“THE PEOPLE CALL SHAUN FITZSIMMONS.”
Waiting for Constantine’s former bodyguard and henchman to enter the courtroom, Karp went over in his mind how the previous day in court had ended.
As anticipated, the defense attorney, Mike Arnold, a white-shoe hot-shot aggressive young Harvard Law type who liked to hear himself talk, had hammered away at Mueller during cross-examination. Arnold was the prototype big-reputation Wall Street litigator whose comfort zone was securities-fraud-type cases. But an overriding ego inexorably led him to the unfamiliar and, in his warped sense of superiority, the pedestrian state court. Defending the proverbial big guy in a steamy major media case, Arnold craved the elixir of celebrity.
The gist of his attack was that Mueller had killed Swindells because the colonel had run him out of the Army. “And now you’re trying to get a sweetheart deal by going along with the fantastical story invented by the prosecution,” Arnold accused.
Listening passively to Arnold’s vitriol, Karp knew that even some members of the jury had to be questioning Mueller’s account. Taken on its own it would be hard to believe. However, the case didn’t rely on the testimony of any one witness or lack of corroboration.
Whatever the jury thought of Mueller and his “fantastical” testimony, they were in rapt attention when Karp next called Ted Moore Sr. to the stand. The former police officer began by testifying that he and his wife had identified Shaun Fitzsimmons in a lineup, which contained five stand-ins, as the man who visited their son.
“What happened immediately following that visit?” Karp asked after he entered into evidence a lineup photograph of Fitzsimmons holding the number 6 against his chest.
“My son . . .” the old man started to say, then broke down and had to pull himself together. “My son killed himself.”
Karp questioned Moore about bank statements he and his wife had located in their son’s room after he shot himself. “Would you tell the jury what bank these statements were issued by?”
“Grand Cayman National Bank.”
“And what is the balance on the last statement issued, I believe, two weeks before your son died?”
“It says $579,283.”
“What does that say to you?”
“That my son was on the take,” said Moore, his voice grim. “Thirty-five years on the force, I know a dirty cop when I see something like this.”
“Was your son a dirty cop?”
Moore hung his head and his shoulders shook. But when he looked up, his face was hard in spite of the tears on his cheeks. “Yes, he was a dirty cop.”
As the old man left the witness stand, Karp reflected on the orchestration of the People’s case. He sometimes saw himself as moving the pieces of his cases around like playing chess, a game he’d learned from his mother. She’d taught him that it wasn’t all about a frontal attack and a war of attrition, trading pieces with an opponent. “With a true grandmaster,” she said, “you can’t see the strategy until it’s too late and you’re in checkmate.”
Karp approached prosecuting criminals the same way and was prepared to move another piece as the hulking presence of Fitzsimmons entered the courtroom. Just getting Constantine’s bodyguard on the theoretical game board had required moving a lot of pieces to put him into check.
Pretending to be irritated but secretly pleased, he’d gone along with motions by Fitzsimmons’s attorney to delay the trials for murdering Clare Dune and Jim Hughes. Then after Mueller’s conviction, he asked to meet with Fitzsimmons and his attorney, Stephanie Clagel.
“Maybe you heard,” Karp said to Fitzsimmons when they were seated with Fulton and a stenographer present but waiting for the go-ahead to record, “that Mueller’s talking and he’s pointing the finger at you as the guy who set up the murder of Colonel Michael Swindells. And I want to talk to you about that.”
Fitzsimmons gave him a bored look. “Snitches end up in ditches,” he said. “You just don’t get ‘fuck off,’ do you, Karp? You think a different month is going to change anything?”
“Mr. Karp, you’re wasting our time,” Clagel said.
“Well, then, let me get to the point,” Karp said. “You’ve also been identified as having visited Detective Ted Moore shortly before he committed suicide.”
“Don’t know the man,” Fitzsimmons said. “Wasn’t my finger on the trigger.”
“How’d you know he pulled a trigger?” Karp asked.
“Mr. Fitzsimmons, I’d advise you not answer any more of the DA’s questions,” Clagel cautioned.
Fitzsimmons shrugged. “It’s boring in jail. I want to hear what this clown has to say. Maybe his bullshit will be entertaining.”
“Well, that identification connects you to Moore,” Karp said. “Mueller also picked you and Moore out of lineups as the men who put him up to murdering Swindells.”
“I must have a doppelgänger out there,” Fitzsimmons said with a smirk. “Somebody who looks like me.”
“Go ahead and play stupid,” Karp said. “But now the feds are interested. You do know that conspiring to murder an active-duty Army officer during the performance of his duty, while acting in concert with agents of foreign governments, is a federal crime. There’s one other person involved in this, a Russian, and she can put you in Istanbul.”
