Felony Murder

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “I wish I knew,” said Dean.

  For Joey Spadafino, no tea is served on B Block in C-93 on Rikers Island, either in china cups or mugs. But on this Thursday, as Dean Abernathy meets with Marie Wilson in her Bleecker Street townhouse, Joey’s notified that he has a visitor, his first in four months. He’s summoned not to the general visiting area, where inmates receive visits from family members and friends whose names they have listed on their visit permission sheets. Instead, he’s brought to the counsel room. His visitor is an attorney.

  “Hello, Mr. Spadafino,” says a tall, tanned man with silver hair and a matching, carefully trimmed beard.

  “Hello,” Joey says, not knowing what to make of this stranger. He had expected Dean.

  “My name is Leonard Winston. I’ve been asked by a mutual friend to speak with you. I’d like a half hour of your time. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you any questions about the case. I simply want to introduce myself and let you know why I’m interested in your situation. Okay?”

  “Who’s the mutual friend?” Joey asks, looking into Leonard Winston’s eyes. They are a brilliant blue.

  “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge that,” says Leonard Winston. “Let’s just say he’s someone who thinks you’re being railroaded, someone who cares about you. Willing to listen to me for a few minutes?”

  “I’m listening,” says Joey.

  “Wonderful. Mr. Spadafino, I know you didn’t murder anyone. I know you’re not guilty. I know you have a lawyer right now who’s, well, let’s just say he’s in over his head. He’s someone they assigned to you. He gets paid by the court. In other words, he’s part of the system that’s out to get you. Understand?”

  “I’m listening,” Joey repeats. But the truth is that what he’s hearing makes a lot of sense. It’s all occurred to him before, of course, but he’s never been able to put it into words as neatly as Leonard Winston.

  “I’m not part of the system,” says the man. “I fight the system every day. I take cases like yours. Little people with no one to fight for them. I take cases like yours, and I win them.”

  “Why? What do you want from me?” Joey asks. “I got no money.”

  The man laughs. “I don’t want any money,” he says. “I’ve got all the money I need. I want to defend you against unfair charges. I want to win your case. And I’ll be honest, I want the publicity that comes with getting an innocent man off. After I do that, who knows, maybe we’ll write a book together, you and me, and you’ll end up a rich man, too.”

  “And if you fail?” Joey asks.

  “I won’t fail.” The man smiles confidently. He is very good-looking. “I’ve picked your case because I know I can win it.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Nothing but sign on the dotted line,” says Leonard Winston, reaching into his inside jacket pocket and producing a wad of papers stapled together. From the other inside pocket, he pulls out a pen. He unscrews the cap and places it on top of the writing part of the pen. It’s a fountain pen. Joey hasn’t seen one like it since grade school penmanship classes. It’s dark green, with wavy lines through it. It looks like it’s made out of marble. Leonard Winston slides the pen and the wad of papers in front of Joey. Joey looks down at them. The papers are folded in such a way that the page for his signature is on top. He begins to shuffle through the other pages. They’re printed like the pages in a book, only the letters are much smaller and closer together. There are almost a dozen pages.

  “Don’t worry about the fine print,” Leonard Winston says with a smile. “That’s just legal language.”

  Joey suddenly has a headache. The things this man is saying sound good, but he seems a little too smooth, too slick. Joey feels confused and stupid.

  “Can I keep the papers?” he asks the man. “Read them over and let you know?”

  “I’m afraid I have only one set,” explains Leonard Winston. “Tell you what. Sign this set. As soon as I get back to my office I’ll have one of my secretaries make a copy for you and send it right out to you, Express Mail. You’ll have it this time tomorrow. Can’t beat that, can you?”

  It sounds good, but again Joey feels somehow that he’s being conned. He remembers one time a black kid from Fourteenth Street wanted to sell him a twenty-five-inch RCA color TV for $50. It all sounded so good until the kid asked him for half the money up front and said Joey would have to wait while the kid went to get the set. He knew then that he was about to be taken, and knew enough to not part with his $25. He has the same feeling now, even though this man is a lawyer and not some black kid from Fourteenth Street.

