Mean Streak

by Carolyn Wheat

  “How in hell did you know that?” Dwight demanded. He came over to the sofa and sat down at the other end, still glaring at me.

  “Isn’t it interesting,” I remarked, answering his question with one of my own, “how Eddie never manages to take official responsibility for anything? How he gets Stan on record as TJ’s contact? I’ll bet you’re out front on something else, something that was really Eddie’s, but Eddie put your name on it.” I paused to gauge the effect my words were having. And they were having an effect; I knew that because Riordan was silent. If he’d thought I wasn’t getting anywhere, he’d have had no compunction about jumping into the conversation.

  “He’s really good at that, Eddie. And now he’s a big hero, picture on the cover of the Voice, movie deals I’ll bet. And where are you and Stan?” I continued, jabbing the needle in a little further. “In the shitcan, Dwight, that’s where you are. In the shitcan, while Eddie Fitz—”

  “Shut up! Will you just shut up and get out of here?”

  “I could do that,” I replied. “Or I could stay and talk to you about how to improve your position in all this.” I leaned back on the sofa to indicate my willingness to spend the night if necessary.

  This was disingenuous at best, unethical at worst. I represented Riordan, and my interest in Dwight Straub was strictly that of attorney seeking a witness; I had no right to offer under-the-table counseling to a man who might be facing serious charges himself. But I could listen to Dwight and help him get a lawyer; he’d need one if he did what I wanted him to do, which was to take the witness stand and tell the truth about Eddie Fitz.

  It would be the end of him as a cop. I knew it and he knew it and Annie knew it.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “You think that keeping your mouth shut about what went on is being a standup guy. You think Eddie and Stan will respect you for that. You think if you tell the truth, other cops will consider you a rat and a traitor. But what you really are is a patsy, Dwight. You’re letting Eddie Fitz take you down because you’re afraid to do what he did and cut a deal.”

  “Eddie didn’t make any deals,” Dwight retorted. “He told me and Stan he didn’t cut a deal and I believe him.”

  I said nothing. I just looked at him, letting my face reflect the very real pity I was feeling for the man on the other end of the white sofa. He was like a kid, with his magic thinking: If I close my eyes real tight and believe Eddie’s my friend, then he won’t hurt me. But even he was beginning to realize magic wouldn’t be enough.

  “Maybe you should listen, Dwight,” Annie Straub whispered. The words were said so softly I could almost believe I hadn’t really heard them.

  “You keep out of this,” Dwight shouted. “You never liked Eddie, and now you want me to rat on him. I won’t do it. I won’t talk about Eddie, not to you, not to anybody.”

  “You’d better go,” Annie said. She rose from her chair and led us to the door. As I walked behind her, I reflected that if I’d been alone with Annie, if neither man had been present, I might have convinced her that her husband’s best interests lay in telling the truth about Eddie Fitz.

  “Counselor, don’t waste your breath,” Stan Krieger said with a world-weary tone straight out of ten o’clock television. “I got nothing to say to you about Eddie or anything else.”

  It was 6:38 A.M.; I’d had about four hours of troubled sleep, waking every twenty minutes or so with yet another penetrating question I should have asked Dwight Straub. I was on a sleep cycle that was all-too-familiar to lawyers on trial: fitful sleep followed by too much coffee and heavy doses of adrenaline, followed by another sleepless night that required serious caffeine the next morning, which led to tossing and turning the next night, and so on. I stifled a yawn that had nothing to do with boredom.

  “So it’s okay with you that Eddie goes down as the Hero Cop, and you just go down,” I said. I followed the detective from his battered desk over to the ancient coffee urn on the equally battered table, next to the battered waste-basket. Did the city really buy all this stuff new, or did they have open contracts with junkmen to buy up badly used office furniture?

  He squeezed a cup out of the urn, tipping it to increase the flow. I figured there wasn’t much left, but acting on my theory that a drink in the hand meant more time with the witness, I poured myself half a cup when he finished, I even skipped the sweetener so I could follow him back to his desk without fussing around.

