Page 85 of Witness 8

37

Eddie

Detective Arthur Chase took the bible in his right hand and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God.

He was a career NYPD man. Dark suit. Dark shirt. Set off with a dark navy neck tie and flashy silver cufflinks. A chunky chain on his right wrist and a thick Rolex Submariner on his left. Both silver. To match the cufflinks, and the tie pin. He was a man with a mission. Places to be. Bad guys to catch. A year-round tan. A little gray at the temples, but age hadn’t slowed him down or dulled his wits. Sharp green eyes flashed like the cufflinks and seemed to take in the whole room. Artie Chase had a good rep. How could you not, with a name like that. He looked after the officers on his team. Filed his reports on time. Pushed up his precinct’s clearance rate. Always bought the first round at the bar. He was a straight operator. No ties to New York’s Finest. He’d never beaten a suspect. Never broken the rules. He just looked after his team and closed his cases.

Which, in a way, made him the worst kind of cop.

Bad cops see out their twenty years in the job because of guys like Chase. Cops look after cops. All cops. The bad ones too. If you rat on a fellow officer, your life is turned into a living hell and your career takes a nose dive off a ten-story building. And that’s the best-case scenario. Chase learned this early. And, like all cops, he learned to keep his mouth shut. That’s hard at first,but it becomes easier when you’re doing good police work. The price you pay for doing good in New York is ignoring all the bad that goes on under your own roof. The more good you do, the easier it becomes to look the other way.

Chase did a lot of good.

He never got a hard time on the stand from defense attorneys. They knew, instinctively, any jury would admire a guy like Chase. And, if they didn’t know it beforehand, the looks jurors would give him during his testimony put all doubt out of their minds. Any criticism of Chase risked alienating the jury. And he told the truth on the stand. The trouble with cops who told the truth in court was that you couldn’t catch them out in a lie. There was no weakness in their battle lines. No way to put a hole in their testimony or even shake it.

A defense attorney’s worst nightmare.

Castro played up to Chase’s charm and natural magnetism, taking him through his résumé – his years of service and seniority – before he got to the juicy parts of his testimony.

‘I got a call to attend a possible homicide on West 74thStreet. A neighbor had noticed a front door lying open. Unusual for that time of the morning. He called out, then went inside and found Margaret Blakemore dead on the floor. He called the police right away . . .’

The neighbor had been Norman Tuttle. He was a tech investor who had moved into the street just a month before the murder. When he left for his five a.m. run, he’d seen the door open. Didn’t touch anything, didn’t disturb the body by attempting CPR: it was clear Margaret was dead and beyond help. Bloch and Lake had looked into Norman extensively – he was as straight as they come. Much like our client. We had agreed Norman’s deposition could just be read to the jury and admitted into evidence. He didn’t know Margaret, didn’t reallyknow anyone yet, and the less bodies on the stand the quicker this case would be over.

‘I arrived at the scene and spoke to the two response officers who had secured the property. I ran through my standard questions about what they had touched, what areas of the house they had been to, what they had found and recorded all of it. I opened a crime log and called for forensics and the medical examiner.’

‘What did you find when you went inside the property?’ asked Castro.

‘I saw a woman lying in the living-room area on her back. Her head was pointed toward the bay window. There was what appeared to be two bullet wounds in her temple and one wound in her chest. Her eyes were open. She was clearly deceased.’

‘Were there any signs of a struggle?’ asked Castro.

Right then, I knew the anonymous witness was going to testify to some kind of relationship between our client and the deceased. Castro was setting it up.

‘No obvious signs, no.’

‘Was there any sign of forced entry to the property?’

‘None.’

‘Given your expertise in investigating homicide cases for more than twenty years, were you able to draw any insight from the fact that there was no sign of a struggle and no sign of forced entry?’

There was no point in objecting. Some lawyers would in the hope the judge would intervene and ask the cop to stick to the facts. The jury liked Artie Chase. Best thing to do was to turn that to our advantage.

‘It raises the distinct probability that the victim knew her attacker.’

Some members of the jury nodded, agreeing with Chase.

‘After you had examined the crime scene, and a forensic examination was conducted of the living room and the victim, what happened next?’

‘Our officers canvassed the neighborhood, but no one saw anything suspicious or heard anything on the night of the murder.’

‘What course did your investigation take?’

‘We spoke to the deceased’s spouse, Alan Blakemore, who was not in the state at the time of the murder . . .’

He was a good witness. Closing off avenues of potential attack from the defense. Most married women whose lives end in violence are murdered by their spouses. Chase was long enough in the job to know that’s an area that defense might go to and he was shutting those doors before we could open them.

‘. . . and we built up a picture of the deceased and her social circle and her life. We continued our investigations and two weeks later we got a breakthrough. An anonymous tip from a caller. The call came in from a public payphone.’