The DeadHouse

by Linda Fairstein

  "Did they know-?"

  "Whether she was dead? Fuggedaboutit."

  "No, did they know that it was Lola?"

  "You know what happens when you step on a cockroach? Any idea if it was Willie or Milton? The one that was crawling on your desk, or the one that was living in your file cabinet? The super hadn't even seen her in the building for months. Emergency Services responded to help get the remains up, and she was carted off to the ME's office."

  "But they didn't treat it as a homicide?"

  "Everyone involved assumed, up to that point, that it was all an accident. The elevator's been on the fritz, stopping between floors when it wasn't quitting altogether. The super told the first cops on the scene that some broad-probably just visiting in the building-must have stepped off into the black hole without even noticing that the elevator wasn't there."

  "No one had any reason to know what she had been going through," I mumbled aloud as I struggled to recall whether I could have pushed Lola any harder when I had wanted her to press charges.

  "Hell, it wasn't till one of the morgue attendants found a few papers in the pocket of her blouse that anyone even knew the identity of the deceased. Called back up to the Twenty-sixth Precinct, and they passed the news on to the lieutenant. Could still easily be an accident, according to what the super's been telling the cops. But then, in light of all the other bad news in her life, I'd have to think Ms. Dakota had outlived her string of lousy luck and was due to win the lottery."

  Mike hit the brakes and I jerked forward, restrained by the seat belt. He had tried to pass a Yellow Cab at the entrance to the highway, and the turbaned driver gestured obscenely and cursed at us as he fishtailed on an icy patch of road.

  "Move it, Mohammed!" Chapman yelled back, blasting the words into my ear as he aimed them across me toward the cabbie. "Those camel-humpers can guide a herd across the burning sands of the Sahara, but there oughtta be a law to keep them off the snow."

  "I thought we had a deal for the new year?"

  "I got a couple of weeks to go, kid. Don't expect any mouthpiece miracles overnight."

  The New York City skyline glittered against the cobalt ceiling stretched out above and beyond it. From the Chelsea Piers, outlined against the water off to our left, to the red-and-green-lighted spire of the Empire State Building, across the middle of town in the distance, everything was gaily dressed for Christmas. I stared out at the assortment of blinking lights while Mike dialed up the numbers on his cell phone to check the whereabouts of his team.

  I had known Chapman for more than ten years, and accepted the fact that he was no more likely to change his ways than I was able to explain the nature of our friendship, intensely close and completely trusting, despite the vast differences in our backgrounds. It had been almost twelve years since I joined Battaglia's office, and I smiled, remembering my father's prophecy that I wouldn't last there much past the three-year commitment required by the district attorney when I signed on. No one in my family believed that my training at Wellesley College and the University of Virginia School of Law would prepare me for the grim realities of life in an urban prosecutor's office.

  My father, Benjamin Cooper, was a cardiologist who had revolutionized surgical procedures when he and his partner invented a plastic valve that was used in virtually every heart operation in the country for more than fifteen years following its introduction to the field. To this day, he and my mother, while aware of the great personal satisfaction I derive from my work, worry about my ability to separate myself from its constant emotional drain-and its occasional dangers.

  "Tell Peterson I'm on the way." Chapman turned to me and winked. "I'm bringing the lieutenant a little surprise." He clicked off the phone and was quiet for a few minutes. "I just assumed you'd want to come with me tonight. If I'm wrong, I can cross over to the East Side and drop you at your apartment."

  Mike knew me well enough to know that I wouldn't have missed the opportunity to go with him to Lola Dakota's home and see for myself, firsthand, what the police were about to learn. It was logical for onlookers to presume some kind of freak accident, but the odds should truly have been in Lola's favor at this point, and the lieutenant was not going to let go of someone who had met an unnatural death on what he would consider his watch.

  "Did you like this Dakota dame, blondie?"

  I rolled my head back away from Mike, staring at the vista as we drove up onto the elevated portion of the highway.

