Fairstein, Linda - Final Jeopardy (24 page)

And as the very large, bright moon outside my window threatened to disappear into daylight, I wanted to be saved just as the deceived Ingrid had been: by Gary, sweeping me into his arms and down the grand staircase and out of all danger. Just what I needed an escape from my troubles into a cinema life of intrigue and romance and lovers not knowing whether they could trust each other. Worked like a tonic.

Now I was wired. It was almost 5 A.M. and I clicked the dial past an endless array of gadgets like Veg-O-Matics and Ginzo knives and tummy-slimmers. Nothing engaged me on any channel and I was resigning myself to the fact that this was going to be an allnighter - I was much too edgy to sleep.

I leafed through the current New Yorker, hoping for a long piece on the most current Washington scandal, but finding instead a dull treatise on ozone levels in the Brazilian rain forest.

The buzz of the intercom in my kitchen, connected to the phone of the building’s doormen in the lobby, nearly lifted me out of my chair when it shattered my quiet daze a few minutes later. It would be Jed.
Should I let him in when I was alone? The ringing kept up interminably, but I held my resolve not to pick up the phone and acknowledge his presence. I was annoyed that the doormen had ignored I my instruction not to admit him if he showed up, and I assumed he had greased their ever-open palms with some I large bills.

I had stopped counting rings at sixty-five, and was now toying with the idea of calling 911 to have the cops usher him away. That would be a terrible waste of police resources, as I knew better than anyone, so I let it ring on instead.

Then I heard the elevator doors open in the hallway. He was actually upstairs and was going to try to get in to me.

What if Mike Chapman was right that Jed’s greatest fault had not been his infidelity, but that he was, indeed, a murderer? Maybe he was coming to kill me, to silence me because I had implicated him in Isabella’s death? My mind didn’t seem to work. I simply didn’t know what to do next but I had clearly waited too long to call the police.
There were voices in the hallway now. That meant he had come back with at least one other person and I was terrified that he had found some thug to do his dirty work for him. I stepped over to the bar next to the television set and picked up the wine-bottle opener which lay on top the ‘screw-pull’ version with the wickedly sharp-pointed tip that projects into the cork. I had no idea what I would do with it but its mean metal point felt good in the palm of my hand as I tiptoed closer to the front door.

“Coop, Coop? It’s Mike. Open up, I got a surprise for you.”

Lucky I didn’t have a gun because I probably would have blasted it through the door at Chapman at precisely that point, for freaking me out and heightening my growing sense of paranoia. I looked out the peephole for a confirmatory sighting, threw back the bolt, and turned the lock to open the door.

I was fuming, again.

“Do you have any idea-‘ That’s when I saw Mercer Wallace standing next to him, holding three pints of Haagen-Dazs ice cream the most direct way to my heart stacked up in a pile as his deep bass hummed the melody of ”What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?“ while Mike laughed.

“Great music, Mercer. But I can’t dance to it tonight.”

“This shit’s gonna melt all over your hall carpet if you don’t let us in, Alex. Move it.” Chapman pushed past me and the two of them headed straight for the kitchen to dish up the portions.

“What happened since I left you off, kid?” he asked, eyeing my tattered chenille robe.

“You look like Ma Kettle in that getup. Here you got the two most eligible guys in the city banging at your doorstep and you won’t open up. Look at her, Mercer, she’s prayin‘ for somebody to show up at this hour with some vintage Chateau Lafite. Who ya gonna kill with that bottle opener? Okay, we got Cookie Dough Dynamo, Chocolate Chocolate Chip, or Vanilla Fudge?

What’ll it be, blondie let’s put a little meat on those bones.“

“Now that we’re having this cozy breakfast party, boys, who wants to explain to me what it’s all about? Chocolate for me, of course.”

“Not my fault. I was lookin‘ deep into the most beautiful pair of ebony eyes, in a gentrified townhouse we used to call ’em tenements on West Ninety-third near Amsterdam‘ Mercer was dropping a hint that was supposed to suggest the identity of the recipient of his enormous charm, undoubtedly one of my colleagues’ when my beeper went off an hour ago. Seems Brother Chapman’s knowledge of Motown is a bit shallow. It started and ended with ”Respect.“ The man wanted help with some lyrics life-will-go-on-after-your-man-is-gone kind of stuff.
When he told me it was you he was gonna serenade, I volunteered to do backup for him.”

