The Mayor of Lexington Avenue (36 page)

Dick and Joaquin stared straight down at their breakfast. They both were experienced enough to recognize a domestic dispute when they saw it. These questions were for Jack to answer.

“I don’t know what to tell you, honey,” Jack began. He knew it was hardest on her because she didn’t have the luxury of escaping into the normal routine of the office like Maria and he could. “The only way we can ensure that nobody else gets killed is to account for all of our whereabouts day and night. You’re in danger because you’re close to me. If you go out of town—say if you went to New York for a couple of weeks—you’d be fine. I don’t think anybody would follow you there. So if you’re feeling a little penned in, just take a trip. Anybody else have any other thoughts?”

Dick and Joaquin didn’t look up from their plates.

“Sounds good to me,” Dick said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Me too,” mumbled Joaquin from behind his coffee cup.

Jack made the mistake of trying to add a little levity.

“Poor Maria has to ride with me to work every morning
and
have lunch with me every day.” The “Poor Maria” line did not go over too well with Pat. Maria knew it right away and knew how to save the situation better than Jack.

“The people in the office are starting to talk,” she said. “And you don’t help the situation, Jack, when you have your arm around me every time we walk in and out the front door.” They all knew that was part of the plan—to make it common knowledge that Jack and Maria were together at all times. The people who were watching needed to get that message. “But don’t worry, Pat, I don’t like
gringos.
”

Pat smiled and came back with a zinger of her own. “We’ve all noticed,” she said with a waggle of her eyebrows, which made everyone laugh except Joaquin, who turned a little red. Sometime during the first two weeks, he and Maria had bonded. During the third week, he abruptly stopped his morning fishing routine. Everyone assumed he had simply decided to sleep in, until he emerged from Maria’s bedroom one morning. Nobody said anything until a few days later at breakfast. Jack and Pat had their heads together, and Maria and Joaquin were sneaking glances across the table when Dick suddenly blurted out, “I feel like a fifth wheel around here.”

Jack almost spit his oatmeal out he started laughing so hard.

“I can set you up with Dolly at the Pelican,” Pat offered. “I hear she’s available.” She had taken to dragging Dick to breakfast at the Pelican whenever the others left early for the office.

“I don’t know if I could take her asking me if I wanted the usual every night,” Dick shot back, bringing them all almost to tears.

They were laughing again now, but the problem had not been resolved.

“Do you want to take a vacation? Get out of here for a few weeks?” Jack suggested again.

Pat hesitated. “I don’t think so. You’re all dealing with the circumstances, so I guess I can too. But Jack, when is it going to end? What I really mean is, when is it going to start?”

“As soon as I have an opportunity, Pat, I promise you. As soon as I have an opportunity.” Pat nodded. She knew he was doing his best, although she didn’t quite understand what he meant by an opportunity. There were certain things Jack kept to himself.

“All right,” she sighed. “But when this is over, you’re going to take me to Europe.”

“Hell, when this is over, I’ll take us all to Europe.”

Forty

Jack’s “opportunity” finally arrived two months later.

He had inherited an aggressive young lawyer named Todd Hamilton, who had been with the office for two years before Jack took over. Hamilton had all the makings of a potential superstar in the business. He was smart, articulate, handsome—and had one gigantic pair of
cojones.
Although he’d grown tired of prosecuting the usual small-town felonies, instead of packing his bags and heading for the big city, he’d stayed put and dug deep to find the corrupt underbelly of Cobb County. He was already in the thick of a major investigation when Jack was appointed.

As Miami, Fort Lauderdale and the Palm Beaches grew and grew and grew, real estate developers began to run out of the necessary dirt to churn their profits. They couldn’t go south or east: It was hard to build condominiums and single-family homes in the Atlantic Ocean. They couldn’t go north: Everything up to Fort Pierce and Vero was pretty much built out. So they did what Horace Greeley had suggested to a much different crowd about a hundred years before—go west! Even west created some problems, however, because of a rather large freak of nature called the Everglades. But just north of the Everglades was Lake Okeechobee, and it wasn’t long before the land around the lake started popping up on radar screens as prime property for future development. Developers began to gobble up acreage at bargain-basement prices. Few people noticed. Unfortunately for the buyers, Todd Hamilton was one of the people who did.

