“How’s it going, Tito?” I addressed my client, a kid of eighteen whose Colombian parents had had enough trouble learning English, let alone taking on Ameslan. They could communicate with their son only in the most rudimentary fashion. As soon as he met the Homicides, Tito had left his family and moved into the semi-abandoned building they called home.
Unfortunately, sombody’d lit a fire in the tumbledown building, starting with Tito’s mattress, and the cops had arrested him on the complaint of the super, a hostile type who objected to the “dummies” taking over his building and who claimed Tito and another gang member had threatened to burn down the building earlier in the week.
I’d talked to the guys many times about the day of the fire, but I’d always had the feeling, born of ten years in the system, that they were holding something back. I knew I’d better find out what it was before the trial.
I turned to Frankie. “Tito says he was with three other guys in Julio’s room, right?” Frankie signed and Tito nodded; his hands started rapid movement, his mouth miming words. Frankie turned back to me and said in the dull monotone of the deaf, “Tito says he was with Julio, Marco, and Randy.” Here he pointed to a tall black kid with cornrows. Unlike most gangs, the Homicides were integrated. Deafness was the only entrance requirement.
“What were they doing there?” I faced Tito as I spoke, even though I knew his lip-reading ability to be nil. “And I don’t want any bullshit!” I said, pointing and scowling as I spoke. “I want the truth!” I punctuated my words with a forceful gesture, then turned to Frankie and repeated it. Whenever I talked to Tito, I found myself using exaggerated gestures and facial expressions to make up for the lack of words. I felt like a silent-movie actress.
Tito and Frankie signed back and forth and finally both turned to Ray, the leader. Ray stared at me with the impassivity I had come to expect from him. He was in his mid-twenties and had an acne-scarred face. He made a living selling cards printed in the sign-language alphabet on the subway. I asked Frankie to explain that if I was going to help Tito out of this jam, I was going to need the truth. While I spoke to Frankie, I deliberately locked eyes with Ray. He stared back coolly. He was a born leader, Ray, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he could have been had he been born rich or hearing, or both.
After Frankie finished relaying my message, he looked at me with a steady, appraising glance. I willed myself not to blink. Finally he nodded, a single nod that sent all the fingers in the group flying as the Unknown Homicides proceeded to breach the wall of silence and tell me what had really happened.
“We was in Julio’s room,” Frankie translated. “We was gettin’ high.”
I nodded. I had expected something like this. “Tito was helpin’ Marco find a vein,” Frankie went on, pointing to a skinny, curly-haired kid of about fifteen. “He got skinny arms, and we was pokin’ him to get the vein to pop.” Frankie illustrated as he spoke, pointing to his own arm, pulling the tourniquet, searching for the vein. “Then Randy smell smoke.” Frankie lifted his head and made a sniffing motion. It was such perfect mime, I could almost smell smoke in the courthouse corridor. “We didn’t think nothin’,” Frankie went on, making a brush-off motion, “but then it got stronger and we all run out.” Tito was acting it out now, using his whole body to show how he ran downstairs, opened his apartment door and then recoiled from the flames.
“Stop!” I held up a hand. “Ask him why he went to his room. Why not straight outside?”
Signs flew. “He wanted to get his stuff out,” Frankie explained. “But there was too much fire.” His hands encompassed a conflagration.
The rest I knew. The super, perpetually angry at the Homicides’ invasion, had told the police the boys had lit matches in front of his face. In his view, this had been their way of announcing their plans for the building. This the gang emphatically denied.
“So if you guys didn’t do it, who did?” I asked, although I already knew the answer. Their answer. According to them, any rival gang, any Hearing gang, could and would have done it. “They always down on us for bein’ deaf,” Frankie said in his eerie voice, pointing to his ears. “We always gettin’ crap from Hearing,” added a plump black kid, whose huge earphones almost but not quite put him in the Hearing world.
Some wonderful defense, I thought as I signed the case in on the clerk’s sheet and walked toward the front row of the courtroom. Gang vengeance by an unknown gang for an unknown reason. And my kids no angels in spite of their handicaps. The Homicides might not have lived up to their name, but there were burglars, shoplifters, and drug addicts among them, just as there were among the Hearing.
