Sly Fox

by Jeanine Pirro

  Obviously, O’Brien and Wilbur were not going to become pals.

  “Any idea who took a shot at you?” O’Brien asked.

  “I think it was Juan Lopez.”

  “The guy from Yonkers who likes to cut names in his wife’s belly?”

  “And also his own belly.”

  “I’ll station an officer outside your house tonight.”

  “Don’t bother. I’m not spending the night here. I’m going to my mom’s.”

  “How about the pig?” O’Brien asked. He glanced at Wilbur and went “Oink, oink.”

  Wilbur grunted and walked past O’Brien to his bed for a nap.

  “You need to get yourself a handgun,” O’Brien said. “I should have insisted on it after Hitchins murdered Mary Margaret.”

  “How do you know I don’t already have one?”

  “If you had one, you’d still be carrying it or it would be on your coffee table or in the kitchen. I saw a knife next to the sink. That’s what you grabbed, am I right?”

  “Yes, Detective.”

  “Let me ask you something, Counselor. You ever cut up a chicken?”

  “Of course I’ve cut chicken.”

  “Then you know what it’s like to cut through meat and bones. You really think you got it in you to stick a knife into a man and feel that blade cutting through the flesh and muscles, ripping into his organs and hitting his bones? Knives are personal.”

  The thought of it turned my stomach.

  “We’re going to get you a gun,” he continued. “Pulling a trigger is easy. Besides, chances are Juan Lopez would have taken that knife away from you and carved something on your belly.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was trying to scare me or was just being honest.

  “Get your stuff together,” O’Brien said. “I’ll have an officer drive you over to your mom’s.”

  “What about my car?”

  “Leave it. That way if the shooter comes back, he’ll think you’re here. I’m going to have an officer watch your place. Besides, someone needs to guard that pig.”

  He chuckled but I don’t think Wilbur found it funny.

  I dumped most of my salad into Wilbur’s bowl and took it and him out to his pen while O’Brien stood watch. After collecting a few personal items, I was ready to leave for Mom’s. The patrolman driving me had gone only a few blocks when the radio in his squad car cracked with O’Brien’s voice.

  “Change of plans. I just got a call from Yonkers. I need you to drive Miss Fox to this address. I’m heading there now.” He gave the officer instructions. We took the Cross Westchester Expressway to the Saw Mill Parkway and didn’t speak the entire twenty-five-minute drive. I spied O’Brien’s unmarked car parked next to two Yonkers cop cars on Hamilton Avenue. An officer from the Yonkers fourth precinct was standing guard on the front stoop of a row house that had been converted into apartments. He yelled inside an open door of a ground-level apartment to O’Brien, announcing my arrival.

  “You found Maya?” I asked, rushing to the entrance.

  “Yes, but there’s no sign of Juan.”

  O’Brien was standing in the doorway, blocking my path.

  “Well, let me talk to her,” I said impatiently.

  “Dani. She’s dead. He killed her.”

  “She’s dead?”

  I felt like I was caught in a recurring nightmare, only this time the victim was not named Mary Margaret. How could this be happening again?

  “I want to see her.”

  O’Brien bit down hard on the toothpick in his mouth. “Not sure that’s a great idea, Counselor.”

  “Where’s her body?”

  O’Brien stepped out of my way so I could enter the tiny apartment’s living room, where a Yonkers officer was writing on a notepad.

  “The woman,” I said, “where is she?” He glanced at me and then at O’Brien, who said, “It’s okay, she’s a lady assistant D.A.”

  The Yonkers officer pointed toward the kitchen.

  O’Brien said, “Dani, you really don’t need to see this. He stuffed her in the oven.”

  I froze.

  “He shot her first,” O’Brien said, walking up next to me. “So she probably was dead when he turned it on.” I knew he was sugarcoating it. Something in my gut told me that Juan had put her in that oven while she was still alive. He wanted to punish her, to torture her for disobeying him.