There are always a few minor start-up problems when converting a basically rural area into a sub-sub-sub-suburb of the metropolis—minor irritants such as land-use, zoning and environmental regulations that must be removed. Politicians need to be paid off at the state and local level, and environmental regulators need to be taken care of. Zoning officials and city and county code enforcement officers have to get their cut as well, although theirs is usually quite a bit smaller because of their position in the food chain. The big dogs eat first.

While everybody was feeding at the public trough, Todd Hamilton was taking notes and following the money trail. By the time he approached Jack about convening a grand jury to start handing out indictments, Hamilton could trace money flowing from four separate companies that had purchased land in Cobb County to the personal bank accounts of state senators and representatives, state environmental commission employees, and assorted other parasites—to the tune of millions of dollars. He could also show where zoning restrictions had been removed and permits had been granted in protected wetland areas and estuaries without any valid basis.

Jack was ecstatic when Todd presented his evidence to him, but not for the obvious reasons. Jack had known all along that the biggest impediment to bringing Wesley Brume and Clay Evans to justice was getting an indictment from a grand jury. In Florida, a state attorney can prosecute most crimes by
information
, which basically means that the state attorney has the discretion to determine whether there is probable cause to charge someone with a crime. The only time a state attorney is required to get an
indictment,
a finding of probable cause from a grand jury, is when the potential punishment is death. Since Jack intended to charge both Evans and Brume with first-degree murder, he would have to have a grand jury convened to get an indictment—and there was the rub. The chief judge of the circuit court would have to convene the grand jury, and the chief judge of Cobb County—the
only
circuit judge in Cobb County—was Bill Sampson, Jack’s predecessor as state attorney. Bill Sampson would
never
convene a grand jury to consider the indictment of Clay Evans, a sitting federal judge, and Wesley Brume, a chief of police.

While grand juries
must
be the source of indictments in first-degree murder cases, they can be convened for any type of felony and often are asked to issue indictments for high-profile crimes like the corruption case Todd Hamilton was investigating. A grand jury indictment in such a case shields the state attorney from charges of unfairness or playing politics or things of that nature. Bill Sampson would have no problem convening a grand jury to investigate corruption. Once the grand jury was in place, however, Jack could ask them to issue an indictment in any case he wanted. This was the “opportunity” he had told Pat he was waiting for.

Still, he waited until the grand jury had been in session for a month before he told Todd Hamilton that they were going to take a break from his case for a few days to present another case.

The proverbial shit was about to hit the fan.

Forty–one

Jack first addressed the eighteen grand jurors on a Monday morning, when they were fresh and, hopefully, attentive. He didn’t pull any punches. He told them that he wanted them to indict the former state attorney and the investigating detective in the Rudy Kelly case for murder because the two of them knew Rudy Kelly was probably innocent, but they coerced testimony and hid evidence to get a conviction, then later refused to talk to the real killer because they didn’t want to spoil the verdict they had already obtained. They let Rudy Kelly die in the electric chair without checking out the facts that would have made him a free man. He meticulously laid out the evidence he planned to present at trial: that three men were a few hundred yards from the murder scene on the night of the murder; how two of them were questioned that night and then disappeared; how the third, a man named Geronimo, was never questioned and was never found.

He told them about Rudy—how Rudy was a very affable, almost retarded young man who had been to visit Lucy Ochoa on the night of her murder. He told them about Wesley Brume’s interrogation of Rudy and the so-called confession written in long hand by Wesley Brume without the aid of readily available video and audio recorders.

When he had given them an overall view of the case, he focused on the specific details that incriminated Evans and Brume. The first was the rape file.

