Wiseguys in the Woods

by John P. M. Wappett

  Although he had initially thought Judge Ginola to be a bit dim and inexperienced in criminal law, it soon became clear that while the judge could learn, he had no desire to do so. By simply siding with the prosecution at every turn, the judge ensured that any public criticism would be deflected by the DA, who would have to justify the decision both in the press and before any appellate court.

  Making matters worse was the fact that Judge Ginola was easily offended, especially by defendants, who often didn’t know any better. There are few things in the criminal justice system more unpleasant to have to witness than a spiteful bully of a judge verbally savaging some poor bastard standing in chains, even figuratively, before him. Peter remembered one occasion, where a mentally disturbed young man on probation was brought before Judge Ginola, after blowing up at his female probation officer. The fellow had been arrested and had given a statement, expressing his frustration in vivid language. When arraigning him on his violation of probation, Judge Ginola seemed to take great delight in reading the fellow’s statement aloud in a full courtroom. Ginola loudly emphasized every obscenity in the statement, including the remark “if I had the chance I would fuck her up for screwing with me.” Looking around him as the judge read that, Peter could see that the court personnel were extremely uncomfortable with the judge’s performance.

  Judge Ginola’s inadequacies served to remind Peter of what he had left behind when moved north to Warren County. The Albany County DA’s office, under DA Shearer and his Chief Assistant Patrick O’Donnell was, in Peter’s opinion (shared by many law enforcement officials and judges) one of the best prosecution teams anywhere. While knowledge of law and practical experience were the primary ingredients, shared by the senior attorneys with the younger staff, it was the moral compass of the Office and its members that was its essential focus, the source of its excellence and espirit de corp.

  Early on, Peter had realized that the Office’s ethos was to do the right thing, for the right reason. Nothing less was satisfactory or acceptable. And the ends never justified the means. In fact, the means were everything. Since coming north, Peter had tried, on several occasions, to explain these philosophies to Judge Ginola, in hopes of encouraging some effort by the judge to learn the law and try to make his own decisions based on that knowledge. Peter might as well have been speaking Urdu.

  Abe showed up just after 4, and filled Peter in on the previous night’s excitement in Lake George Village, the center of the region’s tourist industry. Abe told Peter that at 0142 hours yesterday morning, a 911 call came from a pay phone on Canada Street, (the main drag through the Village of Lake George), that someone had fired a handgun into the ceiling of the men’s room of the Night Cap bar during the course of an argument with someone. Abe continued, flipping through his small notebook as he spoke,

  “Witnesses described the shooter as ‘looking out of place’, an older man, in his late 40’s, dressed in a dark three-piece suit. One said the guy held his cigarette with his finger tips, and seemed to speak with an accent. I also interviewed the regular weekend bartender this morning and although he was not on duty when the shooting took place, he believed he knew the guy being described by the witnesses. The bartender said the guy was a periodic regular, meaning that he would appear suddenly and then almost nightly for several weeks and then disappear for a few months.

  “One reason why the bartender remembered this man was that he only drank campari.”

  “What’s that?” asked Peter.

  Abe replied with a grin: “I had the same question. The bartender told me that it was a red-colored, somewhat bitter aperitif, which this guy drank on the rocks. Apparently, this guy would drink five or more of these per night, so the bartender took to keeping several bottles on hand, just for him.”

  Abe set down the notepad. “You know. This incident isn’t all that big a deal, since no one got hurt, but there’s something about this guy that’s got me curious”, observed Abe, when he had finished briefing Peter.

  Peter agreed. “Yes, it is kind of weird that such an odd-appearing character could be wandering around Lake George with nobody knowing who he is or where he lives or works or anything. Hell, I grew up in that town and all the locals knew everything about everybody, except the tourists. If this guy isn’t a local, then he certainly has a connection with one or he wouldn’t keep turning up the way the bartender describes.”

  “What do we know about the person this guy was arguing with?”

  Abe rubbed his eyes: “Not much at the moment. One of the witnesses thought he was a local or at least did not seem to be a tourist, but did not know his name, mid-thirties, average height and weight, brown hair. One odd thing that the regular bartender mentioned was that the shooter had once told him that if he ever wanted to work in the Albany area, that he, the guy in the suit, was part owner of a bar in Colonie.”

  Peter smiled. “I have a couple of guys down there you might want to reach out to. Det. Jay Gainley and Inv. Andy Zant at Colonie PD are buddies of mine. We used to do drug cases together. If this guy is hanging around the bar scene in that town, they will know it. And when you speak to them, be sure to ask them to tell you how their sergeant, Steve Heinemann, became the laughing stock of the County Court during the Gonzales trial. The sergeant still pretends to be mad at me for that trial.”

  Abe and Peter wrapped up their discussion, agreeing that the other guy in the argument needed to be found and interviewed. Peter got up to leave for home. He was looking forward to heading out after dinner with his wife to take their two small children to Martha’s, across the street from the Great Escape amusement park, for soft ice cream. Those two rascals loved ice cream almost as much as he did.

