Material Witness

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “Hey, Harry, check this out.”

  It was the crime-scene tech, Ernie, and he was holding up a large plastic bag containing another plastic bag full of white powder.

  “It was in the glove,” said Ernie. “Must be eight hundred grams.”

  “Toot?”

  “You betcha. Good shit too. Commercial grade. My tongue is still numb. Now we know how he could jump like that. Coupla hits of this and I could get fuckin’ rebounds off of Kareem. Jesus, what a thing, though! Kid was averaging, what? twenty-five, twenty-seven points a game the last six games, getting triple doubles too. The Hustlers are fucked.” Bello was unresponsive; Ernie paused and said, “You a fan?”

  Bello shook his head. In fact, he watched a good deal of basketball. It was basketball season, the City was a basketball town, and Bello spent most of his off-duty hours staring at whatever the TV threw up at him, and drinking, until either the station signed off or he did. Necessarily, some of what he watched was New York Hustlers games, so he had seen the thing on the gurney leaping through the air and doing the other skillful contortions characteristic of NBA stars. But he had not envied Simmons his skill as he now envied the athlete’s current state.

  Ernie saw that he was not going to generate a conversation about the Hustlers’ prospects without their star power forward and drifted back to his van. Bello stared out the window for a few minutes. There were half a dozen things he should be doing now: minutely inspecting the car, getting the feel of the scene, making sure the crime-scene guys hadn’t missed anything, scanning the neighborhood, insuring the integrity of the chain of evidence. He should have found the shells and the dope. He should be on the horn now, trying to establish what Simmons had been doing during the last evening of his life.

  Homicide—at least the kind that cops called a mystery, like this one here—was like an hourglass: the sand started running at the victim’s last heartbeat, and after that you had twenty-four hours to figure out whodunit. After that the odds that you would ever find the killer went down precipitously. Bello wasn’t jumping on this case because his jumping days were over and because he was fairly sure that it was not going to be his case. Not once the brass found out who the victim was.

  He looked up. Winofski was standing there, dripping and looking ill at ease. He said, “Um, they said to hold everything just like it is.” Winofski had never been the first officer on a homicide before, and since he had learned about Simmons he had been filled with both apprehension and excitement. People would be buying him beers for the rest of his life on this one. He was worried about Bello, though. The homicide DT was supposed to own the crime scene after the first officer, but this guy didn’t look like he owned his raincoat.

  “Do you need, like, any help?” Winofski offered.

  Bello looked at him. His eyes were like lumps of burnt coal. He shook his head.

  Sirens sounded in the distance. Winofski looked startled and became even more nervous when, after a few minutes, they could see flashing red and blue lights as what appeared to be a motorcade swung into the alley. Shortly thereafter, there were three more cars parked at different angles around the crime scene with a large white van from one of the TV stations disgorging cameras and mike booms and a blow-dried reporter.

  The suits were out in some force, looking remarkably spiffy for men who had been dragged from bed in the deep of the night to observe the loading of a body bag into an M.E. bus. There were five of them: a preppy blonde from the Deputy Police Commissioner for Public Affairs; the Chief of Patrol, Queens, in full uniform; the Chief Inspector in charge of Queens Homicide; a man from the Queens D.A. named Thelmann, and Detective Lieutenant Brian McKelway, who was Harry Bello’s watch commander.

  These, with their associated drivers and the TV crew, made a considerable crowd as they wandered around shaking hands with one another and observing the scene, so that the citizens of the City might know, when they saw this scene for eight seconds on the news, that justice was being served, and that the murder of one of the most famous people in the City was not being casually ignored.

  They were also there to begin an operation known to members of the NYPD as a slick. In the Vietnam War, a slick was a medical evacuation by helicopter—a rescue. In the NYPD the term had come to mean a gathering of suits at the scene of a politically important crime in order to pre-establish credit and protect against blame. If the murder of Marion Simmons resulted in an arrest and conviction, they would share in the credit. Were they not there at the very beginning, expressing confidence and professionalism before the cold white glare? Exerting leadership right on TV? If the result was failure, surely it was the fault of incompetence in the lower ranks, and one of the main functions of a slick was to choose a fall guy.

