However, the FBI was not actually in charge of protecting witnesses once they were accepted into the program. That job fell to the U.S. Marshals Service. The marshals, who could trace their history back to the old Wild West days, were responsible for hiding and giving witnesses new identities.
Those two discoveries were important because they meant Longhorn didn’t really have final say over Carlos Gonzales’s future. He had to get the Justice Department to approve Gonzales and the U.S. Marshals to accept him. Put simply, Longhorn could be overruled.
All I needed to do was find a reason for the government to overrule him.
It took me hours and hours of digging, but I finally found what I’d been so desperately searching for: a legal loophole. I immediately dialed O’Brien’s home number. As it was ringing, I checked the clock on my office wall. Wow. It was 3:45 a.m. I’d completely lost track of time.
“Hello?” a sleepy woman’s voice answered.
I wasn’t expecting a woman to answer because O’Brien had told me he was twice divorced. I said, “I work with Detective O’Brien and need to speak to him. Did I dial the wrong number?”
No sooner had the words left my mouth than I realized that I knew that woman’s voice, or I thought I had. She was someone I had heard repeatedly on the telephone.
There was a muffled sound, probably caused by her putting her hand over the receiver. The next sound I heard was O’Brien’s gruff “Hello.”
“Hey. I’m still at the office but I had to call. I think I found a way to beat Longhorn. But it’s going to depend on those records you are getting for me.”
Still half asleep, O’Brien said, “What records?”
I reminded him that he’d promised to pull the autopsy and investigative files about Benita Gonzales’s alleged suicide. “I need to read about that case as soon as possible to see if she was, indeed, murdered by Carlos Gonzales.”
“Sure, okay, I’ll bring them to you this morning. Now why don’t you go to bed?” he said. “Get some sleep and stop calling me.”
“One more thing,” I said.
“What,” he replied in an irritating voice. “It’s three forty-five in the morning.”
“Is the woman who answered the phone who I think it is? It sounded just like her.”
When O’Brien slammed down the receiver, I knew that I had hit pay dirt. One mystery was solved. The reason why O’Brien knew what Whitaker’s pollster was telling him before the elections and other tidbits about Whitaker’s private conversations inside the D.A.’s office was because he was sleeping with Whitaker’s uptight and formidable secretary. O’Brien was sleeping with Hillary Potts!
43
By the time I got home and got to bed, it was time for me to head back to work. Anne Marie greeted me as soon as I stepped into the Domestic Violence Unit. “Have you heard what’s happening at the courthouse?” she asked.
“What?”
“Paul Pisani just resigned. Rumors are flying but he supposedly got some young intern pregnant and Whitaker forced him to resign.”
The moment I reached my desk, I dialed Will Harris at the Daily. I’d promised to call him and I also wanted to thank him for the other night when we’d met for beers.
“Will Harris.”
“Hi. It’s Dani.”
“You okay?” he asked. “Our police reporter told me there’d been a break-in at your house. He saw it on the police logs. Vandalism.”
“Yeah, I seem to make men angry,” I said, making a stab at humor. “But that’s not why I called. Pisani just resigned. Rumor is that he got a girl pregnant, just like you said the other night.”
“Paul Pisani caught with his fly open. Our editor is going to love this. Thanks for the tip. And thanks, too, for chatting the other night. I’d like to do it again, if you want, when you’re ready.”
“Let me think about it.”
“Here’s something else to think about. I’m going to talk to that cop’s wife again. I’ll see if I can find out any more about the FBI and Gonzales. I’ll let you know if I do.”
I considered telling him about my showdown with FBI Agent Long horn, but I decided against it. Instead, I said, “I hope you find Paul Pisani today. I’d like to hear him talk his way out of this one.”
“Can I quote you on that?” Harris said, quickly adding, “I’m joking!”
I thought, Maybe I need to mail that coffee mug with the word PRICK on it to Pisani. He’d earned it.
