Clever Fox

by Jeanine Pirro

  “You mean stairwell?” O’Brien asked. “You just told us that’s where you saw her, not a hallway.”

  Gilmore was avoiding eye contact with me and I was losing patience. “You’re lying again. Look at me when you talk.”

  He glanced up and I could tell he was getting angrier.

  “It would have been a snap,” I said, “for you to learn her schedule, especially if you talked to Roman Mancini. He probably told you she came twice a week to the building.”

  O’Brien joined in. “You wait until her visitor leaves the apartment. You see him get into his limo and then you knock on her door.”

  “No, no,” he said. “That never happened.”

  “She answered and you forced your way in and attacked her. You brought a knife with you, didn’t you?” O’Brien said.

  “I wasn’t there! I never touched her!”

  “Where were you,” I asked, “on the afternoon when Isabella was butchered?”

  “At work. I was getting lots of extra hours.”

  “That should be easy to check,” I said. “You’d better be telling the truth.”

  “Wait, wait, I wasn’t at work,” he replied, sounding panicked.

  “Changing your story, huh?” O’Brien said.

  “No, I was confused. I took the day off because Rachel had to visit her mother. I stayed with our baby. But, I swear, I was in the apartment the entire day. I never went near that woman’s apartment.”

  “Your baby isn’t going to make a very good alibi witness,” I said.

  “Which is it: Were you at work or at home? You go out that day or not?” O’Brien asked. “Think about your answer because, so far, you ain’t been too convincing.”

  Gilmore hesitated. “I was definitely at home and I only went out once. The baby and me went down to a park, after he got up from his nap. I wasn’t even in the building when that murder happened.”

  “How do you know when it happened?” I asked.

  “One of the police detectives. He told Rachel it happened in the afternoon, between two and six.”

  “You took Chucky to a park for four hours?” I asked.

  “No, no. I don’t think I should say anything more now without talking to a lawyer.”

  “Why do you need a lawyer?” O’Brien asked, somehow making it sound like an oddball request when, in fact, a detective and A.D.A. were grilling him about a homicide.

  “Because I’m innocent.”

  “Then you got nothin’ to hide,” O’Brien said. “She didn’t want to have sex with you and you couldn’t stand it.”

  I joined in, tag-teaming Gilmore. “You got angry, told her husband that she needed to be taught a lesson, to be raped and humiliated.”

  “No, you’ve got it wrong.”

  “You find a way to bump into Marco, you befriend him, you plant a new idea in his head: going to a hotel with Isabella wearing a blindfold. Sounds erotic to him and you finally get to have sex with her.”

  O’Brien said, “But that wasn’t enough, was it?”

  “You’re putting words in my mouth,” he said.

  “You started stalking her,” O’Brien said.

  “When you discovered she was meeting someone else—someone better than you—in the apartment twice a week, you got jealous,” I said.

  “You moved your family into the same building,” O’Brien said.

  “You watched her come into the building on New Year’s Eve,” I said, “and you got furiously angry. Who did she think she was, rejecting you?!”

  O’Brien had taught me about what cops called the Reid Technique, a nine-step process that included providing a suspect with a justification or rationale from the criminal’s viewpoint during an interrogation. “You got to get inside their skull,” he’d told me. “Make them think you know exactly why they did it.” Once O’Brien had gotten a murderer to literally talk himself into a jail cell without any physical evidence. The killer had become so wrapped up in O’Brien’s account that he began correcting the cops, revealing details that only the murderer would know. As we continued to pressure Donnie Gilmore, I noticed that his hands, which he was warming with his coffee, start to shake.

  “You tied her up,” O’Brien said, “because you knew she wouldn’t have sex with you any other way. You began cutting off her clothing.”

  “And then you really decided to teach her a lesson, didn’t you?” I added. “You really decided to humiliate her. Maybe she laughed at you. Maybe she spit in your face.”

  “No, no, no!” he protested.

  “Things got out of hand, didn’t they?” I continued. “You only meant to scare her with your knife. Terrorize her.”

  “She kicked you,” O’Brien said.

  “No!” he declared, suddenly slapping the table with his hands. “I don’t want to talk to either of you anymore.”

  “Then let’s go back upstairs and we’ll talk to Rachel,” I said. “We’ll tell her about your little outings in Scarsdale and how you had sex with a blindfolded woman in a hotel who later ended up cut to pieces in the building that you just happened to move into.”

  Gilmore raised his hands, covering his face, and said, “I need a lawyer. You can’t keep talking to me without a lawyer. Rachel’s my wife. You can’t talk to her, either. I watch television. I know my rights.”

  We were entering touchy territory. As soon as Gilmore told us that he wanted a lawyer, we should have stopped interrogating him. At least that is what they always did on television. But he was not in custody and he was free to stand up and walk out of the coffee shop. Therefore, we technically were not violating his rights, nor were we required to give him a Miranda warning. That subtly was not something he would have learned from watching Hill Street Blues.

  “You don’t own your wife,” I said. “I think she’ll want to talk to us, especially when she hears about Scarsdale and your hotel sexual escapades.”

