Felony Murder

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “After the evidence is completed, I’ll be speaking to you again, and I’m confident that I’ll be asking you to return a verdict of guilty on each and every count in the indictment. Thank you.”

  Joey does his best to look unconcerned as the DA sits down, but inside he feels like he’s going to vomit.

  Finally Dean, too, saw Bingham sit down. He was aware now that all eyes in the courtroom were on him, waiting for him to rise and begin his own statement. But all of the strength seemed to have gone out of his legs, and he felt absolutely powerless to push himself back from the table and rise to his feet.

  “Mr. Abernathy,” Judge Rothwax was asking him, “does the defense wish to make an opening statement?”

  Dean fought to find his voice, but even as he spoke, it cracked. “May we approach the bench?” he managed to ask.

  “Excuse me?” Rothwax stared at him.

  “I need to approach, Your Honor.” This time, Dean mustered enough authority in his voice that the judge nodded.

  Bingham fell into step with Dean, and they walked forward together. “Do it, Dean,” he heard Walter whisper menacingly to him. “Just fucking do it before it’s too late.”

  “Is there some problem?” the judge asked once they’d reached him.

  “Yes, there is,” Dean said. “I can’t do this.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not ready to open.”

  “You-”

  “Judge,” Walter Bingham interrupted, “ordinarily I’d object. But it’s after four-thirty on Friday afternoon. It’s been a very long week for all of us. Under the circumstances, the People are willing to give Mr. Abernathy until Monday morning to resolve whatever problem he may have.”

  Still, Rothwax looked dubious. It wasn’t like him to defer like this, even when the lawyers themselves were in agreement. But finally he nodded at Dean and said, “Only because I know you well enough to believe this must be something serious.”

  “It’s pretty serious,” Dean said.

  They stepped back. Dean listened as the judge excused the jury for the weekend. He felt like he’d dodged a bullet with his name on it. He wondered if Janet would be as lucky when her turn came.

  Joey sees the judge turn to Dean and ask him if he’s ready to take his turn. Finally: This is the moment Joey’s been living for all these months, for his lawyer to get up and tell everybody what really happened, how Joey’s got nothing to do with the guy dying. But instead of saying yes, Dean’s asking to have one of those secret huddles, “at the bench,” they call it - they seem to have a lot of these secret huddles - and next the judge is telling the jury they’ll have to wait till Monday morning to see if Dean’s going to talk to them after all.

  Joey’s totally confused, confused and disappointed. He feels like Dean’s selling him out. He’s led back to the feeder pen, upstairs to the twelfth floor holding pen, back down to the third floor, and from there across the Bridge to the Tombs and his cell. He doesn’t know what’s going on now.

  Teach him to trust a fuckin’ free lawyer.

  “Thanks,” Dean said to Walter Bingham as they walked out of the courtroom and toward the elevators.

  “It’s not your thanks I need. It’s your client’s guilty plea.”

  “I honestly don’t think I can get it, Walter.”

  “You’ve got no choice, Dean.”

  Some people had gathered nearby, so Bingham moved away from the elevators and opened a door to a staircase. Dean followed him, closing the door behind them.

  “You’ve got to understand,” Dean said. “I can’t always control my clients.”

  “And I can’t control these cops!” Bingham snapped.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know fucking well what that means. They’ve got one card left to play, and I don’t put it past them to play it.”

  “You really think they’d kill her?”

  Bingham seemed to deliberately avoid Dean’s stare. He said nothing.

  “Maybe they already have.” Until Dean heard himself say the words, that was one possibility that frankly hadn’t occurred to him. But suddenly now it did. “I haven’t heard from them - or her - for almost a week. How do I even know she’s still alive?”

  If Bingham knew, he wasn’t saying.

  The thought that Janet might already be dead consumed Dean all Friday night, and as exhausted as he was, he slept only fitfully, waking several times from dreams in which he was either suffocating or drowning, always fighting for air and unable to breathe.

