Star Time (75 page)

"Dan!" a voice called out.

Dan turned. Hurrying toward him, puffing white smoke in the winter
air,
was the tenacious figure of Scott Feller, the crime-beat reporter for the
Herald.
A fringe of dark hair hung like an awning over his wire-rimmed spectacles.

Dan remarked curtly, "I'm surprised you didn't shoot me in the back when you had the chance."

"I can't control how my editors rewrite what I turn in," Feller protested. "Just wanted you to know today's ambush
wasn't
my fault."

"Peter
Boelter
probably loved it."

"Newsstand sales are up. You have to give him credit for recognizing the circulation possibilities once Feeney came forward."

"And for trashing me in print when I took the case?"

Dan had taken offense at a story that implied his success on behalf of notorious clients had tarred his character. Although mellower in recent years, Dan’s short temper could still flash when faced with what struck him as injustices. That aversion to unfairness and a distrust of those in authority had steered him toward law school and criminal defense work.

"It's
Boelter's
newspaper," Feller pointed out. "He gets to play by his rules."

"Including giving his buddy, Gil
Huyton
, the front page when he shoots off his mouth to win points with the public?" It was no secret that the publisher's and the DA's upper-class families had long been friends and allies; the
Boelters
had backed
Huyton's
election campaign editorially and financially. A lifetime's experience had taught Dan that the rich and powerful invariably relied on each other for such mutually beneficial arrangements.

"I don't think it's personal on
Boelter's
part, Dan. You just happen to represent the bad guys. This is a big story, and what the DA says about it is big news. Law and order sells papers."

''I never met Peter
Boelter
, but it's personal, all right,” Dan replied heatedly. “I'm the Jewish shyster who grew up in South Philly, remember? Not on the Main Line with him and his crowd. I didn't go to Yale Law like
Huyton
or get hired by some firm with names on the door that signed the Declaration of Independence. I don't sit with them on the board of the Art Museum or the Orchestra or University Hospital. And I'm sure not a member of their Philadelphia Club or their Fish House. You fucking bet it's personal."

Feller pulled out his memo pad. "Maybe it is. Not on
Boelter's
part, I mean, but on
Huyton's
."

"Did
Huyton
say something?"

Feller nodded.
"When I interviewed him on the phone this morning."

"What did he say?
Exactly."

"That one of the reasons he ran for DA was to rid the justice system of guys like you, shady lawyers who use technicalities and tricks to get criminals and killers off. Any comment?"

"One.
It’s about time
Huyton
tried his cases in the courtroom, not the newspaper."

Dan broke off the conversation and strode into the courtyard toward a far wing.

Huyton
had been content since winning office to devote himself to setting policy and supervising his subordinates. An important early prosecution had been against one of Dan's clients, a major organized-crime figure.
Huyton’s
deputy had tried the case, and the
Huyton
was badly embarrassed when Dan won an acquittal for his client.

The charges back and forth during that contest had turned the two lawyers' hostility into personal animosity. After Dan agreed to defend Ricardo Montano for
Cassy
Cowell's rape and murder,
Huyton
announced that this would be the first case he himself would prosecute.

Cassy
Cowell had been pretty, lively, and young, too young to work at a bar. But the good income paid for the college education she was pursuing during the day, and a false driver's license got her the job. At midnight, after finishing her shift, she had left the bar on Twelfth near Walnut to walk the dozen blocks home. Like much of Philadelphia, that part of Center City contained old four-story brick buildings on blocks that were often sliced through by narrow, interconnecting alleys that served as interior streets. She had probably chosen to zigzag through them to save some walking. Her half-naked body was found early the next morning behind a dumpster on St. James Street, one of the alleys between Twelfth and Thirteenth. She had been raped and strangled, apparently when she struggled with her attacker. No one in the adjacent buildings had heard a sound. Lab tests revealed semen in her vaginal cavity, but could not determine the attacker's blood type. Like fifteen to twenty percent of the population, the attacker was a non-
secreter
—his blood type did not show up in his other bodily fluids.

An almost identical rape-murder had occurred in mid-December, when the body of a woman stockbroker who had left work late the night before was discovered only a few blocks away. In that case, too, no clues were found. But on this occasion a policeman who had been driving a patrol car in that sector the night before remembered spotting Ricardo Montano, a local pimp, walking alone at midnight on Thirteenth headed north toward Walnut. Upon seeing the policeman, Montano had ducked
into one of the alleys in the direction of Twelfth, but the officer was not sure which one. Nevertheless, Montano was brought in for questioning.

Two days later Tim Feeney, a truck driver employed by the
Herald
who had been delivering copies of the paper to downtown newsstands that night, came forward to identify Montano as the man he had happened to see running out of St. James onto Twelfth a few minutes after midnight.

Entering City Hall's northwest corner.
Dan felt the familiar sense of having entered a medieval keep. Ascending to the upper floors was freestanding wide circular stairway that hugged the red marble and sandstone block wall. The far doorway led to elevators and the ground-floor corridor. To the left, at an angle between the two outer doorways, was a snack bar. Dan had not yet eaten.

"I'm ashamed of myself to be talking to you.'' Matt Rooney's expression was censorious, at least as much as his short stature permitted over the high top of the glass display case.

"What is it now?" Dan asked.

"This case of yours today.
They ought to take the rat out and shoot him."

