What’s-her-name arrived exactly at nine dressed in black jeans, black silk shirt, black leather jacket, black silk gloves, and stilettos.
You don’t want me looking like a pimp! Benny said to himself. You ain’t exactly incognito in that outfit. And how the hell you gonna run from anybody with those fuck-me pumps on? Hell, most people would have a hard time walking in those shoes.
But he kept his thoughts to himself. He still wanted—needed—a piece of the action.
“You guys back again?” the bartender said to them after they’d ordered drinks. The Kettle was a rundown little place and not one of the more frequented establishments in the Village. Showing up twice in the same week almost made you a regular and certainly caused Rick the bartender—whose living depended on the tips he could squeeze out of the paltry clientele—to take notice. Benny’s companion did not appreciate the attention, however.
“Let’s walk,” she said after they had finished their first drink.
As they walked, she talked. “The mark is going to be on East End Avenue and Seventy-eighth Street. He’ll arrive at ten o’clock sharp in a black Mercedes. I’ll show you where he parks the car. When he gets out, we’ll be there hiding in the shadows. I’ll do the talking and hold the gun on him. He’ll have ten thousand dollars in his inside suit pocket. You get the money while I keep him covered. You hand me the cash, then we take off in different directions. I’ll meet you on the corner of Ninety-fifth and Lexington exactly one half hour later. Don’t be late.”
She stuck her finger in Benny’s face to emphasize the importance of timeliness, and as she stepped closer to him she appeared to catch her heel in a crack in the sidewalk and fell hard to the pavement.
“What the hell—are you okay?” Benny asked as he started to bend down to her.
“Does it look like I’m okay?” she yelled. “I twisted my ankle.”
I’m not the one wearing those stilts, Benny wanted to shout, but he held it in. “Let me see,” he said instead and bent down to look.
She put her arm out to stop him. “I don’t need you to examine me. I know when I’ve twisted my own ankle. I can move it, so it’s not broken.”
“Okay, okay. I’m just trying to help.”
“Then hail a cab. We gotta get moving.”
He hailed a cab while she slowly got up and hobbled over to get in. She kept rubbing at her ankle during the ride, and when they got out at Seventy-eighth and York, Benny noticed that she wasn’t putting any weight on it.
“I don’t know if I can do this tonight,” she said, grimacing as she leaned against a wall. “Maybe we’ll have to put it off until next month.”
“No, no, no!” Benny told her, unaware of how desperate he sounded. “I can do this alone! You just stay off in the shadows.”
“No way. I’m not letting you fuck this one up on me. I need that money.”
“I won’t fuck it up, I swear.”
“I’m supposed to trust you? I don’t even know you, for Christ’s sake.”
“I ain’t gonna cheat you. I need the score too. I won’t take off without you, I promise.” Benny was giving it his all, even though he had no intention of sharing one thin dime with her.
“All right, all right,” she finally relented. “I’ll let you do it. But if you fuck me, I’ll search the ends of the earth to find you, and then you don’t want to even think about what I’ll do to you.” Benny couldn’t believe such venom was coming from this beautiful creature.
She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a revolver and handed it to him. “Here, take this,” she said.
Benny took the gun and held it in his hand, pretending to look it over while he tried to feel comfortable with it. He hated guns, hated being around them at all.
“Do you even know how to fire it?” she asked.
“Sure, I do,” he blustered. “You just aim and pull the trigger.” He started to point the gun at an imaginary target.
“Be careful with that. It’s got a hair trigger and there’s no safety on it,” she told him. “Don’t even think about using it. He’ll give you the money. Ten thousand to him is like pennies to you and me. Just point the gun at him and tell him to hand the cash over.”
Benny lowered the gun. “Okay, okay. I got it. So what’s the split?” he asked.
“What split?”
“The money. I figure it should be fifty-fifty since I’m doing everything now.”
“You’d be doing nothing if it wasn’t for me, shithead. It’s a seventy-thirty split, that’s it. Take it or leave it.”
