A Case of Redemption (17 page)

In front of Roxanne's house, behind a black wrought-iron fence, a makeshift memorial had sprung up, where fans had placed bouquets of flowers and lit candles. The full Princess Di treatment. Even today, a month after the murder, there were several flower arrangements in front of the door and three candles were burning. Next to them was a framed photograph of Roxanne. Her blue eyes glistened, a stark contrast to the lifeless eyes in the autopsy photos.

We were supposed to be there at noon for the walk-through. We'd gotten there early, however, to spend some time canvassing the neighborhood.

“Let's go a-knockin',” I said to Nina.

“Split up or together?”

“Together.”

It is one of the Ten Commandments of criminal defense practice never to speak to a witness without a witness of your own. It's one of the most unfair aspects of criminal law: prosecutors are permitted to coerce witnesses with the threat of jail time, but if a defense lawyer even suggests some type of benefit to a witness in exchange for his cooperation—or worse, threatens the witness in any way—that's considered obstruction of justice, and the lawyer could find himself a defendant in a hurry. To guard against that happening, it's always advisable to talk to witnesses with a witness of your own, because it's harder later on for someone to claim that two lawyers are lying. Not impossible, but harder.

No one was home at the first house we tried. Or the one next to that. The house after that was at least occupied, but the middle-aged man who answered the door said he didn't even know Roxanne was his neighbor until after she died. The elderly, well-maintained woman who answered the door at the next home told us the same thing—she hadn't even realized that anyone famous lived on the block until after the murder.

“It was awful, just awful,” the woman said. “All those television vans and people. This is a nice, quiet street, and . . . thank goodness, it's finally back to normal, although we still have the occasional tourist coming by taking pictures.”

It was more of the same at the next few homes. Either no one was home or, if someone was, he or she had never seen Roxanne.

“Don't you find it strange that these people didn't know that Roxanne was their neighbor?” Nina asked me as we crossed the street to begin making our way down the other side.

“This is New York City,” I said with a shrug. “Nobody knows their neighbors.”

“I guess, but wouldn't there have been paparazzi camped in front of her house?”

“I think all that started after she died. From what I read, she only
moved to this place a few months ago, and she'd been on tour for most of the time since.”

We started down the other side of the street. The first house had a bright red door with a brass knocker, which I ignored, instead striking the door lightly with my fist.

A large black woman opened the door. Her hello was heavy with an accent, indicating she was from one of the Caribbean islands, and my prejudices led me immediately to assume she was an employee of the family that lived there.

“My name is Daniel Sorensen and this is my partner, Nina Harrington. We're lawyers working on the case involving Roxanne's murder. Did you know that Roxanne was your neighbor?”

She nodded that she did. “Dr. and Mrs. Collins are at work now. I'm just the housekeeper.”

“Were you here the night Roxanne was murdered?” I asked quickly, realizing that our time with this woman was going to be short-lived.

“Yeah. I'm always here.”

She said this with a smile, which I viewed as an opening. “May I ask your name?”

“Eugenia Tompkins.”

“Ms. Tompkins, did you ever see Roxanne?”

“Not too much,” she said.

Eureka! Someone who had actually spotted Roxanne, who I was beginning to believe was as elusive as the Loch Ness monster.

“So you did see her in the neighborhood?” Nina said.

“Not when she died. The police asked me about that, but a few weeks before, I'd seen her.”

“Was she with anyone?” I asked.

“A man. At first I thought it may have been her father.”

“Why'd you think that?”

“I dunno. I guess because he was older. I thought maybe they were going to church or something.”

Tompkins looked back into the house. I figured I had one more question before she cut this off, so I decided to make it count.

“You said that you first thought he was her father. Did something happen to cause you to think he wasn't?”

“You could say that,” she said with a mischievous grin. “They started to kiss. And it wasn't the kind of kiss you give your father.”

She said this laughing, but when I was a beat too late joining in, she must have realized that she'd said too much. Even before I could get out another question, she said, “I think I hear the baby. I'm sorry, but I got to go,” and then she slammed the door in our faces.

We knocked on the doors of the rest of the houses on the street, but no one else told us anything worth knowing. A few had seen Roxanne coming and going, usually getting into some type of black SUV, but no one had seen her with anyone, man or woman.

I was beginning to wish that paparazzi had staked out Roxanne's home. At the very least, we'd have photographs of the older man she'd been kissing.

•   •   •

By the time we made it back to Roxanne's house, two uniformed policemen were standing on her stoop, behind the wrought iron gates. They did not seem happy to be there, but I've rarely seen a cop happy to be anywhere.

“It's about time, Counselors,” the older of the two cops said. He had a thick black mustache. The hair on his head was equally thick and also black as night.

“Sorry if we're late,” I said, checking my watch to see that we were, in fact, on time.

“We're supposed to babysit you,” said the mustachioed cop. “So we're going to stand out here and make sure you're not disturbed while you do your thing.” He made little effort to hide that he found the assignment beneath him. “Then, when you're done, we're going to look through your bags and have you empty your pockets, so we can report back that you didn't take anything.”

When the speech was finished, the other cop unlocked the gate, and then unlocked Roxanne's front door. “We'll be right out here if you need us,” Mustache Cop said as we walked past his partner into the house.

Roxanne's house was far more classically appointed than I would have imagined. Her entry hall was done in black-and-white marble that reminded me of something out of an Edith Wharton novel. The furniture had a Victorian flair, as did the artwork, which was, by and large, oil paintings of landscapes.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” Nina asked.

“It'd be nice if some guy left a bloody wristwatch with his fingerprints all on it,” I said, “but beyond that, we're just looking for something that doesn't make sense. It's like the old joke about pornography. Hopefully, we'll know it when we see it.”

“Ha-ha.”

