Hostile Witness (13 page)

Outside her building, as she held onto my arm and led me off to a bar she knew near Independence Hall, I glanced behind us on Church Street. I caught the glint of the streetlight off the cobblestones and then, farther back, the shine of a boomerang hovering over the tail end of a black limousine. The car’s lights were off, and I couldn’t see inside, but whatever sexual charge had been within me dissipated immediately, grounded by the sight of that car. It was too dark to make out the license plate, but I had no doubt at all as to who the owner was. That was Jimmy Moore’s limousine and whoever was inside was staking out the councilman’s girlfriend. And there I was, my arm linked in hers, stepping out with her into the night. It was a warmish fall evening, the air thick and humid like in springtime, but by the time we had turned from Church Street onto 3rd I was shivering.

FROM THE OTHER SIDE
of the door I could hear the muffled sound of a busy office, typewriters clacketing, phones ringing, voices shouting from one desk to another. Inside the small, battleship-gray room it was just me and Detective Griffin.

Detective Griffin was a pasty-faced, donut-shaped man with deep dark swaths beneath his eyes. He grunted as he paged through the
Daily News
, occasionally throwing out bits of gossip he seemed to take great delight in. “Hey, can you believe this stuff?” he would say before he’d read to me from the lurid middle pages of the tabloid. Then he would let out a great, noisy groan of weariness. I was in that small, stuffy room in the DA’s office to examine a stack of files and two large cardboard boxes of physical evidence, the whole of the basis for Slocum’s indictment in
Commonwealth v. Moore and Concannon.
The evidence had been signed out from Room 800 in the attic of City Hall by Detective Griffin, personally, and he was there to make sure I didn’t walk away with any of it.

“Hey, can you believe this stuff? Listen,” said Detective Griffin. “That guy Bobbitt, whose wife sliced off his peter, right, he’s stripping now in some gay strip joint. His new girlfriend, some Penthouse Pet, is ripping off his G-string with her teeth while the guys all cheer. He says he’s getting sensation back a millimeter a month. It’s like he’s proud it got wacked. Can you believe that guy?”

I could, yes.

The detective stretched his arms out wide and yawned. “Geez, I’m tired.”

This is what the evidence I was looking at showed. On the night of Bissonette’s final beating a young homeless man, only slightly psychotic, while digging in a dumpster for a late-night snack, had seen a black limousine pull up to the back of Bissonette’s. He didn’t see who got out of the car, but Michael Ruffing did. Ruffing and Bissonette were alone, closing the club, when, through a window, he saw the limo pull up and Concannon and Moore get out. This had all happened on Henry’s night off, and Henry’s alibi had checked out, so it was apparently Concannon who had been driving. Before the two could come in the club Ruffing left through the front door, hoping to avoid a confrontation. Inside there had been some sort of discussion, a few drinks had been poured, and then a fight broke out. Bissonette had gone behind the bar, supposedly to reach for a gun taped beneath the counter. His fingerprints were on it. One of the two visitors had grabbed a Mike Schmidt autographed bat from off the wall and knocked Bissonette down with it before Bissonette could grab the gun. He had proceeded to beat Bissonette with the bat all across his body, fracturing bones in both his arms, his fibula, his patella, his coxae, five ribs, and his skull, leaving a five-inch dent in the side of his head. The medical records were voluminous and ugly. Even through the technical jargon, the savagery of the beating was clear. When the paramedics found Bissonette he was covered with blood and vomit. They intubated him immediately and put him on a respirator the moment he arrived at the emergency room. He never regained consciousness.

A tough way to go for such a nice guy, I thought. Even if he couldn’t hit a slider.

The assailants had apparently not rushed to leave after the beating. The bat had been cleaned of fingerprints, the
glasses from the drinks had been rinsed. Everything had been sanitized while Bissonette was undoubtedly moaning and breathing with difficulty through the blood and vomit. In my mind I saw Chester Concannon casually wiping the bar with a rag as Bissonette struggled to stay alive behind the bar, his breath rising and falling in a horrific slurp. That would be just like Chester, I thought, not wanting to leave a mess, such a polite young man.

