Likely To Die

by Linda Fairstein

  Chapman asked DuPre a few more questions while I recorded some details on my pad. We thanked him and asked him to stick with us a bit longer while we spoke to other witnesses, reminding him not to discuss his statement with anyone else.

  Peterson ushered him out of the room and Chapman went to get Coleman Harper.

  Dr. Harper was still in a white lab coat when he walked into the office more than three hours after he had been brought from the hospital to the station house to retell the story of the discovery he and DuPre had made. He was a little shorter than DuPre-about my height-with flecks of premature gray in his dark brown hair. He was stocky and solidly built, and his left leg jiggled nervously as he sat in the chair opposite me at the desk.

  We shook hands as I explained to him why I needed to question him and told him to relax.

  “It’s really weird, Miss Cooper. I’ve never been involved in anything like this before. Where do I start?”

  “Don’t worry. Most witnesses we meet have never been through anything like this. Mike and I have some questions to ask you.”

  Chapman started with the usual background information. He got Harper talking about himself and his credentials.

  “I first affiliated with Mid-Manhattan about ten years ago. But I left, it was a year or so after Dr. Dogen arrived here, so I wasn’t around for much of her tenure. I moved back down to Nashville, where my wife’s family lived, to continue my neurological practice there.

  “Then, when my marriage broke up, I just thought it was time to try to come back to a great teaching hospital and do some of the things I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve been here since last September.”

  “And you’re here on a fellowship?” I asked, looking at Chapman’s briefing notes.

  “Well, yes. It’s a bit of a trade-off, actually, but once my wife left me I decided to try and do things that would makeme happy for a change. I’ve always been interested in neurosurgery. So I took a healthy pay cut for this position-I’m a little older than most of the men and women in the program-but the upside is now I can assist in the operating room. I may actually go ahead and try to get into a neurosurgical program here. Something I should have done a long time ago.”

  I exchanged glances with Chapman and looked down at Harper’s twitching leg. I assumed Mike was thinking like I was and was thankful he didn’t make a crack about how steady Harper’s hands must be for brain surgery. A friendly interview with the local constabulary and the doctor was completely aflutter. It was the kind of effect Mike and I had on lots of people.

  “So you were in the OR when Dr. Dogen was a no-show yesterday morning, am I right?”

  “Yes, yes, I was. Dr. Spector was doing a procedure on a stroke victim. The patient had suffered a stroke on the right side of his brain, actually. I try to watch Spector whenever I can. He’s really a genius.”

  “And he picked you out of the crowd to assist?”

  “Yes, well, so to speak. There were only a dozen or so of us present and only a smaller handful who’d even worked with him on this kind of thing before. It’s quite an honor.”

  “With a good result for the patient, we understand.”

  “Not quite out of the woods yet but looking pretty safe at this point.”

  “Are you involved in this Huntington’s disease program with Spector as well?”

  “Not officially. But I’m certainly counting on his support to get into the neurosurgical program. And, of course, my years of experience as a neurologist have given me an opportunity to study the disorder. You could certainly say I’m following his work closely.”

  “So how did you come to be with Dr. DuPre this evening?”

  “I had gone to the library to find a volume I needed. When I got there, a bunch of my colleagues were talking about Spector’s new X rays of a patient he’s been studying and DuPre suggested we go take a look. The X rays were mounted down in radiology. I wanted to wait and finish my research but-”

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but whose idea was it?”

  “John DuPre. He told me he couldn’t wait for me because he had to get home for dinner and asked me to go along with him right then.”

  Great. Half an hour into the case and I’ve already got conflicting facts, just on the minor stuff. DuPre says it was Harper’s idea to go to radiology, Harper says DuPre pushed him to do it.

  Inconsistencies, Rod Squires used to lecture me in our training sessions, the hallmarks of truth. A pain in the ass, if you asked me. It’s natural for different people to see the same events from different perspectives, we were encouraged to believe, but it sure could foul up a good case.

