by Greg Olear
Three words are all you need to make a guy putty in your hands.
Ready…
Massage oil or nerve agent, Taylor had found whatever it was she was looking for. (In retrospect, I should have asked to look at the bottle—she had even created the opening by describing the Hawthorne-themed label—but by the time I thought of that, it was literally years later. I never was good off the cuff.) She was at the foot of the futon now, on all fours, crawling toward me. I held my sweat-slick finger against the trigger.
…set…
In her high, wispy voice, Taylor uttered four words I’d longed to hear since the day she moved in. Four words that, under any other circumstances, would have heralded the happiest days of my life. Four words that instead were her death knell.
“Todd, I love you.”
…go.
I whirled around, fired…and hit.
The kickback was incredible; my whole wrist went numb. Taylor, meanwhile, lurched backward, smashing into my desk and landing in a heap on the floor. As she fell, she knocked over her handbag, the contents of which fell on top of her. Outside the door, Bo let out a hideous moan, like he knew what had happened.
“Taylor? Taylor, are you okay?”
She was not okay. Not unless you’re an evangelical Christian, like my mother’s husband, who believed in the blessed afterlife—and even if you were and you did, what were the chances that Taylor would end up with wings and harp rather than horns and pitchfork? Seventy-eight men had fallen for her charms, but St. Peter sure wouldn’t.
“Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”
I’d blown her face clean off. Taylor’s nose—her sexy, Streisandy nose—had taken the brunt of the blow. The bullet had driven her oversized ethmoid bone into her brain, and then both out the back of her skull. Blood sputtered from the open wound, from her mouth, from her ears even. Blood seeped into the sheets, into the futon mattress, into the Oriental rug. Everything was blood.
The contents of her handbag had scattered around her. By her left hand was a bottle of massage oil; by her right, a tube of mascara. The tube of mascara.
Bo was scratching at the door, his meow like a foghorn.
It was all over so fast. The most significant act of my pathetic life, over in a flash, a literal flash, a single burst of gunfire.
I looked down the barrel of the gun. Another bullet in the chamber, and four more after that if I screwed up. I pressed the gun against my right temple and closed my eyes. I took a deep breath. I began to count.
One…two…
Before I could pull the trigger, there was a knock at the door. An authoritative knock, one not to be avoided. I heard voices, men’s voices, deep voices. There was fumbling in the lock—someone had a key—and the door burst open, knob slamming into the wall and making a hole in the plaster.
“This way, this way!”
“Down the hall!”
“Here, here!”
There were four men in gray suits and sunglasses. The same guys I’d seen at Quid Pro Quo that day? Maybe. They had guns at the ready. They had white wires dangling from one ear. How did they get here so quickly? Who sent them?
“Drop the weapon. Drop the weapon!”
“Put your hands on your head.”
“Drop the weapon, motherfucker!”
“Hands on your head, you piece of shit!”
I did what I was told.
Two of them dragged me into the bathroom, threw me into the shower—I was naked, remember—and hosed me down with cold water. They threw some clothes at me, made me get dressed. By the time I’d obliged, the other two had already wrapped Taylor’s body in a thick plastic bag, the kind you see in Vietnam movies. They collected her purse, my envelope of hundred-dollar bills, the photographs of her and Trey Parrish, her diary—all the evidence, basically; everything but the list of lovers, which was still in the pocket of my jeans—in a black Hefty bag.
“You’re under arrest,” one of the suits told me.
“You have the right to remain silent,” said another, a big square-jawed prick, “and blah blah blah.”
“Her diary,” I was shouting. “It’s all in her diary. She was going to kill me. She was going to kill me!”
“I said you have the right to remain silent,” Square Jaw said. He reared back and socked me in the temple.
Fade to black.
