Sly Fox: A Dani Fox Novel (2 page)
Read Sly Fox: A Dani Fox Novel Online
Authors: Jeanine Pirro
THE BOYS
A woman, a dog,
and a hickory tree.
The more you beat them,
the better they be
.
—SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH PROVERB
1
Monday, Spring 1976
I was late.
It was because of my dark, naturally curly hair. The alarm at my bedside had gone off at six a.m. and I’d thrown on a pair of running shorts, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and done a three-mile jog, returning in plenty of time to get to work at the Westchester County Courthouse. But when I’d looked into the mirror while cooling down, I’d seen the face of Janis Joplin staring back at me after one of her whiskey-and-drug-fueled concerts. I’d been a sweaty disaster with an out-of-control mane. A shower and wash had only made it worse. I’d been forced to flop my head on my ironing board and iron my locks to get them under control.
I’d only run one red light—in my opinion it was set too long between changes anyway—before reaching the courthouse’s parking lot at 8:10 a.m., where I slipped into a row of spaces reserved for courthouse workers.
My name is Dani Fox and I’ve been an assistant district attorney for about a year. At age twenty-five, I’m young for the job. But that is not unusual for me. I’d come into this world in a rush and had no intention of slowing down. I’m currently the only female assistant district attorney in Westchester County. One hundred ten male lawyers and me.
Westchester County was America’s first real suburb. It’s just north of New York City and the Long Island Sound. Many of our residents commute to work in Manhattan each day. They used to live in the city but they moved here to start families. What many of them didn’t leave behind was their New York attitudes. Our county is the second richest in the state. Only Manhattan’s got more money. And our wealthier and more sophisticated residents aren’t shy about letting you know that if you’re a public servant, you work for them. Because of our county’s close ties to Manhattan, there are challenges here that are a bit different from those that a prosecutor in Topeka faces. I’m not saying the district attorney in Kansas doesn’t feel the same pressures as Carlton Whitaker III, our district attorney, whenever he’s prosecuting a headline-breaking case.
But to quote
The Great Gatsby
’s Nick Carraway, “The rich are different from you and me.”
Mostly, because they have more money.
And with their money, they can hire fleets of Manhattan’s finest lawyers to make the forty-five-minute drive along the Henry Hudson Parkway north to White Plains in a cavalcade of black limos to rescue them.
There’s another side to Westchester County as well. The landscape is dotted with lower-income neighborhoods where blue-collar workers struggle to pay bills and kids grow up on mean streets. In these areas a drug called cocaine is exerting a deadly grip.
Justice in Westchester County is dispensed to the rich and the poor alike in our new nineteen-story courthouse, one of the tallest buildings in White Plains. It was the first project in a massive urban renewal program approved in the 1960s that has pretty much destroyed the original village-like character of our community. It’s fitting that the stark design of our courthouse is called Brutalist architecture. That refers to the building’s concrete-and-stucco exterior and its strikingly repetitive angular design with rows of identical windows. But I also think that tag describes how some of the masses who flow through its doors are treated. We call it the Criminal Justice System, giving the creeps top billing. I think it should be the Victims’ Justice System. If I sound a bit touchy about all of this, it’s because I am. Only, I prefer to call it passion. I don’t like it when the meek are preyed upon. The Bible may say the meek are going to inherit the earth, but until God reaches down and signs over the deed, it’s my job as a prosecutor to protect them.
I’ve never wanted to be anything other than a prosecutor. Even as a kid when I was watching Perry Mason on television, I’d root for Mason’s district attorney rival, Hamilton Burger, hoping that he would win at least one case. After a while, you had to wonder how Burger kept getting reelected, given that every time Mason defended a client, it turned out that the D.A.’s office had been bamboozled and was trying to convict the wrong guy. I especially enjoyed how the guilty leaped up in court and confessed. That doesn’t happen in real courtrooms—particularly if there is a defense attorney within reach.
