False Witness (3 page)

He stopped speaking.

“There was a great deal of blood, Mr. Doyle. Yes. I saw that myself. It must have been very shocking for you to walk in on that. And Sanderalee, Mr. Doyle. Tell me.
Tell me.”

His eyes glazed. “There she was, you see, that poor child, all broken, all ... broken, all torn and bleeding, everything covered with blood and her hand, her poor hand was clutching the telephone like a vise.” He blinked and said to me, “It was hard to realize then, what we were seeing, how terrible it was. How hurt she’d been. Only her eyes seemed alive: her eyes, so wide-open, dear God, what her eyes had seen. And the poor younger cop, the twenty-two or twenty-three-year-old, Christ, he went whiter than the walls and the older policeman, he took over and he said, ‘Petey, get on the phone in the other room and get an ambulance’ and then ... I guess he realized what neither of us, the younger one or I, had realized. He said to me ... funny, this policeman’s voice was so strong and so calm. He took charge, very snappy like—like a soldier—he said to me, ‘Pop, you find a plastic bag in one of the cupboards here and you fill it with ice from the freezer. Just do it,’ he said, although I didn’t realize why. Like ‘boil water, the baby’s coming.’ ” Timothy Doyle laughed. It was a nervous, inappropriate laugh and we both knew it but he couldn’t help it. He laughed a little more; then he coughed and put his head down. When he raised his face, there were long running tears trickling down his cheeks. I reached out and pressed his arm. He was trembling.

“Mr. Doyle. You did that, what the policeman told you to do? The ice, the plastic bag?”

“Oh yes. I did that. And then the younger cop came back in and said the ambulance was on its way and then there was a terrible gagging sound. Yes. That’s what it was: a dying sound. Ms. Dawson was strangling right there on the floor and the three of us looking down at her. And the younger of the policemen, white-faced and shaken, he knelt down and just, it seemed to me anyway, he covered her face with his, he was face down to her. I couldn’t tell, of course, but I knew anyway, he was helping her to breathe and ... he looked up all of a sudden and—” Mr. Doyle stopped speaking.

He put his face in his hands and his shoulders heaved convulsively. I dug into my pocketbook and came up with a wad of tissues, which I separated: half for him, half for me. I felt a wave of sympathetic sobbing deep inside my chest, which is where it would have to stay for now. That’s all I needed: to sit and get hysterical with my witness.

“Okay, Mr. Doyle. Take a deep slug of that tea of yours. Okay.
Tell me, Mr. Doyle.”

He regained control. It was even worse than when he’d been emotional. He spoke in a dead steel voice; by rote, he described the indescribable.

“When the young policeman tried to help her to breathe, he realized there was something blocking her windpipe, or whatever. He ... put his mouth over hers and sucked hard and then he raised his face and spit something into his hand. At just about that moment, the medics arrived. They burst into the apartment. They took one look and thought the young policeman was wounded. His face was covered with blood. His mouth ... and then he looked at what was in his hand. It ... it was what had blocked the girl’s breathing. He screamed. The young policeman. He leaped up as though an electric prod had touched him.” Mr. Doyle studied his clasping and twining fingers for a moment and then said softly, “It was her lip, you see, the flesh that she had bitten off. It had come loose and slipped into her throat and he sucked it out and cleared her breathing passage. And saved her life, if the poor girl will live after all that’s happened. And the policeman, he suddenly keeled over with his hands clutching his stomach, frantic as to where he could ... he was convulsed, you see, and my God, he didn’t want to add to ... I grabbed his arm and turned him to the kitchen sink. Now maybe I destroyed some evidence, I hope to God not, but I turned on the cold water and sloshed the boy’s face and washed away the vomit from the sink. And from his face. And the blood from his mouth.”

“And then what, Mr. Doyle?”

“And then, they took over is all. The medics. She was breathing with short gasping sounds and they bundled her up and took her out on a stretcher. And then. Yes. Then the older one, the older patrolman, he helped the medic pry the telephone receiver from—from her—her hand and ...”

“And put it into the plastic bag you’d filled with ice?”

He nodded.

“From the moment you saw her until they took her away on the stretcher, did she say a word? Anything that sounded like a word?”

“Not a word, ma’am. Just a small baby sound, a sighing when she breathed. Not a word.”

