Pipe Dream (26 page)

Police were starting to gather on the platform across from the one where he stood, and others were coming off the train. Black couldn’t see them, but he knew there had to be some police sharpshooters crouching somewhere, waiting for just the right shot at the man with the bag. For all Black knew, they could’ve been crouching and waiting for just the right shot at him.

“I’ll kill her,” the man said, swinging Clarisse from one side of his body to the other, making himself a more difficult target.

“Put the gun down, Morgan,” a cop with a megaphone said from somewhere on the platform. “Let the woman go and we can talk.”

The man with the gun laughed—a squealing, strangled sound that was probably more from pain than from amusement. The cop with the megaphone said something else and the man laughed again. But even as he laughed, he kept moving toward the steps at the end of the platform, dragging Clarisse along with him.

The closer they came to Black, the more muddled his thoughts became. He stood there, unable to move, and waited for something, for anything.

“Black,” a voice said from behind him.

He looked up and saw a Puerto Rican detective he hadn’t seen before. The detective was looking at a picture and comparing it to Black’s clean-shaven face. When he saw that it was him, the detective started to walk slowly down the steps and reached into his pocket.

“Black, I don’t want you to run,” he said, holding his hands up in a gesture almost like surrender. “I know you didn’t shoot Podres.”

Black almost believed him.

Before the detective could make it down the steps, Black started to back away from him. The detective started to walk faster. That was all Black needed to see.

Black ran toward the other end of the platform, listening as the detective shouted something that he couldn’t quite make out. He ran and he watched as signs and lights and benches and people shot past him in an unending spectrum of color and sound. He almost ran into a pole, then weaved toward the edge of the platform, nearly falling down onto the track. He hopped on one foot, darting back toward the center of the platform. Then he straightened out his path and ran, faster still, toward an impossible escape.

Everyone, it seemed, was watching him. The police who had been focusing on the man holding Clarisse were now focused on Black. The people who had been rushing toward the steps slowed down to watch the chase. The people who were still on the Atlanta train crowded against the windows, scuffling to get a view of the platform. And the detective ran relentlessly behind him, yelling for Black to do something he must have known he would never do.

“Stop!” the detective shouted.

Black ignored the detective like he was his mother, telling him to stop hanging with the guys on the corner.

“Stop, Black!” he said, his voice fading as his footsteps trailed in the distance.

Black pretended not to hear him, like he was his teacher, telling him to stop talking in class. Or his wife, begging him to stop neglecting her. Or his father, telling him to stop wasting his life. Or his son, begging him to stop ignoring him.

Black couldn’t stop. He clung to the illusion of escape like a freezing man clings to the fading embers of a dying fire. He clung to it because he knew it would destroy him. And somewhere down deep, he wanted to be destroyed. Black clung to it because it was the easy way out. Because it was the only way out. He clung to it and prayed that there would be no more swirling clouds and crackling illusions on the other side.

Black turned his head in midstride to see if anyone else had joined the chase. They hadn’t. Everyone was just watching, standing there waiting for the inevitable. When he turned back around, he saw why.

The man who was holding Clarisse was still backing up, angling toward the middle of the platform, and Black was running toward him on a collision course. By the time Black tried to swerve, it was too late. He had already run into him.

From that point on, nothing felt real.

Black saw the man’s mouth open wide and watched his eyes squeeze shut as he crumpled to the ground grasping helplessly at his leg. He saw the man’s bag hit the ground and fall open, and watched as stacks of money tumbled out onto the platform. Black saw Clarisse’s eyes focus on someone behind him as she raised her hands to her mouth and turned away. He saw the police at the end of the platform raise their weapons and take aim. He saw the light from the midday sun, creeping in from the open end of the train shed and reflecting brilliantly off the man’s gun as it skidded toward the edge of the platform.

With all Black saw, that was the only sound he heard: the gun clattering against the cold concrete, its echoes ringing hollow like church bells on a Sunday afternoon. He couldn’t hear the man scuffling his way across the platform as he got up and hobbled toward the gun. He couldn’t hear the detective running toward them and yelling for the police to hold their fire. He couldn’t hear Clarisse crying and begging for him to get down. He only heard the gun skipping across the platform.

Black hesitated, and then reached for the gun. He didn’t know what he thought he was going to do. He didn’t know what he thought, period. His mind was in another place, filled with writhing, snakelike images that swirled through his head like the cream-colored cloud he’d seen so many times against the glass. There was no today, no yesterday, no tomorrow. There was just the same cloud he had always chased: the one that made something inside of him kneel down and surrender. Only this time, he thought, there would be no surrender. Because this time, he was going to fight against it. If only he could reach the gun.