  “Please, please. I didn’t kill her but you’re going to destroy my marriage.”

  “You’ve got no one to blame but yourself,” I said.

  O’Brien said, “I’ll check the rental records at the apartments and if you moved there after Isabella Ricci began shacking up with her lover, we’re going to be coming back.”

  I added, “You will most definitely need a lawyer then.”

  19

  A bouquet of twenty-four red roses was sitting on the front porch of my house when I got home after work. It was Friday night and, although Will and I had not spoken since our last awkward conversation, I was expecting him for dinner. We took turns fixing dinner on our Friday “date nights.” I always prepared something in my kitchen, because I love to cook. On Will’s nights, he either made a reservation at a local restaurant or arrived armed with Chinese carry-out. I picked up the roses and smiled when I reached the kitchen and saw the message light blinking on my answering machine.

  “Sorry, I’m running late tonight,” Will’s familiar voice announced. “I’ve got another big story on page one tomorrow, but I’ll get to your place as quickly as I can. I’ll bring Chinese because it’s my turn. Can’t wait to see you!”

  Will hadn’t said anything in his message about our argument. It must have been bothering me more than it did him. It didn’t seem as important to me now as it had been, in part because I now knew Will’s exclusive story hadn’t been responsible for Roman and Maggie Mancini being murdered. Just the same, we still needed to discuss how we were going to keep our professional and private lives separate.

  It was our work that had brought us together in the first place. Will had contacted me a few days after I was hired as a prosecutor. He’d wanted to write a story about me since I was the first and only woman prosecutor in Westchester County. Will had accepted my initial “No thank you” answer but remained interested. When my office got a federal grant to open our Domestic Violence Unit in 1978, I agreed to let him write about me.

  It wasn’t love at first sight, although I’d found him attractive enough. It was more
of a slow, gradual affection. I admired his desire to make a positive difference in our society. He’d been a teenager when President John F. Kennedy had issued his famous call: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” And Will tried to answer that challenge.

  During our interview, Will asked me why I felt so strongly about domestic violence and I’d told him about an incident in my own family. As a young girl, I’d been extremely close with a cousin who was a few years older, and I was thrilled when she and her boyfriend got married. In my innocent fourteen-year-old eyes, it was a fairy tale come true. But years later, they’d fallen on hard times and he’d started drinking. When my mother and I saw the bruises and tried to intervene, my cousin got angry and stopped talking to us. That experience had shown me how smart women were often unwilling or unable to extricate themselves from violent relationships.

  As soon as I told Will about my cousin, I’d wanted to take back my words. I knew my mother would be horrified if she read about our family’s problems in the newspaper. I’d asked Will to keep it out of his story, even though I’d cited it as an example of why I cared about battered women. The night before his article was scheduled to appear, I assumed the worst and prepared a speech in my head to deliver the next morning to Mom.

  But Will didn’t write a word about my cousin. The only line that Will put in his story that embarrassed me was a flattering description. He called me a snappy dresser with a great pair of legs and “bee-stung lips.” The secretaries in the office teased me endlessly about it. Within a few months, Will and I began dating.

  Will arrived late, carrying a paper bag stuffed with take-out containers, as promised. “I got beef and broccoli and General Tso’s chicken,” he declared, giving me a peck on my cheek after I answered the door.

  He was clearly in a good mood. “I’ve got another exclusive tomorrow,” Will announced. “We’re running ten thousand extra copies of the morning edition and my boss says it should sell out. This is gnarly.”

  “That’s great! What’s this one about?” I asked.

  Will smiled broadly and said, “Sorry, counselor, but I’m sworn to secrecy. I got a tip from a source and I promised that I wouldn’t tell a soul until after it’s published. It was part of our deal.”

  “Is it about the murders?” I asked suspiciously.

  Will held a finger up to his lips and said, “Secrecy means secrecy. My lips are sealed, but you’ll definitely want to read it, I guarantee you that.”

  Although curious, I decided to let him keep his secret and instead said, “I’ve got some great news, too. Your exclusive story about Roman Mancini didn’t get him and his wife murdered.”

  Will stopped arranging the carry-out on my kitchen table. “What?” he said.

  “The coroner has determined the Mancinis were murdered between the hours of midnight and five a.m., which was before your front-page story hit the streets at six o’clock. That means the killer didn’t learn from reading your story that Roman Mancini was our key witness.”

  Will looked more disappointed than relieved.

  “I thought,” I explained, “that you’d be happy to know you didn’t have their blood on your hands.”

  “I never thought I did,” he replied, sounding irked. “Dani, I think you just don’t get it. Sure, I’m sorry that the Mancinis were murdered. But I don’t care if the murderer read my story or if he didn’t. My job is to get a great story and that’s what I did. It was your job to protect Roman if he said something stupid. I don’t understand why you keep trying to make me feel guilty about what I do for a living.”

  “Will,” I replied sternly, “like it or not, you are responsible for what you write in the newspaper and what gets published. Even the U.S. Supreme Court agrees that speech can and should be limited. The fact that you put our key witness on the front page—even after I asked you not to do it—and quoted him talking about what he’d seen on the day of the murder should give you pause.”

