Felony Murder

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Jesus, Joey, you look like hell. Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. No.” Back to the multiple-choice answers of their early interviews. “I been in the Hole. Twice now.”

  “What happened?”

  “First time they flaked me,” said Joey. “Put a package in my cell. Gave me fifteen days.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “With what, my toothbrush?”

  “They won’t let you make a phone call to your lawyer?” Dean was incredulous. “You’re entitled to a hearing.”

  “I’m lucky they let me take a piss.”

  “And this time?”

  “I just decided it’d be easier.”

  “How many days you got left?”

  “I don’t know.” Then, with a crooked smile, he added, “Fuck ‘em, I can do it. I done worse than this.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the case, Joey? Today’s D-Day.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want outa here,” said Joey, and the simplicity of his answer caught Dean off guard, and for a second he thought he might cry. For once, he was grateful for the obscuring presence of the mesh that separated them.

  “I know,” said Dean.

  “Can we beat this thing, Dean?”

  Dean hesitated. Ask me anything but that, he thought. Don’t ask me to decide for you. Sure they could beat this thing. Dean knew enough now to turn the case upside down. He had detectives forging his client’s signature on a confession, substituting a porno actress for one witness, and rendering another one brain-dead. He could have a field day with this case. He could drive a truck through it. But he also knew they could just as easily lose it. A jury could ascribe Mr. Chang’s condition to coincidence and attribute all of the other irregularities to the understandable zeal on the part of the police to nail down the conviction of their commissioner’s murderer. In spite of everything Dean had to work with, he had no way of saying that a jury might not believe that Joey Spadafino was robbing Commissioner Wilson when Wilson suffered a fatal heart attack.

  “Maybe,” he said weakly.

  “Maybe?” said Joey. “Seven months you been workin’ on my case and all you can say is ‘Maybe’?”

  Joey was right. He was entitled to more. “Yes, we can beat it,” Dean said in a firm voice. “We can kick the shit out of them. And I want nothing more than a chance to do it. But a trial is always a roll of the dice, and the only thing I know for certain is that when it’s over they’ll let me go home. They’re offering you four-and-a-half to nine on a murder case.”

  “If we blow trial, will he really give me the max?” Joey asked. “Twenty-five to life?”

  “He might.”

  “I’d be fifty-three,” said Joey in a small voice. “I figgered it out.”

  “Yup.”

  “What would you do if you was me, Dean?”

  Dean thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Would you be angry at me if I took the cop-out?”

  “No, Joey.” Dean smiled. “I wouldn’t be angry at you at all. Whatever you decide to do, I won’t be angry at you.”

  Joey said nothing for what seemed a long time. When he finally broke the silence, it was to ask Dean a question.

  “Didja know I was in the Golden Gloves once?”

  “No.”

  “Seventeen years old. Hundred-and-nineteen-pound class. Novice. I had six fights,” said Joey, sitting back and smiling as he relived that time of his life. “Won the first five. Three by knockouts. Sixth fight, regional semifinals, Madison Square Garden. They bring in this black kid, six-foot-one. So skinny I figure I could blow him over. Trouble was I couldn’t get near him. He had these arms that were about a hundred feet long. Two and a half rounds he held me off with his jab. Wasn’t really a jab, more like a push. People booin’, everything. Finally I say, ‘Fuck this shit, I’m goin’ to go down fightin’ if it kills me.’ So I lower my head and charge the motherfucker. I figure we’ll mix it up for a half a round, see what happens. Only Stretch, he spreads his arms wide, and I go crashin’ into his gut, head first.”

  “What happened?” Dean felt like he was playing straight man.

  “What happened is Stretch, he goes flyin’ through the ropes ass first into the front row of the audience. Me, I get disqualified and banned for life from the Gloves. ‘Conduct unbecoming a sportsman,’ or some such shit. But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I went down fightin’.”

  “I have a feeling there’s a message in that story,” Dean said with a smile.

  “Yeah.” Joey returned the smile. He looked more like himself. “And the message is: Tell those cocksuckers we’re comin’ in head down and full speed ahead. If we’re goin’ to go down, we’re goin’ to go down fightin’.”

