Dog Day Afternoon, page 5
“Actually, no. It’s too high profile, and too awful an offense. Of course we would welcome a guilty plea to avoid the expense of a trial, but no reduced sentence will be offered. I do have a question, though. Why did you take the case?”
Richard knows that I want to work as little as possible, and only when I think the client is innocent. He doesn’t believe I could think that of Williams.
“Marcus. Marcus swears by him. That carries a lot of weight with me.”
Richard nods. “Interesting. Anyway, I’m glad we had a chance to catch up.”
“So am I. And you know I love coming down here. I have so many close friends among your colleagues.”
He laughs. “Did they throw rose petals at you as you walked down the hall?”
“Actually, I think they were knives.”
The next crime scene Laurie and I are visiting is unusual.
That’s because in this case we are hoping it’s actually a crime scene; our case and our client’s chances for an acquittal probably depend on its being one.
We’re at the garden-apartment complex in Clifton where Nick Williams lives, or at least where he lived before moving into the Passaic County jail. He had a studio apartment next door to Rafael “Rafe” Duran, the other young man who Marcus has been mentoring.
Duran is not home now; he’s at work. That’s fine; we’ll come back and talk to him later. Right now we just want to see the place and judge the credibility of Williams’s story, since the jury may be judging it themselves at trial. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the jury will even hear it. We’re a long way from that.
Corey Douglas has been canvassing the neighborhood, talking to the residents, and he told Laurie that he’ll meet us here, because he has someone he wants us to talk to. But for now we’re just checking out the place, especially the area behind the house, where Williams says the kidnapping took place.
The eight identical units have four apartments each, separated on each side from its neighbor by a driveway. A common garage sits in the back at the end of each of those driveways.
Laurie and I walk the length of the one adjacent to Williams’s unit, on the right. At the end is the garage where he kept his car. Laurie goes directly to it and lifts the door open. She doesn’t bother putting on gloves or being careful since the presence of powder indicates that the cops have already dusted the handle for prints.
“No automatic opener necessary,” she says. “Anyone could have gotten in.”
We look into the garage and see only one car, a fairly beaten-up Chevy Malibu.
“Is that Nick’s?” She’s started to use Nick’s first name; I still refer to him as Williams.
“Yes. It matches what he told me.” I point to the back door of the apartment unit. “He says he left through that door, as he always did, and at some point between there and the garage they grabbed him. That’s all he remembers.”
“They knocked him out?”
“He doesn’t know, but he had no bruises, so maybe they used some kind of drug, or anesthesia.”
“And they had a car?”
I shrug. “He and I have no idea.”
“But they must have driven here and taken him off in their car.”
“Right. This is going to be hard for a jury to buy into.”
Laurie doesn’t answer for a while, a sure sign that she agrees with me. Then, “So three days later they dropped him off at the rest stop.”
I nod. “Which is what he says happened.” Then, “But there is one thing which might corroborate his story.”
“What’s that?”
“If he had no car, and if they didn’t drop him off at the rest stop like he claims, then how did he get there? And if he somehow did have his car, and Marcus picked him up at the rest stop, then how did the car get back here?”
“Good point.”
We’re interrupted by Corey walking up the driveway with a man who I would estimate is in his late twenties. He must be the neighbor that Corey said we should speak with.
Corey introduces him as George Truesdale, and George tells me that he’s seen me on television and that it’s “really cool” to meet me. Obviously George is a quality individual.
“Tell them what you told me,” Corey says.
George nods. “Okay, sure. Am I going to have to testify or anything?”
“We’re a long way from that, George. Let’s hear what you have to say first.”
“Okay. Nick is a buddy of mine; we hang out a lot. I work near the law office where he did. I’m a cashier at the 7-Eleven on Market Street.” Then, probably feeling the need to explain, he adds, “Today’s my day off.”
“Okay,” I say, because the conversation seems to be lagging.
“So Nick would give me a ride to work and back. I live a couple of blocks that way; he’d pick me up. But on that day, he didn’t show.”
“Which day?”
“You know … the day those people got killed.”
“Had Nick been acting in any way unusual the last time you saw him?”
“No, but I hadn’t seen him in a few days. The day before, he got his car serviced, so he didn’t drive me then either.”
I make a mental note to check into the car servicing, then ask, “So what did you do when he didn’t show up that day?”
“I called him to see what was going on, but he didn’t answer, so I walked down here. As I got near the house, a car was pulling out of the driveway. There was a guy driving; looked like a big guy but it was hard to tell. And there was another guy in the backseat.”
“You didn’t know who they were?” Laurie asks.
“No, but it seemed weird. I mean, the passenger seat in the front was empty, but the other guy was in the back. Like it was a cab or something, but it was a regular car.”
“What kind of car was it?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Just a regular car … black or dark blue. I’m not really into cars. But I never saw it before, and I never saw them before, and Nick wasn’t around. It wasn’t like Nick. Then when the shooting happened, and they were looking for Nick, I thought it might mean something.”