  “Look, you’re not under oath,” I pointed out. “In fact, you could deny every word that passes between us. Forget about testifying, just tell me the real truth about Eddie, person to person.”

  “Why?”

  It was a good question. Because I need you to help me acquit a criminal lawyer you probably think of as the scum of the earth didn’t strike me as a viable answer.

  Then I remembered the photograph on the piano in Dwight Straub’s living room, the picture in which Stan Krieger had sat slightly apart from his younger squad colleagues. The picture in which he looked like a disapproving uncle dragooned into playing with the children.

  “Because you hate the man’s guts,” I shot back, firing on instinct, “and you want somebody to know what a piece of shit he is. You want it so bad you can taste it. You want to see Eddie Fitz brought down. You want to blow the lid off, to—”

  “What I want and what I have to do are two different things,” Stan broke in. His voice was raw, harsh. His dark eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks an unhealthy color. The summer tan was fading badly, and there were heavy bags under his eyes. He looked like a bloodhound with a bad hangover.

  I pushed all the chips forward into the pot and called.

  “There’s going to be a book, you know,” I said casually. “And a movie, too. I talked to Jesse Winthrop, and—”

  “That cop-hating prick,” Stan muttered. “What’s he got to do with anything?”

  “He’s writing the book,” I said. “And selling the movie rights to Eddie’s story. I hear,” I lied, “that they’re talking about Johnny Depp for Eddie’s part. I wonder,” I went on, “who they’ll get to play you? Somebody who’s good at villains, I suppose. One of the usual Hollywood heavies. Someone who’ll be believable as Stan the Man: the older, corrupt cop who leads the saintly Eddie into temptation.”

  “Will you shut up!” Stan jumped from his chair so fast, he knocked his coffee onto the floor.

  “Fuck!” he screamed, hopping back as the hot liquid hit his pants leg. “Jesus fuck!” He slapped at his leg with a force that probably left a bruise. The look on his face was murderous; if a cup of coffee could die, that one would have—

  No. The anger wasn’t directed at the coffee. It wasn’t even directed at me, despite the furious glance he shot me as I handed him a fistful of napkins.

  “You’re going to let Eddie get away with it, then?” I asked, going for a conversational tone, as if Stan had spilled his coffee in some perfectly ordinary mishap.

  “Get away with it?” Stan parried. He tossed a wad of sodden, coffee-colored napkins on the desktop. Then he drew in a breath and let it out with a long, ragged sigh. “That little fuck’s been getting away with it for years, you know that?”

  I knew better than to say anything. In fact, I was afraid to nod, afraid to respond in any way. Stan the Man was just bursting to talk, but if he stopped for half a second to recall just who he was talking to, the fountain would dry up.

  “You know what he did when they Psyched him?” It took a moment to translate the cop-speak; when I did, I had to restrain myself from reaching for a notebook and demanding details. What Stan was telling me was that Eddie Fitz, Lazarus’ key witness, had been sent to the police department’s Psychological Services Unit for evaluation. One more little fact Davia Singer had neglected to include in her packet of discovery materials.

  Stan kept talking, the words rushing out as if they’d been dammed up too long. “We had a racket over at Dwight’s,” the detective recalled. “One of the guys on the squad
got a promotion to OCCB downtown,” he explained. “Eddie got drunk and loud, the way he always did. He’s yelling about the Department shrink, about how they’re gonna twist his words around, but he’s got a way to beat them. He’s gonna wear a wire, go in with a tape recorder.”

  “Is that allowed?” I asked, daring to interrupt.

  “Shit, no, it’s not allowed,” Stan retorted, giving me a civilians-are-stupid look. “But that’s what I mean about Eddie. He got away with it. He taped the interview with the shrink, and the next thing everybody knows, he’s passed with flying colors.” Stan shook his head. “If I’d pulled something like that, it’s dollars to donuts they’d have found the wire and hit me with a disciplinary action. But Eddie”—he paused and shook his head, reluctant admiration on his face—“Eddie waltzes into Psych Services wearing a wire and walks out with a tape of his interview and nobody down there’s the wiser.”

