The Defense: A Novel

by Steve Cavanagh

  I could see no blood spatter on the floor behind the victim’s head. I picked up three more photos: close-ups of the head from different angles. Mario got shot either when he was sitting or kneeling down, but definitely not lying down, as there was no evidence of spatter on the carpet. The blood on the carpet was clearly postmortem leakage.

  I could still hear Volchek and Arturas in conversation in the next room as I pored over the shots of the apartment.

  The walls of the victim’s apartment were cream. The spatter showed up easy. A closer inspection of the photos revealed red spots in the center of the wall directly behind Mario’s body. In the middle of the staining I saw a small hole, the bullet’s final resting place and, an inch above that hole, a picture nail. From this I felt fairly certain that Little Benny had sat at the small dining table when he’d fired the fatal shot. The table lay just in front of Mario’s body, and an upturned chair wasn’t far away. Little Benny and his victim had sat at the table together before Benny fired the shot.

  Volchek hadn’t mentioned the reason for the hit, but it became clearer when I saw photo fifty-two. Glass covered the dining table. On the floor I saw a broken picture frame. A close-up shot revealed the photo in the frame to be a black-and-white professional photograph of a good-looking man holding a baby. It must have been the photo that came with the frame.

  The victim didn’t take pride in his appearance: He hadn’t shaved in days and there were food stains on his vest. His apartment seemed filthy, but even a slob would sweep up broken glass and there were no cuts on his feet. I couldn’t see any wounds on Mario other than the gunshot, so he probably hadn’t been hit with the photo frame. The rest of the furniture remained intact: no open drawers, no signs that the apartment had been ransacked or even searched. I guessed the picture frame had originally hung on the nail that I’d seen just above the blood spatter. There didn’t appear to be any blood on the picture frame and no bullet holes in the photo. It appeared that Mario had taken the picture off the wall for some reason before he was shot.

  I spread out the rest of the photos on the desk, and my attention was drawn to shots of the kitchen sink in Mario’s studio apartment. The first crime-scene photo wasn’t so clear, but it appeared to show a mixture of black sludge and paper in the sink. The last photo in the set was a close-up. It wasn’t sludge in the sink. It was the remnants of one or maybe two Polaroids that looked as though they had been burned before somebody ran the faucet and tried to mash up what was left. Only one corner of a single photo was still visible. I could just make out an arm and a hand. That was it.

  Easing my back into the chair and squirming when I felt the bomb jab into my skin, I tried to piece together what had happened in that apartment. Mario had not been shot at his front door. Little Benny had gotten into the apartment, and I figured he even sat down across the dining table from his victim. Why not sit on the couch? Why sit at the table? Mario had taken the picture frame off the wall; the bullet hole and the blood spatter were framed in the clean rectangle of wall where the picture had saved the paint beneath it from the accumulating dust and grime. The frame was on the floor, beside the table, the broken glass spread across the tabletop. The picture itself was a generic photo that came with the new frame. Then the burned photographs in the sink. My best guess was that this was a business transaction gone wrong. Little Benny had arrived at the apartment on some pretense of doing business. That’s why they sat at the table. Mario took the picture frame off the wall. They broke it open because something was hidden in that frame, and my only thought was that the photos in the sink were once hidden behind that stock image of the father and child.

  It was a leap, a thin, treacherous leap.

  But it made sense.

  The short statement from the arresting officer, a female cop named Tasketh, confirmed that they’d received a call about a disturbance in Mario’s apartment from one of his neighbors. The NYPD patrol car was only a block away, and the cops got into Mario’s apartment building just as the shot was fired. They broke down the door to find Mario dead and Benny sitting patiently at the table, his gun on the floor. Tasketh stated that a smoke alarm began whirring as they were breaking down the front door. I noticed that this cop’s statement bore a mark saying it had been agreed by the defense so Tasketh wouldn’t have to give evidence.

