A Killer's Alibi (Philadelphia Legal)

by William L. Myers Jr.

  Apart from his belief in constitutional protections, of course, his core duty is to battle for his clients regardless of their guilt or innocence. A particular client isn’t entitled to win. But they do have the right to expect that their lawyer will fight like hell for them. So when the police browbeat a suspect to the point that he’ll confess to anything, Mick files a motion to exclude the confession. When the police bust into someone’s house without a proper warrant and find evidence of a crime, he runs to court waving the Fourteenth Amendment.

  In the Nunzio case, he’s filed a motion to exclude all the evidence the police found inside the warehouse: the knife, the blood, even the body. He’ll lose, of course; the smashed doorframe and the woman sobbing created “exigent circumstances,” justifying the cops’ decision to enter the warehouse without a warrant. And once they were lawfully inside, anything in plain view was fair game for seizure and use at trial.

  He leans back in his chair and considers Nunzio. He doesn’t feel good about representing the crime lord. He’s represented mob guys before and didn’t have a problem with it. But there’s something about Nunzio that isn’t sitting well with him. He feels like he’s getting played. Nunzio is clearly withholding critical information that he’s not ready to trust Mick with. But what could be more important than his freedom?

  “Uh, Mick?”

  He looks up. Angie is standing in the doorway, an odd look on her face. She moves inside and closes the door.

  “Susan’s father is in the lobby. I told him she’s not here, but he says he wants to talk to you.”

  “Where’s Susan?”

  “She called and said she had a doctor’s appointment and might not be in. Should I tell him to leave?”

  Mick sighs. “No, no. I’ll talk with him. I just need a few minutes to finish something up.”

  Five minutes later, Mick walks into the lobby to meet Leonard Klein. The man is tall and blubbery, with watery blue eyes and loose jowls. His thinning white hair is fashioned into a ponytail. He’s wearing tan pants with a pink button-down shirt. The pants are too baggy, the shirt too tight.

  Mick extends his hand and receives a sweaty handshake with a quick release.

  “Let’s go into the conference room,” Mick says. Then to Angie: “Would you mind bringing us some waters and coffee?”

  “Please, no coffee for me,” says Klein. “Though a spot of tea would be much appreciated.”

  Mick exchanges glances with Angie and escorts Susan’s father to the conference room.

  “So I understand you’re back from England,” Mick says.

  “Possibly for good, I’m afraid. My wife, Ava, passed a few months ago, and it’s been a terrible strain on me living in our home—all of the memories just kicking me in the balls from the time I wake up in the morning. You can’t imagine how hard it is to lose one’s spouse.”

  Like your wife did when you walked out on her and Susan?

  “You have my deepest sympathies,” Mick says.

  “But apparently not my daughter’s. She wasn’t expected at the funeral, of course, but a card would have gone a long way.”

  “Is there something that I can help you with? Is that why you wanted to talk with me?”

  “I suppose I was looking for some enlightenment as to why my daughter refuses to see me.”

  Mick doesn’t answer.

  “I mean, circumstance has accorded her a golden opportunity to reunite with her own father. You’d think she’d jump at the chance, instead of putting me off.”

  Mick stares.

  “One would also expect that, as an attorney, she’d enjoy helping help me with the, uh, legal issues being stirred up by Ava’s children. I can’t tell you how disappointed Ava would be to learn they’re contesting her will. We were together for how many years now? To hear them tell it, I’m little more than a gold digger. If they have their way, I’ll be out on the street.”

  So he’s looking for money.

  Mick feels an overwhelming urge to smack Leonard Klein in the face.

  “Maybe Susan’s having a difficult time reconnecting with you because you’ve spent so little time together since . . .”

  “Oh, go on and say it: since I left. I’ve no doubt she’s been beating that dead horse for years. Just like her mother. That woman—she all but drove me out of the house with her constant harping about responsibilities and the need to bring home as much bacon as I possibly could, regardless of the cost to my own happiness. The constant pressure I was under, the injuries to my self-esteem, meant nothing to Candace.”

  Mick clenches his jaw, envisioning Susan as a young girl, crying and terrified as her father packed his bags and turned his back on her.

  Angie brings in the beverage service. Susan’s father wastes no time placing his tea bag into a cup and pouring his water. While his tea steeps, he helps himself to two or three of the madeleines—butter cakes—on the serving tray.

  “One thing Ava told me when we first met,” Klein says after he’s washed the cakes down with his Earl Grey, “is that Americans live to work, while Europeans work to live. It’s a rat race on this side of the pond. You can’t deny it. Our side is more civilized.”

  Our side?

  “Susan told me you were a dentist. In Scarsdale. A very successful dentist.”

  Leonard Klein rolls his eyes. “Well, I suppose it depends on how one defines success. I certainly made enough money. But I was miserable. With Ava, I was freed of the need to debase myself with drudgery; her family owns a department store.”

  Ah . . . freeloading all this time, then.

  Mick begins to tap his thumb on the conference table.

  “It’s not like I didn’t intend to reach out to Susan earlier. Many times, I thought of arranging a visit, or calling. But life does have a way of interceding, doesn’t it? I’m sure you understand.”

