Ghettoside (43 page)

Skaggs gripped his hands together or played with his pen. Once, Jessica tilted her head up to view some point on the map, and her neck tattoo became fully visible to the jury. As the testimony wore on, she looked cold, sinking in her chair and drawing in her shoulders. But she missed no cue.

She was perhaps just a little too affectedly ladylike (she made an unnecessary show of delicacy when Stirling asked her if she’d been “intimate” with Starks), but apart from that, Stirling could not have asked for a better witness. He sat down and braced himself.

But neither Applebaum nor Perlo went after Midkiff. They cross-examined her in a perfunctory, careful manner, Perlo trying to build a case that Midkiff also knew the man in the wheelchair’s cousin Bobby Ray Johnson, twenty-six, nicknamed “Gutta,” whom investigators believed had been stabbed to death by one of his own comrades from the Bloccs in 2008. Perlo was planning to try to pin the murder on Johnson later in the trial.

Applebaum did manage to summon a little of Midkiff’s old combativeness when he asked why she had at first hidden from police. “You didn’t want to get caught?” he asked. “No,” Midkiff snapped. “Who would?” But the cross-examination Stirling dreaded never materialized. Good defense attorneys know that if a witness is telling the truth, it can only hurt their case to attack. Midkiff stepped down without having lost an ounce of self-possession. As she passed the bench where Tennelle sat on her way out of the courtroom, he whispered to her, “Thank you.”

On what was supposed to be the last day of testimony, an earthquake hit. People across the region were awakened at 4:30
A.M
. by a 4.4 temblor under Pico Rivera.

John Skaggs, of course, was already awake. Further rattled was Arielle Walker, who was by then complaining to Skaggs about what she said were cars with tinted windows parking in front of her house since her testimony. She was convinced she was being threatened. Skaggs was not so sure.

Half of the jury, it seemed, was coughing and sneezing. The lineup offered no relief: a coroner’s investigator and Rubin, the weapons analyst. Numbing talk of “muzzle climb” and “lead cores.” The state patrol officer who arrested Starks in the Suburban testified. Then came the “gang expert,” Sheriff’s Detective Daniel Leon of the Lennox station, a crew cut and a chin in a light beige suit clutching an attaché case by the handle.

Leon spoke with confidence of the gangs’ undying hatred of each other and the brazenness of their face tattoos as if he were describing some exotic tribe. They lived for “putting in work,” he said. Leon’s testimony was supposed to back up the gang enhancement charges in the prosecution’s case. But when Stirling showed Leon graffiti of a down-pointing arrow—perhaps the most universal bit of gang shorthand in L.A., it means “this is our turf”—Leon could not tell him what it meant. Skaggs, watching, looked pained. Later, again, Leon failed to recognize graffiti containing the initials “S.C.” Stirling had to tell him the obvious: “South Central.”

A state-ordered furlough day due to budget cuts would put off the trial’s conclusion for one more day. The defense felt the walls closing in. A glum Zeke Perlo summed up week two: the prosecution, he said, “was building a monster of a case.”

But Phil Stirling was still nervous. The central problem—proving Starks’s culpability—remained elusive. Everything, including Midkiff’s testimony, had gone as well as possible for the prosecution. But there was no telling how the jury saw it. Like Skaggs, Stirling was unnerved by the stony faces in the jury box. If the jurors thought Jessica was more
involved than she let on, or that Davis had taken the initiative to kill on his own, the case against Starks could still be weakened. The long, hot furlough day fell on a Wednesday and prolonged the suspense.

On Thursday, when the trial resumed, Devin Davis initially refused to come out of his cell. He was despondent. Five deputies were stationed in the courtroom to watch him in case he misbehaved.

Then Perlo stood and delivered a thunderbolt.

“The defense calls Derrick Starks,” he said.