  “What do you say, Mr. Spadafino? Do we have a deal? Do I beat this case for you or not?” The smile is still there.

  Joey speaks slowly. He says, “The deal is, you leave the papers here with me to read. If that’s no good, you can go shit in your hat.”

  Joey watches the smile disappear. “You’re an asshole,” says Leonard Winston. “A stupid, ignorant asshole. I hope you get twenty-five to life. I hope you die in jail. I hope-”

  But Joey Spadafino has already stood up and begun to walk away, and he doesn’t hear the rest of what the man has to say. He feels angry at the man. But at the same time he feels good, like he’s just saved himself $25 all over again.

  The half keg had already been tapped by the time Dean arrived at Mark Wexler’s on Friday night, and the odor of beer and marijuana smoke filled the apartment. Dean was late because at the last moment, he had remembered he was supposed to bring a gift. Worse yet, the gift was supposed to be something silly, $20 or under, and accompanied by a poem written by the giver.

  In a panic, Dean had decided to approach the task backward. He had quickly given up trying to think of words that rhymed with Angelo or Ange, and settled on something he pretentiously entitled, “To Angelo, on the Eve of the Big Plunge.”

  Behold the great Ange Petrocelli!

  His pits may be damp and smelly,

  And his knees shake like jelly,

  But he never eats meat

  And refuses to cheat,

  So there’s nothing wrong with his belly!

  It wasn’t much, but it was a poem. Then Dean had rushed to a health-food store on Broadway, where he had spent $19.38 on the most absurd products he could find. He bought concentrated carrot juice, garlic mints, fortified millet, unsulfured organic sun-dried raisins, and blue sesame seaweed candy. The yogurt-covered dried carob clusters would have put him over the $20 limit. Then he violated his rule against cabs and was still an hour late getting to the party.

  Dean, it turned out, knew few of Angelo’s friends besides Mark Wexler. So he spent the first hour or so pretty much in the background, an observer to the beer-guzzling, marijuana-smoking, joke-telling rituals of male bonding that were the order of the evening. A six-foot hero sandwich arrived, and an impressive amount of it disappeared. Poems were read, gifts were presented to cheers and laughter. A cake created and decorated at a place called the Erotic Baker was brought out. It was made to resemble a naked woman lying seductively on her belly, rear end on display. All who knew Angelo’s fiancee Stephanie agreed it was a remarkable likeness of her, though Angelo insisted Stephanie’s buns were cuter. Someone disagreed, and good-natured ribbing followed. Photos of the cake were taken from all angles, body parts were served and eaten, and crude jokes abounded. In spite of himself, Dean found he was mellowing and joining the fun, not without the help of several mugs of beer and even a hit or two of premium Wexler weed.

  Then the movies came out, with more laughter and a heated argument over selection. Naughty Nipples and Sweet Cheeks had few supporters, it turned out. It came down to a runoff between When Carry Met Sally and Inside Teenage Vixens, Part Two. Dean cast his vote for the Vixens, based purely on the improbable campiness of the title. But the Vixenistas were narrowly outvoted by the Carryites. In the days that followed, Dean would wonder about fate, destiny, and the long arm of coincidence. At the moment it happened, he simply
accepted the election returns good-naturedly and settled back on the sofa, feeling no pain from the pleasant buzz of cold beer, fattening food, and top-grade marijuana. He watched Mark Wexler work the VCR controls and waited for his first glimpse of Carry and Sally.

  The truth was, Dean secretly liked pornography. Not the graphic closeups of sweaty body parts endlessly slapping together and merging, but the foreplay: the seduction, the teasing, the undressing. Unfortunately, there was precious little of that in what he had been exposed to. He concluded that his tastes must be strange, or at least in the minority, and that the average porno viewer (whoever that might turn out to be) was eager to zoom in with the camera and focus on organs, orifices, and orgasms.

  Even before Carry could meet Sally, there were previews of coming attractions, with the inevitable comments on the use of the word coming. Promising scenes from Heather in Leather and Rear View Mirror raised complaints that Mark should have included them in his selections. Then, finally, the feature attraction.

