House Witness

by Mike Lawson

  “Treat yourself, Ed. Take a cab home instead of the subway.”

  18

  Thirty-one days after Ella swapped out Esther’s pills, she got her daily phone call from her dope-smoking spy, Curtis. The thirty previous calls had normally been about ten seconds long, Curtis saying, “Everything’s fine here. She’s doing okay.” To which Ella would say, “That’s good. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  But on the thirty-first day, Curtis called and said, “Jesus. Esther had a stroke last night. They took her to the hospital.”

  “Oh, my God!” Ella said—and she meant it. Because now she really had to hustle.

  Ella put on a wig and rushed over to the assisted living place. She went up to Esther’s apartment, knocked on the door, and when she didn’t get an answer, let herself in—and swapped out Esther’s pills again. She took the diet and antihistamine pills out of the Coumadin and digoxin prescription vials in Esther’s medicine cabinet and put those pills back in the diet and antihistamine pill bottles she’d placed in Esther’s bathroom closet. Then she took the Coumadin and digoxin pills that she’d taken from Esther’s prescription bottles—the ones she’d placed in plastic sandwich bags—and put those pills back in the prescription vials. Now if someone, for whatever reason, looked at Esther’s pills, the right pills would be in the right bottles.

  The only thing she had left to do was swap out the pills in Esther’s daily pill organizer box—but then she couldn’t find the damn box! It should have been on Esther’s kitchen table but it wasn’t. Where the hell was it? Well, it wasn’t anywhere in the apartment that she could find after a thorough search.

  She told herself: Don’t panic. It’s okay. If anyone—again for reasons she couldn’t imagine—looked at the pills in Esther’s pillbox and saw that they weren’t Coumadin or digoxin, this person might then discover the antihistamine and diet pills in the bathroom closet and conclude that Esther had just mixed up her medications. Ditto if Esther died and an autopsy was performed and the pathologist discovered that Esther didn’t have Coumadin or digoxin in her body. But why would anyone perform an autopsy on an eighty-six-year-old woman who’d had a stroke? There was no reason to panic. With the bottles of diet and antihistamine pills in Esther’s closet, there was a logical explanation for why Esther had the wrong pills—pills that looked just like her prescription medications—in her pillbox.

  Ella left Esther’s apartment and called Curtis and told him to meet her back out behind the big rhododendron where Ella met him the first time.

  Curtis looked flustered when he arrived, not his usual, mellow, dope-smoking self. “Man, this doesn’t feel right to me.”

  “What doesn’t feel right to you?” Ella said.

  “What happened to Esther? I mean, did you …”

  “Did I what?” Ella said.

  “I don’t know. You asked me to let you know how she’s doing every day, and then this happens to her. So did you …”

  “Curtis, I told you this was a family thing, a legal thing. Esther’s got a lot of money and her will is a mess and she doesn’t have any close family, just a bunch of distant relatives who are going to squabble over her estate. Well, I’m one of those relatives, and I needed to know right away if something happened to her so I could get my lawyer moving on things. That’s all this is about.”

  Ella pulled a wad of bills out of her pocket. “That’s a thousand bucks. Call it a bonus. But, Curtis, let me explain something to you. If you were to tell anyone that you were spying on Esther for me …”

  “Spying?”

  “That’s right. Spying. That’s what you were doing, spying on Esther for me, keeping me informed of her condition. So like I said, if anyone learned that you’d been spying on her, you could be in deep trouble. You’d lose your job for sure, and if, hypothetically, a crime was committed, you’d be an accomplice to the crime. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah,” Curtis said.

  “Good. Now you sit here and have a joint and think about what you can buy with the money I just gave you. And forget you ever met me.”

  Ella went to a deli and ordered a pastrami sandwich for lunch; they made the best pastrami sandwiches in New York, New York. While she ate, she used her iPhone to see which hospitals were close to Esther’s place, and the second one she called informed her that yes, an Esther Behrman was a patient, up in intensive care.