Perlo had spent the previous day and night pleading with his client not to take the stand. Perlo had a plan. It was not to tear apart the prosecution’s case—he had gone through the pages and pages of Skaggs’s investigation without spotting a hole—but rather to build a credible alternative theory of the murder, enough to sow doubt and confusion in the jury’s mind. If Jessica’s testimony could be called into question, there were plenty of other ways that the car and the gun and Bryant Tennelle might have come together without Derrick Starks. Chiefly, he planned to show that Bobby Ray Johnson, the cousin of the man in the wheelchair, had had access to all of them. He did not want any facts to come out that would conflict with the alternate theory, a strong possibility if the prosecution got hold of Starks.

He saw another danger: that Starks’s testimony could open the way to the admission of evidence the judge had excluded. He hadn’t had high hopes for the case before this. But at least he had a defense. An argument. Starks’s testimony could ruin it.

But nothing he said made any difference. Starks, watching the prosecution take shape before him, had decided his attorney was incompetent. So now he swung his way into the stand, scooted around a little in the chair to get comfortable, and took a deep breath. Perlo, questioning him, did his best to conceal his dismay from the jury.

Starks had been working on a goatee during the trial. It was brown and neatly trimmed, with a little peak that ran up the middle of his chin. He wore a tan shirt, a maroon tie, and a small, self-confident smile. His
mustache clung to the corners of his lips and his collar did not quite lie flat. His eyes had deep shadows above and below. From where the jury sat, the little tattoo under his eye looked like a birthmark. His face softened for an instant when his eyes fixed on his mother.

“Are you a member of the Blocc Crips?” Perlo asked. “Yes,” Starks said, and they were off.

Starks was taking the “I’m no angel but I didn’t do it” tack. He was all that the gang “experts” alleged, he said, but he had been out of town in North Carolina at the time of the murder. He had left a week before Bryant’s death and heard about the murder after he returned. He had gone east to help a cousin move. She lived near Charleston, was pregnant, he said, and needed his truck. He was not in the Suburban when Jessica had the accident, he said. He had come running to see what had happened and got arrested.

Perlo took his time between questions, his expression flat. Starks rocked and swung slightly in the chair as he answered. At the noon break, Starks walked away from the stand with a little rolling step.

After the break, Devin Davis sauntered into court. His shirt was untucked, and now he was joking with bailiff Hardy and with Applebaum. Perlo resumed, and Starks offered the version of the case that Perlo had hoped to make plausible:
Johnson had sold his cousin the gun. Johnson had been running with Jessica at the time of the murder
. Starks was still swinging slightly, as if he heard music in his head. He seemed relaxed, rocking his head back and forth between questions, glancing periodically at the clock. Perlo finished and bowed his head.

Phil Stirling stood up. He crumpled a piece of paper in his hand and flung it down with a flourish.

Then he pounced.

Everything was fair game. He brought up Starks’s recent criminal history—robbery, attempted burglary—and then laid into his story. He forced Starks to recount every detail of the trip to North Carolina, what he’d done every day, what he had eaten, whom he had stayed with. Starks grew noticeably tense. He pressed his lips together between answers, and he stopped swinging in his chair.

Stirling had calculated distances and driving times. He asked Starks how much gas his tank held and tested him on when and where he had stopped for gas. Starks was trapped into insisting he had driven at eighty miles per hour all the way to Baton Rouge, Louisiana barely stopping, amped up on energy drinks and NoDoz before heading up to North Carolina. Stirling asked about people he had seen on the way. Starks recalled some relatives but said he couldn’t remember others.

The situation played to Stirling’s strengths. He barely glanced at his notes. He did not bother to point out that Charleston was in South Carolina, that no one could drive that fast, that a man facing murder charges might be expected to at least try to corroborate his alibi. He didn’t need to.

Starks said a cousin picked him up for the last leg of the journey from Louisiana to North Carolina. Stirling prodded. Starks said he couldn’t recall in what type of car they rode. He mentioned another passenger. Stirling pressed. “I can’t recall his name,” Starks said. “You have been in jail two and a half years. Have you made an effort to learn that person’s name?” Stirling asked.

