Bad blood

29

Quillian took a few steps forward, his head sweeping the room so his only good eye could scope the territory. He’d been present enough times to know that the door to the main hallway stayed locked until the prisoner was seated. His only way out was the exit in back that had brought him from the Tombs to the holding pen.

Jonetta Purvis was standing still, frozen in place, screaming at the bloody sight of the woman whose brains had been blown out before us. I watched helplessly as Brendan Quillian struck Oscar Valenti on the head with Elsie’s gun, after the older man instinctively kneeled to look at his partner’s wound at the same time he tried to unholster his own weapon.

Then Quillian swung the barrel of the gun in Jonetta’s direction. I tackled her to the ground and we both went down behind the desk. There was a huge noise in the high-ceilinged room as he fired again, a bullet striking the wall above our heads.

As I fell on top of Jonetta, I saw Lem Howell vault over the side of the jury box, taking cover behind it. “Give it up, Brendan. Give it up, you damn fool.”

The judge must have ducked beneath the bench the minute the first shot rang out. I neither saw him nor heard his voice.

Artie Tramm had drawn his gun and was trying to jog to the rear of the room to unlock the hallway door-or to run out. Quillian moved faster than Tramm. Before the officer was halfway down the aisle, Quillian fired three times at Artie’s broad back.

I couldn’t see my old friend, but I heard him grunt as at least one bullet struck its mark, and I recoiled as his body hit the floor with a dull thud.

From beneath the kneehole of Jonetta’s desk, I saw the defendant turn and go back to Oscar’s side.

I had one hand over Jonetta’s mouth, trying to stifle her sobs while I propped myself up with the other. I could see Quillian take the man’s gun from its leather case and disappear back into the top of the landing beside the holding pen from which he had emerged. After all these months, he knew the enormity of the building as well as I did-a maze of hallways, staircases, and elevator shafts. He’d had scores of opportunities to make note of its labyrinthine passages, and he was undoubtedly scrambling down the one adjacent to the prisoners’ elevator as we stayed frozen in place.

The slaughter and turmoil that Brendan Quillian had begun so abruptly ended just as fast.

I pushed myself up as Lem called out the judge’s name. I got onto my knees, barefoot, the skirt of my dress ripped at the seam from the tumble with Jonetta.

There was still no sound from the bench, no sign of Fred Gertz.

Oscar was stirring, rolling onto his back and stroking his head.

I started crawling toward Elsie’s body.

“Get the hell back, Alex,” Lem said. “Fred, are you alive, man?”

Lem ran toward Elsie and crouched beside her. I stood up, thinking I could help him if there was any chance of keeping her alive. “Forget it. She’s gone, Alex. Get back with Jonetta.”

Judge Gertz clutched the top of the bench with both hands. “Is it safe?”

Everything seemed to be happening at once. I could hear Artie Tramm moan and Lem ran in his direction. “Stay down, Fred. He could be back any minute.”

I dashed to the door through which Quillian had entered and slammed it shut, turning the lock. If he encountered other armed officers in the stairwell, he was just as likely to try to get back here and take us all hostage.

“I told you to stay put, Alex,” Lem shouted. “That one’s not like the front door. Most officers have a key to open that lock-it’s useless.”

Lem had spent far more time outside those holding pens than any prosecutor had.

“Is Artie-?”

“I got his gun, Alex. Everybody stay calm with me. That door opens again, I got Artie’s gun and we’ll be fine.” Lem raised his arm so Jonetta and I could see it. “It’s just your arm, Artie. Don’t fight it. Stay down here with me. You’ll be kicking ass again in no time, Artie.”

I stepped closer to Elsie Evers. Two minutes earlier, this quiet woman had been doing her job, none of us anticipating the deadly threat from the seemingly well-bred defendant who had been so compliant during every other court appearance.

I ignored every principle of crime-scene investigation I had ever learned and expected from other professionals. I knelt beside her, taking her still-warm hand in my own to try to feel a pulse. One look at the back of her head was enough to tell me I wouldn’t find one-that it would be better for Elsie if I couldn’t find one-but I felt an overwhelming need to minister to her in some human way as her life oozed out on the filthy courtroom floor.

“What are you doing?” the judge asked. “She’s dead. Leave it alone.”

“Jonetta, would you get my jacket from the back of my chair?”

Someone was rattling the door from the pens.

Jonetta heard it, too, and ducked back beneath the desk.

Lem had grabbed Artie’s walkie-talkie to toss to me. “Alex-catch it! Press the talk button and send an SOS.”

He sprinted the remaining twenty feet to the main entrance and unlocked the door to the hallway. The two young officers who had been stationed at the metal detector came in with their guns drawn as Lem explained to them what had happened.

I transmitted the message that an armed prisoner had escaped and one court officer was dead. “Lem,” I called out. “Someone’s trying to get back in over here.”

Both officers were on their walkie-talkies, coming toward me to secure the door through which Quillian had fled. “When we heard shots, I called for backup and a bus,” one of them said-the NYPD shorthand for an ambulance. “They should be here any minute. Those reporters are all going nuts.”

One stationed himself beside the door, watching the knob wiggle, hearing a man’s voice yelling to Artie Tramm as he banged at the door. “Artie? Open up. It’s me-it’s Blakely.”

The second officer went around to the back of the bench and put his hand under Fred Gertz’s arm to help the shell-shocked jurist to his feet. “Judge, you gotta come with me. I want you at the other end of the room.”

