The Defense: A Novel (15 page)
Three files were of no use at all. Expert reports compiled by four different law firms: legal opinions and expert summaries on the case—none of which helped. Some experts said Volchek would be the worst witness they’d seen in their careers. I thought that to be a fairly reasonable assessment. All of the reports and expert opinions came to the same conclusion—Volchek was guilty.
The other four files contained the trial bundle. File one contained the charges and a transcript of Volchek’s interviews with NYPD. Volchek hadn’t answered a single question in any interview. The only other document of interest was a photocopy of the front page of the
New York Times
from April fifth, two years ago. A mug shot of Mario Geraldo, probably from an early arrest, and below the fold, a picture of Volchek being led from the court. The article focused on the murder and subsequent arrest of the leading light of the Russian Mafia.
File two largely consisted of photographs and maps. Mainly photos of the crime scene. The photos revealed an untidy apartment with a fat man on the floor. The fat man had a bullet hole in his face, an inch below the left eye and a quarter inch from the nose. A pretty central shot. There was bound to be a medical examiner’s report somewhere in the papers, but I hadn’t found it yet. I didn’t need to read the report. This guy had the cause of death written all over his face. Momentarily, the pain in my neck eased, and I stretched my shoulders again to prolong the relief.
The fat man in the photos wore a grubby white vest and dark pants. He was barefoot. Mario Geraldo, the victim. His appearance didn’t give the impression of him being a typical victim. He looked like he came straight from the casting couch of the best Scorsese movies. There were four Italian crime families in New York. I couldn’t think of anyone by the name of Geraldo, but the name had some resonance that I couldn’t quite define yet.
I held the photo under the desk lamp in the chambers and peered closely at the fat man lying in the middle of the room. I tried to make out his tattoos in case they were old gang tats. None of the ink was territorial. I saw powder-burn marks around the entry wound. He’d been shot close; the gun almost at his face but not touching the skin. If the gun had been touching his head when it went off, the powder wouldn’t have burned such a wide area of skin and there would be a smaller, but more profound, circular burn from the hot mouth of the gun barrel.
I emptied all the photos from the file onto the desk and started piecing together the scene. There was a report from the CSI and a statement from the IO, a guy named Martinez. I didn’t want to read either one of these documents before I’d examined the photos and made up my own mind. If I read their reports, it might infect my interpretation of the scene. Not that there was a lot to interpret. The cops caught Little Benny in the apartment with the gun still hot on the floor. He confessed to the murder a day after he signed his plea bargain. He got twelve years, would be out in seven.
I could see no blood spatter on the floor behind the victim’s head. I picked up three more photos: close-ups of the head from different angles. Mario got shot either when he was sitting or kneeling down, but definitely not lying down, as there was no evidence of spatter on the carpet. The blood on the carpet was clearly postmortem leakage.
I could still hear Volchek and Arturas in conversation in the next room as I pored over the shots of the apartment.
The walls of the victim’s apartment were cream. The spatter showed up easy. A closer inspection of the photos revealed red spots in the center of the wall directly behind Mario’s body. In the middle of the staining I saw a small hole, the bullet’s final resting place and, an inch above that hole, a picture nail. From this I felt fairly certain that Little Benny had sat at the small dining table when he’d fired the fatal shot. The table lay just in front of Mario’s body, and an upturned chair wasn’t far away. Little Benny and his victim had sat at the table together before Benny fired the shot.
Volchek hadn’t mentioned the reason for the hit, but it became clearer when I saw photo fifty-two. Glass covered the dining table. On the floor I saw a broken picture frame. A close-up shot revealed the photo in the frame to be a black-and-white professional photograph of a good-looking man holding a baby. It must have been the photo that came with the frame.
The victim didn’t take pride in his appearance: He hadn’t shaved in days and there were food stains on his vest. His apartment seemed filthy, but even a slob would sweep up broken glass and there were no cuts on his feet. I couldn’t see any wounds on Mario other than the gunshot, so he probably hadn’t been hit with the photo frame. The rest of the furniture remained intact: no open drawers, no signs that the apartment had been ransacked or even searched. I guessed the picture frame had originally hung on the nail that I’d seen just above the blood spatter. There didn’t appear to be any blood on the picture frame and no bullet holes in the photo. It appeared that Mario had taken the picture off the wall for some reason before he was shot.
