Mean Streak (15 page)

“He also said he wouldn't mind if I shared my own theory of the case with you,” he went on.

“That's very generous,” I said, my mind racing to figure out what the catch was.

It wasn't long in coming. “See, the thing you've got to remember,” Zebart said, his tone still eerily conversational, “is that when this TJ character was killed—not when his body was found, you understand, but when he was actually killed—your client had more reason to worry about him than Eddie did.”

“Riordan? Riordan didn't even know there was a TJ until we started hearing rumors.”

Warren Zebart's mouth grimaced into a nasty smile. “That's what he wanted you to think, Counselor,” the FBI man said, “but TJ worked for your client's client, remember. He was Nunzie Aiello's front man in the ghetto. Do you really believe your client didn't know Aiello had a partner?”

I got the point. I knew I was getting the point because my stomach sank into my pumps. “You were going to put the squeeze on TJ to nail Riordan for suborning perjury in the Nunzie Aiello case.”

“No, Ms. Jameson,” the agent said with a mock-mournful shake of his head. “I was going to put the squeeze on TJ to nail your client for murdering Nunzie Aiello.”

“You can't seriously believe—”

“Oh, but I can,” Zebart cut in. “I can and I do. Nunzie Aiello was killed in almost the same way Donatello Scaniello bought it three years ago. Maybe you didn't take much of an interest in the case at that time. Maybe you don't recall the particulars. Let me refresh your memory.” Zebart was enjoying this; there were little flecks of spittle at the edges of his mouth.

“See, Donatello was killed the same way. Two bullets, one in the head, one in the mouth. And they mushroomed inside the body like hollow-points. Makes it hard to get a match. The bullet deforms as it travels. Only in Donatello's case, the bullets weren't hollow-points, they were hollow-base. The killer put them in backwards; the damned things exploded in the body and left Ballistics with a lump they couldn't possibly match. Same thing with Nunzie. Hollow-base bullets put in backwards. Now,” Zebart continued, warming to his theme, “this was a little fact the Bureau managed to keep from the press. We didn't tell a soul about those bullets, just said they were deformed. Any citizen reading the account would have thought ‘hollow-points.' Only someone who knew the precise details of the Scaniello hit would have known to reverse hollow-base bullets. It was a copycat hit, and that means only someone who really knew the inside story of how the Don died could have copied it.”

“Fine,” I replied, “but how does that lead to Riordan?”

“We have tapes,” the FBI man said with an affable smile, a smile that told me how much he was enjoying this. “Tapes of Frankie Cretella and his goombahs sitting around shooting the shit. Somebody brings up Nunzie, asks Frankie C. what he's going to do about Nunz talking to Lazarus, maybe bringing down Matt Riordan. And you want to know what Frankie says?”

I wasn't sure that I did, but I nodded anyway. “He says, ‘So the feds take down my lawyer. Big fucking deal; lawyers are a dime a dozen—no, make that a nickel a dozen. Fuck, a nickel for two dozen. So I'll hire me another boy. What do I care a mick like Riordan takes a bath?'”

Zebart's smile showed cigarette-stained teeth. “Some loyalty, huh? That's what Riordan got for twenty years of getting Frankie C. out of jams. And that left your client high and dry; Nunzie was going to put him away, and Frankie the Crate wasn't going to do jackshit about it. See,” the agent went on, “as far as Frankie was concerned, Nunzie was just a gofer. But one of his little jobs was to carry messages between Frankie's goombahs and their lawyer, meaning Matt Riordan. Put those messages together and you have solid proof that your client wasn't just a lawyer representing individuals—he was the lawyer for an illegal organization.”

“House counsel for the Mob,” I murmured, echoing the damaging words Judge Schansky had used when he bounced Matt off the last Cretella case. This was sounding too plausible for comfort.

“So there was only one thing for Riordan to do,” Zebart continued, “and he did it. He hit Nunzie himself, and he made it look as much as possible like a Mob hit.”

“You can't really believe this,” I protested. Some corner of my mind was aware that this was a truly weak defense, but I hadn't had time to assimilate all the information and innuendoes that were piling up around me.

