Last Chance for Glory (22 page)

Bell Kosinski shrugged his shoulders. “You want to put them in an office somewhere, an office that just happens to have oil-stained concrete next to it, that’s fine with me. In fact, you can take it one step further and say they were both nude when the fatal blow was struck. That eliminates the bloody clothes problem altogether. But what you can’t take out is the fact that they knew each other and that he loved her. What you can’t take out is that the case would’ve been a dunker if somebody with ultimate juice hadn’t stepped in. Tell me something, Max, tell me how Grogan, or whoever started the ball rolling, got Billy Sowell’s name?”

“I don’t know,” Steinberg answered. “It’s been bothering me, too.”

“You know what we’re talkin’ about, Marty?” Kosinski shifted his gaze to Marty Blake. “Billy Sowell lives in a box. He has no ties with any city agency. Doesn’t get welfare, disability, food stamps. How the fuck does anyone know enough about his life to set him up?”

“Why don’t we cut to the chase, Bell? Why don’t you tell us what we’re gonna do about it?”

Blake’s voice was dead neutral, which didn’t bother Kosinski at all. If Blake wanted to pretend to play his cards close to the vest, that was perfectly okay. Eventually, Blake would come around and he …

“Hey, Bell, you still with us?” Steinberg’s voice, more concerned than condemning. “You fall asleep?”

Kosinski opened his eyes, grinned sheepishly. “I was reminiscing,” he explained. “Blame it on the booze. Anyway, I only spent a few days on the case before I took my vacation. Tommy and I canvassed the neighborhood around Gramercy Park, spoke to the husband twice, interviewed as many friends and relatives as we could locate. The neighborhood gave us nothing, except for Melody Mitchell. At the time, I was a hundred percent convinced that she couldn’t make a positive ID, but I had Brannigan take her into the house to look at the mug shots anyway. According to him, it was a complete waste.

“The husband, Johan, had an ironclad alibi for the time of the murder. He was on a plane, halfway between Stockholm and Manhattan when his wife was killed. Returning from a business trip. Tillson Enterprises is the largest importer of Scandinavian furniture in the country; the two of them, Johan and Sondra, ran the outfit together. I caught up with him as he came off the plane, told him his wife had been murdered, hit him with it as hard as I could. What I wanted was a reaction, and what he did was fall down. Just like that—he hit the carpet like a sack of potatoes.

“By the time I came back for the second interview, I was sure that Sondra Tillson hadn’t been hit by a professional, that it was an impulse crime. Now, I was looking for the lover, and I put it to Johan in no uncertain terms. ‘If your wife was sleeping around, I want to know it,’ I told him. The statement took him off guard and what he did, the prick, was lie to me.”

“You know that for a fact?” Steinberg demanded. “Or are we maybe looking at a cop hunch?”

“Call it a hunch if you want to. I don’t really give a shit. Sondra Tillson was having an affair and Johan Tillson knew about it. Likewise, the girlfriends and relatives. You wanna hear something funny? Nobody—not one single individual—would admit to having any contact with the victim in the forty-eight hours preceding her death. I tell ya, Max, another couple of days and I would’ve had the lover’s name—I would’a got it by squeezing Johan Tillson like a tube of toothpaste—but then my vacation came up and I took it. I figured I’d put the pieces together when I got back.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Blake asked. “Aren’t you forgetting about Grogan?”

Kosinski tried to shrug, tried to get mad, failed in both attempts. He knew where Blake was going and in his heart of hearts, knew he deserved it. “Yeah,” he admitted, “there was that, too.”

“Because the fact is,” Blake continued, “the frame started
before
you went on vacation. The fact is that you let Billy Sowell hang.”

“Look, Marty …”

“Look at what? Look at Billy Sowell’s corpse? Should I check out the size of his asshole? See if it’s bigger or smaller than the Lincoln Tunnel?”

“For Christ’s sake, Marty, I’m not your damned father.” Kosinski’s first reaction was to wish he could take the words back. His second reaction was to brace himself against an all-out attack. He slid his hand into his pocket, fingered the sap, decided that, come what may, he wouldn’t let Marty Blake tie him into a pretzel. Meanwhile, Blake hadn’t flinched, hadn’t moved a muscle. “Look, what’s done is done. You know your bible? ‘When I was a cop, I spoke as a cop.’ Now I’m wearin’ a different hat and there’s nothing more to be said about it.”

