On the opposite side of the street were walk-up three-flats and some single-families. Some were renovated in the last decade and some looked like they’d barely survived an aerial bombing. A neighborhood in progress, halted by the economic downturn.
Joel extended his right arm and made a gun with his hand. “So he shot her from here. The casing probably landed straight in the dirt.”
Using one of the evidence photos as a guide, I walked over to the curb and found the spot where Kathy Rubinkowski had fallen dead. There was a diagonal crack in the curb that I could use as a reference point from the photographs. Plus I pretty much knew it, anyway, as this wasn’t my first trip to the crime scene. It’s absolutely vital that you visit the crime scene. It’s almost as important that you visit it a second time, and a third. You have to see things up close. You have to play out the scene. Otherwise, you could miss something that could make or break the case.
“Last time I walked it, it was ten feet,” I said, measuring the distance from Joel Lightner to me.
“That’s highly accurate shooting,” Joel said, not for the first time.
“He shot her right between the eyes?” Tori asked. “So she was looking right at him?”
I looked at Tori. “What’s your point?”
She was her typically put-together self in the long white coat with black knee-high boots. “If someone pointed a gun at me, I’d run. Or duck.”
“That’s what you think,” said Joel. “But in fact, humans center their eyes on danger. There are studies on this. People want to predict the danger, so they focus on whatever is the source of danger. If Kathy saw the gun, odds are that she’d fix her eyes directly on it, and she’d turn so she was seeing it head-on.”
Tori listened, then shook her head. “I’d duck. I wouldn’t stare at the gun.”
“That would be your secondary response,” said Joel. “Your initial response would be to focus on the weapon. Remember, this probably happened in the space of a second or two. Maybe given more time, maybe the outcome would have been different.”
“This is all very fascinating, folks,” I said. “When this over, let’s write an article together. But for now, how about we figure out how to acquit our client of murder?”
Peter Gennaro Ramini watched Jason Kolarich and the others as they reenacted the shooting of Kathy Rubinkowski. He’d had little trouble following them, using the cover of the festive crowd on a Saturday night. He didn’t need to get too close at this point. He knew what they were doing. So he stood at the intersection of Gehringer and Mulligan, half a city block away, leaning against the door of a bank, his hands stuffed in his pockets as always-his signature, at this point.
Kolarich and company seemed to have the details of the shooting basically right, the distance and the angle, the position of the victim’s body. The latter detail would have been easy to gather from the photographs. The accuracy of their distance measurement surprised him initially. Once you got past a space of four feet or so, it was difficult to pin down the distance of a gunshot with any particularity.
But then he remembered the spent shell casing. That must have been how they measured it. There had been no need to be concerned about the shell casing, from his perspective, because it didn’t matter if the casing traced back to the murder weapon; the murder weapon was going to be found, anyway. Besides, if the shell casing wasn’t left behind, it would look like a professional job. It wouldn’t look like an amateur robbery-turned-homicide, which is how he’d wanted it to appear.
But the flip side of that was now obvious to him: It gave a distance. And that distance was meaningful, a pretty long distance for a Glock to be fired with such precision. It gave Kolarich an argument he wouldn’t otherwise have-that the shooting was carried out by someone of superior skill. A pro. A hired gun.
He watched them until he knew all he needed to know. And then he went home.
Tomorrow, there would be a conversation.
36
The black town car picked up Peter Ramini at precisely nine in the morning, as Ramini exited the drugstore. He got into the backseat and quickly returned his hands to his coat pockets.
Next to him, Donnie ate a bagel lathered with blueberry cream cheese, more than a little of which found resting places on his chin or his ever-expanding stomach. The guy was like a beached whale. But he was the only person Paulie Capparelli trusted, the only person in the world who could lean down and whisper into Paulie’s ear and receive advice back the same way.
“Whaddaya got, Pete?” Donnie grunted.
“I got a problem, that’s what I got.”
“Tell Donnie. Donnie will make it all better.”
Ramini glanced over. Sometimes Donnie forgot that he was the courier, not the decision maker.
“You remember this thing back in January, almost a year ago, with that lady at the law firm.”
Donnie grunted again. That meant yes. “Polish name.”
“Rubinkowski, right.”
“A beautiful piece of work, my friend. They pinched some other guy, and the fucknut actually confessed to it.” Donnie had a good chuckle with that. “He says he was insane, right?”
“That’s right, Don. But listen. So we just had this other thing-the one with Zo.”
Donnie grew quiet with the change in topic. Of course he recalled that. Lorenzo Fowler, at one time, had been one of those guys who could whisper in the capo’s ear, only then the capo was Rico Capparelli, not Paulie. Still, even with the transition, Zo had been considered a trusted member of the inner cabinet-trusted, that is, until the problem with the strip club owner. Nobody had told Zo to take a baseball bat to the guy, and then, of all things, he fucking died from the injuries.
Lorenzo had been feeling the hot breath of law enforcement on his neck, and it wasn’t hard to see the nerves getting to him. Enough so that Paulie ordered a close watch over Lorenzo.
So when Lorenzo made a phone call to set up a meeting with Jason Kolarich-not one of their Mob lawyers but a total outsider-Paulie knew about it within ten minutes. And he didn’t like it.
“You remember how Zo called that attorney,” said Ramini.
“Yeah. Right. We figured he was gonna cut and run. Use an outside lawyer so we wouldn’t know.”
“Right. So remember this lawyer’s named Jason Kolarich.”
“Right.” Donnie took a mountainous bite of his bagel. “Kolarich. What is that, Russian? Bulgarian?”
Ramini breathed in, breathed out.
“Romanian? No, Hungar-”
“Don, how the fuck should I know? He’s from… Paraguay, okay? He’s from fucking Antarctica. I fucking care.”
“Petey-”
“I’m trying to make a serious point here. I got a problem here, all right?”
“Okay, Petey.” Donnie patted Ramini’s knee. “Listen, I know this already. Lorenzo goes to see the lawyer. We’re afraid he mighta told him things. Lots of things. But then you took care of Lorenzo. So that erases the lawyer from the equation. He’s got nobody to worry about after Lorenzo was in the ground. Problem solved, right?”
“Wrong. Because this guy Kolarich, he’s not some random lawyer. We figured Lorenzo picked just anybody. Like outta the phone book or whatnot.”
“Right.”
“Right, but it turns out Kolarich isn’t just some random guy. Kolarich is the lawyer who is defending the guy they pinched on the Rubinkowski thing.”
Donnie stopped in mid-bite. His head slowly turned to Ramini, cream-cheese chin and all. “The guy who says he’s crazy?”
“Right. Tom Stoller is his name. But whatever. Point being, Zo wasn’t just talking to some stiff. He was talking to the guy trying to figure out who killed Kathy Rubinkowski.”
Donnie wasn’t sure what to say, which has hardly surprising. When Donnie fell out of the tree, he hit a few stupid branches on the way to the ground. Undying loyalty was in his job description. Smarts, not so much.
