[Boston Law 01.0] Unlawful Deeds

by David S. Brody

  Charese hesitated for a moment. The man was obviously expecting her to follow, but the Grand Am was parked in a darkened area in the shadows behind the building. The Castle, a former armory now used as a convention hall, was empty tonight, and there was no other activity in that area—it was a block comprised of smaller brick office buildings and now-empty parking lots.

  She approached the car cautiously. It was a newer model, clean and in good shape. It gave her a bit of comfort, but, even in her drugged euphoria, she knew she was taking a huge risk every time she climbed into a stranger’s car. The passenger side window was rolled down about three inches, but the car was dark. In the darkness she could see only the outline of the driver—baseball cap, beard and mustache, dark glasses. She spoke through the crack. “Hey, Baby, thought you could hide from me, driving down this alley?”

  He spoke gruffly, in a gravely voice that sounded somehow unnatural to Charese. Maybe he was just nervous. “How much?”

  “That depends. You a cop?” She wanted to get a better feel for the guy before agreeing to anything. One thing for sure, he didn’t want her to get a good look at him.

  “No. How ’bout you?”

  Smart question, she thought. She laughed lightly. “No, honey. Just a working girl.”

  “How much?” he asked again.

  “Seventy-five for a blow job. Best you ever had, too.” He reached out and, with a gloved hand, handed her four twenties through the window. She stuck them in her bag. “Sorry, honey, I don’t make change.” She laughed alone at the joke.

  “Get in, but leave the door open.”

  She opened the door, but the car remained dark—he must have turned off the dome light. She climbed in, hoping her eyes would adjust to the darkness. He had pushed his seat all the way back and, before she could even get a look at his face, he took her by the back of the neck and pushed her mouth down to his open fly. She noticed the smell of expensive cologne, which calmed her a bit—he was probably just a nervous, rich guy cheating on his frigid wife.

  It surprised her to see a flaccid penis barely protruding through the opening in his khakis. Normally, by the time she got in the car, the john was already erect and quivering with excitement. Damn, she thought, I hope this doesn’t take too long. “Hello, big boy. Come out and play.” She bent over further, rested her right hand on the floor of the car and used her left hand to extract his penis. She opened her mouth and flicked the pink tip two or three times with her tongue. It barely moved, and the john made no sound. Something was wrong here—nobody had ever reacted, or not reacted, that way….

  It was her last thought. Suddenly her entire existence was reduced to a desperate struggle for air. Her mouth, her nose, even her eyes and fingers opened wide in an attempt to grab hold of a bit of life and feed it to her lungs. Gasping, clawing, wreathing. Then finally one final gurgle. Her last sensation was the taste of her own hot blood pulsating into her mouth as she bit through her tongue.

  * * *

  The john held the garrote tightly around her neck, slowly continuing to compress her windpipe with the steel-corded strangulation device. He was careful not to break her skin—the garrote was designed to kill bloodlessly by crushing the windpipe. Maintaining constant pressure on both ends of the cord with his left hand, he removed his right hand from the garrote and turned Charese’s face upwards toward him and closed her mouth. He did not want her saliva—or, he saw with disgust, a part of her bleeding tongue—to spill out of her mouth and onto the car’s upholstery.

  He looked away from her anguished face, counted to thirty, and felt for a pulse. There was none. He took a deep breath, and released tension on the garrote, still using it like a puppeteer string to hold her head up above his lap. He swung her head back over her prone body, where it dangled awkwardly over her left shoulder like a fish on a hook, and reached his left hand under her buttocks and tried to slide her over onto the passenger side. She was caught on something. He looked down—the fingernails of her right hand were imbedded in the car’s upholstery in what must have been a final claw against death.

  He pried her fingers open, and now was able to slide her body over to the passenger side of the car. He looked around—there was nobody else in the alley. He pushed her head and upper body out the door, again careful that no bodily fluids dripped into the car. He walked around the car, tossed her crumpled torso out onto the pavement, and closed the door.

  Crouching down, he removed the garrote from Charese’s neck and stuck it into a plastic bag he took from his pocket. He walked back to the driver’s side of the car, pulled the seat forward and turned the ignition key. The car started on the first try, and he shifted into reverse. He heard a slight thump as the right front tire rolled over Charese’s body, felt the car settle a bit as her bone structure collapsed under the car’s weight. He waited for the traffic to clear, then backed onto Arlington Street and drove away.

  CHAPTER 44

  [June 18, 1990]

  Shelby was still having trouble getting used to getting to work by nine o’clock, but it was her third week on the job and her internal clock, for years set to a student’s semi-nocturnal schedule, was beginning to adapt to the business world’s demands. She was actually beginning to like it—imagine leaving work at five or six o’clock and having the whole evening to do what you want! No homework, no evening classes, no study groups. Just free time to go to lectures, shows, sporting events, recitals. Or play tennis. Or just read. Or even watch television.

  This free time was only temporary, unfortunately. In a couple of weeks, she would have to begin cramming for the bar exam, scheduled for the end of July. But her free evenings now gave her a taste of what life would be like after the bar exam, and it excited her.