“As I said, Counselor, I can and I do. And what's more, I believe that Riordan was so pleased by his success in wiping out the Nunzie Aiello threat that he did the same to TJ. And there may not be anything I can do about it,” he went on, “but it might interest you to know that I'm not the only one who's noticed the similarities between the two murders.” He smiled his wolfish smile and popped a cassette into the tape player on top of his desk. He whirred it on fast forward, then pushed the Play button.

“… really pisses me off when guys think they can pin a lotta shit on us, do things our way, mislead the public.” The voice was raspy, a caricature Mob boss.

“Yeah, I can see where that would roast your chestnuts, all right. Some asshole making that nigger's death look like a hit.”

“I find out that sleazebag lawyer's behind this, he's gonna pay. That's all I'm gonna say. He's gonna know what it means to be on the business end of a hit, I find out he whacked Nunz. And if he did the nigger, too—”

Zebart stopped the tape. “Just a taste of what your client can expect when we try him for murdering a federal witness,” he said.

I wasn't about to leave with defeat in the air. “If you had the evidence to indict him,” I said firmly, “you'd do it. And since you haven't indicted him, I can only conclude that you haven't got the evidence.”

The FBI man's last word chilled the air: “Yet,” he said.

Eddie Fitz was good. The way he averted his eyes just a little when he was about to tell the jury how he'd slipped behind his corrupt partner's back to do a favor for the shop-owner who'd given his partner a kickback. As if he didn't want to seem like too much of a saint. Or the way he cleared his throat and spoke up manfully when admitting that he'd twice given drugs to an informant. On both occasions, according to Eddie, the junkie in question was “really sick.” The gray-blue eyes pleaded with the jury to understand how things are on the street, to set aside their middle-class prejudices and see the sweating, shaking remnants of humanity begging Eddie Fitz for just enough heroin to get them well.

It was
NYPD Blue
without the television screen between the jury and their hero. A street-smart cop, just corrupt enough to get along with his brothers in blue, just hard enough to survive in the concrete jungle, not hard enough to sit still while a junkie sobs for his medicine. They'd seen it all before, in prime time.

This time it was being brought to them by U.S. Attorney Davia Singer and her executive producer, Nick Lazarus.

Lazarus knew
was the thought that kept chugging through my brain as I watched Singer take Eddie Fitz through his paces. Eddie Fitz had done more than just turn the other way while TJ sold drugs in his precinct: Eddie Nino, Eddie Bigmouth, was TJ's full partner in the heroin business.

And Lazarus had known.

But could we prove it? Could we prove it, now that TJ was dead?

“Detective,” Davia repeated, her throaty voice going all earnest, “you admit you gave narcotics to a known drug addict in violation of the Penal Code of the State of New York on two occasions. Is there any other act of misconduct in your tenure as a police officer that this jury should know about?”

He hung his head for six seconds. Six precisely; I had my eye on the dial of my watch. Then he raised his head and I swear to God there were tears in the altarboy eyes.

“No,” he said in a low whisper. He cleared his throat again. “No, and I wish to God I'd never—”

“Objection,” I rapped out, jumping to my feet. “Unresponsive to the question, Your Honor.”

Judge de Freitas smiled a dry little smile; his black eyes narrowed behind his half-glasses as he considered the objection. “Overruled,” he said in a tone so soft I had to lean forward to hear him. “You may proceed, Ms. Singer.”

She was magnanimous in victory. “Thank you, Your Honor,” she said with only the tiniest smile of smug triumph.

“Detective,” she continued in a tone of high portentousness, “I ask you to search your soul. Is there any act of misconduct, any criminal act, any unethical behavior in your past besides the two you have forthrightly reported to this court?”

I had to object to the “forthrightly.” Once my objection was disposed of in the usual manner, Eddie Fitz gazed at the jurors, one by one. I timed it: twenty seconds. Over one second each, including alternates. It was all I could do to keep from shaking my head in admiration. If there were Oscars for Best Performance by a Corrupt Cop Turned State's Witness, Eddie Fitz would have—

Who cared? It was working. That was the problem—it was fucking working. Without TJ, the jurors would never know the truth behind the Hero Cop façade.

