Key Witness (11 page)

“Then we should be okay,” he assured her; and himself.

She nodded slowly. “Is this … will this, whatever you’re going to do … be legal?”

“Nobody’ll catch on, if that’s what’s worrying you.” His smile was meant to be reassuring, but there was an obviously cynical undertone to it. Doris had seen that look on him before—she knew it well.

She didn’t have to think twice about her decision. “Okay.” Her fingers touched his wrist again. “What can I do for you in return?” she asked tenderly.

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he answered, his mind already in another gear. “After we see what I can do for you.”

“H
ERE’S YOUR OFFICE.” JOSEPHINE
DiStefano, the paralegal, a cup of coffee in one hand and half a bagel in the other, nudged the door open with her hip. They had met ten minutes earlier. “You share it with Max Strauss. He’s already in court this morning.”

The office he had been assigned was a partitioned cubicle about ten feet square, half the size of the bathroom in his own office. No windows—one wall was battleship gray concrete, and the other three were particleboard at the bottom with a half-glass top that went up about eight feet. There were about twenty offices on the floor just like it, none of which had any privacy.

Two government-issue battle-scarred metal desks facing each other, partner-style, took up most of the space, along with their desk chairs and another straight-back chair alongside for interviews, again metal. He hadn’t seen furniture this ugly since his stint in the Peace Corps in the early seventies, working in a hospital in Zaire. Up against one wall were some ancient legal-sized file cabinets, and leaning in the corner diagonally from the entrance was a wooden clothes tree, from which hung a set of sweats, assorted jackets and rain gear, and a racquetball racket in a case.

In deference to his new job he had worn an old suit to work, a navy blue Brooks that had been languishing in the back of his closet for years. It was heavier than the svelte lightweight Armanis he was used to—already he felt uncomfortably hot. There was no air-conditioning on the floor that he was aware of, and the windows, which were open, offered little cooling.

Laying his briefcase on top of his newly assigned desk, he shrugged off his suit coat, glancing toward the clothes tree for a hanger.

“If you want a hanger for your jacket,” Josephine instructed him, reading his mind, “you’ll have to bring in your own. Our budget doesn’t cover the necessities, let alone something fancy like a wooden coat hanger.” She smiled at him. “Not exactly what you’re used to?”

“It’ll do,” he said with a shrug. “I’m here to work, not worry about appearances.”

“Good attitude to have,” she said, polishing off the last bite of bagel. “You’ll need it.” Having dispensed with the formalities: “Lucien wanted me to bring you up to his office as soon as you were settled in. I’d say you’re as settled as you’re going to get, so follow me.”

Chucking the rest of her coffee in a trash can, she led him through a rabbit-warren maze of cubicles similar to his, corridors that bisected them, and open bullpen areas, where people were talking on the phones, banging away at typewriters and computers, or having their morning coffee with the paper. He figured her for her late twenties, unmistakably Italian, given the name DiStefano. Her long black hair was teased above her head, and her skirt was tighter than those worn by the women who worked in his firm. Waskie, Turner didn’t have a dress code, but there were unwritten rules.

Against the far wall there were a few larger offices, which had real walls, solid, that went all the way to the ceiling, and windows with a view. Josephine knocked on a half-open door, then stuck her head in. “Mr. Matthews,” she announced.

“Come on in,” Walcott sang out.

“I’ll catch up to you later,” Josephine told him as he entered Walcott’s office. “I’ll be your eyes and ears for a few days, help you find your way around. My space is right near yours.”

“I appreciate that,” Wyatt said. “I’m sure I’ll need all the help I can get.”

“Sit down.” Walcott indicated a chair across from his desk. “You want coffee?”

“Thanks.”

“What do you take?”

“A little milk.”

There was a Mr. Coffee on a credenza in the corner. Walcott poured a cup for Wyatt. “All we’ve got is the powdered stuff.”

“Black, then.”

They sat across the desk from each other. Walcott leaned back, his fingers laced, stretching his arms over his head.

“So. Are you ready to jump right in?”

“If you feel comfortable with that, yes.”

