House Witness

by Mike Lawson

  Carmine sipped his coffee as he thought about what to say. “Ten, fifteen years ago Vinnie and me both worked for a guy named Frank Vitale. Frank’s dead now, but Vinnie ended up getting the bar Frank used to own. Anyway, Vinnie got busted for killing a guy over in Jersey and it looked like he was going to go away for a long time. So, Vinnie claimed that I, uh, allegedly killed a guy in a warehouse in Red Hook when Vinnie and I were, uh, allegedly robbing the place. I mean, I couldn’t believe he would do that to me. In the end no one went to jail, but no thanks to fuckin’ Vinnie.”

  “Did you attempt to retaliate against Vinnie for implicating you?”

  “I would have killed him, but Frank wouldn’t let me. Then, you know, time goes by and it’s not worth it. But we never worked together again.”

  Ella thought about the story and concluded it didn’t really matter other than in establishing that the papers were right about Vinnie and Carmine having a reason to dislike each other.

  “Okay,” Ella said. “There’s one other thing.” She took out of her pocket a glossy page that had come from a Macy’s catalog and showed it to Carmine. On the page she’d circled a London Fog trench coat. “Send your wife to Macy’s and have her buy that trench coat for you. That exact trench coat. I want her to buy it, not you, and tell her to use cash. After she buys it, tell her to drag it on the ground, spill a couple of drinks on it, wash it half a dozen times. You know, do whatever she has to do to make it look like you’ve owned the coat for a while. And that’s basically it. That’s all you have to do to make twenty thousand.”

  Carmine ran his fingernails over his cheek, the sound like a bastard file being dragged across a pipe as he scraped his beard. “I say I’ve had a beef with Vinnie, that I saw fuckin’ Dante following me, say I was worried he might kill me, and I own a trench coat. That’s it? For twenty g’s?”

  “Yep,” Ella said. “But we’re going to practice your testimony several times before the trial.”

  “And Dante ends up in jail for murder?” Carmine said.

  “I doubt it,” Ella said. “We—the people I work for—don’t care about what happens to Dante. If he’s arrested for murder and convicted, well, that’s okay, but that’s not our objective. Our objective is only to show that Dante might have seen you go into McGill’s and tried to kill you. Do you understand?”

  “Not really.”

  Ella sighed. Did everything have to be so hard? “Like I said, we’re going to talk several times before the trial and you’re going to practice your testimony with me. Now, can you think of a reason why you might go to McGill’s frequently?”

  “No. I told you, I don’t even know where it is. I wanna drink, I go to my usual places around here.”

  Ella pulled out a tourist map of Manhattan and showed him the location of McGill’s. “Do you know anyone who lives near the bar?”

  Carmine squinted at the map. “Yeah,” he said. “I got a cousin who lives about four blocks from there.”

  “Do you know this cousin well?”

  “He works for me. And his mother, my aunt Lucy, she lives about two blocks from him. Oh, and there’s a restaurant here,” Carmine said, stabbing at the map. “I go there with my wife a couple of times a year because she knows the gal who owns it. She went to high school with her.”

  And Ella thought: the little island of Manhattan. She loved it.

  Then Carmine grinned. “There’s someone else who lives a few blocks from there, too.”

  “Who’s that?” Ella said, seeing that Carmine was dying for her to ask.

  “My girlfriend.”

  “Now that would be perfect,” Ella said. “That’s the reason you go to McGill’s. You go to see your girlfriend a couple of times a week, and you stop off in McGill’s before or after you see her.”

  “I don’t know,” Carmine said. “Theresa wouldn’t be too happy to hear me talking about Nadine. I mean, she knows I got a girlfriend, but as long as I don’t rub her nose in it …”

  “For twenty grand,” Ella said, “your wife can live with the humiliation. And she doesn’t have to be in court when you testify. I want to go with the girlfriend story. Now, show me on the map exactly where she lives.”

  Carmine did.

