by Lutz, John
Chapter Thirteen
Coop knew Sue Coppolino was twenty-three, but she looked too young to be in a women’s prison rather than a juvenile detention center. She was about twenty pounds heavier than the attractive woman in her newspaper photos taken shortly after Marlee Clark’s murder. Her face was pale, with cheeks reddened and puffed slightly by acne, and she wore no makeup. A ruined child. Her dark hair was cut short in a way that reminded Coop of Alicia.
From the moment a guard had brought her into the interviewing room, her eyes had been fixed on Deni Green. She paid no attention to Coop.
“I thought you forgot about me,” she said to Deni, as soon as the door closed behind the guard.
“No chance of that,” Deni said. She put her hand across the table and Sue grasped it with both of her own. “I told you, you’re the main reason I’m writing this book. You don’t belong in here.”
Coop was sitting next to Deni, facing Sue Coppolino. They were alone in the small, pale green room, at a wooden table bolted to the floor, with three wooden chairs. That was the only furniture. One wall was a mirror that was probably two-way glass. An overhead fixture encased in a wire cage provided the only illumination. The locked door had a tall window in it, outside of which stood the guard, who appeared disinterested even though he glanced into the room every four or five seconds. The room held the scent of stale sweat and desperation that Coop recognized from his days in the department. Hopelessness had seeped with tears and perspiration into the scarred wooden table.
“Have you got any news for me?” Sue asked. “What did your friends say—the ones you were going to talk to about my case?”
Deni hesitated.
“You know,” Sue hurried on, “your friends at NBC News and Time magazine and—”
Deni smiled and shook her head. “You’re going to have to be patient, Sue. I know it’s hard. But all that has to wait until my book comes out. That’s the time to start beating the drums. To raise a media outcry about correcting this miscarriage of justice and freeing you. Remember some time ago that convict Hurricane Carter, how he was finally freed after years in prison? Well, I’m going to make freeing you my personal crusade, I promise you.”
Sue’s lips tightened. She blinked back tears.
Deni freed her hand from Sue’s and reached for a notepad. “Right now, though, we have to ask you a few questions.”
Sue’s face hardened. “I’ve heard that so many times….”
“You have nothing to fear from questions, Sue. You’re innocent. I know that.”
“What about him?” Sue asked, seeming to notice Coop for the first time.
Deni looked with Sue at him.
“Do you know I’m innocent?” Sue asked Coop.
“No. But I think there’s a chance you are, or I wouldn’t be here.” It had sickened Coop, the way Deni was playing this young woman’s hopes to get information out of her. He was going to be straight with her.
“Deni said on the phone you were an ex-cop. I don’t trust ex-cops.”
Coop smiled at her. “You’re right in that. Most of us don’t have much compassion for the bad guys.”
“She’s not one of the bad guys,” Deni said. She sounded exasperated. Coop wasn’t buttering up Sue enough.
“I’m being honest,” he said. “Most ex-cops are that, too.”
“I haven’t noticed such a trait,” Sue told him.
“You can start noticing it. If I think you’re innocent I’ll do what I can to help you. If it looks to me like you’re really guilty, I’ll work to leave you right where you are.”
“Take it easy on her,” Deni said. “She’s been put through a horrible ordeal and there’s no justification. She’s completely innocent.”
Sue’s eyes drifted back to Deni. She could never hear that word innocent from her supposed savior often enough. She must have spent hours every day thinking about Deni, imagining what Deni was doing for her in the outside world. Prisoners were so helpless, so easily manipulated by the unscrupulous.
Like Deni Green.
The writer was all business now, opening her notepad, fixing a cool, appraising gaze on Sue. “You’ve told me Marlee showed you a route into her condo complex that would keep you from being seen. And when she was expecting you, she left a gate open and deactivated an alarm.”
Sue nodded. “Right. Marlee was so paranoid about anybody finding out she was a lesbian. She didn’t even want her neighbors to set eyes on me.”