  I walked into the efficiency kitchen and was hit by a putrid smell that caused me to gag. The oven door was open. Thankfully she was not inside. The medical examiner had put Maya’s body on a stretcher under a white cover. The outline showed that she was still in a cramped position.

  “I want to look at her. I want to see what that bastard did.”

  “Why?” O’Brien asked.

  “Because if I ever have a moment of weakness when I might feel sorry for one of these sick sons of bitches, I want to remember Maya and what she looked like.”

  O’Brien didn’t react. “Show me!” I said.

  He lifted the sheet.

  What I saw turned my stomach, but I refused to look away from the burned woman curled in front of me. Her entire face was burned. Most of her body had been in the open oven for several hours.

  “You need to go to your mom’s now,” O’Brien said. We walked outside together. I took a deep breath but I couldn’t get the smell of burned flesh out of my nostrils. I wondered if I ever would. All I could think about was the last time that I had seen Maya. She’d had such a desperate look in her eyes.

  I asked O’Brien: “Do you ever get used to this?”

  “No—and you better not. You just put it in a spot of your mind that you don’t visit often. But you feed off it. Feed off the anger. Our job is to protect the sheep—remember?”

  “I failed her. Just like I failed Mary Margaret. They were counting on me and I let them down and they died.”

  “Counselor,” O’Brien said in a gruff voice that surprised me, “you need to get over yourself. Do you really think that you’re responsible for what Rudy Hitchins and Juan Lopez did to these women? Do you think that this sort of brutality hasn’t been going on for years? The only one responsible is the bastard who did the killing.”

  I looked at him and said softly, “Thanks for being here.”

  “That’s what partners are for,” he said.

  I went directly to Whitaker’s office when I got to work and told Miss Potts that I needed to see him immediately. O’Brien had already tipped him off about Maya Lopez, so I was ushered into his office without having to wait.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, genuinely concerned. “Do you need a few days off?”

  “No. I want to catch that bastard and being in our office is probably safer than being on the street.”

  “Okay, I agree.”

  “We need protection in our unit—security like you have here at the courthouse. We can’t risk having an abusive husband simply walk in and attack someone.”

  “I’ll talk to the court officers.”

  “No, I don’t want court officers. We need an investigator assigned to our unit, someone who can arrest a Juan Lopez on the spot when he carves his name into his wife’s belly.”

  “You want a White Plains cop assigned to your unit?”

  “I don’t want any cop. I want O’Brien.”

  “What do you have against O’Brien?” he said, but I didn’t laugh and he realized this wasn’t the time for jokes.

  “I need a detective,” I said, “who takes what we do seriously. Who doesn’t think we’re a joke!”

  “I know you’ve been through a lot, but do you really think a veteran homicide detective who’s been on the force for decades is going to voluntarily transfer from the White Plains P.D. into the Domestic Violence Unit?”

  “Yes, if you hire him as a D.A. investigator, he will. We’ll get an experienced cop who understands what we do.”

  “I’ll talk to the chief.”

  “Do it today,” I said in a harsh tone t
hat surprised even me.

  26

  I wanted to escape from white plains and the ghosts of Mary Margaret and Maya Lopez. I needed a break, and although it wasn’t one of our scheduled weekends to visit each other, I decided on Friday afternoon to drive to Albany to pay a surprise visit to Bob. I wanted him to wrap his arms around me and tell me that I wasn’t to blame for all the bad happenings in my life. I wanted him to tell me that everything would be fine—the police would arrest Juan Lopez and I would prosecute him. I wanted him to tell me that all the pain and guilt I was feeling would go away.

  I also felt as if I had been neglecting Bob. The calls between us had become rushed. He was busy studying. I was busy working. The events in our lives had taken priority. I was scheduled to work Saturday and Sunday as the duty assistant district attorney “on call” for that weekend, but after Maya’s murder, Steinberg took me off the rotation.