  “Calendar Number Fourteen, Joseph Spadafino,” called the clerk. Dean stepped forward into the well area as Joey was led into the courtroom from the side door that led to the feeder pen.

  “This case is on,” announced Judge Rothwax, “for the defendant to accept or reject an offer that has been held open until today, and which will be withdrawn if the defendant declines it. What is your pleasure, Mr. Abernathy?”

  “We’d like a trial date, Your Honor.”

  “And you shall have one. There will be no further offers in this case. Hearings and trial, September seventh.”

  Outside the courtroom, Mike Pearl stopped Dean again. “Anything you can tell me?” he asked.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I can give you a direct quote.” As Mike reached for his notebook, Dean whispered in his ear, “‘Tell those cocksuckers we’re comin’ in head down and full speed ahead.’”

  The third letter arrived on Friday.

  Contained in the same type of envelope as the first two and created out of the same type of characters, cut from newspapers and magazines and pasted into words, it was crafted less neatly than the first two, suggesting to Dean that its author was either in something of a hurry or had simply grown less preoccupied with the artistic aspect of his - or her - creation.

  Dean sat at his desk, stunned. There, fully contained in the first three words of the message, was the inescapable conclusion to which he had known for months his investigation was leading him. But until he saw the words spelled out before him, childlike, in the bizarre magazine and newsprint collage that had by now become familiar to him, Dean had utterly refused to accept it. Yet forced to confront it now, he knew immediately that it had to be true. There had been no heart attack; the dibenzepin in Commissioner Wilson’s body had come from no accidental overdose; the mysteriously ordered cremation and the destruction of the tissue samples had been no mystery after all. They had been the intentional acts of a cover-up. And the cover-up had sought to shield an event so staggering that Dean could not even begin to comprehend it. But one thing he knew, finally, absolutely: The police had killed their own.

  Dean forced his eyes to the remainder of the letter: the confirmation that they had tried to murder Mr. Chang as well, the warning that Dean and Janet were next, the suggestion of a meeting, and - for the first time - a sign-off: the letter S.

  He picked up the phone and dialed Leo Silvestri’s beeper number. When his phone rang two minutes later, and he heard Leo’s voice on the other end, Dean said simply, “Come on over. I’ve got another letter.”

  Leo examined the letter gravely. “It’s time to stop fooling around,” he said to Dean. “We’re prepared to move the two of you to a safe house immediately. We need to start screening your mail and put a tracing device on your phone. We just can’t wait any longer.”

  “Let me meet with him.”

  “What?”

  “Let me meet with S.,” Dean repeated. “See what he wants to tell me.”

  “No way,” said Leo. “It’s a setup if ever I saw one. You meet him, they run you over on the way home. No dice.
”

  “I’m willing to take the risk,” Dean said.

  “I’m not,” said Leo. “I’m going to run this stuff over to the lab. When I come back, it’ll be with permission forms for the mail and phone. Do you want me to tell Miss Killian, or do you want to?”

  “I’ll tell her,” Dean said.

  Driving his Jeep up to Janet’s building late that afternoon, Dean was acutely aware of the FBI agents who were following him, something he had not sensed in the week or two since the meeting with Bennett Childs at the safe house in New Jersey. Obviously, their concern was mounting with the receipt of each letter, just as Leo Silvestri had been telling Dean, and they were stepping up their efforts to protect Dean and, presumably, Janet.

  He made no attempt to evade the surveillance, realizing it was there for his own good, but his awareness of the agents shadowing him made him feel foolish. He remembered a time back in grade school, the first day his parents had finally given him permission to bike to school instead of taking the bus like the little kids. He had pulled out of the driveway feeling brave and independent, backpack strapped on securely, a ten-year-old adult imagining himself on a crucial mission behind enemy lines. He had threaded his way along familiar streets with a sense of importance and purposefulness never before imagined. He was about to pull onto Grove Street - he remembered it to this day - a maneuver that required him to look back to his left for oncoming cars. Looking over his shoulder, he spotted the familiar form of his father’s blue Oldsmobile creeping along well behind him. Then, as now, he had done nothing but continue on, but in that instant, he had been reduced to a boy again.

