“Oh, you would be surprised. Believe me, I’ve dealt with cases like this before, and you’d be surprised how many of the wives were actually involved with all the dirty deeds. Now, I’m going to ask you again. When did you move out of Vittorio’s house?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember? At all? You can’t remember if you moved out of the house sometime last year, or early this year, or two years ago, or whenever?” I stood up. “Or maybe you never moved out of that house at all. Maybe you made up that whole story about living with Enzo. You know I’m going to talk to Enzo and ask him. Hopefully the two of you got your stories straight about what you’re supposed to tell me, but, from where I sit, I have a feeling that you’re lying. You never did move out of Vittorio’s house, did you? You weren’t really with Enzo on the night of the murder, were you?”
“Why are you asking me all these questions?” She crossed her arms in front of her, a sure sign that she was getting defensive. I was a student of body language, and her language told me that she was ready to blow. “I’m not on the witness stand.”
“No, but you will be. You will be, unless I think that you’re lying, and then I probably won’t put you on. But, for now, I’m trying to make sure that you get your story straight before the prosecutor comes in and cross-examines you and makes you look like an idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot. I resent you calling me an idiot. I graduated high school. I’m not dumb.”
“No. But you’re lying. And you don’t even have a good answer for me. Me, your attorney. You don’t have a good answer for the questions I’m asking you, so you sure as hell aren’t going to have good answers for the opposing counsel.”
I realized that I wasn’t going to get anywhere with Gina with my bullying tactics. So, I decided to try something else. I was going to try to get on her good side and see if she told me the truth that way.
“Listen,” I said softly. “You say that Vittorio beat on you. Maybe he has frightened you. Maybe he has men out there who will take care of you if you tell me the truth about what happened the night that Vittorio was murdered. Maybe you really know what happened. If that’s the case, then just tell me. Just tell me, and I can get you into a good witness protection program. You’ll change your name, change your identity, the government will pay for you to live anywhere you choose. Paris, Rome, wherever you want to go. If you have information that will bring down a big fish, somebody that the government really wants, they’ll make sure that you are protected.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Vittorio didn’t know no big fish. He was a soldier, a low-level guy. He didn’t even carry out hits. He just shook people down. Did the occasional burglary, sometimes found working girls for the family, that kind of thing. He didn’t know no big fish. He didn’t know nothing about any of that. He had no information that the government would want, and neither do I.”
“Well, okay then.” I took a deep breath. “But maybe you have your own reasons for lying. Maybe you do. At any rate, I’m your attorney, and you need to be straight with me. You need to tell me everything, down to the letter. If you don’t, then I’m simply going to have to withdraw from your case.”
“You’re not going to withdraw from my case. I’m paying you big money to represent me. Joey told me that-“
“And that’s another thing. You lied to me about Joey. About who he was. You were sleeping with him. You go and see him in the prison on a regular basis. You have conjugal visits with him. Now, why would you lie to me about that? You knew that I was going to find out. All I had to do was see my friend in prison, Nick, and he was going to tell me everything that he knew about Joey. And about how Joey knows you. So why lie?”
“I didn’t want you to know. I thought that if you knew about that, you wouldn’t believe me about my story about Enzo.”
“I don’t believe you about Enzo. Worse, I don’t believe a word that’s coming out of your mouth. You’re playing a game, and I don’t like it.” When I worked for the Public Defender’s Office, my clients played games with me all the time. They would lie, they would hide things. Omit things. Make me try to guess what their game was. I always figured it out, but, sometimes, I would figure it out too late. I would be blind-sided in trial, made a fool of in front of the judge and jury. I got smarter as I went along, however, and I got better at figuring out the puzzles that my clients presented to me.
But when I was in the Public Defender’s Office, I didn’t have a choice with my clients. I was just assigned defendants, and I had to go with them to the end. I couldn’t just withdraw from their case. But I had the choice to withdraw from Gina’s case. I could do it, and I could do it in a heartbeat.
“That’s it,” I said, standing up. “I can’t work with you. Not when you can’t tell me the truth.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” she said. “You can’t withdraw from my case. I won’t let you.”
“I am going to withdraw from your case,” I said. “I can’t have a client who lies to me.”
“Well, maybe if you withdraw from my case, maybe something’s going to happen to your friend in prison. Nick. Maybe something happens to him if you withdraw.”
At that, I lunged at her. I wasn’t going to have her threatening Nick or anybody else. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe you’re gonna find out. I wouldn’t want to find out if I were you.”
I turned around and looked out the window. I counted to ten, very slowly, and did some deep breathing. I was going to have to face this woman calmly. I couldn’t speak to her in anger. I had to find out what she was talking about.
I took a few quiet minutes as I closed my eyes and slowly went to my happy place.
Then I turned around. Gina was still there, sitting in the chair, her arms crossed. She was giving me the stink-eye to end all stink-eyes. I sat down and stared down at my yellow pad of paper. “What did you mean,” I asked, as calmly as I could, “when you said that something will happen to Nick if I withdraw from your case?”
