Clever Fox

by Jeanine Pirro

  Another five minutes passed before a well-dressed man in his sixties and a much younger man—probably in his thirties—wearing an off-the-rack suit appeared.

  “I’m Anthony Conti, one of the firm’s senior partners,” the older man explained, “and this is Mr. Bianchi, one of our younger associates. You asked to see him.”

  They made an odd couple. Conti was tall and thin, with salt-and-pepper hair. Bianchi was short, heavyset, had stringy, shoulder-length hair, and still bore remnants of teenage acne.

  “We’ll be more comfortable in our conference room,” Conti volunteered, leading the way.

  The fact that we’d asked for Bianchi but had gotten him and Conti irked me.

  “Are you Mr. Bianchi’s attorney?” I asked flippantly.

  “Does he need one?” Conti replied.

  “You tell me.”

  “We prefer to have either Mr. Gallo or myself present whenever law enforcement personnel come to our office. It’s standard procedure.”

  “How do you ever get any work done? There must be a ton of law enforcement coming here,” I replied.

  He ignored the jab and said, “How can we help you?”

  “We’re here about the homicide in a Yonkers apartment on Midland Avenue last night,” I said.

  “Yes,” Conti replied, “I heard about it on the morning news. A woman was found in an apartment building with pieces of her skin missing. Tragic, just terrible. What’s the world coming to?”

  “Mr. Bianchi rented the apartment where the victim was found,” I said.

  “Your law firm is paying for it,” O’Brien added, tag-teaming them.

  Without the slightest sign of surprise, Conti said, “Our firm rents an apartment in that building, that’s true. But I can assure you that no one in our firm was involved in a murder there.”

  “How can you be so certain?” I asked.

  “Because no one in our firm has ever used that apartment,” he replied. “We rented it in case Mr. Gallo or I needed a place to stay when we were working late. But I don’t believe either of us has put a foot in the place.”

  “Never been inside it?” O’Brien asked suspiciously.

  “I haven’t.”

  “And Gallo?” O’Brien asked.

  “Ask him,” Conti said. “But I doubt he has.”

  “You’re telling me that your firm rented an apartment and has been paying rent for three months, but no one ever used it. Nobody stopped by for a nap or at night. Must be nice to throw away money like that,” O’Brien said.

  “Thanks for your concern,” Conti said.

  “We’ve been told,” I said, joining the conversation, “that the victim arrived at the apartment at two o’clock every Tuesday and every Friday.”

  Conti shrugged his shoulders indifferently.

  “And,” I continued, “that an older male arrived fifteen minutes later in a black limo at the apartment to visit her.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Conti said. “But I can tell you this: our firm doesn’t use limos.”

  “Huh,” O’Brien said, sneering. “You can afford to rent an apartment for three months that you never use, but you take cabs to save money.”

  Conti gave him a stern look. “Detective, I don’t spend your money. Why are you trying to spend mine?”

  “Is it possible,” I asked, “that you rented this apartment for one of your clients? Someone who prefers to keep his identity a secret?”

  “If we were,” said Conti, “then we would be violating our client’s trust if we talked to you about it, wouldn’t we? Besides, I don’t believe renting an apartment is against the law—not yet, at least.”

  “Do you know the name of the woman whose body was found there?” I asked.

  With an exaggerated sigh, Conti said, “Are you planning on charging someone in our firm or is this just a fishing expedition?”

  “A young woman was strung up and butchered in an apartment that your firm rented,” I said. “This is hardly a fishing expedition. It would seem logical that you might know her name.”

  Conti gave me another smug look. “I don’t think that’s logical at all. Our firm rented the apartment but we never used it. So why would we know who this woman was or why she was in our apartment?”

  Clearly, we were getting nowhere.

  Apparently Conti agreed. “This conversation is a waste of time,” he announced. “I think we’re done here.”

  “No,” I said, letting my temper show, “we aren’t really done here. Does anyone in your office have a scar across his cheek?”

  Conti’s facial expression stayed expressionless. But I detected a nervous glint in Bianchi’s eyes.