CHAPTER 23
B
ail was set at five hundred grand—an excessive magisterial measure; it could have been five, and I wouldn’t have been able to pay—so I spent the weeks after Taylor’s death shuffling between rooms at the city jail. The Tombs, as said jail is called, is something of a misnomer—most of my cellmates were there for the oh-so-heinous crime of possession of controlled substances, which didn’t stop them from toking up behind bars. Jobless, more or less penniless (Taylor never did surrender her share of the rent) and desperate, I phoned Laura, my ex, whose now-fiancé Chet was a defense attorney at Legal Aid. Chet felt that representing me was a breach of ethics, or so he claimed. Instead, he pawned me off on the newest Legal Aid recruit, Elliott Gross.
Gross was a wet-behind-the-ears law school grad, with next to no trial experience, but his heart was in the right place. He still gave a shit—no small consolation, in that line of work. He genuinely loathed injustice. He did pro bono work for animal rights organizations and homeless shelters. And he was sharp. He was very sharp. Top of his class at Hofstra.
In the days that followed, I told Gross everything, every last detail, just as I’ve laid it out in these pages. He took it all in. He promised to do whatever it took to exonerate me. He liked me, I could tell, probably because I had more in common with him than the rest of his drug-addled clientele. As for me, I insisted on pleading innocent. I clung to the naïve faith that the truth would come out in the trial, which was scheduled for after the New Year.
“Mr. Lander is innocent of the charges,” he told the vulturine press, who were, as you might recall if you read the tabloids at the time, going to town with the story. JUNIOR EDITOR SLAIN IN CRIME OF PASSION. WOMAN, 23, KILLED BY JILTED LOVER. Nothing like spilt white-girl blood to spill ink, and the truth be damned. The articles were usually accompanied by Taylor’s college yearbook picture, which wasn’t particularly flattering, and my API photo ID headshot, which was even less so. And the press always referred to me by all three names, Todd Alan Lander, like mommies reprimanding a recalcitrant child. It was one of their ways of humiliating me, along with describing me as “friendless” (the Post), “a loner” (Newsday), and “almost certainly psychologically disturbed” (the Daily News).
My intrepid attorney did what he could to shelter me from the media shitstorm. But the shitstorm died down soon enough. I was like Robert Chambers, yet another lesser loser in a long line of notorious New Yorkers. The Preppie Killer, however, had only himself to blame. Me, I had as much control over my fate as the dude from the “Owner of a Lonely Heart” video.
The Friday before Thanksgiving—a holiday I would not get to spend with my dying father; I would never see him again—Elliott Gross met me in one of the interrogation rooms at the Tombs. He wore a goatee, which was fashionable in New York at the time (but is no longer, although the Red States seem not to have gotten the memo), and his suit, while a suit, was somehow unconvincing, like he was dressing up as a lawyer for a high school production of Night of January 16th.
“Cowboys are 7–5,” he said. “Looks like Jimmy Johnson can coach a little.”
“We’ll finish higher than the Giants,” I told him. “What’s up, counselor?”
There were two red plastic ashtrays and a cracked faux-wood table, and the fluorescents overhead buzzed and flickered. Pigskin small talk aside, I could tell from his demeanor he had something on his mind—something I didn’t want to hear.
“I know you want to plead innocent,” he began, “and I respect that decision. But the prosecution has offered a deal, and it’s my responsibility to present it.”
Lawyers sought pl
ea deals because they saved the taxpayers money—that’s what all the guys said at the Tombs. I saw no reason why I should spend time behind bars because some bureaucratic DA wanted to trim his budget. “Fuck that,” I said.
“Listen to me, Todd. Listen. Please. You’re being charged with murder in the second. Do you have any idea what that means?”
In the movies, of course, it’s always murder in the first. In the real world, they save that designation for cop killers. Murder in the second was the charge. Sorry I couldn’t be more romantic.
“Fifteen to life,” he continued, as if I were hearing this for the first time. “If you’re convicted, you’re looking at, realistically, nineteen or twenty years before parole. If you’re lucky. Years. Before parole. That’s a long fucking time, Todd.”
He was right; it was a long fucking time. I was only twenty-six. Nineteen years represented the entire interval between first grade and now.
