Exquisite Justice Read online

  Exquisite Justice

  A Marc Kadella Legal Mystery

  Dennis L. Carstens

  Previous Marc Kadella Legal Mysteries

  The Key to Justice

  Desperate Justice

  Media Justice

  Certain Justice

  Personal Justice

  Delayed Justice

  Political Justice

  Insider Justice

  Copyright © 2018 by Dennis L Carstens

  email me at: [email protected]

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Epilogue

  Also Available on Amazon

  One

  Damone Watson, his ever-present Bible tucked securely under his left arm, stood in the doorway and surveilled the scene. Damone was in the entryway of the Minneapolis City Council meeting room. He was half an hour early for the meeting, and the room was already full. About two-thirds of the faces were black, and the rest were a combination of white and Hispanic. Almost every one of them was here to pay homage to Damone. He was here to receive a plaque of appreciation from the city council and a key to the city from the mayor.

  Damone stood in the doorway for less than thirty seconds waiting for it to happen. Someone in the audience noticed him and a buzz went through the room. As it did, he went inside and began to humbly work the crowd. By this point, everyone was on their feet, applauding as he strolled around smiling, shaking hands, and acknowledging the adulation while making his way to the front row. Of course, three seats in the middle of the front row had been reserved for the evening’s man of the hour and his two aides/bodyguards. Before taking his seat, Damone, holding the Bible in his left hand, pleasantly waved with his right.

  Damone Watson was born forty-three years ago on the South side of Chicago. His father, Victor Watson, was a part-time construction worker and a full-time drunk. Victor’s brother, Albert, was a business manager for a local union which allowed him to get no-show jobs for Victor which kept the family afloat. That is until Victor got into an argument with a man in a bar over some minor transgression. Within seconds, a push and a shove escalated into a one-sided gunfight that left Victor on the floor with a third eye in his forehead.

  Damone, all of eleven years old at the time, was now the man of the house. His younger brother, Jeron, age nine, and two younger sisters, Jamella and Elesha, six-year-old twins, all looked up to their big-brother for support.

  Their mother, Danielle, had barely an eighth-grade education. Minimal job skills and experience made her almost unemployable, except for the most menial of jobs; minimum wage in the hotels downtown doing maid and laundry service.

  Uncle Albert did what he could until he was caught up in a union shakedown scam six months after Victor’s death. Because all of his co-conspirators sang like canaries to the prosecution, Albert ended up the patsy. A ten-year sentence he would not survive in a federal prison ended his contributions to his nieces and nephews.

  Before his twelfth birthday, Damone was a first-class dope slinger for a local street gang. The Parker Boy Crips, named for a local park, were a small collection of wannabe tough guys with a one-block turf to call their own. Little did they know that the young Damone was the best thing to happen to them.

  By the time he was fourteen, helped by a borderline genius IQ, Damone had become the de facto gang leader. By the time he was twenty, his little gang had grown to over two hundred members and Damone Watson’s income was in excess of a hundred thousand dollars a month. It would have been considerably more except Damone knew how to buy loyalty. He had also ruthlessly eliminated the real competition for the top spot. Damone had personally put seven people in the cemetery. It all changed shortly after his twenty-second birthday.

  His eighth personal homicide became his undoing. The leader of a rival gang became a little too bold intruding on Damone’s turf. Damone knew the young man, and he believed the two of them had a turf understanding. Instead, the rival decided to test Damone with a minor incursion across the border. Damone knew an example had to be made. Except, this time, there were witnesses including an undercover cop. To compound his carelessness—some would say arrogance—he failed to dispose of the gun. When he was arrested, the gun was found in the wall safe of Damone’s luxury apartment.

  During the trial, after pleading self-defense, his lawyer managed to convince the jury that his fear of the rival had some merit but not much. Instead of premeditated first-degree murder and a life sentence, Damone received a break. The jury came back with a second-degree verdict instead.

  The judge, an older black man, thoroughly fed up with the South Chicago chaos, was clearly displeased with the verdict. During Damone’s sentencing hearing, the judge spent a half-hour verbally hammering him. Unable to give Damone the life sentence the judge believed he so richly deserved, he gave him the maximum twenty years. The judge also put a lengthy letter in the file to let the parole board know how he felt. He wanted Damone to serve every minute of it. The letter worked. Despite the parole board having been convinced of Damone’s conversion to Christianity while in prison, he did the full twenty.

