Felony Murder Read online

  No trial consumed Dean now, however. With no court appearances scheduled, the following day cried out for his attention, and the snow beckoned. He would go skiing.

  First light found Dean Abernathy on the New York State Thruway, two hours north of the city. Hunter Mountain was not Vermont, and though it could be a dreadful place when swarming with skiers on weekends, it was a good enough spot during the week. And if no blond or raven-haired beauty was available to share Dean’s fantasy of a New England weekend, he would settle for some fresh air and exercise by himself.

  The snow had left only an inch or so downstate, but as Dean exited the Thruway and headed west from Kingston, he found the ground well covered, and even the trees displayed their overnight catch of powder. The sun rose behind Dean, reflecting brightly in the rearview mirror and casting the square shadow of the Jeep onto the pavement in front of him. He turned down the heater to acclimate himself to the cold. He thought momentarily of Joey Spadafino, then fought hard to chase notions of work from his head. This was his day off. He was going skiing. The case could wait till tomorrow.

  But try as Dean might, Joey’s letter kept coming back to him. Why was Joey so insistent in trying to persuade Dean that he had not robbed Commissioner Wilson, even to the point of making the absurd claim that the detectives had forged his signature on the second page of his statement? Hadn’t Dean taken the trouble to show Joey the statement, and hadn’t Joey recognized and identified his own signature at the bottom of each page? Why was he recanting now?

  And the answer seemed painfully obvious to Dean: Joey had grasped the gravity of his earlier statement to the detectives. Whether he had learned this soon after from them, as Walter Bingham had suggested, or over the days that followed from Dean and from other inmates who had educated him, Joey was now waging a desperate battle to retract his confession, to distance himself from it. He had to deny the robbery; there was simply nothing else he could do.

  The slopes at Hunter Mountain were all but empty and the early runs fast. The warming effect of the sun hadn’t yet begun to melt the loosely packed powder, and Dean knew that conditions would deteriorate by midday, as the combination of more skiers and rising temperatures took its toll. He decided to try to ski hard, without a break, for as long as his out-of-shape legs could take it.

  By his third run, Dean was at his peak, having worked the tentativeness out of his turns but not yet feeling the fatigue that he knew would come. A good athlete who hadn’t taken up skiing until his twenties and had never taken a formal lesson (he abhorred lessons of any sort, taking absurd macho pride in mastering skills on his own), Dean knew he would never be a great skier. He liked to say that he skied intermediate slopes like an expert, and expert slopes like an intermediate, but the truth was that skiing for Dean was an exercise in trying to look like he knew what he was doing, while never being quite in control. Nonetheless, he fought this morning to keep his skis tightly together as he carved respectably parallel turns around slower, if steadier, skiers.

  By the fifth run, Dean’s legs had begun to ache, and he found himself seeking out the gentler terrain of intermediate and even beginner trails, rationalizing to himself that they were prettier and longer than the steeper and shorter expert runs. The truth was he welcomed the respite of the long ride up the chairlift, acquainting himself each time with some new skier, gloating together over their good fortune to be able to take a day off during the week while the rest of the world worked.

  On his sixth and seventh runs, Dean was aware that his form had dropped off considerably. He began to substitute an occasional stem-christie for a parallel turn, went out of his way several times to navigate around a mogul instead of challenging it, and widened his stance on the steeper inclines. But each time he reached the bottom, the empty chairlift lured him back for one last run.

  He didn’t fall until midway down his eighth and definitely final run. Coming out of a turn on a slope humiliatingly named Belt Parkway, Dean happened to glance down at his skis, only to notice that they were slightly but decidedly crossed at the tips. Had his legs not been so tired, he mused to himself later, lying on his back in the first-aid station, he would have easily been able to lift the offending ski clear and replant it. Instead, he had been mesmerized into staring at the crossed tips, paralyzed in what seemed like eternal slow motion. He knew intellectually that he should be lifting his top ski, but the weight of it seemed absolutely awesome, as though the gravitational pull on it had increased twenty-fold. For a long moment, nothing happened, and Dean actually had time to wonder if he might not be able to get away with it after all, to continue downhill in that fashion in defiance of the laws of nature.

  He didn’t have to wait too long for his answer. With alarming suddenness, Dean felt a tip catch and catapult him forward. Launched airborne, cartwheeling over his skis, he was able to tuck his left shoulder at the moment before impact. The move, an onlooker had told him later while helping to disinter him from the snow some twenty yards downhill, had probably saved him a broken collarbone or a dislocated shoulder at best. But it had done nothing for his right ankle, which the X-rays disclosed was not broken but severely sprained.

  “Of course,” explained some ski patrol guy named Rolfe or Sven or Horst, “a schprain can actually be verse than a fracture, you know.”

  Dean knew. He knew then; he knew driving home, willing his left foot to simultaneously master brake, clutch, and accelerator, while his right leg stretched uselessly, immobilized by a cast, to the passenger side of the Jeep’s floorboard. He knew because, determined to drive himself the three-hour trip home, he had been denied medication for the pain. And he knew that night when, having hobbled into his apartment on crutches generously loaned to him by the Hunter Mountain Volunteer Ambulance Corps, he made dinner of three frozen tacos, five aspirins, and a half bottle of red cooking wine. But at least, he realized as he finally succumbed to sleep sometime after midnight, not once had his thoughts wandered to the subject of Joey Spadafino.

