Felony Murder Page 12

  In the end, he decided to settle for the truth. He would appeal to Janet Killian with his own heartfelt sincerity, the same sincerity he had mustered time and again in addressing juries at summation. Of course, there were some differences. For one thing, with a jury, Dean had his sincere good looks there to help him. He could stand in front of the jury box, making eye contact with each juror willing to meet his steady gaze. Over the years, he had on occasion heard his voice crack with emotion and felt his eyes come close to spilling over with tears. But a jury was a captive audience. They could look away, they could yawn, they could even doze off (and Dean had seen just that happen more than once). But for better or worse, they were stuck there sitting in front of him for as long as he chose to talk to them. They couldn’t hang up the phone. This was different. What Dean needed was a grabber, a way to keep Janet Killian listening for a minute so that he could somehow get through to her, get her to trust him and talk with him.

  Over and over, he practiced his introduction. He paced the floor; he spoke to his bathroom mirror; he cleared his throat. By the time he finally picked up the phone on Sunday afternoon, his shirt was wet with perspiration at the back and under the arms. He was reminded of phone calls made long ago, of calling to invite the class beauty to the junior prom, of phoning to find out whether he had been accepted or rejected by the college of his choice, of inquiring from a pay phone to hear whether that desperately needed job was his, of calling to learn whether he had passed or flunked the bar exam. He cleared his throat one final time and dialed. The phone rang once, twice, three times.

  “Hello?” It was her.

  “Miss Killian?”

  “Yes?”

  “Miss Killian, my name is Dean Abernathy, and I’m a lawyer and I beg you to listen to me for a minute. You don’t have to say a word, just please listen to what I have to say.”

  There was no response, but there was no click, either. Dean pushed on.

  “I’m the lawyer they’ve appointed to defend the guy who’s charged in the death of the Police Commissioner. I called you once before and lied to you about there being a reward. I apologize, I shouldn’t have done that. I’m also the one who called on Friday and asked for Miss Killington. I apologize for that, too. I shouldn’t have done that, either, but I had to hear your voice. Miss Killian, I need to speak with you. I give you my word I’m not going to harm you, I’m not going to endanger you in any way. I just need to ask you a few questions, and then I’ll leave you alone, I promise.” Dean took a breath. He had gotten through his preamble without getting hung up on. On the other end, there was still silence.

  Then, finally, she spoke. “Would you spell your name for me, please?”

  “Sure,” said Dean. “A-B-E-R-N-A-T-H-Y. The first name is Dean, D-E-A-N.”

  “And your phone number?”

  Dean gave her both his home and office numbers.

  “I’ll get back to you,” said Janet Killian.

  Around the corner from Dean’s building was a homeless man who begged for change. Dean sometimes gave him a quarter. On the occasions he did not, he would say “Sorry” to the man, who would then respond with “Thank you for at least listening to me.”

  “Thank you for at least listening to me,” Dean now said to Janet Killian.

  * * *

  It was almost eleven when his phone rang. Dean was working on the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. The theme was opera, which had put him at a great disadvantage, but, working at it on and off all day, he had filled in all the long answers, and was missing only about four or five small words. He was trying to come up with a seven-letter word for a Muslim ascetic for eighty-six across, and had _E_VIS_, when the sudden ring made him jump.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Dean Abernathy?” said a male voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Abernathy, this is Det. Richard Rasmussen. Forgive me for calling you at home, and so late in the evening.”

  “That’s okay,” said Dean, trying to place the name.

  “I understand you’d like to speak with a Miss Janet Killian with regard to the Wilson homicide.” If the ringing of the phone had caused Dean to jump, this brought him to his feet.

  “That’s right, I really would.”

  “The woman’s been through a lot,” said the detective. “She really doesn’t want to talk to anyone else.”

  “I can appreciate that,” Dean said, trying to imagine what she had been through that was so difficult, but not wanting to be confrontational. “All I want is about ten minutes of her time. I just want her to tell me what she saw.”