  The drive to Albany seemed longer than usual simply because I couldn’t wait to get there. When I finally reached the parking lot at Bob’s apartment, I felt a tremendous sense of relief. It was a few minutes after nine p.m. A young couple was walking out the door, so instead of buzzing Bob and asking him to come open the building’s secure front door, I ducked by them and headed up the stairs to his apartment. I was grinning widely when I knocked on his door.

  But no one answered. I assumed he was with his study group. Fortunately, I had a key. I decided to go inside and make myself useful by cooking spaghetti for us with olive oil and garlic. Bob always kept boxes of pasta in his cupboards. I’d select a nice wine, too.

  I stepped inside and heard music coming from the living room. “Bob?” I called. No one replied. I entered the living room and noticed that a delivery box with half a pizza still in it was on the coffee table, along with two wineglasses and several medical books and study papers. Why were there two glasses? My heart began pounding hard when I heard a sound coming from his bedroom. I walked down a short hallway and opened the door. That’s when time stopped.

  Bob was lying naked on his bed with his back resting against the headboard and his eyes closed. There was a naked woman with her back to me giving him a blow job. His hands were on the sides of her head holding her blond hair, guiding her up and down, and he was so engrossed in the moment that he didn’t realize that I had caught them. Although I could not see her face, I remembered that long hair and her slender figure from when I had seen Bob and her a few weeks ago walking to his apartment from what they said had been an “all-night study session.” It was his “study partner,” Linda.

  “You bastard!” I shrieked.

  Bob’s eyes popped open. “Dani!”

  Linda raised her head and looked at me.

  I ran from his apartment, slamming the door behind me. I was driving my Triumph from the lot when I saw Bob running from the building’s entrance wearing only his pants.

  “Dani, wait!” he yelled.

  I pressed harder on the accelerator. How could he have done this to us—to me? We’d been together nine years! Hadn’t those years and all of our dreams and secrets meant anything to him?

  I drove down Route 17 and went west as if I were on autopilot. I couldn’t believe he had betrayed me. Was she prettier? Smarter? All of my insecurities bubbled to the surface. Why hadn’t I tried harder? What warning signs had I missed? Why? Why? Why?

  Those “whys” were only followed by more questions. How long had Bob and Linda been doing this? Had they spent the night at her apartment when I first met them coming from having bagels and coffee? Is that why he had insisted on taking a shower before joining me in bed that day? Is that why he had fallen asleep rather than holding me—because he was exhausted from his night with her? I was torturing myself but I couldn’t stop it.

  I got to Mom’s just after midnight and ran up to her front door. She’d heard my car as soon as I’d turned onto her block and was waiting.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” she asked when she saw my tear-stained face.

  I flew into her arms sobbing. “It’s Bob. I caught him with another woman.”

  “Oh no!” she said, hugging me. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  She took me into her kitchen, fixed me warm milk, and asked if I’d eaten. I hadn’t but couldn’t stomach food. I talked. She listened. We sat there for two hours with me talking and her trying her best to comfort me. Mostly she simply listened as I went over and over again my most recent conversations with Bob. What had I done wrong? Why had he cheated on me? Am I not pretty enough, Mom? When I was so exhausted that I couldn’t say another word, she led me into her bedroom, and we climbed under the flannel sheets and held each other.

  “We’ll talk more in the morning,” she said. I cried myself to sleep in Mom’s arms, as if I were still her little girl.

  When I awoke at noon and opened my eyes, I thought it had been a bad dream. But then I saw that I was at my mother’s and I knew better. I began crying again and didn’t want to get out of bed. My tears turned to anger. How could Linda have done this to me? Had she seduced Bob? That bitch! She knew we were a couple. How dare she! Mom eventually came into the bedroom and insisted that I get up.

  “I made breakfast. Put this robe on.”

  I followed her into the kitchen. I sat at the table with my head in my hands. “My heart is broken. I feel so betrayed.”

  “Do you still love him?”

  “Of course, but how can I love someone who is fucking another woman?”

  “Dani, your language, please!”

  “Mom, what should I do?”

