A Killer's Alibi (Philadelphia Legal)

by William L. Myers Jr.

  He feels his heart pounding in his chest, the rush of adrenaline, the reddening of his face, the darkening of his eyes—physiological reactions, partly instinctive but mostly deliberate now. Tools he uses to manage people through fear. It’s working: McFarland’s trying to act nonchalant, but he can smell the man’s fear.

  Good. He needs to understand who the boss is. Who’s really running the show.

  “I don’t like the way you’re talking to me,” the attorney says. “I won’t be threatened.”

  The two men square off.

  Neither moves until the deputy steps up to the bars. “Everything all right in here?”

  “Peachy,” Nunzio answers, his tone cold. Then, when the deputy leaves, he breaks the ice by offering up a smile, one of his warmest. “I don’t want to threaten you, Mick. We’re on the same side. You’re the best lawyer in town, and that’s why I hired you. I just need to know you’re going to go to bat for me. That you’ll keep an open mind and figure out a way to beat this thing.”

  McFarland exhales, takes a step back. “I’m going to do my best. I always do my best for my clients, always look for a way to win.”

  “That’s all I needed to hear.”

  Mick leaves the holding cell and walks into the hallway feeling as though he’s just been whipsawed. Nunzio’s reputation for emotional volatility is well deserved. As he turns toward the stairwell, he sees Max Pagano talking heatedly to a man who looks like another attorney. Wearing a dark-blue suit, the man appears to be in his midforties and is tall and strongly built. Mick passes Pagano and the second man just in time to hear Pagano say, “Or you could just stick it up your ass.”

  Pagano slams open the door that leads to the stairs and disappears. From behind, Mick hears a voice calling his name. He turns and sees the lawyer Pagano was talking to. The man approaches him and hands Mick his card. It identifies him as Assistant US Attorney Martin Brenner. Mick gets it now, what was going on between Pagano and Brenner. As is fairly predictable for a case involving the arrest of a high-level mobster, the feds are going to try to take it over in hopes of turning Nunzio against his New York overlords.

  “Can we talk?” Brenner says, taking a step closer. His dark-blue eyes are intense, and his strong frame radiates the energy of a tightly wound spring.

  “Sure, but I can tell you up front that Nunzio’s never going to flip.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure. His bosses are facing a war, thanks to him. They have to be pissed as hell.”

  “If you’re suggesting he agree to be conscripted into witness protection, I just don’t see Jimmy Nunzio letting you move him to Iowa to sell fire insurance.” Mick taps the lawyer’s business card. “And why am I being approached by the Philly office? I’d have expected this to come out of the Southern District of New York.”

  “Nunzio’s a Philly boy. We get first dibs.”

  “Not buying it. But even if I did, this is a nonstarter. He’s not going to turn. You’re wasting your time.”

  Brenner smiles. “We’ll see.”

  9

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24

  It’s just before 9:00 a.m., and Piper and Susan Klein are headed back to the Lehigh Valley. They have a full day ahead of them. First, they’re going to meet Melvin Ott, one of the Buchanan Township police officers who showed up at the Dowd farm the day of the killing. Then, they’ll head up the pike to meet former police chief Sonny Foster, the bad guy in Darlene Dowd’s version of events. Finally, they’re going to the office of Ken Galbraith, the lawyer who represented Darlene the first time around.

  Piper is the one who spoke to each of the men and set up the meetings. She’s explained to Susan that, of the two law enforcement officers, she wants to talk first to Melvin Ott because he seemed the most forthcoming over the phone. He agreed to the meeting right away, unlike the ex-chief, who had to be talked into it. He actually laughed when she told him she was considering taking on Darlene as an innocence case at the firm. The lawyer, Galbraith, was open to speaking with Piper but didn’t want to talk about the case over the phone.

  Piper pulls the car into the parking lot of the Perkins Restaurant on Hamilton Street in Allentown. She and Susan enter the restaurant and look around. A large-framed man sitting in a back booth waves them over. He has graying hair and deep wrinkles from too much sun. He appears to be in his early sixties. He rises to meet them, extends his hand.