  As the brass milled around, getting wet and waiting for the TV to set up, Lieutenant McKelway wisely headed straight for Harry Bello, as being the only person likely to know anything. Bello had been only six months on McKelway’s watch, and the lieutenant was not pleased that this particular case had fallen, in the luck of the draw, to the man he considered least likely to succeed in solving it.

  He led Bello by an arm away from the crowd and the lights.

  “What you got, Harry?”

  Bello looked at his lieutenant blankly. McKelway was a medium-sized, scowling man with short red hair and freckles. Bello didn’t know whether he was impatient and irritable with everyone or just with him, nor did he much care.

  “I got a dead basketball player,” he responded in a dull voice. “Took two in the head at close range. A nine. We got the casings. And the car’s full of dope.”

  “Dope! Oh, Christ!” said McKelway. He glanced nervously over to where the suits were conversing. McKelway was a hard-charger, twenty-three years younger than Bello, bound and determined to make captain by fifty, and pinched by the fate that had placed him in one of the relatively unmurderous precincts of Queens. This Simmons thing was a case that could get him to Manhattan, where juicy cases dropped from the trees every day, or to Brooklyn. Brooklyn was where Bello had made his own spectacular reputation.

  He turned back to the older man, and wondered yet again whether this feeble boozer was really the legendary Bello of Bed-Stuy. McKelway realized that they had parked Bello with him as at a rest home, but he had also thought that the magic of the name might have added some luster to his group. But in this he had been disappointed. Bello did not tell cop stories; he was not free with tricks of the trade; he did not respond to the good-natured jibes that passed for social interaction in the squad room. He was quiet and punctual, but passive as a rib roast and about as useful in a homicide investigation.

  Nevertheless, he was the responding officer of record on this mess, and would have to be handled, forthwith.

  “Ah, Harry—this case—you’re gonna need some help with it, right?”

  Bello looked at him noncommittally. He might have been watching a late movie.

  “So I thought I’d call in Fence and Morgan to, ah, do the field work and just support the case. We’ll get together tomorrow when we’re all fresh and decide how to play it, OK?”

  Bello nodded.

  “OK, good. Now on this mess here—me and the chief inspector’ll handle the questions. You just stand by in case we need you. And for chrissake, don’t say anything to anybody, especially about the dope.”

  McKelway walked back to his lords and masters. Bello stood at the edge of the crowd, the rain dripping down his hat, trying to fix in his mind why he didn’t just hand in his shield. He remembered. It was to avoid having to spend seven, rather than just two, days a week sitting in front of the TV getting drunk. On nice days he sat in Doris’s garden, out back, watching the weeds take over. He wasn’t sure he could take it full-time, not with a gun in the house.

  Two more TV vans had arrived, and another couple of cars containing police officers. Bello saw Darryl Fence and his partner, Chick Morgan, get out of their unmarked and confer briefly with McKelway. Fence and Morgan were hot t
his year. Bello didn’t blame McKelway for steering Simmons to them. He had been a hot detective too, once, him and Sturdevant. He shook his head violently. A silly thing, but he always did it when the image from the hallway on Lewis Avenue came into his mind.

  It was down to a couple of times a week now. It would pop into his head, a scene lasting little over a minute that turned his whole life into shit. The booze helped. Maybe it would kill enough brain cells after a while, maybe the very cells that stored the memory: he didn’t know, but he was willing to try.

  A sudden actinic glare told that the suits were on TV. They spoke into the mike booms, poking at their faces like the greedy mouths of nestling birds. Nobody asked Bello’s opinion. He spoke briefly with the crime-scene people, collected his evidence, got back into his car and drove away.