  “Okay, so Dr. DuPre and you went to the second floor-then what happened?”

  Harper’s version dovetailed with DuPre’s from that point on. “I mean, once I saw the blood I thought immediately of Gemma. Has he admitted anything yet?”

  “Let me askyou, Dr. Harper, did you hear him say anything about Dr. Dogen or the assault?”

  “No, he barely spoke in my presence. But I ran down the hall to use the telephone. He wasn’t making much sense between the time I got back to him and the time your detective got there. Man seems unstable to me.”

  “Did you know Dr. Dogen well?”

  “Depends on what you mean by that. She wasn’t an easy-”

  Lieutenant Peterson opened the door. “Excuse me, Alex. Sarah’s here, and I think we’re almost ready to go with some stand-ins. And keep away from the windows in the squad room. Somebody’s flapping his mouth to the press. You got a couple of camera crews setting up in front of the building and if they could get a shot of you up here I’m sure they’d love it.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Harper. Sorry to interrupt you. Would you mind waiting across the hall again? We’ll try to get back to you as soon as we finish up some of this other business.”

  “Have a slice of pizza, Doc,” Chapman said as he got to his feet and gave Coleman Harper a slap on the back. “We got some homeless guys watching the ball game inside who could use a good checkup. Maybe you and Dr. DuPre could make yourselves useful.”

  12

  WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?“ SARAH asked, already set up at a desk with her laptop computer.

  “Try cranking out a couple of warrants for those two shopping carts. One of them belongs to Pops, the other one to a friend of his. See if Ramirez and Losenti can help you with the probable cause-they know a lot more about the facts than I do at this point. Peterson wants to run some lineups, and I may need help interviewing a couple of the witnesses if they make IDs. Pace yourself, please, will you?”

  I left her in the squad room and walked down the hallway to the lineup cubicle. Wallace and Chapman were trying to arrange Pops and the five fillers in positions for the viewing. Jerry McCabe was handing each of them a clean, V-necked surgical blouse so all of their clothing would be similar.

  Pops had been relieved of the bloody pants and was sitting in the fourth chair from the door holding a placard with his number printed on it and talking to himself.

  “No good, Jerry,” I said as I scanned the pack. “The two closest to me look much too young.”

  “Yeah, well,you try finding stand-ins at this hour of the night. They’re not exactly throwing themselves at me.”

  “Send one of the uniformed guys down to that all-night drugstore on the corner of Lex. Get some talcum powder. I’d just like to gray them up a bit so they look a little more like Pops, okay?”

  Mercer was telling the array what they had to do to earn their five dollars for the night. Hold their numbers in front of their chests, on their feet when he told them to be, approach the mirror and stand before it for as long as directed, facing front before turning to display each profile, then come back and sit in their seats. A half-hour’s work as a lineup extra would keep these guys in Thunderbird wine for the night.

  I walked out to check on Sarah. She was pounding away at her laptop computer and looked up to tell me that Pops’s clothing was on its way to the lab for anal
ysis.

  Anna Bartoldi was still manning the hotline phone in the corner of the squad room. She got up from her desk and passed me on her way out to the soda machine. “Dinner?”

  I waved Sarah along and the three of us crossed the hallway to pick up a soda from the vending machine and munch on a slice of lukewarm pizza. “Calls still coming in?” I asked Anna.

  “I’m up over three hundred fifty. So far, four women have turned in their husbands and six suspect their boyfriends. It’ll slow up for me tomorrow once word gets out we got a candidate.”

  I put down the pizza and took the soda can with me when I heard Mercer’s voice booming out my name. When I got back to the lineup room, he was sprinkling Johnson’s baby powder on the heads of the younger fillers and I viewed them through the window to compare them to their more mature companions. “Much better, Mercer. Let’s not waste any more time.”

  Peterson’s men had assembled four people to look at the array. One was a third-year student at Minuit who had worked in the sixth-floor library-down the hall from Dogen’s office-until one in the morning on the night she was killed. Two others were the cleaning staff who covered that shift, and the last was a nurse’s aide who sneaked into the medical school on her breaks so she could use the phones at the reception desk to call and talk to her boyfriend at odd times throughout the night.

