Jury of One Read Free Page B

now he’s going to come, this person whoever he is, he’s making the noise and she feels him shiver and moan, she feels it shooting inside her and she wants to return to the dream, she wants him to leave, it hurts and she wants him to leave but it’s over now, he’s off her, and she catches her breath and shuts her eyes and she’s crying. She hears him zip up his pants and she doesn’t know what it means when he chuckles and says, “Nice to meet you,” and then, “Go back to sleep, it was just a dream.”

3
Lost
    S HELLY RACED FROM the courthouse to her car and found the jail where Alex Baniewicz was being held. She approached the police station and assumed an air of confidence. So much of being a lawyer was presentation, and she did not anticipate a warm reception.
    The interior of the police station had been remodeled. The reception area was spacious, with white walls and a long bench on each side of the door. The rest of the structure was cordoned off from the reception area by a wall with a secured door. Visitors were directed to the one division along the wall, a window covered by bulletproof glass, behind which sat a uniformed officer busying herself with paperwork. Above the thick glass was a sign in black, bold letters, ALL VISITORS ARE SUBJECT TO SEARCH , with the same words written in Spanish beneath it. Shelly walked up to the window and spoke into the small microphone embedded in the thick glass. She felt like she was buying a movie ticket.
    Shelly gave her name to the officer. “I’m an attorney here to see Alex Baniewicz. I understand he’s being detained here.”
    The uniformed officer glanced over the glasses perched on her nose. The thought passed in and out of Shelly’s mind, the women always got the traffic duty and reception jobs. The woman looked over a sheet before suddenly looking up at Shelly. It registered with the officer now. Baniewicz. The one who had killed the cop. Now came the runaround—
You’ll have to wait, he’s not availableright now, maybe you should come back later
—which Shelly had been through before with a number of her clients held on juvie beefs, when the cops wanted more time to interrogate their suspect. The police were supposed to stop talking to the accused once a lawyer was requested, but the Supreme Court had goofed it up and ruled that any equivocation on the suspect’s part was open game to continue the interrogation, notwithstanding the request for counsel. And if the suspect hadn’t asked for a lawyer, the police weren’t required to tell the suspect that a lawyer was waiting outside, trying to get in. So Shelly was accustomed to being insistent. In this context, she reminded the officer of the high-profile nature of the case and promised her that she would be taking down the names of every officer who prevented her from speaking with Alex Baniewicz. Right now.
    Her presentation seemed to buy her something with the officer. Shelly sat on a bench and made a point of looking at her watch. But her mind quickly drifted from the cop to her client. What had happened to Alex in the last few months? How could it have come to this?
    A small classroom on the second floor of the law school, doubling as a conference room for the Children Advocacy’s Project. He was seated in a chair, looked no different from any tenth-grader learning English or math or science. Appropriately dressed in a white shirt and khaki trousers, with a long black wool coat folded in his lap—better dressed, in fact, than most of her clients. Well developed for sixteen, a strong neck and broad shoulders, a square jaw, thick curly hair. His eyes were large and expressive, something like amusement playing on his face as Shelly walked into the room.
    According to his file, he had been involved in a fight in the hallway at Southside High School. No weapon, no racial epithets, and while it was not his first offense, it was far from a pattern of misbehavior. A brief suspension and nothing more,