The man suddenly lunged. Shots rang out. Blood splattered from the man’s arm, from his chest, and from his face. He fell down and Black made a final, desperate grab. As he did so, he felt searing heat burning violently against his leg, then a sharp, cutting pain in the middle of his back. And then nothing.

Black fell down, unable to move, and looked into the dead man’s face, his eyes lingering on the blood that ran against the man’s cheek. The man somehow reminded him of Podres, though Black had never seen Podres before. And then, in the crack-depleted cauldron that was Black’s mind, the man became Podres, and this was Black’s final chance to explain.

Black strained his eyes and willed them to focus, but they wouldn’t. He tried again, but his eyesight was fading like the puffs of creamy smoke that had brought him to that place.

“I didn’t kill you,” Black said, the words rushing out in a single breath.

But somehow, he knew that wasn’t enough. He knew that it would never be enough.

Chapter 19

W
hen Black finished telling his story, he sat there, handcuffed, looking across the table at his lawyer and waiting for him to say something. But as the lawyer turned off the tape recorder and stumped his last cigarette, they both knew that there was nothing left to say.

The whole thing seemed like something from another life. The train station didn’t seem real anymore. Neither did Pookie or Leroy. Neither did Black, for that matter. The bullet in his back had taken reality away and left him an empty shell, slouched against the plastic and metal confines of a prison within a prison—rolling up and down like a shrunken ghost.

Black had spent the past year in the prison library, reading anything and everything he could get his hands on concerning his case. And nobody ever bothered him, because they all felt sorry for the brother in the wheelchair.

But none of that mattered when the case went to trial. The district attorney knew that Black was the Commonwealth’s last chance to secure a conviction in the murder of Johnny Podres. So she used the only thing she could to link him to the crime—the seven hundred dollars the police found in the suit jacket he was wearing when they arrested him at the train station.

The prosecutor set the tone for the trial in her opening statement, when she held up a plastic bag filled with the money and drugs Black had had in his possession at the time of his arrest.

“Johnny Podres was not killed as the result of some wild conspiracy,” she said, twisting the bag so everyone in the room could see it. “No. Johnny Podres—a man who spent twenty years speaking out for all of us against drugs, crime, and corruption—was killed for this.”

She emptied the contents of the bag onto a table and paused to look into the face of each juror as she picked up a cap that had fallen to the floor.

“Whatever conspiracy caused Johnny Podres to be murdered was as small as the rocks of crack cocaine that Mr. Jackson bought with the councilman’s blood,” she said, holding the cap at eye level. “It was a conspiracy fueled by the addiction that whispered in the defendant’s ear; a conspiracy that convinced Mr. Jackson to join Leroy Johnson and Patricia Oaks to destroy a twenty-year legacy of hope.”

She walked toward Black with the cap in her hand, drilling her eyes into his face as she spoke.

“While Mr. Johnson and Miss Oaks aren’t here with us to be tried for their crime, Samuel Jackson is. And so is his coconspirator.”

She slammed the cap onto the table in front of Black.

“They’re both guilty of murder in the first degree.”

When the district attorney took her seat, Black’s lawyer looked at him with a troubled expression, then got up and recounted the story Black had told him just two days before. He was nervous, he was stumbling, he was constantly referring to his notes. And he was well on his way to losing the contest before it even began. When he sat down, exhausted and covered with a thin layer of sweat, the prosecution called its first witness.

Eldridge Scott hobbled to the stand, shuffling his feet behind an aluminum walker. It had only been a year since the murder. But Eldridge Scott had aged a lifetime.

His frail body was small and withered. His hands looked like the gnarled branches of an oak tree. And his watery eyes were hidden behind the forgotten tears of years gone by.

“Mr. Scott,” the prosecutor said, after she’d given the jury ample time to develop compassion for the sickly old man. “Do you know the defendant?”

“I used to see him visiting our neighbor—well, more like our adopted granddaughter—Clarisse Williams.”

“And did she ever introduce you to the defendant?”

“No.”

“Was that unusual?”

“If we was just neighbors it wouldn’t be unusual. But we practically raised Clarisse. She was pretty young when her parents died, and we watched out for her, tried to make sure she didn’t get mixed up in a bunch of foolishness. We even helped with her tuition when she went to nursin’ school.”

