Counterplay bkamc-18

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “I’ve already got an appointment with Judge Paul Lussman in a half hour,” Guma answered, grinning. “Want to come watch?”

  Two hours later, Guma looked up at the opulent brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper West Side as his car pulled up behind a marked police cruiser with a flashing light. A second unmarked car was behind them, followed by another cruiser with its light flashing. He might never get to bring Emil Stavros to justice, but Guma wanted to remind the neighbors that Emil Stavros had killed his wife.

  Teresa Stavros had been on his mind a lot lately; in fact, her face as it appeared in the photograph on his wall at work stayed with him long after he left each evening. He’d always made it a point when prosecuting a homicide trial to get to know the victim as well as he could. It was important to make the victim real to the jury, not some character out of a story who had never been flesh and blood.

  So he’d talked to anyone he could find who’d known Teresa. There wasn’t much in the way of family outside of Zachary, who could only recollect bits and pieces. But she’d had quite a few friends, especially before she’d married, and some of them dating back to when she was a student at Marymount School of New York. They’d painted quite a picture of a wealthy Italian Catholic girl who was a little bit angel and a little bit devil. She’d been known to leave white mice in the desk drawer of the mean sister and skipped school to try parachuting. She loved the author Tom Robbins, and had once been expelled for bringing his sexy, funny novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues to school to share with her classmates.

  In her college days at Columbia, she would have been the first to strip naked for midnight swims in the Atlantic. A strong swimmer, on a dare she’d even tried crossing the East River where it met the Hudson on the north end of Manhattan at a particularly treacherous spot known as Spuyten Duyvil. Many a strong male swimmer had drowned in its strong currents and undertows, and she had nearly succumbed as well, but crawled out on the Washington Heights side and collected on the bet.

  Most of her friends spoke of Emil Stavros with disgust. They’d tried to talk her out of getting serious about him. He was a big talker and had all sorts of grandiose plans-they always thought he was more interested in her trust fund than her love. But it seemed the more they tried to break them up, the harder Teresa fought to stay with him. Then she got pregnant and agreed to marry Emil, determined that her son-she was sure from day one it was a son-wasn’t going to be born a bastard.

  She was the best mother any child ever had, one of her college roommates said. She adored that baby from the moment she knew she was pregnant. Then when Zachary was born, she fell in love. He made living with Emil almost bearable.

  That guy Emil is a piece of work, said another old friend. The guy cheated on her all the time, and we suspected he was slapping her around. He wouldn’t let her see us much, but when she did, we noticed a lot of bruises on her face and arms-a lot more often than could be explained by clumsiness. But she was a devoted, old-fashioned Catholic. She refused to have an abortion when she got pregnant with Zachary. And she wouldn’t divorce Emil. So she just devoted herself to her son.

  She was a wonderful friend, said yet another. It didn’t matter if her own life was a mess, she would drop everything for any one of us in a heartbeat. She was an unusual woman in that as beautiful as she was, other women weren’t threatened by her-everyone wanted to be her friend. And I don’t have to tell you that men fell in love the moment they met her.

  The fourth woman Guma interviewed laughed at some recollection, then added, I’ll tell you what…she would have melted your heart, Mr. Guma, like butter in the sun.

  Ray Guma didn’t tell the woman that Teresa Aiello Stavros already had. It had come as quite a shock that he’d fallen in love with a dead woman. He’d always adored women in just about all their myriad shapes and sizes, and he’d made it a mission to bed as many of them, in as many ways and as many places as possible.

  Yet, in spite of the playboy image he’d carefully cultivated, he’d always believed that someday he’d meet the woman who would make all the others superfluous. Then he’d settle down and have the sort of marriage his parents had enjoyed for nearly seventy years. There’d be a handful or two of kids-who’d have been out of college by now if you’d met her twenty-five or so years ago, he thought as he looked out the window of the car at Teresa’s former home. And later, he and the ball-and-chain would retire and spend half the year in Miami and half the year in Manhattan, right up until the Yankees won the World Series every October.

