by John Verdon
Esti looked incredulous. “Un-perjure himself?”
“Nice concept, don’t you think? I told him he could get out from under the avalanche of shit that was about to come down on him if he described how his original testimony was concocted entirely by Mick the Dick.”
“He spelled all that out on paper?”
“And signed it. I even got his fucking thumbprint on it.”
Esti looked cautiously pleased. “Does Freddie think you’re with BCI?”
“It’s possible he may have formed the impression that my connection with the bureau is more current than it actually is. I don’t really give a shit what he thinks. Do you?”
She shook her head. “Not if it helps put Klemper away. You have any leads on the other two witnesses who dropped out of sight—Jimmy Flats and Kay’s boyfriend, Darryl?”
“Not yet. But Freddie’s statement, along with the recording of Dave’s conversation with Alyssa, should absolutely seal the deal on the police misconduct issue—which in turn should seal the deal on Kay’s appeal.”
Hardwick’s happy little rhyme scraped Gurney’s brain like nails on a blackboard. But then it occurred to him that his edginess might be coming from another direction—from the unresolved question of Kay’s guilt, an issue quite apart from the fairness or unfairness of her trial. There was little doubt about the evidence tampering and witness tampering. But none of those illegalities made Kay Spalter innocent. As long as the identity of the person who hired Petros Panikos to kill Carl Spalter remained a mystery, Kay Spalter remained a viable suspect.
Esti’s voice broke into Gurney’s train of thought. “You said something about showing us some videos?”
“Yes. Right. In addition to my Skype conversation with Jonah, I have a couple of security camera sequences from Axton Avenue—a close-up view of someone entering the apartment building before the shooting, and a long-distance view of Carl getting hit and going down.” He looked at Hardwick. “Did you fill Esti in on how I got the videos?”
“Things were moving a little too fast. And there wasn’t much information in that thirty-second voice mail you left me.”
“And what information there was you decided to ignore, right?”
“The hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“My message to you was clear on the key point. I had told Klemper things would go better for him if the missing video material was to end up in my hands. Well, it did. But then you made your no-holds-barred appearance on Criminal Conflict—and bashed the ‘thoroughly corrupt’ detective on the case for framing Kay with perjured testimony. Everyone in the criminal justice system up here knows that the detective on the case was Mick Klemper—so you essentially named him and blamed him, and totally ignored my situation with him.”
Hardwick’s expression was darkening. “Like I said, things were moving fast. I’d just come from the arson by the lake—seven dead people, Davey, seven—and I was a fuckload more focused on the main battle than with the niceties of your tête-à-tête with Mick the Dick.” Hardwick went on, reminding Gurney that ambiguous promises and expedient lies were the hidden foundation stones of the criminal justice system. He wound up with a semi-rhetorical question. “Why the hell would you worry about a piece of shit like Klemper?”
Gurney opted for a practical and simplistic response, prompted by his memory of the odor of alcohol on the man and the almost incoherent message he left on Gurney’s voice mail the next day. “My concern is that Mick Klemper is an angry drunk being backed into a corner, and that he might be desperate enough to do something stupid.”
When Hardwick said nothing, Gurney continued. “So I’m keeping my Beretta a little closer than usual, just in case. In the meantime, Esti asked about the videos. So let’s take a look. I’ll run the street-view sequence first, then the long shot of the cemetery.”
Chapter 48
Montell Jones
After they watched the security camera videos twice, Hardwick asked, “Can we prove that Klemper had these in his possession at the time of the trial?”
“I’m not sure we can prove he ever had them. The electronics store owner might be talked into providing an affidavit, saying he turned the videos over, but he’s shadier than Klemper. And besides—”
Esti broke in. “But you asked Klemper for the recordings and he gave them to you.”
“I told him if I got the recordings, things might go better for him. And the next day they appeared in my mailbox. You and I know what that means. But legally, it’s a yard or two short of proving possession. In any event, who had the recordings or when they had them isn’t the important thing. What’s important is what’s on them.”
Hardwick looked ready to object, but Gurney pressed on. “The importance of the long-distance cemetery sequence is that it shows Carl being shot in the exact spot where everyone said he was shot—which essentially confirms the impossibility of the shot having come from the window that Klemper’s team claims it came from.”
Esti looked troubled. “This is like the fourth time I’ve heard you talk about the bullet thing—the contradiction in where it came from. What do you think is the answer?”
“Honestly, Esti? I’m going around in circles on that one. The physical and chemical evidence in the apartment where the murder weapon was found says that’s where the bullet must have been fired. The line of sight to the victim says it couldn’t have been.”
“This reminds me of the Montell Jones mess over in Schenectady. You remember that one, Jack? Five, six years ago?”
“Drug dealer? Big controversy over whether it was a righteous kill?”