“Mr. Scott, did Miss Williams change when she began to spend time with Mr. Jackson?”

“Objection,” the defense lawyer said. “Changes in Miss Williams’s behavior are irrelevant.”

“Your honor,” the prosecutor said, “the changes in Miss Williams’s behavior speak to motive, which in this case is the defendant’s addiction.”

“I’ll allow it. Please answer the question, Mr. Scott.”

Eldridge Scott turned to face Black, his hand shaking violently as he extended an accusatory finger toward the defense table.

“He dragged Clarisse down. It was like he sucked the life right out of her; sucked her dry just as sure as he sucked the smoke outta that pipe.”

The old man lowered his trembling finger and slowly shook his head, as if the memory were too much to bear.

“It wasn’t just the way her body wasted away,” he said. “It was the way her spirit died. He killed Clarisse’s spirit.”

One by one, the jurors began to look at Black. He tried not to show any emotion, but it was hard for him not to feel a sense of loss when he thought of Clarisse. He had been her example. He had shown her how to smoke crack. He had watched as she had changed from a proud black queen to a frightened and hopeless addict. And he hadn’t tried to stop it.

He sat there wishing that he hadn’t dragged her down the same path that had destroyed him. If only he could see her again, he thought, things would be different. He shut his eyes and tried to visualize her. But before her image could form itself in his mind, the prosecutor asked the next question.

“Did you see Miss Williams with the defendant on the night of the shooting?” she said.

“No,” Eldridge Scott said. “But I heard him in her house. He was tellin’ her to shut up. Then I heard a lot of banging and Clarisse yelled, ‘Oh my God!’ I called the police and, sure ’nuff, him and them other two was in there with her. But they left before the police came.”

“And what happened after the police discovered that the suspects had been at Clarisse’s house?”

“They called me and I gave them a description of Clarisse’s car. Next thing I know, all these people was dead and Clarisse was on the news and they was sayin’ she had been kidnapped and she wasn’t gon’ be charged.”

“Have you heard from Miss Williams since the night of the shooting?”

“We waited for her to come home,” Eldridge said. “When she didn’t, we thought she might call us. But she never did. She just disappeared. So we started spendin’ our days tryin’ not to talk about how much we missed her. But after while, my wife couldn’t live like that no more. She couldn’t live not knowin’ what happened to Clarisse.”

Black couldn’t bear to look at the hurt in the old man’s eyes anymore, so he turned away.

“I buried my wife two weeks ago,” Eldridge Scott said as silence enveloped the room. “Now I don’t have nobody. Not Clarisse. Not my wife. I guess I’ll be gone pretty soon, too. But I promised myself I wouldn’t die until I got a chance to see this boy pay for what he done to my family.”

Scott turned back to the defense table and began to lift himself up from the witness stand.

“If Clarisse don’t turn up alive,” he said, struggling to stand up, “I’m gon’ see you in hell, boy. One way or another, I’m gon’ see you in hell.”

The defense attorney didn’t cross-examine Eldridge Scott. It was better to get him off the stand and away from the jury as soon as possible.

But the Commonwealth’s next witness had nearly the same effect on the twelve people who had assembled to decide his client’s fate. She made them hate him.

Viola Green was the neighbor who said she’d seen Leroy going into the house seconds before the shots were fired. She later amended the statement to say that she’d seen both Black and Leroy going into the house. When the district attorney asked her why she hadn’t mentioned Black in her first statement, Mrs. Green took a deep breath and explained.

“When you’ve lived in a home for fifty years, paid for it with the sweat of your brow just so you could have something to pass on to your grandchildren, a little piece of you dies when you watch the neighborhood fade away.”

“Objection, Your Honor,” the defense lawyer said. “Irrelevant.”

“Your Honor,” the prosecutor said, “this testimony goes to the state of mind of the witness at the time of the shooting.”

The judge’s answer was immediate. “I’ll allow it. Please continue, Mrs. Green.”

“Well, like I was saying, when your neighbors die, nobody buys the house because the neighbors that died the year before couldn’t sell their house. And before you know it, the property taxes pile up and the house is fallin’ down, and nobody wants to pay what it takes to fix it. Not in that neighborhood, they don’t.

