I look at him and roll my eyes. As if. “She gave me an idea,” I say. “Let’s go over to the BMC.”
Kevin’s wife is a nurse at the hospital. I’ve met her over the years, mostly for work-related reasons—she’s always been pleasant enough. She invited me to Kevin’s surprise fortieth birthday party, and after a few glasses of white wine, she let her feelings show when she referred to me as Kevin’s “work wife.” It could have been the word wife that set me off, or it could have been her pejorative tone. Either way, I hope we don’t run into her.
We park in front of the hospital and stop in the records department. There’s one clerk on duty, and she pulls Ezekiel’s file. It’s Sunday, and his doctor isn’t in her office. We have her paged, and she calls us back immediately.
“I’ve treated a lot of patients with gunshot wounds, but few as serious as Ezekiel’s,” she says. “He’s lucky to be alive.”
“When did you see him last?”
“He was in on Friday.”
“Can you check to see when he’s due back?”
I wait as she logs on to her home computer.
“He has an appointment next month.”
The trial will be over by then, and without Ezekiel’s testimony, Orlando will be free to kill again.
“Ezekiel lists his mother’s house as his home address, but we know he’s not living there. Do you happen to know where he might be staying?”
“He mentioned that he has two children by different mothers. You might want to talk to them.”
“Do you know their names?”
“Not offhand.”
After I get off the phone with the doctor, I ask the clerk to search for Ezekiel’s emergency contact form.
“Marie St. Pierre,” he says. “She has an address in Lower Mills.”
When we get back in the car, Kevin and I agree that knocking on Marie’s door would tip them off and drive him deeper underground. Kevin dispatches someone to sit on Marie’s house to try to catch Ezekiel coming or going. We still have to find out the name of the second woman.
It’s after eight when Kevin drops me off at home. We make plans to reconvene in the morning. Monday is Martin Luther King Day, and court will be closed. Inside my apartment, I check for a sign that Ty has been here since I left this morning.
In the kitchen, I forage for food. I open the refrigerator and pull out a block of Manchego cheese, grab a box of rosemary crackers from a cabinet, and open a bottle of Merlot. I take my dinner into the living room, plop down on the couch, and wonder how to make things right.
Chapter Thirty-five
Pretrial detainees are held at the Nashua Street Jail, a modern building on the fringes of Boston’s West End. Orlando, along with about 450 other upstanding citizens, reside there while they await the outcome of their cases. There are far worse places to be locked up—some of the cells have water views.
Prisoners’ phone calls are automatically recorded and we routinely subpoena the audiotapes. The conversations can provide a treasure trove of information.
“I pulled Orlando’s jail calls and e-mailed them to you,” Kevin says, looking up from his laptop.
“What’s he got to say?”
“Listen for yourself—you’re going to love it.”
While I log on to my e-mail, Kevin walks around and surveys my apartment, inspecting the artwork and books. The last time he was here was the night of the break-in, and he didn’t have a chance to do a lot of snooping. He was busy making sure a crazed killer wasn’t hiding in my linen closet.
“Is this a first edition?” he says, carefully taking my copy of Poe’s Tales off a shelf.
He’s good. It is a first edition, first state, and it cost more than a Hyundai.
“No, it’s just old,” I say.
I open the e-mail and hit play. A female voice issues a warning. This call is being recorded. It’s the advisory that all prisoners hear, and couldn’t be any clearer. Fortunately, inmates often ignore the message, call their friends, and brag about their crimes. They ask their fellow gang members to hide evidence or threaten witnesses. Sometimes they speak a foreign language, thinking we won’t know what they’re saying. They’re right—we won’t. But our certified interpreters will, and they’ll translate every syllable for us.
Some Einsteins think they’re clever by speaking in code. They seem surprised when we play their calls for jurors, who know exactly what they mean when they say, “Hide the puppies in the basement ceiling.” Especially when police get a search warrant and go into the basement, remove the ceiling tiles, and find not a littler of newborn labradoodles but a stash of fully loaded AK-47s.
