T
HE MEDIA HAVE CALMED
down lately, which has resulted in my receiving fewer death threats and crank calls. Unfortunately, the reason that the furor around the case has lessened is that things have been going so well for the prosecution. The public feels secure that Daniel is going to be convicted and put to death, so there’s much less for them to be upset about.
My plan this evening is to shake things up in media land, and I’ve scheduled an interview on CNN. To do so, I simply had to tell them that I was going to be making news, not simply rehashing my view that my client is innocent.
Laurie accompanies me into the city, and we park at a lot near Penn Plaza. The attendant comes over and says, “Forty-one dollars.” I assume he’s making me an offer for the car, but it turns out that’s the flat rate to park for the evening. New York parking lots are a better investment than coffee.
We leave the lot and start walking toward the CNN offices. It’s a typical early evening in Manhattan, with wall-to-wall people on the streets. I’m about half a block from the building when I look slightly toward the right and see something that jolts me.
Tommy Lassiter.
He’s staring at me, smiling, and then suddenly he’s not there, having melted into the crowds.
“Jesus . . . ,” I say, and take a few steps toward where he was standing. A few steps is all I can take because of the masses of people.
“What’s the matter?” Laurie asks.
“I’d swear I just saw Tommy Lassiter.”
“Where?”
I point in the direction, but of course he’s nowhere to be seen. “He just looked at me and smiled and then disappeared.”
“Are you sure it was him?” she asks.
I was sure in the moment, but I’ve never been one to recognize faces, and I’ve never seen Lassiter in person. “I think so. Especially because of the way he looked at me. Like he was taunting me.”
“You’re under a lot of stress, Andy. It may not have been him. What would he have to gain from following you?”
“Maybe to stop my going public with his name. To scare me off. Which would not be that tough to do.”
She shakes her head. “He’s got more effective ways to scare you than smiling.”
She’s right about that, so I try to forget the encounter and we go into the building. About an hour goes by before they are ready for me, and I’m brought into the studio, hooked up with a microphone through my shirt, and we’re ready to go.
The interviewer is Aaron Brown, an intelligent, soft-spoken man who seems to have thrived in cable news despite those qualities. I’ve chosen him because I want my news to be taken seriously, not dismissed as the sensational ramblings of a desperate defense attorney. Even though that’s what it is.
Two minutes into the interview, he comes straight to the point. “I understand that you have something new to reveal tonight.”
I nod. “Yes. I know the identity of the real killer of Linda Padilla, as well as the others.”
He takes this revelation in stride. “And who might that be?”
I reach under the table and get the picture of Lassiter that Pete provided me. I hold it up for the camera. “His name is Tommy Lassiter. He’s a contract killer, a hit man. A very successful one.”
“What do you base this accusation on?”
“A number of sources, some of whom I cannot mention tonight. But one of those sources was Randy Clemens, a former client of mine who was recently killed in prison.” I go on to detail the conversation I had with Randy prior to his death, and the details of that death.
Brown asks me why I am going public with this news, rather than bringing it before the judge and jury.
“Because the people that have confirmed this information to me are afraid to testify. Without any direct evidence, none of this would be admissible. But that is why I am here, to reveal Lassiter’s identity and show his photograph, in the hope that others with information will come forward.”
The interview continues for another ten minutes, and by the time I get outside, other members of the media have created a mob scene in front of the studio. I hold an impromptu press conference, during which I make my pitch again. In answer to a question, I deny that one of my reasons for going public is to have the accusation reach the unsequestered jury. I deny this even though it’s true.
As Laurie and I leave the studio, I’m feeling pretty good about the session and what it accomplished. We walk down Seventh Avenue and then turn onto Thirty-fourth Street toward the parking lot. The streets are far less crowded than they were before, since rush hour is essentially over, but I find myself still looking around warily for another sighting of Tommy Lassiter.
A few steps after making the turn, I hear a slight popping sound and feel an impact in my chest. I hear Laurie give out a short scream, and as I reach for the point of impact, I feel a sticky liquid on my hand. I look down and see that my shirt and hand are a bright red.
I’m not in pain, but rather stunned, and it is this plus dawning fear that sends me to my knees. I can hear the crowd around me on the street yelling, and some people are running for cover. Laurie comes to me to hold me on the ground, and I am literally shaking in fear.
I let her lower me farther to the ground, but I am slowly realizing that I am not hurt. “Oh, my God, Andy. It’s paint,” she says. “It’s paint.” She’s half laughing, half crying. “It’s paint.”
It takes me a moment to realize that my lifeblood is not literally draining from me onto the street. Once I do, I instantly know what has happened. Lassiter has given me a demonstration of his power; obviously, this could have been a bullet, and I would be dead.
“Where is he?” I say, but I know that he is nowhere to be found.
Laurie, no longer worried about me, jumps up and scours the crowd, but Lassiter has melted away. I stand up, feeling some embarrassment, and we don’t wait for the police. We rush to the parking lot, get our car, and head home.