  “Why would you ask that?” Conti said.

  “Because an older man—someone in his early seventies—was in that apartment at the time of the murder. He had a scar on his face and we are trying to locate him.”

  “You have a witness who saw a man with a scar on his face going into that apartment at the same time that girl was killed?” Conti repeated.

  “I’m not telling you whether we do or do not have a witness,” I said. “I’m asking you if anyone on your payroll here is an older man with a scar on his face.”

  “No one in our firm fits that description,” he replied.

  “Doesn’t your firm represent Nicholas Persico?” I asked.

  Before Conti could answer, O’Brien said in an innocent voice, “Huh, I seem to remember that Persico does have a scar on his cheek.”

  “It’s no secret that Mr. Persico is one of our firm’s clients,” Conti said drily. “We have represented him for many years.”

  “And the scar?”

  “I’ve never noticed.”

  At that moment, the door to the conference room burst open and another older, well-dressed man came in.

  “I’m Alonzo Gallo,” he announced. “What’s the problem here?”

  “This detective and Ms. Fox,” Conti said calmly, “are hinting that a witness saw Mr. Persico entering an apartment where a girl was murdered.”

  “You people are outrageous!” Gallo snapped. “Every time there’s a sensational crime in Yonkers and you cops want to make headlines, you come running in here, trying to drag Mr. Persico into it. For you to mention his name in the same breath as this murdered girl is nothing but a cheap publicity stunt.”

  In an indignant voice, Conti added, “We’ve been cooperative and civil with both of you, but now I think I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  I glanced at Bianchi, who hadn’t spoken a word, and asked him, “Is there anything you want to say? It’s your name on the rental agreement.”

  He shook his head.

  “You ever go in that apartment after you rented it?” O’Brien asked him.

  Bianchi glanced at the two senior partners. “I have nothing to say,” he said.

  “Who’d you give the key to?” O’Brien said.

  Bianchi was starting to sweat.

  Conti saved him. “We’re done answering questions,” he said.

  “Thanks for being a model of cooperation,” I said.

  “We always try, especially with law enforcement,” Gallo sneered.

  Once we were outside the building, I said, “Judging from the way Gallo came bursting into that conference room, I’m guessing he’d been listening to us in an outside office. The room must have been bugged.”

  The police radio in the console of O’Brien’s unmarked cruiser crackled with a message as we both entered the car. “We got a positive on Jane Doe,” the Yonkers dispatcher said. “Got a home address too. Name is Isabella Ricci.”

  O’Brien interrupted the dispatcher before he could announce the address. “Isabella Ricci?”

  “Ten-four,” the dispatcher replied.

  O’Brien looked at me and said, “What the fuck?”

  He was breaking his New Year’s resolution to avoid saying the F-word, but in this case, it seemed fitting.

  “If this Isabella Ricci i
s the girl I think she is,” I said, “then this case just got even more sensational.”

  “And dangerous,” O’Brien replied.

  7

  Whitaker paged us as soon as he learned the identity of the victim. What I didn’t expect when we walked into Whitaker’s office was that there would be an entourage waiting. Whitaker’s three chiefs, Steinberg, Myerson, and Vanderhoot, were seated around the conference table, as well as two outsider guests. O’Brien and I were outnumbered and outranked.

  The lanky fellow with capped teeth and carefully groomed hair sitting closest to Whitaker near the head of the table was Jack Longhorn, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s New York field office. I despised him. He had done everything he possibly could to stop me from prosecuting Carlos Gonzales and was the backstabbing son of a bitch who had tried to put Gonzales into the Federal Witness Protection Program.

  Longhorn had that good ole boy act down pat, sprinkling folksy sayings into his banter to call attention to his Oklahoma roots. But if you pricked his southern façade, underneath you’d find a blindly ambitious opportunist who didn’t play fair and never let facts get in his way. Being the agent in charge of the New York field office was the final stepping-stone before an administrator became a confidante in Washington, D.C., of the all-powerful FBI director.

