Authors: Alafair Burke
M
cKenna sat on a bench at the far end of the fourth floor. She was out of the flow of traffic but had a clear view of the entrance to Judge John DeWitt Gregory’s courtroom, where Will Getty was arguing against a defendant’s motion to vacate a jury’s guilty verdict.
McKenna had gotten lucky when she arrived to find Berta Ramos outside for one of her hourly smoke breaks. Ten years later, the woman still hadn’t kicked the habit.
“Ay, Mamí,” she had called out when McKenna waved at her from the sidewalk. Though their kinship had started with an unlikely shared love of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, Berta had become one of McKenna’s better allies among the DA support staff. She barely had an accent but liked to pepper her conversation with Spanish slang. “Your ears must be burning. Lots of talk about you around here this week.”
“I can only imagine.”
“Don’t you worry. Berta knows you wouldn’t make up a story. Besides, all these people”—she used her manicured blood-red fingernail to draw a circle in the air—“they know that Judge Knight is just how you say he is.
Cerdo sucio.
”
“I need to talk to Will Getty, but I’d rather not plant myself in the DA waiting room like a goat at the petting zoo.”
“Don’t you even worry about it. Give me your number and I’ll report from inside.”
Now Getty walked out of the courtroom, carrying only a single file folder. His back was straight, shoulders squared, steps even and proud. Defeating the motion clearly was a cakewalk.
McKenna pretended to be composing a text and then faked a double take in his direction. She smiled, gave a wave as an afterthought, and caught up with him.
“Bold move, being here,” he said. “The courthouse staff is secretly cheering you on, but Knight’s still got friends.”
“I know. I thought if I came and talked to my sources, I’d figure out who burned me.”
Was it you?
She searched his eyes for some sign of nervousness. “No luck yet.”
“I have no doubt you’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“Hey, it dawned on me when I saw you that you’d be a good person to bounce some ideas off of. You have a second?”
He looked at his watch. “Sure. Gregory calendared an hour for a motion that took ten minutes.”
“Coffee? My treat.”
G
etty opted for a Chinese bakery on Canal. Once they were settled in with a tray of roasted pork buns, Diet Cokes, and egg tarts, she continued the I’m-just-bouncing-some-ideas-off-you talk.
“Sorry if I sound a little scattered, but my thoughts are all over the place. Did you hear about Scott Macklin?”
“Fucking awful.”
“I know. The first thing I thought was, Oh my God, what if this is because I was digging up the whole Marcus Jones issue again. I mean—”
Getty was shaking his head already. “You can’t try to figure out why someone does that. Otherwise, everyone who ever met the guy could say, What if I had done something different? I’m sorry. I liked Macklin, rest his soul. But what he did is on him and him alone.”
“I hear you, and I appreciate that. But like I said, my mind went there. And maybe it’s because I didn’t want the weight to be on me, but I started thinking, No, someone doesn’t shoot himself because of a magazine article or even a book. I mean, he didn’t do it back when protestors were waving pictures of his face behind bars and the city was close to rioting. So, I hate to admit it, I started wondering—you know—what if it was because he thought if I looked again, I’d find something new. Something I missed. Like maybe the hammer was finally going to come down.”
Getty washed down some pork bun with a big gulp of Diet Coke. “That’s a lot of wondering, Wright.”
“Here’s the thing. I went back and took another close look at the case. It’s a long story, but it turns out that a prostitute who used to meet tricks down at the piers went missing the night Mac shot Marcus Jones.” McKenna glossed over the uncertainties in that part of her theory. “According to her mother, the prostitute was meeting a regular that night—someone slow and strange-looking. I think she was meeting Marcus Jones.”
“Possible, I guess. Makes sense that the kid would tell his mom he was meeting a girl, not a working girl. Plus, he had cash in his pocket.” Getty’s lightning-quick reasoning had always been amazing. “What about it?”
“The girl never came back. I’m thinking, What if she saw something that night?”
“The shooting?”
“Or maybe she saw something
before
the shooting. And so did Marcus Jones. And they both wound up dead. You can get rid of the hooker without raising too many questions, then drop a gun next to the body of the kid with a criminal record.”