  “Mel Ott,” he says.

  “I’m Piper McFarland. We spoke on the phone. And this is Susan Klein, an attorney with our firm.”

  Piper and Susan slide into the bench seat across the table from the ex-officer. On the table is a porcelain mug, silverware, and a plate picked clean. Ott has already eaten.

  The waitress, a bone-thin woman with wiry red hair, comes over with two menus. Piper and Susan order coffee but decline breakfast, which seems to annoy the waitress.

  Piper is quick to get out of the way that she is not an attorney, but that she spearheads the innocence cases at the law firm run by her husband and by Susan. This seems to surprise Ott, but he warms to Piper as she engages him by asking about his life and family and career in law enforcement. Once he’s talking easily, she gets down to business.

  “So . . . Darlene Dowd,” she says.

  “Darlene Dowd.” He nods and repeats the name. “One of the sorriest cases I ever worked on. What her father did to her. I almost can’t blame her for what she did back to him.”

  “Then you think she did kill her father?”

  “What I think is that the jury who convicted her didn’t have all the evidence. There was a witness who should’ve been allowed to testify. She was a neighbor of the Dowds.”

  Piper glances at Susan. This was starting out better than she expected. As friendly as Ott was over the phone, she still thought she’d have to pull teeth to get potentially exculpatory evidence. She decides to let him run with his story and gives him the opening to do so.

  “What do you remember about that morning?” she asks.

  “Well, I’d just come into work when the call came in from a woman who said she’d found her husband dead on the floor, that there was blood all over from a head wound. I got the address, jumped in my car, and drove straight to the farm. On the way, the chief, Sonny Foster, called me on the radio, said he was on his way, too, and that he’d called out our criminal-investigation team. We had a detective, John Cook, and a crime-scene technician, Dave Fonseca. I pulled into the driveway just before Sonny. We approached the woman—Cindy Dowd—who was walking around in a circle outside the house, crying and pulling at her hair.

  “We asked her where her husband was, and she pointed to the back door and said he was in the kitchen. We walked to the door, which was hanging wide open, and there he was—his body was—right inside the doorway. It was a holy mess, let me tell you. His head all bashed in, brains and bone and gore spilling out. Blood everywhere.

  “Cindy told us that she’d woken up, gone downstairs, and found her husband dead. She said he was facedown, and when she turned him over, she got blood on her hands and her slippers.”

  The waitress returns with coffee, and Melvin Ott pauses to let Piper and Susan stir in their sugars and milk. Piper takes a sip, then asks how Darlene came into the story.

  “A neighbor, Lois Beal, showed up. She told us she’d seen Darlene walking past her house around six, a half hour or so after the sun came up. She told us Darlene often spent the night in the fields because she liked to sleep outdoors, under the stars. Sonny looked at me, and I could tell he wasn’t buying that a teenage girl would choose to sleep on the ground.

  “Sonny asked Cindy where Darlene was. Cindy said she didn’t know, and Sonny gave me another look. I could see his gears were turning. Just about then, our crime-scene guys showed up, along with some other patrolmen. Sonny sent them inside the house and told me to go up to a big shed we saw on the property and report back to him with what I found. Well, I went inside and there she was, looking right up at me. Darlene. She was
huddled in the corner, covered in blood. I helped her to stand up and walked her outside. As we got closer to the house, her mother tried to run up to her, but Sonny held her back.

  “I brought Darlene to where everyone was standing—Sonny, Cindy, Lois, and some patrolmen. Sonny smiled and said, ‘Well, well. Look at what the cat dragged in.’ And I knew that, in his mind at least, the case was solved. He told me to fetch the technician to take pictures of Darlene; then he had the detective take her to the station.”

  “And that’s where she gave her confession?” Susan asks.

  “After about eighteen hours.”

  Ott grits his teeth, and Piper can see he’s not comfortable with this part of the story.