“What’s the story, Mike?” I asked once more, leading the three of us, each with a bowl of ice cream, back into the den.

He hemmed and hawed and stalled a bit more before coughing up the real answer. Chapman had waited in his car at the parking space at the end of the driveway, thinking he would watch for an hour or so to make sure Jed didn’t stop by and try to see me.

“I walked down to the all-night coffee shop to get a cup of brew to keep me awake. Called the office from a phone booth outside the place to explain the situation to the lieutenant can you believe it, the City of New York is paying me to do this little ”power breakfast“? When I looked up at your apartment I can always pick it out ‘cause it’s on the corner, and it’s got those fancy-drooped drapes your mother had done for you your lights were all off. While I stood out there drinking my coffee, I looked up again and every few minutes another light went on, till you got comfy in front of the TV.”

“Geez, you put that much deduction into one of your homicides you might close a case now and then.”

“By that time it was almost three o’clock. Figured I might as well sleep in my car instead of dragging home.” Mike didn’t live very far from my apartment, actually, in a tiny studio off York Avenue near the East River in the Sixties.

He had been in the rent-controlled cubicle he referred to it as ‘the coffin’ for almost fifteen years and paid very low rent, but it was a sixth-floor walk-up, which got harder to go home to the later the hour.

“I napped for a while, checked to make sure your lights were still blazing, then decided if neither of us could sleep we might as well be miserable together I beeped Mercer for some inspiration never dreamed the guy would crash my party. But he did have the good sense to find a twenty-four-hour Food Emporium with a great selection of ice cream.
Cheers.”

I thought of Nina Baum and how happy it would make her when I told her later that I had not been alone. That two of the most decent guys I had ever known had taken it upon themselves to hang out with me through the last desolate hours of the morning, and tried to entertain me at a time when I was content to wallow in my misery.

We gossiped about prosecutors and cops, we told each other war stories we had told dozens of times before, and we took turns doing impressions of the most outrageous defendants we had encountered.

“Remember the first case I ever brought you?” Mercer asked.

“Of course. The two brothers who assaulted the woman on Lenox Avenue, the rooftop?”

“I was still in uniform, Mike. Got a 911 to the address, civilian holding two in a stairwell. Some guy heard a woman screaming in his building. Started to go toward the noise on the roof and these two teenagers were running down from the top landing, zipping up their pants as they came down. Guy had a licensed gun stopped ‘em in their tracks. Yelled to his wife who called us.”

Mercer went on.

“My partner holds the kids and I go up to the roof to see what happened. Fifty-five-year-old lady, pretty hysterical, tells me these two kids she never saw before followed her onto the elevator, the bigger one pulled out a knife and forced her to the roof. Stripped her and tried to rape her. When the tall one put down the knife to unzip his fly, she began to scream and they ran off.

“I radio for a bus’ police jargon for ambulance ‘to take her to the hospital, and I go back down to cuff the kids.

They’re jivin‘ my partner like crazy.

“That’s our mother, man,” they’re tellin‘ him.

“That’s our mother she’s just mad at us ‘cause she says the rent money is missing. Man, we didn’t do nothin’ to her.”

“So I say, ”What’s her name, your mother?“ For the first time, they’re both real quiet. They look at each other but that’s no help. Finally, the older one looks up at me with one last try, ”I don’t know we jus’ call her Mom.“

It wasn’t his best story but it always made him laugh.

“Not as good as when we almost screwed up that murder trial for Cooper, when you got promoted to the squad,” a case Mike loved to remind both Mercer and me about.

A few years back I had worked on an investigation that involved the discovery of a murder victim who had been sexually assaulted and whose body had been found near the Lower West Side piers, left in an alley in a large packing crate. She hadn’t been identified for weeks, and the detectives working on the case observed their usual tradition of giving an identity of their own to the victim.

Eventually a truck driver was arrested and charged with the crime. I never heard the casual references to the young woman which the cops had dared not make in my presence nor did they appear anywhere in the police reports, so it came as just as much a surprise to me as it did to the jury when the defense attorney drew it out on his cross-examination of Mercer.