“I told you that you gotta withdraw to find out. I’m not gonna say anything more to you than that.”
I sighed. “Listen, Gina, no matter what you say, no matter how many lies you tell, no matter how many empty threats you give me, I’m gonna find out the truth. That’s what I do. I have a crack investigator who is going to find these things out for me. So, you might as well tell me.”
She shook her head. “I got my Ace up my sleeve, and like hell I’m gonna let you know what it is. Now, you gotta represent me to the end.”
I finally just sat down. “Just get out of here, please. Just leave. I’m obviously going to have to find out the facts of this case without your help.”
She pointed at me. “Okay. But I gotta give you a warning here. You don’t worry about what Vittorio was up to with those women. You got that? You don’t worry about that.”
“What do you mean, I don’t worry about that? You do know that Vittorio’s double life is your best chance at acquittal, don’t you?”
“No. You try to think of something else. You try to come up with another story that’s going to get me off. Not that one.”
At that, she turned her back and walked rapidly out of the office.
“What do you mean, Gina doesn’t want you to go there with the drugging women?” Harper asked me after Gina left the office.
“Just what I say. She told me not to go there. She’s a sneaky one, I’ll give that to her. All that she has done has made me want to go to that defense all the more.”
“Well, it’s pretty simple, right? You have to defer to your client, whatever defense she wants to go with, but if you don’t feel comfortable with what she wants, then you have to withdraw. It’s early enough to do that, you know. She hasn’t even been Grand Juried, let alone formally arraigned. Do a quick motion to withdraw and let her be somebody else’s headache.”
I bit my lower lip. “I would do that, but,
I don’t know. I think that she’s bluffing, but goddamn if she’s not.”
“About what?”
“She said something cryptic about something happening to my best friend, Nick Savante, if I withdraw from her case. See, she’s seeing this guy inside, his name is Joey Caruso. Caruso knows Nick. I have no idea what Gina is talking about, though. She just told me that I was going to find out if I withdrew from her case.”
“Ah ha. Now, see – you’re in the same situation I was with Erik Gregorian. I thought that Sargis was bluffing me when he said that he was going to kill me and kidnap my girls if I didn’t defend his son and get an acquittal. But I wasn’t going to find out for sure. It’s the same thing with you – she’s probably bluffing. She probably can’t do anything to your friend, even if you did withdraw from her case. But what if she can? Then what?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what she’s even threatening. I guess I should go ahead and stay on her case and try to figure out a way to defend her. The best way to defend her. But one thing is for sure – she’s told me not to worry about the drugging women thing. I’m gonna worry about it. I’m going to do my due diligence on it. I at least want that card up my sleeve just in case nothing else presents itself.”
“Something is going to present itself,” Harper said. “The guy was a gangster. He had enemies. You don’t necessarily have to show his perverted side to the jury to get an acquittal for Gina. Maybe you should focus on what enemies he might have had with the mob. Try to figure that out.”
I steepled my fingers and swiveled around in my chair. “I know what you’re saying, but my gut is screaming at me about two things. One, that the drugging women had everything to do with why Vittorio was murdered.”
“And the second thing your gut is telling you?”
“That Gina is hiding something. She’s hiding something big. And I need to find out exactly what it is.”
Chapter 6
In the meantime, I decided to go ahead and put Gina’s case on the backburner. It was still early in the process. The Grand Jury hadn’t yet convened on her case, which meant that she hadn’t been formally arraigned, which meant, in turn, she hadn’t been assigned a trial docket just yet. In other words, there was plenty of time for me to prepare for her case.
I did send Tom Garrett to do some digging on Vittorio’s victims to see if he could scare up some of them. Once he did, I was going to go and speak with them and see what I could find out about Vittorio and what he did to them.
Other than that, however, I decided to not do any more work for her. I was at a standstill, and I still wrestled with whether or not I wanted to withdraw. On the one hand, I knew in my heart that I should withdraw. She didn’t listen to me, she wasn’t being truthful with me, and she was against my strategy. Everything was telling me that the relationship between Gina and me was toxic, and was only bound to get even worse.
Instead of actively working Gina’s case, I decided to go ahead and throw myself into Darnell’s case. Or, should I say, Arnetta’s case. Harper was busy with a few other murder cases that she was trying to plead, along with a ton of other cases, and I was less busy, so I decided that working Arnetta’s case was going to be what I was going to focus on.
I needed a win with Arnetta’s case. I wanted to bring down those slumlord bastards, and I wanted to bring them down hard.
So, the first thing that I did was meet with Garrett to find out what he knew about who owned Arnetta’s building, whether that person owned other property, and whether or not other people were getting sick because of this person’s neglect.
We met at a bar downtown, one of the seedier bars around. It was the kind of bar, with the basic cement floors, exposed overhead pipes and dimly-lit pool tables in the back, that people could be incognito. Not that I cared if people saw Garrett and me together. Of course I didn’t. But this was the kind of bar that Garrett liked. He always told me that he wasn’t comfortable in the “yuppie bars,” as he called them – the kinds of bars with wine lists and craft cocktails were not for him. He wanted to go to someplace where he was going to see somebody puke in the corner.
