An Eye For Justice

by Mark Young

  ‘When was K Tower built?’ Pascal asked.

  ‘Opened by the Mayor in 1977. Full topping out ceremony with all the city’s dignitaries.’

  ‘So. What we got? Anything?’

  Christoff paused, running his finger across the floor plan of the penthouse suite. ’Not really,’ he said slowly.

  ‘But?’ Pascal said, glaring at him impatiently. ‘Look, Christoff, Emilio will be here with the bread in a minute, so we need to get moving.’

  ‘Keep your shorts on,’ he quipped. ‘The floor plans are not really detailed enough to draw firm conclusions from, but if you look here,’ he said, placing his finger on one of the faint blue lines running across the plan. ‘This is the rear boundary line of this room, which they’ve called “office/study”. Now there are some faint dimensions shown here,’ he said, pointing again. ‘It says these plans are said to be not to scale, but I’ve been over them, and its clear that all the dimensions quoted, if you compare them to the length of the lines on the plan, are proportionate to each other and the dimensions quoted. That is, all except?’

  ‘The office/study,’ Pascal said.

  ‘Give the lady a lollipop. You know who figured it out?’ Christoff asked.

  Pascal looked mystified. ‘You?’ she said

  ‘Cara,’ he said. ‘She’s one sharp cookie. I left her with the plans to have a look at and told her we were looking for a secret room, and she cracked it. The only room on the plan where the stated dimensions do not tally with the extent of the actual line on the plan, is that room. In English, the room as shown on the plan is actually a lot bigger than the measurement shown on the floor plan would suggest.’

  Pascal sipped some coffee. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Not really. Its a pretty bog standard skyscraper, and very much of its time. There’s a service elevator to the rear of the building, and I’m guessing that’s how Emilio delivers Angel’s bread. But you should be able to check that shortly when you follow him. Speaking of which, he should be here any minute.’

  ‘Right, I’ll get ready,’ she said, getting up from the table and leaving the room. Christoff put the empty cups in the sink, rolled up the plans and followed her out just as the security buzzer sounded from down in the ground floor porch.

  He checked the security screen. It was the man he had seen with the delivery van outside Oskars. He pressed the intercom button, and said, ‘Emilio?’

  ‘Si, ‘ the man said, then, ‘yes, I have your bread delivery sir.’

  ‘Bring it on up,’ Christoff said, pressing the door release control.

  A short while later he lead Emilio into the kitchen. The young man seemed friendly, like he wanted to talk but was a little shy, perhaps embarrassed that his English wasn’t quite up to scratch. As he removed the Pumpernickel loaves from his covered delivery basket, Christoff complimented him on the recipe and baking skills, trying to put Emilio at ease.

  They chatted a bit, about where Emilio was from - Puerto Rico - and how long he had been in the city - 7 years - and how he liked the job - he loved it. Christoff asked if he would like a drink. ‘Just a quick one, Emilio, to keep me company, yes?

  Emilio looked conflicted, didn’t want to appear rude, which was what Christoff was hoping. He needed to establish a routine of getting Emilio to accept a drink as that would be important if they were to perfect a plan for getting into K Tower.

  ‘Okay, sir. I’ve time for a quick one. Orange juice, if you have it,’

  ‘Coming up,’ Christoff said, relieved, moving to the fridge.

  * * * *

  People v Calver - Manhattan Supreme Court

  Day 8

  Stahl bounded out of his chair like a Doberman I’d just chucked a joint of lamb at. He wasn’t quite foaming at the mouth, but you get the idea. He’d been waiting for this a while and now it was showtime. From the witness stand I glanced around the court. Judge Gonzalez had a tight little smile on her face, and the jury looked full of anticipation. With no preamble Stahl jumped right in. ‘Let’s face it, Calver, there’s no cavalry coming to the rescue - no CCTV wizard waiting in the wings to waive a magic wand, and make it all go away.’

  ‘Let me guess, Stahl,’ I said from the stand. ‘You used to mix drinks for your rich folks out in Martha’s Vineyard, and now you just mix metaphors.’

