“What was he wearing?”
“The same thing he always wears in the summer-a T-shirt, shorts, and basketball shoes.”
“Did you see any blood on him? On his clothes? His hands?”
Amelia Acevedo shook her head. “No, nothing. And not when I washed his clothes later.”
Garcia looked over at Marlene. “I don’t know what was in the newspapers, but I’ve talked to a few people on the street who wouldn’t shit me. They said there was blood everywhere. But Felix doesn’t get any on him?”
Marlene frowned. “I haven’t seen the crime scene photographs, but maybe he washed up or changed clothes.”
“Talk to Felix sometime and then you tell me if you think he’s so cool that after he cuts this woman up and did whatever else they say he did, he washes the blood off himself and his clothes,” Garcia said. “Maybe he stopped at a Laundromat and then went to the Y to take a shower.”
“Maybe,” Marlene said with a laugh. “But it’s just the sort of thing we’ll have to look into should the prosecution try to make that claim.”
Garcia grinned. “This means you’ll take the case.”
Marlene smiled back. “I can’t represent him on the Manhattan beef, but I have someone good in mind, a real sharp lawyer, Alea Watkins. But let me look into this and the Bronx case some more and see what I can come up with.”
Suddenly Amelia sobbed and reached over to grab Marlene’s hands. “Felix is a good boy,” she said. “Gracias, he is all I have to bring me joy.”
Marlene squeezed the other woman’s hands and smiled. “We mothers have to stick together. I’ll do the best I can.”
13
Butch Karp was waiting for Marlene in the living room of the loft when she got home that night. “So how’s Alejandro?” he asked, patting the couch in an invitation to join him.
“He’s fine,” she said, sitting down and curling up against him. “It’s his friend he’s worried about. I met with him and Amelia Acevedo, the mother of one Felix Acevedo, who is currently under indictment for murder with the New York DAO and may be facing similar charges in the Bronx.”
Karp felt his wife hesitate. There hadn’t been much time to tell him about the telephone call from Garcia that had precipitated the meeting. He furrowed his brow when she asked him why he hadn’t spoken about the Yancy-Jenkins case to her before the indictment and he replied, “Well, I have to admit, I didn’t know about it. Not that I hear about every indictment or that every felony-even murder-is brought before the bureau chiefs meeting on Monday morning for vetting. But still…” His voice trailed off.
“I told Mrs. Acevedo that I’d look into what’s going on in the Bronx,” she said now as she burrowed under his protective arm. “And I’m going to see if I can find someone willing to take the New York case pro bono.”
“Really? You think there’s something amiss?”
Marlene raised her eyebrows and he knew his studied nonchalance wasn’t fooling her. She gave him a basic rundown of what she’d heard at the bookstore. “I think you might want to take a look at that confession,” she suggested now. “I’ve got a gut feeling that something’s not right about this.”
“Not every confession is a fraud, Miss Hug-a-Thug Defense Attorney, even if this guy has a history of giving false statements,” Karp said. “However, I’ve already called Pat Davis; had to leave a message, but asked to see him in the morning to brief me and bring the case file.” Pat Davis was the deputy chief of the Homicide Bureau. “Can’t have some fire-breathing defense lawyers and their friends in the press catching me with my pants down.”
“Damn straight… especially if one of the fire breathers is your wife,” Marlene said with a sly smile. “But why Pat Davis, not Tommy Mack?”
“Tommy’s in the middle of a six-week trial,” Karp said of the Homicide Bureau chief. “Meanwhile, Pat’s been handling the bureau administrative duties. And as for getting caught with my pants down, there are exceptions to every rule, and if you play your cards right
…” He winked. “But I believe we were talking about this friend of Alejandro’s. Do you know who you’re going to bring on as his attorney for Yancy-Jenkins?”
Marlene nodded. “I’m hoping to talk Alea Watkins into it. Then your people will at least know they’d better be prepared for a fight.”
“Good choice.” Karp pictured the attractive, middle-aged black attorney known for taking on the tough cases. “Sharp and aggressive. I wonder who we have working the case.”
“I thought Guma was your point man on the Yancy-Jenkins task force,” Marlene said.
