“But I told you the truth. I swear it’s all true.”
I put both my hands on the table, at the far end facing Kate. “I said that I needed to know every conversation you ever had with Brendan from the time Amanda first tried to leave him-the night he smacked her across the face. You never mentioned being alone with him, sipping wine in his den by the fireplace after the blizzard-not to mention-”
“That-that encounter had nothing to do with Amanda’s murder.”
“It had everything to do with Brendan, though, didn’t it? How could you possibly think he wouldn’t use that-what would you call it, Mercer?” I looked over at him before turning back to Kate. “Encounter just doesn’t nail it for me. That tryst? That betrayal of your best friend?”
I was trying to control my temper and hold my tongue. We ruined her life? How long had she been waiting, been thinking, about getting into bed with Quillian?
“Amanda didn’t love him anymore. I’ve told you that. Their entire reconciliation was an accommodation to keep Brendan in the Keating business. To stop Amanda from telling her father about the fact that she wanted to leave Brendan, while Mr. Keating was still alive. Then she had to keep the charade going after his death or Brendan would have walked off with half the Keating fortune.” Kate grimaced and barked out the last sentence. “It was all about the money.”
“And you? What was it about for you?” I tried to make eye contact with her, but she put her hands over her face.
“I was having my own problems at the time. And they are none of your business,” she said, pointing her finger at me and then repeating the gesture at Mike and Mercer. “And you, Ms. Cooper, why didn’t you get up when that-that-shyster was done and ask me to explain the circumstances of that evening? You should have-”
My eyes widened. “How could I possibly have known you had something to say that would have restored any credibility to your testimony when I didn’t even know that one-night stand had occurred? It was as though you handed Brendan Quillian a loaded gun, aimed to blow my case apart and take both of us out with it. Did you think for one minute he wouldn’t use that night to discredit you?”
“Never.”
“Whatever drugs you’re on, Mrs. Meade,” Mike said, “I’d like a handful.”
“There…are…rules, Detective,” she said in a clipped, angry voice. “There are just some things that one never-”
“Dream on, lady. Maybe they got regs in the Social Register that I don’t know about, but this scumbag’s on trial for friggin’ homicide. Quillian paid or hired or leaned on some bastard to kill his wife, and if you thought he was gonna let you sit there and nail him for all the world to see like you didn’t flop down on your back for him and throw your legs up in the air, you’re insane.”
Kate Meade had never been addressed that way, I was sure. She sat up straight and directed her venom at Mike. “I never asked for any of this. I never wanted to come here and talk about these things in a court of law. This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t forced me to come down to this office that day in October. Now how am I supposed to go on with my life?”
“Mrs. Meade, you’re the one who called 911,” I said. “You’re the only person in the world who heard what Amanda said to her killer. You hurled yourself at me last fall, telling me you’d do anything in the world to help find the man who murdered her. Nobody forced you to do this.”
“I’m sorry I ever told any of you what I heard,” she said, dissolving into tears again.
“What I most need to know from you right now is whether every word you said in that courtroom is true.”
Her answer was smothered as she cradled her head in her folded arms.
“What did you say?”
“Why would I have lied?”
“Because it seems to me your feelings about Brendan Quillian are a bit complicated, at the very least. Mr. Howell is going to tell the jurors to disregard every single fact you gave to them because-trust me, he’ll think of a reason-because you hate Brendan for what he did to you that night or you hate him because he didn’t do enough for you after that night. He might even tell them you want to see him convicted because of your own guilt for betraying your best friend.”
She lifted her head, shaking it as though she had never thought of any of these things. “Why don’t they despise Brendan as much as I do? He’s the one who was unfaithful to Amanda, lots of times.”
Kate knew that I had other evidence of the defendant’s philandering. But I certainly hadn’t needed her to make that point so dramatically and so personally before the jury.
“And what do you get?” Mike asked, anticipating the next morning’s tabloid take on my first witness. “The Park Avenue Neighborhood Association Desperate Housewife of the Year award? You’ve cratered our whole case. There’s not a word you said today that the jury’ll give any weight to.”
Mike’s beeper went off and he opened the door to step out into the hallway.
I could hear Kate Meade draw breath. “You mean I’ve done this for nothing? I’ve-I’ve exposed myself to all this public humiliation for no reason?”
“You have something more serious to think about right now,” I said. “We’ve got to get you out of here by the back door so the photographers don’t ambush you. My paralegal will get police officers to take you home.”
“Photographers waiting for me? Why in the world would they-” The answer seemed to hit her as soon as she formed the question. She stood up and walked toward me. “You’ve got to come with me, Ms. Cooper. I can’t face my family alone.”
“I’m due back in court in forty-five minutes. I won’t be able to help you with this. I’m a prosecutor, Kate, not a social worker.”
“I’ll take you. I’ll stay till your husband gets home,” Mercer said. He had worked in the Special Victims Unit for almost ten years, one of the only African-American detectives in the NYPD to hold the rank of first grade. Like me, he thrived on the highly charged emotional connections in this category of crimes, which required extra sensitivity on the part of the investigator. Mike Chapman, on the other hand, worked best when there was no one to hand-hold, when the cold, hard facts were teased out of the victim’s remains and the physical evidence. He loved being a homicide cop.