I spread out the rest of the photos on the desk, and my attention was drawn to shots of the kitchen sink in Mario’s studio apartment. The first crime-scene photo wasn’t so clear, but it appeared to show a mixture of black sludge and paper in the sink. The last photo in the set was a close-up. It wasn’t sludge in the sink. It was the remnants of one or maybe two Polaroids that looked as though they had been burned before somebody ran the faucet and tried to mash up what was left. Only one corner of a single photo was still visible. I could just make out an arm and a hand. That was it.
Easing my back into the chair and squirming when I felt the bomb jab into my skin, I tried to piece together what had happened in that apartment. Mario had not been shot at his front door. Little Benny had gotten into the apartment, and I figured he even sat down across the dining table from his victim. Why not sit on the couch? Why sit at the table? Mario had taken the picture frame off the wall; the bullet hole and the blood spatter were framed in the clean rectangle of wall where the picture had saved the paint beneath it from the accumulating dust and grime. The frame was on the floor, beside the table, the broken glass spread across the tabletop. The picture itself was a generic photo that came with the new frame. Then the burned photographs in the sink. My best guess was that this was a business transaction gone wrong. Little Benny had arrived at the apartment on some pretense of doing business. That’s why they sat at the table. Mario took the picture frame off the wall. They broke it open because something was hidden in that frame, and my only thought was that the photos in the sink were once hidden behind that stock image of the father and child.
It was a leap, a thin, treacherous leap.
But it made sense.
The short statement from the arresting officer, a female cop named Tasketh, confirmed that they’d received a call about a disturbance in Mario’s apartment from one of his neighbors. The NYPD patrol car was only a block away, and the cops got into Mario’s apartment building just as the shot was fired. They broke down the door to find Mario dead and Benny sitting patiently at the table, his gun on the floor. Tasketh stated that a smoke alarm began whirring as they were breaking down the front door. I noticed that this cop’s statement bore a mark saying it had been agreed by the defense so Tasketh wouldn’t have to give evidence.
My theory was that Little Benny was sent to Mario’s to kill him and get back the photos, but Little Benny got coldcocked by the cops and he probably figured he had to get rid of them. So he burned the photos in the sink. I had no way to be sure. Surely Miriam must have thought about this, and I thought it likely that Miriam came to the same conclusion I did but rejected it as motive because of lack of evidence. For me, it was just a hunch, a gut feeling.
My survival on the street for the first part of my life had largely been based on listening to my gut. The prosecutor couldn’t present her gut to the jury; she needed evidence for a motive.
In her opening statement, Miriam hadn’t talked a lot about the motive behind Mario’s murder. Prosecutors love motive because juries love motive. Only reason she didn’t hammer it into the jurors was because she didn’t
have
a strong motive. If Little Benny had told her why he’d been ordered to kill Mario—that would have been the first thing Miriam told the jury. Instead, she would let the jury come up with their own motive. This was a powerful and risky play for any prosecutor.
What did those burned photographs show?
Why did Mario have them? Why was he killed?
Something didn’t add up. Not yet. But this felt important. The murder of Mario Geraldo served as the spark to ignite this whole situation. Little Benny had given his boss up for murder and kept quiet about the rest of the operation, but why? Was it out of loyalty to his fellow
vor
? Something about Little Benny’s motives didn’t make sense.
I felt like I’d just dipped my fingers into a black pool, that there was a good deal more about this murder and this whole situation hidden below the surface. What I didn’t realize then was how deep those waters ran.
Turning my attention to a new file, I found the depositions and statements. There were no depositions or statements from Little Benny. That made sense. In order for the prosecutor to depose a witness, they had to let the defense know when and where the deposition would happen. That meant revealing Little Benny’s location to Volchek’s lawyers. The FBI had probably spent a fortune keeping Little Benny hidden, so they weren’t going to send an open invitation to every hit man in the Russian Mafia by naming a date, time, and location for Benny to appear. Even if they didn’t hit Benny at the deposition, they would make sure to follow him afterward. The rules often went out the window when the witness’s life was at risk.
