Sudden Death

by David Rosenfelt

  “Yes, it was stupid, but there was a why behind it, a motive for what he did. He had just found his friend’s body, a bullet through his chest, in the back of his house. Suddenly, men were at the door trying to get in, men who within moments had guns drawn. How could he know that these men were really police? He had no idea why his friend was shot, and was afraid that the same thing was about to happen to him. He panicked, of that there is no question, but it’s easy to understand why.

  “Kenny Schilling is not a man capable of murder. You will come to know him, and you’ll understand that. You’ll also hear about other people, people very capable of murder, and you’ll understand that as well.

  “All I hope, all Kenny Schilling hopes, is that you keep asking why and keep insisting that things make sense. I know that you will.”

  I get a slight nod from Kevin, telling me that it went reasonably well. I agree with that, but I also know that “reasonably well” is not going to cut it. Not in this case.

  It’s late in the day, so Harrison tells Dylan that he can call his first witness tomorrow. It’ll give me something to look forward to.

  A TRIAL IS AN incredibly tense, hectic process, yet for me there’s something calming and comforting about it. It’s the only time in my life when I have a rigid schedule, a self-discipline in my actions, and it’s a refreshing change.

  Tonight is a perfect example. We have our team meeting at my house, after which Kevin leaves and Laurie and I settle down to dinner. We have take-out pizza, though hers is of the vegetarian variety and in my humble opinion not worthy of the name “pizza.” Luciano Pizza or Jeremiah Pizza or whoever the hell invented it would cringe at the sight of the healthy mess that comes out of Laurie’s pizza box.

  Laurie turns out the overhead lights and instead lights candles she had put on the table. It makes it a little tough to see the pizza, but she seems to like it that way. We talk about the case, about what’s going on in the world, about how great Tara is, or anything else that comes to mind. Everything except the Findlay situation.

  After dinner my ritual is to go into the den, turn on CNN or a baseball game as background noise, and read and reread our files on the Schilling case. In order to react in a courtroom the way I want to react, I need to know every detail of our case, every scrap of information we have.

  Each night, I go over the next day’s witnesses, as well as an area of our investigation that I select more or less randomly. Tonight I’m going over Kevin’s and Adam’s reports on their work in locating and talking to Kenny’s friends and acquaintances, especially those he shared with Preston.

  At ten-thirty Laurie and I go up to bed, where I continue to go through the papers. She makes a phone call, which is disconcerting, since she speaks to Lisa, a high school girlfriend from Findlay. Laurie is making real connections, or reconnections, back there, and the knowledge of it makes it a little hard for me to concentrate.

  I’m trying extra hard to focus, since I have the uneasy feeling that there is something in these particular reports that is significant and that I’m missing. I’m about to discuss it with Laurie, now off the phone, when Tara starts to bark. Moments later the doorbell rings.

  “Let me get it,” Laurie says, which means she’s at least a little worried that it could relate to Quintana.

  I’d love to say, “Go ahead,” but I’m too macho for that, so I throw on a pair of pants and go downstairs. I get to the door just as the bell rings again, and I ask, “Who is it?”

  “Marcus” is the answer from the other side of the door.

  I turn on the porch light, move aside the curtain, and sure enough, there is Marcus. I open the door. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Rope,” says Marcus.

  “Rope?”

  “Rope.”

  “What about rope?” This conversation is not progressing that well.

  “He wants to know if you have any rope,” says Laurie from the top of the steps.

  “No, I don’t have rope,” I say to Laurie. “Who am I, Roy Rogers?”

  I turn back to Marcus. “I don’t have any rope. Why do you need some?”

  Marcus just shakes his head and closes the door. I turn to Laurie once he’s gone.

  “What is he doing? Should I get him some rope?”

  “From where?” she asks.

  “How the hell should I know? Maybe there’s a rope store open late around here.”

  Marcus seems to be gone, so I go back upstairs and once again get into bed with Laurie. My sense is, I haven’t heard the last of this rope situation, and this is confirmed about five minutes later when the doorbell rings again.

  Once again I trudge down the stairs. “Who is it?”

  “Marcus.”

  I open the door and immediately see a sight that will forever be etched in my memory. Two men, one of whom I recognize as Ugly, the guy Quintana sent to threaten me, are tied up with my garden hose. They are head-to-toe and back-to-back, but stretched out full length against each other. They look like a two-sided human bowling pin, and Marcus walks into the house carrying them over his shoulder. He comes into the room and drops them on the floor, and the thud could be heard in Hackensack. Tara sniffs around them, having absolutely no idea what is happening. Join the club.

  “Laurie!” I call out. “You might want to get down here!”

  She comes downstairs, surveys the bizarre scene, and takes over. “Marcus, what’s going on?”

  He tells her in a series of barely decipherable grunts that they were outside, trying to break in, and he caught them. His plan now is to question them. Marcus questioning people is not a pretty sight.

  “I think we should call the police,” I say.

  Marcus looks at me, then calls Laurie off to the side. They whisper out of earshot of me, Ugly, and his friend. The intruders are rolling back and forth in a futile effort to untie themselves and/or get up. It would be funny if it were happening in someone else’s house.

