Felony Murder Page 5

  Dean decided to postpone reading it. He forced himself to focus on Joey’s face through the mesh.

  “This is terrific,” he said. “I’d like to take it and go over it thoroughly, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay. I don’t spell too good.”

  “I don’t care, neither do I,” said Dean.

  They shook hands by pressing palms, fingers extended upward, against the mesh that separated them.

  Dean read the story over and over until finally he could get through it without the distraction of the infantile printing, the misspellings, and the utter absence of grammar. Joey Spadafino was saying that not only had he not touched his victim until the man fell, he had never even said anything to him. In other words, he was now denying the robbery as well as the murder, just as he had denied it in the videotaped Q&A with Walter Bingham. The same robbery he had admitted earlier in his signed statement to the detectives. Well, Dean smiled, Joey might be stupid, but he wasn’t crazy. At least he’d figured out somewhere along the line what felony murder was all about. Too bad for him he had figured it out so late.

  That afternoon, Walter Bingham called Dean to tell him that the autopsy performed on Edward Wilson had been completed.

  “I don’t have the written report yet,” he said. “That usually takes a couple of weeks. But I spoke to the ME this morning.” The ME was the Medical Examiner. “He confirms that it was a heart attack.”

  “Too bad,” said Dean. “We were pinning our hopes on suicide.” It was a bad joke, as well as a tasteless one, and as soon as he had said it Dean was sorry. “You’ll send me a copy of the report when you get it?”

  “Sure thing,” said Bingham.

  “By the way,” said Dean, “I watched the Q&A. Shame on you for not getting him to admit the robbery.”

  “Yeah, I must be slipping. I checked with Rasmussen. Apparently after your client signed the confession they explained the significance of it to him.”

  “That by admitting the robbery he buys the murder?”

  “Yeah. So, naturally, by the time I get him, he’s wised up and not admitting the robbery anymore.”

  “Smarter than most of my clients,” said Dean.

  “Not smart enough,” said Bingham.

  Out of court as well as in court, prosecutors love to have the last word, thought Dean. But he didn’t say anything. He was wondering if Bingham’s explanation made sense and whether it adequately explained the change in Joey Spadafino’s story. It did make sense, Dean had to admit. He was less certain about the answer to the second question.

  Lawyers who went into the office on weekends were mercenary, workaholic fools who had no outside interests, Dean Abernathy had long ago proclaimed. He himself was anything but mercenary and had a stack of unpaid bills and a checkbook full of almost as much red ink as black to attest to the fact. He was a workaholic only on those occasions when he was on trial; at all other times, he was master of the early-afternoon getaway. And when it came to outside interests, Dean was second to none. He sailed, he scuba dived, he rock climbed, he biked, he visited the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History, he read, he skied-

  He skied.

  The weekend gradually came into focus: Dean and a beautiful companion of the female persuasion gliding down the slopes of Vermont, sipping hot rum concoctions by the fireside, making passionate love under a down-filled comforter as the snow fell gently outside in the New England night. . . .

  Only thing was, Dean had never been much when it came to making plans ahead of time. No matter; it was Friday night and, as the saying went, there was no time like the present. Surely the list of eager candidates waiting hopefully by their phones would run into the dozens. He walked to the bathroom, faced his rugged good looks in the mirror, lifting his chin ever so slightly to accentuate its strength. “Yes,” he said with self-assurance, fighting off a vague sense of déjà vu that he had seen Ted Danson play this role once in a Cheers rerun.

  He dialed Joanne Bushfield’s number. She could be boring, but then again she had certain indisputable strengths, and as Dean listened to the phone ringing, he didn’t doubt for a moment that those strengths would be made to order for the weekend he had in mind. But the phone continued to ring.