  “And then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She tells you what she saw. She tells you she saw your client pull a knife on the victim, saw the victim grab his chest and go down, saw your client go through his pockets and take his money. Then what?”

  “Then,” said Dean, struggling for the right answer, “then I can tell my client once and for all that he’s full of shit and it’s time to cop out. That’s what.”

  “It’s very irregular, you know, Counselor?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Me trying to work it out so you can talk to a witness who don’t wanna talk to you in the first place.”

  “Look,” said Dean, lowering his tone to sound like the Voice of Reason, “I don’t want to try this case. It’s going to be a fucking bloodbath, I know that. Get me ten minutes with the witness. You pick the spot. You sit in. She answers my questions. I talk to my client. He cops out. She never has to come to court and testify. Why don’t you tell her that?” And then, pulling out all the stops, he added, “C’mon, I’m not going to bite her. I’m not such a bad guy, I used to be On the Job.” Police speak for: I used to be a cop.

  “I know,” said the detective to Dean’s surprise. Then, “I’ll get back to you in a day or two, Counselor.”

  For the first time in nearly three months, Dean fell asleep feeling hopeful. He was acutely aware that he had been expending an enormous amount of energy on a case that was probably completely hopeless to begin with. Was he on to something with these tiny clues he was picking up or was he just grasping at straws? If you looked hard enough at something, you could always find some irregularity, some infinitesimal incongruity from which you could begin to see the seeds of doubt germinate and begin to sprout. Hadn’t half a nation come to believe that Oswald hadn’t killed Kennedy? Weren’t there those who insisted, against overwhelming evidence, that the Holocaust had never happened, that HIV didn’t cause AIDS, and that man had not evolved from the apes?

  But even in his awareness that he might be denying the obvious to the point of being a sore loser, Dean couldn’t help feeling hopeful. Hopeful because now he was on the verge of finding out one way or another what had really happened that night. He was about to gain access to the star of the prosecution’s case, the very eyewitness who placed the knife in Joey Spadafino’s hand and, in doing so, put the lie to his story that he had been but an innocent bystander to the Commissioner’s death. As soon as Dean heard the truth in her own words, he could put an end to this absurd charade of innocence being played out between insistent client and skeptical lawyer. “Okay, Joey,” he heard himself saying, “it’s over,” and Joey, nodding in agreement, pleading for Dean to get back the fifteen-to-life offer he had earlier so foolishly turned down.

  Joey Spadafino is anything but hopeful. As Dean falls asleep on a soft couch in front of his fireplace on the West Side of Manhattan Island, Joey lies sleepless on his bunk in C-93’s B Block on Rikers Island. Unlike Dean, Joey doesn’t live alone on his island. He shares his nine-by-twelve-foot cubicle with two cellmates, who at this moment snore and fart and toss in their sleep. Joey doesn’t sleep. He’s been on the Rock nearly three months, and he sees no end in sight. Other inmates come and go, get bailed out, take pleas, hit the street, or move on upstate. Joey stays. In three months, he’s gone from being New Kid on the Block (an expression that takes on a very literal meanin
g in prison) to Longtimer. It’s a change in status that brings with it some measure of physical security, since the newcomers tend to defer to those inmates who’ve been here long enough to have made friends and forged alliances with others. But Joey can’t shake the feeling that he’s going to be here forever and that time - which is something that exists only on the outside - is passing him by.

  His court appearances are now three weeks apart. The routine is the same. They wake him up at four in the morning by clanging a metal pipe against the bars of his cell. He isn’t permitted a shower, and because he’s got only two changes of clothes, he turns out in whatever he’s slept in, tucking in his shirt and slipping into his sneakers. When he walks, he’s got to curl his toes to keep his sneakers from falling off, because either they’ve stretched or Joey’s feet have gotten thinner as he’s steadily lost weight. He can’t lace up his sneakers because inmates are not allowed laces for fear they might use them to hang themselves or strangle one another.

