by Linda Wolfe
McEntee was distressed at the news. He had been feeling great for the past few hours. His first homicide had not only been solved but the culprit apprehended, a confession obtained, and the booking nearly completed. Everything, give or take a couple of broken cameras, had gone smoothly. But now the whole thing threatened to come to a bad end. The fact of the matter was, he didn’t want Robert in a pen and had planned to get a private cell for him once he was booked. There were three or four such cells, and although they were generally reserved for transvestites, who fared poorly in the big pen, prisoners who were considered suicidal and therefore in need of close watch could be assigned to them. In McEntee’s estimation, Robert wasn’t suicidal. But he wouldn’t know how to look after himself with the animals he’d be meeting in the pen. Not with those bandaged hands. All he knew how to do was defend himself with girls. But there was nothing McEntee could do about a private cell now. He’d just have to hope for the best. He turned to Robert and said, “You gotta go in there with the rest of them.”
Robert looked frightened, but McEntee told him not to worry. “Just don’t get into any fights in there,” he cautioned. But he couldn’t put out of his mind the time not long ago when he’d seen a guy locked up for having thrown his baby daughter off a roof. The guy had been in one of the pens only ten minutes before he’d had to be pulled out and rushed to a hospital. Prisoners had a code. They didn’t like guys who killed kids. Maybe they wouldn’t like what Robert had done either. “Listen, whatever you do,” he warned Robert, “don’t tell anybody why you’re here. If anyone in there asks you, just say we booked you on assault or robbery.”
When Robert was led away and placed in a pen, McEntee got himself coffee and talked to some fellow officers. The radio was on—someone had tuned it loudly to News 88—and the officers were listening to it and guffawing at Robert’s story, which they found hilarious. “Tell me, you think this guy is attractive?” one of the listeners, a male officer, demanded of a female one. “Well, yeah,” the woman replied. “Yeah, he’s cute.”
“Very cute?”
“Yeah, very cute.”
“Well, just don’t squeeze his balls.”
The female officer giggled, and all the men cracked up. But McEntee couldn’t relax. Even if Robert doesn’t say why he’s here, he kept thinking, those guys in there will figure it out pronto. Because the damn radio’s on. Worried, he quit the group he was standing with and hurried to the pen to check up on his prisoner.
What he saw amazed him. Robert had managed to clear a few feet of space for himself amid the roiling, shoving mass, and he was curled up on the dirty cement floor. His eyes were closed and he appeared to have shut out his surroundings and fallen soundly asleep.
He still seemed to be sleeping when, an hour or two later, the computer at last came on line. McEntee did a first set of prints, squeezing the thick ink that looked like black toothpaste onto a Lucite pad and pressing Robert’s fingers down on the pad as firmly as he could, given the bandages. But he wasn’t an experienced fingerprinter, and the prints came out smudged. A fingerprint specialist tried the process over again. But he was reluctant to do the printing the way he usually did, which involved grabbing the prisoner’s fingers and plunging them into the swirl of ink as if they were anchors being heaved into the sea. Robert’s gauze-wrapped fingers made the specialist nervous, and he pressed them down so lightly that he got only a partial set of prints. McEntee tried again, and managed to print nine fingers. It was enough. The booking was over.
By now it was 8 A.M. McEntee got ready to go. But he was still feeling uneasy, still worrying that some harm might befall his first homicide collar. He knew that Robert had managed to make out all right when surrounded by other prisoners for an hour or two, but wasn’t certain he’d go on managing if he had to hang around with them for another eight hours, or however long it took till he was arraigned. Leaving, McEntee arranged a private cell for him. Then he said goodbye to Robert. “I hadda lie for you a little,” he said. “I hadda tell ’em you were suicidal.”
Robert looked grateful, but McEntee shrugged the look away. He’d done what he’d done for himself, not for the preppie. “The last thing I need is for you to get killed in there,” he said grudgingly.
