Doubt in the 2nd Degree

by Marc Krulewitch

  “One last factor to consider, Lucille,” I said. “You have a cat, don’t you?”

  Chapter 36

  As expected, the press conference announcing two new arrests in the Jacqueline Whitney murder caused an uptick of excitement throughout the Chicago area and propelled Detective Thomas “Tommy” Brookstone into the limelight as the face of breaking news. When reports identified the suspects as a doorman romantically linked with an affluent fundraising professional, ratings across the board surged. But it was the disclosure of cat DNA playing a key role in securing their arrests that sparked a full-scale media frenzy. All broadcast and publication outlets, blogs, and webzines competed to outdo one another with headlines such as, “Fundraiser Forsaken by Faithless Feline,” “Pussycat Payback,” “Tabby Treason,” and “Mouser Mendacity.” Inevitably, Manny’s and Lucille’s passion for salsa dancing also found its way into the rhetoric and led to scandal-sheet scrutiny with suggestions of hedonistic lifestyles financed by Furry BFF’s unsuspecting donors. Sadly, Manny’s make-believe family too was exposed and thoroughly criticized as a lowly tactic to extract pity money.

  As Brookstone had predicted, Manny was charged with accessory after the fact, which in Illinois meant he faced the same sentencing guidelines as the perpetrator of the actual killing. The judge set bail at one hundred thousand dollars, ordinarily an insurmountable sum. But Manny’s twenty-plus years of exemplary service to the forgiving residents of Kenilworth Manor was enough to overcome the court’s hardship and even procure Manny the services of Gloria’s son-in-law, an experienced criminal defense attorney.

  Thanks to advances in technology that enabled DNA extraction from fingerprint skin cells, lab tests on the hammer found at Jackie Whitney’s murder scene confirmed the presence of Lucille’s DNA. In addition, tests performed on the items found in the Youji Lu Grocery dumpster found Lucille’s DNA on Jackie Whitney’s prescription pill bottles, vehicle registration, and keys, while Manny’s DNA was identified on the plastic bag. Thus far, the purported book of financial and judicial misdeeds, allegedly taken from DeWeldt’s home, had not been recovered, although the book’s hypothetical existence had been widely speculated upon in the press. Manny denied possession or knowledge of such a book. When the book found its way into the hands of Post reporter Ellis Knight, the story of Jacqueline Whitney’s murder took on a new dimension, and even provoked some pundits to call upon the memories of legendary bribery sting operations with names like Greylord, Gambit, and Silver Shovel.

  Angry that he had been unable to keep his name out of the press, Henry DeWeldt publicly accused me of expediting the book’s placement into the hands of the Post reporter and then claimed I slanderously exposed him as the owner of an otherwise anonymous spiral notebook. Just as publicly, I labeled DeWeldt’s acknowledgment of the book’s existence as an arrogant display of invulnerability to the law.

  Although one could argue that Kessler’s testimony and Manny’s DNA on a plastic bag were all the state had to allege Manny’s presence in Jackie Whitney’s apartment, his chances of acquittal still looked bleak. Ultimately, Manny’s jacket and home were found to be full of Lucille’s and her cat’s DNA, and his graveyard-shift attendance, CCTV time-stamp gap, van reservation, and well-timed phone calls with Lucille comprised a heap of dangerously incriminating evidence. What Manny did have going for him was a highly skilled lawyer who deftly argued Manny’s absolution based on his having no prior criminal record, playing no part in the commission of the murder, and not following through on moving the body out of the building. The defense’s characterization of Manny as a working-class immigrant’s son who had fallen under the spell of Lucille’s sex appeal and money may have also helped convince the district attorney to respond with a plea deal. In exchange for no prison time, Manny would plead guilty and cooperate fully with the prosecution of Lucille Mackenzie for the murders of Jackie Whitney and Linda Napier.

