Bad to the Bone (20 page)

Moodrow leaned back on the edge of the ring and ran the towel over his short gray hair. “What about the evidence? Were the stiffs identified?”

“The vials were sent out to a DEA lab in Maryland. The report came back positive for opiates, but not for any particular opiate. The drug isn’t heroin or Demerol or morphine or any drug we know about. The three stiffs consist of two HIV-positive junkies and one pretty young runaway from New Jersey.”

Moodrow tossed the towel into a corner and began to walk toward the lockers at the far end of the room. “Unless I’m missing something, whatever it was in the vials didn’t kill the junkies.”

Tilley grinned. “Well, I didn’t actually inject myself with it, but according to the lab, it doesn’t kill mice. It gets mice stoned out of their minds. You remember that new drug I told you about, PURE? Well the rumor was that PURE was being sold in vials, not bags.”

“Didn’t you say PURE was a brand of heroin?”

“My own snitches told me that junkies were using it, so I naturally assumed it was dope. Which it is. It just isn’t heroin.”

“You think it’s a designer drug, like Ekstacy?”

Ekstacy, created in a clandestine California lab, had swept into New York’s discos in the mid 1980s. For the first year, until the legislature added it to the drug law, it had been sold quite openly.

“Or LSD,” Tilley said. “That was made in a lab, too. It was legal for years. By the way, the only reason I know about this is because Izzie Malkin asked me if any of my snitches were talking about the stiffs. One of them, Deeny Washington, was the main source for PURE.”

“I know Izzie. I know him pretty good.”

“He says you should come down and talk to him, if you want more information.”

Moodrow began to work the combination lock on his locker. “I don’t wanna seem like a party pooper, but how does this new drug relate to Flo Alamare? The doctors said she was positive for heroin.”

“Only that it was a case that looked like an overdose and turned out to be something else. Of course, Flo Alamare’s alive, so the docs can’t slice her brain open to look for poison. Anyway, I just mention it as a possibility.”

“All right, Jim. I know you’re tired.” Moodrow pulled on his shirt, working the buttons with massive fingers. “Wanna hear something funny? All day I been thinking about how I fucked it up yesterday. I should’ve checked the arms of that bodyguard. What’s his name? Kenneth Scott? When I had him alone, I should’ve roiled up his sleeves and checked his arms for needle tracks. What happened was I got caught up with the bullshit, with playing the big, bad cop. The Hanoverians didn’t look like junkies to me, not even middle-class junkies, but there’s no question I should’ve rolled up the bodyguard’s sleeves and checked it out once and for all.”

I
T WAS NEARLY EIGHT
o’clock when Betty Haluka bustled into her lover’s apartment. Her arms were full of groceries and she was bursting with news, but the sight of Stanley Moodrow bent over the kitchen table, a slender pencil clutched in his right hand, brought her up short. There were times when Moodrow seemed to live in the small notebook he kept with him twenty-four hours a day, but this time he was working with a sheet of writing paper. Betty had never seen him write a letter before.

“What’re you doing?” she asked, dumping the packages on the table.

“I’m writing a letter.” He held his cheeks up for a kiss, then began to inspect the goodies in the bag, his face impassive, as always.

“I can see that,” Betty said. “I’m not blind. What kind of a letter?”

“A friendly letter.”

“You mean, as opposed to a business letter?”

“Something like that.”

“Stanley, why are you busting my balls?”

“I don’t wanna be the one to tell you this, but…”

“Who’s the fucking letter to, Stanley?”

Moodrow giggled. “Davis Craddock.” He started to return to his work.

“Stanley, if you don’t stop it, I’ll throw out the ice cream.”

“What kind of ice cream?”

“Dark chocolate peanut butter swirl.”

“That’s extortion.”

“Right now. Right in the garbage. Read the letter.”

“All right. You want me to read the letter, I’ll read it. But I’ll never forget this. You shouldn’t even
buy
chocolate peanut butter if you’re gonna play that kind of a game with it.”

“Right now, Stanley.”

