Sly Fox: A Dani Fox Novel (6 page)

I’d turned him down because I already knew that I was going to face resentment from male prosecutors and I didn’t need the additional grief. I hadn’t even bothered to mention it to Whitaker or Steinberg.

If I could get an appointment directly with Whitaker, I could tell him that Harris was interested in writing a story about women and the legal system. I could tell him that having me prosecute Hitchins as a criminal would give reporter Harris a terrific news angle. D.A. Whitaker could tell the public on page one how concerned he was about battered women in our county and that message would surely help him win the female vote in his upcoming reelection in November this year.

The trick was getting to Whitaker. And that meant I had to find a way to get around Steinberg. Our office was all about chain of command.

I picked up my phone and called Steinberg’s office. His secretary, Patti DeVries, answered. Our office had a strict policy when it came to addressing fellow employees. Everyone was required to call secretaries by their last name. The same was true about the male lawyers. But for some reason, which no one had ever bothered to explain, the secretaries and male attorneys usually called me by my first name and didn’t think anything of it.

“Hi, Mrs. DeVries,” I said. “This is Dani.”

I liked Patti DeVries. She had been a real pal when I was hired. I’d been shunned at noontime by my male counterparts. Not one of them had invited me to lunch—not even now. It might sound trivial, but their fraternity-brat tactics hurt my feelings. Of course, I’d refused to show it. Instead, I’d begun brown-bagging it, pretending I was too busy at work to take a break. And then one afternoon Patti DeVries had waltzed into our office and she’d spotted me eating a tuna sandwich at my desk. She’d invited me to join her and the other women for lunch.

The male attorneys thought it was hilarious that I had been relegated to eat with secretaries. But what their testosterone-drenched brains hadn’t realized was that my lunches with the secretaries quickly paid off. Any jealousy that the women felt toward me because I outranked them had vanished. I got to know them as peers and they got to know me. I asked them for advice about things that they talked about—mostly men, but also where to shop, office politics, and family problems. They began watching my back. Best of all, there was no better way to keep track of the latest gossip than by lunching with the girls. Nothing, and I mean nothing, escapes the eyes and ears of a good executive secretary. If a married judge groped his clerk, I heard about it. If a defense attorney had a drinking problem, I heard about it. There was only one secretary who stayed aloof from the rest of us. She was Hillary Potts, the personal secretary of our boss, Whitaker. I suspected she thought she was better than the other secretaries and me, too.

“I need a favor,” I told Patti on the phone. “Can you tell me when Mr. Steinberg is not going to be in his office?”

“Don’t you mean when is he going to be here?”

“No,” I replied. “I want to know when he will definitely
not
be in the building.”

Patti chuckled. “Well, hon, he has a dental appointment tomorrow morning. He’s taking the entire day off to get his wisdom teeth removed.”

I avoided making a crack about Steinberg and wisdom. Instead, I said, “Isn’t he a bit old for that?”

“Apparently not,” she replied. “They’re impacted. Actually, he’s going to be out for two days—at least. Why do you want to know?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow at lunch, okay? I’m buying.”

“Oh, this should be good, especially if you’re buying.”

We hung up, and for a second I thought about Patti DeVries and the other secretaries who worked in the courthouse. She’d gone directly from high school to a local two-year program for secretaries and had been hired by the county. Because she wasn’t a college graduate and was married to a blue-collar worker, the lawyers in our office looked down on her. But she was a fast learner, and after a year as Steinberg’s secretary, she knew more about how to navigate the county court system than any of the lawyers. Our office would have become paralyzed without her and the other secretaries, although their paychecks certainly didn’t reflect that.

5

Hillary Potts, a striking, but stern-looking woman in her fifties, always maintained a formal air at her desk directly next to the double doors that opened into D.A. Whitaker’s massive office. She was more than his personal secretary. She was a gatekeeper. No one got in to see him without first getting by her. No one.

When I arrived first thing the next morning in Whitaker’s office, Miss Potts made it clear that she was in no mood for chitchat. Instead, she focused on a letter that she was typing until she got a call on her intercom from the Boss.

“District Attorney Carlton Whitaker III will see you now,” she announced solemnly as if I were being presented to the Queen of England. She opened one of the doors that led into his office.

As I approached the doorway, I recognized the voice of Paul Pisani, Westchester County’s “Mr. Invincible,” coming from inside. I had heard that Pisani made it a practice to meet most mornings with Whitaker to review that day’s court docket. I stepped inside just as Pisani was lowering a porcelain coffee mug from his lips.

“Jesus Christ,” Pisani declared, “why can’t our cops make some goddamn decent drug arrests? Rudy Giuliani began going after drug dealers three years ago and look where it’s gotten him. He’s a goddamn associate deputy attorney in the Justice Department going after mobsters now just like Bobby Kennedy did in the sixties. Mark my word, Giuliani has a bright political career ahead of him in New York and he’s only half the prosecutor that I am. Don’t we have any gangsters around here we can arrest? What the hell’s wrong with our cops?”