“They found semen in Lucy Ochoa’s vaginal cavity,” he told them. “And the blood type—they didn’t have DNA testing back then—was different from the blood type of the blood on the carpet, which was Rudy’s blood when he fell and cut his hand. They put that information in a separate rape file and didn’t tell Rudy’s attorneys about it.” He spoke the next two sentences with special emphasis, punching every word home:
“It was evidence that someone else was in Lucy’s house on the night of the murder and they hid it from defense counsel. That rape file was only uncovered last year.”

Next, Jack informed them of the letter Tracey James sent to Clay Evans just before she left the case, telling him that one of the three men who was on the street that night—the one called Geronimo, who disappeared before anyone could talk to him—was undoubtedly the killer. And he told them how she had attached Joaquin Sanchez’s report of his interview with Pablo Gonzalez. He repeated two sentences from Tracey’s letter verbatim:

“Release the boy or at least delay the trial until we can jointly investigate who and where this Geronimo person is. Let us work together to see that justice is accomplished.”

The third important piece of evidence was the anticipated testimony of Maria Lopez, that two years after Rudy’s conviction, the City of Del Rio police department sent a letter to the Bass Creek police department informing them that they had just arrested an individual named Geronimo Cruz for rape and murder.

“According to Ms. Lopez, Wesley Brume called Clay Evans immediately and told him about the letter and went directly to his office. There is no evidence that the Del Rio police department was ever contacted, and the letter disappeared.”

The final elements in Jack’s case were the confession and the blood testing of Geronimo Cruz.

“You will see a video recording of a sworn confession by Geronimo Cruz in which he describes in detail how he murdered Lucy Ochoa. We blood-tested Mr. Cruz, who is on death row in Texas for the rape and murder of another woman. His DNA matched the semen found in Lucy Ochoa. There is no doubt he is the killer.

“There is also no doubt that an innocent young man was executed by the State of Florida,” Jack concluded. “Evidence was intentionally hidden; other evidence was intentionally not followed up on. The people who did that—whether they are part of law enforcement or not—should be prosecuted for their actions and should receive the punishment they deserve.”

His presentation had the earmarks of a closing statement, which was exactly what Jack intended. He trusted juries—a lot more than he trusted judges—to go out on a limb and make the right decision, but he had to convince them at the outset that they were doing the right thing. Like Judge Bill Sampson, they would initially be reluctant to indict a state attorney and a police officer. But unlike Bill, they wouldn’t be worried about their own jobs if they did so.

He started to present his case that very afternoon. He read them Wesley Brume’s testimony from the suppression hearing, then the testimonies of Rudy’s principal, Bill Yates, and Benny Dragone, his employer at the convenience store. The combination pretty much painted a picture of Wesley Brume as a snake. Next, he introduced his documentary evidence—a certified copy of the rape investigation and Tracey James’s letter to Clay Evans with Joaquin’s report attached. He followed up with something he hadn’t mentioned that morning, live testimony from Charley Peterson, the public defender who had represented Rudy at trial.

Jack had had a hard time finding Charley Peterson but he eventually located him through a relative in town. Charley had retired unwillingly from the practice of law. His drinking had gotten so bad that he was eventually disbarred, a fact Jack did not know about when he’d filed Rudy’s appeal. A disbarred Charley Peterson would have been another factor in Rudy’s favor. Charley was now clean and sober and teaching at a small college in western North Carolina. When Jack phoned him and told him about the rape file, he was so angry he offered to come and testify at any time without a subpoena.

Charley Peterson knew that he bore some responsibility for Rudy’s death because of his drinking, and he intended to make up for it by testifying honestly and forcefully. He told the grand jurors that he was never told about the rape file and that if he had known about it, he would have introduced the semen evidence at trial. It was significant because it put somebody else in Lucy’s trailer besides Rudy. He was convinced that the jury in Rudy’s case would never have convicted him had they known of the semen evidence.

Jack ended the day on Charley Peterson’s testimony. He was going to call Maria first thing in the morning and finish with Geronimo Cruz’s video confession.