26

Although things were going well, Ella was a bit worried.

Three of the witnesses were in the bag: Edmundo Ortiz was on a fishing boat off Alaska cooking for a hungry crew; old Esther Behrman was now a bedridden turnip as a result of her unfortunate stroke; and the gambling bartender, Jack Morris, would testify that he wasn’t sure Toby was the guy who’d shot Dominic DiNunzio. This left two witnesses: the hot young barmaid, Kathy Tolliver; and Rachel Quinn.

Rachel Quinn was the one who concerned Ella. According to the information provided by the Dallas data miners, Quinn was as pure as the driven snow. She had no criminal record, hadn’t ever been busted for anything in her lily-white life—not for smoking a joint in college or getting a DUI. She was a lawyer—did Wall Street financial crap, not criminal law—and made so much money that it wasn’t likely Ella was going to be able to buy her off. Ella was certain that if she approached Quinn and even insinuated that she wanted her to change her testimony, the woman would immediately whistle for a cop.

The other problem Ella had—and it might be a tougher one than the remaining witnesses—was that she hadn’t even started looking for an alternative suspect for DiNunzio’s murder. And that was Toby’s defense: Toby didn’t kill Dominic—some other dude did it—and Ella had yet to identify the dude.

But when it came to the barmaid, Kathy Tolliver, Ella knew exactly what to do.

Kathy was twenty-four years old and had a four-year-old daughter. She had been busted half a dozen times for taking drugs, usually coke, then going a bit nuts and breaking things and assaulting folks. The father of her child was an abusive alcoholic and Kathy had divorced him about a year after her baby was born.

The interesting thing about Kathy was that she was engaged in a vicious custody battle with her ex—although according to the Dallas data miners, the battle was really between Kathy and her ex-husband’s parents. The grandparents—not the father—wanted the kid and they were determined to prove that Kathy was an unfit mother, in which case the child would be given to her ex-husband and then raised by grandma and grandpa, who doted on the little girl.

Kathy, to her credit, was doing her best to be a good mom. She’d stopped taking drugs, attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings three times a week, and worked her lovely tail off to support her child. Raising a child had to be a financial struggle; she was a single woman with a minimum-wage job whose primary source of income was the tips a looker like her could generate. So Kathy was vulnerable, and Ella figured the best strategy when it came to her was to use both the carrot and the stick. She’d start with the stick.

Ella spent a few days following Kathy Tolliver. She worked at McGill’s from four p.m. until midnight, five days a week. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she attended a noon NA meeting near her crummy apartment in Brooklyn. A lady who lived in her building and appeared to have about a dozen kids of her own took care of Kathy’s little girl when Kathy was working.

Ella soon learned that the first thing Kathy did when she got off work was to go to a bar near McGill’s and have a single glass of white wine before catching the subway home. While she was in the bar, some drunken ass would inevitably try to hit on her, but Kathy would blow the guy off, and sometimes wasn’t very nice about the way she did it. The girl just wanted a half hour to herself to decompress before she went home to her kid.

The other thing about pretty Kathy was that she was a smoker, and since you can’t smoke in any bar in New York anymore, what she’d do was sip half her white wine, step outside for a cigarette, and then go back inside to finish her wine before trudging to the subway station.

Ella decided that she needed a drug dealer, but she didn’t know any dealers in New York. However, Curtis—the maintenance man at Esther Behrman’s rest home—was a pot smoker, and he might know a few guys who dealt in commodities other than pot. She called Curtis—she hadn’t spoken to him since Esther’s tragedy—and offered to mail him five hundred bucks. Curtis hooked her up with a dealer, who steered her to another dealer, and she bought what she needed.

Kathy left McGill’s at midnight and went to her favorite after-work watering hole. She chatted briefly with the bartender, a mannish-looking woman about Ella’s age, and ordered her glass of Chablis. Ella thought Kathy looked tired and noticed she had a run in the black fishnets she was wearing. Ella had been sitting in the bar, at a table, for half an hour before Kathy arrived.

A guy with a ridiculous pompadour immediately went up to Kathy, hoping to chat her into the sack, but whatever Kathy said to him caused him to back away, holding his hands up in a don’t-shoot-me gesture. She finished half her wine, and then, as was her custom, asked the bartender to watch her purse and went outside to have her pre-subway smoke.

As soon as Kathy stepped outside, Ella walked up to the bar and asked the bartender for another drink, and when the bartender turned her back to reach for the bottle of Stoli, Ella dropped the tablet into Kathy’s Chablis. Kathy came back into the bar five minutes later, chatted a bit more with the bartender, and then began her weary schlep to the subway. Ella again thought that the poor girl looked frazzled, and actually felt sorry for her.

Kathy walked about a block before she began to stagger, and as she was about to collapse facedown on the sidewalk, Ella walked up to her and said, “Are you all right, honey?”

“No,” Kathy said, then slumped to the ground, with Ella grabbing her arm to make sure she didn’t fall too hard.

Ella called 911. “A woman just collapsed. You need to send an ambulance right away. She doesn’t look good at all.”

She rattled off the address and hung up before the dispatcher could start asking questions. A passerby stopped to ask if she could help, but Ella shooed the Good Samaritan away, saying that she had things under control and that the medics were coming.