Okay. We’d gotten the shock stuff over with; he’d survived it. It was out in the open. Now. Backtrack.

“Mr. Doyle. When you took Sanderalee Dawson and this man up in the elevator, and they didn’t speak at all, and you didn’t look directly at either of them, where did you look?”

He closed his eyes tightly, then snapped them open. “At his feet. At his running shoes. He was wearing a navy blue runner’s suit. I said that in my report. But I’d forgotten about the shoes.”

“What about the shoes?”

“They were ... different. Not your usual Adidas or Nikes. They were different. I’ve never seen shoes exactly like that before.”

“Mr. Doyle, are you familiar with running shoes?”

“I am. In this building alone, I can’t tell you how many of them run. It’s the thing now, you know, and they get all decked out just so. Dear God, I wish I could tell you more, but just that one thing: his shoes were ... different. Special.”

“Okay. We’ll get some catalogues to you. Maybe they were imported or something. It might be very important, Mr. Doyle.” I stood up.

“Mr. Doyle, did you see this man come back downstairs? Did you see him again, after bringing him up to the eighth floor?”

“No, miss. He never came through the lobby.”

There was a back door—a service exit that opened outward; it had a safety lock so that it could not be opened from the outside. It backed onto an alley. Bloodstains had been found at the door, which had been shoved open and left ajar.

“Mr. Doyle, thank you for the tea, and for all your time. I will probably come back and talk with you again.” We walked into the small entrance hall and I looked up at the high ceiling for the first time. There was a lovely, shining crystal chandelier hanging from a gleaming brass chain. Dimly, I could make out angels on the ceiling, frolicking in a large circle.

“I’d like to really take a good look at Holcroft Hall. I’ve passed it many times through the years, but never really looked at it.”

“I can give you its long and interesting past, Ms. Jacobi,” Timothy Doyle told me. “This place here, it’s the real genuine article, Ms. Jacobi. You come back another day and I’ll tell you,” he said, love and pride in his voice.

Bobby had his car ready at the curb and we headed toward Roosevelt Hospital. The morning light was grayish blue, dampish, raw with a March wind that had played around with Bobby’s yellow hair. A farmboy’s cowlick stood up dead center, defying the big-city hairstylist’s efforts. His handsome face was drawn and thoughtful. The scattering of freckles over the bridge of his nose was ridiculous: a man of thirty-two with freckles. Huck Finn. Bobby Jones. He sucked on the corner of his mouth, which activated two deep cheek dimples. We stopped for a red light, and he turned to me, his honest, open, midwestern face astonished at the evil one human being had visited on another.

“My God, Lynne. My Lord, what he did to her.”

“They don’t do things like that in Lincoln, Nebraska, do they, Bobby Jones?”

“Except in wartime, I don’t think they do things like that anywhere in the world, Lynne.”

I smiled sweetly and then asked him, “Bobby, dear, have you ever heard of a mass murderer named Charlie Starkweather? I do believe he was a near neighbor of your’n.”

W
ITHIN THREE MINUTES OF
our arrival at the Roosevelt Hospital Emergency Unit we learned that Sanderalee Dawson had been transferred by ambulance to New York Hospital for special surgery. Within the next three minutes, it became crystal clear to me that a prosecutor’s nightmare was unfolding in the large public waiting room.

In the center of the room, Deputy Police Commissioner in Charge of Public Relations Fred Mandell stood beaming and nodding and grinning and becoming serious and dramatic by turns, in response to his former colleagues from two of the major national television networks.

“Want to try that again, Freddie?”

“Turn the kid in to the camera, Fred. Damn. I’m not picking up on the blood enough.”

Deputy Police Commissioner Fred Mandell was not a police officer. He had never been a police officer and he could never begin to qualify as a police officer. Yet he took his high appointed role as Public Relations Commissioner very much to heart. Rumor was he carried a pearl-handled .32 and even knew how to use it. He was handsome, personable and went out of his way to accommodate the cameramen assigned both from the networks and from the newspapers. He was posing and positioning one of my primary witnesses, the young patrolman who had apparently saved Sanderalee Dawson from strangling on her own lip.

I had spotted a small empty office on our way in and I told Bobby Jones, “Get that jerk over here right away. And get that young police officer off to a corner and don’t let him open his mouth—not to show his bloody fangs or to make one more remark.”

