Felony Murder

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Do we call the real FBI now?” Janet asked.

  “Yes. Let’s ask Mrs. Del Valle if we can use her phone.”

  Janet reached for her own phone, but Dean stopped her. “Nothing on this one.”

  “I need to call my sister,” Janet said. “I want her to take Nicole for a few days, until we know we’re safe. Can’t I at least do that?”

  “Yes,” Dean said. “It’s a good idea. But not from here. You’ll do that from Mrs. Del Valle’s, too.”

  So Janet gathered up a sleeping Nicole, and the three of them climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Janet rang the bell to 4A. A bald, heavyset man answered the door and invited them in. Somehow Dean had not counted on a Mr. Del Valle. He explained in broken English that his wife was out.

  “Her at bodega.”

  “Can we use your telephone, please?” Janet asked him.

  “Yes, but no,” Mr. Del Valle replied. “Is broke.” He made them follow him to the kitchen, where he took the receiver off a wall phone and handed it to Dean, who held it to his ear. Silence. It was indeed broke.

  Janet asked Mr. Del Valle to send his wife to her apartment when she got back from the bodega. He seemed to understand. Nicole woke up and took in the surroundings somewhat apprehensively. They walked back downstairs. Once they were inside Janet’s apartment, Dean triple-locked the door. Janet noticed, and a visible shiver ran through her body.

  Dean walked to the phone and picked it up.

  “I thought you said-”

  “Shit,” was what Dean said. Her phone was dead, too. “I guess they aren’t taking any chances.”

  “Can they really do that?” Janet asked.

  “They can probably knock the whole building out. Can you buzz the super on the intercom and see if his phone is out, too?”

  Janet buzzed Mr. Novacek.

  “I know, I know,” came his voice over the intercom. “The phones are out. It’s the whole building. The phone company knows. They’re trying to locate the problem.”

  It was twenty minutes before the doorbell rang, and Janet let Mrs. Del Valle in. She listened carefully to Janet’s instructions on how to take Nicole to Janet’s sister’s on Long Island. She was to leave in an hour, when Nicole would be asleep, carrying the baby in a bag to hide her. She was to be absolutely certain that nobody followed her. She seemed to sense the seriousness of the situation and asked no unnecessary questions. She fussed over Nicole while Janet went inside to pack the things her daughter would need. When Janet came back out her eyes were dry but red, and her hands were trembling slightly.

  “You don’t have to do this, you know,” Dean said. “I’ll be okay. You can go with Nicole to your sister’s until this blows over.” God only knew when that might be, of course.

  “And let you fall into a fish tank again?”

  “It wasn’t exactly a fish tank.”

  “Whatever,” she said, drying her eyes and taking a deep breath. “As they say in the movies, we’re in this mess together.”

  Dean didn’t argue. He stood by helplessly as Janet hugged her daughter tightly, and then surrendered her to Mrs. Del Valle, who crossed herself quickly before stepping out into the hallway.

  At the third-floor window, Dean parted the blinds just enough to watch the Del Valles emerge from the building. They appeared to be carrying several large bundles, which they placed carefully in the back of a rusted Toyota station wagon. When they pulled away from the curb, no one followed.

  “She’ll be okay,” Dean told Janet with some measure of confidence.

  The more difficult question was whether the two of them would be okay, and he was grateful to her for not asking it.

  With no working phones in the building, they needed to slip out without being detected, get to a phone to call the FBI, and locate a place to hide while the FBI began the business of identifying and apprehending the various Police Department people involved in the killing of Commissioner Wilson, the poisoning of Mr. Chang, and the suspicious death of Officer Santana.

  “Suppose they don’t believe us?” Janet asked. “Suppose they think we’re nuts?”

  The thought had certainly occurred to Dean. After all, he was the lawyer for the very man charged with killing Wilson. It would be easy to dismiss as a total fantasy his claim of a police conspiracy to murder their own.

  “You may be right, but we’ve got to do something. Can you think of a better plan?” he said.

