Blood Relations Read online

  In a while court would reconvene. The judge would tell the jury what the law was, reading from instructions agreed to by both sides. Greenbaum was gambling. He wanted the judge to instruct the jury only on premeditated murder, not on second or manslaughter. The jurors would then have only two choices: first-degree murder or acquittal. If convicted, Luis Balmaseda would face the minimum mandatory of twenty-five years, possibly the electric chair. But if the jury had any doubts, Balmaseda would walk.

  Sam looked at McGee. “What do you think, Joe?”

  McGee blew out a breath, took another one. “I think Greenbaum wants us to crawl over there and beg him to take a plea to second before the jury gets the case.”

  “I’d say so.” Giving no hint of his own preference, Sam waited for McGee to lay out the alternatives. He’d been told he didn’t make it easy for younger lawyers in the office.

  McGee said, “We could ask for second degree ourselves. Tell the judge to instruct on lesser-includeds. Give the jury some room to compromise.”

  “We could do that.”

  “And Balmaseda could be out in five.” McGee stared across the room. “Or we go with instructions on first degree and we pray.”

  Unfortunately, the case had taken a hit at the outset. When two uniformed officers arrived in response to a neighbor’s 911 call, Adela Ramos was incoherent and Balmaseda was on his knees crying. One of the cops put handcuffs on him, dragged him into the living room, and asked what the hell had happened. Balmaseda babbled in Spanish, “I killed them both. I want to die. Shoot me, please.” The officers read him his rights. The subject refused to say anything else, either at the scene or later at Miami Beach Police Headquarters. Only that he wanted a lawyer.

  On a motion to suppress, the judge ruled that the officers had taken Balmaseda into custody without probable cause; therefore, his statement couldn’t be used against him. They should have asked him what had happened, then handcuffed him. The state took an appeal, but the judge’s ruling was affirmed.

  Alan Greenbaum had leaned hard on Carlito’s mother. Through a court translator, Adela answered in a lifeless monotone, unable to meet the lawyer’s eyes. A nervous woman with her nails bitten ragged, whose voice shook, whose heart must have been heavy with remorse that somehow she had let this happen to her son. All Sam could do was try to repair the damage on redirect.

  Luis Balmaseda turned his soulful brown eyes to the jury and admitted he’d been jealous. He had loved Adela so much. But when he caught her cheating and said he wouldn’t stay with her anymore, Adela went crazy. She ran into the boy’s room and threw Carlito through the window. Carlito! He was like my own son! Sobbing, Balmaseda said Adela started to climb through the window to her own death, but he dragged her back. The police got it all wrong.

  Drying his tears, he had faced Sam Hagen’s tough questions on cross. Sam had shaken him, but what did the jury believe?

  Sam motioned to Balmaseda’s lawyer. “Let’s talk.”

  Alan Greenbaum walked over, snapping his fingers in a rhythm, slapping a fist into his palm. He had a high, intelligent forehead, a neat mustache, and a custom-tailored suit. Sam had heard this was his last criminal case; he had taken a job with a civil practice firm.

  The three men faced each other in a tight circle.

  “What’s this shit about instructions only on first degree? Your client could be sent to the chair. Did you explain that to him?”

  Greenbaum whispered, “Take it easy, Hagen. He says he’s innocent. I can’t make him do anything. You want, I’ll renew the offer of a plea to second.”

  “Too late.” Sam fixed a look on him. “I told you, we’re not pleading this out.”

  There was a quick grin. “Sure. Then what do you care if we go for instructions on first? You want me to ask for second so the jury can grab it and it won’t look like plea-bargaining. I told you, babe, you should’ve taken a plea last year. He’d be in Raiford as we speak.”

  The defendant, with an arm extended casually across the railing behind him, turned to speak to his father, who had come back in. The jailer motioned for the man to move back. The father kissed his son, then sat down with Balmaseda’s mother, who had a tissue pressed to her nose.

  A big man, Sam had a few inches on Greenbaum, and he leaned into his face. “You tell your client, we get a conviction I’ll have the press all over this courtroom. This judge will burn him. Give me a plea to first, right here, right now, I’ll recommend life.”