“You plead guilty of a lesser charge—first-degree manslaughter is what’s on the table—and you could be out in as little as three. Three years is a lot less than twenty, Todd.”
“Seventeen, to be exact,” I told him. “But the math is beside the point. She was trying to kill me, Elliott.”
“Be that as it may, we still have to prove it. And your case is…”
“Is what?”
He made a wave sign with his hand.
“Whose side are you on?” I pounded my fist on the laminate that was supposed to make the table look like real wood. “She came after me with this poisoned needle. She was still holding it when she died. They must have recovered it.”
“Well, they didn’t.”
“Her diary, then. Exhibit A. It’s all there, every last detail.”
“We searched the apartment,” he said. “No diary.”
“The police took it. I saw the police take it. I was there when they took it.”
“That’s not what they claim.”
I was beside myself that the Boys in Blue had so shirked their responsibility. Police officers were good guys, beacons of light in a dark underworld, right? This was before Mark Fuhrman proved unequivocally that cops are as fallible, as corrupt, as the rest of us. And it did not even occur to me, gullible-ain’t-in-the-dictionary sap that I was, that the first responders, the men in suits, were not New York’s Finest.
Gross, who had been leaning against the wall, sat down backward on one of the chairs, like a cutup in a John Hughes movie. “I had lunch with Mike Poskevicius yesterday,” he said. “You know who that is?”
I did—the Tombs guys were terrified of him—but Gross answered anyway. “He’s the assistant district attorney. Nice enough guy, but tough as balls. He told me that he can prove, in court, that your story is—this is a direct quote—a steaming pile of shit.”
“Well, he’s wrong. Quid Pro Quo…”
“There is no Quid Pro Quo, Todd.”
“Yes, there is.”
Gross shook his head from side to side. This was to prepare for the come-to-Jesus portion of the meeting, although I didn’t realize it at the time. “It’s time to come clean. You want my help? Stop bullshitting me. There is no Quid Pro Quo.”
“I interviewed in the offices.”
“Right, the offices. Five-twenty Madison Avenue, I got that right? That’s the New York headquarters of the Carlyle Group, a financial services company. They’ve occupied that space for years.”
“Like hell.”
“Poskevicius showed me a copy of the lease.”
“Maybe they leased the office under an assumed name.” I was beginning to lose my patience. “Did you find Trey Parrish?”
“No.”
“Is he really so hard to track down? He lived in my building for years. There’s no paper trail on the guy?”
“Your landlord’s never heard of him.”
This was not that much of a surprise. My landlord was a heroin addict who only spoke Ukrainian. “Great.” Looking heavenward, perhaps for divine inspiration, I found only tobacco-stained ceiling tiles. “What about Asher Krug?”
Even before Gross spoke, I could see what was coming. Talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve—he’d have made a lousy poker player. “There’s no record of him, Todd. None. We checked the phone book, police records, student records at Yale, the co-op board at the Dakota. Nothing. And frankly, his name sounds a little…”
Here it comes, I thought. “A little what?”
“Made up.”
“Made up? You think I’m making this up?”
Gross shifted into his most authoritative lawyerly voice, as if he were auditioning for Law and Order (which began its second season in 1991). “Highly secretive employment agency. Very well financed. Offers a deal too good to be true. Everyone who passes through there has blood on his hands. Does that sound familiar, Todd?”
From his cheap briefcase, my attorney produced a copy of the bestselling novel of 1991. On its familiar green-marbled dustcover, a besuited man with a briefcase was pulled to and fro by marionette strings.
Gross held it up dramatically, like it was the lost Watergate tape. “It’s straight out of Grisham. Quid Pro Quo is just the recruiting arm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke. Even some of the names match…Nathan Ross, Nathan Locke. And who’s behind all the evildoing at Quid Pro Quo, Todd?” His voice took on a most unbecoming tone of sarcasm. “Let me guess…oh, could it be…the Mafia?”
This did not bode well for my defense.
