by James Lepore
“That’s good, but remember, we came to the church to say a prayer.”
Jay turned and looked Dan fully in the face for the first time. On that face was a combination of beguiling innocence and sly defiance—the dark brown eyes laughing at some inner joke—that Jay was to encounter in joy and exasperation times without number in the years to come.
1.
7:00 PM, September 1, 2004, Newark
The phone was ringing as Jay Cassio walked into his office in the old Fidelity Bank building near the Essex County Courthouse in Newark. He picked it up, swinging the cord wide as he settled himself into the leather covered, padded swivel chair behind his desk.
“Hello, law office,” he said.
“Jay? Al Garland. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Al,” Jay replied. “What’s up?”
“Do you represent a woman named Kate Powers?”
“Yes, I do,” Jay said. “Why?”
“What’s Kate’s story?”
Jay did not answer. He leaned back in his chair and ran the fingers of his free hand through his thick, wavy, dark brown hair, hair that fell below his ears and down the nape of his neck, and that was just beginning to go white at the temples. He had known Al Garland, the Essex County Prosecutor, for ten years, and never once had he called, out of the blue, to ask a question like this. A question he could not answer without violating Kate Powers’s attorney-client privilege.
“You’re kidding, right, Al,” he said, finally.
“The Newark police just found her head in the Passaic River. They’re on the way to her house right now. Don’t count on getting paid for a while.”
“Jesus. Are they sure it’s her?”
“The head was in a garbage bag. Her wallet was in it, too.”
“Jesus . . .”
“I need your file, Jay,” Garland said abruptly. “They’re doing a subpoena.”
“Slow down, Al,” Jay said, trying at the same time to both fend off and to absorb the image of Kate Powers’s severed head floating in the grimy Passaic River. He could also feel the fine hair rising at the back of his neck and down his forearms, his anger rising at Garland’s hectoring, sarcastic tone of voice. “What do you think is in my file?”
“I don’t know,” said Garland. “You tell me.”
“I can’t tell you, you know that.”
“I assume it’s in your office.”
Jay did not answer. Garland in a bad temper was capable of anything, like sending a SWAT team to Jay’s office to seize the file.
“You wouldn’t hide it, Jay?” said Garland.
“I’m not giving it up without a court order,” Jay said. “Don’t send your people over here without one.”
“Don’t get yourself into an ethics situation over this,” said Garland.
Jay took a breath and looked up at the brown water stain that he fancied took the form of a dragon on one of the tiles in the dropped ceiling directly above his old wooden desk. Al Garland’s years of holding all the power in the criminal justice game had made him self-righteous and stiff in his dealings with the enemy: criminal defense lawyers, and others who stood in the way of his conviction machine. Jay and Garland had had a wary but respectful relationship for many years, and Jay knew that it would pay neither to antagonize him nor to try to stroke him. He would do what he felt should be done no matter what Jay said.
“You know I’m entitled to go to court on this,” Jay said finally. “The file is privileged. I would have an ethics problem if I didn’t fight you.”
“How long have you represented her?”
“A year and a half.”
“Who’s the husband’s lawyer?”
“Bob Flynn. He’s had three. Flynn’s the third.”
“Why three lawyers?”
“Every time there was a court order for discovery, Powers changed lawyers. He was reluctant to let go of his paperwork.”
“He’s the big real estate guy, Bryce Powers & Company, correct?”
“That’s him.”
“Meet me at Judge Moran’s courtroom at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ll call Flynn,” Garland said. “Take care of the file, Jay. I’m only doing this because it’s you.”
They hung up, and Jay stayed at his desk. The last of the day’s sun filtered through the slatted openings of the wooden Venetian blinds that covered the large window behind him, painting horizontal yellow bars on the rows of red and gold-embossed law books that lined the far wall. His secretary, Cheryl, was gone, and the building was quiet. He could hear the occasional car horn honking on Market Street two stories below. Newark had been trying desperately over the past decade or so, with some success, to revitalize itself; but for all its efforts, each evening at around six o’clock, its downtown merchants and professionals and working class people fled to their homes in the suburbs, and the city center, bustling all day long, became eerily quiet while the cops waited for the next teenaged carjacker to go screaming by.