  My theory was that Little Benny was sent to Mario’s to kill him and get back the photos, but Little Benny got coldcocked by the cops and he probably figured he had to get rid of them. So he burned the photos in the sink. I had no way to be sure. Surely Miriam must have thought about this, and I thought it likely that Miriam came to the same conclusion I did but rejected it as motive because of lack of evidence. For me, it was just a hunch, a gut feeling.

  My survival on the street for the first part of my life had largely been based on listening to my gut. The prosecutor couldn’t present her gut to the jury; she needed evidence for a motive.

  In her opening statement, Miriam hadn’t talked a lot about the motive behind Mario’s murder. Prosecutors love motive because juries love motive. Only reason she didn’t hammer it into the jurors was because she didn’t have a strong motive. If Little Benny had told her why he’d been ordered to kill Mario—that would have been the first thing Miriam told the jury. Instead, she would let the jury come up with their own motive. This was a powerful and risky play for any prosecutor.

  What did those burned photographs show?

  Why did Mario have them? Why was he killed?

  Something didn’t add up. Not yet. But this felt important. The murder of Mario Geraldo served as the spark to ignite this whole situation. Little Benny had given his boss up for murder and kept quiet about the rest of the operation, but why? Was it out of loyalty to his fellow vor? Something about Little Benny’s motives didn’t make sense.

  I felt like I’d just dipped my fingers into a black pool, that there was a good deal more about this murder and this whole situation hidden below the surface. What I didn’t realize then was how deep those waters ran.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Turning my attention to a new file, I found the depositions and statements. There were no depositions or statements from Little Benny. That made sense. In order for the prosecutor to depose a witness, they had to let the defense know when and where the deposition would happen. That meant revealing Little Benny’s location to Volchek’s lawyers. The FBI had probably spent a fortune keeping Little Benny hidden, so they weren’t going to send an open invitation to every hit man in the Russian Mafia by naming a date, time, and location for Benny to appear. Even if they didn’t hit Benny at the deposition, they would make sure to follow him afterward. The rules often went out the window when the witness’s life was at risk.

  The investigating officer’s statement read well. Raphael Martinez could be a star in the making. He stuck to the facts, didn’t pose theories of the crime like he was taught in the academy, didn’t infer anything from the crime scene, and didn’t embellish the facts. He’d basically ignored everything he’d been taught, and that made him a great witness. This guy would be almost impossible to cross-examine.

  I closed the files for a moment. My eyes felt raw, my throat dry.

  “Arturas, do you have anything to drink?” I called.

  “It’s coming.”

  If I was going to be up all night working, I needed something to keep me going.

  An image of Amy flooded my mind, the thought of her shivering and whimpering, scared out of her mind. She was a smart girl, did well in class, and loved reading. When she was younger, her mother liked to read her princess stories and fairy tales. The alarm had sounded on my watch at eight on my first night in alcohol rehab, and knowing that she had that same alarm call made me feel connected. We talked, and I read her a chapter a night from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She could read just fine on her own. She said she liked my voice; it was soothing. At the beginning of my treatment, I’d felt a lot like Alice: that I’d been tumbling around
in a strange world, drinking everything in sight to get out of it, to get out of the law, to change what had happened. By the end of my time in rehab, I’d come to realize that disappearing into a bottle didn’t solve anything. When I’d left rehab, I had been sure that I would never practice law again. Christine and Amy picked me up after I checked out of the addiction center, and we ate hamburgers and fries at a little joint around the corner. That felt good. Felt like old times. My wife was always there for me when I needed her, even though I hadn’t been there for her. There was tension between us, but I felt that was easing because of Amy. My daughter and I were slowly reconnecting through reading and talking about books, although I made sure not to tell Christine about the kind of books that Amy really loved. In my apartment I kept a small library on sleight-of-hand techniques, magic tricks, poker, and lots of books on my hero—Harry Houdini.