  “Sonny had John Cook let her stew for three hours before they went in to talk to her. She must’ve been mighty uncomfortable sitting there in clothes covered in blood. It was a small room to begin with, just enough space for a table and some chairs. And I’m sure it got closer as the day wore on. Our office has air-conditioning, of course, but Sonny kept the door to the interrogation room closed, and the window open to the outside air. And I remember it being unusually hot for June.

  “I didn’t go in the room, but the mic was live, so I could hear what went on from the outside, and I watched through the window. Darlene denied that she’d killed her father, but Sonny and Cook weren’t having it. Cook used all the usual methods to gain a confession. He kept insisting that she’d done it. He lied about finding evidence proving it was her. Finally, he just wore her down, and she agreed to a confession. It took her three or four drafts, with him coaching her as to the details, before she gave him something he was satisfied with. He had her sign it. Once she’d done so, he booked her, took her clothes as evidence, and locked her in the cell until her preliminary arraignment.

  “A few weeks later, Lois showed up at the station. Detective Cook was on vacation, so she asked to talk to the chief. I know this because I happened to be in Sonny’s office when the clerk brought Lois back. She told Sonny and me, again, that Darlene couldn’t have killed her father that night because she wasn’t at home, that she’d seen Darlene walking past her house, toward her own house about 6:00 a.m., and that she had no blood on her. By then it had been established that Lester Dowd died between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m.”

  Ott lifts a mug and takes a sip of coffee before continuing.

  “Lois told us she often slept on the front porch of her farmhouse. Sometimes when she did, she’d wake up in the morning to see Darlene walking down the road past her house. She told Sonny and me that once Darlene hit puberty, she developed a habit of wandering off and spending the night in the fields or down by a small stream that ran through the nearby woods. Lois said she’d asked Cindy about it, and that Cindy told her the girl was born for the outdoors, didn’t like living under a roof.”

  Ott pushes his coffee to the side and sighs deeply.

  “We came to learn later from Darlene’s lawyer that the real reason she spent her nights away from home was because she was being abused by her father.” He shakes his head. “I sat in at the sentencing phase, when Darlene testified about all the things her father had done to her. I still can’t wrap my head around it. How a father could do that.”

  Piper waits a moment, then says, “We met with Darlene at the prison, and she told us that she had spent the night in a field down the road and that she’d gotten home a little after six in the morning. She said she’d entered the house through the back door, the door to the kitchen, and tripped over her father’s body. She said she’d started crying and tried to get up, but slipped in the blood. That’s how she explained the blood that was all over her. She testified she panicked and ran and hid in her father’s workshop, thinking that the killer might still be around. A short while later, she heard a commotion down at the house, but she kept herself hidden in the workshop because her clothes were bloody, and she was afraid the police would think she was the killer.”

  “That’s what she said in court,” Ott says.

  “But Darlene’s attorney never put Lois Beal on the stand to corroborate her testimony that she’d been away from the house at the time of her father’s killing.”

  Piper lets the sentence hang in the air.

  Ott nods. “When Lois was done repeating her story, Sonny told her to get the hell out of the station and keep it to herself.”

  Susan frowns. “And that’s all it took to get Lois to bury what she knew?”

  Ott sighs again. “Sonny and Lois had a history—what kind, exactly, I’m not sure. When he kicked her out, he told her if she didn’t go away, he’d look into her background. He said he had some buddies in the FBI who owed him a favor, and he’d give them a call.”

  “And that scared her?” asks Piper.

  “The look on her face—I’ve never forgotten it. She turned white. Then she turned around and walked out of the station. That was it.”

  “But what was Sonny’s motive for keeping Lois from telling what she knew about Darlene?”

  “Apart from his not liking Lois, his motive was twofold, I believe. First, he was certain from the start that Darlene was guilty. Second, he was the kind of cop who was always right.”

  “A great combination.”

  Ott nods, and they sit quietly until Susan says, “And you let all of this happen. Why?”

