Felony Murder

by Joseph T. Klempner

  Janet got Mrs. Del Valle from Apartment 4A to baby-sit Nicole. Janet insisted on dressing in all black - black jeans, black turtle-neck top, and black sneakers - saying she wanted to feel like a cat burglar. Dean managed to talk her out of blackening her face with mascara. “It’ll make trying to explain this as a spur-of-the-moment thing a little difficult if we get caught,” he said.

  “We’re not going to get caught,” Janet assured him. But she relented on the mascara.

  They had to take the elevator down because Mrs. Del Valle insisted on seeing them off, bestowing motherly smiles on them. Dean guessed her weight at upward of 300 pounds and didn’t want to do anything that might upset her.

  “She’s so happy for me,” Janet explained. “She thinks I’m going out on a date.”

  “Yeah,” said Dean. “My mother would be thrilled.” But the truth was, it was Dean that was having a hard time hiding his excitement at being with this young woman he didn’t quite know how to deal with.

  They got off the elevator at the second floor and took the steps back up to the fourth. As Dean followed Janet up the stairs, taking them quietly, two at a time, he felt like he was back in high school, prowling the building at night in search of the answer sheet to the next day’s math test. He had an almost uncontrollable urge to reach up and grab her rear end as she took the stairs in front of him. He fought the impulse by picturing himself the subject of a Congressional inquiry on sexual harassment, trying to explain that he had meant no harm.

  Janet cracked open the door to the fourth floor, peered out, and motioned Dean to follow. They paused at the door to Apartment 4B and listened. There was no sound from within. Janet unlocked the two locks, and they stepped inside, closing the door behind them.

  The interior reminded Dean a little of his own apartment. It had an informal, lived-in quality, and Dean took an immediate liking to this Mr. Chang, who was obviously comfortable enough with himself to leave his things around in a casual way.

  “Oh, my God,” Janet whispered. “Someone’s torn the place apart!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Mr. Chang is compulsively neat. He’d never leave his things like this.”

  So much for the informal, lived-in quality. Dean walked into the bedroom and had to agree with Janet’s version. The mattress had been pulled halfway off the bed, and the linens tossed to the floor. All the drawers of a dresser had been pulled open, and one was removed altogether and left on the seat of a wooden chair. Articles of clothing were scattered about, personal items dumped in piles on the bare floor.

  “Someone’s been looking for his money,” said Janet. “He told me he didn’t trust banks. In China, the government can decide to take your money out of your account any time they want, and that’s it.”

  Dean kneeled down and began sifting through the piles of Mr. Chang’s belongings. “I don’t think it was his money they were looking for,” he said, showing Janet a billfold with several fives and tens in it. There was also a gold pocket watch that was heavy enough to be worth something.

  “What were they looking for, then?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Dean.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “I’m not sure about that, either. Wasn’t this your idea?”

  “Oh, sure,” laughed Janet. “Blame me.”

  “Shut up and search, you. We’re looking for something that’ll give us a clue where the inscrutable Chang is at the moment. There’s got to be something here.”

  And there was. It took them close to a half hour, but Janet finally came up with a packet of letters neatly tied together and stored atop a bookcase in the living room. The letters themselves were written in Chinese, but the envelopes were addressed in English. On the back of each one was a neatly printed return address:

  Edna Chang

  133 Hillcrest Road

  Brimfield, MA 01010

  Dean copied the information onto a separate piece of paper and returned the packet to its hiding place.

  Another twenty minutes of searching turned up nothing further, and Dean announced that it was getaway time. Janet was going through kitchen containers, insisting she was looking for opium or microfilm, and pleaded for another ten minutes. Dean told her she had five and wandered over to the window.

  It had turned dark outside, and streetlamps lit up Bleecker Street below. Dean looked across to where Joey Spadafino had encountered Edward Wilson nearly six months ago. From Mr. Chang’s apartment on the fourth floor, the doorway where Joey had been huddling from the storm was even easier to make out than it was from Janet’s window one floor below; the added height actually improved the perspective, much the way you could sometimes see the playing field of a ballpark better if you sat up higher in the grandstand.

