1987
Torchy Albright had agreed to meet with an old colleague from the D.A.'s office for dinner at a bar and grill, what she'd neglected to mention was that she was bringing her husband with her, and from the moment the two of them walked into the place, Caspian looked like he'd rather have a hole drilled in his skull than be anywhere with this woman. All the same, you don't go near 5,000 years without learning the importance of knowing when and where to put in public appearances; they were 2 months into their marriage and so far it had been one very unusual experience. It was still early enough on in the marriage that everyone expected to see one wherever the other went, and he knew everybody Torchy knew still remembered him as one of the bailiffs when she was prosecuting, so against his better judgment, he'd come along for the ride, and gradually spent the evening trying to kill enough brain cells that he wouldn't have to remember the night at all, while his wife talked to a fellow prosecutor, Daniel Reberty, about an up and coming case he was working on.
Over shots of tequila, the lanky Immortal woman with short black hair, still spending her days half dressed like Perry Mason, flipped through the man's legal briefs and said, "So this woman shot her ex-husband, for running off with their daughter and completely changing his identity halfway around the world, and he's claiming he had to, to protect his kid from his crazy ex?"
"That's about the size of it," Reberty answered, "This case started off with we arrest her for attempted murder, then turned into we arrest him for kidnapping his own kid three years ago and falsifying documents to illegally change his daughter's identity. And we have to try this case before we can determine the status of her case. She shot him, but we have to look at the circumstances that led up to it. Kind of like that movie with Jimmy Stewart, what was it? 'I shot this man but he raped my wife and it drove me temporarily insane'. I wish somebody on this case could claim insanity. The real problem is the courts only recognize kidnapping by parent as custodial interference at best more times than not. If it were up to me, I'd have him hanged in Times Square and give her the key to the city. I've got two daughters, if my wife were to pull a disappearing stunt like that I'd…"
"Well what you need to do is hang this guy with his own words. He says he did it to protect his daughter, he went halfway around the world, got a new name, because he thought his ex-wife was going to find them?"
"That's what he's claiming," Reberty said.
"What're their finances?"
"He's got over a million to his name that we know of…this woman can't even afford a pack of smokes. At the time of the kidnapping she was doing well to get her rent paid every month, but three years ago he still had close to a mill to his name."
"And he was scared of what she could do?" Torchy asked.
"He never said he was 'scared' of her," Daniel said, "His exact words were that he had to do what he did to protect the daughter."
"So," Torchy told him, "All you have to do is get him on the stand and ask him why he was so afraid of his ex-wife. It's not going to look good if he admits in open court that his petite little, don't-have-a-pot-to-piss-in ex-wife who had a restraining order against him, could somehow terrorize him, could have him shaking in his boots for some reason. Word it just right and hammer the point home until the defense objects or the judge orders it stricken from the record, and if this guy's got a violent bone in his body, it should come tearing through and he'll expose himself in front of everybody for what he really is."
"That might work if I had your guard dog in the courtroom with me," Reberty told her as he gestured to Caspian, who was seated across from him in the opposite booth, just about asleep until that comment, "Everybody still remembers that time you got that racist defendant to choke you in open court."
"Yeah," Torchy said proudly as she leaned back, "I was good back then, wasn't I?"
"It's just a miracle nobody tried taking shots at you sooner," he replied.
As time passed and the drinks kept coming, Caspian slowly started to fall asleep, and the more the whiskey, tequila and vodka took effect, he slumped to the side and wound up leaning against Torchy, who elbowed him and sent him reeling the other way so he fell straight on the floor. As he got back up, everybody in the bar heard the sudden oncoming noise of sirens outside, followed by spinning blue and red lights shining in through the windows. Everybody became very curious and went running to the exit to find out what had happened.
What had happened was that somebody passing by outside had discovered a body of a murder victim that had been dumped by the corner garbage cans, and suddenly everybody was a suspect. Torchy and Caspian managed to push past everyone else and get a good look at the body. In life it must've been a young man, 19, 20 maybe, but now it was just a mutilated and bloody mess; slash marks around the torso indicated that whoever the killer was had in vain, tried to cut the body in half, but either it didn't work or he gave up on trying.
"Amateur," was Caspian's only remark.
The police kept everybody at the scene for an hour around the crime scene experts and the medical examiner doing their jobs; everybody was questioned about if they saw anything, heard anything, how long they'd been there, etc. It was nearly an hour before the cops came around to ask Torchy and her husband the same questions, and by that time nobody was amused.
