Jessie Black Legal Thrillers Box Set 1

by Larry A Winters

  Finally the door opened. The rodent-like eyes that peered at him over the door chain definitely belonged to Silba. In person, the man looked just as skinny, greasy, and mean as he had in the mug shots Leary had reviewed before driving over here. Peering past the ugly face, Leary saw a woman lounging on the couch. She was naked except for a pair of panties.

  “I see you’re enjoying your freedom, Miguel” Leary said.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “My name is Mark Leary.”

  “You look like a cop. If you’re here to arrest me, you can fuck off, man. I was found not guilty.”

  Silba’s legal analysis was a bit of a stretch—his conviction had been overturned, but he could still be tried in a retrial if the state thought it could win without the evidence that had been ruled inadmissible on appeal—but Leary saw no advantage in educating him on the finer points of criminal justice. At least, not until he needed to scare him. Then those details might come in handy.

  “I’m just here to talk. Why don’t you let me in? Your girlfriend can wait in another room.”

  Silba sneered. “She ain’t my girlfriend. She’s a pro.”

  “Okay.” Leary reached into his pocket. His fingers came out holding a few folded bills. “Maybe I can offset your entertainment expenses. I just want to talk to you about a friend of yours.”

  “What friend?” The man’s response and the way his gaze zeroed in on the money told Leary he would open the door.

  “Can we talk inside? I just walked up three flights of stairs.”

  Silba’s face scrunched as he debated his options. Leary waited, struggling to maintain a patient expression. Silba nodded, then closed the door, undid the chain, and opened it wide. He grabbed the bills. “Make it quick.”

  “Thanks,” Leary said. He took a step inside.

  Silba turned to the prostitute. “I need a minute, sweetheart. Wait for me in the bedroom.”

  The woman slid off the couch and slunk from the room without a word. Leary glanced about the room as he entered. There wasn’t much to see—a few mismatched lamps, an old TV, a coffee table with some TV remotes and a cell phone, and the ratty couch the mostly-naked prostitute had just vacated. Silba waved Leary toward the couch. “I think I’ll stand.”

  “Thought your legs were tired.”

  “I got a second wind.”

  Silba shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He dropped onto the couch with a grunt. “What friend you talking about? Jose owe you money? Good luck collecting from that broke-ass—”

  “I’m here to talk about Reginald Tuck.”

  Leary watched Silba closely for a reaction to the name, but he needn’t have bothered. The man’s physical response was instant and unmistakable. His eyes seemed to darken with hate, and his mouth twisted into a snarl that looked more vermin than human. His voice came out choked with rage. “I got nothing to say about that fucker!”

  “Tuck testified at your trial. He looked right at the jury and told them, with a straight face, that you confessed to him that you raped and killed a woman. You have nothing to say about him?”

  “You are a cop. I knew it.”

  “That should only bother you if you have something to hide, right?”

  Silba cleared his nostrils with a wet snort. “I won my appeal. Got nothing to fear from you.”

  “Then talk to me about Tuck. You must be pissed off. I mean, this guy gave you up to the District Attorney for rape and murder, probably in exchange for extra french fries at the cafeteria.”

  “Yeah, no shit I’m pissed off. So what?”

  “It must feel good to be out of prison,” Leary said, hoping the sudden change in direction would throw Silba further off balance. “You meet up with your old friends? Maybe some of the guys from back when you served?”

  “What are you talking about, old friends? I was dishonorably discharged, man, and that was years ago. That part of my life is over. I got no friends from back then.”

  Leary picked up the cell phone from the coffee table. “So I guess if I look in your contacts, I won’t find any?”

  “Give me that!” Silba snatched the phone from his hand. “You can’t just come in here and touch my stuff. Not without a warrant.”

  “You invited me in.”

  “Why are you here? What the fuck do you want, man?”

  Leary hesitated, but only for a second. He had Silba on the defensive, and he needed to press that advantage while he had it. “I want you to call your buddies and tell them it’s over.”

