Sly Fox: A Dani Fox Novel

by Jeanine Pirro

  Praise for Sly Fox

  “Jeanine Pirro, who’s seen it all and heard it all, knows how to tell it all. Judge Pirro’s debut novel is a fast-paced blending of fact, fiction, and autobiography. If you’ve enjoyed her humor and straight talk on TV, you’ll love and recognize her alter ego, prosecutor Dani Fox, in Sly Fox.”

  —Nelson DeMille, New York Times bestselling author of The Lion, The General’s Daughter, and Word of Honor

  “Sly Fox is a terrific debut crime novel, bristling with the authenticity that only a true pro could bring to the courtroom. Jeanine Pirro is the real deal, and she adds a strong voice to my favorite genre—filled with experience, compassion, style, and humor—all of which were Pirro’s trademarks in her pioneering prosecutorial role.”

  —Linda Fairstein, internationally bestselling author of the Alex Cooper crime novels, including Night Watch and Silent Mercy

  “Dani Fox hits the ground running! She’s a heroine. And Judge Jeanine Pirro knows about heroines. Kudos to the judge and Prosecutor Fox! Sly Fox is riveting!”

  —Lis Wiehl, former federal prosecutor, Fox News legal analyst, and bestselling author of the Triple Threat novels

  DEDICATION

  Dedicated to my mother, Esther Ferris—

  my backbone and the woman who taught me

  to never remain silent in the face of injustice

  A NOTE TO READERS

  As an assistant district attorney, the first-ever woman elected county judge, and, later, District Attorney in Westchester County, New York, I have always fought for the underdog in a legal system that often favors the accused.

  This book is fiction, and the events, incidents, and characters are imaginary or are used in a fictitious way. Nevertheless, much of this book was inspired by actual events and criminal cases that I personally prosecuted.

  I’m using this fictional venue to give readers an intimate glimpse into what really happens inside and outside of courtrooms and to describe a time not long ago when women, children, and the elderly were treated as lesser citizens.

  Helping victims has always been my calling. I don’t want justice to be blind. I want her to see the victims, to feel their loss and their pain, and to make sure that those who are responsible for causing those losses and suffering are rightfully punished.

  The great judge Learned Hand once wrote, “The spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded.”

  I see myself as a “sparrow catcher”—no matter how small or insignificant, the fallen sparrows in our society deserve to have their day in court and a champion determined to fight for their rights.

  —Judge Jeanine Pirro

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Praise for Sly Fox

  Dedication

  A Note to Readers

  PART ONE

  Not One of the Boys

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  PART TWO

  A Serious Matter

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  PART THREE

  In the Ring

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  PART FOUR

  Against All Odds

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  NOT ONE OF

  THE BOYS

  A woman, a dog,

  and a hickory tree.

  The more you beat them,

  the better they be.

  —SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH PROVERB

  1

  Monday, Spring 1976

  I was late.

  It was because of my dark, naturally curly hair. The alarm at my bedside had gone off at six a.m. and I’d thrown on a pair of running shorts, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and done a three-mile jog, returning in plenty of time to get to work at the Westchester County Courthouse. But when I’d looked into the mirror while cooling down, I’d seen the face of Janis Joplin staring back at me after one of her whiskey-and-drug-fueled concerts. I’d been a sweaty disaster with an out-of-control mane. A shower and wash had only made it worse. I’d been forced to flop my head on my ironing board and iron my locks to get them under control.

  I’d only run one red light—in my opinion it was set too long between changes anyway—before reaching the courthouse’s parking lot at 8:10 a.m., where I slipped into a row of spaces reserved for courthouse workers.

  My name is Dani Fox and I’ve been an assistant district attorney for about a year. At age twenty-five, I’m young for the job. But that is not unusual for me. I’d come into this world in a rush and had no intention of slowing down. I’m currently the only female assistant district attorney in Westchester County. One hundred ten male lawyers and me.

  Westchester County was America’s first real suburb. It’s just north of New York City and the Long Island Sound. Many of our residents commute to work in Manhattan each day. They used to live in the city but they moved here to start families. What many of them didn’t leave behind was their New York attitudes. Our county is the second richest in the state. Only Manhattan’s got more money. And our wealthier and more sophisticated residents aren’t shy about letting you know that if you’re a public servant, you work for them. Because of our county’s close ties to Manhattan, there are challenges here that are a bit different from those that a prosecutor in Topeka faces. I’m not saying the district attorney in Kansas doesn’t feel the same pressures as Carlton Whitaker III, our district attorney, whenever he’s prosecuting a headline-breaking case.

  But to quote The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, “The rich are different from you and me.”

  Mostly, because they have more money.

  And with their money, they can hire fleets of Manhattan’s finest lawyers to make the forty-five-minute drive along the Henry Hudson Parkway north to White Plains in a cavalcade of black limos to rescue them.