  He dialed Arlette Franks, the aspiring amateur pornography star, having no idea whether she skied or not, but dismissing the fact as secondary. Anyone could be a snow bunny and sit in the lodge, after all. Dean had once tried unsuccessfully to pick up a gorgeous blonde with crutches and her leg in a cast by the fire at Killington, only to hear later that the crutches and cast were nothing but props. But Arlette’s answering machine was the best Dean could do. At the beep, he hung up.

  He dismissed Penny James, the Assistant District Attorney, as too serious for a whole weekend.

  He toyed with the idea of calling Elna Terjesen but finally convinced himself that, even if she was “stateside,” as she liked to call it, there was no way that the Sweetheart of Swissair would be sitting around on a Friday night without plans for the weekend.

  Down to Jennifer West. Dean realized that his social life had slowed to a crawl these last six months. He silently made a pact with whatever god happened to be on duty that, if only Jennifer would answer, he would strive to get out more and meet people.

  The phone answered on the second ring. Dean cleared his throat.

  “The number you have dialed, 496-2212, has been changed at the customer’s request to an unlisted number,” said the voice of a female robot. “The number 496-2212 has been changed-”

  The drive to the Rikers Island jail was not that bad on a Saturday morning. Dean had detoured by his office to pick up the Spadafino file. He wanted to have his copy of Joey’s signed statement to the detectives so he could confront Joey with it. He wasted no time.

  “Joey, I noticed when they were videotaping you, you told the DA that the detectives hadn’t beaten you or mistreated you in any way. Remember?”

  “Yeah,” Joey nodded.

  “Was that true?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They didn’t threaten you?”

  “No.”

  “They didn’t make you sign the statement?”

  “No.”

  “So why did you sign it?”

  “I figgered it’d help me,” said Joey.

  And Dean could understand that, of course. It was the old felony murder trap, the suspect figuring that in being honest and admitting the felony that he had committed, while denying the killing he had never intended or even - in his mind - caused, the police would recognize and reward the truth, and he would be spared the far more serious murder charge.

  “You now understand that it doesn’t work that way?”

  “I guess so,” said Joey.

  “Well, you understand that if you were robbing the guy, and he got a heart attack and died, it’s murder.”

  “Yeah.” Joey nodded. “You splained that to me.”

  “So did the detectives, I understand.”

  “Say what?”

  “The detectives. They ‘splained that’ to you, too,” Dean heard himself say, and was immediately sorry that he had made fun of his uneducated client. He recognized those old companions, Frustration and Anger, as they circled around him, already picking up the scent of defeat.

  “No, you was the first,” said Joey in a small voice.

  Dean sat for a while. He had heard Joey’s words but was somehow unable to process them, to digest them. The protective shell that had formed around him prevented him from reacting to them. He sensed vaguely that they meant something, had some significance, but he felt powerless to decode the message.

  So he said, “What?”

  “You was the first to eggsplain it to me.”

  Dean smiled at Joey’s attempt to correct his pronunciation. But he knew he had to press on.

  “So why did you change your story?” he said.

  “I didn’t,” Joey said. “I didn’t change nuthin’.”

  “Joey, by the
time you spoke with the DA on the videotape, you were denying the robbery. You changed your story. You said you never told the guy to give you his money.”

  “I never did. Honest.” And the way Joey’s eyes met Dean’s, it was hard not to believe him.

  “So why the fuck did you tell the detectives you did? Why did you tell them you said, ‘Freeze, motherfucker’? Why did you tell them you told him to give you his money? And why did you sign this goddamn statement?” He threw the two-page document in front of Joey Spadafino, whose mouth hung open in puzzlement.

  Joey bent over the statement. His lips formed silent words as his eyes moved laboriously back and forth, working their way down the first page. He got to the bottom of the first page and nodded. Dean could not tell if the nod signified agreement with the written words or triumph at having completed a page.

  Joey folded over the first page and began the same slow process with the second. He stopped. His brow knitted up, and his eyes narrowed into a squint. The back-and-forth movement of his eyes grew exaggerated to the point where his whole head swung from left to right, right to left, in denial. Still he read the words.