  “Come on, Andy. Let’s go upstairs,” says Laurie.

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Marcus is going to question our guests.”

  I start to argue, but Laurie silences me with a look, and a head motion directing me upstairs. I have confidence in her in situations like this, and none in myself, so I follow dutifully behind.

  As we near the top of the steps, Marcus calls up to her. “Knives?”

  “In the kitchen. Second drawer on the right,” she says.

  When we get in the bedroom, Laurie closes the door. With Marcus, Ugly, and his buddy now out of range, I become a little more assertive. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Marcus said we can call the police in fifteen minutes. He’ll know what he needs to know by then.”

  “What is he going to do?”

  She shrugs. “Be Marcus. But he said he won’t kill them, and he won’t do anything on the carpet.”

  I nod. “Well, that’s comforting.”

  “Andy, those guys were trying to break into this house. They might well have killed you, or even us.”

  She’s got a point. “Fifteen minutes?” I ask.

  She nods. “Fifteen minutes.”

  Except for the agonizing times I’ve felt waiting as verdicts were about to be delivered, these are the longest fifteen minutes I’ve ever spent in my life. I strain to hear any noises coming from downstairs, but it seems, as they used to say in Westerns, to be “quiet out there, too quiet.”

  At the moment the fifteen minutes are up, I pick up the phone and call 911, reporting that two men have broken into my house. I then call Pete Stanton at home, and he agrees to come over. I think he gets some kind of perverse kick out of Marcus and doesn’t want to miss out on what is going to be an entertaining evening.

  Laurie and I go downstairs. I don’t know about her, but I’m cringing at what I think I am about to see. The trio is not in the living room or den, and we find them in the kitchen. Ugly and his pal are sitting with Marcus at the kitchen table, drinking diet s
odas. They look unhappy but are no longer tied together with the hose and look none the worse for wear. Marcus looks impassive, which is not exactly a stunning piece of news.

  Five police cars pull up less than two minutes later. The process takes only a short time; I explain that these two guys tried to break in and that my bodyguard caught them and held them here so that they could be turned over to law enforcement.

  Pete Stanton arrives just as the cops and their captives are leaving, and I let him listen with Laurie and me to the mysteries of the agonizing fifteen minutes, as told by Marcus Clark.

  It takes almost an hour and a half for us to understand his cryptic grunts, but basically, the pair admitted to him that they were sent by Quintana and this time were told to “kick the shit out of the lawyer.” They also revealed that it was money that Quintana believes Kenny took from Preston that night, a total of four hundred thousand dollars. The night Preston died was drug receipt payment night, but Preston was killed before he could make that payment. My two visitors were supposed to find out with certainty whether I know where that money is.

  Pete points out the obvious. “Quintana’s going to keep coming at you.”

  “Why can’t you arrest him once these guys tell you what they told Marcus?”

  Pete shakes his head like I just don’t get it. “They won’t talk to us. We’re not allowed to be as persuasive as Marcus. They go down for breaking and entering, then maybe serve a little time, maybe not. There’s no way they rat out Quintana.”

  “Which means Quintana remains a big problem,” I say.

  “I could kill him,” says Marcus.

  Pete jumps up as if somebody shoved a hot poker up his ass. “I’m outta here,” he says, and walks out the door. He’s a friend, but he’s also a cop. He has no love for Quintana, but he’s not going to sit and listen while somebody plots his murder.

  Once Pete leaves, Laurie says, “Don’t kill him, Marcus. That’s not going to solve anything.”

  I’m torn here. I’m not usually one to countenance murder—after all, I’m an officer of the court—but in this case I’d be tempted to make an exception. To say the least, if I heard that Quintana died, it wouldn’t prompt me to sadly shake my head and say, “Boy, that really puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?”

  “You need to protect Andy full-time,” Laurie continues.

  I turn to Marcus and nod. “I want you on that wall. I need you on that wall.” Either he recognizes the line from A Few Good Men or he doesn’t; with Marcus it’s hard to tell. He grunts a couple of times and leaves.

  “That is one scary guy,” I say after I’m sure that he can’t hear me.

  “Just be glad he’s your scary guy,” Laurie points out.

  It’s now two-thirty in the morning, so Laurie and I get back into bed. I take some time to think about the case. I find I’m starting to believe my own PR now, considering it more and more possible that Preston actually was the victim of a drug killing. The money was certainly substantial enough that people from that underworld might kill for it, and I’m certain, too, that members of Quintana’s gang would have been aware of it.

  I’ve been thinking all along that it wasn’t a drug hit because Quintana, Moreno, or even Petrone wouldn’t have bothered to frame Kenny. They’ve got the people and the experience to have murdered anonymously, without real fear of it being traced back to them. Therefore, there would be no reason to frame anyone.

  But what if it was one of Quintana’s men who did the killing so as to get the money? He might well have framed Kenny, not to throw the police off his trail, but rather to make sure Quintana did not catch on. Quintana’s justice would be far more swift and deadly than the police.

  There is also the chance that Kenny found out about the money and went for it, but this seems far less likely. Sam has checked and found no evidence that Kenny had anything but a rosy financial picture, and he’s been paying his substantial legal bills on time.