  There’s another side to Westchester County as well. The landscape is dotted with lower-income neighborhoods where blue-collar workers struggle to pay bills and kids grow up on mean streets. In these areas a drug called cocaine is exerting a deadly grip.

  Justice in Westchester County is dispensed to the rich and the poor alike in our new nineteen-story courthouse, one of the tallest buildings in White Plains. It was the first project in a massive urban renewal program approved in the 1960s that has pretty much destroyed the original village-like character of our community. It’s fitting that the stark design of our courthouse is called Brutalist architecture. That refers to the building’s concrete-and-stucco exterior and its strikingly repetitive angular design with rows of identical windows. But I also think that tag describes how
some of the masses who flow through its doors are treated. We call it the Criminal Justice System, giving the creeps top billing. I think it should be the Victims’ Justice System. If I sound a bit touchy about all of this, it’s because I am. Only, I prefer to call it passion. I don’t like it when the meek are preyed upon. The Bible may say the meek are going to inherit the earth, but until God reaches down and signs over the deed, it’s my job as a prosecutor to protect them.

  I’ve never wanted to be anything other than a prosecutor. Even as a kid when I was watching Perry Mason on television, I’d root for Mason’s district attorney rival, Hamilton Burger, hoping that he would win at least one case. After a while, you had to wonder how Burger kept getting reelected, given that every time Mason defended a client, it turned out that the D.A.’s office had been bamboozled and was trying to convict the wrong guy. I especially enjoyed how the guilty leaped up in court and confessed. That doesn’t happen in real courtrooms—particularly if there is a defense attorney within reach.

  Even though I am an assistant D.A., I haven’t officially been given a chance to try any bad guys in court. That’s because I’m assigned to our office’s equivalent of Siberia. All the male lawyers who were hired at the same time as I was were immediately sent to the criminal courts division to prosecute cases. But D.A. Carlton Whitaker III, in his infinite wisdom, assigned me to the appeals bureau. He doesn’t believe a woman has the killer, go-for-the-jugular instinct that you need to win in court. One day I am going to prove him wrong.

  Whitaker, my boss, can actually be a pretty decent guy. He’s just part of an old boys’ network that thinks a woman’s place is in the kitchen or the bedroom but certainly not trying cases in the hallowed halls of justice. When he hired me, he said he really didn’t have a choice. He had to meet a quota; or, as he put it, “I was forced to find a girl lawyer somewhere.” So much for being magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and on Law Review at Albany Law.

  I spend my days reading court transcripts of trials that some male attorney prosecuted. Once convicted, the guilty of course have the right to appeal, and it’s up to me to review what happened during their trials and explain to an appellate court why the guilty got exactly what they had coming to them.

  What I do is important, but I want to get into a courtroom to try a case so badly I can barely stand it.

  As I hurried across the parking lot on this bright sunny morning, up the sidewalk toward the courthouse’s door, I spotted Westchester County judge Michael Morano a few steps ahead of me. I actually didn’t see his face. Rather it was the back of his head that gave him away. A tall, thin man, Judge Morano had bushy salt-and-pepper hair divided equally on either side of his head with a bald streak down the center that reminded me of a bowling alley. I’d encountered him many times in the courthouse hallways but we’d never been formally introduced. At age sixty-three, he was one of our county’s most senior judges and was known for his crackerjack legal mind and disagreeable temperament. He wasn’t a happy man. Behind his robe, everyone called him “Miserable Morano” or “Misery” for short. In addition to his distinctive hair, he had massive bushy eyebrows that moved when he spoke, making it appear as if he had two woolly caterpillars doing push-ups on his forehead.

  I entered the courthouse behind him and by chance stepped into the same elevator. There we were, just the two of us, with him looking straight ahead. I decided I wasn’t going to let his gruff reputation intimidate me.

  “Good morning, Judge Morano,” I said cheerfully.

  He gave me a puzzled look. “Young lady, do I know you?”

  “I’m Dani Fox, an assistant district attorney.”

  He replied with an ambiguous grunt.

  As the door opened to his floor, I said, “I hope someday to prosecute a case in your courtroom.”

  He glanced at me with contempt and said, “It’s unlikely, my dear. I handle serious matters.”

  As soon as the elevator door closed, I made a sour face and repeated in a snickering voice: “It’s unlikely, my dear. I handle serious matters.” What an arrogant jerk, I thought.

  I don’t deal regularly with police detectives, which is why I was surprised when I arrived at my cubicle and found White Plains police detective Tommy O’Brien sitting in my chair, talking on my phone with his feet propped up and his well-worn shoes resting on my desk.

  Just as I hadn’t been properly introduced to Judge Morano, I’d never been introduced to O’Brien. But I’d read transcripts of testimony in the appellate division that he’d given in dozens of high-profile criminal cases and seen him in the halls. He was a street-smart cop who—how should I put this—didn’t have a high opinion of lawyers. Or to be blunt, the guy was an “old school” Irish cop.