  Ella, still wearing the wig she’d worn when she put Esther’s pills back in the correct containers, went to the hospital. She stopped at the nurses’ station in intensive care, said she was Esther’s niece—well, actually her grandniece—and wanted to know how dear Aunt Esther was doing. Not good, a nurse told her. “The prognosis isn’t … hopeful.”

  Ella said, “Oh, no, that’s just horrible,” and tried to squeeze out a tear, but couldn’t make that happen. When she asked if she could see Esther, the nurse said there wasn’t any point, Esther was completely unresponsive.

  “This is just so horrible,” Ella said again.

  And it really was horrible. It would have been better for everyone—including Esther—if the stroke had killed her immediately. Ella certainly hadn’t been trying to turn her into a vegetable. She wasn’t a cruel person.

  Ella texted David Slade.

  Two down, three to go. Everything proceeding well.

  We need to meet!

  No. Just make sure you can get another delay if needed. But the way things are going now, we might not need one.

  And that was true: Ella really felt good about the way things currently stood.

  Part III

  19

  DeMarco was glad he’d finally been able to ditch the crutches.

  The last two months, they’d about driven him insane. It was a hassle to move around any room where the furniture was close together, like almost any bar or restaurant. It would take him three times longer to get anyplace he had to go on foot. He couldn’t drive, even a car with an automatic transmission, because the bone he’d cracked was in his right leg; and getting into and out of cabs was a feat of acrobatics. He’d also developed a real appreciation for wheelchair ramps, as steps were a bitch, particularly when it was icy or raining and he was afraid he’d slip.

  Finally, after he had stumped around for ten weeks, the X-rays showed the crack in his hip bone had mended itself. The bad news was that the doctor wanted him to use a cane for the next couple of months, just to keep him from putting too much weight on his bad leg too soon. Meaning no golf.

  They gave him an aluminum cane at the hospital, one that could be adjusted to match his height, but he thought it looked like something an old codger on Medicaid would use. So he bought an ebony cane with a brass derby handle from a pawnshop, wondering briefly about the poor bastard who’d been forced to pawn it. Anyway, he felt better using the cane, mainly because he figured he looked better. Like an RAF pilot you see in old movies, a guy with an Errol Flynn mustache whose Spitfire had been shot down by the Luftwaffe over the English Channel. Well, okay, maybe it wasn’t that romantic, but the cane was definitely better than hobbling along on crutches.

  He was taking his new cane for a test spin around the block when he got the call. It was from the 212 area code, and he didn’t recognize the number.

  “DeMarco?” the caller said.

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Justine Porter.”

  “Who?”

  “The ADA prosecuting the man who killed Dominic DiNunzio.”

  “Oh, yeah,” DeMarco said. “Sorry, I forgot your name for a moment there.” He hadn’t thought about Porter since they arraigned Dominic’s killer two months ago. He was glad she’d called, because he’d been wondering when they were ever going to hold the trial.

  “What can I do for you?” DeMarco asked.

  Porter began, “There might be a problem with the case against Toby Rosenthal.”

  Five hours later, DeMarco was in New York.

  Porter worked out of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, located at One Hoga
n Place in Lower Manhattan, near Foley Square and within an easy walk of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, and One World Trade Center. It was also just a few blocks from the Financial District, where some of the greatest American criminals plied their trade. From the upper floors of the courthouse, you could get a peek at the Hudson River to the west and the East River to the east.

  Justine Porter’s office was on the sixth floor and didn’t have a view of anything because it didn’t have a window. When DeMarco rapped on the doorframe, Porter was on the phone. She looked haggard, DeMarco thought, and judging by the smudges under her eyes, she wasn’t getting much sleep.

  She waved DeMarco into her office but kept talking on the phone: “I’m telling you, Morrie, I’m not going to plea-bargain this case down to a misdemeanor. We got your asshole of a client on video punching a seventy-two-year-old grandmother in the face after he stole her purse.” Pause. “I don’t give a shit how much a trial will cost. That little prick you represent is going to jail. So either plead him guilty or I’ll see you in court.” Porter slammed the phone down and said to DeMarco, “Everything in this city is a fucking negotiation.”