“He’s right,” Steinberg declared. “This is bullshit. You should please save it for your psychiatrist. The
both
of you.” He tapped the table with his index finger. “Because the point is that Max Steinberg is going to be doing all the paying. I’m the cash register and I don’t open for psychodrama. The question here is what we’re gonna do about Billy Sowell and Sondra Tillson.”

“That’s two questions,” Kosinski said. “Because I’d bet my pension against a nickel that the man who killed Sondra Tillson had nothing to do with Billy Sowell.”

B
LAKE STARED AT HIS
untouched drink, half-listened to the babble, bided his time. He was no longer angry, no longer drunk. Something inside him had shifted and was now hardening. It had happened to him several times in the past: when he’d moved out to avoid his drunken father; when Joanna Bardo had summoned him to Manhattan Executive; when he’d left the computer room to go into the field. Looking back, he saw this sequence as inevitable, though at the time he’d assumed it was all just happening. No more than random events to which he reacted.

Blake let his attention fall back into the conversation. They were arguing about the target, whether they should content themselves with Billy Sowell’s killer. Or did conscience demand that Sondra Tillson also be avenged?

“Excuse me for saying this,” Kosinski insisted, “but you didn’t see Sondra Tillson’s body.”

“Big deal,” the lawyer said. “I didn’t see Billy Sowell’s, either. Look, you wanna wag weenies, I got file cabinets
stuffed
with crime-scene photographs. I tell you, when it comes to murdered people, black and white is worse than color.”

Steinberg, his cheeks flushed with alcohol, black eyes glittering maliciously, turned to Marty Blake. “How ’bout you, Mr. Blake? You ever come eyeball to eyeball with a corpse?”

Blake smiled, felt himself drift back to his father’s funeral, envisioned himself standing over the open casket, remembered that, of course, his father’s eyes had been closed. “Guess not, Max. Can’t say as I’ve had the privilege.”

“Well, you didn’t miss nothin’,” Kosinski said. He lifted the empty bottle of Hennessy, frowned, looked over at an uncaring Max Steinberg. “Guess it’s time to get down to business, right?”

“Right,” Steinberg said. “Past time.”

Kosinski set the bottle on Steinberg’s desk, eyed Blake’s untouched drink. “We have to start with the human beings. Sondra Tillson was killed; Billy Sowell was framed. They stand at the center, like all victims. Surrounding them, we’ve got the husband, Johan; the witness, Melody Mitchell; Billy Sowell’s attorney whose name we don’t even know …”

“David Ferretti,” Steinberg interrupted. “He’s writing wills now. Out in Brooklyn.”

“Plus the Honorable John McGuire who passed judgment; Detective Tommy Brannigan who conducted the investigation; Captain Aloysius Grogan who put Billy Sowell’s name in Brannigan’s ear. We can forget about Brannigan and Aloysius Grogan. You’re not gonna crack those two nuts. As for the lawyer, Ferretti, it’s possible he was just a jerk, that he thought the deal he got for Billy Sowell was too good to be true. Likewise for Melody Mitchell. If they were gonna bribe Melody Mitchell, they wouldn’t have bothered with the hypnosis, which actually hurt the case. Now, Johan Tillson knew Billy Sowell didn’t kill his wife. Would he let an innocent man go to prison without getting something in return? I doubt it, but even if he let Billy Sowell hang because he was too embarrassed to admit his wife had a lover, he knows who actually killed her. Judge McGuire, on the other hand, is guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. He knew the kid was being framed; he could have stopped it; he let it happen. It’s that simple.”

Steinberg stopped Kosinski with a wave of his hand. “Okay, fine, for this you don’t have to be a genius. The husband and the judge. What do you plan to do? Beat it out of them?”

“Marty, you’re up.” Kosinski, unable to contain himself, slid Blake’s drink across the surface of the desk.

“It’s not very complicated, Max.” Blake pushed his full glass over to Kosinski. “The first week, I investigate the targets—bank and credit records, deeds and mortgages, tax returns, like that. What I’ll be looking for is enough ammunition to start a panic. Meanwhile, Bell’s gonna check out their homes and offices, look for the easiest way in, who’s got an alarm, a wife, a dog. The next step is to wire them up—believe me, by the time I get finished you’ll be able to hear sugar hit the Frosted Flakes—then have Bell pay a visit, hit them with the facts of life. Me, I don’t think there’s gonna be a problem finding the bad guys. The problem is what we’re gonna do with the proof. That’s where you come in, Max. You and your press connections. You’re gonna play Deep Throat in the Billygate investigation.”