  Peter had just reached his car when Ned Khoury stuck his head out of the door and said to him. “We just got a call from the Sheriff’s people that a construction crew found what appears to be a body in a wall up in the Village. They’ve requested our Forensic Identification Unit and have invited me up as a courtesy. Want to come along?”

  Peter looked quizzically at Ned. “A body in a wall?”

  Ned shrugged. “That’s what they said. It’s not likely to be natural causes.”

  “Thanks, Ned. I’d already worked that out for myself.” Peter replied, while rolling his eyes. They both laughed and went back inside, so Ned could get his suit jacket and Peter could call home to say he’d be late, again.

  Chapter 3

  He heard and felt the familiar creaking of the seat’s upholstery being compressed by his back, as the police-equipped car leapt out of the driveway of the substation, as only a souped-up unmarked police vehicle could do. Like most of law enforcement, the State Police had recently abandoned the cost-saving policy of equipping their investigators with smaller, more economical K-cars and returned to the large Crown Vic or Chevy Impala type sedans, with high performance engines and beefed-up suspensions. Peter remembered one of the turning points in this argument, when a bank robbery in Albany turned into a high-speed chase on the Thruway. The robbers had a large, heavily modified sedan that outran most of the police vehicles and shouldered off the road those that could keep up. In the aftermath, police hierarchy and police unions joined forces to protest the inadequate cars and the safety threat they posed.

  They sped past the Queensbury School campus as school was out of session and Our Lady of the Annunciation church where Peter and Eileen had been married eight years earlier. Peter just had time to remember that the church was sometimes irreverently known as Our Lady of the Northway, when Ned whipped the wheel to the left and launched his unmarked car down the entrance ramp onto the Northway – the main highway that runs straight north though New York State from Albany to Montreal.

  Peter had not yet come across a cop who could actually resist the impulse to drive faster than the rest of the less-privileged motorists. Even Ned, who wouldn’t dream of taking advantage of his position under any other circumstances, seemed to harbor some child-like delight in blowing by the tourists
and locals in the right lanes.

  Peter still shivered at the recollection of one predawn ride through the streets of downtown Albany a few years ago, as Detective Sergeant Farmer drove his young and terrified drug prosecutor, Peter, from one drug house to another while simultaneous raids were being conducted to break a cocaine ring that he and Peter had been investigating with wiretaps for months. That was as close to the chase scene in the movie Bullet as Peter ever wanted to get.

  It wasn’t as if this newly-discovered body in the wall was going to get any more dead…

  ***

  Once he had been interrupted in the middle of enjoying a drive-in Disney movie with the family, to respond to a homicide scene, where he witnessed the removal of a very dead and very frozen boyfriend from a chest freezer. The suspect, his girlfriend had shot him and then decided that he looked so peaceful in death that she wanted to preserve his expression. As the EMT’s lifted the body out of the freezer, Peter could not resist: “Well he may have looked peaceful on the way in, but he sure looks pissed now.” To make matters worse, the curled-up corpse rolled off the gurney, landing with a sound like a bowling ball on the concrete floor, resulting in macabre giggling. When they retrieved the body, strapped it to the gurney and began to roll the laden gurney out of the house, Peter glanced around the corner, turned back and announced, “Press outside! Everyone look somber!” If one looked closely at the newspaper photo on the front page the next day, one would have noticed that everyone in the frame seemed to be biting their lower lip.

  ***

  A glance over at the speedometer confirmed his thoughts as the needle swept past 90 mph and kept on going. The interstate they were scorching, I-87, known as the Northway, had been constructed through this part of the state when Peter was a young child and he had some fragmented memories of massive earth-moving equipment and dust and engine growls and backup beeps.

  Once completed, this highway had shifted the center of most human activity in the county somewhat to the west, marooning a lot of what had been thriving along State Route 9, formerly the main artery between Montreal and New York City. State Route 9 had basically followed the passage laid out by military roads, corduroy roads, ox cart paths and winding trails between the English colony of Canada and the early American colonies nearly three hundred years prior.

  Peter had once seen photos of isolated, garish tourist attractions and motels along Route 66, running from Chicago to the West Coast, that were likewise victims of the expansion of President Eisenhower’s vision of interstate highways crisscrossing the country. Eisenhower had been so inspired by the autobahn he had admired in conquered Germany that he decided to bring the idea home. The result, both along Route 66 and here along Route 9, were bypassed communities that had withered to one extent or another, with the paint-flaked remnants of gaudy miniature golf courses, kitschy and exaggerated tourist sites touted by peeling billboards and now lonely single-story motels.

  Bucking this trend was the area around the 32 mile length of Lake George. The southern half of the lake, in particular, had flourished. The Northway had improved access to this beautiful body of water, once dubbed the “Queen of American Lakes” by some fellow named Thomas Jefferson, and the tourist trade, which had been sizeable since the early decades of the twentieth century, was bigger than ever. It was one place where local teenagers never had any trouble finding summer jobs-almost all of them worked at the hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions that surrounded the lake.

  “Nuts! I forgot that Al was on traffic interdiction” said Ned, reaching for his car radio’s microphone.

