Also interviewed, live from his living room, was the Wayne County prosecutor Peter Canzoneri, who offered absolute assurances that “every step will be taken to get to the bottom of every single allegation” and that “no stone will be left unturned to insure that those who may have broken the public trust are brought to justice.”
Chapter 98
Though it would not be seen today, the sun had been up for a while on this frigid February morning, everything in browns, blacks and grays, from the ice covering the lake, to the stripped bushes and naked trees, to the thick cloud banks blocking every inch of sky. Staring at this bleak scene through the kitchen window, he had to admit he was feeling pretty damn good.
Empty nesters now, with Bobby in his freshman year at U. of M. along with Jen, he and Marci seemed to be making the transition okay. Yes, it would be nice to hear more often from the kids, but Marci’s more relaxed attitude now was no news was good news.
Her voice came from behind him as she entered the kitchen. “You couldn’t sleep?”
He turned to her, the blond hair sleep-tousled, a little crazy, the way he liked it in the morning. “Yeah, no, I had one of those stupid, annoying dreams where nothing makes sense when you wake up, and every time you try closing your eyes, it starts again. You ever get those?”
“No. But I think you just couldn’t wait to read the Freep.”
They both glanced at the table covered with sections of the paper.
“Well, that might also be true.”
She let him kiss her, a soft peck on soft lips, then went for the pot of coffee he had made more than an hour ago.
Half the Free Press had seemed to be devoted to coverage of the trial’s conclusion yesterday. Even Wee Willy’s gossip column was almost straight reporting on the jury’s surprisingly quick return of the verdicts.
Frank rarely looked at the little prick’s column these days. Actually, Barnes had pretty much left him alone ever since that strong backlash to the piece on Frank’s peccadilloes with Sherie Sloan. Word was the guy had nearly lost his column over that, when even some of his most avid gossip fans had deemed the story both salacious and unfair.
Three months later when the lease on her apartment was up, Sherie had called to tell him she was moving to Pittsburgh for a new job and a new life. He had wished her luck and resisted the urge to see her gorgeous face one last time.
Chapter 99
Upon first sitting at the table that morning with his coffee and the paper, it had been clear the Free Press had pulled out all the stops, assigning extraordinary resources to report the story and developing several background pieces, all poised to grab and illuminate the moment.
According to the paper, the bribery, corruption and murder cases against William O’Bryan and Sam Dworkin had turned on the testimony of two men: the aggrieved widower Anthony Peoples and the judge’s bailiff, Detroit Police officer Kenneth Miles.
On the corruption charge, Peoples, bolstered by the videotape that had caused such a sensation when it was first shown on the news, had sunk both the judge and the attorney popularly known as “Suspenders.” Despite a variety of detailed and inventive arguments, including the claim of a broken chain of evidence, their high-powered legal team had finally failed to get the tape tossed, and the defendants went down “like a hot knife through butter,” as Frank’s favorite columnist put it.
The murder charges were more of a contest. Miles, the cop assigned as a bailiff for Judge O’Bryan, had pled guilty to one count of attempted murder in the men’s room shooting at WTEM, and one count of reckless endangerment in the Jefferson Avenue incident, both of them involving popular Channel 5 news anchor Frank DeFauw. But after several lengthy and grueling interogation sessions, Miles had continued to maintain that he had absolutely nothing to do with the bombing deaths of Peoples’ wife and two children.
And according to an unnamed source in the federal prosecutor’s office, despite his two pleas, Miles had actually claimed that he had never intended to kill anyone. In plea bargain negotiations, Morgan Flannigan, the attorney for Miles, said the tape of the Jefferson Avenue drive-by near-miss clearly showed an attempt to scare, not harm. And in the men’s room shooting, Flannigan maintained the only reason the gun had fired was that the swinging door had slammed his client in the back.
In the end, the key to the prosecution finally making a plea deal was a firm avowal by Miles that he had a contract from the judge and “Suspenders” to murder both Peoples and DeFauw. Even with his pleas accepted, Miles would likely be spending the better part of 15 years behind bars,
At trial Miles had been grilled unmercifully for several days on his history, character, motives and contradictions. He held up sufficiently to give the jury enough for a second degree murder conviction for both Dworkin and the judge. They were each headed for 18-25 (12 if they behaved themselves) at some federal pen.
There were two other questions about this story that had continued to intrigue Detroiters, and the paper had diligently searched for answers. One involved the early retirement and subsequent suicide of the Wayne County prosecutor Prentis Gant. The other was how Sam Dworkin and Judge O’Bryan had learned of the existence of that infamous tape.
