Felony Murder

by Joseph T. Klempner

  The same rain that falls on the west side of Manhattan also falls on Rikers Island. But Joey Spadafino, locked down in the Hole, is unaware of it. Joey’s also unaware that in addition to the broken ribs he suffered when he was kicked in his side, he’s sustained a partially punctured lung, the result of a tiny sliver of rib piercing the lower lobe of his right lung. He knows something is wrong, because along with the knifelike pain in his side that gets worse every time he moves, he’s having trouble breathing. It isn’t so much that he can’t breathe - he can, though it hurts - as that his breaths somehow fail to supply him with enough air.

  Dean awoke to darkness. This time, he allowed himself to look. The little dots blinked repeatedly at 4:45, and after a while, he wondered if the clock might be broken. But at some point, though he missed the transition, he noticed it was finally blinking 4:46. He knew it was September and decided the darkness meant it had to be morning. The ache in his lower back told him he’d spent another night on his sofa.

  Many years ago, as a college student, Dean had got very drunk one night, a rarity for him even then. At one point, he’d sat down hard and heard a crunch from the vicinity of his back pants pocket. Upon inspection, he realized he’d sat on his reading glasses, smashing both lenses. The following morning, he’d awakened with a terrible hangover, but somehow remembered his glasses. He’d groped around for them, hoping they’d been broken only in some dream, and that now, in the morning, they’d be intact. The sight of shattered glass had assured him it had been no dream.

  Now the memory of leaving Janet locked up in some strange building came back to him, and for a moment, he lay in the dark, trying to transform the events of the previous evening into a dream. But it hadn’t worked in college, and it didn’t work now. He needed no broken glasses to tell him that it had all been real - Leo Silvestri, Bennett Childs, the ride in the van with Janet, and the ride home without her.

  He swung his feet to the floor, managed to get to a more or less standing position, and steered himself toward the shower.

  The warm water felt good against his skin, and slowly his eyes began to focus and his mind to clear. But with the clearing came the full recollection of the previous day’s events and the sobering realization that at this very moment, Janet was being held hostage, and Dean didn’t even have a clue where she was. All he knew was that it was time for him to make another trip to Rikers Island to talk some sense into Joey Spadafino.

  He dried off, made a pot of strong coffee, and drank two cups of it, black and sweet. He got dressed, grabbed his wallet and the keys to his Jeep, and headed downstairs.

  By Sunday morning, the pain in Joey’s side isn’t quite as bad as it was the night before, but he feels like he’s leaking air when he breathes. When his breakfast tray is delivered around seven o’clock, he asks the CO to put his name on the list to see the doctor. The CO grunts something Joey can’t make out.

  At the corner newsstand, Dean picked up a copy of the Sunday Times out of habit. He was a crossword enthusiast. He limited himself to one puzzle a week, but that was the one in the Sunday Times magazine section, and he cherished it. He did it clipped to a piece of masonite board. He did it in ink. Well, sort of: He did it with an erasable pen. And he did it, more often than not, to completion. He knew that a “Loan follower” was a “shark,” that “Pay the pot” called for “ante,” and that the “Heavenly hunter” was “Orion.” He loved clever themes, hated step-quotes, and could usually intuitively tell from the clues whether the author was a man or a woman, before looking to see if he was right.

  Tossing the paper onto the backseat of the Jeep, Dean doubted he’d get around to opening it before the day was over, much less doing the crossword puzzle. His thoughts returned to reality and to Janet. Her reward for being a responsible citizen had been to be locked up as a hostage, separated from her daughter, and completely cut off from the rest of the world. How could he have involved her in all of this? How could he have let things reach a point where her very life was now in danger? They sure didn’t teach you about stuff like this in law school.

  He pulled away from the curb and headed uptown for the Triborough Bridge. A quick check of his rearview mirror assured him that he’d have company on the trip. He figured that would be pretty much the case from now on.