  “Push him in a fucking corner, why don’t you?”

  “Go complain to the kid he killed.”

  “Hey. You want an instruction on second degree, go for it.” Greenbaum’s eyes shifted toward his client, then back to Sam. “Frankly, I don’t give a shit. But my client will not permit me to ask for anything but first.” With a final lift of his eyebrows to make sure Sam got it, he walked back to his associate, who had drifted closer, listening.

  “Oh, boy.” Joe McGee’s forehead gleamed with sweat.

  The court reporter looked over the top of her novel, then turned a page.

  A movement at the door caught Sam’s attention. A woman was striding down the aisle in a black suit accented with white lapels. Auburn hair curled to her shoulders, and her brown eyes were heavily outlined. Vicky Duran. She pulled Sam aside. “I have to talk to you.”

  He gave her a look. “We’re in trial, Beekie.”

  Victoria Duran was the state attorney’s deputy chief of administration. Born in Cuba, she had a leftover accent, and someone had put a Spanish twist to her name. Beekie. It had stuck.

  “The trial is in recess,” she corrected. “Come on, Sam. It’s important.”

  “All right. Wait for me outside.”

  After a glance at her watch, she left. The heavy wooden door swung shut behind her.

  “What’d Beekie want?” McGee asked.

  “Who the hell knows?” Sam turned back to him. “Okay. Show time. The judge is going to come back in here expecting us and the defense to have agreed on a set of jury instructions.”

  “You want to give him the lesser-included offenses?”

  “I’ll let you call it, Joe.”

  “Oh, shit.” McGee breathed heavily in and out. “Okay. If we put in the lesser-includeds, we can’t do worse than second degree. God damn. It’s as good as walking him.” McGee put his hands on his hips. “No. Let’s go for it. Fry the bastard.”

  For a while Sam let himself look at Luis Balmaseda. In his younger days he would have said the same thing: Go for it. A hundred murder trials had taught him not to gamble, but he was sick to death of being careful. Balmaseda must have felt Sam watching him. He looked around and a smile flickered at one corner of his mouth. Go for it.

  “Is that what you want to do, Joe?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “All right. Tell Greenbaum he’s on. I’ll be outside.”

  In the tiled, echoing corridor, with glass-enclosed entrances to courtrooms along the length of it, and people coming and going, Sam ignored Vicky Duran and spoke for a moment with Adela Ramos. She sat alone on one of the wooden benches along the wall, clutching her purse in her lap.

  “Where’s your brother?” Sam asked.

  “He go … for my coffee.”

  “Are you okay?” He sat down beside her.

  She nodded, not looking okay. She was a petite, dark-haired woman who must have been pretty before all this happened to her. Her eyes were fixed on Sam.

  “Listen, Ms. Ramos. I think you ought to go home. Rest. Have some lunch. I’ll call you when the jury comes back in with a decision.”

  “When they coming back?”

  Sam didn’t know. “Maybe this afternoon, but I think tomorrow. Mañana. I’ll call you,” he repeated. “Or you call me. Anytime.” He took a card out of his pocket and wrote a number on the back. “I have a beeper. Call me if you need to talk. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Okay.”

  Still sitting, he shook her hand, thinking how shaking this yo
ung woman’s hand came nowhere near what she needed. Not for the first time Sam regretted taking this damned case. He should have assigned it to someone else in Major Crimes. The subject matter, losing a child, had slashed too close to the bone. He should have said to McGee, Here, finish this. I can’t do it. But he hated to hear excuses, especially his own. Elbows on his knees, he stared blindly at the gray terrazzo floor until he could unclench his jaw.

  Adela Ramos said softly, “Thank you. I say to my brother he take me home.”

  Sam looked around at her, smiled briefly, then went to speak to Beekie.

  She was standing near the entrance to the next courtroom. A stack of green-and-white computer pages lay on a wall-mounted desk, the day’s business. A girl with a baby slung on one hip came along to thumb through it, and Beekie walked farther along the corridor, Sam alongside. Her arms were crossed, making cleavage at the vee in her jacket.

  “What’s up?”

