House Witness
Page 31
The masked woman pushed open the door to the ice cream shop, raising the gun as she walked in—and DeMarco sprinted toward the shop. He crashed through the door less than a second after the woman entered, and when he did, she swung around fast, most likely intending to shoot him—but by then his cane was already in motion, and smashing into the side of her head.
Rachel and the girl behind the counter screamed and Rachel’s dog started barking like crazy, but DeMarco ignored them as he kicked the gun from Fields’ hand. He noticed she was wearing gloves and a long-sleeve jersey and jeans. He knelt down and pulled the mask off her head.
It wasn’t Ella Fields. It was a young black woman in her twenties.
Five minutes later the cops arrived.
49
Ella was running for her life.
She drove toward the Lincoln Tunnel, and after she passed through the tunnel, she was just going to keep going. Out of Manhattan, out of the state of New York, maybe out of the country. She was driving the car she’d rented under the name of Carol Owen and as soon as she could, she’d stop someplace and buy a used car with cash, and then just keep driving. She had no idea where she was going to go. All she knew was that she needed to stay out of sight and off the grid until she could figure out what to do next.
She was now sure the guy with the cane she’d seen walking by her car was DeMarco—and he’d fucked up everything. She’d been parked across the street from the ice cream shop in a place where she could see the interior through a picture window. She’d known that Rachel Quinn had been headed toward the shop when she took her mutt for a walk, so she’d driven past Quinn and arrived at the shop before her. The Jamaican girl was already waiting in front of the shop in her car when Quinn arrived, and Ella saw her get out of her car wearing a ski mask—and then that fucking DeMarco came out of nowhere, burst into the shop, and hit the Jamaican in the head with his cane.
And now her life, as she’d known it, was over.
Ella had decided that the only way she could ensure an acquittal for Toby Rosenthal—and make sure she collected the million Slade owed her—was if Quinn didn’t appear as a witness. If Slade had done his job and gotten another delay, she might have been able to find another way to deal with Quinn, but since he’d failed and she’d run out of time, killing Quinn was the only solution.
She’d asked Carmine Fratello to do two things. One of those things was to get her a gun—the snub-nosed .38 in her purse on the passenger seat. The other thing she’d asked Fratello to do, figuring a Mafia thug like him would know somebody, was to put her in contact with a professional killer, one brave enough or dumb enough or greedy enough to kill a person in broad daylight in the ice cream store. She was hoping the cops would think that Quinn and the clerk in the ice cream store had been killed in a robbery and not conclude that Quinn had been killed because she was a witness. But regardless of what the cops thought, Quinn would be dead, and the only witness left to testify against Toby Rosenthal would be the busboy.
She’d met with the Jamaican girl in the Bronx earlier in the day. She’d expected that the killer would be a man and was surprised when a young woman in her twenties walked up to her in Denny’s. The girl scared the shit out of her: slim muscular arms, a thin scar on the left side of her face, eyes so cold that Ella doubted she had a soul. The deal was that she’d pay the Jamaican forty thousand to take the risk of killing Quinn, twenty up front and the other twenty after the job was done.
Her real plan, however, had been to kill the Jamaican when they met the second time—which was the reason she’d bought a gun from Carmine. The last thing she wanted was to have some professional killer able to identify her and testify that she’d paid to have Quinn killed; she knew if the Jamaican was ever caught for some other crime she’d give up Ella in a heartbeat. But after Ella met the Jamaican in Denny’s, she began to wonder if she’d be able to kill her. Her conscience wouldn’t have bothered her—the woman was a killer, after all—but she was afraid the Jamaican would be too hard to kill.
Now she didn’t have that problem. She had a much bigger one.
The Jamaican didn’t know Ella’s name, but DeMarco did, and DeMarco would show the Jamaican Ella’s photo, and without a doubt—to get a reduced sentence—the Jamaican would testify that Ella had paid her to kill Rachel Quinn. Ella was willing to bet that within an hour—as soon as the Jamaican got over being cane-whipped by DeMarco—there would be a warrant out to arrest her for attempted murder.