“First of all,” I told him, “I never even read The Firm. I think Taylor did, but I never got around to it. I’m not into mass-market stuff. Second of all, it isn’t the Mafia. It’s the government. The Defense Department. I saw Dick Cheney there. In the office. He was there.”
“Dick Cheney?”
“The Secretary of Defense.”
“Well, gee, Todd, why didn’t you just say so? I’ll just go ahead and subpoena the Secretary of Defense.”
In 2009, of course, the idea of Dick Cheney being involved with a sub-rosa assassination squad doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched. Witness those CIA torture centers in Eastern Europe, or the White House energy meetings no one’s allowed to know about, or the fact that he shot his hunting companion square in the kisser. But in ’91, Cheney’s reputation was still impeccable. He was a compassionate conservative from Wyoming, a tool of the oil companies maybe, but innocuous. Most people had never heard of him.
“You think the government doesn’t kill people?” I said. “The government kills people all the time.”
It had only been a few weeks since Taylor’s death, and in those few weeks, I was pretty much useless. Not only was I in panic mode about my future—Life in jail? Really?—but I was still grieving her loss. Whatever the prosecution claimed, it was never my desire to kill her. Grappling with these weighty issues, I had not had a chance to contemplate Quid Pro Quo itself. What was it, exactly? Why did it exist? What was its purpose? My waking mind had never considered these basic questions, but my subconscious must have been mulling them over, because I found myself speaking effortlessly, as if delivering a monologue in acting class.
“The government kills people all the time,” I said again. “Americans. Our own people. The government killed JFK, the government killed RFK, the government killed Martin Luther King, the government tried to kill Ronald Reagan. And those are just the ones we know about. The dramatic ones. There are plenty more. Like those senators who died in the spring—Heinz and Tower? You think it was just a coincidence that they both died in plane crashes on successive days? Two guys who were prominently involved in the Iran-Contra hearings? No way. I’m telling you, Elliott, those were Quid Pro Quo hits.”
Gross was silent for a moment. Then his expression softened, and he nodded his head. Was I winning him over?
“And Elvis Presley? I suppose that was a Quid Pro Quo hit, too? Death by peanut-butter-banana-and-bacon sandwich?”
I sprung from the chair and began to pace around the table, like a caged cheetah I once
saw at the Bronx Zoo. “You really think I made all this up?”
“What I think is not important. It’s what the jury thinks.”
“That’s a good one. Did they teach you that in law school?” I stopped in my tracks. “Yoko Ono! Yoko Ono knows Asher Krug. We’ll get her to testify.”
Gross shot this down, too. Even if she did know Asher, so what? That wouldn’t prove anything, other than someone by that name existed.
“What about Donna Green?”
“She’s dead, all right. A hundred and fifty people witnessed it. She wasn’t murdered, though.”
“But the nerve agent…Cold Ethyl…”
“The only thing they found in her bloodstream was cocaine. A shitload of cocaine.”
“Donna didn’t do cocaine.”
“How the hell would you know?”
Touché.
I kept scrambling. “Go to this bar called Continental. Subpoena one of the bartenders, big dude with tattoos named J.D.”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“He slept with her.”
“With Donna Green?”
“With Taylor.”
“So what?”
So what, indeed. J.D. would know bubkes.
I snapped my fingers—eureka in the bathtub!
“Bill Seward,” I said. “She murdered a guy named Bill Seward. At that steakhouse…what was it called…Chez Molineaux.”
“We already checked on that,” Gross told me. “A man named Bob Seward died of a heart attack at the Ruth’s Chris near Rockefeller Center, which proves what? That men who eat steak have heart attacks? Take the plea, Todd.”
I ignored that. “What about Andrew Borden? She shot Andrew Borden. In Short Hills, New Jersey. It wasn’t a sanctioned Quid Pro Quo hit, so there should be more evidence. We can surely prove that.”
“Right. Andrew Borden. You mentioned that. Andrew and Abigail Borden. You know who Andrew and Abigail Borden are?”
“An investment banker and his wife.”
“Lizzie Borden’s parents. The ones she murdered with a hatchet. In 1892.”