“And Elliot will seek death,” Paul agreed. “For shooting a cop? No question.”
Elliot Raycroft, he meant. The county attorney for the jurisdiction, which included the mammoth city and some of the surrounding suburbs.
Shelly nodded.
Paul touched her arm again. He was a very touchy sort. “Sorry, it sounds like you’re invested in this boy. But we need to know that going in.”
“I understand. I want you to be blunt.”
“Then I’ll be even more blunt, Michelle.”
“Shelly,” she said.
“Shelly?” He had spent the entire sexual harassment case calling her by her formal name.
“Shelly.”
Paul seemed to recognize that he’d been left out of the club. He could probably figure the criteria for admission. “Okay-Shelly. If your guy hasn’t told you whether he did it, do yourself a favor and don’t ask him again. Not yet. Find out what the police have first. You can even ask him what he thinks they have. But don’t ask him whether he did it.”
“Sure.” She inhaled. Advice she didn’t need. “Paul, I was hoping you’d take this case.”
He let out a small laugh, a chuckle, implying that this was a major hurdle. He grimaced, while his eyes hit the ceiling, blinking rapidly. “I’m pretty tight.” He looked at Shelly. “What is the financial situation?”
“About as tight as your schedule.”
Paul rubbed his hands together, studied them. “I make four hundred dollars an hour.”
Shelly drew back. “I make four hundred dollars a week.”
“Surely not.”
She waved. She was exaggerating but not by that much. “Obviously, Alex can’t pay that.”
“Find out what he has, Shelly.”
She held her look on him. She understood rationally, but could not accept emotionally, that his representation might actually depend on how much money he would make.
“This is a for-profit operation,” he added, the closest he would come to apologizing.
“I’ll find out,” she said, quickly shaking his hand and leaving.
“Shelly,” he called to her. “Take a little more advice from me?”
She dropped her arms, closed her eyes. “Sure.”
“Sometimes kids-people-go bad. You don’t understand why. It doesn’t make sense. You do what you can to help them. And when you’re done, when you’ve done your best, you go to bed at night, and you sleep. Because after you’ve done your best, there’s nothing else you can do.”
They have to let you help, she thought. She thanked him and headed for the elevator.
10
Alex Baniewicz had been transferred from the police station to the adult detention center on the southwest side, which would be his permanent pretrial home, confined in a special juvenile section for those under eighteen held for adult crimes. Shelly was not informed of the transfer until she reached the police station, so she didn’t reach Alex until lunchtime.
She caught Ronnie on the way out. He was more dressed up than when she met him last night, now in a button-down shirt and slacks, hair well-combed. His eyes were bloodshot and he was crying. She figured he stifled his sobbing until he was out of Alex’s presence. She had caught him at the release point.
She put her hands on his shoulders. “We’ll figure something out for him. You need to keep up your strength, Ronnie.”
Ronnie swallowed hard and straightened himself. “I’ll be fine. Just tell me what to do and I’ll help. I’ll do anything.”
“Great. I may need that. I’ll talk to you soon.” She realized, after she left him, that Ronnie was supposed to be in school right now. Come to think of it, she was supposed to be at work, too.
She sat with Alex in a holding room. The table, to which Alex’s hands were shackled, was a thick piece of wood on metal legs. The chairs were a hard plastic and bolted to the floor. For some reason, the walls were a pale orange. She wondered who would have made that choice, then wondered why she was even thinking about that. It was amazing how the mind worked, how random thoughts entered the radar screen even during difficult moments like this.
“You and Ronnie have a nice talk?” she asked. Alex gave her a look, as if she had said something challenging. Maybe she had. It was probably the wrong way to start, under the circumstances, but she had less information than anyone and knew that had to change.
“Well, I had a nice talk,” she added. “With the F.B.I.”
Her client looked exhausted. His skin had a yellowish tint that gave the impression of illness. His eyes were sunken, surrounded by dark rings to the point that he almost appeared to be wearing makeup. His reaction to her words was slow, two unfocused eyes eventually meeting Shelly’s. She tried to shake the thought that she might lose this kid before it was over.
“I wish you’d told me when it happened,” she said. “Instead of shutting me out.”
Alex coughed quietly.
“This cop-Miroballi-you knew him.”
Alex nodded.
“He was coming after you, Alex?”
He stretched his arms-with some effort, considering his hands were shackled to the table-and cracked his knuckles. “That’s what they’re saying?”
“They seem to think it’s a possibility, yes. Alex, if you shot him because you thought he was going to shoot you, you acted in self-defense. You know that, right?”
“You said if I shot him.”
“Right. If you shot him.”
God, did he look awful. His hair showed no attempt at order, matted in some spots and sticking up in the back like he’d just awoken. His face was sweaty and unshaven. He ran his tongue against his cheek and stared, with some newfound intensity, at the table.
“The feds are worried about us blowing their operation,” Shelly said.
Alex reacted with a humorless laugh.
“Why don’t we talk about that?” Shelly suggested. “When the feds arrested you.”
His shoulders hunched, his eyes closed, Alex answered quietly. “I-don’t really know. I have my place where I keep-you know.”
The large quantity of cocaine, he meant. Broken down into packets of one gram each.
Buy in bulk, he had told her. Cut down on visits to my supplier.
True, she’d responded. But then they catch you with a bigger stash.
They won’t catch me.
On its face, his scheme made some sense. He would buy a large quantity of drugs and keep it hidden in the trunk of a beaten-down Chevy he’d bought for a couple hundred dollars. To keep the car off the street, he’d rented a parking space in an alley a couple of blocks from his home. He never drove the car. So there was no chance he would be pulled over by the police, or that the car would be ticketed or towed. Each Friday, he visited the car and removed a small quantity of cocaine to sell to the bankers at work.
“They were all over me,” he explained. “I closed the trunk and didn’t even make it out of the alley. A guy walked up to me and whispered to me. He tells me he’s F.B.I. He points to a black car down the street and he tells me not to run. He takes me to the car and it’s all over.”
“How much did you have on you?”
“At the time? Four grams. I was going to take it to work. It was a Friday.”
“They were waiting for you.” Shelly could imagine how it happened. “They were looking at the cop as a suspect and they found you with him. They followed you, sat on you for a while, and then busted you.”
“That seems to be how it happened,” he agreed. “They whisked me away in that black car of theirs and took me to some building. Bunch of them stayed back and-well, they found the whole load.”