by Mike Lawson
She thought briefly about breaking into Quinn’s apartment, where she might find something juicy, like maybe a diary in which she admitted to having a kinky sex life—not that it seemed likely—or some evidence that she’d committed some sort of financial crime, which also seemed unlikely. Eventually, she decided not to take the risk. Quinn’s building had a doorman, there was a camera in the lobby, and she imagined a person in Quinn’s income bracket would have multiple good locks on her doors. And then, of course, there’d be the fucking dog to deal with.
She finally decided that she’d get back to Quinn after she’d dealt with the major problem in ensuring a not-guilty verdict for Toby Rosenthal: finding the man who “really” murdered Dominic DiNunzio. She was running out of time. The trial was only six weeks away.
Ella told David Slade that she needed information on all of Dominic DiNunzio’s clients going back at least five years, so Slade asked the judge to issue a subpoena. He’d told the judge and the prosecutor up front that his defense was proving that someone other than Toby had shot DiNunzio, and that this person could very well be someone connected to the victim’s accounting business. For example, maybe DiNunzio had been about to tell the IRS that one of his clients was guilty of income tax evasion, and the client decided to kill him to silence him. Slade also maintained that the police had rushed to judgment, refusing to even consider that after Toby left the bar, someone who looked like him came into the bar and shot DiNunzio.
“‘Rushed to judgment’ my ass,” Justine Porter said. “Five people saw him shoot the guy.”
“That’s not true,” Slade said. “Five people saw someone shoot Mr. DiNunzio, and they incorrectly identified my client. As I stated at the arraignment, Your Honor, I can present case after case where innocent men have gone to jail because of faulty eyewitness testimony.”
In the end, Judge Martinez granted Slade’s request for a subpoena. Like the prosecutor, the judge thought Slade’s argument was specious, but he didn’t want to leave room for an appeal based on the fact that he hadn’t allowed Slade the opportunity to develop a logical, if unlikely, defense.
Ella had a messenger service pick up the files on DiNunzio’s clients from Slade. The files included not only the clients’ names but also their addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and social security numbers; the birth dates and social security numbers were taken off the tax returns DiNunzio had prepared for his clients.
Ella put on comfortable, lounge-around-the-house clothes—a soft white jogging suit and slippers—and began the cumbersome task of going through the client list to identify the person she wanted. The first thing she did was to eliminate anyone who wasn’t between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-two—and the result was not good at all. Almost all of DiNunzio’s 250 clients were older than forty, and most were in their sixties and seventies. She ended up with only seven men who were approximately Toby Rosenthal’s age.
Ella’s next step was to obtain photos of the seven men. She found four of them online in places like Facebook and LinkedIn. None of the four looked the least bit like Toby Rosenthal. For the three men whose photos she hadn’t been able to find online, she contacted an active-duty policeman she and Bill had worked with in Las Vegas, and in return for fifteen hundred dollars, he obtained DMV photos of the three. One of the men, to Ella’s delight, looked somewhat like Toby—dark hair, handsome regular features—but then Ella saw on the man’s driver’s license that he was six foot three and weighed 190 pounds. Toby was five foot seven and weighed 135.
That was really going to be a problem, that Toby was such a shrimp.
Ella figured that many of DiNunzio’s clients most likely had children and grandchildren, and it was possible that one of those people might look like Toby. But running down the male offspring of 250 people was going to be a horrendous task, and then, even if she found a man who matched Toby’s description, she’d have to come up with a reason why the son or grandson of one of DiNunzio’s clients had decided to kill him.
She knew that she was going down the wrong path and needed to do something different. She decided to take a break and made an appointment at a spa about two miles from where she lived. She’d picked the spa based on Yelp recommendations and its location; she wanted to walk there, hoping the exercise would also help clear her head.