“Good. I’d like to break you in gently, but I don’t have that luxury. We’ve got three lawyers out with the flu, and a stack of cases to the ceiling.” He picked up a handful of files from the top of a two-foot-high pile on his desk and rifled through them. “This is from over the weekend—simple felonies. Every one of these is someone who’s going to be charged and bound over within the next forty-eight hours, or earlier. None of them have a lawyer, none of them have met with a lawyer yet. We have to be their lawyer, and we might not meet with some of them until a half hour before they go up before the judge.”

“Sounds hectic.” Wyatt sipped at the coffee. It was terrible. He made a mental note to bring in his own thermos, starting tomorrow.

Walcott took three files off the top of the pile. “Here’s your first three cases.” He handed them across the desk to Wyatt.

“What are they?” Wyatt asked.

“I don’t know the particulars, I haven’t read them.” He pointed to the edges of the files. “They’re color-coded, that’s how you know. Green for nonviolent, meaning no weapons or force, and red for violent felonies. Juveniles would be yellow, but another office handles them.”

Wyatt glanced at his folders. He had two greens and a red.

“Josephine’ll help you,” Walcott said. “She’s a better lawyer than most of the lawyers. She’ll hold your hand till you catch on.”

Walcott stood up, glancing at his watch. “You’re due in court in an hour and twenty-five minutes. Trial by fire.”

Wyatt felt a surge pulse through him—part exhilaration, and considerable nervousness.

“Don’t worry,” Walcott said calmly, a smile playing over his lips. “The obvious losers you try to cut the best deal you can, the rest you finesse. The judges always grant one continuance, at least.”

“So this is how the law works in the public sector.”

“Every day of the year.”

D
WAYNE AND LIEUTENANT DORIS
Blake sat side by side at the guard’s desk in the law library. It was after hours—the facility was closed. They were the only ones there, she’d made sure of that.

Dwayne connected her small computer to the wall plug and turned it on. It hummed to life.

“What do you have, sixteen megabytes of RAM?”

“Thirty-two. It’s a Pentium two hundred.” She didn’t know if that was important, but the salesman had told her it was.

“Bitchin’. Plenty of power and speed.”

He played around with the computer for a few minutes, checking out the various options. “Okay, baby,” he said to the screen, clicking the track ball onto a cursor, “show me everything you’ve got.”

Besides the extraordinary artwork on his body, Dwayne Thompson was famous for two things. He had an uncanny knack for getting people to talk to him, to open up and bare their souls, which was why he was a good snitch. During the years he had spent in the state prison system, which was over half his adult life, three men had been convicted and sentenced for serious crimes because of his testimony in court against them. Each time he had helped send somebody up one or more charges against him had been dropped completely or reduced to time already served. Considering all the terrible shit he had done (not counting the crimes he had committed but hadn’t been caught at), he would have been a lifer several times over by now if they hadn’t.

The other thing that Dwayne was famous for was as a computer wizard. He had taken advantage of the system and gone to college on a Pell grant inside the walls, receiving a B.S. in computer science, cum laude. He was acknowledged as being the best hacker in the entire state prison system, which was why he had been denied official access to a computer at Durban the last three years, since they’d realized how dangerous he could be.

Until he had been shut down he had done legitimate work in the warden’s office. He had also, from time to time, done some off-the-record, not entirely kosher work for various prison officials. For that he was rewarded with cushy jobs, better food and living accommodations, canteen privileges, and extra good-behavior marks. He didn’t live like a Colombian drug lord, or anything close—that’s impossible in the American prison system—but for a guy in jail, he didn’t do badly.

Working rapidly now, Dwayne scrolled through the myriad applications. Doris sat close to him, legs and hips touching. He ignored it, but she was acutely tuned in to every inch of bodily contact.

He checked to confirm that her modem was working. “Make sure the door’s locked,” he said. “This is going to take some time, and if we got caught we’d be fucked royally.”

Getting royally fucked was precisely what she wanted from him, but this wasn’t the time to bring that up. She walked to the door at the end of the room and locked it. Then she walked back and sat next to him again.