Dear Davis,

Please excuse my addressing you as ‘Davis.’ I know it is presumptuous of me, but all of us at the Royal Society for the Promotion of Creative Hand Humping (you may remember that we created the now commonly used slogan,
Do it Quick or Do it Slow
—
Tour Hankie Never Says No
), feel we have recognized a kindred spirit in you. In fact, in appreciation of your efforts to destroy the nuclear family, you have been nominated for our Jerk-Off of the Year award. This prestigious award, last given to Mike Dukakis for his promotion of defensive tank driving, is symbolized by a bronze miniature of our famous Betty Boop Blowup Doll (created by yours truly) and a lifetime supply of fuzzy tube socks. We’ll be having our annual dinner in two weeks, so please RSVP if you can make it.

Sincerely and with warmest regards,

Vinnie Vaseline

When Moodrow looked up, Betty was standing in the middle of the kitchen, a quart of ice cream in her hand. She stared at him for a moment, then down at her wet hand. “I want a divorce,” she announced calmly.

“You can’t have a divorce,” Moodrow reminded her, “because we’re not married. In fact, we’re not even cohabiting together.”

“In that case, I want a psychiatrist.”

“You could try Davis Craddock. I hear he’s getting an award.”

Betty smiled in triumph. “That’s just what I did. This afternoon I went to my first Hanoverian conference.” She noted Moodrow’s astonished look, then continued. “I begin therapy two days from now.”

Moodrow took a deep breath. “Listen, Betty, Davis Craddock is no joke. This guy would kill you in a minute if he thought you were a threat to him.”

“I suppose your letter isn’t a threat. I suppose your letter is an example of classical drama.”

“The letter’s going out to him
because
he’s crazy. I’m trying to reach a crazy man, to make him paranoid enough to take me personally.”

“How will he know who it’s from?”

“He’ll know. And he’ll know that I’m coming for him. I wish I could show you the expression on his face when I called his bluff with the .45. Craddock is nuts, but he’s in control. I want him to lose control, to panic. Fear isn’t going to make him less dangerous, just stupid and careless.”

Betty began to sort the groceries, taking them from the bag and arranging them on the table. She was trying to phrase her answer in a way that truly represented her feelings. The problem was that she didn’t even like to
think
about the story she would have to tell. She shuffled cans of peas and corn and tomatoes for a minute, then took a deep breath. “This happened to me a long time ago, sixteen, seventeen years. I can’t remember anymore. I never told you about it, because I could never make it good in my own mind. I tried for years, then I stopped thinking about it.

“One day, I picked up a client named David Teitelbaum. He was charged with abusing his two daughters, Anna and Toby. Anna was the oldest. She was eight. Toby was six. The evidence against Teitelbaum was persuasive, but not conclusive. That’s usually the way it is in sexual abuse cases. There were the children’s statements, of course, but the mother hadn’t actually witnessed the abuse and would not be a witness. A medical examination showed some evidence of vaginal and anal scarring, but the doctor who conducted the examination wasn’t willing to swear that it was
absolutely
due to sexual abuse. The trial, if there was to be trial, would hinge on the testimony of the children.

“Teitelbaum swore he didn’t do it. He told me he was a nice Jewish boy with a wife who happened to hate him. Why did she hate him? He didn’t know. Their marriage had been arranged, and he hadn’t gotten to know her before the wedding. True, marriages weren’t really
arranged
anymore, but in the tight, Orthodox community where he grew up, boys and girls were kept apart. One day you came home to find a girl sitting at the dinner table and all the relatives, yours and hers, grinning like idiots.

“ ‘Mona hates everybody. Ask her what she thinks of her parents. Ask her what she thinks of the rabbi. Ask her anything. You’ll see she’s crazy.
Goyim
get a divorce from women like this. Jews shoulder the burden. I tried to be a good husband and this is my reward.’

“I didn’t believe him. I believed the children. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t get him off. The children’s statements were full of hesitations and contradictions. That’s normal. Kids can’t appreciate the importance of clean, emphatic testimony. If you want to get them to talk about something they don’t want to talk about, you have to coax it out of them. But juries don’t necessarily understand children and the hesitations bring doubt. If I put Teitelbaum on the stand and he repeated his accusations against his wife, the doubt could easily blossom into reasonable doubt. I wasn’t afraid of the prosecutor’s cross-examination because there were no witnesses to the abuse and Teitelbaum didn’t have a criminal record.

