The Trials of Nikki Hill Read online

  Wise blinked in surprise, and Nikki could tell by the change that came over his pasty face that he would be raising no more objections. Gleason saw it, too. “Good. Now that we’re in agreement, be off with the two of you. When you’re finished, Nikki, come back and we’ll work out your reassignment.”

  “What reassignment?”

  “I’m sure you’d be happier somewhere else.”

  “Where?” she asked coldly.

  “You’ll stay on here for a few months, closing out your caseload. Then when the media has forgotten all about the damned ‘weenie defense’ case, you’ll quietly request a reassignment to Compton.”

  “You sorry sack of shit,” she said.

  “I love you, too,” he said. “Now, why don’t you and Ray get rid of that nasty old weenie.”

  They made their way to her office in silence, Nikki leading the limping Wise by several paces. When they arrived, she turned to him and said, “He’s gonna be holding this over us for the rest of our careers. Even head D.D.A. isn’t worth it.”

  “Grow the fuck up,” Wise replied. “You can’t beat Tom at this game. You do it his way, or you pay, as you are paying. I have no desire to wind up at the desk next to you in Compton. Besides, you know damned well Durant is guilty as sin.”

  “He is. But...aw, hell, what’s the point of talking ethics to you? You want to destroy evidence, Mister Integrity, do it without my help.” She sat down at her desk. “I’m already on my way to Compton.”

  She took no delight in the sight of Wise limping gingerly from her office, one hand clutching the rotten food wrapped in a Kleenex, the other holding his nose. When he was gone, she went to her bookshelf and pulled down a thick volume. She shuffled through its thin pages until she found what she was looking for. “ Brady v. Maryland, U.S. Supreme Court, 373 OS.83 (1963).”

  She scanned the words of the decision. “A prosecutor that withholds evidence... which, if made available, would tend to exculpate the accused or reduce the penalty helps shape a trial that bears heavily on the defendant, that casts the prosecution in the role of an architect of a proceeding that does not comport with standards of justice....”

  Wise had been right. She hadn’t withheld any evidence. She’d turned over the jacket. It was not her fault that the public defender had failed to inventory the contents of its pocket. She’d had no legal obligation to practice law for the defense. But she still felt sick. To her mind, she was still in the position of being the “architect” of Mason Durant’s fate. That did not comport with her standard of justice.

  Glumly, she returned to Gleason’s office.

  Ordinarily, she would have waited for one of the secretaries to announce her, but her anger pushed her beyond that sort of formality. Gleason looked up from the magazine he was reading. “All done?” he asked.

  “Yeah. And I quit.”

  “Oh? What are your plans? Gonna work as a cleaning lady? Drive a cab? Certainly nothing in law, nothing to compensate for all those years of study and struggle. Even if you managed to get as far as the personnel office of a firm, can you imagine the kind of reference I’d provide?”

  “Why are you being such an asshole?” she asked.

  “Because you disappoint me. Because I thought you were smart enough to know how the game is played. Because in this office defiance is simply not tolerated.”

  “Well, fuck you and your disappointment,” Nikki said. “I didn’t become a prosecutor so I could play games with the law. Ask Mason Durant what he thinks about your damned games.”

  “You want to set him free, Nikki?” the district attorney asked. “Would that be serving the society we’re sworn to protect?”

  Nikki remembered the woman whose husband Durant had bragged about killing, remembered her tears and bitter words. She shook her head, trying in vain to remove that sad image. “It’s... not my call to make,” she said, more hesitatingly than she wished.

  “No it isn’t,” Gleason said. “A jury found him guilty and that’s that. Know why? Because I say it is.”

  “That’s fine for folks who don’t have a conscience.”

  He grinned at her. “That’s the other reason I’m sending you to Compton: punishment should put a little salve on that wounded conscience of yours.”

  “Who died and made you God?”

  “I’m a self-made man,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, I’d rather drive a cab than spend the rest of my life working for you in Compton or anywhere else.”

