He shook his head. “Next time I see that cop-well, you know.”
“The next time you saw him was the day of the shooting.”
Alex nodded yes. Shelly had arrived at the moment, but she wouldn’t ask the question yet. She wouldn’t ask him whether he pulled the trigger.
Alex inhaled and looked over Shelly’s head, working his jaw. “See, Shelly, Miro never just walked up to me in the open like that. He didn’t just get out of his squad car and say, ‘Hey, bud, where’s my money?’ I’d drop it somewhere and he’d pick it up after I left.”
“So that day, when he got out of his squad car-”
“Oh, yeah, this guy”-Alex adjusts in his seat, animated now-“he gets out of his car and comes after me-I know what this guy’s doing.”
“You think he wanted to kill you.”
Alex’s eyes fell to the table, a haunting expression on his face. “Shelly, I swear to you-Miro knew. He was going to take me out right there. People think just because a guy’s a cop, he doesn’t do bad stuff.”
“People don’t think that,” she said. At least, she certainly didn’t. She reached across and put her hand on his.
11
Sometimes she watches him in court. He is a prosecutor, and today he is talking to the jury. He is tall and strong and speaks very confidently. If she were told that he was king of the world, she would believe it. They are drawn to him, she can see, the jurors, the spectators, even the judge. Daddy is prosecuting a man who held up a gas station in Bakerstown and killed the attendant. Felony murder, she has heard him say to Mother.
The defendant was convicted two weeks ago. This is the sentencing phase. Her father is asking the jury to sentence the defendant to death. She can see the defendant and she’s read about him in the papers. There weren’t many murders in Rankin County, so everyone knew about this. He’s a famous killer but she’s not watching him. She’s watching Daddy.
He’s not moving as he stands before the jury. His hands are clasped behind his back. He can be animated, but he’s not now. He is speaking quietly.
He’s telling the jury about the gas station attendant. His name was Davey Humars. He was twenty-two and was engaged to be married. He liked to watch baseball. He liked to fish.
It has been two days since she left the clinic. She was discharged shortly after she came out of anesthesia. She was provided transportation from the clinic through a covert route to the train station to get her home. She never even saw any of the protesters marching outside. And they never saw her.
Davey Humars had a life, Daddy tells them. He had a life and he was entitled to it. What do we stand for, he asks them, if we do not stand for the sanctity of life?
Her eyes well up but she will not cry. She’s cried enough. She imagines the day she will tell him. She was attacked. She got pregnant. She will tell him about the abortion clinic.
He will know. A day from now or thirty years from now. And he will never look at her the same again.
12
Shelly lived on the north side of the city, in a neighborhood generally described as a “developing” community, which meant, as far as Shelly could tell, heavily populated by minorities but getting whiter. She had lived here since she graduated law school. She was near the lake and the park, near a bus line that got her downtown in less than half an hour. It was a rental neighborhood primarily, mostly young gay men and Latino families with kids. It was well-lit, quiet, and affordable.
Her apartment was in a four-story brownstone in the middle of the block. It was about a thousand square feet stretching long and thin, with exposed brick walls and old hardwood floors. She got decent light from the southern exposure and a large bay window. She had no patio per se but a landing for the fire escape, overlooking the alley to the rear of the building, served the same purpose when it was warm.
She arrived home that night at nine. It had been four days since Alex was arrested. She had represented him at his bond hearing, in which the court took all of thirty seconds to order Alex held without bond. She was still waiting to hear from Jerod Romero about working out a plea for Alex. In the meantime, she was struggling to find a lawyer for Alex, someone who worked on homicide cases on a regular basis. She had visited fourteen lawyers in three days, all the while trying to keep up with her regular work at the law school.
She was beginning depositions in a case tomorrow, a lawsuit the Children’s Advocacy Project had filed against the city’s board of education, seeking to increase money and resources to education for the deaf. The board said the time and manpower was needed to teach the mainstream pupils, and forcing resources elsewhere would hurt the majority to benefit the few. Shelly was stretching constitutional principles to argue that deaf kids should be “mainstreamed” with the general student population but given the necessary extra resources. The answer from the city was always the same-no money, no people, no space. Shelly was not unsympathetic. The city’s position was not unreasonable, but it was unacceptable. She filed suit in federal court, where the life-tenured judiciary was far more willing to knock the city around, but even then, any remedy would take years to implement. So much work, to wait so long for what most likely would be only an incremental improvement for deaf and hearing-impaired children.
She was sitting on her bed with the television on. It was primary election day in the state, and results were beginning to pour in after ten o’clock, three hours after the polls had closed. Along the bottom of the screen, numbers were scrolling along. It was a big election primary because all of the constitutional offices-governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and the others-were in play. The gubernatorial primary on the Democratic Party side had been particularly contentious. She was watching a tape of the acceptance speech of the incumbent Republican governor, Langdon Trotter, who had not been challenged in the G.O.P. primary. Still, he had decided to hold a victory rally to get the free airtime.
“We will continue with our goals,” he told a raucous crowd. “We will not back down. We will not change our positions from the primary to the general election.”
The governor was referring, she gathered, to one of the Democratic Party candidates, who previously had espoused pro-life views while in the state senate but, while running for governor, changed his stance to the more conventional Democratic Party position.
“We are pro-life and we are proud of it!” he proclaimed. “We will not turn our backs on the innocent unborn!”
She shook her head and looked back down at her notes. She had been reviewing deposition outlines prepared by the law students. CAP was part of a legal clinic, which meant that students did much of the litigation work. Shelly would often try the cases herself when they went to trial, but she usually had at least one student working with her. For the deaf-ed lawsuit, two of her third-year law students would take most of the depositions.
The portable phone rang. She considered avoiding it but picked it up off her nightstand.
“Shelly.” It was her brother Edgar on the phone. Edgar, clear-eyed and serious, whose hair never moved, even as a child, whose posture never strayed from erect, who worshipped and mimicked their father. “So you’re there.”
“So I am,” she said. “Very busy time for me,” was the most she would apologize.
“Yes, I’ve heard. You’re taking the cop killer, I see.”
The news must have reached the papers. Shelly didn’t read the news on a daily basis anymore. Or maybe Edgar just had the information by virtue of his job.