Certain Justice
A Marc Kadella Legal Mystery
by
Dennis L. Carstens
Previous Marc Kadella Legal Mysteries
The Key to Justice
Desperate Justice
Media Justice
Personal Justice
Copyright © 2015 by Dennis L Carstens
www.denniscarstens.com
email me at: [email protected]
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A short, sweet, and best of all, true story about someone who went up against the IRS-- and won.
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“Those who abjure violence can only do so by others committing violence on their behalf.”
George Orwell
ONE
Thirteen Years Ago
The two men sat silently staring through the windshield of the dark blue Chevy sedan. The passenger, whom the driver called Big, had his window open an inch while he smoked. Big was flicking the ashes out the window and staining the outside of it with gray, wet, cigarette ash. It was a cold, rainy, windy, miserable night, especially for mid-September. While Big stared silently into the night, the driver, whom Big referred to as Little, fidgeted anxiously in his seat and occasionally coughed lightly due to his partner’s smoking. Even though Little was a smoker himself, in the enclosed space of the car’s interior the smoke annoyed him.
Big crushed out his cigarette in the car’s ashtray, careful not to toss it out the window and possibly leave DNA evidence for the cops. When he did this, Little broke the silence by saying, “Roll your damn window down and let some air in.”
Without turning his head, Big replied, “Roll yours down. It’s raining out there.”
A gust of wind came across Lake of the Isles shaking the oak tree they were under on Parker Street. The sudden burst of wind shook the big tree causing a small torrent of rain water to splatter down on the car. A second, less powerful wind burst broke off a tiny, leafy branch from the tree that landed on the windshield directly in front of Little. The sudden appearance of the oak leaves and the noise it made caused Little to jump in his seat, bring his hand to his heart and say, “Jesus Christ!” Big, who rarely smiled and almost never laughed, cracked a brief grin at his partner’s discomfort.
“Time?” Big asked.
Little checked the digital read on his watch and said, “At least five more minutes.”
Big’s real name was Howie Traynor. At twenty-seven, he was already a career criminal and no stranger to jail cells. He was a first-rate burglar because his nerves were almost non-existent. Nothing ever seemed to faze him.
At a very early age his parents began to notice that Howie was a little off. He seemed to be a little too quiet and unhappy. When he started school his teachers didn’t tell his parents he didn’t play well with the other kids. He didn’t play with them at all. He showed no interest in making friends, rarely participated in kids’ activities and basically kept to himself. By the time he entered high school he had become a bit of a bully who scared just about everyone, including his teachers, and was someone to avoid.
During his junior year his parents took him to a psychologist who somewhat reluctantly told them that Howie appeared to be a pure sociopath; a person without empathy or any real feelings for or a connection with other people. A Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory was administered and Howie’s results revealed a 49 profile. He was quite intelligent but had a marked disregard for social norms, mores and standards. He was essentially someone with little or no conscience or regard for anyone else.
The oddity was that people exhibiting these traits normally come from economically depressed, fractured environments. Howie was the anomaly. John Traynor, his father, was a dentist with a very successful practice. His mother, Monica was a surgical nurse. Between them, they made an excellent living and provided well for Howie, his brother Martin who was three years older and a sister Paige, two years younger. The family had an upper-middle class home life in an upscale neighborhood of a Minneapolis suburb. The family was caring, loving, nurturing and almost exactly what any child should have. His brother and sister showed none of the antisocial traits of Howie and both had become normal, self-supporting, law-abiding adults. Howie was simply not wired right.
His criminal life began while still in high school. There was nothing too serious at first. He was joy riding in stolen cars with a couple of other boys with behavioral issues, shoplifting items he didn’t really need and one arrest for burglarizing a house. Howie’s behavior in school steadily worsened as the years went by. None of it was very serious just antisocial to the point that everyone in the building breathed a sigh of relief when he dropped out of school two months before graduation. He gave no explanation why. One day he simply walked into the principal’s office and announced he was leaving. No one, not even his parents, bothered to try to talk him out of it.
From that day until tonight, his family having given up on him years ago, Howie was unburdened with human ties or responsibilities. He bounced around from one loser job to another, his adult life spent in and out of trouble, jail and the workhouse without a care in the world. Howie was a criminal. He knew he was a criminal and simply accepted it as a fact.
Howie made most of his money from home invasion burglaries. With his total lack of conscience, he justified it by simply believing it was what he was meant to do and that was that. The only legitimate job he had that he liked was as a nightclub bouncer.
He was big only in comparison to the man in the front seat next to him. Howie was a touch over six feet and one hundred eighty rock solid pounds. While not at work, Howie could be found at a boxing school in North Minneapolis training and working out.
