A Killer's Alibi (Philadelphia Legal)

by William L. Myers Jr.

  Once more, Piper hears self-reproach in Melvin Ott’s voice. When she hangs up, Susan turns to her.

  “I think it’s more with him than just feeling Darlene didn’t get a fair trial.”

  “You’re saying he saw fire behind the smoke Sonny Foster was worried about?”

  Susan nods, turns back to the road ahead. “I think we shouldn’t offer up that we know about the poker game when we talk to the chief, at least not at first. See if he volunteers it.”

  Piper agrees, and they drive on in silence.

  Twenty minutes later, Piper pulls into the driveway that leads to Sonny Foster’s large log home. The uneven driveway is dirt, grass, and gravel, and Piper’s Range Rover bounces up and down.

  Sonny Foster clearly saw them coming; by the time they reach the house, he has descended the porch steps. Piper takes him in as she climbs out of the car. Now seventy years old, the retired chief is a square-jawed man with a military-style haircut—white hair buzzed close to the head. Tall with broad shoulders and no gut, he strides confidently toward the car, extending his hand as he approaches Piper. His fingers are thick, and his grip is strong and dry. Susan joins them, and he shakes her hand as well, then invites them to join him on the porch. His wife—thin and pretty and polite—brings out lemonade and iced tea as they make themselves comfortable.

  “The Innocence Project . . . ,” he says, arching his left brow as he pours for the women.

  “Our law firm’s own innocence project,” Piper says.

  “You don’t believe Darlene Dowd killed her father?”

  “We’re still in the investigation stage,” Susan says. “Trying to learn as much as we can.”

  “Trying to find loopholes, free a woman who bludgeoned a man’s brain out.”

  “Not loopholes,” Piper intercedes. “What we’re looking for is evidence of actual innocence. Proof that a blameless person was sent to prison.”

  “You won’t find such evidence in that case.”

  “But we can’t know that until—”

  “Darlene Dowd was found covered in blood. Her father’s blood. She had the strongest possible motive. And no alibi—”

  Piper cuts in again. “But she did have an alibi. She wasn’t home at the time of the murder. As Lois Beal told you at the scene, and again later when she came to your office.”

  “Lois Beal.” He spits out the name. “Pie-in-the-sky liberal who moved here from who-knows-where with her tree-hugger husband, the two of them pretending to be farmers.”

  Piper opens her mouth, but before she can get anything out, Sonny continues.

  “Lois Beal, who just happened to be best friends with Cindy Dowd? She would’ve wanted nothing more than to help clear Cindy’s daughter.”

  Sonny Foster takes a sip of lemonade, sets the glass on the table, and waits.

  “That might all be true,” Piper says. “But it doesn’t justify scaring Lois away, preventing her from acting as a witness for the defense.”

  “I didn’t prevent Lois Beal from doing anything. She could’ve walked right from my office directly to the public defender’s office, which was all of a block away, and told Kenny Galbraith her tall tale.”

  Piper glances at Susan, who steps into the fray.

  “So you’re not denying that Lois Beal came to your office to impress upon you that she’d seen Darlene Dowd walking toward the Dowd farm after the time of the murder with no blood on her?”

  “You mean that she’d claimed to have seen her, in dim early-morning light, from thirty yards away.”

  “All good points for cross-examination, chief,” Susan says. “But no excuse for intimidating a witness from coming forward.”

  Piper sees Sonny Foster shutting down. She decides to pivot before he ends the meeting.

  “I understand you searched the Dowd farm after the murder but never found the murder weapon,” she says. “Wouldn’t that indicate that the killer left the scene and took the murder weapon with them?”

  “We searched the farmhouse, the workshop, and the surrounding land. But the Dowds’ farm was a hundred acres. Darlene could’ve buried the murder weapon anywhere.”

  “If she were trying to hide her involvement in the crime, why not take a shower, clean off the blood?” Susan asks. “Why not go to a stream and do it? Bring a change of clothes.”