Even though I am an assistant D.A., I haven’t officially been given a chance to try any bad guys in court. That’s because I’m assigned to our office’s equivalent of Siberia. All the male lawyers who were hired at the same time as I was were immediately sent to the criminal courts division to prosecute cases. But D.A. Carlton Whitaker III, in his infinite wisdom, assigned me to the appeals bureau. He doesn’t believe a woman has the killer, go-for-the-jugular instinct that you need to win in court. One day I am going to prove him wrong.
Whitaker, my boss, can actually be a pretty decent guy. He’s just part of an old boys’ network that thinks a woman’s place is in the kitchen or the bedroom but certainly not trying cases in the hallowed halls of justice. When he hired me, he said he really didn’t have a choice. He had to meet a quota; or, as he put it, “I was forced to find a girl lawyer somewhere.” So much for being magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and on Law Review at Albany Law.
I spend my days reading court transcripts of trials that some male attorney prosecuted. Once convicted, the guilty of course have the right to appeal, and it’s up to me to review what happened during their trials and explain to an appellate court why the guilty got exactly what they had coming to them.
What I do is important, but I want to get into a courtroom to try a case so badly I can barely stand it.
As I hurried across the parking lot on this bright sunny morning, up the sidewalk toward the courthouse’s door, I spotted Westchester County judge Michael Morano a few steps ahead of me. I actually didn’t see his face. Rather it was the back of his head that gave him away. A tall, thin man, Judge Morano had bushy salt-and-pepper hair divided equally on either side of his head with a bald streak down the center that reminded me of a bowling alley. I’d encountered him many times in the courthouse hallways but we’d never been formally introduced. At age sixty-three, he was one of our county’s most senior judges and was known for his crackerjack legal mind and disagreeable temperament. He wasn’t a happy man. Behind his robe, everyone called him “Miserable Morano” or “Misery” for short. In addition to his distinctive hair, he had massive bushy eyebrows that moved when he spoke, making it appear as if he had two woolly caterpillars doing push-ups on his forehead.
I entered the courthouse behind him and by chance stepped into the same elevator. There we were, just the two of us, with him looking straight ahead. I decided I wasn’t going to let his gruff reputation intimidate me.
“Good morning, Judge Morano,” I said cheerfully.
He gave me a puzzled look. “Young lady, do I know you?”
“I’m Dani Fox, an assistant district attorney.”
He replied with an ambiguous grunt.
As the door opened to his floor, I said, “I hope someday to prosecute a case in your courtroom.”
He glanced at me with contempt and said, “It’s unlikely, my dear. I handle serious matters.”
As soon as the elevator door closed, I made a sour face and repeated in a snickering voice:
“It’s unlikely, my dear. I handle serious matters.”
What an arrogant jerk, I thought.
I don’t deal regularly with police detectives, which is why I was surprised when I arrived at my cubicle and found White Plains police detective Tommy O’Brien sitting in my chair, talking on my phone with his feet propped up and his well-worn shoes resting on my desk.
Just as I hadn’t been properly introduced to Judge Morano, I’d never been introduced to O’Brien. But I’d read transcripts of testimony in the appellate division that he’d given in dozens of high-profile criminal cases and seen him in the halls. He was a street-smart cop who—how should I put this—didn’t have a high opinion of lawyers. Or to be blunt, the guy was an “old school” Irish cop.
He certainly looked the part. Although only in his early fifties, O’Brien looked older. Tired. Twice divorced, he had a watermelon belly that draped over the two-inch-wide brown belt that kept his J. C. Penney black slacks in place. He was wearing a shabby navy blazer, a white shirt with its frayed collar unbuttoned, and an ugly maroon tie that he’d undoubtedly gotten as a Christmas present in an office exchange. There was a bald spot inching its way forward from the back of his huge skull and his once-bright red hair was now specked with gray. He had a toothpick protruding from the corner of his lips. He was one of those men who could use the term “doll” or “honey” or “gal” and not realize how archaic it sounded.