Felony Murder

by Joseph T. Klempner

  Larry Davidson was not a golfer, however, and apparently not a regular frequenter of motels, either.

  “Well, I found your dibenzepin,” he said. “Apparently no one sells it in the U.S. But it’s been in clinical use in Europe since 1966. They market it there under the brand name Noveril. It’s a fairly strong antidepressant, prescribed in tablet form. Was your Police Commissioner known to be depressed?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dean.

  “Well, I’ve ordered a reprint of a technical paper on it. Should have some information as to dosage, contradictions, toxicity, that kind of stuff. As soon as I get it, I’ll send it to you.”

  “Terrific, Doc. What do I owe you?”

  “Your life, your firstborn, your estate. That’ll do for now.”

  “You got it. And thanks.”

  Dean hung up the phone. He wondered what Commissioner Wilson had been depressed about. And why he had been taking a drug available only in Europe? That seemed to make no sense at all.

  Then again, did any of this make any difference? Felony murder was felony murder, Dean reminded himself, and it made no difference if the victim had a heart condition, was depressed, or was taking medication from Mars, for that matter. So who was Dean kidding?

  The Assistant District Attorney in the Bronx called to say he wanted to meet with Dean’s witnesses in the Nathan Ramsey stabbing. Dean’s landlord called to say that the May rent was due, and Dean still hadn’t paid for April. Mark Wexler reported that he couldn’t get any hookers for the bachelor party, so they’d have to settle for stag films instead.

  There are no stag films on B Block in C-93. Nor are there any bachelor parties. Sex is just one more thing that Joey Spadafino is deprived of on Rikers Island, along with privacy, food he can eat, and the right to come and go as he pleases. Even during the six weeks he had spent on the street after losing his room, Joey felt like he was part of the world. Here he feels cut off, alone.

  Here there are no pleasures. On the street, he could beg, hustle, steal if necessary. There were no big scores, but there was always money if you were enterprising enough. And money meant you could get high whenever you wanted, could eat when you were hungry, drink when you were thirsty. Could even get laid now and then.

  Not that there are no drugs here. There’s plenty. Some come in on family visits, smuggled inside balloons or condoms concealed in visitors’ mouths and given to inmates in kisses right under the noses of the COs. But most are brought in by the COs themselves, to be distributed by a trusted inmate or two. After a while, the roles reverse, and it becomes the inmate who owns the officer. If the officer stops bringing stuff in, the inmate snitches on him. So the flow continues. Coke, crack, speed, heroin, uppers, downers. You name it. Marijuana can be a problem ‘cause of its telltale odor when being smoked, but you can get that, too. All it takes is money. Something Joey has none of.

  There’s booze, too. It’s called pruno, though Joey can’t say why. The kitchen crew brews it in a makeshift still that looks like it’s part of the refrigeration unit. Joey’s seen it and even tasted it. There are two varieties, white and killer. White is clear like gin or vodka. It tastes like pure alcohol but burns your throat as it goes down. Killer is a dark brownish purple color, thick and syrupy. It’s said to be a 150 proof, and lives up to its name.

  As for sex, for the first two months he was here, Joey had no sex drive at all. Then, gradually, he began to remember sex, began to actually get horny. Lately, he spends a lot of his time replaying his sexual experiences in his mind, starting with the most recent and working back as far as he can recall. Lying awake this night, he tries to relive every sexual experience he’s ever had, all the way back to the time he was fourteen and his cousin Emilia - who was only fifteen herself but was a head taller than Joey and already in high school - had unzipped Joey’s pants, reached into his undershorts, and began stroking his cock. Joey’s whole body had gone rigid right along with his cock, and his mouth had opened like he had lockjaw, making Emilia laugh as she watched him. But she hadn’t stopped, she’d kept stroking him until he thought his head would explode, kept stroking him until he came in agonizing, excruciating spurts that he thought would last forever. Then she had dried him off, stuffed him back in his shorts, zipped up his pants, and kissed him on the cheek, smiling sweetly. The whole time, Joey couldn’t say a word. Afterward, he’d wanted to say, “I love you,” or “Thank you,” or something, but he’d been totally unable to speak, and neither of them has ever talked about it since that day.

