Where Nobody Dies (6 page)

“Hey, Ira,” the other guy protested. “I'm good, but, like, I'm no fuckin'
sur
geon, you know?”

It was something out of a Donald Westlake novel, or Jimmy Breslin's
The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight
. But something told me these guys
could
shoot straight and that the man they were talking about was by this time at least a “fuckin' vegetable.”

I fast-forwarded again. “All right,” Ira was giving orders. “We got Frankie in as super over there. He's been in a week and he's already busted the boiler and rented 6B, 2D, and 3E to junkies. Now we gotta start the break-ins. Let's do 5G for starters—I hate that big-mouth broad. She's been a pain in my ass ever since I bought the building. Clean her out—TV, stereo, cameras—I don't want her to own a fucking toothpick when we're done. Got me?”

I shut the machine off and took out the tape. Someday I promised myself to listen to all of them straight through, but for today I'd heard enough.

I looked around my office. The oak desk I'd earned as a fee from the owners of the Oaken Bucket on Atlantic Avenue, whose leases I'd negotiated; the brass-trimmed legal-size filing cabinets I'd bought with the proceeds of the Harmon divorce; the green-shaded desk lamp my brother Ron had given me for Christmas—it all looked suddenly very dear, and very vulnerable. The thought of arson hung oppressively in the air, like a heavy perfume.

I shook the morbid thoughts out of my head and went on to the second clipped bundle. Now I knew what Bellfield meant when he said he was covered for arson. Duncan Pitt, senior fire marshal for the New York Fire Department, had investigated fires in some fourteen Bellfield buildings. Even the ones he'd labeled “suspicious” he'd attributed to junkies or winos. No mention of the pattern of Bellfield ownership, no hint of arson-for-profit, came through his carefully worded reports. He was on the payroll.

One address caught my eye. I walked over to my briefcase, took out the report ADA Bergen had given me in court, and compared it to the one in Linda's packet. I'd been right. The Unknown Homicides lived in an Ira Bellfield building. It was the break I'd been waiting for. And Linda had known it. Instead of giving it to me, she'd used it for blackmail.

I traded in my Sam Spade fedora for Antony Maitland's barrister's wig and went back to being a defense lawyer. Would any of this, I wondered, be admissible in evidence at Tito Fernandez's trial? Could I show that Bellfield routinely used arson as a means to empty his buildings, and that he was, therefore, at least as good a suspect as Tito Fernandez and the Unknown Homicides?

The truth: probably not. The rules of evidence were strict; the relevance of other Bellfield fires would be hard to establish. Unless—my mind took a different turn. What if Duncan Pitt, the bribed fire marshal, were being investigated? Surely that fact would be relevant to Tito's jury. The question was how would I get this information to the right people without tipping off Pitt and triggering a cover-up?

Matt Riordan. The high-powered, edge-of-ethical criminal lawyer I'd met after Nathan's murder. If anybody would know how to stir up a hornet's nest without getting stung, he would. I decided to schedule a consultation, then smiled as I recalled that most of our recent conferences had ended in bed.

I went on to the third victim. Todd Lessek, called by local newspapers “the Donald Trump of Brooklyn.” A super-developer whose touch was golden, he was a one-man gentrification movement, turning slums into luxury co-ops. If Ira Bellfield's name was synonymous with “slumlord,” then the name Lessek meant money and plenty of it. It was hard to believe he'd leave any room for a small-time blackmailer like Linda. Still less likely that he'd actually paid her off.

But Linda's records spoke for themselves. It seemed that a high proportion of Lessek's buildings had once belonged to Ira Bellfield, and that he'd renovated them with considerable help from the City of New York in the form of tax credits and low-interest loans. Could it be a coincidence that the next blackmailee was a city employee named Elliott Pilcher, and that Elliott was listed as a limited partner in Lessek's most grandiose scheme to date?

The waterfront development plan was the biggest thing to hit Brooklyn since the bridge. When it was finished—if the city approved it—it would consist of luxury housing with splendid views of Manhattan, South Street Seaport–style shopping malls and restaurants, and a sports complex. Nobody was saying much about the fact that the plan would dispossess a number of small manufacturing businesses and the artists who had first staked out the area for living space. I knew about the artists firsthand. Some of them were my clients, introduced to me by Dorinda, who lived in a waterfront building and was wholeheartedly on the side of the community and against Lessek.