  “Use your head, woman,” Gleason growled. “We’re not talking about the rest of your life. Just the rest of mine. I’ve got angina, I’m a hundred pounds overweight, and my cholesterol level is higher than the Dow. My doctor gives me five years tops, but I imagine he might be a little optimistic. If by then you’ve done the kind of job at Compton I think you’re capable of, you’ll be back here in a nanosecond.”

  She remembered her grandma telling her about school, how “smart learnin’ is like carryin’ a sword at your side, ’specially when dealin’ with white folks who expect colored people, women in particular, to have heads full of cotton instead of brains.”

  That bit of advice had been given on a sunny afternoon on the front porch of Grandma Tyrell’s little stucco cottage in South Central L.A. a few decades before. The ashes from the Watts riots were still coating the bushes in the yard, and Nikki knew that she was going to need some weapon to get through life. Knowledge seemed like a good bet. So she ground her way through grade after grade, always excelling, always pushing herself.

  Now here she was, facing the precise foe her grandmother had mentioned. She had the weapon: she was smart. Smart enough to know that what this devious and manipulative white man was saying carried a certain logic. She’d be around to dance on his tombstone.

  “May not even be five years,” she said. “They might vote you out, the next election.”

  “Not much chance of that,” he said. “You’d be better off wishing me dead.”

  “No problem there,” she said.

  Tom Gleason’s inevitable, fatal coronary had occurred near the end of her second Compton summer. The D.A. appointed by the Board of Supervisors, Seymour Kehoe, was apparently unimpressed by her superior record of convictions. Fortunately, he remained in office for only the final three months of Gleason’s term. His defeat at the polls prompted her to apply to the man who beat him, Joseph Elijah Walden, the first African-American to be elected to that post.

  Weeks went by without a response. She’d just about decided that Walden had filed and forgotten her letter when he phoned. He’d been on vacation out of the country, he explained, and had read her request only that morning. He’d be happy to meet with her to discuss the possibility of reassignment.

  She arrived at their luncheon meeting feeling anxious and guarded. He put her at ease almost immediately by recounting an incident that had occurred during his European trip. He’d been trying to impress a woman he’d just met, but his less-than-perfect pronunciation had led to an embarrassing confusion between the French word for fish, poisson, and the American word poison. The self-deprecating vignette was only mildly amusing, but it served its purpose in relaxing Nikki to the point where she began to feel comfortable in his company.

  Their resulting conversation had been wide-ranging, moving from the frivolous to the serious and back again. She’d left the restaurant quite impressed by the intelligent and charismatic district attorney. He must have been impressed, too, because one month later she was back on the job at the Criminal Courts Building.

  Now she was in the thick of it, stepping eagerly from the elevator at the third floor of Parker Center, ready to begin her first assignment as the D.A.’s new special assistant.

  THREE

  The interrogation of the suspect, Jamal Deschamps, a twenty-five-year-old African-American apprehended near Madeleine Gray’s body, was taking place in one of the small rooms off of the Robbery-Homicide bullpen.

  A round, balding detective named Duke Wass
on brought Nikki up to date while she poured herself a cup of black coffee. “Suspect’s been in custody about three hours. He cried lawyer, and his low-rent mouth just got here ’bout a half hour ago. That’s when the party started. Been goin’ on ever since.”

  “Who’s the attorney?” she asked.

  “Bleed ’em and plead ’em Burchis,” Wasson said, grinning. Elmon Burchis was well known for putting on an elaborate legal display until the actual date of trial, when he would invariably plead his clients guilty.

  “High-level case like this,” Nikki said, “maybe Mr. Burchis will change his game plan, get somebody a little stronger to come in with him.”

  “With what we got on Deschamps, they jus’ gonna be walkin’ the dog.”

  “What have we got?”

  “Proximity, motive. Dead woman’s property in his pocket. An’, oh yeah, he’s got banged-up knucks and his back looks like he’s been wranglin’ wildcats. Gotta be pieces of him under the vic’s fingernails. Goodman and Morales are in there wearin’ him down.”

  “Carlos Morales?”

  “None other. Know him?”

  “Uh huh,” she said. “To know him is to love him.”

