MARLENE GOT OUT OF THE CAB ON FORTY-NINTH STREET AND stood for a moment looking up at the looming gray façade of the Saks Fifth Avenue department store. It seemed an odd meeting place. But better than the usual dark alley, she thought.
Warren Bennett’s arraignment on the indictment the day before had taken about an hour. Generally, an arraignment lasted only a few minutes, with the defendant entering a plea either to a prearranged plea bargain, meaning to a lesser charge with a less severe sentence than the original, or a plea of not guilty. If the latter, the case was sent to a trial courtroom, where pretrial motions addressed to the indictment were heard. Then the case was set for trial at some future date.
However, Bennett’s case for many reasons was unusual. DA Chin craved ink, so he’d asked the lead investigating detective, James Meadow, who had similar inclinations, to give a synopsis of the People’s case against Warren, ostensibly to justify Chin’s request for remand of Warren and no bail for the duration pending trial.
All the while, Marlene had sat pondering the coincidence that the same man Warren had witnessed confronting Michelle Oakley at his sister’s party would be presiding at his trial. Her first inclination when her client had made his comment about Judge Jack Kingston was to jump up and demand that the judge recuse himself because of his personal connection to the victim and the defendant. But something had cautioned her to wait. If the judge was somehow part of this conspiracy to commit murder and set Warren up for the fall, she needed to figure out why first.
Better I don’t tip my hand, she’d thought. If it does turn out to be just a coincidence, I can always make the motion at a later time. But for now, let’s play dumb.
All that was required to have Warren bound over for trial was the grand-jury indictment that satisfied a “probable cause” finding that a crime had been committed, that the defendant had committed it, and that if the evidence went uncontradicted or unexplained, the defendant would be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The judge had asked Marlene if her client was going to enter a plea. Rising, she’d given Harley Chin a venomous look before answering. “Not guilty, your honor,” she’d said.
Knowing it was a waste of time, she’d still asked for bail, citing Warren’s Tourette’s, “which places him at great risk in the jail population. He has already been the victim of one attempted assault. He is the owner of a small business in New York City with strong ties to that community, as well as having family in Purchase. He has no criminal record and is not a flight risk.”
However, Chin had requested that Warren be remanded without bail to await trial. “Given the severity and brutality of the crime, the safety of this community demands that he be removed from the streets until such time as this case can be adjudicated.”
After encouraging Warren to keep his head up, Marlene had left the courthouse with her mind whirling. She’d reminded herself that the confrontation at the party between the judge and Michelle could be a false lead. And if she put all of her eggs in that basket, she might miss something important. She didn’t believe that Warren had killed his friend, but it didn’t mean that some intruder intent on burglary or rape hadn’t surprised Michelle and killed her.
Warren could have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this is all just a tragic misunderstanding, she’d told herself. . . . And you don’t believe that for an instant.
Leaving White Plains, Marlene had driven to Purchase and the home of Warren’s parents, Clare and Wesley. She’d called ahead so they were expecting her, and she was invited into the library. The Bennetts had clearly been uncomfortable at first, but they’d answered her questions without hesitation.
Warren had not appeared to be angry when he left the house for his date with Michelle. “Quite the contrary,” his mother had said. “He was actually dressed nicely and seemed very happy. He even spoke civilly to me without that dreadful sense of humor. Of course, he was so excited about seeing Michelle that his other ‘issue’ was acting up. But that happens.”
Marlene had asked how they knew that Warren arrived home a little after ten P.M., as Chin had told her. “I always watch the evening news,” Wesley had said. “And I remember hearing him come in shortly after it began.”
“Did you see him or talk to him?” Marlene had asked.
Both parents had shaken their heads. “No,” the mother had replied. “I did hear him puttering about in the kitchen, getting a late-night snack, I suppose. He used to do that a lot as a boy . . .”
As the woman’s voice had trailed off, tears sprang to her eyes, which she wiped at angrily, as if they were annoying insects. “Pardon me, there must be something in the air.”
“It’s okay,” Marlene had said gently, and she was touched when Warren’s father reached over and patted his wife’s knee. “Mothers never stop loving their children.”
The other woman had looked up, grateful. “Do you . . . do you think . . .” she’d stammered.
“That he did it? Absolutely not,” Marlene had said.
