Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (29 page)

Gabriela was still sniffling, but seemed more composed.

“You said that when Mr. Jiménez saw you and the defendants, he freaked out. Can you describe what happened?”

“He ran back to the bedroom for his gun. See, he didn’t have no gun or nothing when he came out, because he thought it was
only me.”

“Would he normally have carried a gun in that situation?”

“If someone came to the door, yeah, normally he would.”

“To your knowledge, why would Mr. Jiménez bring a gun to answer the door?”

“Because he stashed in the house. I always told him not to. I was afraid of just exactly what happened. That was my nightmare.
I tell him, You crazy stashing here where your kids live. But that was Orlando. He was hardheaded, and he ain’t never listen
to no woman about business.”

“When you say Mr. Jiménez stashed in your house, what do you mean by that?”

Gabriela made eye contact with the jury. Melanie watched them react to her sad, pretty face. They might disapprove of her,
but they couldn’t help liking her and, more than liking,
believing
her.

“He kept drugs and money there,” Gabriela replied.

“What type of drugs?” Melanie asked.

“Heroin, like he sold in the spot.”

“How much?”

“A lot. He kept a lot. And money too.”

“Where in the apartment did he keep the drugs and money?”

“He had a hide built in the closet in our bedroom.”

“Can you explain to the jury what a hide is?”

“It’s like a secret compartment. He built the wall out and made a space in there that you couldn’t see by looking. It was
big. You could fit like a hundred kilos in it, not that he moved that much product at one time.”

“On the night of the seventeenth, to your knowledge, how much heroin was in the secret compartment in the closet?”

“Twenty keys, because Orlando had just got a shipment.”

“That’s twenty kilograms?”

“Yes.”

“To your knowledge, did anybody other than yourself or Mr. Jiménez know about this twenty-kilogram shipment?”

“A lot of people knew. All the workers at the spot. And anybody who worked for the connect. Word got around.”

“When you say connect, who do you mean?”

“The supplier of the drugs. He was a Colombian from Jackson Heights called Gordo. That means fat guy. All Gordo’s people knew
he’d just fronted Orlando twenty keys. That’s why I always told Orlando he’s crazy, that we gonna get hit someday. But he
say he’s gotta take care of his product. He’s not gonna leave it with nobody else because everybody steals. He’d rather risk
his life and keep his product close.”

“But wasn’t he risking your life too, and your children’s?”

“I know.” She gave a resigned little shrug.

“Directing your attention back to what was going on inside the apartment. What happened after Mr. Jiménez ran back to the
bedroom to get his gun?”

“He slammed the door behind him, but it didn’t have no lock on it and they busted it down right away. I got on my knees and
crawled behind the couch, so I couldn’t see nothing, but I could still hear. Everything was crashing around real loud, and
glass was smashing. Orlando kept his gun in the drawer next to the bed, so he must have been trying to get to it. Then I heard
a shot, and the next second, I heard him cry out. I knew he was hit.”

“After you heard Mr. Jiménez cry out, what happened?”

“A lot of yelling. Orlando was still alive. They’re telling him he better give up the product or they gonna bring me in the
room and cut pieces off me until he do. He was telling them get the fu—get out, or he’s gonna kill’em. That was Orlando. Somebody
step to him, he don’t back down. But I heard’em in there tearing everything apart, and eventually one said, ‘Here it is. I
found it.’ They found the stuff. After that, I knew they’d kill us.”

Gabriela stopped speaking and welled up again.

“Then what?” Melanie asked in a gentle tone.

On the witness stand, the young woman looked up at the ceiling and sighed, then swiped her knuckles across her eyes, wiping
away tears.

“I heard shots. Three shots.”

“Coming from the bedroom?”

“Yes. And I knew it was done. My babies’ daddy was dead, and they gonna come for me and my kids next.”

“What made you think they would come for you and your children?”

