20

DeMarco met Coghill and Dent at a deli in Tribeca on Vesey Street. When he arrived, they were sitting at a table near the window, making crude comments about women walking by on the sidewalk outside. Can you believe the gazooms on that one? DeMarco thought they looked like bookends: both in their fifties, gray-haired, and overweight. They had small cynical eyes and faces best suited for displaying skepticism. They wore tight-fitting sports jackets, wrinkled white shirts, cheap striped ties, and thick-soled black lace-up shoes. New York’s finest on display.

DeMarco told them Porter’s theory: that she’d found six cases involving rich defendants and that someone had tampered with the witnesses in all six. Porter, he said, had reason to believe it could be the same person—she’d gotten a “whiff” of the guy, whatever the hell that meant—and she was afraid he might be screwing with the Rosenthal case.

Dent said, “I wouldn’t be totally surprised if somebody got to the witnesses if the defendants were superrich. Fuckin’ rich people can get away with anything. But it’s hard to believe it’s the same guy. I gotta admit, though, Justine’s one of the sharper ADAs in Manhattan, and if she thinks it’s possible … well, who knows.”

“Anyway,” DeMarco said, “Porter said she was suspicious about what happened to the old lady and said you could enlighten me.”

Dent said, “When we first heard about Esther having a stroke, frankly we didn’t think too much of it. I mean, shit, she was almost ninety years old. But Justine told us to go see if anything funny happened because she didn’t like the coincidence of losing two witnesses.”

“So we go to the hospital to see her,” Coghill said, “but she couldn’t talk. You know how folks look sometimes when they have a stroke? One side of her face all twisted down, drool coming out of her mouth? It was a shame.”

“Esther doesn’t have any family,” Dent said, “except some cousin who lives out West she never sees. But her friend Leah was there at the hospital. Leah’s the same lady who was with Esther in the bar when DiNunzio was shot, and she asks if we’re there to investigate who poisoned Esther.”

“We go, whoa!” Coghill said. “‘Poisoned’ her? What are you talking about? So Leah says after Esther had her stroke she went back to Esther’s apartment to bring her things she might need in the hospital. You know—toothbrush, nightgown, slippers, whatever. Well, Leah can’t find Esther’s pillbox, one of those little boxes marked with each day of the week. Leah said it should have been sitting on the kitchen table because that’s where Esther always kept it, but it’s not there. Leah hunts for it for a bit, finally gives up, and starts packing up the stuff she’s going to bring to Esther. And that’s when she finds the pillbox. It was in the pocket of the robe Esther would wear in the morning after she got out of bed. It looked like Esther had taken her morning pills, then stuck the pillbox into the pocket of her robe instead of putting it back on the table.”

“Okay,” DeMarco said, but he wondered why Coghill was droning on about the pillbox. The old lady just misplaced it, the way he sometimes did with his keys, putting them someplace other than on the table beside the door.

“So Leah looks to see how many pills are in the pillbox,” Coghill said, “and she sees there are only three. One blue one in the Saturday space and two pills for Sunday, one blue and one white. The blue one is supposed to be Coumadin and the white one digoxin.”

“Leah, of course, knows what Esther takes,” Dent said. “All these old people do is talk about their medical problems, and Esther and Leah are closer than sisters. Anyway, Leah goes to the medicine cabinet, planning to fill up Esther’s pillbox. She opens the digoxin and Coumadin bottles and shakes a few out, and that’s when she notices that the pills don’t match the ones in Esther’s pillbox.”

Coghill picked up the story again. “The pills are the same color, blue and white, and the same size as the ones in the prescription bottle, but they don’t have the numbers on them that Coumadin and digoxin do.”

“Leah goes bananas,” Coghill said. “She calls the nurse in the assisted leaving place and tells her someone switched out Esther’s medicine. The nurse says, ‘Oh, bullshit,’ and comes up and starts pawing through the closet in the bathroom which is just full of crap and, sure as shit, the nurse finds pills that look just like the ones in Esther’s pillbox. One pill is a diet pill and the other is an antihistamine. The nurse says it’s obvious that Esther mixed up her pills.

“Now it’s Leah who says, ‘Bullshit.’ No way would Esther have made that kind of mistake. Plus, she tells the nurse, Esther never took a diet pill in her life. And this is the story Leah told us when we went to see Esther in the hospital.”

Dent leaned back in his chair. “So what do you think, DeMarco? Do you think an old lady mixed up her pills or that someone sneaked into her apartment and switched out the pills knowing if she didn’t take her medication she might have a stroke? And why would this person have switched out just the pills in the pillbox and not the pills in the prescription bottles in the medicine cabinet?”

“I don’t know,” DeMarco said, but it seemed a lot more likely that old Esther had just mixed up her meds.

“What about this busboy who split?” DeMarco asked.

“Now that was weird,” Dent said. “I mean, weirder than Esther having a stroke, because Ortiz seemed to us like a solid guy. But when Justine called him to check on something in the statement he’d made, she got a message that his phone had been disconnected. So we went looking for him, and found out that he’d moved out of his apartment. We asked the building super where he’d gone, and he said that Ortiz split in the middle of the night and didn’t say anything to anyone about why or where he was going. He didn’t even get back the damage deposit he put down, and left all his furniture. I mean, it’s like he got scared and ran.”

“Did you try to find him?” DeMarco asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Coghill said. “Well, not us personally, but one of the missing persons gals who’s good with computers. She searched to see if he had used his credit cards or bought an airline ticket or if his social security number had shown up on a tax document, but she couldn’t find the guy. But, to tell you the truth, we didn’t try to track him down like he was a serial killer. At the time, we still had four good witnesses who could testify against that little shit Rosenthal.”