  “I reported the facts and I take no responsibility for what someone else decides to do because of those facts. Don’t lecture me about ethics. The New York Times didn’t worry about how President Nixon would react when the Pentagon Papers showed that the president had lied to the American public about the Vietnam War. Woodward and Bernstein didn’t call up the White House to ask for permission to write about Watergate. I don’t decide what the public should and shouldn’t be told.”

  “That sounds noble, but it’s bullshit!” I yelled. “You decide if something is a news story. You decide how important it is by putting it on the front page. You decide if the public needs to know. That makes you responsible for what you print and tell people.”

  Will crumbled the Chinese carry-out bag in his hands. His face was flushed and then, suddenly, he seemed to relax. “Let’s not fight,” he said. “Let’s have a nice evening.”

  But I wasn’t ready to surrender.

  Lowering my voice, I said, “I want a nice evening, too, but we can’t just ignore this tension. Let’s put aside your defense of the First Amendment and talk about how you tried to trick me into confirming that Isabella Ricci was our unidentified murder victim. You’re not supposed to be manipulating me. You’re supposed to be someone I can trust.”

  “C’mon, Dani. You’re making too big of a deal about this.” He walked over to where I was standing and put his arms around my waist. “You can trust me, okay? I’ll admit, what I did the other morning was stupid. I shouldn’t have done it. I apologize. No one is perfect. And I won’t do it again. My editors were on my ass and I gave in. But I didn’t commit a felony.”

  “Will, you have to realize that every time you write something about the courthouse, Whitaker and Steinberg automatically assume it came from me. Until the other day when you tried to trick me, I didn’t give a damn about their suspicions because I knew you kept our conversations private. I could assure them that I wasn’t your source.”

  “You still can,” he said. “I always protect my confidential sources.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  He smiled mischievously and said, “Dani, relax. I’ve got plenty of sources in the courthouse besides you. Just wait until tomorrow and you’ll see that.”

  “I’m not one of your sources!” I exclaimed. “Don’t you get that? We’re sleeping together.”

  “So? What makes you think I don’t sleep with my sources?” he asked, but when he saw my face, his smirk vanished.

  “Stop joking around,” I said. “Clearly, we need to reestablish some ground rules between us.”

  “You sound like a lawyer now. You want to type something up and have me sign it in blood.” He released his grip around my waist. “And what if I refuse to go along with your demands?”

  I winced. “Will, I want to work this out. It’s what professional couples do when they have jobs that conflict.”

  “It’s not our jobs that are conflicting, it’s us,” he said, folding his arms across his chest in what was clearly a defensive stance. “Go ahead. Tell me your demands.”

  “First of all, we’ve got to be completely honest with each other. No more tricks. No manipulations. You don’t try to worm information out of me. We keep our professional lives out of our relationship.”

  “I agree on one condition,” he said haughtily. “If I don’t tell you about a story, like the one that is coming out tomorrow, then you can’t get angry at me for keeping it secret.”

  That was the second time he’d reference tomorrow’s story but I wasn’t going to bite and ask him about it. Instead, I said, “Okay, what you write is your business and you don’t have to tell me about it in advance.”

  “Great,” he said. “You just told me what rules I need to follow in our arrangement. What rules apply to you?”

  “You tell me,” I said. “What do you want from me?”

  “I don’t want you to blame me if I quote someone like Roman Mancini and my story ends up putting him in danger or impacts one of your
cases. I don’t want you trying to censor me like you did the other night. I don’t want you punishing me if I write something that you happen to dislike.”

  “Punishing you?”

  “Yes, getting angry at me for doing my job.”

  “Doing your job is okay with me,” I said.

  Both of us had agreed, but the wounds were still fresh. There was only one way to de-escalate the situation. Reaching out, I returned his arms to my waist, leaned up on my toes, and kissed him. “I just don’t want our jobs to cause us problems in the future,” I said.

  “They won’t,” he said, holding me tightly, “because if I decide to make an honest woman out of you someday, you’ll stop chasing bad guys and start chasing after kids.”

  This was news to me—and it was both presumptuous and disparaging. “First, I don’t need you to make me an honest woman.”

  “It’s just a joke.”

  “An offensive one. Second, I definitely want children but I’m not about to give up my career. I worked too hard in law school to become a prosecutor. Besides, I love my job.”

  He kissed me.

  “And you’re great at it. But my parents divorced when I was young and I never really knew my father. I don’t want my kids to grow up in a home where everyone fights and the parents aren’t around.”

  “I’m not sure why the fact that your father abandoned your family translates into me having to give up my career,” I said. The visual in my head was awful. Me with my Janis Joplin frizzed-out hair with a kid on one arm screaming, a pot boiling over, and Wilbur grunting with longing for the old days when it was just the two of us.

  Eager to switch subjects, Will asked, “How hungry are you?”

  I was tired of fighting. “Not that hungry.”

  “Good,” he said. “This has been a very long week for both of us. We need to reconnect.”