  There’d been a dozen “future Mrs. Ray Guma’s” he’d joked as he introduced each to friends or family over the years, but there’d never been a present Mrs. Ray Guma. Part of the problem-he was willing to admit after years of therapy, which he’d kept secret from even his best friend Karp-was that he’d never been good at keeping his zipper up. He looked at sex as fun and games; none of it meant anything. Unfortunately, the women who had meant something more to him than a passing lay never seemed to see it the same way.

  When he was being less than honest with himself, Guma would contend that he’d messed around on the others because none of them were “the one.” He wondered now if Teresa had lived, and they’d met, would he have known she was the one.

  Face it, a voice in his head said, you’re just all sentimental right now because you’re worried your guts are rotting again and you’ll be alone in your apartment to face it. And she’s dead, so she’s no threat to your “independence.” You can cheat on a dead woman, so you’re free to screw around.

  “That’s not fair,” Guma said aloud to his conscience.

  “It never is-bad things happen to good people,” Swanburg said. The old man cocked his head to one side and gave him an appraising look. “Talking to the dead, Ray? Don’t worry, it’s okay. I do it all the time. It helps me remember why I’m in this business.”

  Guma patted Swanburg on the shoulder. “Thanks, Jack,” he said and pulled the handle to open the door.

  As they stood on the sidewalk waiting for the others to unload their equipment and gather, Swanburg looked up at the brown-stone. “Whoo-whee,” he said and whistled. “Nice digs…more impressive from eye level than the aerials. What’s a place like this cost? A million?”

  Guma snorted. “Yeah…for the fence around it. Land is at a premium in Manhattan and single-family residences a rare breed. This probably runs more like five or six million.”

  Swanburg whistled again, then chuckled. “All the more fun digging it up. Isn’t that right, Mr. Clarkson?” he said to a tall, lanky man who walked up carrying what looked like the handles to a large lawnmower. Behind him two cops struggled with a large case. “Damn straight, Jack,” Dave Clarkson said. “So enough flapping our gums, let’s get to it.”

  Guma asked Detective Clarke Fairbrother to do the honors of leading the charge. The old gumshoe, hobbled a bit by arthritis in his hips, knocked on the door as the rest of the team gathered behind him. They included several police officers to secure the scene, plus Guma, Swanburg, and Clarkson.

  The door opened and a butler appeared, the look on his face as if he’d just got a whiff of a bad odor.

  “Afternoon,” Guma said stepping up next to Clarkson. “Ray Guma, New York District Attorney’s Office. Is Mr. Stavros in?”

  The butler couldn’t have looked more uninterested if Guma had just announced himself as a Fuller Brush salesman. “I’m afraid Mr. Stavros is…indisposed at the moment,” he said and began to shut the door.

  With a dexterity born of practice, Fairbrother blocked the door with his big foot.

  “I’d suggest that your boss might want to be disposed,” Guma said, “or maybe I get my friend Detective Fairbrother here to arrest you for obstruction. Then you’d get to experience a night in the Tombs, see if the rumors about what happens there in the dark are true.”

  The butler blanched, then nodded. “I’ll inform him you’re here, Mr. Guma.”

  “Thank you,” Guma called after the man and led h
is party into the foyer. The butler walked up a flight of stairs and disappeared down a hallway. There were shouts from wherever he disappeared and then the butler reemerged. “He’ll be here in a moment,” he sniffed and left the room.

  A minute later, Emil Stavros appeared at the top of the stairs in a jogging outfit and looked over the railing. “What do you want?” he demanded. “I just got home after a long day and was going out for a run.”

  Guma noted again that the once movie-star handsome face with its strong Mediterranean features had grown jowly and the features more pronounced until he was almost a caricature of his former self. But otherwise he looked to be in reasonable shape; his hair, though a pewter gray, was still full, and the tan looked real.

  Reflecting how his former ballplayer’s body had shriveled, Guma felt a twinge of envy. This asshole was her lover, he thought, and he’s still in better shape than me. He shook off the feeling and shrugged apologetically, “I’m real sorry about that…right now, I’m asking your permission for me and my colleagues to nose about the premises a little, if you don’t mind.”