  Joey’s losing weight because he can’t eat the food. It’s all milk and potatoes and bread, everything white. He’d been living on the street, and he longs for a hot dog with onions, a slice of pizza, even a piece of fruit scavenged from a Dumpster outside a supermarket. His stomach aches and rumbles all day because he can’t go to the bathroom. In the cell, there’s a bare commode for pissing and shitting, but Joey finds it impossible to take a shit in front of other people. He waits until night when his cellmates are asleep, but even then he imagines they’re awake and listening to his noises.

  On court days, he gets led out of his cell at four-fifteen and locked into the day room with twenty other inmates. There are seats for eight. Joey, who’s white and therefore in the minority, finds a spot on the floor to sit, a corner if he’s lucky, a wall if he isn’t. He can sit like that for as much as four hours until his name is called out, and he’s led, in the early-morning darkness, along with five or six others, to a bus with torn seat cushions and grates on the windows. He rides for an hour or more, breathing the stink of forty other inmates, none of whom has showered or brushed their teeth or taken a shit since the night before. He rides in a din of snoring, belching, farting, grumbling men. There’s no joking, no small talk. Each man on the bus is apprehensive about going to court, wondering if his lawyer will show up this time, knowing he may sit all day and never even be brought into the courtroom, but also knowing that this may turn out to be the day he fears, the day they try to railroad him, to fuck with him.

  By the time they arrive at Centre Street, it’s light out. The bus can wait in line for another hour before pulling into the unloading bay. There the inmates are handcuffed in pairs and led off into a freight elevator. Joey, headed for Supreme Court, rides up to the twelfth floor, where he’s booked in at the Bridge, still handcuffed to another inmate who he may or may not know, may or may not like, who may be black, white, Hispanic, or other, may or may not speak a word of English. From there, they’re led to a holding pen in the middle of the floor, where they’re uncuffed and locked in with anywhere from ten to thirty others who have court appearances in any one of the four courtrooms that are on the middle of the eleventh floor below or the thirteenth floor above.

  Because his lawyer always shows up early, Joey’s generally called out by ten or ten-thirty. With two or three others, he’s led down a back flight of stairs to a smaller feeder pen just off Part 56. There Dean comes in, talks to Joey through the bars, and tells him what’s going to happen in the courtroom, which these days is usually nothing.

  Next he’s led into court by a court officer, placed in front of the defense table, told to sit in a wooden chair with arms and pull the chair all the way up to the table so he can’t get up. One court officer takes a position directly behind him, while others stand at either end of the table. Joey sits there while his lawyer and the DA go up and talk to the judge. Joey can’t hear most of what they say, and understands little of it even when he can. Then they step back; the judge announces the adjourned date three weeks away, and Joey’s led back to the feeder pen. His court appearance has lasted less than three minutes. Dean usually comes back to the feeder pen and talks to him for a couple of minutes more, and - if he isn’t too busy with other cases - may come upstairs and spend a half hour with Joey in the counsel room, where they sit and talk through the steel mesh that separates them. Then Joey’s returned to the twelfth-floor holding pen, where he rejoins the other inmates. Joey spends the rest of the morning with them while they wait for their lawyers, who’ll show up later in the day or not at all.

  The routine is broken only by lunch. Bologna sandwiches and cheese sandwiches, made with white bread and wrapped in wax paper. Sometimes there are packages of mustard. There are containers of black coffee, half full and lukewarm.

  At one o’clock, those inmates who are finished in court are led out for the early bus back. Joey’s lucky to be one of them, because those that are left behind don’t get onto a bus until somewhere between seven and nine o’clock, which means they can get back to Rikers after midnight, back to their cells at one in the morning. For the ones who are to be “turned around” - due back in court the next day - they’ll do well to catch two hours of sleep before the routine begins all over again at four.

  Dean did not hear from Detective Rasmussen the following day. And, with the exception of reading the toxicology report, which arrived in the mail, he did nothing on the Spadafino case, turning his attention instead to other cases that needed catching up.

