House Witness
Page 19
“Then the Mexican witness, a guy who mowed lawns with Gonzalez, disappears. He was an illegal, so we told him when we interviewed him that he didn’t have to worry about being deported, but we figured he didn’t believe us and took off. Or maybe he took off because he was paid to take off.
“But I’m still not worried, dummy that I am. I have two witnesses, the man and his wife, both upstanding citizens. Then Hudson’s lawyer hands me pictures of two local guys who had prior convictions for grand theft auto, and says the cops should have investigated them for stealing Hudson’s car. Well, these two guys both looked like they could have been Hudson’s cousins, if not his brothers; it had to have taken weeks for Hudson’s lawyer to find them. And neither of them had an alibi for where he was the night Gonzalez was killed, not even some half-assed I-was-drinking-with-my-buddy alibi. Somebody had obviously paid both of them to take the heat, telling them there was no way we could make a case against them, not after we’d arrested Hudson.
“So now, thanks to a lying motel clerk and two look-alike car thieves, the stench of reasonable doubt hangs in the air, and I offer Hudson manslaughter instead of murder two if he’ll plead guilty. He tells me to go shit in my hat.
“Ten months later we finally go to trial, because Hudson’s lawyer did everything he could to delay it. I’ve never seen a lawyer come up with more reasons why a trial couldn’t start, but I can hardly wait to get the man and his wife on the stand.”
“But they changed their testimony, didn’t they?” DeMarco said, just to shorten the story, which Taylor seemed to enjoy telling.
“Yep. Got in the chair, swore on the Holy Bible, and lied like motherfuckers. It was too dark, they said, and they couldn’t be sure it was really Hudson they saw. Maybe it was one of the two car thieves but they couldn’t say which one. Nope, they just couldn’t, not in good conscience, say it was Hudson who shot Gonzalez. After Hudson walked, I told those two that I was going to nail their lying asses for perjury, and they looked scared after I got through screaming at them, but they didn’t buckle.”
Taylor paused—for the sake of drama, DeMarco assumed—before he said: “But one thing I noticed at the time was that the woman didn’t look particularly healthy. She was real skinny and sort of a pale yellow color and had brown teabags under her eyes like she hadn’t slept in a month.”
“Is this relevant?” DeMarco asked.
Taylor smiled. “Yeah. It’s relevant, because a month after the trial, the woman got a brand-spanking-new liver. She had been on the transplant list for over a year and would have died soon if that liver donor hadn’t miraculously come along. I never even knew she was sick, but someone smarter than me found out.”
“So who did it? Who orchestrated this thing?”
“I have no idea. Hudson’s lawyer was obviously involved, but I suspect that he had help.”
“You didn’t come across anyone who met with the witnesses or—”
“I’m telling you, DeMarco, I have no idea who got to the witnesses. And I looked hard to find whoever it was. But you could be in luck.”
“How’s that?”
“Hudson’s lawyer was a guy named Foreman, like the boxer. He works in a firm with two dozen other shysters and about three years ago, the firm cleaned house and got rid of all the deadwood. One of the guys they booted out was a senior partner named Katz who’d worked at the firm for twenty years. I know he hates Foreman’s guts, and I suspect he’d be happy to dish out all the dirt he can about his old firm.”
Taylor punched the button on his phone again and said, “Adele, come in here and help me tie this damn tie.”
28
The next day DeMarco called Ben Katz and asked to see him regarding a case his old law firm had handled in 2006. Katz said he wasn’t interested in talking; it was ten in the morning and he sounded as if he had just woken up. DeMarco, figuring this wasn’t a time for subtlety, said, “I’m trying to find a way to screw your old partner, Foreman.”
Well, come on over, Katz said.
Katz was a red-faced, overweight man with wispy blond hair and a boozer’s nose. He was wearing Bermuda shorts, flip-flops, and a lime green T-shirt stretched over his big gut. He rented a small apartment in a large apartment complex with a pool the size of a bathtub. It was the kind of place where young people without much money would live, not a former partner in a prestigious law firm.