The most carefully guarded secret in the whole plan were the names of Lessek's limited partners, the people who were to share in the huge profits while keeping their identities hidden from the public. All perfectly legal, of course—unless you were a city employee like this Elliott Pilcher. The question was, what had Pilcher done for Lessek to be rewarded by the chance to invest in the waterfront development scheme? Had he provided all those city loans and tax breaks?

The next victim of Linda's scrutiny was her new boss, Art Lucenti. I read through the papers with interest, as Art had always been a hero of mine. He'd started as a Legal Services lawyer in the great anti-poverty days and had soon become known as an outspoken tenants' advocate, parlaying his popularity in Brooklyn neighborhoods into a seat on New York's City Council. From there he could be counted on to support rent control and generally act as a thorn in the side of the big real-estate interests. I, for one, had been glad to vote for him as congressman.

I wanted my vote back. Reading Linda's evidence destroyed all that. Lucenti had been Lessek's man all the way down the line.

The first item was that Art Lucenti, like the mysterious Elliott Pilcher, was one of Lessek's limited partners, standing to make a giant profit if the waterfront deal went through. And the next item was that Art's investment had nowhere been mentioned in the sworn financial disclosure statement Art had filed before running for office. At the least, he was guilty of perjury.

That was bad enough. What was worse, at least from a moral point of view, was that all through his career as the crusading councilman, Art Lucenti's law firm had represented Todd Lessek. Linda's proof consisted of some very interesting legal papers. It seemed that an angry tenants' group had once sued Lessek, and had turned to Lucenti to represent them in court. He'd appeared on their behalf, but at the same time, the law firm that still used his name on its letterhead, that still shared an office and a phone number with him, that still doled out to him a portion of its profits, came into court for Lessek. It was as blatant a conflict of interest as a lawyer could imagine.

What I didn't know was whether the papers asking for a court investigation had ever been filed. I supposed not—it would have caused a major media explosion if they had—but if not, why not? Had the tenants' group been paid off or warned off? And if so, by whom? I jotted down the names of the plaintiffs and resolved to talk to them as soon as I could.

The last of Linda's victims, with a tiny packet of papers to her credit, was Art's wife Aida. If I'd felt saddened at learning the truth about Art, I felt doubly bad at reading Linda's notes on Aida.

Born Aida Valentin in Puerto Rico, she'd grown up in the South Bronx, worked as a secretary in a Brooklyn legal services office, and married her boss. That was the Sunday supplement version. What the papers had left out was that she had a criminal record and had once been a junkie.

At first I wondered how the papers could possibly have missed the story. It would have added considerable spice to the fluff they'd done on the “feisty but beautiful” wife of Brooklyn's “charismatic” congressman. Then I realized that the busts were either juvenile or youthful offender convictions. Sealed records.

Add the fact that drug program records are about as easy to come by as CIA documents, and it became apparent how the press had missed the boat. The question was, how much would Aida or her husband have paid to keep it that way? Publicly kicking drugs may be a good way for a fading country singer to get on talk shows, but it does less than nothing for the image of a congressman's wife.

The only strike against Aida during the campaign had been the no-show job. Everybody has them, but for Aida her position as a member of the Mayor's Committee on Minority Housing at twenty thousand a year had become a major scandal. For one thing, the ever-forgetful Art had neglected to put it on his financial statement, an oversight he hastily remedied. In Linda's file were a couple of letters from the Department of Investigation asking Aida to come in for fingerprinting and financial disclosure, normal prerequisites for any city job, but she'd resigned when the storm of controversy broke.

I stood up and took a stretch, arching my back like a cat's and unkinking the muscles I'd just realized were coiled as tight as a spring. What the hell, I wondered, was I going to do with this mess? Put my coat on, walk out onto Court Street, and march up to the Eighty-fourth Precinct? Ask for Detective Button and turn the garbage over to somebody paid to collect it? And then what? Watch while the papers ate Art and Aida Lucenti for breakfast, lunch and dinner? Catch the eleven o'clock news to get the latest on the Blackmail Secretary?

That stopped me cold. I stared out the window at the steel-gray sky and realized that I'd be trashing Linda's reputation without any real guarantee that it would help Brad Ritchie. What I'd be giving Dawn would be a mother to be ashamed of, as well as a father behind bars.

I couldn't do it. No way could I add to Dawn's suffering for no good reason. Whatever action I took with respect to the blackmail material, I decided, had to be for the sole purpose of presenting the police with an alternative to Brad Ritchie as Linda's murderer.