  “Like I said, Carmine, we’re going to practice your testimony, but the main thing you need to remember is you go see your girlfriend all the time, and when you do, you drop by McGill’s. You also know that Dante Bello has been stalking you, and most likely because you broke Vinnie’s nose in Atlantic City. Last, you have a London Fog trench coat that you wear when it rains. Are we on the same page here, Carmine?”

  “You know, maybe this is such a big deal, it’s worth more than twenty. I mean, I don’t know how much time I could get for perjury, but—”

  “Don’t get greedy, Carmine. You probably can’t remember the last time you made twenty thousand dollars for a single job. Now, I’m going to give you half the money today. I realize you could stiff me and take the money and not testify, but if you do that you won’t get the other ten.”

  “Hey, I don’t stiff people, honey, and it pisses me off you’d say that. I give my word … Well, it’s my word.”

  Yeah, right, like a criminal’s word was worth Carmine’s considerable weight in gold.

  “There’s one other thing I need you to do. The trial starts in about three weeks, so until then I want you to stop by McGill’s at least twice a week. And when you go there, chat with the bartender. His name is Jack. Do you understand? Jack is going to testify that you go to McGill’s all the time.”

  “Okay. How do I get ahold of you?” Carmine asked.

  “You don’t. Give me your cell phone number.”

  Ella left a puzzled but pleased Carmine Fratello sitting in the coffee shop, counting the money she’d given him. Tomorrow, she’d call Jack Morris and tell him that if he was asked during cross-examination if a man named Carmine Fratello was a frequent patron at McGill’s, he would say yes. She’d also mail Jack a couple of grand for him to lose in Atlantic City to keep him content.

  38

  Ella needed to meet with David Slade again, but before she did, she wanted to take one last look at Rachel Quinn. At five, she dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes and walked to Rachel Quinn’s office on Water Street. She didn’t bother to disguise herself in any way, as she wasn’t planning to approach Quinn. She was waiting when Quinn left her building, and when Quinn caught a cab, Ella caught one too and followed her back to her apartment. Half an hour later, Quinn left her apartment, did the poop-in-the-bag thing with her dog, walked a mile to the ice cream place, bought a cone, and returned home.

  Ella thought about it for a long time, and came to a decision: David Slade was just going to have to live with Rachel Quinn as a witness.

  Ella made a reservation at the Hilton in Midtown and texted Slade. Meet me at the Hilton tomorrow at noon.

  Slade arrived dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. The first thing he said was, “I’m supposed to be at my son’s baseball game. My wife is not happy.”

  Ella had forgotten it was Saturday, but Slade’s domestic problems were the least of her concerns.

  “Okay,” she said. “This is the way Toby’s trial is going to go. The prosecutor will call the detectives to the stand and maybe a crime scene tech, and she’ll ask if they can prove Toby was in the bar. They’ll say yes, that they have eyewitnesses who can put him there, as well as his fingerprints. On cross, you’ll ask if they found any physical evidence that Toby murdered Dominic DiNunzio, like a gun or gunshot residue or a shell casing with Toby’s fingerprints on it. They’ll say no. Then you’ll ask—you’ll ask this as many times as you can—if they found any motive for Toby to kill Dominic.

  “The prosecutor will then call the witnesses. She’ll ask Jack Morris if Toby was in the bar that evening. He’ll say that Toby was indeed in the bar—something you’re willing to concede—but he’ll also say that he can’t be certain it was Toby who shot Dominic. On cross you’ll sh
ow Morris—and the jury—a photo of Carmine Fratello. You’ll ask Morris if Carmine is a frequent customer at McGill’s, and Morris will say yes.”

  Slade said, “The prosecutor will object to me showing him Carmine’s picture. She’ll say it’s irrelevant.”

  “That’s your problem. Figure out how to deal with the objection. Next the prosecutor will call the barmaid, and her testimony and your cross-examination of her will be identical to the bartender’s.

  “Last, the prosecutor will call Rachel Quinn, and she’ll say she saw Toby shoot Dominic, then run past her table. She’ll say she’s positive it was him. On cross, you’ll make her admit that whoever killed Dominic had his back to her when the shooting happened and that she saw the killer only when he ran past her table. You’ll ask her how she can be so sure that the man she saw running in the dim light of the bar was Toby. You’ll hammer the word ‘run.’

