Felony Murder

by Joseph T. Klempner

  Dean hadn’t seen Janet for nearly a week. It was the Friday before the trial was scheduled to begin. He called her from his office and invited her to come over to his place for dinner. She could not, she said, she was working the midnight shift again. But she did have Saturday off and accepted his second offer. Which was better anyway, Dean decided, because it would give him time to clean up his apartment, which had pretty much reached the critical stage. But that was something he could put off until Saturday. His immediate attention he directed to what he would make for dinner.

  He very much wanted to please Janet, wanted to impress her with his cooking. Which meant making something creative but failproof. He knew that, despite her bacon-and-eggs relapse, Janet was not much of a meat eater. He rejected chicken, considered vegetarian, and settled on seafood. He would make a fish stew or casserole of some sort, combining shrimp, mussels, clams, scallops - whatever looked best at the market without doing serious violence to his budget. In fact, he decided, he could even save money by shopping in nearby Chinatown, where the curbside selections were so fresh that the fish could sometimes be seen flipping about on the crushed ice beneath them, and the prices were usually a dollar or two less than uptown.

  He walked up to Canal Street and was immediately enveloped by the short-sleeved afternoon crowd of tourists, merchants, peddlers, hawkers, and hustlers. He headed east, past stalls of $5 watches, baseball caps, batteries, T-shirts, jewelry, videotapes, and perfumes. Crossing Lafayette, he encountered the first of the Chinese grocers, displaying strange-looking cabbage, ginger, and bok choy. Past Centre, the lettering on storefronts changed from English to Chinese, and the pushcarts featured mysterious meat offerings in place of pretzels and ices. At Mulberry Street, he paused at one fish market, but the dull eyes of the red snapper warned him that they weren’t all that fresh. At the second market, things looked better. Though they had no scallops, there were lively blue crabs, small mussels, and, according to a hand-lettered cardboard sign, JUMBOE SHRIMPS, $7.95 POUND. He wondered briefly if Dan Quayle worked there, but managed to keep his joke private, deciding it would be lost on the two clerks, whose eagerness to please far outstripped their command of English.

  “Try the squid,” said a voice behind him. “They’re small and very sweet.”

  Dean turned to see a thirtyish Hispanic man, slightly shorter than he, looking clean-cut in a sport jacket and open-collared shirt, and wearing aviator-style sunglasses. “Thanks,” Dean said, “but I don’t do squid. The legs are all right, but the rest of it makes me think I’m eating rubber bands.”

  “That’s a shame,” the man said. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, but I’m going to pass. But thanks anyway.”

  “No problem,” said the man. “Perhaps I could be of help in some other way.” And he reached into his inside jacket pocket and withdrew a business card, which he extended to Dean.

  Feeling a bit put upon, but not wishing to insult the man, Dean took the card in his own hand. He looked down at it and saw that it was completely blank, except where the letter S - cut out from a newspaper or magazine - had been pasted squarely in the center.

  Dean looked up at the man, but there was no making eye contact; the man’s attention was fixed somewhere over Dean’s shoulder.

  “Who are you?” Dean asked.

  “I can’t tell you that.” The man’s eyes, visible even behind his sunglasses, swept the crowd around them. “Walk with me a minute,” he said, and when Dean hesitated, he added, “You can trust me,” in a way that caused Dean to fall into step with him.

  “What’s going on?” Dean tried a different tack as they threaded their way farther east on Canal Street.

  “Just like I told you,” the man said. “They killed Wilson. They killed the Chinaman. They’ll kill you and the woman if you get in their way.”

  “Why? What’s this all about?”

  “The file,” the man said, suddenly reversing his direction and heading west, causing Dean to pivot into a tiny Chinese woman bear-hugging a sack of rice half her size. He struggled to catch up to the man, who was cutting through openings in the crowd as soon as they appeared.

  “What file?” Dean almost called out from behind him.

  “The Brandy File,” the man answered over his shoulder. Then he stopped, put a hand on Dean’s upper arm, and said, “Stay on this side,” and before Dean could ask what the sides were and which one he was on, a black man was suddenly in front of them, closing in on the run. Dean recognized him as Jeffries, the FBI agent who had driven Janet and him back from New Jersey. The Hispanic man wheeled around, and Dean saw a revolver in his hand. Dean watched him dart from the sidewalk out into Canal Street, jumping acrobatically between speeding cabs and swerving trucks in a dash across five lanes of traffic toward the uptown side. Two men appeared out of the crowd and gave chase, and Dean heard a screech of brakes and the loud thump of an impact just as he took the force of Jeffries’s charge and fell backward into a sidewalk fish display, causing hundreds of pounds of fish, ice, water, crabs, and seaweed to explode in every direction. He ended up on his back on the pavement, unhurt but dazed, and covered with what seemed like half of the north Atlantic. A good-sized carp did flips on the pavement next to him, looking only slightly more out of his element than Dean felt.

  Agent Jeffries, who had managed to remain on his feet despite the collision, bent down next to Dean and said, “Sorry, are you all right?”

  “I’m great,” Dean managed, allowing himself to be helped to his feet. He smelled like low tide. “Somebody help him,” he added, pointing in the direction of the carp, who had thus far eluded his pursuers.

