Blood Relations (2 page)

“Oh, take me, take a picture of me and this cute thing here. Look. All this red hair, both of us. I mean, is this wild? Tonight I’m like Lucy Ricardo. Ricky? Ricky, where are you?” She reached out and pinched the butt of a darkhaired guy walking by. He jumped sideways, and his friends laughed and pointed.

Caitlin took a picture of Ali and Pussy Katz with their cheeks pressed together, eyes wide open, their mouths in big O’s. Ali had met Pussy at a gay club on drag night.

Ali liked the gay clubs because you could dance without the men hitting on you.

When Pussy Katz left, Caitlin took Ali’s arm and asked if she was stoned. “No,” Ali said. “I’m having a good time, all right?”

Hands slid around her waist. It was George. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, except that he wanted her to come with him. They went toward the stairs leading to the second level, a run of blue lights on the curved wall to show the way. Halfway up, George turned toward the wall so no one could see him and gave her one of the pills out of his vest pocket. On the second level the security guy opened the door to the private room and they went in. The room had black walls, white statues of nudes draped with gold cloth, and blue lights in plaster sconces. Long windows looked down on the main dance floor, and the glass vibrated in time to the music.

There were probably twenty people in the VIP room.

Ali recognized an actress from the soaps with her bare feet in someone’s lap. A black movie actor. A girl singer for a New York rock band called Phobos, talking about bondage as the ultimate expression of trust. The man next to her nodded, said, We’re all bound in one way or another. Someone’s bodyguard stood by the door. A blond male model was dancing by himself. White shirt hanging open. Incredibly gorgeous. Ali had seen his pictures in men’s magazines.

A girl looked up slowly from an armchair, squinted at Ali. “Are you somebody I should know?”

“I model for Moschino.”

“Bullshit.” The girl hiccupped.

George took Ali over to meet a man in a yellow silk shirt with palm trees and flamingos on it. Klaus Ruffini.

He was younger than she’d expected, maybe thirty-five.

Ali said hi, and Klaus took a handful of her hair and made a beard for himself. Everyone laughed.

It was late, too late to matter what time it was. The singer left with her people. Then the soap opera actress staggered out, held up by two men. A flash went off.

Caitlin had come in to take some society-page photos.

Everybody posed and smiled, and finally Caitlin put her camera down and somebody gave her a glass of champagne. Somebody else bumped her and the champagne spilled on the drunk girl asleep on the floor. Klaus was on the sofa drinking Cristal out of the bottle. A Japanese girl sat beside him smoking a joint. Her eyes were closed. Ali held out her champagne glass and he filled it. She said his store was fabulous. She shopped there all the time. “I think I’ve got the look for Moda Ruffini. Do you want my card? You could call me.”

The Japanese girl slid off the sofa.

Klaus pulled Ali onto his lap and kissed her. His tongue slid into her mouth, tasting like tobacco. He rubbed her thigh. She wanted to push him away, but thought it would make him mad. So she laughed and got up to dance with the black movie actor. She tried to remember his name.

Klaus was talking to George, looking at Ali, his cigar glowing red between his fingers. Ali dancing, lifting her hair, letting it fall. She stumbled. The heel of her shoe broke, and she kicked them both off. Then George danced with her and moved her toward the back of the room. The floor tilted, and Ali held on to his shoulders.

She asked why he didn’t call her anymore. He said something into her ear but she couldn’t make it out. His voice sounded like it was coming out of a long pipe. They –q pwp’@

kissed for a while. Then she was moving backward, bumping against something. A table. George swept the glasses off it and pushed her onto her back. She tried to get up, but he held her down with an arm across her chest.

His hand went between her legs, pulling at her underwear.

He unzipped his pants. She yelled for him to get off. She tried to twist her hips away but he was too heavy.

When he finished, he kept his hands on her wrists.

Someone else was pushing her legs apart. The movie actor leaned into her, eyes squinted shut, while George held her down and told her over and over it was okay, be quiet, baby, it’s okay. Ali felt like she was up in the ceiling looking down, and she could see herself, pale in the darkness, and the men around her, and her mouth open, yelling, but there was only the hard beat of the music in her ears.

Klaus Ruffini was laughing silently. He stuck his cigar between his teeth and leaned over to pick up an unopened bottle of champagne off the floor. He shoved the actor aside and motioned for George to turn Ali over on her stomach.