  “Then it’s your turn. You present your experts, who’ll talk about men being sent to jail because eyewitnesses made mistakes. You show pictures of men who’ve been mistakenly convicted, and how the innocent man doesn’t look anything like the man who committed the crime. Your video expert will show his video proving how difficult it would have been for Rachel Quinn to accurately identify Toby as he went sprinting past her.

  “Next you call one of the detectives back to the stand. You ask the detective to confirm that the night Dominic was killed it was raining hard, that at approximately seven-thirty p.m. in March it was dark out, and that Dominic was wearing a trench coat and a hat. You show the jury pictures of dead Dominic sitting there at the table, still wearing his trench coat and his hat.

  “Then you call Carmine Fratello to the stand. Carmine will tell about the bad blood between him and Vinnie Caniglia, how Carmine broke Vinnie’s nose in Atlantic City, and how Vinnie threated to kill him and that Dante Bello has been stalking him. You then ask Carmine if he owns a trench coat like Dominic’s, and he says no.”

  “No?” Slade said.

  “That’s right. Dominic had a Burberry trench coat with a belt. The trench coat owned by Carmine is the same tan color and the same length as Dominic’s, but it’s made by London Fog and doesn’t have a belt. You don’t want the trench coats to be identical. That might smell to the jury. But they don’t have to be identical. On the dark, rainy night Dominic was killed, he was wearing a tan trench coat similar to the one Carmine has. And Dominic was wearing a hat, making it even harder for Dante Bello to be sure it was Carmine Fratello.

  “At any rate,” Ella continued, “what happened that night was Dante saw a man he thought was Carmine enter McGill’s. He knew Carmine went to McGill’s all the time, as the bartender testified. So Dante thought it was Carmine who went into McGill’s, then Dante—this criminal, this violent moron who gets drunk and beats people up—decided to kill Carmine. It took him a while to screw up his courage, but he eventually walks into McGill’s—into this dimly lit bar—and up to a man sitting there wearing a trench coat and a hat, shoots him three times, then runs out of the bar.

  “Finally, you call Dante to the stand so everyone can see how much he looks like Toby. You put their pictures side by side so the jury can see them, then you have your video expert show their pictures again side by side in the exact lighting that was in the bar that night. You ask Dante about the bad blood between Vinnie and Carmine. You ask Dante if he shot Dominic. Dante will deny it, of course, but who’s going to believe a hood like Dante? If Dante is asked to prove where he was that night, he’s going to say—I know, because I already asked him—that he was at a Knicks game with two of his fellow hoods. But nobody is going to buy that story.”

  Slade walked over to a window and looked out, mulling over everything Ella had told him. He could see the top of the Manhattan Bridge from where he stood. Finally he said, “It could work, but I still don’t want Quinn testifying.”

  “She’s going to testify, David; get on board with that. I’ve given you enough that a lawyer with your experience and ability can create reasonable doubt when it comes to Toby. They have only one witness who was sure it was Toby. One! You have two witnesses who say they can’t be sure, you have a defendant with no motive, and you have a credible alternative suspect who looks like Toby. And Dante Bello, unlike Toby Rosenthal, is a man with a criminal history.”

  “But …”

  “David, I’m not going to kill Rachel Quinn, and the only way I can ensure she won’t testify is if I kill her. I already took a significant risk with Esther Behrman, so you’re just going to have to do your job and convince a jury that Dante Bello shot Dominic DiNunzio.”

  “I want to remind you,” Slade said, “that our deal was you get the second half of your fee only if I’m satisfied you’ve given me an effective defense. Well, I’m not satisfied.”

  Ella had hoped it wouldn’t come to this—but there was no way that Slade, or Henry Rosenthal, wasn’t going to pay her the other million she was owed. She’d worked too hard, and she’d given Quinn a brilliant defense. A first-year law student could create reasonable doubt when it came to Toby Rosenthal.