Ella felt her eyes well up with tears. It just wasn’t fair. She’d worked so hard to become who she was today. She’d escaped the fate of being raised by shitty, apathetic parents, overcome a lousy education, and become a skilled professional in something she excelled at. If she’d been able to keep working just a few more years, she would have been able to retire in style. But now that wasn’t going to happen. Thanks to DeMarco, the cops knew who she was and what she did for a living and they would be hunting for her. It was going to be impossible to line up another job helping some slimeball lawyer get his rich guilty client off for murder.
Then she thought: Quit feeling sorry for yourself. It’s not the end of the world. It wasn’t like she was penniless. She had over four million bucks—the three million she’d had before the Rosenthal case and the million Slade paid her at the beginning of the case. Not as much as she wanted to have before she retired, but certainly enough to get by. She’d get a new ID, sneak across the border into Mexico, and from there head to someplace cheap but civilized—maybe Panama or some city in South America. Yeah, she’d be just fine.
And that’s when she saw the cop car behind her, its light bar flashing. That damn DeMarco. He must have gotten her license plate number and put out an APB on her, and then the cameras in the tunnel must have captured the license plate.
“Ella Sue,” she said out loud, “you are fucked.”
Epilogue
The Jamaican girl, whose name turned out to be Abrianna Clarke, gave up Ella Fields to get a reduced sentence.
Justine Porter told Abrianna that she knew Fields had hired her to kill Rachel Quinn and that if she didn’t agree to testify against Fields, Abrianna—who was on parole for an armed robbery conviction—would go back to Bedford Hills to serve out the remaining seven years of a ten-year sentence. On top of that, Justine promised that Abrianna would also be convicted for gun possession and attempted murder.
Abrianna agreed to testify against Fields in return for a four-year sentence.
Four years was a bargain for attempted murder—but Justine wanted Ella Fields more than she wanted Abrianna.
Now, with Abrianna willing to testify that Fields had paid her to kill a witness, Justine sat down with Edmundo Ortiz, Kathy Tolliver, and Jack Morris and did her best to scare the bejesus out of them. She said if they agreed to testify that Fields had bribed or blackmailed them to change their testimony against Toby Rosenthal, she’d give them immunity for any crimes they may have committed—such as lying to her when she questioned them. Lying to a police officer or an officer of the court is a felony called “obstruction of justice,” Justine explained, and if they committed perjury during the Rosenthal trial, she was going to nail them for that as well.
She also told them she had subpoenaed their phone records—which she had—and would use them to make the case that they’d conspired with Fields. She said this even though she knew the phone records didn’t really prove anything. It may have been illegal to lie to a prosecutor, but it was acceptable for a prosecutor to lie to a criminal.
Edmundo Ortiz and Kathy Tolliver eventually told Justine what Fields had done and agreed to testify against her. Edmundo said that Fields had threatened to turn his family over to immigration and then essentially bribed him with a new job. Kathy told how Fields had drugged her, then threatened to tell her ex-husband’s parents that Kathy had overdosed on drugs, which could have resulted in Kathy losing her daughter. Neither Edmundo nor Kathy said anything about the cash Fields had given them.
Toby Rosenthal’s first trial ended with a hung jury.
David Slade did a brilliant job convincing some of the jurors that even though three witnesses—Rachel Quinn, Kathy Tolliver, and Edmundo Ortiz—had identified Toby as the killer, they were mistaken. The lighting was bad, Slade said. The killer ran by the witnesses too fast, Slade said. And see, Slade said, how one witnesses, Jack Morris, was honest enough to admit that he couldn’t be sure that Toby was the one. And some of the jurors bought the possibility that Dante Bello—who came across as a complete punk at the trial—could have been gunning for Carmine Fratello and shot Dominic DiNunzio by mistake. Carmine, in spite of all of Ella’s worries, did a wonderful job testifying for the defense, pointing the finger at an outraged Dante Bello.
