Bad Blood by Linda Fairstein Page A

off a clump of Marley’s dreads and shoved them in his throat to try to choke him to death. The message was pretty clear that somebody doesn’t want him to talk.”
     
5
     
    The cops in the patrol car who got the message from the 911 dispatcher to respond to the Quillian home were there within six minutes of the call. Although they were the closest unit to the location, they had been double-parked in front of a deli to buy sandwiches and lost more time while stuck behind school buses stacked to pick up students from trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Police officer Timothy Denton referred to his memo book, with the court’s permission, as he recited the times he had recorded in it.
    “When you turned into the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues, did you observe any unusual activity?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “Did you see any pedestrians?”
    “Yes, ma’am. Mostly kids. A few adults, all women.”
    “Did you see anyone running from the location?”
    “No, I did not.”
    The rookie cop wasn’t much less nervous than Kate Meade.
    “Were you able to enter the Quillian residence?”
    “Not right away. The door was locked. My partner rang the bell while I tried the service door to see if it was open,” Denton said. I was accounting for more critical minutes that had elapsed while Amanda Quillian lay inside on the living room floor. “Then I climbed up on the railing of the stoop to check if I could force open a window, but they had bars over the glass, so there wasn’t any use.”
    “What did you do next?”
    “I’d already radioed once for a backup unit. I called again and asked for ESU.”
    “Would you please tell the jury what those initials stand for?”
    “Sorry. Yeah. It’s the Emergency Services Unit. They do all the rescues and stuff. People stuck in elevators or jumpers on bridges. Called for them ’cause they have the battering rams to open doors.”
    “Who was the next person to arrive at the Quillian house?”
    Denton looked at his memo pad and repeated the name he had written there. “It was maybe ten minutes later. This young woman came — with a set of keys. Said she worked for Mrs. Meade, the lady who called 911. She was the babysitter.”
    “Did you enter the town house?”
    “Yeah, me and my partner. He opened the front door with the keys. We made the girl wait outside and we went in.”
    “Can you tell us what you found?”
    Denton ran the back of his hand over the top of his buzz cut and down his neck. He swallowed hard. “My partner — Bobby Jamison — he was ahead of me. We went in the entryway. Something must have caught his eye—”
    “Objection.”
    Judge Gertz admonished the young cop, “Just tell us what you observed and what you did.”
    “Yes, sir.” Denton turned back to the jurors. “He stepped off to the left, into — well, like a parlor, I guess. I walked straight ahead. Then, I — um — I heard this kind of noise. Sort of a gagging noise. I doubled back.”
    “What did you see?”
    “That’s when I saw the body — the lady on the floor.”
    “She was making a gagging noise?” Gertz asked, incredulous, because he thought he was familiar with the facts of the case.
    “The sound you heard,” I interrupted to ask Denton, trying to keep control of the witness in the face of jurors who had already seen me sabotaged by a character in my own case. “What was the source of that?”
    “Was she?” Gertz said again.
    Denton’s head moved back and forth between me and the judge. “No, sir. The corpse was already dead.” Yogi Berra couldn’t have said it any better. Denton sheepishly looked to the jurors for some sign of understanding, then answered me. “That was my partner, Officer Jamison, making the noise. Throwing up. It was his first DOA.”
    Despite my many hours of prepping Denton for his court appearance, he had always seemed more focused on Jamison’s reaction than Amanda Quillian’s condition.
    I walked him through the events that