Getty balled up his napkin and tossed it on the plastic tray. “I’d keep this to yourself. This on top of the Knight article? Jesus, we went through this ten years ago. You made a mistake. I thought you’d moved on.”
“I know, I know. Hear me out. It was that kid James Low who saved Macklin’s ass. Low’s testimony put the gun right in Marcus Jones’s hands. Mac’s access to the gun through Safe Streets was just a coincidence.”
“And yet?”
“If it weren’t for the kid’s testimony, it would be one major hell of a coincidence. What I want to know is, how did Low come to you? Did someone bring him in? Did he call out of the blue?”
Getty blinked; she could see him searching his memory for the details. “When you came to me about the gun coming from Safe Streets, I told you I’d look into it. And I did. I looked up the other cops in the program. Saw that one of them was on the Crips’ payroll. What was his name?”
“Don Whitman.”
“Right, Don Whitman. I figured a guy who took money from bangers wasn’t above slipping a few guns. So I sent three DA investigators to talk to the usual suspects in East Harlem. Try to find someone from the neighborhood who knew anything about Jones and a gun. I was giving it a few days to sink in. But then you went public.”
She resisted the urge to remind him that he’d locked her out of the case for two weeks before she took the evidence to Bob Vance. That was an argument they’d had ten years earlier. Getty’s regret about his lack of communication was supposedly the reason he’d always defended her.
He continued, “It was a few days after the story exploded when Low showed up at the courthouse, asking who was in charge of the case. Once he got to my office, he told me he didn’t want to say anything bad about Marcus, that he”—Getty let out a laugh, remembering the moment—“he
certainly
didn’t want to help the cracker cop who killed him, but he didn’t want to see Harlem burn.” The remainder of his recitation came in clipped, just-the-facts fashion. “He asked whether I was going to arrest him if he confessed to a gun charge. I made a quick decision to give him a pass if it meant I’d get the truth. He said the gun had been his dad’s, but he’d sold it to Marcus a month before the shooting. I ran his dad. Big-time Crip, which connected the gun back to Safe Streets through Don Whitman.”
“Did you ever think it was weird that a hard case like Low would walk into the courthouse out of the goodness of his heart?”
“I’ve been doing this job a long time, Wright. Those kids don’t give a shit about themselves, but they care about their neighborhoods and their mothers and their friends. Things were getting bad. You don’t think I know how the NYPD was cracking down in the face of those kinds of protests? Yeah, I believed Low when he said he wanted it all to stop.”
“Fair enough. But here’s a thought experiment, nothing more. What if he played you? What if someone realized that Don Whitman’s bust provided an alternative explanation for the gun making it out of Safe Streets? It wouldn’t be hard to find a kid who knew Marcus Jones and had some connection to the Crips.”
“And that someone would be Scott Macklin?”
McKenna shrugged. Other people might berate her for raising such thoughts about a man who had recently died, but she knew that after nearly a quarter of a century at the DA’s office, Getty didn’t dwell on death like normal people did.
Getty said, “You know, when you first came to me, you said you thought Mac panicked when he saw Jones reach into his pocket, so Mac dropped a gun to cover up his mistake. Your little thought experiment sounds a lot worse. Plus, this stuff about the prostitute. Why would Macklin kill her?”
“Maybe the prostitute and Jones saw something they weren’t supposed to see.”
“It wasn’t mistaken self-defense but cold-blooded murder?”
She shrugged again. “Still could have been a panic thing. Trying to keep them from getting away. I know it’s crazy. But you know the facts of that case better than anyone. I’m just asking you to think it through with me—as a friend, not a source. I’m not going to quote you. But as a huge what-if, what could Jones and the girl have seen that would make Mac panic that way?”
So far the words had come out exactly as she’d planned them. The right delivery. The right tone. Just a friend thinking out loud. If Getty blew her off because he was too busy, she wouldn’t know what to think. If he became defensive or angry, she’d assume he was hiding something.
Instead of offering either of the anticipated responses, Getty surprised her. He played out the thought experiment. And damn, he was smart.
“Let me start by saying that if you
ever
try to make it sound like I
believe
any of this shit, I will drop-kick your ass back before the day I met you. But if we’re really playing what-if, I’d say it was all about the pier.”
