Felony Murder

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Yes,” said the woman. “He’s at the Tall Oaks Recuperative Center. If you hold on a minute, I’ll get you the address.”

  “Please.”

  After a moment, the woman came back on with the address. Tall Oaks was on Route 303 in Congers, New York. “That’s in Rockland County,” said the woman.

  “Yes, I know,” said Dean. “May I ask how Mr. Chang is doing?”

  “About the same,” said the woman.

  “Well,” said Dean, “let’s hope for the best. In the meantime, I’ll see that these records get sent right out.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Dean hung up and dialed Janet’s number. Already he knew it by heart.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “So did Mrs. Del Valle approve of me?”

  “She’s giving you one more date to buy me a ring.”

  “That’s what I like,” said Dean. “A nice, relaxed timetable.” Then, “What are you doing today?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought maybe we’d break into the White House, kidnap the President.”

  “You up for a ride?”

  “Where to?”

  “Secret.”

  “How’s a girl to know what to wear?”

  “Don’t ask so many questions,” said Dean. The truth was, he figured the chances were pretty good that one or both of their phones were tapped. “I’ll be over in an hour, if that’s okay.”

  “Should I get a sitter?”

  “I think so,” said Dean, adding, “I’ll pay this time.”

  “No need. Mrs. Del Valle wouldn’t take any money last night. Said I should think of it as going toward my dowry.”

  * * *

  Janet was wearing shorts and a T-shirt when Dean arrived in a gray suit. “I see I guessed wrong,” she said. “What’ll it be, bulletproof vest? Bathing suit? Ballroom gown?”

  “Work clothes.”

  “My work clothes are all white,” Janet said.

  “Work clothes,” said Dean.

  She disappeared into the bedroom while Dean went to the window and checked the street below. There had been no sign of anyone following him over, and he saw no suspicious cars now.

  A few minutes went by before Nurse Killian emerged from the bedroom. Dean looked her up and down. He wanted to tell her she looked gorgeous, stunning, sexy, irresistible. He contained himself and said, “Excellent,” as professionally as he could.

  Mrs. Del Valle arrived and smiled approvingly at Dean. Janet gave her instructions and said she wouldn’t be late since she had to work that night.

  They put the top down on the Jeep and headed uptown. Dean drove without talking for the first ten minutes, watching his rearview mirror for a tail. He saw nothing obvious. He got onto the West Side Highway at Fifty-Seventh Street. He exited at Seventy-Ninth Street, took the circular ramp down into the Boat Basin, and as soon as he was out of sight from the traffic behind him, pulled over to the curb. No one followed. Satisfied, he pulled away and back onto the highway and headed to the George Washington Bridge.

  “Hi, Janet,” he finally said.

  “Gee, I thought you’d become autistic.”

  “Just paranoid,” he assured her.

  “So what’s the mission of the day?”

  “Ever hear of a place called Tall Oaks?”

  “Nope.”

  “Me, neither,” said Dean. “But that’s where we’re going.”

  “You’ve found Mr. Chang?”

  “I think so,” said Dean.

  The air felt 10 degrees cooler on the New Jersey side of the bridge, and the trees that lined the Palisades Parkway offered a welcome contrast to the concrete corridors of the city. Dean reached for one of Janet’s hands that rested on her lap. She took his hand and squeezed it slightly; he returned the squeeze.

  At Exit 5, Dean took Route 303 north. They were in New York State again, passing through towns like Orangeburg and Valley Cottage. Congers, Dean remembered from long-ago visits to a favorite fruit-and-vegetable stand mysteriously called Dr. Davies, was only a few miles up the road, and he lightened the pressure of his foot on the accelerator to make the drive last a little longer.

  The Tall Oaks Recuperative Center was a cluster of stone buildings set back from the road and hidden by not only oak trees but maples, ash, birch, tulip, and cedar. A gravel driveway opened into a circular parking area that contained a half-dozen cars and an antiquated Cadillac ambulance.

