Dead Man's Thoughts (26 page)

As I said goodbye at the door, the pale spring sunlight hit her full in the face, revealing every line. She was forty-five, at least, used up by loving a man she could never fully have. And now he was gone. I felt a surge of sympathy. I wanted to say some healing words, but I didn't have any. However bitter the blow of Nathan's death had been to me, he had not been my whole life. Far from it. We'd had a comfortable, convenient arrangement. I'd liked him enormously, respected him, but I hadn't loved him. Not with the single-minded devotion with which she'd loved Del Parma.

She stood in the doorway looking as dried up as a wrinkled fruit, all the youthful juice gone, leaving a shell of empty promise. Impulsively, I squeezed her hand. Her eyes filled with tears. She brushed them away. “Just get him,” she said through clenched teeth. “Just get the motherfucker that killed him.” I was sure she had never used the word before, to describe anyone.

T
HIRTY

J
esse Winthrop would have given his left ball to be sitting where I was. In Del Parma's office in the World Trade Center, with the formerly locked-up case files spread out in front of me like a banquet. The names on the cardboard folders read like a Who's Who of corruption. Armand and Nunzio Fratelli—one a criminal lawyer, the other a law secretary to a Bronx judge—thought to have fixed cases up and down the Bronx County Court calendar. Theodore Belsner, who allegedly offered a bribe that was refused by the fire marshal investigating the torching of a Brooklyn apartment building. Judge Bert Margab, stripped of his judgeship and tried for excessive leniency to defendants who invested in his Queens insurance business. And Burton Stone, the Fixer.

Dave had snuck me into his office. On a Saturday afternoon, when all his colleagues were away. So I had the place to myself while Dave sat in his own cubicle working on a Court of Appeals brief.

I knew what I would find in the files. I'd thought it through a hundred times, following the Master's advice. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, etcetera. I'd been so sure about it that I'd called Button. He hadn't been in, but I'd left a message telling him I was going to the Special Prosecutor's office to look at the files and I'd let him know what I found out. I knew he'd never let Paco off the hook without proof.

I opened the Fratelli file. True to the traditions of the Special Prosecutor's office, the brothers had been indicted, not for bribery, but for perjury. They'd lied to the Special Grand Jury about meetings they'd had with the undercover cop who, posing as a defendant in a case wholly made up by Parma, had offered them a bribe. When the Appellate Division saw the fabricated indictment, they went crazy. Entrapment was probably the kindest word they'd used. I looked through the file to see whose idea it had been to prosecute for perjury instead of bribery. The name that appeared most often was that of assistant special prosecutor Alfonse Di Anci.

My breath came out in a whoosh of relief. It was good, even after all my deductive reasoning, to see it so graphically stated in black and white.

I opened the Belsner file. According to the Court of Appeals, because the bribe had never been accepted, the Special Prosecutor, whose mandate after all had been to prosecute completed acts of corruption, had been without jurisdiction. Case dismissed. And, since no person can be put in jeopardy twice for the same offense, Belsner walked. The assistant who'd recommended prosecution: Al Di Anci.

The Margab case. Thrown out by the trial judge on the ground that the Grand Jury presentation had been hopelessly botched. Grand Jury assistant: Di Anci.

It was almost too good to be true. Had the man made no effort to cover his tracks? It would have taken Del Parma about three minutes to see Di Anci's guilt. Of course, you had to know where to look in which files, and even more than that, you had to know that there was something to look for. Once you did, it stood out like a neon sign. But if you didn't, the sabotage might never have been uncovered. If not for Jesse Winthrop's curiosity, Del Parma's ambition, and Charlie Blackwell's paranoia.

It was Marian who'd started me thinking. Some of Parma's assistants had gone on to become judges, she'd said. Di Anci had been one of them. What if he, not Parma, had sabotaged the cases? As Paco's sentencing judge, Di Anci had seen from the start how the kid's record could be used. And he'd been on the bench the very night Blackwell had been arraigned. Nathan had told him in conference the reason why Blackwell needed to be kept in administrative segregation—because he had an earful for the Special Prosecutor. I recalled how Di Anci had fled from the bench as though he had seen a ghost.