  For the umpteenth time, she congratulated herself on her decision to work for the District Attorney’s office. Almost all of her classmates had elected to go into private practice. But Shelby had no desire to work eighty hours a week for some corporate law firm. Sure, she took less money to work in the public sector, but how much money did she need, anyway? She could afford a nice apartment outside Harvard Square, and she didn’t really need a car. And she could always get a job in the private sector if she wanted—her experience at the DA’s office would provide her with valuable courtroom skills that many of her classmates would never acquire. But most of all, working at the DA’s office would tell her whether she really wanted to be a lawyer. It was where the action was, and she hoped that she would find that, for the most part, the system was staffed by decent, honest people working to ensure that the concept of justice was more than just something to be recited in the Pledge of Allegiance and then forgotten.

  If she left her apartment by 8:15, she would have time to take the subway downtown, grab a cup of coffee, and get to her desk by nine. And, if the subway was running efficiently, she would have time to get off one stop early and enjoy a half-mile walk to her office.

  So she dressed quickly, threw an apple into her briefcase and scooped up the newspaper—she generally glanced at the front page before she left her apartment, but a thorough reading usually had to wait until the subway ride or lunch time. She cut across the Cambridge Common, stopped for a moment to pet a friendly dog, then entered the subway station. It always depressed her a bit to enter the gloom of the underground at the beginning of a bright summer day, but Boston drivers were particular about not sharing the roads with bicyclists, and it would take over an hour to walk to work. She wasn’t prepared to get up that early, at least not yet.

  The subway was too crowded even to open her newspaper, so Shelby contented herself with people watching. One of the reasons she preferred to live in Cambridge instead of the Back Bay or another Boston neighborhood was that Cambridge maintained at least some semblance of racial diversity. Boston, despite its history of abolitionism and liberalism, was a remarkably segregated city. She had spent a couple of summers in college working in New York City, and by comparison even the Cambridge crowd on the subway seemed
disproportionately Caucasian.

  The train ran slowly, so Shelby did not disembark at the Charles Street station and instead rode all the way to Park Street. She skipped the escalator—forty-eight stairs later she emerged back into the daylight and strolled toward the Government Center area and the Suffolk County DA’s office.

  The Consumer Fraud Division, where Shelby had been assigned, usually held weekly Monday morning staff meetings. Cases were assigned, workloads evaluated, experiences shared. Especially for the young attorneys, many of whom had never tried a case, it was an opportunity to pick the brains of the senior lawyers. This week, however, the meeting had been moved to Tuesday because one of the Division’s attorneys had gotten married over the weekend in Maryland and many of the other attorneys were still making their way back to Boston from the wedding.

  This was fine with Shelby. She and the other young ADAs—Assistant District Attorneys—were encouraged to sit in on other Divisions’ staff meetings during their first few months on the job; it was a way to give them a flavor of how exciting the ADA job could be once they moved beyond the junior level. Boredom had become a major problem for the DA’s office—young, talented attorneys fresh out of law school expected to be prosecuting murder and drug cases within a few months. When they discovered they would have to first cut their teeth on misdemeanor cases, many of them turned an envious eye back toward the private sector. If they were going to be doing drudge work, why not get paid the big bucks for it? The DA hoped to address this problem by exposing his young attorneys to the glamorous side of their career.

  Shelby decided to attend the Homicide Division’s staff meeting. The seriousness of the crime meant that only the most senior and talented ADAs were assigned to this division, and many of the ADAs sitting in the staff meeting that morning would someday become high-priced defense attorneys. It had been a quiet weekend—the only new case was a ‘John/Jane Doe,’ an unidentified male dressed as a female, found strangled in an alley in the South End. Believed to be a prostitute. Time of death: Saturday night, just before midnight. Shelby’s mouth suddenly felt dry.

  The staff meeting adjourned, and Shelby rushed back to her office. Fighting a rising sense of panic, she fumbled with her purse, found her address book, and dialed Charese’s phone number. Three rings, four rings, answering machine. “Charese, pick up. This is Shelby Baskin. Please pick up, it’s important.” Nothing. Charese was never out this early. Could she be in the shower? Shelby forced herself to wait ten minutes, the second hand creeping its way around the clock face, then dialed again. Again the machine. “Charese, are you there? Are you there? Please answer....”

  Shelby put her head down on her desk, fought to keep the tears from pooling in her eyes.

  * * *

  Detective Dominic Mazzutti was kind enough not to ask Shelby to come to the morgue to identify the body; the doorman at the condo complex was able to do that. The detective, however, had come up to Shelby’s office to question her, and she readily agreed to tell him what she knew about Charese’s life. Even though she wasn’t assigned to Homicide, she was hoping her relationship with Charese would convince her superiors to allow her to assist in the case, and a levelheaded performance in front of the lead detective might help her cause.

  The autopsy had revealed coffee in Charese’s stomach, and the detective had been lucky and found a convenience store clerk who remembered selling coffee and a muffin to her at around eleven-thirty Saturday night. The clerk was apparently the last person, other than the murderer, to see Charese alive. Other than the coffee, and the heroin in her bloodstream, the forensic people had discovered automobile carpet fibers under her fingernails and a tire tread on her left arm. They were running this evidence through their computer to try to make a specific automobile identification.