  “No.”

  “I’ve tried,” he said, “and I can’t either. But it’s not going to take Silvestri and his friends forever to figure out I’m not in my apartment. If they know we’re here together, they could panic, and we’re sitting ducks.”

  The last thought seemed to get to Janet, and she offered no further resistance to his plan, or what there was of it. She changed into jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt. Dean had her find a pair of sunglasses and a scarf to cover her head. From her closet, he selected a coat that was almost floor-length. These items, along with his own mask, hat, and sunglasses and some toiletries Janet had assembled, he placed in a canvas bag.

  Dean checked the street below. The maroon Chevy was still there, two men still seated in it. Farther down the block was a Frozfruit vendor. Yuppie surveillance?

  He left the window and went to the front door to check the peephole. No one was visible. He had Janet open the door and step out. She signaled to him that all was clear.

  They retraced Dean’s earlier route, taking the stairs to the roof. It turned out Janet was agile and sure-footed and able to leap tall buildings with the best of them. They crossed from 77 Bleecker to 79, and from there to 81. The next building, a double-wide one, was about five feet away and six feet lower, a combination that made the jump easy but the landing tricky. Dean asked Janet if she was game.

  “Why not?” She shrugged nonchalantly.

  Broken bones, head injuries, death, thought Dean. But he kept such thoughts to himself, knowing that they must have occurred to this brave young woman next to him as well.

  “You first,” said the brave young woman.

  Dean laughed. “As long as you promise not to chicken out,” he said. “I’ve got no way to get back to you once I’m down there.”

  “I promise,” she said. “Unless you don’t make it.”

  “Fair enough,” said Dean.

  He tossed the canvas bag to the lower roof, well to the side of what he had picked out as his landing area. He stepped to the very edge of the roof they were on. Then he rocked his weight forward and back several times by swinging his arms in exaggerated arcs, before pushing off with both feet. He cleared the distance easily and landed without incident.

  “Piece of cake,” he said to Janet, being careful not to raise his voice.

  She stepped to the edge and looked across at the lower roof. As a climber, Dean knew the visual problem that greeted her. A five-and-a-half-foot person looking at a drop of six feet actually confronts a distance of eleven feet, the six-foot drop plus the additional five feet from foot to eye level. Looking down eleven feet is suddenly serious business, because the eye refuses to make the intellectual adjustment that no part of the body - be it eyes or feet or whatever - will have to descend more than six feet during the jump.

  But if the sight terrified Janet, she refused to allow it to paralyze her. She mimicked Dean’s swinging motion, describing longer and longer arcs with her arms. Once, twice, three times. And on the fourth, she pushed off deftly, clearing the airspace with ease and landing lightly on the lower roof, where Dean grabbed her in a bear hug.

  “Terrific!” he told her.

  “No sweat,” she said.

  He could feel her entire body trembling in his grasp.

  A look at the next building confirmed what Dean already knew. It posed the reverse problem: five feet across, but six feet up to the next rooftop. And out of the question. They had jumped their last roof.

  Dean turned his attention to the door leading to the stairwell of the building they
were on. Again he needed his lockpick set, but his touch had not deserted him, and he had the door open in less than a minute. They donned their disguises, Dean becoming Spiro Agnew again while Janet added thirty years or so with a kerchief, dark glasses, the long coat, and the slouch of a crone.

  They walked down the steps to the ground floor and out the front door. Arm in arm, they turned right, away from the maroon Chevy, away even from the Frozfruit vendor. As they rounded the corner, an empty cab sat by the curb, its driver resting against the hood.

  “You working?” Dean asked the man.

  “Depends.” A Middle East accent of some sort. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Anywhere but east,” said Dean.

  “Sure, get in.”

