Key Witness (7 page)

“Healthy set of pictures,” the examiner commented, meaning the tattoos.

Dwayne didn’t reply—it was all bullshit.

They took body Polaroids of him, front and back.

“Any current problems, sickness? Open sores, chronic diseases? You wear glasses, a hearing aid, anything like that?”

“No.”

“Venereal disease. HIV-positive, AIDS, clap, herpes, whatever?”

“Nothing.”

“You aren’t gay, are you?”

If someone on the outside had asked Dwayne that question, Dwayne would have torn the offender’s head off. In here it was SOP, no offense meant. Which didn’t mean he liked being asked. Sexual orientation inside prison had a whole different context than it did in the free world. Dwayne’s criterion was that if he had a choice of fucking a man or fucking a woman, he’d fuck a woman, every time.

If he had a choice.

He was escorted into a small cubicle with a classifications officer. Because of who he was, and what he was here for, Dwayne’s interviewer was a lieutenant, who’d stayed on after his shift had ended earlier in, the evening. The lieutenant leafed through Dwayne’s prison documents. “You’ve been a good enough soldier,” he commented, mildly surprised. “Not many bad marks, considering how much time you’ve done.”

“I stay out of people’s ways, they stay out of mine.”

“Good policy.” The lieutenant picked some dinner crud out of his teeth with a paper clip. “Regulations say you should be housed in protective custody. For your own safety, which I’m sure you can appreciate.”

“I don’t want that. I’ve been taking care of myself for years without any problems. In tougher places than this.”

“I know you don’t. But we’ve got our own interests to watch out for. You wind up with a knife stuck in your back we’re up shit’s creek.” The lieutenant paused for a moment. “No one in population knows why you’re in here. Not even most of the guards, just a handful in administration.”

“They won’t be knowing from me.”

The lieutenant kicked back. “This trial you’re testifying in, it’s moving slower than the proverbial glacier. They should’ve delayed transferring you down here, but the orders had already been cut. You could be with us a couple, three weeks.”

“Time’s time. Here or Durban, it’s still time.”

“That’s a fact.”

Dwayne put his hands on the lieutenant’s desk. “I’m here to do the state a favor,” he said bluntly. “And since I’m doing the state a favor, I think the state should treat me nice.”

The lieutenant looked at Dwayne. “Like how?”

“You’ve got an infirmary here. I want to work in it.”

“So you can get your hands on drugs? Forget it.”

“I don’t do drugs. It’s the best work in the place, and I’ve been working infirmary duty at Durban.”

The lieutenant was skeptical. “I don’t know …”

Dwayne leaned in toward the man. “This is no skin off my ass, you hear what I’m saying? You treat me good, I do the same. Otherwise I’ll call the district attorney up tomorrow, tell him I’ve changed my mind about testifying, they can ship me back upstate.” He leaned back. “I’m not going to make you look bad. But I want my stay down here to be as comfortable as possible—it’s a small perk but it means a lot to me.”

The lieutenant thought about it for a moment. “All right. But if you fuck up, you’ll do the rest of your stay in isolation.”

“I hear you.”

The lieutenant looked at his watch. “We’ll house you in a protective cell tonight and transfer you into the general population tomorrow.” He stood—the interview was over. “So’s we understand each other.”

“We understand each other.”

They gave him the customary delousing shower. His prison garments were put away for when he would be taken back to Durban. Regulation jail clothes were issued—green T-shirt, green sweatpants, boxer shorts, sweat socks. He was allowed to keep his own shoes, Nike cross-trainers he’d bought in the Durban commissary.

He collected his mattress, bedroll, and toiletries, and was escorted by one of the guards into the bowels of the jail.

W
YATT AND MOIRA PICKED
Michaela up on the way home.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” she commented when they told her what had happened earlier in the evening. “Poor old Mrs. Sprague. Do the police know who did it?”

Moira stared at her daughter, wanting to make a statement. “Ted Sprague said they were young black males who looked like gang members to him. Those were his exact words,” she said pointedly, as if daring Wyatt to contradict her.

He wasn’t in the mood to get into a fight. Later on, when everyone’s passions had cooled, they would talk about it rationally.

“I thought the Spragues were in Europe,” Michaela said from the backseat.

“Yes, they were,” her mother confirmed.

