Outrage (15 page)

Marlene had offered to meet Garcia and Amelia Acevedo farther north, but he’d suggested somewhere closer to where Marlene lived in SoHo. “We don’t want to put you out,” he said. “And to be honest, Mrs. Acevedo doesn’t want to meet where someone she knows might see her and tell her husband. She has to take off from work for this, and he’d beat the hell out of her if he knew. The bastard sleeps all day, then drinks all night, gambles her money, and whores around while she’s at work.”

Marlene made her way back to where a bored barista made her a decaf Americano. She then took a seat in a nook and picked up a copy of
Atlas Shrugged
that someone had left on the coffee table. She flipped open the book and noted one of the lines:
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.

Just then the bell above the door rang and a small, dark-haired woman entered, followed by a young Hispanic man. The woman wore the sort of drab ubiquitous uniform found on the army of men and women who cleaned the offices of the high and mighty of Manhattan during the night and then disappeared back to their homes before daybreak. She looked frightened and out of place.

The man was also short but built like a fireplug, with a thick chest and muscular shoulders that supported a round, clean-shaven head. In his baggy New York Knicks jersey and low-rider
jeans, Alejandro Garcia still looked like a kid from the streets of Spanish Harlem despite two platinum records and a major recording deal. He had big brown, soulful eyes that always reminded her of a deer’s, though she’d seen them turn as hard, dark, and bright as obsidian when he was angry. He’d been the leader of the notorious Inca Boyz street gang, whose turf was most of Spanish Harlem. And yet a stint in a reformatory, as well as the guidance and love of the grandmother who’d raised him, helped him focus on his music and gradually allowed him to walk away from the hardscrabble streets.

Garcia spotted Marlene and revealed the Cheshire Cat grin that was his most charming feature. He steered the woman toward her. “I take it that’s your trained bear tied up outside?” he said with a laugh. “I tried to be nice but he just gave me a look like he wanted to eat me. Don’t you feed him?”

“Oh yeah, and Gilgamesh eats like a bear, too,” Marlene replied, chuckling. “But he’s a gentle giant … unless …”

She left it at that, which made Garcia laugh again. “Unless you sic him on some homeboy’s ass…. Anyway, Marlene Ciampi, this is Amelia Acevedo. Her son, Felix, is my friend I told you about.”

The three sat down and Garcia quickly filled in what he knew about Felix’s confession. “I haven’t seen him yet,” he said. “I’m not next of kin or a lawyer. So this is mostly from what he told his mom this morning after his indictment and what the cops told her. The story is the cops picked him up for some other mugging, which I’m sure he didn’t do either—just standing in the wrong place at the wrong time—and then they questioned him most of a day. To tell you the truth, I’m surprised he didn’t
admit to every unsolved killing in the boroughs. But none of this adds up.”

“Like what?” Marlene asked.

“Like—and sorry, Mrs. Acevedo, but I have to be honest with Marlene here—Felix is what you’d call ‘a little slow.’ He was held back a couple of grades and still struggles with things like reading and understanding even when he says he does. He’s not stupid; it just takes him longer to put it together than most people. There’s one thing he’s good at: if he hears something—like which trains to take and what stops to get off, or a rap song—he can spit it back out like he recorded it. But there’s no room for mistakes. If he accidentally got off at the wrong subway stop, he’d be lost until someone else told him what to do. But the cops are saying this is the guy who supposedly slips in and out of buildings murdering women and disappears, until finally they catch him wandering around on the sidewalk on a Sunday morning. You believe that? Hell, the cops said Felix tried to run away and fell over his own feet. That makes sense, anyway, ’cause the guy’s a klutz and blind without his glasses, which they lost, by the way.”

“You say he has a habit of confessing to things he didn’t do?” Marlene asked.

As a former assistant district attorney, she knew that with any major crime there were people who would step forward to confess when they didn’t commit the offense. Sometimes it was for the publicity. Or sometimes they were mentally ill and harboring a guilt complex that made them feel as if they needed to be punished. But those people tended to turn themselves in or made statements to others hoping to be implicated. They didn’t
expect to be spotted on a sidewalk by the police and then try to escape.