The mellow glow of his corner office did not match Jay’s mood. He and Melissa Powers, Kate’s twenty-two-year-old daughter—his client’s twenty-two-year-old daughter—had been lovers for six months. In the midst of their affair, Jay had received documents from Bryce Powers’s lawyer that revealed that Melissa and her older sister, Marcy, were each drawing a hundred thousand dollars a year for “maintenance services” from Plaza I and II, large hotel/retail/condo complexes in north Jersey’s upscale Bergen County, developed and managed by Bryce Powers & Company. The sole share-holders of a shell company, the Powers sisters were simply receiving an allowance from their father via phony service contracts. All cleaning and other routine services were done by Bryce Powers & Company employees. Over a million dollars had thus been siphoned from Plaza I and II in the past five years. Acutely aware of his obligation to retrieve her share of this money for Kate—to sue Marcy and Melissa for it if necessary—Jay, glad for the excuse, had ended the relationship with Melissa two months ago.
Rousing himself, he dialed the number of Dan Del Colliano, a private investigator and his lifelong friend, who had an office on the same floor as Jay. Jay had hired Dan to do some investigating in the Powers case, and wanted to let him know that he might be getting a visitor with a search warrant. There was no answer.
He then dialed Bob Flynn’s number, surprised when Flynn answered. It was close to seven p.m., by which time Flynn was usually on his second Manhattan at the Colonial, a local lawyers’ hangout near the courthouse.
“Bob,” said Jay, “did you get a call from Al Garland?”
“He just hung up,” said Flynn.
“Are you going to court tomorrow?” Jay asked.
“Do I have a choice?”
“What is it with Garland?”
“He’s loony tunes, Jay, power mad, you know that,” Flynn replied. “Are you worried about fucking the daughter?”
“Yes.”
“You deserve it.”
Jay could only laugh at Flynn’s directness. He did deserve it, he knew. He never should have gotten involved with the daughter of a client, especially one nineteen years younger than him. One whose father was worth seventy-five million, and who sat on a dozen philanthropic and Fortune 500 boards in the tri-state area. The beheading of this man’s wife would guarantee a lot of publicity. Jay’s name would undoubtedly come up, linked to both Kate and possibly Melissa, who, angry at being dumped, would hold their love affair over his head, a scarlet sword of Damocles. If dropped it wouldn’t kill him—he had done nothing unethical—but it would hurt his professional reputation, a lawyer’s most valued asset.
He had been thinking recently that there would be no real price to pay for his affair with Melissa Powers. He sat for a moment after hanging up the phone, staring at the dragon on his ceiling, pondering the error of that line of thought.
2.
8:00-11:00 PM, September 1, 2004, Montclair, West Orange
Jay concentrated on the pastel streaks of lavender and pink on the horizon as
he drove home, trying, with little success, to distract himself from thinking of the tortured Kate Powers and the terrible way she had died. At home in suburban Montclair he changed into jeans and a polo shirt, made himself a drink, and sat down on his patio with the Powers divorce file, which he had copied in its entirety before leaving the office, certain that tomorrow he would be handing over the original to either Judge Moran or Al Garland. He skipped over the cold financial documents and hot client affidavits that constitute the typical lawyer’s divorce file, until he found the folder that contained the fifty-odd letters that Kate Powers had written to him in the eighteen months he had represented her. In a childlike, but oddly graceful script, the sentences often rambling and incoherent, they dealt mainly with Kate’s obsession with appearances and her anger at Bryce’s emotional and, of late, financial stinginess.
It was Kate’s mention of incest in one of these letters, of Bryce’s “fondling love for his daughters,” that brought Jay and Melissa together. He had felt compelled to interview her, and her denial was both succinct and credible. “My father may be a prick,” she said with a smile, “but he’s no child molester.” Jay had asked her to confirm her statement in a short letter to him, which she did, adding a postscript inviting him to call her for a drink if the mood struck him, which, unfortunately, it did.
