Corpus Corpus (12 page)
Authors: Harry Paul Jeffers
Tags: #Police Procedural, #Police, #Mystery & Detective, #New York (N.Y.), #Fiction, #General
Turning with a smile, Goldstein exclaimed, "Cornelius!" His hand extended in greeting. "I'm glad you got here so quickly."
Fists on hips, Vanderhoff said, "Harvey, an explanation is in order."
"It certainly is," Goldstein said quietly. "I'm afraid we've got a rather sticky mess on our hands. Shall we find someplace where we can talk about it privately?"
As the men left the room, Bogdanovic chuckled and whispered to Dane, "How would you like to be a fly on the wall of the room during that clash of the titans!"
DURING THE NEXT hour and a half, Dane sat in a surprisingly comfortable overstuffed armchair in the parlor of the suite. Observing the activities of the New York City police in action at a crime scene and appreciating the opportunity for comparisons to the work of the Los Angeles police, she found herself recalling a debate with Janus on television years ago in which she had been required to defend the fact that while district attorneys were routinely on scene when an investigation was beginning in order to provide legal advice, supervise the collection of evidence, and authorize the detention of witnesses or approve the arrest of a suspect, defense lawyers were not.
A defender was called in only after evidence was in hand and somebody was expecting to be, or had been, charged with a crime.
Janus had been forceful in insisting that for many hapless and bewildered individuals it was often far too late. Their fates had been sealed, he argued, because they soon discovered that the scales of justice had already been heavily weighted in favor of the prosecution-unless they had the ability to hire a Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, or F. Lee Bailey, as O.J. Simpson had done. He also cited Roy Black, who had been called in by William Kennedy Smith to fight a rape case. After initial representation by Robert Shapiro, Lyle and Eric Menendez engaged Leslie Abramson and avoided the death penalty.
Others had hired Theodore Janus with an equally satisfying effect, he had pointed out. But, he asked, how many prison cells held hapless, luckless men and women who could not afford such defenders?
"I say that even if it's only one," he thundered in conclusion, "it is one too many."
Now, silently observing the police as they followed the directions of Sgt. John Bogdanovic while he carried out the orders of Chief of Detectives Harvey Goldstein to treat the death of Paulie Mancuso as a homicide, she wondered what the presence of Janus might make of their efforts in a court of law. Would the police find themselves on trial? Might John Bogdanovic again find himself subjected to a withering Janus cross-examination?
For a time she stood at the window and looked down to the sidewalk while the corpse was inserted in a green body bag, then lifted by a pair of husky white-gloved men in blue coveralls into a white van belonging to the medical examiner. In due course the verdict on the cause of Mancuso's death would state the obvious. He died because his plummeting body had slammed into the cement after a nine-story fall.
Turning away from the window, she remembered Leibholz's word for what had happened in the adjoining room and muttered, "Death by defenestration."
Summoned one by one by Detectives Leibholz and Reiter out to the corridor, the three blind mice had gone, tails between their legs, for questioning as to how such a thing could have occurred.
A young woman wearing a blue jacket with "Crime Scene Unit" in yellow across the back had gone into Mancuso's room and come out carrying a plastic evidence bag containing Janus's book.
In another room of the suite, she supposed, Goldstein was explaining to the district attorney that the inscription on the tide page of the book raised the tantalizing possibility that Mancuso had been driven by a concern for the well-being of wife and children when he had followed the implicit suggestion in the words that he do the honorable thing and take his own life.
If this could be proved, she mused as she waited patiently, the death of Paulie Mancuso was not suicide. It was murder, as surely as if someone had pushed him through the window.
Pondering this, she was startled to find Bogdanovic standing before her. "We're done here," he said. "The chief's waiting for us in the lobby."
"I didn't see him go out."
"That's why he's chief of detectives," he said, grinning. "He prides himself on being the unseen force. He had his heart to heart with Vanderhoff in a room across the hall. I'll drive him home and then I am to escort you to your hotel. Which one is it?"
"The Waldorf."
"Well, I'm impressed."
"It's courtesy of the Wolfe Pack."
"That's only fair."
