Hold Me in Contempt (25 page)

Chapter 10

I
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Poor Richard's Almanack
, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.” One of my law school professors who said he “left the profession to hide in the academy” made my class write a five-page essay about the quote. I admit that I completely misunderstood the statement and spent my five pages writing about how insulting the quote was. Franklin was writing in absolutes. Generalizing. Pushing ideas that contributed to those horrible lawyer jokes that commonly opened with two lawyers drowning in the ocean and no one wanting to save them. I wrote about how Franklin's statement didn't take into account those of us who wanted to see true justice in the world. To make things better and have an impact. To change and protect. My professor put a smiley face on the top of the paper and a fancy “F” beneath it. On the last page, he wrote, “Come back and see me in two years.”

It didn't take two years for me to experience what Franklin was really talking about. After six months in the DA's office, I rewrote the paper, sent it to the professor, and got a sad face with an A underneath it, and on the last page, he wrote, “Welcome to the practice.”

My new paper was about the fish's blood and what I saw it doing to me and every single lawyer I knew. At the end of the day, no matter what preconceived notions or ideals a new attorney has about her profession, her training in law is about winning. Not compromising. Certainly not losing. Winning. To win, you use your knowledge and understanding of the law, which you later realize is simply human-written conceptions of what justice is and isn't based on the needs of the percentage of people who have the power to enact the laws. Training makes you so thirsty for this win, you'll go to battle with anyone to get it. Use your laws like armor and weapons to offend and defend and win. After a while, your opposition is always the other lawyer, whatever laws they're using to win. Your battlefield is the courtroom. Your audience is the jury. Your trophy is the ruling. Nowhere in there is mention of the countryman who led the two lawyers to the gathering. He became just a fish. A nobody who met his demise in the full stomach of the lawyer who prevailed in the end.

Walking into the conference room in the DA's office the next morning, I smelled blood everywhere. It was like I was a cat in a seafood restaurant and all around me were my back-alley hunting buddies, who were coming up with a plan to crack open a tank filled with plump pink salmon.

Paul sat at the head of the table in his favorite blue suit. Two other ADAs, one from Rackets and one from Narcotics, and I sat to his left. Chief Elliot was on his right followed by Reddy, the DA from Kings County; his chief; and a police detective from their precinct in Downtown Brooklyn.

I'd been away from the office for nearly a week, but when I walked into the conference room with my coffee cup in one hand and my laptop in the other, I smelled the blood, and sitting down in my chair to Paul's right was like sinking my teeth into a rare piece of fish steak—the first bite. I let the feeling rush through me and looked around to see that we were all enjoying the same invisible meal. These men, all men, were determined to fill their bellies.

I found Carol at her desk. I was unusually happy to see her. We'd actually hugged, and then she'd launched right into her notes for the day, asking if I'd had a chance to open the files she'd placed on the drive about the case. I lied and said I had. Really, it was only a half lie. I did open one of the files, but I couldn't focus on anything after I got the news about Vonn and was waiting to hear back from King. I was so on edge I wanted to go downstairs to the store and get a bottle of Jameson. But I remembered my promise to Kent, so I took two of the pills King gave me instead and got into bed with my iPad and the case notes opened.

As soon as I started reading the first paragraph, my cell phone started buzzing with a new message. I rushed to pick it up from the nightstand, sure it was King. It wasn't. Just a mass text from my gym letting me know about the “summer sizzler sale.”

I decided to take a short nap. Just a few minutes to calm myself down and then I'd get back at it. While it was an honest plan, that nap tumbled into a restless slumber that led to another car-accident nightmare, where I was yet again behind the wheel.

When I awoke in the morning, I found my hand clutching my cell phone.

