From Canal Street, the courthouse looked like a castle, gold and remote and beckoning. It was a place of fantasy, a place to spin tales about.
As recently as last week, that courthouse had been a place of mystery to me. And now I walked up the smooth stone steps every day, stood under the high ceilings and addressed a judge on the high, polished bench.
It was only seven in the morning, but the street was already bustling. Delivery trucks were double-parked in front of Chinese restaurants and groceries; huge plastic bags filled to bursting with bean sprouts and tofu cakes sat on the sidewalk, leaking water in little rivulets that ran toward the curb. I stepped gingerly around the puddles, taking in the exotic sights and smells. I passed a Chinese herbalist, with unlabeled glass jars in the window. One jar held flat, dried lizards. Take two lizards and call me in the morning, I joked to myself.
I passed underneath the huge brown bulk of the Manhattan Bridge, grateful for a temporary respite from the sun. On the opposite side of the street I noticed a building that still had Hebrew letters carved above the door. A former synagogue, perhaps; this was part of the legendary Lower East Side of Manhattan.
There were little hole-in-the-wall eateries with whole smoked ducks hanging in the windows; juices dripped into pans directly under the ducks, which were destined to be wrapped in rice pancakes and smothered with hoisin sauce. There were newspaper stands with Chinese papers and bright red greeting cards with gold calligraphy. There were tourist stores with dusty Buddhas in the windows and backscratchers hanging outside. Asian schoolgirls in plaid uniform skirts walked three abreast, cradling books in their arms like babies. Old women shuffled by in cotton slippers, wearing sweaters in spite of the growing heat. In the street, horns honked and drivers swore at one another.
Although the restaurants were closed, the smells of soy and duck hung in the air; I would have to prevail upon Matt to eat Chinese for lunch. A dim sum parlor, perhaps; my mouth watered in anticipation of little dumplings served from rolling carts trundled through the restaurant by women who seldom spoke English. You pointed and took your chances.
I was meeting Riordan at the little round tables near the food stalls. As I stepped past the Federal Correction Center, which also housed the United States attorney’s office, I found myself hoping one of the booths would be selling hot coffee to early risers.
I ducked down the little alleyway that separated the federal jail from the tiny church that sat among the larger public buildings like a sparrow among hawks.
Most of the food stalls weren’t open yet, but Ferrara’s was doing some business in coffee and Italian pastries. I stepped up and ordered a double cappuccino. When I had the steamy, foamy drink in my hand, I carried it gingerly to one of the metal tables chained to the paving stones.
Too nervous to sit, I shaded my eyes and looked up and down Centre Street, waiting to see Matt Riordan’s purposeful stride heading my way.
The plaza seemed peaceful, in sharp contrast to the bustling activity that would fill it in less than an hour. It was a crossroads of civic life; within a half-mile there were five courthouses, the Municipal Building, One Police Plaza, the Federal Correctional Center, and, across the street, the federal building.
Where was Riordan? I had things to tell him and he had things to tell me. Had he come away with evidence, or had the anonymous fax been, as I’d loudly predicted, a waste of time?
There was someone on top of the courthouse steps. A figure huddled beside one of the huge smooth stone columns that topped the long staircase. Probably a homeless guy catching a few extra winks before the court officers showed up for work and shooed him away. I dismissed him from my thoughts.
Then I looked back. Could the huddled figure be Matt Riordan? Could he be sitting at the top of the steps, waiting for me to join him? Sitting on cold marble in his designer suit didn’t sound much like Riordan, but I decided to hike up the steps on the theory that I’d get a good view of Foley Square from atop the stairs.
I swallowed the last of the cappuccino and tossed my cup into a wire trash bin. Then I crossed to the courthouse and trudged up the steep steps, half-expecting to hear Riordan’s voice behind me, asking me where the hell I was going.
The huddled figure made no move as I approached. I supposed that sleeping outdoors meant being able to sleep in spite of people passing by.