  If the pain from Dean’s ankle was less noticeable by Monday, it was due only to the fact that his entire body ached. He felt as though he had spent an hour in a clothes dryer at high speed. On top of the pain, he had difficulty learning the rhythm of walking on his crutches, nearly falling twice on the way to court, once landing so painfully with his weight on his right foot that he saw stars and felt he might actually pass out.

  And there was the humiliation of it all. Dean coped with that by upgrading the slope that he had wiped out on. Belt Parkway became Kamikaze, and the mishap had not been caused by crossed tips at all, but rather by an out-of-control madman who had sideswiped Dean but ironically emerged unscathed himself.

  At the computer in his office, Dean prepared a set of motion papers on the case of the People v. Joseph Spadafino. In it, he asked the court to inspect the transcript of the grand jury proceedings, which was still secret to the defense, to see if perhaps there had been insufficient evidence presented or some procedural irregularity committed that would require dismissal and representation, though he knew that Bingham would have been careful and the evidence supporting the charges plentiful. He moved for copies of lab reports, property vouchers, the 911 tape (the recording of any calls made to the Police Department on the emergency number, as well as the radio traffic among the units involved in the chase and arrest of the defendant), the sprint report (the computer log and printout of those same calls and radio traffic), the toxicology and serology reports that would be prepared by the Medical Examiner’s Office, and the photographs of the crime scene (all of which the defense was entitled to for the asking at this stage), and for a long list of police reports (which it was not). He made a demand that the prosecution turn over any exculpatory material, information pointing toward the defendant’s innocence, which it might have in its possession, formally referred to as Brady material after the case that first entitled the defense to it. He moved also for certain pre-trial suppression hearings, each deriving its name from a defendant w
hose case had established the right to challenge the constitutionality of how some item of evidence had been obtained: a Mapp hearing to test whether there had been sufficient probable cause for the police to stop Joey, search him, and seize the cash and knife found in his pockets; a Wade hearing to determine if any witnesses had been given an opportunity to view Joey after his apprehension under circumstances more suggestive than those at a properly conducted lineup; and a Huntley hearing to ensure that any statement made by Joey after he had been taken into custody had been preceded by a waiver of his right to remain silent and consult with a lawyer.

  Then, because his ankle hurt too much for the prospect of negotiating the subway steps for the trip uptown, he thumbed through his Spadafino case file. It was already an inch thick. In addition to extra copies of the motion he had just prepared, it contained the original Criminal Court complaint, the computerized printout of Joey’s criminal record, the indictment, the DA’s Voluntary Disclosure Form, the autopsy report, the written statement given the detectives, Dean’s notes of his interviews with Joey, pages with headings like “Things to Do” and “Thoughts,” Joey’s written account of the events leading up to his arrest, and finally, Joey’s letter from jail. It was the letter that Dean ended up staring at absentmindedly, simply because it was the last item in the file, relegated to the back of the folder owing to its insignificance.

  Dean leafed back through the file until he found the statement taken by the detectives. He looked at the signature at the bottom of the first page. He turned the page and studied the signature at the bottom of the second page. They certainly looked alike. He used his fingernail to straighten and remove the staple that joined the two pages. Separating them, he placed them so the signatures were side by side. The similarity left no doubt: Whoever had signed the first had also signed the other. The detectives had not “forgered” the signature on page two.

  But, knowing that his client would insist they had unless confronted with the proof himself, Dean took the two pages and limped up front to the copy machine. There he used the enlargement feature to blow up the signatures, one directly beneath the other, onto a single page.

  Then he enlarged the enlargement, and finally the enlargement of the enlargement. When he had finished, he held in front of him a piece of paper containing virtually nothing but the two signatures, somewhat blurred but magnified to page-filling dimensions.

  Dean stared at the paper in disbelief for a long time, but there was no getting around it.

  They were identical.

  Not just similar. Identical.

  Identical in every stroke, every blur, every imperfection. Identical down to the dot over the I in Spadafino. Identical where the pen had skipped while forming the P in Joseph. Absolutely, perfectly identical. Copy machine identical.

  They were the same signature, mechanically reproduced.

  That evening, as he sat in front of his fireplace, his leg propped up on a pillow, Dean contemplated the significance of his discovery. There was no doubt in his mind that the detectives had somehow altered the confession they had written out for Joey Spadafino, making it look like he had signed both pages when, in fact, he had signed only one. A handwriting expert would be needed to prove the duplication, but for now Dean’s own crude method would suffice.

  Joey had admitted signing the first page and he freely acknowledged that everything it contained was true: He had been standing in the doorway on Bleecker Street; he had seen the man approach; he had thought about robbing him but had not hit him, cut him, or hurt him; he had taken the money and money clip while the man was lying on the sidewalk.