“LeTiffany Tedget, known on the street as ‘Yellow,' was arrested at Brooklyn College two months ago for prostitution and intent to sell prescription drugs.” Reddy had gotten up and started giving the background information on the drug ring with reach into both boroughs. He'd opened with the basics Paul shared with me the day before. “While Major Narcotics Investigation tried to hold her and get some information about her supplier, we didn't have a whole lot on her, so we had to let her go.” As Reddy spoke, on the conference room projector he flashed arrest photos of a frail, light-skinned black woman who looked noticeably strung out. While the craters in her cheeks and pale peeling lips suggested that she was a meth addict, it was easy to tell she'd been beautiful in another life. “A week later, Yellow's body was found on the bank of the East River.” He flashed crime-scene photos of her nude body spread on the riverbank. Her eyes were open and white with film. “She'd been shot in the back of the head.” The images switched from her muddy breasts to black bloody clumps of hair at the base of her skull, right above long keloids that looked like garden snakes beneath her skin slinking up her spine.

“What's that on her back?” Paul asked, pointing.

“Lesions from some kind of incident. The coroner's report says they're fairly new,” Reddy said, looking down at the report in his hands. “Likely from trauma caused by some kind of instrument.”

“A cheese grater,” I said, looking at the large image on the screen and remembering how Bernard had described the dancer Miguel Alvarez brutally attacked in front of him, the skin tearing off her back like Swiss cheese.

“Yes,” Reddy said, looking up at me. He was an old prosecutor whose remarkable instinct made him very popular throughout the state. Like Paul, he liked working closely with detectives and police officers. He liked to keep his ear to the street, connecting law with order. “That's what the coroner suggested.”

“You know this woman?” Paul asked me.

“Bernard Richard mentioned her attack during an interview about Miguel Alvarez and the Candy Shop indictment,” I said. “She was a stripper. Started selling for Alvarez. He turned her out. Beat her up pretty bad. Guess she moved on to Brooklyn.”

“That's how Special Victims Bureau got the lead on her supplier. They started passing her picture around, showed it to a Dominican stripper they busted in a car in back of Pumps,” Reddy said, referring to a strip club in East Williamsburg that was known for prostitutes. “If they took her in, it would've been her first trip to Rikers, so she started talking really fast. Said Yellow was her roommate. She'd stopped working in the club when her old pimp scarred up her back. And since then, she'd been on the street selling for this man—”

I was taking notes on my laptop, so it took a minute before I looked up at the new image on the screen.

“Rig McDonnell,” Reddy started, and the two words stung me harder than King's face in a mug shot behind Paul's head, “is the co-owner of Damaged Goods, a hole-in-the-wall bar in downtown Brooklyn.”

I felt like King's blue eyes were staring right at me—his eyes and everyone else's at the table. Like the next picture on the screen would be of me. The next question aimed at me.

Reddy added, “For a long time, Narc has known about Rig's dealings in organized crime. His father, Dr. Rig Conor ‘R.C.' McDonnell, started opening pain clinics in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the early nineties.” Reddy switched to a map of New York with, like, twenty stars dotting neighborhoods throughout the boroughs. “Soon that ballooned into operations in middle-income communities in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and even Westchester.”

“They were nothing more than pill mills pumping oxycodone,” one of the Brooklyn detectives, Kern Strickland, said, jumping in. “Narc shut most of them down in 2000.” I knew Strickland from a few cases I'd taken on that led me to Brooklyn. He was a brother. Had a bald head and a distinct distaste for lawyers. I always noticed it in how he spoke to me or over me. At first I thought he was just like the other boys who thought girls shouldn't be playing on their ball court and resented me for whatever power I had, but then I saw that he treated all lawyers with the same judgment—man or woman, black or white, he held us all in contempt.

“But before that happened, the clinics made him a very rich man. And even when Narc shut down the clinics and took his license to practice in New York, McDonnell opened legal pain clinics and had his old doctors writing prescriptions for him like bus passes. Dr. Stan Xuhui Li, one of the doctors on McDonnell's payroll, wrote more than seventeen thousand prescriptions in thirty months,” Reddy said, flashing pictures of Li and King's father on the screen. “We took Li down last year. Tried to get to McDonnell, but he used his muscle and his money and went underground. But he's still out there. We think he's in somewhere in Central America—Belize maybe.”