  There was some muffled laughs around the court at my lame banter, but it wasn’t going to change anything. None of it really mattered. I still had nothing to discredit the CCTV showing me as the only person entering Helena’s room at the time of the killing. That damning evidence stood like a mountain across my path, with no way round it.

  From then on Stahl’s cross examination was relentless and brutal, pounding away at me, leaving me nowhere to run except straight back to jail.

  ‘And you like strangling women, don’t you? You’ve got form for it. We all heard the tape of your petrified wife after you tried it on with her.’

  ‘No. I don’t like strangling women, Stahl. I was having a bad dream and I’d been drinking, and my wife knows that. Maybe that’s why you didn’t call her, because she’d say that and it would blow a hole in your case. And just to remind you, there’s a world of difference between manual strangulation with bare hands and how Helena was killed, with a ligature. And what was my motive, Stahl? And why would an attorney with twenty years experience leave his own silk tie around the victims neck,’ I said, turning to look at the jury. ‘I was set up, Stahl, from start to finish.’

  ‘So tell us about the CCTV, again, Mr. Calver?’ Stahl said, with that maddeningly knowing look.

  And there he had me, of course. I looked down at my hands, cursing Pascal under my breath.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like me to show it again? So we can all see you go in and come out, just at the time Helena was being murdered. No one else comes anywhere near that room from start to finish, other than you. Explain that to the jury?’

  And of course I couldn’t, and on it went.

  * * * *

  Thirty minutes after Pascal left Christoff she sat in a hire car across the street from K Tower. She was wearing a blonde wig and dark glasses and she had a tourist map of New York in her hand. As Emilio drew up across the street in his delivery van, Pascal exited her vehicle and crossed the road, opening up her street map as she reached the sidewalk. Once there she slipped into character; confused and lost English tourist. She watched from the corner of her eye as Emilio took his delivery basket from the vehicle and made his way toward the entrance doors of K Tower. She followed him through, looking confused, studying her map.

  When Emilio reached the reception desk there were only two guys manning it, one on the desk phone. Pascal sidled up next to Emilio, still looking closely at her street map. The guard nodded, ignoring Pascal, and said, ‘how you doin’, Emilio?

  ‘Fine, fine. And you?’ he asked, holding out some kind of plastic looking security pass. The security guy barely looked at it, then he scanned his eyes over the contents of Emilio’s basket as he held the cover up. Then he was waving Emilio over to the service lift, which was directly next to the reception desk. Then he turned to Pascal, a resigned look on his face. ‘Yes,’ he said, unenthusiastically, but by then the other, younger security guy had finished his call and was looking Pascal over with a lot more enthusiasm. He said, ‘how can I help you, ma’am?’

  Pascal smiled at him and spread her street map out on the chest high counter, and then asked him about getting to the statue of Liberty. After five minutes or so, where the guy had started to try and chat her up, and his colleague was rolling his eyes, Pascal staggered slightly, and held her hand up to her forehead, as if about to faint. The young guy immediately grasped her shoulder, saying, ‘are you okay, ma’am? Let me get you a chair. They got her sat down and got her a glass of water.

  When Emilio finally emerged from the service lift, Pascal checked her watch. From getting into the lift, going up, and then coming back down and exiting, the time elapsed was 33 minutes. It was much
longer than she had expected. It meant he must have engaged in conversation with whoever was up there, which was good news for them. She watched Emilio walk from the lifts; he didn’t stop and there were no further checks. He just nodded to the security guys and then he was out the door.

  Pascal lingered on for as long as she felt necessary to maintain the pretence of her cover. As she made her escape she was already thinking about the meeting that was due that evening with Fossey at the Marriott.

  * * * *

  It was 7 pm on the dot when Pascal, still wearing her blonde wig, pressed the buzzer on the wall outside John Fossey’s hotel room. The door was opened almost immediately by an average size guy with spiked up gelled brown hair. His Italian suit hung loosely on his thin frame and the tie was loosened around his neck. He held a glass in his hand, half full, and he looked like he’d already had a few.

  ‘ Lucy,’ he said, smiling and proffering a limp sweaty hand for a quick shake. ‘Come on over and sit,’ he said, eyes appraising her. He led her over to a chair. ‘How about a drink?’ he offered. There was a bottle of vodka on the table.

