The letters, he recalled, contained other, similarly bizarre accusations against Bryce, which Jay dismissed as patently absurd—psychedelic falsehoods dreamed up when Kate went down her rabbit hole of prescription drugs and alcohol. He found nothing in any of them that gave any clue that she feared for her physical safety or her life at the hands of her husband.
Relieved, he set the letters aside and sipped his Scotch. Overhead, the bats that slept all day in the woods behind his small Cape Cod were beginning their nightly aerobatics in search of insects to consume. A beheading, he told himself, was not a crime of passion, not in American culture. Who could have done such a thing, and why? He remembered the Menendez case in California several years back: two brothers had been convicted of shotgunning their parents to death. The motive: the parents’ estate. The thought that had been vaguely nagging him since his call from Al Garland now crystallized: Were Melissa and Marcy, princesses with nasty streaks—fearful of losing some or all of their meal tickets via their parents’ divorce—capable of such a thing?
Before he could answer this question, or worse, label it as rhetorical, his phone rang. As was his habit, he let it go to his answering machine. When he heard Melissa Powers’s voice through the open window behind him, he went into the kitchen to listen, picking up her message halfway through: “. . . the police. I need to talk to you. Call me.” He heard her hang up, then pushed the replay button and learned that Bryce Powers was dead, that he had apparently
overdosed on his insulin, and that the police had just tracked down Melissa and Marcy to give them the news.
Jay called Melissa on her cell, but there was no answer and no instruction to leave a message. He finished his drink in one gulp, put the legal file away, got in his car, and drove through the last of the twilight to nearby West Orange, where the Powers mansion sat in the lush, gated enclave-within-an-enclave of Llewellyn Park. When he got there, he was surprised to find the house and grounds in complete darkness. Nevertheless, he took his time negotiating the long, curving driveway, assuming he was being watched. He exited his car nonchalantly, but had taken only three or four steps when a loud voice said:
“Stop right there. We’re police.”
Jay stood still as two uniformed officers, each with a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other, appeared out of the darkness. Behind them was a plainclothesman whom he recognized as Frank Dunn, a detective at the county prosecutor’s office who he had been friends with for years.
“Frank,” he said, “it’s me, Jay.”
Dunn, recognizing Jay, said to the officers, “It’s okay. I know this guy. It’s the wife’s lawyer.” He approached Jay. They shook hands, and the officers, tucking their guns away, headed back to the house, the beams of their flashlights stabbing into the darkness ahead of them.
Dunn was an old-timer, waiting to retire, but despite a cynicism that was part native and part acquired after forty years of police work, twenty of them in New York, Jay knew that he took his job seriously; as seriously as anyone who had seen all the faces of human horror and folly—including his own—could.
“You get dumber all the time,” Dunn said to Jay.
Jay did not answer. He had no business being at a fresh crime scene, and he knew it.
“What are you doing here?” the detective asked. He lit a cigarette and then handed one to Jay, who, lighting it from Dunn’s gold Zippo lighter, caught a brief glimpse of his friend’s grizzled face before the darkness closed in on them again.
“Where is everybody?” he asked Dunn.
“Are you kidding, Jay?” said the detective. “Get in your car. Go home. I’ll try to forget you were here. You’re too dumb to do anything seriously criminal.”
Jay smiled at this. When he was a young lawyer, he had faced Dunn—a seasoned and savvy testifier for the state—several times on the witness stand. Though Dunn was a cynic through and through, he was not dishonest and would not lie under oath, even to put a bad guy away. Recognizing this, Jay had not done badly. Afterward, he and Dunn had come to respect each other, to admire each other’s style and, despite the age difference—Jay was forty-one, Dunn sixtytwo—to become good friends.
Jay, a lean six-three, towered over the detective as they stood close to each other in the dark on the edge of the circular driveway near the large, stately house. His eyes adjusting to the darkness, he could see the outline of the thickly wooded hills behind it emerge in the night sky. Embarrassed, he took a short, hard drag on his cigarette before throwing it to the ground.
“You’re right, Frank,” he said. “Melissa called me. I thought she might be here.”