  Although he hasn’t seen her in ten years, it is his cousin Emilia that Joey makes love to tonight, rubbing himself under his blanket, softly at first, then harder, harder, until at last he cries out in ecstasy and pain and loneliness and despair.

  “Will you shut the fuck up before I come over and cut that thing off for you!” comes an angry voice from the bunk across from his.

  Just as he had been unable to say anything fourteen years ago, half his lifetime away, Joey can say nothing now. He lies motionless in the semi-darkness, afraid to make a sound, feeling the warm stickiness spread slowly between his legs, and cries silently in the night.

  “Dean, have you got a fax machine?”

  It was Thursday afternoon, and Larry Davidson was on the phone.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I just got the reprint of the dibenzepin article. I think you’re going to like it.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Well, for one thing, it says there’ve been a number of deaths reported from overdoses. That may be why they don’t market it here. For another, an overdose - let me read this to you. ‘Overdosage with dibenzepin results in severe circulatory collapse and cardiac arrest. Postmortem presentation will mimic nonspecific heart failure, with microscopic studies of the circulatory system required for differentiation.’“

  “What the hell does that mean?” Dean asked.

  “It means that if there was enough dibenzepin in his system, your Commissioner may just possibly have died from taking too much. But you’re going to have to disinter the body and get another autopsy to find out.”

  “Wow,” Dean said softly.

  “But that’s not the best part.” Davidson was on a roll. “Didn’t the papers say whatshisname had a heart condition?”

  “Yeah,” said Dean, wondering where this was going.

  “Well, listen to this. ‘Contraindications: obesity, coronary disease, respiratory disease, alcohol consumption.’”

  Dean didn’t need any of that explained to him. It meant that Wilson, having suffered a heart attack a year earlier, probably should never have been taking the drug in the first place. And that he certainly shouldn’t have been drinking while he was on it. It meant that, for the first time, there was the possibility, ever so slight, that he had died not from a second heart attack, but from the combination of a drug he shouldn’t have been taking and alcohol he shouldn’t have been drinking.

  “Fax that stuff to me, Dr. Einstein,” Dean said, knowing that there was enough there to take to Walter Bingham and enlist his help in getting a court order to dig up the body of Edward Wilson. And probably enough to get Justice Rothwax to sign an order if Bingham opposed it.

  The fax arrived within minutes. Dean would never understand how such things happened. He could not program a phone with a memory, hook up an answering machine, or reset a digital watch, let alone record on a VCR. But he had no time now for marveling. He glanced at the pages as he walked back to his room. They included a lot of technical data he didn’t understand, drawings resembling benzene rings he remembered from college chemistry days, and tables of levels of concentrations of various demethylated metabolites found in tissues of overdose victims. There were the contraindications Larry Davidson had read to him over the phone. And there was a list of references, mostly from European forensic toxicology publications, many of them in German.

  He dialed Walter Bingham’s number. Walter picked up on the first ring.

  “Wa
lter, Dean Abernathy.”

  “Hey, Dean. What’s up?”

  “I need to see you right away. Can I come over?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. As in immediately.”

  “Bad time, Dean. I’ve gotta see the Old Man in fifteen minutes.”

  “This is more important,” said Dean.

  “Right,” Bingham laughed. “I can always find another job. What’s going on? Did Lee Harvey Oswald confess to killing Wilson?”

  “What’s going on is you and I are going to get an order exhuming the body so we can do another autopsy.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Wait’ll you see what I’ve got, Walter.”

  “I don’t care what you’ve got. Edward Wilson was cremated three months ago.”

  Dean sat stunned. Once, some years back, he had come home to what was then his apartment. As soon as he had put his key in the lock, he had known something was wrong. Dean was no more neurotic than the average New Yorker, but he always double-locked his door, even if he was going no farther than the laundry room downstairs. This time, he had found the door completely unlocked. He had been living alone at the time, and no one else had a key.