  “What buddies?”

  “If you cooperate with me now, I’ll make sure the police and the DA’s Office are lenient with you. If you don’t cooperate, you will go down for this. Hard.”

  “Go down for what?”

  “Call your friends at the courthouse now.”

  “You’re crazy, man! I don’t have any friends at the courthouse. What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about your little revenge scheme against Tuck. Hell, you could have gotten the death penalty. So I guess it’s fair, right? An eye for an eye? The rat tried to kill you, and now you kill him? But it ends now—”

  “I hate Reggie, I don’t deny that. But I don’t know what you’re talking about, trying to kill him. Way I see it, that little shit’s still in prison, and I’m out here, going balls deep in some sweet whore pussy. If that ain’t the best revenge, I don’t know what is.”

  “Having five of your old Army pals gun him down at the courthouse.”

  Silba laughed. “The guys I knew back then wouldn’t loan me bus fare, much less shoot a man for me. I told you, it’s been years, I was dishonorably discharged, and I don’t have any friends.”

  Leary studied the man. He’d conducted his share of investigations, and liked to think he was pretty good at reading people. Silba did not appear to be hiding anything. Leary rubbed the back of his neck, staring at the man, trying to figure out what to believe. The muscles felt knobby and tense beneath his fingers. He was getting nowhere, and wasting time doing it. He hoped Jacoby was having better luck.

  16

  Isaac Jacoby parked at the curb and looked out the windshield at Reginald Tuck’s last known address. Jesus Christ. He hadn’t expected anything above the poverty level—the Mantua neighborhood of Philly was pretty much the definition of blighted—but this place made the rest of the area look like Beverly Hills. Wasn’t Tuck supposed to be some kind of con artist? Apparently he wasn’t very good at it. The row house might have been attractive back when it was new, but that had been a hundred years ago. Age and neglect had decayed its brick exterior and left a crumbling, grimy edifice. Dark boards covered the first-floor windows. Trash lay strewn across the scraggly grass between the stoop and the street. Vacant lots flanked the property, barren spaces of dirt and gravel. Jacoby sighed and slumped in his seat.

  Fucking Leary, sending him here while he probably chased a lead at the Four Seasons.

  Jacoby sat for a moment, listening to the car tick as the engine settled. The street seemed quiet. Just two blocks back, he’d been forced to swerve to avoid two kids playing in the street, but here, there were no kids or adults, and the only movement was the droopy swaying of electrical wires running from a pole across the street to the house’s roof. But that didn’t mean he was alone. Quiet could be an illusion, especially in a neighborhood like this one.

  He touched his door handle, then hesitated again. For as long as he’d been in law enforcement—first with the PPD, now for the DA’s Office—Mantua had remained a hellhole of drugs, gangs, and murders. It would be a shame to survive all those years just to be killed today for the change in his pockets.

  He leaned back in his seat and drew his Smith & Wesson from its holster. The heavy, cool metal felt good in his hand.

  As a cop, he’d shot seven men, killed one of them. But he hadn’t fired a weapon since leaving the Homicide Division, outside of the target range anyway. He hoped he wouldn’t have to break that record today. He watched the stree
t for another minute.

  Maybe Tuck hadn’t really been living here at all. He was a professional liar. What if his last known address, like everything else, was bullshit? Jacoby chewed on the theory, wanting to believe it. But ultimately, it didn’t matter. He was already here. He had no excuse not to at least take a look.

  Besides, Leary was counting on him, and, sometimes despite his better judgment, he liked Leary.

  Returning his gun to its holster, Jacoby unlocked the door and climbed out of the car.

  Weeds clutched at his pants legs as he made his way up the stoop to the front door. The house looked ready to collapse on top of him. The door frame warped where someone had busted the door open. Jacoby touched the door and it swung inward, creaking on its hinges.

