First Degree

by David Rosenfelt

  The press conference was intense after the trial, again bestowing hero status on me. Surprisingly, it hasn’t died down, though the focus has switched to Darrin Hobbs. New revelations seem to be leaking from the investigation daily, and it seems that there may have been as many as eight ex-army buddies who have been committing crimes under his protection. It appears almost inevitable that he is going to be arrested and charged.

  I’ve heard from Cindy Spodek, who is getting the hero treatment from the press and the cold shoulder from most of her colleagues. She tells me that the dominant emotion she feels is relief, and I know exactly what she means.

  The ever-unpredictable Willie Miller has reacted with apparent nonchalance to his sudden wealth, behaving responsibly and prudently. Fred has invested most of the money, leaving some aside for Willie to have some fun. It turns out that Willie’s idea of fun is to buy a Volvo, because he’s read in Consumer Reports that it’s a really safe car.

  Willie, is that you? Willie?

  I’m going to get a firsthand look at the new Willie in a few minutes, as he’s coming by the house to pick me up and drive me to what he says is going to be our investment together. He’s keeping it a surprise, but I assume it’s not going to be anything too formal, since he suggests I bring along Tara.

  Willie pulls up and I get in the beige Volvo. Tara jumps into the backseat with Cash, and I get in the front. After instructing me to put my seat belt on, Willie drives off.

  About fifteen minutes later we pull up at an abandoned, dilapidated building, with an old sign identifying it as once having been called the Haledon Kennels.

  “Come on,” Willie says, and gets out of the car before I have the chance to tell him that this would not be a good investment, and I wouldn’t want to run a kennel even if it were.

  Willie lets Tara and Cash out of the car, and they walk toward the door with us. It’s locked, which is not a problem for Willie because he takes out a key and opens it.

  “You have a key?” is my perceptive question.

  “I should. I own the damn place. We own the damn place.” This shows signs of being a disaster.

  We enter and I’m not surprised to discover that inside the dilapidated kennel is a dilapidated kennel.

  “What do you think?” Willie asks, positively beaming.

  I decide to be direct. “I think you’re out of your mind.”

  He’s surprised and wounded. “Why? I thought you love dogs.”

  “I do. But I don’t want to take money from people to stuff their dogs in cages while they go on vacation.”

  He laughs. “Is that what you think this is?” He points at Tara and Cash. “Look at them, man. Tara was gonna be killed in the animal shelter, and Cash would have been history if they caught him.”

  I’m not understanding. “So?”

  “So we’re the shelter,” he says. “Come on, man. We rescue dogs from the other shelter, from the street, whatever, and we take care of ’em until we can find them homes. It’ll be one of those nonprofit things, like a foundation or something.”

  He’s finally getting through to me. “Damn,” I say in wonderment and admiration.

  “And I’m gonna run the place,” he says. “That’s gonna be my job.”

  I put out my hand and shake his. “And I’m gonna be your partner.”

  Willie and I spend the next couple of hours talking about our upcoming partnership. We discuss things like what we’re going to do to the place, how we’ll take care of the dogs, the need to get veterinary care, etc.

  I’ve spent the better part of a year looking for a charity to call my own, and Willie comes up with one a week after getting his money. I’m not about to abandon the needy otters, but I’m genuinely excited to have this project. I’m even more excited that Willie has agreed that we can call it the Tara Foundation. Cash doesn’t seem to mind.

  I get home and call Laurie to tell her about the venture, but she’s not home and I leave a message on her machine for her to call me. Tonight being Thursday, I won’t be seeing her. I have no idea where she is. I’m not jealous or insecure, but I wonder how she’d feel about wearing an ankle bracelet so I can monitor her activities.

  I call Danny Rollins for the first time in months and place a bet on the Mets against the Braves. I order a pizza, grab a beer, sit with Tara on the couch, and start watching the game. Life is back to normal, and the last thing I remember before falling asleep is a Mike Piazza home run in the fourth inning.