“Because Mac thought Marcus was planning a grab?”
“No, because piers are where we import and export. I don’t know all the details, but Macklin was on the docks that night for some kind of inspection program. If he was on the take, Marcus Jones and the hooker could have seen illegal cargo coming in. Drugs. Maybe people.”
The theory was coming together even as she articulated it. “Mac heads over to make sure they’re not a problem, but they’re not having it. He panics, pulls his weapon . . .”
“Total fiction, if you ask me,” Getty said. “But yeah, it’s possible.”
Depending on the role Macklin played in the cargo inspection, he could have been the one person standing in the way between seized cargo and a free pass. She remembered Macklin asking her about immigration law. The situation was complicated, he had said. She searched her memory for the specifics. Josefina had entered the country lawfully but failed to return to Mexico when her visa expired. Even worse, she had her sister bring Thomas into the country illegally when he was five years old. Macklin was pretty sure that the marriage resolved any of Josefina’s immigration problems, but he was worried about Thomas getting deported. He’d said he needed money for an immigration lawyer.
Thomas, now starting college at Hofstra, obviously remained in the country. Maybe Mac had found a way to fight for his stepson.
“But once James Low stepped forward, we stopped considering the possibilities,” she said. “Do you know what ever happened to him?”
“Been a long time.”
McKenna knew. She’d done the research. Killed in a gang shooting two years earlier in Atlanta. “He got picked up in a bar brawl a year after he testified before the Marcus Jones grand jury.”
“Sure, I know about that. I handled it, in fact. But since then? No clue.”
So much for catching Getty in a lie. “I looked at the police report,” she said. “It was an easy felony. Plus, he had priors. Why’d you plead it to a misdemeanor?”
“Because I have a bias against cases that are cluster fucks. There were thugs on both sides. Complete pandemonium. All the witnesses were drunk, and none of them wanted to testify. The so-called victim had a record six feet long, including multiple assaults. His lawyer—Bernadette Connor, you know her?”
McKenna nodded. Telegenic and straight-talking, Connor was her law firm’s go-to person for high-profile criminal trials. Nine years ago, she was a midlevel associate at the firm but already had a reputation as a hard charger in the courtroom.
“Bernadette came to me early and made it clear the case wasn’t winnable. I’d dealt with him on the Marcus Jones thing. He had a clean sheet during the year in between, and I thought he might not be a lost cause. We pleaded him out to the misdemeanor and moved on.”
Getty’s explanation was plausible, but it was raising questions she hadn’t considered. “Did you ever wonder how a kid like James Low had enough money to hire a private lawyer? Or to get VIP bottle service in a club?”
“Not really. Club night could have been a hookup by a doorman, for all I know. And a firm like Bernadette’s does a ton of pro bono.”
Or James Low had been paid off to say he gave the gun to Marcus Jones.
“Speaking of pleas,” McKenna said, “I saw Gretchen Hauptmann this week.”
His face was blank before the name registered. “Sure, Susan’s sister. How’s she doing?”
“She said you helped her out of a federal drug indictment. I didn’t realize you knew her.”
“I didn’t. I knew her sister. You’re the one who introduced us, remember?”
“Sure, that one night. I didn’t know you stayed in touch.”
For the first time since they’d sat down, he looked offended. “Where’s this coming from?”
“I just found out that Susan was pregnant when she disappeared. And I assumed from your helping Gretchen that you and Susan must have . . . connected after I introduced you. In light of the timing, I thought it was kind of weird that you never said anything to the police when she went missing.”
“Look, not that I owe you an explanation, but I saw her a few times after we met at the bar. It obviously wasn’t going anywhere—she had a lot going on in her life. She was looking at another deployment. By the time she disappeared, we weren’t together that way. I helped her sister because she asked me to review the case and it seemed like the right thing to do.”
Susan had never mentioned anything about deployment to McKenna. And she’d just seen Susan’s file. Scanlin had checked with the military: Susan’s service was done; she was free and clear. Was Getty lying? Or had Susan made up the deployment to break things off with him? Or had Scanlin made yet another mistake?