"No we didn't see anything, we didn't hear anything, we were in the bar, not out here freezing to death," Torchy told one of the uniforms questioning them, "If we saw anything, you'd be here to investigate two dead bodies."
Finally, somebody in the crowd was brought forth who seemed to know something. An older man said that he was closing up his shop across the street when he saw a car drive up, park near the garbage cans, saw somebody dump something out of the car, and drive away, but he'd assumed it was just some garbage to drop off and hadn't thought much of it at the time. Could he describe the car? Yes, to an extent. The car had sped out of the area and in fact just about hit him as it turned the corner.
"I tried to get the number of the license plate," he said, "Because I was debating whether to report him or not for trying to run me over. I didn't get the whole thing, but it was all letters. W-N-B-I-G I think."
Torchy felt her stomach drop. She made her way over to the man and asked, "Could that have been 'WIN BIG'?"
"I suppose so," the man nodded.
"Come on," Torchy murmured to her husband, "We've got to get out of here."
Caspian didn't get what was going on, but he was more than eager to leave. They worked their way past the crowd, Torchy stopped long enough to say something to one of the cops, then he left the scene with her and they got in their car and drove off.
"What the hell was that about?" he wanted to know.
"Rule 1 of being a lawyer, know your enemies," Torchy said, "Early in my career I made a list of all the judges at the court, all the lawyers, defensive attorneys, prosecutors, civil attorneys, everybody. I found out everything I could about all of them so nobody could ever get the drop on me, nobody could ever threaten me, nobody would ever be able to blackmail me because I knew where all the bodies were buried." She looked over and noted the half smirk on Caspian's face and burst his bubble, "Not literally you dope."
"So what?" Caspian asked.
"So it also helps to know what vehicle everybody drives," Torchy said, "Do you remember that case Reberty was talking about, where you had to pull the defendant off of me?"
"A decision I regret to this day," Caspian remarked.
"Do you remember the defense at that trial?"
"No."
"Sam Blowitz, built up a reputation over the years for hiring his services out to defendants accused of racially motivated crimes to show that a man with a Jewish lawyer couldn't possibly be racist."
"What about him?" Caspian asked.
"He's very successful at what he does, usually gets a lot of well paying clients, the defense lawyer's favorite kind. He got a matching set of vanity plates for his car that read 'IWINBIG', always thought he was something, and probably still does."
Caspian looked over to his wife in the passenger seat and asked, "You think that schmuck killed that man back there?"
"No," Torchy replied, "He can't slither that low…but his kid might. I also kept records on the families of everybody at the court, no stone unturned; he's got a son, Paul Blowitz, just turned 18 this year, got a juvenile record long as your arm, he's the right age to be the killer, that was personal, it's unlikely a 20 year old is going to die over something personal involving a 40 year old or a 60 year old."
"So you send the cops to wherever he lives and pick him up," Caspian told her.
Torchy had been in the process of digging a map out of the glove box and when he said that, she hit him over the head with it and replied, "No you moron!"
"Why not?" Caspian asked.
"Because," Torchy explained, "You just find out your kid has just killed somebody, what're you going to do? Get your kid a one-way ticket to a country where even if there is an extradition treaty with the U.S., he won't be sent back for prosecution. We've gotta find out what's the closest airport with the quickest departure flight set for Israel."
"Israel?" Caspian repeated.
"Blowitz came to America as a kid, he's a natural born citizen in Israel, which grants his son the same citizenship the minute he sets foot over there," Torchy said as she lined out the airports marked on the map, "Their extradition treaty's yoyo-ed a bit over the years, but what it comes down to is they won't extradite if the death penalty's even being considered, and at best they'll fight to prosecute him over there and incarcerate him over there where he'll see a more lenient sentence for first degree murder than he'd get here in the good ol' US."
"You've got to be kidding," Caspian sounded disgusted.
"This crap is too insane to make up," Torchy said, "Now they've already got at least an hour head start on us." She found the closest airport from the street where the body was dumped and told Caspian, "Get us here as fast as you can, once we're there we can find out where the first departures are set. And find out if we're already too late."