A few moments later Robert, holding up his sweatpants with his bandaged hands and pushing his feet slowly in front of him in their gaping sneakers, shuffled off with a corrections officer.
7.
Rough Sex
Jack Litman of Litman, Asche, Lupkin and Gioiella was one of the most sought-after criminal defense attorneys in New York. His very posture radiated that fact. Chest forward, shoulder blades so taut they looked starched, he stood like a man who had never known a moment of less than complete self-confidence. He’d always had that look, even back in the days when he was starting out as a lowly assistant in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Even then he’d known he was going places. And so had most people who met him. He’d had the kind of smarts that set him off from his fellows, and few had been surprised when within four years he’d become the star of the office’s elite Homicide Squad.
By the time he was thirty-one years old, he’d struck out on his own. Gone to the other side. The place where the money was. It had been time to go. In his handful of years in the DA’s office, he’d tried close to forty cases and lost only one.
On the morning of August 27, 1986, Litman was at the height of his career. He’d been in private practice for twelve years, handled everything from securities fraud to murder, and had a string of dramatic wins. There’d been the Brooklyn policeman who’d shot the unarmed black man. Acquittal. A Bronx policeman who’d shot two unarmed Hispanics. Acquittal. A business magnate accused of insider trading. Charges dismissed. A bank robber caught only moments after he fled the teller’s counter, a clutch of stolen money and even a hand-it-over note still in his possession. Acquittal.
Litman had also had a couple of clients accused of murder for whom he’d gotten convictions on lesser charges. One had been a seventeen-year-old boy who according to the police had repeatedly bashed his girlfriend’s head with a rock. Litman persuaded the boy’s jury that his client had merely pushed the girl away from him and that in falling she’d hit her head on the rock. Another client—his most famous to date—had been Richard Herrin, a Mexican-American who won a scholarship to Yale and subsequently hammered to death Bonnie Garland, a fellow Yalie with whom he’d fallen in love. Herrin had confessed to killing Garland; he’d even told police he’d begun thinking about doing her in hours before he actually did. But Litman convinced Herrin’s jury that the young man had been suffering from extreme emotional disturbance, and got him convicted of manslaughter rather than murder.
Many people condemned Litman for his victories. Called him a soulless man. But he let the condemnation run off his back like water down a granite wall. The public didn’t understand the Constitution, he often said. The rights of the accused. Spelled out by our Founding Fathers. Those were sacred rights. Holy. He believed ardently in the Constitution and frequently spoke on panels explaining and defending it. He also believed ardently in the family. Had a secret side hidden beneath his arrogant stance and razorsharp observations. He could be domineering and scene-stealing with his wife, a French-born talented lawyer in her own right, but he loved her, and he adored his two young sons. Good boys who excelled at school and could be counted on never to get into trouble. Mensches.
Not long after he first heard about the Chambers case and the teenagers who drank and caroused at Dorrian’s until all hours of the night, the thought crossed Litman’s mind that his own children and those of his friends could never have been part of a scene like that. Because he and his friends controlled their children, didn’t say to them, You can go out into the jungle now. You’re strong enough. You’ve got claws. You’ve got muscles. He and his friends didn’t treat their children the way an animal society treats its young.
But that was after August 27, 1986. On that morning
, when he first heard about the case over the radio, he merely shrugged and continued dressing for work. He had just finished, was just ready to leave his spacious Central Park West apartment for his spacious lower Broadway office, when the phone rang and a man who identified himself as a friend of the Chambers family started rattling off a whole megillah to him. The gist of it was that the Chamberses wanted to know if he would be interested in handling their boy’s predicament.
Maybe, Litman thought. Aloud, he said, “Well, I’ll meet with the parents to discuss it.” Then he took Bob Chambers’s phone number from the caller, spoke to Chambers briefly, learned he had an apartment nearby, and drove over and picked him up in his Cadillac De Ville.
He interviewed him in the car. He didn’t waste time asking him how he felt. People in Bob Chambers’s situation, he had long ago learned, were often inarticulate or confused. There was no point in dwelling on the emotional aspects of the matter. So he just zeroed in on information that might help in the defense of his son, like what had happened to Bob in the police station last night.