  It still cracked Peter up to hear Ned speak without swearing. Nor did he smoke or drink. He was one of a kind.

  “You’re not going to tell him that you are transporting a lawyer to a crime scene, are you?” offered up Peter, knowing this would trigger a response.

  “Why would I do that? The whole idea is to keep from being pulled over and delayed.” He smiled at Peter as he clicked open his mike, “SP patrol G53. This is Khoury, in green sedan, northbound toward Exit 23. On the job! On the job!”

  “Roger that, Senior”, responded the tinny voice from the radio.

  “ I do appreciate the irony of you saying rude things about lawyers, even though you and your colleagues secretly want to be like us, and even try to use fancy language to sound like us” baited Peter, again.

  “What are you talking about? I don’t try to talk like you” said Ned.

  “Sure you do. You are the only people in the universe who say that you proceeded down the road in your vehicle, came to a stop and exited said vehicle. Now why the hell can’t you just drive your damned car and then get out, like everyone else? It’s because you want to sound like lawyers”, concluded Peter, satisfied that he had won this round of this never-ending lawyers-are-scum skit. Ned just shook his head as they both laughed, again.

  Peter was aware that cops were normally reluctant to have prosecutors at their crime scenes, but with Peter it was different. He had proven himself time and again during his stint in the Albany County District Attorney’s Office. After having seen the looks on the cops’ faces when some self-important prosecutor announced to the press that he or she was in charge of an investigation, and then hearing the muttering out of earshot of the reporters, Peter came to understand the depth of resentment such theatrics generated.

  While he was more than willing to go to even the goriest homicide scenes, even when his stomach was less than thrilled, Peter never forgot that he was a guest and that he had no legal authority over even the newest rookie cop. More to the point, a prosecutor had absolutely no training in crime scene protocol or evidence gathering, other than what he may have picked up from the trial testimony and conversations of investigators.

  As a result, Peter treated his crime scene appearances as educational exercises and opportunities to learn, first-hand, about a potential case that he might have to prosecute in court someday. By keeping his eyes open and mouth shut, Peter took in the sights and sounds of the crime so that he could later paint word pictures for a jury. He also let it be known that if needed, he could be an asset to the crime scene investigators, a legal resource if they wanted an opinion.

  Over the course of time, he became accepted and even welcomed by the agencies that knew him. Later, when he moved north, he learned through the grape vine, that the senior investigators here in Warren County had checked him out with their Albany area counterparts. This had made the transition much easier for Peter and for the cops. Peter was grateful to the friends he had left behind, for their loyalty and support.

  Two exits later, Ned swooped off on the exit just north of Lake George Village. As the car moved over onto the exit ramp, Peter looked ahead of them beyond the crisscross of concrete lanes of the exit, toward some thick woods along the interstate.

  “It was just about this time of year when Ricky Cordell dragged Michelle White into those woods”, reminisced Peter, grimly.

  “Yeah, that was a tough case”, replied Ned.

  “Have you ever noticed that we tend to develop ‘places of interest’ in the region that would not be especially popular with the Chamber of Commerce?” asked Peter.

  Ned responded. “It’s not like they are going to erect a sign up there, saying ‘This is the spot where Michelle’s rotting corpse was found.’”

  ***

  The incident to which they were both referring was a homicide case, going back three years, when a young man named Ricky Cordell got into an argument with his girlfriend, the mother of his child. They were driving around in his rental car at the time and he lost patience with her and slammed a large screwdriver into her abdomen. He kept driving, even pointing out to her the local hospital, as he drove past, until she bled out and then dumped her body in the woods that Peter was looking at.

  As always seemed to be the case, this investigation and prosecution had its own oddities that stuck in the memories of those involved. Michelle’s body had not been discovered for
a couple of months in the summer and so when the autopsy was performed, by an internationally known forensic pathologist attached to the State Police Crime Lab, the results were inconclusive as to the issue of cause of death. As for the time of her death, much like in some crime shows on TV, Peter was given a crash course on the loves and life cycles of a number of insects. The lecture was provided by an entomologist from the State University of New York at Albany who was on retainer with the State Police for just this situation. Peter learned how the time of death of this young woman could be fixed with some degree of accuracy, by the insects and their larvae found both in and under the body. At trial this was gruesome but effective testimony.

  While it seemed most unlikely that Michelle, who purportedly was a healthy young woman, had simply walked into an isolated area of woods that had no footpaths or other pedestrian access, and dropped dead; the decomposing and scavenger-ravaged body yielded no clues as to how she had died or why she was there.

  Dr. Michael Brenner later explained to a jury that the natural course of decomposition of a body in the wild included the swift removal of all soft tissue by various carnivorous animals, including bears, fox, bobcats, the neighborhood dogs, crows and a variety of insects and larvae. As a result, blows, stabs and even gunshot wounds may well be undetectable, unless there was some damage to the remaining bone and cartilage or, perhaps the vestiges of clothing. Michelle’s body yielded no such clues and toxicology screens of bone marrow and remaining tissue showed no signs of poison or anything else out of the ordinary.