If there'd been more time she could've regretted saying that because in order to do so, Caspian buried the accelerator to the floor, they did a sharp U-turn, cut across four lanes of traffic and took off at top speed, just narrowly avoiding colliding with an 18 wheeler, and smashing into half a dozen motorcyclists. Torchy about got thrown out through the window on her side of the car, but she managed to stay in her seat more or less, within five minutes they arrived at the airport, made a highly illegal parking, rushed in, found a flight for Tel Aviv that was already boarding, and with little more to excuse them than Torchy's barks of 'DA's office, out of my way!', made their way out to the runway and were about to push past 20 people heading up the stairs to the jet when something else got their attention. They turned around and saw a fancy black town car pull up, the passenger door opened, and out stepped a young man who looked about 18 who was carrying no luggage.
"Paul Blowitz," Torchy called out just short of the top of her lungs.
It got his attention, and he froze like a deer in headlights.
"You're in a lot of trouble," she told him as the two of them advanced towards him.
"I didn't do anything," he replied defensively.
"Sure you didn't," Torchy said as she grabbed one side of him and Caspian grabbed the other, "You just decided 11 o' clock at night was the perfect time to go see the Holy Land for the first time in your sorry life."
Another person got out of the town car, Blowitz Senior.
"What the hell are you people doing here?" he demanded to know.
"Based on the looks of things," Torchy replied, "I'd say stopping a murderer from fleeing the jurisdiction just under the gun, thank you."
The father looked like a vein in his forehead was about to burst, "How dare you accuse my son…"
"Give it up, Sam," Torchy said as they shoved the boy into the back of their own car and locked him in, "Your car was at the scene of the dump job, whoever was driving just about killed an old man who witnessed it, and I know it wasn't you. There's nothing in this life more commendable than taking the rap for your child's sins." She shook her head, "But you're not a commendable person, Sam, you never were, that's how I knew you were coming here. Now, Marcus and I," she nodded towards Caspian, "Are taking him to the police and he's expected to give a full confession, from there we're going to stay through the processing, until the arraignment in court. Now, you're certainly free to come along, put in your appearance as the good, doting father, offer your emotional support, but that's going to be where it ends. No leniency, no deals, no lesser charges, your boy killed somebody and tried to cut up his body, it doesn't matter why he did it, and no jury is going to buy that it was self defense, or that he panicked, or that he had a temporary break of insanity…he's going to pay for what he's done this time, and there's nothing you can do about it."
"You don't work with the court anymore," Blowitz told her as she headed towards the car, "You had no right to arrest him."
"He's not under arrest," Torchy replied, "Yet, we're merely giving him a lift." She turned towards the car, looked at the man in the backseat and said loud enough for him to hear her through the window, "You just try giving us trouble and you'll be begging to go to prison."
"Why are you doing this?" Blowitz asked her.
She turned back towards the man and answered simply, "Old saying…life for a life…" she eyed him and asked, "What's the matter, Blowitz, you got a problem with religion?"
"How did you know?"
Torchy looked over to her husband as they drove back towards the city at a much slower and far less hazardous rate. In the backseat, Blowitz Jr. was resting more or less peacefully thanks to the assistance of a little move called the sleeper hold.
"How did I know what?" she asked as she looked out the window at the lights of the city's nightlife.
"How did you know that kid was going to wind up on the first plane heading out for Israel?"
"Experience," Torchy answered, "How long did you work at the court? First day I was in law school, first day out of law school, first day I started trying cases, I familiarized myself with where every country, every island, every place in this world stood on extradition treaties with the United States. Caught a lot of murderers trying to flee jurisdiction right under the buzzer."
"That's not a prosecutor's job," Caspian noted.
"Yeah well, the cops weren't doing their jobs so…" Torchy replied, "You have no idea how many times I raced out to the airport in the middle of the night to catch them before they boarded. Traffic was always murder so I jetted out there on my motorcycle, for a while I didn't think it was going to survive my career as DDA." She watched the scenery outside passing them by and said casually, "Let's stop at the house for a minute."
"What for?" Caspian asked.
"I'm going to pick up something, and make a couple calls," she explained, "When we left the bar, I told the cops to go to Blowitz's house and look for anything to tie to the murder…to keep this whole case from being thrown out, I may have to call in a couple favors."
"Always a good time to know where the bodies are buried," he replied.