“But the killer got in completely unseen. He must have known about your route in. Could Marlee have told anyone she was expecting you that night?”
“No,” Sue said quickly. She’d been asked that question many times and was bored with it.
“Sue—” began Deni.
Sue squirmed in her chair and made pale fists of her slender hands and fingers. “That’s all I’ve been thinking about in here, and I can’t come up with an answer.”
“She must have let it slip to somebody. Must have let her guard down sometime. Think, Sue, did she mention anyone—”
“No,” said the prisoner stubbornly. “She didn’t let her guard down. Couldn’t. She was a wealthy and famous person. You have no idea how people tried to take advantage of her.”
“But if she met someone who was charming and easy to talk to—”
“You’ve told me about your Ted Bundy theory,” Sue said, “and I’m sorry but I just can’t believe it. Marlee was a public person with a secret she thought could destroy her, or at least cost her a fortune. She would have been very suspicious of a charming stranger trying to worm his way into her confidence. She’d assume he was a reporter.”
“If there had been some man she was close to,” Coop said, “would Marlee have told you about him?”
“Of course! We didn’t have any secrets. She told me often enough I was the one person in the world she trusted. Anyway, she’d had enough of men and simply wouldn’t have been vulnerable in that way to one of them.”
Coop had to ask. “What about another woman?”
Sue stood up from her chair. The guard outside the room caught the sudden movement with one of his sidelong glances and stiffened and stood square to the window in the door.
“I’ll never believe that!” Sue hissed.
“Sit back down,” Coop said. “I told you I’d be honest with you. You’re no fool, and you know I had to ask that question.”
Sue settled back into her chair. “Now you know the answer.”
But Coop wondered if he did.
“We did have to ask you about the possibility of someone else,” Deni said.
Sue shook her head. “Not another woman.”
Deni looked her in the eye. “I told you the footprint we found was made by a man.”
“The man who killed Marlee,” Sue said.
There was another question Coop had to ask. “Did Marlee ever mention a woman named Bette?”
Sue looked down at the table. This question was new, and she gave it careful thought. But in the end she shook her head no. “Not that I can recall.” She looked up at Coop. “Who is she?”
“My daughter. If she and Bette were killed by the same person, I thought there might have been some sort of connection between them in life.”
Sue looked at him for a moment in silence. “Deni told me about that on the phone. I’m sorry.”
Coop smiled at her and nodded, believing her. She was sorry, and that more than anything else made him think there was a real chance she was innocent.
“Had Marlee done any traveling in the weeks before her death?” Deni asked.
“Oh, sure. She was always flying somewhere or other to film a commercial or do commentary on a tennis match. She got back from the U.S. Open only a few days before she died.”
“Sometime, someplace, Marlee met her killer,” Deni said. “And so did Bette Cooper and a lot of other women. We have to find the connecting thread.”
“I wish I could help you!” Sue said, sounding as if she m
ight begin to sob.
Deni smiled beatifically at her, the way Nero might have smiled gazing at a fire. “You are helping, dear! Just keep trying and you’ll remember something critical. Keep thinking about what happened the night of the murder and before.”
Sue didn’t look at them as she said sadly, “Don’t you know that’s all I do think about?”
Outside again, in the bright sunlight, Deni looked at Coop. “I suppose you think I’m an asshole after the way I questioned Sue.”
“You’re using her,” Coop said.
“No more than I have to.”
“For what? So you can write a best-seller?”
“A best-seller that will reveal she didn’t kill Marlee Clark, and set her free,” Deni said.
During the flight back to New York, Deni sat quietly beside Coop. They were flying first class, paid for by Whippet. Deni had made a show of that and reminded Coop of it three times since they’d boarded. But that was all she’d talked about. He knew she was disappointed by the way the interview with Sue Coppelino had gone. Despite the careful preparation Deni had obviously made over the phone, no new ground had been broken.
