House Witness

by Mike Lawson

  He’d been thinking that he’d wasted five days in Texas, but on reflection he really hadn’t. Based on what he learned from the Las Vegas DA and from Coogan in Houston, he knew the man he was chasing was about six foot two, had dark hair, and was good-looking. He’d also learned that a woman might be helping him. And there was something else he’d learned.

  The man who called himself Derek Humphry had discovered the only thing about Randy White that he could use to make him change his testimony: Randy’s love for his sister. Then he was able to convince a man like Randy to give up his own life so his sister could end her suffering. Derek Humphry had to be one hell of a salesman. Last, he—or maybe a woman he worked with—had been willing to take the risk of sneaking into an assisted living facility to essentially murder a person, and that had taken balls.

  Whoever the hell he was chasing, the guy was impressive.

  26

  Although things were going well, Ella was a bit worried.

  Three of the witnesses were in the bag: Edmundo Ortiz was on a fishing boat off Alaska cooking for a hungry crew; old Esther Behrman was now a bedridden turnip as a result of her unfortunate stroke; and the gambling bartender, Jack Morris, would testify that he wasn’t sure Toby was the guy who’d shot Dominic DiNunzio. This left two witnesses: the hot young barmaid, Kathy Tolliver; and Rachel Quinn.

  Rachel Quinn was the one who concerned Ella. According to the information provided by the Dallas data miners, Quinn was as pure as the driven snow. She had no criminal record, hadn’t ever been busted for anything in her lily-white life—not for smoking a joint in college or getting a DUI. She was a lawyer—did Wall Street financial crap, not criminal law—and made so much money that it wasn’t likely Ella was going to be able to buy her off. Ella was certain that if she approached Quinn and even insinuated that she wanted her to change her testimony, the woman would immediately whistle for a cop.

  The other problem Ella had—and it might be a tougher one than the remaining witnesses—was that she hadn’t even started looking for an alternative suspect for DiNunzio’s murder. And that was Toby’s defense: Toby didn’t kill Dominic—some other dude did it—and Ella had yet to identify the dude.

  But when it came to the barmaid, Kathy Tolliver, Ella knew exactly what to do.

  Kathy was twenty-four years old and had a four-year-old daughter. She had been busted half a dozen times for taking drugs, usually coke, then going a bit nuts and breaking things and assaulting folks. The father of her child was an abusive alcoholic and Kathy had divorced him about a year after her baby was born.

  The interesting thing about Kathy was that she was engaged in a vicious custody battle with her ex—although according to the Dallas data miners, the battle was really between Kathy and her ex-husband’s parents. The grandparents—not the father—wanted the kid and they were determined to prove that Kathy was an unfit mother, in which case the child would be given to her ex-husband and then raised by grandma and grandpa, who doted on the little girl.

  Kathy, to her credit, was doing her best to be a good mom. She’d stopped taking drugs, attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings three times a week, and worked her lovely tail off to support her child. Raising a child had to be a financial struggle; she was a single woman with a minimum-wage job whose primary source of income was the tips a looker like her could generate. So Kathy was vulnerable, and Ella figured the best strategy when it came to her was to use both the carrot and the stick. She’d start with the stick.

  Ella spent a few days following Kathy Tolliver. She worked at McGill’s from four p.m. until midnight, five days a week. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she attended a noon NA meeting near her crummy apartment in Brooklyn. A lady who lived in her building and appeared to have about a dozen kids of her own took care of Kathy’s little girl when Kathy was working.

  Ella soon learned that the first thing Kathy did when she got off work was to go to a bar near McGill’s and have a single glass of white wine before catching the subway home. While she was in the bar, some drunken ass would inevitably try to hit on her, but Kathy would blow the guy off, and sometimes wasn’t very nice about the way she did it. The girl just wanted a half hour to herself to decompress before she went home to her kid.

  The other thing about pretty Kathy was that she was a smoker, and since you can’t smoke in any bar in New York anymore, what she’d do was sip half her white wine, step outside for a cigarette, and then go back inside to finish her wine before trudging to the subway station.

