Felony Murder Read online

  He also needed a men’s room. Badly.

  He looked around. There was a McDonald’s on the corner, but a sign on the door announced no restrooms. There ought to be a law, thought Dean, taking a deep breath and willing his knees to stop shaking. To the west was a parking garage, but the long ramp down looked uninviting to his ankle and unpromising to his bladder. Farther west and across the street was what looked like a restaurant. He squinted to make out the name.

  CHANDLER’S STEAK HOUSE

  It might have hit him right away had he not been so preoccupied with his urinary distress. Nonetheless, looking at the name, Dean sensed that it was significant, though he could not quite grasp how or why. Then it dawned on him, and his squint smoothed into a grin, which broadened into a smile before giving way to an outright laugh. One or two passersby craned their necks to stare at him, but the rest went about their business, taking no apparent note of one more New Yorker with his oars not quite in the water. To all of that, of course, Dean Abernathy was quite oblivious; indeed, the revelation made him momentarily forget the urgency of his need for a restroom, the body being the slave of the mind that it is. He had found Chand, S.H.

  Checking his answering machine for messages that evening, Dean listened to the voice of Walter Bingham: The 911 tape had finally come in. There was also a call from a new client with a drunk driving case. And Bobby McGrane had set up a Friday night meeting with the FBI agent with whom he was working, and he hoped that was okay with Dean.

  Sure, Dean said to himself, why should I have a life?

  On Friday morning, Dean picked up his copy of the 911 tape at Walter Bingham’s office. Holding it in his hand, he had an almost overpowering feeling of excitement. He wanted immediately to be back in his office listening to it, so certain he was that it contained some important clue - no, some revelation - that would begin to unlock the mystery of this case. For weeks now Dean had been experiencing a growing sense that there was something going on here, some other level of events beneath the surface of things that he could not quite see but could nevertheless feel. So the sensation of the tape in his hand was nothing less than electric, and the anticipation of playing it, hearing it, listening to the actual voice of the 911 caller, made his heart pound in his chest.

  And yet it would have to wait. Three cases on the court calendar dragged out all morning. A seventeen-year-old was placed on probation for throwing rocks off a twenty-story rooftop, lucky that the only damage he had caused was to the roof of a car. A homeless woman accused of loitering and resisting arrest turned down a plea offer and got a trial date set. And finally, just minutes before the one o’clock recess, a bench warrant was issued for a minor drug seller who had failed to show up for sentencing.

  Skipping lunch, Dean all but ran back to his office, forgetting about his ankle and jaywalking dangerously across Broadway. He postponed his habitual change back to jeans and sneakers in favor of hooking up a portable cassette player and inserting the tape. He closed the door to his room, took out a pen and notepad, and pressed the play button.

  There was the usual introduction of date and time, as well as the date of the rerecording of the tape, followed by code numbers and technical data. Then Dean was listening to the 911 caller herself, to her own words, in her own voice, exactly as she had spoken to the emergency operator early that January morning, as she looked out from her window through the swirling snow and across Bleecker Street.

  “Emergency Operator Twenty-three. May I help you?”

  “Yes, I’m watching a crime.”

  “What sort of crime, ma’am?”

  “A robbery, I guess, a mugging.”

  “Where is this occurring, ma’am?”

  “Right across the street. Across from Seventy-seven Bleecker Street.”

  “What are the cross streets, ma’am?”

  “What?”

  “Seventy-seven Bleecker Street, ma’am. What streets is that between?”

  “Oh. Sixth and Seventh.”

  “Sixth and Seventh. Ma’am, I’m going to ask you to hold on a moment. What’s your phone number in case we get disconnected? Ma’am? Ma’am? Ma’am? Ma’am? Ma’am?”

  Then there was a dial tone. A voice came on announcing that that concluded the first call, which had begun at 2:28 a.m. and ended at 2:29. The second and final call began at 2:32. This time the operator was a male; the caller was the same woman.

  “Emergency Operator Six. May I help you?”