  “But I do mind. As I said, I’m about to go out, and then I have a dinner engagement…. Perhaps, if you call my secretary at the bank tomorrow, you can make an appointment, and we can discuss why you think you get to look around my house. Even then, I’m sure my lawyer will insist on a search warrant.”

  “Afraid it can’t wait,” Guma replied. “Tomorrow’s too late…you see, this search warrant I have in my hand is specific for today…right now, as a matter of fact. I was asking more as a courtesy.” A courtesy you don’t deserve, you scumbag, he thought. “Now, you can watch, go for a run, call your lawyer, whatever it is you want to do, but we’ll be going about our business. Come on, guys.”

  With that Guma led the troop farther into the house toward the back. Stavros followed, protesting “this outrageous invasion. I am calling my lawyer. This is all obviously the Tammany Hall tactics of your boss.”

  Guma ignored him and wasted no time getting to the backyard where the team reassembled on the cement patio. The butler was sitting on one of the lawn chairs, smoking a cigarette. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Looking for Jimmy Hoffa,” Clarkson answered, then noticed the strange, pained look on Guma’s face. “Sorry, Ray, bad joke.”

  “Fuhgitabowdit,” Guma said, waving him off with a lightness he did not feel. He’d met Clarkson on his trip back to Colorado and after the meeting, they’d gone to have a few beers at El Rancho Historic Inn off Interstate 70 near the little mountain town of Evergreen.

  The topic of conversation had turned to the dark sense of humor most of the members of the 221B Baker Street Irregulars, as they sometimes called themselves, revealed when working on cases. Most of us are “civies.” When we got into this, I don’t think we knew the emotional impact working with families of murder victims, as well as the cops and prosecutors who get so involved. I think it’s either we laugh at tragedy or we’d start crying.

  Clarkson now leaned over the large aluminum case the two police officers had carried for him like Moses approaching the Ark of the Covenant. He flipped the latches and gently lifted the lid. Reaching in with both hands, he lifted a large red but otherwise almost featureless rectangle on wheels. He placed it on the ground and attached the handles, then plugged a cable into the top of the box. It kind of resembled an electric lawnmower.

  “Gentlemen,” Clarkson said as he plugged the other end of the cable into a computer he set on the patio table, “meet ground-penetrating radar, the closest thing there is to Superman’s X-ray vision.”

  Guma smiled at the reference. When they went before Judge Lussman for the warrant bearing the photographs and a summary of the case, the jurist had scratched his head and then started asking questions. A Fordham law graduate and former Navy pilot who despite the gray in his crew-cut hair looked like he could probably still fly, the judge was probably the most liberal judge on the bench. But he also ran a tight, no-nonsense courtroom.

  Lussman taught law at NYU at night and expected both his students and the lawyers who came before him to be prepared and to avoid wasting his time. That or risk a glare from his cobalt blue eyes that many a young law student or careless attorney had sworn could see through every excuse and attempt at subterfuge.

  There were a lot of legitimate reasons why a homeowner might get rid of rosebushes and replace them with a patio and hot tub, Lussman had said after Guma explained his reasoning for the search warrant. But at last he’d conceded that combined with the other evidence there was probable cause to issue a search warrant; however, he was going to make it conditional.

  You can go look around, but unless you come up with something stronger than this, I’m not going to let you tear up the man’s house or backyard, Lussman said. Mr. Stavros is a well-known and respected member of the community. He’s still presumed to be innocent and owed the benefit of the doubt in this one.

  Guma had started to protest. How were they going to find “something stronger” if they couldn’t dig? But Swanburg, who’d been allowed to attend the meeting to explain how the photographs were taken, leaned over to Guma and whispered.

  As he listened, Guma’s frown changed to concentration. Then he’d nodded to the judge and said, No problem, Your Honor, but if I find something stronger, I might be back tonight for permission to dig.