  “I understand perfectly.” He rises and waits for Susan’s father to do the same, then leads him to the lobby.

  “It was great to meet you. I’ll tell Susan you stopped by. I’m sure she’ll be happy to hear it.”

  Happy that she was somewhere else.

  He opens the door, watches the man make his way down the hall.

  “What do you think of him?” Angie says as he turns toward her.

  “I don’t need to spend any time thinking about him. He does enough thinking about himself for all of us.”

  13

  FRIDAY, MAY 3

  Working at his computer, Mick notices the light for Susan’s phone line illuminate, indicating that she’s back in the office and is placing a call. She never made it in the day before, so he didn’t have a chance to talk to her about her father. He waits until her phone line darkens, then walks to her office.

  “Hey.” He smiles. “Do you have a few minutes?” She waves him in, and he takes a seat across the desk from her.

  “So I assume you heard your father showed up yesterday?”

  She nods wearily. “He left a message on my cell afterward. And Angie told me all about it when I came in this morning. I’m sorry you had to endure him.”

  Mick’s not sure what to say to that.

  She leans back in her chair. “He’s only here because he wants something from me. Money, for starters. And help fighting his wife’s kids in the battle over her estate.”

  “Yeah, I kind of picked up on that.”

  They sit in silence until Susan says, “I was ten when he left. In fifth grade. I cried myself to sleep for weeks. I could hear my mother weeping in her own bedroom. Sometimes she’d call me in, and we’d cry together. It wasn’t long, though, before she toughened up and realized I needed her to be strong for both of us. She hadn’t worked in years, but she went out and found a job. Sold the big place in Scarsdale, found a nice little house for us to live in. Made new friends, built a new life.

  “When I got older, I asked her how she did it, where she found the strength. She told me plenty of women get left by their husbands. Some fall apart. Others rebu
ild. ‘It all comes down to how you see yourself,’ she told me. She said she wasn’t raised to be a victim, and she refused to act like one. She told me she didn’t see herself that way, and she’d never let anyone else see her as a victim, either.”

  Susan pauses. He waits, watching her eyes take her somewhere else.

  “And your relationship with your father, after he left?”

  “I wrote him letters—once we found out his address. Someplace in England. An estate, my mother called it. His wife’s parents’ place at the time, before she inherited it.”

  “Did he write back?”

  “A few times, the first year. Two or three sentences.”

  Mick nods.

  “But I kept writing, once a week or so, then every month, until I was thirteen. I sent pictures, too, from our Polaroid.”

  “Phone calls?”

  “Long distance to England was expensive, but my mother would call once a month and put me on the phone with him, or try to. Most of the time he wasn’t there, according to his wife. I stopped calling when I turned thirteen.”

  “What happened when you became a teenager?”

  “Boys happened. My interest in them.”

  “And it all went downhill from there?” He smiles.

  She doesn’t smile back.

  After a while, she says, “I tried again in college, to connect with him. I’d write long letters and get back a hundred words. Short discussions of some cause he and his wife were involved in. Vague promises that he’d see me the next time he was in the States.”

  “Did he ever come back? Did you get to see him?”

  “Once. A month after I’d graduated from Bryn Mawr, his wife was being given some award in Philadelphia for donating money to some cause. He tagged along, and I met the two of them for dinner at Le Bec-Fin.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “I never met people who could talk so much without saying anything. It felt like they were blowing words into the air to fill up the space between us.”

  “Did you get much of a word in?”

  “What would’ve been the point? All I knew about was me. And I wasn’t who we were talking about.”

  Mick exhales. “Lovely.” He looks away, then back at Susan. “So, where do things stand now?”

  A bitter smile. “The shoe is on the other foot.”

  “Payback,” he says.

  She shakes her head slowly. “I wouldn’t treat him this way if he came to me because he was in pain. Because he needed a shoulder to cry on . . . because he needed his daughter, after all.”

  But, of course, that’s not why Leonard Klein was here.

  “I’m going to tell Angie that if he shows up again, he’s to be turned away.”

  “I’m good with that,” says Mick. He pauses, then reaches over the desk and pats her hand. She doesn’t remove it, but he can sense that she’s not comfortable with the gesture.

  They switch gears and talk a few minutes about matters of firm administration until Angie buzzes through, looking for Mick.

  “Are you expecting a call from Martin Brenner? He says he’s a US attorney, and he’s calling about Jimmy Nunzio.”

  “I’ll give you my office,” Susan says, shooting up from her chair.

  Mick motions for her to sit back down.

  “No, I want you in on this. Angie, tell him I’m on a call, but I’ll hang up and will be with him in a few minutes.”

  He turns to Susan. “Tell me about Martin Brenner. I assume you worked with him while you were with the US Attorney’s Office, or knew people who did.”

  More than a few times since Susan came to the firm, Mick has squared up against her former colleagues; each time, he’s gone to Susan for inside information on them. Within the bounds of ethics and respect, she’s accommodated him. He expects the same of her now. To his surprise, though, Susan offers up only a few descriptors that would describe every AUSA he’s ever known: ambitious, smart. A stickler.

