Authors: James Grippando
T
hursday’s sentencing hearing went as the pundits had predicted. Sydney Bennett was sentenced to time served for her conviction on one count of providing false information to police. Her release from the women’s detention center was set for some time after midnight the following Saturday, probably very early Sunday.
On Friday morning, Jack met with his client to talk logistics. It was just the two of them, as Hannah Goldsmith was delivering an opening statement in one of the other 143 murder cases pending in Miami-Dade County.
“How scared should I be?” asked Sydney.
She was seated on the opposite side of a small table, attorney and client surrounded by windowless walls of yellow-painted cinder block. Bright fluorescent lighting lent their meeting room all the warmth of a workshop. Sydney was a grown woman, but dressed in pajama-like prison garb, with no makeup, she seemed more like a teenager to Jack. It was hard for him to fathom that Sydney and Hannah were just three years apart in age. Light-years apart in maturity.
“I’m not telling you to be scared,” said Jack. “I’m just saying we have to be careful.”
“They want to kill me, don’t they?”
“If
‘
they’ killed everyone
‘
they’ wanted to kill, death row would be the most overcrowded place on Earth.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it. I’m not clueless. I can watch television in here now.”
That was new. Until her acquittal on murder charges, Sydney had been housed under the category of Protective Custody Level One in the high-security section of the detention center. One hour a day to take a shower, sit in the dayroom, and make collect calls from the jail phone. She could access books from a library cart to take back to her cell, but Level One inmates had no television or computer privileges.
“Okay,” said Jack. “Some people may want to kill you. Some want to marry you. Some want the trial to start all over again so they have something to do while they knock off two bottles of chardonnay before lunchtime. You can drive yourself crazy thinking about what ‘they’ want.”
“You’re right. From now on, the only thing that matters is what
I
want.”
That wasn’t exactly what Jack was saying, but he moved on. “Let’s talk procedure. And safety.”
“Safety’s a good thing.”
“The correctional facility is walking a fine line,” said Jack. “Until you get outside the gate, you’re their responsibility. The last thing they want is for something bad to happen to you on their turf. On the other hand, they don’t want to be accused of giving you special treatment. They want this to go according to standard procedure, as much as possible.”
“Seems weird that turning a woman out on the street after midnight would be standard procedure.”
Jack had once filed a lawsuit on behalf of a twenty-year-old woman who was raped by a carload of gangbangers on the night of her release. The case was dismissed, since putting women on the street alone after midnight actually
was
standard procedure.
“You won’t have to fend for yourself,” said Jack. “I’m walking out with you, and we’re going straight to an SUV.”
“SUV, huh? Faith Corso said I was getting a limo with a hot tub.”
Jack didn’t doubt it. “It’s a Chevy Suburban with a hundred and thirty-two thousand miles on it. I use it to trailer my boat.”
“Cool. We’re escaping by boat?”
It was a rare attempt at humor. Acquittal suited her well. “No. Theo is under strict orders to leave the boat behind.”
“Theo,” she said, smiling thinly. “So I actually get to meet your friend Theo?”
“Yes. Theo’s driving.”
“Loved his interview with Faith Corso. That crack about the rot-in-hell snuggies was hilarious.”
“Yeah, he’s a real stitch.”
“He seems totally my type.”
“Theo is nobody’s type.”
“That’s exactly my type.”
Jack drew a breath, then let it out. “Sydney, let me give you some fatherly advice.”
“You’re not old enough to be my father.”
“Yeee . . .
almost. Let’s call it friendly advice. You need to keep a low profile when you get out.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I don’t mean just for a week, or even a month. It’s going to take a long time for this craziness to subside. The first photograph of you in a club having a good time is going to be worth a hundred thousand dollars.”
“So that’s no B.S. from Faith Corso? Someone is actually willing to pay me a hundred thousand dollars for my picture?”
“No, they won’t pay
you
a thing. They’ll pay the photographer who snaps the picture.”