We made our way quickly through the house. Aside from the television remote being on the floor of the media room, none of the other spaces looked like they'd been touched for months. That made some sense because Roxanne was in South Carolina the prior four days, and she had a full-time housekeeper.

All of which made the contrast with Roxanne's bedroom that much starker.

It was all white. Not just the walls but everything in it, too. Roxanne's king bed was upholstered in white leather, the facing sofas were covered in white chenille, and the throw pillows were white fur. Even the wall-to-wall shag carpeting was a bright white, which made the deep red around the bed pop out. You couldn't look at anything else in the room without your eyes being pulled back to those red stains on the floor.

The bed had been stripped not only of the sheets but the mattress, too, all of which now sat in an evidence room somewhere. The box spring remained, but the dust ruffle had been removed. On my knees, I got closer to the box spring but couldn't detect any blood.
Not that it mattered, of course. Based on the crime scene photos, there was plenty of blood on the dust ruffle. It apparently hadn't soaked through to the box spring, however.

“So this is the famous mantel,” Nina said, standing beside the fireplace. Behind her were the two empty brackets (of course, both white).

And wouldn't you know, they were precisely the right size for a baseball bat to rest upon.

I
'd left four messages for Brianna's mother, Mercedes, at the number L.D. had given us. Her outgoing message didn't say her name, but at least it was a woman's voice, which indicated that she might exist after all. In the first message I stated my name, without any identification, a shot in the dark in case the fact that I was a lawyer was going to frighten her off. In the second, I said I was calling on L.D.'s behalf, and that it was important that she call me back. She didn't. The next day I revealed that I was L.D.'s defense counsel, but that didn't merit a return phone call either. Finally, I left a message saying that it was extremely urgent that she contact me at once, but she either never got the message or, if she had, she must not have agreed, because she didn't return my call.

I didn't think that knocking on the door at the address L.D. gave us would be any more successful than my phone efforts, but stranger things have happened than someone who was ducking your phone calls agreeing to talk to you face-to-face. With that in mind, Nina and I showed up at the Brooklyn address L.D. had given us, a run-down brownstone in the non-hipster part of Williamsburg.

Beside the front door were twelve intercom buzzers. In the middle was the one for apartment 4B, which had the name “Mercedes Williams” next to it.

“At least that's a good sign,” Nina said.

“Want to place a bet on whether she still lives there?”

There was no answer when we buzzed. With no other option, I called the building's super, a man identified on the certificate of occupancy only as “Muki.”

“Mr. Muki,” I said when he answered.

“No, Muki's my first name,” he said.

“Okay, Muki, my name is Daniel Sorensen. I'm a lawyer and I need to contact one of your tenants, Mercedes Williams. Have you seen her lately?”

“Nope. Unless she's got a leak or something, I wouldn't see her.”

“Do you have any way of getting in contact with her?”

“No. I just knock on her door. The office may have a phone number.”

“Okay, we'll ask them. If you do see her, will you ask her to call me? My name again is Dan Sorensen.”

I left my phone number, but the fact that Muki didn't ask for a second to get a pen made it pretty clear that he hadn't written it down.

I was therefore understandably shocked when later that day, I received a call from Mercedes. I was equally surprised that she readily agreed to meet with us.

We were back at her building less than an hour later. This time when we buzzed the intercom, she answered and allowed us entry. I huffed my way up to the fourth floor. Nina giggled as I struggled, telling me that the staircase in her building was even steeper.

Everything about Mercedes was dark. Her eyes, her hair, and her complexion were almost all the same hue, the color of a plum. She wore her hair straight, and long enough that it brushed her shoulders. Although she looked at us fiercely, it wasn't enough to hide that she was scared.

“Thank you for seeing us, Ms. Williams,” I said. “May we come in for just a few moments?”

She nodded, and then led us into the apartment. We made it far enough inside for Mercedes to close the door behind us, but she stopped short of offering us a seat in the living room.

“Is Brianna at home?” I asked.

“No. She in school.”

Of course she was. I really had no clue anymore about kids.

“I don't think I'm going to be much help to you all,” Mercedes
said, clearly wanting to move this along and get it over with. “It's not like me and L.D. talked much, you know?”

“Did he ever talk to you about his relationship with Roxanne?” Nina asked.

Mercedes hesitated for a moment. “L.D. know you here?”

“He does,” I said. “That's how we got your phone number and address. We're his lawyers, and so nothing you say is going to go beyond us unless we think it's good for L.D., if that's what you're worrying about.”

She nodded as I said this, presumably accepting its truth without requiring further proof of L.D.'s consent. But rather than reveal some bombshell that she only would have shared had she been sure L.D. wanted us to know about it, she just said, “None of my business who he with. Like I said, we didn't talk much.”

“I get the whole not telling the ex-girlfriend about the new relationship,” Nina said in a one-woman-to-another kind of way, “but you two must have talked about Roxanne sometimes. That's just normal.”

“Maybe,” she said, and then she took it back. “I really don't remember.”

All of this seemed hard for me to believe. Roxanne was one of the most famous women on the planet. You'd think that there would be some discussion between them about her, if only about the impact on Brianna.

“L.D. told us that he had plans to see Brianna over Thanksgiving,” I said. “This is very important to our defense. It's the prosecution's theory that L.D. killed Roxanne because they had recently broken up, right before Thanksgiving, which was the reason why he didn't go with her to South Carolina. But if we could put on proof that L.D. never intended to go, because he had plans to see his daughter, that would go a long way.”

I couldn't have led Mercedes more with a GPS system, but from her scrunched-up expression, I knew that she wasn't going to help us out.

“What do you want me to say?”

That's the worst thing a witness can ever ask, at least to an ethical lawyer. There's only one response that's possible, and I gave it.