Fiske knew what the suit was saying, knew it as if he could read the man’s lips. The man specialized in defending gang members on any crime they cared to commit. The best strategy: stone silence. Seen nothing, heard nothing, remembered nothing. Gunshots? Car backfire, most likely. Remember this, boys: Thou Shalt not kill; but if thou Shalt kill, thou Shalt not rat on each other about it. He smacked his palm against his briefcase for added emphasis. The huddle broke and the game commenced.
Along another part of the hallway, sitting on the boxy gray-carpeted seating built into the wall, were three hookers, working teens of the night. A variety pack: one black, one Asian, one white, they waited their turn before justice. The Asian looked nervous, probably needing a calming smoke or the sting of a needle. The others were vets, Fiske knew. They strolled, sat, showed some thigh, the jiggle of breast occasionally when some good old boys or young turks prowled by. Why miss some business over a little court thing? This was America, after all.
Fiske took the elevator down and was just passing by the metal detector and X-ray machine, standard equipment in virtually every courthouse these days, when Bobby Graham approached him, an unlit cigarette in his hand. Fiske liked the man neither personally nor professionally. Graham selected cases for prosecution based on the size of the headlines they would garner for him. And he never took on a case he would have to work real hard to win. The public doesn’t like prosecutors who lose.
“Just a little pretrial motion in a dime-a-dozen case. The big man has better things to do with his time, don’t you, Bobby?” said Fiske.
“Maybe I had an inkling that you were going to chew up and spit out one of my baby lawyers. It wouldn’t have been so easy if you’d been up against a real attorney.”
“Who, like you?”
With a wry smile, Graham put the unlit cigarette in his mouth. “Here we are, living in arguably the damned tobacco capital of the world, the biggest cigarette manufacturing facility on the planet just a spit on down the road, and one can’t even smoke in the halls of justice.” He chewed on the end of his unfiltered Pall Mall, noisily sucking in the nicotine. Actually there were still designated smoking areas in the Richmond court building, only not where Graham happened to be standing.
The prosecutor let slip a triumphant grin. “Oh, by the way, Jerome Hicks was picked up this morning on suspicion of murdering a guy over on Southside. Black on black, drugs involved. Wow, what a surprise. Apparently he wanted to increase his inventory of coke and didn’t want to go through the normal acquisition channels. Only your guy didn’t know we had his target staked out.”
Fiske wearily leaned up against the wall. Court victories were often empty, particularly when your client couldn’t keep a lid on his felonious impulses. “Really? That’s the first I’ve heard about it.”
“I was coming down here anyway for a pretrial conference, thought I’d fill you in. Professional courtesy.”
“Right,” Fiske said dryly. “If that’s the case, why did you let Paulie’s motion go forward?” When Graham didn’t respond, Fiske answered his own question. “Just making me jump through the hoops?”
“A man’s got to have some fun with his work.”
Fiske balled up a fist, and then just as quickly he uncurled it. Graham wasn’t worth it. “Well, as a professional courtesy, were there any eyewitnesses?”
“Oh, about a half dozen, murder weapon found in Jerome’s car, along with Jerome. He almost ran down two policemen trying to get away. We’ve got blood, the drugs, the whole candy store, really. Guy shouldn’t have been granted bail in the first place. Anyway, I’ve a mind to drop this rinky-dink distribution charge you’re representing him on and just focus on this new development. Got to maximize my scarce resources. Hicks is a bad one, John. I think we’re gonna have to seek a capital murder indictment on this one.”
“Capital case? Come on, Bobby.”
“The willful, deliberate and premeditated killing of any person in the commission of a robbery equals capital murder equals death penalty. At least that’s what my Virginia statute book says.”