Likely To Die

by Linda Fairstein

  We walked downstairs and the precinct commander directed us out the back door and down an alley that led out to Lexington Avenue to avoid the camera crews staking out the front of the station house. We turned in a separate direction from Mercer and waved good-bye as Mike led me to his car.

  “What’s your gut say on this one, Mike?”

  “Confused at the moment. I want this guy bad and the blood puts him over the top. Then I look at him and I gotta think, maybe there was a second guy, an accomplice. That would certainly help explain why she didn’t have a chance.”

  “Yeah. Maybe we’re just tired at this point. It’ll look better tomorrow.”

  “I called my mother. For your sake, so you know you didn’t miss anything, I mean. She said the Final Jeopardy question tonight was about physics-something about the quantum theory.”

  “Forget it. I plead ignorance. It’d be my luck to get on the show and lose ‘cause the big question would be about calculus or the New Testament or some of those topics I couldn’t bet a nickel on, you know? Physics is one of them.”

  “Me, too.” Mike was cruising up Third Avenue toward the block my apartment was on, ignoring the string of red lights and making the drive in under ten minutes.

  “She was a real beauty, wasn’t she? Such a class act.”

  I looked quizzically at Mike. “Gemma Dogen?”

  “No, sorry. I was just thinking about Grace Kelly, from the movie tonight. She looked fabulous in this one with Cary Grant. But I remember the moment I fell in love with her, when I saw her inDial M for Murder. Plain and simple, dressed in those dowdy clothes, with that grainy color film.”

  “Great flick.” We both had a weakness for classic movies.

  “I think she looked even more beautiful when she wasn’t all dolled up, like in the scene at the end ofDial M. She’s been in jail for the murder, then they decide to test her story and they let her go home. Remember? Man, she looked so vulnerable, you just had to love her.”

  “I never realized you liked your women so vulnerable, Mike,” I said, intending the line as a joke.

  He pulled in the driveway in front of my building and waited for one of the doormen to open my car door. “Not everybody can handle the self-sufficient types like you, Blondie. It’s nice to be needed every once in a while.”

  Take your best shot, Chapman, I thought to myself as the car pulled away and I walked inside. What would I have to do to look to the rest of the world as vulnerable as I felt?

  I emptied the mailbox of its usual impersonal tidings and took the slow elevator ride to my empty apartment. I didn’t bother to hang up my coat but simply threw it on the ottoman in the living room.

  The change from the precinct’s soda vending machine weighed on the threads in my jacket pocket, so I reached in and stacked the quarters on my dresser before hanging the suit in my closet. I had forgotten to return Gemma’s apartment keys to Mercer and laid the chain, with its souvenir of London ’s Tower Bridge, on my bedside table next to the thick volume of Trollope. No one would be needing them tonight.

  At least by this time tomorrow I’d have the company of a cold-nosed weimaraner to console me.

  13

  I WAS UP AT 6:45 ON FRIDAY MORNING AND out of the shower by seven when Chapman called. “Shut off your radio and turn on the tube. I haven’t checked theToday show yet but Jim Ryan’s leading with the story on the local news. He’s got great sources. Says we’re holding a blood-stained psycho in the med center murder case.”

  I clicked the remote to activate the set but Ryan was already on to the story of the subway shooting in the Bronx IRT station. “Damn. I just missed it.”

  “If you’re coming to the station house before you go to your office this morning, I’ll give you a lift, okay?”

  “Fine. I’ll be ready in twenty minutes. Pick me up around the corner, in front of P. J. Bernstein’s.” I finished blow-drying my hair and tried to bring myself to life with some mascara and a touch of blusher. I was sick of the somber colors of the winter wools I had worn throughout this dreary week and decided to lighten the palette and perhaps, thereby, my mood. I sifted through my clothes for a favorite Escada suit-lipstick red with black trim on the collar and around the kick pleat.

  The deli owner greeted me warmly when I walked into Bernstein’s and ordered two dozen bagels, rolls, doughnuts, and enough coffee cups to earn me a moderately pleasant welcome to the squad room.