An hour later, O’Brien arrived in my office with a painfully thin yellow folder that contained two documents and a half-dozen photographs of Carmen Gonzales’s stepmother, Benita Gonzales. The first document was the police department’s report.
According to it, White Plains officer Whitey McLean had arrived at the Gonzaleses’ two-story house in an upscale White Plains neighborhood shortly after two a.m. after getting a call from the police dispatcher. Carlos Gonzales had called the dispatcher seven minutes earlier and reported that he’d found his wife, Benita, dead in the couple’s bedroom. Officer McLean had gone directly to the bedroom where he’d observed a woman lying on the bed with whitish vomit next to her mouth on the sheet. During an interview, Gonzales told McLean that Benita had been suffering from severe depression brought on by the Christmas holidays. He said Benita frequently used cocaine to help lift her out of her dark moods. Officer McLean noted in his report that Gonzales had admitted that he and his wife had argued earlier in the evening about her erratic mood swings. Because of their quarrel, Carlos had gone to sleep on the living-room sofa. He’d awakened later and went upstairs and found her dead on their bed. Carlos told the officer that Benita did not snort cocaine but took it orally. Because of the white vomit next to his wife’s mouth, Gonzales suspected Benita had either accidentally or intentionally taken an overdose. Gonzales further admitted that they both used the drug recreationally.
In his report, Officer McLean noted that he’d briefly spoken to two of the Gonzaleses’ four children, Carmen and Hector, and both had told him that the Gonzales family was a “happy” one. The officer further wrote that Carlos Gonzales did not have a criminal record and that there were no signs in the bedroom that suggested foul play.
Having read the police report, I turned to the medical examiner’s findings. This was the sheet that I was most interested in. It was routine practice in White Plains for the medical examiner to examine a body when someone died at home. Dr. S. A. Swante, an assistant M.E., had performed the autopsy that same night and had noted in his paperwork that he’d found large amounts of ingested cocaine in Benita’s bloodstream, more than enough to kill her. I turned to the portion of his findings that identified the chemical contents inside Benita’s stomach. Dr. Swante had found undigested food, including milk. He performed a series of toxicology tests and determined that the milk in her stomach had contained cocaine. He concluded that Benita had ingested a lethal dose of cocaine with milk.
That was exactly what I needed to read!
Carmen had told me that her father had awakened her during the night and instructed her to take a glass of milk to her stepmother. That’s how Carlos had poisoned his wife. She might have been suspicious if he’d offered her anything, but not if Carmen brought her a glass of milk. Gonzales had sent his unknowing daughter into that bedroom with the lethal dose. I had goose bumps.
I now had the two pieces of evidence that I needed to begin building a circumstantial murder case—Carmen’s testimony and Dr. Swante’s findings.
Dr. Swante listed the cause of death as a cocaine overdose, but because Gonzales had told Officer McLean that Benita often ingested cocaine to combat her dark mood swings, the coroner had decided that the manner of her death had been suicide, either accidental or intentional. Benita’s remains had been cremated the next morning.
There were several photographs in the file. A half-dozen black-and-white eight-by-ten photos of Benita had been taken during the autopsy by Dr. Swante, who had carefully photographed her entire body before starting
to dissect it. The photos showed a nude attractive thirty-four-year-old woman on a steel table. Someone had also tucked another snapshot into the file that was markedly different from the others. It was a Polaroid that I assumed Officer McLean had been given as evidence on the night Benita had killed herself. There was no mention in McLean’s report that explained why he had collected the Polaroid, but I assumed it was for identification purposes.
In this photo, a beaming Benita was shown perched on the knee of a fat Santa Claus. She was holding a small child. I flipped over the Polaroid and read: “Adolpho, age 2, and me. 12-22-74.”
December 22 was the same day that Benita had been found dead. I remembered that Carmen had said Benita had taken all the children to a shopping mall earlier that afternoon. Carmen, her brother, Hector, and their stepsiblings, Angel and Adolpho, had gone on that outing. Obviously, this Polaroid had been snapped that afternoon at the mall with Santa Claus.