Some of Clare Bennett’s icy demeanor had returned. “I know he didn’t do it,” she’d said thinly. “Despite our . . . ‘differences,’ I know my son, and he is not a killer. What I meant was, do you think he’ll be convicted?”
Marlene’s lips had twisted. “I, of course, can’t say how this will go for sure. I haven’t seen, examined, or had a chance to challenge the prosecution evidence, but I think we can beat this.”
“Do you need a retainer?” Wesley Bennett had asked.
Marlene had shaken her head. “No, I’m doing this pro bono for Warren. As I told your daughter, your son is more than he seems and has helped a lot of people, including my family.”
Both parents had exchanged surprised looks. “I’d like to hear about that sometime,” Wesley had said.
“And in the meantime, what can we do?” Clare had asked.
Marlene had looked her in the eyes and said, “You can go see your son and tell him what you told me about knowing he is not a murderer. Right now, what he needs most is the support of his family.”
Clare Bennett’s head had tilted back slightly as though she’d taken offense. But then she’d smiled. “We’ll see what we can do.”
As she’d stood up to leave, Marlene suddenly froze as a new thought sprang into her mind. “You know, it just struck me,” she’d said. “I’ve seen the evidence log from the items the police seized in connection with this case, and it lists the clothes he was wearing when he was arrested—jeans, a sweatshirt, a T-shirt, and socks. But other than that, there’s no mention of any other clothing items; apparently, there was nothing in his apartment they considered worth taking to be tested or kept as evidence. But if I just heard you right, and from what I recollect from talking to your daughter, Shannon, Warren was wearing nice clothes for his date.”
“Yes,” Clare had replied, puzzled. “We bought him a jacket, tie, shirt, and slacks for Shannon’s party; otherwise, he dresses like a street person, and that just wouldn’t do for the occasion. I do know he was wearing the new shirt and slacks when he left for his date; I was watching from an upstairs window. And I believe he hung them back up in his closet upstairs before he left for Manhattan.”
“The police didn’t want them?”
“They didn’t ask.”
“May I see them, please?”
Clare had led the way to Warren’s room. Marlene had smiled as she entered. It was definitely a boy’s room, the walls covered with posters for films such as Star Wars, The Godfather, Indiana Jones, and The Searchers. There were also poster-sized photographs of Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne.
“Warren loves his movies,” his mother had said.
“I know.” Marlene had chuckled. “He and my husband play a movie-trivia game with each other.” The aside had reminded her of the trivia question Warren was supposed to solve for his date with Michelle. The key goes where the book editor sees his wife and son off to Maine. She’d wondered if Butch had ever figured it out or if it had slipped his mind as it had hers.
Clare Bennett had walked over to the closet and opened the door, pointing out the shirt and pants her son had worn on his date. Marlene had carefully picked them off the rack by their hangers and laid them on the bed so she could see the front of both clearly. She’d bent over to look at the sleeves of the tan shirt. “No blood,” she’d said, mostly to herself.
“What?” the Bennetts had asked at the same time, just as Shannon had entered the room.
“Umm . . . it could be nothing,” Marlene had replied. Except, she’d thought, the autopsy report said that Michelle Oakley had been stabbed several times in the back, piercing her lungs and heart; in fact, cause of death was loss of blood. And yet there are no discernible flecks of blood on the shirtsleeves or chest or on the front of the pants. But that media-hound Detective Meadow didn’t think to ask Warren’s parents for the clothing their son wore the night he saw Michelle, just in case? Cousin Bobby said he was lazy, but that’s just plain shoddy detective work!
“Would you have any plastic bags around, like what you’d get from the dry cleaner, that I can use to protect these? I’d like to take them with me to be tested,” Marlene had said.
A few minutes later, Marlene had left the house with the clothes in plastic bags, escorted by Shannon. When they’d reached Marlene’s pickup truck, Shannon cleared her throat. “I . . . uh . . . wanted to talk to you about something I’ve been thinking about.”
“Sure. What’s on your mind?”
“I don’t want to speak ill of the dead,” Shannon had begun, “and knowing the way Warren felt about Michelle, I hope I’m wrong. But I don’t think I am.”
“Go on,” Marlene had said. “Maybe it’s nothing, but we can’t afford to overlook anything.”
Shannon had nodded. “Okay, well, I guess this would fall into the category of rumor or partially overheard conversations and guesswork. But anyway, I was at the club a month or so ago, having a drink with a friend, when I saw Michelle come in and sit down at a table with two of the wealthy—and married, I might add—members. She didn’t see me, and she didn’t stay long, just shook their hands, talked for a few minutes, and left. I’m probably making too much of this . . .”
