Initially, the girl had been frightened and cried out in pain from his "attentions," but she was clever and had soon turned the tables. Two years later, he was paying for a penthouse apartment in SoHo and had just given her a BMW for her sixteenth birthday. Now she wanted a second one in a different color so as not to clash with some of the expensive clothing he bought her.
As for his wife, she was happy enough to let someone else have to struggle beneath his weight. She raised no complaints when Louis stayed out of the house for days at a time.
On the set of the television talk show, Louis closed his eyes and happily pictured the lithe, barely brown body of Tawnee. But his reverie was soon interrupted by the angry voice of the young man sitting on the other side of him from Fitz.
"What the fuck? Keep that shit away from me."
Louis turned in time to see his client, Jayshon Sykes, swat at the makeup girl, who was attempting to pat dry the sheen on his forehead. The girl nearly dropped her kit as she hastily backed out of range.
Summoning a "boys will be boys" laugh, Louis patted Sykes on his knee. "Now there, Jayshon," he said. "This pretty young lady is just trying to do her job. Remember what I told you about these people being our friends. They're here to see that justice be done. Ain't that right, Natalie?" His chair screamed in agony as he turned his mass to look at the talk-show host.
Natalie hardly heard him. She was musing over opportunities lost and how to still find a way to the top. There'd been a time when she was a real beauty-the New York Times's media columnist had called her "a sure thing for the big time." Then again, she'd slept with him for the publicity, just as she'd screwed every executive producer who might possibly help her achieve her dreams. But it didn't help. No man trusted a woman who faked orgasms so poorly that he was able to tell.
She had pretty much resigned herself to the fact that a late night local talk-show gig was as far as she was going to get. She'd even taken to hanging out at TriBeCa bars, hoping that some wealthy divorced doctor or stockbroker looking for a second chance would settle for a still good-looking, if fortysomething (she wasn't saying exactly how something), Number Two. But then a friend who owed her a favor had introduced her to Louis, and she'd landed the interview that all the major networks, including CNN and Fox, were clamoring for. In a few moments, she'd have an exclusive not only with Louis but the leader of "The Coney Island Four."
"That's right, Jayshon," Fitz beamed. "That's the job of the Fourth Estate-the press-keep an eye on government, especially an exploitative, racist justice system." She beamed at Sykes.
He returned her smile. "I'm sorry," he apologized. "It's just that when you are as young as I was, wrongfully accused but sent to prison anyway, you have to adopt a…how should I say this…a tough persona in order to deal with the sort of men who truly belong in a place like that and would do you unspeakable harm. I've been under a lot of stress lately, and I'm so sorry if I reverted to prison mentality."
Hmmm, Fitz thought. Articulate and well spoken. I guess our researcher was right about him having been his high school class valedictorian. Fitz smiled and tried to let her eyes suggest what her mind was thinking. "That's quite all right, Jayshon," she said. "Understandable, considering all you've been through. It's amazing that you've done as well as you have and come out so…strong and…I don't know…almost noble the way you handle yourself."
He'd gone to prison a skinny, six-foot-three nineteen-year-old, hit the weights, and come out ten years later at 250 pounds of muscle. He gave the television host his most winning smile.
Fitz began daydreaming about a reinvigorated career. She'd worked out an exclusive deal with Louis and had already arranged to have her interview aired on the national affiliate. The station's managers were also trying to get her on Larry King Live.
The director called for everyone to take their places. Fitz turned to the camera and put on her best "this is an important story" face. In the chair next to her, Louis wiped one last time at his brow and practiced his righteous scowl. Sykes practiced being contemplative, thoughtful-the aggrieved young black man, set upon by a racist police department and district attorney's office, perhaps because he was too smart, too articulate, and they'd wanted to slap him down. How'd the bitch put it? Oh, yeah, noble.
Someone cued the techno music, as a stagehand counted down and at the right moment pointed to Fitz. "Good evening," she responded, looking at the camera, "and welcome to this edition of Brooklyn Insider." She expertly stopped talking to one camera and turned to the next. "A little more than twelve years ago, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Liz Tyler left her Brighton Beach home one morning and went jogging along the shore toward Coney Island."
On the monitor in front of her, the picture shifted to a scene of a long, wooden-legged pier that jutted from the sand out over the water. The camera zeroed in to an area beneath the pier, as Fitz continued her voice-over. "However, beneath this pier, Liz Tyler was brutally beaten, raped, and left for dead."
The camera zoomed in on Fitz's face. "That much is a fact. We also know there were no witnesses to what happened, except whoever attacked Mrs. Tyler. But Tyler suffered memory loss-probably due to the savage blows she received to her head that fractured her skull, blinded her in one eye, and left her in a coma for nearly three months."
The monitor now changed to old footage of a young Jayshon Sykes and three other black teenagers being led into a courtroom in handcuffs as Fitz droned on. "No witnesses, but that didn't prevent the New York City Police Department from identifying five young black men from Bedford-Stuyvesant-one of whom would become a witness for the prosecution-arresting them and, significantly, after several hours of intense questioning, eliciting alleged confessions to having committed this heinous crime. The four young men, who maintained their innocence-all of them fifteen years old when arrested, except for the eighteen-year-old Jayshon Sykes-were convicted nearly two years later of rape and attempted murder."
Fitz turned back to the second camera. "During the trial, defense attorneys tried to raise questions about the serious doubts they had regarding the confessions, saying that the police had coerced, intimidated, and threatened the boys. However, perhaps the most damning testimony came from one of the five original defendants, Kevin Little"-the monitor showed the thin, handsome face of a young black man-"who managed to work out a sweet deal for himself by turning on the others. Kevin Little was allowed to move to California, while his former friends were sentenced to thirty years in prison."
The monitor showed a file tape taken of the walls of Auburn State Prison with a few inmates wandering around in an open area beyond the fences and guard tower. "The irony is that Kevin Little was gunned down in gang-related violence three months later. But Jayshon and his codefendants-Desmond Davis, Packer Wilson, and Kwasama Jones-were sent to Attica, where they spent the next ten years behind walls and razor wire, guarded by men in towers with guns. And there they thought they would remain for the next thirty years of their lives, until one day this man"-the monitors flashed to the pockmarked face of a man with beady eyes and buck teeth, whose greasy black hair had been combed back, giving him the appearance of a rat-"Enrique Villalobos, stepped forward and confessed that he alone had committed this crime."
The monitors cut away to a taped interview with Villalobos, wearing a gray inmate jumpsuit and sitting in what was obviously a prison setting with a sterile, white cinder block wall. "All I can say is that a positive prison experience has left me a changed man," he said with a lisp to an off-camera interviewer. "I was a terrible sinner, but I have accepted Jesus Christ the Lord as my savior and know that I will be forgiven… My conscience troubled me and so I have decided to come forward now to tell the truth, and that is I alone did these horrible things to that woman. I ask her forgiveness and that of the young men whose lives were stolen to pay for my sin."