  Beekie pushed her heavy mane of hair back from her face, and her gold bracelets jingled. In the buzzing fluorescent lights the makeup made her skin look orange. She had a bad complexion, which she managed to hide fairly well. Her full lips were outlined in brown and filled in with bright red. “Eddie left you a message to see him about the sexual battery from the Beach last weekend?”

  Eddie Mora was the state attorney, and Victoria Duran, among her other duties, had given herself the role of chief expediter.

  Sam said, “And I sent a message back. I don’t have time. I don’t have time for my own cases, let alone those outside my division.”

  “It’s not just any case, Sam. The people involved are going to draw some media attention. Everything has to be done right. You remember just after Eddie came in, there was a girl who said she’d been raped by that rap singer.” Beekie pressed long-nailed fingertips to her forehead. “What was his name?”

  “Henry Wells, aka Doctor Deep.”

  “Yes. We filed the case, and meanwhile she was suing him in civil court. All the time, it was a lie. The case was poorly investigated. The Sexual Battery unit gave it to a prosecutor trying to make a name for herself. We had the black organizations on our neck, and then the women’s groups. When we dismissed, the Herald wrote that snide editorial, saying we were scared off. That isn’t going to happen again.”

  Good old Beekie. Throwing herself in front of Eddie Mora before the bullets started flying. Victoria Duran had been slogging through the swamps of the juvenile division when Eddie came in. Within two years she’d made it to chief of the felony division, and now she was out of the courtroom with an office down the hall from the state attorney, in charge of the day-to-day operations of the office and its two thousand-plus employees. Despite the inevitable rumors that she was sexually involved with Eddie, Sam had always assumed that Beekie was simply ambitious. She had the brittle, edgy manner of a woman who hears the doors closing.

  He said, “Who are we talking about as potential defendants?”

  “Three men took part. One of them, supposedly, was Marquis Lamont. You know the name?”

  “Sure. Used to play for the Giants, out of Florida State.”

  “He’s acting in movies now.”

  “No kidding. What was he in?”

  “I have no idea,” she said impatiently. “The second man is an Italian businessman, Klaus Ruffini, who owns some property on the Beach. The third is a local of no consequence. And the victim is a model. So she says. There are witnesses, but their stories conflict.”

  “What a surprise. Did the victim show up at the pre-file conference?”

  “There hasn’t been one,” Beekie said. “Nor have there been any arrests. The Miami Beach police want our opinion first.”

  “You mean, they dump it on us, we say we won’t prosecute, and they’re off the hook with the press.” Sam shook his head, smiling a little. “Uh-uh. Not my thing. Give it to the Sexual Battery unit.”

  “Eddie wants to talk to you,” she said. “You specifically.”

  “Why?”

  “Sam.” She squeezed his wrist. “Go talk to him. I think he would appreciate your help.”

  He gave her a long look. In Vicky Duran’s oblique way, she was telling him something.

  It took until past eleven o’clock for the judge to finish reading the instructions to the jury. The two alternate jurors were dismissed, and the other twelve retired to the jury room, where the bailiff would bring them lunch. Balmaseda was handcuffed and taken back to his cell across the street.

  Hands braced on smooth black rubber, Sam rode the narrow escalator down from the fourth floor behind a Metro-Dade detective, who asked if a certain strong-arm robbery trial was still set for Monday. Sam said no, the victim had not shown up for her deposition. The state would probably offer probation and a withhold of adjudication rather than see the case dismissed. The detective got off at the police liaison office on three, and a private defense lawyer saw Sam and rode down to second with him. He wanted the state to reduce a burglary to a misdemeanor; otherwise his client, who was completing a drug program, would be kicked out for violation of probation. Sam said forget it, not for a sixth burglary. The attorney shrugged, said he would have to go to trial—both of them knowing the remoteness of that possibility, given Sam’s caseload. Something would be worked out.

  Pausing on the second floor, Sam took out his memo book to make a note to himself about a home-invasion robbery. In the corridor this morning he had offered the P.D. twenty years, a good deal for perpetrators out on parole when they did the crime. He fumbled for a pen, then wrote slowly in the little book. He knew his handwriting was miserable. The pen went dry. Sam sighed and stuck it into his coat pocket. Coming down to the first floor, where the escalator walls were mirrored, he caught a glimpse of himself—wide face, closely trimmed brown hair, going a little gray. His tie was crooked. He pulled it straight, then leaned heavily on the rubber rails again.

