Likely To Die

by Linda Fairstein

  “Can you tell me exactly when it was that he took off his pants in order to have sex with you?”

  “You’re right, Miss Alex,” Clarita said, pointing a finger in my general direction with a look of consternation on her face. “That’s a berry, berry important question, I think. When did the man take off his pants? I have to think about that some more before I could tell you.”

  “We’ll come back to that. It’s okay. I know this is the part that’s hardest for you.” I eased her through the end of the story, where the defendant’s actions finally escalated from merely taking advantage of Clarita to criminal conduct. Once she decided she was not ready to receive the spirits, she pushed Cassano off her body and got to her feet. But when she ran for the door, still naked, the blind witch doctor followed with a machete that he picked up from the kitchen counter. With that, he forced her back into the room and demanded that she give him oral sex. She was only able to escape when she offered to go to the nearby liquor store to buy another bottle of rum and instead called 911 to summon the police.

  I thanked her for her cooperation and patience, directed her to the water fountain for a break, and went back over the case with Margie Burrows, clarifying which parts of the incident were chargeable as crimes and which were not.

  Laura opened my door to tell me that Rose Malone had called. The District Attorney had arrived and wanted to see me as soon as possible, before his luncheon date with the head of the editorial board ofThe New York Times. I sent Margie on her way with instructions for the grand jury presentation she would make later in the day, grabbed my pad with the notes I had assembled about the Gemma Dogen case, and headed over to Battaglia’s office.

  Rose was standing at one of the file cabinets that ringed her office, paging through folders stuffed into the drawers like too many clowns in a Volkswagen. “I’m trying to find the last few op-ed pieces theTimes published on ‘quality of life’ crimes in the city. Paul’s trying to convince them to run a series on our success rate with neighborhood cleanups of marijuana dealers and prostitutes.”

  She smiled at me over the sheaf of yellowing papers she was examining and that was my first sign that the D.A. was in a good mood. Rose was my personal early warning system.

  “He’ll be right out with you, Alex. He’s just on the phone with his wife.”

  I busied myself reviewing the few facts I had learned during my stop at the hospital, knowing that Battaglia was a stickler for detail and bound to want more information than I had here.

  His voice boomed out at Rose from within his huge office. “Have you got Cooper yet?”

  I answered the question by turning the corner and showing myself to him as he waved me in with the two fingers of his left hand that secured the ever-present cigar.

  “If you know what’s good for my domestic tranquillity, you’ll tell your pals in Homicide to solve this one fast. My wife’s running the Mid-Manhattan fundraiser-the spring gala-and the tickets were supposed to go on sale in two weeks. The caterer from the goddamn Plaza called her at eight-thirty this morning when he heard the news asking for a check today to guarantee five hundredsaumon en croûte dinners in case the committee loses supporters over this. So much for the late good doctor. Is it yours?”

  “I’d like it to be, Paul. It’s a rape-homicide and I’ve-”

  He cut me off, not needing to hear things he already knew. “I take it you’ve been up at the crime scene already?”

  “Lieutenant Peterson let Chapman bring me in on it. I stopped by for an update and then came down here to start checking M.O.s and parolees for similarities. I don’t think there’s a hospital in Manhattan where we haven’t had some kind of criminal problem in the past, so there’s a lot to look at.”

  Battaglia puffed on the cigar, lifted one foot against the edge of his desk, and pushed back, letting his chair rest on its rear two legs. He stared directly at my face, eyeballing me to make me answer his questions without evasion.

  “It’s a perfect assignment for you, Alexandra, if you’re up to it. Even though you got it through the back door. Nobody knows more about sex crimes than you, and I doubt the media glare, which I expect will be pretty intense, will bother you much.”

  He left off the phrase “after the last time” but I met his gaze and returned it, telling him that I was looking forward to getting to work with the Squad.

  “You’ll report straight to me on this one. And if Chapman gets any of his creative ideas, like dressing you up in a nurse’s uniform and having you work the midnight shift to try to gather intelligence, you’d make me very happy if you resist the urge.”