“Then how come they didn’t have their alarm on?” Michaela queried. “Don’t you remember last year, when Mrs. Sprague set it off by accident at three in the morning? It woke us all up, remember? We were all running outside in our nightgowns and everything, wondering what was happening, and then the police came, and Mrs. Sprague had to make them coffee and apologize, and the people from her security company came, too, and everybody was so pissed off at her. Don’t you remember, Mom?”

“Yes, I remember,” Moira answered. “They must have forgotten to set it.”

Or it was an inside job,
Wyatt thought to himself again, inwardly seething, but remaining quiet about it. He was going to look into that, first thing in the morning. They used the same security company—Alarms Unlimited—as the Spragues did; most of the neighbors used them. If there was a breach of security in the company, they’d better find out ASAP.

He pulled into their driveway and parked the car in the garage.

“I’ve got more homework to do,” Michaela told them. “I’ll finish in my room.” She kissed both parents good night and disappeared behind her door.

“I’m going to bed,” Moira told Wyatt, sloughing her shoes as she climbed the stairs to their bedroom. “I’m beat.”

“I’m still too wound up to sleep,” he said. He kissed her good night.

“Maybe I’ll still be up when you’re ready,” she said invitingly.

Wyatt went out the back door, skirted the swimming pool, the water dark, still, rippling with light coming from the rising moon and the lamps that were on inside the house, and let himself into the small pool house on the far side of the pool.

His trombone, a Bach tenor, stood on its stand in the corner. Apart from the main stuff—family, work, friends—running and music were the two constants in Wyatt’s life. Music was great therapy—it made all the bullshit and pettiness of the day melt away into the ozone.

He usually worked on classic trombone pieces, Arthur Pryor solos, and Marine Corps virtuoso stuff, but when he got tired from what he was practicing, or stuck, he’d improvise jazz riffs, closing his eyes and playing à la J. J. Johnson, Jimmy Knepper, Bill Watrous.

Jazz was his passion. He had every album J.J. had ever cut; de rigueur for a trombonist—plus all of Miles, Coltrane, Monk, just about everyone, starting with Bird—thousands of old LPs and CDs. Whenever he was in New York on business he would hit all the big-name jazz clubs—the Blue Note, Village Vanguard—wherever there was someone good.

Wyatt’s secret fantasy, nurtured from Jack Kerouac books and forbidden trips to local clubs when he was still in high school (underage and using a friend’s stolen draft card to get in), was to live in some funky apartment in the Village and play jazz trombone professionally. It was an indulgent pipe dream. He knew that the life of a jazz musician was impossible—no money, scant recognition in relationship to your worth as an artist. And he was white—how many whites made it in jazz?

He picked up his horn and started blowing, warming up for a minute with long tones. For the past few weeks he had been working on a difficult eight-bar section, a series of 64th-note triplets that were all written above high D. The piece was by Pryor—“Blue Bells of Scotland,” one of the trombone master’s most famous numbers. It would take Wyatt about eight months to work through the intricate work, note by single note sometimes, from start to finish, until he reached the point where he would be comfortable enough with his technique and understanding to play it all the way through, nonstop.

Tonight he wasn’t playing for enjoyment, as he usually did. Tonight he was playing because he had hit a wall, and losing himself in music was the best way he knew to stop agonizing over it. Compounding his free-form anxiety was the incident next door and then, worse than that actual incident, how his closest friends had reacted to it. The latent racism and bunker mentality, the hostility and fear, had been chilling. Jesus Christ, he thought, is everybody in this country armed except me?

He knew he’d been burning out for a long time, but he had been unable—unwilling was more to the truth of it—to admit it to himself. He was fighting the feeling like a warrior, but it was a fight he knew he wasn’t winning.

He closed the cover on the Pryor piece. Then he played the opening notes of “On Green Dolphin Street,” glissed down from B flat to sixth-position F, secured the slide lock, and set the trombone on its stand. He fastidiously wiped a finger smudge from the bell with a chamois and turned off the light over the stand.

T
HE PARAMEDICS AND THE
cops arrived at the scene of the botched crime at the same time. A crowd had gathered, forming a loose circle around Marvin, who was lying half in the street and half on the sidewalk. He was obviously no threat to anyone, so there wasn’t any tension. It felt like a block party—a couple of the male onlookers were drinking beer out of cans, while mingled sounds of radios, televisions, and ghetto blasters came from nearby open apartment windows and passing cars.

