Fairstein, Linda - Final Jeopardy (29 page)

“No. I’m going to court to testify. I was raped.” A surefire way to end the conversation and allow me to finish perusing the paper the rest of the way downtown, as the driver took another peek in the mirror to see what one of those looked like.

I was later than usual so the elevators and hallways were bustling with prosecutors and witnesses. A heavyset uniformed cop, pushing retirement age, stepped out of my ittorney pert on mestic ases as Jogger her the jghest ith herg way as I turned into the eighth-floor corridor.

“Hey, Miss Cooper. How ya doin‘?

“Remember me? I had that rape case with you in ‘92.”

“Nice to see you. Sure.” I had only talked to a thousand or more cops about a thousand or more rape cases since then.

Give me a hint.

Laura was at her desk when I walked in.

“You don’t want to know who’s been calling, I guess.”

“Not if it’s more of the same from Jed.”

“Okay. There were a few others. Mercer just called. Said he was going out in the field and he’d try you again when he got back. They had a 911 call, something to do with the Con Ed rapist. Not a new case, just a possible suspect. Sarah needs to speak to you she’s got a question about a search warrant. And Elaine called from Escada. The suit you ordered came in. Can you get to the store to try it on?”

“Just ship it. I’ll never get there.”

I started working on my third cup of coffee, called Sarah and several of the other assistants who had e-mailed for help, then spent some time responding to some of the mail that had accumulated on my desk. When I finished, I told Laura I’d be upstairs watching one of the newer members of the unit deliver his first summation. I took a legal pad and went to the trial part on the fifteenth floor, where I sat in the rear of the room to make notes for the critique I would do after the verdict came in on the case.

For the better part of an hour I listened to the defense attorney drone on about his version of the facts of the case. It was a date rape and therefore automatically - a difficult trial. Sarah and I had prepared our newest recruit, Mark Acciano, for the problems he would have to confront before the jury. Most people considered this kind of case far less serious than stranger rapes, and trying to educate jurors during the course of the trial if the ones with that attitude had not been identified and dismissed during the jury selection process was next to impossible.

Unlike cases in which victims were attacked by armed assailants they had never seen before, the typical date rape involved two people who were together because they liked each other, and wanted to be in each other’s company. Many psychologists called them ‘confidence rapes because they occurred when a woman placed her trust in someone she felt she would be secure with, who then betrayed that reliance. While jurors tend to empathize with women who are raped by strangers, they are much tougher in these date cases, in which defense attorneys try to blame the victims for their participation in the events leading up to the sexual acts. The typical strategy is to attack the victim for every aspect of her lifestyle, from her manner of dress to her alcohol or drug use to her initial attraction to the defendant that must have meant that she ’asked for it.“ They were ugly cases to try.

When the defense attorney sat down, Mark rose to make his closing argument. First, he marshaled all the evidence in the case, detailing every word and act that the complaining witness had described about her assailant during the course of the several hours he spent in her apartment when they had returned there after a dinner date. Mark was candid about the weak spots how much liquor she had consumed, how much foreplay she had consented to but firm about the fact that neither of those factors gave the defendant a license to force her her to have intercourse with him. As Sarah and I had coached, he was graphic and emphatic about the defendant’s threats, and about the force with which he had restrained his prey when she had tried to resist and escape his attack.

The victim’s outcry had been prompt, which is somewhat unusual in many date rape cases when women are conflicted about whether to report the crime, fearful of not being believed. The medical record was a useful tool in this case, and Mark took the jury through it carefully. The finger marks on the young woman’s wrists and inner thighs corroborated her story about the defendant’s application of pressure no, she hadn’t been beaten and bruised, but she had been held down against her will, and these marks did not support his story of tender lovemaking.

The internal exam had revealed redness and swelling in the vaginal vault, with several very minor abrasions noted on the accompanying diagram, again inconsistent with the protection afforded by lubrication during consensual sex.

I was impressed with the construction of Mark’s argument, and with the manner in which he made the jury confront the unpleasant details that established the elements of the crime. These were cases that had little to do with the business of a police investigation, but rather rose and fell based on the candor and credibility of the complaining witness. He placed that all before the panel of twelve jurors, some who nodded in agreement as he hammered home his strong points, some who sat stone-faced in their chairs, and some who appeared to be napping through all of the argument. He worked his way painstakingly toward his conclusion.