  I laughed and assured Battaglia that I wouldn’t dream of doing anything like that, while making a mental note to suggest to the team that we consider admitting Maureen Forester, my favorite decoy detective, to the neurological floor of Mid-Manhattan Hospital as a patient-for observation.

  5

  THE REST OF THE DAY PASSED QUICKLY AS I fielded the usual range of problems and inquiries from the young lawyers who worked with me in the unit. Sarah and I had spent the lunch hour in a conference room, eating salad and sipping Diet Coke, while we made lists of defendants and suspects who might warrant a close look during the Dogen murder investigation. Laura shielded me from all the nonessential phone calls, and I spent the last part of the day sorting through messages and returning those that could not wait until the next morning.

  At six-thirty I shut off the lights, went down the hallway to tell the Chief of the Trial Division, Rod Squires, that I was on my way to the task force meeting, and left the building with my folder of case summaries to walk to the Jeep. I had missed most of the rush hour traffic so I sailed up First Avenue with no trouble, using the time to call my best friend, Nina Baum, and leave a voice mail recording on her office system at her law firm in Los Angeles, as I did almost every day.

  I parked near the station house on East Fifty-first Street and entered the building, explaining the purpose of my visit and showing my identification to the cop at the desk, who nodded in response and pointed me in the direction of the staircase. I climbed the flight and as I pushed against the bar on the heavy metal door, it swung open onto the green-tiled hallway of the second floor. The locker rooms for the uniformed cops were to my right, the anticrime office straight ahead, but most of the working space on the floor was consumed by the detective squad room off to my left.

  Walking into the headquarters of a breaking major homicide investigation was, as always, a chance to see the cream of the NYPD at its best. The energy level was electric as Peterson’s hand-chosen task force gathered and prepared for the briefing that would begin after the arrival of the big bosses within the hour. I glanced around the room to see who would be working the case with me, subconsciously rating them not only as investigators but as trial witnesses and testifiers. Whatever skills they brought to this part of the process would be compromised or enhanced by the quality of their paperwork and their ability to account for details like preserving the chain of custody and the proper methods of gathering minute traces of evidence, carefully accumulating clues, or sloppily overlooking significant leads.

  The squad area was like a rabbit warren as I viewed it from within the doorway. More than twenty detectives were clustered around the twelve desks that filled one side of the room. On each desk stood a standard manual typewriter, a couple of telephones, a wire basket-empty now but about to begin to fill with reams of pink-papered police reports called Detective Division 5s. The computer age, I noticed, had made little impact on the day-to-day life of these officers. The two desks closest to the entrance were each manned by a glum-looking plainclothes cop, and it was obvious to me that they were two of the team of 17th Precinct squad members whose home had been taken over by the task force and who were shut out of the Dogen case-their natural turf-while relegated to handling all the usual business and public relations for the neighborhood. They looked on at the elite corps of interlopers like Cinderella must have looked at her stepsisters as
they dressed for the ball.

  To my right was a large holding pen-a jail cell furnished with only a long wooden bench, used to detain arrestees for the hours between an apprehension and the time the prisoner is taken down to Central Booking to begin the arraignment process. I was accustomed to seeing two or three men stretched out on the bench or the tile floor behind the locked bars when I arrived for a lineup or interrogation. I had never seen what I noticed tonight. There were eight men in and around the cell, which was wide open-some sitting, some reclining, one on the outside with his back against the bars, one pacing in and out of the entryway. They seemed from their filthy, mismatched clothes and unkempt appearance to be rejects from a homeless shelter. Nobody was watching them, and they didn’t appear to be in any particular distress.

  At the desk in the far corner I could see the only other woman in the room. She was Anna Bartoldi, a mainstay of the Homicide Squad whom Peterson had no doubt assigned to supervise the detailed record keeping of what was bound to be a complicated investigation. Anna’s photographic memory, combined with her writing skills, would help the lieutenant track the hundreds of documents that would begin to be generated by the officers, whether working on the case or not, who would make note of statements given by witnesses or phoned in by well-meaning citizens, which would become the building blocks of evidence against the killer. Anna held a receiver to one ear and was writing in an oversized log that covered the desktops so I assumed she had already been running the tips hotline that had been announced just an hour earlier on the local news stations.