  Janet greeted him with a hug and handed him a giggling Nicole. “Entertain her a minute,” she said. “I’m trying to get her dinner ready, and she only wants to nurse. Poor kid, can’t decide whether she wants to grow up or not.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Dean.

  Nicole’s ambivalence continued, and her dinner consisted of alternating spoonfuls of orange and green mushy stuff, which she would seem to swallow, only to spit back out what seemed like minutes later. Dean marveled at her ability to store the food for such lengths in her tiny mouth, and was convinced that, during the process, it somehow increased in volume.

  “I swear that for every spoonful that goes in, at least three come out,” he observed.

  “Yes,” Janet agreed. “But somehow she manages to swallow some of that. I can show you dirty diapers to prove my point.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  After about five minutes of spoon-feeding, Nicole would pull her head back, shake it from side to side to avoid the spoon, arch her back, and fidget until Janet would pick her up and nurse her. This Janet did in front of Dean, without the least sign of embarrassment. Nicole would immediately settle down, sucking quietly while looking all around with deep blue eyes that missed nothing. For his part, Dean felt as awkward looking away as he did watching. He wanted to see Janet’s breast, experienced a sudden surge of excitement at the glimpse of her brown nipple, and caught himself feeling lecherous and almost un-American in his lust.

  After twenty minutes or so of the pattern, Nicole’s dinner was declared over. “I have this image of breastfeeding her until she’s thirty,” Janet said. “Like taking a time-out during her wedding ceremony?”

  Bath time was next, and Dean again found himself in the role of designated drier, wrapping a squealing, slippery Nicole in an oversize towel and more or less letting her squirm herself dry inside it.

  It was getting dark by the time Nicole was placed down in her crib, and Dean, thoroughly exhausted by his minimal participation in the evening’s ritual, marveled at Janet’s stamina and unflagging good humor.

  “Don’t you ever get wiped out?” he asked.

  “Only twenty times a day or so,” she answered, smiling.

  “You’re terrific with her.”

  “Thank you,” she said simply, displaying yet another talent for Dean to wonder at and envy - the ability to accept a compliment. He let it go; enough was enough. Besides which, they had things to talk about. He reached into his shirt pocket, unfolded a copy of the third letter, and handed it to her.

  “Today?” she asked as she studied it.

  “Yup.”

  “My God,” she said softly. “This means the police murdered the Commissioner.”

  Dean nodded silently.

  “And your client? What does it mean for him?”

  “It means all he’s guilty of is larceny. He took some money from a guy lying on the sidewalk. The guy might have been alive, he might have already been dead. But he didn’t rob him. And if there was no robbery, there’s no felony murder.”

  “Have you told Leo?”

  “He’s got the original. He’s very concerned for us. Wants to put us in a safe house, intercept our mail, trace incoming calls. His men were on me like glue on the way up here.”

  “And you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dean. “I feel like I should be frightened, but I really don’t think I am.”

  “Who is this S.?”

  “Beats me,” said Dean. “I only know he wants to meet with me.”

  “What does Leo say about that?”

  “He’s sure it’s a setup, a trap. I don’t see that. But what’s the difference? I don’t have any way to contact the guy.”

  “He’ll contact you again.” Janet sounded certain.

  “I guess so,” Dean said. “Though Leo wants to screen my mail. If I give him permission, he may not let any more letters get through to me.”

  “Since when do they need your permission to do stuff to your mail? They’re the FBI.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” Dean said. “That puts them on their best behavior.”

  “You may be a lawyer,” Janet said, “but they’re the law. They’re going to do whatever they want to do, whether you give them permission or not.”

  She was probably right, Dean realized, but he didn’t acknowledge it.

  Janet made them bacon and eggs for dinner. “I know it’s evil to eat stuff like this,” she said. “But I’ve got to be at work at midnight, so it’s breakfast for me. And my arteries are feeling a little soft, anyway.”

