Judgement Day

by Andrew Neiderman

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Not that I think I’ll need to put you on the stand, but when you enter a courtroom charged with murder, you’re on the stand the moment you set foot in the room. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  Lester nodded. “Yeah, I was just thinking about that before you came in, thinking about the impression I would make on a jury right now.”

  “Were you? See? Great minds think alike. Okay, let’s begin with the real reason Elliot Strumfield didn’t turn you in when he realized what you were doing with the money, what you actually had been doing for some time. It helps if you confess what I need you to confess, but to me only for now. So. Why was he so disappointed in you? And don’t tell me it was because he thought you were such an honest man. You and he weren’t strangers to bending rules.”

  Lester felt the heat rise from somewhere behind his heart, flow up his neck and into his face. Who was this man? He couldn’t have been on his case very long, and Warner Murphy had never asked any question with such an underlying implication. He would never suspect Murphy had anything remotely resembling this in his notes for Milton to read. “I don’t know what you mean,” Lester said.

  “Oh, dear, dear,” Milton said. “You’re a coward as well as a liar. How disappointing.”

  “Fuck you,” Lester said, his face now so hot he felt as though he would burst into flames, his head the tip of a torch.

  Milton simply smiled. He didn’t show an iota of vexation or offense. “That’s good,” he said instead. “You still have self-respect and pride. I simply can’t stand having a mealymouthed client who looks desperate and frightened. People enjoy having power over others. If you look meek and terrified, the jury will enjoy their life-and-death authority and might even find you guilty simply for the mere pleasure of doing so.”

  “Huh?”

  “I know human nature, my friend. Let’s get back to our defense. In a real sense, it’s going to be offense, which as you have heard, I’m sure, is the best defense.”

  Lester knew his life was in jeopardy. He wouldn’t get a death sentence, but he couldn’t imagine life in a maximum-security prison. Even life with a chance of parole wouldn’t matter. He would die there not long after he was imprisoned, possibly at his own hand. The tension he felt right now was so severe he thought he might have a heart attack, but his new attorney seemed almost impish. He behaved as if he enjoyed every moment of Lester’s anxiety.

  “All right. We’ll do some preparation. Let me set the table,” Milton said. He shuffled a few papers. “During happy days, you and your wife and Strumfield and his wife were good friends, correct?”

  “So?”

  “You and Elliot Strumfield knew each other from college, but you didn’t start the business together. You went your separate ways for a while.”

  “I worked for a brokerage firm.”

  “That went out of business. It was then that Strumfield came to your rescue.”

  “I had something to offer. It wasn’t an act of charity,” Lester replied with a flare of indignation. After all, this wasn’t the first time he was accused of riding on Strumfield’s coattails. Cisley Strumfield, for one, was always accusing him of doing that.

  “Oh, you had something to offer, all right. No denying that. We’ll get to that in a moment. This money you invested in your shell company outside the U.S. wasn’t all embezzled, correct?”

  “None of it was embezzled.”

  “Well, let’s not debate definitions. That’s what I do in court. However you made the money, you socked away what you could. You have more than three million dollars in this account,” Milton said, and produced a bank statement.

  “How did you get that?”

  “What’s the difference? Just know that if I could get it, Michele Armstrong can get it or has.”

  “Who’s Michele Armstrong?”

  “She’s the assistant DA who’s going to prosecute you. She’s a hotshot, bright and very attractive. Men on the jury will fall in love with her. The judge might, too.”

  “Great.”

  “Cheer up. The women will fall in love with me,” Milton said. His eyes were so dazzling they looked like July Fourth sparklers. Maybe it was the reflection of the lights in the room. He sat back. “Now that we know that I know you more than you imagined, we’ll get into your defense. It’s a lot like getting into a hot bath, slowly. You have to get used to people the same way, Lester, my Lester,” he added, sounding as if he was his father. “Let’s continue peeling the onion.”

  He took out another set of papers. Between the pages were some pictures. He moved them out slowly and displayed them as if he was proud of them.

  Lester looked at them and found he couldn’t breathe for a moment. It was as if that warning his grandmother had whipped over him when he was about ten and doing forbidden things had come true. “God sees everything, Lester,” she had admonished.

  “How did you get these pictures?”

  “What’s the difference, Lester? You were going to use them to get Elliot Strumfield to back off. You had something to do with setting him up, didn’t you? It was your insurance from the start. Doesn’t make you look too nice, I know.” Milton picked up the pictures of Strumfield and Lester’s wife. “Don’t worry about it,” he added. “I have control of them and will use them when and if I have to. And the man you hired for this has a bad case of memory loss until I need him to be otherwise. Now, the question about your hiring someone else, someone to shoot with more than a camera, will probably come up.”

  Lester didn’t speak. He had never admitted this to Murphy. The prosecution must have found out something recently. “Well, I didn’t—”

  Milton held up his hand. “No confessions, please. I hate confessions more than I hate sobbing prayers. All I said was that the prosecution might bring that up. It doesn’t mean they will succeed in attaching you to an assassin. If you did use the seventy-five thousand dollars you withdrew from your Cayman account for that purpose, you most likely felt confident that no one would be able to trace it. However, these foreign accounts are proving to be less and less sacrosanct. I mean this hypothetically, of course. It’s one thing for them to prove you withdrew that sum but another for them to prove you used it to hire a killer. Implications don’t eliminate reasonable doubt.”

