House Witness

by Mike Lawson

  “Was Dante Bello at this donnybrook in Atlantic City?” Slade asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ella said. “He wasn’t named in the papers, and I didn’t see him in the YouTube clip. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter?”

  “No.” Ella opened the manila folder again and took out another photo. “This is Carmine Fratello.”

  “He doesn’t look anything like Dominic DiNunzio,” Slade said.

  “Sure he does. He’s a heavyset, swarthy guy with short dark hair. I realize that he doesn’t look like DiNunzio’s twin brother, but on the street, on a dark, rainy night—and it was dark and raining the night DiNunzio was shot—or in a dimly lit bar, a man who has a history of getting drunk and hurting people might mistake Carmine for DiNunzio.”

  Slade started shaking his head, and Ella could see he wasn’t convinced. “Look, here’s what I have in mind for Dante,” Ella said, and laid out her plan for framing Dante Bello for Dominic DiNunzio’s murder. When she was finished, Slade said, “I suppose it could work. I have to think about how I’d present all this to a jury.”

  “It will work,” Ella said. She almost added: If you do your damn job right.

  “After I’ve taken care of the details with Carmine Fratello,” she said, “we’ll get back together and talk again. What you need to do next is hire an expert; an engineer or a college professor would be best. You have this expert make a video that shows how well you can recognize a face in a brightly lit room and from the same distance the witnesses saw Toby. Then what you do is have the expert turn the lights down to match the lighting in McGill’s. Your expert will be able to show how much less clear the face is and how easy it would be to mistake Dante Bello for Toby Rosenthal or to mistake Carmine Fratello for Dominic DiNunzio. Then what you do—because at this point the only witness that will identify Toby as the shooter is Rachel Quinn—is you have your expert demonstrate on the video how difficult it would have been for Quinn to see Toby or Dante as he ran past her table. Which is what Toby did, and Quinn couldn’t have looked at Toby’s face for even a tenth of a second.”

  “Huh,” Slade said. “I like it. I mean about the video expert. We can do a little demonstration for the jury showing two different men who are very similar in appearance running past Quinn’s table. With the right video, none of the jurors will be able to identify with certainty who they saw. I’ll also introduce testimony about people who’ve gone to prison because of faulty witness identifications, and as you suggested, testimony giving examples of other mistaken-identity killings.”

  “Good,” Ella said, but she was thinking: Do I have to do all the fucking work here?

  Slade said, “But I’m still worried about Quinn testifying. It would really be best if she didn’t.”

  “Well, like I said, arranging that might be difficult, and there’s not much time left before the trial. If you’d been able to get a longer delay …” She didn’t complete the sentence; she’d made her point. “Anyway, there’s one other thing we have to discuss tonight. I’ve been informed that the ADA is going to reinterview the witnesses before the trial.”

  “I’m not surprised by that,” Slade said. “So what’s the problem?”

  “We need to decide if we should have the barmaid and the bartender stick to their original statements when they’re reinterviewed, or say what they’re going to say at the trial. It would be best if they blindsided Porter by changing their testimony during the trial, but on the other hand, I don’t want to confuse these people, and I don’t think we want them on record too many times with the same story.”

  “What do you recommend?” Slade said.

  Ella thought for a moment and said, “I think we tell them to tell Porter what they’re going to say at the trial. I’ve been over their testimony with them several times on the phone, and I think they’ll do okay. I know the bartender will be fine. The barmaid’s a little shakier, but … well, you might as well find out now how she’s going to do in the witness chair. The other thing is, when Porter finds out that she now has only one witness that can positively identify Toby, maybe she’ll dismiss the charges against him.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Slade said. “Not with Justine Porter.”

  Slade drained the scotch in his glass and said, “You and your partner have done a good job. I still don’t like the fact that you haven’t dealt with Quinn, but overall … Well, I’m impressed. Is there more scotch in the minibar?”

