The Girl Next Door

by Lisa Aurello

  “All right, look, Ms. Harmon will be here momentarily. You can express your misgivings to her, but I guarantee that she won’t appreciate it—to put it mildly. Personally, I think you’re just confused by the defendant’s changed looks—it’s not that she’s a different woman. You’d be surprised at how altered a person can look after losing weight. Add to that some makeup and nice clothes? Voila, a completely new person.”

  His eyes more than skeptical, Pernod swung his head back and forth. “Yeah, but, this is not that,” he said, punctuating his opinion by jabbing the photo with his index finger. “That lady is not the same person I met up with who handed over the envelope and I’m certain of it. It’s not the haircut or the weight—it’s that she’s not the same person and I’m pretty damn sure of it.”

  Stupid lowlife piece of shit. Jackson wanted to choke him. The bastard could sink their whole case at the eleventh hour, and he didn’t want to have to hear Rhett when she got wind of this new development.

  She was going to fucking detonate. DEFCON-1 here we come.

  Chapter 39

  Benny “Wink” Rodell sat in the waiting room at the DA’s office, twisting his baseball cap, his knee bouncing up and down rapidly. Proximity to any kind of law enforcement made him edgy but this was the last part of the job he’d been hired for and he wouldn’t see the big payday until he testified in court. He thought he could just give his witness testimony to the local cops in Riverdale but they’d directed him to the district attorney prosecuting the case.

  Months before he’d been hired for a job, a cream puff of one, and been paid half the money upfront. All he had to do was follow some bitch as she made a cash drop to a sandman, and then afterward until she got back to the city. The only critical requirement was that he couldn’t be made by the woman. If she saw him tailing her, he had to abort the job and he wouldn’t get the rest of the cash.

  Easiest money he ever made. Ten bills for two hours’ work, plus the dude rented him a car for the day. Benny was just sorry to have to bring it back to the rental agency the next day; he’d had some fun with that machine.

  Watching the payoff was nothing much, but it was what happened afterward that took him by surprise. The bitch ran someone off the road and then calmly sped away like it was nothing. Apparently, they were now prosecuting the same lady who got run off the highway, and he was here to tell them about the bitch who made the payment and then caused the accident. They weren’t gonna like it ‘cause it trashed their whole case. But it was the truth. Let’s see what they did with it.

  Benny didn’t have much faith in the criminal justice system. He’d been on the wrong side of it a few times and knew lots of peeps who’d gotten royally screwed by corrupt cops and overzealous prosecutors. Sometimes the truth is the last thing prosecutors wanted to hear—they’re after convictions, wins that build up their careers, and they generally don’t give two shits about sending innocent people upstate, not if those people can give them a leg up in their careers—a leg up by stepping on their damn backs. And cops, shit, he didn’t want to get started. Those fuckers need to fill the prisons—it keeps the machine fed that makes everyone money. The holy prison industrial complex that makes a for-profit industry out of taking people’s freedom away and locking them up behind bars. Forcing them to do slave labor for pennies and the slop they’re given to eat.

  Yeah, the truth don’t much matter in the criminal justice system. Benny had to admit he was curious how his testimony would fly with the DA and affect the case. Probably they would just ignore it and keep on going with it as if he’d never came to them. If they did, he’d have another job coming his way: taking his story to the good ol’ media.

  Maybe he’d get his fifteen minutes after all? Wouldn’t that just make his day?

  ******

  When Pernod told ADA Rhett Harmon that Jane Jensen was definitely not the woman who gave him the money—though she had similar height and coloring and was wearing an obvious wig and big sunglasses—the tension in the conference room was about a foot thick before the lawyers began a concerted interrogation of the assassin.