  ‘I’ll take a vodka and orange,’ she said, looking around the room. She noticed he had a laptop sitting open on the bed. She watched him, obliquely, out of the corner of her eye as he went to the door and locked it. Then he went to the table and mixed her a drink.

  Pascal always did her homework. In this case it had involved wading through endless back issues of the Hotel Review and reading up on every aspect of the security and CCTV community. It had bored the hell out of her but was worth it because now she could bullshit outrageously on the subject, and this she proceeded to do for the next half hour, whilst also lightly flirting with Fossey.

  He was starting to relax and lower his guard as she questioned him about his views on various CCTV systems, including Protecta’s Cyclops. There was no discernible reaction at the mention of the system; he gave his views freely which Pascal recorded on her phone.

  As they finished up and Pascal turned the recorder off, Fossey asked whether she might like some food sent up from room service. She smiled tentatively as if she was wavering, then said maybe she would. A burger with fries would do her fine.

  Fossey got up and went to the phone. He sat on the bed with his back to her. She took out a capsule from her pocket. Christoff had prepared it earlier and it contained 4 mg/kg of powdered Sodium Thiopental, a good old fashioned truth drug. She finished Fossey’s Vodka herself, and poured him a straight orange, then broke the capsule and sprinkled the powder into the drink.

  There was nothing very scientific about it. The dose was low and not dangerous but it would loosen his lips if she could get him in the mood and ask the right questions. As he came back to his chair, face lit up like a Christmas tree, eyes bright, smile just starting to turn lecherous, Pascal raised her glass and said, ‘drink up, John. You know, this bit of coverage in the trade mag could open a lot of doors for you. Take you to the next level. You ready to hang out with the big boys?’

  Her last words were delivered with a kind of simper, as if she could see herself accompanying him as he broke into that august crowd. Fossey’s eyes had turned inward, glassy, as if he could see himself gliding through that rarified stratum of security dicks. Time to up it a notch.

  ‘You know, John,’ she said. ‘We were talking in the office, other day, about vulnerabilities in the systems. Say like Cyclops. And the big question was: is it possible to dupe it, get around it, fool it maybe? We all agreed it was just about impossible?’

  A shadow passed over Fossey’s face, a guardedness, but when Pascal gave him her 1000 watt smile, that caution seemed to falter. ‘Whew, its hot in her,’ Pascal said, undoing the top button of her blouse and upping the wattage of her smile.

  Fossey licked his lips, reached for the Vodka bottle and poured himself another shot. ‘It could be done, if you got the right stuff,’ he said, tapping the side of his head meaningfully and smiling mysteriously.

  ‘Wow, that’s awesome,’ Pascal said. ‘Lets play a game, John. A hypothetical.’ She leaned forward and took his hand, studying his palm. ‘You know, you’re beginning to excite me. You’re so knowledgeable,’ she said, moving around in her chair as if she had ants in her pants. ‘How would you do it?’

  He turned Pascal’s hand over in his and gripped it semi-hard, looking into her eyes. ‘I’d do it with a slave,’ he said.

  ‘A slave?’ Pascal said, thinking he had drifted into some kind of sexual fantasy.

  She tried to pull her hand back, but he held on, and said, ‘yeah. A computer slave. Cyclops has got a back door in. You can fool the system around the emergency power trip. You plug a laptop with a special programme into the system and you can fool it to make it think there’s a power outage and go onto the emergency battery power, same time you can stop the camera whilst the clock keeps running. Bingo,’ he said with a glassy smile.

  Pascal felt a shiver of excitement; at last, something. But Fossey was now sweating profusely and starting to look confused. Pascal guessed the dosage was running down. She would need to get out pretty soon. ‘Wow, that’s cool,’ she said, eating him up with her eyes. ‘So you can stop the filming, and make the system think its still running, yeah? With the ticker tape clock and counter still running ’

  ‘Hey,’ he said, suddenly. ‘I was kidding, right?’ And now he looked paranoid, looking around the room. His eyes coming back to rest on Pascal. He pulled her up roughly by her arm, into an embrace, trying to kiss her.