At the spa, she signed up for the works: an hour in a steam room to sweat out the toxins, a deep massage, a wax job, a facial, and then a manicure and pedicure. She was absolutely glowing when she walked out. She always found it hard to believe that Ella Sue Fieldman of Calhoun Falls, South Carolina, was completely comfortable spending seven hundred bucks at an upscale Manhattan spa.
As she walked back to her apartment, an approach to finding DiNunzio’s “real” killer that had nothing to do with his clients occurred to her. She figured if she took this approach she’d have a much better chance of locating the ideal candidate. Then, of course, she was going to have to find some way to link him to DiNunzio—and that wasn’t going to be easy. But, one step at a time.
Ella started surfing the Net, the wonderful Net. She limited the search to articles posted in the last year, looking at stories related to organized crime in the greater New York area. Specifically, she looked at criminal cases and arrests that had photos accompanying the articles. At three in the morning, her eyes feeling as though they were coated with wet sand, she found what she wanted.
In a photo in New York’s Daily News, five men were shown coming down the steps of the New York County Courthouse on Centre Street. In the background was the magnificent building, with its towering marble columns and the chiseled inscription: The True Administration of Justice Is the Firmest Pillar of Good Government. Yeah, you betcha, Ella thought.
In the center of the photo was a huge man in his sixties with kinky gray hair and big ears. He looked as if he weighed three hundred pounds, and he was scowling ferociously at whoever was taking the picture. The man was Vincent (Vinnie) Caniglia, a minor Mafia figure.
The media had had a field day with Vinnie, because he’d been arrested for having twenty thousand dollars’ worth of stolen Viagra pills in a storage locker that had been traced to him. The headlines in the various papers read: Hard Time for Caniglia; NYPD Busts Hardened Criminal; No Time to Be Soft on Crime.
With Vinnie were four guys who worked for him, and one of them was pointing at the photographer and shouting. Ella figured he was saying something like, You don’t get dat fuckin’ camera outta da boss’s face, I’m gonna kick your ass. Three of Vinnie’s associates were large men, though not as large as Vinnie. But the fourth man was a little guy whose head barely came up to Vinnie’s armpits.
And he was perfect.
The short man was identified in the photo as Dante Bello. It was a beautiful name, and Ella wondered if Dante’s mother had thought her son was going to grow up to be an opera singer instead of a hood. Ella had her Vegas cop get her a copy of Bello’s driver’s license and his criminal record. The driver’s license said Dante Bello was five foot six and weighed 140 pounds; Toby Rosenthal was five foot seven and weighed 135. Toby was twenty-six years old; Dante was twenty-nine. Both men had dark hair and regular features. Toby’s eyes were brown; Dante’s were blue—but that didn’t matter. When Toby’s and Dante’s photos were placed side by side, the men didn’t look like twins: Dante’s lips were thinner, his eyes were set closer together than Toby’s, and whereas Toby looked like a spoiled angel, Dante looked hard. The bottom line, however, was that in a dimly lighted bar Dante and Toby would look very, very much alike.
According to his criminal record Dante Bello had been convicted only twice. One conviction was for assault—beating a man senseless in a bar fight; he was sentenced to eighteen months and served ten. The second arrest was for being part of a crew that broke into a Best Buy in Yonkers and afterward attempted to sell a fifty-inch plasma TV to a cop for three hundred bucks. Dante did the whole eighteen months for that one.
The two convictions didn�
�t tell the complete story, however. Although Dante had been convicted only once for assault, he’d been arrested four times for the same crime, and the pattern was obvious: Dante would get drunk, then take offense at some real or imagined slight and go berserk. Maybe his violent temper was because he was a little guy and felt the need to prove how tough he was. He reminded Ella of the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas: a violent little psychopath, not intimidated by others no matter how big they were. The second notable thing about Dante’s record was that although he was arrested for assault several times, he was never convicted again—and Ella could imagine Dante, accompanied by a couple of Vinnie Caniglia’s bigger boys, discouraging the victim and witnesses from testifying.