When he first started working as a bouncer, his actual size rarely intimidated the average drunken idiot, until the drunken idiot crossed the line with Howie. One night, a well-known and very large Viking football player tried to show off to his entourage. Howie politely asked the man and his friends to settle down but the football player thought he would have some fun with the smaller Howie. One punch from Howie and the fool’s eyes rolled back in his head, his knees buckled and the table they were seated at shattered when he fell on it. No one messed with Howie after that story got around.
Howie’s burglary partner was a man named Jimmy Oliver. Eight years older than Howie, Jimmy was Little to Howie being Big because he was barely five foot six and rail thin. Howie hooked up with him because Jimmy was a first rate safe cracker and knew all of the best places in the Cities to fence stolen property. Jimmy kept it well hidden but in reality, he was scared to death of Howie who reeked of menace. Jimmy had witnessed Howie scaring cops with little more than a nasty look.
It was Jimmy who had scoped out the job they were on tonight. He had taken a job using a false identification and forged documents with a home cleaning service. This would be the second job he had come up with while cleaning homes with this company and he figured the cops would find the connection after one more. The third one would be it and then he would have to move on.
The house they were going to hit was a sixteen room beauty overlooking Lake of the Isles surrounded by a six-foot high, spike-topped, wrought iron fence. Jimmy had been inside with a weekly cleaning crew three times. The third time the home’s owner, a seventy-eight-year old widow, was arguing with her daughter about selling the place. The daughter was adamant that it wasn’t safe for her mother to live there alone and the place was simply too much for her. The daughter also let it slip that they would be out of town and the place would be empty for several da
ys, including the night Big and Little now found themselves sitting patiently across the street.
The two men were parked in between two other cars on a side street in this very upscale Minneapolis neighborhood. They were less than one hundred feet from the corner where Parker Street and Lake of the Isles Boulevard met. Despite the lateness of the hour, almost 11:00 P.M. the darkness and the storm, they could clearly see the lake barely a hundred yards in front of them by the ambient light reflecting off of the water. Lake of the Isles is one of the chain of lakes that gave the City of Minneapolis, and the Los Angeles Lakers, its nickname; The City of Lakes. Surrounded by beautiful, expensive homes, many dating back to the turn of the nineteenth century, the area would be a crown jewel in just about any city in the world.
“Time?” Big asked again a few minutes later.
“Any minute now,” Little replied.
Despite the weather, they watched as a man in tights marked with reflective tape jogged past the corner on the path surrounding the lake. When Big saw the jogger he muttered, “Asshole” just as lights from a car on Lake of the Isles Boulevard illuminated the man and a moment later a police patrol car passed by the corner.
“Right on time,” Little said. “Every eighteen to twenty-four minutes.” Little had done a thorough recon of the house and neighborhood and had spent several nights timing the cops patrolling around the lakes.
“Let’s go,” Big said as he opened his car door. Having removed the single bulb from the interior light, the car remained in darkness as the two men got out. Hunched over against the wind and light rain, they quickly ran across Parker Street to the back door of the house.
Next to an alley that ran behind the building was a small, unattached one car garage facing Parker Street. It was constructed of the same brick material as the house from over eighty years ago and looked tiny, almost ridiculous, next to the seven thousand square foot home. Above the door was an old style exterior light to illuminate the small, barely ten-foot driveway. Little had previously loosened the bulb of the light above the garage door and the area in front of the garage was quite dark. Between the missing garage light, the weather and the all black clothing the men wore, the two of them were practically invisible.
The corner of the house met the corner of the garage at this point and there was an entryway door into the house. The lock on the door looked as if it had last been replaced in the ‘50s. It took Big less than a minute, even in the dark, to pick the lock and the two of them were in.
They both carried a flashlight with the lens taped over leaving a hole for the light to come through about the size of a pencil’s eraser. Once inside, they turned the flashlights on and Little went up the single flight of stairs and into the kitchen. With Big casually following him, Little went through the kitchen and into a hallway closet. Inside the closet, while Big shined his flashlight on it, Little removed the cover to the alarm box and quickly attached a bypass hookup to the alarm before the alarm company could be notified of their intrusion.
Little turned around and said, “Okay, we’re good to go.”
“You’re sure there’s no one here?” Big asked for at least the fifth time that evening.
“They’re out of town,” Little replied. “Six minutes. No more.”
“I know the drill, asshole,” Big snarled causing Little to flinch. “You go do the safe. I’ll check things out upstairs.”
Little hurried toward the far end of the first floor where the study was. Having already discovered and photographed the safe, he was extremely confident he would have it open in under two minutes.
While Little went toward the study, Big started up the carpeted open stairway to the upstairs bedrooms. Little had told him the bulk of the items worth taking, the solid silver utensils, candlesticks and other items, many of which were expensive antiques, were on the main floor. While working with the cleaning crew, Little was able to scout the upstairs and told Big to take no more than one minute to go through the master bedroom only. There wasn’t anything in the other rooms worth the time and effort.