  He certainly looked the part. Although only in his early fifties, O’Brien looked older. Tired. Twice divorced, he had a watermelon belly that draped over the two-inch-wide brown belt that kept his J. C. Penney black slacks in place. He was wearing a shabby navy blazer, a white shirt with its frayed collar unbuttoned, and an ugly maroon tie that he’d undoubtedly gotten as a Christmas present in an office exchange. There was a bald spot inching its way forward from the back of his huge skull and his once-bright red hair was now specked with gray. He had a toothpick protruding from the corner of his lips. He was one of those men who could use the term “doll” or “honey” or “gal” and not realize how archaic it sounded.

  When I’d first arrived at Albany Law School, the female students used the term “FEK” when they talked about men who were like Detective O’Brien. When I finally asked what the acronym meant, they said it was not a compliment. It referred to these men’s Neanderthal outlook. Whenever they encountered something new, they tried to fuck it, eat it, or kill it.

  The only male figure in my life of that generation was my father, Leo, and he wasn’t anything like that. Dad was kind, humble, and he loved to laugh. But the older women warned me that I would be encountering a lot of FEKs once I became a lawyer, regardless of whether I went to work in a high-priced law firm or chose the public route.

  O’Brien showed no sign of removing his ample posterior from my office chair, but he did lift his feet from my desk and leaned forward, jabbing a manila envelope at me as if it were a knife—all the while continuing the conversation that he was having on my phone.

  Placing my leather briefcase, a gift from my mother, on the industrial-grade white tile floor, I accepted his packet and shot him a glare that was meant to say: “Okay, Detective, I’ll look inside your envelope, but get your butt the hell out of my chair.”

  O’Brien either didn’t get my social cue or didn’t care. From his comments into the phone, it sounded as if he was speaking to a woman.

  Still waiting in front of my own desk, I slipped open the envelope and removed a handful of eight-by-ten glossy, color photographs. The pictures showed a woman’s face. Her eyes were swollen shut, her nose seemed broken, her lips were puffed out, her jaw was askew, and her cheeks were varying shades of black and blue. From the photographs, I estimated she was in her twenties, although her appearance had been so brutalized that I couldn’t be certain. Several more photographs showed there were no visible marks on the rest of her body, which meant her attacker had focused exclusively on her face. Whoever did this wanted to make her ugly and remind her every day when she looked into her mirror that he’d done it. This was a crime of emotion. Why would a stranger beat her so savagely? This attack must have been personal. Someone she knew had done this to her.

  Having finally finished his conversation, O’Brien put down the phone receiver and nodded toward the packet of photos. “He worked her over good this time,” he announced, without identifying who “he” was, but implying that “he” had delivered this sort of beating before.

  Nor did O’Brien vacate my chair.

  I asked: “Who’s ‘he’?”

  “Her husband, Rudy Hitchins,” O’Brien replied. “She’s Mary Margaret Hitchins, age twenty-four. Tends bar, or did until yes
terday, at O’Toole’s, down on Mamaroneck Avenue.”

  O’Toole’s was a favorite watering hole for cops but I’d never been there. I’d never been invited.

  O’Brien said, “Rudy’s a raging asshole—a jealous prick and he don’t like cops. Mary Margaret, well, she is—or was—a real looker before he decided to rearrange her face.”

  I slipped the photographs back into the envelope and pointed out the obvious: “Detective, you’re sitting in my chair.”

  O’Brien gave me a look-over, running his eyes from my knees to my face, all the while twirling the toothpick in his mouth with his right thumb and forefinger. He didn’t say anything and I thought this practiced scrutiny was probably an intimidation tool that he used whenever he was interviewing a suspect or a witness. Reluctantly, he rose from my chair.

  I edged by him and sat down. I noticed that in addition to using my phone, chair, and desk, he’d eaten all the candy in a bowl near the phone. Sweets are one of my vices. Thankfully, I have a metabolism that lets me satisfy my taste for chocolate yet weigh in at 105 pounds at five feet four inches.

  Now he was the one standing at the side of my desk. “A few of the regulars at O’Toole’s wanted to deal with Rudy on our own. But the prick would only take it out on her later if he got what he deserved and he’s the sort of asshole who’d hire a lawyer and go after our badges if we taught him a lesson. Besides, he’s not really the type who can be educated.” He paused and then added, “There’s a few other complications, too.”

  “Complications?”

  “Mary Margaret is knocked up and rumor is it’s not his kid. That’s what pissed him off.”

  “So who’s the real father?”

  O’Brien shrugged, indicating that it wasn’t really important. But I was quiet for a moment and that awkward silence apparently loosened his tongue. “I guess the father could be a cop. Mary Margaret, well, she’s a flirt at the bar, makes lots of tips that way.”