Primal Fear Read online

  The window was bordered on either side by thick drapes and shuttered by lavaliere blinds. The drapes, bed quilt, throw rugs and blankets were all deep scarlet and the carpeting was—or had been—white. There was a large crucifix with a section of palm leaf behind it over the bed and a sixteen-by-twenty photograph of the Pietà over the sofa.

  Between the door and the sofa was the entrance to a walk-in closet.

  A man who enjoyed his comforts, thought Stenner.

  Stenner took a notebook from his inside pocket and made a hasty sketch of the room. Then he laid the paper towel spool on the floor at the entrance to the bedroom and, stepping on the end towel, rolled the rest into the room like a red carpet being unfolded for a dignitary. Finally he entered the scene, walking carefully along the paper path.

  The walls, bed, chair and floor were splashed with blood, as if an incarnation of Jackson Pollock had been at work in the room. As he continued toward the bed he saw a foot, then a leg, and finally the entire remains of the man who was considered one of the truly great men of the city.

  The naked corpse lay between the bed and the windows, its head jammed against the wall and cocked crazily to one side, its eyes plucked from the sockets, its cheeks puffed and lips bulging, tongue swollen in the corner of its mouth, one hand buried to the knuckles in a straight, gaping slash that stretched just below the jawline from ear to ear. The body, legs and arms, even the toes, were sliced with dozens of deep and awesome wounds and stabbed repeatedly. The number 666 was etched with artistic precision in the stomach. Blood had run riverlike from the wounds, forming a soggy bed for the remains of Archbishop Richard Bernard Rushman.

  As he studied the body, a sudden chill passed through Stenner. The genitals had been removed. Almost fearfully, Stenner’s eyes slowly moved up the body to the gaping mouth, where, he realized, the priest’s private parts had been stuffed—and also realized that what he had thought was a tongue was not a tongue at all.

  Stenner, normally unmoved by such carnage, swallowed a sudden flood of bile that soured his throat, and took several deep breaths.

  Behind him, the soft southern drawl of the county’s chief forensics officer said, “Christ, what a mess.”

  Stenner turned to him.

  “Mind your manners, Harvey, this is part of the church.”

  “Obviously not inviolate.”

  Harvey Woodside was sweating, the result of his climb up the stairs. Woodside was hemispheric, an enormous, asthmatic man whose head seemed to sprout from bulky, rounded shoulders. He breathed through thick lips, a kind of steady gasp that quickly became annoying, and squinted from below fleshy eyelids, his beady brown eyes darting in a continuous search for evidence. He wore a black sleeveless sweater over a rainbow-colored Hawaiian shirt, and both were tucked into gray slacks that were badly in need of pressing and supported by red, white and blue suspenders. But his large hands seemed almost delicate and were always beautifully manicured. All in all, an unkempt and often disagreeable man—but when it came to forensics, the coroner was unparalleled.

  His three-man team climbed the steps carrying several aluminum cases, which they put on the landing.

  One of them said, looking in the bedroom, “We could be here till Labor Day.”

  Woodside waited until Stenner came out of the room, then waddled out to the end of the stretched towel roll and peered down at the remains of Bishop Rushman.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, and then, after a few moments of study, twisted his head and looked back over his shoulder at Stenner. “You got yourself a first-class nuthouse mouse here, Abel.”

  “So it would appear.”

  “Any idea when this happened?”

  “Probably about ten-ten, I think we have a witness, at least an earball witness,” Stenner said, looking at his watch. “That would be less than thirty minutes ago.”

  “That’s a help. Nice to get a break early on. Okay, let’s go to work, boys. Complete wash, floor to ceiling. Bathroom, hall—where’s that door down there lead to?”

  “Kitchen.”

  “And kitchen. Shoot it, print it, dust it, vacuum it, swatch it, don’t miss a goddamn thing. This one’s gonna shake up the environs.”

  Stenner’s walkie-talkie suddenly snapped to life. It was Turner.

  “Better get down here on the double, Lieutenant,” he said. “In the church.”

  Stenner went back down to the vestibule at the foot of the stairs. A cop opened a door at the rear of the large entrance room and Stenner went through it and down a long passageway that ended in a small waiting room beside the altar. Under the towering apse and across sweeping rows of pews, Turner and four police officers were standing in front of a confessional, guns drawn.