  Ella decided that she needed a drug dealer, but she didn’t know any dealers in New York. However, Curtis—the maintenance man at Esther Behrman’s rest home—was a pot smoker, and he might know a few guys who dealt in commodities other than pot. She called Curtis—she hadn’t spoken to him since Esther’s tragedy—and offered to mail him five hundred bucks. Curtis hooked her up with a dealer, who steered her to another dealer, and she bought what she needed.

  Kathy left McGill’s at midnight and went to her favorite after-work watering hole. She chatted briefly with the bartender, a mannish-looking woman about Ella’s age, and ordered her glass of Chablis. Ella thought Kathy looked tired and noticed she had a run in the black fishnets she was wearing. Ella had been sitting in the bar, at a table, for half an hour before Kathy arrived.

  A guy with a ridiculous pompadour immediately went up to Kathy, hoping to chat her into the sack, but whatever Kathy said to him caused him to back away, holding his hands up in a don’t-shoot-me gesture. She finished half her wine, and then, as was her custom, asked the bartender to watch her purse and went outside to have her pre-subway smoke.

  As soon as Kathy stepped outside, Ella walked up to the bar and asked the bartender for another drink, and when the bartender turned her back to reach for the bottle of Stoli, Ella dropped the tablet into Kathy’s Chablis. Kathy came back into the bar five minutes later, chatted a bit more with the bartender, and then began her weary schlep to the subway. Ella again thought that the poor girl looked frazzled, and actually felt sorry for her.

  Kathy walked about a block before she began to stagger, and as she was about to collapse facedown on the sidewalk, Ella walked up to her and said, “Are you all right, honey?”

  “No,” Kathy said, then slumped to the ground, with Ella grabbing her arm to make sure she didn’t fall too hard.

  Ella called 911. “A woman just collapsed. You need to send an ambulance right away. She doesn’t look good at all.”

  She rattled off the address and hung up before the dispatcher could start asking questions. A passerby stopped to ask if she could help, but Ella shooed the Good Samaritan away, saying that she had things under control and that the medics were coming.

  The medics arrived, and Ella said, “She’s my friend, and I thought she was off the drugs but she, I don’t know, fell off the wagon, I guess.”

  While one medic was taking Kathy’s vital signs, the other one asked, “What did she take?”

  “I have no idea,” Ella said. “She used to do a lot of different shit.”

  The medics placed Kathy on a gurney and slid her into the ambulance, and Ella asked if she could accompany them to the hospital. Sorry, they said, against company policy. They were taking her to Mount Sinai, and Ella would have to take a cab.

  At the hospital, the doctors did whatever doctors do when someone is brought in unconscious and the medics have been told that the patient had a bad reaction to an unknown recreational drug. While all this was going on, Ella sat patiently in the ER waiting room reading magazines that were three years old. And like the good friend she was supposed to be, she held on to Kathy’s purse, which contained her cell phone, making it unlikely that when she came to she’d make a phone call or leave the hospital before Ella had a chance to talk to her.

  Five hours after being admitted, at approximately five-thirty in the morning, Kathy walked into the waiting area, white as a sheet, barely able to walk.

  Ella stepped up to her and said, “Kathy, are you o
kay?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m the person who called the medics after you OD’d on whatever drug you took.”

  “I don’t do drugs,” Kathy said.

  “Well, I kind of doubt that John and Helen’s lawyer is going to buy that.” John and Helen were the Petermans, grandparents to Kathy’s child.

  “What?” Kathy said. “How do you …”

  “We need to talk,” Ella said.

  “Is that my purse?” Kathy said.

  “Yes. I picked it up when they took you to the hospital. And like I said, we need to talk.”

  Kathy snatched her purse out of Ella’s hand. “I don’t know you from Adam. Get away from me.”

  “Kathy, listen to me. If we don’t talk, your ex-husband is going to get custody of Maddy.”

  “What are you talking about? And how do you know my daughter’s name? Goddamnit, who are you?”