According to one extensive background report, federal investigators, with information from Anthony Peoples, had looked into the possibility that someone in the county prosecutor’s office had tipped one of the men to what Gant was up to. Investigators determined that Gant had run the operation entirely on his own, apparently not trusting anyone in his office. He had personally gone to a federal judge for a warrant, hired a private company to place the camera and secured the bribe money by accessing a cash account normally used to pay informants. When he met with Peoples, it was always alone at a private location.
Then-assistant prosecutor Peter Canzoneri, who had been assigned to the case in which Peoples was charged with a felony murder, had said he had “no clue what Gant was doing.” He was also quoted as saying, “I didn’t think much of the case, but Gant insisted on going forward with it.”
One member of the county prosecutor’s staff, who wished to remain anonymous, had said while others in the office could have gotten wind of Gant’s operation, Canzoneri was “in the best position to sniff it out and might have had a motive” to pass a word along. According to the source, it was common knowledge in the office that Canzoneri had long coveted the top job and was bitter about his inability to raise the political and financial backing he needed to make a run for it.
Canzoneri had hotly denied all of this, and federal authorities, unable to come up with anything solid, said they simply had no evidence of any wrong doing in the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office.
As for the question of why Prentis Gant had retired after a little over a year on the job, investigators, again with information from Peoples, looked into the possibility that Gant had been blackmailed because his wife reportedly had several relatives in the country illegally, with some of them involved in unlawful activities. The newspaper reported that several of Delores Gant’s relatives, including a brother, sister and two cousins—reputedly all illegal aliens—had in fact spent time in the city over the past decade, though often moving back for periods of time to their hometown on the Mexican border. At least twice over the years family members had been picked up in the city, once for marijuana possession and once for dealing in cheap Mexican knock-offs of high-priced prescription drugs, though both times charges had eventually been dropped.
With Gant’s resignation most of his wife’s clan had scattered and left the city. With Gant’s death, Delores, who had become a U.S. citizen when she married Gant back in 1981, put the family home up for sale and moved with her children to California. When contacted there by federal authorities, she had denied that any of her relatives had ever been in the county illegally and said that she had no evidence that her husband had died by anyone’s hand but his own.
As for the car bombing, it had to this point gone unsolved. Of course, there
had been strong suspicions that it had been directly connected with the bribery case, and Kenneth Miles’ history with the Department’s bomb squad had certainly pointed a finger at him. But an exhaustive canvassing of that westside neighborhood had failed to turn up a single witness who had seen anyone in the vicinity of the car parked in front of the Peoples’ home prior to the explosion. And no evidence of any kind had been uncovered that would even begin to make a case against any of the principals in the case.
Predictably, defense attorneys had managed to float at least one report that Anthony Peoples had been secretly connected with a drug operation competing with his cousin “Pretty Rick,” and that the bomb had simply been pay back.
Along with a photo of Anthony snapped by a Free Press photographer on one of his several days of testimony during the trial, the paper had included a brief and, to Frank, less-than-satisfying interview with the man whose family’s tragedy was at the center of the story.
“Contacted at his sister Vanessa’s home in Cleveland late yesterday, after the verdicts were announced, Mr. Peoples said he was ‘satisfied’ with the trial’s outcome. Asked if he thought justice had been served, he said simply, ‘No.’ After a pause, he added, ‘Not for my Nita and my babies.’
“Later Mr. Peoples went on to say that he would not be returning to Detroit. ‘There is nothing for me there now,’ he said, ‘except bad memories.’”
Chapter 100
At his desk a month later, going through a stack of mail, Frank opened a note from his New York agent. As he expected, it offered news of another rejection of Buffalos in the City.
He had started this process with some reasonable facimile of hope. The agent had said some nice things about the manuscript and thought she could place it. By now every time he saw her distinctive pink stationery, the first thing he thought of was yet another reject. Maybe it was time to try it himself with the Wayne State University Press editor he’d met in that Cass Corridor bar.
A discreet rap on his door was followed by the usual pause. He knew who was out there.
“Enter.”
Francine stuck her pretty red head in the office. “Anything I can do for you, boss?” With Fay on a well-earned Florida vacation, she was filling in for the week.
“Ah, the remarkable young woman who saved my sorry, hopeless, degenerate life.”
“Frank, would you please, please stop saying that!”
“Why? It’s true.”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“So you admit it’s true.”
“What part?”
They both seemed to love this stupid little game they had been playing off and on for months. He said, “The ‘sorry, hopeless, degenerate’ part.”