“Finish your thought,” Marlene had encouraged.
“Well, after she left, I went outside to smoke a cigarette and was standing on the lawn below the raised patio when those same two men came out. They were right up above me, but they didn’t see me. I couldn’t hear everything they were saying, but I did catch one of them telling the other, ‘It’s expensive, but they’re beautiful, discreet, will do whatever you want, and best of all, you don’t have to live with them.’ They laughed, and then the guy who was talking said, ‘Want me to tell Michelle you’re in?’ And that was all I heard.”
Marlene had let it sink in for a moment. “You’re saying you think Michelle Oakley was running an escort service.”
Shannon had bitten her lip and nodded. “It took me some time to believe it, but then it all made sense. I told you that I knew she was struggling financially—her house was up for sale, and the neighborhood gossips were telling Mom, who is one herself, that she was letting her staff go and selling some of her possessions. Then suddenly, the for-sale sign came down, she bought a new car, and I’d been seeing her out again, shopping and attending parties, obviously wearing new clothes.”
“Is this what you started to tell me the first time we met at the jail?”
“Yes. It just seemed so outlandish. Then again, after what the governor of our state did, I guess anybody could be involved in that sort of thing.”
Anybody indeed, Marlene thought now, as she made her way to the expensive-perfume counter inside Saks. Maybe even a judge? She’d asked her husband what he knew about Jack Kingston, and he’d said that the dapper, extremely well-heeled and politically-connected-up-the-wazoo judge was apparently headed for a seat on the federal bench, maybe even the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. “With an eye on the U.S. Supreme Court.”
So why kill Michelle? Was she blackmailing him? She didn’t seem the type, and Warren said she was looking to “atone” for her mistakes, not make new ones.
Marlene knew that the key to solving the murder and saving Warren was Jim Williams. But that wasn’t going to be easy. Warren’s parents knew Judge Kingston, but they only vaguely recalled Jim Williams and his date who had accompanied him to Shannon’s party.
“We could call Jack and ask if he has the man’s number,” Wesley Bennett had offered. But Marlene had declined that offer. If the judge was involved in any way, she didn’t want to tip him off or have him warn Williams.
Marlene had tried looking up Jim Williams in the Westchester County phone book, but there were nearly a hundred entries for Jim, James, and Jimmy Williams and another two hundred in Manhattan. The proverbial needle in a haystack, she thought. I need a break.
It had come with the telephone call she’d received that morning.
“Is this Marlene Ciampi?” the woman on the other end of the line had asked.
“Yes, and who are you?”
“I don’t want to give you my name, not yet. I got your telephone number by calling the Westchester courthouse and asked for Mr. Warren Bennett’s lawyer. He didn’t kill that woman, but I think I know who did.”
Marlene had made a mental note to call the courthouse and tell them not to give out her cell-phone number willy-nilly. There were always amateur sleuths who had it all figured out and were generally nutcases. But what the woman had said next changed her opinion in this case. “I think the killer was my boyfriend, Jim Williams.”
The woman had said she wanted to meet and show Marlene something. “But I’m afraid. Meet me at Saks, at the perfume counter.”
As she approached the counter now, Marlene picked out a pretty, buxom blond woman who was wearing sunglasses, a floppy hat, and a raincoat as her contact. She walked over to her and, in a low voice so as not to startle the woman, said, “My name is Marlene. Did you call me?”
The young woman nodded. “Meet me at King’s Cafeteria on Fifty-first and Seventh in about ten minutes,” she said in a stage whisper. Then she turned and strolled away.
Marlene wasn’t exactly sure what the woman thought she was accomplishing by the subterfuge, but she waited a few minutes and then walked to the cafeteria. Twenty minutes later, she knew she had her man.
Sometimes in tears and sometimes angry, the woman, who identified herself as Sherry Maxwell, talked about how she’d become suspicious that her boyfriend, Jim Williams, was seeing other women. So she’d hired a low-budget Chinatown private investigator named Todd Fielding to follow him. “Todd’s a slimy bastard and has been hitting on me from the moment I walked into his office,” she said. “But he did what he said he would do.”
