Fairstein, Linda - Final Jeopardy (41 page)

“For you, the birthday was my first guess. Never been married, no special anniversary date. Lascar had your birthday in her book, along with her other information about you. April thirtieth. Four three zero. You’re probably stupid enough to use it for your banking code and all your other pin numbers.”

She had me there. Goldman was rapt in her own self congratulatory explanation and didn’t seem to notice that I was making headway against my binds. I wasn’t free, but they were loosening.

“And you picked up messages from my home machine‘ all week? And you erased them after you listened?” I had ignored Jed’s protestations that he had called repeatedly, and I had been depressed that there were so few calls from any of my other friends and family. This was not the moment to find out who else had been intercepted and erased from my radar screen. No wonder Jed had been trying so frantically to get me and my network of friends to believe him.
Goldman had found him again, had reapplied herself to the effort to attract him in the days after Isabella’s murder, and he indeed was asking for my help these past twenty-four hours.

“If you’re telling the truth about not wanting anything to do with him,” she scoffed at me, ‘then you wouldn’t have missed his calls, anyway. Pleading for forgiveness and complaining about me. Those things were bad enough.

But telling you how much he loved you that you were his golden girl, that Isabella was just a mistake, that he wanted to marry you more than anything in the world all that made a mockery of what I had risked my life to accomplish. I didn’t want you to hear any of them, if I could help it. Maybe he was getting that through to you some other way, but not with the messages I could stop.“

Ellen Goldman was intense now, concentrating her anger on me again.

“I followed him to New York when I got out of jail. I found him again.
But he had become distracted because of you,” she said, with obvious disdain.

“I wanted to meet you, to see what you were like. So I arranged the interview.”

“Don’t you really work for the Lawyer’s Digest?” I asked, knowing that the Public Relations Office had vetted her before letting me set an appointment with her.

“What a joke,” she blasted back at me.

“I just said I was freelancing for them I’ve never published anything in my life. I never finished graduate school. Your people were so hungry for good press about the office that once I told them how much I admired your work, I could have said I was writing for Popular Mechanics and they would have given me carte blanche. Nobody ever checked my credentials.”

My thoughts flashed back to the day after Isabella’s shooting, when Mike brought me home to the apartment from the office, and Ellen had left flowers with the doorman. I had been so pleased to see them I had assumed Laura had given her my address. How easily I had been misled, to have commented to Mike then about what a nice reporter she was.
Oxymoron, he had said.

“But why Isabella?” I asked her.

“I can understand you were mad at me for taking up with Jed while you were in jail, but Isabella Lascar?”

“All of a sudden, last month, I began to find out about his meeting her. I could deal with you, I was sure. There was nothing that special about you,” she said.

“I knew if I made him aware of me again, you wouldn’t be in my way.

But then when she began calling him and seeing him, here and in L.A.” I knew it was a serious problem. I may be able to compete with you, but she was a movie star people idolized her, adored her, worshiped her.
He’d never come back to me as long as she was in his life. Once I learned they were going to Martha’s Vineyard together, it just seemed so easy for me. I drove right onto the ferry, didn’t need any reservations off season. Got up to your house easily between the listing in the phone book and those locals in the post office who’d trust anybody pulled off the main road, just like I did tonight… and waited. I was back on the boat within hours. I just never meant for Jed to get blamed for it.“

Psychose passionelle. I tried to recall more facts from my reading the night before. Ellen Goldman really believed that Jed loved her, that he would actually return her affection, were it not for some external influence. The person in jeopardy is not the beloved she’d have no reason to harm him. The most likely recipient of the violent act, I had read, is the person perceived to be standing in the way of the desired union: Isabella Lascar. Get her out of the way and Jed Segal would be free to devote himself to Ellen.

And then, once she was dead, instead of turning his attention to Goldman, he tried to repair his romance with me. I wasn’t interested, but that didn’t lessen the annoyance of his calls and entreaties in her mind. For me, this was final jeopardy, too. Ellen was too impatient to wait for Jed’s ardor to subside. She had seized the moment of my precinct visit this evening when she learned about it on the radio, and used the fact that it drew me through Central Park, to come up with a scheme. Kill me, in the style of Harold McCoy who had a reason to want me out of the way and it wouldn’t look anything like the death of Isabella. Abduct and stab me to death, don’t shoot another one. She was right the tabloids would love it, and more importantly, no one would connect it to the death of Isabella Lascar.