  In a heavy-handed parody of When Harry Met Sally, the movie began with the two principals being introduced and setting out on a cross-country drive. Only Carry and Sally were both young women. Gorgeous young women. Pornography had come a long way, Dean thought to himself, not only in the quality of the production, but in the selection of the performers as well. Gone for the most part were the pale, overweight actors and actresses with bad teeth and sagging breasts, replaced by young California types with Nautilus bodies and toothpaste smiles. One of the women, a curly-haired blonde - Sally, he thought, though he had not paid close attention to the dialogue and might be mistaken - Dean knew he had seen before, right down to the sunglasses she wore, a fact that surprised Dean. He wondered if he had been watching too much pornography, might be in danger of becoming addicted. Was there a program he could join, a Voyeurs Anonymous? Should he contact Clarence Thomas?

  On the screen, the car’s air conditioner gave out in the middle of the desert. To combat the heat, the women were forced to shed various items of clothing. In time, the engine overheated, and an emergency stop had to be made. Off came the rest of the clothing, and Carry and Sally got down to meeting for real.

  It was not the slow unbuttoning of Sally’s blouse that did it for Dean, or the discarding of her bra, though the effect of the latter act was spectacular enough in its own way. Nor was it the wriggling free of her jeans, or even the lowering of an absurdly tiny pair of black panties. It was instead the removal of her sunglasses that did it. Dean reacted in stages. First he experienced a vague but undeniable sense of déjà vu, an awareness that things had somehow shifted to slow motion, that all this had happened to him before. But his mind seemed to be working at half speed, as though he were underwater, trying to reach the surface and break through.

  Sally smiled (at Carry? at him?), then lowered her head between Carry’s breasts. The camera shifted to Carry’s face, thrown back in exaggerated, eye-closed ecstasy. Still Dean felt submerged, separated from the real world or recognition. He watched hypnotically as Sally kissed each of Carry’s breasts, in turn, before lifting her head. The camera caught her smile.

  “That’s her!”

  The shout brought Dean up and out of his reverie with a jolt. It took him a second to recognize the voice of the shouter as his own.

  “That’s her,” he repeated inanely.

  “Who?” someone was asking.

  “Stephanie?”

  “Hillary Clinton?”

  “Your mother?”

  “That’s her,” Dean said a third time. “That’s Janet Killian.”

  It had certainly turned out to be a strange way to end a bachelor party. There had been a loud chorus of “Who-the-fuck-is-Janet-Killian?” followed by complaints that Dean’s epiphany had sure managed to destroy everyone else’s mood. The tape was rewound and begun twice, then finally permitted to run its course. Carry met Sally again and again, and by the end of the movie, the two seemed best of friends. Dean was forced to explain just who Janet Killian, better known to those present as Sally, was, and how she had witnessed the murder of Commissioner Wilson. He succeeded in commandeering the tape from Mark Wexler in exchange for a solemn promise to reimburse Mark out of the check he would receive after the case was over. Even then, Mark looked dubious.

  Despite the beer and marijuana, despite the fact that it was after two in the morning by the time he got home, Dean could not fall asleep. He lay on his back in the darkness, hands folded behind his head, eyes wide open. He watched the occasional lights of a passing car reflect across his bedroom ceiling, and he thought about Janet Killian and the tape.

  He forced himself to believe that the tape was important, though he was unable to figure out just why. But by assuming that it could significantly help his client, Dean was compelled to turn his attention to the question of just how it could best be used.

  The first thing that came to him, he had to admit, was blackmail. He could get word to Janet Killian that if she testified against Joey Spadafino, the whole world would be watching When Carry Met Sally on the six o’clock news. Of course, he could also get arrested for that, lose his license to practice law, and end up in prison. Not to mention that it was a sleazy thing to do in the first place. Other than that, a fine idea.