Sherry handed Marlene a large envelope. She opened it and removed several photographs. The first showed a man walking up a long driveway toward a large house that Marlene recognized as Michelle Oakley’s. The lighting wasn’t good, as he was illuminated only by ground lights along the drive. However, the next photograph was better. It showed the man standing in the porch light and being met at the door by Michelle.
Sniffing and dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, Sherry pointed to the man in the picture. “That’s Jim.”
Marlene looked down at the time and date indicator on the bottom righthand corner of the photograph. Nine fifty-eight P.M., she thought. Warren was just about to walk in the door of his parents’ home a mile away. Not impossible if a cab had been waiting for him but impossible if he walked home. Even Harley Chin would have to sit up and take notice. Or will his ego make him ignore even this?
The third shot was a close-up of the faces. Neither looked happy to see the other, and Marlene could almost feel the tension of the moment.
“I can’t believe he was cheating on me,” Sherry said, shaking her head sadly. “What did she have that I don’t?” Several tears leaked out from beneath the dark glasses.
“I think that’s a better question than you know,” Marlene replied. “This probably won’t make you feel any better, but I don’t think this was a social call.”
Sherry looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t think he was there to see her for anything sexual,” Marlene said.
“But the paper said . . .”
“A red herring,” Marlene replied. “Meant to make it look like something other than what it was, which was a murder for hire.”
“I don’t understand,” Sherry said. “Jim is an investment banker.”
“Another ruse,” Marlene said. “I think your guy’s a pro and knew exactly what he was doing. You just asked me what she had that you don’t. Well, I think she had something—information, a photograph, documents—that someone doesn’t want anyone else to see. So they hired your boyfriend to retrieve it and make sure Michelle never spoke about it again.”
She tapped on the photograph. “He had it set up perfectly, with the perfect scapegoat. Except he didn’t count on a jealous girlfriend having him followed.”
“Todd said he saw your client leave a little after nine,” Sherry noted.
Marlene smiled. “Oh, really?” she said. “Between this photograph and putting Fielding on the stand to say just that, it could be the break we needed.”
Sherry smiled and wiped at her tears. “You might want to talk to Todd right away,” she said, and then explained his plan to blackmail Williams. “At first, I was so angry that he had cheated on me, I almost went along with it. I even said I’d think it over and let him know this afternoon. But then I thought about the poor man in jail . . . what’s his name? Warren? And, well, I couldn’t do that no matter how much money I could get.”
Suddenly, Sherry put her face in her hands and began to weep. “What am I going to do? I came to New York to be an actress, and I end up just being a kept woman for a murderer.”
Marlene reached across the table and gave the young woman’s arm a squeeze. “You should be proud of yourself,” she said. “You could have taken the money. Or you could have just decided to keep living with Williams and pretending you didn’t know. But because you have a conscience, an innocent man won’t have to spend the rest of his life in prison, and we might be able to get a killer off the streets. You’re a real hero in this.”
Sherry looked at Marlene’s face, searching for the truth. “Yeah, I guess I am a little, huh? Thanks. You can have the photographs. Are you going to arrest Jimmy now?”
Marlene considered the question. Maybe it was time to call her cousin, Detective Sergeant Bobby Scalia. But if Williams was arrested, whoever he was working for might get away with his role in the murder and whatever else it was that they didn’t want out.
“Soon, I think,” Marlene said. “I want to do a little more digging before the bad guys get wind of it. When are you supposed to give Fielding your answer?”
Sherry looked at her watch. “It’s noon. I told him that I’d come by at two if I was going to help blackmail Jimmy. I think he’s hoping to get laid, too . . . like that’s going to happen. Not in this lifetime.”
Marlene thought about it for a moment. “If you don’t mind,” she said, “I think I’ll pay a visit to T. X. Fielding Investigations in your place. Will you be okay going home?”
The tears sprang to Sherry’s eyes again. “Yeah, I’ve known about this for days, and he doesn’t suspect. Like I said, I wanted to be an actress—and to be honest, I’ve had to do a lot of acting with Jim Williams, if you know what I mean.” She sighed, took out a small notepad from her purse, and wrote something on it. “Here’s my number. I’ll just pretend you’re a girlfriend if he’s around when you call. Are you going to see Todd now?”
“I have one stop I want to make first,” Marlene said. “I’m going to Warren’s apartment in the Lower East Side.”
“Why?”
Marlene smiled. “To feed a cat . . . and look for whatever it was that Michelle Oakley had that you don’t.”