  Ella knew it wouldn’t take much to get Slade to spend the night with her. She could tell that he found her attractive; most men did. If she indicated that she was in the mood for having sex with him, she was sure he’d call his wife and tell her he wouldn’t be home until the wee hours. The funny thing was, since Bill had died, she hadn’t had much interest in sex. She didn’t know why, but she just didn’t feel the urge anymore. It was as if some part of her had died with Bill. She thought that maybe she should take Slade for a little spin around the block just to see if she could jump-start her libido. But not tonight.

  “There’s more scotch, and you can stay here and have another, but I’m afraid I need to get going. But maybe next time we meet, I’ll have more time.”

  Or be in the mood.

  36

  ADA Justine Porter, with DeMarco in attendance, interviewed the Rosenthal witnesses in a small conference room down the hall from her cluttered office. The witnesses were interviewed separately and Justine started all three interviews the same way, casually saying she just wanted to go back over the statements they’d made to the police and ask the questions she was going to ask at the trial to make sure the witnesses weren’t surprised by them—and to make sure that she wasn’t surprised by their answers. Not a big deal, she said.

  Rachel Quinn smiled at DeMarco when she sat down—which pleased DeMarco—and she was finished in less than five minutes. Her responses to Justine’s questions were given without hesitation: She said that she clearly saw Toby Rosenthal shoot Dominic DiNunzio—that although Toby’s back was to her, after the shooting he ran past her table. She had no doubt—as she’d told the detectives at the lineup—that Toby was the killer.

  The bartender Jack Morris was a different story. When Justine asked him if he was sure that Toby Rosenthal had shot Dominic DiNunzio, Morris said, “Well, like I told the cops, I think it was him. I know Rosenthal was the guy I served a drink to, but I can’t be a hundred percent certain he shot that man. What I’m sayin’ is, I was busy making drinks and the guy who did the shooting was like fifty, sixty feet away and I’m just not sure I can swear it was Rosenthal, although it could have been.”

  Justine sat back in her chair as if she’d been slapped, then she launched into him, saying the last time she’d interviewed him he had been a hundred percent sure it was Toby who’d shot Dominic. Morris responded with: “Well, I don’t remember it that way. And I’m telling you pretty much what I told the cops at the lineup, that I think it was him. But at the lineup, the only guy who looked like Rosenthal was Rosenthal.”

  The last question Justine asked was: “Has anyone talked to you about the testimony you plan to give at Mr. Rosenthal’s trial?”

  “Just one guy,” Morris said.

  “Who was that?” Justine said, ready to pounce.

  “Him,” Morris said, pointing at DeMarco.

  When Morris left the interview room, Justine closed her eyes and muttered, “Fuck me.” She’d forgotten the tape recorder was still running.

  Morris had been completely relaxed when Justine questioned him. He didn’t get nervous even when Justine tried to squeeze the truth out of him. Kathy Tolliver was different. She was clearly on edge even before Justine asked a question, and her eyes kept darting about as though she was trapped in the room and looking for a way out. After Justine finished her introductory statement, Kathy said, “Is it okay to smoke in here?”

  Justine was about to tell her no, but before she could, DeMarco said, “Sure, go ahead. Nobody’s go
ing to arrest you for smoking. Now perjury, that’s a different story.”

  “What?” Kathy said.

  DeMarco half-filled a drinking glass with water from a pitcher on the table and pushed it over to her. “Use that for an ashtray.”

  Kathy lit a cigarette—then started lying, just the way Jack Morris had. She said she was sure that the guy sitting at the bar was Rosenthal, but was she sure that he was the man who shot DiNunzio? Well, it was hard to be a hundred percent sure, she said. You know, the lighting in the room being what it was, how far away Dominic’s table was from the bar, her being distracted, putting cherries and lemon slices in the drinks Morris made … Yes, she’d said at the lineup it was Rosenthal who shot Dominic, but now, you know, months later, it was just hard to be sure.