The two men had left no fingerprints, not even on the doorknobs, all wiped clean, but one of them had stepped in the blood and vomit by accident and so the freshly mopped floor had revealed his stride from the bar to the back door. Forensics hadn’t been able to get a shoe size from the partial markings, but the stride was consistent with a man the height of Chester Concannon. A security guard in a nearby store had noticed a long black limousine pulling out from Bissonette’s about twenty-five minutes after Ruffing had reported Moore and Concannon arriving. It had been a brutal twenty-five minutes.

Along with the evidence of the murder were the same reams of financial documents that the feds had given Prescott and Prescott had given me, records supposedly showing the flow of money from Ruffing to Concannon to Moore to CUP, half a million dollars passed around like pastries. And then the flow abruptly stopping. This was motive evidence, to show why Moore and Concannon had deigned to beat Bissonette into his fatal coma, and the pattern was damning. There was money, then the money stopped, then there was the murder. Only about half the $500,000 supposedly delivered was accounted for in the documents, but that didn’t seem to matter much, really. Especially with those phone conversations between Moore and Ruffing, all on tape, all recorded in high fidelity, the most damning carefully transcribed by the DA’s office.

Slocum thought he had caught it perfectly.

The boxes filled with the physical evidence were most interesting to me because they weren’t in the materials given me by Prescott. The Mike Schmidt autographed bat, an Adirondack Big Stick with the sharp red band just above the handle, was safe in a large plastic sack. I gripped it through the plastic, stood, and took a swing. Detective Griffin looked to be drowsing to sleep into his paper, as if he wasn’t watching me, but when I swung he ducked. It was a little heavy but perfectly balanced: a Hall of Fame bat.

“What’s a Mike Schmidt autographed bat worth these days?” I asked Detective Griffin. “Three, four hundred dollars?”

“Don’t even,” he said as he turned the page of his paper and yawned.

In the label, where Schmidt’s name was burned into the wood, there were still flecks of blood. The laboratory had confirmed that the blood was Bissonette’s. The rinsed glasses were also there, as well as the rag that had been used to clean the bar. It was stained the dull maroon of dried blood. Bissonette’s bloodied clothes, sliced to shreds when removed in the ER, were in one bag; his Gucci loafers, stained with blood and vomit, were in another. His wallet had $230 in ten dollar bills. His key ring was heavy with keys of all shapes. There were four empty crack vials found in his pocket.

So the second baseman was no boy scout after all. I immediately checked back with the medical records but
found that there was no cocaine in his blood when he came into the hospital.

And then there were the photographs. The first looked like a pizza where the cheese and sauce had kind of slid off to the side. With a quiet shock I realized it wasn’t a pizza at all, it was Bissonette’s face after the beating. The rest weren’t any more pleasant.

I was starting to open the second box when Slocum came into the room. He swung a chair around and straddled it so that his powerful forearms rested on the chair back. “Don’t go racking your brain over who did it, Carl,” he said. “We already know and we got them nailed.”

“Hey, Larry, can you believe this stuff?” said Detective Griffin. “Listen. These idiots were screwing on a subway track in New York and like, what do you expect, but the train runs over them. Now their lawyer’s suing the Transit Authority. Can you believe that? Lawyers are such pigs.”

“How you doing, Doug?” Slocum asked the detective. “You look beat.”

“I’m fresh off last out,” said Griffin. “All night at a crime scene. Nothing new. The perp’s wife was squawking at him about his drug use, so he shoots her, takes her upstairs, and shoots her again just to be sure. Sells the gun for a hundred bucks, buys more crack, and sets himself up downstairs, smoking, watching TV, eating takeout Chinese while the wife is up there bleeding. Took her three days to die.”

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s brutal.”

Detective Griffin stood, hiked up his pants, and groaned. “Shit like that happens every day. Look, I got to take a dump.”

“I’ll watch him,” said Slocum.

“What about those crack vials they found on Bissonette?” I asked after Griffin had left.

“Ruffing says they found them every night in the bathrooms.”

“At a high-class joint like Bissonette’s?”

“The drug doesn’t care how much money you got,” he said. “But Bissonette wasn’t using or selling. His blood was clean and the vials were empty, but had traces of the drug in them. Sellers don’t keep the vials, they go with the drug.”

“What’s this second box?” I asked.

“Stuff from Bissonette’s apartment. Check it out, you’ll love it.”