  The younger man with him was a stranger, but his clean-cut appearance, chiseled features, and the tiny American flag in his coat’s lapel pegged him as an FBI agent, too.

  Without waiting to be introduced, he rose, extended his hand, and said, “Ms. Fox, I’m Special Agent Walter Coyle. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “I bet you have. Knowing your boss, I’m sure none of it was good.”

  Longhorn faked a pained expression. “Oh Miss Fox,” he said, “we’ve locked horns in the past, but I’ve buried the hatchet.”

  “And I’m sure it’s in my back.”

  “Time to pull in the claws,” Whitaker said. O’Brien and I both found chairs across from Longhorn and Coyle.

  Whitaker began the meeting. “Special Agent Longhorn and Special Agent Coyle have come with new information about our murder.”

  “We’re here to join the team,” Longhorn declared in an enthusiastic tone.

  Great, I thought. How lucky can we get? The Feds want to partner up and “help” us out, which means they’ll steal our case, all our work, and then take credit. Wow. I couldn’t help myself from replying in his language. Staring at Longhorn, I said, “Only problem, Jack, is this isn’t Dodge City, you’re no Wyatt Earp, and we don’t need your guns. We locals can do this one just fine.”

  True to form, he ignored me, turned to his colleague, and said, “You’re up to bat, Walter.”

  “I work for a task force that is part of a Justice Department effort to break the back of organized crime here in the New York City metropolitan area. The team I’m assigned to has targeted Nicholas Persico in Yonkers. I’m certain you recognize his name,” Coyle said.

  He hesitated in what seemed a very practiced way, apparently to see if any of us wanted to make a comment, but no one did. Continuing, Coyle said, “I thought I had drawn the short straw in the office the other day when I got stuck running surveillance on Persico over the New Year’s Eve holidays. But when I heard about that woman who got butchered over on Midland Avenue, I realized that wasn’t the case after all.”

  “What do you mean?” Whitaker asked, clearly hoping to hurry him up.

  “On December thirty-first, I followed Persico in his limo to the apartment where your murder victim was later found. I saw the Butcher go inside the Midland Avenue building. Of course, it wasn’t until I heard the news this morning that I made the connection that Persico had been at the scene of a homicide.”

  “You actually saw him entering the dead girl’s apartment?” Whitaker asked.

  “No, I didn’t see him enter the apartment, but I did see his limo drive him to the building and I watched him go inside.”

  It’s protocol in meetings such as this one not to speak or ask questions until after the D.A. has finished asking everything he wants. I knew this, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Maybe he was there visiting his mother,” I said.

  Whitaker shot me an irritated look. But Coyle smiled and said, “I checked and his mother doesn’t live there. None of his family members do.”

  Coyle was self-assured. And he really was cute.

  Since I had spoken out of turn, Vanderhoot apparently thought he could, too.

  “What time did you see him get to the building?” Vanderhoot asked.

  “Two-thirty,” Coyle replied.

  I jumped in. “You know the exact time?”

  Now it was Vanderhoot who shot me a nasty glance.

  “We keep logs,” Coyle explained. “I wrote it down, of course.”

  At this point, Whitaker decided to retake control of the questioning. “How long was Persico inside the apartment building?”

  “Almost three hours. He left around five-thirty p.m.”

  Whitaker continued, “And you’re certain it was Persico who went into that apartment building?”

  “Yes, sir. Persico didn’t try to hide his face. There’s something else you need to know. When he left, he was in a rush. He came running out of the building’s front door and jumped into the limo. I followed him from the apartment back to his butcher’s shop, where I watched and waited. When he came out of the shop a short time later, I noticed he’d changed clothes. He’d put on different pants, a different shirt; it even looked like he’d changed his socks and shoes.”

  “Are you suggesting he destroyed evidence?” I asked.

  If Whitaker was irritated at me for butting in, he didn’t show it this time. He must have been as eager to hear the answer as I was.