  In the corridor behind Anna’s chair was the door to the office of the squad’s commander. Whoever he was, he had been displaced for the foreseeable future by Peterson, who would be under pressure to make an arrest in such a high-profile matter as speedily as possible.

  Mercer Wallace, the biggest, blackest man in the room, was the first to notice my arrival as I let the door swing shut behind me and took off my coat and scarf. “Don’t look so surprised, Cooper,” he called to me, waving me in and bending his head toward the motley collection of strays in the holding pen. “Welcome to our Salvation Army outpost. C’mon aboard.”

  I knew most of the cops on the team, and chatted with those who had not been at the hospital this morning as I worked my way through the group to reach the desk at which Mercer had seated himself.

  Wallace continued when I reached his post. “Peterson’s inside waiting for McGraw to get here. The Commissioner and McGraw did a stand-up on the evening news broadcast. The usual crap-urging the public to stay calm, asking for help. Mayor offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the conviction of the killer. Hotline started to ring immediately, everybody looking to give up their nearest and dearest for the money.”

  I looked over Anna’s shoulder and saw that she was up to the forty-seventh entry in the tips book. Years ago she had given me the odds that only one in sixty calls usually had any relevance to the investigation, so it didn’t surprise me when she leaned her head back, rolled her eyes at me for dramatic effect, and went back to recording the notes that were most probably an exercise in futility. It would be the job of a couple of members of the team to follow through on every one of the messages no matter how far-fetched they seemed, because sandwiched in among them might be the real thing-a call from someone who knew the killer and was willing to sell his soul for the financial reward.

  “Hey, Blondie, get your cash on the table. We’re up right after the commercial break.” Chapman’s voice boomed into the squad room as he emerged from the hallway adjacent to the lieutenant’s office, chewing a mouthful from the slice of pizza he held in one hand. “TV’s back here in the detectives’ locker room. Move it!”

  Mercer pushed away from his desk and prodded me in the back. “Let’s go, Alex. My money’s on you. Besides, that’s where the food is, so we might as well humor him.”

  I followed Mercer around the corner and down the corridor to its end. Rows of battered dark green lockers lined the walls of a twenty- by fifteen-foot room. The furnishings featured a Mr. Coffee machine, a vintage 1940s-style Amana refrigerator, a television set, and a large rectangular table that was covered with soda cans, three pizza boxes, a carton that at one time had held two dozen Dunkin‘ Donuts in a variety of flavors, and half-empty packages of nachos, pretzels, and assorted brands of cigarettes. The sole artwork displayed on the only wall without lockers was a centerfold from some old issue ofPenthouse, with a head shot of Janet Reno superimposed on the voluptuous body of the nineteen-year-old manicurist who had posed for the layout. I remembered that Reno had visited the precinct in late ’96 for a photo op when she delivered some of the Crime Bill money to the Police Commissioner and I chuckled at the fond memento that her visit had inspired.

  “Category tonight is Famous Leaders, Coop. I’m going for fifty. Gonna start this investigation on an optimistic note.”

  Chapman took the bill from his wallet and placed it on the table while reaching for another slice. He shoved the box across to me and I opened the lid for Mercer, noting that it was ice cold and covered with grease spots. “Damn, that stuff’s been sitting here since four o’clock this afternoon, girl. Pass. My fifty’s on the filly, Chapman.”

  “Hold it, Mercer. This is his field,” I cautioned as he reached for his money. Chapman had majored in history at Fordham and it was one of the topics he could beat me at easily.

  “You used to have balls, Cooper. What happened? Famous leaders-you read the newspaper every day-maybe it’s current, not old, news. If it’s some relative of Mercer’s heading a Tutsi tribe on the Dark Continent or the Baltic president of an abracadabra-stan that didn’t exist until three weeks ago, you’ll drop me in a heartbeat. Get it up, here’s Trebek.”