  Joey’s able to breathe as he lies on his bunk, though his insides still hurt. They’ve stopped giving him the Tylenol - it seems the doctor said he could have it for only five days. When Joey asks how come, they tell him something about being afraid he might abuse it.

  If you’ve got money in here, you can get heroin, cocaine, or crack. You can get reefer to smoke, booze to drink, glue to sniff, or mushrooms to eat. You can get dust or speed or acid. Got money, the word is there’s one CO on the night shift’ll even bring you paint thinner to inhale and fry your brains on.

  And they’re worried he’s going to abuse fuckin’ Tylenol!

  Sometimes you have to hand it to these guys for dreaming up new and different ways to be assholes.

  Dean spent Saturday morning in his apartment, alternately trying to absorb himself in the newspaper and mindlessly flicking the remote control on his television set. But Saturday’s Times was only two thin sections, and he found himself reading the same paragraphs over and over without absorbing anything anyway. About all he could find to watch on television were cartoons and commercials, and some guy demonstrating spray paint for bald spots.

  The phone rang shortly before noon. He toyed with the idea of not answering it, then picked it up on the fourth ring.

  “I hear your lady friend had a pretty close call yesterday afternoon.” It took Dean only a few words to recognize the voice of the man he knew as Leo Silvestri.

  “How do I know my lady friend’s even alive?” Dean asked.

  “Oh, she’s alive,” Leo assured him. “Take my word for it. She’s doing just fine, so far. But she’s depending on you. We’re all depending on you. Only she’s really depending on you, if you know what I mean.”

  “And suppose I don’t want to take your word for it that she’s okay? It’s not like your track record’s so great with me, you know.”

  “Still the wiseass, huh? Well,” Leo said, “you think what you wanna think. We’ll do what we gotta do.” And there was a click, followed shortly by a dial tone.

  Dean didn’t know whether to feel intimidated or outraged. What balls these guys had! To call him and threaten him like that right over the phone required incredible arrogance. He wished he’d had a tape recorder hooked up to his phone. But, of course, Leo hadn’t just been ballsy; he’d also been smart enough to catch Dean by surprise, not giving him a chance to record his words.

  Dean remembered once being advised by a client to keep a tape recorder hooked up to his phone at all times, just in case he ever needed to record a call without warning. Of course Dean had rejected the suggestion - it was simply too paranoid. Now he kicked himself for not having listened. He tried to think of the name of the client, but it eluded him. He could picture the guy’s face, right down to the mustache that gave him a slick look. Yeah - he was the guy who’d given Dean a whole bunch of electronic stuff - Hotwire Harry Reynolds. Once he’d even presented Dean with a tape recorder that was set up with an electronic impulse starter so that it would begin to record as soon as the phone rang or was picked up. “Even better than voice activated,” he’d told Dean. “Those don’t pick up till somebody starts talking.” But, of course, Dean had had no use for any of the equipment. What other useless stuff had there been? A fancy radar detector. A caller-ID gadget for the phone. An electric-

  He stopped right there.

  The caller-ID thing. Couldn’t that give him the number Leo had just called him from? Dean felt hi
s heart race. Was it possible? Might this be the break he needed?

  He went to his closet and fell to his knees. He began pawing through the clutter on the floor. A broken vacuum cleaner, a circular saw, a rusted toolbox, an electric drill set, a bicycle pump he’d given up for lost, a pair of paint-spattered work boots, and - finally - an old briefcase. He yanked it out by the handle, upsetting a gallon paint can in the process. Luckily, the paint had long ago dried into a solid glob.

  He snapped open the briefcase and dumped its contents onto his sofa. A tiny tape recorder, a portable telephone, a radar detector, a few gadgets he didn’t even recognize, a dozen batteries of different sizes and shapes.

  And the caller-ID device.

  It was nothing but a little digital screen with two cords attached to the back of it. One was a power cord with a plug, the other a telephone line. There was also a jack to accept an incoming phone line.