Benny was a bit surprised she hadn’t brought the subject up herself. Anyway, he had his answer. She was going to fuck him, so it was okay for him to fuck her first. He felt a lot better now.
“I’ll take it,” he replied.
She then pulled what appeared to be a makeup case out of her jacket pocket. She found a stoop nearby, hobbled up the steps with the aid of the banister, and sat down.
“C’mere,” she said. “I’ve got something to give you a little confidence.” Benny walked up the steps and saw she was laying out a few lines of coke on the mirror of her makeup case. She offered it to him and he gratefully accepted. The lines of coke disappeared up his nose in an instant.
“One more,” she said and repeated the ritual. Benny had smoked a ton of dope before he’d left for Kettle of Fish for the same reason—to work up some courage. Now he was flying so high he barely knew what planet he was on.
“I’ll be up the block waiting,” she said “We’ll get a cab. And remember what I said—don’t even think about fucking me over.”
Benny gave her his best Li’l Abner, innocently shaking his head back and forth. His own mother would have believed him.
Carl arrived promptly at ten and parked in his parking spot, the one he had paid the city a fortune for. The one that had its own sign: “No Parking Anytime. Violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” Carl knew that for the right amount of money you could get anything, including your own parking space.
As he emerged from the car, he was surprised to see a wide-eyed young man in front of him holding a gun. No need to panic. He’d been in this situation before. It was surely about money and, therefore, negotiable.
“What can I do for you, young man?” he asked, looking down at Benny, who stood five feet eight inches tall with his boots on.
Carl never got an answer. Instead, he heard a sharp crack and felt a stinging pain in his head, a pain so severe it caused him to lean forward over the open car door so far that his head crashed into the outside of the door’s window. Then he slid to the ground beside the door. While he was lying there in shock, he felt the man’s hands reach into his inside jacket pocket and pull out his cash—the money he had brought for Angie. Carl wanted to stop him but couldn’t move. Then everything went black.
2
Mary Walsh never answered the phone after ten o’clock. With thirty years of marriage to a cop, the last twenty of which he’d been a homicide detective, she was used to the late-night—sometimes middle-of-the-night—calls, and she wanted no part of them. The hairs on the back of her neck always stood up when that damn phone rang past ten and her husband Nick answered it.
“The murder has already been committed,” he’d invariably tell her. “I’m just mop-up duty.” But Mary never bought it. Every time he walked out that door, she was afraid that he might not come back. All she had to do was read the papers to be assured of that possibility.
This night was no different. When the phone rang at a few minutes to eleven, Mary wouldn’t go near it.
“Can you get that?” Nick yelled from his seat in the bathroom. Mary picked up the phone without answering it and walked it to the bathroom. She opened the door and extended her arm and the phone to her husband without looking in.
“Here,” she said. Nick was able to reach out and grab the phone while maintaining his seat on the throne.
“Walsh,” he answered, just like he was i
n the squad room. That frosted Mary. The man was never off duty, even at home—even on the toilet.
“Nick, this is Severino.” Anthony Severino was Nick’s latest partner in homicide. They’d been together for almost a year. Nick was the senior man by about ten years.
“Yeah, Tony, whaddaya got?”
“Some high-powered guy got whacked about an hour ago on Seventy-eighth and East End. The captain wants us down there right away.”
“All right, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
Nick and Mary lived in the same rent-controlled apartment on Ninety-seventh and Park where Nick had grown up with his parents and two younger brothers. It was the only way they could afford to live in the city. Mary’s dream was a house upstate, or in New Jersey or Rockaway Beach—they could never afford Long Island—but Nick wouldn’t hear of it.
“People get murdered all over the city at all hours of the day and night,” he told her. “I can’t be driving in from the suburbs like some commuter. I gotta be there right away. Besides, you’re living on Park Avenue.” It was a quip that had always made Mary laugh in the early years. The real Park Avenue ended at the imaginary line south of Ninety-sixth Street. Nowadays, after all the years of being a cop’s wife and making the necessary sacrifices, she simply ignored the remark.