  “Yes, I called a few minutes ago, about a robbery on Bleecker Street.”

  “Just a minute please.” There was a pause, then, “Yes, Bleecker Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Do you have anything else you can tell us?”

  “He’s gone. He took money from the guy, and he left.”

  “Which way did he go?”

  “To the right.”

  “Which way is right, Sixth or Seventh?”

  “Seventh, he went toward Seventh Avenue.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How tall did he look?”

  “He looked short, maybe five four, five five.”

  “Black, white, Hispanic?”

  “White. Or Hispanic. I couldn’t tell. Not black.”

  “Could you see what he was wearing?”

  “He has a dark jacket and a dark wool cap, black or navy, I’m not sure.”

  “Okay. Could you give me your name, please?” (There was a break in the recording where the name had been erased.) “And your phone number?” (Another break.)

  Again a voice came on announcing the end of the call. It was 2:33 a.m. Dean pressed the stop button. The rest of the tape, containing the radio transmissions to and from the responding police units, could wait. It was the voice of the 911 caller that interested Dean, and he knew it was a voice he had heard before.

  He pulled out his Spadafino case file, which by now had grown to two inches in thickness, and thumbed through the contents until he found the pages of notes he had made during his futile attempts to locate the apartment in 77 Bleecker Street from which the calls had been made. He found the list of the eleven tenants whose windows fronted on Bleecker Street, nine of whose names were followed by phone numbers. He counted the number of characters in the name Janet Killian. Including the space between the first and last name, there were thirteen, precisely the number of characters that had been blacked out in the copy of the sprint report Dean had been given. He dialed the number next to her name.

  The 911 caller answered on the second ring.

  True to the promise he had made to Bobby McGrane, Dean had set aside that night to meet with Bobby and the FBI agent with whom he was cooperating. Dean had expected the meeting to take place at the FBI office at Federal Plaza, but Bobby had called to say that Leo - that was the agent’s name - was working undercover infiltrating the Garment District mafia and couldn’t risk being followed to or from a government building. Leo had suggested they meet at a little bar and restaurant on the West Side called the Allstate Café. When he added that the FBI would spring for dinner, Dean readily agreed.

  Dean found the Allstate, a long, smoke-filled room three steps below street level on Seventy-Second Street. He saw Bobby at a back table, sitting with a good-looking man wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. Bobby spotted Dean looking and waved him over. Sweatshirt stood up as Dean neared the table and extended his hand.

  “Leo Silvestri,” he said.

  “Dean Abernathy.” The handshake was firm.

  “Hiya, Dean,” said Bobby.

  “Hello, Bobby.”

  “Well,” said Dean, turning to Leo, “you sure don’t look like a Febe. No raincoat, no suit-”

  Leo laughed warmly. “That’s the idea. Those days are over,” he said. “We actually get our hands dirty from time to time.”

  Dean was surprised to find that the beer was cold and the food excellent. He ordered something called Southw
estern-Style Paella, and the taste more than made up for the inauspicious name. Bobby tried to order lamb shark and was disappointed to learn he had misread the menu and would have to settle for lamb shank. Leo had steak.

  Leo explained that Bobby was providing important cooperation in the Garment District investigation. He had already succeeded in introducing Leo to some guys who were involved in trucking on Seventh Avenue. Trucking was the key in the business, Leo said: If you couldn’t move your goods, you couldn’t fill orders. And the wise guys had a stranglehold on the trucking routes. You did business with them, which meant on their terms and at their prices, or you didn’t do business. It was that simple. Independent truckers who tried to break into the system found their trucks hijacked or sabotaged and their goods stolen, misdelivered, or mysteriously damaged.

  Bobby and Leo had arranged a cover story that they had met in prison and done some burglaries together. It seemed to be working so far.

  “How about his parole?” Dean wanted to know. “Do they know about this?”

  “Yeah, I spoke with his PO myself. He’s okay,” said Leo. “As long as Bobby’s straight with us, he’s willing to ignore the little problem that brought him to our attention in the first place.”

