Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (7 page)

Sheridan exits for the second time in five minutes. She asks for a glass of water on his way out, and he returns with bottled water. But his demeanor has changed—he’s neither cagey nor credulous, but more the stern father Dalia presumably was missing during her formative years.

SHERIDAN: The game’s over with, okay? There are no more games with you and I. Now we’re going to get down to serious business. I want to know if you know this guy?

He opens the door and a black man in cornrows and a black T-shirt, handcuffed in front—undercover agent Widy Jean, playing the hapless assassin—is led in with his head hung low (even though in real life, the wife of a murder victim would never be placed in the same room as her husband’s killer—even if she were a suspect).

SHERIDAN: You know who this guy is?

DALIA: No.

SHERIDAN: You’ve never seen him before?

DALIA: I’ve never seen him before—ever.

Sheridan addresses the man in handcuffs.

SHERIDAN: Do you know her?

He shakes his head no.

SHERIDAN: Put your head up!

DALIA: I’ve never seen him before.

SHERIDAN: What were you doing coming out of her house?

When he refuses to answer, Sheridan shouts to get him out of there and concentrates the brunt of his attention on Dalia.

SHERIDAN: You’re going to jail today for solicitation of murder. You’re under arrest. That’s an undercover police officer. We filmed everything that you did. Recorded everything that you did. You’re going to jail for solicitation of first-degree murder of your husband.

And just like that it’s over. This circular cat-and-mouse game is stopped in its tracks. This would be the point in a courtroom drama at which the culprit would burst into tears, admit her guilt, and submit to the gears of justice and drama, which would downshift to coast into a finish. But not in this tape. Dalia merely digs in and spends the next forty minutes—the next sixteen hours, the next four years—denying what everyone around her has just seen and heard with their own senses, using every tool at her disposal and every figure within her seductive reach to reverse reality, in a kind of brazen miracle of epistemology. One that is still ongoing.

DALIA: I didn’t do anything.

SHERIDAN: Did you hear what I just told you?

DALIA: I heard what you said but I didn’t—

SHERIDAN: Listen to me. Everything has been recorded. You were photographed in the convertible when you sat in his car in front of CVS. What do you want to do?

Dalia continues to repeat “I didn’t do anything,” the defense of an obstinate child, with the force of a mantra.

“You’re going to jail!” Sheridan thunders, and she starts to cry, but she refuses to crack. And then—

SHERIDAN: As soon as I’m done, they’re going to come in here and handcuff you and take you to the Palm Beach County Jail and book you for solicitation of first-degree murder on your husband. Your husband is well and alive!

DALIA: Thank God.

SHERIDAN: Oh, yeah—thank God?

DALIA: Can I see him?

SHERIDAN: No, he doesn’t want to see you.

He continues to berate her, quoting from the surveillance tapes to bolster his leverage, but all it does is shut her down; she becomes more sullen and unresponsive, punctuating his questions with, “Can I see my husband, please?” Of everyone she’s talked to this morning, Mike is the one she’s had the best luck in manipulating, and he looks like her safest play. When Sheridan has had enough of talking in circles, he asks for someone to come in and cuff her. Detective Midian Diaz enters and places her in handcuffs. As they open the door, she sees Mike standing in the hallway.

DALIA: Oh my God!

SHERIDAN: (off camera) He’s alive!

DALIA: Come here, please. Come here. Mike, come here. Come here, please, come here.

She sounds like she’s commanding a pet.

MIKE: I can’t. You can’t fix it.

DALIA: (screaming) Why not? I didn’t do anything!

MIKE: I heard you.

DALIA: Mike, come here, please! Come here!

The
COPS
cameraman can be seen just inside the door, recording everything for posterity.

“ . . . Lies and the nonsense,” Mike would say later. “I wonder what would have happened if I had grabbed her. That was my one chance. I probably should have took it. It would have made for some great television.”

