Alex Cooper 01 - Final Jeopardy Read online

  “Yeah, we had a bus in front of the hotel, with a big banner on the side: Operation Screen-Play. We made a point of searching everyone who boarded to be taken to Miss Lascar’s secret location. Arthur Piggott got on line eagerly—surrounded by twelve guys from the D. A.’s squad, who had taken to calling him ‘Piggy’—and they took him down flat when they found a fifteen-inch machete in the zippered compartment of the bag. Not a tough case for the good guys—even you might have been able to solve it.”

  “What happened to Piggy?”

  “Bellevue Psych Ward, awaiting trial. He’s not competent at the moment, Mike. A bit delusional—thinks he and Isabella are married, he just can’t find the certificate or the wedding photos.”

  “And Isabella’s most recent trip, Alex?”

  “She called me two weeks ago, shortly after getting into town. And she told me that she was being harassed again. Phone messages and then notes, but she didn’t think they were much so she hadn’t saved them.”

  “Piggy again?” Mike asked.

  “Not likely. I checked Bellevue, but the judge had denied him phone privileges and there’s a mail screen on everything that goes out. Anyway, two of the guys are working on it, but there isn’t a lot to go on.

  “So then Isabella called again, with a more familiar intonation: a favor. ‘Darling, I’ve heard you and Nina talk so much about that quaint little farmhouse you have on Martha’s Vineyard. I’m so sick and tired of being harassed by these crazy characters, and Nina thought you wouldn’t mind if I went up there alone for a few days to be a recluse and read a few scripts. Is it a problem, Alex?”

  “For once,” I explained to Mike, “it was no problem—she wasn’t asking me to use my government job to get her some stupid perk. I just assumed she interjected a second stalker to let me think she truly needed to get out of town. The end of September is the most spectacular time on the island, and I was delighted to let her use the house… especially if I didn’t have to hang out with her and listen to all her crap about ‘the industry.’”

  “Did you go up there with her?” Mike asked.

  “No. Isabella had to be in Boston at the end of the week, so she was going to go down to the Cape from there, and either fly or take the ferry over to the Vineyard. I had reserved the rental car and charged it to my credit card ’cause my car’s in storage for the winter, and I didn’t want to give the rental agent her name. Once anybody in town knew there was going to be another movie star on the island, she’d have no privacy at all.”

  “Any calls from her once she got there? Any problems?”

  I thought for a moment. “She called a couple of times the first day, just to ask where things were in the house, and how to get to the beach, but she seemed quite happy and relaxed.”

  I had been talking with a reasonable degree of calm as I brought Mike up-to-date, but I choked on the fact of Isabella’s death, which still didn’t seem possible to me, and the circumstances in which it occurred.

  “Mike, if I hadn’t given her the house and if…”

  “You can’t do the ‘what if’s,’ kid. You did what you did and that’s not the reason she’s dead. If Isabella Lascar was the target, then whoever hit her would have found his opportunity at one time or another. And if Isabella Lascar was not the target, then we have a different situation on our hands, a real monster.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “That’s what the D. A. thinks, too. He really thinks someone was trying to kill me, not Isabella. But that’s absurd, Mike. I know any prosecutor makes enemies, but its a hell of a stretch to think I’m likely to be on a country road on the Vineyard in the middle of the week at the end of September instead of right here in town—a simple call to the office switchboard would have confirmed that.”

  “Alex, you think we’re dealing with someone who’s wrapped that tight? All I know is that Battaglia called the Chief of Detectives right after you spoke with him and gave him two orders. First was to send someone to the Post offices to stop the presses on the headline that had you as the victim—that’s the version I brought up to your apartment when I came this morning—and make sure they ran the correct story about Isabella. But most important was to get someone from Manhattan North to baby-sit for you until this thing plays out and we know who killed her. I got hit with both of those tasks—that’s why they sent me up to your place so early.”

