Authors: Lisa Scottoline
“Eat,” her mother commanded, but Mary knew she wanted to say, Choke.
“Mom, of course, I’ll be very, very careful,” she said, and her father smiled. “Now, as I was saying. I think it’s up to me because I’m the lawyer in the group and I can go over to Tribe without suspicion.”
“It’s a start.” Brinkley said. He finished the last of his eggs and turned to her mother at the stove. “Vita, this was terrific. Best breakfast I ever had.”
“You deserve,” her mother said warmly.
Mary smiled, mystified. Brinkley was getting along with her mother better than she was. “When did you two become such good friends, Mr. I Have A Gun?”
“Since I fixed the pilot light,” Brinkley explained, and Mary laughed, as the doorbell rang and six heads looked at the front door in alarm.
Mary stood stricken at the silhouette of the police officers and Detective Donovan on her parents’ marble stoop and felt instantly angry at herself for bringing this into her parents’ home. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, though she suspected the answer.
“We’re here for Detective Brinkley,” Donovan answered, self-satisfied in his black wool topcoat. “May we come in?”
“Not unless you have a warrant,” Mary told him, but his hard eyes widened when not only Brinkley but Kovich appeared behind Mary.
“Figured I’d find you here, Reg, but I didn’t figure on you, too, partner.” Donovan sounded sterner than his years. “I bought that dentist story.”
Right behind Kovich and Brinkley hobbled Vita DiNunzio, flushed with anger and brandishing a wooden spoon clotted with scrambled eggs. “Whatta you doin’ inna my
house
?” her mother demanded, but Mary held her back.
“Ma, relax, it’s okay,” she soothed, feeling the balance of power shift to the flying DiNunzios. It meant trouble when her mother had The Spoon. The cops had only guns. It was no contest.
Brinkley touched her mother’s shoulder, dismay marking his thin features. “It’s okay, Vita’s all right,” he said. “Sorry this happened here, at your house. I’m going along with these gentlemen and I’ll be fine.”
“Excuse me, Mrs. DiNunzio, is it?” Donovan said, with a smile that would get him nowhere. “We’ll be gone in a sec. If Detective Brinkley doesn’t resist us, we can avoid cuffing him.”
“
Cuffing?
” Mary’s mother repeated, making the
g
ring out like truth, waving the eggy spoon. “I cuffa
you
one! You no touch Reggie Brinkley.
No touch!
”
“Don’t worry, Vita,” Brinkley said again, as he grabbed his coat from the couch. On the way out, he gave Mary a hug close enough to slip something into her jacket pocket. She had a guess as to what it was, but would check later.
“I’ll have a lawyer down there in an hour,” she told him. In front of her parents’ house idled five police cruisers, exhaust pouring from their tailpipes and turning to steam in the cold air. Uniformed cops hustled Brinkley and Kovich into the backseat of the closest car.
Donovan flashed a smile at the DiNunzios. “Thank you very much, and sorry about the intrusion.”
Mary’s mother snorted in a way you didn’t have to be Abruzzese to understand. “
You!
” She waved the spoon. “You wanna good
smack
?”
Mary sat at her parents’ ancient telephone table, holding the receiver of a black rotary phone that could qualify as a blunt instrument in most jurisdictions. She would be nagging her parents to replace it with a cordless if they weren’t already so upset, huddling together on the sofa like a soft mountain of bathrobe, the wooden spoon back in its scabbard.
“Jude,” Mary said into the receiver, when her best friend picked up. “Have I got a client for you.”
The morning stayed clear and brisk, and Mary flowed with the foot traffic in the business district. Men hurried by with their heads cocked to cell phones, and women hustled along in conversation. She remembered when she had been one of them; an inexperienced associate dressed in her most conservative clothes, hands gripped around a briefcase that contained a legal pad, a Bic, and photocopied antitrust cases. Okay, so it wasn’t all that different now. She was still inexperienced, her clothes remained conservative, and she had the same briefcase, legal pad, and Bic, though the antitrust cases had been replaced by something distinctly illegal:
The Glock that Brinkley had slipped her when he and Kovich had been taken away.
She tightened her grip on her briefcase handle, its shape and heft second nature. The gun had felt far less so when she tried to aim it in her parents’ kitchen, where she pointed prudently away from any religious paraphernalia. Of course she hadn’t fired the gun; the shot would have brought the neighborhood, the police—or worse, her mother—running. As much as Mary hated guns, she had to admit it felt better to have it along, even if it smelled faintly of oregano.
She stopped at the corner, keeping her head down in case anyone recognized her. The Newlin saga was all over the papers; the
Daily News
had run a small photo of her with Jack. It was a strange feeling, seeing yourself in the paper next to a man you had fallen for. The juxtaposition was more appropriate to engagement announcements than murder stories, but she was getting way ahead of herself. Must be the gun. It got a girl crazy.
The traffic light changed and she allowed herself to be carried off the curb and across the street, her thoughts focusing on Jack, in jail again, and what she had to do to get him out. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was clear she had to question Whittier. She would be meeting with him as Jack’s lawyer and start with the easy questions. Ask him about his talk with Jack the day of Honor’s murder. Avoid mention of what happened with Trevor; don’t put him on the defensive. If Whittier wouldn’t cooperate, which was likely given that he hadn’t returned any of her messages left with his secretary, she would confront him.
She sighted the glass spike that housed Tribe & Wright, a block away. Moussed heads bobbed on the sidewalk ahead of her, and the air was filled with the fog from cold breath and late-breakfast cigarettes. The crowd thickened as she approached the building, and her pace quickened, hurrying unaccountably to keep an appointment she didn’t have. She hated the thought of Jack, battered, in prison. She worried what Davis would do next. Two men in front of her stalled. What was the holdup?