  “Come on,” he says. “You have to give me more than that.”

  He watches her struggle for a few moments, then lets her off the hook.

  “One word. The word that best describes him.”

  She stares. “One word? Relentless.”

  He studies her face but can’t decipher the look she’s giving him.

  Hitting the button for the blinking line, he says, “Mick McFarland. You’re on speaker because I have my partner with me. You know Susan Klein, I believe.”

  There’s a pause at the other end; then Brenner’s voice beams: “Susan! Hello! How are you?”

  “Martin,” Susan says, her voice flat. Then, a little livelier: “How are Kathy and the kids?”

  “Great. Duke has started high school, and Tabitha just turned ten last week.”

  “I hate to cut short your stroll down memory lane,” Mick says, giving Susan a wink, “but can we cut to the chase?”

  Brenner answers immediately. “Nunzio. Have you approached him about working with the good guys? Help us bring down his bosses.”

  “I told you before—that would be an exercise in futility.”

  “What about his daughter? We could always bring her into it. Nunzio certainly understands that.”

  “Nunzio’s family is never going to talk to you. And you can’t compel them to.”

  “No, I can’t. But a grand jury can subpoena her.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “She’d have to testify in detail about what went down in that warehouse.”

  “What’s your endgame here, Brenner? You know Nunzio will never turn, and you know his daughter would go to jail before she’d testify against her father. So what’s this really about?” Mick pauses. “Is this just to get your name out there? Is it politics? Because if it is, starting something that goes nowhere will only make you look bad.”

  He turns to Susan for confirmation that Brenner’s ambition is what’s propelling him, but finds her staring at her desk.

  “We could work together on this, Mick, Susan,” Brenner says. “The three of us. Ride Nunzio like a Sherman tank, mow down the New York mob. What do you think, Susan? It’d be just like old times. Remember the Zelonis case, the congressman we nailed for shaking down all the local businessmen? The O’Brien case? We took down the whole family on that one.”

  Mick looks at Susan and sees she’s not enjoying Brenner’s glory-days routine.

  “Hello?” Mick says loudly. “Aren’t you forgetting something? Susan and I run a defense firm. We don’t work with the government to prosecute people.”

  Mick hangs up and looks at Susan. “What a horse’s ass.”

  She doesn’t disagree.

  “Do you think I got through to him?”

  She stares at him. “Remember the word, Mick.”

  He stares back blankly.

  “Relentless,” she says.

  As Mick leaves, he tells Susan that she should come to him if she wants to talk about her father. Later, in his own office, he thinks about Susan, and about Darlene Dowd, and, finally, about Christina Nunzio. Three daughters. One abandoned, one abused, one subjugated by her father. He leans forward and lifts the framed 3-by-5 photo of Gabby in her soccer uniform, taken the year before. He spends a long time looking at the picture.

  “I don’t get it,” he says aloud. “I just don’t get it.”

  14

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 8

  Angelo Valiante sits in the driver’s seat of the stolen Ford Taurus. The car is a bland gray and otherwise unremarkable, a vehicle that will not draw attention to itself. The plates have been switched out with another car’s.

  To Angelo’s right is Dominic D’Ambrosio, Angelo’s buddy since they were kids.

  “Are you sure about this?” Dominic asks. “Broad daylight? A public place? No one does this shit anymore.”

  Angelo turns to him. “We’re sending a message.”

  The car is parked next to the building at One Crescent Drive, just behind the sign for PNC Bank. The location
is a perfect vantage point to spot people entering and leaving the next building down—a four-story glass building with a big Philadelphia 76ers sign on top. It’s where Jimmy Nunzio keeps his headquarters.

  Normally Angelo would have someone else drive. But he wants total control over this situation. Wants to be certain he’ll be able to make a quick getaway.

  “Let’s get some fresh air in here,” Angelo says, opening the sunroof to the mild seventy-two-degree air.

  Overhead, the sky is a bright, cloudless blue. A beautiful morning in May.

  The unmarked police car—a blue Chevy Impala—turns from South Broad onto Crescent and parks next to One Crescent Drive. From the passenger seat, Detective Scott Weaver sees a couple of cars sitting six or seven spaces down—a red Mini Cooper and, ahead of it, a gray sedan.

  “I can’t believe Nunzio keeps his office in the same building as the Sixers,” Weaver says to the driver, Donny Donoghue. Weaver is the more senior of the two men, having almost twenty years under his belt compared to Donoghue’s five years with the department.

  Donoghue shrugs. “I can’t believe we have to sit here hoping the giant’s gonna show.”

  “Tredesco got a tip he’s here,” Weaver says with a shrug. “What you gonna do?”

  “Wasted effort, you ask me,” Donoghue says. “Johnny G.’s never going to talk. Assuming he’s even in the country. I’ll bet he’s in Italy right now, splitting some chick down the middle with his giant Johnny G. horse cock.”

  Weaver looks at him and winces.

  “What?” says Donoghue. “The guy’s like six six. He’s got to be proportional.”

  “How much time you spend thinking about this? You’re starting to worry me.”

  “I have to take a piss. I’ll go into this building. Be back in a minute.”