  “I know this is confusing, Kathy, particularly in the condition you’re in right now, but you need to talk to me. For Maddy’s sake.”

  Ella took her arm. Kathy resisted a bit, then went along as Ella led her over to a table in the nearly empty cafeteria.

  “Now listen carefully. You’re a witness against Toby Rosenthal, and if you don’t say the right things when you testify at his trial, I’m going to have to tell the Petermans’ lawyer about what happened tonight. I’m going to say you took too much coke or heroin and …”

  “I didn’t do any coke, and I’ve never taken heroin in my life.”

  “… then had to be hauled off to the hospital and left Maddy stranded with your sitter, who expected you to pick up your daughter hours ago.”

  “I don’t understand what you want.”

  “I know it’s hard for you to concentrate right now, with the drugs and the trauma and all that, but what you need to realize is that I’m a witness to what happened tonight. The medics who picked you up off the street are witnesses, and I have their names. Most important, there’s a record of your being treated at this hospital for a drug overdose. Now we’re going to talk again, after you’ve had a chance to recover, but the thing you need to understand tonight—or I should say this morning—is if you don’t do what I ask, your ex-husband is going to gain custody of your beautiful little girl. And neither of us wants that to happen.”

  Ella stood up and handed Kathy two twenties. “Take a cab home, not the subway. Your daughter needs you. But tomorrow we’ll get together and talk, right after that NA meeting you usually go to.”

  The next day, as promised, Ella met with Kathy again. The woman was angry and at the same time frightened. Ella once again explained that if Kathy didn’t cooperate she was going to let her daughter’s grandparents know what had happened, which would almost certainly result in her ex-husband being given custody of her child.

  “What do you want me to say at the trial?” she asked.

  “Just the truth, Kathy. You say you saw Toby Rosenthal sitting at the bar; no one is denying Toby was at the bar having a drink. But you didn’t see him shoot DiNunzio. That is, you saw DiNunzio get shot, and you initially thought it was Toby who shot him, but now you’re not sure.

  “You see, I’ve been to the bar, and you were seventy feet away from DiNunzio when he was shot. And it’s dark in McGill’s. Plus, you were busy getting drinks ready to take to another table, and you weren’t really looking at DiNunzio’s table. You understand, Kathy? You can verify Toby was in the bar, but you just can’t say with certainty that he was the killer.”

  “I picked him out of the lineup,” Kathy said.

  “Kathy, that was a terrible lineup. The only person who looked like Toby Rosenthal in that lineup was Toby Rosenthal. None of the other people looked the least bit like him. If a man had been in the lineup who was Toby’s height, and looked more like him, you might not have picked Toby. And the cops, they really sort of steered you into picking Toby. Didn’t they?”

  Kathy shook her head but didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t worry. Before the trial, you and I are going to practice your testimony over the phone. I’m going to pretend to be the prosecutor and I’ll ask you questions to make sure you’ve got your answers straight. We won’t meet again. But Kathy, if you tell anyone about the discussion we had today, or if you don’t do what I want, I’m going to be forced to talk to the Petermans’ lawyer about how you started doing drugs again.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “It’s nothing personal, Kathy. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Ella took an envelope out of her pocket and slid it across the table. “There’s ten thousand dollars in that envelope—I’ll bet Maddy can use some new clothes when she starts kindergarten this year. This is just my way of showing how much I appreciate you helping me.”

  Kathy hesitated, didn’t meet Ella’s eyes, then took the envelope.

  Ella rose from the table. “I’ll call you again soon. Until then take care of yourself. And Maddy.”

  27

  DeMarco had been expecting the temperature in Minneapolis to be tolerable, figuring a place that was arctic in the winter wouldn’t be too bad in the summer. Turned out he was wrong. Both days he spent there, it was over ninety degrees, and so humid he felt as if he was in an outdoor sauna. It also turned out to be a wasted trip. The lawyer who’d prosecuted the Minneapolis case brushed him off, saying she didn’t know anything that could help and was too busy to talk about a case that had been dismissed eight years ago and that the DA’s office had no intention of retrying.