  Upon his release, he went back to Chicago for a short while before moving to Minneapolis. In the nine months Damone had lived there, the city had come to embrace him as a gifted community organizer and role model. Gang violence was down, two new first-class community centers were being built, school attendance in the black neighborhoods was up, and cocaine sales had practically dried up. Damone, while outwardly humble, inwardly was delighted to take full credit for all of it.

  At precisely 7:00 P.M., the thirteen members of the city council and the mayor came into the room. As they filed in, every one of them looked at Damone, smiled and nodded their head at him. The thirteen city council members were made up of six whites; four women, two men and seven blacks; five women, two men. There were no Asians, Hispanics or Muslims. The council president was one of the white women, Patti Chenault. The mayor was a white man, Dexter Fogel.

  For the next hour plus, each of the fourteen in turn, including the mayor who went last, took four to five minutes for a br
ief speech to lay accolades on the man of the hour. In reality, the show was for the cameras. There were local TV news cameras in back getting film for the 10:00 P.M. broadcasts. The politicians, being politicians, used the opportunity to make sure the city’s residents knew they were all on the Damone Watson bank wagon.

  And why not? Damone was their success story. A tall, attractive, intelligent, articulate black man, who was sacrificing his own life for social justice; a troubled young man from a broken home. A murdered father, a struggling mother trying her best to keep her family together on the mean streets of Chicago. What choice—the media loved to point out—did the young Damone have but to be drawn into a street gang?

  Then, a near tragedy for him. A gunfight—many said it was self-defense—and another young black man was railroaded by the criminal justice system into an undeserved prison term. But instead of turning him even more bitter, angrier, more anti-social, Damone Watson found Jesus and has now dedicated himself to helping others. To lift children out of the grip of generational poverty was a wonderful story of redemption. The media and political class ate it up with a spoon.

  There were only a few minor matters on the council’s agenda following the paean to Damone. By 8:30, the assemblage was starting to thin out and by 9:15, the meeting was adjourned.

  Damone and his bodyguards, along with a small group of admirers, took the tunnel under Fifth Street to go back to their car. They were parked in the ramp below the government center. Ever mindful of his image, Damone’s transportation was a modest five-year-old Chevy Tahoe. Not the shiny, new Cadillac Escalade he would have preferred.

  The two aides/bodyguards—Lewis Freeh and Monroe Ervin—were each six-foot-four and a solid two fifty to two sixty. And well-armed. When they reached the Tahoe, Lewis got in the driver’s seat while Monroe opened the passenger side back door for Damone. Monroe quickly joined Lewis up front and a minute later they drove out onto Fourth Avenue. Monroe shifted around to look at his boss.

  “I got a text during the meeting from one of Jalen’s people,” Monroe said. He was referring to Councilman Jalen Bryant. The text message came from his campaign manager, Kordell Glover.

  “Now what?” an obviously irritated Damone replied.

  “Same thing,” Monroe said. “When can we meet?”

  “You gonna endorse him?” Lewis asked while looking at Damone in the mirror.

  “We’ll see,” Damone answered.

  “You think he’s serious about his big crusade?”

  Damone heartily laughed and said, “Of course, he’s a politician. They’re all serious when running for office.” Then Damone turned serious and said, “That’s what I need to find out.”

  Damone had converted a small, run-down office building on Plymouth Avenue in North Minneapolis. It was a three story. On the first floor, it was converted into a place where neighborhood kids could hang out. There were two pool tables, three rooms with TV’s and a hoops court next door.

  The second floor was a set of offices for Damone’s business. His office was twenty feet deep and the entire width of the building. It was in the very back of the building with eight windows. The glass in all eight of them had been replaced with one-way glass. Damone could see out, but no one could see in. The office was paneled and furnished expensively enough to make most Fortune 500 CEOs envious.

  To maintain his humble, modest image, he never met outsiders in his office. He had a conference room to use for that. It held an oval conference table with squared off ends on each end. There were eight comfortable yet relatively inexpensive leather and chrome armchairs around it. The only windows were the tinted exteriors and the interior walls were paneled with modest, walnut paneling. Nice, but hardly ostentatious. It served well his “man of the people” image.