  Stenner hurried across the church and down one row, brushed the cops aside and stared into the cubicle.

  A man-child, almost angelic in appearance, twenty years old at best, his teary eyes bright with fear, cowered on the floor of the confessional. His hair was matted with dried blood. His face, clothes and hands were stained red. His arms were crossed at the chest and a large, blood-streaked carving knife was clutched in his right fist.

  His panicked eyes peered into the beams of three flashlights.

  “Didn’t do it,” he murmured in a pitiful, barely audible voice, shaking his head back and forth. “Didn’t do it, Mama. Mama, I didn’t do it.”

  THREE

  Everyone on the el was riveted to the morning paper and the banner headline: ARCHBISHOP RUSHMAN MURDERED!

  And the subhead: YOUTH ARRESTED IN MUTILATION SLAYING.

  But Martin Vail was more interested in the copy of City Magazine he had bought at the comer newsstand. He checked the table of contests, flipped to page 32 and settled back to read the story.

  VAIL OF INNOCENTS

  A BLOODLETTING AT THE CITY’S EXPENSE

  BY

  JACK CONNERMAN

  The jury’s been out for an hour and a half, it’s eight o’clock on a Thursday eve with only seven shopping days left until Christmas, and the courtroom, which is still crowded, is as tense as a hospital waiting room. There is a lot of aimless conversation but most eyes are on the door through which the jury will eventually return. After sitting through 12 days of testimony so incendiary that at one point the judge suggested calling in the fire department, nobody’s going to leave now. Not with the last act about to go on.

  “What he is, he’s the assassin of the legal game in this town. A vampire is what he is. Sits there in court, shit, you can almost see his fuckin’ fangs drippin’ blood. He’s a big game hunter, comes in with that old-fashioned doctor’s bag of his, his motor’s runnin’, can’t wait for it to happen, know what I mean? Prosecutors? Shiiit. Has ’em for breakfast, lunch and dinner, goes home, snacks on judges before he hits the sack. You’re a prosecutor and he’s sittin’ on the other side of the room? Pack up. Take your writs and legal pads, depositions, all that legal shit, throw ’em away, go home, take a Jacuzzi. Read a book. Suck on some chocolates. Just save your juice, pal, ’cause you’re already dead. You might’s well be hangin’ on a hook in the fuckin’ slaughterhouse.”

  A bailiff is talking, a red-eyed, bag-bellied old-timer with bad breath and what’s left of a toothpick lingering in the corner of his mouth. He’s seen 22 years’ worth of barristers come and go in this town. Knows all the tricks. Could probably spout more law than any $500-an-hour Philadelphia lawyer.

  “Marty Vail. Walkin’ death,” the bailiff says, and strolls away.

  The year is staggering toward a close this December evening in Superior Courtroom 6—where Clarence Darrow once chewed up a hotshot local lawyer so bad he quit and became a law professor—as the crowded courtroom roots in place, waiting for the verdict in the case of Joe Pinero vs. The City.

  Vail is sitting on a windowsill ignoring what’s going on around him, looking out over a city ablaze with Christmas lights. He’s so calm he could be in a coma. Smoking is prohibited in the room, but Vail absently lights one of
f the other, dropping ashes and butts in a plastic coffee container. Nobody tells him to stop.

  What’s on Vail’s mind?

  He’s probably thinking that when the jury returns he’ll own a small piece of the real estate he’s looking down at, a hunk of the city which for a year he has casually stomped into dust.

  His client, a local triggerman and three-time loser named Joe Pinero, is sitting at the defendant’s desk. His fingers are doing a soft shoe to some imaginary tune. If he’s worried about his future, you’d never know it. But then, why should he be? Marty Vail has just done a High Noon on the best the city had to offer, Albert Silverman, an attorney of high repute, who is at this moment down in the john, puking his guts out. That’s how the city’s case has gone for him.

  “If Vail was a big-league pitcher, he’d be king of the change-up,” a sportswriter friend of mine once said. “He doesn’t go in just to win, man. Every game’s gotta be a nohitter.”

