Hounded by David Rosenfelt Page A

organize, in order to prevent my own. It was not my finest hour, but it allowed me to continue to have hours.
    With Quintana out of the picture, others rushed to fill the vacuum, especially with Petrone not inclined to stamp out competition, as he had in the glory days. Haller proved the most resourceful and ruthless, and he gradually ascended to the top by killing off his challengers one by one. He is brutal and apparently without conscience, though marginally more reasonable and level-headed than Quintana was. And most importantly, unlike Quintana, he is smart enough to manage to peacefully coexist with Petrone.
    Tommy Haller is at the top of the lists prepared by both Pete and Phillips as someone who is most likely to exact revenge against Pete. About a year ago, Pete arrested Tommy’s brother, Jimmy, on an assault charge. It seems that Jimmy was in a dispute with a customer who found himself unable to pay for goods received.
    Jimmy, clearly not the sharpest tool in the Haller shed, attempted to buy his way out of difficulty by offering Pete a substantial bribe. The effort earned him an additional felony charge, but the importance of that paled somewhat when the assaulted customer subsequently died of his injuries.
    Pete’s testimony at Jimmy’s trial helped the state of New Jersey put him away for a sentence of forty years to life, and it came as no surprise to anyone that brother Tommy had expressed some displeasure with Pete’s efforts.
    “I think it’s unlikely that Haller is behind this,” Laurie says.
    “Why?”
    “Not his style; there’s way too much finesse involved. If he wanted to go after Pete, he’d just try to put a bullet in his head.”
    I basically agree with her, although I can’t be close to sure, since I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Haller. We travel in different circles: he doesn’t attend crossword puzzle tournaments, and I avoid drug kingpin conventions.
    “I need to talk to him,” I say, regretting the words even as I am saying them.
    “Why?”
    “To get a sense of him; to decide if he’s worth looking into. We don’t have a lot of time, or a lot of people, and we can’t chase down blind alleys.”
    “So you’re just going to go talk to Tommy Haller,” she says, her tone indicating she considers me out of my mind.
    “I’m going to try.”
    “ We are going to try” is how she corrects me. “There is no way you are doing this alone.”
    “I hope the ‘we’ includes Marcus,” I say.
    She nods. “Of course it does. I’ll call him.”
    While she does that, I have a little time to think about how to allocate the limited time and resources at our disposal. It’s a more difficult task in this case, because we have three distinct, and very different, directions that we must take.
    First is the traditional defense: we must try and prove that Pete is innocent of the crime. If we can do that, which is going to be a tall order, then nothing else matters.
    Second, we can try to figure out who actually committed the murder. To do so, we will need to dig into Danny Diaz’s life, and his death, and reveal who had the motive and opportunity to kill him.
    Third, and this is the area that Tommy Haller falls neatly into, we need to figure out who set Pete up to take the fall. There is no question that the answers to questions two and three will be the same, but we can go after that answer from both directions.
    Laurie comes back into the room and says, “Marcus will be here whenever we need him.”
    “What did he say?”
    “What did Marcus say?” Laurie asks, somewhat incredulously. Marcus never says anything, beyond a well-placed grunt or two.
    “Does he know Haller?” I ask.
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Is he worried about dealing with him?” I ask.
    “Marcus? You’re asking me if Marcus is worried? If Marcus was worried, he wouldn’t be Marcus. He’d be Andy.”

 
     
    It isn’t easy to make an appointment with Tommy Haller.
    There’s no phone number to