By nine o’clock he had met Phyllis, too, and by nine thirty, having agreed to take the case, he was gunning the Cadillac downtown.
He arrived at Central Booking just as the cops were leading Robert onto the street in order to transfer him to a detention cell in the Criminal Courts Building. Reporters were thronging the sidewalks, and TV vans were poking the sky with their periscopes. Litman raced toward his new client, introduced himself, and explained that he’d been retained by Bob and Phyllis.
He wasn’t sure how much the boy understood. He’s petrified, he thought. “Try to be calm,” he cautioned him. Then he glanced at the wall of cameras and lights. “Please be calm,” he said. “And don’t talk to anyone.”
Mickey McEntee was at the medical examiner’s office waiting for the Filipino doctor who had examined Jennifer in the park the previous morning to start the autopsy. They were down in the photography room in the bowels of the building, where the photographer was leaping around the body and snapping pictures with a monster zoom lens. McEntee got the creeps just watching the guy, who had a long ponytail, a Harley-Davidson T-shirt and belt buckle, and big black motorcycle boots with silver ornaments. A weirdo. But probably you had to be a weirdo to work in the ME’s office. Even the doctor seemed a little bizarre. When he told her he thought the marks he’d seen on the girl’s nipples were bite marks, she giggled and blushed like an embarrassed virgin. Then she said she didn’t agree.
“Why not?” he asked her.
“Because there’s no hemorrhaging.”
“But suppose the killer bit her after she was dead? Her heart would have stopped pumping, so there’d be no blood going to the skin. She wouldn’t get a hemorrhage if he bit her after she was dead.”
The doctor giggled and blushed again. Then she tittered. “You Americans, you’re such a kinky people.” Unbelievable, McEntee thought. He wanted to say, Jesus Christ, Doc. This is a homicide, not a sociology lesson. But he held his tongue. She wasn’t an experienced ME. No point in aggravating her.
Not that he didn’t want to. Especially when they got to talking about the police theory that the dead girl had been dragged through earth and twigs. The doctor didn’t believe that either, even though there were linear scratches all over the back of the girl’s buttocks and thighs. “That’s her tan peeling,” she said.
Her tan peeling! Peeling skin doesn’t make a linear pattern, McEntee steamed. When you peel, it looks like a mosaic. Like alligator hide. This medical examiner is hopeless. She’s probably never gotten a sunburn in her life.
He watched her for a while as she began her job, washing Jennifer’s body with a huge sponge and sealing her clothes in plastic bags. But he took off right after that. He wanted to be well out of the way when the doctor started cutting into the body. He didn’t mind dead bodies. He didn’t mind seeing people shot and stabbed and lying on the ground with their arms sliced off or their guts hanging open. But when it came to doctors sticking their hands inside skin and pulling things out and weighing and measuring them, well, that kind of thing made him sick.
After McEntee left, Dr. Alandy went calmly on with her work, examining and making notes about all the bruises on the skin.
There were plenty of them. Not just the big band-shaped abrasion at the neck and the marks McEntee had been asking about earlier. There was a contusion above the right eyebrow. There was an irregular abrasion just below that. There was another abrasion on the ear. Another at the left side of the chin. More on the elbows, stomach, and insides of the thighs. And there were small vertical markings on the left cheek.
These interested Dr. Alandy. Probably the girl made those marks herself, she thought. Scratched herself because she was trying to remove something the assailant placed around her face. A gag most likely. Because there was also a laceration inside the upper lip, the kind of laceration a gag made of rough cloth might have caused. Though she couldn’t be sure of that. The laceration could have been caused by a punch in the mouth, too.
Alandy kept going, noting her external findings into a tape recorder.