A
fter Sergeant Sheridan had taken a run at her and belly-flopped in the deep end, Dalia was escorted to a private holding cell where she could cool her heels for the next half hour, and where she claimed to have suffered some sort of panic attack or hyperventilation episode. There was a toilet in the cell, but officers escorted her to a more private restroom when she expressed discomfort with the arrangement. When she returned to the interview room, she had lost her handcuffs, her ball cap, and her ponytail.

The second interview was conducted by Detectives Moreno and Anderson. Anderson had remained largely silent as Sheridan tried to ingratiate himself with Dalia and master her trust, and the effort seemed to have bottled up the spleen he was about to break out on her now. Short black hair, middle-aged, but crisis-hardened, with a solid physique, Anderson looked vaguely like Chris Noth on
Law and Order: Criminal Intent
. Moreno, the lead investigator, was forty, Hispanic, and good-looking (if you squinted, you might mistake him for Benjamin Bratt or Lou Diamond Phillips), and he spent some time as an undercover officer and is still a sniper with the SWAT team. Anyone familiar with police procedurals knows that tag-team interviewers usually identify as Good Cop or Bad Cop, moving methodically to sweep and clear the subject’s interior space with alternating bursts of kindness and venom. But since Sheridan had already expended about all the kindness the department was prepared to muster, to diminishing returns, Anderson and Moreno had nothing to lose by trying to break her as
quickly as they could. Once the gloves come off, a five-foot-nothing kewpie doll would obviously crumble and fold.

Again a surveillance camera in the corner of the ceiling captured the entire conversation, this one more acrimonious than the previous one. For the first four minutes, Dalia intermittently dabs at her eyes with a tissue, a little girl lost, deep in contemplation. Moreno and Anderson enter. Anderson takes his previous seat at the end of the table, partially obscured by the angle, and Moreno kicks it off. He asks Dalia if she has been read and understood her Miranda rights, and she answers, “I wasn’t really paying attention,” requiring them to go through them again one by one. Afterward, she asks to go to the bathroom.

When the interview finally gets rolling, ten minutes into a forty-minute tape, Dalia appears far more composed than she did the last time through. Apparently tears aren’t going to work on this crowd.

MORENO: You mind if I call you Dalia?

DALIA: Yeah, please.

MORENO: Do you understand what happened today? What’s going on here?

DALIA: A little. Now, slowly, I’m understanding a little bit better.

MORENO: What’s your understanding?

DALIA: I was told one thing, and now it’s like, slowly, like, all these things are, like, I don’t, I mean, I don’t really know what happened.

They take that as a no.

ANDERSON: Do you know that you are arrested today? You’re being arrested.

DALIA: That part I understood.

ANDERSON: Do you know what for?

DALIA: Not really, no.

ANDERSON: You don’t know the charge?

DALIA: No, nobody really explained it.

ANDERSON: Okay, go ahead and tell her the charge.

MORENO: You’re being arrested for soliciting to commit murder. What that means is, you attempted to hire someone to kill somebody else, meaning your husband. And that’s why you’re here, and that’s what you’re getting charged with.

DALIA: No.

MORENO: No, you don’t understand?

DALIA: No, I never did that.

ANDERSON: Well, that’s what you’re being charged with, and we have plenty of evidence to back it up. Okay? So, with your rights in mind, we want to give you an opportunity to do some soul-searching maybe, maybe get a lot off your chest, and tell us the truth. That’s what we want to hear.

Dalia’s response is that she wants to talk to her husband. Or call her mom. Or she repeats her fallback mantra of “I didn’t do anything” half a dozen times. Whenever they press harder, she pushes back—like suggesting there might have been impropriety in the document they coerced her to sign.

DALIA: I’m not—I mean, everyone keeps coming and I’m signing all these things and going over all these things, and I don’t really know what they’re for. I’m just signing it because everyone’s saying, “Well, if you sign this, I’ll help you,” or we’ll this or we’ll that.

ANDERSON: I don’t know about that, but the only thing we were concerned about was the rights card, and we went over that twice.