‘… and I ask you to find the defendant guilty of the crime of rape in the first degree. Thank you very much.“

Mark had taken more than an hour for the delivery of his summation, and I smiled my approval to him as he returned to his seat at the prosecution table. The judge would now begin his charge to the jury, in which he’d explain the various laws that had to be applied to the facts in the case. I noted that it was after noon, so I slipped out of the courtroom and returned to my office, knowing that it would be hours before the jurors finished deliberations and reached a verdict in a case like this.

“Rod called. Wants to know if you’d like to go out for lunch,” Laura greeted me when I returned to my office.

“Please tell him I’m stretched for time let’s do it next week. And would you order me in a salad and soda?”

“Sure. Call Mercer at Special Victims. And Lieutenant Peterson at the Homicide Squad.”

I was excited when I picked up the phone to dial Mercer’s number. We were overdue for a break in the serial rape pattern and I was hoping it had come.

“Special Victims. Wallace.”

“Any luck? Heard you went out on a call.”

“A bullshit run. Nothing.” Mercer sounded discouraged.

“Every time some pimply faced plumber rings a doorbell on the Upper West Side, somebody calls 911. Not our guy, not even close. It’s a bad month to be a repairman this poor slob was scared out of his wits.
Took me two hours to calm him down. Then I had to call his old lady and explain the situation make sure she understood it was all a mistake.

Sorry for the false alarm. I’ll be talking to you.“

Peterson was Mike Chapman’s boss at the Homicide Squad, a tough old-timer who had worked Homicide most of his career, and knew the business better than anybody.

“Hey, loo, how’ve you been?”

“Pretty good for an old guy, Alex. Can’t complain.”

“What do you need?”

“It’s on the Lascar case. Mike’s due in at four. I just called him to let him know what’s been going on, and I thought you should know, too.
Then we had an idea, maybe you could help us with.”

“Shoot.”

“Chief Flanders just called. I don’t know the case as well as you do, but Mike says you’d understand what I’m talking about. First of all, Flanders got a hit on the photo ID of this Segal guy from the two sisters at the lunch place. That make any sense to you? Mike says it would.”

Butterflies began floating in my stomach and my spirits sank to a new low. It made no sense at all to me.

“Yeah, loo, it makes perfect sense. Go on.”

Now it was no longer speculation. And now it was no longer just a matter of infidelity. Mike had been right. Jed had been with Isabella less than one hour before she was killed. Despite all the indications, I had kept on hoping he had left earlier. I had refused to consider him a serious possibility as a suspect, but I had to come to grips with the reality of that fact. No wonder it was Peterson who made the call.
Mike was too afraid I’d be shattered by the confirmation of that news.

“The next thing Wally says to tell you is that Burrell I guess he’s the ex-husband has something to hide, too.

Must’ve followed his wife from Boston to the Vineyard.

Stayed at a hotel in Edgartown called the Charles Inn.

Know it?“

“The Charlotte Inn. Gorgeous. Expensive.” Son of a bitch, doesn’t anybody believe in telling the truth anymore?

Burrell shows up here to pitch me his case, then he looks me in the eye and lies. Interesting approach, I got to give him credit. Admit the gun possession, admit the fight in the Boston hotel. Just leave out the part that puts you within fifteen miles of the crime scene. Mike’s right they think we’re all stupid if we’re in law enforcement.

“Now that suggests two things to me, Alex. One is, he didn’t go to the island planning to off his ex-wife. I think he woulda known to use an alias at the hotel. Even in the movies cops canvass hotels and motels to check the guest lists. But it doesn’t mean something didn’t set him off once he got there maybe he saw her with the other man, maybe they had a phone conversation that made him crazy. He’s in town, so we’ll set up the interview and sweat him. It always helps to go in with a piece of information that he obviously doesn’t think we have.”

I was still focused somewhere back on Jed.

“The rest is just local gossip. People who claim they saw and heard things all week. Someone in the post office says a woman was in asking directions to your place. Doesn’t exactly remember what day it was.
Could that have been Isabella or did you have other company?”

“I gave directions to Isabella a week before she went up there. But she could easily have left them behind or stopped in somewhere to check. Maybe she invited someone else over I sure as hell didn’t even know she had Jed Segal there.”