Eddie surveyed the jurors one by one, the look in his pale eyes one of hope and concern. He looked at each of them the way he might look at his grandmother or a favorite uncle, after confessing to something he knew they'd disapprove of. Do you still like me? he seemed to ask. Please like me; I'm really good underneath.

“I was a good cop,” he said. He swallowed; his Adam's apple jumped in his skinny throat. “I wanted to be a cop more than anything in the world. And I'm so ashamed—”

His voice broke. He dropped his head; his shoulders heaved. The straight, fine hair fell over his forehead, making him look even more like a teenager confessing to having gotten his best girl in trouble.

“More than anything in the world,” he said, his tone ragged, his eyes red with unshed tears, “I wish I could have my reputation as a good cop back. That's what I regret most about all this. That when people hear my name, they won't remember the good things I did. All they'll know is that I took part in corrupt acts. They won't know why. They won't care that I was trying to help people who were really hurting.”

“Thank you, Detective,” Davia Singer said. She said the words softly, like an Amen in church. As if to raise her voice would be to intrude on this intensely private moment.

An intensely private moment I had no doubt had been rehearsed for several hours in the U.S. attorney's office.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

As I stood up to cross-examine Eddie Fitz, I felt as if the Mean Streak lurched at 100 miles per hour, then plunged down a canyon of steel, rocketing me faster than I'd ever gone before. This was a make-or-break cross; either I damaged Eddie's credibility in the eyes of the jury or I reconciled myself to watching de Freitas bang Matt away for several years for something I had become increasingly convinced he hadn't done.

Eddie had just repeated, in ringing tones, his allegation that Matt had given him a thousand dollars in return for a manila envelope containing secret grand jury minutes.

A thousand bucks. That alone, I thought as I gazed into Eddie's cool blue-gray eyes, should have been enough to acquit Matt Riordan. He wore suits that cost more than that every day of the week; he drove a silver Jaguar and ate at the finest restaurants. He was a man of taste and class; he did not take manila envelopes and hand over a fistful of cash to crooked cops.

It was a bush-league crime, and my client was major league all the way.

But did that concept constitute a winning summation?

Looking over at the twelve citizens, plus two alternates, sitting in the jury box, I decided reluctantly that it didn't.

“Some nights I went wired,” Eddie Fitz said, using a laconic tone that could have come straight from a Clint Eastwood movie. It was a tone that implied a great deal of worldly wisdom, a lifetime of seeing horrors he would spare us civilians.

“And how did your boss decide when you should wear the wire and when you could go to the meeting without it?” One thing I'd noticed from my review of the tapes was that whoever made the decision had an unerring instinct for knowing when Eddie would be searched and when he wouldn't. I was willing to bet the decision was Eddie's, not a deskbound lawyer's.

He bit the bait. “He didn't. I made all those decisions.” The boast lurked under his deadpan pose.

“Oh, you decided,” I said in a tone that conveyed admiration. I laid on a little more butter. “I guess I assumed that decision would be made by Nick Lazarus, or by the FBI agent who ‘handled' you. That is what it's called, isn't it?” I went on innocently. “‘Handling' the informant?”

He gave a curt nod; just as I'd suspected, he didn't want to talk about someone else handling him; he wanted to take the credit. So I shifted back to the wire, deciding to give him some rope and see how close he came to hanging himself.

“But on the night Matt Riordan allegedly handed you money in return for a manila envelope containing grand jury minutes, the night of the most important event in this entire undercover operation, the night you were going to participate in the crime itself, you just happened to go to the meeting without a wire, didn't you?”

The answer should have been yes. That was all: yes. I'd carefully crafted the question so that yes was the only possible answer.

But that wasn't the answer I got. “Look,” the Hero Cop retorted, “after what almost happened to me the time before that, I sure as hell wasn't gonna wear a wire to that meet. I nearly got killed.”

“Objection, Your Honor,” I shouted, trying to drown out the altarboy voice. “Unresponsive to the question.”

Singer weighed in. “Your Honor,” she proclaimed in ringing tones that carried through the courtroom, “the answer was very responsive. Just because counsel doesn't like the answer doesn't make it inadmissible.”