  He carried it over to his phone. He unplugged the line that ran to his phone and inserted it in the jack of the device. Then he connected the phone line attached to the device to his phone. He’d never hooked it up before, but there didn’t seem to be any other way to do it. He plugged the power cord into an outlet.

  His heart pounded in anticipation. At first, nothing happened. Then the screen came to life. He held his breath as words formed in front of his eyes.

  NO CALLS RECEIVED.

  His elation evaporated into despair. Of course - he was too late. He’d missed Leo’s number by not having had the device plugged in at the time the call came in.

  Suddenly, the letters on the screen began changing.

  HAVE A NICE DAY

  Then it went blank again.

  And the blankness struck Dean as a perfect metaphor for the way things had been going lately.

  Having given up on the newspaper, Dean spent the afternoon channel surfing. Cartoons and commercials had given way to a baseball game, an exhibition football game, a documentary about the depletion of the rain forest, and a panel discussion about the alarming decline of family values. They were all pretty uninspiring. Exhausted from his lack of sleep the past several nights, he stretched out on his couch and let his eyes close.

  In his dream, Janet was strapped into a chair of some sort. People stood around. Dean made out the faces of Leo Silvestri, Bennett Childs, and Bobby McGrane. They all watched a large clock that sat on a metal table. Dean knew that time was running out, but the face of the clock was a blur to him. Try as he might, he couldn’t focus on the hands to make out the time. Suddenly, the alarm on the clock began ringing in long bursts, once, twice, three times, sounding just like a-

  He sat up and fumbled for the phone. “Hello,” he said, trying to sound awake.

  “Dean?” It was a man’s voice.

  “Yuh.”

  “Lissen for yourself.”

  There was a pause. Then a woman’s voice. “I’m okay, Dean.” It was Janet. “They’re going-” Then a click.

  He gripped the phone desperately, as if to squeeze her voice back to life, but there was nothing but silence. Finally, a recording: “There appears to be a receiver off the hook. If you are trying to make a call, please hang up-”

  He did as he was told.

  Dean jumped to his feet and began pacing. Janet was alive! At least he knew that much. And she’d actually sounded okay. What was it she’d tried to tell him? “They’re going-” He couldn’t remember if there’d been any more.

  Back and forth he paced, not even aware that his nervous energy compelled him to do so. Finally, he realized how silly he must have looked, and he stopped himself by the doorway to his kitchen. From there he stared across the room at his phone, trying his hardest to will it into ringing again by sheer determination.

  His eye caught an unfamiliar object sitting next to the phone where ordinarily there was nothing.

  And he remembered.

  Carefully, deliberately, as though if he rushed he might disturb it and spoil everything, he walked over to it and, holding his breath, dared look down at the little screen.

  2015622939

  He found a pen and, afraid the message might disappear while he tried to locate a piece of paper, copied the numbers onto the back of his hand.

  He knew that 201 was an area code for northern New Jersey, including Hoboken. That gave him 201-562-2939.

  It had worked.

  Afraid to use his own phone or even another in the building, Dean threw on a shirt and hurried out the door. Downstairs, two Clint Eastwood types who’d been waiting across the street followed him on foot around the corner but stayed outside when he entered a card store.

  Using the public phone in the back of the store, Dean phoned Jimmy McDermott. He listened to ten rings before giving up. Then he remembered that Jimmy wore a beeper. He found the number in his address book and dialed it. He punched in the number on the coin phone and hung up. He prayed that he might find the investigator both near a phone and sober enough to dial it.

  The phone rang, so loud it frightened him. He picked up the receiver. “Jimmy,” he said, “Dean Abernathy. I’ve got that phone number in Hoboken. I’m pretty sure it’s unlisted. Can you get an address for me?”

  “You bet.”