Katz asked if DeMarco wanted a screwdriver, a little eye-opener to begin the day. Sure, DeMarco said. He wasn’t going to drink it; he just didn’t want Katz thinking he disapproved of a guy who drank his breakfast. He also wondered if Katz’s drinking was one of the reasons he was booted out of his firm.
He told Katz he wanted to talk about the Hudson case and about the possibility that Foreman could have hired someone to tamper with the witnesses—and then had to listen to Katz rant about Foreman and how he himself was now an ambulance chaser working out of his apartment because of that bastard. Finally, he got to Hudson.
“I remember the case,” Katz said. “Foreman kept bragging about bagging a client like Caldwell Hudson and how he was going to bill him at three times his normal rate; he knew Hudson was so damn rich, he wouldn’t care. And right after the trial, Foreman bought a Porsche Boxster. But I’d figured he was going to lose. I’d read what the papers said about the witnesses, and I thought the best Foreman would be able to do was get Hudson a plea deal for manslaughter.
“Anyway, one night I run into Foreman in a bar. We were never really friends, but he waves me over like I’m a long-lost buddy and offers to buy me a drink. I say something like, ‘You’re in a good mood tonight,’ and he says, ‘Why wouldn’t I be. I got the world by the balls.’ So I ask him, since I knew Hudson was his biggest case at the time, if he’s managed to get a decent plea for him, and that’s why he’s celebrating. Well, he says, ‘I ain’t takin’ no stinking plea bargain. My client’s an innocent man.’ I say, ‘Come on, who are you kidding, you’re never gonna get him off.’ Well, he says …”
Katz polished off his screwdriver before completing the sentence, then looked into the glass as though he couldn’t figure out where all the booze had gone. “I’m gonna get another drink. You want one?”
DeMarco said no thanks, he was still working on the one he had. Then he had to wait as Katz took his time mixing another drink, took a gulp, then went to the bathroom, leaving the door open so DeMarco could hear him piss. Finally, he came back to the living room.
“Foreman,” Katz said, “is the kind of guy who always wants you to think he’s got a secret, that he knows something you don’t, but he’ll never tell you exactly what he knows. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” DeMarco said.
“So when I asked him how he expected to get Hudson off, he gives me a wink and says, ‘I brought in the pros from Dover.’”
“The pros from Dover? Who was he talking about?”
“I don’t know, and of course he wouldn’t tell me.”
“But he said ‘pros,’ plural?”
“Yeah, acting all cagey and sly, like the asshole he is, but that’s all he said. So maybe he did hire someone to help with the witnesses, but that’s all I know and I have no idea who it might have been.”
“Well, hell,” DeMarco said. He stood up, about to say, Thanks for the drink and taking the time to talk to me, when Katz said, “But I know someone who might be able to help you.”
Elinore Rodgers lived in a small stucco house in a neighborhood that appeared to be trending downward. The yard was landscaped in typical Arizona fashion: gravel and cactus plants, no trees or grass. Elinore answered the door wearing a powder blue jogging suit, but even dressed casually she looked elegant. She was tall and graceful and her hair was the color of pale champagne. DeMarco thought she looked like the ideal executive secretary, the kind you might find sitting outside the Oval Office. She had been Foreman’s secretary before Foreman fired her.
DeMarco explained why he was in Phoenix and recounted for her
what Katz had told him about Foreman’s bringing in “the pros from Dover” on the Hudson case. He said he was hoping that she might be able him identify the pros.
“They fired Katz,” Elinore said, “because he was a drunk. But they also fired about ten other people, good people, who the senior partners felt weren’t pulling their weight. I’d been with the firm for twenty-five years and I knew more about the law than ninety percent of the lawyers who worked there, including Wayne Foreman. But I wasn’t versatile when it came to all the electronic computer stuff, even though I took classes on my own time and tried to learn.”
