Alibi II (5 page)

The next day, the police found the three dead bodies in the apartment down the hall. Then one week later, he came back to murder her daughter and her grandson, shooting them down like dogs in the hallway as they had almost reached the apartment door. She had been right there in the kitchen when she heard them in the hallway. She thought nothing of it, until she heard gunshots, her daughter’s screams, and then silence. It was the eerie silence that came with death. As she looked out the peephole of her apartment door, she saw their blood-stained bodies, and him, standing over her daughter, before stuffing the gun in his pocket, turning away, and walking down the hallway. While she was looking out the peephole, she reached around the wall, her hand grasped the phone, and she dialed 911. Stepping back into the kitchen, she whispered that her daughter and grandson had been shot and needed an ambulance.

“Please, please come quick. Please send somebody for me, my baby’s been shot. My baby’s been shot,” the fifty-three-year-old woman cried into the phone. It was a tragic loss, altering her perception and existence. For her, after the loss of her only daughter and only grandson, nothing would be the same again in life, ever. And while she knew what happened and could have said something to the police, she was afraid for her life, and she refused to speak to the police and never ever would.

Euretha Giles sat in the fourth row of the courtroom every day in the same spot. She had three sons, one from a previous marriage and two from her murdered husband, Lester. Now, for Euretha, the death of Lester brought a lot of mixed emotions. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship, a roller-coaster ride that ended with them in separate bedrooms under the same roof. Did Euretha miss Lester? She missed his companionship.
I’ll get a dog, thank you, don’t worry about me.
Truth was, ol’ Euretha knew more than Lester thought she knew. She knew he had made the ladies in the building have sex with him in exchange for rent.
He would say to me, “I’m going to collect the rent.” You think I don’t know what Mr. Man was collecting, ’cause where’s the money, then? Where is it at?
All and all, he raised his boys, provided decently, and never was abusive. What more could you say?
Nothing, that’s it, nothing else to say for him.

Euretha sat in the courtroom. She just had to be there. She knew whatever had happened to Lester had something to do with that Daisy Mae. All she remembered about that tragic day was a lot of banging on the front door like someone was desperate to get into the building.

“Lester, go see what all that damn banging is down there why don’t you?”

“Why, what do you care for? Let them bang.”

“See, don’t blame me when you go downstairs and there’s a hole in the damn wall. Then you’ll be mad.”

He picked up his sweater, threw it over his shoulders, and slipped on his slippers.

“Don’t go messing with my fancy TV and remote control unit, leave it just like it is.”

“I’m not sitting here watching no football all night, Lester. I want to watch my Lawrence Welk programming.”

“Woman, has you lost your mind? I’m not fittin’ to sit up in here looking at that old wrinkly white man on my brand-new thirty-two-inch Magnavox television set when my football game is on. The Cowboys is playing tonight,” he said, laughing at her, knowing he was getting his way. “Listen, if you’re lucky, you might get a commercial break, maybe a little five minutes or something extra, but I’m watching my game,” said Lester, laughing at his wife as he walked out the door.

“Whatever, weasel,” she mumbled to herself.

“Hey!” he shouted, “I heard that,” he said.

She went over to Lester’s chair and sat down in it. He had the best seat in the house. She grabbed the remote, changing the channel until she found the station she was looking for. She even turned up the volume a bit and sat back and relaxed, watching her programming. Poor Lester, had it not been for Lawrence Welk, Euretha might have heard the intruder and the attack on Lester downstairs in Daisy Mae’s apartment. But she didn’t.

She had watched as Daisy got down off the stand.
Yeah, honey, you got yourself in a whole world of trouble, Missy. I guess I won’t be seeing you no more. I might as well go ahead and get that apartment unit of yours ready to rent again.

Truth was Euretha didn’t have to do much of anything. She had a two-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy that had been in effect at the time of the brutal beating that led to Lester’s death, which the police had ruled a homicide. And in a couple of weeks, when underwriting was done with their paper-pushing process, ol’ Euretha would be sitting pretty on a fancy island, sipping one of those fruity-looking piña coladas and doing the limbo.
Don’t forget about the rent.
Oh, yeah, and the rent, hope everybody had it on time ’cause there’d be no more bargaining. It was a new day, a new way, and you had to pay.
That’s right, honey, make sure they know it’s a new sheriff in this town and her name is Euretha Giles.