DALIA: And then you guys came, and I guess that may have been for the release of the tape earlier, I don’t know, because he [Sheridan] never came back. And I signed something and I don’t really know what it was. I mean, I was hysterical when I came in here.

When Anderson tries to call her bluff, barking out an insult, it just jolts her onto the transactional level where she seems more comfortable anyway, her pecuniary escort’s mind sizing them up for leverage.

ANDERSON: You sound like a fool right now denying this. ’Cause, like my partner just said, everything’s on tape. Video
and
audio.

DALIA: I just want to go home.

ANDERSON: I know, but you’re not going home. See? You’re being arrested, so you’re not going home.

DALIA: Then what do I have to do to go home? I’d like to go home.

ANDERSON: I know, but you can’t. It’s impossible.

Moreno leaves the room and returns with a handheld tape recorder, on which plays the surveillance audio of her negotiating with a “hit man,” during which she says she’s “five thousand percent sure” she wants to go through with it. He notes they have footage of her exchanging money with the hit man.

DALIA: I didn’t exchange money with anybody.

MORENO: Well, like I said, we’ve been working on this case—

DALIA: So then you know. I didn’t exchange money with anyone.

If all they’ve got is the conversation with the hit man, she knows she never discussed any details and she never handed over any money. Everything else is up for interpretation. She softens this bare assertion with what, in less loaded circumstances, might qualify as flirting.

DALIA: I don’t want to give you guys a hard time. I don’t. You guys have been really nice to me, and I know you didn’t have to take special considerations or things like that, and I appreciate it. I really do.

MORENO: But what you need to understand, it’s not like you’re giving us a hard time or anything. At the end of the day, we go home.

DALIA: I know.

MORENO: And guess what? You’re not going home.

DALIA: I know.

They seem to be going in circles. Anderson decides to up the stakes a notch.

ANDERSON: So I’m gonna ask you a question right now. Okay? Ready?

DALIA: No.

ANDERSON: Can I ask you a question?

No answer.

ANDERSON: I’m going to ask you a question, and I want to know the honest answer. Why did you want to have your husband killed?

Dalia gives a single shake of her head.

ANDERSON: You don’t know why?

DALIA: No. Why?

ANDERSON: Why did you want Michael killed?

DALIA: I never said I wanted him killed.

ANDERSON: You did—it’s on tape.

DALIA: I didn’t.

ANDERSON: Yeah, you did. It’s on tape—a lot.

DALIA: (deep sigh) I didn’t say that I wanted him killed. I didn’t.

MORENO: Well, what did you want done?

DALIA: I didn’t say that I wanted him killed.

ANDERSON: Okay, what did you want? You wanted something—you met with an undercover cop. Why?

More silence.

ANDERSON: Yeah, it hurts. I know. You can’t say it. You don’t know what to say.

DALIA: No.

ANDERSON: I want to know the truth, though.

DALIA: I want to talk to you guys. Like, I want to talk to you, and I want to tell you, but it’s just, like—is it going to change the outcome of everything? Like, am I gonna get to go home? You know? Because if I’m not, then I’d rather just talk to someone else who can help me.

After two sessions and forty minutes on the hot seat, she demands to speak to someone in charge, like she’s just gotten some lip from the girl at the makeup counter at Bloomingdale’s.

ANDERSON: You showed no remorse on these tapes about it, and at one point you say, “I want him dead and I’m five hundred percent—”

MORENO: Five thousand.

ANDERSON: Five thousand percent.

DALIA: I never said that I wanted him dead …

Anderson’s hit his limit.

ANDERSON: (Yelling) You want us to play it for you?

DALIA: Please.

ANDERSON: (Disgusted) Go ahead.

MORENO: That’s what you just listened to a minute ago. Do you agree that this is your voice on this video? On this audio?

DALIA: Can you just replay it, please?

MORENO: Let me ask you before I even replay it, because I’m not going to sit here and play games.

DALIA: I don’t want to play games.

MORENO: Let me ask you: Do you agree that what you just heard, that that’s your voice?

Now she starts to sulk.

DALIA: Don’t play it then.

