Counterplay

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Feeling saucy, he gave the young Hispanic woman behind the counter an extra dollar on top of his usual tip and got what he was sure was a “come back and see me when I get off” smile. But as he turned, he nearly had the coffee knocked from his hand by a young pasty-looking man with long, stringy brown hair and the straggly beginnings of a beard. The man appeared to be trying to escape from a very angry, very thin middle-aged woman who wore her Clairol blond hair tightly piled on top of her head, which accentuated a thin, elegant neck that led his gaze to a black dress cut to reveal the wonders of modern plastic surgery and a string of white pearls that accented her cleavage. She looked like she was dressed for dinner at the Waldorf rather than the courtroom… unless the purpose is to soften up the judge, Guma thought.

  “Albert, you come back here this minute,” the woman hissed, trying not to be gauche and yell. “Albert, you’re not going to fail to appear again, or your stepfather will not bail you out again.”

  Albert stopped and turned so that Guma was pretty much in between the two. “Which one?” Albert asked with a sneer. “Stepfather Three or Stepfather Four?”

  “Albert! That was unkind,” the woman said with prep school enunciation.

  “It’s Rasheed, Mom,” the young man complained. “My name is Rasheed, not Albert.”

  “Oh nonsense,” the woman replied, waving the name change away with a perfectly manicured hand. “You’re not even black.”

  “What’s that got to do with it? I’m Muslim. I don’t recognize the authority of secular governments; I answer only to the imam and Allah.”

  “Pshaw, once a Lutheran always a Lutheran,” the woman said. “And you answer to me. Now, you get your little fanny back in that courtroom or no more money for rent. You’ll just have to move back home.”

  Having fixated on the woman’s breasts, which looked even larger on her emaciated frame than they probably were, Guma decided to attempt the gallant tact, just in case Stepfather Four wasn’t performing up to standards. “Excuse me, I’m Assistant District Attorney Ray Guma, may I be of some help?” he offered her with a slight tilt of his head and his sexiest half smile.

  “You can mind your own business, grandpa,” the woman replied, giving him a look he figured she probably used on the maids when they spoke without being spoken to first.

  “Yeah, mind your own business, grandpa,” the youth echoed.

  Normally, such an affront would have called for a witty comeback. I wasn’t so picky, why are you? But “grandpa” had thrown him for a loop. Guma sipped his coffee and slunk off for the elevator.

  A few minutes later, he sat in the reception area waiting for Karp to arrive. He’d tried to walk right into the inner office, but Mrs. Milquetost had primly informed him that the office was locked until its owner arrived. He was still too crushed by the incident with the blonde and her son to battle with the receptionist, so he decided he’d spend the time reviewing his case while sitting on the couch.

  After Zachary Stavros left Karp’s office the week before, Guma had asked, So what do you think?

  Karp sat back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling, deep in thought. I don’t mean to throw water on this, Goom, he said. But without a body, you’re going to have a tough time getting a conviction based on Zachary’s memory…if you can get it into evidence in the first place. Any defense lawyer worth his salt is going to fight it tooth and nail. And if it gets in, he’ll go after the kid without mercy.

  I know, Guma said. I’d sure like to get a backhoe and dig up Emil’s yard.

  You’ll never get a search warrant, Karp said, without something the judge can hang his hat on. Without a body, you’re not only going to have to prove that Emil Stavros killed his wife, you’re going to have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she’s even dead. That’s twice the normal burden for any prosecutor, even you. What else you got?

  Guma gave him a rundown of what the early police investigation and a subsequent investigation a few years after Teresa’s disappearance had turned up. Unfortunately, the investigation seemed to have ended rather abruptly. I’m still trying to locate the detective who worked on the case.

  You suspect Emil Stavros might have pulled a few strings?

  Who knows? Guma replied. But I’d sure like to find out.

  As he waited now for Karp, his balloon deflated by the bitchy blonde, Guma wondered if he was just spinning his wheels. It just galled him that a wealthy man could get away with murder and go on with his life…his mistress, his parties, and fast cars and expensive vacations…while his wife laid buried in some unmarked grave. But then, he’d gotten into the prosecution business to stick up for people who had no voice of their own.