I needed a postponement. This case just wasn’t ready for a jury, not if I wanted to win. I found myself wishing Linda’s help had paid off. When I’d first picked up the case, I’d asked her how to go about locating the building’s owner to see whether the fire might not have made him a profit. She’d given me advice from her days in a real-estate office, and I’d done my share of sending letters and subpoenas. None of it had borne fruit; the fire had been minor and no big insurance payoff had been made. It was just one more fire in a neighborhood gradually being destroyed by arson.
Still, I felt as though there were things I should know and didn’t. Plus I had to see the building, something I’d been unable to arrange due to a heavy trial schedule. When I asked for the adjournment, Judge Kaplan gave me her Dragon Lady smile and asked, “What’s the matter, Counselor, afraid to take this case to a jury?”
“Of course,” I answered. “Any lawyer who’s not afraid to hold a kid’s life in her hands is someone I don’t even want to know. Especially,” I added with a smile, “when the case isn’t ready. I’m owed a few things by the DA’s office and there are subpoenaed items that haven’t come in yet.”
Over the prosecution’s strenuous objection, I got my adjournment, as well as the fire marshal’s report I’d been waiting for. One week in which to work a miracle.
The only person less thrilled by the delay than ADA Bergen was Tito Fernandez. Angrily gesturing, the Homicides demanded to know why they couldn’t have the trial today and “get it over with.” I tried to explain that “getting it over with” was not the first objective of a good defense lawyer, but they walked away disgusted. There are few things in life less rewarding than addressing the retreating back of a deaf person, but I did it anway. “For guys who don’t trust Hearing,” I muttered, “you’re pretty anxious to put Tito’s fate in the hands of a Hearing jury.”
As the gang passed through the metal detectors, I saw Tito turn toward me. The one-finger sign he flashed me needed no translation.
4
As I surveyed the rack of brightly colored size-four dresses that hung in Linda Ritchie’s closet, I recalled some lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Give away her gowns
Give away her shoes
She has no more use
For her fragrant gowns.
I couldn’t remember the middle, so I jumped straight to the end: “‘Sweep her narrow shoes/from the closet floor,’” I recited to myself.
It seemed too soon. Linda wasn’t even in the ground yet. But I had to admit Marcy was right. Dawn needed her school clothes and tennis things, and there was no reason some charity shouldn’t put Linda’s wardrobe to good use. And of course there was the fact that I needed the rental income from the top-floor apartment. I would have had to find a new tenant anyway, I reflected, once Linda had made her move to Washington. With that, plus the extra office I’d been trying to sublet, I was beginning to feel like a real landlord.
I looked around, trying to decide where to start. The cops had left things pretty much as they were, which meant a mess. The blood had been cleaned up as well as possible, and there was a film of dusting powder on tables and windowsills. The place had definitely been tossed. Brad looking for proof of an affair, the police had thought. Whoever had done it hadn’t found what he came for. I didn’t know at first where that certainty came from
, only that the impression was strong and instinctive. Then I remembered the “safe.” Linda and I had joked about it when she’d first moved in. Brownstone houses with working fireplaces cost more than I could afford; the fireplaces in my building had elaborate mantels under which were ornate gratings, meant to look like real hearths. Behind the grating on each floor was an empty hole just large enough to use as a hiding place. Whatever Linda had hidden—if anything at all—would be there.
I went to the fireplace, pulled back the grating, and found a manila envelope crammed with papers. I took it out, walked over to the window seat and sat looking at it. It was an ethical dilemma.
I finally decided that the contents of the envelope were part of Linda’s estate and that I should, as Marcy’s lawyer, open it. And besides, I was curious as hell.
I hadn’t liked Linda Ritchie. After reading the contents of the envelope, I knew why. She’d been moonlighting as a blackmailer.
The papers were well-organized, held together with giant paper clips. One clip per blackmail victim, plus a bankbook with regular entries—all deposits.
