Mean Streak (12 page)

“Who investigated?” I inquired. “NYPD or the feds?”

“What I heard at the M.E.'s office,” Angie replied, “is that the city cops had the case, and then the feds came in and kicked them off it.”

“I'll amend my subpoena to include all federal reports on the investigation into TJ's murder,” I promised. “And I'll draft a new subpoena for everything the NYPD has on the case.”

“Meanwhile,” Matt cut in, his tone as dry as the imported ale we were drinking, “as you rightly pointed out earlier, I now have no defense. What do we do about that?”

“In fifteen hours,” I murmured.

“In fifteen hours,” he agreed. “We might have enough here to get an adjournment for a day or two, but I don't want to ask for it unless we absolutely have to.”

“Okay,” I said, stifling any misgivings. Even a one-day adjournment would have been manna from heaven as far as pulling together a cross-examination strategy was concerned. “What about the other cops?”

“What other cops?” Angie put in. “You mean the ones who investigated TJ's murder?”

I shook my head. “No, not them. I mean the cops who worked with Eddie on the Narcotics Squad. The cops who have to be shitting bricks, wondering if Eddie's going to rat them out in the grand jury when he's finished convicting you.”

“A good point,” Riordan murmured. “Inelegantly put, but a good point nonetheless.”

“You want elegant,” I retorted, “get F. Lee. One of those cops might be willing to take the stand and tell the truth about Eddie Fitz,” I went on.

“I don't know, babe,” Riordan said with a shake of his head. “These cops stick together. The Blue Wall of Silence, and all that.”

Matt's gloom was catching. “And then there's the little matter of the Fifth Amendment,” I added. “We can subpoena every cop who ever met Eddie Fitz, but—”

“But the minute they say the magic words, the judge bounces them off the stand,” Matt finished. I nodded; it would have been nice if we were able to call Eddie's cohorts to the witness box and present the jury with the spectacle of New York's Finest refusing to answer questions on the grounds that the answers might incriminate them, but it was a good solid bet the judge wasn't going to let it happen. Instead, de Freitas would hold in camera testimony, out of the hearing of the jury, and the minute one of the cops took the Fifth, he'd strike their testimony and refuse to let us call them at trial.

“So what we have to do,” I reasoned, “is scare these cops enough to make them want to sell Eddie out, but not so much that they'll see themselves going down with him.”

“You're assuming these guys even know they're in danger,” Matt objected. “Eddie probably told them he'd cover for them.”

“But Lazarus can't really let them off the hook,” I pointed out. “He's got political ambitions, remember. How's it going to look if he gives Eddie's cop buddies a pass? No,” I went on, warming to my theme, “Lazarus is going to send Eddie into the grand jury some day, some time, and he's going to make Eddie name names, and the first name he's going to name is—”

“Stan Krieger,” Riordan said, finishing my thought. “The cop who registered TJ as an official narcotics informant. I wonder,” he continued, a thoughtful look on his face, “if we could catch him tonight. He could be working a late shift.”

Angie walked over to the pay phone in the corner, put in a quarter, and came back forty seconds later. “He's working midnight to eight tomorrow,” she said. “You could stop by the precinct and see him before court in the morning.”

Wonderful. Not only could I eat, sleep, and breathe this trial from eight in the morning to midnight, I could get up at six
A.M.
and put in a solid hour of interviewing before getting to the courthouse. I stuck my tongue out at my oh-so-helpful investigator, but I would also add a substantial bonus to her fee for this one.

“Which gives us the entire evening to do something else,” Matt said helpfully.

“Something else like what?”

“Something else like going out to Long Island to talk to the other cop in the picture: Dwight Straub.”

Once again, my investigator dug into her Guatemalan basket, fished out a quarter, and went to the phone. This time she came back with Dwight Straub's home address block-printed on an index card in her signature purple ink.

She handed it to me with a superior smile. “I'm gonna owe somebody huge for this one, Juana,” she said. “Which means you're gonna owe me.”

“You're the best, Angelina,” I said, pronouncing the name in the best Spanish accent I could muster. She grinned and popped her gum.

