Authors: Jeremiah Healy
I talked as fast as I could. “Chief, even if the guy had admitted everything to me chapter and verse, without a complete tape of it the DA’s got only my word against Marek’s, and I’m impeachable as hell because of my interest in helping Daniels get off.”
“No.”
I started to suggest that he at least wait to consult the young prosecutor that we’d worked it out with that afternoon, but you can’t argue with taillights. As Wooten sped off toward Marek’s building, I looked at O’Boy. He shrugged and disappeared back into the van.
T
HE CLOCK IN THE
bedroom said only 6:30 A.M., but I wanted to arrive at Middlesex early enough to see William privately before Marek’s arraignment. I had reached Mrs. Daniels by telephone the night before, and she thanked me profusely through her tears. I wanted her to be the first to tell William the good news. I left only a blind “call me” message for Rothenberg with his answering service. I left the same for Murphy with Detective Cross, who said that the lieutenant would probably be gone for the night on a possible murder/suicide in Bay Village.
I was knotting my tie when the telephone rang. I picked it up. “Hello?”
“Cuddy. I got a message from Cross that you called me last night.”
“That’s right.”
“Cross said Willa called too. I thought maybe I’d better talk with you first. What’s up?” He barely spoke the last part, sounding dead tired.
“The Calem cops arrested Marek yesterday for Jennifer Creasey’s murder. It looks like William’s going to be clear of it.”
Murphy’s voice revived. “No shit?”
“Straight. They’re arraigning Marek this morning.”
“That’s awful quick to … Damn, I haven’t gotten any sleep with this murder/suicide thing.”
“Cross told me. Why don’t I call you later today with the details on Marek?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be good.” He stopped. “I don’t mean to put you off, Cuddy. I really appreciate your dogging this one.”
“Glad to do it.” While William could probably use a father figure about now, I decided that for once I’d like to part with Murphy cordially. The suggestion could wait too. “Get some sleep.”
“Right. Hear from you later.”
I hung up and finished dressing.
I got to the courthouse building so early I walked in with the camera crew from Channel 8, the TV station covering the courts that morning. As a woman in the Middlesex County Police security team checked me through the metal detector in the lobby, a man in the team joked with a cameraman.
“Christ, Manny,” said the officer, glancing into one of the big black cases the cameraman was hauling. “Think you got enough videotape there?”
“Tell my hernia about it,” said Manny. “The boss, Creasey himself, wanted it all brought in, all the tape of the Daniels kid plus the blanks for today.”
“Why, for chrissakes?”
“Creasey’s a nut for some things, you know? He wants us to line up the camera today on this shrink guy exactly, and I mean exactly, the way we had it on Daniels.”
“Spooky.”
“Yeah. I figure maybe it’s ’cause this’ll be his last go-round.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Didn’t you hear? Fucking FCC yanked our license yesterday.”
“No! You mean you’re off the air?”
“Not right away. There’s court stuff they gotta go through and all. But the way people were talking at the station last night, it don’t look good.”
“Gee, Manny, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Gotta give the boss credit, though. He gets hit with that yesterday, but still checks us out this morning before we leave the station. Goes through every fucking tape himself while we’re getting the rest of our stuff, making sure we didn’t miss one. Not just the arraignment, either. The arrest, the witnesses coming in and out of the building here. The works. Some people, y’know?”
The crew and I caught the same elevator. They got off at the ninth floor while I continued to the seventeenth, trying to push Sam Creasey’s problems out of my mind.
William’s first words to me were “The fuck do you want?”
I guess I didn’t expect a bear hug, but I said, “I called your mother last night. Didn’t she get the word to you about Marek?”
“Yeah. She made like you figured that he was punking me.”
“Basically.”
“Great fucking news.”
“But, William, it means—”
“It means—” he shouted, then he lowered his voice to a raspy but conversational level. “It means that I did things with him and to him and it’s gonna be all over the news tonight.”
“Yes, but it also means you’re off the hook for Jennifer’s murder. You didn’t kill her, and the police and everybody know you didn’t.”
“Yeah, terrific. But the police and everybody don’t got to do a year with the wrong kind of sign hanging around their necks, you dig?”
“What do you mean?”