“Big deal,” Fitzsimmons said. “I’ll beat these two you have lined up against me. And I’ll beat that one, too.”
“Maybe you will, and maybe you won’t,” Karp said. “And maybe the thought of hard time in a New York prison doesn’t faze you. But the federal murder beef is a death penalty case, and I have reason to believe they’ll be trying to send you to the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where they’ll strap you to a gurney and put you down like the junkyard dog you are.”
Fitzsimmons’s eyes narrowed as his lawyer spoke up. “I think we’ve heard enough of your threats, Karp. We’ll be leaving—”
“Shut up, you worthless twat,” Fitzsimmons said. He leaned forward. “What do I get if I testify?”
Karp smiled. “I believe I can talk the feds into suspending their case against you. You plead guilty to the murder of Clare Dune, and I suspend the cases against you for Hughes and Swindells. That’s if you testify truthfully. Lie, and the feds and I will be fighting over your bones like a pack of wolves. On the other hand, testify truthfully, and you stand a slight chance of getting out of prison as an old man instead of in a wooden box.”
With that image in mind, Fitzsimmons had caved and told his side of the story as the stenographer took it down. Now, seated on the witness stand, he glared about as he took in the packed gallery and men sitting at the defense and prosecution tables. His lip curled and he shook his head when he looked at Constantine, who pretended to stifle a yawn and looked away.
Two hours later, Fitzsimmons had laid it all out for the jury. Admitting to the murder of Clare Dune, he said he’d been ordered to kill her because “she’d been having an affair with her kid’s basketball coach, Richie Bryers. And Mr. Constantine wanted her dead.” Only later, when Bryers called pretending to blackmail Constantine, did they learn that Dune had taken a photograph of one of his boss’s journals that discussed the MIRAGE file.
“He was writing in those damn things all the time,” Fitzsimmons testified. “I told him it would come back to haunt him, but he wouldn’t listen. The arrogant son of a bitch thought he was untouchable.”
Karp also questioned Fitzsimmons about telephone conversations Constantine had on the day of Swindells’s murder in which he discussed both Mueller and, in a separate conversation, “the MIRAGE plan with someone in the White House.”
Fitzsimmons said he didn’t know the details of MIRAGE, “except it has something to do with black-market oil and Mr. Constantine’s facilities in Iraq.” He described his meeting with a Russian woman named Ajmaani in Istanbul to arrange the subsequent meeting with the Russians, Syrians, Iranians, and ISIS.
“Did the defendant end up attending that meeting?” Karp asked.
“No,” Fitzsimmons said. “He was warned that there might be trouble and decided not to go.”
Fitzsimmons detailed how he’d been instructed by Constantine to get the MIRAGE file back after it was seized in the Syrian raid. “We learned that Swindells was trying to get the file deciphered. That’s when Constantine decided that the colonel had to go. He figured if Swindells was out of the picture, the problem would go away and he could move forward with his plan.”
“What was supposed to happen to Dean Mueller after he shot Swindells?” Karp asked.
“Moore was supposed to shoot him,” Fitzsimmons said. “Mueller would be just another crazy vet with a bone to pick with his commanding officer, and Moore would be the hero. But he fucked up. The whole thing was a fucked-up idea from the get-go, but you couldn’t say that to Mr. Constantine. He had it all figured out. He gets off thinking he’s smarter than everybody else.”
After Karp finished questioning Fitzsimmons, there were still blank spaces in the mosaic. He’d carefully avoided questioning him about Constantine’s connections with the administration in Washington. There was a piece on the chessboard he wanted even more than Constantine, but it required laying a trap for his opponents to fall into.
Again during cross-examination, Arnold had to attempt to discredit Fitzsimmons as “an admitted murderer” who was trying to pass the blame onto Karp’s political enemy in exchange for leniency. “You and Mueller and Karp made up this whole implausible plot, didn’t you,” he demanded.
“Nope,” Fitzsimmons said. “If I was going to make up something, it would have been airtight. But I wasn’t in charge.” He pointed at Constantine. “That arrogant son of a bitch was, and now we’re all going down.”
With nothing else to go on, Arnold continued trying to say the same thing in different ways until Fitzsimmons said, “What is it about ‘fuck off’ you don’t get, Arnold?”
Karp had to suppress a smile when Arnold complained, but Judge Dermondy said, “In spite of the witness’s crude remark, I have to agree that you’ve asked your question and had it answered, Mr. Arnold. Let’s move on.”
“No further questions,” he said in disgust.
As Fitzsimmons left the courtroom with one last glare at Constantine, Dermondy looked at Karp. “Do you have another witness?”
“One more, Your Honor. The People call Richie Bryers.”