Bobby DeSimone pushed open the double wooden doors that led into the courtroom. He had worked on the Somerset murder case all night long, gone through at least three pots of coffee. And now, he was ready. He had the perfect defense lined up. After yesterday, and the damaging testimony of Daisy Mae Fothergill, he had to make a comeback. This was it.

“Are we ready, Mr. DeSimone?” the judge bellowed from the stand.

“Yes, Your Honor, yes, we are,” said DeSimone, standing straight and tall. “I’d like to call Bernard Guess to the stand, Your Honor,” said DeSimone, the entire courtroom buzzing with excitement. He felt it was the only way to save the kid’s life. He had no choice but to put him on the stand. With only half an hour of prep time, he had told Nard that the only way to get out of this trap he was caught in was to tell the truth. And at the end of the day, the truth could easily set him free.

After Bernard was finished telling the story of how the two would-be gunmen came from down the hall holding his friend, Ponando “Poncho” Fernandez, in a choke hold with a gun to his head demanding drugs and money, he knew that if he didn’t do something, he would have been murdered, too. By the time 
DeSimone
 had finished with Bernard Guess, he was merely a man who was protecting himself from would-be robbers, a man who was lucky to have escaped with his life. And the bottom line was, because they came through that back window with fully loaded weapons, Bernard Guess had every right to protect himself. It was a classic case of self-defense. Was it wrong to get the girl Daisy Mae Fothergill involved? Of course it was. DeSimone made sure that he and the jury knew that, because if that was all that the district attorney had, that simply wasn’t going to be enough. When DeSimone asked Nard to explain why he had asked Daisy Mae Fothergill to lie in the first place, he solemnly told the jury that he was scared and didn’t know what else to do. The truth was the kid was weeks shy of his twenty-first birthday and had never been arrested before, not even as a juvenile. He graduated high school, but went from basketball courts to hustling.

Of course, Barry Zone attempted to redirect, but Nard simply continued making himself out to be the victim just as DeSimone had coached him to.

After Zone concluded his line of questioning, DeSimone brought Detective Tommy Delgado to the stand. Delgado unfortunately did nothing but offer testimony that backed up the self-defense theory by testifying that the would-be robbers, Jeremy Tyler and Lance Robertson, did in fact climb a tree and come through an open window in the bathroom of the third-floor row home. It was also Detective Delgado he requested to read aloud the criminal records of Jeremy Tyler and Lance Robertson, as both had served time in prison for aggravated assault, gun charges, and drugs.

After he had finished with Detective Delgado, he called to the stand a ballistics specialist, who confirmed that the gun found in Jeremy Tyler’s hand was in fact the gun used to kill Ponando Fernandez, also known as Poncho. However, it was not the gun that was used to kill Lance Robertson. The crime lab specialists also confirmed that the gun used to kill Lance Robertson was the same gun that had been used to kill Jeremy Tyler. Thank God the gun had not been found. DeSimone could only imagine the possibilities, thinking of how his client had merely thrown it away in a trashcan.

Once he was done with his hired ballistics specialist, he moved on to forensics and the fibers found on the bathroom window at the scene, which offered substantial evidence that Nard was in fact defending himself from burglars.

Then DeSimone pulled out the big gun, one of his closest friends from law school, Bernie Madofften. Bernie had become a top-notch expert in the psychiatric study of serial killers. He was very famous, very notable, and trustworthy, and his opinions were regarded as definitive by his peers in the professions of psychology and psychiatry. And of course his testimony backed Nard’s testimony, wherein Nard claimed he panicked, was afraid for his own life, and had a complete out-of-body experience and didn’t mean to kill or harm the intruders.

By the time DeSimone was finished marking exhibits, questioning forensics and the police, and assisting Nard in his apparent and seemingly honest and truthful testimony, DeSimone had not only made Jeremy Tyler and Lance Robertson look like America’s Most Wanted, but it was apparent that not only were they hardened criminals, they were completely responsible for their own deaths, brought on by their own actions, and technically deserved what they got when they climbed through the window that fateful night. He let his last witness go, put his fists on his hips, spread his legs apart, looking like a full grown Peter Pan, and told the judge, “I have no more witnesses, Your Honor.”