Mike played all the parts for us.

“Did you know the name of the deceased when you commenced your investigation on April 10, Detective Wallace?”

“No, sir.”

“And how did the medical examiner refer to the deceased in her report of April 11, Detective Wallace?”

“As Jane Doe, Number 27, 1991.”

“And how did you refer to her in your D.D. 5 of April 12, Detective Wallace?”

“Case number two hundred thirty-four of 1991, Counselor.” Mike finally reached the point at which Detective Wallace had admitted that by the end of the first week, when the late-lamented unknown hooker had ceased to interest the editors of the local tabloids and had dropped off the evening news shows, as his team had given her the rather callous nickname of “The ?er Fox in the Box.” he It had been a very uphill batt leto try to restore the jury’s faith in the able young detective as the judge threatened in the presence of the panel to bring the matter to the attention of the commissioner. But somehow, as usual, justice was done.

That led us to a discussion of the nature of the dark humor that seemed to be the province of law enforcement types all over the world.

And that led Chapman to his next attempt to occupy my wandering attention.

“Ya know, I got an idea for you to make a lot of money, Alex, when you’re ready to go private. It came to me last Thursday when I had to go through all the files in your office.”

“Let’s hope it’s not a step I’m going to have to take today, Mike. I’ll bite what is it?”

“A dating service. Now, you take a look at the women first.

You got a twenty-three-year-old receptionist, a Libra. She likes reefer, jazz clubs, and picking up guys in Washington Square Park on weekends. She likes regular intercourse and oral sex, she just doesn’t like-‘

“You’re a pig, Chapman. You are an insensitive, disgusting pig. No wonder you have to work Homicide.

You shouldn’t ever be allowed to work with a living, breathing human being who has been traumatized. I looked at my watch and stood up to go inside to dress for the next battle.

Mike barely missed a beat. He didn’t need my approval he was content with his audience of one.

“Then you get a perp, Mercer. Not a real violent one. There’s that thirty-five-year-old cook from that restaurant in SoHo who got collared last month. He’s a Capricorn. Are they good together, Mercer, Libra and Capricorns? Anyway he likes reefer, too. Prefers Battery Park City to Washington Square Park, but she might be flexible. He’s also into oral…”

I was out of earshot by then and into the bathroom to shower and wash my hair.

Mike would never understand the cases that Mercer and I liked to handle. He really did prefer working on murder investigations, as he had told me many times. You didn’t have to hold the victims’ hands, as it were, and deal with the emotional struggle of their recovery. You didn’t have to help them manage the pain of reliving the devastating event the pain and torment were long over by the time Chapman got to a crime scene. And you didn’t have to deal with victims who lie on occasion, even when we’re trying to help them convict their assailants.
Mike was happiest when he could work on the intricate pieces of a puzzle silent clues, words offered by or cajoled out of occasional bystanders, pathological findings slowly and carefully unraveling the mystery of a brutal, untimely death.

Death. Which brought me back to Isabella Lascar and then to Jed. I finished toweling myself off and began the tedious process of blow-drying my hair as I re-examined the damage of a sleepless night in the bathroom mirror.

I dressed in a navy blazer, red-and-white wide-striped Charvet shirt and red skirt businesslike but not somber.

I refused to look as if I was in mourning for a lost love. Mike and Mercer were sitting at the dining-room table with cups of coffee they had made while I primped for the day. It was just after seven when I rejoined them. on “Can I get on the school bus by myself, or do you have to escort me?” as “I’m on this watch for another hour.

Mercer’s got the day off. I’ll drop you at your office then go home and crash. I he have to be back at the squad for the four to twelve.”

We all walked out together. Mercer saw the two of us into Mike’s car and continued on his way with a wave.

“Do something to make me look good for a change,” I called after him.

“Catch that bastard in the serial rape case, will you?” He nodded his head and gave me a thumbs-up.

I spent most of the car ride fumbling for a way to thank Mike for looking out for me the night before.

“Cut it out, blondie. That’s what friends are for. Besides, defenestration is the fuckin‘ worst. I couldn’t bear the sight of your body splashed and splattered all over the sidewalk.”