Toby’s second trial, held six months after the first one, didn’t go so well, because Dante Bello was dead and Carmine Fratello was in jail for killing him.
Carmine claimed killing Dante was a case of self-defense.
He said he came out of a bar one night—this was after Toby’s first trial—and Dante took a couple of shots at him, but fortunately missed. Dante’s motive was that Carmine had tried to frame him. Well, Carmine said, he couldn’t live the rest of his life waiting around for that deranged little shit to kill him, so he killed Dante when the opportunity presented itself.
The police—and Carmine’s lawyer—explained that self-defense didn’t work that way. They said Carmine couldn’t lie in wait for a guy walking his dog and come up behind him and shoot him in the back of the head because the guy had taken a shot at him two weeks earlier.
Faced with a first-degree murder charge, Carmine told the cops everything he knew about Ella Fields: how she’d paid him to lie at Toby’s first trial and how she came to him later to find a professional—the Jamaican girl—to kill Rachel Quinn. In return for his cooperation, he was allowed to plead guilty to murder two.
So Carmine wasn’t a witness at Toby’s second trial—but he would be one at Ella Fields’ trial.
Edmundo Ortiz flew back to his home port, Seattle, after the first trial and went out to sea again as a cook on one of Shearson’s fishing boats, but he returned for Toby’s second trial. As far as Edmundo was concerned, he couldn’t have asked for anything more. His daughter and her two kids were happy in Seattle, his daughter had been reunited with her husband thanks to the help of a coyote that Edmundo paid, and Edmundo had a job he loved and that paid very well. America was a wonderful country.
After he was found guilty at his second trial, Toby Rosenthal was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for the second-degree murder of Dominic DiNunzio. He would be eligible for parole in seven years. And it looked as if Toby would survive until he was paroled. He’d been taken under the protective wings of his new boyfriend, a very large Albanian doing twenty-five to life for a couple of murders he’d committed. The one thing Toby refused to do was give a reason for why he killed Dominic DiNunzio. Toby’s new lawyer was appealing the verdict, and he didn’t want Toby making a confession.
David Slade was convinced that he had an ulcer even though several doctors told him otherwise. All Slade knew was that he was in constant pain—stomach pains, chest pains—and suffered rashes of an indeterminate origin, all caused by the never-ending stress of not knowing if he’d be arrested. Everyone in the legal community in New York was certain that he had conspired with Ella Fields to suborn the witnesses in the Rosenthal case—but so far Fields hadn’t pointed the finger at him. Fields had said only two words since she’d been arrested, and those two words were spoken at her arraignment: “Not guilty.”
But in spite of the fact that Fields didn’t give Slade up as an accomplice to everything she’d done, Slade’s law firm gave him the boot. A vigorous defense was one thing, but colluding with a woman to kill a witness … Well, that just wouldn’t do.
And Henry Rosenthal refused to pay Slade’s fee.
Leah Abramson called DeMarco to tell him that her best friend had died.
Leah said, “Are they going to get that bitch for what she did to Esther?”
“No, Leah, they won’t,” DeMarco said. “But she’s going to be convicted of a bunch of other crimes and spend a long, long time in jail.”
John Mahoney met Connie DiNunzio at their son’s grave at Mount St. Mary Cemetery in Queens, where Connie knelt and placed a bouquet of flowers near the headstone. Mahoney had to help her to feet, and then they took a seat on a stone bench that had an engraving of an angel and the name of a little girl who’d died when she was only six months old.
Connie looked terrible, Mahoney thought. Grief had bent her back and added a decade to her face. He knew she’d never get over the loss of her son.
“He was a good man,” Connie said. “It’s a shame that you never got to know him.”
“I know,” Mahoney said, “and I’ll go to my grave regretting that.”