They found Goldstein settled into the rear seat of the car. "I'm glad I don't have the day ahead of me that Vanderhoff has in store," he said. "Sooner or later the poor guy is going to have the press all over him demanding to know how his star witness, who was in protective custody, ended up dead."
"It's a good question," Bogdanovic said as he and Dane got in the car. "Suicide or murder, it happened under the noses of three of his own men. That's pretty embarrassing."
"You're a prosecuter, Maggie," Goldstein said. "If you were in Vanderhofs shoes how would you handle it?"
"There's a very simple solution, really. I'd say that it was under police investigation and refer the baying news hounds to the office of the chief of detectives."
Goldstein grunted. "Thank you very much."
As the car edged past a parked patrol car, Bogdanovic asked, "What did Vanderhoff say when you told him about that inscription in Janus's book?"
"He looked at me as if I'd told him Mancuso was accidentally dropped by some little gray beings from outer space while loading him into a flying saucer in an attempted alien abduction."
"So what is he going to say to the press?"
"The official line will be that for a reason known only to the deity, Mancuso decided to kill himself. He will also say that his death will have no effect on prosecutions of his former pals in organized crime because Mancuso had already provided evidence in writing and on video tape sufficient to convict all of them."
Dane shook her head slowly. "The man is whistling past the graveyard. Without Mancuso on the witness stand to verify those statements, any second-year law student could get a judge to toss them out as hearsay. And even if they were admitted before a jury, a good lawyer can argue that the statements were coerced. Given the attitude of the public in the wake of the Simpson case with its aspersions on police tactics, there is likely to be at least one juror willing to believe it. As you well know, one is all you need. I do not envy the task that confronts Vanderhoff."
"Don't underestimate Cornelius," Goldstein said as the car turned a corner and moved westward. "He's cut from the same cloth as Fletcher M. Anderson. Vanderhoff is a man with professional ambitions, and no fool."
Glancing at Goldstein's reflection in the rearview mirror, Bogdanovic asked, "Who the hell is Fletcher M. Anderson?"
"You tell him, Maggie."
"In the Nero Wolfe novels he was at first an assistant DA in New York City. For a time he was the bane of Nero's existence. Then he married rich and moved up to White Plains, where he became DA of Westchester County."
"To quote Wolfe," Goldstein interjected, " 'Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.' "
Suddenly braking the car to avoid slamming into a cluster of giggling, boisterous, and obviously inebriated young men surging out of a corner bar and into the street against the light, Bogdanovic growled, "Look at those damn fools. They should watch out where they're going. They could've been killed."
"You're right, John," Goldstein said, reaching forward and clapping him on the shoulder as the young men zigzagged to the opposite corner. "They are certainly drunk and disorderly. Will our youth never learn to behave properly?"
'Jaywalking, too! And on the morning of the Sabbath," Dane added. "What is this old world coming to? Somebody should call the police."
"You're absolutely right, Maggie," Goldstein exclaimed as he sat back. "But we all know that you can never find a cop when you really need one."
"And even if they were arrested," said Dane, "some smart-assed lawyer and a bleeding-heart judge would have them out on bail. Before the arresting officer finished filling out the report those kids would be hitting the bars again."
"Gilbert and Sullivan were right on the money,"
Goldstein said. "A policeman's lot is not a happy one."
Dane turned slightly. "Name a cop in a Nero Wolfe story who claimed to have once arrested a man who turned out to be guilty."
"Too easy, Maggie. It was L. T. Cramer. That's how he got to be an inspector."
With hands tightly gripping the steering wheel and eyes on a red light he could have avoided if the drunks had not forced him to brake, Bogdanovic let out a forlorn sigh. As he waited for the light to go green again, he resigned himself to the inevitable as Goldstein and his amenable passenger engaged in Goldstein's favorite pastime of detective story trivia.
For thirty-two blocks heading downtown to Goldstein's apartment on Fifty-sixth Street just east of Second Avenue, he listened in silence while they traded rapid-fire questions and answers, each drawn from a seemingly bottomless well of Nero Wolfe minutiae.
By Eighty-second Street he had learned that any spoke will lead an ant to the hub, frogs can't fly, a hole in the ice was a peril only to those who go skating, you can not pick plums in a desert, and Nero Wolfe did not like being pestered, bullied, riled, badgered, or hounded.