  The interior was dark, but the sun, directly at his back, managed to cast a pale light into the entryway. Three pairs of eyes reflected the light before skinny arms were raised to block the glare. People. Jacoby stumbled backward and tore the revolver from its holster, but no one inside made a move to threaten him. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw that they were squatters. Two men and a woman. Junkies, judging by their emaciated bodies and pockmarked limbs, and the needles and burnt spoons littering the floor. A stench of rot rolled through the doorway and almost gagged him.

  “Get out of here,” he said, trying to talk without breathing the air. He held his gun in his right hand and showed them his badge with his left, for all the good it would do. “This is private property.”

  Nobody moved.

  Jacoby advanced into the house, carefully stepping around the squatters but not taking his eyes off of them. No furniture. No pictures on the walls. It looked like the house had been stripped of anything of value, everything probably sold for crack. His theory about Tuck’s last known address being bogus seemed more likely by the second. A successful criminal living in this horror house? And not making any arrangements to keep the place secure while he served his time? It didn’t add up. And that meant Jacoby was probably here for nothing, following a false lead.

  But police work was all about following leads, the true and the false, until you reached the truth. He returned to the squatters.

  “You know whose house this is?” he asked the woman.

  She stared at him with a vacant expression, then slowly drooped to the floor, where she fell asleep.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Very helpful. How about you two?”

  “It’s nobody’s house,” one of them said.

  “Fabulous.”

  He moved from room to room, leading with his gun. The first-floor rooms were barren except for refuse. He doubted he’d find anything better upstairs, but couldn’t come up with a good excuse not to check. When he mounted the stairs, the wood groaned under his weight. An image flashed through his mind of himself lying at the bottom of a collapsed staircase, paralyzed or worse, as squatters picked him clean. He mentally shook it off. Giving himself the heebie-jeebies right now would only make this worse. He needed to keep a level head, scope out the rest of the house, and get out. He reached the second floor and started to look around.

  “Give me your wallet, motherfucker!”

  Jacoby jumped at the voice, and managed to bring his gun to bear just as a figure emerged from one of the second-floor rooms. Another junkie, but unlike his lethargic friends downstairs, this one seemed to fizz with energy. He was high. Jacoby recognized the manic intensity of his bloodshot stare. More disturbing was the aluminum baseball bat raised above his head. If the idiot hadn’t started his attack with a shout, Jacoby would probably have had his head bashed in. But the shout gave him just enough forewarning to turn, drop to one knee, and aim his revolver at the man’s chest. Even hopped-up on who-knew-what, the man had the sense to pause.

  “Put down the bat.” Jacoby’s heart banged in his chest.

  “Fucking give me your money, old man!”

  “Or what? Are you such a good baseball player you think you can hit a bullet with that thing?”

  “Come on, man, I need it!”

  “I’m going to count to three,” Jacoby said. He’d never had children, but in the course of his long career, he’d probably used those words, as well as because I said so, as often as any exasperated father. “And then I’m going to shoot you.” That part wasn’t as paternal. “One.”

  “Fuck you!”

  In the seconds that followed, Jacoby thought he might actually need to shoot the man. He was debating whether to aim for the foot or the chest—mercy versus certainty—when the bat dropped from the junkie’s fingers, slammed down on the floor, and rolled to the edge of the room. The junkie took off a second later, his footsteps echoing up the stairwell. Jacoby held his breath until he heard the front door open and close with a bang. Then he let out a sigh of relief.

  He gave his heartbeat a few minutes to regulate before he finished his search of the upstairs rooms. They weren’t quite as repugnant as the lower level—not as many needles up here—but they were just as empty.

  He went downstairs and found the other squatters gone. Apparently, they had summoned the energy to pick themselves up off the floor—maybe inspired by the fleeing would-be mugger. Sunlight crept in from the edges of the boarded-up windows, beckoning him. He was about to leave, when something caught his attention.

  Under his shoe, he thought he felt the floorboard move.

