no takers. When are you coming?”
“In about an hour and a half,” Anita said.
“I’ll have some lunch ready. I’m not going to work until early afternoon.” Alberta was a real estate agent.
“See you then.”
Anita got back on her motorcycle and onto the Sawmill River Parkway. She made a point of sticking to the speed limit.
—
Dino sat in an observation booth behind an interrogation room and watched through a one-way mirror as Bill Murphy came into the room with his attorney, a woman named Beth Cutter, a smart lawyer whom Dino knew from other cases. Detectives Connor and Cohn were the interrogating officers.
Connor read Murphy his rights again, and Murphy signed a document saying that he understood them and had an attorney.
“All right,” Cutter said, “Bill is willing to talk to you and maybe answer some questions, if what you’re offering is good enough.”
“Right now, we’re not offering anything,” Connor replied. “This is just a friendly little chat.”
“Then, in the absence of an offer, my client will have nothing to say.”
“Where’s Nita?” Bill said. “She should be here.”
“You two won’t be seeing each other for a while,” Connor said, “but Anita is talking to some other detectives, and she’s being very cooperative.”
“The fuck she is,” Murphy said.
“We’re prepared to be lenient on some of the burglary charges against you, Bill, if you’re willing to help us with another case.”
“Another case?” Murphy asked.
“I’m talking about the people who stole the pictures that you stole from them.”
“Oh, those guys. I don’t know them.”
“How about the people who live at the East Sixty-first Street address where you stole the van and the pictures?”
“I don’t know them, either.”
“Do you know somebody named Don Dugan?”
Murphy’s eyes opened a little wider. “I’ve heard the name.”
“In what connection have you heard the name?” Connor asked.
“Tell you what,” Murphy said, “I’ll tell you everything I know about Dugan if you’ll drop the burglary charges.”
“I can’t promise you that, Bill, because I don’t know what you know. Now, you tell me all about Dugan, and then we’ll see what we can do.”
The attorney, Cutter, nodded to him.
“I can give you enough to help you solve a major robbery,” Murphy said.
“What robbery is that?”
“A lot of big-time jewelry was stolen.”
“We might be able to deal, but you’re going to have to give us names and dates, and what you give us is going to have to lead to convictions. And you’ll have to testify. Why don’t you start by describing the crime, and we’ll see if it matches up with anything we’ve got on our books.”
Dino picked up a phone and called an assistant district attorney. “Come down to interrogation room two,” Dino said. “Something interesting is going on.”
“Be right there,” was the reply.
50
Bill Murphy whispered with his attorney for a couple of minutes. The door to the observation booth opened, and the ADA, Shirley Kravitz, came in and sat by Dino.
“What?” she asked.
“This guy is facing dozens of burglary charges,” Dino said, “but he says he can give us information about a major crime, if he walks.”
“Anybody promise him anything?”
“Jim Connor is too smart an interrogator to do that, but let’s listen and see what he has to say.”
Murphy finished talking with his attorney. “Okay, I’ll tell you this much. The crime I’m talking about was committed in a fancy apartment building on Fifth Avenue in the Sixties. There was a big dinner party, and some people came in with guns and stole all their jewelry.”
“And who was behind this robbery?”
“That’s it, until we have a deal,” Murphy said.
Dino turned to Kravitz. “You know about this robbery?”
“Everybody knows about it,” she said.
“Is clearing it worth bouncing this guy from the burglary charges?”
“You got his charge sheet?”
Dino handed her a file folder. “He has a record for burglary, did eight months at Rikers while trying to strike a deal, and finally got time served.”
“What’s the value of the stolen jewelry?” Kravitz asked.
“Upwards of twenty million,” Dino said. “And the victims were some very important people.”
“Okay, I’ll bite, if we can get a conviction out of what he says and if he testifies.”
“How about bail?”
“A hundred grand.”
Dino pressed the intercom button, and Connor picked up the phone. “Yeah?”
“Kravitz is here. She’ll drop the charges and give him a hundred thousand bail if he gives us the whole ball of wax and testifies.”
“Okay.” Connor hung up. “You’re in luck, Bill. The DA will deal if you give us the whole thing.”
“Bail?” his attorney asked.
“A hundred thousand.”
“He had more than that in the van