Naive

by Charles Royce

  Shawn, watching from the back of a taxi, pounds on the monitor. “You sack of shit. She got to you. Elaine Holcomb got to you. Fuck me.”

  C h a p t e r 1 9

  “You know you have to think like Elaine Holcomb,” the district attorney says to Astrid Lerner, the assistant district attorney handling the case of The People vs. Micah Breuer. He has accosted her in the narrow hallway just outside her office, before she has even had the chance to put her things down in her office, much less enjoy the coffee she holds in her hand.

  “Think like her, be like her,” he says. “Now this sonofabitch is going to plead ‘not guilty,’ cuz he’s already hired the top defense firm in the city. He’s also well-connected and rich as shit, plus his mother-in-law is who?”

  “Elaine Holcomb,” Astrid responds with little affect.

  “Right. Now the arraignment is tomorrow, but the trial? My God, it might start in less than two months if this woman has her way.”

  “Good morning to you, too, sir. I am on it, sir.” She fumbles with her coffee, her folders and her keys, trying to get her boss to realize she has just arrived and has her hands full already.

  “I have no doubt, but you need to be ready,” he says. “Second degree murder, manslaughter, we need it all, back-up plan upon back-up plan. And we need this on the fast track. There’s too much publicity, in addition to the goddamn fact that I don’t need this woman in my hair. I thought I got rid of her once and for all.”

  “Sounds like someone had a phone call early this morning.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, walking backwards a step.

  Astrid pauses, realizing how badly her boss must need to get this off his chest.

  “Sir, she was one of the best you ever had,” she says, placing her hand on the doorknob to her office. Shut up shut up shut up, she thinks. Why does he always seem to do this at the very start of my day?

  “And now she and I both want you to be even better.” He walks away mid-sentence.

  Astrid tries to use her key to unlock her door but realizes it’s already ajar. She pushes it about two-thirds of the way open, until it’s blocked by a brown box of papers on the floor. She forces her way through the small opening.

  Three paralegals are sitting at a round circular table next to her desk, with stacks of folders on their laps. She is concerned about how they got in, but grateful they are so eager. The boss has spoken. We’ve got a job to do.

  A driven young woman from a wealthy Pennsylvanian family, Astrid Lerner is 38 years old with medium-length ash blonde hair. She stands at five-foot-ten, and usually towers over her colleagues, both men and women. She owes her height to each of her parents, whom she both admired for their work ethic and hated for their relentless focus on achievement. Her father wanted her to be a doctor, which is why she became an attorney. She’s always had mixed feelings about the law. She hates the practice of it but loves the doors it opens. Confident, well-rounded and empathetic, she fancies herself a judge-in-training but can also see an eventual run for mayor, following in the quasi-footsteps of the infamous Elaine Holcomb.

  Her light-grey office walls are covered with awards and commendations, with graduation diplomas and framed photos of her parents. One rather large window looks out into the main work area of the felony unit, but no windows with direct natural light, a fact that has always bothered her about the tiny office. Astrid turns on her desk lamp, then reaches behind her and turns off the harsh artificial lights in the drop ceiling above her. She looks at the paralegals to hint that they should have made this particular lighting choice themselves.

  “Good morning, have we found the video yet?” she asks, enjoying the darker, cozier atmosphere she has created.

  ADA Astrid Lerner feels the electricity, and now the pressure, of her first major publicized case and is anxious to be a success. After all, the person whose shoes she is filling is ankle-deep in her own son’s murder and is actively looking to the new ADA to prosecute on the fast track.

  No pressure filling the shoes of the legendary Elaine Holcomb.

  “Not yet. We’ve done everything but knock on doors within the radius,” her young assistant says, fumbling through an unorganized mound of papers.

  “Well, then let’s start doing that. Wait. Radius of the camera, is that what you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me more.”

  The young paralegal smiles as he searches the messy stack in his lap and finds a folder marked CAMERA. “Well, the camera is a Chutter ProHD, and it looks like the video we are looking for had to be recorded within, say, five hundred or a thousand feet of the apartment, sorry, condo.” He pauses and puts his finger on a line in the file. “Hmmm, okay, it’s battery-operated and has a motion sensor, meaning it only records what’s moving in front of it. Night vision up to twenty-five feet, so even if it was dark, it would record whatever it was pointed at. So all that to say, it says here in some sort of conclusion one of us drew up, ‘After a sweep of the computers in question, no laptop or desktop in evidence has any recordings from this camera. But it was most likely recorded somewhere in or outside the house.’ So if you ask me, if it was the latter, it had to be extremely close, maybe even on the same Wi-Fi.”

  “Okay, so the sweep of the condo didn’t produce anything. Any luck with the neighbors?”

  “Micah and Lennox own the entire seventh floor. And in the complex, there are five condos that are full-floor units, two floors that have half-floor units, and one downstairs basement condo, which is the biggest and probably the coolest one out of all of them, didn’t you think?” He looks at another paralegal, who gives him a robust validation in the form of a giant head nod.

  Astrid claps her hands.

  He jumps, looks back at his notes. “We have spoken to the other ten occupants, and none of them have any idea what we are talking about.”