I listen to the call on my laptop.
“That federal dude came to see to me,” a man says.
“That’s Orlando,” Kevin says.
“Yeah, what’s he want from you?” another man says.
“Who is that?” I say to Kevin.
“Orlando’s father, Melvin.”
“I don’t know. But my lawyer says if he don’t put it in writing, then I shouldn’t talk to him,” Orlando says.
“Your lawyer’s costing me a fortune. Listen to him,” Melvin says.
“Blum says the feds can’t tell the DA what to do. It’s up to her,” Orlando says.
“That bitch?” Melvin says. “She’s got it in for you.”
“No shit. She’s been after me since I was in juvie. Did you see her up in my face, waving her finger? I’m gonna fuck her up when I get out of here,” Orlando says.
The call ends. I ignore the part where Melvin calls me a bitch and Orlando says he wants to inflict bodily harm.
“They’re talking about Josh McNamara,” I say. “It would have been nice if he’d have told us what he’s been up to.”
“He’s a feeb—they’re all the same,” Kevin says. “Sounds like he wants to flip Melvin and Orlando. I wonder what they have to offer.”
“He should have told us. Feds and their ‘need to know’ nonsense.”
A few years ago, between the first and second days of trial, federal marshals showed up at the jail in the middle of the night and swooped up my defendant. They didn’t ask permission—they didn’t even give me a heads-up. I found out about it the next day, when my defendant failed to show up at trial. I’m still waiting for them to tell me where he is and when they’re bringing him back.
“What’s the federal interest here? Why is McNamara sticking his schnoz in our case?” Kevin says.
“Tim’s murder may be connected to an investigation they’ve been working.”
“Who’s the target?”
“I don’t know.”
My front door lock clicks and we hear footsteps. Kevin bolts up, whips his gun out, and signals me to stay seated.
“Wait,” I say.
Ty comes in the living room and throws up his hands in exasperation. Kevin tucks his gun into the small of his back and pulls his shirt over it. Ty looks at me and then back at Kevin as though he’s caught us in the act.
“Hey, you remember Kevin. We were working.” I offer the information a little too eagerly. “But I’m glad you’re here—Kevin and I could use a break.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” Kevin says, picking up on the tension. “I have to make a few calls. I’ll go in the other room.”
“Don’t stop what you’re doing on my account,” Ty says. “I came over to pick up my phone charger. Have you seen it?”
“It’s on the bureau,” I say.
He goes in the bedroom, and I follow.
“We should probably talk, don’t you think?” I say.
“It can wait.” He pockets the charger.
“There’s nothing going on between me and Kevin. You know that, right?”
“Sure,” he says.
“I’m sorry about what happened yesterday.”
“It’s all good.”
He’s calm, emotionless, which makes me more anxious. He moves toward the door, but I block his path.
“Don’t be
mad,” I say.
“I’m not.” He sees a book on a chair, a biography of Beethoven, and tucks it under his arm.
“Want to go get coffee or something?” I say.
“Let’s give each other a breather. You need to chill.”
He walks around me, back through the living room. On his way out the door, he speaks to no one in particular.
“See you,” he says.
“Nice talking to you,” Kevin says after he’s gone. “You have a little spat?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I pretend to focus on my computer screen. He seems to let it drop, and we work in silence for a couple of minutes.
“Nothing like a woman scorned,” he says.
“Seriously, Kevin, I’m not in the mood.”
I whip my head around, ready to launch into a lecture on the importance of boundaries and respecting my privacy.
“Before you go all ‘I am woman, hear me roar’ on me, don’t. I wasn’t talking about the situation with your boyfriend. Believe it or not, everything’s not all about you.” He smiles and points to his computer screen. “Look what I found.”
“What?”
“Ezekiel Hogan’s bachelorette number two.”
