On the floor in front of the fire, Dean spread out his copies of the sprint reports and the list of tenants living in the front apartments at 77 Bleecker Street, one of whom had to be the 911 caller. First he studied the sprint entry that contained the blacked-out name of the caller.
0232 911 Op 06 Dupl Job: Fem clld
earlier rpts perp took money fled rt on Bleekr towrd 7th Av. Perp is MW or Hisp 5-4 to 5-7 dark jak blue wool cap ID’S self as tel
Dean held the page up to the light, but the blackout totally obscured the name. He tried a magnifying glass, but that didn’t help, either. Next, he marked off the characters on the portion of the line immediately above the blacked-out name.
jak blue wool
Including the blank space over the last part of the blacked-out portion, Dean counted thirteen characters. He turned to the 77 Bleecker Street list.
1A NOVACEK (Super)
2A CIPPOLINO
2B H. DILLARD
3A KLEIN/RINER
3B J. KILLIAN
4A DELVALLE
4B CHANG
5A DRABINOWITZ, S.
5B JACOBANIS-BREWSTER
6A A & M MANGIARACINO
6B ALTSHULER
Although the list included no first names, and the thirteen characters blacked out on the sprint report undoubtedly contained both a first and last name or at least a name preceded by a Miss, Mrs., or Ms., it was a start. Since there had to be a space between the first and last name, or the title and the last name, at least three characters could be accounted for before even getting to the last name. So the last name could be ten characters at most. That immediately eliminated Drabinowitz and Mangiaracino, and narrowed the field to nine apartments and eleven last names.
Dean rummaged through his hall closet until he found a Manhattan phone directory. Starting at the top of his list, he was able to find numbers listed for seven of the nine remaining names. He entered each number alongside the name it went with, together with the first name or initial listed in the directory. Looking at his watch, Dean saw it was 9:35. Too late to start making calls. He didn’t want the added alarm of a nighttime call, and he also figured his chances of the woman caller’s answering the phone herself - in case she lived with a man - would be better during the day. He wondered if that was sexist thinking, then said, “Fuck it,” and reached for another log to put on the fire. From its weight, he could tell it was another piece of oak even before looking at the split side. He placed it carefully on the already burning logs, leaving a narrow space in front of it for a draft. Within seconds, a blue flame appeared in the space, filling it from left to right in much the same way as the broiler flame of a gas oven ignites.
Sitting there on the floor in front of the newly invigorated fire, Dean settled back against the couch and began composing phone introductions to the good people of 77 Bleecker Street.
Janet Killian answered the phone on the first ring. She had just put Nicole down for her afternoon nap and didn’t want her waking up.
“Hello,” she said quietly.
“Hello,” said a man’s voice. “Is this Janet Killian?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Killian, this is Investigator Frye. I’m calling you about the reward in connection with the killing of Commissioner Wilson.”
“Yes?” said Janet.
“Well, it seems you’re entitled to a major portion of it. It was you who made the first phone call to nine-one-one, after all, wasn’t it?”
For a moment, Janet said nothing. Then she said, “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and hung up the phone.
* * *
A mile and a half away, sitting at his desk, Dean Abernathy crossed another name off his list and said, “Shit,” to no one in particular.
Janet Killian found the business card in the wallet in her blue handbag. As instructed, she dialed the number printed on the lower left-hand corner.
A man’s voice answered. “Midtown South.”
“May I speak with Detective Richard Rasmussen, please?” Janet said.
Dean felt as though he had reached a dead end. For one thing, he had whittled the 77 Bleecker Street list down to two names, Chang and Altshuler, neither of whom had a listed phone number. All of the others he had reached by phone, and none of them would acknowledge having been the 911 caller.
The most recent time he had been to the building, Dean had had to use his piece of Venetian blind slat to slip the lock of the inner door. He was careful to look around before doing it and made sure he could not be seen. When he came out some twenty minutes later, he noticed a dark blue Plymouth with two men sitting in it, three cars behind where he had parked his own Jeep. The men were white, fiftyish, and both wore sunglasses on what seemed, to Dean at least, a pretty overcast day.