  The third floor was his home. The entire five thousand square feet had been remodeled into a two-bedroom and three-bath luxury apartment, always secured by alarms and armed guards; mostly Lewis and Monroe.

  For an hour and a half after arriving back at his office, Damone was on today’s burner phone making calls. He never used a phone for more than one day. It was a touch inconvenient, but he was not paranoid, he was careful.

  Shortly after 11:00, while he was sipping his Cognac, there was a knock on the door. Before he could respond, Lewis opened it and stepped aside for Damone’s late-night guest.

  Lewis closed the door behind her and took up his position guarding it again. Damone casually sipped his drink while the woman walked toward him. She reached the left-hand side of his huge, antique mahogany desk and stopped. So far, neither had spoken a word.

  While he watched, the city council president, Mrs. Patti Chenault, pulled the zipper in the back of her dress down and let the dress fall to the floor. She stood before Damone dressed in a white lace, see-through bra, a white lace garter belt holding up mid-thigh, white silk stockings and high heeled spikes. For a woman pushing fifty, she pulled it off quite well. A twenty-year-old would get horned up as quickly as Damone did looking at her.

  “Well, what do you think?” she asked with her best sultry voice.

  “It’s okay,” Damone said with a shrug.

  “Asshole,” she said with a soft laugh.

  She moved to him, and as he sat in the chair, she straddled his knees. While he ran his hands over her, she unbuckled his belt and opened his pants. She reached inside his underwear, smiled and said, “It’s okay. Junior is ready to go.”

  “He’s always like that,” Damone bragged.

  Patti stood up and pulled his pants and underwear down to his ankles. She moved up and this time, straddled his lap.

  “Ahhh! Oh yeah,” she purred. “That will do just fine.”

  Two

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Maddy Rivers asked Marc Kadella.

  They were in Marc’s townhouse getting ready to start their day. Marc was becoming a successful criminal defense lawyer. He was in his early forties, a once divorced father of two young adult children. Eric, his twenty-year-old son, and Jessica, his eighteen-year-old daughter, were both in college.

  Marc was also a solo practitioner and rented office space from another lawyer, Connie Mickelson. It was in the Reardon Building on Lake and Charles ten minutes from downtown Minneapolis. There was a total of four lawyers, including Connie, who shared the expense of three staff members. The third lawyer was Barry Cline, a litigator trying to do only business litigation. The fourth was another man several years older than Marc and Barry. His name was Chris Grafton and had a thriving corporate practice primarily for small to mid-size businesses.

  Their staff consisted of two legal assistants––Sandy Compton and Carolyn Lucas, whose husband was a St. Paul police detective, John. The final member of the merry little band was an outstanding paralegal, Jeff Modell.

  Even though none of them were formally in business together, they were all good friends and helped each other without question. It was Carolyn, like a good top-sergeant, who ran the place and kept the wheels turning.

  Maddy Rivers was a private investigator who originally came to work on cases for Marc with the recommendation of a PI friend of both of them, Tony Carvelli.

  Before moving to Minnesota, Maddy had been a police officer with the Chicago P.D. A tall, statuesque beauty, on a foolish whim had posed for Playboy magazine. The immaturity of most of the CPD had driven her out of Chicago.

  Over the years, without even realizing it was happening, Marc and Maddy had grown close. Recently each of them had almost died. Marc was the target of a hit and run “accident.” Maddy had been shot while they pursued that case and broke open a serious conspiracy involving stock manipulation, insider trading, political corruption and murder.

  Almost losing each other had caused the two of them to realize how much they meant to each other. Because of it, Marc and Maddy finally admitted how much they loved each other, and a deep romance had resulted.

  “Yes,” Marc replied to her question. “I need to do this,” he continued
while Maddy adjusted the knot in his tie.

  “Why are you wearing a tie?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. A habit, I guess. Besides, it’s always good to look like a lawyer if you’re going to prison. I think it gives you a better chance to get out.”

  “Why? Because they don’t want you contaminating the inmates?”

  Marc paused then said, “That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that, but it could be the reason.”

  “Be careful,” she said as she kissed him. Being almost as tall as Marc, she did not have to look up to him when she did this.

  “Yes, Mom,” he sullenly said.

  “Hey, Bub,” she said poking him in the chest with an index finger. “You started this…”

  “Am I ever going to hear the end of that?”