  “You will stay here this weekend and you will cry today and be depressed. But tomorrow, I’m going to take you out somewhere special, and when we are done with my surprise, you will go home Sunday night with your heart heavy but your head held high. Your father and I gave you a strong sense of values. There’s right and there’s wrong. People make mistakes. You forgive them. But you don’t forget what they’ve done to you or ignore it. You’re grieving now because the love that you had has died. But you will go on with your life and meet someone else, and someday you will be grateful that you found out early about Bob and did not marry him.”

  I heard her words but only half believed them. The “whys” were still nagging at me. I spent most of Saturday in bed. Sunday, Mom came into the room at ten a.m. and ordered me to get dressed.

  “I want you to come with me,” she said.

  “I really don’t feel like going out.”

  “Don’t ruin my surprise.”

  I threw on a pair of jeans, blouse, and coat and followed her out to her car. Ten minutes later, we arrived at the parking lot at Bergdorf Goodman, the most exclusive department store in White Plains.

  “Shopping, Mom? Really? My heart is breaking and you want to take me shopping? Is that your solution?”

  “What we are going to do today is more than shopping,” she said. “We’re going to get you off to a fresh start, Dani.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Continuing, Mom said, “Dani, you’re a professional woman now. You’re no longer in college or law school. You run a Domestic Violence Unit and you are speaking to women’s groups and prosecuting cases in court. This is a good time for you to change your appearance and outlook.”

  “It’s a horrible time, Mom.”

  “Please, dear. Just come with me.”

  I reluctantly followed her into the store, where she took me to the cosmetics counter and introduced me to Jane Criswell, who I quickly learned was my mother’s personal beauty consultant. Jane took one look at my puffy eyes and gasped, “Oh my.”

  I was too emotionally spent to argue with them, so I followed Jane into a private area of the store and sat in a chair while she began applying makeup to my face. Before I knew it, I was telling her about Bob, and Jane was telling me about men who had broken her heart. She was on husband three: Charlie. If her stories were supposed to give me hope, they didn’t. But they were funny. As she spoke, she talked about skin color, texture,
the application of base makeup, eyeliner, rouge, and a host of other cosmetic tricks. When I was finally handed a mirror, I was shocked. My plain face had been transformed into something more exotic through Jane’s skilled hand.

  Next, Jane and Mom patiently led me through the store in search of a new wardrobe. Because I was operating in a male-dominated arena, we decided I always needed to wear business suits to be taken seriously. This was especially true because I was young. But there had to be a feminine touch; otherwise when I appeared in court, jurors might think I was harsh and icy. Getting just the right look wasn’t easy, but Jane helped me find several suits in navy pinstripes, gray, and beige. My favorite part was the shoe department. We bought two pairs of Charles Jourdan high-heel pumps, one in black and one in beige. Even I couldn’t believe how much better my legs looked in a three-inch pump.

  By the time we finished, it was late afternoon and Mom and I went to dinner at one of her favorite restaurants.

  “See,” Mom said, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  I didn’t want to admit it, but actually it had been nice. I’d needed a bit of pampering.

  “Thank you, Mom, but clothing and all this makeup is superficial. I am who I am. The clothes don’t define me. And whether I wear rouge or not shouldn’t define me, either. I shouldn’t have to doll myself up simply to please men or get their attention.”

  “That’s right, dear, but what we did today wasn’t about pleasing men or letting clothes define you. The reason I took you shopping is because I want you to feel good about yourself and to leave the past behind you. Forget Bob and get a fresh start. You’re not the young, naive girl who fell in love with him back in Elmira. You’re a mature and sophisticated professional woman. Your new clothes simply show that better than your old outfits.”

  The bags of clothing that I’d bought at Bergdorf Goodman barely fit in my car when we got back to Mom’s house. We hugged and I thanked her for providing me with a safe place to grieve. When I got home, there was a letter taped to the front door of my house with my name on it. I knew from the writing that it was from Bob.

  Was he apologizing? Did he want me to take him back? Had he understood how he had ripped out my heart? I read his note while standing on the porch.