I opened the Stone file. There was a memo concerning access to the material witness Blackwell. Only two people besides Parma himself could get beyond the guards. One of them was Di Anci.

I was so absorbed in reading and thinking that the unexpected voice made me jump. “Interesting, Ms. Jameson?” It was Di Anci's usual urbane, bored drawl, with its overtones of irony. But there was nothing usual in the bluntnosed gun he was pointing at my chest.

I tried to match his cool. “Weren't you afraid somebody'd find out about you before this?” I asked. “You didn't do much of a job of covering up.”

“I didn't have to,” he shrugged. “Parma made so many enemies and was under fire from so many sources that he naturally thought all his failures were due to outside corruption. A few of them were,” he added.

“But most of them weren't? Most of them were because you were secretly undermining everything he did, making sure indictments would be tossed, witnesses would fall apart, convictions wouldn't hold up?”

He smiled complacently. “Poor Del. He was so intense, so committed. In his stupid way, he thought he could curry political favor with his gung-ho prosecutions. He didn't realize that the people who really count didn't want corruption wiped out. They wanted a show. They wanted a get-tough policy that got tough with their political enemies but not with their friends.”

Which was exactly what Jesse Winthrop had said, I reflected. How he'd love to be listening to this.

“And that's what you gave them?” I asked the judge.

“For a price,” he agreed blandly. I was indignant enough to want to penetrate that calm, to force some show of emotion out of the childishly smooth face of the man holding the gun on me.

“It must have been quite a shock when you saw Blackwell in court that night,” I said.

“It was,” he nodded. “Of course I knew Del was trying to nail him, but I didn't know when the Narcotics Division would actually make the bust. I had to think fast—and make a phone call. I am sorry,” he began, with a smarmy sincerity that rubbed me raw, “that Nathan had to get caught in the middle. I would, believe me, rather not have killed him.”

“It was just one of those things,” I said sarcastically.

“Precisely,” Di Anci said with a little smile. The smile told me more than words how hypocritical his statements were. Far from regretting Nathan's death, he reveled in it. Maybe it had been necessary, but he had also enjoyed it. The thought sickened and chilled me. Up till then I thought I was dealing with the same Di Anci I had appeared before a hundred times. Now I wasn't sure. It was more than the gun in his hand. It was the sick sadism of his mind that scared the hell out of me.

“If he hadn't been such a conscientious attorney,” Di Anci went on, “if he'd only waited a couple more days before going to the Brooklyn House to see Charlie, I could have had Blackwell killed and that would have been the end of it. No other deaths and no reason for anyone to suspect anything more than just another skell hanging himself. Something nobody would lose sleep over.”

“You changed the yellow card,” I said bitterly. “When you sent me up to Jury One on a wild goose chase. A wild warrant chase.”

“There's always a return on a warrant in Jury One,” he agreed. “And if by some chance there wasn't, I'd simply have said I made a mistake. You see, it was so much easier for the people who killed Charlie to get to him when he was on the regular cellblock. It wouldn't have been impossible on the suicide watch, but it would have been riskier. And my friends don't like taking risks.”

“How did you get in to see Nathan?” I demanded. Talking about him was harder than talking about Blackwell. My throat constricted. But I had to know.

“I mean,” I continued, “he knew by that time that you were the one who fixed the Stone case. He'd talked to Charlie that afternoon. So why would he let you into his apartment?”

“Like most civilized men, he found it difficult to believe that other people aren't as civilized as he was. It never entered his mind that I would kill him. It's that simple.”

“But he represented Blackwell,” I objected. “He must have known it would be a conflict of interest even to talk to you.”

Di Anci smiled deprecatingly and gestured with the gun. “He was, shall we say, amenable to persuasion. He'd opened the door, and once he saw this, he really had no choice but to let me in. He still thought he could buy time by talking to me.”

“And once you got in.…” I trailed off, remembering the horror I'd stumbled on when I turned the knob to Nathan's door.