"You Irishmen are always trying to keep a Jewish lawyer from collecting his fee." Dan joined in Rooney's laughter.

Dan always dropped by when starting a case, partly out of superstition, but mostly to pick up the scuttlebutt Rooney inhaled like a vacuum cleaner.

"Heard anything?" he asked.

"Nobody will talk about the case. With all the sensation, that's strange. Usually everybody's trying to show off how plugged in they are. Maybe DA is playing it close to the vest, figuring the less that gets out, the less ammunition you'll have."

Dan glanced up from the display case. "When are you getting in those chocolate doughnuts I like?"

"Jesus, Dan, you don't want to eat that crap! I keep telling you the fat and
sugar'll
kill you. Even a guy with a hole in his head wouldn't be caught dead eating that stuff."

An ex-cop born and brought up in South Philly in the shadow of St. Joseph's, Rooney had retired on disability after a shootout in which he caught a bullet that was still lodged in his head. Rumor had it that another cop had shot him when Rooney stumbled onto a drug payoff. The corrupt cop had been killed in the exchange of gunfire. Rooney had kept his mouth shut about the circumstances of his wound, and the city had quietly provided a large settlement and had thrown in the snack bar franchise.

"Let me have a package of cheese crackers and a Three Musketeers."

"Fat, sugar, and
salt!
Your veins got to look like sewers. I got bagels, muffins. With margarine, if you want it.
Polyunsaturated."

"Did
Huyton
buy a muffin?"

"Oat bran."

"Figures.
I'll just take the junk food."

Dan grabbed the paper bag containing his purchases and thrust two dollars at Rooney's wife, who sat at the cash register eyeing the bag like a sentinel.

Forcing himself to ignore the pain in his knee, he took the steps at a run two at a time, a way of stoking his competitive fires for the hearing. He was a man for whom winning had always been an obsession, but had become harder to focus on in recent months.

Breathing heavily, he jig-stepped through the sixth-floor doors into the dim corridor. He knew many of the regulars loitering along the wide hall: lawyers, court employees, courtroom buffs. Many were eager to greet him or wish him well this morning, a few to flaunt their acquaintance to companions. He chatted with one, tossed a quip at another. A court officer wanted advice for a cousin arrested for drunk driving. A young lawyer asked to borrow a copy of one of his trial transcripts to study. The image he instinctively exhibited in his ritual progress down the corridor—fast-talking, outgoing,
kinetic
—invigorated him; he felt as if he were shadow-boxing down a crowded aisle toward a floodlit ring, impatient for the main event to start.

Bright lights suddenly illuminated the gloom, and two groups of darkened figures behind them thrust TV cameras and microphones at him. Dan moved past them toward the metal detector guarding courtroom 675. An officer slipped him in ahead of the line of people waiting to enter. Dan's hand pushing through the courtroom door clenched into a fist.

The Montano case would be the first of the twenty-five or so preliminary hearings to be heard this morning. Defense lawyers, prosecutors, and police officers awaiting their own cases had filled up the front row of the spectator section. Although the jury box was reserved for reporters, most were gathered around Peter and Susan
Boelter
. 

They look like live-action versions of their damned newspaper and magazine photos, Dan thought, celebrity patricians come to watch the gladiators fight it out. The Golden Couple, a society columnist had dubbed them, and Dan found the nickname apt, despite the husband's dark hair. In their late thirties, both
Boelters
were tall and attractive. His uncommonly blue eyes were set amid sharp, handsome features. He was animated as he spoke, tilting his head with an ingratiating half smile toward the reporter who was timorously addressing him. However, the
rest of his stance, Dan noted, was that of a man used to getting his way; hands on his hips inside his open jacket, he looked like a gunfighter ready to draw.

Susan
Boelter
possessed the silky blond hair and serene good looks customary in old WASP families. Dan could not tell whether she was appraising her husband or happy to stand in his shadow. He had heard she quit working as a reporter at the
Herald
after her marriage, but doubted she could have been serious about her career; he recalled seeing her lauded on society pages for the usual array of benevolent activities—mostly in connection with some kind of family foundation.

As Dan circled the group, he caught sight of Mara chatting with Gil
Huyton
. The two had been hidden from his view until then. She wore the well-tailored black suit with a short skirt that had hung in his closet.  When he glanced back again from the front of the room, she was striding toward him with the determined, ambitious walk he knew so well.

"I think I can get Gil to consider a deal on Montano," she said.

Philadelphia's prosecutors were known to be particularly zealous in taking homicide cases to trial—and in seeking the death penalty. The possibility of their dropping down to a mandatory life sentence was not to be lightly dismissed.

"Since when are you and
Huyton
on a first-name basis?"

"You're as bad as he is, Dan. I've known him and his wife for ages. This town ought to be grateful someone like him is willing to roll up his sleeves and try to clean it up."

"And you think I should make it easier for him by pleading a client guilty who swears he didn't do it."

"You don't seriously believe the word of a skank with Montano's rap sheet. He's already served time for rape."

"
Statutory
rape.
He wasn't much older than the girl, and she was crazy about him. The mother was the one who pressed the charges. That's not the same thing as attacking and killing a woman."

"That's
two
women, Dan."

"Nothing links him to that first case."

"He's also got a suspended for pimping."

"
Huyton
can't get in his priors if I don't let Montano testify."