  “And when does all this end?”

  “Hard to say, Counselor. We figure Bobby owes us another month or two of solid work. After that, it’s his choice. He wants to walk away, everything’s squared up. He doesn’t owe us, we don’t owe him, and his PO doesn’t violate him. On the other hand, if he wants to keep working, he’ll get paid. Won’t get rich, but it’ll be enough to keep him out of trouble. Sound fair?”

  Dean turned to Bobby. “Sound fair to you?”

  “Yup.”

  “Sounds fair to me,” said Dean. He asked Leo for a phone number.

  “Well, the central switchboard number is 335-2700,” said Leo, “but don’t try to reach me there. When I’m deep undercover like now, I can’t go near the office. Let me give you my beeper number and a special code so I’ll know it’s one of the good guys calling.” He pulled out his wallet and extracted a business card. He wrote something on the back and handed it to Dean, who read it.

  LEO N. SILVESTRI

  INVESTOR

  LICENSED AND BONDED (212) 483-1927

  On the reverse side, Leo had written a code number.

  “Punch that in after you enter your own phone number, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Dean, putting the card in his own wallet, which was already crammed with a dozen assorted others.

  It was Saturday night before Dean got up the courage to go into Chandler’s Steak House. He had resisted the temptation to walk right in and start asking questions. He had known he first needed a game plan, a strategy. Which meant he had to figure out what was to be learned by going in. So he had hailed a cab - an unusual step for Dean - and headed home, his knees jiggling tightly together the entire ride, in the manner of a small boy too shy to ask to use the bathroom.

  In the end, he couldn’t quite put his finger on what he hoped to learn at Chandler’s. Commissioner Wilson had spent more than two hours there. Then he had been driven to within a block of his home. He had stepped out of the car, said good night to his chauffeur, Officer Santana, and continued on foot through the falling snow toward his door on Bleecker Street. He had never made it.

  Dean wanted to talk to someone who had seen the Commissioner during the hours preceding his death. Had he looked all right? Had he complained of fatigue, of difficulty breathing? Had there been chest pain? Had he had too much to eat or drink? Departmental loyalty would prevent Officer Santana from answering these questions, but perhaps a waiter or bartender might be coaxed into providing some information.

  He had waited all evening Saturday, the same night of the week that had been Wilson’s last, and had walked into Chandler’s just after midnight, hoping to maximize the chances that some of the same people who had seen the Commissioner that night would be there now. He was not to be disappointed.

  Although dinner was no longer being served, the long bar was crowded and the place was noisy with the competition of voices and jukebox music. Roy Orbison promised that “anything you want, you got it, baby,” and smoke hung thickly in the air. Dean stood by the end of the bar, ordered a beer, and bided his time. When a stool opened up some twenty minutes later, he took it and ordered another beer. Determined to nurse this one along, he swung around slowly and surveyed the crowd. This was a man’s place; of the thirty or so patrons clustered in groups of three and fours, Dean counted only a half-dozen women. And the men had “cop” written all over them. Not beat cops, though; these were the brass, and this was their officers’ club. Edward Wilson had spent his last evening drinking with the elite of the New York Police Department.

  Dean’s opening finally came when a barmaid - he had already decided it was no accident that two of the three bartenders were women - asked him what he did during the daylight.

  “I’m a writer,” said Dean.

  “Oh? What kind of writer?”

  “Freelance. Just now I’m working on a piece for New York magazine about Police Commissioner Wilson. Sort of a human-interest thing. You know, heartwarming and all that stuff.”

  “He was a nice man,” she said.

  “You knew him?” asked Dean. “I mean, I know he used to come in here. But you really knew him?”

  “Sure,” she smiled. “Ray knew him best, though. Served him that night. You know, the last night he was in here.” And with that, she called out, “Ray,” and the lone male bartender came over obediently, drying’a glass with a towel.