Occasionally there was another type of false confession made during police interrogations. There wasn’t a lot of rubber-hosing of suspects, no slapping a potential perp beneath a hot, bare lightbulb—defendants were well aware of their civil rights when it came to physical violence. But some police interrogators stopped just short of it—getting up in the face of the suspect, shouting, threatening, cursing, intimidating.

The U.S. Supreme Court had even ruled that the police could lie in order to secure a confession, such as telling a suspect that he’d been identified by a witness when the truth was that he had not. And some interrogators walked a fine line with techniques like sleep deprivation, hunger, and thirst—cases had been lost when defense attorneys successfully argued to a judge that crossing that line had constituted coercion or worse.

Whatever the reason behind a false confession, the police were supposed to keep secret some details about the crime that only the killer would know. It was a sure way to separate fact from fiction.

“Felix will say anything that will take the pressure off,” Garcia replied, and told her about the incident between Maria Elena and her boyfriend at the Hip-Hop Club. He turned to the other woman. “Mrs. Acevedo, maybe you could tell Marlene more about Felix?”

Amelia Acevedo smiled timidly. Marlene observed that before a hard life had prematurely grayed Amelia’s hair and lined her face, she’d been quite pretty. “Yes, ever since he was a young boy, if someone asks him, ‘Did you do this?’ he will say
yes,” Amelia replied. “He does not like people to be angry with him. His father is always angry with him. The other night Felix tried to deny that he took his father’s beer, and then when my husband found the beer in the fridge, Felix then told him that he did it, which he did not do. That’s when my husband hit him like this.” She imitated a backhand blow to the right side of Felix’s face.

“Has he been in trouble with the authorities—the police or at school—where he confessed to something he didn’t do?” Marlene asked.

Amelia nodded her head emphatically. “Yes, the other kids at school sometimes do bad things and then blame him. They know he will say he did it. This happened at the school when that boy, I think his name is Raymond, threw a rock at the window of the grocery store. Felix was afraid when the police accused him and so he said he did it. He didn’t want them to be mad at him. But then the police found out he didn’t do these things.”

Marlene thought for a moment before speaking again. “Forgive me, but I want to play devil’s advocate here for a moment. I understand he sometimes confesses to things he didn’t do, but what if he really killed these women? Do you have anything else to suggest that he didn’t do it?”

Garcia shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t think he could do it. The kid is a real sweetheart and just sort of naïve about the world. I mean, he wanted to give the coat-check girl a diamond ring he bought from some guy in a park—probably hot as hell—and he’s too shy to even ask her for a date. But besides just not being the killer type, he’s kind of skinny and not very strong.”

He patted Amelia Acevedo’s hand. “Sorry, Mrs. Acevedo, I like Felix but he can hardly walk without falling. The cops are saying he’s this smooth cat burglar who gets into these apartments in the middle of the day, ties up these women, kills them without alarming the neighbors, then just calmly walks away, catches a bus or a taxi back to the Bronx? And nobody sees him? It just doesn’t make sense.”

Garcia looked at Amelia. “Tell her what you told me about Felix on the day of the murder in the Bronx.”

“I do not remember last July when the two women were killed in Manhattan,” she responded, “but I remember when that Bronx woman, Dolores Atkins, was killed because I saw it on television news before I went to work. My boy came home when I was watching.”

“What was he wearing?”

“The same thing he always wears in the summer—a T-shirt, shorts, and basketball shoes.”

“Did you see any blood on him? On his clothes? His hands?”

Amelia Acevedo shook her head. “No, nothing. And not when I washed his clothes later.”

Garcia looked over at Marlene. “I don’t know what was in the newspapers, but I’ve talked to a few people on the street who wouldn’t shit me. They said there was blood everywhere. But Felix doesn’t get any on him?”

Marlene frowned. “I haven’t seen the crime scene photographs, but maybe he washed up or changed clothes.”

“Talk to Felix sometime and then you tell me if you think he’s so cool that after he cuts this woman up and did whatever else they say he did, he washes the blood off himself and his
clothes,” Garcia said. “Maybe he stopped at a Laundromat and then went to the Y to take a shower.”

“Maybe,” Marlene said with a laugh. “But it’s just the sort of thing we’ll have to look into should the prosecution try to make that claim.”

Garcia grinned. “This means you’ll take the case.”