  Mike’s car was curbside when I emerged with my small load. He drove downtown to the 17th Precinct station house, gnawing at a piece of coffee cake held in one hand and steering with the other. I picked up thePost from the car seat and found Mickey Diamond’s byline on page 3:DOC DIES DEFYING RAPIST-SUSPECT HELD IN QUESTIONING.

  There were no reporters outside the building when Mike and I arrived. We walked in together, past the sergeant on duty at the front desk and the uniformed cops in the muster room who were about to turn out for a day on foot patrol, 8A.M. to 4P.M.

  Lieutenant Peterson was already at the desk that had become his command center since Wednesday morning. He lived fifty miles outside of the city but had spent the night-or the three hours’ sleep he had allowed himself-on a cot in the Homicide Squad office farther uptown.

  “Good morning, Alexandra. Morning, Mike. Had some progress overnight. Albany came up with a hit on the fingerprints and we got an ID on Pops.”

  Peterson handed Mike the printout of the New York State Identification System rap sheet. Chapman read from it aloud. “ ‘Austin Charles Bailey. Date of birth, October 12, 1934.’ Makes him sixty-three. Looks like he’s got about twenty priors. Burglary, grand larceny, possession of stolen property, burglary again.” He flipped the pages, his eyes scanning the list faster than he could call out the charges.

  “Last one, twelve years ago. Murder. Not guilty by reason of insanity.”

  Peterson had already checked out the rest. “Yeah, institutionalized in the state loony bin for the criminally insane in Rockland County. Only problem is, he walked off the campus two and a half years ago and nobody reported him missing.”

  “Who’d he kill?”

  “His old lady. He’d been in and out of mental hospitals most of his life. Both of ‘em were drinking. She hit him with a sixteen-ounce bottle of Colt.45-a broken one. That accounts for the scar that runs across his cheek and down his neck. He went loco and-”

  Chapman broke in. “Let me guess. He stabbed her with, what? A kitchen knife?”

  “Serrated steak knife.”

  “Not once or twice, right, Loo?”

  “About twenty-two points of entry. Not to mention some extra slashes on the face just for good measure.”

  “Typical domestic,” I murmured. It fit the pattern of most familial homicides. Not only the fatal wounds but the savage disfigurement of the victim in addition, usually saved for someone the killer knows well enough to hate.

  Many batterers were never violent outside the home against strangers, saving their venom for the people closest to them while presenting a different face to the world. But for scores of others, the first killing broke down the boundaries and expanded the focus of the rage.

  “Still feeling sorry for the old guy, Coop?”

  I was already shifting gears, mentally and emotionally. The challenge was no longer figuring out who had killed Gemma Dogen. Now I needed to think in legal terms, to build the careful and logical blocks toward cementing a circumstantial case that would withstand procedural challenges in a court of law.

  “Is he talking this morning?”

  “I haven’t let anybody near him yet. Mercer’s got the best rapport with him so far. I’ll send him back in as soon as he arrives.”

  “Mike, why don’t you take him some breakfast and see if you can make nice to him while we’re waiting for Mercer.”

  My beeper went off as Mike opened the shopping bags of food and coffee to distribute to the guys in the squad room. I unhooked the little black device from my waistband and checked the nu
mber that appeared on the screen.

  “Schaeffer,” I said. Chapman paused at the door and waited for me to return the call to Bill Schaeffer, the serologist who ran the laboratory at the Medical Examiner’s Office.

  He answered his own phone. “Didn’t want to disturb you during the night but thought you’d want to know first thing. Thatis human blood on the pants you sent down to me last night. Sure you all knew that but I figured you’d want it confirmed.”

  Things were falling into place. I thanked Doctor Schaeffer and nodded at Chapman, mouthing the word “blood” as I gave him a thumbs-up.

  “What else can you tell me?”

  “I’ll have preliminary DNA results for you in the next day or so. We’re working on it. Can you get me a sample of the suspect’s blood, too? Just on the chance he nicked himself anywhere and it’s on the deceased’s clothing.”

