First Degree by David Rosenfelt Page A

you.”
    He shakes his head. “No, I mean the guy that was on TV.”
    I nod. “That’s me. The TV lawyer.”
    He sort of squints at me, checking me out. “What do you want with me?”
    He’s suspicious, the first sign of intelligence I’ve seen. I decide to tell the partial truth, which seems to be the most I can manage these days. “I thought you might need my help.”
    “I don’t need nobody’s help.”
    “Then I’ll find someone who does.” I stand up to leave. “See ya around the campus.”
    I reach the door and I’m halfway out when I hear, “Wait a minute, man.” I can pretend I don’t hear it and keep walking, or I can turn around and continue with this self-destructive insanity. I turn.
    “What is it, Oscar?”
    “I didn’t do it, man. I’ve done some pretty bad shit, but this ain’t me.”
    “Did you know Dorsey?” I ask.
    “A little bit, no big deal. He hassled me a few times. Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
    “How did you handle it?” I ask.
    “I just let it slide, went about my business.”
    “And just what is your business?” I ask.
    “What the hell is the difference? This ain’t about my business. My business is my business.”
    I pull up a chair and sit down less than a foot away from him. “Listen to me, Oscar, because I’m only going to say this once. Your business is my business. Everything about you is my business. And every question I ask you, every single one, is one you are going to answer as best you can.”
    He can tell I’m pissed, and he’s afraid I’m going to walk away. “Okay, man,” he says. “But you can’t tell nobody, right? It stays between us?”
    I nod. “It’s called attorney-client privilege, and you can’t imagine the shit I go through to maintain it.”
    He proceeds to tell me about his drug dealing and prostitution activities. It’s fairly small-time, but like Danny Rollins, his small territory has been bestowed upon him, and he pays a substantial portion of his earnings to his patrons. The days of Al Capone are over, but the mob influence, at least in this area, is surprisingly substantial.
    Oscar adamantly refuses to talk about the mob people that he deals with. He pathetically considers himself “connected,” even though the truth is that the only people below him on the mob food chain are the victims. I don’t press him on it, since there is little possibility his connections had anything to do with his facing these charges.
    I move the conversation to the specifics of the case. I don’t want to ask too many questions at this point; I’ll save that for when I know more about the police’s evidence. I concentrate on the warehouse where the body was found.
    “Of course my prints were there,” he admits. “That’s where I operate out of.”
    He goes on to explain that because the warehouse was adjacent to the park, he would occasionally hide merchandise in there and have certain customers meet him inside when the police were in the area. He considered the warehouse his corporate headquarters.
    And besides that, as he so eloquently puts it, “Prints don’t mean no damn shit anyway.”
    “Write that line down. I’ll want to use it in my closing argument.”
    He doesn’t respond; there may be no bigger waste of time than using sarcasm on someone who has absolutely no understanding of it. “Now, this is important,” I continue. “Someone called the police, a woman, and told them that you killed Dorsey. Do you have any idea who that could have been?”
    “Shit no, man.”
    “What about one of your girls on the street?”
    He shakes his head vigorously. This he is sure of. “No way. No fucking way. They know what would happen.”
    Every time he opens his mouth I dislike him more. “There’s no one you can think of who might want to frame you?” I ask. “No one who has it in for you?”
    “I got some enemies, my competitors, you know? It’s part of business.”
    We clearly have a Macy’s/Bloomingdale’s situation here.