“Because they said so. When they was unlocking the door downstairs on the street, the one with the tattoo, he say to the other
one, ‘We gonna shoot her?’ and the one with the ear say, ‘Not yet.’ So I’m down on the floor expecting to die. But then the
miracle happened. My angel,
la Señora
Marrero, she had called the police, and I started hearing the sirens. Normally in my neighborhood, there’s sirens all the
time, but this was different. It was a lot, and you could tell it was right outside the building. The next thing, I heard
the window going up in the bedroom. It squeaked a lot, so I knew what it was.”

“What was the significance to you of the window going up?”

“We got a fire escape there, so I knew they was running. Running away like scared little girls. The next thing I know, the
cops is busting in, and I’m screaming. I’m saying, ‘Please, please, call an ambulance. They shot my man.’ But it was too late.
I went in the room. There was blood and brains all over the wall. Orlando’s laying on the floor on the other side of the bed.
The top of his head… it was just gone. He was dead.”

And she put her hands up to her face and started to wail.

“No further questions,” Melanie said.

And she walked to her chair at the prosecution’s table and sat down, trying not to let the triumph show on her face.

____

M
ELANIE CHECKED HER
watch. It was a little past four, the jury had been out for over two hours, and she was hoping for a verdict by five o’clock.
Normally she didn’t let herself get overconfident, but this case was more of a slam-dunk than any she’d ever seen. She had
two incredibly sympathetic eyewitnesses—Gabriela Torres and the little old lady who’d seen her getting brutalized and called
the police. She had the murder weapon, with Rashad Baxter’s fingerprints and clear ballistics linking it to the bullets riddling
the victim’s head and upper torso. She had several cops, all African-American or Hispanic, solid and believable, who’d testified
to the racially mixed jury that they’d surrounded the defendants coming down the fire escape carrying two duffel bags stuffed
with heroin. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt was a tough standard, but what more could you want?

Melanie wasn’t alone in expecting a quick verdict. The two defense attorneys, who might otherwise have gone back to their
offices, were hanging around in the corridor, making cell-phone calls from inside the quaint old wood and marble phone booths
that were scheduled to be ripped out in a coming renovation. The courtroom deputy had poked her head into the courtroom a
couple of times to report that there was nothing to report yet—something she wouldn’t have done if a long deliberation was
expected. The DEA agent assigned to the case, who sat at the government’s table with Melanie, had stepped out for a cup of
coffee, but promised he’d be “back in fifteen, just in case.”

So Melanie was alone in the deserted courtroom, expecting a verdict any minute, when the woman walked in. She looked to be
in her late forties, heavy-set, with a close-cropped Afro dyed blond and big gold hoop earrings. She’d been in the gallery
throughout the two-week trial. Based on eye contact and gestures, Melanie had decided early on that the woman was Rashad Baxter’s
mother. Now she was heading down the aisle straight toward Melanie, “irate family member” written all over her face.

Melanie stood up, the better to protect herself.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” she asked in a firm voice as the woman stopped in front of her, hands on hips.

“Why’d you stand up like that? You afraid I’m gonna hurt you?”

“You’re Rashad Baxter’s mother, right?”

“I’m Danita Baxter, yes. I guess you’re afraid because you’re trying to kill my son, so you know I got cause to be angry.”

The prosecution was asking for the death penalty. That decision had been made by bureaucrats in Washington and the previous
prosecutor on the case rather than by Melanie herself. But given that she’d be the one urging the jury to vote for death after
they came back with a guilty verdict, it would be disingenuous to try to shift blame.

“I’m just doing my job, ma’am,” she said. “I’m sure this is very difficult for you emotionally, but there’s no point in making
trouble. If you have something you want to say to me, tell it to your son’s lawyer and let him convey it.”

Melanie picked up her file and turned to leave.

“I’m his mother!” Danita Baxter cried. “He has kids! Doesn’t none of that mean nothing to you?”

“What about Orlando Jiménez’s kids? What about
his
mother? Rashad would’ve killed Gabriela and her children without a moment’s hesitation if the cops hadn’t shown up. You know
that as well as I do. And you know this wasn’t the first time your son killed somebody either.”

“It ain’t Rashad. It’s the streets.”