  Three of them went at him from all angles for over an hour, grilling him, trying to get him to second-guess himself, sowing doubt wherever possible, giving him alternative narratives to explain any discrepancy. As the clock ticked past lunchtime, Rhett, Jackson, and Ezra Johansen, an investigator who was attached to the DA’s office, threw questions and comments at him, made suggestions, offered various scenarios, showed him different photos of the defendant, and did anything and everything they could think of, and still he didn’t budge from his belief that they had the wrong woman.

  “Can you fucking believe this?” Rhett screamed once she and Jackson were back in her office. “I’m due to give my opening statement to the jury in two days and he tells us this now, the little rat turd?”

  Jackson very quietly cleared his throat, hating to deliver her the next blow but he had no choice. The guy was out there and Jackson couldn’t ignore him, much as he’d like to do so. “Rhett, there’s someone in reception waiting to speak with us.”

  Blazing eyes flicked to his, fiery enough to incinerate his courage. The black fury in her gaze forced him to take a step back. “And?” she spat.

  “He says he has information on the case. Kelly quizzed him and it doesn’t sound good. He’s implicating someone else in the hit and saying she was the one who ran Jane Jensen off the road.”

  Rage transformed into disbelief. Rhett just stared at him, her mouth gaping open. “You have got to be kidding me. Tell me you’re kidding me, Jax. Please.”

  “I’m not kidding, Rhett. I’m sorry.”

  She dragged her hands through her hair, ruining her careful styling and giving zero fucks about it at this point. “Could this really be happening?”

  ******

  Oh my God. Rhett’s head swiveled back and forth, listening to the latest story to cut gaping holes into her case. Benny Rodell was a heroin addict with an eye twitch who just happened to be witness to the cash transaction between James Pernod and the woman who hired him. He told them a fantastical story of how he followed the woman, thinking she would be a good blackmail target.

  Why would you think you could blackmail her? Couldn’t she just be paying a debt to someone who loaned her money? is what they all asked him.

  No, he’d said. He’d been around enough to know a shady deal when he saw one.

  Why didn’t you follow the man instead? they asked. You might have prevented a murder.

  His answer was that he was afraid of the man, that he could tell he was some kind of assassin and the woman was a safer bet. Plus, the murder didn’t happen for weeks after, he pointed out helpfully, so following him wouldn’t have saved the lady. He said he followed the cash lady right onto the parkway and saw the whole accident unfold.

  How did a heroin addict have a car? they asked him next.

  “Oh, come on,” he’d replied. “I’m not that much of a loser.” But then he had to admit it was a rental.

  “Who rented the car and why?” they wanted to know.

  “A friend rented it and I borrowed it to make a buy.”

  “What friend?”

  He gave them the name just as his employer told him to do. Benny highly doubted it was his real name.

  They brought him back a few hours later to show him photos of ten women, two of whom were Jane Jensen and Kendra Ortalano. He picked out Kendra with absolutely no hesitation. Zero doubt.

  When asked why he didn’t come forward sooner, he’d said he wanted to clean up his act first. Bringing this to their attention was part of his 12-step program of righting old wrongs. Again, it was a line fed him by the boss man but in a weird twist of fate, Benny’d joined a program and he was really liking it. Having a captive audience to bitch to every week was habit-forming.

  In effect, Wink gave the investigators the truth, at least as he’d rehearsed it with the chap who paid him off. Because Wink had only been paid half the m
oney upfront, the other half would be his after he completed the job by bearing witness in court. A lot more was coming and Wink couldn’t wait to get his hands on the hay.

  He had plans, motherfucker.

  ******

  Kathy Ellison Carter was the motorist who called in the accident. She’d claimed that she thought it was a woman who was driving the black SUV. She had pulled over just ahead of the accident site and had a quick glimpse of the black-SUV driver through the windshield that was only slightly tinted, but she thought it was a Honda CRV. She said it looked like a woman with a baseball cap pulled down low. Granted, she got only a fleeting glance as the woman drove by very fast. It was all on the police accident report that was never further investigated since it was considered nothing more than a collision caused by reckless driving.