  Finally, he looked up. “I didn’t say these things” was all he said.

  “Did you sign the statement?” Dean asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are those signatures yours?”

  “Yeah,” said Joey, looking at the bottom of both pages. “Yeah, that’s my handwriting.”

  It struck Dean that in Joey Spadafino’s uncomplicated world, maybe there was no contradiction, maybe all of those things could indeed be true: He hadn’t told Wilson to freeze or demanded his money, and he hadn’t told the detectives that he had; yet he had signed the statement in which he had admitted precisely those acts, and the two signatures were his. And now an expectant Joey was looking straight at Dean, waiting for an explanation as to where things had gone wrong.

  “Can you really read, Joey?” Dean said gently.

  “Yeah, I can read.” Annoyed.

  “Read to me.”

  Joey bent over the document. Dean pointed to where the narrative continued on the second page.

  “When . . . the . . . black man . . . came . . .”

  “Okay,” said Dean. He was aware of a splitting headache. “Tell me what’s in here that isn’t true. Tell me what part of this you didn’t tell the detectives.”

  Dean had to look away as Joey repeated his reading exercise. He could hear sibilant sounds as Joey formed words.

  It was some minutes before Joey spoke. “It’s all true but this part: ‘When the black man came . . . alongside me . . . I jumped out and . . . yelled . . . “Freeze, motherfucker!” . . . as loud as I . . . could. Then I . . . told him to give me his money.’ I couldna told them that, cause that didden happen. You gotta believe me, Dean.”

  Dean did not. But then again, Dean was having a hard time believing Joey on any part of this one.

  At C-93, Joey Spadafino’s having a hard time, too. He thought he might be welcomed as something of a hero, a celebrity. After all, he’s here on a murder charge, and that fact alone provides him a certain amount of status. Furthermore, the guy he’s charged with murdering was the fucking Police Commissioner, the number-one cop in the whole city. That, he figured, should be worth something.

  It turns out he figured wrong. For one thing, the Commissioner was “a brother,” he keeps hearing from the black inmates, and offing a black cop isn’t quite the same as offing a white cop, they’ve let him know. For another, Joey’s found himself, for the first time, on B Block. B Block is a secure unit within a maximum-security jail. It’s reserved for inmates with bails of $100,000 or higher, or, as in Joey’s case, with no bail at all. This means it’s full of guys charged with murder, multiple armed robberies, and A-1 drug felonies. In spite of that, a lot of them have never been upstate before, so they really haven’t learned how to do time yet, how to settle in.

  For security reasons, nobody on B Block’s allowed to work. A job would require them to leave the Block and move around within the walls, and they’re prohibited from doing that. The result is that you’ve got seventy-five guys, all nervous and frustrated while they wait for trial, with nothing but time on their hands. They eat, sleep, watch TV, and they fight. They fight over what channel to watch, who gets to use the phone first, whether one inmate “dissed” another by “eyeballing” him, or who gets an unclaimed container of milk. Joey’s witnessed a stabbing over a radio being played too loud.

  Many of the inmates have weapons. They’re generally homemade: a piece of bedspring, a sharpened fork or spoon, a razor blade embedded in a block of wood. The radio stabbing was done with the handle of a toothbrush that had been filed down to a stiletto point. It was good enough to puncture its victim’s liver.

  Joey hasn’t had to fight yet, but already he’s come close. Because he arrived with his shoes ruined by the rain and snow, he was given a pair of sneakers by a social worker. The sneakers were second-hand, but the truth is they looked pretty new. They weren’t a brand name, like Nike or Adidas or anything, so Joey figured they’d be okay. To make sure, he scuffed them up pretty good before taking a chance on wearing them.