  At Dean’s instruction, he took them down Seventh Avenue to the World Trade Center, where Dean paid him, and they got out. They headed to a large bank of public phones outside the nearer of the Twin Towers. Dean stepped to an unused phone; Janet alongside him. He picked up the receiver and dialed Information. When an operator answered, he asked her for the number of the FBI.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Abernathy,” said a familiar voice behind Dean, “but I can’t let you do that.” He turned to see Leo Silvestri, flanked by Jeffries and another man whom he recognized as Detective Rasmussen. They looked like they meant business.

  Dean and Janet were led to a gray van and directed to get in through the back doors. The inside consisted of two facing padded benches along either side. Jeffries motioned for them to sit, then closed the doors behind them, leaving them in sudden and total darkness. They heard the doors being locked from the outside and felt the van shift slightly as someone got behind the wheel. Front doors slammed shut, the engine started, and they were moving.

  “Are they going to kill us?” Janet asked Dean softly in the dark.

  “Of course not,” he said, then added more loudly, “these guys are FBI agents.” As he spoke, he groped for her in the dark, and when he located her face he placed his index finger against her lips to quiet her, against the possibility that there was a microphone somewhere in the back of the van. “They’re on our side,” he continued. “They must have felt we’re in danger, that’s all.” He felt her lips kiss his finger softly.

  For a while, Dean tried to keep track of the turns the van made, but he soon found it impossible. At one point, the traffic noise changed and seemed to echo, and Dean guessed that they were going through a tunnel. At another point, the van bounced sharply, as though it had struck a pothole, causing Janet to slide into him on the bench. He put an arm around her to steady her and kept it there the rest of the way.

  After about a half hour, they were aware of the van slowing, then descending a steep incline before leveling out and coming to a stop. The engine was cut off, and they heard the sound of the front doors of the van opening and closing. Noises at the rear of the van told them the doors were being unlocked. Fluorescent light suddenly streamed in, causing them both to squint, but Dean was able to see that they were in an underground parking garage.

  Leo Silvestri led the way while Jeffries and Rasmussen ushered them through a door that connected the garage to the remainder of the building, and they were directed to a freight elevator. Leo pressed the top button, and they rode up in silence. When the elevator door opened, they were led down a long corridor containing doors to offices. Most of the doors were wooden, a few with opaque glass panels; all had numbers, running from 700 to 714. Only one had a name that Dean could make out: D. M. FERGUSON. The door at the end of the corridor was dark wood, broken only by a peephole and the brass numerals 714. It was there that Leo unlocked the door and held it open for the rest of them to enter.

  Inside was a small hallway that opened onto a large conference room. The only furniture in the room was a long imitation mahogany table, surrounded by chairs of chrome and black leather. Leo motioned for Dean and Janet to sit; he, Jeffries, and Rasmussen found empty seats themselves. Of the dozen or so others present, Dean recognized Bennett Childs from the first meeting, as well as Rasmussen’s partner, Detective Mogavero, and several others who, Dean was fairly certain, had been among those following Janet and him over the past weeks. To Dean’s even greater surprise was the presence of Bobby McGrane, the client who had first introduced Dean to Leo Silvestri.

  “Bobby?” Dean asked incredulously.

  “Detective Bobby, to you.”

  “Yes,” explained Leo. “When we found out you were starting to snoop around on the Spadafino thing, we thought you might get lucky and put two and two together. We figured at some point you’d feel the need to reach out to some other agency. We created criminal. It was a time when violent crime was on the increase, the crack epidemic was beginning, and handguns were everywhere. Parks were no longer safe places, people were afraid to go out after dark, whole neighborhoods were being taken over by drug pushers. Gunfire became a commonplace thing, with handguns falling into the hands of teens and even preteens. Saturday Night Specials were replaced by nine-millimeter Mactens and uzis. You couldn’t pick up a newspaper without reading about an innocent woman or child getting killed in crossfire. And yet our courts continued to operate on laws drafted in the nineteenth century, hamstrung by rules that were hopelessly out of date and totally inadequate to deal with the crisis.