  At the first red light, Dean got out of the Jeep and walked directly to the tan Pontiac that had pulled up behind him. The “client” Dean had thought was named Bobby McGrane was driving; Dean didn’t recognize the man in the passenger seat, but knew he had to be one of them, too.

  “In case we get separated,” Dean said, “I’m going to Rikers Island.”

  “Thanks,” Bobby said, shifting a toothpick he’d been chewing on from one side of his mouth to the other. “‘Preciate it.”

  “You look lousy, Joey.” It was something Dean hated to tell anyone in jail. Inmates had enough to deal with without having to worry that they might be sick, too, and Dean tended to go out of his way to tell them they looked good, even when they didn’t. But the truth was, Joey looked worse than lousy.

  “Yeah, I’m not doin’ so good,” Joey wheezed, shifting his position in his chair.

  “Maybe you should see a doctor. Really.”

  “Yeah, later. What’s new with the case?”

  “Lots,” Dean said. He’d spent the drive planning just how he’d tell Joey about the new development. Normally, when there was a new plea offer in a case, Dean would present it to his client as an option to going to trial, and he intended to do that with Joey. At the same time, he’d decided he had absolutely no intention of taking this case to trial if there was the slightest chance it could cost Janet her life. Furthermore, he’d decided that Joey had no need to know everything that went into Dean’s reasoning: Joey’s decision needn’t be based on Janet’s safety, or even Dean’s; those considerations could only serve to complicate things for him and prevent him from doing what was in his own best interest. What Dean owed Joey was a simple, straightforward presentation of his choices, and that was what he’d give him. But he was also going to do it in a way that dictated the outcome.

  In other words, he was going to make Joey an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  So when Joey asked, “So how do my chances look at trial?” Dean’s answer was direct and to the point.

  “There’s not going to be a trial, Joey. I got you petit larceny and time served.” Even as he said the words, Dean knew he should be presenting it as an alternative and not as a fait accompli. But he didn’t care. It was over, and Dean knew it. He told himself it wasn’t a weakness to know when to fold, it was a strength.

  “What’s the catch?” Joey asked. Apparently he didn’t share this particular strength of Dean’s.

  “There’s no catch. It’s a lesser included charge under the robbery count. And it’s exactly what you did: You didn’t rob anyone, but you did steal money. That’s larceny.”

  “And if I still don’t wanna cop out? If I refuse?”

  “You’re not hearing me, Joey. I’m walking you out of here tomorrow morning. No strings, no probation, no parole. Time served on a misdemeanor. It’s over. We won.”

  “No trial?”

  “No trial.”

  “How come?”

  This one made Dean hesitate. But he decided he could make an end run around it and answer it without really answering it. After all, that was what lawyers did, wasn’t it?

  “Because if we were to have a trial, it’s what might very well happen anyway,” Dean explained. “I think we’d be able to prove that Wilson was already dead when you took his money. The judge would have to dismiss all the other charges. The jury would end up finding you guilty of petit larceny. Same result. Only this way it’s risk-free.”

  Joey seemed lost in thought for a moment. Dean was frankly surprised he hadn’t fallen all over himself jumping at the opportunity to walk out of jail. But he figured Joey’d been through a lot and wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist to begin with. So there was no nee
d to bully him. Let him think about it for a minute, let him feel like it was his own decision to take the plea, rather than Dean’s forcing it on him.

  But when at last Joey spoke, it was to ask another question, one Dean wasn’t ready for. Joey, the street kid, the ex-con who’d never gone past ninth grade and hadn’t even earned his high school equivalency diploma upstate, who could barely read and write, and who knew everything there was to know about prison sentences but nothing about grammatical ones, said, “What aren’t you tellin’ me here, Dean?” He closed his eyes as he said it, as though he were in pain.

  It was the last question in the world Dean wanted to hear. Because this one couldn’t be sidestepped; this one left no room for another narrow, evasive interpretation. So Dean tried the only thing left: He countered with a question of his own, pretending he hadn’t heard what Joey had asked, hoping that if he ignored Joey’s question it might simply go away.

