

“What if
I
don’t think he’s important at all? Don’t you think the jury might be happy to learn they could just dismiss that scumbag from their thoughts?”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Spend as little time on him as he deserves. I’d really like nothing more than to spend a couple of days going at him, hammer and tongs, but that would tell the jury we’re scared of him. So, I’m just going to shrug him off like a minor irritation, kind of the way he acted when he shot Dexter Phillips.”