The Fence - Dick Lehr [148]
“Talk about the blue wall of silence,” he said. “It’s real.”
It was different come Kenny’s time. Like the jurors, Kenny watched as a confederacy of cops took the stand and hemmed and hawed, straining belief. Most days he sat in the gallery with his older sister’s husband, off to the left and behind the table occupied by his attorneys, Willie Davis and Fran Robinson. He wanted his turn.
The moment came ten days before Christmas Day—an unseasonably sunny day in the snowless holiday season. Kenny had not done anything special to prepare—no rehearsals, no coaching from lawyers. His lawyers just wanted Kenny to be himself.
“He was ready,” Fran Robinson said. “He had a lot to tell.”
The lawyers were confident but for one worry: The judge was taking “judicial notice” of Kenny’s perjury conviction. He disclosed to jurors the outcome in Ted Merritt’s prosecution earlier in the year—Kenny had been found guilty of lying to a grand jury and obstructing justice when he said he never saw Mike Cox at the fence.
“You have to accept it,” the judge said. “You can’t question it.”
But, the judge continued, the jury was to free to decide how to factor that information into this trial. “We’ll hear what Mr. Conley has to say about other things.” The jury might view the prior conviction as evidence of a cover-up, as evidence undermining Kenny’s credibility, or not at all. “It’s entirely up to you.”
It all meant that even before Kenny uttered a word he was behind the eight ball. “The jury’s being told he’s a liar,” Fran Robinson said. “How do you defend that?”
Their answer was to let Kenny Conley loose, and once he took the witness stand, Kenny found a groove in Willie Davis’s hands. “Are you familiar with the term tunnel vision?” Davis asked Kenny.
“Yes, I am.”
“Would you tell the jury what you mean by tunnel vision?”
“Tunnel vision would mean,” Kenny said, “that you lock on a particular object and you would basically black out everything else in the surrounding area.”
“And is that what happened to you that night?”
“Yes.”
Davis drew attention to reasons that someone in Kenny’s shoes might “lock on” a suspect that night: First, a fellow police officer had reportedly been shot at Walaikum’s, and, second, as far as Kenny knew, Smut Brown was armed. He spoke in a low voice, a courtroom manner he used by design, requiring jurors to practically lean forward in order to listen carefully.
“Were you ever in a position to see whether or not guns were thrown from the Lexus?”
“No,” Kenny said.
“Did you believe at that time that the man you saw running toward the fence may have had a gun?”
“Yes,” Kenny said.
Davis had Kenny talk expansively about his “activity log” for that night’s shift. Kenny had never claimed credit for arresting Smut, and the other side always portrayed the “omission” as proof Kenny was trying to hide his presence at the cul-de-sac; he didn’t want a paper trail leading to him. Kenny explained that, officially speaking, he did not arrest Smut. “Arrest means that I would be arresting him, filling out the reports, and following up in court,” he said.
“Did you do that with Mr. Brown?” Davis asked.
“No, I did not.” He wrote in his log that he’d “assisted” units from Roxbury and Mattapan. “Because we assisted them,” Kenny said matter-of-factly. “They had the initial call,” he said. Any time he crossed into another police district, he and his partner were backing up other officers who were “handling the reports and the arrests.”
From her seat, Fran Robinson liked what she saw. Kenny was open, respectful, and likable. He was effectively debunking the “Southie stereotype” that Ted Merritt had whipped up and exploited at the criminal trial.