  A baseball player in college, good enough for a shot at the pros even if it didn’t turn out, Guma had a competitive nature that made him a tough, even ferocious, prosecutor whether he was going after some crack addict who blasted a clerk in a liquor store robbery or a mob enforcer who slipped up and got caught. Occasionally, those who slipped up were members or associates of his own extended family, some of whom were “mobbed up.” But there was understanding in the “connected” members of the family that if they got caught in Manhattan, they were fair game for Ray Guma and it wasn’t unusual to get a letter from Rikers Island or Attica letting him know that there were no hard feelings.

  Karp entered the reception area. “What’s up, Goom? Or as my kids say, ’Sup, Goom?”

  “Huh? Oh, sorry. I’m just a little preoccupied with the Stavros case.”

  Karp nodded and led Guma into his office. The case seemed to have affected his old friend and colleague more than most. A few days earlier, he’d visited Guma in his basement office and noticed an eight-by-ten photograph of Teresa Stavros tacked to the wall. She was a beautiful woman, indeed, but he was only teasing when he said, You should get it framed.

  Guma had shrugged the comment off. It’s just a reminder when I get here in the morning and when I leave at night that someone is still waiting for the wheels of justice to turn for her, he said. Anything wrong with that?

  No, nothing at all, Karp had replied. Just a bad joke.

  Now, Guma was fretting like any rookie ADA. “You’ve done a thousand of these at least,” Karp said. “Relax.”

  Guma nodded. “Thanks, but this one is pretty complicated, and I’m a little rusty since the…since my illness. I realize there’s no body, but I worry that if I let this go now, I won’t get back to it and neither will anyone else. Those wheels of justice will have ground to a halt for Teresa.”

  Karp noted the reference to the victim by her first name. He knew that Guma had a heart of gold, but when it came to trials, Ray had always approached them more as a competition than something he took personally. He was tough, tenacious, and in court could be quite impassioned when addressing the jury. But he’d never seemed particularly sentimental about the victims he was championing.

  Now Karp wondered if Guma was getting too close, but he wasn’t going to say it. He extended a hand to his friend. “Come on, you wuss. The worst that can happen is they’ll tear you to pieces and leave you a quivering blob of Italian gelato.”

  “That all?” Guma replied, but at least he was smiling again.

  When everyone was assembled at the conference table inside the office, Karp nodded to Murrow, his administrative maven, campaign manager, and numbers cruncher for the DAO, who smiled broadly and said, “Everybody, I’d like to formally introduce Susan Halama as the new chief of the sex crimes unit. Of course, most of you know she’s been the interim chief, but this makes it official.”

  The room full of lawyers erupted in applause and cheers for the pretty brunette at the end of the table, who blushed and shoved the files in front of her around with a finger. Karp smiled and clapped along with the rest. He couldn’t help but think that the former head of the unit, Rachel Rachman, would have never received that sort of approval from her colleagues. Soft-spoken and hardworking, Halama was not the sort to put herself forward or treat
the law like some sort of personal crusade. Yet she was every bit the prosecutor Rachman had been—he couldn’t remember her losing a felony case.

  The meeting progressed with reports from the various chiefs about the major cases they or their assistants were trying or preparing for trial. Then Kipman, the appeals bureau chief, reviewed the various stages of appeals before the meeting turned to dissecting each other’s cases.

  The practice of presenting cases so that colleagues could rip them apart had been a staple of the Garrahy years. Old Man Garrahy, the legendary district attorney and Karp’s mentor, believed that cases were won or lost long before they got to the jury. You win by being the best prepared lawyer in the courtroom, not the flashiest, he’d once told a young Karp, who’d taken it to heart.

  Each attorney with a major case would be called on to present the evidence, and then it was open season for the others to ask probing questions and pick apart weaknesses. Many an assistant district attorney had crumbled under the onslaught, some so badly that they’d disappeared into misdemeanor court oblivion, rarely to be heard from again. Or worse, they became defense attorneys.