  “But what are we going to do to—”

  “To defend against that accusation? Oh, we’ll handle it. No worries,” Milton said. “We’ll handle it all.”

  The room seemed to brighten and radiate with new hope and confidence. Lester looked at Milton for a long moment, and in that moment, for reasons he couldn’t quite understand, he thought that this man could very well save his life. He would turn over every rock necessary to confuse and distort the truth, and in doing so, he would win.

  He finally felt a smile on his face. It was like smiling after you had a terrible sunburn. It hurt a little, but it was wonderful knowing you could still do it.

  And all because of this attorney. The self-pity he’d suffered when he had heard about Warner Murphy’s death dissipated. He could feel the blood returning to his face, his complexion clearing. His posture improved as if he had just been injected with optimism and self-respect. He wasn’t sure why it had come so quickly, but the thought was vivid. John Milton would save his life.

  He was that good and had that kind of power.

  15

  “Why are we going to this prison again?” Fish asked Blake. They had just gone over the George Washington Bridge and turned onto the Palisades Parkway.

  “I told you. I want to follow through on Keith Arthur, Semantha Hunter’s ex-husband.”

  “But . . . Mrs. Murphy wasn’t really sure there was a resemblance between the deliveryman she saw and the picture of Hunter’s ex. And there’s no capture of any deliveryman on the lobby CCTV.”

  “That five-second blackout bothers me,” Blake said.

  “Even if he crossed the lobby and got right into an elevator, there’s no deli
veryman on the elevator CCTV.”

  “I thought you’d mention Bivens not having ever seen him, either,” Blake said.

  “What difference does it make, anyway? The guy was killed some time ago, wasn’t he? I mean, I don’t get all that mumbo-jumbo about things not being what they seem, another choice besides life and death. I’ve got an open mind, but it’s not open to anything and everything, Lieutenant.”

  “I know. Don’t feel bad about it.”

  “Feel bad? Why should I feel bad? I don’t feel bad,” Fish said firmly. He had been thinking about all this and having trouble sleeping. Twice he came close to talking to Deputy Inspector Cullen about Blake.

  Blake smiled.

  “Look, maybe it was someone who resembled Keith Arthur. I’ll give you that, but it couldn’t have been Keith Arthur, so shouldn’t we be looking elsewhere? Use the picture you have of Keith Arthur to see if we have anything on anyone resembling him? I can see doing that, but this is really a waste of time, the way I see it.”

  “I told you when we started out that you didn’t have to come along,” Blake said.

  “I don’t mind coming along. I just don’t get it. Why are we doing this?”

  “I work on instinct,” Blake replied. He turned to him. “So far, that’s not been a bad thing to do.”

  “Sure, sure. I know you’ve got quite a record, Lieutenant. I’m just trying to get my mind around all this.”

  “Think of it this way, Fish. We’ve got ourselves a conundrum. As far as I can tell from everything I’ve learned about Warner Murphy, he was the least likely candidate for suicide. He had no mental issues, was productive and successful in his work, loved his family, and was going to be given a full partnership in one of the most prestigious defense law firms in New York City on the day he died. In a scale of one to ten in assigning suicide for cause of his death, I think we’re somewhere around minus ten. You’ve been party to all this research and information. Do you disagree?”

  “No. I admit that bugs me, too.”

  “Good. Now, we can rule out the second cause of death, accidental. The way the railings are on the patios in that building, it’s impossible to trip and fall off of one, correct?”

  “Yes, yes,” Fish replied. He didn’t intend to be spoken to like this, but he couldn’t deny anything yet.

  “So we come to the last cause of death: murder. Physically, it seems quite impossible for anyone to have gotten into his apartment and committed the act. We have the time of the death nailed down. We know exactly when his wife and daughter left and exactly when he hit the top of that Mercedes. No security camera and no live witness puts anyone going up to his floor just before he was killed, and your check of the visitors a day before hasn’t turned up anyone we could suspect.”

  “You forgot to mention that my review of footage from the video cameras in the elevators didn’t show anyone going from another floor to the Murphys’ floor during the time period involved, anyway.”

  “Correct. We’ll continue to look into it, but so far, no other tenant had any motive for doing him harm, and from what we’ve learned, none of them was very close to the Murphys, close enough to get into an argument with Warner, and none is directly involved with the criminal court system in New York. The only way to tie anyone else in that building to Warner Murphy is to cite his acquaintance and professional relationship with Semantha Hunter’s brother, Judge Hunter. It’s the only thread we have to follow so far.”

  “But to what? It’s a dead end. Literally. Keith Arthur was killed in prison before Warner Murphy died. Not that it would matter. He was in prison, and even if he wasn’t killed in there, he was in there when Murphy died!” Fish felt the blood rise to his face with the frustration.