While Alandy began her autopsy, Litman had his first real talk with his new client. They talked at the Criminal Courts Building, where Robert was in a cell with a crush of other prisoners. Litman didn’t ask to have him brought out to the lawyer-client conference room, a topsy-turvy Alice in Wonderland place where the floors were bare and the walls carpeted. He just stood outside Robert’s cell with his hands on the bars and asked him quietly what had happened in the park. He got the same story the police had gotten.
“Is there any reason that the police could point to that would indicate you didn’t like Jennifer?” he asked once he’d heard the story. “Was there any hostility between you?”
Robert told him there wasn’t and that their relationship had been so casual and uneventful it hadn’t really been much of anything.
Litman didn’t linger. He said, “Take it easy,” and hurried to his office. There was a lot more he could do for the kid from there than from here.
Back at the precinct, Mickey McEntee was dealing with the public. The public always had to be dealt with once a crime got into the papers and onto TV. People called up to say they’d seen the crime in a vision or knew all its details from radio signals they’d picked up through the metal fillings in their teeth, or the police had the wrong guy, because the right one was following them right now even as they spoke. Crazy stuff. But you had to be polite. Because you never knew when someone who really knew something might call up. When a man named Alan Garber got through to him, McEntee expected just another nut call, but he heard the man out patiently. He was a doctor, the guy began explaining, and every day he went running in Central Park. Sometimes he noticed strange things there. Like the night before last, when he’d seen two people lying on the ground.
“Whereabouts?” McEntee asked.
The doctor went into a long-winded story about his jogging route, and how he’d been heading south on the east drive just north of the Museum when he’d spotted the couple under a tree to his right.
“To your right?” McEntee’s brain went on alert. The man had certainly been in the correct area. “Tell me what you saw.”
“The couple was on the grass and they were rocking.”
“Rocking? What do you mean ‘rocking’?”
“Well, you know. Humping. I mean, I couldn’t tell if they were actually humping. It was too gray. But I thought it was humping. Or rocking. Something sexual.”
McEntee was making notes. He wrote down “rocking.” Then he asked, “What did you do?”
“Just kept running. I didn’t stop or anything. I just finished out my loop. But then about twenty minutes later I passed the same spot again, and the couple was still there.”
“Still there?” McEntee’s heart skipped a beat. Maybe the guy had actually seen the killing.
“Yeah. They were still there. Still rocking.”
McEntee s
hook his head. Dead end. He thanked the doctor for calling and said he’d report the information to the district attorney.
Twenty-seven-year-old Roger Stavis had just started working for Litman’s firm. Before that, although he came from Queens, he’d been a prosecutor in the Bronx district attorney’s office. When he joined Litman, Asche a week ago, he’d been looking forward to interesting work. But he’d never expected to be involved with a juicy case like Chambers. So when he got to the office this morning and learned the firm would be handling it, he felt terrific, sure he’d made the right career move.
By eleven o’clock he was actively engaged on the case. Go over and see Robert, Litman told him. Find out who was in Dorrian’s the night of the killing. Find out who his friends are. So we can check out his story. And him.
Despite having been an ADA, Stavis had never been to the hidden world that snaked through Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building, the gloomy skeleton of cells that occupied whole floors and twisted behind every courtroom. He’d seen only the courthouses’s looming polished portals and the inspirational words about justice that soared above them, carved in marble. But he made his way eagerly into the labyrinth and located Robert, who had been moved to a private cell. When he saw the kid in there, sitting on a hard bench that jutted out from the wall, his heart went out to him. Because there wasn’t that big an age difference between them. Just eight years. But look where he was, and look where Robert was.
Later Stavis would think that the difference in their circumstances said something important—and rather self-congratulatory—about social expectations. Because Robert, who had gone to expensive prep schools, had come out a loser while he himself, who had gone to public schools all his life, was a winner. But that morning at the detention cell he concentrated on his similarities to Robert. Their youth. Their inexperience. And because of their similarities he felt he and Robert related well to each other. They struck up a rapport and Robert supplied him with all the information he needed, including the names of friends of his who had seen him with Jennifer at Dorrian’s.