Robert Tanenbaum - Counterplay

“If this is going to turn into an insult contest, we’re out of here,” Anderson said, making a move as if to stand.

Karp put his hand up and motioned for him to remain seated. “I think Mr. Guma, who is lead counsel for the prosecution in this case, would love to hear Mr. Coletta’s ‘version of the events.’ Mr. Guma?”

“Yeah, let’s hear it,” Guma confirmed.

“Yeah, well, if this is the way a citizen gets treated for trying to do the right thing, no wonder there’s so much crime in Manhattan,” Coletta said. “But anyway, yeah, I was there when he did it.”

“When who did what?” Karp said.

“What?” asked Coletta with a smirk. “Am I being tag teamed here?…Look, I ain’t comfortable talking to The Man, con’s code of honor and all, but I don’t want to see Mr. Stavros go down for something he didn’t do. He’s a legit guy, gave me a chance after I did my time, and I’ve worked for him ever since.”

“So you’re saying, you owe Mr. Stavros,” Guma asked, looking at his fingernails as if they might need clipping.

“Nah, it ain’t like that,” Coletta countered. “I just wanted to explain why I would turn on a guy who I was pretty tight with at one time.”

“So who are we talking about?” Guma asked. “Who are you saying you saw kill Mrs. Stavros?”

“His name is, or rather was, Jeff Kaplan,” Coletta said. “He was Mrs. Stavros’s gardener. But I understand he died in a boating accident or something.”

“Start from the beginning. Where did you meet him?” Karp asked, recalling the report he’d read from Detective Fairbrother regarding his conversation with former detective Brian Bassaline.

“I met him at Auburn Prison. He was in for killing some guy-not that he meant to do it; it was a fight in a bar, Jeff one-punched him and turned out the guy’s lights forever. Guess it was sort of a freak thing. Anyway, next thing Jeff knows, he’s doing time for manslaughter.”

“And Mr. Kaplan was a gardener?” Guma asked, although he had also talked to Fairbrother and read the report.

“Yeah, he got into it in prison, said it calmed him down,” Coletta said. “Anyway, we were cellies for a half year or so before I got out. When he was released, I talked to Mrs. Stavros, who was struggling with her roses, and got him a job.”

“You’ll excuse me, but this is the first we’ve heard of the gardener,” Karp said. “But there’s nothing in the file about him.”

Coletta shrugged. “That’s not my problem. I know he was questioned. Guess it’s just sloppy work on your part.”

Guma asked if Coletta had much time to observe the relationship between Emil and Teresa Stavros.

“Yeah, whoo boy, she was an A number-one bitch,” Coletta said, before crossing himself superstitiously. “Excuse me for speaking unkindly of the dead. But I watched Mr. Stavros take a lot of shit from her, and it wasn’t right.”

Karp noticed Guma stiffen at Coletta’s description of Teresa and quickly interjected. “But Mr. Stavros was, by his own account, carrying on an affair with Amarie Bliss.”

Coletta nodded. “Yeah, I knew all about that. Hell, I drove him to her apartment all the time-that’s how I know he wasn’t around when his bitch wife got what was coming to her.”

“This is a bunch of crap-” Guma snarled.

“Ray!” Karp cautioned.

Coletta’s brow was furrowed. “What? You callin’ me a liar?”

“Yeah, a liar and a-” Guma started in.

“Ray…let’s hear what the man has to say,” Karp said.

Guma looked like he was going to say something else. But instead he leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling.

Karp looked at Coletta. “Go on, and please, forgive Mr. Guma…this is the first we’ve heard that sort of description of the victim. Anyway, you were commenting on Mr. Stavros’s affair?”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know how much I want to say if I’m just going to be called a liar,” Coletta said, but went on anyway. “Yeah, Mr. Stavros was bangin’ Amarie. Can’t say I blame him considering his wife was one cold fish.” He looked at Guma as if expecting to be challenged. “Although she was plenty warm around Jeff.”

Guma sat up with his dark eyes burrowing into Coletta. “But you just told us that Mr. Kaplan was the killer.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Coletta replied. “Them two were going at it hot and heavy. He was boning her whenever Mr. Stavros went out, which was plenty. She was just using Jeff to get back at Stavros, but when Jeff wised up and decided to call it quits, she wasn’t going for it. ‘Nobody leaves me,’ she told him that night-”

“Which night?” Guma asked.

“The night of the murder,” Coletta answered. “Anyways, she told him that night that if he left her, she would go to the police and say he raped her when her husband was gone.”

Coletta said he was in the garage, putting the limo away when he heard Kaplan and Teresa arguing. “She was screaming at him and then she pulled a gun…this little.22 jobbie…and pointed it at him. But he took it out of her hands, so she turned and said she was going to go call the cops. Jeff freaked and shot her. That’s when I came out of the garage and saw him shoot and her fall.”

Kaplan turned and saw Coletta and was going to shoot. “But I put my hands up and said, ‘Hey, no worries, she was a bitch and deserved what she got.’ Then I helped him bury her in the rose garden. We even put the rosebushes right back on top of her grave.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?” Karp asked.

Coletta rolled his eyes as if some rube had asked him a stupid question. “Come on, I just told you, I didn’t like the bitch, and Jeff was a friend. And besides, I got paid pretty good to keep my mouth shut.”

“By who?” Karp asked, wondering if they were about to hear the name Andrew Kane. When Detective Fairbrother returned from Maine and wrote up the conversation he’d had with Bassaline, the name Michael Flanagan had jumped at him like a rattlesnake in one of the old Westerns he’d loved.

Guma’s thinking had turned the same way. Do you think this is another Kane thing? he’d asked.

Hard to say, Karp replied. Sort of fits the “No Prosecution” MO. Pulls a few strings for a wealthy and well-connected socialite, gets his people on the force to quash the investigation. But Newbury had found nothing in the files.

Could be this was just Flanagan freelancing, too.

“Who paid me? Kaplan, of course,” Coletta said. “He came up with this scheme to say she disappeared, ran away from home, and kept her credit cards and bank shit. She’d shown him how to get into her private safe, so he had her PIN numbers and passwords, the whole schmear, including her jewelry. No woman was going to leave her jewelry. He had a girlfriend, sort of looked like Teresa, and he had her travel around a bunch, buying shit and then selling it, plus cashing big checks. They were living pretty high off the hog and sending me checks nice and regular, until the money ran out.”

“Mr. Coletta, did you remember seeing Zachary Stavros at the time of the shooting?” Guma asked.

Coletta shook his head. “Nah. That kid’s a basket case; I think he’s making it all up. Been on just about every kind of pill there is.”

“Do you remember what Teresa Stavros was wearing that night?”

Coletta scrunched his eyebrows and put a hand to his chin as if trying hard to recall an old memory. “Yeah, I think it was some white sort of see-through thing,” he said. “That was one thing she had going for her…she was quite a looker and didn’t mind showing the goods, if you know what I mean.”

After a few more questions, Anderson held up his hand. “I think that’s plenty. I hope you’ll give Mr. Coletta’s statement careful thought. It’s obvious this makes much more sense than Mr. Stavros somehow escaping his mistress’s apartment to sneak home, kill his wife, bury her in the backyard, and then sneak back into the apartment so that he could be seen leaving by the doorman in the morning.”