  It took less than fifteen minutes for McDermott to call back with the information. By the time Dean returned to his building and waved goodbye to the two men who’d followed him, he was clutching a small piece of paper with a name and an address on it.

  Ferguson, D.M.

  Ferguson Enterprises

  555 Dawson St.

  Hoboken, NJ

  Dean had no clue as to what kind of business Ferguson Enterprises was involved in, or if it was nothing but a front for the New York Police Department. But he didn’t much care: He knew he was back in business.

  Dean saved quarters in an old milk bottle, emptying it out whenever the discovery that he was out of clean clothes told him it was time for a trip to the laundry room. Now he raided the bottle, figuring his laundry would have to wait. His pockets heavy with change, he made a second run to the pay phone at the card store. As before, he had company on the way.

  His first call was to his brother, Alan, who agreed to come over that evening. There were a few conditions, Dean explained: He had to come without his car (“No problem, I can never find a parking spot in your neighborhood, anyway”), be willing to stay the night and help Dean the following day as well (“I guess so”), and arrive in some sort of disguise that would hide the considerable resemblance he bore to Dean (“Are you out of your mind?”). The second call was to Dean’s friend David Leung, who said he’d be home all day Sunday and be able to help Dean out as well.

  Back at his apartment, Dean began gathering what he’d need. When he was satisfied, he stuffed it all into a small duffel bag. By late afternoon, he’d done everything he could think of. He turned on a Yankee game and stretched out on the couch, a surefire recipe for a nap that he figured might come in handy later on.

  The intercom buzzer woke Dean from a deep sleep, and the darkness of his apartment told him that it was night, which meant he’d been out for a couple of hours. He pulled himself up and groped his way to the kitchen, where he found the house phone.

  “Yeah?” he said into it.

  “Yeah, yourself. Let me in before the guys from Bellevue grab me with a net!”

  Dean recognized his brother’s voice and pressed the button to unlock the inner door downstairs. He opened the door to his apartment and waited.

  Dean had learned to spot cross-dressers back in his Legal Aid days, when you could call them transvestites without risking an argument from a sociology major. That ability, along with the fact that he knew it was Alan standing in front of him in a blond wig, blue print dress, and heels, prevented Dean from being fooled now, but it was not enough to keep his lower jaw from dropping open in awe.

  “Aren’t you going to let me in, sailor?” Alan asked in a teasing, husky voice.

  “No,” Dean said, “I’m going
to send you next door to Everett and Val’s apartment. They’ll take good care of you.”

  Alan ignored the comment and pushed past Dean and into the living room. He stepped out of his heels, pulled the wig off, and sat on Dean’s sofa, knees spread very much like the truck driver he’d once been.

  Dean locked the door. “That’s wild!” he said. “You should’ve been a hooker.”

  “Thanks so much,” Alan said. “Want to tell me what the hell’s going on here?”

  “Sure,” said Dean, “but it’s going to take some time. You up for a pizza?”

  “Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. I could never get those sayings straight. Sure, I could do pizza, if you’re buying.”

  Dean found a flyer that had slid its way under his door one evening and tossed it to Alan, who read aloud from it. “Tulio’s Pizza and Heroes. What kind of a name is Tulio? That’s not Italian, is it?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Could be Greek. Could be Armenian. Could be goddamn Portuguese all we know. How you going to order pizza from a place that could be Portuguese?

  “It’s not Portuguese,” Dean said. “What do you want?”

  “Anything, I don’t care. No anchovies. No olives.”

  Dean called and ordered a large pie with everything but anchovies and olives and garlic.

  “Better tell them no octopus, too,” Alan said. “They really could be Portuguese.”

  Dean ignored him.

  “You got some clothes I could change into?” Alan asked.

  “Yeah,” Dean laughed, pointing to the bedroom. “Anything you like. But I kinda like you in the dress.”

  Over pizza, Dean brought Alan up to date on the late-breaking developments in the Spadafino case. They’d talked about the case before, but not since the business about the Brady File had surfaced.