Felony Murder

by Joseph T. Klempner

  At the same time, however, he remembered Janet’s words, how she was all Nicole had, and he knew he somehow had to get to her, whatever it took.

  Dean awoke a little after seven. He made coffee and drank it black and sweet. He knew Janet would be getting home around eight-thirty, and he wanted to call her then with his everything’s-fine message. But he knew he had to sound convincing, much more convincing than the last time, when her first words had been “Something’s the matter, isn’t it?” So he composed a speech, even jotting down notes on a yellow pad. He felt a bit silly doing it, but he reminded himself that their very lives might depend on how convincing they sounded to whoever might be listening in.

  By the time eight-thirty came, Dean figured it was as good as it was going to be. He dialed Janet’s number, notes in front of him. She picked up on the second ring.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hi, it’s Dean.”

  “Hi,” she said, sounding genuinely glad to hear from him. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing much, I’m doing laundry. It seems I went swimming on Canal Street yesterday.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Dean told her the story. When he got to the part about Jeffries’s flying tackle, he engaged in a touch of revisionism. “One of the agents - you remember Jeffries, the one who drove us back from Jersey that night? - grabbed me to make sure I didn’t get shot, and I landed in a fish display. It was pretty embarrassing. But I’ve got to hand it to those guys, they were really on the ball. As soon as they saw a gun, they were there to protect me. From now on, I tell you. I let them do the detective work. This is all too scary for me.”

  “Good,” said Janet.

  “And Leo was there, too. I told him about the file the guy mentioned, and he went straight to headquarters to bring the Director up to date and run it through their computer system.”

  “Good,” Janet said again. “So what do you think?”

  “I’m finished thinking,” Dean said, trying to sound convincing. “I’m going back to being a lawyer. When the trial comes up, I’ll try it. Until then, my investigator days are over.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “How about you?” Dean asked. “How was work?”

  “Okay,” said Janet. “The usual craziness.”

  “What are you up to this morning?”

  “I’ve got some errands. We’ll go out for a while, before it rains. Nothing too exciting. Then I’ve got a dinner date at some guy’s place tonight.”

  Jesus, thought Dean, he had completely forgotten she was coming over later. If the police were listening in, could he afford to let them know they had plans to be together later in the day? Might that not send the police into a panic, that Dean and Janet were scheming to go public with what they knew?

  “Oh, yeah,” Dean said, changing the intensity of his voice slightly and hoping that Janet would pick up on it. “That guy you met at the museum, right? What’s his name, Ralph Barracuda or something?”

  There was the tiniest of pauses, and then Janet said softly, “Right. You’ve got a good memory.”

  “Yeah,” said Dean, now wanting to end the conversation before she asked him what was going on. “Well,” he said, “have a good time. I’ll talk with you sometime, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Janet, and Dean hung up. If she was mystified, she gave no sign of it on the phone.

  Dean showered and put on old jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt. He found his Venetian blind slat and his lockpick set and tossed them into a small backpack. He added a pair of sunglasses and an old full-brimmed fishing hat. He slung the backpack over one shoulder, stepped out of his apartment, double-locked the door behind him and took the fire stairs to the roof.

  Like the roofs of many small buildings in Manhattan, the one atop Dean’s apartment house provided a breath of fresh air and enough room to spread out a few lounge chairs and soak up some harmful ultraviolet rays in summer. If you craned your neck, you could even see a bit of the Hudson River to the west. When the tall ships had sailed up toward the George Washington Bridge one recent Fourth of July, Dean had climbed halfway up the water tower to a perch from where he could watch with an old pair of binoculars he used for sailing. From there he had seen clipper ships and schooners and barks, and even a full-rigged brigantine. He had watched the spectator fleet and the police boats and the harbor patrol and a Coast Guard cutter and even a fireboat spraying great arcs of water in the air. And, when his attention had wandered, he had watched the traffic on the side streets below, and finally the other watchers on other rooftops. In doing so, he had noticed how his own roof was one of a series of eight or nine of identical height, separated by gaps of a few feet at most. It had reminded him of his DEA days, when an adjoining roof often provided the least noticeable entry to a building where an arrest had to be made or a search warrant executed.