“Right.” She turned to Gurney. “Young officer in a cruiser is making his rounds in a druggy neighborhood—bright, sunny day—when he gets a ‘shots fired’ call, location about two blocks from where he is. Ten seconds, he’s there, out of the car. People on the street point him to a broad alley between two warehouses, say that’s where they heard two shots a couple of minutes earlier. He’s first on the scene, should wait for backup, but he doesn’t. Instead, he pulls out his nine-millimeter, steps into the alley. Facing him, about fifty feet away, is Montell Jones, local bad guy, violent drug dealer, super-long rap sheet. The way the officer tells it, he sees that Montell’s got his own nine. In his hand. He raises it slowly in the officer’s direction. Officer shouts at him to drop it. The nine keeps coming up. Officer fires one round. Montell goes down. Other cruisers start arriving. Montell’s bleeding out through a hole in his stomach. Ambulance comes, takes him away, he’s pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. Everything seems totally righteous. Young officer is a hero for about twenty-four hours. Then everything goes to hell. Internal Affairs calls him in and gets his account of the shooting. He has no doubt about anything. All crystal-clear—facing Montell, sunny, perfect visibility, Montell’s nine rising toward him. Officer fires, Montell goes down. End of story. The IA interviewer asks him again. He goes through it again. And again. They have it all on tape. They have the whole thing transcribed, printed out, he signs it. Then they drop the bombshell. ‘We have a problem here. The ME says the stomach wound was an exit wound, not an entry wound.’ The officer is speechless, he can’t grasp what he just heard. He asks them what the hell they’re talking about. They tell him it’s simple. He shot Montell in the back. And now they’d like to know why.”
“Sounds like every cop’s worst nightmare,” said Gurney. “But at least this Montell guy had a loaded weapon, right?”
“He did. That much was okay. But the bullet in the back was a big problem.”
“Did the cop try to use the old ‘He turned away just as I pulled the trigger’ explanation?”
“No. He kept saying that the shooting went down exactly the way he described it. He even insisted that Montell absolutely did not turn away, that he was facing him straight on from start to finish.”
“Interesting,” said Gurney, a thoughtful light in his eyes. “What’s the punch line?”
“Montell had actually been
shot in the back a couple of minutes earlier by an unknown assailant—hence the original report of shots fired to which the officer was responding. After being left to die in the alley, Montell managed to get back up on his feet—just in time for our hero to arrive. Montell was probably in a state of shock, didn’t know what the hell he was doing with his gun. Officer fires—misses Montell completely—and Montell collapses again.”
“How did IA finally put it all together?”
“A thorough second search of the area turned up a slug in the gutter outside the alley with a trace of Montell’s DNA on it—the gutter behind where the officer had been standing, meaning the original round had come from the opposite direction.”
“Lucky find,” said Gurney. “Could have turned out differently.”
“Don’t knock it,” said Esti. “Sometimes luck is all you got.”
Hardwick was drumming his fingertips on the table. “How does this alley thing relate to the Spalter shooting?”
“I don’t know. But for some reason it came to mind. So maybe it does relate somehow,” Esti said.
“How? You think Carl was shot from a different direction? Not from the apartment house?”
“I don’t know, Jack. The story happened to come to mind. I can’t explain it. What do you think, Dave?”
Gurney answered hesitatingly. “It’s an interesting example of two things occurring in a way that everyone assumes are connected but aren’t.”
“What two things?”
“The officer shooting at Montell, and Montell getting shot.”
Chapter 49
Positively Satanic
While they were finishing their second round of coffee, Gurney played the recording of his Skype conversation with Jonah Spalter.
When it ended, Hardwick was the first to react. “I don’t know who’s the bigger piece of shit—Mick the Dick or this asshole.”
Gurney smiled. “Paulette Purley, resident manager of Willow Rest, is convinced Jonah’s a saint, out to save the world.”
“All those saints out to save the world ought to be ground up for fertilizer. Bullshit is good for the soil.”
“Better for the soil than the soul, right, Jack?”
“You can say that again, brother.”
“He got fifty million dollars as a result of his brother’s death?” asked Esti. “Is that true?”
“He didn’t deny it,” said Gurney.
“Hell of a motive,” said Hardwick.
“In fact,” Gurney went on, “he didn’t seem interested in denying anything. Seemed comfortable admitting that he profited enormously from Carl’s death. No problem admitting that he hated the man. Happy to reel off all the reasons everyone should have hated him.”
Esti nodded. “Called him ‘monster,’ ‘sociopath,’ ‘megalomaniac’…”
“Also called him ‘positively satanic,’ ” added Hardwick. “As opposed to himself, who he’d like us to see as positively angelic.”
Esti continued. “He admitted he’d do anything for that Cathedral thing of his. Anything. Actually sounded like he was bragging.” She paused. “It’s strange. He admitted to all these motives for murder like it didn’t matter. Like he felt we couldn’t touch him.”
“Like a man with powerful connections,” added Hardwick.
“Except at the end,” said Gurney.
Esti frowned. “You mean the thing about his mother?”
“Unless he’s the world’s greatest actor, I believe he was truly disturbed at that point. But I’m not sure whether he was disturbed by the fact that she might have been murdered, or by the fact that we knew about it. I also find it peculiar that he was eager to know what evidence we had but never asked the more basic question: ‘Why would someone kill my mother?’ ”
Hardwick showed his teeth in a humorless grin. “Kinda gives you the impression that the warm and wonderful Jonah in reality might not give a fuck about anyone. Including his mother.”