In the Santa picture, Benita certainly didn’t appear depressed. She was smiling, holding her youngest child, and wearing a red wool holiday sweater that had a big reindeer pin on it. I recognized the pin because it was one of those that had a blinking red light on Rudolph’s nose.
I called O’Brien into my office and briefed him. “I think we have enough to charge Gonzales with murder,” I said, “and we’ve got to do it before the FBI makes him disappear. Let’s go talk to Whitaker.”
44
As O’Brien and I were walking across the street from the Domestic Violence Unit’s offices to the courthouse, the detective slowed his pace and gently touched my arm. “Counselor,” he said in a whisper, “you and I got to talk.” We stopped on the sidewalk.
“About what you said when you called me earlier this morning?”
“The loophole that I found in the witness protection program?” I replied.
“No, c’mon, stop being coy. About me and you know who?”
“Ms. Potts?”
He grimaced and looked to see if anyone walking past us had overheard me.
“Yeah, her and me. It’s personal, as in nobody’s business. Are we square on that?”
I ran my fingers across my mouth, saying, “My lips are sealed.” But I couldn’t help myself from adding, “You and Hillary Potts. Damn, O’Brien, you know I own you for life now, right?” I popped a mint into my mouth, laughed, and as I walked by him, added, “I love seeing a big man with a gun now beholden to the counselor he called kid.”
He bit down so hard on his ever-present toothpick that it broke and had to be replaced.
When we arrived at the D.A.’s office, Miss Hillary Potts was as icy to me as always. She looked at O’Brien without the slightest hint that the two were sleeping together. She informed us that D.A. Whitaker and Chief of Staff Steinberg were in a meeting and had left orders not to be disturbed.
I thought, I bet they don’t want to be disturbed because they are doing Paul Pisani damage control. Women voters were not going to be happy when they heard what he had done.
“Something big must have happened, huh?” I asked Miss Potts, but she didn’t bite.
O’Brien said, “Miss Potts, this is important. It’s about a murder charge that we’d like to file.”
She rose from her desk without giving the slightest hint that she was romantically involved with O’Brien and quietly slipped inside Whitaker’s office. A few minutes later, she returned and announced, “He’ll give you five minutes. That’s it.”
O’Brien and I hurried by her. Whitaker and Steinberg were sitting in the lounge area, so I took a seat in the leather chair next to Whitaker’s and O’Brien sat on the couch beside Steinberg. I’d already decided to put all of my cards on the table, so I quickly told Whitaker and Steinberg about our trip to the FBI’s field office and my confrontation with Special Agent Longhorn. I explained that Longhorn intended to put Gonzales into witness protection, which meant he wouldn’t have to serve a single day in a New York prison for raping and beating Carmen. I told them about my private conversation with Carmen and how her father had awakened her during the night to take Benita a glass of milk. I showed Whitaker the autopsy report, having marked the section where Dr. Swante had concluded that Benita had died from a cocaine overdose with milk in her stomach. It all fit. He had caused her to drink the milk laced with cocaine. This was not a suicide. It was murder.
Whitaker listened closely without interrupting and then asked: “Miss Fox, didn’t you just tell us that Agent Longhorn is putting Carlos Gonzales into WITSEC?”
“Yes, sir. That’s his plan.”
“If that’s what he’s doing, then why does any of this matter? What’s the point of putting Gonzales on trial for murder if the FBI is going to give him a new identity and make him disappear into WITSEC?”
“I’ve found a legal loophole that we can use to stop Agent Longhorn.”
All three of them—Whitaker, Steinberg, and O’Brien—gave me a curious look.
“Agent Longhorn,” I said, “is correct about WITSEC giving cold-blooded killers a clean slate and a new identity in return for their cooperation. But in its entire history, the Justice Department has never allowed anyone to enter WITSEC and go into hiding if he murdered a civilian.”
“I’m not following you,” Steinberg said.