The medics arrived, and Ella said, “She’s my friend, and I thought she was off the drugs but she, I don’t know, fell off the wagon, I guess.”

While one medic was taking Kathy’s vital signs, the other one asked, “What did she take?”

“I have no idea,” Ella said. “She used to do a lot of different shit.”

The medics placed Kathy on a gurney and slid her into the ambulance, and Ella asked if she could accompany them to the hospital. Sorry, they said, against company policy. They were taking her to Mount Sinai, and Ella would have to take a cab.

At the hospital, the doctors did whatever doctors do when someone is brought in unconscious and the medics have been told that the patient had a bad reaction to an unknown recreational drug. While all this was going on, Ella sat patiently in the ER waiting room reading magazines that were three years old. And like the good friend she was supposed to be, she held on to Kathy’s purse, which contained her cell phone, making it unlikely that when she came to she’d make a phone call or leave the hospital before Ella had a chance to talk to her.

Five hours after being admitted, at approximately five-thirty in the morning, Kathy walked into the waiting area, white as a sheet, barely able to walk.

Ella stepped up to her and said, “Kathy, are you okay?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m the person who called the medics after you OD’d on whatever drug you took.”

“I don’t do drugs,” Kathy said.

“Well, I kind of doubt that John and Helen’s lawyer is going to buy that.” John and Helen were the Petermans, grandparents to Kathy’s child.

“What?” Kathy said. “How do you …”

“We need to talk,” Ella said.

“Is that my purse?” Kathy said.

“Yes. I picked it up when they took you to the hospital. And like I said, we need to talk.”

Kathy snatched her purse out of Ella’s hand. “I don’t know you from Adam. Get away from me.”

“Kathy, listen to me. If we don’t talk, your ex-husband is going to get custody of Maddy.”

“What are you talking about? And how do you know my daughter’s name? Goddamnit, who are you?”

“I know this is confusing, Kathy, particularly in the condition you’re in right now, but you need to talk to me. For Maddy’s sake.”

Ella took her arm. Kathy resisted a bit, then went along as Ella led her over to a table in the nearly empty cafeteria.

“Now listen carefully. You’re a witness against Toby Rosenthal, and if you don’t say the right things when you testify at his trial, I’m going to have to tell the Petermans’ lawyer about what happened tonight. I’m going to say you took too much coke or heroin and …”

“I didn’t do any coke, and I’ve never taken heroin in my life.”

“… then had to be hauled off to the hospital and left Maddy stranded with your sitter, who expected you to pick up your daughter hours ago.”

“I don’t understand what you want.”

“I know it’s hard for you to concentrate right now, with the drugs and the trauma and all that, but what you need to realize is that I’m a witness to what happened tonight. The medics who picked you up off the street are witnesses, and I have their names. Most important, there’s a record of your being treated at this hospital for a drug overdose. Now we’re going to talk again, after you’ve had a chance to recover, but the thing you need to understand tonight—or I should say this morning—is if you don’t do what I ask, your ex-husband is going to gain custody of your beautiful little girl. And neither of us wants that to happen.”

Ella stood up and handed Kathy two twenties. “Take a cab home, not the subway. Your daughter needs you. But tomorrow we’ll get together and talk, right after that NA meeting you usually go to.”

The next day, as promised, Ella met with Kathy again. The woman was angry and at the same time frightened. Ella once again explained that if Kathy didn’t cooperate she was going to let her daughter’s grandparents know what had happened, which would almost certainly result in her ex-husband being given custody of her child.

“What do you want me to say at the trial?” she asked.

“Just the truth, Kathy. You say you saw Toby Rosenthal sitting at the bar; no one is denying Toby was at the bar having a drink. But you didn’t see him shoot DiNunzio. That is, you saw DiNunzio get shot, and you initially thought it was Toby who shot him, but now you’re not sure.

“You see, I’ve been to the bar, and you were seventy feet away from DiNunzio when he was shot. And it’s dark in McGill’s. Plus, you were busy getting drinks ready to take to another table, and you weren’t really looking at DiNunzio’s table. You understand, Kathy? You can verify Toby was in the bar, but you just can’t say with certainty that he was the killer.”

“I picked him out of the lineup,” Kathy said.

“Kathy, that was a terrible lineup. The only person who looked like Toby Rosenthal in that lineup was Toby Rosenthal. None of the other people looked the least bit like him. If a man had been in the lineup who was Toby’s height, and looked more like him, you might not have picked Toby. And the cops, they really sort of steered you into picking Toby. Didn’t they?”

Kathy shook her head but didn’t say anything.

“Don’t worry. Before the trial, you and I are going to practice your testimony over the phone. I’m going to pretend to be the prosecutor and I’ll ask you questions to make sure you’ve got your answers straight. We won’t meet again. But Kathy, if you tell anyone about the discussion we had today, or if you don’t do what I want, I’m going to be forced to talk to the Petermans’ lawyer about how you started doing drugs again.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“It’s nothing personal, Kathy. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Ella took an envelope out of her pocket and slid it across the table. “There’s ten thousand dollars in that envelope—I’ll bet Maddy can use some new clothes when she starts kindergarten this year. This is just my way of showing how much I appreciate you helping me.”

Kathy hesitated, didn’t meet Ella’s eyes, then took the envelope.

Ella rose from the table. “I’ll call you again soon. Until then take care of yourself. And Maddy.”