The judge and DeSimone turned to Barry Zone, whose job was to put Nard in jail. “Will you be cross-examining, Mr. Zone?” he asked once again. And once again, Zone’s answer was the same.

“No, Your Honor, not at this time.”

DeSimone couldn’t help but look over at Zone, intentionally mimicking the sly eye slant of a fox.
Gotcha!
He smiled, showed his pearly whites as Barry Zone held up his middle finger, pretended to smile back, then rolled his eyes.

Liddles, his trusty binoculars in hand, sat in his beat-up old navy blue van, just as he had yesterday and the day before, and watched as Wink and his family got into the silver Oldsmobile. Their faces were somber, and no one said a word. They didn’t seem as happy and jubilant as they had been yesterday. His sister had already taken a cab home, after filling him on the day’s courtroom drama. At least it was looking better for Nard, and Nard had finally gotten a chance to tell what happened that night.

He turned the key, started the car, and began following the Tyler family. This time he didn’t lose them, and Wink never noticed the van following him even as it pulled up in front of his mother’s house.

Liddles watched the house carefully and waited as the family went inside. Wink emerged fifteen minutes later with a laundry bag in tow.
My brother for yours,
he thought to a dead Jeremy.

Timing would be crucial, but other than that, it was all coming together in his head. He would kill Wink without his even seeing it coming, and then they would be even. He watched as Wink opened the back door on the passenger side and grabbed a gym bag and pair of sneakers, then walked up the steps and back inside.

“Mom, why you crying?” asked Wink, as he saw his sisters, Leslee and Linda, consoling their mother as she sat on the living room sofa, weeping.

“That boy killed Jeremy, that boy killed him…just took my son,” she bellowed.

The woman’s emotions took over, and she continued to cry. “And now he’s gone. Now he’s gone…”

Wink couldn’t stand to see his mother cry. But, ever since the death of Jeremy it seemed that crying had become a regular pattern for her, and he couldn’t take it anymore. He knew what had to be done, if nothing else, for his mother’s pain, so his brother wouldn’t have died in vain, and for his own peace, he’d show Nard what it felt like to hurt someone’s family the way that Nard had hurt his.

Vivian left the doctor’s office. Her fear of stomach cancer had been unfounded. Her secretary’s bright idea was now a reality. And it was now a documented fact that she was indeed pregnant and was definitely having a baby.
We have to get married
, she thought to herself.
What am I going to do? What is Tommy going to say?
The truth was it would kill her mother. Marceline Lang would die a thousand deaths if any of her daughters came home pregnant, or worse came home pregnant without a husband.

“A woman doesn’t do these things. A woman just doesn’t let these kinds of things happen. Whatever you do, don’t ever go too far. There’s only so far you can go, then before you know it, oops, you’ve gone too far and then you end up with a baby before the husband. What kind of life is that? Listen to your mother and trust me; don’t have sex until you’re married.”

Vivian could picture her mother’s face, and the words coming out of her mother’s mouth.

“Jesus Christ, Vivian, if I told you once I told you a thousand times. What the hell is wrong with you? Why would you get pregnant by him? He’s a scumbag! Of all the men in the world, my God, look at who you picked to mate with. What’s wrong with you?”

Vivian’s family didn’t care for Tommy any more than Tommy’s family cared for her.

“It’s bad enough you’re a fucking cop, Tommy, you’d think you’d stay clear of the FBI, but not you, you got to go and fuck an agent?” his little brother, Sammy, teased him one day.

“You see the fucking rack on her, come on, FBI my ass, she’s hot, and her tits, oh, my God, you should see her tits, oh, my god, you should fuck her, then you’d understand,” he responded, as if he was so serious he could have died of a heart attack right then and there.

“Her fucking rack is gonna have us all sitting behind bars. Wake up, why don’t you!”

But love has a way of doing strange things and before anyone could stop them, they were living together, and now they were having a baby.