  By contrast, Joey had denied signing the second page, insisting that he had never told the detectives the major admission it contained: that he had yelled, “Freeze, motherfucker!” to the man and demanded his money. Subsequently, Joey had consistently denied doing either of those things - to Bingham in the Q&A, videotaped barely a half hour later; and to Dean in both the narrative he had written out and the interviews since. So adamant had Joey been that he had finally accused the detectives of “forgering” his signature on the disputed second page, an accusation that had initially struck Dean as too absurd to take seriously, but one that now seemed supported by the evidence.

  Buy why had the detectives doctored the statement to include the demand for money on Joey’s part? Particularly when they had an ironclad case, complete with eyewitnesses, without that admission. It didn’t make sense.

  Or did it?

  This was a big case, Dean reminded himself. The death of the Police Commissioner had been an extraordinary event, receiving headline coverage not only in New York, but across the nation. Within police circles, it was even bigger. No crime of this magnitude had ever touched the Department so directly; at One Police Plaza, it was nothing short of the Crime of the Century. The pressure to “solve” it was enormous. And with the suspect already in custody and admitting that the money in his pocket had come from the fallen victim, all that was left in terms of “solving” the crime was getting the prisoner to confess. When he had balked at the point of admitting having demanded money from the Commissioner, the detectives had simply gone ahead and put on paper the magic words they couldn’t quite pry from his mouth. Then they had somehow reproduced Spadafino’s signature from the first page onto the second.

  Before he had been a lawyer, Dean had been a cop. For two and a half years, he had worked the streets as an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration of the U.S. Justice Department. As a gangly kid fresh out of college, his youthful appearance had enabled him to make undercover buys from mid-level heroin and cocaine suppliers who sized him up as too young to be a cop. Ironically, he had been slower to win the confidence of his fellow agents, who suspected him - with his law-school aspirations and ability to read serious books and write grammatical sentences - of being a “plant” placed among their ranks to investigate their own wrongdoings and report on them. For as Dean slowly gained their grudging respect, he learned that there were plenty of wrongdoings to report, had he been inclined to do so. Short of stealing money and reselling the very drugs they were sworn to seize (acts which were by no means confined to only a few of his peers) was the more common offense of tampering with the truth in order to make a search become legal or an arrest stand up in court (behavior which was virtually universal, and departure from which could actually cause an agent to be ostracized).

  It was the latter course of conduct, and the fact that almost all in law enforcement whom he had encountered then or since embraced it, that intrigued Dean. The rationale was clear enough: Police officers, almost to a man, believe that the laws were written and are invariably interpreted to favor the criminal; in order to balance the scales of justice, they have to do what they can to make sure that those few who do get caught aren’t thereafter permitted to slip through the net on some absurd legal technicality. It’s merely a classic application of the end justifying the means, and the fact that in many cases the means include false sworn reports and perjured testimony seldom bothers the officer involved, who invariably feels that he’s the good guy, doing what he must in an us-against-them world.

  And that same rationale, Dean recognized, was undoubtedly what confronted him here. A pair of detectives, who surely saw themselves as good and honorable men, had a two-bit, ex-con mugger who had caused the death of the Police Commissioner while robbing him. They knew he was guilty: He had all but confessed, though he’d cunningly shied away from admitting the magic words at the last moment. But they weren’t fooled, and they weren’t going to take any chances; they’d do it for him. Justice would be done after all. And if, in the process, the detectives themselves were to receive a bit of special recognition for extracting the perpetrator’s signed confession, so much the better; the truth was they were overworked, underpaid, and they put their lives on the line for the rest of the people of this rotten city every day of the week. . . .

  Dean awoke with a start, his ankle throbbing. Disoriented, he neede
d a moment to realize that he’d fallen asleep on the couch in his living room. He struggled to reposition his leg, then looked at the clock: 3:46.

  Something was wrong with the way he had figured things out last night. He struggled to regain his train of thought, much the way he sometimes struggled, usually in vain, to recapture the thread of some erotic dream that had slipped away upon his awakening.

  The detectives had altered the statement, rationalizing that the end justified the means. There was nothing startling about that. So what was Dean missing?

  Nothing, as long as Joey Spadafino had, in fact, demanded money from Commissioner Wilson and afterward was simply too smart to admit it to anyone. But suppose that wasn’t the case. Suppose just for a moment that the reason Joey kept denying the demand was because it had truly never happened. Joey’s version was that he had thought about robbing the man but decided against it, that the man had suddenly grabbed his chest and collapsed. What if all that was true?

  Bullshit.

  Stop getting soft in the head, Dean told himself. Just because cops lie, it doesn’t mean that criminals tell the truth. He struggled to raise himself on his elbows, rolled over into a new position, and closed his eyes.

  Joey Spadafino senses that his lawyer isn’t buying his story of deciding at the last moment not to rob the guy. He knows it’s a bad thing to have a Legal Aid or an 18-B who thinks you’re guilty, but he’s got no money to hire a street lawyer. It’s not that he doesn’t like his lawyer; he does. It’s just that if a guy thinks you did the crime, he’s simply not going to fight for you the same as if he thinks you’re innocent. Anybody knows that. So he decides to write a letter to the judge asking for a new 18-B.