  The ex-cop lowers his head. “This is where I start to feel like shit. I’d just joined up with the township police a few months earlier. I was a deputy out in Westmoreland County for twenty-two years. My wife is from here, though, and when her mother got sick, she felt she needed to come back. I agreed to relocate, but it took me a year to find a job, Sonny Foster being the only one who’d take a chance on a fifty-year-old new-hire cop. So I didn’t want to rock the boat with him on the Dowd case, even though he wasn’t playing it straight. All of which is just a roundabout way of saying I was a chickenshit. I got no better answer for you than that. I should’ve stepped in and stopped Sonny from scaring that woman off.”

  “You think Lois Beal’s testimony would’ve made a difference at trial?” Piper asks.

  “I don’t know, but I think Darlene and her lawyer should’ve had the chance to find out.” He looks away, then back at her. “And I got the sense that there was even more to it than Lois told me and Sonny. You know, we never found the weapon that killed Lester Dowd. I’ve been thinking for years that Lois Beal might know where it is.”

  Piper glances at Susan. If Darlene’s mother was right, Lois did indeed know the whereabouts of the murder weapon.

  “Do you know where Lois is now?” Susan asks.

  “No idea. She moved away after her husband died, but I never tried to find out where. Never had a reason to.”

  “Would you be willing to put all of this in an affidavit we can use to get a hearing on a petition for a new trial?” Piper asks. “Would you testify at the hearing?”

  He takes a deep breath. “Yeah, I’ll do it. I was in law enforcement for close to thirty years. I never fudged on evidence. Never manufactured it, or held it back, or helped anyone else do it, either . . .”

  “Except this one time,” says Piper.

  He looks down.

  “Except this one time.”

  Piper’s cell phone rings as she and Susan drive to their second stop, the home of former police chief Sonny Foster. She presses the button on her steering wheel, and the call is put through to Bluetooth.

  It’s Melvin Ott.

  “Hey, listen. I’ve been thinking about this since you left. There’s one thing I forgot. Lester Dowd had been at an all-night poker game run out of Elwood Stumpf’s barn. The game was a once-every-other-month thing, and it brought in enough of the locals that the pots got to be pretty big.”

  “Did something happen at the game?” asks Susan.

  “Rumor is that Dowd got into a shouting match with the guys at his table. They accused him of cheating. And he did walk away with close to a thousand dollars—we found it up in his workshop after th
e murder. It got heated. If Elwood hadn’t stepped in, it would’ve come to blows.”

  “They listened to Elwood?” Piper asks.

  “Everyone listens to Elwood; he goes six foot six and close to three hundred pounds.”

  “Why would the poker thing have anything to do with the chief not wanting Lois to testify?” asks Susan.

  “I’m not saying for sure it did. But the thing is, one of the guys at the poker table was Richie Foster. Sonny’s brother.”

  Piper glances at Susan. “The plot thickens.”

  “Now, Richie was a no-account. He’d been arrested on DUIs more than once and even served time for something or other.”

  “And you think Sonny Foster may have been trying to protect his brother,” Susan says. “By locking in Darlene as the suspect.”

  “Protect himself, more likely. Sonny was up for reelection at the time, and it was going to be close. His opponent was a good man, well liked. Career law enforcement, clean-cut, the whole nine yards. Any scandal could have swung the election his way.”

  “Such as having a low-life brother who got into a fight at a poker game with a guy who ended up dead a few hours later,” says Piper.

  “Again, I’m not saying for sure this factored into Sonny’s motivation,” Ott says.

  “But you’re suspicious enough to raise it with us,” Susan says.

  “When I heard the rumors—this was about a month after the murder—I went to Sonny and asked him about it. He waved me off, saying he already knew all about that. He said he had personally questioned Elwood and some of the men involved in the poker game. He said it did get heated, but not to the point that anyone seemed ready to kill. He said if it came out, it’d give Darlene Dowd’s attorney a bunch of smoke to blow in the jurors’ faces. He told me to drop it, and I did.”