  “As police officers - and we are all police officers, as you’ve probably figured out by now - we knew we couldn’t sit idly by and watch criminals walk free because of technicalities while our city was destroyed in the process. So we did what we could. We lied a little here; we cheated a little there. When we made a good collar, we’d do our best to make it stick. If we didn’t have a search warrant, we’d say we found the drugs in open view. If we didn’t give a suspect his rights, we’d later say we had. Nothing major. Certainly nothing that you and every other defense lawyer hasn’t been aware of for years.”

  “And every DA and judge, too,” said Dean.

  “Exactly. But we were the ones who always had to do the dirty work,” Childs continued. “We had to be the liars, the perjurers, the cheats. And when one of us would get caught at it, some politically ambitious prosecutor would go after him with a vengeance, some holier-than-thou judge would take away his shield and send him to prison, and the media would chime in with a chorus of righteous indignation about dishonest police. That was the height of hypocrisy, and that was what we set about to correct. If you want us to do our job in a particular way, make it legitimate: Change the laws so the men who enforce them don’t have to be criminals.

  “But how to do this?” Childs asked rhetorically. “That was the problem. We couldn’t very well come out and tell the world that we’d been falsifying evidence and expect everyone to pat us on the back and say keep up the good work. So the suggestion was made that we begin the process of keeping track, at least in serious cases - those involving murder and other violence, or large amounts of hard drugs - of precisely what falsification we engaged in and how it was necessary in order to ensure a conviction. The ultimate goal was to assemble enough data to convince even the most extreme bleeding-heart liberals that under their rules almost all of those major felons would have gone free, and that the laws must be changed so that we can obey them and at the same time get convictions on guilty felons.

  “After a great deal of discussion, the study was approved. In every major case that qualified under the guidelines, the arresting officer or detective was interviewed by an inspector, precinct commander, or captain, under an absolute guarantee of confidentiality. The interviewer then prepared a report, usually a single page or two, of what liberties had been taken in the case in order to obtain a conviction. That report was forwarded to the Commissioner’s office, where it was analyzed, and the data contained on it was entered into a computer program. The program was accessible to no one under the rank of inspector. The individual reports themselves were kept under lock and key in a secure vault in the Commissioner’s office, under the heading of the Brady File.”

&nb
sp; “As in Brady v. Maryland, the case that requires exculpatory material to be turned over to the defense,” said Dean.

  “Precisely,” Childs said, nodding. “Though it seems our Officer Santana somehow confused it with an after-dinner drink and called it the Brandy File instead. We figured it was only a matter of time until you realized his mistake.”

  “Right,” agreed Dean, though of course it had not occurred to him.

  “In any event,” Childs resumed, “the data began coming in. And it was very impressive data. Drug kingpins, terrorists, serial murderers, Mafia hitmen, Central Park rapists - in virtually every case, we learned that the officers or detectives involved had been forced to engage in at least some minor fabrication in order to ensure a conviction. The statistics run to about 92 percent. Know what that means? That means for every ten major criminals behind bars for the most violent crimes and biggest drug conspiracies committed in this city in the past dozen years, nine of them would have walked if our men hadn’t been willing to bend things a bit.”

  Childs paused to relight his pipe. “The next problem was how to reveal the data to the politicians who write the laws without blowing the whistle on ourselves and jeopardizing the very convictions that had been obtained. Everybody agreed that this was the tricky part. But we had to do it. Our men deserved better than to be turned into criminals for doing what no one else was willing to do. No less than four Commissioners, beginning in the early nineteen eighties, supported the plan and worked to implement the next phase, the lobbying of the legislature.”

  “Until Wilson,” Dean said.

  “Precisely,” said Childs. “As Chief of Patrol, the highest rank he held before that of Commissioner, Wilson had been out of the loop. He had never heard of the Brady File, much less been involved in its creation. As Commissioner, he had to be brought in on it sooner or later. Those of us who knew him best were afraid to trust him. He was so zealous in his anticorruption campaign that we were frankly afraid that he’d see this as a corruption issue, when, in fact, it has nothing to do with corruption and never has.”