  Mrs. Del Valle arrived at eleven-thirty, and Dean drove Janet uptown to Mount Sinai. Before she got out of the Jeep, she looked at him seriously and said, “Please be careful, Dean.” Then she leaned over and kissed him gently on the mouth. He forgot to look for his FBI friends the entire way home.

  The days pass slowly for Joey Spadafino back in the Hole. With only a few weeks left before his trial is to begin, he figured doing his time there would be a piece of cake. He figured wrong.

  Afraid because of the contract on him, Joey gives up his daily yard privileges, meaning he’s in lockup twenty-four hours a day. The only time he comes out is to shower, and he’s even reduced that to once or twice a week. He’s aware that his body has begun to smell like the boys’ locker room in high school, but like most smells, he finds it bad and good at the same time. He catches himself smelling his armpits now and then and wonders if he’s going crazy, like some of the weirdos he used to see when he was living on the street. Doesn’t matter, he decides. Better to smell bad and talk to himself than to be cut up in the weight room.

  It’s not so much that he’s afraid of dying, Joey decides. What he’s afraid of is being cut, the pain of a knife or a razor slicing through his skin, ripping his flesh, hacking him down to the bone like a piece of meat, making blood pour out of him.

  He counts the days until his trial starts. With the trial so near, Joey expects Dean to come see him, or at least have him brought over to the courthouse for a counsel visit. He needs to tell Dean that he wants to take the stand at his trial, tell what really happened. He has a little dream-fantasy that he plays over and over in his mind. He’s on the stand, testifying in front of the jury, telling his story The DA is cross-examining him, the big guy, Mr. Bingham. Every time the DA asks a question, Joey kills him with
his answer. The jury understands perfectly. They nod in agreement at every point he makes, smile at his honest explanations, cheer him when he finishes. The judge orders all of the charges thrown out, then rises from his seat to shake Joey’s hand as he steps down from the witness box. Flashbulbs go off, and the TV people surround Joey for interviews and autographs. The only thing he can’t explain is that Dean is nowhere in the dream. . . .

  For a while nothing happened. No more letters arrived. No more requests were made that Dean permit his mail to be screened, and his incoming calls to be traced. The teams of agents assigned to follow him receded into the background, and he was seldom aware of their presence. Walter Bingham didn’t call with any new plea offers. Mike Pearl didn’t stop him in the hallway and ask him for a quote.

  His calendar lightened, a reflection of the usual August slowdown at the Criminal Court Building. There were days when he had a single case in court, and days when he had none at all. Only one of his trials, the Bronx attempted murder stabbing, was scheduled to begin before September, and the chances that it would actually go were slim. He caught up on his paperwork, organized and reorganized his files, rearranged his office furniture, and straightened the pictures on his walls, until there was nothing left to do but get down to the business of preparing for trial in the case of the People of the State of New York v. Joseph Spadafino.

  He broke his file down into subfiles, and inked titles on them: JULY SELECTION, OPENING, LEGAL PAPERS, PROSECUTION WITNESSES, DEFENSE WITNESSES, PROPERTY VOUCHERS, 911 CALLS, MEDICAL EVIDENCE and SUMMATION. He grouped police reports according to whichever officer or detective he would need to question regarding them. He actually took photographs of the doorway of 77 Bleecker Street, both from street level and from Janet’s third-floor bedroom window. He had the photos developed and had enlargements made of the ones he intended to use, which he then arranged and cataloged. He brought an order before Judge Rothwax, ex parte so he wouldn’t have to alert Walter Bingham, to authorize the appointment of a handwriting expert for the defense, and he phoned and met with Herman Lopat, a former Secret Service agent, who agreed to analyze the two signatures on Joey’s statement to the detectives. He called Larry Davidson, the doctor who had educated Dean about dibenzepin, and asked him if he would testify as an expert on the basis of his readings about the drug and its toxicity in overdose, particularly when combined with alcohol or administered to a heart patient. He reviewed reports, made notes from them and then reviewed the notes. At night, lying in bed, he thought about his summation, sometimes working himself into an emotional pitch that made sleep impossible. He found himself watching the late movie for distraction, and eventually the late late movie. All part of the process, long a ritual with Dean, of getting ready.