  “I know. Battaglia told me he was insisting on a bodyguard. You’ve had better assignments, Mike, but I asked him to ask for you. I need a friend to do this, to be with me, so please don’t be mad at me. I wanted it to be you.”

  “Hey, I wouldn’t miss this one for the world. You think I’d rather be stepping over dead bodies in a Harlem crack den or killing cockroaches back at the precinct? This isn’t exactly combat duty. Besides, I told the chief I didn’t even have to go home—I could go right to your place because I had left some clean underwear there last month.”

  “Mike, you didn’t say…”

  “Relax, kid. You can’t lose your sense of humor over this.”

  He rounded the corner onto Hogan Place and parked a few feet from our building entrance on the south end of the criminal courthouse—not a lot of competition for spaces at six-twenty in the morning. “You’ve got a lot of friends and every one of them is going to help you through the next few days.”

  We got out of the car and headed for the steps. “What does lover boy have to say about all this?” Mike asked, as he held open the door and we moved into the dingy lobby of the District Attorney’s Office, nodding hello and showing our ID’s to get past a security guard and the metal detectors.

  I wasn’t even aware that I frowned as I tried to form an answer to that question, knowing that Mike was never short on opinions about guys I had dated over all the years we had known each other. I liked to think that some of it was because he was a little jealous. It was an easy topic for ridicule, so he often took aim at the “white collar wimps” he met at office parties and courthouse bars. Jed Segal, investment banker, didn’t escape Mike’s strike, even though he was not in that category. Jed had first had a brilliant career practicing law, which led to a stint in Washington, before he returned home to California to make an unsuccessful run for the Senate last year. To my good fortune, a tempting corporate offer had lured him to New York earlier this year, when I met and started to date him.

  “He’s not back from Europe yet. I, uh… I tried to reach him but, you know, with the time difference and all. I’ll tell him when he calls today.”

  “That’s what you really need, Cooper, a guy who’s always there for you when trouble strikes—just an ocean away. Another deal to close. Then he’ll come back to comfort you one of these nights and he’ll be all wet and slurpy and I’ll be keeping you both safe with my trusty six-shooter by my side, sitting in your living room watching reruns of ‘I Love Lucy’ while he gets consoled on your big brass bed. If only the Police Academy gave MBA’s—I could’a been a contender, know what I mean?”

  “No, then you’d be an investment banker, too, Mike,” I said as we got off the elevator on the eighth floor and turned into the corridor toward my office, “… but you’d still be an asshole. Leave me alone on this.”

  “I hit a nerve, blondie, didn’t I? Maybe even deep enough for root canal, huh? Lover boy’s off limits. I understand.”

  I unlocked the door to my office, flipped on the light and sat at my desk, while Mike settled himself at the post in the anteroom where my secretary worked. He had indeed hit a nerve. It was one of those moments when I didn’t want to be the tough litigator who could solve everyone else’s problems and separate the emotional baggage from the realities of any situation. I wanted to stay curled up at home on my sofa, with Jed holding me in his arms, caressing me and assuring me that everything would be all right. But I wasn’t at home and it would probably be days before Jed would be there to make love to me, and the best I could hope for was that the business of a hectic day in the office would temporarily distra
ct me from the nightmare that had so suddenly enveloped me.

  Chapter

  3

  Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building is a massive, ugly, gray structure, the facade of which unconsciously reflects the rumor—not true—that it was built during the Depression as a WPA effort. The usual maxims about the search for truth and justice are chiseled into its exterior columns and above its entrances which stretch the length of several city blocks. But its even more somber interior houses the cramped work cubbyholes of the thousands of worker bees who do the everyday business of the criminal justice system: judges, assistant district attorneys, Legal Aid Society lawyers, and probation officers. The northern end of the complex—the only piece of it to have been remodeled in more than half a century—is named the Tombs, the cells in which prisoners are held before arraignment or during trials, connected to the courthouse by the Bridge of Sighs.