  At bond court, Lucille’s lawyer acknowledged the tragic loss of life, but argued that the defendant did not pose a physical danger to the public, had no previous criminal record, and had strong ties to the community through her work at a humane animal shelter. The prosecution disputed the claim that Lucille posed no threat, then relented somewhat, contending that if bail was to be granted, the defendant should be placed on home confinement and wear a GPS monitoring bracelet. The judge agreed with the prosecution and set bail at one million dollars. When Lucille’s bail was posted by a man later identified as employed with DeWeldt’s law firm, speculation grew that DeWeldt was afraid Lucille might get some kind of break in exchange for testifying against him, should charges be brought at a later date.

  Because of the identical DNA evidence at both crime scenes and the similar manner in which the victims died, the prosecution successfully argued for a single trial to cover both murders. Doing his best to avoid eye contact with his former lover, Manny testified to receiving a frantic phone call from a drunken Lucille Mackenzie hysterically describing something terrible having happened to Jackie Whitney. Manny then admitted to canceling the order for a substitute doorman so that he could attend to Lucille’s predicament. Upon arrival at Jackie Whitney’s apartment, Manny said he found Lucille sitting on the floor, head in her hands, mumbling incoherently. He needed only a look to know Jackie Whitney was dead.

  After Manny coaxed Lucille into again telling him what had happened, Lucille described a semi-coherent patchwork of scenes suggesting the scenario I had depicted, of former friends chatting nicely at first, but slowly succumbing to the wine’s influence, until diminished inhibitions culminated in tragedy. Manny’s initial thoughts were to first get Lucille home, and then try to make sense of the situation. He ushered her to the freight elevator, made sure she had money for a cab, then explained that she was to exit through the alley.

  About an hour after returning to his post in the lobby, and for reasons he couldn’t explain, an intense need to remove Jackie Whitney’s body from the living room prompted Manny to take a luggage cart and return to her apartment. From the victim’s closet, he then took a garment bag and brought it to the living room. Before packing Jackie Whitney’s body into the garment bag, Manny removed his own clothes to avoid bloodstains. Once he had positioned the bag onto the cart, he wheeled the body to the bedroom closet, maneuvered it over his shoulder, then climbed the ladder to the top shelf.

  With the body now out of sight, Manny returned to the lobby just in time for Linda Napier to see him exiting the elevator. What, if anything, transpired between them, he didn’t say. When Kessler showed up, the subsequent events regarding Kessler’s retrieval of personal items occurred as both Kessler and Manny had previously described. Despite reserving a van, Manny claimed he never would’ve gone through with the alleged plan to move Jackie Whitney’s body to another location outside of the building. Manny also testified that he called Lucille on the day Linda Napier was killed and told her that their conversation included innuendos of where Manny had been when she saw him exiting the elevator. It was during this phone call that Manny revealed to Lucille that he and Linda Napier had engaged in a brief affair. Manny said he never thought Lucille would go to Linda’s house and kill her, and that all along, Lucille denied having anything to do with Linda Napier’s death.

  Despite a robust defense from her lawyers, Lucille was found guilty of murder in the first degree of Linda Napier, and murder in the second degree of Jackie Whitney. She received a life sentence plus twenty years.

  Chapter 37

  I would tell my story one more time to Tamar while celebrating at a Persian restaurant in Andersonville. It was still a few days before the arraignments and all the details had not yet been validated, but Tamar’s curiosity gave me no choice but to answer her questions.

  “It seems kind of weird that Lucille would just sit there the whole time listening to you unravel the truth,” Tamar said. “I mean, you said it wasn’t until the end of your speech that you started implicating Lucille.”

  “She thought
I was going to present my case for DeWeldt murdering Jackie Whitney,” I said. “Lucille didn’t realize she was a murder suspect until the end, although I was a little concerned she would run out of there before I had a chance to spin my web around her.” The waiter came to the table and put a glass of red wine in front of Tamar and a root beer in front of me. I said, “And when I made Manny the initial focus of my statement, Lucille realized that she absolutely had to know what Manny was going to say.”

  “How did you bring in Lucille’s financial scheming with DeWeldt?” Tamar said.

  “I tried to suggest Lucille was an unwitting victim of DeWeldt’s sneaky banking tricks,” I said. “But I’m sure everyone knew Lucille’s culpability would be easily discovered if the police looked into it.”