“Plenty of men grow up on the streets and don’t become killers. Besides, he had
you
. It’s not like nobody cared about him. I’m sure you were a good mother. He chose to become what he is.”

The woman’s eyes went wild with misery. “You don’t know him! To this day he calls me every night to see how I’m doing, if
I need anything. I got two of his babies living with me’cause their mother got a drug problem, and they don’t want for nothing.
Not only that—he spends
time
with them. Those children are gonna suffer.”

“Orlando Jiménez’s children are already suffering.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Danita whispered hoarsely. “And if you think Orlando ain’t never killed no one, you’re sadly
mistaken. He killed women and children too. Ask anybody in Bushwick.”

Melanie didn’t need to ask. She knew those things to be true. Jiménez had been every bit as evil as the men who murdered him,
and Gabriela Torres, Melanie’s star witness, was his knowing consort. But so what? This case wasn’t about them. If Melanie
had been called on to prosecute Orlando or Gabriela, she would have done so to the full extent of the law. That didn’t make
her feel sorry for their killers.

Danita Baxter sat down heavily in the front row of the spectator benches and began to weep as if her son were already dead.
She’d been in the courtroom and heard the testimony. She knew what the verdict would be as well as anybody else did.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Melanie said, and turned for the door.

“Then why
do
this to him?” Danita cried out to Melanie’s receding back.

Melanie was halfway down the hall before she realized that she had tears in her eyes. She took the elevator to the lobby and
exited the building, blinking them back in the hot sunshine. At some point when she’d been working too hard to notice, spring
had turned to summer. She’d found her first gray hair, and her daughter had shot up suddenly, seeming a lot older.

She found a seat on a bench in the plaza and watched the people walking by. Some nodded hello, others were strangers. Everybody
went about their business, unconcerned with life’s big questions. She didn’t have time to think about those questions either.
Some things were just too complicated to figure out, like where the truest morality resided in a situation like this one.
Melanie put her head in her hands and practiced breathing in and out deeply to clear her mind, like she remembered from the
one yoga class she’d been to, over a year ago now.

Her pager went off.

It was 4:53 when the jury filed in, and 5:10 when they filed back out, after having delivered the expected verdict of guilty
on all counts. Normally, the fact that a jury had its collective eye on the clock would not have seemed remarkable to Melanie,
or problematic, so she did her best to push those thoughts away. She looked around and didn’t see Danita Baxter anywhere in
the gallery.

The next day, Danita testified for her son during the penalty phase of the trial and said the expected things. How he’d been
a loving little boy until he was five or six years old. How an absent father, a series of abusive father substitutes, and
the streets had all conspired to turn him into someone else, but how he was still a good son and father.

When Danita finished her testimony, she stood up and walked calmly down the aisle, passing right by Melanie’s table. Nothing
passed between them, not a word or a glance, to suggest that they’d ever met before. They’d used up all their emotion the
previous afternoon. For a split second, she even felt as if her encounter with Danita in the empty courtroom had never happened.
But it was real, and it had happened. Why else, when the jury came back a day and a half later with a sentence of life without
parole, did Melanie feel such relief?

BY ANITA PAGE

I
t was cold as misery in the shed, but that wasn’t why I was shivering. Mr. Davis lay dead on the floor and my mama was sharpening
her ax. I had just turned fourteen that winter of 1910 and I was scared to think what would become of me.

When we heard Mr. Davis riding into the yard that night, we knew right away he was drunk. My mama used to say that when he
was drunk you heard him before you saw him. She put on her shawl and went out to the barn. Even when he was sober, Mr. Davis
would never put a blanket on the horse or give him hay.

While she was still at the barn he came busting into the house, yelling and swearing, where was his supper. His face was red
and ugly, and he stank from drink. He threw off his coat and left it on the floor where it dropped.

When my mama came in from the barn, she told him he could stop yelling, she had his supper. While she was frying the meat,
he started throwing things around the place. First the chairs, then the bread she had baked that morning. He threw two loaves
right out the door and into the snow. Then he tried to pick up the frying pan from the stove and burned his hand. He started
yelling that Mama had gone the length of her rope, that she was a dead woman.