  It was very easy to verify Ms. Carter’s story once they had Kendra’s name. All it took was a search on Kendra Ortalano’s credit cards. They quickly determined that Kendra Ortalano had rented a black Honda CRV the day before the accident. GPS showed the car was in the vicinity of the accident at the same time and day. A letter ostensibly written to Mason by Jane was found in Jane Jensen’s dresser drawer during the search conducted immediately after her arrest. It was covered in Kendra Ortalano’s fingerprints and none of Jane Jensen’s, obviously something she planted to incriminate the latter. The evidence kept mounting against Ms. Ortalano and exonerating Jane Jensen. In the space of a day and a half, their rock-solid evidence disintegrated into dust, and weeks of hard work went down the toilet.

  Their case was now as dead as Cate Caldwell.

  After having watched in utter dismay her airtight case unravel strand by strand, Rhett excused herself to go to the restroom. Once there, she checked all the stalls to make sure she was alone. She wadded up a bunch of paper towels, went into a stall and locked it, then screamed into the paper. The paper muffled the noise but it still probably could be heard outside.

  She could hardly care. Her case had gone to shit and that was all she could think about at the moment.

  “I wasn’t prepared. Motherfucker,” she muttered. “I wasn’t fucking prepared enough.”

  A week later the charges were dropped and Jane was legally unencumbered. News articles reported that new information had come to light in the form of new witnesses. Actually, two were new and one was revisited—an interview someone took when they were preparing the case against Jane Jensen. A Metro-North rider by the name of Rachel Carson, who came forward and gave a deposition about her conversation with Jane on the train, and it was considered irrelevant and buried in the mound of ever-growing paperwork associated with the case. Truly, Ms. Carson’s information didn’t prove anything but helped bolster Jane Jensen’s innocence when the other witness testimony came to light. Jensen had shown Rachel Carson the text summoning her to Poughkeepsie for a job interview. If she were planning a murder, she’d probably keep her trip to meet the hired killer under wraps.

  To say Rhett Harmon was peeved was the understatement of the year. Being a realist, however, Harmon had done her grieving for her dead case and moved on. And just when the night was the darkest… well, she was gifted with a new shining beacon in the form of a culpable suspect, gifted to her with the same information that exonerated Jane Jensen. ADA Harmon was all about making lemonade.

  ******

  Less than two weeks after all charges against Jane Jensen were dropped, Aaron Rinder was with Kendra in her apartment and still asleep, having spent the night. The evening before they’d gotten home late from a cabaret show and he hadn’t felt like making the drive to Greenwich. Aaron’s wife hardly noticed when her husband didn’t come home these days. For one thing, their house was so big that even when both were home, they didn’t necessarily have to be aware of the other’s presence. Besides, Lydia really didn’t care where Aaron stuck his dick, as long as it wasn’t in her. She loathed him and only stayed married to him to spite him.

  The Rinders also had a condo on the Upper West Side, a two-bedroom, but his college-age son was living in it right now and Aaron didn’t dare just show up unannounced, never knowing what or who he might find there.

  The banging on the apartment door was loud.

  Aaron bolted up in bed and poked at the dead-to-the-world woman beside him. “What the fuck is that all about, Kendra?” He glanced at the clock: it was barely eight a.m. “Deal with it.”

  She unstuck her eyelids, glued together by remnants of mascara, and looked at him through bleary eyes. “What?”

  The word had just left her lips when the banging started again. She threw her arm across her face, blocking out the sunlight. “Someone’s at the door.”

  “Very astute observation, dear. Get up and go see who it is, but don’t open the door until you’re sure it’s safe.”

  Kendra rose, reaching for her kimono, and shouted toward the door, “One minute please,” as she quickly wrapped the cobalt and pink satin robe around her naked body.

  She peered through the peephole and saw a police officer staring back at her. Leaving the chain lock engaged, she opened the door slightly. When she looked out now, she saw three cops—two men and a woman. “Yes? May I help you?”