I walked in, saw him sitting in the back, and joined him. The waitress came around and I saw that they had PBR on the menu. I hadn’t had PBR since I used to run with the guys, so I felt nostalgic enough to order it. I wasn’t so high on myself that I couldn’t enjoy some really cheap brew once in awhile.
“Hey, buddy,” Garrett said when I walked in. “Sit down. You’re gonna love some of the stuff that I’m coming up with.”
My order taken, I sat down and leaned forward. “Hit me,” I said. “I hope you got something juicy to tell me.”
“I do. Listen, I managed to track down two different women who knew Vittorio, all of whom are ready to speak with you, whenever you want to talk to them. They both told me how relieved they are that Vittorio is dead. I think that you can start with them, and they might lead you to other women. At any rate, I’ll keep digging to find out if I can scare up anybody else for you to talk to about that.”
“I knew you could do it,” I said. “But boy, that was fast. How did you figure it out so quickly?”
“I got connections. I know guys who knew Vittorio, knew where he frequented, and it was just a matter of going to those places and asking around. It wasn’t hard to find people who knew Vittorio at these bars – he was there all the time. It also wasn’t hard to find people who saw Vittorio go off with women. From there, it was just a matter of me tracking down the women and asking them a few questions. I don’t know if these are the women that Vittorio raped or nothing like that, but I figured that it’s a good bet that we’re on the right track.”
I nodded my head. “Good, good. Just give me a list, and I’ll go and talk to them. That is, if I even want to still be on this case. Don’t worry, you’ll get paid no matter what, but I’m starting to think that I need Gina to not be my client anymore.”
“Why? She giving you the business?”
“Oh, yeah. I mean, they all do, to a certain extent. But this one…” I shook my head. “I don’t think that I can believe a word that comes out of her mouth. She’s one of those women who you know they’re lying just because their lips are moving. Anyhow, thanks for that. Now, what you got for me on the Arnetta Williams case?”
“I did a title search and found out that a Robert Weismann owns that building that Arnetta died in. And, just like you thought, he owns property around the city. I visited some of the other apartment buildings that he owns, and all I can say is, where are the condemnation people when you really need them? These places aren’t fit for bums to live in. Homeless people on the street wouldn’t even want to squat there. But there are people living in all these places. And, get this – the bastard is loaded. Loaded. You know, sometimes you might find somebody who maintains property and they really shouldn’t, because they don’t really have the money to do repairs. Sometimes real estate doesn’t have the best profit margins, especially when you can’t charge much rent. In those cases, I feel that the person needs to sell to somebody who might be able to make repairs when the repairs are needed. But in this case…” He shook his head. “It’s some fat cat who obviously could give shit less about the conditions his people live in. That’s what pisses me off the most.”
“Tell me about this Robert Weismann,” I said. “What does he do, aside from being a slumlord?”
“Well, he’s one of those goddamn trust-fund babies, from what I can see. He comes from old money. His old man is a billionaire, and he himself is living off a trust fund of $10 million. So, yeah, he has the money to make sure his people in his apartment buildings are living in safe conditions, but he just don’t care. He’s a sociopath if you ask me.”
I shook my head. “Bastard. What else did you find? Did you talk to anybody that you saw around those apartments?”
“Nah. I just got the addresses. But I did some digging – I know people down at Truman Med. I know record-keepers down there. They giv
e me information when I need it. They aren’t supposed to because of the HIPAA laws and all that, so they could lose their jobs if anybody ever found out about what they’re doing. Anyhow, I was able to cross-check with my people down at Truman to find out how many people have been admitted to the hospital from those apartment buildings. There are three other apartment buildings, by the way, that this prick owns. Anyhow, I found five other cases for you to investigate. All of them sound like your lady, Arnetta. Coming in with all kinds of weird symptoms. A couple of them actually were diagnosed with pneumonia, but they came back in a few months, still coughing, still with body aches and headaches and diarrhea. I haven’t found nobody else who has died in these apartments who are complaining of the same types of things, but it sounds like you have some sick people on your hands.”
“Seriously? You got names and all that?”
“I sure do. Names, phone numbers, addresses, all that. Listen, you’re going to have to come up with some kind of story when you approach them. You can’t just go on down there and say that I told you about them coming to the hospital. You do that, and the jig will be up, and my people over at Truman won’t talk to me no more.”
“Goes without saying. Guess I need to have some type of ruse to speak with them.”
“It’s pretty easy. They’re all still living in the same apartment complex. Guess they can’t afford to go anyplace else, the poor bastards. Go on over there, tell them that you’re there to fix their apartments, and then talk to them about what’s going on. Listen, these people need help with their problems. They don’t know it, though. They probably have limited education, maybe some of them don’t even speak English. They might be immigrants, maybe not even legal immigrants. At any rate, they don’t know that they need a lawyer. They probably don’t even know that their apartments are killing them. You need to get in there and let them know what their rights are. They won’t come to you.”.
[Damien Harrington 01.0] The Alibi Page 7