As I drew closer, my first thought was that the man had made a hell of a mess out of the pristine marble wall behind the austere columns. There was a huge brownish-red stain behind where he lay. Graffiti was my first thought.
My second thought was that the color was dumb and there was nothing artistic about the scrawl that ran from head level down to the floor.
My next thought was that it was strange that the huddled man had so much of the brownish-red paint all over his head and clothes.
The cappuccino came halfway up my throat in a great burning rush as reality finally dawned on me. I leaned against a cool marble column to prop up my suddenly rubbery knees.
The man was dead. The brown-red stains were blood.
I focused my eyes on the face—could it be Riordan who lay there, his blood and brains splattered against the granite wall?
Relief surged through me as I realized that the remaining hair on the half-shattered head was a light color. The clothes were wrong, too—a navy blazer, gray summer-weight slacks, and black loafers. And there was an ankle holster strapped to his right leg.
Eddie Fitz. The dead man was Eddie Fitz.
He’d been shot. You didn’t have to be a forensics specialist to see that. He’d been shot the night before he was due to finish testifying against Matt.
I hoped to hell that my ex-lover and present client hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Oh, my God,” a man behind me said in a strangled voice. I turned; a blue-uniformed federal court officer stood nearby, his face as white as the granite columns on the portico.
“I’m gonna call 911,” he said in a croak.
“The Fifth Precinct would be better,” I pointed out. “He’s been dead a while. There’s no emergency here.”
I sounded far cooler than I felt.
The court officer turned and made for the heavy doors. He opened them with his key. I decided to go back down the stairs and wait for the cops by the picnic tables. My knees shook badly as I hobbled down the steps, and I cursed the lack of a railing; I could picture myself falling, and finishing the trip on my—
I saw Riordan as I was halfway down. He gave his watch an ostentatious glance. When I got close enough to be heard, I told him to shove it.
He raised an eyebrow and I explained what I’d found at the top of the stairs. His face showed surprise. I was glad. I was glad I wasn’t telling him something he already knew.
“Oh, God, Matt,” I finished, putting a shaking hand over my mouth, “it was horrible. Half his head was missing. He—”
“Don’t think about it, babe,” Matt said. He placed his hand over mine and gave a squeeze. My hand felt cold and fragile, as if it might shatter if squeezed too hard. I swallowed and lowered myself onto a bench at one of the tables in the plaza. My client had a warm hand on my shoulder. I wanted very much to bury my face in his starched white shirt-front and cry.
I bit my lower lip to keep from doing just that, and took in a long, ragged breath.
“Matt, I have to know,” I said, deliberately refusing to look into his eyes. “Did you—”
“Did I put a hole in Eddie Fitz?” His tone was harsh. “Is that what you’re asking?”
“I have a right to know,” I replied in a trembly voice. “I have to know if I’m representing you on a bribery charge or a murder charge, after all.”
His smile was half-amused. “I assure you, Cass, I’ll get another lawyer if they charge me with murder. I won’t ask you to stay with my case if you—”
“Oh, shut up,” I cut in, my voice rising to what even I recognized as a hysterical shriek.
“Just shut up and tell me the truth.”
“I did not kill Eddie Fitz,” my client replied in a solemn tone. “Since I don’t know when he was killed,” he went on, “I can’t be certain where I was when he died, but—”
“You were home, weren’t you?” I asked, surprised there could be an issue on that point. “You left my house to go meet this anonymous faxer, and after that, you went home.”
He shook his head. It seemed to me that a slight blush tinged his tanned cheeks. “I came here to Foley Square at eleven or so,” he said. “I waited for over an hour. No one showed. I’ll tell you more about that later. Then I left and went to Taylor’s for the rest of the night.”
He’d gone from my bed to hers. From his old squeeze to his lemon-haired lady.
I clenched and unclenched a fist. He’d slipped out of my bed and ended the night in hers. He’d betrayed me in the worst way a man can betray a woman. There was a lot I could have said—wanted to say—but now was not the time.