  “He’ll be all right,” Jeffries assured him, causing Dean to wonder momentarily if the carp might not be one of them. “Let’s get you some clean clothes before you start attracting cats.” And Jeffries steered him around the corner and into the backseat of a white car. The sudden chill inside against his wet clothing made him shiver, and even as Jeffries walked around to the front passenger side, Dean begged the man seated behind the wheel to turn off the air conditioner.

  “Sure thing, Dean,” said the familiar voice of Leo Silvestri as Jeffries joined them. “Sorry about the takedown back there.”

  “What was it for?” Dean asked. “That was ‘S.’ He was starting to tell me what this thing is all about. Why did you guys have to break it up?”

  “We saw him pull a gun,” Leo said, pulling away from the curb. “I thought you were about to buy the farm, and I couldn’t take a chance. I gave the order. Agent Jeffries here wanted to make sure you weren’t in the line of fire if there were shots.”

  “You saw his gun,” Jeffries added, “didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Dean acknowledged weakly. He had seen the man’s gun.

  “What did he tell you?” Leo asked, taking side streets and heading in a southwest direction.

  “Something about a file,” Dean said. “I think he called it the Brandy File. Mean anything to you?”

  “No,” said Leo.

  “What else?”

  “Just what was in the letters, that the police had killed Wilson and the Chinaman. And that Janet and I will be next. Who is he? Or was he?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Silvestri had picked up Lafayette Street from Worth, and now he pulled over to the right in front of FBI headquarters at 26 Federal Plaza.” I’ve got to report to the Director,” he said, “and run this Brandy File thing through our computers, see if we’ve got anything on it. Agent Jeffries, take Mr. Abernathy home, or back to his office, or whatever he wants.”

  “Right, Lou,” said Jeffries.

  “And Dean?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful,” Silvestri said. “That was a real gun that guy had. Chances are it had real bullets in it.” He got out of the car and walked toward the entrance to 26 Federal Plaza.

  Jeffries slid over behind the wheel and adjusted the rearview mirror. “Where to?” he
asked.

  “Home, I guess.” There was a good fish market on Seventy-fifth and Broadway. And, anyway, at the moment, chicken was sounding pretty good.

  Back at his apartment, Dean peeled off his wet clothes and climbed into the shower, where he scrubbed his body for a good twenty minutes. When he got out, he was still convinced that he smelled of fish. He headed for the laundry room in the basement and threw his clothes into a washing machine, using extra detergent and even some Clorox. He didn’t care if his things got bleached out; anything would be better than smelling like a flounder.

  Dean inspected his refrigerator and could locate nothing that even remotely resembled food. He found a jar of peanut butter in the cabinet and some pita bread in his freezer. He made two sandwiches, which he ate standing in the kitchen and followed with three handfuls of Grape Nuts. Maybe it was his imagination, but everything seemed to taste vaguely of sushi. He made some iced tea, extra strong so he could chill it with ice without its becoming too diluted. That way he didn’t have to wait for it to cool. He rubbed his fingers with the piece of lime he added to the tea, but the fishy smell stubbornly refused to disappear. He drank one glassful of iced tea still standing in the kitchen, then poured himself another one, which he took with him when he finally walked into the living room and collapsed on the sofa. The tea felt cold inside his chest, no doubt where it had run into an impenetrable mass of peanut butter, dough, and Grape Nuts. His brother had probably been right when he’d warned him he’d be dead of terminal indigestion before his fortieth birthday.

  Propping his feet on the cross section of a log that served as his coffee table and resting his head on the back of the sofa, Dean replayed the afternoon’s events. He couldn’t remember being aware that he was being followed as he left his office and walked east along Canal Street. But then again, he paid little attention to such things lately; he knew the agents were there, but regarded their presence as something benign and even protective, rather than threatening. He had been unaware of the stranger at the fish market until he had heard a voice behind him suggesting that he try the squid. He had politely rejected the idea, and the stranger had then produced the business card with the letter S. Dean didn’t even know if he still had the card or if he had lost it in the events that followed.

  He recalled S. repeating the warnings contained in his letters. In response to Dean’s questions about what was behind all of this, S. had mentioned a file, and had specifically referred to it by name. It had been the Brandy File, or something like that, Dean could no longer be sure. He remembered S. nervously scanning the Chinatown crowd and starting to move through it, telling Dean to follow him. Had he already spotted the agents in the crowd? Then his abrupt about-face, and finally his command to Dean to stay on that side of Canal Street, while he bolted into traffic, revolver in hand, pursued by what must have been FBI agents. The screech of brakes and the sickening thud. Finally, the image of Agent Jeffries bearing down on Dean, crashing into him, producing his own dramatic backflip into the fish stand.

  Dean drained his second glass of iced tea. He supposed he should be grateful for Jeffries and Leo Silvestri and the rest of the agents. S. had pulled a gun, after all, though Dean had trouble recalling when in the course of events he first became aware of it. But afterward, in the car, Leo had explained that it was the sight of the gun that had prompted him to give his men the order to move in, and that Jeffries had responded by tackling Dean to get him down and out of the line of fire in case shooting started.