  “Guy’s writing a story about Commissioner Wilson,” she said, introducing Dean to Ray with her eyes. “Needs some mushy stuff.”

  “Nice man,” said Ray, shaking his head sadly.

  “I understand you served him that last night,” said Dean.

  “Yeah, I’m afraid I did.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Well, not afraid afraid,” said Ray.

  “Then?”

  “Well,” said Ray, “it’s just that knowing what happened later, it’s easy to say he might’ve had too much to drink that night. But, you know, how do you tell the Police Commissioner that?”

  “I guess not.” Dean smiled. He ordered another beer. “Really too much, or just . . .” He let the question complete itself.

  “Oh, really too much,” Ray said, then quickly added, “not that he was driving, you know. The Commissioner gets a chauffeur. But he was feeling no pain, if you know what I mean. Right, Sam?”

  The barmaid, who evidently answered to the unlikely name of Sam, nodded in agreement. “That’s for sure,” she said.

  “What did he drink?” Dean asked.

  Sam’s “Beer or wine” collided with Ray’s “Jack Daniel’s.” Ray explained: “Usually he stuck to beer or wine, Sam’s right. But that night they must’ve been celebrating. Putting away the good stuff. He was doing his share, and then some.”

  “They?”

  “A bunch of the Big Brass.”

  Let it go, thought Dean. It didn’t matter who was with him. “Did he seem sick or anything?”

  Ray and Sam exchanged glances this time. It was Ray that answered. “He looked tired, is how I remember it. Like he’d been working too hard. He usually looked so energetic, you know. That night he did look sick, if you want to know the truth.”

  Thinking about it later, Dean had the uneasy feeling that it had all been just a bit too easy. For one thing, he had actually been more than ready to pay for information. After all, in the movies didn’t the bartender always want a twenty before answering the reporter’s question? But beyond that, this was a place where the brass came and spent their money. In return, they would expect the kind of loyalty an establishment bestows upon its regulars. The last thing they would want was for the help to share confidences with an outsider, particularly a reporter. Yet not one, but two bartenders, in the presence of each other, had done just that, readil
y admitting that their most valued customer had been drinking to excess the night of his death. And while Joey Spadafino corroborated their account by confirming that Wilson had been staggering drunk the morning of his death, there was the little thing of the serology report: At the time of his death, the Commissioner had had a blood alcohol level of only .04 percent. Hardly the reading one would expect of someone who had been knocking back Jack Daniel’s for two and a half hours.

  Unless, of course, the .04 percent figure was wrong.

  Dean spent all of Sunday morning trying to come up with the best approach to get Janet Killian to talk with him. The first time he had reached her, going down his list of 77 Bleecker Street tenants and posing as a police inspector offering her a reward for having called the 911 operator, she had said she didn’t know what he was talking about and had hung up on him. The second time had been Friday afternoon, when, having just listened to the tape, Dean had called her again to compare her voice with that of the 911 caller. When she had answered, Dean had asked for Miss Killington. He made the name close enough so that Janet would have to say something before realizing that it was a different name from hers and a wrong number. But the truth was that she hadn’t had to say much; Dean knew immediately that the voices were one and the same.

  Now Dean needed more. He needed to get her to talk about what she had witnessed that night, needed to know if she had really seen a knife in Joey Spadafino’s hand, needed to find out if it had really been a robbery or if Joey’s story about Wilson collapsing all on his own was true.

  But Janet Killian seemed to have a compelling reason not to talk about the incident. She had hung up on a caller who wanted to give her money for having dialed 911. What would it take to persuade her to talk?

  Dean concocted elaborate hoax after elaborate hoax. He was a reporter for The New York Times writing a retrospective piece about Commissioner Wilson. A professor at Columbia doing research on how New York citizens do get involved, Kitty Genovese notwithstanding. A filmmaker needing a shot of Bleecker Street from the exact angle of her window. But each time he played a scenario back in his mind, he had to admit that it was no better - and often far worse - than the reward hoax that had already failed.