Somewhere over the Carolinas, Coop noticed Deni staring at the flight steward who’d brought her her third Bloody Mary. The man was handsome in a clothes catalog way and well into his forties. He moved about the cabin smoothly and professionally, smiling warmly, making sure passengers’ needs were being met.
Coop knew Deni was aware he was watching her, but he didn’t ask her why she was observing the attendant so closely. She told him anyway.
“See that attendant?” she said.
“Sure. He’s six feet tall, the only one standing up, and wearing a uniform.”
She ignored his sarcasm. “Consider the opportunities somebody like that has.”
“It’s no way to make pilot.”
She looked pityingly at him and shook her head. “You’re making a joke out of a very serious matter.”
“Only because I think you’re about to make a digression. You remind me of a partner I worked with in the department a long time ago. He’d always look for clues outside if the weather was good, inside if it was raining. And always where the light was best.”
“I know what you mean, but that’s not what I’m doing here. That’s a good-looking, personable guy.”
“It’s part of his job to make people like him.”
“So he’s good at it. That’s my point. On a long flight, in a half-empty plane, he could chat with a woman for a long time. He could give her drinks, make them stronger than she suspected. He could work on her, all seemingly very innocent. People will talk freely with a flight attendant, thinking they’ll never see him again.”
“True enough,” Coop admitted. He knew it was a fallacy that people opened up the most to friends and family. Some matters were more freely discussed with bartenders or even perfect strangers, anonymous confessions that were like trial balloons in the face of God.
“Did your daughter fly anywhere recently?” Deni asked.
He thought back. “She went to California on business a few months ago.”
“Uh-huh.” Deni took a sip of her Bloody Mary. “I bet I’ll find that all the victims took flights not long before their deaths.”
“You may well, but it won’t necessarily mean anything.”
“If there’s any correlation, I’ll find it. You’d be surprised what I can find on-line. I’ll cross-check victims’ flights with airline personnel records and crew rosters. I’m a dedicated hacker, Coop. I don’t give up.”
This new sense of direction had jolted Deni out of her uncharacteristically quiet mood. She talked the rest of the way to La Guardia.
She was still hot on her theory when Coop’s cab dropped her off in front of her Manhattan apartment.
As the cab pulled away, he watched her enter her building. He thought of his own apartment, his own bed, only twenty blocks away. He wondered if he could stay awake until he got there.
He felt utterly exhausted. And he felt like a criminal himself, after the way he and Deni had worked Sue Coppolino, held hope in front of her nose like a carrot. There was actually little hope. It saddened him that a young, vital woman like Coppolino would probably spend the rest of her life in prison, where she would die.
In the dim backseat of the cab rocketing through Manhattan, a mood darker than the night took him over.
“Where we goin’ now, buddy?” the driver asked over his shoulder.
I wish I knew, Coop thought, and recited his address like a lost child.
Chapter Fourteen
Coop sat in his car waiting for Maureen to emerge from the office building in midtown Manhattan where she worked. Her employer was Allied National, one of the giants of the insurance business. Coop wasn’t quite sure what her job title was these days, but she’d been with the company a long time. Insurance seemed to suit her; she was the sort of person who always dwelled on the worst possible outcome.
A steady stream of people issued from the revolving doors of the skyscraper. Maureen stepped out of the crowd, glanced around, saw Coop’s Honda, and headed toward him. Coatless despite the cold, she was wearing a plain gray dress, ugly ankle-high socks, and the usual clunky shoes made, probably, out of old tires. Her bra strap that was barely visible at the shoulder was the light tan color of natural cotton. Her slip and underwear, he knew, would be the same color. Maureen refused to wear chemically dyed clothing next to her skin. Yet she had dyed her hair red. Well, everyone had inconsistencies, but Maureen was so blissfully unaware of hers. He’d learned not to mention them to her. She had become stranger and stranger to him during the final year of their marriage as the stress of being a cop’s wife ate away at her. Never a religious person, after the divorce she had adopted causes as a spiritual substitute. They were mostly causes of concern and gentleness, as if she wanted to distance herself as far as possible from Coop’s violent world that had pervaded and poisoned their married life.
