House Witness

by Mike Lawson

  “The other thing you need to understand, Henry, is this defense will cost a considerable amount of money—much, much more than a hundred thousand.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but at least three million. I was told that this team charged one client two million—but the client was exonerated. I do know that my fee will become one million.”

  Henry raised an eyebrow to convey his shock.

  “Henry, the reason I’m charging that amount is that A, I’m taking a significant personal risk, and B, I’m now going to have to work considerably harder to ensure Toby is found not guilty.

  “The first thing I’m going to have to do is delay Toby’s trial as long as possible. If I can delay the start of the trial by one or two years, I will do so, because a lot can happen in one or two years; for instance, one of the witnesses is eighty-six years old, and she might die before the trial starts. The other reason I have to delay is to give this team time to do their job.

  “In addition to delaying the trial, I also have to present an alternative suspect for Dominic DiNunzio’s murder. I’m going to have to tear DiNunzio’s life apart to show he had enemies and that one of those enemies killed him.

  “Last, I have to convince this team to do the job, which is not a sure thing. They don’t take every case, and they charge so much they can choose not to work if they’re so inclined. So, before I proceed further, I need to know if you want to do this and agree to pay whatever is asked.”

  Henry didn’t hesitate. “Yes, I agree. Toby’s a spoiled brat and he got drunk and killed a man, but I won’t have my son brutalized for years.”

  “That’s all I needed to know,” Slade said.

  The next morning, David Slade called the law office of attorney George Chavez in San Antonio, Texas. He told Chavez he needed an exceptional jury consultant to assist on the case of Tobias Rosenthal versus the State of New York. He said he’d been referred to Chavez by Scott Barclay. Chavez said he’d pass on the message and if Slade didn’t hear back from anyone in a couple of weeks, he could assume the people he represented had declined.

  “A couple of weeks?” Slade said.

  But Chavez had already hung up.

  8

  Dominic’s funeral was held the second week in April at Holy Family Church in Queens and he was buried at Mount St. Mary Cemetery.

  It was one of those days when you felt lucky to be alive: the temperature in the mid-seventies, not a cloud in an azure sky, spring flowers in bloom. It was a day to be at the ballpark, walking through Central Park, having a picnic—doing anything but watching a man get buried as his mother, wife, and children cried.

  The funeral was well attended. There were probably more than two hundred people in the church, and DeMarco suspected that a lot of the attendees were friends and associates of Connie’s from Albany. Connie, in spite of her age, was still a major force in the state capital, and these people wanted her to know that they were there for her.

  After the burial, there was a reception at the church; DeMarco’s mother had been in charge of organizing it. Connie took a seat in a chair at the back of the hall and people came up to her and tried to console her, knowing nothing they could say would do so. Connie was wearing a black dress that came down to the middle of her calves and a small black hat with a short veil. DeMarco knew she was the same age as his mother, but she looked a decade older. She was also heavier than the last time DeMarco had seen her, her ankles were swollen, and there were coffee-colored half-circles under her eyes from lack of sleep. DeMarco had seen pictures of Connie DiNunzio holding him the day he was baptized. That beautiful young woman had disappeared, altered by age and grief.

  Dominic’s wife was a plump, pretty, dark-haired woman, and her three children, all boys, were on the heavy side, reminding DeMarco of the way Dominic had looked as a kid. He hadn’t known Dominic well, but he had no doubt he was a good father and that his sons had loved him. Toby Rosenthal had shattered their lives.

  DeMarco waited until the line of people talking to Connie had almost come to an end before he walked up to her. He took one of her hands, and said, “Aunt Connie—”

  “I don’t want hear it, Joe. You and John just make sure that son of a bitch pays for what he did.”

  DeMarco had dinner with his mother that night in Queens, at an Italian restaurant she and his dad always used to go to.