  A small sign in front of the centrally situated building said reception, and Dean and Janet entered. A gray-haired woman sat behind a counter and reminded Dean of his grade school librarian. There was no one else in sight.

  “Hello,” said Dean. “I’m Dr. Braithwaite, and this is Nurse McCarren. We’ve driven up from St. Vincent’s in New York. We had promised to look in on Mr. Chang.”

  “Do you have an appointment?” said the woman.

  “We were told there wouldn’t be a problem,” said Dean. “At the time of the transfer we said we’d be making a follow-up visit. We were told to come on a Saturday morning, when things wouldn’t be too busy.”

  “Well, let me see if I can reach Dr. Warshaw.”

  “Thank you,” said Dean.

  Within minutes, a short, nervous man arrived. He was wearing a white lab coat and dark slacks and carried a clipboard. He walked over to Dean and Janet. “I’m Dr. Warshaw,” he said. “May I be of assistance?”

  “Yes,” Dean said. “I’m Dr. Braithwaite.” He took the man’s hand and shook it unnecessarily hard. “This is Virginia McCarren. We’re from St. Vincent’s in New York. We transferred a Mr. Chang to you awhile ago, and at the time, we said we’d have a look in on him after he was settled in here. Our guidelines auditors require it, as I’m sure you know. So we’re here to do our duty.”

  “I’m afraid this isn’t a very good time,” said Dr. Warshaw.

  “That’s why we’ll just take a minute and be on our way,” said Dean, and he turned and moved toward the door. Janet took her cue and fell in behind him. With nothing else to do but be left standing there, Dr. Warshaw followed. Dean opened the door and held it for the others.

  In spite of what seemed like great reluctance, Dr. Warshaw led them to one of the buildings that flanked the first one. A sign atop the entrance read simply west building. As they entered, Dr. Warshaw cleared his throat and appeared to be about to say something, but Janet beat him to the punch.

  “How’s he doing?” she asked.

  Dr. Warshaw stopped inside and looked at them in turn. Again he seemed on the verge of challenging them. Dean looked at his watch in an exaggerated display of annoyance.

  “Mr. Chang,” Janet said. “How’s he doing?”

  “About the same,” said Dr. Warshaw finally, and led them into a large room. The interior was dimly lit, with the overhead fluorescent fixtures casting a violet hue. There was a hum from the air-conditioning, punctuated periodically by electronic beeps and hissing noises from around the room. Two rows of eight beds each filled the room, sixteen in all. Each bed was occupied by a patient, or more precisely a body, which was, in turn, connected by a series of plastic tubes and colored wires to various monitoring, feeding, and collecting devices. Although a few of the bodies were elevated slightly on their mattresses, none of them showed the slightest sign of movement or, for that matter, life.

  Janet and Dean followed Dr. Warshaw to a bed in the second row, where a gaunt Chinese man lay on his back with his eyes open. Thick plastic tubes ran from his nostrils to a machine that alternately compressed and expanded like an accordion, but instead of music it emitted a rhythmic hissing sound. An intravenous hookup dripped a clear liquid from a plastic bag suspended above the bed into a thinner plastic tube that ended under a patch of tape on the back of one hand. A stenciled card attached to a chart holder at the foot of the bed informed them what they already knew: The body was that of P. W. Chang. Dean heard Janet catch her breath and watched her momentarily grasp the siderail of the bed before her tr
aining took over and she regained her composure.

  “About the same” turned out to be a polite euphemism for comatose. As Dean and Dr. Warshaw stood by the bedside, Janet made her way to the foot of the bed. With his size advantage, Dean was able to position himself between the two of them in such a way as to block her from Dr. Warshaw’s view. Janet picked up the chart, as Dean tried to ask doctorlike questions to distract Dr. Warshaw.

  “Any change in his vital signs?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “What do the EEG’s show?”

  “Virtually flat.”

  “Any idea what brought this on?”

  “Can’t say.” Dr. Warshaw was not exactly a wealth of information. “And I’m afraid I have my rounds to complete now,” he added.

  “By all means,” said Dean.