It meant work. It meant questioning the blackmail victims until I had something to take to Detective Button. One quick thought: I'd start with Bellfield and the Lucentis. As Linda's employers, they were likely to show up at her funeral, where I might get a chance to talk to them with reasonable discretion.

Having a plan felt good. The helpless paralysis that had enveloped me ever since I'd sat on Dawn's bed and lied to her began to lift. I might not be able to comfort her in her loss or secure her a guardian, but maybe—just maybe—I could give her back her father.

5

What I needed was coffee. Coffee and a quiet place, far away from Kings County Criminal Court, in which to discuss Aida Valentin Lucenti with my old friend, Pat Flaherty. What I had was Part GP1 and a client named Derrick Sinclair.

“I ain't did nothin'.”

I stared at him through the bars of the pen behind the courtroom. “A classic defense,” I murmured, frustration turning on my sarcasm button. Hilary Quayle could have taken my correspondence course. “Is that ‘I ain't did nothin', I was just the lookout'? Or, like the kid rapist I once had, is it ‘I ain't did nothin', I just held her down'?”

“I told you,” Derrick replied doggedly. “All I did was ask the lady for a cigarette. Since when they make that a crime?”

“How about when the guy you're with goes behind the lady and rips off her gold chain while you've got her stopped?”

“How'm I s'posed to know he gonna do that?” Derrick countered, his eyes measuring me.

“Might I suggest a little light reading?” I asked with a laugh. “Starting with your rap sheet. You and this guy Ralph Salazar have been busted twice before for the same thing. You'd better start carrying your own smokes, Derrick.”

“Those cases was squashed,” Derrick replied with all the confidence of a jailhouse lawyer.

“Oh, my God,” I groaned. “If I had a dollar for everybody whose cases were ‘squashed,' I'd …” I broke off, aware that I'd lost Derrick's already minimal attention.

“In the first place,” I said waspishly, “nothing's ‘squashed.' I'm trying to work out a deal here to cover the whole package. In the second place, ‘squashed' or not, a guy who keeps getting busted in the company of a known chain-snatcher is going to have a hard time selling a jury on the idea that he just stood there with his thumb in his mouth while his buddy grabbed the chain. Do you hear what I'm saying?”

I let Derrick think about it while I dashed to the door to make sure my quarry was still waiting to be flushed. I'd done a lot of juggling to arrange an accidental meeting with Pat Flaherty and I didn't want to lose him to another courtroom.

To say the least, it had been a shock when Pat's name leaped out at me—on about the fourth reading—from Aida Valentin's application to a Phoenix House in Brooklyn. She'd listed him as a reference. It took me a minute or two to recall that before coming to Brooklyn Legal Aid, he'd been a juvenile rights lawyer in Bronx Family Court. It seemed a coincidence made in heaven—somebody who could clue me in on Aida's past and maybe pave the way for me to talk to her without scaring her half to death.

Pat stood before the bench, his humorous Irish face solemn as he spoke on behalf of his client, a guy who looked as if he'd been around the block so many times he'd worn a groove in the pavement. In the old courthouse phrase, he wore his yellow sheet on his face.

“My client, Your Honor,” Flaherty boomed, “is now ready to submit himself to the discipline of a residential drug program. He's ready to—”

“Mr. Flaherty,” Judge Diadona's dry voice interrupted. His lightly ironic tone was helped by the slightest of Spanish accents.

“Your client,” he went on, “felt
ready
in 1982, in 1980, and in 1977. He entered drug programs in each of those years, promising each and every judge who put him there that now would be the time he would conquer his drug habit and face the world as a law-abiding citizen. May I remind you, Mr. Flaherty”—the judge was near a smile, but it was the grin of a predator about to pounce—“that in none of those cases did your client last in the program for even one month. So kindly do not give me”—this time the ‘r' had a full Spanish pronunciation—“‘ready.'” The lawyers in the front row cracked up, but Flaherty looked pained, as though Judge Diadona had told a dirty joke at a funeral. That was Flaherty's strength as a criminal lawyer, I thought appreciatively, watching him work. He conveyed an air of utter sincerity, of deep concern for each of his clients, that was only partly an act. It seemed suddenly odd and touching to think of a younger Pat Flaherty using these talents on behalf of the South Bronx teenager who'd grown up to become the beautiful Aida Lucenti.