  Maureen DeMarco had been a beautiful, lively girl when she married his dad, but as she’d aged she became grim and bitter, and the sadness never seemed to leave her eyes—which was somewhat understandable. She fell in love with a man who became a Mafia hit man, and spent half her life worrying that he might be arrested or killed. Then, after he was killed, she never got over his death or remarried.

  She said, “Connie’s worried that the guy who killed Dominic will get off because his dad is so rich. Do you think he will, Joe?”

  “No. The prosecutor’s got an airtight case. Plus she knows Mahoney will destroy her career if he gets off.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” his perpetually pessimistic mother said.

  “I’m curious about something, Mom,” DeMarco said. “Do you have any idea what Connie has on Mahoney? I know she’s got something on him; he wouldn’t have hired me if she didn’t.”

  His mother looked at him for a long moment, then said, “No. I just know she knew him from the time she worked in Washington.”

  His dear old mother was lying to him. She and Connie had been friends forever, and DeMarco could tell, by the way she’d hesitated, that she knew the truth. But there was one thing he knew about his mother: No one was more loyal, and no one could keep a secret better. Like all the secrets she’d kept about his father.

  Part II

  9

  Fifteen years earlier

  Calhoun Falls, South Carolina—May 2001

  Ella Sue Fieldman was eighteen years old the day she looked into a mirror and decided to change her life.

  Ella realized that she’d never really had a chance. Her parents, Bob and Shirley, were devoid of ambition; they hadn’t graduated from high school, they didn’t read, not even the newspaper, and they watched nothing but mindless crap on television. Bob was a janitor at a nursing home; he started the job when he was seventeen and was still working there twenty-two years later. Her mother worked off and on, usually as a waitress. Most often Shirley lost the job because she rarely made it to work on time and when she was there, she moved so slowly she barely stirred the air.

  When Bob and Shirley got home from work, after one of Shirley’s pathetic dinners they’d start drinking beer and watching television, sitting side by side on a couch that hadn’t been vacuumed since the day Shirley bought it at a Goodwill store. If something broke around the house, it would remain broken for weeks before Bob got around to fixing it—and then he usually couldn’t fix it. As for Shirley, she didn’t do home improvement projects, she didn’t garden, she had no hobbies. If it weren’t for the miracle of television, Ella was convinced, her mother would have just sat on the couch and stared at the wall.

  If a single word were used to describe her parents, the word would be “indifferent.” They were indifferent when it came to their jobs, the home they owned, the world they lived in. And they were indifferent toward their only child. Thinking back on it, Ella wondered how she had survived infancy; she was amazed that her mother had been able to work up the energy to change her diapers and feed her.

  Ella did horribly in school, and the main reason was that she didn’t learn to read until she was almost seven. Most kids she went to school with were reading in kindergarten. Later in life, she would learn that children whose parents didn’t read to them when they were little—or for that matter, barely spoke to them when they were little—struggled their entire lives with reading and vocabulary. As for math, forget it. There was no one Ella could turn to to explain the mysteries of long division.

  But Ella didn’t inherit her parents’ apathy. From an early a
ge, as young as six, she was embarrassed—embarrassed by her grades and the way she dressed and spoke. So she tried—she really tried—to keep up with the kids around her. Ella was also competitive—another trait she hadn’t inherited from mom and dad—and although she hardly ever won at anything, at least she made the attempt.

  Life changed for Ella when she was fourteen—about the time she began to get noticeable breasts and hips—because there was one area where she could compete with her classmates: her looks. Ella was a beautiful girl. Her mother had gotten fat over the years, but was only passable-looking before that, and her father was downright homely. But Ella—with her blond hair and her cornflower blue eyes and her perfect long-legged, high-breasted body … Well, it didn’t take long for her to realize that the boys wanted her—and, for a while, she gave in to their desires.

  The other thing that Ella had going for her, in addition to her beauty, was a quality rarely found in one so young, and that quality was objectivity. She didn’t know how she came to be this way, but she was able to shine a harsh light on herself and dispassionately evaluate what she saw. And that’s what she did the day she graduated from high school.

