"That's my mother," Brinkley said with wonder in his voice. "That's my mom!"
Heads swiveled toward an attractive, light-skinned African American woman in her early fifties as she edged along a row of seats, smiled stiffly at her son, and sat down.
"Fred," Sherman said.
"Mom! I'm going to tell," Brinkley called out, his voice warbling with emotion, his expression twisted up in pain.
"Are you listening, Mom? Get ready for the truth! Mr. Sherman, you've got it wrong. You keep calling it an accident. Lily's death was no accident!"
Sherman turned to the judge, said matter-of-factly, "Your Honor, this is probably a good time for a break -"
Brinkley interrupted his lawyer, saying sharply, "I don't need a break. And frankly, I don't need your help anymore, Mr. Sherman."
Chapter 118
"YOUR HONOR," Sherman said evenly, doing his best to act as though his client hadn't gone off road and wasn't about to go airborne over a cliff, "I'd ask that Mr. Brinkley's testimony be stricken."
"On what grounds, Mr. Sherman?"
"I was having sex with her, Mom!" Brinkley shouted across the room. "We'd done it before. She was taking off her top when the boom came around -"
Someone in the gallery moaned, "Oh, my God."
"Your Honor," Sherman said, "this testimony is unresponsive."
Yuki jumped to her feet. "Your Honor, Mr. Sherman opened the door to his witness – who is also his client!"
Brinkley turned away from his mother, pinned the jurors to their seats with his intense, shifting stare.
"I swore to tell the truth," he said as chaos swamped the courtroom. Even the judge's gavel, banging hard enough to split the striker plate, was drowned out by the commotion. "And the truth is that I didn't lift a finger to save my sister," Brinkley said, spittle flying from his lips. "And I killed those people on the ferry because he told me, I'm a very dangerous man."
Sherman sat down in his seat behind the defense table and calmly put folders into an accordion file.
Brinkley shouted, "That day on the ferry. I lined those people up in my gun sight and I pulled the trigger. I could do it again."
The jurors were wide-eyed as Alfred Brinkley wiped tears from his sunken cheeks with the palms of his hands.
"That's enough, Mr. Brinkley," the judge barked.
"You people took an oath to do justice," Brinkley trumpeted, rhythmically gripping and slapping at his knees. "You have to execute me for what I did to those people. That's the only way to make sure that I'll never do it again. And if you don't give me the death penalty, I promise I'll be back."
Mickey Sherman put the accordion file into his shiny metal briefcase and snapped the locks. Closing up shop.
"Mr. Sherman," Judge Moore said, exasperation coloring his face a rich salmon pink, "do you have any more questions for your witness?"
"None that I can think of, Your Honor."
"Ms. Castellano? Do you wish to cross?"
There was nothing Yuki could say that would top Brinkley's own words: If you don't give me the death penalty, I promise I'll be back.
"I have no further questions, Your Honor," Yuki said.
But as the judge told Brinkley to stand down, a little red light started blinking in Yuki's mind.
Had Brinkley really just nailed his own coffin shut?
Or had he done more to convince the jury that he was insane than anything Mickey Sherman could have said or done?
Chapter 119
FRED BRINKLEY SAT ON THE HARD BED in his ten-by-six-foot cell on the tenth floor of the Hall of Justice.
There was noise all around him, the voices of the other prisoners, the squealing of the wheels on the meal cart, the clang of doors shutting, echoing along the row.
Brinkley's dinner was on a tray on his lap, and he ate the dry chicken breast and watery mashed potatoes and the hard roll, same as they gave him last night, chewing the food thoroughly but without pleasure.
He wiped his mouth with the brown paper napkin, balled it up until it was as tight and as round as a marble, and then dropped it right in the center of the plate.
Then he arranged the plastic utensils neatly to the side, got up from the bed, walked two paces, and slid the tray under the door.
He returned to his bunk bed and leaned back against the wall, his legs hanging over the side. From this position, he could see the sink-commode contraption to his left and the whole of the blank cinder-block wall across from him.
The wall was painted gray, graffiti scratched into the concrete in places, phone numbers and slang and gang names and symbols he didn't understand.
He began to count the cinder blocks in the wall across from him, traced the grouting in his mind as if the cement that glued the blocks together was a maze and the solution lay in the lines between the blocks.
Outside his cell, a guard took the tray. His badge read OZZIE QUINN.
"Time for your pills, Fred-o," Ozzie said.
Brinkley walked to the barred door, reached out his hand, and took the small paper cup holding his pills. The guard watched as Brinkley upended the contents into his mouth.
"Here ya go," Ozzie said, handing another paper cup through the bars, this one filled with water. He watched as Brinkley swallowed the pills.
"Ten minutes until lights-out," Ozzie said to Fred.
"Don't let the bedbugs bite," Fred said.
He returned to his mattress, leaned back against the wall again. He tried singing under his breath, Ay, ay, ay, ay, Mama-cita-lindo.
And then he gripped the edge of the bunk and launched himself, running headfirst into the cement-block wall.
Then he did it again.
Chapter 120
WHEN YUKI REENTERED THE COURTROOM, her boss, Leonard Parisi, was sitting beside David Hale at the defense table. Yuki had called Len as soon as she'd heard about Brinkley's suicide attempt. But she hadn't expected to see him in court.
"Leonard, good to see you," she said, thinking, Shit! Is he going to take over the case? Can he do that to me?
"The jurors seem okay?" Parisi asked.
"So they told the judge. No one wants a mistrial. Mickey didn't even ask for a continuance."
"Good. I love that cocky bastard," Parisi muttered.
Across the aisle, Sherman was talking to his client. Brinkley's eyes were black-and-blue. There was a large gauze bandage taped across his forehead, and he was wearing a pale-blue cotton hospital gown over striped pajama bottoms.
Brinkley stared down at the table, plucking at his arm hair as Sherman talked, not looking up when the bailiff called out, "All rise."
The judge sat down, poured a glass of water, then asked Yuki if she was ready to close.
Yuki said that she was.
She advanced to the lectern, hearing the soft ka-dum, ka-dum of her pulse pounding in her ears. She cleared the slight croak in her throat, then greeted the jurors and launched into her summation.
"We're not here to decide whether or not Mr. Brinkley has psychological problems," Yuki said. "We all have problems, and some of us handle them better than others. Mr. Brinkley said he heard an angry voice in his head, and maybe he did.
"We can't know, and it doesn't matter.
"Mental illness is not a license to kill, Ladies and Gentlemen, and hearing voices in his head doesn't change the fact that Alfred Brinkley knew what he was doing was wrong when he executed four innocent people, including the most innocent – a nine-year-old boy.
"How do we know that Mr. Brinkley knew what he was doing was wrong?" she asked the jury. "Because his behavior, his actions, gave him away."