Mahoney asked if Dominic’s wife and kids were going to be okay financially, and Connie said they would be. Dominic had a big life insurance policy—he’d always been worried about having a heart attack because he was overweight—and his family would be fine. Plus Connie had money, and she planned to leave it all to her grandchildren when she passed.
They didn’t really have much else to say to each other, and Connie said she had to go; she was having dinner that night with her grandsons. She rose from the bench with a grunt and started to walk slowly toward her car on her swollen ankles, then turned and said, “I look back on my life, and the only thing I was ever truly ashamed of was having that fling with you, knowing that you were a married man. I don’t regret having Dominic—I’ll never regret that—but I do regret ever having met you. I don’t ever want to see you again, John.”
Mahoney watched her walk away, then took a flask out of his jacket pocket and sat there on the angel bench and sipped Jameson whiskey until the light faded from the sky.
Ella Fields was at the Rose M. Singer Center at Rikers Island awaiting her trial.
When the cops pulled Ella over in the Lincoln Tunnel, Justine had told them to hold her as a material witness in the attempted killing of Rachel Quinn until she could figure out another charge. Then the cops found the .38 in Ella’s purse and she was charged with possessing an unlicensed firearm. Then they found identity documents, including a passport, in the name of Carol Owen and she was charged with carrying a fake ID.
After Justine got the Jamaican girl to agree to testify against Ella, an attempted-murder charge was added to Ella’s indictment. And after Kathy Tolliver and Edmundo Ortiz agreed to testify that she’d attempted to get them to change their testimony through coercion, witness tampering charges were added.
At Ella’s arraignment, Justine was like an avenging angel, and Ella was not granted bail. Justine argued that the court couldn’t grant bail to a woman with no fixed address and potential access to an unknown quantity of money. Justine also pointed out that a woman with false-identity documents clearly had the resources to flee the country if so inclined. The judge agreed with her.
So off to Rikers Island Ella went to await her trial—but Ella wasn’t finished.
Ella had a plan.
DeMarco was worried, really worried.
He’d just sliced the ball so badly it ended up in the adjacent fairway.
His hip was fine now. The bone had healed completely, he didn’t need the cane, and his leg didn’t ache a bit. But ever since the injury, he’d been slicing the ball on almost every drive. He was convinced that his mended hip had something to do with his problem, although he couldn’t understand why or how. He desperately needed professional help.
As he walked over to try to find his ball, he thought briefly about Ella Fields, wondering when they were ever going to get around to trying her. He wanted to be there when they sentenced her to y
ears in prison. DeMarco didn’t know her backstory, but the woman was clearly a sociopath and she belonged in a cage. He was proud that he’d been instrumental in making sure she ended up in one.
The first thing Ella did after she was arraigned was call George Chavez from a monitored phone in Rikers. She said, “I want to see you. Get your ass out here now.”
George was bright enough to know that he didn’t want to piss Ella off, so he flew to New York.
Without any preamble, Ella told George that what he was going to do was find somebody that could do what she and Bill used to do. “If you don’t,” she said, “I’m going to rat you out.”
Two months later, Ella met with a young guy in his thirties named Michael. He was good-looking, very confident, very smooth—and she liked him immediately. He didn’t look at all like Bill, but he reminded her of him. She explained to Michael that she couldn’t do anything about the weapons charge and the false-ID charge, and she’d have to serve time for those crimes. But she wasn’t going to serve time for attempted murder or for witness tampering, which provided the motive for the attempted murder.
“There are four witnesses who can testify against me,” Ella said. “Kathy Tolliver and Edmundo Ortiz, for bribery and blackmail and God knows what else. Then there’s the Jamaican girl and Carmine Fratello, who are serving time in two separate prisons.”
“Bad things can happen to people in prison,” Michael said.
Ella smiled. “Exactly,” she said. “So do what you gotta do, and after I’m out of this mess, well, maybe you and I can work together.”
Regarding Ella’s lawyer, another smart young guy, Ella had met with him only a couple of times. During their first meeting, she’d said, “Your primary job at this point is to delay my trial as long as possible.”