  When I wake up, the television is off, but so are all the lights. My first reaction is to assume it’s a summer power failure, due to overuse of air-conditioning in the hot weather. However, I can see a streetlight on outside, so the outage must be within the house.

  I’m annoyed as I stand, ready to grope around for my flashlight. I hear Tara barking near the back of the house. It is unusual for Tara to bark, and there is always a reason. The last time it was a head being buried on my property. In an instant I go from annoyed to scared, because I know that there is no way Tara would consider a blown circuit breaker a reason to bark.

  On a gut instinct level, I know what is going on.

  Darrin Hobbs.

  I make my way to the phone, but I’m not surprised to discover it has been shut off along with the power. My cell phone is in my car, and I don’t think my chances of getting to it are very good.

  I hear Tara come into the room, moving toward the other side of the house. I can use her in this fashion as a sentry, but I know that Hobbs would not hesitate to shoot her.

  “Here, girl. Come here,” I whisper.

  She comes to me, and I grab her collar and half coax, half drag her to the closet. I open the closet door and push her inside, closing the door as quietly as I can behind her. She starts barking again, but it’s muffled, and she’s relatively out of harm’s way.

  Now it’s just Hobbs and me. A Special Forces killing machine head-to-head with an out-of-shape, chickenshit attorney. I’m not thinking about winning; I’m thinking about escaping … about surviving.

  I inch out of the room, trying to make it to the back door of the house. It’s very difficult in the darkness, and with the need to be perfectly quiet.

  “It’s show time, asshole.”

  It’s Hobbs’s voice in the darkness, but suddenly it’s not completely dark anymore. There is the beam of a flashlight, moving back and forth slowly across the inside of the house. I duck down behind a couch as the beam approaches, but I’m very aware that eventually I will be found. And if I am found, I will be killed.

  I am more physically afraid than I have ever been in my life, but for some reason it is not a debilitating fear. My mind is totally alert, my senses exquisitely tuned, as I try to come up with a strategy for staying alive.

  And then I realize that silence is not my ally … it’s his. I need noise, disruption, anything that will attract attention and cause him to move faster and with less caution. If he is free to take his time and methodically hunt me down, he will.

  I peer out and follow the beam of the flashlight. It helps me see where the window is, and I pick up a vase and throw it toward the window. I’m right on the mark, and it crashes through.

  Hobbs turns toward the noise, and I pick up a paperweight and throw it against a lamp, knocking it over and shattering it. All of this is making a racket, but not enough. I start screaming, “Help! Call the police!” at the top of my lungs, all the time moving from hiding place to hiding place.

  The beam of light glances on me once, while I’m on the move, and Hobbs fires his weapon, though the sound is muffled by what must be a silencer. The bullet misses me, but breaks another window. Good.

  I’m near the entrance to the hallway when an opportunity presents itself. I throw a plate down the hall, and Hobbs moves toward the entrance, not knowing that I’m there. Ironically, the flashlight allows me to see him, even though he can’t see me. As he nears me, I leap for the light, crashing into it and Hobbs as hard as I can.

  I land
on top of him and can hear him swear. The flashlight falls to the ground, casting a reflected aura on us as we fight.

  Fight is probably not the right word for it. I turn into a maniac, desperately trying to hang on to him, trying to rain blows on him, while all he wants to do is separate himself from me so he can take me apart. Or shoot me, if he is still holding the gun.

  We knock over a table, but he manages to back off for a moment and deliver a stinging blow to my forehead. I rush forward again, winding up and blindly throwing as hard a punch as I can. It connects, sending shooting pains through my hand as I land on him and we tumble into a cabinet filled with china and glassware, sending it crashing to the ground with a noise that may be louder than any I have ever heard.

  I feel like I hit him hard. My hand is aching and wet from what feels like blood, either his or my own. I summon the strength to try to do it again, while readying myself for his return barrage. But he’s not retaliating, not attacking, not moving, and I realize that I’ve knocked him unconscious.