  She pointed DeMarco to a chair in front of her desk; the surface of the chair was the only horizontal space in her office that was unoccupied. There were brown accordion file folders stacked in towers on her desk, on the floor surrounding her desk, and on top of three olive green metal file cabinets along one wall. Some of the drawers in the file cabinets couldn’t close because they were overstuffed. DeMarco knew that in New York trials were delayed for months and sometimes years because there weren’t enough prosecutors and public defenders, and Porter’s cluttered office seemed to confirm this.

  DeMarco sat and said, “So what’s going on? You told me on the phone that—”

  The phone on Porter’s desk started ringing at the same time her cell phone chimed an incoming call. She tapped her cell phone to send the call to voice mail, and while the other phone was still ringing, she looked at her watch. It was five p.m. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “If we stay here I’m going to get interrupted every two minutes. And anyway, I need a drink.”

  “Sounds good to me,” DeMarco said.

  They left the courthouse and began walking down Baxter Street, along the perimeter of Columbus Park, DeMarco limping beside Porter on his cane. Not having put any weight on his bad leg for two months, he was aching even with the cane.

  Porter said, “So what’s with the cane? The first time I saw you, you were on crutches, but I never asked why.”

  DeMarco told her how’d he’d cracked a bone in his hip in a fluke golfing accident. Porter said, “My dad was a big golfer. Said it was a great way for an older guy to get some exercise, which in his case meant he’d ride around in a golf cart for three hours chasing a little white ball, then spend three more hours in the clubhouse drinking beer with his buddies. He died on a golf course.”

  “He did?” DeMarco said.

  “Yeah. He and my mom decided to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary by taking a trip to England, Scotland, Ireland—the whole grand tour. Well, my dad got a tee time at St. Andrews a year in advance, paid almost two hundred dollars to play a round, and dropped dead of a heart attack on the third fairway.”

  “Gee, that’s a shame,” DeMarco said, but he was really thinking: What a perfect way to go.

  They ended up a couple of blocks from Porter’s office at a place called Forlini’s, an Italian restaurant that had been around since the 1940s. The bar was packed with lawyers, judges, and cops, and probably more than a few criminals, so Porter asked for a booth in the restaurant. The booth had red leather seats, and on the walls were faded oil paintings in gilded frames depicting bowls of fruit and rural Italian settings and photos of old Italian guys whose names nobody could remember.

  Porter ordered a bourbon. DeMarco asked for a bottle of Birra Moretti, an Italian beer. When in Rome.

  “So,” DeMarco said. “What’s going on? You said on the phone you lost two witnesses and were concerned about the case.”

  “Yeah. The busboy and the old lady. The busboy was a brand-new citizen and he was just dying to testify to show how American he is. But then he split, and we can’t find him. As for the old lady, she had a stroke and the doctors say she’ll probably be dead before the trial, and if she isn’t, she won’t be able to testify anyway.”

  “But you still have three witnesses,” DeMarco said.

  “Actually, I’ve really got two. The bartender—his testimony has always been a little shaky, him saying things at the lineup like ‘I think it was Toby Rosenthal who did it.’ He’s not a strong witness. I also don’t have any physical evidence that Rosenthal did the shooting, like a weapon or gunpowder residue on his clothes. Nor do I have a motive, which makes it even harder to convince a jury that Rosenthal did the crime. The case was strong when I had five witnesses, but with two of them out of the picture I’m worried, and I really got worried after what happened to the old lady. She was the main reason I called you.”

  “So what happened with her?” DeMarco asked.

  “I think somebody might have caused her to have the stroke.”

  “What! How?”

  “Never mind how, for now. Just listen. I wanna tell you a story.” Porter took a sip of her drink and muttered, “Man, this hits the spot.

  “This job doesn’t have a lot of perks,” she said, “but I got to attend this conference in Miami a couple of years ago. The conference was about all the crime-busting shit that prosecutors were doing, and DAs and ADAs came from all over the country. It was a total boondoggle, of course, but I went because I figured I deserved a week in the sun in January.