  “Great. Sure thing. Sarah can write up a court order to get a sample from the defendant this morning. You want to send someone up here to draw his blood?

  “And thanks for the call, Bill. I’ll speak to you over the weekend.” Setting up the gels and running the probes for DNA results, the genetic fingerprinting that could determine to a virtual certainty the source of the blood on Pops’s pants, was a process that could take as long as two or three months. A new technique, known as the PCR testing of DNA, would give Schaeffer an early reading, which could be confirmed by later tests, in as short a time as forty-eight hours.

  “Nothing much in these but I’ve made copies of all of ‘em for you,” Peterson said, handing me the police reports he’d been reviewing. Each one summarized an interview with a hospital employee or official concerning their whereabouts and activities in the hours before and after the stabbing.

  I glanced at the contents but my thoughts were in the room with Austin Bailey. I fast-forwarded to worries about how tough an adversary the judge would appoint to represent him. I knew that every step we took from this moment on would be scrutinized under the harsh and unforgiving eye of the trial and appellate courts.

  “Mercy, mercy,” Wallace said, looking at his watch as he walked into the squad room and saw Peterson motioning him over to where we stood. “I didn’t realize you were holding a sunrise service today or I would have been on board hours ago.”

  “Get in here. We need you to go to work on Pops right away. We’re going to have to get him downtown to be arraigned by the end of the day or some knee-jerk’s likely to void the arrest,” Peterson said. “I want you to see who you’re dealing with.”

  The courts in New York have a very strict rule about the length of time during which a defendant may be held without the opportunity to appear before a judge for a bail hearing. The latest trend was the complete dismissal of the charges when police and prosecutors dragged their feet getting the suspect into the courtroom.

  Peterson briefed Wallace on Bailey’s sheet and background. “Sounds like he ain’t goin‘ anywhere except back to his padded cell. Lemme see what he’ll give me this morning.”

  Wallace picked up two cups of coffee, a bagel, and a doughnut. He walked to the still open door of the holding pen and greeted Austin Bailey, who was stretched out the length of the wooden bench. The prisoner-we’d all assumed his status as a “guest” had been downgraded to a custodial relationship during the night-sat up and appeared to smile as he talked to Mercer.

  After the detective handed Pops his breakfast, he led him back down the hallway to the interrogation room.

  Wallace emerged briefly to come back to Peterson’s office, pick up a pad, and suggest to us that we watch some of the conversation through the two-way mirror. “Don’t want to lose this good thing, baby,” Mercer said aloud, to no one in particular. Then he nodded at me. “Think Eddie Floyd, Coop,” he urged, smiling and whistling the chorus of the R amp;B singer’s only big hit, “Knock on Wood,” as he turned around to head back to talk with Bailey.

  “Anybody Mirandize him since last night?” I asked, referring to the Supreme Court ruling that had crept into the criminal justice lexicon as a verb, a noun, and a landmark decision.

  “Don’t worry, that’s what I’ll start with. I’ll read him his rights but I don’t think it’ll much matter. I’m not sure we’re talking on the same wavelength.”

  Mercer returned to start his session with Pops. I walked over to the adjacent room and peered through the glass. Both men sat at the Formica-topped table in the bare room. Mercer was clean-shaven and well dressed, sitting erect and talking with Bailey, who was taking bites of his food and sips of his coffee. The older man was slumped over the table, his few front teeth nipping at the doughnut while he slurped from the cup without lifting it to his mouth.

  Detective Wallace was warming up his subject, chatting about himself and his father, trying to find some level on which to connect with the broken figure he was hoping to engage in a coherent conversation.

  I walked into the hallway, chastising myself for mingling the pity I felt when I looked at Pops with the outrage I had internalized because of Gemma Dogen’s murder.

  Chapman came toward me and we reentered the room with the viewing window. Mercer had thrown away the paper cups and was eyeballing Austin Bailey across the table. He was explaining the right to remain silent to his target, using language and paraphrases that a second-grade child would have been able to understand.