  In any event, they had learned something. They had a clue now as to what this whole business was all about - this Brandy File, or whatever. Leo had seemed very interested in that, interested enough to drive himself directly to his office so he could report to the Director and begin a computer search. And he had been decent enough in telling Jeffries to drive Dean wherever he wanted to go, sparing him the humiliation of wandering about in his soaking, smelly clothes.

  Was there something else? Had Dean missed some detail? he wondered. He had the uneasy feeling that something else had happened that was important, and he closed his eyes tightly in an attempt to blot out the distraction of his living room and picture the scene once again, trying at the same time to ward off the first deep blue wave of fatigue that came rolling in. . . .

  In his dream, he was falling backward underwater, slowly, interminably. Sea creatures swam by him and floated around him on all sides. Red snapper, bluefish, mullet, fish he couldn’t identify. Eels wriggled by close enough to reach out and touch. The ominous shapes of sharks and manta rays loomed overhead near the more brightly lit surface. Beside him, a carp did strange flips in the water. . . .

  He awoke in darkness, without any idea what time it was or how long he had been asleep. He lifted himself painfully from the sofa. His neck felt like it had been permanently bent to the contour of the sofa back. One foot was asleep where it had rested atop the other one, and he favored it as he half hopped across the living room, afraid to put weight on it, remembering reading years ago that you could get a stress fracture by doing so.

  He turned on the TV set, more to find out what time it was than to locate any particular program. One of the channels - the Weather Channel, he thought - always displayed a digital clock as part of its format, but he couldn’t recall what channel number it was. He rejected, in turn, a Star Trek episode, an old black-and-white Fred Astaire movie, an MTV offering of Bon Jovi singing while repeatedly pointing at a screaming crowd of teenagers, and a commercial for something called the Touch-of-the-Orient Escort Service. He paused at a stand-up comedian in front of a brick-wall backdrop, allowing him two jokes before moving on. A Mary Tyler Moore rerun featured Mary in conversation with Ed Asner, giving in on an argument and saying, “Right, Lou.”

  And he froze right there.

  The fishy smell was back in his nostrils, the cold, wet clothes clinging to his body all over again, as he sat shivering in the backseat of the air-conditioned car. “Right, Lou,” Agent Jeffries had said in response to the instruction that he drop Dean off wherever he wanted to go.

  Only he had said it to a man whose name happened to be Leo.

  Dean’s grogginess disappeared, replaced in an instant by a jolt of pure adrenaline. Jeffries, the field agent, had addressed Silvestri, his supervisor, as Lou. Had he called him Tom, Dick, or Harry, Dean might have dismissed it as a harmless slip of the tongue. Or Moishe or Leroy or Jose or almost any other name in the world. But not Lou. For in the stylized, quasi-military world of law enforcement, the nickname Lou wasn’t up for grabs; it was the exclusive province of one group, and there were no exceptions to the rule. Lou was what every officer in the New York Police Department used when addressing his lieutenant.

  These guys weren’t FBI agents.

  They were cops.

  New York Police Department cops.

  Dean struggled to grasp the full significance of what he now was sure of. There were many things going on that he didn’t fully understand, but he realized one thing only too well: If the police had indeed killed Commissioner Wilson and Mr. Chang, and had reason to kill Janet and Dean, they were his enemy in all of this, and he had played right into their hands. He had told them everything he had found out during his investigation of the Spadafino case. He had reported every subsequent development to them over the past two weeks. He had turned over the letters from S. to them, when it now appeared that S. was trying his best - even risking his own life - to warn Dean about them. He had all but invited them to follow him, probably intercept his mail, maybe even listen in on his phone conversations. He had confided in them that he knew it was the police who had killed Wilson and Chang and might kill Janet and himself, and he had even told them that he had learned from his aborted conversation with S. that the killings were related to something called the Brandy File. In other words, Dean realized, he had made it clear that while he still lacked the details to bring down whatever cops were involved, he already had the knowledge - and a certain amount of proof to go along
with it - to go public and make life very difficult for at least one ranking lieutenant, several detectives, and maybe a bunch of other cops as well. Which meant that Dean was, in their eyes at least, nothing short of a walking, ticking time bomb, waiting to explode at any moment.

  He sat down, trying to calm himself and collect his thoughts at the same time. The one thing he still had going for him was that the police couldn’t yet know that Dean had seen through their FBI cover. That tiny edge might be all that was keeping Janet and him alive at this moment, and he couldn’t afford to jeopardize it. But he also realized that he had to alert Janet. He looked at his phone. She would be at Mount Sinai now, working the midnight-to-eight shift. He could call her, arrange to pick her up when she got off, and tell her then. Together they could go directly to the real FBI.

  But even such a call might alert the police if they were listening in, particularly if they were waiting for some sign that the afternoon’s events had awakened Dean to the fact that the FBI agents who were protecting him were in reality the very police who were so threatened by what he knew. No, he needed to avoid making waves for the moment, to stay within his routine as much as possible so as to let the police think that nothing had changed. In the morning, he would even call Janet and say things into the phone calculated to reassure them that they had nothing new to fear from him.