  During Amy’s second overnight stay at my apartment, I came out of the kitchen, having fixed dinner, to find Amy reading a biography of Houdini. Christine knew all about my past, and she would not have approved of Amy reading that stuff; she thought it was a bad influence. I didn’t tell Christine about Amy’s appetite for Houdini. Just as I didn’t tell her that I had taught Amy a few coin tricks to wow her friends. At ten years of age, Amy was in that magic time of her youth when I was still the most important man in her life. My pal, Judge Harry Ford, had told me to enjoy it because in a year or two I would turn into a nobody who ran a free car service.

  My lips began to tremor. Amy had her whole life ahead of her.

  I coughed, rubbed my face hard, and reopened the files.

  Apart from the cop, and the inevitable Benny, there were two other witnesses. The first was a girl, Nikki Blundell, a twenty-six-year-old nightclub dancer. She saw Volchek and Mario having a fight in the Sirocco Club on East Seventh Street, the night before he was killed. Miriam knew, just as well as I did, that a bar fight wasn’t enough motive for a professional hit, but it was still pretty damning evidence.

  The only other witness was the vic’s cousin, Tony Geraldo. And suddenly I remembered. I knew a Tony G who worked for Jimmy “the Hat” Fellini, my boyhood pal. Jimmy’s amateur boxing career came to an end when he went into the family business; that business was organized crime. Tony G and I had met once, a long time ago, at Jimmy’s place. He collected for Jimmy. I couldn’t quite picture Tony, but I would know if it was the same guy just by looking at his shoes. Bagmen cover a lot of miles in the car. They wait around a lot; they spend a long time collecting, protecting, and being there for the money. Being an employee in a high position of trust, they tended to be older guys. After spending a week in their car, a couple more days collecting, and a day beating somebody half to death, these guys didn’t care to look after their appearance. Hence the one important thing—they wore expensive, soft, light, old-fashioned shoes that your granddaddy would wear. No Italian leather, pointy-toed shoes for these guys; they’d be in agony before they got through their first pickup. Octogenarians and serious Mafia men—they kept the manufacturers of comfortable American shoes in business.

  Tony’s statement focused on his cousin Mario and his animosity with Volchek. It started well, talking about Mario’s time in juvie, then his graduation to federal lock up, Mario turning over a new leaf, Mario having a long-running disagreement with Volchek over a debt, then Tony’s recollection of the nightclub altercation with Volchek. This could be the same argument that had been independently witnessed by Nikki Blundell. Tony’s statement was bad for Volchek. It helped set up more of a motive. It established a timeline to the murder, and it corroborated Nikki Blundell’s story. Not good.

  I ran through the witness list again.

  The IO could be a big problem, but his evidence wasn’t too controversial. The female cop who had arrested Little Benny at the scene wasn’t giving evidence because it didn’t establish anything toward Volchek’s guilt.

  The nightclub girl I could deal with.

  The vic’s family member—he was trouble. Miriam probably had an ace in Tony Geraldo. Something I hadn’t seen yet.

  Then there was the last witness—the star man, Witness X. The anonymous moniker served only to protect whatever new identity he would be given from being discovered by the press. Volchek knew, as sure as he knew his own face, the identity of the man who’d betrayed him.

  Tony Geraldo and Little Benny sank Volchek. Both of them were devastating. I felt sure I had enough to cause problems for the prosecution, enough to keep Volchek occupied so he wouldn’t worry about me.

  If Tony G was Tony Geraldo, then I’d found my leverage.

  I turned slightly in my chair. Arturas and Volchek were whispering. I made a soft noise and moved a little. Volchek saw me. He closed the door separating my judge’s room from his reception room. He wanted privacy and didn’t want me trying to listen in on the conversation. I couldn’t hear a thing, but I wanted him to see me listening so he would close the door. I could then watch them unobserved.

  Below the handle on the old, paneled oak door, I saw a keyhole.

  I looked through it, but the key must have been in the lock. The key narrowed my vision even further. I could just about make out Volchek talking to Victor. Volchek turned and embraced Arturas, then left. Arturas sat down and struck up a conversation in Russian with Victor. I had some privacy now. Kneeling down, I felt the bomb components jabbing into my side. I’d almost forgotten the damn thing was there.