“He was,” Karp replied. “Or is. But he’s been on vacation at a health retreat in the Catskills. He’s not due back in the office until Monday, and it’s only Wednesday, so I think I’ll take a look at the case file and ask a few questions of Davis, including why I’m in the dark on this one.”
Karp was still mulling over what Marlene had told him about Felix Acevedo as he walked to work the next morning, following his usual route east on Grand and then south on Centre to the monolithic Criminal Courts Building, which also housed the DAO. He smiled when he saw the owner of the newsstand in front of the building. The little man with the pointed nose and Coke-bottle eyeglasses spotted him at the same time and grinned as he hopped from foot to foot in front of his kiosk.
Dirty Warren was Marlene’s first case in her new role of crusading defense attorney. He’d been framed for the murder of a Westchester County socialite and without Marlene’s help would likely have been convicted-if the conspirators had not first had him murdered in jail to make sure the case was closed. He got his nickname because he had Tourette’s syndrome, which afflicted him with various facial tics and caused him to lace his conversations with frequent and unexpected bits of profanity and odd sounds. But he was a genuinely good man who’d been a font of information about what was going down on the streets.
“Hey, Karp… son of a bitch whoop whoop… got a good one for you,” Dirty Warren said, continuing his little dance, which was one of the manifestations of Tourette’s.
“Take your best shot, and good morning, by the way,” Karp replied as he came up to the newsstand. For years, he and Dirty Warren had played a game of movie trivia. Dirty Warren would ask some obscure question having to do with films, and Karp had to answer. So far the score was a zillion to none in favor of Karp, whose lifelong affection for movies had begun with his visits to the Kingsway Theatre in Brooklyn, where he grew up.
“This one should be easy, right up your… whoop… alley,” Dirty Warren said. “Why would a scout… asshole balls oh boy ohhhh boy… watch the trial of a framed innocent man?”
Karp scratched his head, shuffled his feet, started to speak then stopped, and secretly enjoyed seeing the hope of victory grow in Dirty Warren’s eyes. Then he dashed it. “Are you trying to mock me?” he said. “I thought you were my friend, but you’re killing me here.” He paused as if listening to a voice and said, “Ah, a little bird just gave me the answer.”
The sparkle went out in Dirty Warren’s eyes. Resigned, he said, “Just give me the… whoop whoop… answer, Karp.”
“Well, she’s there to watch her father, Atticus Finch, defend Tom Robinson in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird,” Karp said.
“Damn it, Karp,” Dirty Warren said. “I figured maybe you wouldn’t waste your movie-watching time on something so… fuck me bastard whoop whoop… so work related.”
“Au contraire,” Karp replied. “Some of my favorite films are courtroom thrillers-for instance, Twelve Angry Men. A classic.”
“Well, I told you it would be easy,” Dirty Warren grumbled. He handed Karp a copy of The New York Times, but when his customer tried to pay him, he waved it off. “Your money’s no good here, Butch. Not after… oh boy balls oh boy… what Marlene did for me.”
Karp tried again to hand him the money. “I’m glad she did but that was Marlene, not me.”
“The way I see it… asswipe bitch… you’re
a team,” the little man said. “So like I said, you’re wasting your time trying to pay me.”
Karp held up the paper. “Well, then, thanks, Warren.”
“Not a problem. Now, if I could… whoop whoop ohhhh boy… only beat you once, just once, I’d be a happy man.” He scrunched up his eyebrows and squinted his baby blues at Karp through his thick glasses. “But no throwing the game out of pity.”
“I have too much respect for you to do that,” Karp replied with a grin. He turned and left the smiling news vendor hopping from one foot to the other.
In the elevator, Karp glanced at the large bold headline at the top of the Times and sighed. The headline and story the day before had been bad enough.
COLUMBIA U SLASHER ARRESTED
A nineteen-year-old Bronx man confessed Monday to the brutal murder of Olivia Yancy and Beth Jenkins, whose maimed and bloody bodies were discovered last July…
But this morning’s edition made him grimace.