The store owner hovered in the entrance of his shop, his face a stone.

After giving Marvin a cursory check to make sure he wasn’t in immediate danger of dying, the paramedics loaded him into their wagon and took him, sirens wailing, to Memorial Hospital, the city’s main public facility, a couple miles away. One of the responding officers rode in the ambulance with him, while the other stayed behind to take the store owner’s statement.

The officer in the ambulance Mirandized Marvin, who was lying on his stomach, one hand cuffed to the gurney. There were about two dozen pellets in his ass and the backs of his upper legs. Number-four bird shot, pheasant load, a little smaller than a BB. His pants were shredded and he was bleeding good; there had been a trail of blood on the sidewalk, from where he’d been hit to where he had landed. He had regained consciousness before the police had arrived.

Marvin moaned loudly. He knew he sounded weak, but he couldn’t help it. “This is killing me! Give me something for it, it hurts like hell!”

The paramedic felt his pulse and checked the flow of the IV he had inserted into his arm to keep him from dehydrating and going into shock. “Can’t help you there,” he told Marvin. “You’ll have to wait for the doctor to examine you first.”

“It’s killing me,” he moaned again.

“Hey, shut the fuck up,” the cop ordered him. A veteran, a black man like Marvin, his face pocked with craters from years of shaving with a can of Magic and a butter knife. “Be a man—if you know how.”

“It hurts.” Softly, a wounded dog’s whimper.

It took the ER intern over an hour to pick the individual pellets out of Marvin’s ass and legs. He had to probe with tweezers, and every time he pushed against one of the open sores Marvin screamed. They didn’t give him any painkillers—he was going directly to jail from here and he couldn’t be admitted with drugs in his system.

W
YATT AND MOIRA SAT
in the kitchen. Wyatt, bare chested, had on a pair of boxer shorts. Moira wore her old thin cotton nightgown that she’d bought years ago in Paris, on their second honeymoon. He poured himself a glass of white wine out of the refrigerator left over from the night before’s dinner.

“So …?” she prompted him.

“I can’t keep doing this anymore. I mean … I don’t want to.” He stared at her.

She held his look firmly, without judgment, but said nothing. For one thing, she didn’t know what he was referring to. “I thought you were upset about what happened tonight.”

“I was, but it’s deeper than that, Moira. It’s about me. This isn’t why I became a lawyer.” His arm waved a vague all-encompassing motion.

Moira pulled her legs up onto her chair and wrapped her arms around her knees to anchor herself. “What isn’t?” she asked.

“What I’m doing.”

She got up and poured herself a glass of orange juice, sat down again.

“This is not original, what I’m talking about. Everybody in the world seems to go through it. Everybody that can afford the luxury of thinking about it.”

“Everyone goes through periods of self-doubt, Wyatt,” she said, trying to soothe him.

“I don’t have any self-doubt,” he corrected her. “Not personally. It’s the work.”

“With you they’re the same thing.”

He shook his head. “That’s not true anymore. It used to be that way, I used to think that was true, but it isn’t. My work, the firm, it’s part of me but it isn’t me, like playing trombone is part of me, and running is part of me. And being your husband, and Michaela’s father. They’re all part of me, but they aren’t who I am.”

“I know,” she said, “but still …”

“Still … what still?”

“If somebody asks you who you are you don’t say I’m a trombone player or a runner. Or a husband or a father, for that matter. You say you’re a lawyer. That’s what it says in
Who’s Who,
in the
American Bar Directory,
in your college newsletters. You’re a famous attorney who wins important cases all over the world.”

“And makes a lot of money,” he added pointedly.

“That, too,” she agreed.

“So what does that mean?”

“It means you’re successful.”

“So?”

She got up and stood in front of him, taking his head in her hands. “Something’s troubling you besides whatever this is,” she said. “So tell me whatever that is so we can go to bed.”

He looked up at her. “I’m burned out, babe.”

“You’re tired. You’ve been through a grueling case. You always feel down after a big long case; it’s inevitable. And what happened tonight didn’t help. We should go somewhere for a couple of weeks,” she declared. “We’re overdue for some time off.”