“Jail, man. In-car-cer-a-tion. Twelve fucking months for the gun charge. Or did you forget about that?”
“I guess I did.”
“Yeah, well, too bad you ain’t running the system. They ain’t gonna forget about it.”
“Maybe Rothenberg can work something out.”
William shook his head. “You don’t know shit, man. Gun charge is automatic. No deals, no probation, no parole. One year gone.”
“Look, they’ve got to control for things, at least. They’ll give you credit for the time you’ve already served.”
“Oh, great, man! Wonderful system. One down, just eleven to go, huh?” He hitched his seat forward, clenching and unclenching his fists and his teeth. “Well, let me tell you something, mother’. This the same system that encourage me to step up in class. To go from home to U Mass, and U Mass to Goreham. But it didn’t ‘control’ for the bloods back on Millrose Street that made me buy the piece, or the dudes in the dorm at Goreham, or the shrink who was supposed to be helping me instead of helping himself to me. You got that, Jack? This system of yours has fucked me but good. And now it’s gonna keep on fucking me by way of any mother’ doing hard time with a hard-on. Thanks, man. Thanks a lot for all you and your system done for me.”
William stood and gestured impatiently for the guard.
The proceedings against Marek were to be held in courtroom 9A. Like most of the new courthouse, 9A was carpeted and acoustically perfect, a modern butcher-block arena for deciding which side had hired the better lawyer.
The camera crew was still setting up off to the left. The courtroom was nearly half full already, and it looked like old home week. I could see Chief Wooten talking intently with a shrugging guy at the district attorney’s table. Officers Clay and Bjorkman were sitting in the first row. When Clay saw me, he got up and said something to the chief. The prosecutor looked at me and mouthed “Him?” Clay nodded and the prosecutor, now ignoring Wooten, started walking back toward me. Before he reached me, I spotted Homer Linden in one corner on the left waving to me sociably and the backs of Sam and Tyne Creasey in the first row on the right. Sam Creasey stood and moved over to his camera crew, directing one of them. Then Creasey began looking through one of the big black cases as the prosecutor drew even with me and said, “C’mon.”
“You’re kidding.”
He said, “Wish I was.”
The assistant district attorney’s name was Gibson. He was sturdy and paramilitary in a three-piece suit. I didn’t like what I’d just heard him tell me in the little conference room outside 9A.
“You mean that even if the tape had come out perfectly, it still wouldn’t be admissible?”
“That’s right. You want the short version or the long one?”
“The short one, please.”
“Okay. We have a statute in this commonwealth, call it Section Ninety-nine. That statute says generally that the police can’t tape a conversation without a warrant. Section Ninety-nine has an exception, though, that basically says that if one party to a conversation agrees to the interception, then we don’t need the others to consent nor do we need a warrant.”
“That’s what happened, though. I was a party to the conversation, and I agreed to the taping.”
“Yeah, but the exception requires you to be a law enforcement officer, which, even stretching things, you aren’t. And the taping has to be done to prove certain ‘designated offenses’ connected to some kind of ‘organized crime.’ Our boy Marek doesn’t fit.”
“So what does that mean? Aside from the fact we can’t use the tape.”
Gibson tugged on an earlobe. “It means that you, Wooten, and O’Boy broke the law.”
I stood up, walked over to the window to calm down. “The assistant DA yesterday, the one Wooten and O’Boy and I met with before the taping. He approved all this.”
“That kid’s been in the office barely a year. Wooten calls him—he’s Wooten’s brother-in-law’s kid, by the way—Wooten calls him with this maybe big case opportunity, so the kid speed-reads the statute, Section Ninety-nine. The kid misses the organized-crime part, which is interpreted in Supreme Judicial Court cases and elaborated in a Massachusetts Law Review article to the point where a dim ten-year-old could deal with it. The kid, however, misses it, like I said, signs out the wire equipment, and … Well, you know the rest.”
I turned back to Gibson. “Does this foul-up mean that even I can’t testify on what Marek told me?”
“Hard to say. The statute just limits recording or eavesdropping on conversations. A party to the conversation should still be able to testify about what the prospective defendant, here Marek, said during the conversation.”
I thought about it. Even embellished, my version of what was said wouldn’t be convincing. “If you were to handicap it right now, what would you say?”