  Sonny Foster exhales. “Darlene’s lawyer made all those same arguments at trial, and the jury didn’t buy them. They probably thought she just wasn’t thinking clearly after the murder. Beating someone to death tends to have that effect on a person.”

  Piper pauses, then decides it’s time to bring up the chief’s brother.

  “Were there no other suspects?” she asks.

  “None,” he answers.

  “No one who bore a grudge toward Darlene’s father?”

  He smiles. “Few people liked Lester Dowd. He was a sour, mean-spirited SOB. But being disliked is very different from being hated to the point that someone wants to kill you.”

  “He was liked enough to get invited to Elwood Stumpf’s poker games,” Piper says.

  Foster sits up. “So that’s where you’re going with this? Let me tell you a few things. First, and of least significance, men didn’t get invited to the card games, they just showed up. If they had the money to put down, they got to play. Second, the game Lester Dowd attended that night had nothing to do with his killing.”

  “We’ve been told he was accused of cheating at that game,” says Susan. “So it could have had everything to do with his murder.”

  “There was never any proof that Lester cheated.”

  “But the other players thought he’d cheated. And he took them for a thousand dollars.”

  “I spoke to Elwood Stumpf personally, and to some of the men in that game, and—”

  “Including your brother?” asks Piper.

  Sonny Foster’s eyes darken. Then he laughs.

  “Richie? You think Richie killed Lester Dowd?”

  “We think you were up for reelection—”

  “Enough!” He smacks his hand against the table. “That girl killed her father. It’s as simple as that. My brother was an alcoholic and a stoner. He was entitled and thought the whole world owed him, yes. But one thing he was not was a killer. Hell, Richie didn’t have the ambition to kill someone.”

  Piper homes in on the fact that Sonny speaks of his brother in the past tense. As if sensing this, suddenly deflated, he says, “My brother passed about five years ago. He was in and out of rehabs most of his life. He’d do something destructive, then make a big show of repenting, dry out in rehab. He’d be sober for a while, then crash and burn all over again.”

  With that he stands, signaling the meeting is over.

  “Look,” he says, “you seem like good people. I’m sure you have the best of intentions. But you’re wasting your time on Darlene Dowd. If ever a man deserved killing, it was her sick son-of-a-bitch father. But the law is the law, and people can’t take it into their own hands.”

  Piper and Susan thank the ex-chief for speaking with them. As they’re getting into Piper’s car, Sonny Foster shouts out to them.

  “When you talk to Lois Beal, why don’t you ask her where my brother got his pot? Where most of the stoners in the whole county got their weed?”

  Piper parks the car on Linden Street in Allentown, in front of a three-story brick building that has a brass placard announcing it as the home of Galbraith and Stevens. Piper and Susan climb four stone steps to a pair of heavy wooden doors that open into a quiet lobby. The furniture is traditional—dark woods and wing chairs and a Victorian-style couch. They introduce themselves to the receptionist, who invites them to take a seat.

  “Did you ever consider practicing in a small-town firm?” Piper asks Susan.

  “I never wanted to be a ham-and-egger. I think that’s what Grisham calls them. Lawyers who do wills and divorces and some small-potatoes contract work. For me, the big city was always the lure. Glass office towers.
The highest-paid and best attorneys. And, of course, I wanted to do criminal work, and trials. All of which is why I went to the US Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia.”

  “Why did you leave? Go into private practice?”

  Susan’s face transforms in the blink of an eye. “It was time,” she says. Nothing more.

  Surprised by the reaction, Piper immediately switches topics.

  “From what I read in the transcript, it looked like Galbraith did a good job at trial. He made some points against Sonny Foster and the detective, especially about the ordeal they put Darlene through to secure her confession. And in the sentencing phase, he really went to town on the horrors Darlene’s father inflicted on her.”

  “In other words, no basis for an ineffective assistance of counsel claim,” concludes Susan. “What do you think he can give us that’s not in the transcript?”

  “I don’t know. Probably nothing. But I want to see his reaction to what we’ve learned about Lois Beal. And the idea that she might know where the murder weapon is.”