  I stood in the back of the darkened viewing room while Wallace and McCabe led each of the witnesses through in turn. None of the group looked familiar to the medical student or the nurse’s aide. But both of the women who cleaned the professors’ offices each night recognized the man who called himself Pops.

  I left the room and told Mike to bring the two housekeepers in to me, one at a time, in Peterson’s office.

  I took out a fresh pad and headed it with the date and time: 11:45P.M. Pedigree information on each had already been documented by the detectives who had canvassed the hospital, so I reviewed the Xerox of the notes that told me that Ludmila Grascowicz and Graciela Martinez were both assigned to clean the fifth- and sixth-floor offices in the Minuit Medical Center.

  Both women were immigrants-Ludmila from Poland and Graciela from the Dominican Republic. The former had been at Mid-Manhattan for three years and the latter for six months. Ludmila had requested a change of assignment to day duty after the murder of Gemma Dogen and Graciela had resigned altogether. Both of them knew Dogen by sight since she was often around in the midnight-to-eight shift that they had worked. Neither had much to do with her because they had strict instructions never to enter Dogen’s office during the night. She didn’t like to be disturbed when she was doing her research and writing so her chambers were always cleaned by the day staff and only if her door had been left open. The doctor didn’t like intrusions and she didn’t like anyone touching her files.

  Ludmila’s accent was as thick as her waist and her ankles. Her chest was heaving as she tried to answer my questions, making the sign of the cross after every response. Yes, during the last few weeks she had often seen the man who was holding the number 4 in the lineup. He had tried to talk to her several times but she was unable to understand his speech. She came on duty at eleven-thirty Monday evening and had encountered the man in the stairwell between the fifth and sixth floors. No, there was nothing unusual about his appearance or his clothing. But, then, she usually averted her eyes when she approached him since she had repeatedly complained to security about his presence after hours in the medical college. One last sign of the cross, and an extra blessing for Dr. Dogen, and Ludmila had no more to add.

  Graciela’s jumpiness made Ludmila seem almost calm by contrast. She shared responsibility for cleaning the same two floors. Although she and Ludmila rarely communicated with each other, they had joined forces to complain about Pops’s nocturnal wanderings. The water cup that someone had given the young woman to fortify her for her conversation with me was spilling its supply over the edge onto the desk where I was taking notes because her hand was shaking so badly. Graciela was certain she had seen this man on the sixth floor after midnight in the early hours of Tuesday morning coming out of the men’s room. She didn’t call security because they never listened to her when she tried to make herself heard. But she went immediately to the library to clean there since she knew it was likely that at least one of the students would be burning the midnight oil.

  I thanked the women for their cooperation and passed them on to the lieutenant to arrange for their rides home.

  Sarah came into Peterson’s office to see what we would do next. The warrants were completed and she would make certain they would be signed in the morning as soon as the judge took the bench in the arraignment part.

  We walked back to the lineup room and looked through the two-way mirror. Mercer had rearranged the area after the stand-ins had been discharged and was again sitting at the table with Pops, talking with him in a quiet, steady manner in an effort to gain his confidence and trust. Sarah and I had watched him do it hundreds of times.

  “It’s odd, isn’t it?” Sarah remarked. “They always look so benign when you get these guys into a station house or a courtroom. All the way here in the cab I was hating this man-rethinking my beliefs about capital punishment. A murder like this and I think I’m capable of giving the lethal injection myself.”

  “I thought the same thing the moment I got here and saw him drenched in Gemma Dogen’s blood. How do youdo that to another human being and just walk away?”

  “Then you see the guy half an hour later and he looks absolutely pathetic, doesn’t he?”

  We were standing with our arms crossed, peering in at the duo. “He doesn’t even look strong enough to have taken on someone as fit as Dogen. I guess, like Chet Kirschner figures, that’s the advantage he had in surprising her.”