  He had pushed the door open slowly, ready for combat. But, probably luckily, he was too late. Whoever had ransacked the apartment had apparently been unwilling to believe that the occupant had nothing of value, and he - or they - had torn it apart, whether in frustration or retaliation. But to Dean, who placed enormous value in his thrift-shop surroundings, in his collections of seashells, driftwood, and old bottles, the violation had been deep and personal.

  He sat now, crushed as he had been then, feeling as he had then that the world had collapsed around him.

  Was this some sort of roller-coaster ride he was on? Every time he developed a lead and found some small cause for hope, things would dramatically nosedive. The signatures duplicated by the detectives had turned out to be, in all likelihood, nothing more than typical police overreaching. The painstaking search for the 911 caller and tracking down Janet Killian had succeeded only in the discovery of a witness who would completely demolish the defense at trial. And now the possibility that Wilson’s death might actually have been caused by an accidental overdose of a drug he shouldn’t have been taking and alcohol he shouldn’t have been drinking, was suddenly rendered unprovable because his body had been cremated following the autopsy.

  It was almost enough to make a guy feel paranoid, thought Dean.

  With no cases scheduled for the following day, Dean turned on the radio that evening to hear the weather forecast. While listening to the business news, the traffic-and-transit report, and the late-breaking headlines, he decided he would place his fate in the Gods at AccuWeather. If the Oracle of WINS 1010 said tomorrow was going to be rainy, Dean would take that as an omen that he should go to the office and catch up on paperwork and filing and that sort of stuff. If, on the other hand, sunny skies were promised, that would be a definite sign that he should go climbing.

  He walked to his window and craned his neck to peer upward in an attempt to spot the tiny portion of sky visible from his apartment, but the gray patch told him little and almost caused him to miss the weather report, which his ear picked up just in time to hear “mostly sunny, with highs in the low eighties. Tomorrow night, becoming cloudy, with a chance of showers.” As omens went, that was a definite A+.

  Dean called his regular climbing partner, Mark Wexler, but Mark had to be in court the following day. Next, he tried Jordan Miller, a much better climber than Dean himself, but got no answer. Finally, he called Gary Ranier, who was less experienced than Dean - a fact that meant Dean would have to act as lead climber rather than follower, an arrangement that raised Dean’s level of anxiety considerably, and one he accordingly tried to avoid whenever possible.

  “Yello,” came Gary’s trademark greeting.

  “Gary. Dean. Howyadoin’?”

  “Nothin’ much. Whatchupto?”

  “Sameold sameold.”

  “Me too.”

  Not quite as articulate as the way a couple of women friends might bring each other up to date on the course of their lives over the past five weeks, but it would do.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” Dean asked.

  “Going to the doctor, my favorite thing.” Gary had AIDS. He had survived a tumor in his neck and two bouts of pneumonia. He was between crises now, and he went to the office where he worked as an accountant as often as his health permitted him to. “Why, got something in mind?”

  “You up for a trip to the Gunks?”

  “Dynamite!” Gary shouted.

  “Pick you up?”

  “You bet. What time?”

  “How does seven sound?”

  “Sounds horrible,” said Gary, “but I’ll deal.”

  Dean busied himself checking his climbing gear and laying out his clothes to save time in the morning. He picked out a rope of brightly woven orange and black nylon laid over a solid core, the combination of which was capable of withstanding an impact of several thousand pounds, a very relevant requirement when one considered the momentum generated by a free-falling human body and the need to stop that body in midair in a fraction of a second. He packed a harness, a sling, various lengths of nylon webbing, several dozen carabiners, or snap-rings, an assortment of nuts and chocks to wedge into the cracks of the cliff face, a chalk bag, and a second bag containing emergency equipment: knife, whistle, flashlight, lighter, water bottle, and first-aid kit. He checked his climbing shoes and backpack and selected several layers of clothing that would enable him to keep warm in the early-morning shade and gradually peel down for the strenuous business of climbing in the heat of the afternoon sun.