  Piper senses someone approach. She looks up to see a wiry man of middling height dressed in gray slacks and a white shirt. No tie. She rises, and he smiles and extends his hand.

  “Ken Galbraith,” he says, taking first Piper’s hand, then Susan’s. “Let’s go back to the conference room.”

  Once they’re seated, Piper thanks him for meeting with them, then opens her satchel and passes him the deathbed letter sent to Darlene by her mother, explaining what it is.

  Galbraith reads and then rereads the letter.

  “‘Lois’ is Lois Beal, who was the Dowds’ closest neighbor,” Piper says. “And a good friend of Darlene’s mother. She went to Chief Sonny Foster, told him she’d seen Darlene walking toward home after the time of the murder, no blood on her. But Foster pressured her into not coming forward. Threatened to look into her background, apparently.”

  Galbraith stares at her, looking like a man dazed by a horse kick to the head. He rereads the letter again.

  “Her letter says ‘hammer,’ not ‘murder weapon,’” he says. “That jibes with the pathologist’s testimony. No one knew for sure what the murder weapon was, but the injuries were consistent with blows from a hammer.”

  “And she doesn’t just say ‘hammer,’” Piper says. “She says ‘claw hammer.’”

  “So either Cindy Dowd saw the hammer or talked to someone who did,” concludes Galbraith.

  Piper’s chest floods with adrenaline. “Did Darlene’s mother ever tell you about Lois Beal or the hammer?”

  He shakes his head. “Not a word.”

  “Why would that be?” asks Susan. “Chief Foster pressured Lois Beal to keep quiet about seeing Darlene that morning, and Lois obviously told Cindy Dowd that. So why wouldn’t Cindy come straight to you, her daughter’s lawyer, and tell you that Lois Beal knew the location of the hammer?”

  Galbraith shrugs. They sit in silence until Susan answers her own question.

  “There is only one reason I can think why Cindy wouldn’t tell you about it,” Susan says. “And that’s because the hammer would inculpate someone she cared about more than she cared about Darlene.”

  “But who in the world would she feel a stronger need to protect than her own daughter?” Piper asks.

  They look at each other. Piper realizes they all know the answer.

  “I guess there is only one person,” she says. “Herself.”

  Galbraith nods. “So once Cindy was on her deathbed, and safe from prosecution . . .”

  “She was free to tell Darlene about the hammer,” Susan says.

  Galbraith sits up. “Wait a minute, though. What we’re saying here is that Cindy Dowd killed her husband, then told Lois about it. Why would she do that, and risk Lois turning her over to the authorities?”

  “Cindy would have to be very certain that Lois wouldn’t go to Chief Foster again, like she did about seeing Darlene that morning,” Susan says.

  “You said the chief scared off Lois Beal by saying he’d look into her background,” Galbraith says. “That implies Lois was carrying a secret. Maybe Cindy Dowd knew Lois’s secret and threatened to reveal it if Lois told the police about the hammer.”

  “My head is spinning with all this,” Piper says. “So many unanswered questions.”

  “Seems to me there’s only one person who can answer them,” Galbraith says. “Where’s Lois Beal?”

  10

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 1

  Mick is in the firm’s lobby, reviewing his calendar with Angie, when Susan walks in and brushes past them without saying anything.

  “She okay?” Mick asks Angie quietly.

  “She has a lot going on with her father in town.”

  “I thought he fled the country.”

  When they were first getting to know each other, Susan told him that when she was a teen, her father left her mother for another woman, a foreigner, and followed the woman to Europe.

  “He was living in London,” Angie says. “But his second wife died, and now he’s back. He told Susan he wants to rekindle their relationship.”

  “When’s the last time she saw him?”

  “Like, eight years ago.”

  “Unbelievable.” He can’t imagine abandoning Gabby, not seeing her for years at a time.

  “She’s been ducking him,” Angie says. “She told me if he calls to say she’s on the phone.”

  “Has he called?”

  “A dozen times.”

  “And she doesn’t call him back?”

  “She did once. Told him she’d meet him for lunch.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “She stood him up.”