  "She was a tough character to like. Admire, maybe, but hard to warm up to. Very smart. And even more arrogant than brilliant. But she was willful and shrill, rode herself really hard, and from what I understood, rode her students even harder."

  "And the husband? What made him so irresistible?"

  "Who knows what goes on inside anyone else's marriage? I'll pull my files together in the morning and check my notes. I've got all kinds of details from our conversations and meetings about the case." I remembered again the many hours I had spent with Lola throughout the past two years, trying to convince her that we could make the criminal justice system work for her, and to let me take Ivan to trial for assault.

  Chapman came from another direction altogether. His father, Brian, had been a second-generation Irish immigrant, who worked as a cop for twenty-six years and then died of a massive coronary two days after turning in his gun and shield. Mike was in his third year at Fordham when he lost his father, and although he completed his degree the following spring, he immediately took the exam and enrolled at the police academy, in honor of the man he most admired and respected. He was half a year older than I, and had recently celebrated his thirty-sixth birthday. Mike was one of the few people I knew who was thoroughly comfortable in his own skin, doing exactly what he most wanted to do in the world. That was simply to come to work every day at the Manhattan North Homicide Squad, with the best detectives in the city of New York, and spend all his waking hours restoring some dignity and a bit of justice to victims who had been murdered on what he liked to think of as his half of the island.

  "Maybe we can stop by Mercer's house over the weekend. He's got some case folders on this one, too," I added. "And probably some good insight about Lola."

  We had both been counting the days until Mercer Wallace would come off sick leave and back to the department on limited duty. Four months had passed since the attack that had almost taken his life, and it still took my breath away to think how close I had come to losing one of my dearest friends. Mike and Mercer had been partners in Homicide for several years, until Mercer was transferred to the Special Victims Unit, where he carried the lead role in some of the most complex rape investigations in the city.

  Grand old apartment houses lined up along Riverside Drive, to our east, and Mike took the Ninety-sixth Street exit to wind his way up the quiet streets till we saw the array of NYPD cars and trucks that blanketed the intersection and rested on the snowy slopes of the park entrance opposite Lola's building. "Must be the place, kid."

  Two uniformed cops were stationed on either side of the front door, and one nodded at Mike as he flashed his badge and asked the way down to the basement. "Press hasn't crawled all over this yet?" he asked, puzzled by the lack of interest from the media.

  "Been and gone," the younger guy answered, jiggling one foot at a time and flexing his fingers, trying to keep warm. "They pulled out after a few shots of the body bag."

  "Is there a doorman?"

  "Not all day. Just came on at midnight. The entrance is only covered from twelve till eight A.M. And I think we're cramping this guy's style already. He likes to hang on to his flask pretty tight, and he's really spooked out by this. You gotta use the stairs or the north elevator to get down to where they found her. The south car has been shut off altogether. That's where the body was."

  A couple in formal dress glanced at the police officers and brushed past Chapman on their way inside. They were still in the rear of the lobby as we entered, standing in the recessed area off to the right
, by the mailboxes, trying to find out from the confused doorman what the commotion was about. Two elderly women in flannel bathrobes and one grad student type with purple-streaked hair had beaten them to the old guy for a chat, and I expected that by dawn, most of the tenants would have some version of a rumor from one of these sources.

  Chapman pulled open the heavy service door that led to the fire stairs. There was no lightbulb at the top of the landing, and I followed him slowly down the two flights of steps.

  Lieutenant Peterson was sitting at a bare desk in what I assumed was the super's office at the foot of the staircase. His cigarette dangled from his lips as he clutched the phone receiver with one hand and held up his other in our direction, palm outward, signaling Chapman to be quiet.

  When he finished the conversation, he rose to his feet to greet us. "Alexandra, how've you been? That was the deputy commissioner, Mike. Can I talk to you alone for a minute?"

  "Jeez, and I brought Sonja Henie all the way up here just to see you, Loo."