Apparently, Whitaker had heard Pisani’s refrain before because he shot me a “here we go again” look. Pisani also glanced over his shoulder at me and I felt an immediate sense of dread. We’d never formally met, but I certainly knew him by reputation for being a formidable prosecutor, a complete snob, and a notorious philanderer. The secretaries in our office had warned me about Pisani and his endless flirtations. Rumor was that Pisani had tried to bed every attractive woman whom he’d encountered in the courthouse—and some unattractive ones, too! I’d been told that he hadn’t found any of them as fascinating as he found himself.

In our courthouse almost every lawyer and judge had a last name that ended in a vowel. Even so, Pisani stood out. He had graduated from Phillips Exeter and Harvard Law. He was also the only assistant district attorney in Westchester who’d ever walked into a courtroom dressed in a London Savile Row suit.

The secretaries had also tipped me off about Whitaker and his insecurities and ego. Shortly after he was elected, he’d spent thousands having contractors remove walls in the suite of rooms that included the D.A.’s office so it was now the equivalent of three offices remodeled into one. The additional space at one end had been made into a massive conference area with a table large enough to seat sixteen. On the opposite side of his expanded domain, he’d installed a lounge area with leather sofas and chairs clustered around a wooden coffee table. Directly in the center of the room was a hand-carved mahogany desk from the 1800s that was rumored to have once been owned by one of New York’s robber barons. Whitaker, who was in his midsixties, had a fondness for antiques and had found a way to purchase the desk with public funds when the desk showed up at an estate sale on the Hudson. A Waterbury school clock, another antique that he’d secured, was hanging on the wall to his left. Its noisy pendulum had been intentionally stopped because Whitaker had found the tick-tocking distracting. The clock was the only decoration in the room. All of the remaining wall space was taken up either with framed photographs or documents. The photos were eight-by-tens of Whitaker shaking hands with local, state, and national politicians or celebrities. The framed documents were certificates, honors, and awards that he had received. It was a museum of egomania.

Pisani was seated directly in front of Whitaker’s massive desk in one of two red leather chairs. I nodded politely to Pisani as I walked across the thick carpet. I could feel both men’s eyes giving me the once-over. It seemed to take forever to reach the empty chair next to Pisani. I did not sit down but rather remained standing until Whitaker acknowledged me.

That was not something he apparently was in a hurry to do.

Seeing them together reminded me of the 1969 movie
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. The older Whitaker would have been cast as Paul New-man while Pisani would be an Italian version of Robert Redford.

As always, “Mr. Invincible” was stylishly dressed and not a single piece of his slicked-back black hair was out of place. He was in his midforties and had a strong jaw and beautiful steel-gray eyes.

Some fifteen years older, District Attorney Whitaker did not have as impressive a legal pedigree as his younger impresario, which was why, I suspected, the D.A. had furnished his office with the antique remnants of the once powerful and had covered his walls with reminders that he was someone of importance. He’d graduated from Fordham University Law School and returned to White Plains, where he’d used his physician father’s social connections to open his own successful legal practice while immersing himself in local politics. Like Pisani, Whitaker dressed well, but not so well that his constituents would be resentful. Both men could feel at ease on the ninth hole at the country club. But only Whitaker could shed his jacket, roll up his sleeves, and drink mugs of draft beer with the cops and blue collars at O’Toole’s well into the night.

After a few intentionally awkward seconds, Whitaker said, “Miss Fox, you told my secretary that it was urgent for you to see me. Something about a potential news story and big case. What’s it about?”

As I started to answer, Pisani interrupted. “I’d like another cup of coffee, wouldn’t you, Carlton? Can you fetch us some, Ms. Fox?” He nodded toward a silver urn in the office’s northwest corner, yet another antique, and held out his white mug. I didn’t move. What a pig, I thought. I was a prosecutor, not his personal waitress. I made eye contact with Whitaker and much to my disgust, he slowly hoisted up his empty mug, too. I noticed that Whitaker’s had the words THE BOSS emblazoned on it in gold leafing. I thought both of those mugs should have had the word PRICK on them.

“No problem,” I said flatly.

“I take two lumps,” Whitaker said.

“I take mine any way I can get it,” Pisani added.

How about with some added spit?
I thought.

I had brought the manila envelope with me that contained photographs of Mary Margaret’s beaten face. As I reached toward Whitaker’s outstretched hand to retrieve his coffee mug, I handed him the envelope. Then I turned and took Pisani’s mug with the most disingenuous smile that I’d ever flashed anyone.

When I returned from pouring the two men’s coffees, Whitaker was examining the photos.

“Mr. Whitaker, I wanted you to see these photographs so you would know what sort of defendant we’re dealing with here.”

“Defendant?” Whitaker asked. “Has someone already been charged with this beating?”

“Well, not yet,” I said, correcting myself. “The victim is Mary Margaret Finn, a local White Plains girl, and the man who did this to her is her boyfriend, Rudy Hitchins.”

Pisani said, “Would this be the same Rudy Hitchins who got a free pass a few weeks ago on an armed robbery charge? A ‘smash and grab’ at a jewelers on Mamaroneck Avenue?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, genuinely impressed that Pisani remembered.