Dwayne connected one end of the telephone cord into her computer. Then he took the other end to the pay telephone that was attached to the wall, which the prisoners used to make calls to their lawyers. Unscrewing the receiver, he took it off the cradle, revealing the wiring underneath, and looked it over. Then he moved some wires aside and inserted the other end of the telephone cord.

“Aha!” He clicked onto a particular item, brought the information up onto the screen. “Take a look,” he told her.

On the screen, it read:
STATE BAR EXAMINATION RESULTS, SPRING 1997.

“How did you do that?” she gasped. She looked at the screen again. “There’s no closing date,” she commented.

“That’s because it isn’t complete yet,” he explained.

“So every bar exam result is on this?” she asked.

He nodded and typed some instructions onto the screen. “What was the date you took the exam? The exact date, and the location.”

She gave him the information. He typed the details into the machine.

They waited a moment, watching the screen together. Nothing came up.

She sagged. “That means I didn’t pass, doesn’t it.”

He smiled, a deadhead grin. “Not necessarily. It could mean that your group’s test scores haven’t been recorded yet, like you thought. They give the test in dozens of locations all over the state at the same time,” he explained, “since they only do it twice a year. Then they have to collate them all, and grade them, and then go back through to check for mistakes. It takes time. Months.”

“So we can’t find out how I did.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She looked at him. “How can you …?”

He started typing. On the screen there was a flurry of activity: then a program came up.

Dwayne smiled—the cat that ate the canary. “We’re in,” he told her.

“In what?” she whispered.

“Their computer. The one that has your test score record in it.”

“We’re going to be able to find out how I did? Before it’s posted?”

“We’re going to try.” He looked down at the information on the screen. “It shouldn’t be too hard.”

He sat down at her computer again and started typing in some instruction, combinations of words and numbers. She hovered over him, watching.

“Don’t crowd me.” His fingers flew over the keys.

She backed off. She was having a hard time breathing.

“Come on, baby. Don’t fuck with the kid.” He tried another combination, then another.

A code flashed onto the screen and held. “All fucking right!” he whooped.

She looked around nervously to make sure there wasn’t anyone else in earshot. The door was still locked—they were the only people in there.

“What?” she asked. She was shaking, she was so nervous.

He typed in a command. The computer hesitated a moment as it processed the information: then a series of names came onto the screen.

“Everybody who took the bar exam the day you did, in alphabetical order,” he said, pointing. “And how they did.” He read the date at the top. “We’re lucky. They’re not going to post these for a while—probably still waiting on results from other, more out-of-the-way locations.”

He typed in her name:
BLAKE, DORIS.
The screen scrolled down to the middle of the B’s, faster than the eye could read the names.

Blake, Doris, came up. 66. The word “Fail” was next to it.

“Oh, shit!”

His look to her almost had some compassion in it. “Sorry, babe. I mean Lieutenant.”

“I knew it. I knew it. I can’t take tests.”

The tears started. She couldn’t stop them, and she didn’t care now.

“I get so scared when I have to take these fucking tests. I clutch. Oh, shit. Son of a bitch!”

“You can take it again in six months,” he said. “Now that you know what it’s like, you’ll do better. You only missed by a few points.”

She shook her head. “I’m forty-one years old,” she sniffled. “I’ll be too old to start practicing law.” She wiped her runny nose on her uniform sleeve. “I’m going to be a goddamn jail sheriff for the rest of my life.”

“Maybe,” he said. And then, enigmatically: “Maybe not.”

She looked at him through red scrunched-up eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Watch this.”

He highlighted the 6 on the screen next to her name, punched the delete key, and typed in a 7.

She stared at the screen in disbelief. It read, Blake, Doris. 76. The word “Fail” flashed, then automatically converted to “Pass.”

“Congratulations,” he told her. “You are now a member of the state bar, with all the privileges that come with it.”

“I … how …” For a moment she was speechless. “Won’t they catch it?” she asked when she found her voice.

“Not unless somebody was to go back in and reread your test book. The odds on that are conservatively a thousand to one.”