Jay watched as Dunn put his cigarette to his lips, sucked in smoke, and took it away.
“Fucking pussy,” the detective said. “It makes us weak.”
Jay smiled. He knew that Dunn, who had been having an extramarital affair for the past five years, was referring to himself as well as Jay.
“We’re done, Frank,” Jay said. “But her parents are both dead.”
“You could have anybody you want,” Dunn said.
“I don’t think so,” Jay murmured. Dunn, his fair face ruined by drink, had often referred to Jay as Attorney Adonis.
“She’s with her sister at that fancy Hilton in Short Hills,” said Dunn. “You think I give a shit if these rich bastards kill themselves off?”
“You’re tired, Frank.”
“Fuck.”
3.
5:00 PM, September 4, 2004, Montclair
The town of Montclair, one of a closely-linked chain of suburbs to the west of Newark, is known and much praised for its cultural diversity. Point of view being all, Jay Cassio, who graduated from Montclair High School in 1980, experienced that diversity as separateness: Blacks hung out with blacks, rich white kids with rich white kids, middle class white kids with middle class white kids, and everyone else, that is, the handful of lower-middle-class white kids, like Jay Cassio, was left to fend for him or herself. Jay, a terrific athlete, managed to rise above class on the football field, and avoid it at all other times by hanging out with Dan Del Colliano and his friends from predominantly blue-collar Bloomfield, the next town to the east, but light-years away in terms of youthful snobbery.
When it came time to buy a house, Jay, then thirty-two, chose Montclair because its many physical charms were no longer painful, as they were when he was a teenaged outsider, but actually pleasant. The tree-lined streets, the well kept parks, the mansions of the rich, the Mercedes in the parking lot at the Whole Foods supermarket, were the devils he knew. His house, a small Cape Cod, was on a quiet dead-end street that backed onto the South Mountain Reservation, two hundred
acres of county-owned park and woodland, the perfect setting for the outsider life he had grown accustomed to living.
On Saturday, three days after his conversation with Al Garland, Jay took a run on a five mile loop in the reservation, mowed his lawn, pulled some weeds, and then, after showering, settled on his flagstone back patio to read and eventually sleep. He woke up, around five p.m., to see Dan Del Colliano, sitting, facing him, on one of his patio chairs, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, a newspaper rolled up on his lap.
“Hi,” Dan said, smiling. “How are you?”
“I’m good. What’s up?”
“You’re in the paper.”
“I thought so.”
Danny handed him the Newark
Star-Ledger
. Jay, groggy from his nap, took it and tossed it onto a nearby low table. “What’s it say?” he asked.
“Murder-suicide.”
“Anything else?”
“That you’re very handsome and the best lawyer in the state.”
Jay laughed and, sitting up, rubbed the sleep out of eyes and then ran his fingers through his hair. He retrieved the newspaper, which Danny had folded to the Powers story, under the byline of a reporter they knew named Linda Marshall. Remembering the locustlike swarm of reporters that accosted him and Bob Flynn on the courthouse steps on Thursday morning, he saw the disappointment in the lead paragraph.
Essex County Prosecutor Alan Garland has determined, based on preliminary autopsy findings, that the deaths of the beheaded socialite Kate Powers and her multimillionaire husband are a case of murder-suicide . . .
In court, Garland said he still wanted the Powers divorce files, but he was much less aggressive. Without objection from the prosecutor, Judge Moran had ordered Jay and Bob Flynn to surrender their files to him so he could decide what information they contained that was relevant to a murder investigation, assuming one was still being pursued.
The announcement by Garland, Linda Marshall’s story continued, rendered moot his earlier attempt to confiscate the legal files of the Newark attorneys representing the couple in what was believed to be a contentious divorce . . . Confiscate, Jay thought, recalling his history with Marshall, that’s the wrong word, but I like it. Give Garland a whack. He deserves it.
“I’ve been calling you,” Jay said to Danny, settling the paper on his lap.
“I’ve been busy.”
“Doing what?”
“I have a new client.”
“So?”
“
So
,” Danny answered, “she says she worked for Bryce Powers.”
“Who is she?”