  No, he thought. Too easy.

  But wasn’t that always the way, since his earliest days on the job? You think you need to solve a complicated series of clues, when the answer is right in front of you.

  A house this old, the floor was probably hardwood, and not the tongue and groove type used nowadays. No, this floor would be the older type. Simple wooden planks that became loose with age. That became hiding places.

  Jacoby leaned down, grunting as his knees protested. He ran his fingers along the outline of the loose board, worked a few fingernails into the gap, and pried up the board.

  The board concealed a narrow rectangular space. An object rested there, wrapped in a gray rag. Lifting it out, Jacoby could tell just by its heft and contours that it was a gun.

  Probably belongs to one of the squatters, and has nothing to do with Reginald Tuck.

  Still, he thought as he unwrapped the cloth and located the serial number on the side of the frame, there was no harm in checking.

  17

  Jessie could sense Reggie becoming restless beside her. The man could not sit still, constantly fidgeting with his hands, repositioning his legs, sliding his back along the wall behind them. It didn’t help that they were sitting on the floor. Every few minutes, he would mutter something about his “cheeks going numb” or his “butt bones aching.”

  “For someone who just came out of a holding cell, you’re awfully picky,” she said.

  His only response was to increase his squirming. She was far from comfortable herself—sitting on the floor was twice as hard in a skirt and heels—but she was not about to join in his complaining. There were armed men hunting for them. She was thankful just to be in a relatively safe location, where she could wait for the police to restore order. She wished Reggie would settle down so they could wait in peace.

  When a woman left a seat in the gallery and came over to them, squatting beside Reggie with a pad of paper in her hand, she knew things were about to get worse. Jessie recognized the woman. Her name was Shira LaVine and she was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer who covered criminal trials. Jessie had never actually met her, but her boss, Warren Williams, had warned her that the reporter was not to be trusted. Apparently, she had burned Warren a couple of times. Looking at her cherubic face, framed by blonde curls, it was hard to believe she was the backstabber that Warren had told her about, but if there was one lesson Jessie had learned early in her time in the Homicide Unit, it was that a person ignored Warren’s advice at her own peril.

  “You’re Reginald Tuck, right?” LaVine said. Her voice was as perky as her face. “My name is Shira.
I write for the Inquirer.”

  Reggie’s face lit up at the prospect of being interviewed. “Call me Reggie,” he said with a gleaming smile. “Let me guess. You heard about how some badass tried to kill me today. Want to get yourself an exclusive, huh?”

  “No exclusives today,” Jessie said. She leaned forward and offered LaVine an apologetic smile. “Mr. Tuck is a witness in an active case and will not be speaking to the press at this time.”

  “You’re Jessica Black,” LaVine said. “I tried to interview you during the Ramsey trial, but you weren’t available. Did you see my columns following each day’s testimony?”

  “I try not to read about my trials while I’m in the middle of them,” Jessie said. It was half true. The full truth was that she didn’t read about her trials at all. She wasn’t interested in the criticism—or praise, for that matter—of armchair lawyers. The only feedback she valued came from the twelve jurors who decided whether she won or lost a case.

  “You might learn something,” LaVine said. “Several attorneys have told me that my insights proved invaluable in the development of their styles and strategies.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Jessie said.

  “Hey, I thought we were talking about me,” Reggie broke in. “We don’t have to talk about the trial, you know, if that’s off-limits. I could tell you about my childhood. Got some interesting stories from back in the day. Do you have a photographer with you? Be nice to have my picture with the interview, you know? Show how pretty I am?”

  LaVine’s angelic smile seemed to crack slightly as she realized she wasn’t dealing with a typical interview subject, but Jessie gave her credit for recovering quickly. “I’m sure you had a very interesting childhood, but human interest stories aren’t my beat. I write about crime and the law.”

  Reggie nodded, his face suddenly serious. “That’s good. That’s very important. Very intellectual.”