How sadly ironic for me, to have spent a decade prosecuting men for crimes of violence against woman, and now to meet my peril at the hands of a woman. Perhaps that’s what had me blinded in this case all along.

I thought of the lines of poetry scribbled in Isabella’s manuscript, sent to her by Goldman, in the guise of the letters of “Dr. Jeffers‘:
”Is it… a crime… to love too well?“

Pope named it aptly a most unfortunate lady. The crime was not the loving, but the murder.

I tried to give her more incentive to back off.

“Let’s call Jed together, Ellen. Let’s talk with him about-‘

”I don’t ever want him to talk to you again, don’t you understand that?
If you’re out of his life, he’ll come back to me. I know that.“

“I’m leaving New York. I’m going out of town this weekend. I - I won’t come back till you work it out with Jed.” I’d go anywhere, forever, if you’d let me out of here.

I was almost able to work loose my hands, but had no idea what I could do with them, against her weapons and her physical ability, if I were free.

“You’re playing with me again, Alex. You won’t leave for long. This is where your work is, you can’t stay away.”

Shit, maybe they need a sex crimes prosecutor in Wyoming or Montana.
Someplace without investment bankers and without erotomaniacs.

A man’s voice from the top of the staircase on the Bethesda Terrace, to our south, broke the stillness. Both of our heads snapped in that direction, vainly trying to see who he was and where he stood, as he called out, “Hey, girl, hey, pooch. You down there? C’mon back up here to me.”

A dog walker. Goldman tensed and held a finger in front of her mouth, warning me to stay quiet. I prayed whoever he was would venture down the steps to my hellhole.

“Hey, Zac. C’mon back up here. Zac? Zac? C’mon, let me put your leash on.”

David Mitchell? David and Prozac was it possible?

My eyes were riveted to the top of the great staircase as David, snapping his fingers as though to attract a wandering dog, moved into sight, flooded in the full light of the moon.

“Hey,” he called out again.

“Anybody there? Anybody see a Weimaraner loose around here?”

It was impossible to know whether he could see Goldman from his angle, but I was certain that he wouldn’t be able to tell that I was seated below her on the ground. She didn’t speak. I assumed that she hadn’t recognized him, but she had done so much research about me that I couldn’t be sure she hadn’t checked my building and neighbors as well.

“Yes!” I screamed out at the top of my lungs, and she swung around to stick the tip of her knife against the back of my neck, without uttering a sound.

David started down toward us at a trot.

“Great,” he was enthusing, ‘which way did you see her go?“ He was still acting as though he were simply looking for a lost dog, so it was impossible to tell if he had anyone else with him, or if he had identified the sound of my voice.

He was coming at us too quickly now, and I feared that Goldman wouldn’t let him intrude on our session without penalty. I could feel her body leaning over, from behind me, and although she was out of my range of vision, I was afraid she was going to make a move to reach for her holster.

“David!” I screamed out, ‘she’s got a gun.“

I lurched forward by my own motion and pulled one hand out of the rope.
But it was my left hand, and as I broke away from Goldman’s grasp, I was useless to do anything to disarm her with it. My right one was still entangled in the cord. As she dropped the knife to the ground and reached for her pistol, four or five dark figures ran down the steep incline and the staircase heading for us, as David dropped to his knees in place.

I could hear Chapman’s voice yelling orders from somewhere in this small charging force. First at me, to stay flat, and then at the others to move in slowly, and next at Ellen to throw down her gun.

A shot rang out from just inches above my right ear and I looked for a place to shelter myself without success. I had no idea who Goldman was aiming at, but if she chose to focus her attention on me again, there was no way she could miss.

Someone on Mike’s team had apparently been waiting for Goldman to shoot first, and fired back in our direction.