  The day she graduated—a graduation that her parents hadn’t bothered to attend—she looked around at her female classmates. Most of them were going off to college, even if it was only a community college. They would become teachers or nurses, maybe even doctors or lawyers. Those girls had sat at the graduation ceremony just glowing, looking forward to whatever came next. Then there were those girls like Ella, the ones who were dumb and poor. They would become waitresses or hairdressers or clerks at Winn-Dixie, marry a mechanic or a salesman at the tire store, have two or three snot-nosed kids, buy a shitty home and a shitty car—and basically become Ella’s parents.

  It was after they played Pomp and Circumstance for the graduates that Ella had her epiphany. She looked at her image in the streaked bedroom mirror, dressed in her dark blue graduation gown, the mortarboard with the silly little tassel on her blond head, the tear tracks on her cheeks. And that’s when she said to the pretty girl in the mirror, “So what the hell are you gonna do now, Ella Sue?”

  Well, what she did was sit down, still dressed in her graduation gown, and make up her list. It was a things-to-do list and a things-not-to-do list. When she finished there were twelve items on it.

  Item number one was: Leave Calhoun Falls.

  Item number two was: Marry a rich guy.

  Ella knew that this was the only way she was going to escape the drudgery that would certainly become her life. She couldn’t stay in Calhoun Falls. All the rich men there were already taken, and those who would become rich all knew Ella Sue Fieldman as the dumb, easy lay in high school.

  She decided that in order to snag a wealthy mate, she needed to make herself over in every way possible. She would study the way sophisticated women dressed and spoke and acted. (That was item number nine on her list: Learn how not to be a hick.)

  She would also stop calling herself Ella Sue Fieldman—item number five. Ella had always hated her name. “Ella Sue” was a hick’s name and, as stated, she was not going to be a hick. As for “Fieldman,” it made you think of sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

  That summer Ella got a job at the truck stop on Highway 72. She worked as many hours as she could get and put only about half her tips into the tip jar so she wouldn’t have to share so much with the other servers. And she didn’t spend a dime on herself that summer, not for clothes or entertainment or even a recreational joint. By September she’d saved twenty-eight hundred bucks, enough to pay the first and last months’ rent on a cheap apartment in Charleston and buy some of the items she would need.

  She’d selected Charleston, South Carolina, for the simple reason that she needed a town with a decent-sized population—a population large enough to have a lot of rich, single men but not so large that she would be just one of a million pretty girls. She sure as hell wasn’t going to LA, where there was a potential starlet on every corner. But item number four on her list was: Do not get hooked up with a married man no matter how rich he is. She was not going to become some married guy’s bimbo girlfriend.

  Ella left for Charleston driving her father’s car. She stole the car. There were many times in the past when she’d stayed out all night, so she figured it might be a couple of days before her folks decided that she wasn’t sleeping at some guy’s house and had taken the car. And she doubted the cops in Charleston would hunt relentlessly for a stolen Corolla from Calhoun Falls.

  The reason she stole the car was not to get to Charleston—she could have taken a bus—but because she needed a car to go job hunting. Which was item number three on her start-a-new-life list: the kind of job she was going to get. She knew she could get a job at a titty bar in a heartbeat, and it would pay better than waitressing, but no way was she going to do that. A rich man meets a woman in a strip joint, he’s most likely not thinking she’s the ideal candidate for a wife. And she wasn’t going to waitress in any place like the truck stop in Calhoun Falls where she’d worked that summer. Truck stops and diners and family restaurants weren’t places where rich guys tended to dine. Her plan was to get employment in one of those restaurants that had four dollar signs behind the name in magazines. If there was a place in Charleston that had five dollar signs, she’d apply there.

  Two weeks after arriving in town she became a waitress at Charleston’s most exclusive yacht club.