Elinore looked away and sniffed, and DeMarco thought she was going to cry. But she didn’t. She said, “I was fifty-seven years old and didn’t have a chance of getting a job in another law firm, but Foreman didn’t care. He tossed me out, and eventually I had to sell the beautiful home I’d lived in for twenty years and move into this god-awful place. But if you’d come to me even a year ago, Mr. DeMarco, while I was still trying to find a job, I wouldn’t have talked to you. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone in this town to think I was a person who couldn’t be trusted with a law firm’s secrets, even a law firm that had treated me so badly. But after three years of job hunting … Well, fuck ’em.”
DeMarco could tell that Elinore Rodgers didn’t normally—or ever—say things like “fuck ’em,” but she’d clearly reached her limit.
“But about the Hudson case,” DeMarco said to get her back on track. “Can you remember …”
“Five or six months before the Hudson trial, a man came to see Foreman,” Elinore said.
“A tall, dark-haired, good-looking guy?” DeMarco said.
“I don’t remember him being good-looking or tall. In fact, I can’t really remember anything distinctive about him other than he had a ponytail and was wearing scrubs.”
“Scrubs?”
“Hospital scrubs, like doctors wear during surgery, although I doubt this person was a surgeon. He was probably an aide who pushed patients around in wheelchairs. When he came to the office and asked to see Foreman, I asked his name but he wouldn’t tell me. He said that Foreman was expecting him. I called Foreman, described the man, and Foreman said to send him right in.
“Two minutes later he leaves and Foreman tells me to come into his office. When I walked in, he was writing something on an index card—it turned out to be an address—and he said he wanted me to deliver an envelope to a house. He didn’t want to wait for a messenger service or FedEx or anything like that; he wanted me to deliver it personally, and right away. But when he reached for the envelope he knocked his coffee cup over and spilled coffee all over the envelope and everything else on his desk. I started to get some paper towels to wipe off his desk, but he told me to get going.
“Well, I decided to put whatever was in the envelope into another envelope. It seemed unprofessional delivering something with a big coffee stain on it to anyone associated with the firm. So I opened the envelope—I knew Foreman wouldn’t mind, since I handled all his correspondence—and saw it contained medical records.”
“Medical records?” DeMarco asked. “Whose records were they?”
“I don’t know—there was no name on them. Anyway, I delivered them to a house on Canyon Drive. After Hudson was acquitted, the DA made accusations about Foreman somehow engineering a liver transplant for a witness in return for her falsifying her testimony, which, of course, Foreman denied. He told the DA, ‘How would I know anything about a witness’s medical condition, medical records being confidential.’ After he fired me, I thought about talking to someone in the bar association but never did. At the time, I still thought some law office might hire me.”
“Who was the envelope addressed to?” DeMarco asked.
“It wasn’t. It was blank.”
“So who did you give it to?” Please, please don’t tell me you shoved it into the mail slot.
“A young woman,” Elinore said. “I remember she was very pretty. I told her I was delivering something for Foreman and she said she’d been expecting it. She took the envelope, thanked me, and I left.”
“So you never got her name?”
“No.”
“Did you see a man at the house, a dark-haired, handsome guy?”
“No, just the woman who came to the door.”
“What did she look like, other than being pretty?”
“Oh, tall, good figure, short blond hair. That’s all I can remember.”
“Do you remember the address of the house?”
“No, but I could find it again. It was a spectacular house, and, like I said, on Canyon Drive.”
An hour later—after DeMarco treated Elinore to lunch—they went for a drive. Elinore recognized the house as soon as she saw it. It was the last house on the street, sitting on a hill overlooking the city. Tall wrought-iron gates barred the driveway. DeMarco wrote down the address.