I flattened myself on the ground, my face crushed against a sharp rock my left arm out to the side and my right one pinned beneath me.

Chapman shouted at her once more: “Drop it!”

Goldman fired again and again. I ached so badly from every bloodied joint and bruised skin surface that I wasn’t sure I would know if a bullet struck me or not.

Seconds later, I heard footsteps approaching Goldman from the rear a crunching on the dry leaves as someone ran down the slope from the north. She must have heard the sound as well, since she swung herself around to point her pistol in the direction of the man coming in behind her.

But he got a shot off first, and she screamed as she dropped backward, her body falling across my own.

The gun was still in Goldman’s hand as she lay writhing in pain, her body cushioned against mine. I couldn’t tell where she had been hit, but her legs were still twitching and kicking like a frog on a dissection table in a high school biology class.

I didn’t know whether to try to wrest the weapon from her grip, but within moments the cops were on her, and I was relieved of that decision.

I could see, from my limited angle of vision, that the shooter was the first to get to us, landing on her right arm with his foot and bending down to take the small pistol away from her as he pressed her elbow against the rocks with his heavy boot. I didn’t know who the guy was or whether I would ever lay eyes on him again, but I was certain I would be in love with him for the rest of my life.

Goldman was coughing and crying at once, and in an instant we were surrounded by six or seven other men, Chapman and Mitchell among them.
They were all talking over each other, as two of them lifted her off my body and David leaned in to help me raise myself up from my awkward position on the ground.

“Where’s she hit?” I heard someone ask, while Mike got to his knees in front of my face, questioning me at the same time “Are you shot?”

I rolled onto my back, biting the corner of my lip to prevent myself from crying, and shook my head in the negative.

“Looks like the gut,” was someone’s answer to the question about Goldman, and the men carrying her between them started up the pathway to the street. Another guy was on a walkie-talkie ordering two ambulances stat to meet us at the pavement above the Bethesda Terrace.

David was on one side of me, asking where I was injured and checking my vital signs. He pressed my shoulder back against the ground as I tried to sit up, cradling my head in place with his sweater and stroking my hair to calm me, telling me not to try to talk yet. Chapman was on my other flank, working his cell phone, telling someone probably his boss where we were and what had gone down. He reached for my right hand, inspecting the abrasions and rope burns that covered its surface, and I grabbed him back, squeezing as hard as I could and holding on to him, because it was so much easier than saying anything aloud.

“Just rest for a few minutes,” David urged me.

“Listen to your doctor, Coop. We’ll explain it all later,” Chapman said, laying the phone on the ground and trying to muster up something that resembled a smile.

I closed my eyes, keeping hold of Mike’s hand and attempting to make myself breathe more evenly. The noise and commotion of people running up and down the incline continued to swirl around me, and I relished the sound of sirens coming closer and closer to the roadway above.

Within minutes, two EMS workers came pounding down the staircase, carrying a stretcher which they placed beside me on the ground.

“Which one we got here, the perp or the victim?” one asked.

“You got the victim,” Mike said, rising to his feet and flashing his badge at the pair.

“She’s a prosecutor,” he went on, summarizing the story in a couple of sentences.

“V.I.P treatment or else she’s likely to drop a dime on you.”

My mouth curled up in a grin as he used police lingo for ratting someone out.

“I’m a physician,” David added, “I’d like to ride with you.

She’s my friend.“ He began to describe his observations of my condition as they gently lifted me onto the canvas.

“I don’t need this, really. I can walk,” were my first words as they carried me toward the staircase.

“Relax, blondie. You’re going first class. You’re my case now I make all the decisions,” Chapman replied.

It wasn’t exactly Notorious, but I was every bit as grateful as Ingrid Bergman must have felt as my saviors swept me up the grand steps toward the waiting ambulance. It was almost 5 A.M. by the time I was comfortably settled into a nightgown and robe, sipping some warm, exotic combination of herbs that was prepared for me by Joan Stafford’s Asian housekeeper, after David had refused my request for a double Dewar’s.
He had called Joan from the Emergency Room of New York Hospital, when I admitted that the only way I could get any sleep during the next few days was in the care of a friend I could trust.