Laurie drives, and I spend the ride trying to reduce my anxiety level. Lassiter was trying to scare me, and on that he more than succeeded. But he was not trying to kill me, merely to demonstrate that he could do so. And his primary goal, I believe, was to have fun, to receive a bizarre diabolical pleasure. Cindy Spodek was right when she said he was insane.
When I get home, I get in the shower and scrub off the paint that has penetrated to my skin. Once I’ve done so, Laurie, Tara, and I watch the reaction to my interview on television. It is all that anyone is talking about, and Lassiter’s picture is everywhere. To my surprise, most of the pundits are not dismissing this as a desperation ploy, but rather taking it seriously. The scene on the street goes unmentioned, as if it never happened.
I slowly start to feel like myself again. I have to admit that I’m enjoying the coverage and feeling pleased at my ability to dominate the news. Laurie seems to tire of it more quickly than I do. “Feel like watching a movie?” she asks at about ten o’clock.
“A movie? You want to watch a movie? We’re watching real life, and you’re sitting here with a real star!”
She nods. “And it’s thrilling, just thrilling. But just for a brief break from all this exciting reality, let’s watch some fake life, with a fake star. Shall we?”
Not waiting for an answer, she searches through the movie channels and settles on
Witness
, with Harrison Ford. “This should do it,” she says. Tara barks her agreement, and I am officially no longer a part of the evening’s entertainment. And though it’s a great movie, and I watch it with them until the end, Ford cannot begin to match my screen presence.
I wake up at seven in the morning to take Tara for a walk. Laurie stays in bed, and my plan is to join her again when we get back. I negotiate with Tara, and she agrees to cut the walk down to a half hour, providing I buy her a bagel. Little does she know that I was going to buy her one anyway. Chalk one up for human shrewdness.
I try to accomplish all this without fully waking up, and I’m doing pretty well until we approach the house. I am horrified to see Vince Sanders pulling up in front. I briefly consider sneaking in the back and then not answering the doorbell, but if Vince is up this early in the morning, he’s not going to give up that easily.
“Vince, what a pleasant surprise,” I lie.
“You got coffee?”
I nod. “In the house. But I’m not drinking it until after the Olympics.”
He holds up a bag. “Good. I got donuts. And wait’ll you see what else I got.”
I let him in the house. “Laurie here?” he asks.
“Upstairs,” I say. “In bed. Which is exactly where I was going to go.”
“You trying to make me feel bad?”
“Yes.”
He considers this for a moment. “It ain’t working. You know I’ve been doing a lot of research on this. Well, guess what? Walter Castle hated Margaret Cummings.”
It could be because I’m still half-asleep, but it takes me a while to mentally process this information and identify Walter Castle. He is the Cleveland billionaire whose company lost over a hundred million dollars when Linda Padilla identified it as having caused a leukemia cluster. It is the connection I wished I would have had Marcus check out while he was in Cleveland. We have since gone over all of Padilla’s possible enemies, but none, including Castle, jumped out at us.
The fact that he even knew, no less hated, Daniel’s wife is a significant piece of news. “Why did he hate her?” I ask.
Now Vince gets smug, knowing his statement has jolted me from wanting him out of my house to anxiously waiting to hear more. “What happened to that coffee?”
I get Vince the coffee and wait while he downs a donut, not too long a wait, since he does so in one bite. “Margaret had a lot of time on her hands, and she tried to put it to good use. So she was active in a lot of causes, the environment, public health, that kind of thing.”
He inhales another donut, taking his time and relishing the fact that he has the floor. “She was the first one to raise the possibility of a leukemia cluster, and she wouldn’t let go of it. Padilla didn’t get in until much later, which made the story go national. And get this: Daniel wrote a story about it.”
He hands me the story and I skim through it. It’s really just a few paragraphs, obviously early on in the health controversy, recommending that it be thoroughly looked into.
“There’s not that much here,” I say.
“Right. But it was Margaret he hated. Daniel was just backing her up. The whole episode destroyed Walter Castle’s reputation . . . his legacy. So he has Margaret killed and then ruins Daniel. The perfect revenge.”
I’m not nearly as confident as Vince that this is the break we need, but it’s certainly an interesting development requiring and deserving much more investigation.
Laurie comes into the room, still in a bathrobe. “Good morning, Vince, want some granola?”
“Are you crazy? That stuff’ll burn a hole in your stomach.”
She goes into the kitchen and comes out a few moments later with a tasty bowl of granola and skim milk. Vince tells her about the Walter Castle connection, and she thinks it’s worth Marcus going back there to check. I agree, and also think I will put Eliot Kendall’s people on it, since it’s on their turf. I call Eliot on his cell phone, and he is excited about the news. He’s on the way to visit Daniel in the jail, and I give him permission to update Daniel on the developments.
For the next hour and a half, Vince peppers me with questions about Lassiter and whether I’ll be able to get my suspicions about him before a jury. He’s pleased, as I am, about the press coverage my interview has gotten. “You were the only thing on television last night,” he says.
“Not in this house. Laurie and Tara watched Harrison Ford.”
Vince puts his finger down his throat in a gagging gesture, which sends Laurie upstairs to put on a sweat suit for her morning jog. I use this opportunity to get Vince out of the house so I can spend the rest of the day preparing for court on Monday. I have a tradition, which is even more important during football season, to rest the day before I open my case, which is why I want to be free to spend Sunday in front of the television.