MORENO: Was that your voice or not?

DALIA: I just wanted to hear it. Don’t play it then if you don’t want to.

MORENO: Well, no. I’m just asking you a simple question, Dalia. Was that your voice?

DALIA: You guys are treating me like a criminal and I’m not. I’m not. Like, I’m not that kind of person. I’m just not. And I know you’re hearing what you’re hearing, and I know you’re saying all these things, and it’s fine, but I’m not. I–I–I have no criminal history, I have no criminal record, I have no nothing. I’ve never even done drugs, period. Nothing of nothing is nothing.

MORENO: Exactly. And that’s why it surprises me …

DALIA: (Raises her voice) Nothing. Nothing!

She punctuates this by appearing to tear up again.

DALIA: You guys have your minds made up. Both of you have your minds made up about everything I say. I appreciate both of you being nice to me. I really do.

ANDERSON: Is that your voice on the tape? Yes or no?

Silence.

ANDERSON: Go ahead, play it again.

Moreno plays the section again.

DALIA: There’s nothing there that says dead or anything about dead. Period … I never wanted anybody dead.

ANDERSON: Then why did you—why were you meeting with this black guy? We’ll break it down like that. Why did you meet with this guy? Do you know why?

DALIA: Whatever I say to you, with what I say, like, do I go home, is what I’m asking you. Or am I not going home either way?

This tears it, and Anderson hits his tipping point.

ANDERSON: Okay. From this time on, do not ask me if you’re going home, because you’re not going home. Okay? You’re not going home. You’re going to jail. So to get back to my question, why did you meet with this black guy?

As he’s excoriating her, Moreno lays out color 8″ × 10″ surveillance photos of Dalia and the hit man in the front seat of his car. Dalia leans in to get a better look. When she speaks again, she’s lost whatever little-girl quality was shielding her from their harder edge. For the first time in her life, her feminine wiles are not buying her the benefit of the doubt.

DALIA: What is it that you need from me? I don’t understand.

ANDERSON: Okay. I’m asking you a question. Why did you meet with this guy?

DALIA: You have your minds made up. You have all the stuff you just showed me. I don’t understand why I’m sitting here.

ANDERSON: I want to hear the truth from you—that’s why you’re here. I want to hear
the
truth.

DALIA: If I’m not going home, then I’d like to speak with an attorney, please.

There is a knock on the door—even before she finishes the sentence— and Sergeant Sheridan enters the room.

ANDERSON: Thank you. There you go.

Finally.

MORENO: Based on that statement, this is going to end our interview, okay? Understand?

Sheridan tells her she can make her phone calls when they get to the Sheriff’s Office. “No cooperation?” he asks the detectives.

“No,” says Anderson, wishing he had the thirty minutes back.

Outside the station, maybe ten reporters with microphones and video cameras wait for her to make the short perp walk from the building to a waiting vehicle.

“I didn’t,” she says in response to some inaudible accusation.

“How does it make you feel that he’s still alive?” someone asks.

“How you feeling, Dalia? Any regrets?”

“Did you know this morning you were going to jail?”

“I didn’t do anything and I didn’t plot anything,” Dalia declares once she’s safely inside the vehicle, framed in close-up as the camera jockeys for position.

“What was that?” a female voice asks, apparently caught off guard.

Dalia repeats what she said, her face scrunching into a sob at the very end.

The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Headquarters Complex is about a twenty-minute drive from the Boynton Beach Police Department, thirteen miles up I-95 just south of the Palm Beach Airport. It’s in a single unit with the jail, a large multistory structure with flying wings pasted on at 45-degree angles. Located on Gun Club Road, it is popularly referred to as simply Gun Club. After she was processed, Dalia was finally allowed to make a series of phone calls over the course of several hours. The first was to her mother, Randa Mohammed. The second and third were also to her mother, but dealt exclusively with hiring a lawyer; defense attorney Michael Salnick got on the line during the third call, and I was prohibited from listening to it because of attorney-client privilege. Her fourth and final call was to Mike.