But Ella had found her man, a violent, honest-to-God Mafia thug—the perfect person to frame for killing Dominic DiNunzio. Now the problem she had was to find some way to link Dante Bello to DiNunzio. In other words, she needed to find a motive for Dante’s killing DiNunzio, because the beauty of Toby Rosenthal’s defense was that Toby had no known motive.
32
DeMarco, having had no luck in getting anyone to admit they’d seen Ella Fields, headed over to Starbucks on Chambers Street—Sarah’s office away from the office—hoping she’d been more successful than him. When he walked in, he saw her chatting with a good-looking young guy with longish hair and soulful eyes. DeMarco couldn’t help wondering if he was the reason Sarah preferred to work at Starbucks.
He took a seat across from her, and Sarah said, “This woman has done everything she can to stay off the grid. I did a credit check on her—I got her social security number when we got the passport information—and her credit rating is worse than mine, and not because of student loans. Her problem is she’s never borrowed any money, so she has no credit history. She’s never had a mortgage or a car loan. She doesn’t have credit card debt, because as near as I can tell she doesn’t use credit cards, which is almost impossible not to do.”
“Huh. What else?” DeMarco said.
“I’ve used four of those people-finder Internet sites, like the one that turned up her marriage to Cantwell. She has no past-address information.”
“I can understand that,” DeMarco said. “In Phoenix, Cantwell rented the house where they lived and everything was in his name. It’s like the guy was trying to protect her by not listing her as being a tenant.”
“Something else is weird,” Sarah said. “I went to Justine’s office and called the IRS and told them I was her.”
“You little devil.”
Sarah smiled. “Anyway, I told whoever I talked to to call the DA’s public number so he’d know he was really talking to an ADA. When the guy called back, I said I wanted to know if Ella Fields had ever filed a tax return. He said no. I then asked him if Bill Cantwell had ever filed one and he said yes. When I asked him if I could get copies of Cantwell’s returns, he said, Not without a subpoena. I said, The guy’s dead! And he said, Not without a subpoena. So I asked him if he could tell me just one tiny thing: Did Cantwell file as single, married filing jointly, or married filing separately? He said Cantwell filed as single.”
“Huh,” DeMarco said again. “So he didn’t want her on his tax returns so later, when he got busted for income tax evasion, she wouldn’t go down with him.”
“Maybe,” Sarah said. “Or maybe she wouldn’t let him put her on his tax return. She never took his last name after they married.”
“So how do we find this woman, Sarah? We’re running out of time here. The trial is only a few weeks away.”
“Do you still think she’s here in New York?”
“Yes.” DeMarco had no evidence to support that conclusion, just his instincts, but he trusted his instincts.
“Well, in the past,” Sarah said, “Cantwell always rented some swanky place—like the penthouse apartment in Seattle and the house in Phoenix where he was paying twelve grand a month. What I can do, I guess, is start calling property management companies that rent out high-end places and see if they’ve rented to a lady named Ella Fields.”
DeMarco groaned, lowered his head, and rapped his forehead three times on the table. Sarah looked over at the young guy she’d been talking to and rolled her eyes, her expression saying: Hey, what can I tell you? He’s a nut.
DeMarco worked with Sarah for the next four days, calling property management companies that leased expensive houses and apartments in New York—and he knew they weren’t getting to all of them. Folks advertised on their own when they wanted to sublease; they stuck pieces of paper in coffee shops where you could rip off a slip with a phone number on it; they posted on fucking Craigslist. DeMarco was hung up on; placed on terminal hold; promised somebody would get back to him and no one ever did. He was told that client information was confidential, and, as his mood grew increasingly worse, he screamed that he’d get subpoenas and disrupt their fucking businesses for weeks if they didn’t cooperate. Do what you gotta do, asshole, he was told. Most people, however, cooperated, but the answer was always the same: We have no client named Ella Fields.
After he couldn’t take it anymore, he gave Sarah the sort of clear, precise directions a true executive gives a subordinate. He said, “Just do something, I don’t know what, but find that goddamn woman.”