One hour from the time they escorted Paul Blowitz into the police department; one hour to arrest, print, photograph, process, examine, and question the man. Another nine hours in a holding cell during which time the police arrived with pieces of evidence found at the Blowitz residence including bloody clothes, bloody knives, a bloody saw blade, all found bunched up in trash bags set out for the garbage, and all processed into evidence. Altogether it was a 10 hour wait until he was taken to court for arraignment, where since it was mentioned that he had just been ready to step on a plane fleeing the country moments before his arrest, bail was denied and he was remanded until the trial. Among the spectators at the bail hearing were his father, and the two people who had handed him over to the police. Blowitz sat up towards the front; once or twice he turned back to look and saw Torchy Albright and her husband Marcus von Croy seated at the back, both of them looking like they were at the bus stop waiting for the number 6 bus.
Samuel Blowitz left the courtroom with the rug jerked out from under his feet. His mood was only further dampened when he heard that all too familiar voice calling to him.
"What do you want?" he asked as he turned around to face the woman he had butted legal heads with so many times in the past.
"I just thought you might want this," Torchy said as she handed him something.
It was a small white sheet.
"What's this?" he asked skeptically.
"For the shiva," Torchy answered matter-of-factly and told him with next to no emotion whatsoever, "Your boy's gonna die, Sam."
"New York hasn't executed anybody since 1963," he snapped as he tossed down the sheet.
"Then why did you try sending him to Israel if you weren't worried they'd bring it back for him?" Torchy asked, "Because you know just as well as I do that whoever prosecutes this case will try for it. Your son brutally murdered somebody and then tried to cut up the body to dispose of it, what more, he thought he could get away with it, even worse, he thought you would help him get away with it, and worst of all, he was right…he grew up knowing that's what you do, you help guilty people escape punishment and he knew you would always do the same for him. Well you can't help him this time, Sam…whether the state does it themselves, or he does it with his bed sheet, he just bought himself a one-way trip to the death penalty."
Two days later the morning news announced that Paul Blowitz had been stabbed to death in a prison corridor, no witnesses, no 'official' suspects though many had their own suspicions that it was the work of one of the Aryan white pride gangs the prisons were getting only too full of those days. A mutual acquaintance at the prison phoned Torchy shortly after it happened so she knew about it before it even hit the morning broadcast.
"This is not what I wanted," she said as she and Caspian walked down the street early that morning.
"You said it yourself, it doesn't matter how he died, just so long as he did," Caspian remarked.
"I know it," she replied, "But the last thing anybody needs is those sons of bitches getting away with another murder that they'll never be held accountable for. They think they're justified in doing it to clean up the race population, but for two cents I'd…"
"You!"
Torchy turned around to see who had called to her, and before she had time to fully realize what was happening, Samuel Blowitz ran up to her, grabbed her by the throat and knocked her to the ground, trying to strangle her.
"You killed my son! You killed him!"
Torchy felt the cider being squeezed out of her Adam's apple but she didn't put up much of a fight. Instead, Senior Blowitz got bopped on the head and pulled off of the woman beneath him by none other than Mark von Croy, the same man who had been doing this same dirty work for nearly two years now.
"You stupid bitch!" the lawyer tried lunging at her, "It's because of you that my boy's dead!"
"Congratulations, Mr. Blowitz," Torchy said calmly as she got up, "Now you know what every single family of every single victim of every single son of a bitch you ever defended and got off scot free ever felt. How does it feel?"
In spite of the death grip Caspian had on the man, he still tried to break loose and wring Torchy's neck. Both Immortals were content to let him stay that way for a minute before Torchy told her husband, "Let him go, Marcus, he's already been through enough."
Caspian was reluctant to do so, but he let go of the man. Torchy got in Blowitz's face and told him, "Now get this, Sam, regardless of what you think and what you're always going to think, this is not my fault. All it would've taken for your son to not get killed in prison was to not murder somebody, then he never would've gone to prison in the first place. I know why you tried sending him to the Holy Land for sanctuary, and I never went to Sunday school, but religion teaches people take responsibility for their actions, not run away and hide from them."
The once proud and mighty legal defense shark crumbled and fell on his knees sobbing, the first, and Torchy suspected, only proof she would ever see, even in her now extended life, that defense lawyers had a heart somewhere in them. Though she still wondered if the same could ever be said for conscience or soul?
"Come on, Blowitz, get up," she said as she grabbed the man and pulled him to his feet, "I know you've got a clock running, I'll go with you to get the body released."
Whatever was going through Caspian's mind at that exact moment, he kept to himself. Silently, he followed after his wife and endured the ride up to the prison to get Blowitz Jr.'s body released to the father for a quick and imminent burial per the custom. During their visit out there, Caspian looked around the prison, listened to all the yells and screams from the inmates that could be heard throughout most of their stay. It reminded him very much of his previous stays in the mental asylums, now those were the days.