  Today it would provide him with the least noticeable exit from his own apartment house.

  The first three gaps were easy enough, and he took them from a standing position. The height didn’t bother Dean: He was a rock climber, accustomed to working a ledge several hundred feet up a vertical wall. The six-floor drop to street level represented maybe eighty feet at most, roughly half the length of a fifty-meter rope, a height well within his comfort level.

  The next gap was no wider than the others, but the building Dean had to jump to was several feet lower than the one he stood on. No problem. He stepped back, and his three-step approach allowed him to easily reach the lower rooftop. But a quick visual inspection confirmed his fear: The next jump had to be up as well as across. He gauged the distance as about three feet across, but two feet up. He looked around for a board or a ladder that he might use as a gangplank, but there was nothing in sight. He removed his backpack and tossed it across. He paced off eight steps back from the edge, the way he had seen high jumpers do it at track meets. He imagined the next morning’s Daily News headline,

  LAWYER DIES IN FALL

  See Pics in Centerfold)

  before going for it. To his surprise, he not only lived, but managed to clear it with room to spare.

  The last three roofs were a piece of cake. He now stood atop the westernmost building on the block, nearly a full avenue from his own apartment house. He walked to the front edge and, showing as little of himself as possible, looked down over the edge. None of the cars beneath him was occupied; no one was sitting on a stoop or hanging out on the corner. Back up the block, a man wearing a sport jacket and sunglasses held what looked like a container of coffee as he stood by the driver’s side of a black Ford, in conversation with the driver. They might as well have been in uniform, Dean thought.

  He tried the door that led from the roof to the stairway and found it locked. But it was a simple latch bolt, the kind with a beveled tongue, and his Venetian blind strip slipped in easily and tripped it open on the first pass. He closed the door carefully behind him and descended the stairs silently on his sneakers. At ground level, he put on his hat and sunglasses, stepped out onto the sidewalk, and turned the corner in the direction opposite the surveillance team up the block.

  Which was the easy part, of course; the hard part would be getting into Janet’s building unnoticed.

  He hailed a cab and directed the driver to head downtown to Broadway and Twenty-Second Street. When they got there, Dean paid the fare, got out, and proceeded to circle the block on foot to check for a tail. Twice he stopped abruptly and reversed his direction. Satisfied finally that there was nobody following him, he completed his circle and slipped into a store called the Gordon Novelty Company. He had been in it once several years ago, when a last-minute need for a costume had forced him to do a Yellow Pages search, which, in turn, had led him to Gordon’s.

  It hadn’t changed much. Masks of every sort lined the walls, famous people, monsters, ghouls. Costumes that could instantly transform one into anything from a ballerina to a gorilla. Grass skirts, flowing capes, magic wands, halos, devils’ pit
chforks - it was all there, jammed together onto three walls of floor-to-ceiling display.

  The line Dean had waited on just before Halloween had been twenty deep; Saturday morning in late summer was a different story altogether.

  “May I help you?” asked a fiftyish man with sixties sideburns turned gray.

  “I hope so,” Dean said. “I’m looking for a disguise. I’ve got to go to a party and look like a regular person - you know, not like a clown or anything - but not be recognized. Any suggestions?”

  “Do you want a mask?” Sideburns asked. “Some of our full rubber masks are very lifelike.”

  “Maybe,” Dean said. “But I don’t want a Ronald Reagan or anything identifiable like that.”

  “Aaaah,” the man agreed theatrically. “Something in the obscure for the gentleman! Do you have a few minutes?” When Dean said that he did, the man called for a clerk to replace him on the floor. “I need to go into our archives,” he whispered to Dean conspiratorily.