“Would you recognize those guys in the car again?”
“Sorry, but I don’t think so.”
“George, if you think of anything else, anything at all, call Corey, okay?”
“Sure, but I told you everything. Will this help Nick?”
“It might, George. It just might.”
Our conversation with George Truesdale has had a major effect on my attitude toward this case: I too am now thinking of my client as “Nick.”
Actually, that’s a secondary effect. The real change is that Truesdale’s story fits in so well with what Nick has told me that I have an increased glimmer of hope that Nick might be telling the truth.
Of course, not every “hope glimmer” turns out to be meaningful; for example, at one point last year I hope-glimmered that the Mets could get to the World Series. And I hope-glimmered a date with Nancy Dolman my entire senior year in high school. It turned out that Nancy had the exact opposite hope glimmer and hers prevailed.
Hope glimmering is a zero-sum game.
The two people that Truesdale saw might have had nothing to do with Nick; eight apartments are adjacent to that driveway. And that the passenger sat in the back might well be of no significance; for all I know the car was an Uber.
But it tends to at least be consistent with Nick’s story, and even though Truesdale’s recounting of events would carry little weight in court, it tends to make this lawyer feel better.
I am also starting to think in terms of trial strategy. Nick’s story could at this point only be told by Nick; no one else could testify to it. Like all defense attorneys, I would only put my client on the stand as a last resort; there’s too much chance of a cross-examination disaster.
Besides, Nick’s story has huge holes, even as he tells it. Where was he for three days? He doesn’t know. Why was he taken? He doesn’t know. Who took him? He doesn’t know.
The position of the defense, at this point, is that he was taken to set him up for the shootings. The tattoo, plus the referring to the witness by her nickname before keeping her alive to testify, was a setup to make things point even more clearly to Nick.
Our theory, such as it is, makes sense, as long as one believes the kidnapping narrative. Getting the jury to believe it is going to be a neat trick.
The use of the nickname Monty for Sally Montrose is particularly interesting. It shows that the real killer was familiar with her, whether through work or somewhere else. The methodical way he went through the office, apparently knowing exactly where he was going, also shows that it was an inside job.
Unfortunately the prosecution completely agrees with our assessment and uses it to point to Nick. He knew Montrose and he knew the office layout.
Laurie and I order a pizza in for dinner. Her suggesting it is a rare treat and surprise. Usually I use Ricky to try to arrange a pizza dinner; I get him to beg for it. It’s not something I’m proud of. But with him away on the teen tour, I have so far suffered through a pizza-less summer, so I grab at this opportunity.
I bring up the mass murder case over dinner because I am at heart an incurable romantic. “We have two areas of possible motive. One is that the killer was striking back at the law firm for reasons unknown.”
“And two?”
“That one of the people killed was the target, and the rest were collateral damage. It was an effort to cover up that there was one intended victim; this way that victim would get lost in the crowd.”
“I’m picking door number one … some issue at the firm,” Laurie says. “The killer knew Nick; they knew where he lived, they knew about his tattoo, and they probably knew something of his checkered background. And the use of the nickname shows a connection to the firm as well.”
I think she’s right, but at the moment my mouth is too full of pizza to verbalize it. My technique is to eat all the cheese-covered areas of the pie, then nibble on the crusts afterward. And if I’m full, or even if I’m not, I can give pieces of the crust to Tara, Hunter, and Sebastian.
Laurie never eats her crust, so the dogs love it when we get pizza.
“But I think we should look at both possibilities,” she says, echoing something I would have said when I finished chewing. Pizza tends to put me at a conversational disadvantage.
“I will look at the possibilities that it was revenge against the firm,” I say. “You, Marcus, and Corey should do a deep dive on each of the deceased. Sam already has information to give you a head start.”
Once we’re done, I call Sam and ask him to update everyone on whatever information he has gotten on the victims.
“Will do,” he says. “You think one person was the target?”
“It’s one of a number of working theories.”
“That’s pretty cold.”
He’s right; if the killings were indeed done to target only one person, then it shows a horrifying disregard for human life. Of course, in a mass murder that horrifying, disregard is there whatever the motive.
“You need anything else?” Sam asks.
“Yes. I want to know as much as I can about the firm. How they’re set up, how they make their money, if they have had any well-publicized disputes lately … and I don’t mean just legal.”
“I’m on it. When do you need it?”
“Yesterday.”
“Figures. Anything else?”
“Funny you should ask. Nick left his house at around seven thirty in the morning the day of the shooting. I want to know if any cell phones belonging to nonresidents were there.”
Sam has the less than legal ability to cyber-enter phone company computers and access the GPS records that all cell phones generate. Sam prefers the phrase cyber-enter to hack; he considers it more dignified.
“A lot of people live there,” he points out, accurately. “There will be a lot of phones to cull through, with different providers, and I don’t have a list of residents.”
“Sounds like an easy problem for you to overcome.”