  The next day was a regular day off. He stayed drunk most of the morning. In the late afternoon he made himself a ham sandwich and staggered out into the backyard. Wet leaves from the big sycamore lay in dark piles on what used to be flower beds. In the yard next to his, he could see through the low chain-link fence that his neighbor was out wrapping his fig trees in burlap. All over the City, men of Italian extraction were doing, or had done, this homely task so that they could cheat nature and grow figs in a climate hostile to their cultivation. Bello had a fig tree too, but it wasn’t wrapped.

  His neighbor waved to him, and Bello waved weakly back and then got up and went into the house. The neighbor was the kind of man who liked to chat across the fence, and today he didn’t want to talk to the guy. The neighbor was a retired cop, shot in the line of duty. He had his three-quarter pension, a wife, a large and noisy family, his fucking fig trees, and … What else?

  His … Bello’s mind couldn’t formalize the concept of honor, but the loss of it had strangled his heart. He could think only that his neighbor hadn’t let a partner of twenty years get killed in a stinking hallway in Bed-Stuy. Bello sat in front of the TV and watched nothing in particular until he fell asleep.

  His next shift was a swing, and he arrived promptly at four at the homicide squad room in the 105th, a building on Hillside Avenue, not far from the Queens County courthouse. There was a note on his desk that McKelway wanted to see him. He knew what it was about. He took out his notebook and sat down at the old Royal and carefully typed out his notes from the Simmons killing. He put them, together with the DD5 situation report, in a case jacket. Bello was a rapid and accurate typist. He could even type drunk. He had typed up all the reports when he and Jimmy Sturdevant … he shook his head from side to side like a housewife trying to shake a spider from a rag mop. Then he picked up the large manila envelope that held the evidence bags from the crime scene and went to see McKelway.

  He knocked on the door and went in and mutely placed the stuff on the lieutenant’s desk. He said, “This is all of it. I don’t have the autopsy yet.”

  McKelway looked surprised. “What’s all this?” he asked.

  “The stuff on Simmons. I figured you wanted it for Fence and Morgan.”

  McKelway leaned back in his swivel chair and gave Bello a look that even in his fogged state struck him as very peculiar—appraising, contemptuous, but with a tinge of something close to fear.

  “No, Harry,” said McKelway slowly. “What I wanted to say was that it’s your case. All yours.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Far from Queens that day, on the isle of Manhattan, on the tenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street, Roger Karp, called Butch by his few friends and “that big son of a bitch” by his more numerous enemies, sat at the prosecution table and watched the jury in People v. Dodd file back into the courtroom and take their seats in the box.

  Ramon Dodd, twenty-three, street name “Baggy,” was watching too from his seat at the defense table, flanked by his glum Legal Aid Society lawyer. The Legal Aid lawyer was glum because this had been a shitbag trial, which he never would have got into if his client had shown any sense, and taken his advice and pleaded guilty.

  Of course, if Ramon Dodd had had any sense, he would also have not shot dead his local drug dealer at six o’clock on a spring evening in front of a street full of people, after a loud and noisy argument. If he had had any sense, then, having done it, he would have ditched his pistol, or at least stashed it with somebody other than his girlfriend.

  But Ramon Dodd’s life had been but a twenty-two-year prelude to his current state, devoid of sense from its beginning to the present moment. Even now, as his doom approached, he glanced vaguely around the courtroom as if its proceedings had nothing to do with anything he had actually done. He was a typical professional low-level New York street criminal—that is, a mildly retarded black man with a ten-minute attention span and the foresight of a trout.

  Asked to decide between (a) a long career of moving heavy objects around for intermittent minimum wage and (b) a brief life on the streets, where he might hold as much as a thousand dollars in cash in his hands (this had happened to him twice), Dodd had had no trouble choosing the latter course. Given the clearance rate for the kind of crimes Dodd was capable of, it was not entirely an irrational decision.

  This trial was his eleventh appearance in court on the present indictment, a number not unusual for a New York County felony. The Legal Aid lawyer appointed to his case knew that delay favored the defendant. Witnesses might forget, might die, might get sick of the whole thing and not show up. Evidence might get lost. The prosecution might relent or slip up in some way.