“I'm going home, then,” she said, slinging the bag over her shoulder. “Catch Jimmy Smits on TV. Why can't any of the cops in this city ever look like him?”

I slipped the card into my purse with resigned acceptance. When you're on trial in a big case, you don't expect the night off. You expect to work until at least midnight and then get up at dawn to add whatever new ideas you might have come up with in your sleep. But I'd thought my time would be spent preparing my cross-examination questions, not chasing down cops who'd probably refuse to answer questions, in or out of court.

I said as much as we drove along the Long Island Expressway, on our way to the North Shore, in Riordan's silver Jaguar. We'd picked it up from the garage underneath his First Avenue apartment building after leaving McSorley's.

“Face it, he's not going to talk to us.”

Riordan gave a shrug that might have been dismissal or resignation. “We can't assume that. He might want to get it off his chest.”

I made an unladylike sound. “He wants to get it off his chest, he'll go see a priest. He won't tell all to a defense lawyer he's been brainwashed to think of as the scum of the earth.”

“We have to try,” Riordan said with a finality that closed the subject.

“You're right,” I agreed with a sigh. “I'm just getting tired of running into dead ends.” It took a moment for my exhausted brain to realize I'd just made a bad pun; TJ was a very dead end, indeed.

Dwight Straub lived in Southhold, on the North Shore of Long Island, in a white house with an honest-to-God picket fence. It was a modest house, maybe three bedrooms, but it had a postage stamp yard of emerald-green lawn and neatly trimmed hedges. Marigolds and red impatiens bordered the shrubs, and a red-painted rowboat filled with flowers graced the front yard. It was a far cry from the mean streets he'd patrolled, from the drug dealers' apartments with their trapdoors cut into the ceiling so that narcotics could be passed upstairs in case of a raid.

I rang the bell. Riordan stood behind me on the concrete porch.

The woman who opened the door had a lived-in face. She was in her mid-thirties, but her face had seen a lot more life than most women her age; it showed in the wrinkles around her eyes and the set of her mouth. She had opened that door more than once with her heart in her mouth, praying she wasn't about to be told to come to the morgue to identify a dead cop who used to be her husband.

She didn't relax an inch when she saw it was me. I was bad news, not as bad as the news she reflexively stiffened against, but bad enough.

“My husband's not here,” she said, beginning to close the door. “I don't know when he'll be back.”

My foot was already wedged in the doorway; a lawyer learns all the techniques of a door-to-door salesman, being just about as welcome in most people's homes.

“Ms. Straub, my name is Cassandra Jameson,” I began. I made a gesture that encompassed Riordan, and introduced him as well. That name she recognized. She took a step back from the door and said, “You're that lawyer.”

She didn't mean me. I stood silent while Riordan stepped forward and exercised his formidable Irish charm. Within minutes we were inside, seated on the sofa, while Annie Straub poured us iced tea.

“Dwight wouldn't want me talking to you,” she said, “but I can't see protecting Eddie forever. He wouldn't keep quiet to save Dwight, that's for sure.”

Riordan decided he'd been silent long enough. “If you feel that way about Eddie Fitz,” he said conversationally, “why not tell the world what he really is?”

The smile she turned toward him had all his Irish charm and more. “Because every word I say against Eddie is a nail in my husband's coffin, and I'm not going to see him taken down. Not even to nail Eddie. If nobody talks, everyone has a chance to walk.” She lifted her chin in a defiant gesture. “At least that's what Stan says,” she amended. Her eyes traveled to the piano in the corner of the room; a photograph of a group of men holding beer steins aloft in a drunken gesture of camaraderie sat atop the polished surface. It could have been a fraternity beer bust, except that most of the men were too old for college, and several wore sweatshirts with NYPD logos on the front. One logo read OCCB, the Organized Crime Control Bureau, which operated out of police headquarters.

The Squad. I squinted my eyes to try to make out Eddie Fitz, whose face I'd only seen so far in the newspaper. He sat at the center of the group, wearing the biggest grin and holding his beer mug higher than the others.