We had a lot more to talk about, but before we could get to it, the cops rolled up. Blue-and-whites screamed into Foley Square, rolling right up onto the broad sidewalk in front of the federal courthouse. Cops jumped out, ran up the steps, and went to work. A plainclothes detective team walked over to Matt and me, deceptively pleasant expressions on their faces.
The black detective’s name was Martha Rodney; her Asian partner was Harold Lam. They separated us. I went with Rodney, while Matt followed Lam to the church steps. My client was out of earshot, but not out of sight. I couldn’t keep my eyes from wandering in that direction as I answered the detective’s questions, wondering whether Matt needed his lawyer by his side.
“I understand you found the body,” Detective Rodney said in a noncommittal voice. I nodded.
“Did you recognize him?” She had a steno pad in one hand, a ballpoint pen in the other. I felt uneasy speaking for the record, answering questions without knowing how those answers might be used. This probably wasn’t exactly what Rodney had in mind, but I could have bet that she wouldn’t be happy to learn how anxious she’d made me.
“Not at first,” I said. My gorge rose again as I remembered the horror of Eddie. “I don’t know if his mother could have recognized him in all that blood,” I added.
“I know what you mean,” Rodney replied in a soothing tone. “It never gets to be what you’d call easy.”
But underneath the velvet glove, the iron fist lay in wait. “Could you tell me who you recognized the corpse to be?”
I joined her in speaking police jargon. “I recognized him to be Detective Edmund Fitzgerald of the Seven-Four Precinct in Brooklyn.”
“And exactly how did you recognize him?”
“He’s a witness in a case I’m defending,” I said.
“Could you tell me where you were last night?” she asked. Then she flashed a bright, white smile that lit up her dark face. “It’s just a routine question, Counselor,” she explained.
“Then I’ll give a routine answer,” I said, deliberately echoing the words and the smile. “I was home in bed.”
“And was anyone there with you?”
No, the person who could and should have been there with me jumped out of the sack and went away. He either shot Eddie or he didn’t, but either way he went from me to Her, so why don’t you put that in your little detective’s notebook and—
I took a deep breath. “No,” I replied.
Before she could ask another question, her partner was back, with Matt in tow.
Detective Lam made a gesture with his thumb toward Matt. “He says he won’t say another word without talking to his lawyer first.” Lam nodded at me. “I guess that’s you,” he added sourly, as if the word “lawyer” hurt his mouth.
“I’m his lawyer,” I confirmed.
Lam pointed toward the church steps. “Then go over there and talk,” he demanded. “When you’re finished, come back here.”
We obeyed. When we reached the steps leading to St. Andrew’s, I turned on Matt and asked, “What the hell happened last night?”
“I got here at exactly eleven-oh-three,” he replied. “I checked my watch and made a note of the time. If somebody did show up and hand me something I could use as evidence,” he explained, “I wanted to be prepared to give accurate testimony about the meeting. I waited for over an hour. No one came up to me, no one brought me anything. But,” he added, a glint in his eye, “I saw some very interesting things just the same.”
“Like what?”
“Like at eleven-fifteen on the dot, Davia Singer came out of the U.S. attorney’s office and walked toward that ugly piece of junk.” Matt pointed toward a giant sculpture of three huge circles enmeshed in one another. It had originally been a rusty metal color; the city had painted it bright red in vain hopes of improving its aesthetic quality.
“She stood by that damned thing for a good twenty minutes,” Matt continued. “And every two minutes she looked at her watch and tapped her foot and craned her neck to see who was coming. She acted, in short, like she’d been waiting for someone who stood her up.”
“Do you think she had an anonymous fax, too?” I asked.
“Who knows? All I know is she left before I did, and she left without anyone turning up to meet her. But the important thing is, she was here. Here in Foley Square at about the time Eddie was killed.”
“Yes, but you were watching her,” I protested. “Did you see her walk up the courthouse steps?”