  Suddenly, the flashlight moves, rises on its own power, bewildering me, since Hobbs is lying at my feet.

  “Andy, are you okay?” is what Laurie says, as beautifully crafted a sentence as any I’ve ever heard.

  “I think so. It’s Hobbs. I knocked him out.”

  I can almost see her grin in the darkness. “So I shouldn’t have shot him?”

  She points the light on Hobbs’s face, and there is a neat little hole in his forehead, which I don’t think was made by my fist.

  “No, you did fine … but it wasn’t necessary. I used my right cross. It’s the punch against which there is no known defense.”

  I go to her and we hug, though I can feel that she is still holding the gun in her hand, just in case. “How did you know to come here?” I ask.

  “Pete called to tell me that they went to arrest Hobbs, but he had taken off. Pete tried to call you, but your phone wasn’t working. I was worried, so here I am.”

  “And you didn’t think I could handle it?” I say with mock offense.

  Suddenly, the house is washed in light, streaming in from police cars outside. “Apparently, Pete had some doubts as well,” she says.

  I let Tara out of the closet while Laurie goes outside to bring Pete and the other officers in. That gives me about sixty seconds to figure out a way to spin this so I seem heroic.

  It’s not enough time.

  IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE HOW MUCH PROGRESS Willie and I have made in just seven weeks. The renovation of the building is almost complete, we’ve hired two permanent staff members, and we’ve arranged for veterinarian care. Willie has been amazingly focused and driven, and I thought he was going to cry when I told him I wanted him to be president of the Tara Foundation.

  Laurie is doing great. Her saving my life sort of evened the emotional score, enabling her to stop gushing her gratitude for my keeping her out of prison. I’ve decided not to belabor the point: that her intervention was not necessary and that neither Hobbs nor anyone else could have survived that right cross.

  Cousin Fred is in the office more than I am, counseling Edna and Kevin on their investments. Laurie is no longer thrilled to have to use her share of the Willie Miller settlement to pay for my legal work, and she’s been quibbling over the bills.

  I’ve told her that the bills are justified, and I thought she had backed off, but she’s just presented me with bills of her own. At first glance they seem unfair. Twenty thousand for a pancake seems high, but I could live with it if she weren’t charging me for Kevin’s.

  And you don’t want to know her price for basil.

  More David Rosenfelt!

  Please turn this page for a preview of

  BURY THE LEAD

  available wherever books are sold.

  AS SOON AS I WALK IN, THE WOMAN GIVES ME THE eye.

  This is not quite as promising a situation as it sounds. First of all, I’m in a Laundromat. The actual name is the Law-dromat, owned by my associate Kevin Randall. Kevin uses this business to emotionally, as well as literally, cleanse himself of the rather grimy things we’re exposed to in our criminal law practice. In the process he dispenses free legal advice to customers along with detergent and bleach.

  Also, the woman giving me this particular eye is not exactly a supermodel. She’s maybe four feet eleven inches tall, rather round, and wearing a coat so bulky she could be hiding a four-gallon jug of Tide under it. Her hair is stringy and most likely not squeaky clean to the touch.

  Truth be told, even if we were in a nightclub and the woman looked more like Halle than Boysen Berry, I doubt I could accurately gauge the situation. I’m no better than average-looking myself and thus have almost no experience with women giving me the eye. In fact, though I’m not in the habit of counting offered body parts, it’s safe to say that over the years I’ve gotten the finger more than the eye. And I’ve probably gotten the boot more than both of them combined.

  To totally close off any romantic possibilities in this encounter, I remain in love with, and totally faithful to, one Laurie Collins. So no matter how this round stranger tries to tempt me, I’m not about to engage in an early evening bout of tawdry Laundromat sex.

  I notice that the woman’s eyes start alternating between me and the door, though no one else is entering. And as I move in her general direction, she starts to inch toward that door. This woman is afraid of me.