She craned her neck, apologizing as she jostled someone’s cup of Starbucks. She was too short to see the base of the building. In the street, uniformed police were waving traffic away from the lane nearest the building, their squad cars parked haphazardly behind them. Lights flashed atop the hoods of the cruisers but the sirens weren’t on. There seemed no immediacy; it was probably the aftermath of a traffic accident.
Mary threaded her way to the front, heedless about drawing attention to herself. Nobody was looking at her; they were worrying about being late for appointments. The crowd grew denser as she got closer to the building, brought to a standstill by whatever was going on. Over their heads she could hear their chatter and the shouting of the police. The block was suddenly buzzing with activity as two more squad cars pulled down the street, their roof lights flashing, followed by a news van. If it was an accident, it must have been a serious one.
She wedged herself between wool-clad shoulders but couldn’t go forward, the crowd was too packed. She didn’t know how much time she had. Whittier had been in when she called, but he might have gone out. He’d certainly want to avoid her, knowing the questions she’d have. She had to get going. She stood up on tiptoe and looked around. One way out. The street.
Mary broke free and headed for the street, then ran along the gutter beside an ambulance that was moving slowly, despite the lane evidently cleared for it. Its driver waved her off in alarm but she sprinted ahead, trying to forget she was bounding along with a concealed deadly weapon. She was out of breath by the time she reached the cop directing traffic.
“How can I get into the building?” she asked him. Behind him was a sea of uniformed cops in caps and black leather jackets. They clustered on the sidewalk on the near side of the building. The ambulance stood parked a few feet away, its back doors flung open and its powerful engine idling.
“Lady, get out of the street!” the cop directing traffic shouted. “Can’t you see we got a situation here?”
“But I have to get into the building.”
“You can’t. Now get outta here!” The cop turned his back at the sudden blare of a horn, and Mary sprinted behind him and pushed her way toward the building, just in time to see the cluster of cops breaking up. From the center of the group emerged two paramedics in blue uniforms, carrying a stretcher between them. On the stretcher lay a black body bag, zipped to the top.
Mary stood appalled at the sight. The paramedics loaded the body into the van and the doors slammed closed with a final
ca-thunk
. Someone had died here, right on the street. A heart attack maybe. “What happened?” she heard herself say, and one of the older cops turned around.
“A suicide,” the cop said. His expression was somber and his eyes strayed skyward. “A man jumped out a window.”
“My God.” Mary looked up, too, squinting against the searing blue of the sky, or maybe to soften the impact of the sight.
An empty pane of jagged glass marred the shiny, mirrored surface of the building, and the sky reflected in its mirrors looked like someone had torn a hole in heaven itself. A few business papers floated from the shattered window, caught crazily on the crosscurrents of city air, and fluttered to the crowd. She watched them fall, drawing her gaze down to the sidewalk, visible now that the cops were moving away. A large white tarp had been thrown over the pavement but blood still soaked through the material. “How terrible,” she said, horrified, and the cop nodded.
“Not a pretty sight. He was a big deal, too.”
She looked over, suddenly stricken. Something was very wrong here. She thought of her phone calls to Whittier. “Who died? Who was he?”
“Don’t think we’ve notified next of kin yet, miss,” the cop answered, with a quick glance over his shoulder. Behind him the cops had begun redirecting the pedestrians around the tarp, now that the body had been removed. But Mary wasn’t thinking about getting inside the building any longer. She had a terrible hunch.
“From what company, what firm?” she asked, urgent. She couldn’t explain how she knew, but she did. “Was the man from Tribe & Wright?”
“Can’t say, Miss. Now please, move along.” One of the officers behind him was listening, and in the next minute she understood why. Captain Walsh, standing out from the uniforms in his bright white cap, navy dress jacket, and dark tie, was eyeing her warily from the center of the group.
“But I’m supposed to see somebody at Tribe. His name is Whittier, William Whittier,” Mary said.
The cop didn’t answer but his eyes registered a reluctant, but unmistakable, recognition just as Captain Walsh strode toward her.
Mary felt Captain Walsh grip her arm and steer her toward an empty white-and-blue police cruiser. “Step into my office, DiNunzio,” he said under his breath.
“It was Whittier who committed suicide, is that right, Captain?” she asked, as he placed her bodily into the passenger seat, slammed the door closed after her, and went around to the driver’s seat. The legal term “custodial interrogation” popped into her mind, but she shooed it away. Everything was happening too fast for her to process, but the suicide only confirmed Whittier’s culpability. And it might have been the final key to Jack’s freedom.
“DiNunzio, you are one royal pain, you know that?” Walsh climbed into the cold car and tore his hat off. “First you get two of my best detectives in hot water, then you show up here. What were you doing with Reg? Did he help you?”
“Reg who? Now tell me about Whittier.”
“‘Reg who?’ The Reg we tagged in your parents’ house. That Reg.”
“Tall, black guy? Likes peppers and eggs?”
“That’s the one.”
“Don’t know him.” Mary would be damned if she’d incriminate Brinkley. “Talk to me about Whittier. I need to know what happened.”
“No you don’t. We got Brinkley and Kovich in custody because of you. You think that’s good for the people of this city? You think it’s easy to run a homicide squad with two detectives out? We’re understaffed as it is.”
“I’m not talking to you about Brinkley or Kovich. I’m talking to you about Whittier. You don’t want to talk about him, I’m on my way.” Mary put a hand on the door handle and hoped she was convincing.
“You wanna talk about Whittier? Okay, explain to me what you’re doing here and why you been calling him all morning.”