  Dr. Warshaw stepped away from the bed, where Mr. Chang continued to lie, motionless and unseeing. Dean moved too late to block his view of Janet leafing through the chart. Dr. Warshaw extended his open hand toward her like a teacher who had just caught a schoolchild in the act of passing a note. “I’m afraid that unless you’re on staff here, Miss-”

  “McCarren,” said Janet, to Dean’s relief, since he himself had forgotten the name he’d assigned to her. She finished reading the page she was on before handing over the chart.

  “I’m sorry about your neighbor,” Dean said to Janet as soon as they pulled out of the driveway. “But while it’s fresh in your mind, I need you to tell me what you found out from the chart.”

  “What I found out was that most of it’s missing. But he’s brain-dead, that much I saw. Been like that since before they admitted him. Massive circulatory collapse resulting in anoxia. That’s a fancy word for when your organs are deprived of oxygen. One of those organs happening to be the brain. By the time they got him to St. Vincent’s and coded him, there had already been massive, irreversible brain damage. He’s been on a ventilator ever since.”

  “Prognosis?”

  “He lives like this, or he dies,” said Janet. “They usually pull the plug when the insurance runs out. In this case, it doesn’t make much difference; he’s got about as much brain activity as a cucumber.

  “Any clue as to the cause?”

  “The chart says ‘Suspected overdose of unspecified antidepressant medication,’ “said Janet. “But Mr. Chang never seemed depressed to me. And it doesn’t make any sense, because he never would have taken medication even if he was. He believed in ginseng and garlic and herbal teas. I’ve never known him to take an aspirin for a headache. I can’t for the life of me believe he took an overdose of anything.”

  “He didn’t,” said Dean.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he was poisoned.”

  They rode in silence while they each absorbed what was now painfully but unmistakably true, at least to Dean. For all intents and purposes, Mr. Chang had been murdered for what he saw the night of Edward Wilson’s death, or for what he didn’t see and wouldn’t say he did. How safe could the young woman sitting next to Dean now be, given that she had seen almost as much as Mr. Chang and was now almost certainly known to be cooperating with Dean in an effort to unravel the entire business? The thought sent a shudder through his body.

  It was Janet who finally spoke. “We have to go to somebody.”

  “Like who?”

  “The police?”

  Dean laughed. “They are the police.”

  “The District Attorney?” she said. “That Mr. Brigham, he seemed honest.”

  “Bingham,” said Dean. “And I can’t be sure he’s not part of this. He’s acted very strange lately. He’s been trying to get my client to take a plea on this case in the worst way. Like he’s petrified at the thought of going to trial, when he should be looking forward to it as his moment in the limelight. I end up not being able to trust him.”

  “How about the FBI?”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to Dean. He wasn’t a big fan of the FBI, and he traced his wariness of them to his DEA days, when the two agencies had been rivals with overlapping jurisdiction in drug cases. He tended to think of the Febes as guys who wore suits and carried attaché cases, and were afraid to get their hands dirty. He remembered saying as much not too long ago to one of them.

  “Leo Silvestri,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Leo Silvestri,” Dean repeated. “I’ve got a client, Bobby McGrane, who’s cooperating with the FBI. I met the agent he’s working for, Leo Silvestri. He seemed like an okay guy. I guess I could call him.”

  Dean dropped Janet off a block from her building. He had noticed no one following them at any point during the day, but in case they were watching her building, he didn’t want them seeing her with him. He figured he had put her in enough danger already.

  Back home, he spent an hour searching for Leo Silvestri’s phone number. After looking through stacks of notes and scraps of paper, he emptied out his wallet. There, among a dozen or so business cards, was the one he was looking for.

  LEO N. SILVESTRI

  INVESTOR

  LICENSED & BONDED (212) 483-1927

  He turned the card over. On the reverse side, Leo had written the code Dean was to use when calling him.

  Dean dialed the number. When he heard a long beep, he entered his own phone number, followed by *#*, and hung up.

  It took only three minutes for the phone to ring.

  “This is Leo. You beeped me?”