Were any of these to occur, he heard from Dane as the car dashed across Seventy-ninth Street, Wolfe was likely to protest with expletives from a quaint thesaurus: "Egad!"
"Pfui"
"Confound it!"
"Great hounds and Cerebus!"
And the occasional "Bah."
The great detective had resolved cases recorded under the names "Bullet for One," "Omit Flowers," "Black Orchids," "Booby Trap," "The Father Hunt," and "Death of a Doxy," whatever the hell a doxy was.
Brought to a halt at Sixty-fifth Street by a traffic light he was regaled by domestic arrangements of the house on Thirty-fifth Street. An orchid nursery on the roof watched over by a man named Horstmann. A basement with a pool table and a cubbyhole with a couch, as well as the quarters of a majordomo called Fritz and an insulated room for storage of bottled beer. The ground floor had an office for Wolfe, a front room, a dining room, a kitchen, and an amply stocked pantry.
Finally, as he turned the car into East Fifty-sixth Street, he learned that there was an unresolved question concerning where Wolfe had been born. Although he claimed to have come into the world in the United States, he was on record saying he had been born on the border of Montenegro and Albania in the shadow of the Black Mountain, from which he claimed the name Nero was taken.
"All in all, it's been an interesting evening," Goldstein said as he left the car. "A fine dinner, the camaraderie of the Wolfe Pack, two extremely pleasant companions, the sdmuladon of literary conversation, and a challenging case of murder. Could we ask for anything more? Good night to you both."
Bogdanovic smiled fondly. "G'night, Chief."
"Pleasant dreams," said Dane.
With a wave of hand, Goldstein went up two steps, unlocked the door, and entered the building.
A moment later as a light turned on in a front window on the first floor, Bogdanovic turned to Dane and said, "Okay. Next stop, the Waldorf-Astoria."
"Do you always wait around until he's in his apartment?"
"There are lots of people that he sent to prison through the years who might be out walking the streets and decide that now is the time to finally settle their accounts."
"That's very touching, John."
"It's pretty selfish of me, actually. I have no desire to spend a lot of time breaking in a new boss."
"Yes, I can see why you'd feel that way, especially when there are so many bad guys that need to be brought to justice in a city that never sleeps."
"Do you ever miss New York?"
"Sometimes."
"What times?"
"When I'm looking at a television show about cops, or at a movie that was made here, and there's a shot of the skyline at night, all lit up and sparkling like a million jewels. Sometimes a courtroom drama will gave me a nostalgic tug by reminding me of the years I spent jousting for justice for the people of New York in the down-at-the-heels chambers in that foreboding, ugly gray monstrosity known as the Criminal Courts Building at One hundred Centre Street."
"Then why did you leave all that?"
"That's a very long story," she said as the car moved along deserted streets. "No, it's more like a Joan Collins novel. Woman falls in love with a dashing and handsome guy, follows her heart instead of her head, then realizes too late that the heart is not a very reliable compass. By then she has the responsibility of a child and before she knows what's happening she finds herself the lead prosecutor in what should have been a slam-dunk case. But it becomes the trial of the century with the whole country watching her and justice go into the sewer on Court TV."
'Janus took it into the sewer."
"He did what he believed he had to do for his client," she said looking through the window and realizing they had arrived at the hotel. "Wiggins raided the Wolfe Pack treasury to put me up in this palace and now I'm too damn excited by all that happened at that uptown hotel to sleep."
"Murder has a way of doing that."
"You're quite right, Sergeant Bogdanovic," she said, opening the car door. "But if death ever slept, you and I would be out of a job, wouldn't we?"
"What time shall I pick you up for our visit to Janus?"
"Suppose I give him a call around ten to see what hour he'll be ready to receive us at his ranch. Since the subject under discussion will be himself, I'm sure he'll be eager to do so."
HALF AN HOUR later, after circling the block several times and failing to find a legal place to park, Bogdanovic gave up looking and put the car in a bus stop. Trusting the blue police department parking permit in the front window would be noticed, should a traffic enforcement cop pass by looking to meet a daily quota for writing tickets, he turned up his coat collar against a cold wind biting from behind and walked the two blocks to his apartment house.
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