  Charlene Crowder, tough as a stevedore after spending the better part of her life recording trials, swears this actually happened:

  “This is in his early days—six, seven years ago, okay?—he’s defending a small-time stickup man. A key piece of evidence is this hat, supposedly owned by the defendant. So Vail kneecaps the prosecution, proves the hat can’t possibly belong to his client, and tucks the case in his pocket. Then when it’s over, Vail walks over to the property man and says, ‘My client wants his hat back.’”

  Vail says now he was kidding—but he took the hat.

  Vail, in seven years, has become a legend. He never gives interviews, carries printed business cards which say “No comment,” comes to court in suits that haven’t been pressed since Elvis was in grade school. He maybe gets a haircut when the seasons change. Ties hang at half-mast like a loose noose around his neck. His shoes have never heard the crack of a shineman’s rag.

  He’s a sleepwalker, strolling around the courtroom as if he’s dropped an idea on the floor and can’t find it. Then he’s a jack-in-the-box, roaring out of his chair like a volcano going off. Then he’s a charmer—smiling, soothing, patronizing—before suddenly turning into an asp, striking at the jugular of an unsuspecting witness. Sometimes he smiles, sometimes he looks worried, sometimes he looks bored. But those gray eyes never change. Look in those eyes, you’re staring straight at sudden death. It’s take no prisoners. He is the merciless executioner, destroying opponents as casually as if he were dunking donuts at the comer coffeehouse.

  Marty Vail at thirty-two: legal enfant terrible for the upcoming eighties. In his hands, the law is a juggler’s ball.

  Joe Pinero, known to friend and foe as Shades because he wears his sunglasses everywhere—probably sleeps in them—is a mobster, a street soldier whose sheet includes convictions for assault, attempted murder and manslaughter. The first time he gets two to five for using a sawed-off baseball bat on a shoe clerk who owes a bookie $400. He’s out in nine months. The second time around he shoots another hood in a territorial argument, a gang killing reduced to manslaughter because the prosecutor’s case is weak. He walks in six months. A year and a half ago, Pinero and three other gangsters go at it on a crowded downtown street in a shoot-out reminiscent of World War II. When the smoke clears, two are dead and Pinero has three holes in him. Witnesses vanish, nobody can figure out who did what to whom and Pinero plea-bargains to manslaughter and takes another hike. Needless to say, he is not a popular figure in law enforcement circles.

  Cut to last New Year’s Eve. Pinero is on his way home from a party. Two cops fall in behind him—one is a county cop, the other a state john who is off duty, just out for the night with his pal—who, it turns out, is his brother. The county cop recognizes Pinero and they pull him over and decide to hassle him, make him walk a line, touch his finger to his nose, the DUI trip. What they don’t realize is that they have crossed the line into the city. Along comes a city cop and joins the party. They shake down the car and find a loaded revolver in the trunk. Pinero starts screaming about his rights, about county and state cops pulling him over in the city, one thing leads to another and next thing you know, all three policemen are beating on Pinero like he’s the bass drum in a high school band.

  He ends up in the hospital with two broken ribs, crushed cheekbone, concussion, multiple bruises and contusions, and charges of DUI, resisting arrest, concealed weapon. Then up pops the devil. Pinero it turns out, has clocked a .06 on the breatholater. He was legally sober. Rumors are rampant—the most popular being that the powers-that-be are up the river, frantically looking for a paddle.

  Enter Marty Vail with a civil suit for 25 mil. He ends up in a legal brawl with the state, the county and the city. There is a lot of smirking over at the Lawyer’s Club, where jealousy spreads like the plague. The odds are running about a thousand to one that Vail has finally bitten off the big one.

  But over the next ten months, Vail tears the city, county and state to pieces. He pits state and county cops against city cops. The infighting gets so vicious the three governments are threatening to sue each other. Vail sits back and clips his fingernails—before he’s through he agrees to drop the charges against county and state, subpoenas both cops, and they turn on their city brother like a couple of pit bulls.

  Before it goes to trial, the odds are running even—with the smart money on Vail.

  Now Vail is contemplating the blinking lights on the county Christmas tree, his client is as cool as a draft beer in a frosted glass, the county prosecutor turned defense counsel is on his knees in the men’s room, and seven men and five women are off in the jury room trying to figure out who did what to whom and how much it’s going to cost.