Deputy Police Commissioner Fred Mandell approached me with a pleasant expression, his arms opening wide for one of those European side-to-side embraces with kisses flung into the air. I slid away from him and slammed the door closed. The puzzled, slightly worried expression wiped the stupid grin from his face.

“Been holding a little free-for-all press conference out there, have you, Fred?”

“Lynne, Lynne. They are our best friends in the long run. We’ve got to keep them on our side.”

“How much did you let that poor dopey-looking kid with the blood on his mouth say?”

“Hey, Lynne, wasn’t that kid something?” Fred shuddered. “Yuk, imagine sucking out a thing like that. And he’s able to laugh and clown around about it now, just like it’s an everyday thing. He couldn’t have more than a year on the job, and he handled himself beautifully.”

Wonderful.

“You keeping notes for your book, Fred: my three most wonderful cases as a police commissioner? You signed up with anyone yet? This will be one hell of a case. It’s got all the elements: beautiful victim, a racial angle, sex-sex-blood-and-gore. Just one thing, Fred. You put a lid on. Right now. A very tight, not-another-single-word lid. Not one single leak. Nothing, without my approval. Got that, Fred?”

“You’re a very uptight lady, Lynne, you know that?”

“Fred. Commissioner Mandell. Your fun is over for the night. Don’t make me get an injunction. Smile a lot and wink at your pals out there, but open your mouth once more, say one more word about my case without my permission, and I’ll take away your pearl-handled revolver.”

His handsome face tightened and then relaxed. He reverted to the anxious-to-please former television executive he had been before the Mayor, for God knows what reason, made him a police commissioner.

“How could I refuse such a charming request from such a charming lady?”

“You can’t. Now tell that little patrolman to get his butt in here.”

That cop would have broken Mr. Timothy Doyle’s kind heart, the little jerk. He had had his moment. He had behaved properly and selflessly. But now he had reverted to his more basic self. I could see him twenty years from now; the smug lines had begun in the corners of his young mouth. His eyes narrowed and measured me with a cool and distant wariness: who the hell was I?

“Sit down, officer. I’m Assistant District Attorney Lynne Jacobi, Bureau Chief of the Violent Sex Crimes Division.”

“Oh? I’m Police Officer Peter Delaney. Me and my partner were the first on the scene with that woman ...”

“Tell you how we’re going to do this, officer.
I’m
going to ask you a question and
you’re
going to give me an answer. Clear?”

His brows climbed slowly up his forehead and a grin played around his lips and he shrugged. He still didn’t have the vaguest idea who I was;
he
was the hero of the moment.

“Where did that blood come from, officer? That blood that’s smeared on your mouth?”

His hand reached up and his fingertips delicately traced the evidence of his glory. “From that Sanderalee-whatever’s mouth, lady. Didn’t no one tell you about what happened?”

I leaned against a desk and folded my arms and regarded this kid from the distance of nearly twenty years; measured him; let him enjoy a few more seconds of his glory.

“Officer Delaney, don’t mess around with me, because if you do I’ll wreck you so totally, so completely that you’ll spend the next eighteen or nineteen years plucking drunks from public toilets from one end of this city to the other. And no one, sonny, no one at all, will want to see your face smeared with vomit on their front pages. You got that? You ready to sit up straight and start behaving like a professional police officer?”

He had gone a little pale; a little tighter; a lot more resentful. His fingers touched the corners of his mouth again.

“Look, lady, I ...”

“Chief.
You call me
Chief,
because that’s my title. Got it?”

“Yes, sir. Uh-uh-Chief. I’m ... well, you see, me and my partner were the first on the scene and ...”

“No, we’ll get to all that when I ask you. You tell me where that blood came from that’s on your mouth right now. Or you want me to tell you how it happened? Did someone out there say ‘Hey, officer, show us how it was’? Did someone suggest you dip your eager little fingers into the blood on your tunic and smear it on your mouth so it would look more dramatic for the cameras?”

Right on target. The kid started to fall apart. I let him because he had it coming, even though it wasn’t totally his fault.

“All right. Now we’re being honest with each other, Police Officer Delaney. You will speak to
no one
without the permission of someone from my office, whether it be me or one of my subordinates. Got it? Good. Now, I spotted a washbasin over there behind the screen. Go over and wash your face, then come back here and show me your memo book.”