The Trials of Nikki Hill Read Online Free Page A

the decision. “A prosecutor that withholds evidence... which, if made available, would tend to exculpate the accused or reduce the penalty helps shape a trial that bears heavily on the defendant, that casts the prosecution in the role of an architect of a proceeding that does not comport with standards of justice....”
    Wise had been right. She hadn’t withheld any evidence. She’d turned over the jacket. It was not her fault that the public defender had failed to inventory the contents of its pocket. She’d had no legal obligation to practice law for the defense. But she still felt sick. To her mind, she was still in the position of being the “architect” of Mason Durant’s fate. That did not comport with
her
standard of justice.
    Glumly, she returned to Gleason’s office.
    Ordinarily, she would have waited for one of the secretaries to announce her, but her anger pushed her beyond that sort of formality. Gleason looked up from the magazine he was reading. “All done?” he asked.
    “Yeah. And I quit.”
    “Oh? What are your plans? Gonna work as a cleaning lady? Drive a cab? Certainly nothing in law, nothing to compensate for all those years of study and struggle. Even if you managed to get as far as the personnel office of a firm, can you imagine the kind of reference I’d provide?”
    “Why are you being such an asshole?” she asked.
    “Because you disappoint me. Because I thought you were smart enough to know how the game is played. Because in this office defiance is simply not tolerated.”
    “Well, fuck you and your disappointment,” Nikki said. “I didn’t become a prosecutor so I could play games with the law. Ask Mason Durant what he thinks about your damned games.”
    “You want to set him free, Nikki?” the district attorney asked. “Would that be serving the society we’re sworn to protect?”
    Nikki remembered the woman whose husband Durant had bragged about killing, remembered her tears and bitter words. She shook her head, trying in vain to remove that sad image. “It’s... not my call to make,” she said, more hesitatingly than she wished.
    “No it isn’t,” Gleason said. “A jury found him guilty and that’s that. Know why? Because I say it is.”
    “That’s fine for folks who don’t have a conscience.”
    He grinned at her. “That’s the other reason I’m sending you to Compton: punishment should put a little salve on that wounded conscience of yours.”
    “Who died and made you God?”
    “I’m a self-made man,” he said.
    “Yeah, well, I’d rather drive a cab than spend the rest of my life working for you in Compton or anywhere else.”
    “Use your head, woman,” Gleason growled. “We’re not talking about the rest of
your
life. Just the rest of
mine.
I’ve got angina, I’m a hundred pounds overweight, and my cholesterol level is higher than the Dow. My doctor gives me five years tops, but I imagine he might be a little optimistic. If by then you’ve done the kind of job at Compton I think you’re capable of, you’ll be back here in a nanosecond.”
    She remembered her grandma telling her about school, how “smart learnin’ is like carryin’ a sword at your side, ’specially when dealin’ with white folks who expect colored people, women in particular, to have heads full of cotton instead of brains.”
    That bit of advice had been given on a sunny afternoon on the front porch of Grandma Tyrell’s little stucco cottage in South Central L.A. a few decades before. The ashes from the Watts riots were still coating the bushes in the yard, and Nikki knew that she was going to need some weapon to get through life. Knowledge seemed like a good bet. So she ground her way through grade after grade, always excelling, always pushing herself.
    Now here she was, facing the precise foe her grandmother had mentioned. She had the weapon: she was smart. Smart enough to know that what this devious and manipulative white man was saying carried a certain logic. She’d