I
F
G
OD HAD WANTED
humans to communicate, he wouldn’t have invented caller ID. But I’m glad that somebody did, because I love it. It’s not the greatest invention of all time, which is to say it’s not quite up there with the point spread and the remote control, but it’s in that still-wonderful second tier, right alongside the cash machine, satellite TV, and light beer.
Combined with the answering machine, caller ID enables me to permanently avoid anyone I don’t want to talk to on the phone, which is most of the world’s population.
The Giants are playing the Dallas Cowboys today, and nothing short of an earthquake above 7.0 is going to get me off the couch. Certainly, a ringing phone won’t do it, though the phone rings repeatedly during the game. One of those times is when I’m making a hurried trip to the bathroom, and I glance at the caller ID. It’s my office number—no doubt Kevin is spending Sunday working—but I don’t pick it up. If it were President Heather Locklear calling from the White House, I wouldn’t pick it up.
The game is a magnificent rarity: an offensive explosion by the Giants that results in a thirty-point victory. As the fourth quarter begins, the camera starts focusing on an obviously upset Jerry Jones, the Cowboys’ owner, fuming on the sidelines. It’s poetry; I’ve hated Jerry Jones ever since he bought the team and fired longtime coach Tom Landry, though I hated Landry as well. I especially hated Jerry because he brought in Jimmy Johnson and immediately started beating the Giants and winning Super Bowls. Today is sweet revenge, and it tastes best hot.
There are two minutes left in the game, and the Giants are running out the clock, despite my screaming admonitions for them to run up the score even more.
The door opens and Laurie comes in. She doesn’t say anything, simply walks to the TV and turns it off.
I’m stunned. “Correct me if I’m wrong, because I must be wrong. But did you just turn off a Giants-Cowboys game?”
“We’ve got a witness,” she says. “Let’s go.”
“A witness to what?” I ask, but she’s already on the way to the car. I stifle the instinct to turn the game back on, and I follow her out the door.
Laurie tells me that Kevin has been trying to reach me all afternoon but that I haven’t been answering my phone. “I didn’t hear it ringing,” I lie. “Tara must have been barking.”
“Right. That Tara can really bark.”
Kevin is waiting for us in my office with a man, probably in his early forties, wearing sneakers, jeans, and a pullover shirt. The man is drinking a beer, interesting only because I don’t keep any in my office. Either he brought his own, or he sent Kevin out to get him one.
Kevin introduces him as Eddie Gardner, a truck driver who travels the country but whose home base is North Jersey. He turns the floor over to Eddie, so that he can repeat for me what he saw.
“It was September fourteenth,” Eddie begins. “I saw a guy pick up a hooker on Market Street in Passaic.”
I look up at Kevin, who nods at my unspoken question, indicating that September 14 was in fact the night Rosalie was killed.
“What were you doing there?”
He smiles with some embarrassment. “Hey, come on, man. What do you think? I had just come back from a two-week haul—that’s how I remember the date—and I had some extra money . . .”
“So you were there as a customer,” I say, stating the obvious.
He shoots a quick glance at Laurie, then nods. “Right. A customer.”
“Who was the guy you saw?” I ask.
He points to the newspaper on the desk, with Lassiter’s picture on the front page. “Him.”
“What time was it?” I ask.
“About one o’clock in the morning.”
“So you were there to pick up a hooker, but you were looking at the other customers?”
“I notice things,” he says.
“And how is it you noticed
him
?”
“He pulled up in his car, and usually the girl comes over and gets in the car. That’s how it’s done. But this guy leaves his car running and gets out. Then he walks around, trying to figure out who to take, like he’s out shopping, you know? He picks one, and they go back to his car and pull away. It just seemed weird, so I remembered him.”
“Why didn’t you come forward earlier?” Laurie asks.
“I didn’t see the picture until today,” he says. “And I’m on the road a lot, so I hadn’t known there was a murder that night.”
We question Eddie for a while longer, and when we’re finished, he gives us a number at which he can be reached. He’s willing to testify, even though it will cause him some personal embarrassment.
After he leaves, Laurie speaks first. “I don’t believe him.”
“Why?” says Kevin, his surprised tone revealing that he disagrees.
Laurie shakes her head. “I’m not sure. It just seems too easy, too pat.” She turns to me. “What about you?”
“I’ve got some doubts myself,” I say. “But I can’t be any more specific as to why.”
We talk about it some more, and Laurie takes on the responsibility of checking into Eddie’s background. Absent any significant negative discoveries, we agree that his story is credible enough that we have to put him on the stand.
In terms of the impact on our case, it can be enormous. Eddie provides a way to introduce Lassiter into the courtroom. Our alternate theory will be before the jury and might well create the reasonable doubt necessary to get Daniel off.
I have my doubts about Eddie’s veracity, but on its face his story stands up. As a lawyer, I cannot introduce testimony I know to be false, but I do not have to have an affirmative belief in its truth. That is for the jury to decide after they hear our side of the story.
And starting tomorrow they will.