By the end, Starks was asserting that he had stayed in houses in places he couldn’t remember, occupied by people whose names he didn’t know. He couldn’t say who he was carpooling with, he said, because “I was pretty much inebriated through the whole way,” drinking Courvoisier and smoking marijuana. He said he couldn’t recall whether it was day or night when he departed.

Starks was stiff, but he faced Stirling squarely. Once, between answers, he drew a hand over his forehead in a gesture of exhaustion. Perlo suffered silently through his client’s self-destruction, a finger over his lips, one leg jiggling.

Davis, watching from the defense table, appeared relaxed and jovial, as if he had given up. Skaggs went out to take a phone call and returned smiling a little irrepressible smile. A bunch of DAs had filed into the courtroom. Something was up.

But first, Stirling took Starks to task on all the recorded material from jail that up until now had been kept out of court. He was now able to
introduce Starks’s jailhouse reproach to Davis that “you should have kept your mouth shut,” and his “bitch be squealing” remark in reference to Midkiff. “I was talking about somebody else,” Starks said. But his voice was weak.

Finally, Stirling introduced Starks’s threat against Skaggs on the jail tape. He displayed the transcript and asked Starks to confirm that he had said, “If I were to kill a copper, it’d be Detective Skagg”—the “tall white boy” he described as wearing only a shirt and a tie but no jacket.

“I don’t recall,” Starks said. Through it all, Olitha Starks kept gazing at the ceiling, a trace of a wan smile on her face.

The Starks jury at last betrayed a faint emotion: impatience with Starks’s routine. Perlo noted it. The defense disaster was nearly complete.

Stirling returned to Starks’s alibi, got him to insist again that he had been out of town on the night before the killing when Midkiff said they had stayed at the Desert Inn.

Then, without fanfare, Stirling laid a small slip of blue paper on the overhead projector.

It was rectangular and lined—an old-style motel receipt. It bore the Desert Inn logo, the hotel’s name in a retro font with a palm tree. And it was dated 5-10-07. Also on the receipt were the printed name D. Starks, a driver’s license number, and a signature.

The jurors peered. Stirling pointed to the slip and forced Starks to admit that it was his driver’s license number and, grudgingly, that “it looks like my signature.”

“Nothing further,” Stirling said, and sat down.

After court adjourned, John Colello couldn’t contain himself. “That’s it!” he cried, rising from his seat and turning toward his fellow DAs in back. In the corridor, Stirling gave John Skaggs one of his awkward hugs. “A seven-year-old could have done that,” he said. “A seven-year-old could have tried that case!”

The motel receipt was Skaggs’s final contribution to the case. Prompted by Starks’s testimony, he had sent Matt Gares, one of his young detectives
from Olympic, down to the Desert Inn at the break. Gares had driven the length of the city in search of the receipt. Skaggs had given Gares no particular instruction for this assignment, except the usual one: “Do whatever you have to do.”

Gares did. It meant searching through scores of tiny, flimsy receipts in the back office of the motel.

The management bundled the receipts in little stacks for each day. But when Gares looked, there was no stack from May 10, 2007.

So he went through the next day’s receipts, and then the next. No luck. He went back in time. It was like the way Skaggs went back to knock on a door again and again. Just keep going, keep pushing, until that door opens. In the end, Gares resigned himself to searching randomly through box after box.

At length, he found the missing receipts. They had been filed by mistake under May 27. Gares pulled out what he was looking for: the little blue slip marked “D. Starks.”

Court convened that Friday, the nineteenth of March, a cloudy, cool day. Stirling sported a shiny yellow tie that looked like trim from a bridesmaid’s dress, and Colello was finally healthy. For the first time since the trial began, the pair appeared relaxed. Devin Davis had spent Starks’s time on the stand nudging Applebaum over and over to confirm his suspicion that Starks was badly muffing it—“That’s bad, right?” Now he, too, seemed relaxed, ready for it to be over. Even Starks seemed looser than usual, smiling at his family in the back, as if relieved.