  I don’t blame her.

  When Angie leaves, Mick walks to the office Piper uses when she’s at the firm. He sits just in time to hear Angie buzzing through and telling Piper that Matt Crowley’s on the phone. Piper hits the “Speaker” button and tells Crowley that Mick’s with her.

  “Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you, but I’ve had a heck of a time tracking down the mysterious Lois Beal.”

  “But you found her?” Piper asks hopefully.

  “Good news, bad news,” he says. “It took some finagling, but I was able to unearth her Social Security number, which I used to track her down.”

  “That’s great! Where is she? What’s she doing?”

  “This is where we move into the bad-news part. Lois Beal’s in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And she’s not doing a thing. Hasn’t done a thing since she died—over sixty years ago, at the age of nine.”

  Mick and Piper look at each other. “So the Dowds’ neighbor was using Lois Beal’s identity as an alias?”

  “Her husband, too. Jason Dell, age eight, died on March 7, 1957.”

  “They were on the lam,” Mick says.

  “They were hiding from something, at the very least,” Crowley says. “And since they were hiding together, chances are that whatever it was they’d run from was something they’d done together, too.”

  Piper exhales. “So now what?”

  “This is where we move into the expensive part. Basically, we’ll have to scour the news for two people, a man and a woman, who disappeared in the early 1970s, the same time when Lois Beal and Jason Dell showed up in the Lehigh Valley, presenting themselves as husband and wife. Given that Dell’s obituary in 2009 reported his age as sixty, this means he was in his early twenties when they disappeared, and probably she was, too.”

  “That also assumes they disappeared from wherever close to the time they moved onto the farm,” Mick says.

  “Yes, assuming that’s true.”

  Piper okays Crowley to launch the next phase of the search, then ends the call and turns to Mick. “When does the law thing start to get easy?”

  He laughs and laughs. After a few seconds, she joins him.

  They’re still chuckling when Tommy walks into Piper’s office, dragging the weight that’s present whenever the three of them are together—the s
ins and secrets they’ve all carried since the Hanson case.

  “Did you talk to your cop buddies about the Nunzio case?” Mick asks.

  “A bunch of ’em. Tredesco was telling the truth about the phone used to call Nunzio to lure him to the warehouse—it was a burner, untraceable. Nunzio’s phone was a burner, too, as were all the numbers he called himself. Dead ends all around.”

  “Was anyone willing to tell you what the prosecution’s thinking is on the case?”

  “One, a detective assigned to the DA’s office. He says Pagano can’t figure out what happened to Johnny G. and Valiante’s bodyguards. What really has him going is why Nunzio—who had a gun—didn’t just shoot Valiante.”

  Mick nods. “Exactly what I asked the arresting cop. Maybe Nunzio wanted to send a message. You mess with my daughter, you’re not just going to die, you’re going to die slowly.”

  “And the bodyguards?” Tommy asks. “I still don’t believe Tony Valiante was running around without his protection. But if the muscle had been there when Nunzio and Johnny G. busted into that warehouse, you know there would have been a fight. Blood and bodies.”

  “Maybe they cleaned the blood up,” Piper says. “Johnny G. and Nunzio. Then Johnny took the bodies away.”

  Tommy shakes his head. “The crime-scene guys went over that place with a fine-tooth comb. They used luminol to check for traces of blood. Other than Valiante’s, they found nothing. And no signs of a struggle.”

  Mick considers this, then switches gears. “Have you found out anything about the daughter? Other than she’s a party girl?”

  “Just that she really was seeing Tony Valiante. Had been for a couple of months, at least.”

  “That must’ve pissed their fathers off to no end,” says Mick.

  Piper says, “So it really was a Romeo-and-Juliet thing.”

  “I’ve been looking into her schooling,” Tommy says. “Neighborhood Catholic schools while the Nunzios lived in South Philly. Then private schools on the Main Line once Jimmy hit the big time and moved to Villanova. From there, she got her undergraduate degree from the Wharton School at Penn. Honor student. On the soccer team. Joined a sorority.”