  Dean spent the time studying the masks on the walls and identifying to himself as many of the likenesses as he could. There were JFK and LBJ, a beaming Ike and a scowling Nixon. Bogart winked, and Brando pouted. Even George Bush did the smile thing. There were Marilyn Monroe, Dr. Ruth, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. There was Ross Perot, interestingly juxtaposed with Alfred E. Newman of Mad magazine fame. And Freddy of A Nightmare on Elm Street, several Frankenstein monsters, and an assortment of Count Draculas.

  After about fifteen minutes, he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to see a sixtyish man, quite bald on top, but with black hair. “Adlai Stevenson,” Dean said.

  Adlai pulled his mask off and revealed Sideburns underneath. “Not bad for a youngster,” he said. “But how about these?” With a flourish, he spread out several others on the counter. Of those, Dean quickly identified Dan Quayle and Lee Harvey Oswald; he was less certain with Walter Mondale, Nelson Rockefeller, and a rather poor likeness of Warren Beatty. But the one that stumped him completely was Spiro Agnew.

  “How much for old Spiro?” he asked.

  “Well, let’s see. We don’t get many calls for him. How does $15 sound?”

  “Ten sounds better,” Dean said.

  “Twelve and it’s a deal.”

  “Done,” said Dean, wondering where on his voucher he was going to list a $12 expense for a Spiro Agnew disguise. “Investigation” was always worth a shot.

  It was a curious-looking man who got out of a cab and entered 81 Bleecker Street. The brim of his hat was turned down all around, and sunglasses shaded his eyes. What was visible of his face suggested a rather rubbery texture to his skin, and his expression seemed frozen between a smile and a sneer. But it being New York City, and indeed Greenwich Village, no one seemed to pay him any mind, certainly not the two men eating jelly doughnuts in a maroon Chevrolet across the street and four doors down.

  Once in the vestibule, the man used something in his hand to slip the inner door. He walked to the elevator and rode it to the sixth floor. From there he found the stairway, which he took one flight farther, stepping out onto the roof. Earlier, he had asked the cab driver to make one pass through the block before dropping him off, and had selected the building as the farthest one of similar height that connected to 77 Bleecker Street. His visual inspection now confirmed his street-level reconnaissance.

  He took off his sunglasses, hat, and mask before jumping first to 79 Bleecker, and then to 77. Then he put them back on. He appeared to have difficulty with the lock on the door to the stairs and soon rejected whatever implement he had used previously. In its place, he withdrew two flattened, slender metal tools from his pocket. One he slid directly into the keyhole of the lock; the other, which had a 90-degree bend in it, he inserted up to the bend, then worked the protruding portion back and forth with his free hand. Within fifteen seconds, there was an audible click. A turn of the knob pulled the door open, and the man was inside.

  Dean removed his sunglasses and took the stairs down to the third floor, where he rang Janet’s bell. He waited, then rang it again. He could hear the chime tone it made inside the apartment, and when there was again no response he retreated to the stairwell to consider his options.

  The roof lock had been child’s play. Dean seriously doubted that his skill was sufficient to pick the more difficult locks on Janet’s door, one of which was a Medeco deadbolt. Even if he succeeded, the process would take time, during which he would be vulnerable to being spotted by someone suddenly getting off the elevator or coming out of an apartment. In addition, the doors had peepholes, and any noise he made might attract attention. The risk of someone calling the police, however slight, was a risk Dean judged he could not afford.

  He thought about ringing Mrs. Del Valle’s door, which he knew was 4A. She might have a key to Janet’s apartment, and he could probably coax her into letting him in. If not, she might at least let him into her own apartment, where he would be safe, and from where he could phone Janet until she picked up. But he was reluctant to involve Mrs. Del Valle, and involving her might also mean involving anyone else who happened to be with her at the moment.