  Mike liked to call the prison Landin Lounge, after the federal judge who ordered it rebuilt because of the overcrowded conditions that had prompted riots and lawsuits a decade ago. “Yeah, build those scumbags a first-class joint. Give ’em private rooms and color tubes and a gym so they can pump themselves up so they can fun faster next time I’m chasing ’em. After all, they’re killing each other to get in there, might as well make it comfy for them. Oh, and showers, six showers on every cellblock. Remember Devon Cranston? The homeless guy who lived in Riverside Park and stabbed four people to death? How often did he shower, in Riverside Park? You bet your ass he showers twice a day now in Landin Lounge. Meantime,” he was fond of saying, “if I put my sandwich down on your desk for a minute, forty-three roaches swarm out of your filing cabinets and devour it. There’s asbestos leaking out of your water fountain and lead paint chips falling off the ceiling into Battaglia’s coffee cup. But start with the prisoners first. That’s a judge who’s really got his priorities straight.”

  Despite my tenure in the office and my administrative position, the room in which I work is no fancier or larger than that of any of my colleagues. It’s a cubicle about eight by fourteen feet with a single window that faces another dreary government building across the narrow side street. My efforts to cheer it up with photographs and prints are outweighed by the drab collection of battered pieces of furniture—a desk, several unmatched leather chairs, one bookcase, and an array of tall five-drawer file cabinets which—like most city-issued supplies including a very worn strip of stained carpeting—are a dull shade of gray.

  Today, like most other days, there is additional clutter which includes exhibits from complex investigations and completed trials. They document the violent landscape of the city over which my colleagues and I have jurisdiction: maps and charts of rooftops, parks, housing project stairwells, and elegant apartment interiors—waiting to be marked as evidence at trial or shipped to the archives in the basement of the cavernous courthouse for storage until all the defendants’ appeals in each of the cases are exhausted.

  The top of my metal desk is covered with a bright red blotter, rarely more than a sliver of which is visible because of the accumulation of manila folders and white legal pads that pile on top. They are house case files and witness interviews, police reports and memoranda from unit prosecutors, laboratory analyses of body fluids and blood types, mug shots of suspects being sought, medical records and DNA profiles of rape survivors, and every other form of detritus of the world of criminal law.

  I walked from my office down the hallway to the conference room to fill the pot for the first round of coffee, while Mike double-checked to confirm that Piggy was still in the nuthouse at Bellevue.

  “That would have been much too easy,” he said, “so let’s figure out where to go from there.”

  “Battaglia wants us to review every pending sex offense complaint, all of my closed cases that resulted in serious time, and the lists of guys released to parole recently. My paralegals will help you put that stuff together when they get in—the files are all in their office, down the hall near the Appeals Bureau.”

  “You’ve got to think for me, Alex. Things that aren’t in case files, things nobody else could know about, remarks that you’ve ignored because you’ve been in the business too long to pay attention to them. Hang-up calls, letters from cranks, goofballs, malcontents.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it all night, Mike. Most of the guys you and I encounter are much too stupid to plan something like yesterday’s murder. I’m sure this is going to tie in to something that Isabella did to someone, really.”

  “Well, Coop, we still have to go through the motions, so start combing your file folders for ideas. Jesus, your desk looks like the bottom of a birdcage! I want you to go through every piece of paper that’s current, and clean up that mess while you’re at it.”

  I gave Mike the key to the office shared by my two paralegals, where all the unit records were stored, so he could get a jump on the older cases and parole notifications while I thought about how to begin to examine the jumble of papers on my desk.

  I picked up the phone, accessed an outside line, and dialed the number for the Ritz, the elegant old hotel Jed favored when he was doing business in Paris. “Non, madame, Monsieur Segal is not in at the moment. Yes, madame, of course I will leave him another message. Au revoir, Madame Cooper.” It was midday in Paris. Jed was probably sitting in some outdoor café sipping a good Bordeaux with a client, and unlikely to pick up my messages until he returned to his room at the end of the evening.

