Andrea looked at him.
“What I’d like to do,” he said, “even though I’m certain we can do this under Miranda without a court order…”
“Do what?” Bertinotti asked at once.
“Have a vaginal smear taken, Counselor.”
“You’d damn well better get a court order before you invade her privacy that way!”
“I intend to do that, sir.”
“Good, go do it. Meanwhile, the questions are finished.”
“Counselor,” Carella said, “if Miss Packer wasn’t in that bed with Mr. Madden last night, she’s got nothing to worry about. But if we come up with a DNA match, then we’ve got her there with him before he went out that window. You might want to discuss this with her in private.”
Bertinotti looked at her.
“Give us fifteen minutes alone,” he said.
He was back in ten.
“Is there a D. A. on this case?” he asked.
Nellie Brand got uptown at two minutes past midnight. Officially it was Palm Sunday, but she wasn’t dressed for church. They had caught her at a dinner party, and she was wearing her basic black and pearls with high-heeled black patent pumps. She apologized for her improbable appearance, talked to Carella to find out what they had, and then went in to talk to Andrea’s lawyers.
Foley just sat there with his finger up his ass.
Bertinotti did all the bargaining for their client.
Nellie knew her evidence wasn’t overwhelming, but she wasn’t ready to let Bertinotti plead her down to a stroll in the park. The very fact that he was willing to bargain at all told her that Packer had been in Madden’s apartment on the night he’d taken the plunge. But she knew she had nothing that really tied Packer to the Cassidy murder. Even so, she told Bertinotti she was going for Murder Two on both cases, under the theory that Packer had acted in concert with Madden on the Cassidy murder. Murder Two was an A felony that carried a lifetime sentence. Bertinotti knew she was being ridiculous, otherwise why were they here talking?
He told her he’d agree to Man One on the Madden case, if she forgot the Cassidy case entirely. She told him that was out of the question, the two cases were irrevocably linked, and if she couldn’t wrap both, she wasn’t going to deal at all. He reminded her that she already had somebody in jail for the Cassidy murder…
“Please, Counselor,” she said. “You’re not suggesting I send an innocent man to prison, are you?”
“Perish the thought,” Bertinotti said.
Foley, the jackass, actually chuckled.
“I was merely positing the notion that perhaps the voracious appetite of the public for mystery, intrigue and revenge would be sated if you dropped the A felony on the earlier murder…”
“No way.”
“… and substituted for it a B felony, to wit Conspiracy to Commit.”
“Eight and a third to twenty-five on each,” Nellie said.
“I was thinking two to six on the conspiracy.”
“No way. The max on both.”
“Concurrently.”
“Consecutively,” Nellie said.
“I can’t accept that.”
“Then get your client ready for the stirrups.”
“Mrs. Brand, she’s twenty-one years old…”
“Right. She killed two people and you want her out when she’s twenty-nine? Forget it. Let’s roll the dice, and let a jury decide. Maybe you’ll win. Maybe she won’t have to spend the rest of her life in hell on a pair of A felony convictions. But take my deal, and she’ll be out before she’s forty.”
Bertinotti thought about this for a moment.
“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll take the Bs. Eight and a third to twenty-five on each. Consecutively.”
“We’ve got a deal.”
“Let me talk to her.”
“Then it’s my turn,” Nellie said.
The idea came to me right after Michelle got stabbed in the alley that night. First I thought it was too bad someone hadn’t done the job properly because then the leading role in Romance would have been open, and who better to fill it than the second lead, right? Who better than me? Chuck and I were joking about it in bed that night, how unfortunate it had been, you know, that the stabber hadn’t actually killed that bitch.
We’d been living together, Chuck and I…
Well, gee, it must’ve been more than a month by then. Was it that long? I think so, yes. Since before we even started rehearsals. We fell in love the minute we laid eyes on each other. I met him when I read for the part, stage managers do that all the time, read opposite whoever’s trying out. It was so romantic. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I went to bed with him that same night, it was that kind of thing, a real coup de foudre, amazing. So romantic and sexy and immediate, do you know?
This was even before they called to say I had the part. I thought at first they meant the leading role, the starring role, because that’s what I’d read for, but instead it was the second lead, what Freddie calls the Understudy in his play. Listen, I was happy to get anything at all, believe me, I would have taken one of the bit parts, moving furniture, whatever, playing a waitress or a reporter, one of the bit parts. It galled that someone like Michelle got the part, of course, but listen, that’s the way it goes, sometimes a not very good actress gets lucky, she wasn’t a terribly good actress, you know, I mean anyone can tell you that. Even Josie is better than she was. Josie Beales, I mean, who finally…
Boy, that was amazing, I have to tell you.
I never expected that.
I think it started out as just kidding around, Chuck and me. In bed. We’d just made love, I think, it was the night she’d got stabbed, we already knew she was all right and would be back at rehearsal the next day. Chuck was telling me how much better I was… as an actress, that is. He’d never been to bed with her, I’d have killed him, that’s not what I’m saying, he wasn’t comparing us as lovers or anything. Solely as actresses. He told me, in fact, that there’d been some kind of debate about who they should offer the part to, the leading role, the Actress, the three of them had talked it over, Morgenstern and Freddie and Ashley. And they decided to offer the part to Michelle, “Probably because she had bigger tits,” Chuck said, and I said, “Oh yeah, you mean you noticed?” and we were clowning around like that when he said, “The part should really have gone to you, Andy,” and we sort of got quiet for a while, and then he said, “It would’ve gone to you if that guy had succeeded tonight.”
Well we talked about that for a while.
About whether I’d really have gotten the part if Michelle had actually got killed that night.
We decided I would have.
We decided I would have been the logical choice.
Decided, in fact, that I would still be the logical choice if anything happened to Michelle. If, for example, whoever had tried to kill her tonight came back and really did the job. We had no idea who’d stabbed her, we didn’t care who’d stabbed her, we were just saying suppose he came back and stabbed her again, only this time it took.
Then I would get her part.
We were convinced I would get her part.
Which, of course, would make me a star.
Because of all the publicity already surrounding the play, you see. And all the publicity that would come if she actually got killed.