The investigating officer’s statement read well. Raphael Martinez could be a star in the making. He stuck to the facts, didn’t pose theories of the crime like he was taught in the academy, didn’t infer anything from the crime scene, and didn’t embellish the facts. He’d basically ignored everything he’d been taught, and that made him a great witness. This guy would be almost impossible to cross-examine.
I closed the files for a moment. My eyes felt raw, my throat dry.
“Arturas, do you have anything to drink?” I called.
“It’s coming.”
If I was going to be up all night working, I needed something to keep me going.
An image of Amy flooded my mind, the thought of her shivering and whimpering, scared out of her mind. She was a smart girl, did well in class, and loved reading. When she was younger, her mother liked to read her princess stories and fairy tales. The alarm had sounded on my watch at eight on my first night in alcohol rehab, and knowing that she had that same alarm call made me feel connected. We talked, and I read her a chapter a night from
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. She could read just fine on her own. She said she liked my voice; it was soothing. At the beginning of my treatment, I’d felt a lot like Alice: that I’d been tumbling around in a strange world, drinking everything in sight to get out of it, to get out of the law, to change what had happened. By the end of my time in rehab, I’d come to realize that disappearing into a bottle didn’t solve anything. When I’d left rehab, I had been sure that I would never practice law again. Christine and Amy picked me up after I checked out of the addiction center, and we ate hamburgers and fries at a little joint around the corner. That felt good. Felt like old times. My wife was always there for me when I needed her, even though I hadn’t been there for her. There was tension between us, but I felt that was easing because of Amy. My daughter and I were slowly reconnecting through reading and talking about books, although I made sure not to tell Christine about the kind of books that Amy really loved. In my apartment I kept a small library on sleight-of-hand techniques, magic tricks, poker, and lots of books on my hero—Harry Houdini.
During Amy’s second overnight stay at my apartment, I came out of the kitchen, having fixed dinner, to find Amy reading a biography of Houdini. Christine knew all about my past, and she would not have approved of Amy reading that stuff; she thought it was a bad influence. I didn’t tell Christine about Amy’s appetite for Houdini. Just as I didn’t tell her that I had taught Amy a few coin tricks to wow her friends. At ten years of age, Amy was in that magic time of her youth when I was still the most important man in her life. My pal, Judge Harry Ford, had told me to enjoy it because in a year or two I would turn into a nobody who ran a free car service.
My lips began to tremor. Amy had her whole life ahead of her.
I coughed, rubbed my face hard, and reopened the files.
Apart from the cop, and the inevitable Benny, there were two other witnesses. The first was a girl, Nikki Blundell, a twenty-six-year-old nightclub dancer. She saw Volchek and Mario having a fight in the Sirocco Club on East Seventh Street, the night before he was killed. Miriam knew, just as well as I did, that a bar fight wasn’t enough motive for a professional hit, but it was still pretty damning evidence.
The only other witness was the vic’s cousin, Tony Geraldo. And suddenly I remembered. I knew a Tony G who worked for Jimmy “the Hat” Fellini, my boyhood pal. Jimmy’s amateur boxing career came to an end when he went into the family business; that business was organized crime. Tony G and I had met once, a long time ago, at Jimmy’s place. He collected for Jimmy. I couldn’t quite picture Tony, but I would know if it was the same guy just by looking at his shoes. Bagmen cover a lot of miles in the car. They wait around a lot; they spend a long time collecting, protecting, and being there for the money. Being an employee in a high position of trust, they tended to be older guys. After spending a week in their car, a couple more days collecting, and a day beating somebody half to death, these guys didn’t care to look after their appearance. Hence the one important thing—they wore expensive, soft, light, old-fashioned shoes that your granddaddy would wear. No Italian leather, pointy-toed shoes for these guys; they’d be in agony before they got through their first pickup. Octogenarians and serious Mafia men—they kept the manufacturers of comfortable American shoes in business.