Chapter Thirty-six
The Tobin Bridge sits high above the industrial-waste-filled Mystic River. As Kevin zigzags in and out of traffic, I look out the window and think about number twenty, Clyde Ellis, who took out an insurance policy on his business partner and then laced her iced coffee with antifreeze. A month after the murder, just as we were closing in, Clyde jumped off the bridge to his death. I was really upset—I had been looking forward to convicting him.
Kevin reaches around to the backseat, grabs a folder and hands it to me. It’s a restraining order, prohibiting Ezekiel Hogan from having contact with a woman named Helena Marshall or her daughter, Zara. He put me in fear. I believe that he may try to hurt me.
“Her statement is pretty generic,” I say. “She says she’s scared but doesn’t allege any actual abuse.”
“Probably because there wasn’t any,” Kevin says. “He’s got two girlfriends and two kids, both about the same age. Marie is his main squeeze—”
I throw him a look. Puleeze. “Main squeeze?”
“Primary partner. That sound better?”
“Not really.”
“And he’s got this other woman, Helena. Both think she’s his special lady.”
“Seriously, special lady?”
He smiles and continues. “Helena finds out about Marie, realizes that she’s not Ezekiel’s one and only. She punishes him by taking out a restraining order and hauling his ass into court.”
Restraining orders can be a lifeline for victims of domestic violence. It takes courage and resolve to get one. Victims have to stand in a public courtroom and tell the judge, a complete stranger, about the most intimate and embarrassing details of their relationships. Sometimes, however, women apply not out of fear but spite. Looks like Helena is one of those women.
Helena lives in a massive public housing complex built in the 1960s. We get out of the car and navigate a maze of cement footpaths until we locate her apartment. We can hear a cartoon playing on the TV from outside the building. Th-th-th-that’s all, folks.
We knock on the reinforced metal door, and within seconds, Helena pulls it open. She steps aside and lets us in. Rail thin, with a lot of energy, she talks a mile a minute, making me wonder what she’s on. Her three-year-old daughter, Zara, is planted in front of the television, watching Looney Tunes, sipping from a juice box.
Unlike most people we visit, Helena is an over-sharer. We have no problem extracting information from her.
“Zeke told me that he was going to dump that slut,” she says while folding pillowcases from a bottomless pit of laundry. “I actually believed him. What a fool I was.”
“Let me guess, you ran into her in the hospital?” I say.
“My cousin Tanya called, said she heard that Zeke got shot. I took the bus over to BMC to see him. That bitch was there, standing next to his bed, acting like she was his wife or something. I totally busted his ass.”
A hospital emergency room is a cheater’s purgatory. Spouses and girlfriends rush to be by their man’s side, only to discover that he has another significant other—or others. There’s nothing that a bed-bound patient can do to prevent the encounters. Especially if he’s in a medically induced coma.
“Do you know where we can find Zeke?” I say.
“Who cares,” she says.
Time is short, so I hit the note that’s guaranteed to elicit a response. “How much does he owe you in child support?”
“A lot,” she says, rolling her eyes and releasing an exaggerated exhale. “Do you know how much a box of Pampers costs?”
I have no idea, and at the rate I’m going in the dating department, I’ll never have the need to find out.
“How does Zeke get money to you? Does he mail it or deliver it in person?”
“He brings it by when he feels like it.”
“Call him. Tell him that you’ll call the cops if he doesn’t give you some money.”
“You want me to threaten him?”
“That’s not what I said. I just think you should let him know his options.”
Helena is more than happy to comply, and she makes the call that will smoke Ezekiel out of wherever he’s holed up. She hangs up and smiles, pleased with her performance.
“He said he’d meet me at the burger place and give me fifty bucks. Like that’s gonna make up for everything he owes me.”
“Better than nothing,” I say, rushing her to grab her purse.
She insists on changing her clothes and comes out of the bedroom all sexed up, wearing a low-cut tight T-shirt and leggings. She combs Zara’s hair and wipes juice from her face.
We drive over to the Burger Bonanza on State Boulevard, Kevin and I wait in the parking lot while they go inside. I wish I had used the bathroom at Helena’s. My bladder is about to burst, but I have an aversion to public restrooms, especially at fast-food joints.