The letters, he recalled, contained other, similarly bizarre accusations against Bryce, which Jay dismissed as patently absurd—psychedelic falsehoods dreamed up when Kate went down her rabbit hole of prescription drugs and alcohol. He found nothing in any of them that gave any clue that she feared for her physical safety or her life at the hands of her husband.
Relieved, he set the letters aside and sipped his Scotch. Overhead, the bats that slept all day in the woods behind his small Cape Cod were beginning their nightly aerobatics in search of insects to consume. A beheading, he told himself, was not a crime of passion, not in American culture. Who could have done such a thing, and why? He remembered the Menendez case in California several years back: two brothers had been convicted of shotgunning their parents to death. The motive: the parents’ estate. The thought that had been vaguely nagging him since his call from Al Garland now crystallized: Were Melissa and Marcy, princesses with nasty streaks—fearful of losing some or all of their meal tickets via their parents’ divorce—capable of such a thing?
Before he could answer this question, or worse, label it as rhetorical, his phone rang. As was his habit, he let it go to his answering machine. When he heard Melissa Powers’s voice through the open window behind him, he went into the kitchen to listen, picking up her message halfway through: “. . . the police. I need to talk to you. Call me.” He heard her hang up, then pushed the replay button and learned that Bryce Powers was dead, that he had apparently overdosed on his insulin, and that the police had just tracked down Melissa and Marcy to give them the news.
Jay called Melissa on her cell, but there was no answer and no instruction to leave a message. He finished his drink in one gulp, put the legal file away, got in his car, and drove through the last of the twilight to nearby West Orange, where the Powers mansion sat in the lush, gated enclave-within-an-enclave of Llewellyn Park. When he got there, he was surprised to find the house and grounds in complete darkness. Nevertheless, he took his time negotiating the long, curving driveway, assuming he was being watched. He exited his car nonchalantly, but had taken only three or four steps when a loud voice said: “Stop right there. We’re police.” Jay stood still as two uniformed officers, each with a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other, appeared out of the darkness. Behind them was a plainclothesman whom he recognized as Frank Dunn, a detective at the county prosecutor’s office who he had been friends with for years.
“Frank,” he said, “it’s me, Jay.”
Dunn, recognizing Jay, said to the officers, “It’s okay. I know this guy. It’s the wife’s lawyer.” He approached Jay. They shook hands, and the officers, tucking their guns away, headed back to the house, the beams of their flashlights stabbing into the darkness ahead of them.
Dunn was an old-timer, waiting to retire, but despite a cynicism that was part native and part acquired after forty years of police work, twenty of them in New York, Jay knew that he took his job seriously; as seriously as anyone who had seen all the faces of human horror and folly—including his own—could.
“You get dumber all the time,” Dunn said to Jay.
Jay did not answer. He had no business being at a fresh crime scene, and he knew it.
“What are you doing here?” the detective asked. He lit a cigarette and then handed one to Jay, who, lighting it from Dunn’s gold Zippo lighter, caught a brief glimpse of his friend’s grizzled face before the darkness closed in on them again.
“Where is everybody?” he asked Dunn.
“Are you kidding, Jay?” said the detective. “Get in your car. Go home. I’ll try to forget you were here. You’re too dumb to do anything seriously criminal.”
Jay smiled at this. When he was a young lawyer, he had faced Dunn—a seasoned and savvy testifier for the state—several times on the witness stand. Though Dunn was a cynic through and through, he was not dishonest and would not lie under oath, even to put a bad guy away. Recognizing this, Jay had not done badly. Afterward, he and Dunn had come to respect each other, to admire each other’s style and, despite the age difference—Jay was forty-one, Dunn sixtytwo—to become good friends.
Jay, a lean six-three, towered over the detective as they stood close to each other in the dark on the edge of the circular driveway near the large, stately house. His eyes adjusting to the darkness, he could see the outline of the thickly wooded hills behind it emerge in the night sky. Embarrassed, he took a short, hard drag on his cigarette before throwing it to the ground.