Marlene smiled back. “I can’t represent him on the Manhattan beef, but I have someone good in mind, a real sharp lawyer, Alea Watkins. But let me look into this and the Bronx case some more and see what I can come up with.”

Suddenly Amelia sobbed and reached over to grab Marlene’s hands. “Felix is a good boy,” she said.
“Gracias
, he is all I have to bring me joy.”

Marlene squeezed the other woman’s hands and smiled. “We mothers have to stick together. I’ll do the best I can.”

B
UTCH
K
ARP WAS WAITING FOR
M
ARLENE IN THE LIVING
room of the loft when she got home that night. “So how’s Alejandro?” he asked, patting the couch in an invitation to join him.

“He’s fine,” she said, sitting down and curling up against him. “It’s his friend he’s worried about. I met with him and Amelia Acevedo, the mother of one Felix Acevedo, who is currently under indictment for murder with the New York DAO and may be facing similar charges in the Bronx.”

Karp felt his wife hesitate. There hadn’t been much time to tell him about the telephone call from Garcia that had precipitated the meeting. He furrowed his brow when she asked him why he hadn’t spoken about the Yancy-Jenkins case to her before the indictment and he replied, “Well, I have to admit, I didn’t know about it. Not that I hear about every indictment or that every felony—even murder—is brought before the bureau
chiefs meeting on Monday morning for vetting. But still …” His voice trailed off.

“I told Mrs. Acevedo that I’d look into what’s going on in the Bronx,” she said now as she burrowed under his protective arm. “And I’m going to see if I can find someone willing to take the New York case pro bono.”

“Really? You think there’s something amiss?”

Marlene raised her eyebrows and he knew his studied nonchalance wasn’t fooling her. She gave him a basic rundown of what she’d heard at the bookstore. “I think you might want to take a look at that confession,” she suggested now. “I’ve got a gut feeling that something’s not right about this.”

“Not every confession is a fraud, Miss Hug-a-Thug Defense Attorney, even if this guy has a history of giving false statements,” Karp said. “However, I’ve already called Pat Davis; had to leave a message, but asked to see him in the morning to brief me and bring the case file.” Pat Davis was the deputy chief of the Homicide Bureau. “Can’t have some fire-breathing defense lawyers and their friends in the press catching me with my pants down.”

“Damn straight … especially if one of the fire breathers is your wife,” Marlene said with a sly smile. “But why Pat Davis, not Tommy Mack?”

“Tommy’s in the middle of a six-week trial,” Karp said of the Homicide Bureau chief. “Meanwhile, Pat’s been handling the bureau administrative duties. And as for getting caught with my pants down, there are exceptions to every rule, and if you play your cards right …” He winked. “But I believe we were talking about this friend of Alejandro’s. Do you know who you’re going to bring on as his attorney for Yancy-Jenkins?”

Marlene nodded. “I’m hoping to talk Alea Watkins into it. Then your people will at least know they’d better be prepared for a fight.”

“Good choice.” Karp pictured the attractive, middle-aged black attorney known for taking on the tough cases. “Sharp and aggressive. I wonder who we have working the case.”

“I thought Guma was your point man on the Yancy-Jenkins task force,” Marlene said.

“He was,” Karp replied. “Or is. But he’s been on vacation at a health retreat in the Catskills. He’s not due back in the office until Monday, and it’s only Wednesday, so I think I’ll take a look at the case file and ask a few questions of Davis, including why I’m in the dark on this one.”

Karp was still mulling over what Marlene had told him about Felix Acevedo as he walked to work the next morning, following his usual route east on Grand and then south on Centre to the monolithic Criminal Courts Building, which also housed the DAO. He smiled when he saw the owner of the newsstand in front of the building. The little man with the pointed nose and Coke-bottle eyeglasses spotted him at the same time and grinned as he hopped from foot to foot in front of his kiosk.

Dirty Warren was Marlene’s first case in her new role of crusading defense attorney. He’d been framed for the murder of a Westchester County socialite and without Marlene’s help would likely have been convicted—if the conspirators had not first had him murdered in jail to make sure the case was closed. He got his nickname because he had Tourette’s syndrome, which
afflicted him with various facial tics and caused him to lace his conversations with frequent and unexpected bits of profanity and odd sounds. But he was a genuinely good man who’d been a font of information about what was going down on the streets.