“Too early to tell.”
“Meaning I’ve got a great theory, we both believe Marek’s the killer, but you don’t have the ammunition to prove it.”
“Like I said, it’s too early. Hell, we’re months from the trial, and evidence has a way of falling into your lap. I’ll tell you this, though. Marek’s hired himself one of the best. If there’s a rug this can be swept under for him, the lawyer you’ll see today is the broom that can do it.” He stood up. “We’d better be getting back in.”
Gibson moved up the aisle. There was a new face at the otherwise empty defense table. A distinguished, graying man who shook hands with and smiled at Gibson. A lawyerly replica of Marek. I felt sick.
“John?”
I turned my head. It was Sam Creasey. He had one of those black, snap-open videocassette cases in one hand and a concerned look on his face. “Sam, I heard about the license. I’m—”
“That can wait. I saw you go out with the prosecutor. What’s going on?”
I shook my head. “Nothing, Sam. He just wanted to hear my side of it.”
“John, please don’t bullshit me on this. It’s too important. What is it?”
I tried looking him in the eye, but it wasn’t easy. “The prosecutor didn’t say it this bluntly, but I don’t think he can prove a case against Marek.”
Creasey looked as if he’d been slapped. “I knew it. I knew it yesterday, when the call came in at the station. It didn’t feel right. The way everything else has gone against us … John, there’s no doubt in your mind that he did it, is there?”
“That Marek killed Jennifer?”
“Yes.”
Creasey was entitled at least to that. “No, Sam. No doubt.”
He hung his head, then shook it off and looked back at me. “I don’t see Mrs. Daniels.”
“I called her, but she said, all things considered, she wasn’t up to seeing”—I gestured with my hand—“this.”
“I think I know how she feels.” He looked over to his wife, sitting ramrod straight in her bench. “I wonder if you’d mind sitting with us, with Tyne and me. I think Tyne would really appreciate it.”
“Be glad to,” I said.
We walked up to the front row, Creasey motioning for me to go in first. He whispered to me, “Could you sit on the other side of her, John? In case she faints or anything?”
I nodded and Creasey said gently, “Tyne, you remember John Cuddy. He came to the house about Jennifer.”
Tyne looked up at me, then stared ahead.
“Tyne,” said Creasey in the same soft voice. “Let John past you, please?”
His wife shifted sideways, and I slid past and sat next to her. I and everyone else immediately had to stand as the court officer intoned, “Co-o-o-ourt. All rise.”
The judge ascended the bench and the case was called by the clerk. As the audience settled back down, two uniformed sheriff’s officers brought Marek in from a side door, no handcuffs. Marek was in a suit and looked marvelous despite his several jail meals. He smiled and shook hands with his attorney. As Gibson the prosecutor began speaking, Marek swung his head around, looked at me, and sneered, not ten feet away from us.
What came next takes a lot longer to relate than it did to happen. As Gibson paused for a question from the judge, I heard Creasey click open the videocassette case. I leaned forward to look at him across his wife, and he said quietly, “Please tend to Tyne.” Then Sam drew a short-barreled revolver from the case, stood up, and barked “Marek!” so sharply that the psychiatrist jumped while turning around to face us. Creasey pumped five shots into the man as Marek’s lawyer dived to the left and I threw my arms around Tyne and tackled her to the floor. Uniformed officers began firing at Sam, with several rounds either missing him or plowing through fleshy parts and lodging in the wall and bench around us. The impact of the slugs that definitely hit Creasey lifted him up and over the back of the pewlike seating, into the laps of the people behind us. There was a moment of stunned silence, smoke literally hanging in the air of the room. Then screams and yelling and everybody pushing and shoving as I helped Tyne back to a sitting position. She turned to me with that same vacant stare and said simply, “Thank you.”
As I stood up, George Bjorkman was craning over the aisle side of where Sam Creasey had fallen. I couldn’t see the body, but Bjorkman, pointing with his gun barrel, said, “Those two there, the ones right above the heart. Those are mine.”
I said, “Bjorkman?”
He turned that distorted baby face of his toward me, and I smashed his nose flat with my right fist. I had cocked my left when I heard Clay’s voice say “Stupid shit,” and then the lights went out.