  After Kathy left, Justine sat there silently for a moment with her eyes closed. Finally, she said, “You know, if anything happens to Quinn, or if she changes her testimony, Slade will ask for a dismissal, and the judge will grant him one.”

  “Quinn isn’t going to change her testimony,” DeMarco said. “I don’t know how Slade—or Ella Fields—got to the other witnesses, but they won’t get to her.”

  Justine sat there another minute—then shouted: “Son of a bitch!

  DeMarco said, “We need a warrant to look at the witnesses’ phone and financial records—especially their phone records. Their financial records might prove they’ve been bribed. But the phone records are the main thing. If they called Fields or she’s called them, we can find her, and then go from there.”

  “What would be the basis for a warrant, DeMarco? We have no evidence that anyone has tampered with the witnesses—they just changed their testimony, which is their right. And you can’t prove that Fields or anyone else has been in contact with the witnesses. If you could at least prove she’s in New York—”

  “Hey!” DeMarco said. “It’s your damn job to come up with justification for a warrant. Quit trying to lay this whole thing on me.”

  The conversation went downhill from there, as DeMarco and Justine snarled at each other.

  But Justine was right. He had to prove Ella Fields was in New York.

  Part V

  37

  What Ella had to do next was turn a brute named Carmine Fratello into a victim.

  Carmine lived in Hell’s Kitchen, less than a mile from Ella’s place in Chelsea, and Ella decided to walk there, as it was a lovely summer day. It occurred to her as she was walking that when it came to the Rosenthal case the beauty of Manhattan was that it was so small. Not only did Carmine live within walking distance of Ella’s apartment; he was also less than a mile from McGill’s Bar & Grill in Midtown South. And Dante Bello, who lived in the East Village, was also about a mile from McGill’s—and when you thought about all these folks living so close to each other, that wasn’t at all remarkable.

  The island of Manhattan is only thirteen miles long and two and a half miles wide. It covers a mere twenty-three square miles. By comparison, Disney World in Orlando is about twice the area of Manhattan, covering forty-two square miles. Yet within Manhattan’s small area one point six million people live, meaning there are about seventy thousand residents per square mile. So everybody in Manhattan lives or works near everybody else in the borough. And what all this meant was that Carmine Fratello could have some plausible reason to be near McGill’s when Dominic DiNunzio was shot.

  Carmine’s apartment building was an older one, probably prewar, and the place was not impressive. There were black garbage bags on the landing near the front door, and the door itself looked as if someone had whipped the paint off it with a chain. Ella took a seat in a coffee shop across the street from the building and called him.

  A woman answered, saying, “Hello?” Ella assumed it was Carmine’s wife. Based on the research she’d done, she knew Carmine was married to a woman named Theresa and had three kids.

  “I need to speak to Carmine,” Ella said.

  “He’s sleeping. Who are you?”

  It was ten in the morning, which reminded her of Dante Bello, not rising until almost noon to walk his dog. Didn’t any of these people get up at a respectable hour? “A business associate,” Ella said.

  “Business associate, my ass,” Theresa Fratello said. “All Carmine’s business associates are guys.”

  The way Theresa sounded, Ella wondered if Carmine was the unfaithful type. Then she remembered the article about the brawl in Atlantic City saying that Carmine had been accompanied by his girlfriend, not his wife. “Mrs. Fratello, please put Carmine on the phone. This call could be worth a lot of money to him.”

  Theresa Fratello didn’t say anything for a moment, but being a wife and a mother, if the call was about something that could make her husband money, she couldn’t afford to let jealousy screw it up. “Hang on a minute,” she said.

  A minute turned out to be five minutes, but eventually Carmine came on the line. “Who the fuck is this?” Which, Ella recalled, was exactly the way Dante Bello had answered the phone the time she called him.

  “I’m a lady who’s willing to pay you twenty grand to tell a lie,” Ella said.

  “What?”