  “Anyway, I’m sitting in the hotel bar with four, five other lawyers one night, and this one guy tells how he lost this case because a cop gets on the stand and steps on his crank with both flat feet. So we start playing I-can-top-that, about losing cases because of techs spilling coffee on evidence samples and witnesses flubbing their testimony and judges doing bonehead things.

  “But this one guy from Phoenix said he had a big case that went south on him one time, and it wasn’t because of bad luck or incompetence. He said he lost it because somebody tampered with all his witnesses.”

  “All of them?” DeMarco said.

  “Yeah. He had three witnesses, but one disappeared and the other two, a guy and his wife, changed their testimony, and he was positive that somebody got to them.”

  “Okay,” DeMarco said, but he was wondering what the Phoenix case had to do with Toby Rosenthal.

  “Then one of the gals there says that never happened to her, but it did to a buddy of hers in Houston. He had a case he couldn’t possibly lose, but witnesses disappeared or lied on the stand, and her buddy was absolutely convinced that somebody had orchestrated the whole thing.” Porter polished off the bourbon and held up her glass to get the attention of a passing server.

  She continued, “It turns out the two cases had only one thing in common: The defendants were both rich. And I’m not talking a couple million rich. I’m talking forty, fifty, a hundred million rich.”

  “Is the Rosenthal kid that rich?”

  “No, but his old man is, and when two of the witnesses against his dipshit kid suddenly became unavailable, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I heard in Miami. So just for the hell of it, I had my intern—this kid’s really sharp—do a search for cases where the defendant had megabucks and was found not guilty at trial or the case was dismissed because witnesses vanished or changed their testimony. I told her to go back fifteen years, and it took her a week, but she found six cases. Actually she found nine, but I disregarded three of those for various reasons.”

  Porter’s second drink arrived, and she took a long swallow. DeMarco was afraid that, as exhausted as she appeared to be, if she had one more drink she might fall asleep right there in Forlini’s.

  Porter said, “I called the prosecutors who tried the six cases, and after ta
lking to them I think it’s possible that there’s a guy out there who makes it his job to get rid of witnesses in cases with superrich defendants.”

  “A guy?” DeMarco said. “What did these prosecutors say that made you come to that conclusion?” He was really thinking: jump to that conclusion.

  “A couple of them said they got a whiff of a man who might have tampered with their witnesses, and based on the guy’s description, it might have been the same man.”

  “A whiff?”

  “Yeah, but that’s all they got. Which is why I want somebody to independently investigate the six cases and see if it’s possible that anyone involved in them could be messing with Rosenthal.”

  DeMarco shook his head. “Just because a couple of witnesses in these cases disappeared …”

  “They didn’t all disappear. It’s more complicated than that. Some changed their testimony. In one case, evidence was tainted. But the main thing is that the cases against these six rich defendants were so strong that none of them should have been acquitted, but they all were.”

  “But still, you’re saying you don’t have anything solid showing that whatever happened has any bearing on Rosenthal.”

  “That’s right, I don’t,” Porter said. “But I’m too old and battle-scarred to ignore my gut. And my gut’s telling me if I don’t do something, I’m going to lose.”

  “Well, I can tell you right now that that’s not going to make Mahoney happy. And you really don’t want to make him unhappy.”

  “Which is the reason I called you, DeMarco. You told me if I needed help, I was to give you a ring. Well, I need help. I want you to look into the six cases and see if there’s a connection to Rosenthal.”

  “Me!” DeMarco said. “Why me? You got thirty thousand cops in New York.”

  “And normally I would use them, but I got another problem. I’ve told my boss the same thing I’m telling you, and he doesn’t believe me. You see, my boss and I, we don’t get along too well. He thinks I should accept more pleas and take fewer cases to trial. He thinks I spend too much on lab testing and paying experts to testify and all the rest of the things you have to do to win. And, of course, he’s got budget shortfalls, which he blames on everyone but himself. The bottom line is, he’s told me that I’ve got a strong enough case with three witnesses and to make do with what I’ve got.”