She didn’t smile as she approached the car and got in beside him, bringing a swirl of cold air with her. It was Maureen who had called him and suggested lunch so they might discuss their daughter’s murder.
After saying hello to him she stared glumly ahead. He considered again that if she thought more of herself, took better care of herself, she would still be attractive. But that wasn’t the new Maureen. She had no makeup on today and was wearing her gray mood as she was her gray dress. Coop didn’t blame her. He wasn’t looking forward to lunch either. He had a great deal to tell her, but he didn’t know how she’d react.
He checked traffic and gunned the engine, pulling out in front of a lumbering Madison Avenue bus. “There’s a nice place around the corner,” he said, “called Ferrante’s or something like that.”
“Ferado’s,” she said. “We’re not going there.”
“Ferado’s has Italian subs for me,” he said, “veggie pastas for you. I thought it would be a nice compromise.”
“Nice for you, maybe. They use the same pans and utensils, so the vegetarian dishes get tainted with meat. I can’t go to any restaurant that serves meat. I get sick afterward.”
“Okay,” Coop said. “How about the vegetarian restaurant on Fifty-second?”
“No. They use butter, milk, eggs.”
She suggested a place called the Common Carrot, and Coop capitulated, even though it was way down in the East Village.
Traffic was bad and the drive turned out to be long. Maureen was silent. Coop considered beginning his report on the investigation, then thought Not yet. Instead he asked, “What do you believe is wrong with eating dairy products?” She didn’t answer. He looked over in time to see her lips tighten. He thought he’d used a respectful tone. “I can see where you think it’s cruel to kill animals and eat them, but shearing a sheep or milking a cow doesn’t harm it.”
“People have no right to enslave animals, to keep chickens in tiny pens and cows in narrow stalls all their lives.”
“Well, we can agree that nobody should be unnecessarily cruel to animals.”
“You’re being sarcastic. You’d like to think I’m just a sentimentalist, weeping over brown-eyed bossy, wouldn’t you? But I’m worried about people’s health, too. We’re violating the natural order more and more and we’ll pay the price.”
“I wasn’t being sarcastic. I actually admire your concern for fellow creatures, human and otherwise.”
This was like when they were still married, the verbal duelling, the disconnection, the cold space between them ever widening. He decided to give up the conversation and concentrate on his driving.
When they reached Thompkins Square, where the restaurant was located, there were no parking spaces. Coop double-parked and flipped down his visor with the NYPD OFFICIAL BUSINESS sign he’d forgotten to turn in when he retired. He expected Maureen to make a comment about the arrogance of power, but she let it pass.
The Common Carrot occupied the ground floor of an ancient row house, between a store that sold old records, the vinyl kind, and a tattooing and piercing parlor. It had sidewalk tables, empty because of the chilly weather, and a big window giving a view of the square.
The restaurant was crowded, but Coop was the only man wearing a tie. Maybe the only person wearing leather shoes. He was relieved to sit down and get them out of sight. The table was wooden, unstained and unpainted. At least the walls were painted, the same drab green that had been in his office at the precinct. It didn’t matter, because not much of the paintwork could be seen. Political posters championing animal rights and environmental causes took up most of the wall space. Across from their table hung a large poster of a bulky woman wearing dark, turn-of-the-century clothing and a white sun bonnet. She looked as glum as Maureen, only more fierce.
“That’s Mother Jones,” Maureen said, noticing him examining the painting.
“The labor leader?”
She raised her eyebrows, also dyed the new red color, and looked surprised that he’d heard of Mother Jones. And a little resentful. She obviously considered Mother Jones hers. Coop didn’t see any connection between Mother Jones and natural products, but he didn’t push it for fear of further raising Maureen’s hackles.