  “I’m in the coffee shop across the street from your building. I’ll give you ten minutes to get over here. If you’re not here in ten minutes I’ll find some other hood to do what I need.”

  “Twenty grand?” Carmine said.

  “Ten minutes, then I’m gone.”

  “What do you look like?”

  “Red hair,” Ella said.

  Five minutes later—enough time for Carmine to throw on a white wifebeater T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants and slip into flip-flops—he entered the coffee shop. He looked heavier than in the pictures Ella had seen of him in the papers. His dark hair was uncombed and he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days; his big gut strained the wifebeater and he had more hair on his arms and shoulders than some apes.

  He saw Ella immediately. There were only three other people in the coffee shop: a kid fiddling with an iPad, a man in his eighties reading the Times, and the barista, a girl in her twenties who probably had a master’s degree in some subject that was useless in regard to getting a job.

  Ella was wearing the long red wig she wore the day she met Jack Morris in Atlantic City, a green T-shirt that clung to her breasts, tight jeans, and high heels. She figured it wouldn’t hurt to seduce Carmine a bit—and when Carmine arrived at her table the first words out of his mouth were: “Whoa! You’re a babe.” Ella could see that Carmine was not a sophisticate; she just hoped he was bright enough to do what she needed.

  “Sit down,” Ella said.

  “Let me get a cup of coffee first. Can you wait that long, honey?”

  Carmine got his coffee and took a seat. “You said twenty g’s.”

  “You know Vinnie Caniglia?” Ella said, already knowing the answer.

  “Yeah, I know the fat fuck. This have to do with him?”

  “How ‘bout one of his guys, a man named Dante Bello?”

  “Yeah, I know him, too, the little shit.”

  “Well, Carmine, I’m willing to pay you twenty thousand dollars to implicate Dante Bello in a murder he didn’t commit.”

  Carmine laughed. “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “Nope. You’re going to be subpoenaed to testify at the murder trial of a man named Toby Rosenthal. You’re going to say—”

  “How do I know you’re not a cop wearing a wire?”

  “I guess you don’t, Carmine. And these days, cops don’t wear wires. Communication equipment is so sophisticated that the old guy over there reading the Times could be recording this. This button on my jeans could be a listening device. But why don’t you just listen to what I have to say and see if you think this is the sort of thing the cops would do to put a low-level hood like you in jail.”

  “Hey! Fuck you, ‘low-level.’”

  Ella reached into her purse and pulled out a white business envelope filled with twenties and hundreds. Sh
e opened the envelope and showed Carmine the money. “There’s ten thousand in the envelope. Are you interested or not?”

  “Maybe. Keep talking.”

  “As I was saying, you’re going to be subpoenaed to testify at the trial of Toby Rosenthal, who’s been accused of murdering a man named Dominic DiNunzio. You’re going to say that you frequently go to a bar named McGill’s on—”

  “Never heard of the place.”

  “Quit interrupting, Carmine; just listen. As I was saying, you’re going to say you go to McGill’s all the time. You’re also going to say, under questioning, that there’s been bad blood between you and Vinnie Caniglia for a long time. You’re going to talk about the incident in Atlantic City where you got into a fight with Vinnie and broke his nose.”

  “You know about that?” Carmine said.

  “Yes, it was in the papers. You’re going to say that Vinnie threatened to kill you.”

  “He did.”

  “And that you’ve seen Dante Bello following you.”

  “I ever saw that little shit following me, I woulda stomped him like a bug.”

  “You’re not going to say that, Carmine. You’re going to say that Dante has been following you—that he’s been stalking you—and you know he’s a vicious little prick who works for Vinnie …”

  “Well, that part’s true.”

  “… and you’d heard that he might even be a button man for Vinnie and you were afraid he might kill you.”

  “I’d never be afraid of a mutt like him.”

  Ella shook her head. “I can see this is going to take some work.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Never mind. By the way, what is the story of the bad blood between you and Vinnie? The papers didn’t say.”