  I took a shot and asked the same question I’d thrown at Dwight Straub the night before: “If you feel that way about Eddie Fitz, why not tell the truth about him?”

  Stan shook his head. “You just don’t get it, do you?” he said. “If I do that, I’m dead as a cop. I may be dead anyway, which I suppose is what you’re going to tell me next, but at least I go down with some dignity. I don’t go down naming names of all the cops I ever worked with. I don’t go down,” he finished with palpable contempt, “like Eddie.”

  I finished my half-cup of coffee and sat with Stan for another fifteen minutes. As I questioned him, I visualized the scene that would take place if I subpoenaed him to testify in Riordan’s case. He’d give name, rank, and serial number, and, as soon as things got hot, he’d intone the words of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution—and that would be the end. Judge de Freitas would strike his testimony, and the jury would never hear what Stan the Man Krieger had to say.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  One good thing about having a lawyer for a client: Riordan met me at the courthouse with four perfectly drafted subpoenas in hand. One was for the FBI, and essentially amended the one we’d already served to include the fact that John Doe “TJ” was deceased; the other was addressed to the NYPD and called for all police reports regarding the discovery of the body.

  The other two were for Stan Krieger and Dwight Straub; I was determined to bring them into court and let them decide for themselves whether to tell the truth about Eddie Fitz or hide behind the Fifth Amendment.

  Davia Singer walked over to me as I handed the subpoenas to the judge’s clerk for His Honor’s signature. They were useless pieces of paper unless Judge de Freitas agreed the information we wanted was relevant to Matt’s trial.

  Singer took one look at what we wanted and said, “You’ll never get these signed. We’ll oppose.”

  “Go ahead,” I invited. “Oppose. Go get Nick Lazarus right now.” I looked the younger woman in the eye and added, my tone tinged with contempt, “Go get your boss. I’m sure he’ll want to argue this himself rather than trust you with it.”

  The charge was true enough to bring a flush of anger to Davia Singer’s sallow cheeks. She opened her mouth as if she wanted very much to tell me she could argue her own motions to quash, thank you very much, but then she turned and walked away, the heels of her pumps clicking on the hard floor of the courtroom. The truth was, Lazarus would want to argue these subpoenas himself, and she didn’t dare fail to inform him of what we were up to.

  The Great Man himself came down within a scant five minutes. He strode to the clerk’s desk without a word to me or Matt, picked up the subpoenas without asking the clerk’s permission, and said, loudly enough to be heard at the defense table, “What’s all this shit about a dead drug dealer, anyway?”

  We all stood as Judge de Freitas entered, even though there was no jury in the room. Looking more than ever like a medieval painting of Saint Jerome, scholarly, ascetic, with an egg-shaped head and a sallow complexion, he took the bench amid a swirl of black robe. He’d presided over the courtroom like a law professor conducting an advanced seminar, and he proceeded to view the four subpoenas in the same bloodless way.

  “Your Honor may recall,” I began, “that the defense has already subpoenaed FBI records regarding this man TJ. We have reason to believe that TJ could have presented relevant evidence in this trial regarding Detective Fitzgerald’s credibility. In fact,” I went on, “the defense had every intention of calling TJ to the stand as a witness in this case.”

  “You speak in the past tense, Ms. Jameson,” the judge said in his dry, papery voice. “Am I to assume this TJ is no longer on the defense witness list?”

  “TJ is dead,” I replied, “a fact the defense learned only last night.”

  “Then if he is not going to be called as a witness, how is he relevant?”

  Lazarus stood next to me with a smirk on his face, as if the judge’s statement were a direct consequence of some brilliant argument he’d made.

  “He’s relevant, Your Honor,” I said, plunging ahead in spite of an inner misgiving that I didn’t have the evidence to back up my claim, “because the defense has reason to believe that TJ had dealings with Detective Fitzgerald that might have tended to undermine his credibility.” I was deliberately couching my remarks in legalese; the judge disliked emotional outbursts, and I wanted Nick Lazarus to be the one who appeared irrationally angry, while I presented a picture of cool competence.