  Still, he felt very exposed in the stairway. The third-floor landing, from which he could keep an eye on Janet’s door if he held the stairway door open a crack, placed him in the way of anyone who might decide to take the stairs for a couple of flights rather than wait for the elevator. So he decided to sacrifice the convenient view of Janet’s door for the greater safety of the highest - and therefore least traveled - portion of the stairway, that connecting the sixth floor to the roof level.

  His choice required periodic trips back down to the third floor and left him vulnerable each time he stood at Janet’s door hoping she would answer his rings. But it turned out he needed only three such trips before her “Who is it?” rewarded his patience.

  “Spiro Agnew,” he answered.

  He heard a slight noise within and saw a blue eye appear in the peephole. “Who?” he heard.

  “Spiro Abernathy.”

  The door opened.

  “I must’ve slept late, and it’s Halloween,” Janet said after she had let Dean in and closed the door.

  “Very funny,” Dean said, as he struggled to pull the mask up and off his head.

  “And you’re about the last person in the world I expected to be ringing my bell. I thought you blew me off for dinner. And what was with the Ralph Barracuda business?”

  “Sorry about that,” said Dean, wiping off the sweat that the mask had left on his face and walking to the window, where he adjusted the blinds so the two of them couldn’t be seen from the street below. “But I was afraid to let them know you were coming over tonight. This thing has gotten very complicated. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

  They sat in Janet’s living room, where Dean turned up the volume on the TV news, afraid the apartment might be bugged. He explained what S. had told him about there being something called the Brandy File at the heart of it. Then he told her about Jeffries’s referring to Leo Silvestri as Lou and the significance of the slip, that their FBI agent-protectors were in reality the very police behind the murder of Wilson.

  “Oh, my God,” Janet said.

  “And I’ve been so stupid,” Dean added. “I’ve had us playing right into their hands this whole time. Telling them everything we know, letting them follow us, turning the letters over to them, even telling them what S. told me.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, the only sound being the muffled voice of the newscaster on the television.

  “What do we do now?” Janet asked slowly. But Dean hardly heard her. His attention was focused over her shoulder, upon the TV screen. The smiling photograph of a young police officer, uniformed but hatless, filled the screen. His face looked familiar, and Dean’s first thought was that he might have testified at one of Dean’s trials. He raised a hand to command Janet’s silence. She turned, and together they listened to the newscaster.

  “. . . struck by a truck as h
e pursued a fugitive across Canal Street Friday afternoon. He was pronounced dead at Beekman Downtown Hospital. Officer Santana was twenty-seven. Among his recent assignments, he had served as the chauffeur for the late Police Commissioner Edward Wilson, and was the last officer to have seen Wilson before the Commissioner’s untimely death at the hands of a mugger. Officer Santana is the fourth member of the force to be killed in the line of duty this year. He leaves behind a wife and two small children. The fugitive escaped. No charges have been brought against the truck driver. In other news . . .”

  “That’s him,” Dean managed to say, numbly. “That’s S.”

  “Was,” Janet corrected.

  “Was,” Dean echoed. “He knew what had happened and was trying to tell me. Leo and his men saw that and ran him into the street. They killed him, too.”

  Janet was shivering. “What do we do, Dean?” she almost begged him to have a plan.

  “We call in the real FBI,” Dean answered, trying to speak with conviction. “But we can’t do it from here. We’ve got to assume they’ve got both of our phones tapped.”

  “They’ll kill us, too, won’t they?” Janet’s shivering grew worse, and Dean put an arm around her.

  “Not as long as they think we’re still buying their cover,” he said, but he was aware that his voice carried a bit less conviction this time. “That’s why I gave you all that I’m-letting-the-professionals-handle-this business when we were on the phone before. I want Leo and his people to feel secure that I’m not about to do anything rash.”

  “Like call the real FBI?”

  “Like call the real FBI. Or even get together with you to try to figure things out.”

  “How do you know they didn’t follow you over here?” Janet asked. “Do you really think that silly mask fooled them?”

  “I’m not even sure they saw me. I’ve also been leaping tall buildings at a single bound.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “It was, actually.”