She pursed her lips, then an idea came. “I know. Your buddy Theo’s a bartender, right? We go to his bar, you snap the picture, and we split the hundred grand.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“First of all, I’m not interested. Second, as things stand right now, I would say that I’m concerned about your safety, but we can manage it. The moment this trial puts ten cents in your pocket, it’s a different story.”
“How do you mean?”
“Let me be clear. No magazine can pay you enough for a photo, no publisher can pay you enough for a book, no movie studio can pay you enough for the film rights to cover the costs of the security you will need if Faith Corso tells her viewers that you’ve turned the murder of your daughter into personal profit.”
Sydney gripped the table’s edge. “I didn’t kill my daughter.”
“We didn’t prove that.”
“I’m not supposed to have to prove it.”
“That’s true. That’s why you’re about to be a free woman.”
“Free enough to work for free? Is that it?”
“I didn’t say you can’t work for a living.”
“Who’s going to hire me? Other than a porn king?”
Those calls had already come to Jack’s office. “Don’t go that route.”
“I may have no choice. In two days I have to pay rent, eat, just like everyone else.”
“This will pass with time.”
“When?”
“That’s up to you. It could be never, if you become the poster child for taking blood money.”
The words made her cringe. “I don’t get that term, ‘blood money.’ On
The Sopranos
that was what a hit man got for a contract killing.”
“It’s one of those terms that has gotten away from its original meaning. Technically, blood money is what a murderer pays to compensate the victim’s family.”
“Perfect. TV murdered my daughter. Over and over, day after day. They can pay me for the rights to the made-for-TV movie. All nice and legal. Blood money. You can cut the deal.”
“I’m not cutting any deals.”
He said it with finality, no room for negotiation—which elicited a cold glare from Sydney. She suddenly didn’t look like a teenager in pajamas anymore. Reporters who had watched their interaction in the courtroom and described similar expressions as “pouty” had no idea what the real Sydney was like.
“Then I’ll find someone who will,” she fired back.
Jack let her simmer, but she wasn’t cooling down.
Sydney rose. “Are we done, Jack?”
“We haven’t really covered the whole plan for Saturday night.”
She walked to the green metal door and knocked for the guard. “I don’t care about the fucking plan,” she said, not even trying to get her temper under control. “Just do your job and get me out of here.”
The door opened. Sydney stepped out, and one of the corrections officers led her back to the housing unit. Jack gathered his briefcase and exchanged glances with the other officer at the door. The guards had seen many meetings between Jack and his client end this way—Sydney gnawing at her lip, fists clenched, red-faced with anger.
“What’s she so mad about now?” the guard asked.
“I handed her my bill,” said Jack.
The guard laughed. It was public knowledge that Sydney was indigent. “Good luck with that, partner.”
“It takes luck,” said Jack, continuing to the visitors’ exit.
S
outh Beach called to him. Theo was speeding east on the Dolphin Expressway, well aware that if he kept going for another twenty minutes, past I-95 and across the causeway, he would run smack into Ocean Drive, where hundreds of bad girls were ready to party. Ironically, a quick exit at Twelfth Avenue put him on a collision course with hundreds of others who were more than ready, but who weren’t going anywhere tonight.
Except for one Sydney Bennett.
Theo parked the SUV in a dark lot beside a tall chain-link fence, followed the cracked sidewalk beneath the interstate overpass, and walked across the street to the Miami-Dade County Women’s Detention Center.
The multistory center north of downtown Miami housed 375 female inmates. Some were awaiting trial. Others were serving time. Theo remembered the days of contact visits from his childhood, when his mother—in and out of jail on drug-possession charges—could hug him. Contact was no longer allowed, which was one of the many tidbits of information that Theo had picked up while listening to Faith Corso and her panel of experts on BNN fill hour after hour in the final chapter of Shot Mom coverage. The thought of Sydney Bennett’s return to the comfort and pleasure of human contact after killing her daughter had so many loyal viewers upset. Many were downright furious. Some—“an army of thousands,” according to Corso—were fed up with the system and ready to take justice into their own hands. The exact temperature of the crowd was hard to determine, but it was undeniable that few, if any, corrections facilities had scheduled a more anticipated release than Sydney’s.
