by Mike Lawson
She needed to keep her eye on the big picture, and the big picture was that she wanted to keep on doing this kind of work until she’d made enough money to retire comfortably. She could, of course, do what she’d planned to do when she first left Calhoun Falls, and marry a rich guy; she knew she was attractive enough to snag one. But she liked doing what she did. She enjoyed the challenge and being her own boss and living the way she wanted without having to compromise to keep some man happy. And she’d proved with the Rosenthal case—a case more complicated than any she and Bill had ever dealt with in the past—that she could do the work on her own. After David Slade got an acquittal for Toby Rosenthal he would definitely refer her to other lawyers, and George Chavez could use her success in the Rosenthal case to get her other clients.
What she needed to do was not panic, and stay in New York until the trial started just in case Slade needed her help—and to make sure Slade paid her the final installment. In the meantime, and although she had no reason to believe her Carol Owen ID had been compromised, she’d find someplace else to live and whenever she ventured outside she’d wear a disguise.
The following day, Ella packed her bags and moved out of the apartment in Chelsea. She rented a room for two weeks at a cheap hotel in Chinatown, paying cash. The place was a god-awful dump; a Motel 6 looked like the Ritz-Carlton compared with it.
Next she called the forger in San Antonio and told him to make her another ID as good as the Carol Owen ID. He said it was going to take him at least a month—and she told him to speed it up. If she had to run, she wanted to be able to run under some name other than Ella Fields or Carol Owen.
She thought again about the calls she’d made to the witnesses and the possibility of the cops looking at the witnesses’ phone records. How would the witnesses explain, if asked, who’d called them from an unregistered cell phone? She thought about that for a bit, then had to hunt for almost an hour to find a pay phone.
She called Jack Morris and Kathy Tolliver and told them what they would say if someone asked about the phone calls she’d made to them. Jack said he could use a little more cash—big surprise, he’d had another bad weekend in AC—but he was cool about what Ella wanted him to do.
Kathy was not so cool. The girl started shrieking about how Ella was going to land her in jail and how then her daughter would be taken from her no matter what happened at Toby’s trial. So Ella had to calm her down, threaten her a bit more about what would happen to her daughter if she didn’t testify correctly at the trial, and then made sure Kathy knew what to say if anyone asked about her phone records.
Yeah, everything was going to be all right.
43
DeMarco couldn’t believe it.
They’d used the warrants granted by the Not-So-Honorable Walter Hoagland, contacted phone companies and banks, and examined the financial and telephone records of the bartender and the barmaid. They were both swimming in credit card debt, and the bartender appeared to be a degenerate gambler, based on his almost weekly trips to Atlantic City. But neither Jack Morris nor Kathy Tolliver had come into money since the Rosenthal case started—at least they hadn’t deposited money in their bank accounts or paid down their credit card debt. If they’d been bribed, they’d been paid in cash—and he had no way to prove that.
Phone records showed that Morris and Tolliver had both received several calls from a prepaid cell phone—but not from the same prepaid cell phone. When Justine asked the service providers to locate the phones that had been used to call the witnesses, she was informed that the phones were no longer in service. Son of a bitch! DeMarco was certain that the person who had been calling Morris and Tolliver from the prepaid phones was Ella Fields—but again he couldn’t prove it.
Livid, DeMarco went to McGill’s and leaned on Jack Morris and Kathy Tolliver again—and they both lied to him again. Kathy claimed that the calls were from her Narcotics Anonymous sponsor, and when DeMarco demanded the sponsor’s name, Kathy said, “They call it Narcotics Anonymous for a reason.” DeMarco told her how much time she could serve for perjury—doubling the amount she’d probably get. He also said she could be sent to jail for obstruction of justice if she was lying. Hell, maybe the DA could even find some way to make her an accomplice to Dominic DiNunzio’s murder, since she was obviously helping Toby Rosenthal avoid going to jail. Tolliver looked for a minute as though she might throw up—but she didn’t buckle.
Morris, on the other hand, wasn’t the least bit nervous. Jack had a lot more grit than DeMarco had expected. He said he gambled a bit, borrowed some money from a shark, and the shark called periodically to hound him for his money. He wasn’t about to tell DeMarco the shark’s name. “The guy might not break my legs for being a little late on a payment, but if I gave his name to the DA’s office, I could be walking on crutches for a month.”
The warrants that he and Justine had worked so hard to obtain hadn’t accomplished anything.
He called Justine to tell her where things stood, and started ranting. He couldn’t find Fields. He couldn’t prove that she’d committed a crime. He couldn’t prove that she’d tampered with the witnesses, or disappeared Edmundo Ortiz, or attempted to kill Esther Behrman. The whole time he was yelling, Justine kept trying to interrupt to tell him something. Finally, DeMarco said, “So I don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna do now.”
Justine said, “Well, if you’d shut up for two seconds and let me talk, I’ve got some good news for you.”
44
Toby Rosenthal’s trial was scheduled to start in a week, and Judge Martinez called for a pretrial meeting with Justine Porter and David Slade. Martinez just wanted to get an idea of how long the trial would last. The reason he wanted to know was that he was planning to take a vacation immediately after the trial and wanted to start booking reservations—although he didn’t tell the lawyers this.