Big almost carelessly opened the door to the master bedroom which caused it to bang slightly against an antique armoire behind it. The noise it made, while not very loud, made a significant impact on the silence of the room.
Big ignored the noise and while standing in the doorway began to play the flashlight around the room. In the middle of the bedroom, directly in front of the door was a king size, four poster bed, complete with a canopy above it. He slowly moved the light over the bed then heard the obviously frightened and shaky voice of an old woman say, “Who are you and what do you want?”
Big didn’t hesitate for an instant. He didn’t think about what to do or take a moment to consider it. He simply reacted. In barely a second he leapt over the bed’s baseboard, flew across the length of the large bed and came down directly on top of her. He heard the air rush out of her lungs as he clamped his left hand down on her mouth and with his right hand he grabbed a pillow, roughly pushed it down to cover her face and used both of his powerful hands to hold the pillow in place.
The elderly woman tried her best to fight back. She kicked her legs, thrashed about back and forth and tried to claw at his arm with her hands. The poor woman never had a chance. Less than thirty seconds after it started her back arched, her eyelids fluttered and her body went completely lax.
Big held the pillow over her face for another minute to be sure she was dead. He got off of her body, found his flashlight and surveyed what he had done. Then he did something even he could not have explained. Big pulled the blankets down, took the woman’s hands, gently folded them together and placed them on her stomach. He then covered her up to her chin with the blankets, put the pillow he used to kill her back where it was and fluffed the pillow under her head. Despite the sudden and violent attack, she looked quite peaceful and serene. Apparently satisfied, he returned to his task.
Big opened the door to the study and found his partner seated at a desk with the contents of the safe spread out on its surface.
“Hey,” Little began when he saw his partner. “We did okay. Looks to be about seven or eight grand in cash and if the jewelry is real, and it looks like it, should be another hundred here easy. Everything okay upstairs?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine,” Big lied. “Why?”
“What do you have there?” Little asked indicating the black cloth sack Big carried.
“Silver,” he answered.
Little looked at his watch and said, “Times up, we need to get out of here before the cop comes around again.”
TWO
“I know you told the other officer what happened, Carlotta, but I need you to tell me,” Detective Tony Carvelli patiently said to the obviously distraught Latina woman.
Carvelli and his young partner, Antwone Spenser, a recently promoted detective with the Minneapolis Police Department, were seated in matching, obviously expensive cloth covered wing-backed chairs. The two men were facing two women, both of whom appeared to be the same approximate age. The women were seated together on a sofa and the four of them were in the main living room of the house on Parker and Lake of the Isles.
Carlotta took a deep breath, squeezed the hand of the woman next to her and said, with barely a trace of an accent, “I got here at eight just like every day. As soon as I came into this room, I noticed some things missing. I looked around for a few minutes and could tell that a lot of the silver things were gone. Then I realized Mrs. Benson wasn’t downstairs. She’s almost always here when I get here,” she explained. “So I hurried upstairs and went into her bedroom. She was still in bed and not moving.”
Carlotta stopped and wiped a couple of tears away, looked at the woman seated next to her and said, “I guess I knew right away she was dead. Her eyes were closed, she wasn’t moving and her face was really pale.” She sniffled and said to the woman, “I’m so sorry, Miss Janet.”
“It’s all right, Carlotta,” the woman said rubbing the back a
nd shoulders of the upset housekeeper.
Carlotta turned back to the two detectives and continued. “I checked to see if she was breathing, which she wasn’t, then I came downstairs and called Miss Janet from the kitchen.”
“I called 911 then drove here as quickly as I could. There was a police car already here when I arrived,” Janet Benson Milliken, the victim’s daughter said. “I came inside and before they could stop me, hurried upstairs to Mom’s bedroom.
“I came back down and we talked to your officer, the tall black man. And we both told him what happened. He had us sit down here and told us not to move around or touch anything. More police and other people started arriving and we’ve just been waiting. Do you think my mother was murdered by burglars?”
“It’s too soon to tell,” Carvelli softly replied.
“It’s all my fault,” the daughter said fighting back a sob. “We were supposed to be at my cousin’s cabin but something came up at my job and I decided to stay for a couple more days.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Carvelli soothingly said looking into the daughter’s eyes. “This is not your fault. If this was done by the guy who did the burglary, he’s the one to blame. Don’t do that to yourself. Don’t start second guessing things. It won’t bring your mother back and it isn’t true. We’ll get this guy and put him away.”
“Sarge,” Carvelli heard a voice say coming from the living room’s entryway. It was the same officer the two women had first talked to. “Sergeant Waschke just pulled up,” the man said referring to the arrival of a homicide detective.
“Thanks, Jefferson,” Carvelli replied looking up at the man. He turned back to his partner and asked, “Did you get everything?”
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