  “Then you see what Deschamps is up against,” Wasson said.

  “Who’s Goodman?” she asked.

  Wasson’s expressive round face seemed momentarily puzzled. Then: “Oh, you musta met Morales back when he was partnered with Tony Black.”

  She nodded.

  “Good guy, Blackie.”

  “Uh huh,” she said, her mind recapturing the image of Tony seated on the floor of his apartment, Bird’s huge head in his lap, both of them quietly listening to a cassette of John Coltrane and the amazing Johnny Hartman. She could hear the wistful strains of “Lush Life”...

  “It’s what fuels our fear,” Wasson said. “Relaxin’ off duty havin’ a sam’ich an’ some cranked-up punk-ass comes in wavin’ a Heckler an’ takes out half the tavern. Poor Tony didn’t have a chance.”

  “I’d better get to work,” she said.

  “Be our guest,” Wasson said. “Al’ays happy to cooperate with the D.A.’s office.”

  She took her coffee, and the memory of Tony Black, to a dreary room that hadn’t changed much in three years. The same almost-orange wooden table and three matching straight-back chairs. The new addition was a puke-green leatherette couch that looked like it had last seen duty in a women’s lounge where the women hadn’t been too careful with their cigarettes. She stared at the furniture, but she was seeing Blackie’s smile and humorous brown eyes.

  “You okay, honey?”

  The question came from a pale, skinny woman in jeans and a polo shirt sitting at the table, hands poised over a court stenographer’s machine, looking at her with concern.

  “Jacked as can be,” Nikki replied.

  The pale woman made a noise like “Hup,” and her fingers began dancing over her machine’s keyboard. She was wearing a cheap headset that was plugged into an ancient reel-toreel tape recorder on the table, doing its job slowly and silently. With fingers flying, the steno moved her head to indicate a second set of earphones on the tabletop.

  Nikki recalled how surprised and disappointed she’d been the first time she laid eyes on this room, when she’d learned that those cool, comfortable shadowy spaces with their one-way secret observation windows didn’t exist outside of the movies. At least not in L.A. Maybe in New York, where they actually let the D.A.s participate in the interrogations. Here, you had to stand back and hope that the detectives asked the right questions. Which they did sometimes.

  She placed her briefcase and coffee cup on the table, pulled over a chair, and picked up the headset. Satisfied that it was free from anything too communicable, she slipped it over her hair.

  “. . . the hell you think you kiddin’, Ja-mal?” were the first words she heard. Morales sounded just as cocky and bullshit macho as always.

  “Man, the Crazy Eights, they chased me into that alley. Like I said.”

  “Then how did the friggin’ ring get in your pocket, home-y?” Morales asked, giving the final word a nasty sarcastic twist.

  “I resent that tone, detective.” Elmon Burchis’s overly dramatic delivery brought a smile to Nikki’s face. She got her notepad from her briefcase, opened it, and slipped the pen from its leather holder.

  “Excuse me, counselor,” Morales said. “I din’ mean to offend yo’ altar boy client, who we all know is nuthin’ but a fuckin’ street rat.”

  “Sir, I am putting you on notice—”

  “Everybody just calm down, now,” came a new voice. Low. Resonant. Maybe a hint of the south. It must have belonged to Detective Goodman. “We’re gonna be here long enough without the unnecessary rhetoric. Mr. Deschamps, I believe Detective Morales asked you about the object you had in your pocket.”

  “I tole you that already,” Jamal Deschamps said. “I see this ring on her finger, looks like it worth some bills. So I take it. She already so dead she’s stiff.

  “Can’t I go pee? My eyes got to be turning yellow. Lawyer man, don’t I got the right to pee?”

  “Indeed you do. I—”

  “Okay, Mr. Deschamps,” Goodman interrupted Burchis. “Detective Morales will escort you to the lavatory.”

  “You escort him, amigo,” Morales drawled. “Up to me he could just piss in his pants. I’m sure it wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “My God, you are a barbarian,” Bleed ’em and plead ’em Burchis exclaimed.