  The first afternoon he’s wearing them, he’s stopped on his way to lunch by two Dominicans. “Nice shoes, man,” says one, an ugly guy with a “telephone,” a scar that runs from his earlobe to the corner of his mouth. Then he speaks in Spanish to his friend, a tall, dark-skinned guy with a bad eye, who spits a lot and stares at Joey with his one good eye while the other eye kind of rolls around in its socket. Joey says, “Thank you.” At that moment two older inmates, white guys, walk by. Joey cuts between the Dominicans and runs to catch up to the white guys. They turn to look at him like he’s crazy, but meanwhile he’s gotten away from the Dominicans. As he continues down the hall, he hears from behind him, “Watch your back, maricon.” Joey doesn’t speak Spanish, but he understands maricon. It means “faggot.”

  Joey knows it would be easy enough to give up the sneakers. Problem is, you give up your sneakers and they want your socks. Give up your socks and they want your shirt. Before you know it, you’re standing there with no pants on.

  Joey’s thought about asking to be put in protective custody. The thing is, it’s sort of like the sneakers: Once you go into PC, you got to stay there, ‘cause everyone figures you for a snitch, whether you are or not. It seems everything you do in here has got consequences. So Joey’ll try to make it out in Population. At the same time, he watches his back and has taken to carrying a sharpened length of coat hanger on his way to meals.

  The media assembled again on Joseph Spadafino’s next court date. Unlike the first two, this appearance had the promise of some substance. Having been indicted, Spadafino had had his case transferred from Criminal Court to Supreme Court. In New York County, that transfer meant going to a higher court in the most literal sense, from the first floor to the eleventh. There, in one of three “up front” parts, a defendant is arraigned on the indictment, for the first time entering a formal plea of guilty or not guilty. His lawyer is provided a copy of the indictment containing the various charges the grand jury has voted. Accompanying the indictment is a Voluntary Disclosure Form in which the District Attorney’s Office has supplied certain particulars as to post-arrest statements attributed to the defendant, physical evidence recovered from him, identifications made of him, and the like. And there his lawyer often makes an application for a reduction in bail or, in a case such as Spadafino’s, for the initial setting of bail.

  The presiding judge in Part 70 was Brenda Soloff. She was even-tempered, businesslike, and generally regarded as fair. She presided over no trials, and the Spadafino case would come before her only this once. She would take the defendant’s plea, consider a bail application if one was made, and send the case on to a trial judge, supposedly picked at random, with whom the case would remain thereafter.

  Aware of all this, Dean Abernathy knew he had a decision to make. He could ask Justic
e Soloff for bail, or he could wait, gambling that the trial judge might be a better bet. If Dean went with Soloff, he could expect to be stuck with her ruling, since the trial judge would probably adhere to it.

  Dean decided to take his chances with Soloff, not so much because he regarded her as good on bail, but more because he knew that a high-visibility murder case such as Spadafino’s would be treated as an exception. In place of the usual procedure, in which a clerk literally pulled the name of a trial judge at random out of a drum, the administrative judge would designate the trial judge, making the selection from a short list of tough, veteran judges accustomed to dealing with major trials. Invariably strong on keeping control of their courtrooms, generally knowledgeable in the law, and sometimes even-handed during trial, such judges were seldom liberal when it came to bail.

  Dean had other reasons to make his bail application now. Even if Justice Soloff might decide to set bail, she would set it somewhere up in the $50,000 to $100,000 range, and of course, there was no one to put up any bail for Joey, let alone those kind of numbers. But Walter Bingham’s ego would compel him to make a full argument against bail being set at all, particularly with the media in attendance. So Dean had registered no objection to the presence of the television camera, and even let slip to Ralph Penza of Channel 4 that he would be asking for bail for the defendant.

  “Joseph Spadafino,” read the clerk, “you have been charged by the grand jury with murder in the second degree and other crimes. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?”

  “Not guilty,” said Joey.

  “Would Your Honor hear me on the question of bail?” Dean asked. “There’s been no previous application.”

  “Certainly,” said Justice Soloff.