  In this case, delay had not worked for the defendant. Karp did not relent and he had not yet made an important slip in twelve years of practice as an assistant D.A. And he wanted Dodd, who had already killed two people that Karp knew about. He had done his first murder at age sixteen, had received a juvi sentence and served four years in kiddie jail. Starting fresh, as the law requires, he had lost no time in killing again, this time his sister’s boyfriend. He had copped to manslaughter and served twenty-seven months.

  With this as background, Dodd might have been justified in thinking that killing people was but a minor irritant to society. Like most petty criminals in New York, he had an understanding of the real constraints of the system that would have done credit to a full professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

  The jury trial, for example. Dodd understood that every accused felon was entitled by law to a trial like the one he had just had. But with New York County racking up one hundred thousand felonies a year, this was clearly impossible, and the well-known institution of plea bargaining blossomed forth. It was a kind of ameliorative magic: robbery became larceny; burglary became trespass; attempted murder became simple assault; and murder became manslaughter. The law accepted conviction on a lesser crime than the one that was actually committed in order to avoid a complete breakdown of the system; it preferred corruption to strangulation.

  Corruption it was, for what had started as an expedient became a virtue, almost the only virtue. The skills of the trial lawyer, which had been prized above all else in the New York D.A.’s office, had fallen into disuse, while the ability to make convenient deals was praised, not least by Sanford L. Bloom, the district attorney, who was not, and never had been, a trial lawyer.

  Still, murder was an exception, even now. Under the laws of New York state, if you were judged guilty of murder you had to serve a minimum of fifteen years in prison. For other crimes you were subject to the max-out rule, which said that you couldn’t serve more than two-thirds of your maximum sentence. Thus, if you could beat your murder rap down to manslaughter, and pulled a two-to-ten sentence, you couldn’t serve more than about six years, and you might serve a good deal less: a lot better than a sure fifteen plus.

  Of course, whether they would let you cop or not depended, oddly enough, on whom you killed. Not all lives in New York state are worth the same. If the life you take is a policeman’s, or a jailor’s in the line of duty, then it is murder one, and you are in serious trouble indeed. Aside from thos
e privileged lives, murder in the Empire State is only murder two. If you’re looking to cop a first-degree manslaughter plea on murder two, first try to kill only those close to your own age and socioeconomic and ethnic background, and second, try to do it as spontaneously as you can manage, and without endangering others.

  Dodd had scored high on the first criterion, since his victim was a black street criminal, but rather worse on the second, since he had told at least four individuals that he was gonna off that motherfucker Bennie D., giving approximate time, place and method, and exhibiting the .38 Smith with which he had eventually done the deed.

  Dodd was mildly surprised when they didn’t offer him man one. Because if they didn’t let you cop to a lesser, of course, they had to take you to trial on the top count of the indictment, and a murder trial took not only skill and confidence, but also balls, because if you lost the trial, the defendant would be free. He wouldn’t be shuffling off to Attica even on a reduced charge; instead this guy that you had painted during the trial as the soul of depravity would be out on the street, thumbing his nose at you, and the whole world would know it. But Dodd had not, of course, counted on Karp.

  It was not that Karp had never offered a reduced plea. It was a necessity. But he was not in the least afraid of trials. He loved trials.

  And, having read over Ramon Dodd’s yellow sheet, he had decided that killing three people in a relatively short span of time pointed to a social dysfunction so severe as to require at least fifteen years of the sort of kind and usual punishment they dish out in the state penitentiary. So Karp had offered nothing but a guilty plea to the top count, murder two. Dodd had refused, and so here they all were.

  The jury was seated now, and the clerk of the court asked the foreman if the jury had come to a verdict. The foreman, an erect elderly gent, stood and answered that it had.

  “On the charge of murder in the second degree, how do you find: guilty or not guilty?” asked the clerk.