SLASHER CONFESSES, NEW YORK DA INDICTS
He found deputy Homicide Bureau chief Patrick Davis already waiting for him in the reception area of his eighth-floor office. He looked at his watch-seven thirty; their appointment wasn’t for another half hour. But he knew that Davis was ambitious and always trying to impress, hoping for a promotion to the bureau chief’s spot. It was now common knowledge in the office that Homicide Bureau chief Tommy Mack was being offered a judgeship but was undecided.
With respect to Davis, Karp felt that the jury was still out. There was no question that Davis was a top-flight trial lawyer and respected by his peers, including those with the defense bar. But he was thirty-five years old, and the man’s age, or more accurately his lack of administrative experience and mature judgment in a leadership role, was worrisome.
“Good morning, Patrick,” Karp said as his visitor shot up from his chair like a soldier when the commanding officer enters a room. “I hope I didn’t forget what time we were meeting.”
“Not at all,” Davis said. “You just never know what traffic’s going to be like coming through the Lincoln Tunnel, so I got started a little early. And wouldn’t you know, it was smooth sailing… But I can wait if you need to do some other things first.”
“No, let’s get started,” Karp said, and nodded to the door leading to his inner office. At the same moment, the door to the hallway opened and a plump middle-aged woman entered the reception room. She seemed surprised to find them there and eyed the two men suspiciously.
Receptionist Darla Milquetost considered the office to be her domain as much as Karp’s and didn’t like surprise visitors who weren’t on the calendar. “Good morning,” she said, arching her painted-on eyebrows.
“Good morning, Darla,” Karp replied cheerfully. He generally found her territorial imperative amusing. “I’m sure you know Patrick Davis?”
Milquetost gave the young man a tight smile. “Of course, I just didn’t know we’d have the pleasure of his company this morning,” she replied, and headed behind her desk, where she opened a drawer and dropped her purse in before closing it with enough force to rattle the photograph of Karp hanging on the wall.
Karp smiled at the display and turned on his heel to enter his office. “Please hold my calls unless it’s an emergency.”
“Certainly, Mr. Karp,” the receptionist replied. She brightened at the thought of being able to tell anyone who called that her boss was not available. And would you like to schedule a time to call back?
Karp waited for Davis to pass him before closing the door behind them. “Make yourself comfortable,” he said, indicating the chair in front of his desk.
When Karp was seated, Davis handed over a thick file folder. “Here’s the Yancy-Jenkins case file,” he said. “It has everything the task force compiled plus the new stuff: a transcription of the defendant’s confession to the detective in the Bronx-I believe his name is Graziani-as well as his transcribed Q amp; A statement to our ADA Danielle Cohn.”
“I know Danielle,” Karp said. “Good kid, but didn’t she just get assigned to Homicide? How’d she catch a case like this one?”
“She was working the night chart on Monday when she got the call from Detective Graziani up at the Four-Eight in the Bronx,” Davis said. “She’s young, but she’s very good; top of her class at Brown and Yale Law. Blazed her way through the criminal courts; tried a lot of cases successfully down there. Been with Homicide for six months and done well as second chair on a couple of murder trials and on her own with a reckless manslaughter. Still batting a thousand.”
Davis stopped talking, realizing he was sounding like a used-car salesman. He shrugged. “Of course, I was going to talk to you about her co-counsel. If you think she should second-chair this one, too, that’s fine by me. She’ll understand; she won’t like it, but she’ll understand.”
He doesn’t like being second-guessed, Karp thought. I don’t suppose any of us do, but he has to see the logic. This case is going to get a lot of press attention and Alea Watkins is a tough, seasoned adversary. You can’t hand a case like this over to a rookie.
“We’ll talk about that in a bit,” Karp said. He didn’t want to beat up on Davis; he might not be ready for the job right now, but someday he could be if he remained with the DAO. But he still needed to make his point; he felt that teaching his subordinates was one of his main functions as a DA. “Why didn’t Danielle get in touch with the senior ADA who was supervising the night chart when she got the call? The Yancy-Jenkins murders were as high-profile as it gets and that usually requires an experienced hand.”
“Well, for starters she wasn’t immediately told that this concerned the Yancy-Jenkins murders,” Davis said. “This Detective Graziani who called said he had a suspect who’d confessed to a Manhattan double murder. She only learned which case it was when she got there.”