Kate Meade tugged on Mercer’s sleeve like a child hoping not to get lost in a crowd. “You’ve got to make sure there are no pictures in the newspapers.”
“I’ll allow Detective Wallace to take you home, Mrs. Meade. But only on the condition that you tell him every detail-I don’t care how intimate, I don’t care how embarrassing-about what went on between you and your friend Brendan. By the time I see Mercer later tonight, if there is anything Lem Howell knows about you that I don’t, there’ll be hell to pay.”
I turned on my heels to go back to my office to wait for Jerry Genco.
“Slow down,” Mike said, pulling me into the alcove next to the conference room. “Do me a favor-don’t buy any lottery tickets today.”
“Now what? Genco’s stuck in traffic?”
“Someone got to Marley.”
“How? What do you mean? He’s on Rikers Island.” Mike had come up with a witness, a thirty-two-year-old burglar from the island of Jamaica who was awaiting trial on a string of break-ins when Amanda Quillian was murdered.
“Got out of jail free. Went directly to the operating room at Bellevue Hospital.”
“What for?” It had taken me weeks to negotiate a cooperation agreement with Marley’s lawyer, whose client would testify that six months before Amanda’s murder, Brendan Quillian had offered him twenty thousand dollars to kill his wife.
“Snitch fever.”
The only prisoners lower on the totem pole than pedophiles were rats. “He’s sick?”
“You would be, too, if someone stuck a shiv between your fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae while you were working out in the yard.”
“You think it’s related to the case? Will he live?”
“It’s all about t
he case. Count on it. Critical but stable.”
I shook my head and continued on my way. “Yeah, maybe it’s just a jailhouse-”
“I mean they cut off a clump of Marley’s dreads and shoved them in his throat to try to choke him to death. The message was pretty clear that somebody doesn’t want him to talk.”
5
The cops in the patrol car who got the message from the 911 dispatcher to respond to the Quillian home were there within six minutes of the call. Although they were the closest unit to the location, they had been double-parked in front of a deli to buy sandwiches and lost more time while stuck behind school buses stacked to pick up students from trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Police officer Timothy Denton referred to his memo book, with the court’s permission, as he recited the times he had recorded in it.
“When you turned into the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues, did you observe any unusual activity?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Did you see any pedestrians?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mostly kids. A few adults, all women.”
“Did you see anyone running from the location?”
“No, I did not.”
The rookie cop wasn’t much less nervous than Kate Meade.
“Were you able to enter the Quillian residence?”
“Not right away. The door was locked. My partner rang the bell while I tried the service door to see if it was open,” Denton said. I was accounting for more critical minutes that had elapsed while Amanda Quillian lay inside on the living room floor. “Then I climbed up on the railing of the stoop to check if I could force open a window, but they had bars over the glass, so there wasn’t any use.”
“What did you do next?”
“I’d already radioed once for a backup unit. I called again and asked for ESU.”
“Would you please tell the jury what those initials stand for?”
“Sorry. Yeah. It’s the Emergency Services Unit. They do all the rescues and stuff. People stuck in elevators or jumpers on bridges. Called for them ’cause they have the battering rams to open doors.”
“Who was the next person to arrive at the Quillian house?”
Denton looked at his memo pad and repeated the name he had written there. “It was maybe ten minutes later. This young woman came-with a set of keys. Said she worked for Mrs. Meade, the lady who called 911. She was the babysitter.”
“Did you enter the town house?”
“Yeah, me and my partner. He opened the front door with the keys. We made the girl wait outside and we went in.”
“Can you tell us what you found?”
Denton ran the back of his hand over the top of his buzz cut and down his neck. He swallowed hard. “My partner-Bobby Jamison-he was ahead of me. We went in the entryway. Something must have caught his eye-”
“Objection.”
Judge Gertz admonished the young cop, “Just tell us what you observed and what you did.”
“Yes, sir.” Denton turned back to the jurors. “He stepped off to the left, into-well, like a parlor, I guess. I walked straight ahead. Then, I-um-I heard this kind of noise. Sort of a gagging noise. I doubled back.”
“What did you see?”
“That’s when I saw the body-the lady on the floor.”
“She was making a gagging noise?” Gertz asked, incredulous, because he thought he was familiar with the facts of the case.
“The sound you heard,” I interrupted to ask Denton, trying to keep control of the witness in the face of jurors who had already seen me sabotaged by a character in my own case. “What was the source of that?”
“Was she?” Gertz said again.
Denton’s head moved back and forth between me and the judge. “No, sir. The corpse was already dead.” Yogi Berra couldn’t have said it any better. Denton sheepishly looked to the jurors for some sign of understanding, then answered me. “That was my partner, Officer Jamison, making the noise. Throwing up. It was his first DOA.”
Despite my many hours of prepping Denton for his court appearance, he had always seemed more focused on Jamison’s reaction than Amanda Quillian’s condition.