I opened the box and suddenly understood why Bissonette was such a favorite of the fans. At least some of the fans. What I pulled out of that box was enough to make Hugh Hefner blush. There were all manner of sex toys, appropriately bagged and numbered. There were shackles and ropes and dildos of varied lengths and widths and surfaces, there were vibrators, there were belts of leather and underpants of leather, there were strange harnesses, there were sadistic metal instruments that looked like something out of an alien dentist’s office. Not bagged were the videos and sex magazines and photographs from a Polaroid camera.

“Our Mr. Bissonette got around,” I said.

“Anyone you recognize?” asked Slocum.

“Not likely,” I said, though I did review the photographs one by one. They were blurred and the shots were off center; the camera had been set above and behind the bed and obviously operated by remote control. They were all of a well-built man, ponytailed, with the familiar ballplayer’s face, having sex with women, sometimes just one, sometimes more than one. In many the heads of the women were obscured, showing only long legs, thin arms, bustiers, a tangle of swollen body parts. And in some there were other men.

“Didn’t know he was a switch hitter, did you,” said Slocum.

“It wasn’t on his baseball card,” I said, still looking
through the photographs. One caught my eye, a long pale woman with dark hair stretching her body across his, her back arched, her thin butt riding high as Bissonette worked from below. She was reaching back with her arm and squeezing his balls. There was something familiar, tasty about the woman.

“Maybe it was a jealous husband who did him in,” I suggested.

“Give it up, Carl,” said Slocum. “No jealous husband here. The murderer was too careful for a crime of passion. Besides, we have the IDs.”

Quickly I shuffled the photos so it wouldn’t look like I was concentrating too long on any one. In my shuffling I brought back the picture of the long pale woman. This time I saw it clearly, what I had missed before. I shuffled the pictures again and put them back.

“If you take away Ruffing’s testimony,” I said, “all you got is a black limousine and some guy about Concannon’s height.”

“And if you take away the Atlantic we could walk to London. We have motive, we have opportunity, we have eyewitness identifications, we have two convictions here.”

“What’s this?” I said as I pulled out the final object in the carton, a wooden box the size of a head, painted black with Chinese designs inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

“That’s his love chest,” said Slocum. “Open with care.”

Slowly I lifted the lid.

“Jesus,” I said. “He might not have been a boy scout, but he was sure as hell prepared.”

Inside the box were hundreds of loose condoms in different colors and shapes, lubricated, unlubricated, some of genuine goatskin. The little packets glistened in their foil wrappers and looking at them was a little like looking at a display window of a candy store. Beneath the layers of condoms were stacks of casino chips, heavy, in black and gold colors. There were hundred-dollar chips from Bally’s
and Trump Plaza and Resorts, over a thousand dollars’ worth, and a series of heavy gold and green chips without a casino’s name printed on them, just the head of a wild boar embossed in gold. There was a small pot of ointment that smelled of sweet and spice, like liniment, with pictures of tigers on the outside. And there were little pipes with screens and a glass tube and, most interesting of all, a goldenrod colored paper slip with the words “Property Receipt” on top and a date stamp. It was signed by our Detective Griffin and indicated that the lab had been given one glassine bag of a chunky, off-white substance.

I lifted up the property receipt. “Now why didn’t the feds tell us about this?”

“It’s not relevant,” said Slocum.

“It’s not
Brady
?”
Brady v. Maryland
was a Supreme Court case that required the prosecution to turn over any evidence that would tend to exculpate a defendant. “It seems to me that knowing the victim was a drug user could show that the crime was drug related.”

“His blood was clean and he had no drug priors or drug history. You know what that little bag was?” said Slocum, gesturing to the property receipt. “That was his last chance aphrodisiac. Any hunter in this town knows enough to pack some coke if he’s really looking. If all else fails, you’ll always pull in something with free jam.”

“What about these casino chips without a name, just a wild boar’s head?”

Slocum shrugged. “Maybe some casino out of the area.”

“Seems to me there are a lot of maybes about this guy.”

“What’s not a maybe,” he said, “is that he’s dead.”

Detective Griffin waddled back in and dropped into his chair.

“I got to get to court,” said Slocum. “But hurry it up, Carl, so we can get the detective some sleep.”

“Just a few more minutes,” I said.

I started going through the documents as quickly as I
could, checking for anything I didn’t already have, when I caught Griffin dozing off into his paper. His neck drooped, his head dropped lower, then lower still, until he snapped it up and looked at me with surprise on his face.