  The toxicology report was essentially negative. It described the findings of the postmortem examination conducted on samples of brain, liver, and bile taken from the body of Edward Wilson at the time the autopsy was conducted. As had the blood sample reported in the serology report, all of the tissue samples tested negative for the presence of opiates, amphetamines, and barbiturates. There was .01 percent of alcohol in both the liver and bile. Dean knew from previous cases that the figure, lower than the .04 percent found in Wilson’s blood, did not necessarily represent an inconsistency: Alcohol simply took longer to show up in the liver and bile than it did in the bloodstream.

  The report revealed virtually no other positive findings. Traces of aspirin and something called dibenzepin were present in the liver sample, and there were also traces of aspirin in the brain tissue.

  * * *

  Rasmussen did not call the day after, either, and Dean wrestled with the idea of calling the detective himself but resisted. He would give him one more day.

  On Wednesday afternoon, Dean got stuck in court until four-thirty. A woman charged with passing more than 200 bad checks finally pleaded guilty in exchange for a promise of a one-year jail sentence, after much coaxing from Dean and the judge.

  By the time he got back to his office, there were six messages on Dean’s answering machine. He rewound the tape before even taking off his coat. The first was from a new client, worried he was about to be arrested for making payoffs to a taxi emissions inspector. The second was his mother, inviting Dean to a Passover seder. The third was a hangup. The fourth sounded like an insurance salesman or a stockbroker looking for customers. The fifth was his father, inviting him to Easter Sunday dinner. The sixth was Detective Rasmussen.

  “Mr. Abernathy, this is Detective Rasmussen. Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I’ve been working nights. I spoke to the Killian woman, and I’ve convinced her to talk to you. I gotta say, she’s very nervous and very reluctant to do so. But she says if I can be present, and it’s not at her place, she’s willing to do it.” The message ended with a phone number for Dean to call back.

  The meeting took place at the edge of the Hudson River, at the end of Christopher Street. Rasmussen was very specific in his directions. Dean was to meet him three o’clock sharp Friday afternoon. Rasmussen would have “the Killian woman” with him; they would be in his car, which was blue. Dean should come alone. No tape recorder, no camera, no signed statement, no notes of the meeting. Take it or leave it.

 
As soon as he arrived, Dean spotted the blue car. It was the same blue Plymouth he had seen on Bleecker Street the afternoon he had left the building and circled back in his Jeep. As he approached the driver’s side now, Dean recognized the man behind the wheel as the big guy who had come out of 77 Bleecker Street that day. Instead of getting out, the man reached back and pulled up the button on the back door. Dean got in and closed the door behind him. In the front passenger seat sat a woman with curly blond hair. She wore sunglasses and stared straight ahead. She blew a stream of cigarette smoke out her half-opened window, then stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray. She looked very nervous.

  “Mr. Abernathy,” said the man, “I’m Detective Rasmussen. This is Janet Killian.”

  “Hello,” said Dean. “I appreciate your doing this, both of you.” Janet Killian nodded but did not speak.

  “Janet’s agreed to answer your questions, Counselor. No personal stuff, no cross-examination. Short and sweet. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough,” said Dean.

  “Janet?”

  “Okay,” said Janet to the detective.

  “Miss Killian,” Dean began, “rather than fire a bunch of questions at you, I’d really just like you tell me what you saw that night, in your own words.”

  Janet Killian turned slightly but not enough to face Dean. She cleared her throat. “I was having trouble sleeping, so I was looking out the window, watching the snow. I saw a man walking along. All of a sudden I saw another man, a smaller man who I hadn’t noticed until then, jump out of a doorway and hold a knife to the first man’s throat. I know he said something, the one with the knife, but I couldn’t hear what it was. Then I saw the other one grab his chest and collapse on the sidewalk. He moved a little at first, like he was in pain, then he stopped. As I watched, the one with the knife bent down and went through the pockets of the man on the sidewalk. I saw him take a wad of money from him. I could see it was money, ‘cause he held it up to the light to look at it.