  Pedestrians were visible in the lights as they made their way along the narrow sidewalks on either side of the street. An Italian restaurant featured specials on a blackboard propped up out front. Taxis cruised by. A dark blue car sat at a hydrant across the street, about five parking spaces to Dean’s right. And even though he could not distinguish its make or model from the distance, Dean knew immediately that it would be a Plymouth. Squinting into the glare of the lights, he could see that there were two people in the front seat. And though it was impossible to tell if they were male or female, black or white, young or old, he knew that they would be Detective Rasmussen and his partner, Detective Mogavero. As his eyes adjusted further, Dean thought he could make out eyeglasses on the occupant of the passenger seat. As he strained to see better, he saw the passenger lower them to his lap, and Dean realized they were not eyeglasses at all. They were binoculars.

  Dean pulled back from the window, knowing he’d been seen. When he was thirteen or fourteen, he had been spying on Mrs. Felcher undressing in her bedroom across the way one night, when she had suddenly and unexpectedly looked straight at him from her own window. He pulled back now as he had then - too late - feeling caught, discovered, and very much in trouble. For days, he had lived in dread anticipation of a midnight knock on the door, followed by his parents’ summoning him to face the inquiries of the police. He prayed for deliverance, swore off his Peeping Tom ways, and made a secret pact with whatever powers might control things that, if only he could be spared this one time, he would never again lust after Mrs. Felcher or any other woman as long as he lived.

  “Turn off the lights,” he said to Janet, and the urgency in his tone brought an almost immediate response. In the darkness, Dean stood at the side of the window but back a step, in shadow, as he studied the blue car on the street below. A fragrance of what seemed like peach, or perhaps apricot, reached him, and though she said nothing, he felt the presence of Janet Killian standing close behind him.

  “See the blue car?” he said.

  “Yes.” She was so close to him he could feel her nod.

  “That’s your friend Rasmussen.”

  Now he felt a shiver go through her body, and he reached back with his hand. She took it in her own, which felt small and cool to the touch. She closed the distance between them even more, and they continued to stand like that in the shadow by the window, the front of her body lightly touching the back of his.

  “What are they doing here?” she whispered, though they were well out of earshot.

  “Watching us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re afraid of us.”

  “For a minute there,” Janet said, “I thought you said they’re afraid of us.”

  “I did,” said Dean.

  “Why?”

  There it was again: the Question, reduced this time to a single word. Dean tried his best. “Because they’ve done something,” he said, “and they think we’re on to it.”

  “Something,” Janet echoed. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Dean admitted. “Something to do with Joey Spadafino and Commissioner Wilson and you and Mr. Chang. But I don’t know quite what yet.”

  “They’r
e moving,” Janet said. And she was right; the blue car pulled away from the curb and into traffic. It slowed down as it came abreast of the building entrance, then accelerated and continued up the block and away from them.

  Dean looked at his watch. It was nine-thirty. “What time do you have to be back?” he asked Janet.

  She laughed. “Mrs. Del Valle told me I should stay out all night. She expects me to be at least engaged by the time I return. But if I don’t get back to Nicole by two, my breasts explode.”

  Dean suppressed his interest and let her comment pass. “I’m starved,” he said. “Let’s spend our ten bucks’ bail money on dinner somewhere.”