“A knockout Spanish broad.”
“What’s her name?”
“Donna Kelly.”
“
Donna Kelly
is
Spanish
? You believe that?”
“It’s an alias, who cares?”
“What’s her story?”
“She has something she says Powers gave her.”
“What?”
“Five hundred thousand in cash.”
Jay’s brain had still been dull from sleeping, but this brought him fully to his senses. “Seriously?” he said.
“Yes. I’m going to Florida on Monday.”
“What for?”
“I’m bringing her the money.”
“Where is it now?”
“In a locker at Newark Airport.”
“Dan,” Jay said, “I don’t . . .”
“Get dressed,” Danny replied, cutting him off. “I’ll tell you in the car.”
“Five hundred grand, Dan, come on, it’s dirty.”
“Her retainer was clean.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-five K.”
Jay took this number in, remaining silent. Twenty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money for any working class guy, but especially for Danny, who was always on the balls of his ass, swimming in credit card, and, recently, shylock debt.
“Where are we going?” Jay asked, knowing that with a fee like that in hand there would be no talking his friend out of this job, and that he would get the full story later when Dan, a lover of drama, felt the moment was right.
“Remember that hostess at that restaurant on Varick Street?” Dan asked.
“No.”
“She remembers you. I ran into her last night. She was with a friend. She said to bring you in tonight, we’d have dinner, the four of us. She says there’s no hard feelings.”
“No hard feelings for what?”
“She wouldn’t say.”
Jay, smiling, rerolled the newspaper and threw it at his friend, who fended it off with a forearm. In Danny’s dark brown eyes was the sly, mischievous look that even Jay, who had known him for thirty-seven years, could never interpret
entirely.
I might be pulling your chain
, it could be saying,
or I might not, take your pick
; or possibly,
I am lying to you for the fun of it and you may never know the truth
. Or,
you’re too serious, Jay, so I’m breaking your balls to try to get you to lighten up.
Or any combination of these.
“Okay,” Jay said, looking at his watch, “what time?”
“Eight o’clock, but let’s go in now. I gotta see a guy.”
“What kind of a guy?”
“Just a guy. Come on, get dressed.”
Upstairs, Jay shaved and put on khakis, comfortable loafers, and a black polo shirt. Before he pulled his shirt over his head he took a quick look at the six-inch scar that ran vertically down his right bicep, faded to a pale, almost translucent white after thirty years. Danny had helped him get revenge for the infliction of this wound, had nearly killed a black kid twice his size in Newark’s Branch Brook Park to do it. He was a happy-go-lucky guy usually, his friend Danny, but he could turn mean in a heartbeat, and there was no stopping him when he got it in his head to do something, like take on somebody twice his size or courier a large amount of cash to Florida for a beautiful woman.
“So who’s this guy we’re seeing,” Jay said once they were out of Montclair and headed east on Route 3, one of a half dozen north Jersey highways that feed cars and buses and people by the thousands around the clock into the glittering maw that is Manhattan.
“Why do you have to ask so many questions?” Danny replied, “It’s not good for your health.”
Danny was divorced, with two sons, aged fourteen and twelve. He made a decent living from his private eye business, but he liked nice clothes and fancy cars; he liked to eat at good restaurants; he liked to entertain women in style; he liked to pick up tabs; he liked to go to the track, and bet with
bookies. With those habits he was always in debt. He had maxed out many credit cards since his divorce five years ago, and could never manage to pay anything but interest on a total debt that was approaching sixty thousand dollars. And Jay knew that he had recently borrowed from a loan shark in Manhattan, a guy that he and Danny had grown up with on the streets of Newark, but who nevertheless insisted on repayment.
They’re quirky that way
, he had told his friend at the time.
“Is it the Pretzel?” he asked now.
The Pretzel was Johnny D’Ambola, who, at the age of eight, had been diagnosed with idiopathic scoliosis. His back corkscrewing out of control—hence the nickname—he had been put in a full body cast for six months, which apparently left him a lot of time to ruminate on how he would one day get even with his neighborhood tormentors, Dan Del Colliano being chief among them. He was the loan shark.