  During the next two hours, I managed to fill several pages of a white legal pad with some obvious candidates for consideration. There were plenty of active investigations to look at—the drama coach who subjected students to sexual abuse, the drug importer who sedated and videotaped models as he raped them, and the gay art dealer who played sado-masochistic games with young men he picked up in leather bars; and there were literally thousands of closed cases—serial rapists, pedophiles, and professionals who didn’t look the part of sexual deviants. For once I was delighted when the hour approached 9 A.M. and the corridors began to come alive with the courthouse regulars.

  Laura Wilkie had been the secretary for the Sex Crimes Unit even before I joined the staff, and fortunately for me, had stayed on as my assistant ever since. She was almost twenty years older than I—in her mid-fifties—and lived alone in a small apartment on Staten Island where she devoted her off-duty hours to tending her cheerful flower garden and painting imaginary landscapes. Laura was terrifically loyal to me and responsible for keeping the work of the twenty-five lawyers who reported to me in better control and order than I ever could. When Laura came in she was pleased to see me in place and plopped the pile of daily papers in front of me, as she always did.

  “Well, somebody besides me really didn’t like Isabella, did they?” she offered with a wry expression.

  “Don’t say it too loud, Laura, or Chapman will add you to the suspect list. What did you have against her?”

  “Oh, nothing really, Alex. She just used people like you so much, and she had no use for people like me. She wasn’t a very nice person, that’s it.”

  “She wasn’t all that bad. I know she could be rude and insensitive, which was inexcusable. But she was also clever and funny and extremely talented, once you got past that artificial veneer. Anyway, let me bring you up to speed on what lies ahead today,” I went on, repeating last night’s events to Laura, who would serve as the shield between me and the outside world. On a good day, no one got past Wilkie—on the phone or in person—without her knowing their purpose, except for close friends. And on a bad day like this, she would be impenetrable, if that’s what I asked for.

  “Mike’s in charge—anybody who shows up without an appointment gets cleared by him.” Laura nodded. She knew that Mike Chapman and I had met on one of my first cases more than ten years ago, and even though the constant macho banter was not Laura’s style, she enjoyed Mike’s friendship and knew I respected his ability as a cop.

  “The D.A.’s at
a budget meeting at City Hall, which should go a couple of hours,” I went on. “He’s going to call for me the minute he gets back, so that’s the big one I’m waiting for.

  “Mercer Wallace should be on his way down with a victim. Make her comfortable in the waiting area and let me see him alone first. I want to get the story from him before I talk to her, because it’s part of the pattern, the serial rapist we’ve been looking for. I’ll take calls from any of the guys on trial—Gina may have some questions during jury selection ’cause she’s got a tough drug issue in her case.

  “And no personals, not one, not any, nobody.” In addition to the three lines on Laura’s desk, I have a private line that rings only on mine, so I knew that Jed and my closest friends could get through when they wanted to. “Tell everybody that I’m fine and I’ll call them later.”

  “What about press calls?” Laura asked, as Mike came back into my room with several case jackets under his arm.

  “Hey, Wilkie, you want to lose your job? You ever know her not to take a call from a reporter? Get a grip, Laura.”

  “He’s kidding, Laura. All press calls go into the Public Relations Office. Please tell Brenda I’ll give her a full update as soon as I can.” The District Attorney had a well-trained professional staff to deal with media matters, and my friend Brenda Whitney had her hands full trying to keep tabs on the hundreds of thousands of cases that passed through our office every year. She didn’t need the complications of our private lives to make her job more miserable, and it was essential to bring her in on details that were likely to surface in the press.

  “Alex,” Laura questioned timidly, “how about people from the office? Everybody’s going to come by to check out how you’re taking this. Who do you want to see?”