When Martinez asked Porter how many witnesses she intended to call, Slade wasn’t really paying attention. He was thinking instead about his daughter, who had just turned thirteen. The girl had been an absolute angel growing up, the apple of his eye, a joy to be around. But as soon as she hit thirteen, she morphed into this sullen, belligerent airhead who spent all her time texting her girlfriends.
Last night at the dinner table she’d announced that she was getting a small tattoo on her lower back, just above the crack of her ass. The tattoo was a Chinese symbol that meant fate or destiny or some fucking thing. When his wife objected, saying she was going to do no such thing, his daughter said that she had a right to do what she wanted with her own body and called her mother a control freak. Things escalated from there. So when Porter started naming the witnesses, he really hadn’t been paying any attention because for one thing, he already knew who her witnesses were going to be.
The detectives, Coghill and Dent, would be called, maybe one of them, maybe both. They would discuss how they had identified Toby and what had happened at Toby’s lineup. Slade suspected that Porter would use the detectives’ testimony as an opportunity to show the jury pictures of Dominic DiNunzio: Dominic sitting at the table where he’d been shot, his shirt soaked with blood, his eyes half-closed, looking convincingly dead. And Slade wouldn’t object to showing the jury the gory photos because he wanted the jurors to see what DiNunzio looked like—and later be able to conclude that he’d been mistaken for Carmine Fratello by Dante Bello.
A CSI tech would be called to testify that Toby had been identified as being in the bar based on his fingerprints being on a glass—which Slade was willing to stipulate. Slade would ask the tech if they had found any physical evidence that Toby Rosenthal had shot Dominic, to which the tech would respond no.
Then Porter would call the witnesses.
“How many witnesses do you intend to call?” Judge Martinez asked.
“Four, Your Honor,” Porter said.
Slade thought: What? Did she say four?
“Excuse me,” Slade said. “I missed that. Did you say you were calling four
witnesses?”
“Yes,” Porter said, a slight smile on her face. “I’ll be calling the bartender, Jack Morris; the barmaid, Kathy Tolliver; and one customer who was in the bar at the time of the shooting, a lady named Rachel Quinn.” Then Porter paused dramatically before saying: “And a busboy named Edmundo Ortiz.”
Slade couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “I was under the impression that Mr. Ortiz wasn’t available to testify?”
“What gave you that impression?” Porter said.
“I don’t know,” Slade said, but he was thinking: What the fuck is going on here?
Still reeling from what he’d just been told, Slade told the judge that most of his defense would be based on cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses. He would be calling a law professor from Columbia who would discuss several cases in which men were wrongly convicted based on faulty eyewitness testimony, and an engineer who would demonstrate, using a video, how the lighting in McGill’s would have made a positive identification of Toby Rosenthal almost impossible. He concluded by saying, “But, Judge, I’m still trying to run down a couple of people.”
“If you’re about to ask for another delay, Mr. Slade,” Martinez said, “it’s not going to happen.”
“No, Your Honor, I’m just saying that I’m still trying to locate two people who may have a significant bearing on Mr. Rosenthal’s defense and may be called to testify.”
The reason he told Martinez that he was trying to locate two witnesses was that he was going to spring Carmine Fratello and Dante Bello on Porter during the trial. He would say that they weren’t on his original witness list because he hadn’t been able to find them until the day before the trial started.
“Whatever,” the judge said, ready to conclude the meeting. “The trial starts as scheduled next week, and I wouldn’t expect it to last longer than two weeks. And I’ll be moving things along to make sure that’s the case. Thank you both for coming.”
As soon as Slade left the judge’s chambers, he sent a text message saying: We need to meet. Urgently!!!
But his phone informed him the message had not been delivered. He sent it again, and again was informed the message hadn’t been delivered. Goddamnit! What the hell was going on?
When DeMarco had called Justine to complain that the warrant they’d obtained from Judge Hoagland hadn’t done them any good, Justine had said, “If you’d shut up for two seconds and let me talk, I’ve got some good news for you.”
“What good news?” DeMarco had said.
“Guess who called my office this morning.”
“Who?”
“Edmundo Ortiz. He told me he’s been in Alaska working on a fishing boat but if I send him an airline ticket, he’ll fly back for the trial. When I asked him if he was planning to say that he could identify Toby Rosenthal as the killer, he said yes, indeed he was.”
“You gotta be shittin’ me,” DeMarco said.
“Nope. When I asked Ortiz why he left New York and if anyone had tried to get him to change his testimony, he evaded my questions. All he would say was that he left because he got a good job out West and he just called me because he was trying to be a good citizen and knew it was his duty to testify. What I think happened is Fields forced him to leave town—or maybe she bribed him with the job he got—but the guy’s conscience got the best of him. God Bless the new Americans,” Justine said.
45
Ella called David Slade’s office. She wanted to give Slade the number of the new burner phone she’d use to communicate with him in the future. She told Slade’s secretary that she was Judge Martinez’s clerk, and Martinez wanted to speak to him. She figured Slade would take a call from the judge.