“They’re not supposed to be within a hundred feet of each other, which means we’re aiding and abetting in the violation of a restraining order,” Kevin says.
“Arrest us,” I say.
When we get inside the restaurant, it’s dinnertime, and there’s a line at the counter. A dirty mop and bucket are in the corner, next to an overflowing trash barrel. The odor of grease is so strong that I feel like I need to go to Elizabeth Grady and have my pores extracted. I was hungry when I walked in here. I’d planned to get a burger and a bag of fries for the road. Now I’m seriously considering becoming a vegetarian.
A twentysomething woman with smeared lipstick exits the ladies’ room. A fiftysomething man who forgot to zip his pants follows behind. I’m definitely going to wait to pee.
When we approach Exekiel, he turns to Helena. “You set me up,” he says.
“Break up with that bitch, then you get to complain,” she says. “Until then, I don’t want to hear you flapping your gums.”
I take a seat next to Ezekiel on a plastic chair the color of Bozo the Clown’s hair. Kevin remains standing.
“Told you we weren’t going away,” Kevin says.
“Look, we need you for a couple of hours tomorrow, that’s it. You’ll never have to talk to us again.”
“That’s what that other dude said after I testified in the grand jury.”
“I know you’ve been through a lot and that you’re scared.”
“Don’t try to play me,” he says.
Kevin pretends to stretch his arms but twists his body in a way that shifts his jacket and exposes the handcuffs that are clipped to his belt. Ezekiel gets the point and says uncle.
We take him to the Parker House, where we stash our most reluctant witnesses. The hotel rooms are pricey, but it’s in a great location, a couple of blocks from the courthouse. After we get him checked in at the front desk,
Kevin escorts him to his room. I stay behind to talk to the manager.
“No charges to Mr. Hogan’s room,” I say. “If he wants anything from room service, he’ll have to pay for it with the cash we gave him.”
“Don’t want to get burned again?” she says.
“Not if I can help it.”
A couple of months ago, one of my witnesses invited six buddies up to his room to eat steak dinners, drink bottles of booze, and watch porn. He charged everything to the room, which we didn’t discover until after he checked out. Owen wasn’t pleased when he got the bill. Worse, I had to disclose it to the defense attorney, who argued that I was bribing my witness with food and drink.
We make arrangements to come by and get Ezekiel in the morning and escort him over to the courthouse. Kevin arranges for a uniform to stand watch for the night outside his room, in case he has second thoughts.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Court resumes for the day, and the jurors file into the courtroom and take their seats. I glance over at Orlando, and he looks back at me, his eyes landing on the side of my neck. This morning, I removed the Band-Aid and a small scab has formed. Orlando smirks and snorts a little air out of his nose, as though laughing at his own inside joke. I turn to the back of the room. Darrius doesn’t flash his gold-toothed smile. He just gives me a vacant stare. He’s too smart to threaten me in public.
Sal goes into the corridor to summons my next witness. In what feels like an hour, but is actually about a minute, Ezekiel comes hurtling through the courtroom doors. It’s hard to tell who is more surprised to see him, Orlando or his lawyer.
Ezekiel looks like a new man, wearing the oxford shirt and green tie that I had Kevin drop off at the Parker House this morning. I keep a pretty extensive supply of clothing in my office. There are shirts and pants in a variety of colors and sizes for both men and women. I also have an assortment of toiletries that I’ve acquired from the cosmetic counters of Saks and Neimans—soap, shampoo, combs, brushes, and makeup. It’s good to be prepared—left to their own devices, witnesses frequently show up for court wearing tattered T-shirts and dirty jeans, looking like they haven’t showered in weeks.
Ezekiel wastes no time stepping into the witness box. He sits and leans forward, eager to begin, making it clear that he wants to get out of here as soon as possible. He keeps his gaze on the floor as the clerk swears him in.
Mission Hill Page 15