  Time to get out. She pulled back. ‘Whoa there, John,’ she said, backing away, still smiling, but he wasn’t.

  He got up and started pacing about, running his hands through his hair and muttering to himself, almost as if he had forgotten her. She watched him, worrying that Christoff had got the dose wrong. He moved to the table and mixed himself another drink, heavy on the vodka. When he turned to her there was a calculating look in his eyes, and the smile was long gone. Looked like Christoff’s little wonder drug had just worn off.

  ‘You’re not Lucy Kellaway, are you?’ he said, calmly. ‘And you don’t work for the Hotel Review. So who the fuck are you?’

  Pascal walked over to the table and mixed herself a screwdriver, heavy on the vodka. She sipped her drink, unperturbed. Calver was way out of time now so what did it matter? No time left for pussyfooting around. ‘I work for Jonas Calver’s defense team. We know you were at the murder scene, and we know you doctored the CCTV, and now we know how.’

  Fossey didn’t look shocked or scared or worried. He just watched her. ‘You wearing a wire?’ he asked.

  She shook her and held her phone up. ‘Nope. Just what you saw me record.’

  ‘Well it doesn’t matter, because I was just blowing smoke. I said nothing that would stand up in court, even if you could get me there. And of course I’ll deny it all anyway.’

  He was right. She changed directions. ‘What happened to the jewels, John?’ she said. ‘You got away with that one, nine years ago. Pretty slick deal from what I hear. You doctored that tape as well?’

  He smiled. ‘Hey. I walked. They had nothing, just like you.’

  ‘Really?’ she said, leaving it hanging, watching his eyes.

  He licked his lips again, and for a fraction of a second the mask seemed to slip and he looked scared, but then it was gone. ‘Look, maybe you better leave now,’ he said.

  ‘Boy, you’re more changeable than a prairie fire,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘But yeah, maybe you’re right, but I’ll leave you with a thought. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that K Corp are watching you right now. They may even have seen me come in here. I guess you’ve met their security guy, Schmidt? You ever see a better candidate for psychopath of the year? I would not want to get on the wrong side of that guy,’ she said, watching Fossey’s face as he tried to keep it from showing anything.

  ‘Not counting Helena Palmer, I think the body count currently stands at two. John Palmer, who didn’t drink
, apparently got drunk and drove his car into the harbour. And then there’s John O’Leary, the main prosecution witness, hotel manager, and I’m sure the guy you met with the night of the murder. Well, he’s dead as well. Apparently hanged himself, if you believe that?’

  Fossey gulped his drink down and poured himself another. Pascal watched the slight tremor in his hand as he held the bottle. ‘I want you to leave,’ he said.

  ‘Fine,’ Pascal said, turning towards the door, and then turning back. ‘You know, John, I’m guessing the only people in the world who can help you right now are the Justice Department. If you were to talk, they’d cut you a deal, like yesterday. Then they’d take the whole lot of these fuckers down or you’d go into witness protection. Think about it, but don’t take too long. And John?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’d seriously watch your back. Here’s my number if you want to talk,’ she said, scribbling it on a scrap of paper.

  As she walked away, he said, quietly, ‘I didn’t know about the murder, you know. Until after….’

  She whirled around. ‘Who did it? Who was in that room that night after Calver?’

  He shook his head, face closed and scared and she knew he would never tell. He was more scared of K Corp than he would ever be of her. At the door she turned back, nodded and said, ‘you enjoy the rest of your evening.’

  She left him standing at the door, empty glass in his hand, looking scared.

  As she went down in the lift she cursed. Fuck. Another blow-out. Now they knew how it had been done, but so what? Calver was going down. A dead end, everywhere they turned.

  * * * *

  People v Calver - Manhattan Supreme Court

  Day 9

  I hadn’t slept at all. I’d sat up with Pascal long into the night, talking about John Fossey and what he’d told her. I hadn’t asked how she’d got him to talk. I no longer cared. But it didn’t matter. What she’d got out of him merely confirmed what we already knew. They’d tampered with the CCTV, and even though Christoff had done his best to explain how they’d done it, it didn’t matter. We couldn’t use it. He wouldn’t come to court, and even if we subpoenaed him, he wouldn’t repeat it.