  I always want to believe that a client is innocent, but there’s believing and really believing. For the first time, I’m starting to really believe, and it’s a nice feeling. It doesn’t quite make up for my knowledge that a murderous maniac in command of an entire gang of other murderous maniacs is trying to kill me, but it’s a nice feeling.

  DYLAN’S FIRST witness is Patrolman Jared Clayton, the officer that found Kenny’s abandoned car. I would have expected Dylan to build his case more methodically, to perhaps put on team officials of the Jets to talk about Preston not showing up that day and how uncharacteristic that was. As I reflect on it, I realize that Dylan’s strategy is a good one: He doesn’t want to give me a chance to cross-examine based on Preston’s character. As far as Dylan is concerned, this is a physical evidence case, and he’s going to focus on that as much as possible.

  Patrolman Clayton testifies that the car was abandoned maybe ten feet into the woods off the road but that he was able to see it.

  “What made you approach?” Dylan asks.

  “Well, I thought maybe somebody was in it, in some kind of distress or something. It wasn’t really a normal way to leave a car. Then, when I got close, I saw the license plate.”

  “It was an unusual plate?”

  Clayton nods. “It said ‘GIANTS25.’”

  “Why was that particularly interesting?”

  Clayton looks sheepish, a look he can pull off, since he can’t be more than twenty-three years old. “There had been a report that a football player was missing and… well, I’m not really a football fan, so I didn’t realize he played for the Jets.” Most of the female jurors smile their understanding.

  “What did you do when you reached the car?” asks Dylan.

  “I looked inside and determined there was no one in the car. Then I opened the door and saw what looked to me like bloodstains on the passenger seat and passenger side dashboard. Then I immediately closed the door, called in for a detective team and forensics, and secured the area.”

  Dylan introduces evidence proving that the car in question is Kenny’s. Having done that, he could let the witness off the stand, but Clayton is an appealing witness, so he keeps him up there for another ten minutes before turning him over to me. Clayton hasn’t done us much damage—that will come later from the lab results—but my strategy is to make points with every prosecution witness, no matter what they testify to. It reduces the chances of a “steamroller effect,” in which the jury starts to view the prosecution as an unstoppable force.

  “Patrolman Clayton,” I begin, “were you on a special assignment on that day? Or just on your regular patrol?”

  “Regular patrol,” he says.

  “So you weren’t looking for this specific car? This make and model?”

  “No.”

  “So it was the way it was left in the woods, the way it was abandoned, that attracted you to it?”

  “Right,” he says. “It was unusual for a car to be partway into the woods like that.”

  “Almost as if it were meant to attract attention in the way it was positioned?”

  Dylan objects that Clayton could not possibly know the intent of the person who left the car there. Harrison sustains, but I’m starting to make my point.

  “Would you say there was a significant amount of blood,” I ask, “or just some small specks?”

  “I would say a decent amount, certainly not just specks.”

  I nod. “And you testified you saw it immediately and that as soon as you saw it, you were positive what it was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were there wipe marks? As if somebody had tried to clean it up?”

  “I didn’t see any,” he says.

  “Patrolman, let me ask you a hypothetical question. If that were your car, and you had murdered someone, would you have done a better job hiding it? Would you have cleaned up the blood?”

  Dylan objects, but Harrison lets Clayton answer. “I guess I would have, sir. But I wouldn’t murder anyone.”

  I accept that and
move on. I get Clayton to describe where the car was on the highway, then ask, “And where was the taxi stand?”

  “Taxi stand?”

  “Right. Because if the defendant left his car there, he couldn’t walk home, could he?”

  “Well…”

  “Are you aware of any theory of an accomplice, someone who drove Mr. Schilling home after he carefully hid the car?”

  Dylan objects that this is out of the witness’s area, and I don’t push it. Clayton responds to another question by saying that there is a rest area with a telephone a half mile away. I don’t ask if there is any record of that phone calling a taxi company, because Dylan would object again. I know from the discovery that two such calls were made during the days when the car might have been left, but they were both by women, so Kenny is in the clear on that.

  I let Clayton off the stand, satisfied that I’ve done as much damage as I could, but I’m all too aware that Dylan’s big guns are still loaded and ready to fire.

  Next up for Dylan is Dr. Janet Sheridan, the lab director who did the DNA tests on the blood in Kenny’s car. I know from the reports that the results are conclusive, that it is without question Preston’s blood.

  Dylan takes three hours to get Janet to say this in as many ways as she knows how. Her conclusion is that the chance of its not being Preston’s blood is one in two point five quadrillion, or something like that.

  My cross-examination is quick and to the point. “Dr. Sheridan, how did Mr. Preston’s blood get in the car?”

  “I’m afraid I have no idea. That’s not within the scope of my work.”

  I nod. “Sorry. Who was driving the car when it was left where it was found?”

  Dylan objects, but Harrison lets her say she doesn’t know this either.

  “So if I were to say that someone other than Mr. Schilling took his car, murdered Mr. Preston, and then left the car with the blood in it, is there anything in your test results that would prove me wrong?”