Esti looked confused. “So where do we go from here?”
Hardwick’s chilly grin widened. He pointed at Gurney’s list of unresolved issues lying on the table next to the open laptop. “That’s easy. We follow the ace detective’s road map of clues and clever questions.”
They each took one of the copies Gurney had printed out. They read through the eight points silently.
The further down the list Esti read, the more worried her expression became. “This list is … depressing.”
Gurney asked what gave her that feeling.
“It makes it painfully clear that we don’t know much at this point. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes and no,” said Gurney. “It enumerates a lot of unanswered questions, but I’m convinced that discovering the answer to any one of them could make all the others fall into place.”
She offered a grudging nod but appeared unconvinced. “I hear what you’re saying, but … where do we start? If we could coordinate the efforts of the relevant agencies—BCI, FBI, OCTF, Interpol, Homeland Security, DMV, et cetera—and throw some major manpower against the case, tracking down this Panikos character might be feasible. But, as it is … what are we supposed to do? Panikos aside, we just don’t have the hands and feet and hours to look into all the other relationships and conflicts in the lives of Carl, Jonah, Kay, Alyssa—not to mention Angelidis and Gurikos and God knows who else.” She shook her head in a gesture of helplessness.
Her comments produced the longest silence of the meeting.
At first, Hardwick showed no reaction at all. He appeared to be comparing his thumbs, studying their relative size and shape.
Esti stared at him. “Jack, you have any feeling about this?”
He looked up and cleared his throat. “Sure. We have two separate situations. One is Kay’s appeal process, which Lex’s partner tells me is in great shape. The other is the effort to answer the ‘Who killed Carl?’ question, which is a trickier deal altogether. But yon crafty Sherlock has an optimistic look in his eye.”
Her anxious gaze moved to Gurney. “Optimism? You feel that?”
“Actually, yes, a bit.”
Even as he was saying this, he was struck by the rapid change in his attitude in the short time since he’d first put his list of issues together and reacted to it with frustration at the complexity of the project and lack of law enforcement resources he’d once taken for granted—exactly what Esti was just complaining about.
Neither the complexity nor the resource problem had gone away. But he’d finally realized that he didn’t need answers to an endless series of perplexing questions to unlock the solution.
Esti looked skeptical. “How can you be optimistic when there are so many things we don’t know?”
“We may not have a lot of answers yet, but … we do have a person.”
“We have a person? What person?”
“Peter Pan.”
“What do you mean, we have him?”
“I mean he’s here. In this area. Something about our investigation is keeping him here.”
“What’s this ‘something’?”
“I think he’s afraid that we’ll discover his secret.”
“The secret behind the nails in Fat Gus’s head?”
“Yes.”
Hardwick began tapping his fingers on the table. “What makes you think it’s Panikos’s secret and not the secret of whoever hired him?”
“Something Angelidis told me. He said Panikos only accepts pure hit contracts. No restrictions. No special instructions. You want somebody dead, you give him the money and chances are they end up dead. But he handles all the details his own way. So if a message was being sent with the nails in Fat Gus’s head, it was Panikos’s message—something that mattered to him.”
Hardwick produced his acid-reflux grimace. “Sounds like you’re putting a shitload of trust in what Angelidis told you—a mobster who lies, cheats, and steals for a living.”
“There’d be no advantage to him in lying about the way Panikos does business. A
nd everything else we’ve learned about Panikos, especially from your friend at Interpol, supports what Angelidis said. Peter Pan operates by his own rules. Nobody gets to tell him what to do.”
“You’re suggesting the boy may be a bit of a control freak?”
Gurney smiled at the understatement. “No one ordered him to shoot out the lights in your house, Jack. He doesn’t take orders like that. I don’t believe anyone ordered him to burn down those houses in Cooperstown, or to walk away with Lex Bincher’s head in a tote bag.”
“You suddenly sound awful goddamn sure about this shit.”
“I’ve been thinking about it long enough. It’s about time I started to see at least one piece of it clearly.”
Esti threw up her hands in bafflement. “I’m sorry, maybe I’m being dense here, but what is it you see so clearly?”
“The open door that’s been right there in front of us all along.”
“What open door?”
“Peter Pan himself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s responding to our actions, to our investigation of Carl’s murder. A response equals a connection. A connection equals an open door.”
“Responding to our actions?” Esti appeared incredulous, almost angry. “You mean by shooting at Jack’s house? By killing Lex and his neighbors in Cooperstown?”
“He’s trying to stop what we’re doing.”
“So we investigate, and his response is to shoot and burn and kill. That’s what you’re calling an open door?”
“It proves he’s paying attention. It proves he’s still here. He hasn’t left the country. He hasn’t slipped back into his hole in the ground. It proves we can reach him. We just have to figure out how to reach him in a way that provokes a reaction we can work with.”
Esti’s eyes narrowed, her expression shifting from disbelief to speculation. “You mean, like, use the media—maybe that asshole Bork—to offer Panikos some kind of deal to reveal who hired him?”