As Dean pulled away from the curb, he watched the Plymouth in his rearview mirror, but it did not follow. Dean made a left on Sixth Avenue, then circled around to Seventh. Back at Bleecker, he pulled into a bus stop before turning into the block, where the Plymouth would now be in front of him. Walking to the corner, he saw that it had moved so that it was double-parked directly in front of 77 Bleecker Street. From the corner, it looked to Dean as though there was now only one man in the Plymouth, the driver. His impression was confirmed moments later, when the other man, still wearing his sunglasses, emerged from 77 Bleecker. He was a large man, broad-shouldered and beer-bellied. In the few seconds Dean had to observe him walking around the Plymouth and getting into it, Dean was certain he had seen the man before, but he could not quite place him. The two men sat in the Plymouth for a moment longer, then pulled away and drove off slowly.
Dean had walked back to his Jeep just in time to see a traffic department officer placing a $55 parking ticket on the windshield.
The building had not been the only disappointment, however. Despite repeated calls to Walter Bingham, Dean still didn’t have the 911 tape. To be sure, Bingham had provided him with a steady trickle of other items. He had received, for example, a set of photographs of the crime scene, showing Commissioner Wilson lying dead in the wet snow, his open eyes eerily reflecting the flash of the camera lights. There had even been a shot of the trash basket on Seventh Avenue, its contents strewn on the sidewalk, and a closeup of the money clip recovered from exactly where Joey Spadafino had told the detectives he had thrown it.
Dean had also received a report from the Latent Print Unit of the Police Department. They had compared a partial fingerprint found on the knife recovered from Joseph Spadafino with those taken after his arrest, and found that the partial print was identical to that of the index finger of Spadafino’s left hand, to the exclusion of all other persons. The report had hardly shocked Dean. After all, it was Spadafino’s knife; Joey had told Dean that. What he continued to deny was that he had pulled it out before, during, or after the encounter with Commissioner Wilson. In fact, Dean had to admit that his client had been pretty persuasive on the point. “Hey,” Joey had said in one of his recent meetings with Dean, “I’d forgot I had the fuckin’ thing. Don’t you think I woulda throwed it away before I got caught if I’d a used it to rob the fuckin’ guy?” If it was not beautiful prose, it did seem to make a certain amount of sense.
Bingham had sent Dean some other worthless stuff as well. The Emergency Medical Service records contained the notes of the personnel who had responded by ambulance to where the lifeless body of Commissioner Wilson lay. The notes, in turn, depicted their efforts to resuscitate him until a Police Department surgeon had arrived and pronounced the Commissioner dead.
Then there were the usual two identification-of-body forms, one by a police officer, the other by a civilian who had known the deceased personally. In this case, it had been the Commissioner’s nephew, Garth Wilson, who had responded to the morgue to verify that the body was indeed that of his uncle.
The death certificate, signed by Dr. Hans Van den Berg, the Deputy Medical Examiner who had performed the autopsy, certified that the Commi
ssioner had died of a “massive coronary occlusion” at two-thirty in the morning. It listed the deceased’s next of kin as his wife, Marie Crawford Wilson, of 76 Bleecker Street.
Finally, Bingham had sent Dean copies of the memo book entries of the various police officers who had responded to the robbery-in-progress radio run, participated in the chase and arrest of the defendant, or returned later to sift through the contents of the trash can on Seventh Avenue.
There were also copies of the memo book entries of a police officer named Jorge Santana, but instead of containing entries of times relating to the radio run or the events following it, almost all of its entries preceded the time of the crime. It was these entries that Dean turned to now, wondering what he was looking at.