First victim: Ira Bellfield. It was no longer a secret how Linda had gotten the job in his real-estate office. Right on top was a Xerox copy of Norma Bellfield’s file card showing that she’d been treated at the Safe Haven, the same battered women’s shelter Linda had sought refuge in. Ira Bellfield was a wife-beater.
Linda hadn’t wasted time once she started work. She’d learned everything she could about Ira’s business, and what she’d learned hadn’t been too savory. I began to see why Jack Newfield had named Bellfield as one of his Ten Worst Landlords. Linda had lists of his buildings showing apartments to be burglarized, fires to be set—all to encourage recalcitrant tenants to leave so the building could be flipped to a new owner at a profit. There were tapes wrapped in yellow legal paper and bound with a rubber band. I left Linda’s apartment, went downstairs to my office, and put one of Linda’s tapes in my cassette player. Then I pushed the button for “play.”
“This fuckin’ coffee’s gonna kill me,” a voice on the tape said.
“You think you got troubles,” a higher-pitched voice answered. “I gotta eat dinner again when I get home or my wife’s gonna think I been out screwin’ some broad.”
The conversation wasn’t moving; I pressed “fast forward.”
“I want that guy whacked,” the high-pitched voice ordered. “He’s been giving me nothing but trouble, him and that fucking tenants’ association.”
“You want a fire or what?” The tone was bored, as though the men were discussing plumbing supplies. “I mean,” he went on, “we done a lot of fires over there, Ira. We maybe oughta try a new tack.”
“You let me worry about that,” came the answer. The high-pitched voice carried more authority than I would have thought possible. “We got coverage on the fires—and I’m not talking Mutual of Omaha.” He laughed, a snigger that went with the voice. “But what the hell, maybe you’re right. Maybe we could just hurt the guy. Not even kill, give him a break. Hurt him for life.” His voice grew intrigued with the possibilities. “A fuckin’ vegetable,” he concluded.
“Hey, Ira,” the other guy protested. “I’m good, but, like, I’m no fuckin’ surgeon, you know?”
It was something out of a Donald Westlake novel, or Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. But something told me these guys could shoot straight and that the man they were talking about was by this time at least a “fuckin’ vegetable.”
I fast-forwarded again. “All right,” Ira was giving orders. “We got Frankie in as super over there. He’s been in a week and he’s already busted the boiler and rented 6B, 2D, and 3E to junkies. Now we gotta start the break-ins. Let’s do 5G for starters—I hate that big-mouth broad. She’s been a pain in my ass ever since I bought the building. Clean her out—TV, stereo, cameras—I don’t want her to own a fucking toothpick when we’re done. Got me?”
I shut the machine off and took out the tape. Someday I promised myself to listen to all of them straight through, but for today I’d heard enough.
I looked around my office. The oak desk I’d earned as a fee from the owners of the Oaken Bucket on Atlantic Avenue, whose leases I’d negotiated; the brass-trimmed legal-size filing cabinets I’d bought with the proceeds of the Harmon divorce; the green-shaded desk lamp my brother Ron had given me for Christmas—it all looked suddenly very dear, and very vulnerable. The thought of arson hung oppressively in the air, like a heavy perfume.
I shook the morbid thoughts out of my head and went on to the second clipped bundle. Now I knew what Bellfield meant when he said he was covered for arson. Duncan Pitt, senior fire marshal for the New York Fire Department, had investigated fires in some fourteen Bellfield buildings. Even the ones he’d labeled “suspicious” he’d attributed to junkies or winos. No mention of the pattern of Bellfield ownership, no hint of arson-for-profit, came through his carefully worded reports. He was on the payroll.
One address caught my eye. I walked over to my briefcase, took out the report ADA Bergen had given me in court, and compared it to the one in Linda’s packet. I’d been right. The Unknown Homicides lived in an Ira Bellfield building. It was the break I’d been waiting for. And Linda had known it. Instead of giving it to me, she’d used it for blackmail.