  “Do we know who he is yet?”

  “Mercer’s trying to get that now. Losenti printed him when they brought him in. Figured they got him for criminal trespass if they couldn’t hold him on anything else. They’ll run the prints through the computer and hopefully have an answer by morning.”

  Sarah stifled a yawn.

  “Let’s make some decisions about what’s next and let me get you home.”

  We walked back to Peterson’s office and asked him to bring Mercer and Mike in to give us a sense of where we stood.

  Mercer came in shaking his head. “He’s falling asleep on me. I don’t think there’s any point in going on tonight. It’s almost one o’clock. Let’s put him to bed, find out who he is, and I’ll start on him fresh in the morning.”

  “You girls oughtta go home,” Peterson added. “Pops is a keeper. He’s under on the trespass. What do we give out about the murder?”

  Sarah and I looked at each other. At the moment, we had nothing at all except the potential for a circumstantial case. “Let McGraw tell them we’ve got no charges on anybody. Still an open case. There’ll be a feeding frenzy if we say much else.”

  Mike came in and closed the door behind him. “You got anything?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Almost an arrest for public lewdness. Your hospital homeless are in the Anti-Crime Office watching old movies on the television. The short guy in the gray sweats, turns out he’s T. T. Thompson. The T.T. stands for ‘Tippy-Toes’-has fourteen collars for burglary. He’s in there looking atTo Catch a Thief with the rest of them. All of a sudden he stands up, drops his pants, and starts giving himself a lube job. I don’t know if he’s playing with himself because Grace Kelly looks so great or because the movie’s about a cat burglar who gets better stuff than T.T. ever dreamed existed. I practically had to smack him to get him to stop.”

  “How about anything more useful tous, Mikey?”

  “Well, the second shopping cart belongs to another tunnel dweller who’s in there. Agosto Marín. He’s known as ‘Can Man.’ Seems he wheels the cart around the outside of Mid-Manhattan all day picking soda cans out of recycling bins and garbage pails. Sells ‘em to get the money to bu
y crack. Says you’ll find all he has to his name are several hundred cans-you don’t need a warrant to look.

  “At the moment, Can Man is sober. And he’s swearing to me that Pops was with him in the tunnel from a little bit after midnight until the two of them went above ground Wednesday morning. He knows it was that night because by the time they came up at daybreak, it was snowing. And itdid snow Wednesday morning, remember?”

  “What the hell have we got here, huh?” Mercer asked of no one in particular.

  “We’ve got a blood-soaked suspect who won’t tell us who he is. Opportunity? You bet. ‘Cause he lives in the hospital, illegally. Motive? Depends on what we decide the motive is,” Mike answered. “If it was a sexual assault attempt that failed, I’d say just by looking at him he’d have trouble getting it up.”

  “Wait a minute.” I interrupted Mike’s narrative. “You’re telling me you know bylooking at someone whether or not he can get it up? I’ve got friends who would pay dearly for your services, Mr. Chapman. Let’s leave that point for later debate. This could have been an aborted attempt at a rapeor a robbery. We still don’t know if anything’s missing from her office.”

  He went on. “We’ve got two people who put Pops on or near the sixth floor within the probable time range of the murder. And we got an aluminum can-collecting junkie who’s gonna be his alibi. We got no weapon. No DNA. Unlikely to find prints, according to the Crime Scene guys-but, then, you could pick up surgical gloves anyplace you look in that hospital.”

  “I’m getting nowhere with him tonight. Let’s knock it off and pick up again tomorrow,” Mercer said.

  The excitement of a solution to this brutal killing had lifted all our spirits several hours back and now we were about to crash from the combination of our exhaustion and the stalled progress of the investigation. Detectives were signing out and saying goodnight as they ferried the assorted witnesses-civilians and physicians-to their homes. We packed up our case folders and notepads, figuring our schedules for the next day. Mercer offered to take Sarah, and Mike said he’d drop me at my apartment.