  “I’m not sure it’s a dead end,” Blake said calmly.

  “Your instincts tell you something else?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Fish thought a moment. “How did you get into this?” he asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Police work. I learned you were studying to be a priest.”

  “It’s not exactly a secret. I was surprised at how long it took you to learn that.”

  “Right. I was lazy. So what happened? You had an affair with some girl and decided you couldn’t be celibate?”

  Blake smiled. “That’s the usual reason people ascribe to my decision. I even had a bishop accuse me of it. He wouldn’t accept my real reason.”

  “Which was?”

  Blake turned to him. “I had a calling.”

  “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “You know,” Blake said, smiling at him, “like people get a calling to join the clergy. It’s not all that different when you think about it. We’re all trying to defeat evil.”

  Fish shook his head. “So you had a calling to become a police detective? Some voice called to you and said, ‘Matthew Blake, go be a police detective’?”

  “Something like that, yes. The good guys don’t always rely on prayer alone, Fish. In the New Testament, the angel Michael is said to have led God’s armies against Satan’s forces. God has an army, and it’s not soldiers carrying prayer books. Don’t you feel like you’re in God’s army sometimes, Fish?”

  “If it’s God’s army, we should have a better budget,” Fish said.

  “Good point, Fish. I’ll tell the captain to use that argument next time he tries to increase the budget.”

  Fish looked out at the scenery as they flew along the parkway. He still didn’t know what the hell they were doing. “I don’t know whether you’re just a lucky nutcase or someone with a special talent, Lieutenant.”

  “You’ll know soon enough,” Blake said.

  “You seem to know your way around here pretty good,” Fish said when they left Route 17 and began to wind their way through small hamlets a little more than an hour and a half later.

  “I have an escape up here.”

  “An escape?”

  “Old farmhouse I picked up. Good R and R.”

  “I wondered if you had any other life but police work, Lieutenant.”

  “I claim it’s an escape, but the real truth is that you can step out of the room but not out of yourself,” Blake said.

  “Not out of yourself? Do I get college credit in philosophy for being your partner?”

  Blake laughed the hardest he had since they’d met. Fish smiled. “Let’s get some lunch,” Blake said. “I know where there’s some home cooking in this hamlet.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Pulling into Woodbourne. The maximum-security Sullivan correctional facility is here.”

  Fish looked around. It was basically a one-street village, with a garage on one end and a bar and grill on the other. Blake made a right onto the street that led to the prison and pulled up to a place called Richard’s Pot House, a small luncheonette that was packed with customers. There was little pedestrian activity in the village, so he figured these people were obviously familiar with the place.

  “Pot House?” he asked, looking up at the sign.

  “Sal specializes in chicken pot pies, shepherd’s pie, that sort of thing, but he makes other things. It’s a prison town. It makes all its money off the employees and businesses that service the penitentiary. Years ago, it was one of the hamlets that was supported by the Catskill Mountains resort industry.”

  They got out of the car, and Fish paused for a moment and looked around. “I like the quiet and the fresh air. They need cops here?”

  “They need them everywhere, Fish. Even the Eskimos have some law enforcement.”

  They entered Richard’s Pot House. It wasn’t that big a restaurant. There were about twenty tables and a counter with ten stools. It had chestnut-brown walls and a white-tiled floor. Two large front windows had silvery white shades. Because the place had a low ceiling, the conversations echoed over one another, making it sound like the Tower of Babel. Blake nodded toward the counter, where there were two seats available. Three waitresses served
the tables, and the owner, Sal Richard, and another man worked the counter.

  From the look on Sal’s face when he saw them, Fish realized he knew Blake. When they began to talk, Fish could see that he was fond of him, too. Blake remembered everything about the man’s family, where his children were, even what they did for a living. Sal assumed Blake had come up to go fishing, which was another thing Fish never suspected he had any interest in doing. He realized that Sal knew Blake was a New York City detective, but he didn’t ask him anything about his work.

  “I know I told you about the pot pies, but the chicken and cheese sandwich he makes is the big secret. He has his own special sauce on it,” Blake told him.

  Two of the waitresses paused to say hello to him, and he asked them about their families.

  “You’re like some old-timer here, a local yokel or something,” Fish said.

  “People are our business, Fish. You have to be interested in them to do the work we do. We win trust. That’s how we get done what we have to get done. I know we have the toilet-bowl view of humanity, but there are really good people, too, which is why we have to work hard at this.”

  “You do sound like someone who had some kind of calling,” Fish remarked. “Maybe you should have stuck it out and become a priest.”

  “Forget about what I should be. What got you into it?”

  “My father. He wanted me to be a policeman, but he pushed me to go to detective school. He and I used to watch mysteries on television together. He loved to read Raymond Chandler, writers like that. Got me reading them. Got it into my blood.”

  “It was probably already there, Fish.”

  “Probably.”

  “You’ll get very good at this. I can sense it.”

  “Instinct?”

  “Yep,” Blake said.

  He didn’t know how to think of Blake anymore. He couldn’t help respecting him, but at the same time, he was so damn weird. “What about your family?” Fish asked him.