  Although some of his predecessors had let the practice slip, Karp had revived it. Now, he looked forward to Guma’s presentation of the Stavros case.

  Guma had asked to go last. I may have to run to the crapper to throw up and wouldn’t want to interrupt the flow of the meeting, he’d joked when he made the request. But Karp sensed that there was a grain of truth to it and now, as he watched Guma wince as he stood, he wondered if there was more than a grain.

  Guma began by giving the basics of the case. Teresa Aiello Stavros, the child of a wealthy Italian jeweler, had married Emil Stavros twenty-five years earlier. She’d borne a son who by all accounts she’d doted on, even as her marriage fell apart, mostly due to a philandering husband.

  “One night fourteen years ago, she suddenly disappeared,” he said. “One theory is she grew tired of her husband and, I guess, her five-year-old son, Zachary, and ran off to start a new life. The other theory is that she was murdered that night by her husband…. And I have one witness who is prepared to testify that he saw Emil strangle Teresa. The witness is Zachary, who has recently, through hypnosis, recalled a memory he has repressed all these years.”

  Guma ignored the eye-rolling and shaking heads of some of the older ADAs and moved on to other aspects of his case. The original police investigation had turned up very little to suggest foul play before it was shelved. “A little abruptly, though, as we haven’t located the detective assigned to the case to ask why,” Guma noted. “He retired five years ago, and we understand moved up to Bar Harbor, Maine—so that remains on the list of things to do.

  “However, according to police investigation reports, someone had continued to use Teresa’s credit cards after her disappearance and withdrew cash from her private accounts,” Guma said, looking at his notes, “for a period of about five years, according to bank records we’ve obtained, until the money was gone.

  “A story about ‘missing persons’ that had appeared in the New York Times several years later touched on the Stavros case. Apparently, Emil hired a private investigator who turned up ‘evidence’ that Teresa was living abroad, leaving tracks in the form of hotel registrations and shopping sprees from Madrid to Buenos Aires. However, somehow the PI just never quite caught up to her, though he supposedly snapped this photograph”—Guma held up a fuzzy black-and-white photograph from the newspaper—“of a woman in a hat and dark glasses getting into a taxi in Paris, who he claims was Mrs. Stavros.”

  When he finished, Guma sat down—a bit wearily, Karp thought. But when he picked his head up, it was again with the look of a prize-fighter eyeing his opponent at the weigh-in. “Come on, guys, take your best shot,” he challenged.

  “So what do we know about the husband’s whereabouts when Mrs. Stavros disappeared?” Kipman asked.

  “Emil Stavros was questioned a number of times, but he stuck with his alibi—that he’d attended a very public fund-raiser that night, apparently not concerned how the press would react to being accompanied by his mistress, a former Radio City Music Hall Rockette by the name of Amarie Bliss,” Guma replied.

  “I take it they were seen by others then?” Susan Halama tossed out.

  “Lots of people saw him at the fund-raiser. He and the little gold digger even got on the Times society page,” Guma said.

  “So maybe he whacked her after the party,” Murrow suggested.

  “Well, he spent the night in bliss with Ms. Bliss at her apartment. A doorman at her building saw them going in about 1 A.M. and Emil leaving about eight the next morning. Told the cops that he was on duty all night and would have noticed if Emil left.”

  “Before the party, then?”

  “Not according to a report from the chauffeur, a Mr. Dante Coletta, who said he saw Teresa when he returned from dropping Emil and Amarie off. She was apparently upset and talking to someone on the telephone.”

  “Have you talked to the chauffeur?” Kipman asked.

  Guma shook his head. “Not yet. That’s from an old police report. Clarke Fairbrother is looking for him, as well as the detective originally assigned to the case.”

  “Anybody else recall hearing any arguments that night or other sounds that might have seemed out of place, like gunshots?” Karp asked.