  “Having someone as powerful as DeWeldt on her side probably made her feel confident,” Tamar said.

  “No doubt,” I said. “If this whole meeting was just about stealing the shelter’s donations, Lucille probably would’ve walked out as soon as the detectives walked in. But she knew I was there to talk about murder. And people with her background know running away is like an admission of guilt. They’d rather stay and use their money and influence to fight the accusations. I also think she legitimately cared about Manny and didn’t want to abandon him.”

  “I guess Manny wasn’t the man everyone thought he was,” Tamar said.

  “Yes and no,” I said. “His house was absurdly small for a family of four, and there was nothing about the interior that conveyed a sense of family or homemaking. No games or toys or photos of the kids, et cetera. However, I do think Manny’s personality was authentic. That is, he was a genuinely nice person who figured out a way to manipulate his clientele.”

  “What do you mean, ‘clientele’?”

  “By definition, doormen are supposed to be friendly and courteous. I would think a doorman who embraced this role without giving off the slightest air of self-consciousness or bitterness, and was also married with small children, endeared him to many of the people he served. And his charade agreed with him financially, of course.”

  “How did you come to realize Manny and Lucille were a couple?” Tamar said.

  I laughed. “ ‘Cha-cha-cha’ was the first clue,” I said, then described my initial encounter with Lucille, waiting for her to get off the phone. “Other clues included Lucille supposedly referring to a ‘Latin lover,’ and Lenny referring to Manny as a ‘salsa athlete hoofin’ on the dance floor.’ Then one afternoon I followed Manny to the building where Lucille lived, and that sealed the deal.”

  Tamar nodded enthusiastically, smiled. “The note to DeWeldt demanding McCall be convicted,” Tamar said. “That was Lucille’s idea.”

  “Nope. Manny.”

  “Really?”

  “Kessler said that when Linda Napier saw Manny coming out of the elevator, she told him Manny acted like he was hiding something under his jacket. I’m sure it was DeWeldt’s book of crooked financial deals. Manny’s smart enough to know what the book represented. He knew McCall showed up on the eighteenth, he knew she had a key to Jackie’s apartment. But putting Jackie Whitney’s personal items in the trash where McCall worked, that was probably a collaboration.”

  “How could either of them have possibly known that the grocery store owner checked his trash for illegal dumping?”

  I gave Tamar a sly smile. “Ah,” I said, “that required my brilliant observational skills and more than a little luck. I knew Lucille was a customer at Youji Lu Grocery because on her desk she had a condolence gift basket Youji Lu sent to her when one of her cats died. The day I went to check out the dumpster in the alley behind the grocery, the owner of the boutique that shared the alley just happened to be hanging out, smoking a cigarette. I asked her if she was aware of a guy who rummaged through the grocery store’s dumpster, and she verified that a Chinese guy did just that. I guessed from the boutique’s address and the way the owner was dressed that she sold accessories with expensive labels, the kind of labels I noticed Lucille wore. Lucille had mentioned she shopped on North Michigan Avenue, so I asked the boutique owner if Lucille was one of her customers. It turned out they were quite friendly. Lucille often popped in before or after shopping for groceries at Youji Lu.”

  “You’re right,” Tamar said. “That was lucky. Okay, on to the fur. What made you suspicious that the fur on Manny’s jacket wasn’t dog fur?”

  “That was purely a gut feeling. It just didn’t seem right that a wealthy woman in her eighties, living in an apartment, would have a dog that shed.”

  The waiter brought dinner, which seemed to irritate Tamar. When he walked away she said, “What happened to Kate McCall?”

  “She’s back working at the Youji Lu Grocer,” I said. “She has a lot of folksy knowledge about Kentucky mushrooms that’s been passed down in her family. Mr. Chao wants her to become the grocery’s mushroom expert, and is sending her to wild mushroom identification courses.”

  “How nice!” Tamar said. “How about telling me the story of DeWeldt’s book getting into the hands of a Post reporter?”

  “You’re better off not knowing,” I said. “That way, if you’re tortured, you still won’t reveal the truth.”

  “Is Ellis Knight going to get a real story out of this imaginary book?”