“Those hit men—Joe ‘the Animal’ Barboza and ‘Fat Vinnie’ Teresa—they murdered other mobsters. They killed their own criminal associates. But WITSEC doesn’t take criminals who murder innocent civilians. An FBI agent tried last year to get a gangster into WITSEC who’d set off a bomb that killed a small child and his parents. Both the Justice Department and U.S. Marshals said no. They drafted a specific regulation about this very issue. Benita Gonzales wasn’t a criminal, and if I can convict Carlos Gonzales of murdering her, he won’t be eligible to go into WITSEC. He’ll have to go to prison here in New York and there’s nothing Agent Longhorn can do to stop that. That’s my loophole.”
“I’ll be damned,” Whitaker said. “It seems you’ve caught Agent Longhorn with his pants down.”
“I’d like to charge Gonzales with murder two to get the maximum—twenty-five to life.”
“You’ve done a good job,” Whitaker said. “But I need to think about it.”
“Actually,” Steinberg said, “the timing of murder charges against Carlos Gonzales might be a smart idea right now.”
I realized what Steinberg was hinting. Filing murder charges against Carlos Gonzales would make Paul Pisani’s actions old news.
“Carlos Gonzales,” I volunteered, “is a monster. I’m sure the residents in Westchester County—especially women voters—will be grateful when he is charged.”
“And what about the FBI and Agent Longhorn?” Whitaker asked.
“Sir, the last time I checked, he wasn’t a registered voter here.”
45
Two days after our meeting, Whitaker announced during a press conference that a grand jury had indicted Carlos Gonzales.
Whitaker said a few words at the beginning of the press conference and then let me take over and answer questions. I’d never seen him share the spotlight. I assumed he was keeping a low profile because he didn’t want reporters peppering him with questions about Pisani’s sudden resignation. By now, everyone in the courthouse and Westchester political circles had heard about his womanizing.
Later that afternoon after I got off work, I drove to Mom’s so we could watch the local news together.
“Look! Look!” Mom said when my face appeared on the newscast. “There you are and you look so beautiful!”
I must admit that I did look good. My Janis Joplin days were over. I’d dropped by Bergdorf Goodman and Jane Criswell had helped me pick out a new dress. It was a long-sleeved, knee-length Halston with shoulder pads that was identical to one that a model had worn in a New York Times full-page advertisement. The Halston was a rich royal blue with a jagged, pencil-thin black line that curled around the arms and ran up the dress’s high-necked collar. Across my waist was an ink
-colored belt. The accessories Jane selected for the Halston were button earrings in the same color blue as my dress. As always, I wore a thin gold ankle bracelet. The shoes were Charles Jourdan with spiked heels.
The clip lasted only a few minutes.
“I’m going to call O’Brien,” I said.
“Did you see me?” I asked when he answered.
“Yeah, you done good.”
“If I done so good, why do you sound like you’re going to a funeral?”
“Dani, you just spit in the face of Special Agent Jack Longhorn and the FBI. He’s not going to take this lying down. You’d better prepare yourself for a few surprises.”
46
A few days after our news conference, an extremely hostile Carlos Gonzales was brought into the Westchester County Courthouse before a scowling Judge Morano for arraignment. The confident smirk Gonzales had exhibited during his first trial was gone. He glared at me, and for the first time I felt as if I was seeing the hate that Carmen and Benita had witnessed when he was wielding his leather belt.
A young attorney, whom I’d never met, stepped forward to stand next to Gonzales at the defense table. He looked barely out of law school. Not recognizing him, Judge Morano said, “Introduce yourself and please tell me you’re licensed to practice in the State of New York. I hate wasting time.”
“Your Honor,” the young man said.
As if on cue, the doors to the courtroom opened and Paul Pisani waltzed through the spectators’ gallery.
“I apologize, Judge Morano, for being a few minutes late,” Pisani said. “I’ll be representing Carlos Gonzales in this matter. This young man is an associate of mine.”
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