VC03 - Mortal Grace (69 page)
Mickey Williams rose. He struck Cardozo as unusually relaxed for a man facing arraignment on murder charges. Unshaven and smiling, he seemed casual, almost cheerful.
“Mr. Williams, you are charged with two counts of second-degree homicide. How do you plead?”
David Moriarty bounded to his feet. “Your Honor, my client pleads guilty.”
A door slammed and a voice shouted, “Just a moment!”
Cardozo turned his head. The benches held the usual midday sprinkling of lawyers, criminals, cops, and reporters. Those who weren’t asleep were clearly nodding off. At the rear of the court an elderly man with a wild crown of white hair pushed through the doorway.
A jolt of surprise caught Cardozo. He recognized the face from front pages of supermarket tabloids: Dotson Elihu—antigovernment gadfly and successful defender of murderous billionaires, international terrorists, and homegrown serial killers.
“Attorney Dotson Elihu, Your Honor. Mr. Williams’s sister has retained me to represent him.”
The judge peered dubiously over half-moon lenses. “Mr. Williams, which of these attorneys is defending you?”
“Your Honor,” Moriarty called out, “the court has appointed me to Mr. Williams’s defense. At no time has he expressed the slightest dissatisfaction with me.”
Elihu threw back his head and burst out laughing, as though he could savor a good legal tall tale as well as the next lawyer. “Mr. Moriarty has done nothing for my client except hold him incommunicado while the state lays the tracks to railroad him. If that sort of malfeasance is advocacy, then someone has rewritten the canons of the New York Bar Association.”
The judge’s gaze rested patiently on the prisoner. “Mr. Williams, have you chosen
either
of these attorneys to represent you? Or do you wish to do so now?”
“Your Honor.” Tess diAngeli rose. “I must protest.”
“Save it for trial. This is arraignment. Well, Mr. Williams? The court hasn’t got all day.”
Mickey Williams blinked painfully, as though embarrassed to be the center of controversy. “Well, Your Honor, if my little sister really hired the gentleman with gray hair—”
“Indeed she did, Mickey.” Elihu waved a piece of paper. “I hold in my hand Rilda-Mae Turnbull’s fax retaining me.”
Williams shrugged. “Then I guess he’s my lawyer.”
“My client,” Elihu said, “pleads not guilty on all counts.”
Tess diAngeli strode angrily to the bench. “Your Honor, in view of Mickey Williams’s appalling record of past offenses and the savagery of the Briar murders, we request that he be held without bail pending trial.”
“Ms. diAngeli … as we are both well aware, criminal court has an overflowing calendar.” The judge sat tapping his fingers on the open file. “How much time are we realistically talking—two, three years?”
“I hope not. The state will do all it can to reasonably expedite trial.”
Dotson Elihu ambled toward the bench. “Your Honor, since my client has no previous record in New York State, and since the police coerced his so-called confession
in the absence of counsel
—”
“Mr. Elihu,” the judge cut in, “none of that’s relevant here today.”
“Then I ask Your Honor to release Mr. Williams on nominal bail on his own recognizance.”
“Your Honor,” Tess diAngeli cried, “Mickey Williams’s continued freedom constitutes a clear danger to the community.”
For a long, deliberating moment, the judge was silent. “The court understands your concern, Ms. diAngeli, but it must balance that concern against the prisoner’s rights. We therefore set bail at five hundred thousand dollars.”
Mickey’s people are dirt farmers. I don’t believe for one minute his sister could afford to hire a big-ticket defender like Elihu.” Cardozo thumped his mug on the desktop. Coffee sloshed across a stack of unsolved crime reports awaiting their semiannual update. “So who’s paying? Where did Elihu get the money to put up bail?”
“Give the coffee a rest, Vince.” Ellie reached down with a Kleenex and daubed the papers dry. “That’s your third cup in ten minutes. You should switch to ginseng tea.”
Cardozo relied on coffee to stoke his brain. Like all addicts, he didn’t want to discuss or defend his habit; and like all addictions, it had begun to deliver diminishing returns. Today his synapses weren’t getting the jump start they needed; the chemical switch in his head refused to click. “How the hell does a showboater like Elihu get in on the act?”
The linoleum floor deadened the slow, careful tap-tap of Ellie’s heels. “You want an educated guess? Elihu represented Corey Lyle in the White Plains hearings. So the cult hired him to help Mickey.”
Cardozo ran it through his mind. “Where do they get their money?”
She shrugged. “Rich supporters.”
“I wonder. They’ve got enough troubles with law enforcement. Why would they go out of their way to identify themselves with a wacko like Mickey? He’s a known rapist and child molester, and now he’s a killer.”
“It could be the cult’s loyal to their members.”
“There’s got to be more to it than that.” Outside the shut door of Cardozo’s cubicle, the squad room kept up its steady bubbling—footsteps hurrying, voices chattering, cop radios giving off bursts of static. “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit on my duff and wait for Mickey to rape another little girl.”