  “Hi,” I say, figuring a clever opening like that will put her at ease. Instead, she just nods slightly and seems to draw inward, as if she wants to become invisible. “Kevin around?” I ask.

  The woman mutters, “No … I don’t know … ,” then gathers her clothes, which she hadn’t yet put into the machine, and quickly leaves. In the process she bangs into Kevin’s cousin Billy, who is just coming in. Billy runs the place when Kevin is not around.

  “Hey, Andy. What’s with her?” Billy asks.

  “I’m not sure. I think she was afraid she might succumb to my charms.”

  He nods. “We’ve been getting a lot of that lately.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Billy just points toward a shelf high up in the corner of the room, and for the first time I realize that there is a television up there. It’s turned to local news, though the sound is off. There was a day when that would have been a problem, but now all the stations have that annoying crawl along the bottom of the screen.

  The subject of the newscast is the murder of a woman last night in Passaic, the third such murder in the last three weeks. The killer has chosen to communicate and taunt the police through Daniel Cummings, a reporter for a local newspaper, and in the process has created a media furor. The woman who just left is not alone in her fear; the entire community seems gripped by it.

  “They making any progress?” I ask, referring to the police.

  Billy shrugs. “They’re appealing to the guy to give himself up.”

  I nod. “That should do the trick. Where’s Kevin?”

  “Doctor.”

  “Is he sick?” I ask, though I know better. Kevin has as many admirable qualities as anyone I know, but he happens to be a total hypochondriac.

  Billy laughs. “Yeah. He thinks his tongue is swollen and turning black. Kept sticking it out at me to look at.”

  “Was it swollen?”

  He shakes his head. “Nope.”

  “Black?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you tell him that?” I ask.

  “Nope. I told him he should get it checked out, that he might be getting ‘fat black tongue’ disease.” He shrugs and explains, “I’m a little short this month; I needed the hours.”

  I nod; the more time Kevin spends at the doctor the more time Billy gets to work here. I hand an envelope to Billy; it had come to the office for Kevin. “Give this to him, okay?”

  “You making deliveries now?” he asks.

  “I’m on my way to the foundation.”

  Billy nods. “Listen, do me a favor? When
you see Kevin, tell him his tongue looks like a bowling ball.”

  “No problem.”

  NORTHERN NEW JERSEY EXISTS IN A SORT of twilight zone. That is, if it exists at all. It is a densely populated, diverse collection of cities and towns, yet it has no identity. Half of it is a suburb of New York City, and the other half a suburb of Philadelphia. The Giants and Jets play in Jersey, yet deny its existence, referring to themselves as “New York”.

  The most embarrassing part is that all the major TV stations that cover North Jersey are based in New York. Ottumwa, Iowa, has its own network affiliates, but North Jersey doesn’t. It should thus come as no surprise that those same stations treat Jerseyites as second-class citizens.

  Stories about New Jersey are barely covered, unless they are simply too juicy to overlook. The recent murders have successfully crossed that high-juice threshold, and the networks are all over them. Even more pumped up are the national cable networks, and I’ve been invited to serve as an uninformed panelist on$$$[MS PAGE NO 147]$$$ eleven of the shows that specialize in uninformed panels. I’ve accepted three of those invitations, and in the process I fit right in by bringing absolutely nothing of value to the public discourse.

  My appeal to these shows is based on the fact that I’ve successfully handled a couple of high-profile murder cases in the last couple of years. I must’ve gotten on some list that is shared among TV news producers. “Let’s see …”, I can hear them say as they check that list when a New Jersey crime story comes up “Here it is … Andy Carpenter. Let’s get him. That’ll fill twenty minutes.”

  The one question always posed to me on these shows is whether I would be willing to defend the murderer when he is caught. I point out that he wouldn’t legally be a murderer until he’s been tried and convicted, but this distinction is basically lost on the questioner and, I suspect, the viewing public. I ultimately and lamely say that I would consider it based on the circumstances, and I can almost feel that public recoiling in shock. “How,” they collectively wonder, “could you defend that animal?”