  I wondered if Mike was thinking, as I was, about the futility of this questioning. A killer with this kind of psychiatric history would necessitate a competency hearing and I was already cross-examining the shrinks who would testify for the defense that Arthur Bailey was unable to stand trial.

  As we watched Wallace try to hold his subject’s attention, Bailey reached for the old black rotary phone on the end of the table. He was ignoring Mercer and picked up the receiver to dial a series of numbers.

  “Hello, Ma? Yeah. Charlie’s back-”

  Mercer’s long arm gently wrested the phone from Pops’s grip and replaced it on the hook.

  “I wish he’d just let the guy talk,” I said under my breath to Chapman. “Now he’s going to claim he wasn’t allowed to make his phone call.”

  “Coop, you know where that phone goes? It’s a friggin‘ intercom. You can’t dial out-it only goes to extensions in the station house. He’s not talking to his mother, he’s talking to Harvey the rabbit, for Chrissakes. I don’t even know why we’re wasting our time with this nonsense. Let’s just take him down to Criminal Court and get on with it,” Mike said, walking out of the airless room.

  I followed him back to Peterson’s office. We were trying to figure out what to do next when Wallace joined us.

  “He says he’ll talk to you, Cooper. Might as well come in and see what you think. I wouldn’t bother with your video unit. This is either an act worthy of the Ringling Brothers or he’s really deranged. I think this is one scene you wouldn’t want to show a jury on videotape.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and retraced my steps, this time going into the interrogation room with Mercer.

  Pops looked up at me when I closed the door behind us and offered a grin in my direction. “Ruthless and toothless, ma’am,” Bailey said by way of introduction. “That’s what the doctors always say about me.” Dead on.

  Wallace told him who I was and why I was there as I pulled one of the chairs alongside Mercer’s position.

  “I want to talk with you about some things that happened at the hospital, Mr. Bailey. D’you understand me?”

  “I’m sorry about the hospital, ma’am. I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  How much more frightening, it seemed to me, Gemma Dogen’s struggle must have been against a madman with whom she had been unable to reason when she was pleading for her life.

  “That’s what I want to talk about. I want you to tell me what you’re so sorry about so I can tell the judge.”

  It would be imperative for me to prove to a judge, and then to a jury, that Bailey had been given his rights in a manner he compre
hended if there were any statements he was about to make that I wanted to introduce into evidence.

  “Did Detective Wallace tell you that you don’t have to talk to me, Mr. Bailey?”

  “Ido want to talk to you, lady. I haven’t talked to a nice girl since my wife passed on.”

  “You see, you don’t have to answer any-”

  “She talked to the knife, didn’t she? That doctor talked to the knife.”

  A chill passed through me like a bolt of lightning. Was he talking about Gemma?

  “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t talk to me. Didn’t talk to nobody. She talked to the knife all right.”

  Now I had to bring him back to a logical conversation. I had to finish some kind of Miranda warning but not lose his willingness to talk about the killing.

  Suddenly Pops’s facial expression changed, his mouth drew tightly closed and his hands clasped against both ears as though responding to a loud noise. I leaned forward toward him as Mercer reached for one of his arms and pulled it away from the side of his head. Pops rocked back and forth in his chair, wailing for us to get him some Kleenex. Mercer nodded at me and I got to my feet, running down the hallway to grab some tissues from my purse. I returned with a handful of them and placed them in front of the prisoner, who smiled and began to shred them into tiny bits, ball them up, and press them in each ear.

  He kept rocking as he stuffed the Kleenex, which hung in little strips past his lobes. “Charlie’s talking to me. See?” he said, looking at Mercer. “I told you that’s who tells me what to do. Nothin‘ you can blame on me ’cause everythin‘ I ever done is what Charlie makes me do.”

  “Tell her who Charlie is, Pops.”

  “He’s my brother, lady. Born the same day I was only he never left the hospital. Kept him there all these years, but he always talks to Mama and me. Every day. Tells me what to do.”

  I looked at Mercer and tried to find an outlet for my temper. My elbow rested on the table, head in my hand, as I struggled with a plan for how to proceed.