Twenty minutes later Nick was standing over the body of Carl Robertson, his eyes exploring every detail of the dead man’s body—searching for the obscure clue. It was one of the things that separated him from the run-of-the-mill homicide detective. In this case, there was nothing subtle about the fact that Carl had met his demise as a result of a gunshot wound to the head.
The place was swarming with uniformed police officers, gawkers, and reporters from both print and television. Nick was the guy in charge, and he looked the part. He was a big man, a few inches over six feet, with broad shoulders and an ample waistline that he carried well, even though it seemed to be growing an inch or two each year. He was constantly telling himself that he was going to start working out “one of these days.” Tony Severino, on the other hand, worked out like a madman, but in some respects it did him no good. At the end of the day, Tony was still short and stocky.
A perimeter had been set up with tape before the two detectives arrived. The perimeter was supposed to secure the crime scene, but too often everybody—cops included—just walked through like it was Disneyland. That wasn’t going to happen on Nick Walsh’s watch.
“Get those uniforms outside the tape line,” he told Tony. “I don’t want the crime scene destroyed. Have them do crowd control or something.” Technically, uniforms and detectives were the same rank, but at a homicide scene the detectives were in control. “And get the fuckin’ press as far away from here as you can,” Nick added. He hated the press. They had a tendency to report what they wanted to report, regardless of the facts—although Nick wasn’t above using a reporter from time to time to put out a story.
Tony set about giving the uniforms assignments outside the lines and moving the press and everybody else out of the way.
When he had finished his initial investigation of the corpse and the immediate area surrounding it, Nick strode over to the assistant medical examiner on the scene, Dan Jenkins, who was standing just a few feet away directing his people and making notes.
“Whaddaya got so far, Dan?”
“It seems open-and-shut, Nick, although you and I both know it’s never open-and-shut.” Nick nodded. They both had been doing this long enough to know that nothing was as it seemed. “It looks like death was caused by a single bullet to the brain. I don’t know if you have this yet, but the woman who called this in said she heard a noise that sounded like a gunshot a few minutes after ten. She looked out her window and saw the deceased there lying on the ground. She also saw a man—apparently the shooter—kneel over the deceased while he was on the ground, then get up and run away. She was too far away to give a description and she didn’t know if he took anything from the deceased or not.”
“What about time of death?” Nick asked.
“It’s a little early to say definitely”—it was a disclaimer Nick always expected and usually received—“but rigor mortis has not set in yet, and from the coagulation of the blood in the ankles I’d say offhand that everything shut down about ten o’clock.”
Coroners, Nick thought. They have such an interesting way of describing death.
“Thanks, Dan. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the next few days and weeks.”
“Yeah,” Dan groaned. “You know, Nick, I was scheduled to be off tonight. Just my luck to get one of these high-profile cases where everybody is breathing down your neck.”
“I’m with you,” Nick replied. “Who the fuck was this guy anyway?”
“Some super-rich oil guy.”
“Jesus. Let’s see if we can put this to bed as quickly as possible.”
“Sure thing, Nick. Okay if I take the body? I want to get it out of here before the reporters start sticking their heads down his shorts looking for a scoop.”
Nick laughed. It wasn’t far from the truth. “He’s all yours.”
“Thanks, Nick.”
As Nick watched Dan Jenkins assemble his people and equipment to transport the body to the morgue, the assistant chief, Ralph Hitchens, sidled up next to him.
“Looks like a robbery gone bad,” he said, trying to sound like he knew what he was talking about. In twenty years in homicide, Nick had never seen Ralph Hitchens at a murder scene before.
Nick stifled the urge to say, No, Sherlock, it looks like a murder. Instead, he just nodded in agreement as he watched Dan Jenkins’s young assistant load the body onto a stretcher. He didn’t like to miss any of the details, especially in a high-profile case like this.
“Any thoughts so far, Detective?” Hitchens asked.