  Peterson wasn't amused. He motioned Mike into the small room and closed the door. I turned the corner and said hello to the rest of the team from the Homicide Squad. Four of them were standing in front of the open space of the elevator shaft, and the bottom of the deadly cab was posed eerily above their heads and behind them, like a huge weight ready to drop again. They were talking about the squad's Christmas party, planned for the next evening, with no mention of the gruesome death that had brought them to this filthy room.

  "You in on the pool?" Hector Corrado asked me.

  "Only if you make sure I don't win. Battaglia thinks it's in such bad taste that we shouldn't humor you guys by chipping in."

  "Pick a number, Alex. It'll only run you twenty bucks, and it's a big pot this year. You wanna lose, go low. Man, things always get crazy around the holidays, and this one's starting off wild. You're too young to remember, but it's beginning to look like the eighties around here."

  Homicide cops had a tradition of betting on the number of murder cases they expected to occur before the end of the year. Hector kept track of the field, since choices had to be made by late summer. If there were open slots left, prosecutors were invited to kick in before the night of the party.

  "So far, we've only had three hundred sixty-two in Manhattan this year. I just missed by six bodies back in eighty-eight. Total was seven sixty-four, can you believe it? And these wimps think they're overworked now when they're carrying a handful of investigations."

  Chapman had left his overcoat in the super's office and emerged holding an oversize flashlight. He held out his right hand to Hector and asked the guys if the Crime Scene Unit had finished its work.

  "Hard to make this a crime scene. Super was selling it to the first guys who responded as an accident. Peterson pulled in every chit he could think of to get Crime Scene to come over and give it a look, sort of unofficially. They're treating it as a suspicious death, not a homicide yet. Not every day you get a broad who lays down and rolls out her front door into an elevator shaft just hours after somebody else paid a lot of money to have her knocked off," Hector opined. "They took some photos of the body before she was scooped out. You could look. All you're gonna see is some dark stains."

  Lieutenant Peterson, the veteran detective who ran the Homicide Squad, could get the Crime Scene Unit to do almost anything he requested. He had the best instincts in the business when it came to death investigation, and the finest track record in the department for solving cases. When he asked for backup, men knew he wouldn't be wasting their efforts.

  Mike squatted and pointed the beam into the dark shaft. I rested one hand on his shoulder and looked in over his head. "You want to step aside, blondie? I know you think you give off quite a glow yourself, but you're blocking the little bit of help that seventy-five-watter is shining down at me from over your head."

  I straightened up and stepped back.

  "Hector, anybody get down here and scrape some of this crap up? It's impossible to tell what's blood and what's oil from the works, just by looking." Mike was standing, too.

  "Yeah, that's all been done."

  "They dust for prints?" I asked.

  "Nobody even knew what parts of the building to include in the scene, Alex. We don't know if she had been dead for one hour or four by the time she was found. In the meantime, one super, two handymen, and a bunch of teenagers had been all over this area. They didn't know who she was, so they couldn't figure out which floor she'd dropped from or which elevator button she'd pushed. Sure, they went up and down all twenty-two landings, dusting for latents, looking for signs of a struggle, canvassing to see if anyone was at home who heard any noise. Pretty futile runaround so far. You go try that other elevator bank. It's not impossible that she just missed her footing and went off into a swan dive. You'll see, these things are on their last legs."

  "Anyone been inside her apartment yet?"

  "Waiting on that now. Peterson sent someone down to the morgue to get the keys they found on the body. Emergency Services is on their way back with a ram. Whoever gets here first, that's how we're going in."

  "Super doesn't have a key?"

  "Nope. She didn't trust nobody with nothin', is what he says."

  That would be Lola. Chapman motioned to me to follow him back up the staircase to the lobby. There was a pair of stuffed armchairs against the wall, covered in a dreary tapestry fabric, sorely in need of reupholstering, and we sat opposite each other in them while he told me about his conversation with the lieutenant.

  "Loo's really ripped. The commissioner's sticking with the accident story. It certainly can't be Ivan who had anything to do with this, they figure, since he was already under. That's what Peterson took me inside to tell me. That, and to get you off the premises pronto. If the mayor says this is an accident, then there's no need to have an assistant district attorney meddling in it."

