Counterplay

I’ll be honest, Guma told Karp when he returned, I wasn’t expecting that much…but they really put me through the wringer. If nothing else, I learned that I wasn’t half as prepared in this case as I thought I was.

They’d asked him if the moon was absent or full on the night Teresa Stavros disappeared. It might indicate, they said, how much light the killer would have had to work with in the backyard if he hadn’t wanted to turn on the lights. They asked if he knew the composition of the soil, which could affect how deep the killer might have been able to dig. Could Stavros have moved the body from the premises without being seen?

“I basically had to say, ‘I don’t know,’ to a lot of the questions,” Guma said now recalling the inquisition for Karp.

“But he also said, ‘I’ll find out,’ ” Swanburg added, “which is what we wanted to hear. We don’t take all the cases presented to us. We simply can’t with our limited resources and time. So if the cops or, in this case, the DAO, aren’t willing to do their homework, we shake their hands, wish them well, and politely decline.”

Swanburg walked over to Karp’s desk and opened a large manila envelope he was carrying and withdrew two large black-and-white photographs, which he placed on the desk. “One of the questions we asked Ray was the availability of aerial photographs of the Stavros home from before the ‘disappearance’ and after,” he explained. “These photographs are more available than people think-if you know where to look. Places like surveyors’ offices, zoning commissions, the United States Geological Survey, even declassified military photographs-which have the highest resolution, those guys can read a license plate from a satellite. Take a moment and look at the photographs I handed you and tell me what you see. The former Stavros house and yard is the one surrounded by the circle I’ve drawn to make it easy.”

Karp stood up and, resting his knuckles on the desk, leaned over to get a bird’s-eye view of the side-by-side photographs. He felt like a kid being put on the spot in a geography bee. However, when he compared the circled areas on the photographs, he quickly noticed a difference between the two. “The backyard…the one photograph there seems to have more bushes and less of this white space; the other, there’s more white space, with something on it, and fewer bushes.”

“Very good!” Swanburg exclaimed like a proud parent overseeing a homework assignment. “Photograph number one, as you correctly noted, has more vegetation, and was taken by a photographer in a Piper Cub in 1989, two years before Mrs. Stavros disappeared. The photographer was creating a coffee-table book called A Bird’s-Eye View of Manhattan Neighborhoods. Photograph number two, which was taken in conjunction with the experimental mapping of Manhattan with a new satellite, was taken in 1991, three months after she disappeared. By the way, the white space is a patio, probably cement, and that’s a hot tub on it.”

“That’s pretty cool, but what’s it prove?” asked Karp. “Emil got tired of the garden and wanted a hot tub for his mistress…or was she a wife by then?”

“Still a girlfriend,” Guma said. “There was still money in the account, so he hadn’t divorced Teresa yet.” He used the eraser end of a pencil to point to a corner of the house above the former rosegarden-turned-patio. “Zachary said that he remembered the sound of digging that night. And his bedroom was here, above the former rose garden.”

Karp looked at his friend. The old Guma energy was radiating from him, he was gearing up for the fight with relish. Karp looked down at the photograph again. “I’d say if your instincts tell you a judge will grant a search warrant based on this photograph, then go for it.”

“I’ve already got an appointment with Judge Paul Lussman in a half hour,” Guma answered, grinning. “Want to come watch?”

Two hours later, Guma looked up at the opulent brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper West Side as his car pulled up behind a marked police cruiser with a flashing light. A second unmarked car was behind them, followed by another cruiser with its light flashing. He might never get to bring Emil Stavros to justice, but Guma wanted to remind the neighbors that Emil Stavros had killed his wife.

Teresa Stavros had been on his mind a lot lately; in fact, her face as it appeared in the photograph on his wall at work stayed with him long after he left each evening. He’d always made it a point when prosecuting a homicide trial to get to know the victim as well as he could. It was important to make the victim real to the jury, not some character out of a story who had never been flesh and blood.

So he’d talked to anyone he could find who’d known Teresa. There wasn’t much in the way of family outside of Zachary, who could only recollect bits and pieces. But she’d had quite a few friends, especially before she’d married, and some of them dating back to when she was a student at Marymount School of New York. They’d painted quite a picture of a wealthy Italian Catholic girl who was a little bit angel and a little bit devil. She’d been known to leave white mice in the desk drawer of the mean sister and skipped school to try parachuting. She loved the author Tom Robbins, and had once been expelled for bringing his sexy, funny novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues to school to share with her classmates.

In her college days at Columbia, she would have been the first to strip naked for midnight swims in the Atlantic. A strong swimmer, on a dare she’d even tried crossing the East River where it met the Hudson on the north end of Manhattan at a particularly treacherous spot known as Spuyten Duyvil. Many a strong male swimmer had drowned in its strong currents and undertows, and she had nearly succumbed as well, but crawled out on the Washington Heights side and collected on the bet.

Most of her friends spoke of Emil Stavros with disgust. They’d tried to talk her out of getting serious about him. He was a big talker and had all sorts of grandiose plans-they always thought he was more interested in her trust fund than her love. But it seemed the more they tried to break them up, the harder Teresa fought to stay with him. Then she got pregnant and agreed to marry Emil, determined that her son-she was sure from day one it was a son-wasn’t going to be born a bastard.

She was the best mother any child ever had, one of her college roommates said. She adored that baby from the moment she knew she was pregnant. Then when Zachary was born, she fell in love. He made living with Emil almost bearable.

That guy Emil is a piece of work, said another old friend. The guy cheated on her all the time, and we suspected he was slapping her around. He wouldn’t let her see us much, but when she did, we noticed a lot of bruises on her face and arms-a lot more often than could be explained by clumsiness. But she was a devoted, old-fashioned Catholic. She refused to have an abortion when she got pregnant with Zachary. And she wouldn’t divorce Emil. So she just devoted herself to her son.

She was a wonderful friend, said yet another. It didn’t matter if her own life was a mess, she would drop everything for any one of us in a heartbeat. She was an unusual woman in that as beautiful as she was, other women weren’t threatened by her-everyone wanted to be her friend. And I don’t have to tell you that men fell in love the moment they met her.

The fourth woman Guma interviewed laughed at some recollection, then added, I’ll tell you what…she would have melted your heart, Mr. Guma, like butter in the sun.

Ray Guma didn’t tell the woman that Teresa Aiello Stavros already had. It had come as quite a shock that he’d fallen in love with a dead woman. He’d always adored women in just about all their myriad shapes and sizes, and he’d made it a mission to bed as many of them, in as many ways and as many places as possible.

Yet, in spite of the playboy image he’d carefully cultivated, he’d always believed that someday he’d meet the woman who would make all the others superfluous. Then he’d settle down and have the sort of marriage his parents had enjoyed for nearly seventy years. There’d be a handful or two of kids-who’d have been out of college by now if you’d met her twenty-five or so years ago, he thought as he looked out the window of the car at Teresa’s former home. And later, he and the ball-and-chain would retire and spend half the year in Miami and half the year in Manhattan, right up until the Yankees won the World Series every October.

There’d been a dozen “future Mrs. Ray Guma’s” he’d joked as he introduced each to friends or family over the years, but there’d never been a present Mrs. Ray Guma. Part of the problem-he was willing to admit after years of therapy, which he’d kept secret from even his best friend Karp-was that he’d never been good at keeping his zipper up. He looked at sex as fun and games; none of it meant anything. Unfortunately, the women who had meant something more to him than a passing lay never seemed to see it the same way.

When he was being less than honest with himself, Guma would contend that he’d messed around on the others because none of them were “the one.” He wondered now if Teresa had lived, and they’d met, would he