Most of the detention center’s windows had been dark since nightfall, but lights were still shining in the ground-floor lobby, the release point for inmates in the system. A pair of corrections officers stood guard, and all appeared quiet on the other side of the glass doors. It was completely unlike the spectacle on Seventh Avenue and the park directly across the street.
“Ho-lee shit,” Theo muttered.
The night air was thick with humidity, the mercury still in the high eighties, and all those bare arms and legs were a veritable feast for hungry mosquitoes. People were milling about, walking with no particular destination in mind, just wanting to be there for “the moment.” It was as if the beaches had closed, happy hour was over, and an armada of sunburned tourists had wandered over to the jail for free entertainment. Parents with their young children. High-school kids on their bicycles. College students with rum-filled go-cups in hand. Vendors selling boiled peanuts and bottled water. Drivers on the elevated stretch of expressway above it all honked their horns as they passed the detention center, as if it were New Year’s Eve or the Super Bowl. One young man stood outside the center with a homemade sign that was sure to get him on television:
MARRY ME, SYDNEY.
“Snuggies,” a vendor called out, “get your hand-stitched snuggies.”
Theo did a double take.
ROT IN HELL, SYDNEY
was the stitched message. Theo had been joking on the
Faith Corso Show
, but this entrepreneur had stolen his idea and run with it.
The bright lights of a camera crew caught his attention. A BNN reporter had staked out a position on the sidewalk just a few feet behind him. She was interviewing the young man with the handheld marriage proposal, earnestly trying to find out what would make him want to spend the rest of his life with Sydney Bennett.
“Well, uhm, she’s really hot,” he said, reaching up inside the John Deere cap to scratch his head. “Obviously she, uh, likes to party. And did I say she’s hot?”
Theo’s phone vibrated. He stepped away from the small gathering around the television crew and checked the text message. It was from Jack.
“Hang
,
”
it read.
They had worked out a system back at the hotel. The release could happen any time between midnight and two
A.M.
Such a broad window of time made it impractical for Theo to sit in the SUV with the motor running. The agreement was that Jack would update Theo by text every fifteen minutes. “Hang” meant nothing was happening. When it was time to bring the SUV around, the message would read “Greenlight.”
Theo slid his phone into his pocket. He had at least another fifteen minutes to kill, probably more. He continued down the sidewalk, beyond the detention center’s main entrance, toward the more secure wing that butted up against the elevated expressway. Razor ribbon topped a high chain-link fence that extended beneath the overpass, and the streetlamps cast the yellowish glow of high-security vapor lights. Theo was sweating, but he suddenly felt goose bumps. The dark prison walls, the guard towers and ribbon wire, the vigil keepers outside the chain-link fence—it was eerily reminiscent of the darkest time of his life, those hours before the execution he had narrowly avoided at Florida State Prison. This time, however, there was no competing right and left ideology, no clash of capital punishment proponents versus death penalty opponents, no “eye for an eye” versus “Kumbaya.” This crowd was unified in its vitriol, especially at this end of the parking lot. This was where the hard-core Shot Mom haters had set up camp.
“No blood money!”
A middle-aged woman, hoarse from hours of shouting, was screaming at Theo. Theo kept walking, but she stayed with him, shaking a poster that delivered the same message in bloodred letters:
NO BLOOD MONEY FOR SHOT MOM!
“And for her lawyer, neither!” another woman shouted.
Theo stopped and fired back a response that these women undoubtedly thought was still part of the black-speak lexicon. “Right on, sistuh.”
The women continued their chant, and a group behind them picked it up: “No blood money, no blood money, no blood money!”
The mantra had started a week earlier on the
Faith Corso Show
, when a guest commentator had reported incorrectly that Jack was in New York City shopping a million-dollar book deal for Sydney. Corso had seized the moment to rally her troops: “We
cannot
let this happen,” she’d told her viewers. “The injustice of Shot Mom’s acquittal will forever stain the hands of those twelve jurors who ignored the clear evidence of guilt. But if we stand aside and let Shot Mom sign her million-dollar deal with publishers in New York or filmmakers in Hollywood . . . well, then shame on all of us. There truly will be no justice for Emma. So stand up, friends. Stand up with me and say it:
“No blood money!”