“I wasn’t watching her every minute,” he replied. “She walked toward the sidewalk and back, she walked to One Police Plaza and back. There could have been three, four minutes there where she slipped around the back of the church and climbed the steps to the courthouse without my seeing her. She could have shot Eddie when I wasn’t watching her.”
“But did you hear a shot?” I demanded. “I can’t believe whoever killed Eddie did it without making a noise.”
“I didn’t hear a shot,” Matt answered. “But the killer could have used a suppressor.” Suppressor. Most people, including me, said “silencer.” But suppressor was the term of art, the term a real gun person would have used.
I nodded, refusing to consider the implication that my client knew more about firearms than I’d realized. “Okay. Singer could have killed Eddie. But why?”
“Leave that for a moment. She’s not the only person I saw. Nick Lazarus left his office ten minutes after Singer came out. He walked along Centre Street, toward Worth; I wasn’t watching every second, and he could easily have gone up the steps to meet and kill Eddie while I was over here by the church.”
“Lazarus,” I said, thinking aloud. “What if he got the news that I’d been to see Di Blasi? What if he knew I had a smoking gun ready for today’s testimony? I’m willing to bet he’d rather see Eddie Fitz dead than properly cross-examined in a way that could prove he knew Eddie was crooked. He had a lot to lose if we destroyed Eddie on the stand.”
“True,” Matt replied. “It’s hard to cross-examine a corpse. There’s one more player who was here last night,” he went on. “I was right here in this church doorway,” he explained. “I had a perfect view of the plaza, but I don’t think anyone saw me here in the shadows. And who should I see walking toward One Police Plaza but Stan Krieger?”
Stan Krieger, who was very probably going to be indicted on Eddie’s say-so as soon as Mart’s trial was over. Stan Krieger, who had no way of knowing I had the ammunition to destroy the witness who could put him away. Stan Krieger, who rightly blamed Eddie for Dwight Straub’s suicide.
It flashed through my mind that there was something extremely odd about the fact that four people, all with good reason to want Eddie Fitz dead, just happened to be hanging around the plaza at the time he was shot. Before I could remark upon this apparent coincidence, Detective Lam gestured at us to come back to the food-stall area.
“What do you want to do about them?” I asked Matt.
“I don’t mind telling them I was he
re,” Matt replied. “For one thing, someone may have seen me. Why get myself hung up if I don’t have to? Might as well cooperate.”
But when we walked back toward the table where Rodney and Lam waited, we discovered they’d been joined by a third law enforcement officer: FBI Special Agent Warren Zebart.
Zebart was all iron fist; if he’d ever owned a velvet glove, he’d mislaid it years ago.
“For a lawyer,” he said heavily to Matt, “you sure as hell don’t like letting the system do its job.”
I gestured to Matt to keep quiet, but he pretended not to notice. “Just what do you mean by that?” he demanded.
“I mean it’s amazing to me how many cases in which you’re involved end up closed on account of murder.”
Matt shrugged. “When you represent a certain type of individual,” he replied, “murder is just part of the package.”
I tuned out for a dangerous minute as the full implication of Zebart’s remarks sank in.
Closed on account of murder.
You can’t cross-examine a corpse.
The case against Riordan was effectively over. Judge de Freitas would have no choice but to grant my motion for a mistrial; without a full opportunity to cross-examine Eddie Fitz, Riordan couldn’t get a fair trial. And with Eddie dead, there would be no retrial.
I’d just won the case.
And Matt’s motive to kill Eddie loomed as large as the massive Municipal Building that overshadowed the plaza.
“Stop,” I said, holding up a warning hand. “Whatever you two are saying to one another, please stop.”
Of course Riordan was way ahead of me. He’d understood from the moment I’d told him Eddie was dead that this meant he’d be acquitted. I’d still been in shock from the grisly discovery I’d made at the top of the stairs. I hadn’t been parsing out the legal implications of a New York City detective with his brains splattered all over the white granite of the federal courthouse.
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