“Yeah, right. There also might be guests, possibly delivery people. How will I know who to look for?”
“Concentrate on nonresident phones that arrived in the area not very long before seven thirty and left shortly thereafter. And I doubt they have returned.”
“Okay. Do I have more time on this one?”
“I’m thinking no.”
“Can I go now? I have a lot of work to do.”
“Of course. I’m an agreeable guy.”
Sam hangs up and I am about to take the dogs on a long walk when Eddie Dowd calls.
“I’ve got some bad news,” he says.
“That is probably my least favorite sentence. What is it?”
“They found the murder weapon in a dumpster a block away from Nick’s house. It took until now to do the forensics on it.”
“Let me guess. This is about to get worse.”
“It is. They got Nick’s print off it.”
According to Marcus, Rafe Duran is Nick Williams’s best friend.
I haven’t confirmed that with Nick, and I will, but right now it is pretty low on my list of priorities. For example, it ranks below my trying to explain away how Nick’s fingerprint is on the murder weapon.
Duran is the other young man currently under the protective wing of Marcus Clark. He lives in the unit next door to Nick’s and works as a detailer at a car wash in downtown Paterson. Marcus apparently got him the job, as he got Nick his job at the law firm.
Duran asked me if I could meet him during his break. Since the car wash is just a few blocks from my house, it was convenient for me to do so. We meet at a coffee shop next door, and I get there just before he does.
He recognizes me; maybe he’s seen me on television. Being a big-time celebrity lawyer has its advantages.
“How is Nick?” he asks, as we are on the way to our table.
“He’s hanging in there.”
We reach the table and sit down. “Can I visit him?”
“Yes. I’ll get your name on the list. But when you’re there, don’t ask him to talk about the case.” Conversations between prisoners and their guests are, shall we say, prone to being overheard.
“Is he going to beat this?”
“How long do we have to talk?”
“My boss said I needed to be back in a half hour.”
“Then order some food if you want it, but let me ask the questions, okay?”
I call the waiter over and he orders a burger and fries; we obviously share the same taste in food. I just get a Diet Coke.
“How long have you known Nick?”
“About two years. We met at a pickup basketball game in Nash Park, and we became buddies.”
“Are you aware of anyone who has a grudge against him?” It’s an obligatory question; I’m just checking a box. I don’t think this was about Nick at all; if he’s innocent, then he was just a patsy to blame the shooting on. If he’s guilty, then grudges against him are beside the point.
“No, I can’t think of anyone. Nick’s a good guy; everybody likes him.”
“Did he talk to you about his job?”
“Sometimes. He was okay with it; he thought the people were nice. He wanted to make more money, but they turned him down for a raise.”
I’m not happy to hear Duran say this, though the prosecution will find out about it anyway and claim it as a motive. It makes it less likely I’ll call Duran as a character witness.
“Ever known him to be violent?”
“He got in a fight once, but he didn’t start it. It wasn’t that big a deal.”
“When was this?”
Duran shrugs. “Not sure. More than a year ago. This other guy was drunk.”
“Has Nick seen the guy since? If you know…”
“I don’t think so. But really, it was a quick thing; I only mentioned it because you asked if I ever saw Nick do anything violent.”
“The morning of the shooting, did you notice anything unusual at Nick’s house?”
“What do you mean?”
“Anything at all. Maybe people around who you never saw before?”
“No, but I leave really early for work.”
I don’t have anything else to ask Duran; I’ve gotten nothing out of this interview, which is pretty much what I expected.
“Will you get Nick off?”
“I hope so.”
“There is no way he did this. No chance. He didn’t even own a gun.”
I think my ears actually, physically, perk up. “How do you know that?”
“Because I told him we should each get one; we don’t live in the greatest neighborhood. But he wouldn’t do it; he was afraid of them. He said he’d probably shoot himself accidentally.”
“Did you get one?”
“Damn straight I did.”
The Castle Diner in Nutley claims it has the best hamburgers in New Jersey.
Not many New Jerseyans would agree with this dubious claim, unless they’ve led a mostly hamburger-free life. But the burgers are good enough, and burger judging is a subjective thing, so a diner can make any claim they want. In any event, the Castle was never lacking for customers.
Gerald Bullock ate at the Castle quite often. He certainly could have afforded better; Bullock was a top executive in a large office-supply company in Elizabeth, which sold its products as far south as Florida and as far west as St. Louis.
But the Castle was fine with Bullock; it felt more like home than home did. The magic had left the relationship between Bullock and his wife, Cynthia, and she had long ago stopped cooking for him anyway. They had both filed for divorce, mainly because she’d caught Gerald cheating on her, so he was going to be eating at the Castle for the foreseeable future.
On this night Bullock ordered his normal open-faced roast beef sandwich, with fries and a Diet Coke. He had long rejected the Castle burger claim; it was by no means the best even in Nutley. As always, he topped his meal off with a vanilla milkshake, defeating the purpose of the Diet Coke.