  Or he could sit tight and use it at trial. Chances are Janet Killian was not going to take the witness stand and volunteer that she was a porno star. She would be much more likely to say she did something else altogether, whether waiting tables, tending bar, or working as an office temporary. If she had no such other job to cite, she would still be inclined to describe herself as an actress doing bit parts, studying filmmaking, or in between roles. Then, on cross-examination, Dean would ask her if she had appeared in pornographic films. If she said yes, she would drop a notch in the eyes of the jury, and Dean would get credit for his perceptiveness. If she said no, he would raise an eyebrow in surprise and ask her if she was certain. Hearing her yes, he would walk over to the defense table, fumble around looking for something, find a manila envelope, withdraw a videocassette, and study its title.

  “Miss Killian,” he would ask, almost matter-of-factly, “have you ever heard of a film called When Carry Met Sally?” There would be a dramatic silence in the courtroom as the jury stared at her, waiting for her answer. And the beauty of it was that whichever way she went at that point, he would have caught her in a lie.

  But not a big lie.

  Showing the jury that the prosecution’s star witness had appeared in pornographic films, even coupled with the fact that she had lied under oath to conceal the fact, was hardly the stuff to produce an acquittal in an otherwise overwhelming case. The jury might well disapprove of Janet Killian, but they were hardly likely to disbelieve her testimony because of their disapproval. And if Dean played the card too heavily and tried to make a major issue of it, the tactic could even backfire and cause the jurors to feel sympathy for a beautiful young woman who had been compelled to do compromising things in front of a camera in order to support herself.

  So using the film to embarrass Janet Killian wouldn’t pay big dividends for Joey Spadafino. There had to be some other use of it, some other significance it held for the defense. But try as he might, Dean couldn’t figure out the answer to the riddle he had created. Yet he continued to force himself to remain convinced that an answer did exist. . . .

  Monday morning Dean called Dr. Larry Davidson to tell him that the body of Edward Wilson had been cremated and that therefore no second autopsy would be possible.

  “What did they save from the one they did?” he wanted to know.

  “What?” Dean was confused.

  “What samples did they take from the body for toxicology? Liver, brain, stomach contents?”

  Dean thumbed through his file, which was getting thick and needed to be subdivided under headings. He found the autopsy and the toxicology reports. “Brain, liver, and bile,” he read to Larry Davidson.

  “And where did our friend dibenzepin
show up?”

  “In the liver sample,” said Dean, looking at the toxicology report.

  “Okay, you’re going to need a toxicologist. He’ll have to examine the sample, and do dilutions to see if he can calculate the level of metabolites. From there, he may be able to work backward and estimate the amount of dibenzepin. It’s not precise, but it might be able to give you an idea. Like, was it just traces, or was it enough to suggest an overdose?”

  “Know any toxicologists?” Dean asked.

  “Not on a first-name basis. They tend to wear thick glasses and live under rocks,” Davidson explained. “But I’ll ask around.”

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  Dean dialed Walter Bingham’s number. Bingham was on another line but promised to get right back to Dean.

  Dean called him back twenty minutes later.

  “Sorry,” said Bingham. “What can I do for you, Dean?”

  “I’ve come for your liver.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve got a toxicologist,” Dean stretched the truth a bit. “I’d like to get him access to the liver sample that was saved from the autopsy.”

  “No can do,” said Bingham.

  “How’s that?”

  “They tell me the sample was used up in the analysis. There’s nothing left of it.”

  The line that separates being appropriately suspicious and being downright paranoid can sometimes be a thin one, and Dean Abernathy sat at his desk, wondering just which side of that line he was on at that moment. Walter Bingham, who had tried a lot more homicide cases than Dean had, had gone on to assure Dean that it happened all the time, that tissue samples removed from a body by the pathologist at the time of the autopsy were routinely used up by the toxicologist. After all, there were a lot of tests and only a small sample of tissue. They look for alcohol, all sorts of dangerous drugs, and a whole list of prescription drugs. By the time they’re finished, there’s little or nothing left. That was often the case, Bingham explained, particularly in a situation such as this, where at the time of death there had been no basis to believe that there had been an “exotic” cause of death. Not that there was any basis to believe so now, either, Bingham reminded Dean.