"What the hell was that?" he finally asked his wife once they'd gone their own way and left Blowitz to deal with his own situation.
"A lesson in humility," Torchy answered simply.
"Humility?" Caspian scoffed, "A lawyer? He'll never get it."
"Well, he has two things he'll have to deal with for the rest of his life," she told him, "One, that his own son could murder somebody in cold blood, and two, that somebody killed him before they could ever get an answer why he did it. Everything else is irrelevant."
Caspian turned and looked back to the prison inside the gated yard.
"Don't look back," Torchy told him, "You'll turn to salt."
"Maybe not," he replied, an idea forming in his psychotic head.
During the night, the prison experienced a sudden blackout, and for some unknown reason, the backup generator wouldn't kick on. At that time, the entire facility became a madhouse. For the guards' own protection, a SORT Team was brought in and everybody got ready to face the unknown and if necessary, bash in more than a few heads. Everybody was divided between their jobs of finding out why the power went out in the first place, getting the generator working, catching any inmates that had gotten loose and finding out if there were any hostage situations. The generator wouldn't work but within half an hour, the power kicked back on and everybody could actually see what they were doing. All prisoners were rounded up and accounted for, except for five members of the prison's Aryan white pride gang, all of whom were doing multiple life sentences for Murder One. One of the guards finally found them in one of the facility's supply closets, and doubled back out of the room ready to puke from the scene.
All five members, well built Caucasian males ranging from the ages of 20-30, were laid out on the floor each alongside the other, all of them with their throats slit wide open and the blood pooled on the floor underneath them. As horrible as that scene was, nothing could prepare anybody for the preliminary finding that while yes, this was the scene where the murders happened, they were not moved there from another spot in the prison, something didn't add up and there was not as much blood on the scene as there should've been. It was too soon to tell, tests would have to be performed to check for saliva, but the best the prison doctors on the scene could tell, it appeared that whoever killed the men also drank some of their blood.
Nobody at the prison slept. The guards went back over every square inch of the place that they could access without calling the riot patrol back out, looking for anyone, anything, that would explain what the hell had gone on that night. Despite an extensive all-night search, they were unable to turn up anything that would explain what had gone on there that night.
"You son of a bitch," Torchy said when she saw the news early the next morning in their bedroom, "How in the hell did you pull it off?"
Caspian was nothing if not elusive on the subject, but he did say by way of response, "Prisons, mental asylums, they're all the same, and I've been in more of both of them than anyone else alive, and I've escaped more times than anyone else alive. I know all the ins, all the outs, there's nothing about one of those damn lockups that I don't know about. It's all just a matter of timing everything right, and knowing right where to be."
"I can't believe it, you son of a bitch," she said as she shook her head in disbelief and flopped back against the pillows.
Torchy looked over to her husband through the corner of her eye and, biting the bullet, said quickly and simply, "Thank you."
"What?" Caspian asked as he turned towards her.
"I said 'thank you', you dope," she said.
"I didn't do it for you," he told her.
"No?"
"I didn't do it for you and I sure as hell didn't do it for that mouthpiece," Caspian insisted.
"Why did you do it then?" she asked.
"Why not?" he returned.
"I should think even you would have standards, Caspian, I'd think those bastards would give you blood poisoning…or at the very least, food poisoning."
"What's that expression…shooting fish in a barrel?" he asked, "Nothing simpler than taking a few bites out of caged animals, especially disoriented ones stumbling around in the dark."
"And nobody aside from their prison brethren is going to miss them," Torchy realized, "Smart thinking. And nobody is going to figure out who was responsible. The rest of the Aryan brotherhood's gonna be scratching their heads wondering what other prison gang could possibly have done it."
"Well," she said as she folded her arms behind her head and looked up at the ceiling, "This won't fix anything but maybe now Blowitz will get a little peace of mind."
"Which piece?" Caspian asked.
She glared at him through one eye and told him, "Shut up." She let out a long sigh and said to neither of them in particular, "Sometimes I wish I hadn't quit prosecuting. I was good at what I did, and I seldom lost, I enjoyed it."
"Now you sound like my brother," Caspian complained.
"Your brother was a lawyer?" Torchy asked.
"No, but something just as bloody," he replied.
Torchy bared her teeth momentarily as she considered that, and threw her head back laughing, except it came out as a deep, throaty chuckle.
"She's even starting to sound like my brother," Caspian complained.