  The jury’s been out two hours when I wander over and lean on the windowsill beside Vail. He has taken off his yellow tie and stuffed it in the breast pocket of a tweed suit that looks like he’s been sleeping in it for a week. He is badly in need of a shave. Early in the trial, Judge Harry Shoat, a fanatical conservative known in legal circles as Hangin’ Harry who, comparatively speaking, makes Attila the Hun look like a social reformer, admonishes Vail about his dress code.

  “With all due respect, Your Honor,” Vail replies, “I came here to practice law, not audition for the cover of Gentleman’s Quarterly.”

  That sets the tone for a trial during which Vail is twice fined $1,000 for contempt. The only reason he does not spend ten days or so in the local hoosegow is fear of a mistrial. Nobody wants to go through this massacre again.

  “So whadda ya think?” I ask Vail.

  “I think blinking lights on Christmas trees are the epitome of bad taste,” he says, staring down at the tree in front of the courthouse which looks like a red-and-green caution light. “Looks like a damn neon sign.”

  “How long do you think they’ll be out?”

  “Until they decide how much we get.”

  “You think it’s that simple?”

  “Yep.” He lights another Vantage and drops the old one in the cup, where it sizzles out.

  “When did you figure it was in the bag?” I ask.

  “The day I took the case,” Vail answers.

  Self-confidence and that look, that’s what nails them. It never occurs to Vail that he will lose, only how big he’ll win.

  The jury is out for two hours and forty minutes. Verdict: $7.6 million for ex-gunman suddenly turned millionaire Joe Pinero. The courtroom goes crazy. Silverman heads back to the men’s john. And Martin Vail has just earned himself a cool $2.5 mil.

  The judge stares balefully down from on high. “Perhaps,” he says to Vail, “you can afford a new suit now, Counselor.”

  Martin Vail smiles up at the judge. “A possibility,” he answers.

  Two days later, the city files an appeal.

  And the beat goes on.

  It promises to be a fun year.

  Vail shivered against the frigid breeze reaming the el car and huddled deeper inside his sheepskin jacket as he read the City Magazine article for the second time. Not b
ad, he thought. Not bad at all. The photograph was fine. It showed a hard-eyed young man with a cocky smile leaning against a judge’s bench with his hands in his pants pockets, a sheaf of writs stuffed in his jacket pocket, staring straight into the camera with a battered medicine bag at his feet. The caption was a killer: MARTIN VAIL: PROSECUTORS BENEDICT FOR BREAKFAST.

  Vail chuckled. He owed Connerman drinks and dinner for this one. He slipped the magazine into his bag as the train stopped at the edge of the el loop, and rushed out of the car, turning his collar up against the wet snow drizzle lashed by a hard breeze off the lake, four blocks away. Vail hated this time of year. The damp north wind blew down across the lake and slashed the flat midwestern city like a razor, knifing through Vail’s thickest coat and freezing his face. He half-ran the two blocks and took the wide granite steps two at a time. Once inside, he flipped dampness off his collar and lit a cigarette. Across the broad marble-and-brass lobby, Bobby, the newsman, waved a copy of the magazine at him.

  “Mr. V,” he yelled. “It’s a killer.”

  Vail strolled across the lobby, took the magazine, picked up a bag of shelled peanuts and dropped a five in Bobby’s hand.

  “Keep the change,” he said, rushing off.

  “G’bless ya,” Bobby called after him.

  He walked to the second floor, avoiding the crowded elevators. It was five after nine. He would be five minutes late. Fashionable. Vail had taken an hour that morning to mentally prepare himself for the meeting. Valerie Main, who had been secretary to a succession of city attorneys for about a century, glared at him as he entered the office.

  “You’re late,” she snapped.

  “It’s the weather,” he said, and smiled, shucking his jacket and throwing it over a chair. He was wearing a ski sweater, no shirt, corduroy pants and thick-soled clodhoppers.

  “You’re in for it,” she said cryptically as he entered the inner office.

  FOUR

  The players surprised Vail. The room was bloated with old-time politicos—the muscle—instead of quick, clever, young hitmen eager to slice a deal. It threw him for a minute. There was the city attorney, Arnold Flederman, who had been around since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked the oil lamp that started the city’s fire; Otis Burnside, the city councilman, the masterful puppeteer who pulled the strings of the downtown first ward; and Johnny Malloway, the malevolent ex–FBI agent, now police commissioner, who knew just what pressure points to push if he wanted to stop blood from flowing to the brain.