  “David, you are going to pay me. I told you when this all started that my partner and I are not the kind of people you want to renege on. And these witnesses who are now prepared to testify for Toby? Well, I can always make them change their minds.”

  Slade didn’t say anything. He just looked at her, the look of a stubborn man used to getting his way—and not one who liked to be threatened.

  Tough shit. Ella left him sitting there in the hotel room glowering.

  And it was a shame. Ella actually had been in the mood.

  39

  DeMarco woke up wanting to kick something. He needed proof that Ella Fields was in New York and had had contact with the witnesses. If he could find proof, then maybe Justine would be able to get the warrants he wanted so that he could look at the witnesses’ phone and financial records. He called Sarah to see if she’d had any luck with the property management companies, knowing that if she had, she would have called him. He just called her because he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  “Sorry,” Sarah said.

  He stopped to have breakfast at a greasy spoon near his hotel, and picked up a newspaper that was lying on the table next to his. One of the stories on the front page, given almost as much space as the latest news from the Middle East, was about a movie star who’d committed suicide. The guy was handsome, only thirty years old, made four or five million on every picture—and he goes and kills himself. What could he have possibly been depressed about? The article said he died at the home of his girlfriend, a gorgeous actress, who lived in Malibu.

  And something clicked.

  Why did Bill Cantwell die in Santa Barbara, California? Cantwell had been a gypsy, living all over the country. He’d been raised in Colorado, practiced law briefly in San Antonio, married in Hawaii, and lived in at least six different cities that DeMarco knew about. So why did he die in Santa Barbara? He called Sarah back and asked her to see if she could figure out what was special about Santa Barbara.

  “His mother lives there,” Sarah told him forty-five minutes later.

  “His mother?”

  “Yeah. Maybe she has some idea where Ella Fields is. I mean, if Cantwell was married to Fields at the time of his death …”

  “Email me everything you’ve got on Cantwell’s mom and get me a ticket to California. And remind me to tell Justine to give you a raise.”

  “I’m an intern, remember. How can I get a raise?”

  “Well, I’m going to make her give you something.”

  Janet Kerns, Bill Cantwell’s mother, lived in a large and stunning Spanish-style home in Santa Barbara. The house, surrounded by a rose-colored stucco wall, had a view of the Pacific Ocean and the Channel Islands. Before visiting Janet, DeMarco had learned that she had been widowed once and divorced three times, “Kerns” being the name of her fourth husband. She was in her late sixties, slim and fit, and amazingly well pre
served. DeMarco didn’t know how much of Janet’s appearance could be attributed to good genes and exercise and how much credit went to a California surgeon, but whatever the case, Janet Kerns was a lovely woman.

  DeMarco never even got through the door. When he knocked and Janet asked what he wanted, he said, “Mrs. Kerns, my name’s DeMarco. I’m an investigator for the Manhattan DA and I need to ask you—”

  “Manhattan?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” DeMarco said, and presented his credentials. “My boss sent me out here to ask about your son and—”

  “My son’s dead.”

  When she said this, he could tell her son’s death was still a painful memory, and always would be.

  “I realize that, Mrs. Kerns, and I was sorry to hear that he’d passed away, but—”

  “I’m not ‘Mrs.’ Kerns.”

  “Fine,” DeMarco said. The damn woman wouldn’t let him get two words out without interrupting. “As I started to say, Ms. Kerns, I want to ask about your son’s wife, a woman named Ella Fields.”

  “Ella?” the woman said.

  “Yes,” DeMarco said. “Now may I come in?”

  “Why are you asking about Ella?” she said, still blocking the doorway.

  “It relates to a murder that occurred in New York and—”

  “Are you saying Ella murdered someone?”

  “No, ma’am. I know for a fact that she wasn’t involved in the murder. But she may have information related to what happened, and I need to speak to her.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” DeMarco said. “Now can you tell me—”

  “If you can’t tell me why you’re asking about Ella, I’m not going to tell you anything.”

  “Ms. Kerns, the Manhattan district attorney can subpoena you and force you to fly to New York for a deposition, where you’ll be speaking under oath.”