“The ADA who handled the prosecution, a veteran named Max Bauer, had no illusions about the case. He offered me a plea bargain three days after Teitelbaum was arrested. One count of abuse and five years Upstate. I took it back to Teitelbaum, but I advised him to turn it down. If we waited, we’d do better.

“Teitelbaum was a tailor, a working man struggling to move up into the middle class. The community had already convicted him, and his wife had control of his meager assets. Bail had been set at $50,000 and he had no hope of making it, so if he wanted to sit it out, he would have to survive in the Brooklyn House of Detention. I don’t have to tell you what the other prisoners think of child abusers. In order to make his wait a little easier, I notified the court that my client’s life had been threatened and that the Department of Corrections wasn’t taking adequate measures to protect turn. If he’d been black or Latino, I doubt if I would have gotten a response. But David Teitelbaum was a skinny Jewish man who walked with a stoop. His glasses were so thick that looking into his eyes was like peering into the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. If he was assaulted in prison, no matter what he did, the Jewish community would have been up in arms, so Corrections moved him into protective custody and set up a twenty-four-hour guard in front of his cell. It was like a suicide watch, but it went on for three months.

“I ran into Max Bauer in one of the courtrooms the day before Teitelbaum’s trial was supposed to start. He asked me to meet him in his office after court recessed for the day. I wasn’t surprised when he upped the ante. The kids, he told me, were reluctant to testify with their father present. Not reluctant, I take that back. They were
afraid
to testify. He’d filled their heads with tales of dybbuks and imps and devils, all the horrible creatures who’d attack them if they told their mother what he was doing. (I already knew this from their statements; that was one of the advantages of waiting it out.) In order to avoid a trial, Max would allow Teitelbaum to plead to a single count of neglect. He’d get six months and do three. On the other hand, if we insisted on a trial and Teitelbaum was found guilty on all counts, the DA’s office would push for the max on every count, sentences to run consecutively.

“The trial judge was a tough old bird named O’Brien. He was usually fair to both sides during a trial, but, upon conviction, he gave away time like Santa Claus gives away Christmas candy. I took the plea and the threat back to my client. Teitelbaum accepted the deal without hesitation and did the time, as they say, standing on his head. Three months in the same secure cell and he was back out on the street. A year later, he was arrested for the rape-murder of an eight-year-old Dominican girl.

“I know it was just my job, Stanley. I know all the bullshit rationalizations. The truth is that Teitelbaum was evil in just the way Davis Craddock is evil. He had no conscience, no sense of what he did to those girls. They were objects to be used for his pleasure, like an air conditioner or a toilet bowl. And I helped him get off. Instead of doing five years, he did three months…”

Moodrow got up and took two bowls off the shelf. “I don’t see where this is getting us. Does Teitelbaum make Craddock less dangerous?”

“After Teitelbaum committed the murder, I refused to handle any more child-abuse cases. Technically, Legal Aid lawyers are supposed to take whatever comes along, but the turnover at Legal Aid is so great, the administration tends to compromise, especially with experienced trial attorneys. But that didn’t make it right for me. I carried it around for years. Until I realized that
nothing
could make it right. The system would go on and on and on. Teitelbaums would continue to get off with light sentences, then go out and commit murder. I happen to think, on balance, our system is the best. It’s not perfect, mind you, just better than anything else I know about. But that belief doesn’t make it better. Teitelbaum was a tailor. He didn’t know a damn thing about trials or rules of evidence. If I’d told him there was no chance that a jury would find him innocent, he would have accepted the five years like any good psychopath. There are a number of prisons with specialized programs for sexual offenders.
Maybe
he would have gotten into a program.
Maybe
some psychiatrist would have reached him. One thing’s for sure, that particular little girl, Inez Escobedo, would be alive today. She’d be twenty-two years old.”

“I still don’t see how that makes it safe for you to go into Hanover House,” Moodrow insisted.

“Look, I don’t see how there could be any danger to me. I’m not going to walk up to the nearest Hanoverian and ask if I can speak to Michael Alamare. Davis Craddock doesn’t know anything about me. And I’ve also got the perfect background: a burnt-out Legal Aid lawyer searching for ‘something to believe in.’ ”