Nick couldn’t bring himself to ignore the question. The assistant chief was nothing more than a glorified pencil pusher: they had entered the academy together and graduated at the same time, but while Nick went directly to the street, old Ralphie boy became some captain’s clerk. Nobody who knew Ralph Hitchens back then would ever have picked him as a leader of men. They might have picked him as the guy most likely to piss his pants in a gun battle, but that was about it. He rose in rank the way most of them did, sticking their nose up enough asses until they were rewarded for the endeavor. Politics, Nick thought with that exact picture in his mind. No wonder it stinks!
“Well, it’s definitely a homicide, Chief. Bullet wound to the head,” Nick deadpanned. Over to his left, Nick noticed that Tony Severino, recently returned from his crowd-management duties, was fighting to keep from laughing out loud.
Ralph Hitchens’s jaw tensed. He clearly was not amused by the remark.
“I want this case wrapped up quickly, Walsh. You’ve got an eyewitness.”
Is this shithead for real? Nick fumed to himself. Yeah, Chief, there’s an eyewitness who saw someone next to the body. That narrows it down to eight million people, you schmuck! He decided to pull the prick’s chain a little longer. What the hell, I’m vested.
“I’ll get right on it, Chief. An unidentified male shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
As he said the words, Nick realized all he needed was a description to solve the case. Whoever did this crime was probably in the system somewhere.
Thanks, Chief! he said to himself. I wouldn’t have thought of that right away if I hadn’t been busting your balls.
3
Florida, 1998
Clang! The gates of the maximum-security state prison in Starke, Florida, slammed shut behind Jack Tobin as he entered. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sound. This had been his work for the last two years—representing people on death row. There were aspects of the endeavor that he loved and aspects that he hated. One of the things he hated most was entering the prison, with its dank odors and its chaotic sounds bouncing off the bare walls and steel bars and ricocheting up and down the corridors. The racket r
eminded him of the Central Park Zoo when he was a kid, when it was the sounds of animals that rang in his ears and the smells of their excrement that filled his nostrils. Zoos had changed since then. Apparently, some experts decided that animals thrived in a more open, natural environment. Maybe someday a lightbulb will go off somewhere and they’ll realize that a better environment might work for human beings as well, Jack thought as he walked down the corridor and into the visiting room accompanied by a uniformed guard.
He was visiting an inmate named Henry Wilson. Jack did not know the complete details of the case. He knew that Wilson, who was black, had a rap sheet about six miles long, that he had been a criminal and a drug addict his entire adult life, and that he’d been convicted seventeen years ago of murdering a drug dealer named Clarence Waterman.
Jack had been a very successful civil trial lawyer in Miami for twenty years. He had started his own firm, and when it grew to one hundred lawyers and he could no longer stand it, he had negotiated a twenty-million-dollar buyout of his interest. He had planned on retiring to the little town of Bass Creek near Lake Okeechobee and becoming a part-time country lawyer and a full-time fisherman. Other matters intervened, however. First, the governor offered him the position of state’s attorney for that county. Even though he didn’t want the job, he couldn’t say no. And then he learned that his best friend from his childhood years in New York, Mike Kelly, had died, and that Mike’s son, Rudy, was on death row in Florida. Thus began a quest to save Rudy from the electric chair. It was through the process of representing Rudy that Jack realized he had a calling and that his particular calling was to represent death-row inmates.
The visiting room was as stark and uninviting as the rest of the facility, with nothing in it but a steel table and steel chairs bolted to the ground. Jack took his seat and waited for the sound of Henry Wilson coming down the hall. It was always the same. You heard them long before you saw them: chains clanging, feet shuffling. Still, Jack was shocked when Henry Wilson walked in the room. He was an imposing figure, standing at least six feet, five inches tall with a wide, thick, muscular frame. His brown eyes were dark and inset, and the corners of his lips turned downward in a perpetual scowl. He looked like he could break his shackles, overpower the guards, and walk through the walls to freedom anytime he wanted.
The Law of Second Chances Page 2