1115 To garage to p.u. Dep. MV 226
1125 To res. of PC
1135 With PC to Chand S.H. W. 45th
1205 To 10th & 47th re refuel: 12.5 gals $17.50
1215 Ret to W. 45th
0215 With PC to res
0230 D.O. PC Bleecker & 7th
0300 D.O. Dep. MV 226 @ garage
0330 Off Duty
It didn’t take Dean long to realize that Officer Santana’s assignment that night had been as chauffeur to the Police Commissioner. He had dropped Wilson off a half block from his townhouse, five minutes before the Commissioner met Joey Spadafino and his death.
Working backward, Dean was able to reconstruct the events that led up to that moment. The drive to the townhouse had taken fifteen minutes, originating at West Forty-Fifth Street. Except for a trip to Eleventh Avenue, Santana had waited for the Commissioner on Forty-Fifth Street from around twelve until quarter after two in the morning. Although the exact location of where he had waited wasn’t shown, it appeared that he had dropped Wilson off to visit with someone he referred to only as “Chand S.H.” on West Forty-Fifth Street. Dean smiled. To his cynical eye, the midnight rendezvous had all the earmarks of a lovers’ tryst, and he noted that Officer Santana had discreetly omitted the full name and complete address. It made him wonder who the mysterious Miss Chand might be.
The single practitioner is denied the luxury of putting all other business aside to concentrate his efforts on the one case in front of him. To a certain extent, judges will permit him to do this when he is “actually engaged” in the trial of a case. At such times, he is allowed to submit an affirmation - a signed document that is the equivalent of an affidavit but requires no notarization - to other judges before whom he has court appearances, stating the case and court where he is on trial and requesting an adjournment to some date after his trial concludes.
But Dean was not on trial now, and even if he had been, the realities of earning a living and paying rent in New York City compelled him to seek, welcome, and attend to other cases. As much as he might have liked to turn down new matters and ignore old ones in favor of working on the Spadafino case, he had to remind himself that he would not get paid on it until after it was over, and that even then, in a day when a backhoe or crane operator might earn upward of $150 an hour, Dean’s voucher would be based on a rate of $40 for in-court time and $25 for out-of-court.
So Dean took care of other business.
The other business he took care of was an attempted rape case in Queens. Dean’s client, a Pakistani national named Kermani, had had a rent dispute with his landlady that had escalated into a shoving match. He had stormed out; she had called the police. When they arrived, she told them that Kermani had also “tried to have sex” with her. By the time the Sex Crimes Unit had finished interviewing her, the case had become an attempted forcible rape. What would have been a laughable example of overreaching ten years ago, the charge had to be taken very seriously in the heightened awareness climate of the nineties, and Dean set about reinterviewing witnesses, studying police reports he had read a dozen times already, and plotting his trial strategy.
Frank Ippolito, a former bank manager who had embezzled several hundred thousand dollars from his employers over a three-year period, came in, and Dean scheduled meetings with the bank’s attorney and the assistant United States Attorney who was prosecuting the case. The defendant had never been in trouble before, had a military background, was a devoted husband and loving father, and was active in fundraising for his church. In another time, a sympathetic judge might have largely looked the other way and imposed a stiff fine and some community service. But under the new federal sentencing guidelines, all that had changed, and Ippolito was looking at a three-year prison sentence.
Bobby McGrane, a tough kid from Hell’s Kitchen, who had traded a promising boxing career for a heroin habit, came in, referred by a former client whose name Dean could not place. It seemed that Bobby, already on parole from a manslaughter conviction, had been picked up by federal authorities investigating the role of organized crime in the Garment District. Knowing that even an arrest could jeopardize his parole status and lead to a violation and a return to prison, Bobby had cut a deal on the spot. Now he needed a lawyer to meet with the FBI agent he was working with, to ensure that his own involvement would go unprosecuted. Dean told him to set up the meeting.