The glare of the television lights caught Theo’s eye, and again he found himself just a few yards away from the BNN reporter with her camera crew. The live interview of the moment was with an elderly woman from Lake City who had followed Faith Corso’s coverage of the case from the beginning. She was describing the poster that she and her eleven-year-old granddaughter had created to protest Sydney Bennett’s release. It was a collage of headlines and photographs spanning three years of newspaper coverage. Her voice quaked with emotion as she told the reporter about the photograph in the middle of the poster, a five-by-seven headshot of Sydney’s daughter, Emma.
“We glued on all these pictures this morning with plain old white glue,” the woman said, “and we used the exact same glue on Emma’s picture. But Emma’s is the only one where the glue soaked through the paper and left these red marks. Not a single one of these other pictures have that. You see what I’m talking about?” she asked, pointing.
“Yes, I do see,” said the reporter. “Let’s get the camera in closer for our viewers.”
“It looks like tiny red tears on her little cheeks, don’t it?”
“Remarkable,” the reporter said. “Viewers can draw their own conclusions, but, seeing it with my own eyes, I can only say that this is truly remarkable.”
“I believe that’s the Lord’s way of telling us that we’re doing the right thing here tonight, and I believe—”
A shout from across the parking lot halted the interview: “There she is!”
Theo’s gaze locked onto the commotion in the middle distance, and the BNN reporter signaled her cameraman to zoom onto the building.
“Hold on, Faith,” said the reporter. “We may have a Shot Mom sighting.”
Heads turned as random voices carried the news of one sighting after another.
“It’s her!”
“There’s Shot Mom!”
Onlookers jumped up from their lawn chairs and picnic blankets. Demonstrators grabbed their posters and sprinted across the street toward the high-security end of the building. A crowd that, minutes earlier, had been milling around and waiting was suddenly a cohesive ball of energy, catapulted by the Sydney sighting.
Theo ran, too, not sure what had happened to Jack’s plan, wondering if he had missed the “Greenlight” message. He checked his iPhone, but the display showed
NO SERVICE
. The Sydney sighting had overloaded the system, but word of mouth was spreading all around him.
“I see her!”
“Yeah, that’s her!”
Theo tried to get closer, but it was human gridlock ahead of him. Demonstrators blocked the sidewalk and the exit to the parking lot, but he was tall enough to see over most of the people in front of him. The most vocal and aggressive in the crowd, the tip of the human spear, had surrounded a young woman whose white blouse made her an easy mark in the darkness. People shook their fists and brandished their posters, shouting at her. She shouted back, but that only seemed to unify the mob.
“No blood money, no blood money!”
She darted in one direction, then in the other, desperately seeking a way out. The human circle around her drew tighter, and the angry crowd moved closer.
“No blood money!”
The BNN reporter and crew tried to push forward, but there was nowhere for them to go. Theo was trapped beside them and could hear the on-the-scene reporter shouting into her microphone with an update for the studio.
“Faith, you are absolutely correct. It does appear that this is the moment, the dreaded moment of Sydney Bennett’s release from prison.”
A big guy from BNN’s lighting crew gave one more shove. Suddenly, the logjam broke, there was a collective surge forward, and Theo nearly fell over the woman in front of him. He helped her up, and then peered across the sea of heads that stretched all the way to the chain-link fence. The buffer zone—a few feet of separation—between the mob and its prey had disappeared. The woman in the white blouse had been swallowed up in the crowd, her body somewhere beneath the hysteria.
“No blood money!”
Theo checked his cell again, but he was still without service. He wasn’t sure what to do, but things were turning ugly. He gripped the phone, useless as it was, frustrated enough to shout at the top of his lungs, but he kept it inside.
What the hell is going on, Jack?