Fingers went inside her, then something heavy and cold. She screamed and twisted when the pain tore through her. Faces floated like moons in the darkness, watching. Finally the thing was gone, and Klaus let her up. He said she was very pretty and tried to kiss her. She hit him in the chest.

George pulled her off Klaus and told her to shut up. Ali was screaming and crying. She grabbed a glass and threw it at him, then a half-f bottle of rum. George ducked and the bottle knocked down one of the sconces. The light glared harsh and white into the room, showing lines of liquid running down the wall. The bodyguard dragged her to the door and pushed her through it. She slid to the floor.

Then Caitlin was there, bending over her. Bastards!

What did they do to you? Ali, please. You have to get up.

The walls tilted and moved. Caidin gripped her arm and pulled. Half-carried her down the stairs, through the bodies on the dance floor, all heat and sweat and noise.

Outside, people stared. Then somehow Ali was in Caitlin’s car. But not going home. Going across the causeway to Miami. Then stumbling barefoot along a corridor with a shiny floor. Caitlin put her into a chair in a waiting room with pink wallpaper.

Ali remembered her booking at six o’clock and tried to get up, hitting at Caitlin and crying when she wouldn’t let her go. Caitlin held Ali’s head in her lap and cried, too, and stroked her hair. Oh, Ali, I’m sorry. Damn them all.

Oh, God. I’m so sorry.

The murder of Carlito Ramos brought three television news reporters and a satellite truck to his mother’s apartment on Miami Beach to record the scene, but when the case finally came up for trial a year later, none of them covered it. The big trial that week was the robbery-homicide of a Japanese couple who had become lost on their way to Metro Zoo in broad daylight and had stopped to ask directions. The Ramos case, which most people had forgotten about, was a domestic dispute of no real significance for the tourist trade.

Sam Hagen had been a prosecutor in Miami for eighteen years, and by now most first-degree murder trials had become routine-if violent deaths could ever be routine.

He could almost accept those cases where the killing was at least explainable, or where the victim was as bad as his killer, but this one had made him burn with rage. Carlito Ramos, four years old. His mother told her live-in boyfriend to get out, she never wanted to see his face again. Luis screamed that he’d give her something to remember him by. He ran into Carlito’s room, picked up the sleeping child, and hurled him through the window. Carlito fell sixty-seven feet to a concrete sidewalk. His skull shattered like a melon.

After final arguments the jurors filed out. They would be called back in a while to be given instructions. The judge gaveled a recess. Sam Hagen watched the observers leave the courtroom-the defendant’s parents, in tears;

two law school grads here to pick up some pointers; and a group of retirees who spent their spare time watching criminal trials. Adela Ramos, the dead boy’s mother, went out leaning on her brother’s arm.

At the prosecution table Sam dropped wearily into hiis chair. He was forty-six and feeling every year of it. He reached up to squeeze the younger prosecutor’s shoulder.

“Good job, Joe.”

He had let Joe McGee make the final argument. Sam or another of the dozen prosecutors on the Major Crimes staff would supervise heavy cases to make sure they weren’t lost or reversed on appeal through an inadvertent screw-up by someone with less experience. McGee was a black Miami ex-cop who had decided he would live longer in court than on the streets. Smart and aggressive, he had moved up fast through the felony division, but this was his first death-penalty murder trial.

Sam saw him glance toward the defense table, nostrils flaring as if he’d smelled something vile. I want the son of a bitch,” McGee said between his teeth.

Luis Balmaseda. Good-looking darkhaired guy; twenty-eight years old, dressed in a neat blue suit. His lawyer sat on the railing, swinging one foot, talking to an associate in the firm. The lawyers laughed and Balmaseda smiled.

With the jury out of sight, everybody relaxed. The lawyers could kid around, and the defendant might laugh at their jokes. And for a minute you could almost forget what he had done, just as he could forget he might die for it.

Turning away, McGee pulled a stack of notes and xeroxed jury instructions out of a box and tossed them onto the table. He sat down. “You got any inspirations here, boss?”

“Yeah. A rope.”

Before trial the defense had offered a plea to seconddegree murder. Greenbaum denied that his client had killed the boy, but even if he had killed him, first degree didn’t apply. The act wasn’t premeditated. Balmaseda and his girlfriend were drunk and arguing violently. A plea to second would mean fifteen or twenty years. Why not take a sure thing? Sam had said no fucking way.

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, B almaseda 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, intelfigent 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 pleabargaining. 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.”