  Ella studied the women at the yacht club and got catalogs from Macy’s and Sears and Target—the kind of places where she could afford to shop if the clothes were on sale. After careful consideration, she bought three outfits she could wear to expensive restaurants and bars. All the clothes showed off her legs and her figure, but none of them screamed I’m a cheap hussy. She also bought two pairs of panties and two bras—marked down 40 percent—from Victoria’s Secret. If the right man came along and she allowed him to take off her dress, she wanted to look just as good in her underwear.

  The other thing she did after she arrived in Charleston was legally change her name, and it was surprisingly easy to do. She was no longer Ella Sue Fieldman. She was now Ella Fields. She thought that sounded classy.

  Years later, when she looked back on what she had done, she realized it had really been quite remarkable. She had always known that she wasn’t stupid; she’d just had no one to guide her. But she hadn’t allowed herself to become a victim. She hadn’t allowed her circumstances to dictate who she would be. As young as she was, Ella Fields had developed a plan, and then relentlessly executed it.

  After two months Ella was pretty much settled in Charleston—she had a job, an apartment, new clothes, and a stolen car—and she was ready to begin … well, “hunting” was the only word she could think of. After work, three or four times a week, she’d go to the nicest bars in Charleston, the kind of places that charged ten or twelve bucks for a drink. She hardly ever had to pay for more than one drink, as some man would almost always offer to buy the second one.

  She quickly became brutally efficient at weeding out the undesirables. There were the obvious signs: a wedding ring, cheap clothes, unshined shoes, tattoos, dirty fingernails, and so forth. And the first question she usually asked a man was what he did for a living. Everyone tried to sound more important than they really were—teachers became professors, salesmen became marketing vice presidents, engineers became project managers—but she’d expected that. And teachers, salesmen, and engineers—almost anyone paid by the hour—weren’t what she was looking for.

  Occasionally, a man would appear to meet all her criteria—but item number seven on her list was to never leave a bar with a man she’d just met. For that matter, she had no intention of going to bed with a man until at least the third date; she wanted him absolutely panting for her. When a man asked her out, she would ask for a card and say I’ll call you tomorrow to let you know if I’m free on Saturday. She wanted the card for two reasons: Married guys would lie about thei
r names, and a card would tend to confirm that a man really had the kind of job he said he had. As for guys who didn’t have business cards …

  In her first six months in Charleston she slept with no one and had only two second dates.

  The seventh month, a week before her nineteenth birthday, Ella Fields met Bill Cantwell.

  10

  It had been twelve days since David Slade had called George Chavez in San Antonio to put him in touch with the team that was going to save Toby Rosenthal’s life—and the waiting was driving him insane. He knew it would take some time for the team to research Toby and the case, but almost two weeks should have been long enough. He was beginning to think they had decided to give Toby’s case a pass—which meant he was going to lose a million-dollar fee and have to tell Henry Rosenthal that his punk kid was going to prison. He was thinking about calling Chavez again when his secretary told him there was a woman on the phone who refused to give her name but said she’d been referred to him by a lawyer in Texas.

  Slade snatched up the phone. “This is David Slade,” he said. “I’d about given up on you.”

  “Meet me in the MObar at the Mandarin Oriental at seven,” a woman said in a voice that was low and calm.

  Then she hung up. She hadn’t even told him her name.

  The MObar in the Mandarin Oriental hotel is on the thirty-fifth floor and offers a view of Central Park and the city’s lights. It’s a small, intimate place with a hammered-nickel bar and high-backed booths. There were only five people in the bar when Slade arrived, and four of those people were coupled up. The only single woman was a gorgeous blonde with short hair who appeared to be in her early thirties. She sat at the bar, drinking a glass of white wine. She was wearing a black suit over a white blouse, the skirt short enough to display two outstanding legs. On her feet were black stilettos with three-inch heels. Had David Slade known anything about women’s shoes he would have known they were Manolo Blahniks and sold for about six hundred bucks.