Nathan Ramsey had an attempted murder case in the Bronx. A black man in his forties who had no prior record and held two jobs, Ramsey had been jumped by a group of Hispanics in Harris Park. He had run home to the safety of his apartment, where his family swore he had remained for two days, afraid to venture out, but unable to call the police for lack of a phone. Sometime during the period, one of the Hispanics had been stabbed in the midsection, deeply enough to lacerate his spleen and almost cause death. Ramsey had been identified as the stabber by two witnesses. Dean needed to talk to them.
And there were routine court appearances on two dozen other cases that were slowly working their way through the system: the drug sales, robberies, assaults, larcenies, and drunk drivings that filled Dean’s calendar and more or less paid his bills.
Life goes on, as they say.
Life goes on for Joey Spadafino, too. The bandage is off his forehead, and the scar will be every bit as mean-looking as he figured. Not an ugly scar, like black people get, with the skin all puffed up around it. Just a long, thin line that gets attention, forces anyone to move their eyes up to stare at it, even when they try not to. It’s almost like a tattoo on his forehead, he thinks, but better. A tattoo you would of had to put there. This got put there in a fight.
But aside from the gash on his forehead, it’s not a good time for Joey. The days and weeks and months have begun to weigh on him. The novelty of being back on the Rock is over. The rapid-fire developments in his case are over - the arraignment, his One Eighty Eighty Day, his first appearance in Supreme Court, his offer from Judge Rothwax. By now his case had bogged down. The court dates are further apart, and when he does go to court, nothing seems to happen. His lawyer has told him to expect this for a while and has explained some of the things that have to be done before the case can be ready for trial, but it doesn’t help much.
Not being able to work doesn’t help, either. Except for his lawyer, Joey has had no visitors. He’s spoken to his mother twice and his sister once, but they sounded afraid to make the trip out, and Joey told them not to bother, that he was fine, if they could just send him some money for commissary so he can get cigarettes. With nothing to fill his days but meals and TV, he loses track of time, forgets what day of the week it is. He finds himself nodding off during the day, then has trouble sleeping at night. By the next day, he’s tired from not sleeping good, and he starts nodding off all over again. He wonders if they put stuff in the food, decides the coffee may be laced with some kind of drug. He cuts out drinking coffee, but that lasts only half a day. When there is nothing else to do, sitting five minutes with a cup of coffee is something he finds himself unwilling to give up, even if it means they’re drugging him.
* * *
The Manhattan phone directory showed no listing for a Chand, S. H., on West Forty-Fifth Street, or anywhere else, for that matter. Dean was
not exactly surprised, though. Someone having a midnight rendezvous with the Police Commissioner would probably be the type to also have an unlisted number. Dean longed for the power and convenience of his DEA days, when such things as unlisted phones, names that went with license plates, and Con Edison subscriber information were all at his fingertips, a phone call or a computer search away.
He decided the walk would do him some good. He had been managing without his cane for a week now, and although he continued to limp slightly, he felt that was more from the habit of favoring his good ankle than from any pain or weakness in the bad one.
He began at Fifth Avenue, the dividing line between Manhattan’s east and west sides. Determined to cover the whole stretch in a single afternoon, he proceeded to head west, zigzagging back and forth across Forty-Fifth Street, checking the directory boards in every apartment house on both sides of the street.
The first few blocks went fairly quickly. The buildings were large and commercial around Times Square, and many could be ignored altogether. Once he was past Eighth Avenue, there was a scattering of residential buildings to slow him down, and he had to check each one, often climbing a staircase to a second level before finding the directory. He noted two Chans and a Chang, but no Chand, S.H. By the time he reached Ninth Avenue, Dean had spent nearly two hours and was still a few blocks from the Hudson River.
He crossed the avenue, feeling his ankle beginning to ache. He needed a phone to check his office for messages. In an era when his colleagues were beginning to carry beepers and pagers and cellular phones, Dean clung to his old habit of calling in periodically to his answering machine. He could not afford his own secretary, and found that answering services managed to lose more messages than they took in the first place.
Felony Murder Page 10