  The view of the lobby opened up, making visible a swirl of police, lawyers, criminals, victims, witnesses, people putting briefcases and bags on the X-ray machines just inside the glass doors, and others going out again. A steady flow.

  Miami, the Magic City. Number one in crime. Two hundred and fifty prosecutors couldn’t keep up. Even with a thousand, there wouldn’t be the judges to hear the cases or a place to put the criminals if they were convicted. It had become a plea-bargaining bazaar. There was hardly a case without a deal. A cut-rate discount store of deals, with the public paying in one way or another. More crime, more taxes, residents fleeing over the county line to Fort Lauderdale, which had only the sixth-highest crime rate in the United States.

  In the crowded hallway outside the cafeteria, Sam put down fifty cents on the counter for a shot of Cuban coffee, then drank it on the way out the back entrance. He tossed the cup into a can. The pink marble steps were gray with grime. Sam turned right, squinting in the sun. His office was across the next street.

  Most of the young assistants signed on for the courtroom experience. They had the energy to handle two or three hundred open cases, with a hundred set for trial at any one time. They learned, they made a name, then they found a job that paid good money and didn’t grind them up.

  Dina—Sam’s wife—used to complain about that. He was never home. He didn’t earn enough. How could they send the children to college? Four years ago, after a lot of thought, Sam decided she was right. He took a job at a civil practice firm with a friend of his, a guy he’d served with in the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. They gave him a mahogany-veneer desk in a tenth-floor office on Flagler Street, with clients in clean clothes, most of whom had never been the victims of anything worse than the auto accident or slip-and-fall that had brought them there. Sam filed claims and dictated letters to his secretary. This firm has been retained by (fill in name) in connection with (describe accident), a result of your negligence, which caused (describe injuries), said injuries resulting in pain, disfigurement, temporary and/or permanent disability, and loss of earnings.

  He
did all right in trial, but not many cases went that far. He spent more time at his desk than in a courtroom, signing dozens of letters and pleadings and motions. Then one evening, working late, gazing out his window at the streets of Miami going away in a neat grid, west and north through neighborhoods that didn’t seem so bad from that angle, Sam Hagen saw the sodium vapor crime lights come on, and realized that he had turned into a pencil dick.

  He got his job back in Major Crimes and moved up to head of the division the following year. Dina understood, or said she did. Sam didn’t know what he was accomplishing, if anything. Coming out of law school, ready for action, he had thought he could do some good in the state attorney’s office. As a prosecutor he had only seen more crime, more violence. Maybe the criminal justice system was as ultimately doomed as any other product of human invention. But there had to be some system of order, and someone to stand guard.

  Sam went through the rear entrance of the curving, glass-and-tan concrete building that housed the state attorney’s office. He nodded to the guard, walked past the X rays and metal detectors, and took the elevator to the fourth floor.

  “Sam. Come in. Vicky said you were on your way up.” Eddie Mora motioned to shut the door, then finished knotting his tie. He looked into a circular mirror propped on a shelf of his bookcase. “Lunch with the Beacon Council.” His image in the mirror smiled. “I think that’s it. Sit down.” He ducked his head to see his hair and smoothed it with his fingers. The hairline was receding. Even so, Eddie seemed younger than forty-one, with his round face and quick movements.

  Edward José Mora was a Harvard grad, born in the United States to Cuban parents. His father had run the Hilton hotels in Cuba, pre-Castro, getting his money out before the country went to hell. Eddie Mora had grown up in Manhattan and the family’s summer home in Connecticut. He had clerked for Supreme Court justice Scalia, then rocketed upward in the Justice Department. He married the dark-eyed daughter of a former sugar baron, then moved to Miami to reorganize the U.S. Attorney’s office, getting some good press in the national media. When the prior Dade state attorney died of a stroke, the governor passed over everyone in the office and asked Eddie Mora to fill in. The Cuban exiles would like it, and the governor wanted to carry Dade County in the election. Sam, considered a safe bet for the job, had clamped down hard on his disappointment.