After DeMarco dropped Elinore off back at her sad little house, he called Sarah. For the first time since leaving New York, he finally had a solid lead. He told Sarah to find out who was living in the Canyon Drive house before the Hudson trial.
The intern was a bloodhound with a keyboard. She called him back the following day and said the house was owned by a Chinese investor who lived full-time in China.
“Aw, shit!” DeMarco said. Couldn’t anything be easy?
“Calm down,” Sarah said. “The Chinese guy rents the place out, and he uses a property management company there in Phoenix. It rents for twelve grand a month, by the way.”
“Call the property management company,” DeMarco said. “Say you work for the Manhattan DA and your boss needs to talk to whoever rented that house in 2006. Threaten them with subpoenas and warrants and lawsuits and anything else you can make up that sounds threatening.”
“I can do that,” Sarah said. DeMarco really liked this kid.
While waiting to hear back from Sarah, DeMarco decided to go for a swim in the motel pool, since it was about 110. How could people live in this part of the country in the summer?
Paddling around in the pool—the water hot enough to boil an egg—he thought about how he could find the guy who had delivered the medical records to Foreman. All he knew about the man was that he had a ponytail and probably worked in a hospital, and eventually concluded it was going to be impossible to find him. He then wondered if there was some way he could squeeze Foreman, although lawyers were notoriously hard to squeeze; squeezing a lawyer was like trying to squeeze Jell-O. Maybe if he told Foreman that Elinore Rodgers was willing to testify that she knew he’d been given copies of medical records …
His phone, which was on a poolside lounge chair, started ringing. He paddled over to the side of the pool, clambered out, banging his bad leg, but reached the phone before it went to voice mail. It was Sarah.
“I talked to the property management company. A lady there named Judy Gleeson will show you the rental records if you can prove you work for the Manhattan DA.”
“Text me the address,” DeMarco said. “Then go out and buy yourself a milk shake or something, and put it on my expense account.”
“A milk shake? I was thinking more along the lines of an appletini.”
“What’s that?” DeMarco said.
“A martini made with an apple liqueur.”
“Are you old enough to drink?”
“Yes. I’m over twenty-one. And I’m not a virgin, either.”
“Aw, geez, you didn’t have to tell me that.”
Judy Gleeson turned out to be a pleasant, talkative woman about DeMarco’s age. Her office was in a shopping mall in Phoenix, and the windows were covered with photos of homes the company rented as well as those it was trying to sell.
DeMarco showed her the badge identifying him as a special investigator for the Manhattan DA. “Well, okay,” Judy said, barely glancing at his credentials before handing them back. “The young lady in New York who spoke to me said this concerned a murder. This is so exciting!”
Judy flipped open a buff-colored file folder that was sitting on her desk. “His name is William S. Cantwell. After your assistant called, I looked at the file, and I remembered him. He was very handsome and very nice. Polite, no trouble at all—not one of those tenants always calling to complain about something.”
“Do you know if Cantwell was his real name?”
“Well, I guess I don’t know for sure, but he showed me a driver’s license with his picture on it. And we don’t rent out homes like Mr. Wu’s to anybody who walks in off the street. We’re talking about a two-and-a-half-million-dollar home. So we require references and do credit checks. I also have Mr. Cantwell’s social security number, a copy of his driver’s license, the references he provided, and the policy number for his renter’s insurance.”
DeMarco almost rose from his chair, raised his hand toward the heavens, and shouted, Thank you, Jesus!
“Can I see the copy of his driver’s license?” DeMarco asked.
“Sure,” Judy said, passing an eight-by-eleven piece of paper over to him.
The copy of the driver’s license showed a man with a full head of dark hair, looking relaxed as he smiled into the camera. DeMarco had to admit he was a good-looking guy. The license was from Washington State and had a Seattle address on it; the expiration date was 2009. Cantwell’s date of birth was also on the license. He’d been born in 1966, which meant he’d currently be fifty years old, and was forty at the time of the Hudson case.