“Yes,” he agreed. The complacent smile was full-moon bright. “Once I was inside, I forced him into the bedroom, tied him up, and strangled him. I had to tie him first, because of the blood flow,” he explained with a clinical detachment that made my gorge rise. “If I'd killed him first and tied him later, it would have been obvious from the post mortem. And, since I wanted it to look like a sex case, he had to be tied while still alive. He did try resisting,” Di Anci went on, annoyed by the memory. “He was already tied, but he raised his head and bumped right into my nose. Hurt like hell, plus I bled like a pig.” The blood on the towel, I thought excitedly. For all the good it did me to know. “After that, the strangling was a pleasure,” Di Anci gloated, “a real pleasure. Then, once he was dead, I placed those magazines you've undoubtedly seen in the night table. You see, I knew Nathan when he was a lawyer in Manhattan. He was a hotshot in those days, an arrogant sonofabitch. I wasn't sorry when he got his ass in a sling over those faggots he picked up. And when I saw how he made goo-goo eyes at that little spic he represented. … He said he wanted to get the little fucker into a program. Ha! Program, my ass. He wanted to get him between the sheets.”

I tried to control my disgust. “So you called Paco and pretended to be from the program.”

He nodded. “Fucking kid came running. He knew what side his bread was buttered on. I put out the note to hold the kid while I killed Nathan, then I waited while the kid came and knocked on the door. I'd removed the note by then. When I heard the kid go down in the elevator, I slipped out myself, leaving the door unlocked to facilitate the finding of the body. I gather it did so, Ms. Jameson?” he asked, his voice thick with amusement. I could hardly bear the thought that Nathan had had to listen to that gloating voice in the last precious moments of his life. I came to with a start when I realized that as things stood, I'd be spending the last few moments of my own life listening to it.

“Why?” I cried hoarsely. “Why did you do it? Just for money? Didn't they pay you enough?” My voice broke with fear and bitterness.

He laughed. Still calm, self-possessed. Not the least bit ashamed or sorry. I'd seen gang-rapists with more remorse.

“The money was good, Ms. Jameson. They don't really pay judges enough, you know.”

I snorted. “Most of them get by.”

“You think they do the job because of some altruistic motive?” he asked, contempt in his tone.

“No,” I answered calmly. “They do it because they want to advance to the Supreme Court. Civil side. Where the bucks are. But at least most of them don't steal while they're on the way up.”

“And neither do I. A favor for a friend, here and there. I like to live well. I like to gamble. Sometimes my speculations don't turn out so well. That happened when I was a young assistant district attorney. It so happened the debt could be forgiven if I just saw to it that certain charges were dismissed. They were, and I got my reward. After that, I did more favors. Finally it was suggested that I could do a lot more as a member of Parma's outfit. Parma being the kind of fool who thought that because my father was a judge, I was automatically a good risk, hired me.”

“Your father ought to be really proud of you,” I sneered.

Now I got my emotional reaction. The pudgy baby face turned red, the face of a tantrum-throwing child. “You shut your face,” he said. “I don't need him. I never did. Nothing I ever did was good enough for him. Not my grades. Not the schools I went to. Not my law career or my wife or my kids. Well, fuck him! I've made more money than he'll ever see with his fucking ethics. I fuck his precious legal system up the ass every day of my life, and let me tell you something, Ms. Jameson, I love it. I love watching you lawyers stand in front of me talking about justice and all that crap. I can fucking buy and sell justice, and you want me to give it away for free. It makes me laugh.” But Di Anci wasn't laughing. He was shouting, he was gesturing with the goddamn gun, and he looked on the verge of a stroke, but he wasn't laughing. Whatever satisfaction he took from his corruption hadn't made him happy. It was scant comfort.

“Look, you might as well know,” I squeaked, trying to distract him, “I'm not here alone. Dave Chessler's with me. So if you try anything, he'll—”

I broke off as I saw Dave quietly slip into the room behind Di Anci. The gun in his hand reassured me. Until I realized it was pointed, not at the judge, but at me.

T
HIRTY
-
ONE

D
i Anci seemed pleased by the shock on my face. Dave just looked uncomfortable.