“Okay, that’s for starters,” Karp said. “But what’s next? Why not call after she got there and learned which case this was?”
Davis dipped his head, but then to his credit he looked Karp in the eye. “Actually she tried to reach Terry Daley, the senior ADA who should have been on call, but there was a mix-up in the schedule and he wasn’t home. Then she tried to call me, too, but I was late getting to the Yankee game and had rushed out of the house without my cell phone. I guess there was a concern by the detective that the suspect might lawyer up. So by the time I got home and got her message, she’d already gone ahead and questioned the suspect and got a separate confession.”
The younger man hung his head again. “Sorry, I messed up,” he said. “I shouldn’t have been out of touch.”
“Yeah, with this job we’re pretty much on call twenty-four/seven, or at least we have to make sure that the lines of communication are open,” Karp replied. “But it happens, and it’s one of those lessons we don’t soon forget.”
“True, true,” Davis said, and smiled slightly as he pointed to his head. “It’s now engraved in stone.”
Karp chuckled. “Good. Then let’s move on from here. Refresh me on the timing of these events. I take it the suspect confessed Monday sometime after our bureau chiefs meeting.”
“Yes,” Davis said, and pointed at the file folder. “You’ll see how it breaks down in there, but essentially Graziani calls Monday evening and says he’s got this guy who’d been popped in the Bronx on Sunday for an assault and ended up confessing to a murder up there. And now he’s confessed to a Manhattan homicide. So Danielle then trots up to the Bronx jail and gets the whole story. Apparently, Graziani was working narcotics in the Two-Six when the Yancy-Jenkins murders went down. He did some work with the task force, so he was familiar with the details of the case. Anyway, he hears about this guy confessing to the Bronx homicide and gets a hunch to look at the evidence. Turns out, this guy-the perp’s name is Felix Acevedo-was carrying a woman’s engagement ring in his wallet with the inscription filed away. And Graziani knew that whoever killed Olivia Yancy took her engagement ring; in fact, the bastard cut he
r finger off to get it. So Graziani goes after this guy and pretty soon he gets the guy to confess to the Yancy-Jenkins murders. That’s when he called the DAO and got Cohn.”
“Okay, I understand all that,” Karp said. “But why the rush to indict?” He knew it sounded a little harsh, like an indictment itself, but it might well be a question Alea Watkins would raise to get the case thrown out, and he wanted to see how Davis would react.
Davis bit his lip. “I didn’t consider it a rush. It’s pretty much a slam-dunk case. The defendant confessed first to Graziani and then gave a virtually verbatim Q amp; A statement to Danielle-plus he confessed to the murder in the Bronx. When you read the confession and the Q amp; A you’ll see the guy is as consistent as a Swiss watch. Hardly a word of difference between what he told the detective and what he told Cohn. Then there’s the ring. To be frank, I think his defense attorney is going to take one look at the evidence and beg us to plea-bargain the case.”
Karp thought about what Marlene had said about her meeting with Alejandro and Acevedo’s mother. His gut told him that it wasn’t going to be anywhere near as much of a “slam dunk” as Davis thought, and he doubted that “Perry Mason Junior” Watkins was the sort to beg for mercy.
“What’s the status of the Bronx case?” Karp said.
Davis frowned. “I’m not sure. I don’t think they’ve filed an indictment yet. Maybe it’s not as strong a case… I’m not familiar with all of the details. But I can find out.”
Karp’s brow furrowed and he shook his head. “I owe my old friend Mr. Bronx DA himself, Sam Hartsfield, a call. I’ll let you know what he says.”
Davis nodded but didn’t reply. Karp knew that his young colleague was taking it hard. “It’s okay, Pat,” he said. “Under the circumstances, I understand how it all happened. I just want to review the case file, like we would have at the meeting, and make sure we didn’t leap into something we’re going to regret. I can’t emphasize enough how vital it is for this office to not only believe that we can win a case but be convinced a thousand percent that the defendant is factually guilty and that we have the legally admissible evidence to prove it. Otherwise, we don’t go forward. But that first threshold is factual guilt.”
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