  “Oh, then they must not know anything. Oh my God, get me search warrants for all the neighbors.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” replies one of them. Astrid doesn’t know which.

  “And I want a full report from all the laptops and computers and cell phones, of course including the victim’s and the defendant’s,” Astrid says. “Internet search history, email search of key words, all of it. Now what about the murder weapon?”

  The paralegal fumbles again, this time taking longer.

  “Look at me, look at me, look up here.” Astrid mimes two fingers poking herself in her eyes. “I understand this is a lot of pressure I’m putting on you guys to help me prosecute in this amount of time, but just concentrate. You know the information, you don’t have to find it. I simply want to go through what we have. I need the high points.”

  Astrid sits back, proud of herself for not reaming the shit out of him.

  He diverts his attention away from his folders and closes his eyes for a full two seconds. “Right. Okay, the murder weapon is still in question. Analysis of the utensils left in the sink reasonably confirms that none of them was the actual murder weapon, although the puncture wounds prove almost conclusively that the thirty-three stab wounds were from one of the steak knives found in the sink.”

  “What does that mean?” she asks, already knowing the answer.

  “Okay. First, the knife in the sink could actually be the murder weapon, but it could have been wiped clean. However, there was food on it, which means it’s not. Shit.”

  “Calm down. You’re on to something, just take your time.”

  “But we don’t have time, you said.”

  “You’re right. Here’s the deal. First, we know it wasn’t the actual murder weapon because of the analysis, but what we do know is that it could be part of a set owned by the defendant. Second, the murder weapon is still out there, and could be hidden somewhere close. Do we have someone on it?”

  “Actually, we do. The same team who’s looking for where that video could’ve recorded to.”

  “Okay, what about the African case that housed the wireless camera?”


  “Near as we can place it, it was hand-made, and it came from Africa.”

  Astrid bites her lip. She looks at the girl sitting next to him.

  “You, what about the drug use? The initial results from blood and saliva rule out heroin consumption in the previous 48 hours. Can anyone confirm or deny that Lennox and/or Micah have used drugs recently?”

  “We’ve talked to friends and combed social media,” the second paralegal answers. “We’ve even visited two twelve-step support groups we know they have attended and asked around. Everyone we talked to seems to think they were both sober.”

  “And what about the icon on the drugs found at the scene, any idea who the heroin came from?”

  “A vague recollection from a few months ago,” says the third paralegal. “Someone at what’s called ‘the Red Door A.A. meeting’ in the Village said he remembers buying heroin with that emblem. He said he was too fucked up to remember exactly who it came from, although he did remember buying it from someone at a party in Chinatown, around Grand and Chrystie.”

  “Good, good, start there. Speaking of drugs, I want hair follicle analysis as soon as the results are in. They’ll tell us if either of them had been using in the past three months or so. These drugs they found may be old, meaning we don’t know how recently he was using, if he got sober again or what. Talk to his friends, his friends’ drug dealers, whoever you can. If he was using, it might be argued that it could be an additional motive for Micah to kill him, maybe a reason for a fight, maybe a lingering resentment.”

  “On it,” two of them say in unison.

  “Okay, we have a savage murder, people, possibly sexually motivated, with a possible drug angle, possible resentment for infidelity from two years ago, possible murder weapon, a confession of sorts, a one-point-five-million-dollar insurance policy, and the possibility that the whole night was caught on tape. Sounds pretty good, but we have to get specifics beyond circumstantial. I want that tape.”

  “Actually, it’s probably digital,” says the first paralegal.

  Again, Astrid chews her lip, this time almost bringing blood.

  He notices. “But I know what you mean. I’ll make that a priority.”

  “What about tape surveillance from nearby sources?” She continues to talk directly to him. “Where was Micah before? When? What did he do?”

  “Well, the video from his condo complex is not working, but there are two outside within a block of his house, one facing the front of the building, the other down the street, pointing north towards Essex,” he says authoritatively, this time referring to notes from a folder he has quickly located. “According to the one just outside his building, Micah Breuer was spotted leaving the condo at 7:17pm, and the camera just outside the new Élan building caught him arriving at the party at 7:57pm on the night in question. I know what you’re thinking, how can it take that long to drive uptown? We checked on that. Traffic wasn’t bad that evening, according to GPS records and several video sources at vantage points along the way. But we have the vehicle clocked at a gas station at 7:40pm just east of the Village, which could explain why it took so long.”

  “Great work, so now we have the beginnings of a timeline. Do we have any other people coming in or out of the building during that time?”

  “Yes, a few, but they’re accounted for.” He grabs 8x10 photo stills from the folder and lays them on the table in front of them. “These two are neighbors who live upstairs. One’s an actor and the other is a model. We talked with them and they were both together all night, said they barely know Lennox and Micah other than the occasional party they all attended. They didn’t hear anything that night, but not sure they would, considering no one shares a wall with the full-floor units.”

  “What about this person in the thingies, what are those called?” She points to a different photo.

  “Coveralls. That’s the janitor of the building, we think. We haven’t been able to find him yet.”

  C h a p t e r 2 0

  “Make sure we find it.”

