The Trials of Nikki Hill Read Online Free PDF Page A

Johnny Hartman. She could hear the wistful strains of “Lush Life”...
    “It’s what fuels our fear,” Wasson said. “Relaxin’ off duty havin’ a sam’ich an’ some cranked-up punk-ass comes in wavin’ a Heckler an’ takes out half the tavern. Poor Tony didn’t have a chance.”
    “I’d better get to work,” she said.
    “Be our guest,” Wasson said. “Al’ays happy to cooperate with the D.A.’s office.”
    She took her coffee, and the memory of Tony Black, to a dreary room that hadn’t changed much in three years. The same almost-orange wooden table and three matching straight-back chairs. The new addition was a puke-green leatherette couch that looked like it had last seen duty in a women’s lounge where the women hadn’t been too careful with their cigarettes. She stared at the furniture, but she was seeing Blackie’s smile and humorous brown eyes.
    “You okay, honey?”
    The question came from a pale, skinny woman in jeans and a polo shirt sitting at the table, hands poised over a court stenographer’s machine, looking at her with concern.
    “Jacked as can be,” Nikki replied.
    The pale woman made a noise like “Hup,” and her fingers began dancing over her machine’s keyboard. She was wearing a cheap headset that was plugged into an ancient reel-toreel tape recorder on the table, doing its job slowly and silently. With fingers flying, the steno moved her head to indicate a second set of earphones on the tabletop.
    Nikki recalled how surprised and disappointed she’d been the first time she laid eyes on this room, when she’d learned that those cool, comfortable shadowy spaces with their one-way secret observation windows didn’t exist outside of the movies. At least not in L.A. Maybe in New York, where they actually let the D.A.s participate in the interrogations. Here, you had to stand back and hope that the detectives asked the right questions. Which they did sometimes.
    She placed her briefcase and coffee cup on the table, pulled over a chair, and picked up the headset. Satisfied that it was free from anything too communicable, she slipped it over her hair.
    “. . . the hell you think you kiddin’, Ja-mal?” were the first words she heard. Morales sounded just as cocky and bullshit macho as always.
    “Man, the Crazy Eights, they chased me into that alley. Like I said.”
    “Then how did the friggin’ ring get in your pocket, home-y?” Morales asked, giving the final word a nasty sarcastic twist.
    “I resent that tone, detective.” Elmon Burchis’s overly dramatic delivery brought a smile to Nikki’s face. She got her notepad from her briefcase, opened it, and slipped the pen from its leather holder.
    “Excuse me, counselor,” Morales said. “I din’ mean to offend yo’ altar boy client, who we all know is nuthin’ but a fuckin’ street rat.”
    “Sir, I am putting you on notice—”
    “Everybody just calm down, now,” came a new voice. Low. Resonant. Maybe a hint of the south. It must have belonged to Detective Goodman. “We’re gonna be here long enough without the unnecessary rhetoric. Mr. Deschamps, I believe Detective Morales asked you about the object you had in your pocket.”
    “I tole you that already,” Jamal Deschamps said. “I see this ring on her finger, looks like it worth some bills. So I take it. She already so dead she’s stiff.
    “Can’t I go pee? My eyes got to be turning yellow. Lawyer man, don’t I got the right to pee?”
    “Indeed you do. I—”
    “Okay, Mr. Deschamps,” Goodman interrupted Burchis. “Detective Morales will escort you to the lavatory.”
    “You escort him, amigo,” Morales drawled. “Up to me he could just piss in his pants. I’m sure it wouldn’t be the first time.”
    “My God, you are a barbarian,” Bleed ’em and plead ’em Burchis exclaimed.
    Nikki removed the headset and walked to the door in time to see a tall, gaunt white man leading a smaller, much younger black man past the bullpen in the