  “Yes. Thanks for calling back, Leo. My name is Dean Abernathy. I’m Bobby McGrane’s lawyer.”

  “Yeah, sure, we had dinner with Bobby,” said Leo. “Smart boy. How you been, Dean?”

  “I’m okay, thanks.”

  “Bobby’s doing real good for us. Good kid.”

  “Good.”

  “What can I do for you, Dean?”

  “You can let me buy you dinner this time. I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

  “You got it, except the buying part,” said Leo. “The Bureau’s too rich for that. Tonight soon enough?”

  “Sounds good,” said Dean.

  “You name the place.”

  “Same as last time?” Dean didn’t want to name a place, in case someone was listening in.

  “Eight o’clock?”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  The Allstate Café was crowded when Dean arrived, and he didn’t spot Leo Silvestri. He worked his way to the bar and asked what kind of beer they had on tap.

  “Try the Newcastle Brown Ale,” said a man’s voice behind him. Dean turned to see Leo Silvestri.

  “I’ll try the Newcastle Brown Ale,” Dean said to the bartender. To Leo he said, “Hello, Leo. Thanks for meeting me.”

  “My pleasure,” Leo said, smiling. He held what looked to be a club soda with lime. Catching Dean eyeing it, he lifted the glass slightly and said, “On duty.”

  The Newcastle Brown Ale was good. They stayed at the bar until a table opened up in the corner, where they could talk without being overheard. Leo had arranged it.

  “Try the roast chicken,” said Leo. “They make it nice and moist.” Dean ordered the swordfish, no garlic.

  “So what’s on your mind, Dean? You sounded serious on the phone.”

  “You got an hour or so?”

  “I got all night.”

  Dean began at the beginning, how he had been assigned to represent the man accused of the felony murder of Police Commissioner Wilson. How it had seemed at first to be an open-and-shut case. How inconsistencies began popping up. The signatures forged by the detectives, the dibenzepin in the toxicology report, the mysterious cremation, the used-up liver sample. He took Leo through the meeting with Detective Rasmussen and the first Janet Killian, Dean’s accidental discovery that she was an actress, and his success in contacting the real Janet. He described being followed and even expressed his concern that both his and Janet’s phones might be tapped. He talked about the increasingly attractive plea offers made by t
he District Attorney’s Office. By the time Dean concluded his story with the locating of the comatose Mr. Chang, Leo Silvestri could barely contain himself.

  “Jesus Christ, Dean. This is big. This is awesome. Who else have you told this to?”

  “Nobody, really, besides Janet and now you.”

  “Well,” said Leo, “I’d like your go-ahead to talk to the New York field director about this. I can tell you this much: He’s going to want to meet with you, and probably Janet, too. This thing is dynamite.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “Me?” said Leo. “I’m a stupid field agent, what do I know? But it sure sounds to me like the NYPD is up to no good here.”

  “You and me both,” Dean said, nodding.

  “So what do you say?”

  “About what?”

  “Can I go to the Director?”

  Dean thought for a minute, but the truth was he could think of nothing else to do. Besides, that was the whole idea, wasn’t it? “I suppose so,” he said. “But be careful.”

  “Me?” Leo laughed. “You’re the one who better be careful, you and this Janet woman. These guys, whoever they are, seem to be playing for high stakes. Take my advice and back off a step or two for the time being. You don’t want to end up like Charlie Chan.”

  “Chang.”

  “Chang,” echoed Leo. “I’ll talk with the Director first thing Monday morning. Meantime, anything happens, you know how to reach me, right?”

  “Right,” said Dean. He picked at the remains of his swordfish, which had proved to be a bit on the dry side. Leo Silvestri’s roast chicken looked moist and tender.

  For Joey Spadafino, there’s no swordfish and no roast chicken. Joey picks over his food slowly, trying to drag out each meal as long as he can, since meals have become just about his only activities.

  He figures he’s down below 120 pounds, but he doesn’t worry about it too much. He knows he doesn’t need much strength or energy to sit in a cell twenty-three hours a day.