A Cure for Night Read Online Free PDF

said, realizing I hadn't seen Myra since it'd come down.
    "What do you know about the Gibbons verdict?"
    "I know it didn't go our way."
    "That's for sure."
    "And I know you don't think he did it."
    Myra shook her head. "It's not a question of thinking. I know he
didn't do it."
    "The jury thought so."
    "Yeah well, the jury didn't know as much about crime as I do. The
big thing was that Terrell had confessed."
    "That's a problem."
    "It was, yes."
    "But you don't think it was legit?"
    "I know it wasn't. They were in that room for about fourteen hours
before Terrell confessed. He never stood a chance."
    "You think they convicted just on the confession?"
    "There wasn't any direct evidence. The only other thing the police
had was the word of a supposed coconspirator, which they couldn't have brought
in if Terrell hadn't confessed. The confession is what did him in."
    "You have good grounds for appeal?"
    "Nothing great, no. But you never know."
    "Sorry. That must be tough."
    "More for Terrell than for me. Anyway, we're here to work on
Lorenzo Tate. So I made a copy of the file, what there is of it at this point,
which is almost nothing. We've got the incident reports, a summary of the
witness statements, some paperwork coming out of the actual arrest."
    "What should I be doing?"
    "First thing, of course, is we need to go talk to our client. I
represented him at the lineup and arraignment a few days ago, but didn't get a
chance to really talk to him then, other then to tell him to keep his mouth shut
until he saw me again. We've got a meeting at Rikers set up for nine a.m.
tomorrow. Where do you live?"
    "Bergen Street, between Fifth and Flatbush."
    "I'll come get you around eight fifteen," Myra said. She picked up a couple of large bound documents and handed them to me.
"These are two pretrial omnibus motions from other cases. We'll steal as much as
we can from these in assembling our motion papers, so you should read through
them to get a feel for how we'll proceed."
    "Anything that needs doing now?" I asked.
    Myra shook her head. "It'll take you a while to read the file and
look at these omnibus motions. You can do that between now and tomorrow
morning."

4
    O UR CLIENT , Lorenzo Tate, was twenty-six years old. He'd been arrested on the basis of two witness statements. The sister of the surviving victim, Latrice Wallace, had told the police that Lorenzo had come looking for her brother earlier on the night of the shooting and had made threatening remarks. There was no statement from that victim himself, Devin Wallace. I figured this could either mean that his condition was still too serious for him to talk, or that he wasn't cooperating with the police. The eyewitness to the shooting, Yolanda Miller, had said that while she didn't actually know the shooter, she'd seen him around the neighborhood, and had identified him by a street name, Strawberry.
    It was after seven by the time I had finished going through the file. Suddenly finding myself working a murder had charged me up; I felt an excess of energy combined with being at loose ends, not a great combination for someone coming off a serious heroin flirtation. A cornerstone of the way I lived now was in how I structured my time, always knowing in advance what I was about to do, first breaking the day down into little pieces, then building it back up again with defined activity. I fought a vigorous campaign against dead air, and finding myself in an unplanned moment was enough to send me into a panic.
    I needed to make a plan. Nothing better coming to mind, I called Paul at work.
    My years at Walker Bentley had conditioned me to get straight to the point when talking to someone who billed out his time in six-minute intervals.
"I just sort of got promoted," I said. "And I'm at loose ends tonight, thought
I'd see if you wanted to get dinner."
    I noticed the pause before Paul spoke. "Sure, pal, but it's going
to have to be on the semi-late side. How's