  Nikki removed the headset and walked to the door in time to see a tall, gaunt white man leading a smaller, much younger black man past the bullpen in the direction of the lavatories. The tall man was clean shaven, with longish, graying hair that stuck up in back as if he’d slept on it. Detective Edward Goodman.

  As for the black man, she’d been expecting Jamal Deschamps to be dressed in bulky gangsta clothes, but he was wearing rumpled and dirty chino trousers and a maroon silk shirt with a rip at the right elbow. He looked a lot like the brothers who’d been in her law school classes.

  Morales spotted her across the room and winked at her. A solid Chicano in his mid-forties, even in his boots he wasn’t more than five feet eight, slightly shorter than she. He’d trimmed his Pancho Villa mustache since she’d last seen him. Aside from that, the years didn’t seem to have changed him at all. Maybe obnoxious behavior kept you young. She’d have to try it sometime.

  He strutted to Duke Wasson’s desk, his thick torso shifting under his untucked pale blue short-sleeved shirt. He bent over the desk, his back to Nikki.

  Wasson looked up, eyes shifting to her, then back to Morales. He mumbled something to the detective, who turned and ambled toward her. “Well, well,” he said, “back from bad Compton country and already special assistant to our new D.A. You two must get along pretty good, huh?” He gave her a conspiratorial wink.

  “Got something in your eye, Carlos?” she asked.

  “Only your beauty,” he said.

  “I like what you did with the mustache,” she said. “That and those high heels. And is that a rug you’re wearing?”

  “Ooohhh. Compton turned you mean, huh?”

  “Mean? Little ole me?”

  He cocked his head to one side and said, “It did do something to you, chica. An improvement, I think.”

  “We shall see.”

  “How you like our radio show so far?” he asked.

  “I think you’re ready for TV.”

  He smiled broadly, white teeth gleaming under the mustache. “Yeah. Us an’ Maddie Gray. You ever watch her?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “My wife was a big fan. Usually had it on at dinner. Mad-die looked pretty fine, but she was a real ball buster. I never much cared for her.”

  “Maybe we should check your alibi.”

  “Now, Nikki, you know we got our killer. You prosecutin’ this pendejo? ”

  She shrugged. Yesterday, she wouldn’t have thought such a thing possible. But
today...“That decision won’t be made for a while,” she said.

  “Maddie had lots of fans. They gonna want our Jamal strung up by his cojones. ”

  “I think they stopped that particular form of justice a few years ago.”

  “Too bad. The mess he made of that woman, gas is too good for him.”

  “Assuming he did it,” Nikki said.

  “Yeah,” Morales said, grinning. “Assumin’ that.”

  FOUR

  By seven A.M., when Nikki made her second call to D.A. Walden, several other facts had surfaced to strengthen the case against Deschamps. He’d previously been arrested for assaulting a young woman named Irma Childs. His day job, delivering and picking up mail for a production company in the San Fernando Valley, had taken him often to the studios where Madeleine Gray’s series was taped.

  Detective Morales eventually got Jamal to admit having met the deceased on the lot. He had, in fact, delivered scripts to her on at least two occasions that he could recall.

  “She was a nice woman,” he told the detectives. “Wacko, like all of ’em, but nice.”

  “All of whom?” Goodman asked.

  “TV, movie people. All wacko.”

  “Wacko how?”

  “You know. Kinda wired. Nervous, like.”

  “She gave people a hard time on her show,” Goodman said. “Probably gave people she worked with a hard time, too.”

  “Not me, man. She was nice.”

  “Give you a big tip?” Morales asked.

  “Tip? Hell, they never tip.”

  “But she was nice?”

  “Yeah. Friendly.”

  “How friendly?” Morales asked. “Pet your pony for ya?” “Jesus, man,” Jamal said indignantly. “She smiled. That’s all. Always real busy, but she took the time to smile.” “Maybe it was a special smile, huh?” Goodman asked. “Naw. Just a smile.”

  “You’re a good-looking young man,” Goodman said.

  “Woman smiles at you, what do you think?”

  “Lots of women smile at me,” Jamal said. “That don’t