Read Online A Trial by Jury by D. Graham Burnett - Free Book Online

he put it) and put on two condoms, provided by his client.
    As he did so, however, the white man took out and charged a small glass crack pipe (later recovered at the scene) and began to smoke, offering it to Trevor. He declined, and reportedly became angry, saying that he did not meddle with crack. Disgusted by the incivility of the customer and the “arrogant” (i.e., nasty, offensive) smell of toasted cocaine now pervading the small bathroom, Trevor testified that he removed the condoms (here he gestured in such a way as to suggest that he did so by pinching them at the base with his thumb and forefinger and shucking them defiantly), and exited into the main room of the apartment, from which, after briefly explaining things to Cuffee, he took his leave.
    This testimony placed the victim in a new light. Nahteesha and Hector-Laverne both vehemently denied that Cuffee ever pimped his acquaintances or ran an escort service, but the prosecution did not contest the evidence that he did—including business records found on the victim’s home computer. Trevor’s testimony, however, also threw a number of uncertainties into the case. The most obvious of these was the presence in the fatal apartment of a sex-starved, shaved-headed white male, high on crack, who was about to confront his pimp, and who never turned up in subsequent investigations. One did not need a hyperactive imagination to paint a considerable number of scenarios for how this volatile encounter (mediated, somehow, by Milcray?) might have been linked to Cuffee’s violent death minutes later. The whole business also made more spooky Milcray’s fleeting allusion, in the videotaped statement, to his having thought he heard the victim, as he slumped into the corner, mumble something about there being someone else in the apartment.
    Was the john still in the bathroom during the alleged attempted rape? Did he, perhaps, duck out after Milcray had fled? If so, perhaps he could account for one of the lingering minor puzzles of the case: Milcray insisted that the television had been on when he exited (in fact, that it had provided the only light for the whole incident), but the police testified that they found the television off when they burst into the room the following afternoon. Leaving the bathroom, seeing the body and the partially open curtain, and surmising that the light from the television would reveal the corpse to anyone who peeked in the window, did the john turn the television off in order to give himself more time to get away from the scene he had stumbled on? And did he merely stumble on that scene, or was he involved in it in some other way?
    Milcray, of course, had claimed simply that he did the stabbing alone, in self-defense. But, then again, he had clearly lied before.
    Baroque plots percolated in the mind as Stevie Trevor stepped out of the box, willowy and tall, and made his way from the room. Later, in deliberations, I would realize that others, too, found themselves fascinated by the possibility of ever more tangled stories—conspiracies, missing persons, Milcray taking the fall to protect, say, one of these witnesses we had just heard. Who knew? Now, as I look back, some of the hypotheticals we entertained (however briefly) have about them a feverish and fantastical quality. Such are the perils of the imagination in a trial: the sense of drama goads one to raise the dramatic ante; to conceive of fantastic resolutions worthy of the setting, the cast, the deeds. But not only that. This sort of reasoning—compounding improbabilities, dreaming up still more intricate motivations and counterplots—has, I think, much to do with a deep, shared idea about the nature of truth and the means of reaching it: namely, a sense that getting to the bottom of things should be hard work, should be difficult, should lead through long and knotty webs. Philosophers may wield Ockham’s cold razor in the pursuit of the true (cut