“Which one's Stan?” I asked, pointing to the picture.

“Oh, Stan the Man's the one in the back,” Annie replied. “The older guy.”

Stan the Man. I filed the nickname for future reference and asked, “Did your husband have a nickname, too?”

“Not at first,” she said. “But then Eddie found out his middle name was David, just like Eisenhower. So he started calling him Ike.” The twist of her lip said she'd never liked the nickname, but she didn't say why.

Riordan brought the conversation back to essentials. “Nobody's going to walk,” he said firmly, putting all the considerable authority his voice was capable of behind the statement. “Lazarus is going to pick off the squad one by one. The only hope any of the cops have is to cut a deal before the others do. The same way Eddie did. The first guy to open his mouth can walk; the others are going to do time. So if you don't want to see your husband behind bars, Mrs. Straub, I advise you to convince him to be the one to tell the truth.”

“To be the one to rat out his friends, you mean,” Annie retorted. She crossed her arms over her chest. “My husband is not that kind of man.”

The door opened. All three of us turned toward the man who entered.

My first impression of Dwight Straub was that he was a pale imitation of someone else. His hair was sandy, thinning on top and revealing a broad forehead. His hands fiddled with the keys in his pocket, they ran through his hair, they waved in the air as he spoke, making odd, jabbing gestures that had little or nothing to do with what he was saying. His voice was high-pitched and verged on a squeak in his agitation at finding us in his living room.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded. He turned to his wife. “Why did you let them in?”

Dwight Straub stood in the doorway, his eyes wide with fear. He was a deer caught in the headlights; I was the Cadillac.

“I won't talk about Eddie,” he said, his tone truculent, like a toddler refusing to eat his nice oatmeal. “You can't make me talk about Eddie.”

“Actually, I can,” I replied. “I can subpoena you and make you come to court, and then—”

“Get the hell out of here,” Dwight said. His face was red; he looked like a three-year-old about to hold his breath. “Get out of here right now.”

“Honey, maybe it would be better—” Annie began, but her husband was having none of it.

“I'm not talking to any lawyers, and I'm not talking about Eddie,” Dwight shot back. He still stood in the doorway, his short-sleeved sport shirt stained under the arms, clutching a spiral notebook as if holding onto a life preserver. His balding head added to the babyish, unfinished quality of his moon face and smooth skin.

He was an unlikely cop; he looked more like an accountant for a small, failing business. A man continually on the edge, a man growing an ulcer, a man who took his work home with him and fretted about it through dinner. A man ripe for exploitation by the likes of Eddie Fitz.

“But is Eddie going to return the favor?” I inquired with an air of innocent curiosity.

“What's that supposed to mean?” Dwight tried for menacing, but only achieved petulance.

“You know what it means. Do you really think Eddie's going to stop with Matt Riordan? Or is he going to step into the grand jury room and start naming names? Cop names?”

Ninety percent of my attention was on Dwight; the look on his face told me this question had kept him awake nights. The other ten percent was focused on Annie; her face said she'd been thinking about this possibility longer than her husband. She'd seen the potential for disaster in Eddie's cooperation with Nick Lazarus for a long time; Dwight was just beginning to catch up.

“He's going to sink you,” I pointed out. “He's going to pin everything you guys did with TJ on you and Krieger. He's already on record as telling Lazarus he saw bad stuff go down on the street, but he wasn't part of it. He's stuck with that now; if he admits he lied, Nick Lazarus can and will charge him with perjury. So his only hope is to hold the line and blame you and Stan for TJ.”

Dwight blanched. I'd thought his face was pale already, but it went so white I thought he was going to faint.

“What do you know about TJ?” he asked. For the first time, his face reflected menace; he wasn't just scared, he was scary. He took a step toward me, fists clenched at his side as though he was restraining himself from striking me.

Not that I was really afraid he'd hit me. But I could see now where street junkies could find this baby cop from East Cupcake, Long Island, someone to fear. On the street, they might have the ability to strike back, but in his own world, armed with a badge, he had authority it would be all too tempting to misuse.