  I reached into my coat pocket and took out the wallet that I’d lifted from the big guy who’d put my lights out in the limo. Inside the leather foldable, I found around six hundred dollars in loose hundred-dollar bills, together with two brass money clips holding a thousand dollars each, again, in hundred-dollar bills. Among the credit cards for “Gregor Oblowskon,” I found something that took my mind into a blizzard of questions: a business card with a telephone number scrawled on the back. The number was written in blue ink. A cell phone number. I couldn’t find a name on the card, but it was the printing on the card itself that worried me the most. The card gave the address and the title of an organization. I didn’t need to read the name of the organization; the address—“26 Federal Plaza, 23rd Floor, New York, NY”—was well known to me. It’s on Broadway, south of Canal Street, north of City Hall, and home to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  I knew then I could trust no one, not cops and certainly not the feds.

  My watch chimed—eight o’clock. Amy’s watch would be chiming, too. Our time. I couldn’t let myself think of her. I had to stay sharp, focused, and angry. Sending myself crazy with worry wouldn’t help my daughter.

  Five hours to get to Harry before he began court duty. There was only one way I could get to his office without the Russians knowing, and the thought of it terrified me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I heard a footstep outside the door and plunged the wallet back into my pocket, sat on my chair, lifted one of the open files, and buried my head in it.

  The door opened and Arturas stood over me. He tossed a bottle of water into the corner.

  “Olek has gone home for the night, so I’m locking you in here. Victor and I need some rest. You get some sleep, too. If you try to escape…”

  “Where am I going to go?” I said. “Can’t I at least take the jacket off?”

  “No. Try to get some sleep anyway. I’ll be back to check on you at daybreak.”

  “Please.” I stood and grabbed his right forearm and gave him a pleading look. He began to pull away, and I turned, quickly, catching his retreating body with my hip. As he fell, my right hand moved swiftly into his coat—my second pocket dip of the day. He landed on his ass and swore. Digging his heels beneath his thighs, he sprang up at me. I kept hold of his wrist and pulled him back up.

  “Jesus. I’m so sorry, man. It was an accident,” I said. I put my hands up defensively. My hands open, palms toward Arturas with my fingers splayed, cradling my prize in the fold of my right wrist, in between the back of my hand
and my forearm. A tricky hide, but I’d practiced it for years. I could hide a silver dollar in the crook of my wrist unobserved and still play a round of poker. I pretended to look scared—when really my limbs were tense with anger. Arturas feigned a right hook. I flinched and exaggerated it. He smiled and closed the door. Victor let out a big laugh from the next room.

  “Pussy,” said Victor.

  I listened to the key turning in the lock, gave it a few seconds, then snapped the back of my wrist toward the ceiling, sending the little black device tumbling into the air. Catching the detonator in my right hand, I wondered how long I had before Arturas discovered it was missing. I needed the detonator. I didn’t want Arturas triggering the device if he just happened to open the door and find me gone. I was going to see Harry, and I needed to bring the bomb with me because if any man knew how to disable it, it was Superior Judge and former Captain, United States Army, Harry Ford.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Before I did anything, I had to be sure my babysitters wouldn’t come looking for me anytime soon. Volchek had already left. I heard a whispered conversation, then the door to the hall opening and footsteps walking toward the elevator. The door to the corridor closed. I heard the rattle of keys locking it, and through the keyhole I saw Victor lie down on the couch and close his eyes. Arturas had just left.

  Victor was on his own.

  I watched Victor carefully for a little over an hour. I could hear him breathing heavily as he lay on the couch. His eyes were closed, and his hands rested on his stomach. Apart from a small lamp, the only light in my room came from digital billboards across the street. Rhythmic dances of red, blue, and white slipped in and out of the room every few seconds and threw strangely shaped creatures around the walls.