I walked him through the events that followed, trying to leave as little room as possible for Lem Howell to paint the pair of rookies as Keystone Kops. Bobby Jamison’s physical response to encountering the murder victim had obviously contaminated an area of the crime scene. No, neither man had worn rubber gloves or booties in the house; yes, Denton had moved the body a bit to keep clear of the problem his partner had created; and, no, they hadn’t called to report the homicide until after they had cleaned up Jamison’s mess.
“Were there any signs of forced entry?”
“No, ma’am.”
Howell would argue that the killer was a street person who had pushed in after his victim unlocked the door. It was Chapman’s view-with Brendan Quillian conveniently out of town and the housekeeper on her regular day off-that the defendant had given the killer access to the home, so that he could lie in wait for Amanda as she entered alone after her luncheon date.
Howell’s cross-examination was a well-organized punch list of activities that the most casual of television viewers had come to expect of crime-scene responders. Tim Denton had been oblivious to just about every rule as he tended his unsteady partner on that fall afternoon, and the volley of No’s he gave in response to the questions seemed endless.
“I have no redirect of Officer Denton,” I said when Howell ceded the witness back to me and nodded at me with a smile.
The entryway of the town house and the area surrounding Amanda Quillian’s lifeless body had been hopelessly compromised by the first two cops on the scene. If the killer had left any trace evidence near her, he couldn’t have asked for more than the timely arrival of Jamison and Denton.
“You want a recess before you call your next witness?”
“May I have ten minutes?” I didn’t need the time, but I counted on it to let the jurors stretch their legs and come back fresh to a more compelling witness.
“Sure,” Gertz said. “Why don’t we give the jurors a short break.”
Max signaled me from her third-row seat that Jerry Genco had arrived and was waiting in the witness room. Artie Tramm let me slip out of the courtroom to the small cubicle off the locked hallway, and I confirmed with the pathologist the points that would be covered in his testimony.
“Dr. Genco,” I asked as the trial resumed, after he had completed the details of his medical education and training as a forensic pathologist and been qualified in his area of expertise, “for how long have you been employed at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York?”
“Three years.”
“I’d like to direct your attention to a date last fall, the late afternoon of October third. Do you recall that day?”
“Yes, I do.”
“What was your assignment at that time?”
“I was catching cases,” he said, speaking to the jurors in the manner of a professional witness who had testified many times before, and explaining the steps that he was obligated to perform at a crime scene. “I was on call to respond to any homicides reported between eight a.m. and six p.m.”
Jerry Genco, expecting a day in the morgue’s lab, was casually dressed in a sports jacket and chinos. He was in sore need of a haircut and a small screw to replace the Band-Aid that held one earpiece of his glasses to the edge of the frame, but his smart, studied answers were in sharp contrast to the nervous manner of Kate Meade.
“Would you tell us, please, what time it was and who was present when you arrived at the Quillian town house?”
“It was four thirty, and I was admitted to the home by Detective Michael Chapman, Manhattan North Homicide Squad. There were two uniformed officers from the Nineteenth Precinct there, three other homicide detectives, and Hal Sherman, from the Crime Scene Unit.”
“Any civilians?”
“There was a woman identified to me as the houseke
eper, but we never spoke. Someone had called her and she was brought in just as I arrived.”
“What happened when you entered?”
“Chapman led me through the vestibule into an adjacent room, like a small sitting area with several armchairs and a sofa. In the middle of the floor, on the carpet, was the body of Amanda Quillian.”
“Would you describe for us what you observed?”
Genco faced the jury box and gave a clinical description of the scene. “I saw the body of a Caucasian woman who appeared to be in her midthirties, fully clothed, lying on her back, apparently dead.”
He was more artful than Tim Denton in talking about the grotesque bruising on the slim neck of the victim, the protruding tongue hanging to the side of her mouth, and the pinpoint hemorrhages that dotted her still-open eyes.
Genco carefully described what he set about to do to pronounce the manner of Mrs. Quillian’s death, the legal classification that made it a homicide, rather than a natural event. The causation-the medical finding of the mechanism responsible for the death-was fairly obvious to anyone looking at the victim’s throat, but not able to be legally confirmed until autopsy.
This was not like the many cases in which the determination of the time of death played a critical role in the case, making measures of postmortem rigor, lividity, body temperature, and ocular changes significant. Here, instead, the parameters were tightly drawn by the hour and minute stamped on the digital photograph taken at the end of the ladies’ lunch, the phone records from Amanda Quillian’s cell as she was confronted by her killer, and the 911 call from Kate Meade.
So Dr. Genco moved his audience from the exquisitely appointed parlor in which he first saw the body of the deceased to the formaldehyde-scented room decorated only with a cold steel gurney in the basement of the morgue.
He described photographing his charge, undressing her, washing her body, and autopsying it. He didn’t need a receipt from the tony bistro where the friends had dined to assert that the victim’s last meal had been a Cobb salad with blue-cheese dressing. Stomach contents visible to the naked eye underscored that death had occurred within a short time after the ingestion of food. The two glasses of white wine she had sipped might have made it even more difficult for her to resist her attacker.
Bad blood Page 5