“The captain has us in lockdown,” the first officer answered Blakely. “I can’t let you in till we get backup here. The prisoner went out your way. We got Elsie down. Artie and Oscar are waiting for medics.”

I walked to counsel’s table and slipped my jacket off the back of the chair. I brought it over to where Elsie lay and covered her head and upper body with it. There would be no shelter from the way the media pundits would blame her for her own death-for allowing Quillian to overpower her, take her gun, kill her, and endanger everyone else, as well as possibly make his escape from the massive building with its dozens of entrances and exits.

I could only offer her a bit of dignity now, in case the reporters and photographers flooded the room when we admitted the rescue team.

“Lockdown?” Gertz shouted. “I want to get out of here now. Right now.”

“I’d like you in that last row,” the officer said, “so they can remove you as soon as they deal with Artie.”

“Not that way. I’m going through my chambers,” Gertz said, resisting and pointing to his own exit. “I don’t need an ambulance. I don’t want any of those people to see me.”

The deep red blood stained through the turquoise of the fabric of my suit jacket, turning it to cobalt blue as the silk quickly absorbed it.

As much as the sight of Elsie’s gaping head wound had revolted Jonetta, she had not been able to stop staring at it. Her sobs subsided as I put my arm around her and guided her out of the well to a seat closer to the main hallway entrance.

Lem was crouched beside Artie, trying to keep him calm. He was writhing in pain, sweat dripping from his face, drenching his hair and his mustache. The more he rolled around, the more the blood spread through the tear in his dingy shirtsleeve.

I squatted behind Lem’s back.

“The great white whale,” Lem said.

Artie mustered a laugh.

“That’s why he got away, Artie. Brendan Quillian is the great white whale in this friggin’ criminal justice system. Damn, if he’d been a brother-or just a lowlife from the Bowery-you’d have been on his ass like every other prisoner. That whole Upper East Side rich-boy attitude was just a veneer. Nobody took him seriously. Nobody saw the risk.”

Artie opened his eyes. “Make me a promise, Lem. Tell me you’re not gonna represent that bastard for shooting me. For killing Elsie, okay?”

“I think Alex and I are grounded on that one. We’re gonna be your star witnesses.”

There was a loud banging again, this time from the hallway. The walkie-talkie crackled in my hand. “Open up in there, Part 83. Artie, can you hear me?”

I held the device in front of Tramm. He gulped for breath and answered with a weak “Yeah.”

“Open up, dammit. I got four cops and some EMTs here.”

“You know who that is? Recognize the voice?” Lem asked.

Artie nodded.

Lem walked to the door and unlocked the large brass bolts.

Two of the medics got right to work on Artie, one ripping open the polyester uniform shirt to examine the wound as the other started taking his vital signs.

The next two asked if we were okay, and we signaled them on to Elsie’s body and to Oscar, who still seemed dazed and disoriented.

The four cops, dressed in flak jackets and helmets, positioned themselves around the other door, relieving the court officer who had been the first to arrive. The knocking started again.

“Who’s there?” one asked.

“Blakely. Captain Blakely, for chrissakes. Lemme in.”

The cops turned to us. Artie nodded again at Lem.

“You alone?” one cop asked, while another motioned to Lem, Jonetta, and me to get down on the floor, in case Blakely had been taken hostage by the escapee.

“Yeah.”

Another unlocked the door, and as Blakely entered, we got the all clear to get up.

“Where’s Artie?”

They pointed Blakely back to the cluster of people in the aisle of the courtroom, and the crusty, white-haired captain barely stopped to look down as he passed Elsie’s body.

“We owe this to you?” Blakely said to Lem Howell. “You the brains behind this operation?”

“I appreciate the thought, Captain. But I was about to whip Ms. Cooper’s tail fair and square at the end of this trial, so, the answer to that would be no.”

“Has Quillian been caught?” I asked.

Blakely raised his thick, white eyebrows and frowned at me.

“The prisoners’ elevator must have been very busy at this hour,” Lem said. “I kept thinking he’d be trapped because of that. I was waiting for him to burst back in here.”

“Forget the elevator. He used the stairwell. Nobody else seems to have gone that way. He must have run down a few flights. Probably reentered the main corridor on four or five,” Blakely said.

The rooms in which misdemeanor cases were heard were on the lower levels of the courthouse. The sixth through ninth floors, in the bizarre architectural scheme of the WPA building, were occupied by the District Attorney’s Office. No access was possible from the courts except where they connected on the seventh floor.

“Then he’s somewhere in the building?” I asked. “You know he’s still got a fully loaded piece-he took Oscar Valenti’s gun with him, too.”

“Too bad there are no metal detectors when you exit the damn place,” Blakely said.

“Why? You think he can escape? There are hundreds of cops and court officers around at this hour of the day,” I said.

“He was out before the word spread-out before any of them knew.”

“What do you mean?”

“If Quillian crossed over on the fourth or fifth floors, he must have gone down on the public elevators from there, passing off like a lawyer with the rest of you suits,” Blakely said, fingering the lapel of Lem’s jacket.

“What makes you think he got away?” I was shocked that a breakout of this magnitude could happen at 100 Centre Street.

“’Cause a man fitting his description just hijacked a car on the corner of White Street, opposite the courthouse steps. Shot the guy who was putting his money in the meter and drove off in a black Toyota,” Blakely said. “Brendan Quillian’s on the loose.”