Slade came on the line, sounding vexed. “Yes, Your Honor. What can I do for you?”
“It’s not the judge, it’s me,” Ella said.
“Where the hell have you been?” Slade said. “I’ve sent you a dozen text messages.”
Ella started to tell Slade to calm down but before she could, Slade said, “The case has fallen apart. We need to meet. Immediately.”
“What do you mean it’s fallen apart?” Ella said.
“Not on the phone,” Slade said.
Ella hadn’t told Slade that a DA investigator named DeMarco was hunting for her—and she decided not to tell him now; he didn’t handle stress all that well. But she was afraid that DeMarco would follow Slade and Slade would lead him to her. She told him, “If we meet, you can’t be followed to the meeting place.”
“Why would anyone follow me?” Slade said.
“You just never know,” Ella said.
“Well, I’ll be careful,” Slade said.
“Being careful won’t be good enough,” Ella said. “The cops could put a dozen people on you. They could use a helicopter to track you or stick a GPS device on your car.”
“They’d never do that,” Slade said. “I’m a lawyer.”
Ella laughed, though it wasn’t exactly a laugh.
Then Slade said, “Does it really matter if they follow me? The thing that’s important is that they don’t know we’re meeting. My mother-in-law has a beach house on Long Island, and she’s not using it now. If you’re sure the cops aren’t following you, you need to get to the beach place before me; the front door key is under this little lawn statue of a leprechaun. There’s no way for the cops to know that you’ll be inside. Then we’ll talk and I’ll leave first and you can leave after I do. Just don’t park near her place.”
“That’ll work,” Ella said. Slade gave her the address of the beach house, and Ella arrived there an hour before he did and parked a mile away.
“So what’s going on?” she asked Slade as soon as he stepped into the house.
“There was a meeting yesterday with the judge who’s presiding over Toby’s trial.”
“Why?” Ella asked.
“He just wanted to get a sense of how long the trial would last.”
“So what’s the problem?
“The judge asked about the number of people we’d both have testifying so he could get an idea how long it would take to present our cases. And that’s when Porter said she had four witnesses.”
“Four?” Ella said. “There should be only three.”
“Yeah, well, that’s when I heard that Edmundo Ortiz is planning to testify.”
“Goddamnit!” Ella shrieked.
“For whatever reason, the damn guy decided to come back. Which means that now we’ll have two people testifying that Toby did it, and two who will say they’re unsure.”
“Get another delay,” Ella said. “I need time to deal with this.”
This was the last thing she needed, with DeMarco hunting for her. She also knew there was no way Slade was going to pay her the million he owed if he had to walk into court facing two honest witnesses. He could still win; he might be able to create enough reasonable doubt with half the witnesses saying they couldn’t identify Toby as the shooter. The problem now, though, was that the bartender and the barmaid had been a fair distance away from Toby when he shot DiNunzio, but Toby had run right past Quinn’s table and almost ran into the busboy. So the prosecution was going to argue that the best witnesses had identified Toby and the jury should take that into account. She needed time to unravel all this, but then Slade said, “I can’t get another delay. Martinez told me today he wouldn’t give one. So what are you going to do?”
Not ‘What are we going to do?’ What are you going to do?
Ella walked over to one of the windows and looked out at the ocean. This was her dream: a place with an ocean view, her reward for becoming so much more than Ella Sue Fieldman from Calhoun Falls, South Carolina. Now everything she had worked for might go up in smoke.
“Which of the two witnesses is more important?” she asked Slade.
“What do you mean?” Slade said.
“I mean, if you had to pick between Rachel Quinn and Edmundo Ortiz, which of the two would you prefer to testify?”
“Ortiz, of course,” Slade said. “He was shakier on his identification at the lineup, he never saw Toby shoot Dominic, and then there’s the fact that Quinn will come across better than him. She’s well educated and most likely articulate, and Ortiz … Well, you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do,” Ella said.
She had to do something about Rachel Quinn, and she had to do it quickly.
46
“When is Ortiz arriving in New York?” DeMarco asked.
“This evening,” Justine said.
“We need to put him someplace where Fields can’t find him.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve reserved a room for him at the Howard Johnson’s in Soho. I’ll have a cop meet him at the airport and—”
“I’ll meet him,” DeMarco said. “I want to talk to the guy. I want to see if he’ll admit that Fields made him leave the city.”
“I don’t know,” Justine said. “I don’t want to lose this guy as a witness.”
“Justine, we have no evidence that Ella Fields has done anything illegal. But if Ortiz will admit that she—”
“Joe, my priority is convicting Toby Rosenthal, not Ella Fields. If Ortiz admits that Fields bribed him to leave, then the judge might not allow him to testify.”
“Only if you tell the judge,” DeMarco said.
“Or if Ortiz is worried that he can go to jail for taking a bribe, then I don’t know what he’ll do. Maybe he’ll split again. So I don’t want to do anything that makes him change his mind about testifying against Rosenthal.”
“Okay, I hear you,” DeMarco said. “But I still think I’m the one who should pick him up. We want to minimize the number of people who know where he’s staying before the trial. We can’t take a chance that Fields might locate him and do something to him.”