  The detective had been inclined to treat the case as a random homicide—some wacko angry at the world, or some john pissed off when he found out Charese was really a guy. Shelby sensed that he had begun to change his mind as she answered his questions. He was a wiry guy, a few years older than her, quiet with big brown probing eyes. “So, it sounds like Charese had at least a few enemies. Do you think any of them could have killed her?”

  Shelby took a deep breath and tried to gain control of her emotions. She wanted to think clearly, logically. She wanted to be assigned to this case, and she knew the Division Chief would ask the detective about her state of mind. It would be unusual for such a young ADA to be assigned to a homicide, but Shelby hoped the Division Chief would realize that her relationship with Charese and her knowledge of Charese’s enemies could be beneficial to the investigation. She tried to focus her thoughts, and struggled to fight back a sense of guilt—had she pushed too hard? Had she backed Reese or Roberge or Pierre so far into a corner that they reacted by murdering Charese?

  Shelby shook the thoughts away, tried to focus on the detective’s question. Could one of them have killed her? It was one thing to describe for the detective the reasons why Pierre, Roberge and Reese might want to see Charese dead. It was another thing entirely to reach the intellectual conclusion that one of them could have committed the murder. “I really don’t know if one of them could have killed her. I know Reese fairly well, but I don’t know the other two beyond a couple of phone conversations. The fact that the video is missing makes it hard to eliminate Reese or Roberge right now. Did you say you searched her apartment for the video?”

  “My guys are over there right now. So far, no video. Would she have put it in a safe deposit box or something?”

  “No, that wasn’t her style. Besides, I’m pretty sure she kept it with her all the time. She was worried Roberge might be able to get the doorman to let him back into the apartment.”

  “Let’s get back to the three potential suspects.”

  “All right. But all this is just between you and me, right?”

  The detective nodded. “I’m just trying to get the lay of the land here. I’m not arresting anyone yet.”

  Shelby took another deep breath, fought for some control. “Reese Jeffries is a world-class sleaze ball, and he definitely was worried Charese was going to report him to the Board of Bar Overseers, and maybe even blackmail him. And he was desperate to get the video, because he thought he could bring Krygier down with it. But I’m not sure he has the balls to murder someone. Maybe he does, but he just strikes me as a bit of a wimp, you know?

  “As for Roberge Krygier, from what I know he was pretty cold-hearted. Spoiled rich boy. And he needed to shut Charese up to keep Daddy from cutting him off. So it could definitely be him.

  “And Pierre Prefontaine, he actually seemed like a decent guy when I talked to him, and Charese said he was pleasant enough when they met. But he also seemed a bit desperate, and he was pretty exasperated by the fact he couldn’t get her out of the condo. But he would have had no interest in the video, as far as I know. Or even knowledge of it.”

  “So if she had been killed and the murderer didn’t take the video, that would point more toward Pierre Prefontaine in your mind, right?”

  “Yeah, but the flip side of that isn’t necessarily true: The fact that the video is missing doesn’t necessarily eliminate Prefontaine as a suspect.”

  “I agree. And, of course, it still could be a random thing. But let’s get back to the three musketeers here. Did any of them know her well enough to know her schedule? I mean, if it wasn’t random, it stands to reason that the murderer was waiting for her.”

  “Let’s see. I know that Saturday night was her regular night to work, as long as the weather was good, and that she liked to work the Theater District. I would guess that anybody who followed her for even a few weeks could have guessed that she’d be there after the shows let out. But I have a question for you. Why would she get in the car if she recognized the driver?”

  “Well, we don’t even know she actually got in the car.”

  “But you said there was automobile carpet fibers under her fingernails.”

 
“Right.” He smiled at her kindly, as if apologizing for having to test her. “So you tell me. Would she get in the car with any of them?”

  Shelby thought for a moment. “Maybe Reese. She would never trust him, but he seems like such a wimp that my guess is that she wouldn’t be very afraid of him. Maybe Roberge also. I mean, they were lovers for sixteen years; she might get in the car with him. As far as I know, he never beat her up or anything. As for Pierre Prefontaine, I don’t know. I don’t even know if she would recognize him. I think she only met him once, a couple of months ago.”

  “And, of course, the other two could have been wearing a disguise so she wouldn’t have recognized them, either. The alley where they found the body was fairly dark.”

  “How about other evidence? You said they found coffee in her stomach and carpet fibers under her nails.”

  “Eighty bucks in her shoe—four twenties, probably from the john. But no prints.”

  “Anything else, like semen?”

  He averted his eyes. “No, miss, they didn’t find anything else in her stomach.”

  “How about other bruises, like from a struggle?”

  “No, nothing. My guess is that she was strangled while, um, performing a sexual act, and never had time to really put up a fight.” He was clearly uncomfortable with the sex details. Normally she might have found it charming in an old-fashioned kind of way, but now she just wanted to figure out what happened to Charese.