  The big one in front spoke. “Are you Kendra Ortalano?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I’m Officer Robards, NYPD. Ms. Ortalano, I need you to open the door please.”

  “Can you tell me why first?”

  “Ma’am, I need you to open the door now.”

  Aaron had come up behind her now, wearing trousers with his shirt flapping open. “What’s the problem here, Officer?”

  “Who are you, sir?”

  “I’m her friend.”

  “Sir, you should instruct your friend to obey my directive and open the door before we have to batter it down.”

  “That really won’t be necessary,” Aaron replied, his cheeks flushing. “May I see your badges please?”

  All three pulled out their badges and held them aloft for Aaron’s inspection. He carefully read each one, comparing the information with the faces in front of him. “What precinct are you with?”

  “Sir, two of us are attached to the 24th precinct. Officer Romano is with the Riverdale station.”

  Aaron looked at Kendra. “Go put on some clothes. I’m letting them in.”

  Kendra retreated to the bedroom as Aaron shut the door to unchain it, quickly opening it again to give them entrance.

  “Come in, Officers. I’d offer you coffee but this isn’t my home, and it’s probably not stocked with any provisions if I know Kendra. She’s dressing and will be back in a moment.”

  The cops just nodded in unison and stood in the hallway awkwardly.

  “Would you like to sit down? There are chairs in the kitchen.”

  “No, thank you. What’s your name again?”

  “I never provided it to you before. But it’s James Sinclair.” Rinder just hoped they didn’t ask him for identification.

  “Do you live in the vicinity, Mr. Sinclair?”

  “No. I’m just visiting the young lady and we had a late—”

  Kendra’s entrance into the room interrupted his explanation. Still barefoot, she now wore worn-out jeans and a relatively transparent T-shirt. “OK, so what’s this all about?”

  The largest one moved closer to her and again spoke up. “Kendra Ortalano, you are under arrest for the premeditated murder of Catherine Caldwell. You have the right to remain silent—”

  “What? Are you serious?” Aaron interrupted. His head whipped toward Kendra whose face had turned ghostly pale. “Kendra, don’t say a word. I’ll call my attorney and have someone meet you wherever they take you.”

  “…anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney…”

  Aaron pulled the female officer to the side. “Where are you going to be taking her?”

  “Riverdale station, sir. Could you get her a pair of shoes, please?”

  A
aron Rinder nodded, his ashen face pinched. After grabbing a pair of sneakers he found in the bedroom closet and having to put them on her himself because of her state, he felt ill. He watched as they took a nearly catatonic Kendra away, considering whether using his own personal attorney to help her was wise. Maybe Kenneth could recommend someone? After all, it was a criminal case and Ken was more of a corporate litigator.

  His next thought was less altruistic as he wondered how he could keep his name out of the press. If he abandoned her now, she could drag his name through the mud as this case was getting a lot of media attention. It was probably in everyone’s best interests to try to help her. Damn Kendra for putting him in this unenviable position. He really could strangle her.

  ******

  By day’s end Kendra Ortalano had been charged with one count of first-degree murder, one count of second-degree murder—since the death of the male driver in the car accident she caused constituted felony murder—and a charge of attempted murder in the case of Jane Jensen.

  She was processed at Rikers and met her attorney in the same room where Jane had discussed her own case with her legal representation. Aaron Rinder paid her bail and cautioned her not to do something stupid. As far as he was concerned, the attorney and fees he paid constituted the last of his dealings with Kendra. He paid her rent for the next three months, gave her a check for living expenses, and wished her good luck.

  Kendra didn’t blame him. She knew he had a reputation to maintain, and he at least hadn’t abandoned her. The person guilty of that treachery was Mason Caldwell. He wasn’t answering his phone when she tried to call him and he hadn’t gotten in touch with her. Kendra hadn’t even realized the charges against Jane Jensen were dropped until she read about it in the news.