  CEO James West is used to giving orders and watching his minions scramble to fulfill them. He has risen to power at Élan Publishing in a relatively short amount of time, based largely on his ability to delegate.

  “Yes, sir,” two dark-suited men say, exiting the office in unison, as if marching to war. James closes his office door behind them.

  “Now, you people,” James says, turning to the three persons seated at the large conference table, all backlit by the sunset off the Hudson River.

  James West’s office, designed by renowned interior designer Benjamin Vanderweiss, is decorated with an eclectic mix of furniture, including a steel-and-glass conference table surrounded by fourteen vintage walnut Herman Miller chairs. Six poster-sized black-and-white safari photos from his African travels are displayed on the walls throughout the room, and a bulky and weathered thousand-year-old Italian desk is the designated focal point, semi-obscured by the mound of cardboard boxes leaning against it.

  “Fill me in, please.” James walks across the room in front of them, scooting a half-filled box across the jet-black floor with his foot. The box is stopped only by the far wall to his right, and the jostling of its components makes his audience wriggle in their chairs.

  “The two have nothing to do with each other,” says one of the nameless faces in silhouette.

  “I should hope not.”

  “What I mean is that we can’t figure it out. We’ve taken care of one issue, but the other seems to be shedding some unwanted light.”

  “Ya think?” James West says, walking toward the window behind them. He stares at the new Élan International headquarters to his left, his pride and joy, the third tallest building in Manhattan, nearing completion in Hell’s Kitchen and about to open its doors. The structure itself is being heralded by the international press as “one of the most remarkable and technologically advanced architectural works of the last two centuries.” The design is the brainchild of the respected architect Enrick Goldman, known mostly for his dramatic and timeless residential works that fit in perfectly with the landscapes surrounding them. He was tapped by Élan and its corporate investors to bring the same aesthetic to a commercial skyscraper, and according to most critics, he had not disappointed. With a hefty base that houses an entire mall, convention center, indoor golf course and twelve floors of parking, the new Élan headquarters then tapers inward in three sections that match the exact heights of the skyscrapers that surround it. The first section is a 3,200-room luxury hotel, the second section is a sprawling forty floors of Élan headquarters, and the top section boasts thirty floors of high-end condos, with glass penthouses offering sweeping, majestic views of New York City and beyond.

  James West watches as a gigantic crane hoists an enormous Élan logo to its final resting place on the new building’s façade. “Look, we’re moving in less than three months. Our building and our ugly-ass logo are all over the news, we have stockholders asking questions, two employees dead in the same fucking night, and multiple detectives talking to our people and obtaining search warrants for our goddamn computers and servers.” He pounds on the window to emphasize the latter point. “Now, do I have to be worried about anything else?”

  “Not at all, sir. We have erased any—”

  “‘Not at all’ is fine. I don’t need to know what that means.”

  C h a p t e r 2 1

  “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understood you,” Shawn says to the taxi driver, covering the mouthpiece of his cell. They are parked just outside the courthouse on Centre Street, just south of Canal.

  “That is because you are on the phone,” replies the Pakistani cabbie, enunciating in a more purposeful accent than before. “I said $14.50.”

  “I gotta go,” Shawn says into his phone. He swipes his credit card, opens the door, and begins to exit just as Chinatown’s subtle smell of fish and soot fills his nostrils.

  He leans in to the taxi. “You’re why Uber is taking over the wor
ld.” He slams the door.

  “I cannot understand you,” mouths the taxi driver, not really caring if Shawn sees his face. He peels away.

  Shawn is directly in front of the Manhattan Criminal Court building, staring up at the large bronze and marble spires that bookend each of the two entrances. Quotes about the importance of justice are carved in concave relief all along the walls of the two courtyards. To his left, a gigantic copper mast protrudes from the building’s façade. The pole, weathered and oxidized over time, still manages to wave a proud but tattered American flag.

  He walks up the steps through the first security screening and past the information booth. Just above the booth hangs a beautiful 1930s black globe timepiece with the clock reading 8:45. Shawn nods in approval as he makes his way to the waiting area. He checks his phone just to make sure the timepiece is still working. Yep. Beautiful.

  Shawn sits on a long wooden bench surrounded by beige marble walls. His briefcase makes a thud on the green granite floors, echoing down the long hallway.

  Micah should be here soon, he thinks. The Tombs is right next door. The Tombs. What a dreadful name.

  ✽✽✽

  Having been transferred from the police station to the Manhattan Detention Complex, aka “The Tombs,” Micah is dressed in MDC-issued tan scrubs. The prison escort accompanies him across the twelfth-floor walkway that connects the Tombs to the courthouse. Micah is scared and shaking, looking for Shawn, who’d said he’d meet him. He wasn’t sure where.

  The elevator doors open to the lobby of the courthouse. Micah sees the public for the first time in days. As he exits to his left, he becomes aware of his clothing, his appearance. For the first time throughout this ordeal, he feels like a common criminal.

  He turns the corner with the escort and sees Shawn. His pace quickens as he walks toward him.

  “I thought you were meeting me earlier,” Micah says, trying not to shiver.