  The morning found Dean and Gary headed north on the New York State Thruway, approaching the New Paltz exit. There, far off to the west, the first section of cliff came into view, marked by the Mohonk Tower.

  Located fifteen minutes out of New Paltz, the Shawangunk Mountains are a conglomerate of granite-like sedimentary rock roughly 400 million years old. They are a portion of the Appalachian chain that rises slightly to the north and extends as far south as Alabama. But only in its northernmost reaches do the cliffs soar dramatically to their full height and is the rock hard enough to form the premier technical climbing site in the eastern United States, drawing climbers from all over to a mile or so of vertical wall known affectionately, as well as pronounceably, as the “Gunks.”

  Dean aimed the Jeep west on Route 299, then north on Routes 44 and 55. Immediately, the road began to climb, and after a hairpin turn and a short uphill stretch, the cliffs rose sharply on the right. Dean continued up until he found a spot between two trees, into which he was able to maneuver the Jeep. They got out, packed up their gear, and began a short hike to the base of the cliff.

  The very first route they came to was a favorite of Dean’s, a short, single-pitch 5.7 climb. Under a universal rating system that graded climbs by degree of difficulty, Dean considered anything from a 5.0 to 5.3 something he could safely free climb. A 5.4 to 5.6 route was still within his comfort range though he would not attempt one without a rope. The 5.7 to 5.9 range provided him with all the challenge he needed, and though he’d managed one or two 5.10’s, he didn’t consider himself a 5.10 climber, certainly not when he was in the lead. There were climbs in the Gunks rated as high as 5.13, and even a 5.14 or two, but Dean resigned himself to the role of admiring spectator at that level of the sport.

  They set up at the bottom, Gary tying onto a tree with a length of webbing and wrapping the rope around his body in a belaying stance. Dean stepped in a harness and slipped a sling containing carabiners, webbing, hardware, and chalk bag over one shoulder and across his body bandolier-style. He tied one end of the rope to a carabiner connected to the harness at his waist and stepped to the base of the cliff.

  In a stylized manner used by virtually every English-speaking rock climber and duplicated in a hundred languages around the worl
d, Dean checked to see if Gary was ready to catch him should the need arise.

  “Belay on?” he called.

  “On belay,” came Gary’s response.

  “Climbing,” Dean announced.

  “Climb.”

  The climb began with a four-inch-wide vertical crack, into which Dean wedged the toe of one climbing shoe. Then, placing a hand on either side of the crack, fingertips pointed together as though he intended to rip the crack apart, he pulled himself up from the ground and began his ascent. On this route, the crux - or most difficult - move came very quickly, and he wasted no time placing protection in case of a fall. At fifteen feet, he wedged a hex nut into a V-shaped groove so that a downward force would serve only to tighten it. The nut was pre-tied to a short piece of webbing that held a carabiner at the other end. This carabiner Dean now snapped onto the climbing rope. The result was that were he to fall at this point, Gary could catch him right where he was, saving him a fifteen-foot drop to the ground below.

  Dean continued upward to the crux move. There he placed his left fist thumb up into the crack and then turned it 90 degrees, wedging it into the opening as a jamb. Working quickly to avoid the fatigue of hanging on to the cliff, he leaned back to test his hold. The crack hugged his wrist snugly while refusing to let his wider fist come free. Satisfied, he shifted all of his weight to his fist, simultaneously reaching high above him with his right hand and walking up the vertical surface of the rock with both feet. As his right hand found an outcropping of rock above him, he turned his left fist and released it from the crack, transferring his weight to his right hand. As his feet kept contact below him, he was able to reach up with his left hand to a good handhold. He placed both feet in the crack beneath him, one atop the other, and thus secured, he paused to place another piece of protection. That done, he was able to climb easily to an alcove, where he rested for a moment before making a simple traverse to the right, from where he continued on up to the top. He had completed the forty-foot ascent in fifteen minutes, the only price having been a set of raw knuckles on his left hand.