“You’re right, Frank,” he said. “Melissa called me. I thought she might be here.”
Jay watched as Dunn put his cigarette to his lips, sucked in smoke, and took it away.
“Fucking pussy,” the detective said. “It makes us weak.”
Jay smiled. He knew that Dunn, who had been having an extramarital affair for the past five years, was referring to himself as well as Jay.
“We’re done, Frank,” Jay said. “But her parents are both dead.”
“You could have anybody you want,” Dunn said.
“I don’t think so,” Jay murmured. Dunn, his fair face ruined by drink, had often referred to Jay as Attorney Adonis.
“She’s with her sister at that fancy Hilton in Short Hills,” said Dunn. “You think I give a shit if these rich bastards kill themselves off?”
“You’re tired, Frank.”
“Fuck.”
3.
5:00 PM, September 4, 2004, Montclair
The town of Montclair, one of a closely-linked chain of suburbs to the west of Newark, is known and much praised for its cultural diversity. Point of view being all, Jay Cassio, who graduated from Montclair High School in 1980, experienced that diversity as separateness: Blacks hung out with blacks, rich white kids with rich white kids, middle class white kids with middle class white kids, and everyone else, that is, the handful of lower-middle-class white kids, like Jay Cassio, was left to fend for him or herself. Jay, a terrific athlete, managed to rise above class on the football field, and avoid it at all other times by hanging out with Dan Del Colliano and his friends from predominantly blue-collar Bloomfield, the next town to the east, but light-years away in terms of youthful snobbery.
When it came time to buy a house, Jay, then thirty-two, chose Montclair because its many physical charms were no longer painful, as they were when he was a teenaged outsider, but actually pleasant. The tree-lined streets, the well kept parks, the mansions of the rich, the Mercedes in the parking lot at the Whole Foods supermarket, were the devils he knew. His house, a small Cape Cod, was on a quiet dead-end street that backed onto the South Mountain Reservation, two hundred acres of county-owned park and woodland, the perfect setting for the out
sider life he had grown accustomed to living.
On Saturday, three days after his conversation with Al Garland, Jay took a run on a five mile loop in the reservation, mowed his lawn, pulled some weeds, and then, after showering, settled on his flagstone back patio to read and eventually sleep. He woke up, around five p.m., to see Dan Del Colliano, sitting, facing him, on one of his patio chairs, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, a newspaper rolled up on his lap.
“Hi,” Dan said, smiling. “How are you?”
“I’m good. What’s up?”
“You’re in the paper.”
“I thought so.”
Danny handed him the Newark Star-Ledger. Jay, groggy from his nap, took it and tossed it onto a nearby low table. “What’s it say?” he asked.
“Murder-suicide.”
“Anything else?”
“That you’re very handsome and the best lawyer in the state.”
Jay laughed and, sitting up, rubbed the sleep out of eyes and then ran his fingers through his hair. He retrieved the newspaper, which Danny had folded to the Powers story, under the byline of a reporter they knew named Linda Marshall. Remembering the locustlike swarm of reporters that accosted him and Bob Flynn on the courthouse steps on Thursday morning, he saw the disappointment in the lead paragraph. Essex County Prosecutor Alan Garland has determined, based on preliminary autopsy findings, that the deaths of the beheaded socialite Kate Powers and her multimillionaire husband are a case of murder-suicide . . .
In court, Garland said he still wanted the Powers divorce files, but he was much less aggressive. Without objection from the prosecutor, Judge Moran had ordered Jay and Bob Flynn to surrender their files to him so he could decide what information they contained that was relevant to a murder investigation, assuming one was still being pursued.
The announcement by Garland, Linda Marshall’s story continued, rendered moot his earlier attempt to confiscate the legal files of the Newark attorneys representing the couple in what was believed to be a contentious divorce . . . Confiscate, Jay thought, recalling his history with Marshall, that’s the wrong word, but I like it. Give Garland a whack. He deserves it.