“What are you going to do?” Sarah asked.
“I’m gonna go talk to people face-to-face so I can hit them if they give me any shit.”
Actually, he didn’t know what he was going to do.
33
Ella learned that Dante Bello lived in the East Village in a 1940s brownstone with his mother, Lena. She followed him for four days, just as she’d followed Rachel Quinn, hoping that by following him she’d somehow be inspired.
Each day he left his apartment about noon, and the first thing he did was walk his dog—a midsize black one that Ella thought was some kind of Labrador. Just as with Quinn, Ella couldn’t imagine why New Yorkers, living in apartment buildings, would want dogs. Anyway, after the dog had taken a crap, Dante would return to his mother’s place, change clothes, and then walk six blocks to a rundown bar called Frank’s Lounge. While she was watching Dante, Ella saw two of the men who’d been in the courthouse photo with him and Vinnie Caniglia enter the bar. It appeared that Frank’s Lounge was headquarters for Vinnie C’s pathetic crew of thugs.
During the four days she watched him, three of those days Dante stayed inside Frank’s Lounge until six and then returned to his apartment, where Ella imagined he had dinner with his mother. She had no idea what he could possibly be doing inside the bar all afternoon. One afternoon, he left the lounge and took a ride in a sedan with Vinnie and another man, and Ella followed them to a pawnshop in Queens. Ella suspected the pawnshop owner might be someone who fenced whatever Vinnie’s guys stole.
After Dante would dine with his mom, he and his friends would entertain themselves. One night it was a sports bar where they watched a Mets game and played pool; another night it was a shabby card place in Brooklyn where they played poker; two of the four nights they went to bars that attracted single women with big hair, tight skirts, and too much makeup. One night Dante left with a blonde who was two inches taller than him.
Ella never saw Dante or anyone else in Vinnie’s crew doing anything that appeared to be illegal, and she couldn’t help wondering how they made any money. Maybe they were lying low because of the Viagra bust, but whatever the case, Dante’s life as a gangsta appeared incredibly monotonous.
Ella was stuck. She couldn’t find any way to link Dante Bello to Dominic DiNunzio. As near as she could tell, Dominic and Dante had only two things in common: They were both wops and they both liked dogs. Yep, Dominic, too, owned a dog—she’d learned this from his obituary—but in Dominic’s case that made some sense, as he owned a home and had three kids. But what good would it do her that Dominic and Dante both had dogs?
She could imagine one scenario: Dominic and Dante are both walking their dogs in one of those parks where they’re allowed to unl
eash their mutts so they can run around and hump each other. And Dante, being the violent nut that he is, gets into a fight with another dog walker, pounds on him, and Dominic witnesses the encounter—and then Dante decides to kill Dominic because he’s a witness.
No, that was just stupid. Although she had no problem at all imagining Dante beating someone half to death, it would be almost impossible to put him and DiNunzio in the same park, at the same time, and then build a credible backstory that would support such an event.
Another possibility, she supposed, was to build a paper trail showing that Dominic was laundering money for Vinnie Caniglia’s low-rent Mafia operation. She would have to break into Dominic’s office and, with the aid of a hacker, plant files in his computer that would provide evidence that he was in cahoots with Vinnie—and then create some scenario where there’s a falling-out between thieves and Vinnie sends Dante to whack Dominic to keep him from talking. But Ella knew that the chances of making that work would be almost impossible. It was too complicated; there were just too many moving parts. She’d have to somehow establish that a respected member of the community, a man with no criminal record, had a secret life working with a minor Mafia don.
Shit.
Then Ella made what she considered to be a brilliant intellectual leap: Who said there had to be any link between Dante Bello and Dominic DiNunzio?
Ella again dressed in comfortable lounge-around-the-house clothes, made a pot of coffee, and went on another Internet Easter egg hunt. This time she searched for articles mentioning Vinnie Caniglia or Dante Bello—and she found the golden egg.