I traded in my Sam Spade fedora for Antony Maitland’s barrister’s wig and went back to being a defense lawyer. Would any of this, I wondered, be admissible in evidence at Tito Fernandez’s trial? Could I show that Bellfield routinely used arson as a means to empty his buildings, and that he was, therefore, at least as good a suspect as Tito Fernandez and the Unknown Homicides?
The truth: probably not. The rules of evidence were strict; the relevance of other Bellfield fires would be hard to establish. Unless—my mind took a different turn. What if Duncan Pitt, the bribed fire marshal, were being investigated? Surely that fact would be relevant to Tito’s jury. The question was how would I get this information to the right people without tipping off Pitt and triggering a cover-up?
Matt Riordan. The high-powered, edge-of-ethical criminal lawyer I’d met after Nathan’s murder. If anybody would know how to stir up a hornet’s nest without getting stung, he would. I decided to schedule a consultation, then smiled as I recalled that most of our recent conferences had ended in bed.
I went on to the third victim. Todd Lessek, called by local newspapers “the Donald Trump of Brooklyn.” A super-developer whose touch was golden, he was a one-man gentrification movement, turning slums into luxury co-ops. If Ira Bellfield’s name was synonymous with “slumlord,” then the name Lessek meant money and plenty of it. It was hard to believe he’d leave any room for a small-time blackmailer like Linda. Still less likely that he’d actually paid her off.
But Linda’s records spoke for themselves. It seemed that a high proportion of Lessek’s buildings had once belonged to Ira Bellfield, and that he’d renovated them with considerable help from the City of New York in the form of tax credits and low-interest loans. Could it be a coincidence that the next blackmailee was a city employee named Elliott Pilcher, and that Elliott was listed as a limited partner in Lessek’s most grandiose scheme to date?
The waterfront development plan was the biggest thing to hit Brooklyn since the bridge. When it was finished—if the city approved it—it would consist of luxury housing with splendid views of Manhattan, South Street Seaport–style shopping malls and restaurants, and a sports complex. Nobody was saying much about the fact that the plan would dispossess a number of small manufacturing businesses and the artists who had first staked out the area for living space. I knew about the artists firsthand. Some of them were my clients, introduced to me by Dorinda, who lived in a waterfront building and was wholeheartedly on the side of the community and against Lessek.
The most carefully guarded secret in the whole plan were the names of Lessek’s limited partners, the people who were to share in the huge profits while keeping their identiti
es hidden from the public. All perfectly legal, of course—unless you were a city employee like this Elliott Pilcher. The question was, what had Pilcher done for Lessek to be rewarded by the chance to invest in the waterfront development scheme? Had he provided all those city loans and tax breaks?
The next victim of Linda’s scrutiny was her new boss, Art Lucenti. I read through the papers with interest, as Art had always been a hero of mine. He’d started as a Legal Services lawyer in the great anti-poverty days and had soon become known as an outspoken tenants’ advocate, parlaying his popularity in Brooklyn neighborhoods into a seat on New York’s City Council. From there he could be counted on to support rent control and generally act as a thorn in the side of the big real-estate interests. I, for one, had been glad to vote for him as congressman.
I wanted my vote back. Reading Linda’s evidence destroyed all that. Lucenti had been Lessek’s man all the way down the line.
The first item was that Art Lucenti, like the mysterious Elliott Pilcher, was one of Lessek’s limited partners, standing to make a giant profit if the waterfront deal went through. And the next item was that Art’s investment had nowhere been mentioned in the sworn financial disclosure statement Art had filed before running for office. At the least, he was guilty of perjury.
That was bad enough. What was worse, at least from a moral point of view, was that all through his career as the crusading councilman, Art Lucenti’s law firm had represented Todd Lessek. Linda’s proof consisted of some very interesting legal papers. It seemed that an angry tenants’ group had once sued Lessek, and had turned to Lucenti to represent them in court. He’d appeared on their behalf, but at the same time, the law firm that still used his name on its letterhead, that still shared an office and a phone number with him, that still doled out to him a portion of its profits, came into court for Lessek. It was as blatant a conflict of interest as a lawyer could imagine.
Where Nobody Dies Page 4