  “I seriously doubt that book will ever see the light of day,” I said, then tried to explain how DeWeldt’s army of lawyers had filed injunctions against the Post, claiming the tabloid was in possession of stolen property belonging to DeWeldt, even though DeWeldt insisted the notebook had no identification markings linking it to him.

  “But if there are real account numbers that Furry BFF’s money was illegally put into—”

  “Objection!” I said louder than I should have. “Investigating those account numbers would constitute a violation of DeWeldt’s Fourth Amendment right prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure, blah, blah, blah.”

  “In other words,” Tamar said, “if you’re rich enough, you can afford lawyers who know how to interpret the law any way you pay them to. One more question.”

  “Good. I don’t like my Persian food cold.”

  “The other night, when you mentioned genetic databases for dogs and cats. Why didn’t you just tell me you were talking about cat fur and your murder suspects?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I wanted you to be surprised, like the public was when it all came out. And besides, the perp getting busted because he stepped in dog poop sounded much more realistic.”

  Chapter 38

  Shortly after the resolution of Jackie Whitney’s murder, a Partisan front page article ignited new interest in Kate McCall. Although better known for exposing Chicago’s uninterrupted legacy of municipal corruption, The Partisan also took pride in championing the causes of common people. For this reason, the article focused primarily on Kate McCall’s work with handicapped children, a mea culpa of sorts for encouraging images like the Chicago Post’s depiction of Kate McCall as a farcical hillbilly sexpot. Thanks to the article, Kate’s public image transformed from an ignorant hick suspected of murder to a sensitive young woman determined to help others despite the economic disadvantages of her upbringing. I purposely kept at arm’s length from Kate’s redemption, going as far as imposing a personal media blackout to ensure the focus stayed on her and not me.

  Several weeks after the article’s freshness had turned, I answered the phone to hear Kate’s charming Kentucky timbre. We’d be right pleased, Kate said, if you would meet me and Debbie Lopez at Penguin House this very evening. The district attorney had updated Debbie on the developments of the Jackie Whitney case, and we had not spoken since she agreed to have my illegally obtained evidence DNA tested before telling me to get the hell away from her. I could hardly wait to resume our fellowship.

  —

  They looked quite comfortable sitting across from each other in a booth, both grinning, both sipping from a cup of something. It was the first time I had seen K
ate not wearing a tan jumpsuit.

  “Well, now,” Kate said. “Here he is.” I slid in beside her. She draped her left arm over my shoulders and squeezed.

  “You almost look happy,” I said to Debbie.

  “Smug as ever, aren’t you, Landau?” Debbie said.

  “What’re you pissed off about? You had plenty of reasonable doubt to get Kate off. I just went a step farther and found the real killer.”

  “I wanted to get you’ns together so I could thank you both for what you done for me,” Kate said. “No point in arguin’.”

  “It’s your do-whatever-is-necessary attitude that bothers me,” Debbie said. “Breaking into a man’s house! You realize what would’ve happened—”

  “So how’re you feeling, Kate?” I said. “Looking back now with all the facts laid out. Must be hard to imagine being the sacrificial lamb in that whole mess.”

  “Yeah, it seems like a bad dream.”

  “I hear you’re back working at Mr. Chao’s grocery store,” I said.

  Kate gave Debbie a disbelieving look. “I would’ve thought you’d done told Mr. Landau ’bout what’s been goin’ on.”

  Debbie frowned. “Now that we’re finished working together, we really have no use for each other.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “Debbie’s more interested in half-truths than the whole truth.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Debbie said.

  “Don’t take it that way,” I said. “You said yourself that ‘reasonable doubt’ is all that mattered—”

  “Oh, fuck you—”

  “Hold on there, you two. It ain’t doin’ anyone any good carryin’ on like that. Whyn’t I tell Mr. Landau all the good things been happenin’? Yes, I am workin’ for Mr. Chao….”

  Kate went on to explain how the Partisan article inspired Mr. Chao to get in touch with the Chicago Botanic Garden, whose experienced volunteers were helping Kate organize and eventually run Nature’s Child, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping special needs children commune with the natural world.