“That brings us back to his son—Rig. He goes by ‘King' on the street,” Strickland said when King's photo was on the screen again. Strickland fit the typical profile of a black Brooklyn detective—tall and muscly with a walk that carried the weight of the heavy-ass chip on his shoulder. He was no lawyer, but he wanted blood, too.

“You okay?” Paul whispered to me. “You look sick.”

“I'm fine,” I replied. “I'm just a little thirsty.” I kept my eyes low and off the screen, so Paul couldn't read anything into my reaction to King's image—if he hadn't already.

He reached past me and picked up the carafe to pour water into the empty glass beside my laptop.

Reddy went on, “As I said earlier, Rig has been using his daddy's money to make moves through this nightclub.” He showed a picture of Damaged Goods. “Working with a couple of local thugs—small-time dealers—for a while. We've kept our eyes on them. Kept our eyes on Rig.”

Reddy explained that King had the perfect plan to move drugs out of Damaged Goods. The girls at the club, and at that point I was assuming it was the beauties I'd seen lined up at the bar at Damaged Goods, had prescriptions from actual doctors throughout the city. He registered a pain clinic to the club's address, legally dispensed pills to the women using their prescriptions, and even acquired medical insurance payouts for the drugs. They then went out and sold the pills. Gave King 90 percent of the profit. The women played it safe though. They were all strippers who used their beauty to work the college scene and sell to an audience that couldn't get enough until it was all too late. They sold everything from codeine to Ritalin. They hosted “welcome back” parties at the beginning of the semester. Had payment plans to collect student loan funds and even took credit cards. They were working the stripping parties legally and just added the cost of the Baggie to the cost of the dance. It all appeared legit until the kids started dropping off like flies toward the end of the semester, showing up at addiction clinics shaking and begging their suburban parents for more pills.

It was hard for me to hold the Cronut I'd eaten for breakfast in my stomach as I ingested the information about King. As Reddy and the detective carried on, I pretended to take notes to keep my eyes off of the images, but all I could feel was King all over me. Hear him in my ear. Feel him inside of me. There was buzzing in my ear. The croissant/doughnut tossing around in my stomach. I was asking myself every question that began with “What the fuck?” and ended with “How didn't I know?”

The last week was in instant replay in my mind. Every minute since I walked into Damaged Goods. Since King walked into Damaged Goods.

I heard Reddy say, “We had reason to believe McDonnell was behind LeTiffany's murder.” Through the corner of my eye, I saw King's mug shot beside the photo of Yellow's body beside the river. I took air fast into my nose to calm an uneasy feeling growing in my stomach. “We have statements from her roommate that Yellow was afraid because King's crew heard about her arrest. They thought she was talking to us, and that was how she got dead.”

“Real dead,” Strickland chimed in.

“I don't get it. If you had the statement from the roommate, how didn't you get an arrest?” Paul asked.

“We brought all the guys in,” Reddy explained, moving his slides along to a collage of pictures of every one of King's friends I'd seen with him at the club—including Vonn. “We were ready to go. But then the roommate lawyered up. She suddenly had a whole bunch of money. Recanted her statement, saying the officers set her up. Turns out one of them was her old john. We can't touch her.”

“But we did have one ace in the hole—LaVonnte Russell—a member of the crew the feds nabbed a long time ago on the Jersey Turnpike with a shitload of cocaine,” Strickland said. “He was moving his own stuff but said he'd give intel on a boss behind a bigger operation that was growing and about to take over the city—move into Manhattan.”

Vonn's picture grew larger.

“He'd been wearing a wire for us for weeks,” the detective added before Vonn's mug shot changed to the crime-scene image of his body washed up along the shore. “We found him yesterday morning.”

“You think McDonnell did this?” Paul asked.

“Number-one suspect,” Strickland answered. “Vonn betrayed McDonnell. Vonn's dead. That's what we got. Motive, but it's all speculation right now. We can't seem to get anything to stick to McDonnell. He operates like the old mobsters did back in the day. Never gets his hands dirty. Just orders and orders through so many ears, he comes out clean every time.”