  “So what do you say, Joey?” he said.

  “I say, what aren’t you tellin’ me?”

  It hadn’t gone away. Which meant, in the strange world of legal ethics that Dean took so seriously, that Joey, having asked, now clearly had the right to know. And that Dean had been trapped. He no longer enjoyed the luxury - or had the right, when it came down to it - to keep from his client what he himself knew. Ethics could get in the way like that sometimes.

  He took a deep breath. “Joey,” he said, “not only did the police forge your signature on the confession to make it look like Commissioner Wilson died of a heart attack while you were mugging him, they did more. They’ve gotten rid of one witness who saw you didn’t mug him, and they’re threatening to kill another one if we expose them.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman.”

  “The one who lied first?” Joey asked.

  Dean nodded absently.

  “She’s tellin’ the truth now?” Again Joey seemed to wince.

  “Yes,” Dean said. He felt suddenly too tired to explain to Joey how there were two Janet Killians. It was all too complicated, too difficult.

  “Can’t she hide out?” Joey asked. For him, there were always answers.

  “It’s too late for that. They’re holding her hostage somewhere. We expose them, they’ll kill her.”

  “Where do they got her?”

  “I don’t know.” Dean’s voice cracked slightly as he said it.

  “How come they’re doin’ all this?”

  Here it comes, thought Dean, here it all comes. But there was no turning back now.

  “Because they’re the ones who killed Wilson,” he said softly. “He wasn’t drunk when you saw him coming up the block, he was dying. They’d already poisoned him.”

  Joey said nothing. Maybe he was too sick to be understanding this. Maybe it was all too much for him. They sat in silence for a while.

  “What you’re sayin’,” Joey said finally, “is that they killed the guy themselves, an’ now we’re sposed to protect them.”

  Dean had to smile. “Something like that.”

  Again, Joey didn’t speak right away. It was almost as though his brain worked in slow motion. It seemed to take extra time for Dean’s words to sink in, for a response to then occur to Joey, and for the response to finally find its way back into spoken words. Dean found himself wondering if it was the years of drugs, or the alcohol, or the cold nights on the street that had taken their toll, or being sick or hurt or whatever Joey was now, or some combination of all of those things and much, much more.

  “This woman,” Joey said after a while. “She somethin’ special to you?”

  Slow maybe, but not stupid.

  Dean didn’t say anything. Joey seemed to take that for an answer. Maybe drugs and alcohol weren’t so bad for you, after all.

  “I guess there’s nothin’ I can do,” Joey said. “Me bein’ in here and all.”

  Dean thought he might have missed something. “What does your being in here have to do with anything?”

  “I’m locked up. You’re not.” He winced again, shifting positions in his chair.

  “So what’s that supposed to mean?” Dean asked.

  “It means if I was on the street, I’d fuckin’-A find her ass and spring her so’s we could go to trial and nail those fuckin’ cock-suckers. That’s what that means.”

  “I told you, Joey. I don’t even know where they’ve got her.”

  “Hey, you the one seen they copied my signature?”

  “Yes.” Dean nodded wearily.

  “You the one figgered out it wasn’t me who killed the guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You the one solved this whole thing, came up with the idea the cops killed the guy themselves, even know it was fuckin’ poison they give him?”

  Dean nodded again.

  “An you mean to say after all that you can’t find one lousy fuckin’ broad?”

  Dean said nothing. But Joey didn’t seem to care; he was on a roll now.

  “Me, I’d find her, Dean. That’s what I’d fuckin’ do.”

  “Easy for you to say” was all Dean could think to mutter.

  “Easy?” said Joey. “Easy? Nothin’s easy here, man. It ain’t easy to fart in here, or take a shit, or close your fuckin’ eyes without some dude maybe comin’ up behind you an’ stickin’ a knife three feet up your ass. Easy? You wanna swap places with me for twenny-four hours? You come sit here in the fuckin’ Hole, man. I’ll go find the broad. How ‘bout that? I’ll show you easy!” When he stopped talking, it seemed more like he was out of air than out of anger.