  Guma shook his head. “No. The neighbors reported that Emil and Teresa argued frequently and sometimes publicly. But no one heard anything unusual that night…then again—it was the middle of August. Most people, especially in that neighborhood, would have the windows closed and the air conditioners cranked. Even if they’d had a window open, traffic noise and city sounds would have muted even a gunshot, especially if the gun had a silencer.”

  “Maybe she moved on,” one of the young assistant district attorneys chimed in, trying to look serious and thoughtful.

  “Maybe,” Guma conceded. “According to Zachary all this activity—the credit card use, bank withdrawals, plus a few typed Christmas cards and birthday wishes sent to her son—all stopped about the same time, about five years after she disappeared.”

  “Well, that makes sense,” the ADA persisted. “She blew through her money or transferred it to other accounts so that Emil couldn’t get at it and then got rid of the personal baggage.”

  “Which included a son she was very devoted to,” Guma replied. “She was also a good daughter to her mother, but all contact with her family ceased. She didn’t even attend her mother’s funeral.”

  “So she’s good at disappearing and made a complete break,” Murrow said. “Maybe she wasn’t as close to her family as the reports indicate. Or maybe she had some sort of mental breakdown.”

  “Or maybe she died,” Kipman noted. “But not here. Maybe she’s been dead for all these years and buried in some other country. Like you said, the husband has an alibi—”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time a mistress lied for her sugar daddy,” Guma retorted, his face flushing. “Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. I thought we dealt in common sense. A devoted mother and daughter disappears suddenly; writes to her son until the money runs out and then nothing; plus misses her mother’s funeral.”

  “Doesn’t prove Emil Stavros killed her or that she’s even dead,” Karp said. “We’re short on the thing we call hard evidence around here.”

  Guma shrugged. “You could be right. But here’s the kicker…at least it was for me. Emil Stavros didn’t file for divorce and remarry for five years…not until her bank accounts were emptied.”

  “So?” Murrow asked.

  Guma shot Karp a look that Karp had seen plenty of times before in the courtroom when his friend had led a witness into painting himself into a corner. “Teresa was the much wealthier of the two, worth millions from her parents’ trust. Emil made good money as a banker, but rumor had it that around the time of Teresa’s disappearance he’d made some poor financial decisions…and a lot of it involved other people’s money. Other peo
ple who don’t bother going to courts to recover their money.”

  “Anybody you’re related to?” Newbury asked to general laughter.

  Guma laughed with the others, and then did his best imitation of Marlon Brando playing Don Corleone, “If I told you, I’d have to have you whacked.” Then he reverted to his normal voice. “Let’s just say I have a little insider information about Emil’s financial straits. Funny, but after his wife died, he was able to make good on his debts.”

  “So maybe he was waiting for his wife to return?” Murrow said.

  “First of all, they’d signed a prenup,” Guma said. “He had full access to her accounts so long as they were married. However, if they divorced, he got nothing that wasn’t his from before the wedding or earned in his current employment. Second, her will stated that if she died, all of her money would go immediately into a trust to be held for her son, Zachary, until his twenty-first birthday. Dad would get nothing.”

  “So he doesn’t move to have her declared dead, otherwise the kid gets the entire bankroll,” Kipman summed it up.

  “And he doesn’t divorce her until the money’s all gone,” Newbury added. “Got to admit, it’s pretty good stuff.”

  “I still think it’s weak,” Murrow shot back. “You can’t prove a negative—just because there’s no evidence that she’s alive, doesn’t mean she’s dead…. Without a body you’re toast.”

  “There have been successful prosecutions of so-called body-less homicides,” Guma said.

  “But they’re rare,” Kipman noted.

  “I’m aware of that,” Guma said, “but I’d rather try and fail for the right reasons than regret doing nothing at all.” He looked at Karp, who nodded. “I’ve done something a little different this morning. I knew many of you, rightly so, would have some concerns about my witness’s ‘recovered’ memory. So I’ve invited Zachary Stavros here; you can judge for yourself how you think he’ll do on the witness stand.”

  Guma got up and opened the door. “Come on in, Zachary,” he said.