  They found a Mexican restaurant on Bank Street. Janet would not drink while she was nursing Nicole, so Dean was forced to down a margarita for each of them. They wolfed down chips and salsa and shared an order of vegetarian fajitas. And they talked. Janet, it turned out, had been orphaned at nine when her father, an alcoholic, had raced a locomotive to a crossing in the family car, killing himself, Janet’s mother, and two of her four brothers. She had looked after her two younger brothers since she had been fourteen. One was in college in Boston, the other writing poetry in Ireland. She herself had worked as a waitress, barmaid, lifeguard, aerobics instructor, and housepainter, earning enough money to put herself through nursing school at night. It had taken her five years. She had lived with one man for two years and spent two more waiting in vain for another one to leave his wife. Three days after that ended, she had gone to the Museum of Natural History and picked up the best-looking man who ventured into the Hall of Fishes that afternoon, taken him home, and gone to bed with him. She had never asked or learned his name. When Nicole was born and Janet had been asked the father’s name for the birth certificate, she had replied with a straight face, “Ralph Barracuda.” She was presently working in the post-operative recovery room at Mount Sinai Hospital, because they had a good day-care facility, where she could leave Nicole and even nurse her on her lunch break.

  Dean insisted on paying the check, even though it came to somewhat more than $10. “Mrs. Del Valle’s liable to ask you if I treated,” he explained, “and I don’t want her getting angry and sitting on me or anything.”

  They walked back to her building hand in hand, Dean and this woman he had already fallen in love with.

  For Joey Spadafino, there’s nobody to hold hands with. Joey sits in the darkness in a six-by-nine-foot cell in what is officially designated by Rikers Island management as the Administrative Segregation Unit. Among the inmates, it’s known simply as the Hole.

  Joey’s in the Hole for fifteen days, the punishment for possession of a dangerous instrument, and a Schedule One Controlled Substance. The decision to treat the incidents administratively, rather than refer them to the Bronx County District Attorney for prosecution in court, is supposed to be appreciated by Joey as a break, but he regards it as an admission of sorts by the corrections authorities that he has been “flaked” - the cocaine put on him by the COs.

  In the Hole, Joey’s in lockdown for all but one hour a day, which means he spends the remaining twenty-three hours sitting in his cell. There’s no bed; he’s provided a mattress and a blanket. He sleeps on the mattress at night; during the day he folds it against the wall and uses it as a chair. There’s no other furniture in the cell. There’s a hole in one corner of the concrete floor, to be used as a toilet. There’s a discolored sink with a single faucet that drips lukewarm water. A twenty-five-watt bulb lights the interior of the cell from within a protective cage attached to the ceiling. There’s no window. The metal door has a six-inch-square opening in it for the duty officer to look in on him. A vent in the opposite wall lets a blast of hot air in during the day, a trickle of cooler air at night.

  For one hour a day, Joey’s led out into a small yard and permitted to exercise, along with half a dozen other inmates he assumes are also in the Hole. He’s permitted to walk with them, to run laps with them, even to lift weights that are provided. He’s forbidden to talk to them. One word of conversation results in all of the inmates being immediately returned to their cells, as has happened once, even though the rule was not explained to Joey in advance. But it was another inmate who spoke, not Joey. Joey has no way of knowing whether the rule had been explained to the other inmate and dares not ask.

  On rainy days, there are no yard privileges.

  Twice a week, Joey’s led out and escorted to the shower area, where he’s allotted five minutes of water, the same lukewarm water that drips from the faucet of his sink.

  Three times a day, meals are passed to Joey on a plastic tray slid through the small square opening in the door of his cell. Everything on the tray is room temperature - meat, potatoes, vegetables, coffee, milk - as though it’s been sitting somewhere for an hour before being brought to him.

  Joey tries hard to finish his food because the tray from one meal isn’t collected until the next one’s delivered at the following meal. The leftover food draws roaches and reminds Joey of a science experiment in sixth grade, where a magnet attracted iron filings in pretty patterns. At first, Joey squashes the bigger roaches with the soles of his sneakers, but the dead ones only manage to attract more live ones. So he ends up leaving them alone, lets them come and go as they please. He’s begun thinking of them as his cellmates. Once he even catches himself talking to one of them, asking it if it wants some of his leftover cooked peas.

  He worries that he’s beginning to crack up. He thinks it’s even possible that he talks to the roaches a lot, only he’s not aware of it, except for the one time he caught himself.