“Yes, that part is true.”
“Frankie, I’ve got nothing for you. Go find some real work.”
She gave him her light-up-the-world smile and left. And then all those vibrant curls got him thinking about redheads. Letty Pell had called the other day.
“Just wanted to say I miss you.”
“Well, Letty, I seriously doubt that, but I’ve wondered for a long time if my old friend Billy, now of the Lewisburg Federal Pen, really put you up to coming on to me. How about telling me the truth?”
“The truth, Frank? The truth is I’ve always found you enormously attractive.”
“That isn’t what I was asking, Ms. Pell, but let’s just leave it at that.”
Would he call Letty?
Unlikely.
Even he could learn a lesson occasionally.
###
Other Books by T.V. LoCicero
True Crime Books:
Murder in the Synagogue
Squelched: The Suppression of Murder in the Synagogue
Novels:
The Obsession
The Disappearance
Admission of Guilt
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An excerpt from Book 2 of The detroit im dyin Trilogy
ADMISSION OF GUILT
By T. V. LoCicero
Available from Smashwords
Chapter 1
New spring leaves, already withering, scratched and whispered in the few Dutch Elms still standing on this dark, working-class street. Birds chirped and chattered on the pre-dawn breeze, and a worn-out Plymouth whined slowly to a stop in front of one of these decrepit wood-framed flats. A smallish figure slipped out, ran to the big front porch, then darted back to the street.
As the Plymouth’s door opened, the yellow dome light limned the black, care-lined, 38-year-old face of Joe Martino. Thirteen-year-old Lissa slid onto the front bench next to him and shut the door. In darkness again he moved the car forward.
“Your turn, Pappy.” The girl reached to the backseat for a rolled-up paper in a thin rubber band.
“Pappy?” Martino’s glance raised an eyebrow and made a face. “Where’d you get that? Pappy.”
She shrugged, then smiled.
He said, “Okay, how about something that rhymes with table.”
Her guess was quick: “A place to keep horses.”
“No, it’s not a stable.”
Martino brought the car to a stop again, and Lissa opened the door. “How about the name of Mama’s funky old aunt?”
He grinned. “No, it’s not Aunt Mable.”
Out of the car once more, the girl slammed the door, just the way he’d told her not to. He watched as she sprinted toward another porch. In the dome light her thin face and dancing eyes had so mimed her mother that he suddenly found it hard to swallow.
Tossing the paper up on the porch, Lissa ran back to the Plymouth, and Martino again sent it forward. This time she grabbed two papers from behind. “Is it the kind of fur coat that Mama always wanted?”
“No, it’s not a sable. But that’s pretty good for a kid.” When he stopped the car, Lissa opened the door and eyed her father. He reminded her: “Don’t slam it.”
“Right. For a kid? How about the kind of story that Aesop wrote?”
He laughed. “Yeah, it’s a fable.”
“Oh, Pappy, that was a good one!” In the darkness she moved quickly away, carrying the two papers. Her lean teen hips in the jeans he bought the other day were hinting at the future.
At the front steps of the first house, Lissa flipped one paper onto the rubber mat and ran quickly past the next two houses, glancing at the old Plymouth whining again slowly up the street and staying just behind her. They both knew every stop without thinking.
One more to run past. But as she moved through the overgrown yard in front of a low, crumbling porch, a loud, percussive crack seemed to explode right next to her ear. Terror bolted through her body. A sharp sting seared her right arm, and the rolled up paper fell from her hand. In a panic, she froze, then spun, unable to find the street.
Another explosive crack and with a high-pitched scream she ran, finally glimpsing the Plymouth. Veering toward the street where the old car’s door was swinging open, she screamed, “Daddy!” Another crack and, almost to the Plymouth, her legs stopped working properly. She saw her father screaming at her but couldn’t hear him, the cracks now coming quickly one after another. Stumbling badly she threw herself at the car and somehow got her head to the seat and her left hand far enough in for her father
to grab.
As Martino shoved the accelerator to the floor, there were more cracks and a side window exploded. The car lunged and squealed away, and, covered with shards and fragments and feeling his right arm go numb, he lost his grip on Lissa’s hand.
The car careened weirdly across the street, jumped the curb and crashed into a front porch. The impact echoed for a moment, then faded into the whispers of the dying trees.
Back on the cracked pavement in the middle of the street Lissa was sprawled face down.
###
For more information on this and other works by T.V. LoCicero please visit:
www.tvlocicero.com
The Car Bomb (The detroit im dying Trilogy, Book 1) Page 18