  Dean was too tired for the lecture.

  “Joey,” he said, “I give up. You tell me: Do you want the time served or not?”

  “No, I don’t want the time served! They can offer me the Congressional Fuckin’ Medal of Honor, and I don’t want it. I want a trial,” Joey hissed. “I want a trial where we can stick it to those bastards just like they been stickin’ it to me. Only diffrence is they’re dirty. They got it comin’ to them, an’ I didn’t.”

  Outside the interview room was a small waiting area, and since it was still pretty early on a Sunday morning, it was empty, except for a row of plastic chairs, a soda machine with a cardboard OUT OF ORDER sign, and a pay telephone on the wall. Bobby McGrane and his friend had apparently been satisfied to wait by Dean’s Jeep in the parking lot, where they’d pulled in alongside him.

  Dean collapsed onto one of the chairs, overcome by fatigue. He’d come out to Rikers Island to get Joey’s decision, and he’d gotten it. Only it was the wrong decision, the exact opposite of what Dean had tried so hard to push Joey into doing. Dean had made Joey an offer he couldn’t possibly refuse, but Joey had refused it. And what was worse, Dean knew that in some way Joey was right. Not for Dean, and certainly not for Janet, who stood to die because of it. But some small part of Dean knew that what Joey had said made perfect sense for Joey. The same cops who’d been ready to frame Joey and put him away for the rest of his life without a second thought were now asking him to come to their rescue and protect them from the deserved consequences of their own murderous acts. And Joey wanted no part of it. Who could really blame him when you looked at it that way?

  But in the process, Joey was turning down an opportunity to walk out a free man, and making a choice that - for somebody charged with murder - was almost unheard of. Dean tried to put himself in Joey’s position but found it all but impossible. Who knew? Maybe freedom wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be when you were on the street, with summer over and nothing but cold weather ahead. Maybe it was having all of life’s good stuff stripped away, until you were left like Joey Spadafino, without all that much to gain or lose one way or the other, truly free to figure out what was the right thing to do.

  But where did that leave Janet?

  Dean stood up and tried to fend off the panic that accompanied the thought. Ignoring the OUT OF ORDER sign on the soda machine, he inserted three quarters, stepped back, and gave it a solid kick with the botto
m of his shoe. A can of Pepsi dropped into the opening with a pleasing thud! He opened it, drained half of it in a single swallow, and pinched the bridge of his nose to deal with the sudden pain from the cold. Then he walked to the pay phone and, using the rest of his change, dialed the number Janet had given him to phone her sister.

  “Hello,” answered a woman who could have been Janet herself.

  “Hi,” said Dean. “I’ve got a message from your sister.”

  “Yes?”

  “That little package we had sent out to you yesterday?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did it arrive?”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “How is it?”

  “Just fine. A little damp at first, but just fine.”

  “Good,” said Dean. “Please listen carefully. Your sister needs you to take care of it for a while. She can’t call you, and it’s important that you don’t try to call her. In fact, it might be safest for you to move the package somewhere else altogether, where nobody’ll know where it is. Understand?”

  “I think so. Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine,” he lied, trying to sound as reassuring as he could. “Can you do this for her?”

  “Yes, I can,” the woman said with an air of competence that told Dean there was more to the sisters’ resemblance than a similar voice.

  In the parking lot, Dean stopped by the two cops sitting in the tan Pontiac. His “client” Bobby McGrane sat behind the wheel, sipping from a container of coffee. Bobby had gotten rid of the toothpick, but now he had powdered sugar and a drop of purple jelly on one side of his mouth.

  “I’m going home, fellas,” Dean said. “And you can tell your people that their dirty little secret is going to be safe. My client will take the time served. He was thrilled.” He figured this bit of misdirection might take some heat off Janet for a while.