  “Why else change clothes in the middle of the day?” Coyle asked rhetorically. “After he left his shop, I followed him straight to his home. He didn’t leave his residence the rest of that night, so it wasn’t like he was dressing up for a New Year’s Eve party.”

  Satisfied that his young protégé had whetted our appetites, Longhorn declared in a booming voice, “It looks like we finally have a chance to wrap Mr. Persico up in a nice neat little package and send him off to the federal pen in Leavenworth. All you fellas need to do is invite us into this homicide investigation so we can officially saddle up with your organized crime chief.”

  Coyle added, “I can provide Vanderhoot our daily logbooks that show Persico’s recent activities.” Glancing at Vanderhoot, Coyle said, “I’ve heard you have an excellent reputation in organized crime cases.”

  Longhorn said, “What do you think, Carlton? You want to partner up here, ride the same horse, and catch us a bad guy?”

  “Let me think about it,” Whitaker said.

  “What’s to think about, Carlton?” Longhorn replied with a slight edge to his voice.

  “We already have an eyewitness who saw Persico at the apartment yesterday,” Whitaker said, reminding Longhorn that our office could handle this case without him.

  The political game-playing had begun.

  “Interesting,” Coyle said. “Who is it?”

  “The building’s superintendent,” Vanderhoot volunteered. “He spotted an older man with a scar on his face ducking into the building yesterday afternoon.”

  Whitaker looked irked. Vanderhoot had volunteered more information than the D.A. had wanted. In his eagerness to impress the FBI, Vanderhoot had dug another shovel’s worth of dirt for his own grave.

  “That’s Persico, all right,” Coyle chimed in. “His scar’s a dead giveaway.”

  Longhorn said, “Carlton, I can have Coyle in Vanderhoot’s office this afternoon with a stack of daily logs and other intel that will nail Persico’s hide to the barn door, then we can all be heroes. Or you can do this case solo and if you fail to get a conviction, you’ll be standing alone on a hill with your britches down and your butt showing.”

  That was not an image I wan
ted in my head. Apparently Whitaker didn’t, either. I knew him well enough to know that he didn’t like sharing the limelight and he didn’t trust Longhorn. Whitaker smiled slightly and said in a polite but firm voice, “Jack, that’s a most generous and tempting offer. But at this point, I think we’ll do this one on our own. Of course, now that we know Agent Coyle is a witness, I’m sure Miss Fox and Detective O’Brien will want to speak with him.”

  A frustrated look flashed across Longhorn’s face, but he shook it off and said, “Okeydokey, Carlton. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” He slapped his knees and rose from the table, a motion his sidekick echoed. But Longhorn wasn’t quite done. “Did you say Miss Fox and Detective O’Brien were handling this investigation? Not Vanderhoot, your expert organized-crime prosecutor?”

  Whitaker stuck out his hand. “Thanks for stopping by, Jack. We’ll be in touch.”

  This time, Longhorn made a point of shaking my hand as he made his way around the table.

  I wanted to vomit.

  As soon as they were gone, Whitaker exploded. “Who the hell does that son of a bitch think he is, trying to weasel into my case?”

  “The FBI does have a task force and tremendous resources,” Vanderhoot said. “Agent Coyle is an eyewitness. I think it might be smart to—”

  Before Vanderhoot could finish his sentence, Whitaker snapped, “I’m sure you think it would be great to team up. But you’re not in charge, are you? I’m calling the shots and right now, Miss Fox and O’Brien are going to continue pursuing this investigation.”

  Like a puppy who’d just been caught next to a puddle on the kitchen floor, Vanderhoot bowed his head.

  Whitaker addressed Myerson, who had remained silent up to now. “What do you think, Henry?” he asked. “You’re the courtroom expert.”

  Myerson said, “You’re making the right call for now. But someone needs to meet with Agent Coyle. We’ll need him down the road when we take this to a grand jury, along with the super, Roman Mancini. Two eyewitnesses are better than one.”

  Chief of Staff Steinberg jumped in. “You’re making the right call here, keeping the FBI out for now. We need this case. It’s big news.”