  To pass the time, Joey dreams. Not just when he is asleep, but when he’s awake, too. If he wakes up from a dream, he tries to continue it while he’s awake. He finds he can do this if he concentrates real hard when he first wakes up, while the dream is still fresh in his mind. If he waits even a few seconds, it’s too late, and the dream gets away from him.

  He dreams now he’s at an amusement park, though he’s not sure which one, or even if it’s any one in particular that he’s ever been to. He’s on the Ferris wheel, sitting next to a pretty girl. Each time they get to the top, he has the feeling the car they’re in is going to come unbolted and sail forward, out over the park below. But each time, they stay attached and begin to drop, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, as though in free fall, and as they drop, Joey feels like his insides have been left at the top, and the feeling is so intense, so excruciating, that it’s all he can do to keep from crying out.

  Dean slept until after ten Saturday morning. He had walked Janet home, said goodnight to her and a beaming Mrs. Del Valle at the door, and headed carefully home, the two margaritas being one more than his customary self-imposed limit when he was biking. It had been after two when he climbed into bed, but still he had lain awake for at least an hour. The intrigue of searching Mr. Chang’s apartment, the panic at almost certainly having been spotted by the detectives, and the general excitement over spending the evening with Janet Killian had combined to produce an adrenaline level in Dean that was totally incompatible with sleep. The last time he had looked at his clock it read 3:11.

  He took three aspirins for his morning headache, reminded of his father’s kidding him that when it came to alcohol, Dean took after his mother and drank “like a Jew,” meaning he was better suited to eating. He showered, shaved, made a pot of espresso. He had just sat down on the couch with a cup of it when the phone rang.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello, Dean.” Dean recognized David Leung’s voice.

  “How’d it go?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?” David asked.

  “That good, huh?”

  David explained that he had gone to St. Vincent’s Hospital Friday afternoon, as he had said he would. He had identified himself as the brother of Mr. Chang and had even been able to produce some phony identification he had made up in case he was asked to show some. When he had asked about the whereabouts of
his brother, he had been ushered into an office and asked to wait while the files were checked.

  “After about fifteen minutes, some guy in a suit from Administration comes in and starts asking me a bunch of questions. I had the impression he was stalling for time, and it turns out I was right. About ten minutes later, two detectives arrive, along with two uniformed security guards. They want to see my identification. I’m worried now, so I act all indignant and refuse to show it to them. I keep saying, ‘This is America,’ and start threatening to call my lawyer. They want to know who my lawyer is. I make up a name for them.”

  “Good thinking,” said Dean.

  “They want to know who I’m working for. I keep saying I don’t understand; I’m not working for anyone; I just want to find out where they’ve sent my brother. Then they ask me if I’m the only family he has. You can call me crazy, Dean, but I had the feeling that if I’d said yes they would’ve killed me on the spot. ‘Big, big family,’ I said. ‘Mother, father, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, all the works.’ Finally, they ask me for my phone number and tell me they’ll call me with the information. But I’m too scared by this time, so I gave them a wrong number. After an hour or so they let me go.”

  “Jesus, David, I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I failed in my assignment. What the hell is this all about? Nuclear secrets? Alien invaders?”

  “Over dinner some night,” Dean said, aware that they had already said too much on the phone. “I owe you one.”

  After hanging up, Dean called Information for Brimfield, Massachusetts. He was pleasantly surprised when they were able to supply him with a number for an E. Chang at 133 Hillcrest Road.

  A woman answered on the second ring.

  “Hello,” said Dean, in his most official voice. “I’m Mr. Frasier in the records department at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. I’m trying to reach Edna Chang.”

  “This is Edna Chang.”

  “Oh, good. Miss Chang, we’ve located some additional portions of Mr. Chang’s chart, and we’d like to forward them to the hospital he was transferred to, but I’m afraid nobody entered the name and address of that hospital in our computer. I wonder if you could assist us.”