  “I’m good for it. I left my wallet in the other room.”

  Alex Trebek had just revealed the Final Jeopardy answer to his three contestants. I saw the name Medina Sidonia on the screen and was clueless.

  Chapman was poker-faced, waiting for me to guess first. With all of the vocal authority I could muster, I gave him the question: “Who was the head of the Brooklyn faction of the Gambino family before John Gotti?”

  “Bad answer,” he shot back at me, washing his pizza down with a jelly doughnut. “Señor Sidonia-a Spanish nobleman, by the way, and not a goombah, Miss Cooper-was the commander in chief of the Spanish Armada, leading the doomed sailors up the coast with the backup assistance of the land army of Alessandro Farnese, the Duke of Parma-”

  “I guess I’m buying dinner,” I threw back over my shoulder as I walked away from Mercer and Mike, impressed anew with Mike’s almost encyclopedic knowledge of military history. “Sorry to take you down with me, Wallace. I owe you on that one. I’m going back out to talk to Anna.”

  I emerged from the locker room to see Chief McGraw standing in the open doorway of Peterson’s office. The lieutenant had an old wooden easel next to his desk, on which was propped a large sketch pad opened to the first sheet on which someone had neatly lettered “ Mid-Manhattan Hospital.” McGraw was suggesting that they go into the back for the briefing, so he could see how the story was playing on New York 1, a local TV station that repeated the news headlines every half-hour.

  Mercer had stopped short behind me, whispering in my ear: “McGraw has probably only seen himself on the tube six or seven times since the press conference an hour ago, but he never seems to get enough, does he?”

  As the two of them came out, Peterson signaled to us to go back inside the locker room, handing the easel to Mercer, while he walked to the edge of the squad room and called out the names of the three other men he wanted in attendance for the briefing. Since McGraw was ignoring my presence, I walked on in ahead to make sure that Mike wasn’t standing in front of the tube doing his imitation of the Chief. He was watching the newscast, which was running with a print of the next morning’s tabloid headlines over the familiar image of the entrance to the hospital:MAYHEM AT MID-MANHATTAN. Reporters were
clustered around the mayor as he decried the fate of Gemma Dogen and affirmed his confidence in the city’s medical centers.

  “Wait ‘til superdick finds out he didn’t get any air time,” Chapman chuckled. “He hates getting bumped by the mayor.”

  “Maybe you’ll want to tell him yourself. He’s about five steps behind us,” I cautioned.

  Mercer followed after me and set up the easel. He flipped over the top sheet and revealed the first in a series of sketches that one of the police artists had already prepared with a layout of the hospital buildings in order to familiarize the bosses with the territory. Though the rough diagram didn’t show it, we all knew the complex had a larger population than half of the towns and villages in the entire country. There were dozens of entrances and exits to streets, garages, and other structures; there were miles of corridors lined with offices, laboratories, storage rooms, and surgical theaters; and thousands worked in, visited, or used its facilities every day of the year.

  Lieutenant Peterson led McGraw into the crowded area in the back of the locker room, followed by three detectives from the task force. They were the ones who had spent the day starting the groundwork at the hospital, patiently speaking to witness after witness to see whether anyone had seen or heard anything unusual during the preceding day or night. Peterson shoved his glasses on top of his head, told us all to take our seats around the table, and directed Mercer to begin with what he had learned about the deceased. Chief McGraw stood off to the side, arms folded and cigarette dangling from the corner of his tightly pursed lips, positioned so he could see each of us as well as the TV screen, which had been muted but continued to replay the frenzied scene in front of the medical center.

  Laura had sent me off with a standard D.A. Office’s homicide Redweld, the rust-colored accordion folder that would expand and then multiply quickly throughout the course of this kind of investigation. I removed the legal pads she had placed inside-several blank and two filled with the notes Sarah and I had assembled during the day for this meeting-while each of the cops opened the pocket-sized steno pads that would be their lifelines to the case. We would all be taking notes as Mercer began to speak.