“So instead of children playin’, you got drug addicts runnin’ in and out of every abandoned house on the block. And then they in the house next door. And you go to sleep every night prayin’ and askin’ Jesus to keep you out of harm’s way just one more time. So when somethin’ like this happens, you just so afraid that sometimes it takes a minute to get it together. Now, I know I didn’t say it the first time, because I guess I was just in shock. But that boy was there that night. I know he was there because I saw him.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Green,” the prosecutor said. “Your witness.”

When Black looked at the jurors, they were all glaring at him, like he was solely responsible for destroying the dreams of people like Mrs. Green. But when his lawyer got up to cross-examine, he began with a very simple question.

“How old are you, Mrs. Green?”

“I’m seventy years old.”

“I see. And do you wear your glasses all the time?” he said, indicating the thick bifocals that framed her eyes.

“Yes, I do.”

“Were you wearing them the night that you believe you saw my client outside the house?”

“No. I was sleep and I got out my bed and looked out the window, because they was makin’ more noise than they usually do on Sunday.”

“Mrs. Green,” the lawyer said, “how far is it from your window to that house?”

“About forty or fifty feet.”

“Would you agree that the jury box is about twenty feet away from where you’re sitting?”

“Yes.”

“Please take off your glasses.”

She pulled her glasses from her face and let them dangle from the chain around her neck.

“Thank you, ma’am. Now, would you please describe the fifth juror from the right in the second row. What is that person wearing and what do they look like?”

Mrs. Green stumbled through a description. She got more than one detail wrong, and even described the juror, who was a woman, as a man.

“Let the record reflect that Mrs. Green has identified a female juror wearing a gray dress as a male juror wearing a blue suit. Thank you, Mrs. Green. You’ve been most helpful.”

That was the brightest moment for the defense.

Over the next day, the prosecutor brought in several crack addicts who swore that they had seen Black at the scene of the shooting. None of them came across as credible.

She also brought in the detectives who’d answered the call at Clarisse’s house. They testified that they had seen the suspects leaving the block in Clarisse’s car, dressed as women.

The Commonwealth’s final witness—the 6th District officer who’d given the suspects directions to I-76—corroborated the detectives’ testimony. He said that the suspects had intentionally and convincingly disguised themselves as women in an effort to elude the police.

On cross-examination, Black’s lawyer asked the officer if he’d ever known people to act out strange sexual fantasies while using drugs.

“I don’t know anything about what people do when they use drugs,” the officer said. “I’m not in Narcotics.”

“Of course you’re not in Narcotics,” the lawyer said. “Forgive me for that oversight. But is it a fact, or an assumption on your part, that my client dressed as a woman on the night of Podres’s murder solely to avoid the police?”

“It’s an assumption, but—”

“If they were trying to elude police, why didn’t they run away from you when you approached them?”

The officer thought about it before he answered. “I don’t know.”

“Thank you. No further questions.”

The prosecution rested its case without calling any of the witnesses they knew would mention Captain Sheldon. After all, Sheldon was long gone, disappeared with an estimated $5 million in stolen money. And if it was at all possible, the district attorney wanted to keep Sheldon’s and Morgan’s names off the minds of the jurors.

Black’s lawyer knew that. So he began his case by calling Latoya Thomas to the stand.

“Miss Thomas, what were you doing on the morning of September 24, 1992?”

“I was at Abbottsford Hospital, visiting my brother, Darnell Thomas, who had been burned in a car accident the night before. My brother is—was—a crack addict who was in the house when Mr. Podres was murdered.”

“And what happened during this visit?”

“Detective Hillman came to the hospital to interrogate my brother,” she said. “I informed him that I would be representing my brother and I taped the interrogation.”

“What did your brother say during this interrogation?”

“He said that a white man killed Johnny Podres—a tall white man with blond hair, blue eyes, wearing a white shirt, black pants, and a heavy gold link bracelet.”

The spectators began to murmur as her words floated up from the witness stand and burst like a bubble against the ceiling.

“Did he name a person who might have matched that description?”

“No. But the person he was referring to was Captain Irv—”

“Objection,” the prosecutor said. “Conjecture.”

“Sustained.”

The defense lawyer immediately asked his next question.

“What happened to the tape of the interrogation, Miss Thomas?”

“I gave it to a reporter named Henry Moore right after the interrogation, and Mr. Moore was killed. My brother was—”

“Objection. Mr. Moore’s death is not germane to these proceedings.”

“Sustained. Please answer the question, Miss Thomas. What happened to the tape?”

She paused and looked over at Black with an apology lingering in her eyes. “I gave it to Henry Moore. I don’t know what happened after that.”