  Lazarus blustered, but in the end, the judge signed the four subpoenas. “I’ll reserve decision as to the admissibility of this material,” he said, “until after I’ve seen the reports themselves.”

  I thanked the judge and hastened out of the courtroom, eager to place the subpoenas into the hands of my investigator. Angie was under instructions to get them served at the earliest opportunity. They were “forthwith” subpoenas, which meant the information could be in court as early as the next day.

  “Don’t worry, Carmelita,” she said in a stage whisper in the corridor outside the courtroom. “I’ll get these served pronto. This is the Angelina express leaving right now.”

  But the Mean Streak kept moving, its pace inexorable. I needed sleep; I needed coffee; I needed a viable defense. But what I got was a parade of secondary witnesses: waiters at the Chinese and Italian restaurants Eddie Fitz and Fat Jack had frequented; Paulie the Cork Corcoran, who admitted handing over grand jury minutes in return for cash.

  On cross, Paulie admitted he’d never actually taken money from Matt, nor had he handed the manila envelope with the grand jury minutes to my client. All his dealings had been with Fat Jack; at most, he’d exchanged a little courthouse gossip and Chinese noodles with Riordan. I breathed a little easier when the disgraced court clerk stepped down; he hadn’t laid a glove on us.

  The real damage would be done after the lunch break, when Eddie Fitz would step up and take the oath.

  I was stopped on the way out of the courthouse, not by the usual reporter, but by Annie Straub.

  “I have to talk to you,” she said in a low voice.

  Matt, standing next to me on top of the stone steps, said, “I’ll grab lunch and meet you back here at two.” He strode down the stairway before I could respond.

  I’d sensed that Annie and I could talk more freely woman-to-woman, and now I was going to have my chance.

  “Shall we have lunch?” I asked.

  She nodded. She turned and began the hazardous walk down the steep stone steps that had no railing. She wore a rayon print dress in royal blue, with an antique lace collar. It tied in the back like a little girl’s dress, but the hemline was high enough to reveal shapely legs in caramel-colored hose.

  I followed, making my way through the crowd with difficulty.

  A voice behind me caught my attention. It was one of the print reporters from the trial. “Ms. Jameson,” he called as he raced toward me, his steno pad open. “Can you answer a question for me, please?”

  I nodded. Much as I would have liked to brush him off, I was under
orders from my client to maintain good relations with the press. I gave him a quick summary of the morning’s activities, then turned back to Dwight Straub’s wife.

  “Sorry about that,” I said with a self-deprecatory shrug. “Maybe we should start walking, get away from this crowd.”

  “I have an idea,” she said. “But it will only work if you’re not really hungry.”

  “Hungry? Me? Not at all,” I lied. It was more important to put Annie at ease than to take in calories.

  “Then come with me,” she said. She walked purposefully toward the little church that lay hidden behind the skirts of the federal courthouse. It was a tiny brick building, dwarfed by the huge public edifices that towered over it. I glanced up at the portico above the simple columns and resolved to ask Riordan, the former altarboy, to translate the Latin motto: Beati qui ambulant in lege Domini.

  I decided to ask Annie Straub instead.

  She gave a small, indulgent smile. “It means ‘Blessed are they who walk in the law of the Lord,’” she translated. “It’s not a real beatitude or anything, but I always liked walking past it.”

  She turned right at the church and walked down the little alleyway that separated it from the Federal Correctional Center, which also housed the United States attorney’s office. When she reached a gate leading to a side door, she pulled it open.

  “We can go into the church?” I asked, surprised.

  “There’s a meeting room back here,” she explained. “I have a key.” She fished in her purse and pulled out a single key on a ring; there was a triangle within a circle on the emblem. She unlocked the door and pushed it open so we could enter.

  The room was functional, undecorated. Perhaps fifty folding chairs were set up in a casual grouping; there was a table at what would have been a focal point of attention, and on another table in the back there was an unplugged coffee urn. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what kind of meetings took place here.