  Lussman raised an eyebrow. Well, you know where to find me, Mr. Guma. And ask my secretary to give you my cell phone number in case I’m gone for the day before you find what you’re looking for.

  When they left the courthouse, Guma asked Swanburg to explain in more detail what he’d meant by Superman’s X-ray vision. It’s called ground-penetrating radar, or GPR. It works by shooting an ultrahigh-frequency radio wave into the ground through a transducer or antenna. Part of that signal from buried objects or differences between, say, compact soil and loose soil reflects back up to the antenna, which stores them in a digital control unit.

  Huh? It was getting complicated for Guma.

  Uh…think of it sort of like taking an X-ray of what’s underground, Swanburg had said. When you take an X-ray of your arm, the picture you get back shows the bone as a denser white, while things like ligaments are more a shade of gray.

  So we’ll be able to see Teresa’s body? Guma asked.

  Well, yes and no, Swanburg explained. GPR produces a cross-sectional profile of what’s under it-a record of subsurface features. It isn’t as exact as that X-ray at your doctor’s office. It could indicate when it’s reflecting off something hard, like bone, but it’s more for finding “anomalies” in the soil-like a pocket of natural gas or looser area soil of a size and shape to indicate a grave.

  Seems like a lot of trouble, Guma said. Why not just go in there with a backhoe?

  Well, a couple of reasons, Swanburg said. As you just heard, the judge isn’t going to let you go on a fishing expedition and dig up holes all over this guy’s yard without narrowing the search. Another reason is, unless you know exactly where to dig, you could miss a grave by a few inches and never know you were that close-unless you’re intending on bulldozing the entire backyard.

  I might, Guma said.

  Well, that would be a mistake, Swanburg said. When we excavate bodies, we do so very carefully with small hand trowels and whisk brooms. We try not to miss a single shred of evidence, like bullet casings or pieces of clothing, that could be overlooked from a bulldozer. Also, any human remains might be disturbed, likely damaged, by machinery-sometimes even the position of the bones in a grave can tell us a lot. GPR, while not perfect, can give us a good idea of where to dig.

  Swanburg had referred any other questions to Clarkson, who was a geologist working for an oil company “in my real life.” GPR, Clarkson said, was used by geologists to evaluate the location and depth of buried objects-from buried cables to mineral deposits. It was capable of penetrating to one hundred feet in loose soils, like sand, but was more limited in denser soils, such as o
nly a few feet in clay, which is why we asked if you knew the soil composition.

  “The question is,” Clarkson said now as he ran the GPR antenna-the red box-over a test area on the patio, “where exactly beneath the cement we should dig?”

  “What if it’s under the hot tub?” Guma said.

  “Then we’re screwed,” Clarkson replied. “GPR sends its signal straight down, not sideways.”

  Swanburg saw Guma look over at the hot tub with concern. “Funny thing, Ray,” he noted. “We’ve done a couple of these-and so have other groups like ours-and for some reason, killers who hide their victims on the property, don’t like to put things like hot tubs or even new rooms or outdoor furniture directly over the graves. Maybe it’s superstitious or disconcerting for their consciences, but they avoid it.”

  Over the next two hours, Clark slowly pulled the GPR device over the patio area, which had been divided by Swanburg into grids, as the digital recorder made a printout. Guma looked at the printouts but couldn’t make heads or tails of them-they just looked like a bunch of different-colored bands and squiggly lines.

  After they were finished, and the scene secured with a sign NYPD, the ensemble went back to the hotel where Clarkson and Swanburg were staying. Ordering a half dozen beers and ice up to the room, they pored over the printouts.

  Clarkson showed Guma what the bands and lines meant. “Here’s one that clearly indicates the electrical line just under the concrete, which is about six inches thick, that goes to the hot tub.”

  But it was the printout taken in the corner of the yard closest to the house that caused the two scientists to get excited. “Here you can see that this light area is looser soil and begins a foot beneath the concerete and goes about three feet below the surface, approximately six feet long and thirty-one inches wide,” Clarkson said. “If I were looking for a grave, that’s exactly where I’d dig.”