  For the moment, we both ignored that point. "They never heard of backup? What if Kralovic didn't trust the guys he hired in Jersey and wanted a little security, some extra insurance, to make sure his plan to kill Lola worked?"

  "I don't need convincing. City Hall does. The first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a shove in the back and a trip to the morgue, right? The mayor doesn't want to add to the murder tally for the end of the year. And he's getting additional pressure from the powers that be at Columbia University."

  "But Lola didn't even work there anymore."

  "They farmed her out to a new, experimental school-King's College. It's got an entirely separate administration, but it bought some of the old Columbia buildings, so it's adjacent to the Columbia-Barnard campus. Somebody up there's got a direct pipeline to the mayor's office. The school officials don't want to open the whole can of worms about the history of their own tortured relationship with Lola Dakota, so they'd like this shoved under the carpet as well."

  "They're leaving out a great big stumbling block, in the oversize form of the rotund, thick-skulled, and honorable Vinny Sinnelesi, the Jersey prosecutor who put together this clever sting operation. Battaglia thinks the entire plan was to snag some visibility to launch Sinnelesi's bid for the gubernatorial race next year. Vinny had no qualms about getting attention on the back of Ms. Dakota while she was alive, so I doubt he'll lose a minute's sleep about doing it over her dead body."

  Mike laughed at my description of Sinnelesi, and at my obvious state of agitation. "Calm it, Coop."

  I was too wound up to stop. "Easy for him to sit tight in his own little fiefdom and point his fat finger at us, calling this a murder-whether it is or isn't-knowing he can't screw up this investigation 'cause it will be in Battaglia's jurisdiction."

  The front door of the building opened and, with the frigid air, in walked Lieutenant Peterson. Chapman got up and his trademark grin vanished in a flash. "I thought you'd gone home, Loo."

  Without breaking stride as he moved toward the elevator, Peterson barked back, "I told you to get Ms. Cooper out of this building
, Chapman. She's got nothing further to do with this matter. This, this,… accident."

  3

  I sat in Chapman's car, shivering against the chill of the night air, which kept me wide-awake despite the late hour. Peterson's unexpected reappearance in the lobby had been due to the arrival of the detective who had been sent to the morgue to fetch Dakota's keys. The two had crossed paths as Peterson was about to close his car door, so the lieutenant doubled back to see whether they could gain entry to Lola's fifteenth-floor apartment. Chapman knew that it wasn't Peterson's style to examine the woman's home himself. He wasn't a micromanager in that sense, and would rely on the intelligence of his men-and the photographs they would bring back-to highlight any information of significance. "Loo'll give it a once-over just to satisfy himself, somebody'll snap some pictures, and then I'll come down to get you," he said as he led me to his car and unlocked the door. "Just slink down in the seat so he doesn't make you when he's leaving- no heater, no radio. He'll be gone in twenty minutes."

  "You know he'll kill us if we get caught."

  "Can't happen, kid. It'll just be you, me, and George Zotos. Who's gonna squeal?"

  Zotos was one of the guys on Mike's team in the squad, and I had worked well with him over the years. "There's no downside to this for you. Battaglia doesn't even know you're here, and Peterson gave orders to me, not to you."

  Shortly before one-thirty in the morning, Peterson walked out on the sidewalk and his driver swung around in front of the building to pick him up. Ten minutes later, Chapman came out the same way, said something to the uniformed cops still posted next to the entrance, and crossed the street to the car to help me maneuver the icy road. We walked down to 115th Street and into the alley that led to the rear of the building. The heavy iron door was wedged ajar by the flashlight that Chapman had been holding earlier. He picked it up from the ground as he pulled open the door and took me inside through the basement. We rode to the fifteenth floor on the one elevator that was still in service, which creaked its way upward, slowly and noisily, then crossed over to the south side of the building to get to 15A. When Chapman tapped lightly on the door, Zotos opened it immediately and we joined him inside the apartment.