  Of the six cases DeMarco was investigating, the Minneapolis case was unique. It was the only one where a witness had been killed; he had been run over while jogging. So DeMarco went to see the Minneapolis cops to ask if they had any new leads on the killer. They didn’t. They figured it was just your garden-variety hit-and-run: A guy’s jogging in the morning darkness, someone hits him by accident, then panics and flees the scene. To which DeMarco said: “Didn’t it bother you that this man was a major witness in a murder trial?” The Minneapolis cops responded with: “Hey! We don’t need some smart-mouthed New York investigator telling us how to do our job.”

  “Sarah,” DeMarco said, “get me a ticket to fucking Phoenix.”

  “You don’t have to be so crabby about it,” Sarah said.

  He couldn’t help feeling crabby. The only thing he had, after all the time he’d spent, was that a tall, dark-haired, possibly handsome guy had been involved in the cases in Las Vegas and Houston. And that maybe he was working with a woman. But that’s all he had. He felt he was wasting his time and the taxpayers’ money—not that he cared about the taxpayers’ money—and doubted that he’d have any better luck in Phoenix on a case that happened ten years ago.

  In Phoenix, in 2006, a rapacious real estate developer named Caldwell Hudson got into a fight with his wife. Hudson stomped out of his mansion, drove to a bar, and had five or six or seven shots of tequila. He left the bar, drunk as a skunk, still boiling from the fight with his spouse, then ran a stop sign and T-boned a pickup driven by a man named Alfredo Gonzalez. In the back of the pickup were the lawn mowers and weed whackers Mr. Gonzalez used to take care of the yards of rich people like Caldwell Hudson.

  Hudson and Gonzalez exchanged curses, Gonzalez gave Hudson a little shove when Hudson got in his face, so Hudson—who always went about armed for no good reason other than that he had the right to go about armed—pulled out his .45 and shot Gonzalez. When it occurred to him that he’d just killed a man, Hudson got back into his car and sped away. Hudson’s Hummer was barely damaged in the accident.

  Unfortunately for Caldwell Hudson, a married couple saw the accident and saw Hudson shoot Gonzalez. The woman got Hudson’s license plate number. Another man—a Mexican trapped inside Gonzalez’s T-boned truck—was also a witness. The only good news—from Hudson’s perspective—was that the event occurred at one in the morning and the only light near the scene of the accident was a streetlight app
roximately forty yards away. Nonetheless, all the witnesses said that Hudson, and everything he did, was clearly visible.

  The lawyer who’d prosecuted the Hudson case was a cocky bantamweight named Harry Taylor and he was now the Maricopa County attorney. When DeMarco was ushered into Taylor’s office, he found him in a tuxedo, trying to tie his bow tie. Taylor explained that he had to leave in five minutes, as he was speaking at some event that evening. But after DeMarco told him the reason he was there, Taylor gave up on the tie, punched a button on his phone, and said, “Adele, call my wife and tell her I might be a few minutes late, but not to panic.”

  “Hudson’s defense,” Taylor said, “was that somebody who looked like him stole his car, which had his gun in the glove compartment, and it was this other guy the witnesses saw kill Gonzalez. He said he’d had a fight with his wife, drank a bunch of drinks, and figured he was too drunk to drive. Plus, he said, he didn’t want to go home to his bitch of a wife, so he checked into a motel at least an hour before the shooting. His car, he said, was stolen from the motel parking lot; he’d been so drunk he’d left his keys in the ignition. And his car was later found at the airport, no gun in the glove compartment, and wiped clean of prints.”

  “How did he expect that alibi to hold up?” DeMarco said.

  Taylor laughed. “Because the clerk at the motel backed up his story. He said Hudson checked in when he said he did and paid cash, so there was no credit card record. But I wasn’t worried. I had three witnesses, and this clerk had about as much credibility as my teenage daughter does when she lies to me; I mean, he just looked like a sneaky, lying weasel. I figured no jury was going to believe him. Those twelve citizens, good and true, would conclude that rich Mr. Hudson had paid off the clerk, which I’m sure he did.