Max Steinberg’s face turned petulant. His eyes and mouth squeezed down; his nose wrinkled up. For a moment, Blake was sure the lawyer was going to cry. Which didn’t surprise Blake all that much. It’s easy to be a hero, he reasoned, when heroism means writing a brief. Or a check.

“You know how many felonies you want me to commit?” the lawyer asked. “Federal and state?”

“Actually, I haven’t counted. I started to, but I ran out of fingers and toes.”

Kosinski laughed softly. “Don’t be nasty, Martin,” he advised. “It’s too early for nasty.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Steinberg demanded.

“It means you haven’t turned us down. Yet.”

Steinberg folded his arms across his chest. “What you’re talking here is disbarment and prison. There’s gotta be another way. A
legal
way.”

“We could always forget about it,” Marty said. “Hey, look, you’re a defense lawyer. You’ve dedicated your life to getting criminals off the hook. Maybe you could look at Billy Sowell’s killer as another notch on the old gun.”

“That’s
enough,
Marty.”

Blake looked over at Kosinski, noted the narrowed eyes, the thin, disapproving mouth. “Yeah, maybe so,” he admitted.

“See, Max,” Kosinski said, “and you could trust me here, because I got a lot of experience in these matters, without badges, we got no hope of doin’ it the right way. We’ll never get court orders for the taps and bugs, never get permission to go into financial records. No, either we do it Marty’s way and try not to get caught, or we just walk away. Me, I’m a lazy drunk. I don’t like to walk.”

“Let me explain a few things,” Blake interrupted. “You’re not gonna do shit, Max, except supply the money. Not in the beginning. Me and Bell are gonna set it up, collect the evidence, then
retrieve
the hardware. The idea is to get in and out before anybody knows what’s happening. Bell’s gonna be the target, of course. He’ll be the one asking the questions and the one they’re gonna go after if things get rough. What
you
have to do is pick your reporter carefully, make sure he’ll stand up, protect his source. Because the whole idea is to force the cops to investigate the cops, which is like asking politicians to tell the truth. It doesn’t happen unless there’s real strong motivation.”

Steinberg, his mouth set in a tight, determined line, pushed the chair away from his desk and crossed the room to a three-drawer, oak-paneled file cabinet. He opened the top drawer and removed a .32-caliber automatic. “I had a client,” he announced, “two or three years ago. A crazy man. Talked to himself, heard voices, but smart, too. Sly is a better word for it. I pled him insane for the murder of his wife and two children, got him off the hook, at least as far as prison was concerned. Somehow, I failed to make it clear that when the jury said, ‘Not guilty,’ it only meant that he was going to the crazy house instead of jail.
He
thought he was gonna walk out of the courtroom. A free man, so to speak.

“Well,
boychicks,
as you might expect, when he figured it out, he flipped. Threatened to cut my head off was what he did. I admit the jerk was scary, but I’d been threatened before, so I didn’t think much of it. Until he escaped on the way to Mattewan. I bought this gun twenty-four hours later, carried it in my coat pocket; I was that sure the prick was coming after me, that any minute he’d appear with an ax in his hands. As it turned out, he headed north after his escape and never came within a hundred miles of Manhattan.

“Still, it taught me a lesson: better to keep so far away from the line that you can’t cross it by accident. I stopped taking cash payments from clients, started reporting all my income to the IRS, stopped encouraging witnesses to perjure themselves. What I didn’t want is that I should be hunted again—not by an individual, not by the government. Now, I’m being asked to risk going to prison.”

Steinberg paused, held up the automatic for inspection. “Not much of a weapon, it’s true. Fifteen-year-old gangbangers wouldn’t spit on it. But, for me, it made a big difference.” He paused again. “Look, it’s easy to say, ‘We’ll investigate the targets, wire up the houses, retrieve the hardware.’ I mean, you don’t have to worry about the consequences of everything going right. That much is obvious. But what about the consequences of things going wrong? What if they catch you going into the houses? What if they find the bugs? Like I told you before, Steinberg doesn’t back down. But that doesn’t mean Steinberg’s a moron, either. Marty, you said something about money. How much do you need and what are you gonna do with it?”

Blake saw the question as a command, which is what it was. He forced himself to react calmly. “Somewhere between five and ten thousand dollars. Information costs money. It’s not like in the movies where a ten-year-old can break into any computer in the world. If you wanna get into the IRS computer, for instance, you have to find somebody with access to rent you a little time. And like any other black-market operation, illegal time costs a lot more than legal time. The same principle applies to the hardware. I have to buy it on the black market, because if I buy it legally, the serial numbers will come right back to me if it’s found.”