“Also, American Express confirmed the Chanel sale. Only thing is Segal bought the stuff in New York, on Saturday afternoon, after his European trip. Looks like he got it at a drugstore about two blocks from your place. Sorry. The ic tie he St. ier good news was that he had purchased the Concorde ticket to Paris weeks ago, then he moved his departure back a day or two at the very last minute. So he hadn’t planned the trip to the Vineyard for long. Well, that’s today’s report. Next thing, that FBI agent, Luther Waldron is in town. The feds had to make calls to get some of these guys to come to New York, which leads me to the favor we want to ask you.

“Mike doesn’t want Waldron in on all the interviews tomorrow. Doesn’t like the guy’s style, doesn’t think he knows anything about murder investigations, says he’s no better than a Meter Maid. So Mike’s trying to get as much done as possible out of Waldron’s presence, okay?”

“Suits me fine.”

“Johnny Garelli you know that name?”

“Yeah. Johnny Gorilla, she called him. The stunt man stud Isabella romanced for a few months. I only met him once.”

“Waldron got him to come into town for a sit-down tomorrow. He arrived on the red-eye this morning. Staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Mike thinks that if you called him and asked him to meet you for dinner this evening, you might be able to get more out of him than we could in a formal interview. Mike says Garelli likes broads better than he likes’ cops I’m supposed to butter you up and say he likes blondes with great wheels does that work?”

“No butter needed. You know this is the kind of assignment I love. Do I have to tell Battaglia?”

“Hey, you know me. If it was one of my guys did a thing like that without my permission, I’d wring his fucking neck.

But in your case, don’t you go off duty at 6 P.M.? I’m not asking you to get a pass from nobody to have a dinner date. It’s nothing dangerous like Mata Hari. We have no reason to think he’s the killer, but Mike wants to look at him ‘cause he’s got such a history of jealous squabbles with the deceased. We figure he’ll bite if you call, one of yous’ll pick a place, and Chapman’ll be having a drink at the bar.

Maybe you’ll get some scoop, some juice he’ll give you as a friend of Isabella’s. Pick his brain. I guess I’m usin’ that term loosely. Worst that can happen to you is you have a boring evening and a bad meal.
Choose the restaurant, you might even eat good.“

“On the job, loo. I love it. I’ll try to reach him. Tell Mike to call me when he gets in this afternoon. I’ll really feel like a wallflower if he turns me down.”

“If he turns you down, Alex, I’ll take you to Sheehan’s for a steak.”

Ugh, the food at Sheehan’s, a friendly bar run by the family of a retired Homicide cop. Great place to drink, but damned if I’d eat another meal there. That was incentive enough to put in a call to the Gorilla.

I got the number of the hotel from Information and asked the desk for Johnny’s room. He answered the phone and sounded as though I had awakened him. I reminded him that we had met once at Mortimer’s, expressed my less than-enthusiastic sympathy for Isabella with exaggerated sincerity, and suggested that we might meet for drinks or dinner to commiserate about her loss. He told me he’d been napping because of his jet lag, and that he had a date with a dancer from one of the Broadway shows who couldn’t meet him till almost midnight. Yeah, he’d be glad to do dinner with an old friend of Isabella’s.

“Want me to suggest a restaurant, or do you know New York?”

“You got any problem with Rao’s?”

“Only getting in. I adore it, but you’ll never get a table for tonight.” A New York classic, but impossible to get into. The tiny place four booths and a handful of tables was one of the hottest tickets in New York, despite its unlikely location on the corner of Pleasant Avenue and 114th Street in the heart of East Harlem. It was one of the last remaining vestiges of the Italian neighborhood that ,ey once flourished there. Run almost like a club, regulars had On their own tables for designated nights of the week and there was no room for reservations for unknowns unless every as politician, actor, writer, and hotshot were marooned on the ;er same remote island. Great food, no menus, and the most he incredible jukebox in the city light on Smokey, but lots st of Sinatra and the Shirelles. ier “Not a problem.
Stallone told me I could have his table if I wanted it tonight. I was just about to give it up this girl I’m being set up with doesn’t get off till it’s too late to eat. I’ll meet you there at eight.”