“What makes you so sure he will?”
“Look at his rap sheet. He’s a compulsive sociopath. He can’t control his actions and I doubt he even wants to.” Cardozo’s gaze came up, angry and grim. “If the court’s not going to deal with him, then it’s up to us.”
“Hold on a minute.” Misgiving was written in capital letters on Ellie’s face. “What are you planning to do?”
“Whatever it takes.” Cardozo searched the cluttered desktop and found the transcript of Mickey’s confession. He reread it. He reread Dan Hippolito’s preliminary autopsy and his own report on yesterday’s crime scene. He couldn’t get past a nagging sense that the picture was incomplete—some vital element was still missing.
On his computer, he called up Sergeant Britta Bailey’s crime-scene report. According to Bailey, a man named Jack Briar came to the precinct at 1:10
P.M.
yesterday and reported trouble in his parents’ apartment. Bailey then checked with the telephone operator. Learning there was a receiver off the hook, she broke into the Briars’ apartment and found John and Amalia’s bodies.
That much Cardozo already knew. Now came the part he hadn’t known. “Well, how about that?”
Ellie leaned to read over his shoulder. “What have you found?”
“It turns out Jack Briar wasn’t the first person to report trouble in the Briar apartment. According to Bailey, a woman named Yolanda Lopez made an identical report three days ago.”
The door to the female officers’ changing room was partway ajar. Cardozo rapped loudly. “Is Britta in there?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Cardozo.”
She came to the door tucking her plaid work shirt into faded jeans. “What’s this I hear about Mickey Williams making bail?”
“You heard right.”
Her eyes brimmed with open disgust. “It makes me sick.”
The Muzak was playing “Goody-Goody.” Cardozo hated Muzak. He didn’t see why a police force that was still 20 percent undermanned was wasting any part of its budget on canned music. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
“Make that a beer and you’ve got a date.”
The waitress leaned into the booth and set down a Heineken and a ginger ale.
“Could I ask you something?” Britta lifted her mug.
Cardozo lifted his and clinked.
“Are you on a diet or in AA or something?”
He smiled. It wasn’t the first time a cop had asked him that question. Nowadays, diets and alcohol were two subjects that made a lot of cops insecure. “No, I’m not on a diet and so far I’m not in AA, knock wood.”
“So why the ginger ale?”
“With ginger ale there’s no collateral damage. Gotta keep the old brain clear.”
Britta sighed. “I wish you’d talk to my husband sometime. He’s a cop in the twelfth precinct, and lately he could use a little less booze and a little more clarity.”
This could have been Britta’s roundabout way of saying she trusted Cardozo. His ego enjoyed the stroke, but he knew better than to play marriage therapist or alcohol counselor. “Tell me about Yolanda Lopez,” he said.
Britta shrugged. “Came into the precinct Sunday. Dark-haired, petite Latina—barely five feet tall. She was hysterical. She said John Briar and his wife were very sick and needed help.”
“What kind of help?”
“I couldn’t tell you. Her mouth was going ten miles a minute and half of it was in Spanish. Frankly, she was acting like a crazy.”
“Did you check on it?”
“I phoned the Briar apartment and a guy answered and said the Briars were just fine. He also said he didn’t know any Yolanda Lopez.”
Cardozo ran it through his mind. “Did you get her phone number and address?”
“I always go by the book, Lieutenant.”
Cardozo dropped a quarter into the pay phone, dialed the number, and put a finger to his ear to shut out the fifties retro-rock thudding from the jukebox. There were four rings, a click, and then a female voice weirdly stitched together from sound bites: “I’m sorry, but the number you dialed is no longer in service.”
The coin clanked into the change-return slot. Cardozo dialed zero and identified himself to the operator. “I need some information.” He gave her the number. “When was that line disconnected?”
There was a long, silent wait with ghosts of other phone calls crowding the circuit. And then another click. A district manager asked if she could help.
Cardozo explained who he was and what he needed to know.
“That number was disconnected two hours ago.”
“Why?”
“The subscriber requested it.”
As Cardozo hung up, reality seemed to shift. The light in the bar seemed yellower than a moment ago, as though it had to fight its way through darker impurities. Shadows of customers hunched over their drinks seemed to run at a steeper angle and stretch further.
He returned to the booth and counted out five singles from his wallet. Britta looked up at him curiously.
“I have to run,” he said. “Catch you later.”
About the Author
Edward Stewart (1938–1996) grew up in New York City and Cuba. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Harvard, where he edited the famed
Lampoon
humor magazine. He studied music in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and worked as a composer and arranger before launching his career as a writer. His first novel,
Orpheus on Top
, was published in 1966. He wrote thirteen more novels, including the bestselling Vince Cardozo thrillers
Privileged Lives
,
Jury Double
,
Mortal Grace
, and
Deadly Rich
.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1993 by Edward Stewart
Cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4804-7075-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
THE VINCE CARDOZO MYSTERIES
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
