MARY CLARK - Piece of My Heart

The memory was coming back to Laurie more clearly. “I remember you telling Mom later that she was the one to solve the case.”

Alex’s gaze moved back and forth between them like a spectator at Wimbledon, trying to make sense of the conversation.

“Here’s how it went down,” Leo said, seeing Alex’s confusion. “Finn was trying to break up the fight as it spilled out onto the sidewalk, but Gunther and Pratt were clawing at each other’s throats. Plus, a bunch of people from the bar had spilled outside, too, drawing even more gawkers from the streets. It was total pandemonium. And then Finn dropped to the ground, stabbed—twice it turned out—in the abdomen.” Leo’s left hand touched the area just above his belt indicating the location of the wounds. “No one actually saw the stabbing, but the most likely scenario was that it was one of the two brawlers—Gunther or Pratt.”

“They each blamed the other one,” Laurie explained, trying to hurry the story along. She knew her father could easily spend an hour talking about the case, especially in light of the distortions Darren Gunther had made of the facts over the last several months. She understood her father’s obsession with the facts, but was eager to hear how they might relate to Johnny’s disap-pearance.

“When I first read them their rights—in separate interrogation rooms, obviously—both of them said the other guy must have been the one to pull the knife. And I had no witnesses. Gunther, Pratt, and Finn had been clustered too tightly together for anyone else to have a good view. By the time Finn fell, the knife had been dropped on the sidewalk, and from the looks of the handle, we suspected someone had done a quick wipe-down to try to get rid of any fingerprints. We found Finn’s blood on both men, including their hands, but that didn’t tell me much under the circumstances. So I waited a bit and told Gunther we found his prints on the knife. And, of course, I told Pratt the exact same thing.”

“And whose prints did you actually find?” Alex asked.

“No one’s,” Leo said. “Obviously, it took the crime lab a couple of weeks to confirm that for certain. But that night, I told them both that whoever did the quickie cleanup job on the knife’s handle had missed a couple spots, and that we had found two latents remaining as points of comparison. I explained how a fingerprint is made up of loops and whorls and arches. I said we had thirteen matching points on one of the latents, and twenty on the other. It was practically a forensic science seminar. I even brought in the kind of graphics an expert witness would put on a screen during a trial so they could see the similarities with their own eyes—but it was evidence from an entirely different case.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Alex noted. “Even as a defense attorney, I knew that police were allowed to use deception during an interrogation.”

“Exactly,” Leo said. “As long as the defendant’s statements remain voluntary—which they were. Well, Pratt was absolutely defiant. He told me to bring in a Bible or a lie detector so he could swear that he never touched a knife. He insisted that the lab must have switched his print card with Gunther’s. But not Gunther. I could see the wheels churning. Suddenly, he shifted his story entirely. He claimed Finn was the one who pulled the knife in the first place, saying he’d show the two of them for starting a fight in his bar. He claimed he was trying to take the weapon away to protect himself when someone pushed Finn toward him.”

“Twice?” Alex asked with disbelief. “He accidentally stabbed the man twice ?”

Leo shook his head. “Of course not. That’s why I said this was the first version of his confession. I knew it was bogus. And Gunther looked so smug, almost smiling as I left the room, daring me to try to disprove his story. You’ve seen Gunther’s interviews with those fawning TV hosts? He’ll never sit down with someone with a real journalism or criminal law background. He’s tapped into the celebrity showbiz market. He was the same arrogant guy, even back then.”

“The profile in Vanity Fair called him disarmingly charming,” Laurie recalled dryly.

“And he knows it,” Leo said. “That charm and some smarts are what earned him scholarships to prep school and to Vassar.”

“Well, it probably helped that he had lied and said he was an orphan,” Laurie said.

In the lead-up to Gunther’s criminal trial, Leo and the police discovered that Gunther had a dark side lurking beneath his charismatic exterior. Deeply insecure, he manipulated people to gain access to elite circles, only to steal personal items from the homes of his hosts and lie about his background. His high school teachers and college professors were under the impression that he had been orphaned during middle school after his parents died in a private plane crash, but it turned out that his single mother was alive and well and working as a housekeeper in Forest Hills.

But Leo knew none of this the night of the murder. It was Laurie’s mother who had pointed Leo in a new direction of interrogation when he had come home briefly in the early morning hours after the killing.

“Eileen was always so intuitive,” Leo said, his voice softening at the memory of Laurie’s mother. “I saw Gunther and Pratt as two young hotheads in some booze-filled bar brawl. She was the one who wanted to know what the two men had been fighting about in the first place. Gunther never offered his side of that story, but Pratt said it started after he bought a drink for a woman he knew from boarding school. Eileen heard that and… boom !” Leo pointed a finger for emphasis. “Eileen said, ‘That’s it! I guarantee you, it’s about Gunther trying to control that young woman. He didn’t want her talking to another man.’ Sure enough, I got hold of this bartender from Finn’s, a woman named Clarissa DeSanto. She said Gunther had been focused all night on another customer—female, probably three years older than him, dressed down in jeans and a sweater for a night in the Village, but wearing two-karat diamond studs and a stack of Cartier bracelets.”

“Out of Gunther’s league?” Alex asked.

“That was Clarissa’s impression, so I worked that angle. I tracked the female customer down through one of her friends’ credit card charge. Her name was Jane Holloway. She and Pratt went to high school together. She said Gunther kept trying to talk to her all night. At first, she was flattered, but then she and her friends joked about him behind his back, saying he was the next Wolf of Wall Street, that kind of thing. She finally fibbed and told him she was engaged, so he’d leave her alone. Then when Pratt showed up, Gunther said something like, You must be the lucky fiancé. Your girl’s been talking to me all night. From there, it quickly became clear there was no actual engagement. Jane had embarrassed him big time.”

“So it was all about his fragile ego,” Alex said.

“Exactly, or at least, that was my theory. I pulled him back into the interrogation room, this time making it clear I knew how insecure he was. How rejected he must have felt. How he had spent his entire birthday seeking attention from a woman he could never actually date. How Jane had treated him like a joke. When he realized that I knew—that I could see who he truly was—he finally confessed, and this time it was the truth. He called the girl and her friends names that could never be repeated in polite company, and he admitted that he stabbed Finn in a blind rage.”

“All because a woman rejected him,” Laurie said.

“It happens much too often, sadly,” Leo said. “When the trial came around, Gunther denied ever making that confession. He told the jury I fabricated every single word of it, claiming once again that he never even saw the knife and had no idea who stabbed Lou Finney. He said someone else in the crowd must have done it.”