Mike passed me a pair of rubber gloves, in exchange for the black leather pair I'd been wearing all evening. "Don't touch anything without showing it to me first. Just poke around and see what strikes you as interesting."
"Some kind of slob, eh?" George was shaking his head, not knowing where to begin. "You think it was ransacked, or she just liked to live this way?"
I had been to Lola's office several times to discuss her case and to try to pressure her supervisors into supporting her during the process. "I think this is her natural habitat. It's pretty consistent with what I saw on campus."
We were standing in the living room, which appeared to have been decorated with the remains of a Salvation Army used-furniture sale. The classic bones of a prewar six-room apartment were practically obscured by the bizarre accumulation of odd-shaped chairs, a pair of Victorian love seats covered in faded burgundy velvet, a beige Naugahyde lounger, and cardboard boxes piled everywhere, with strapping tape still in place. Whenever she had moved them in, Lola had not yet opened or unpacked them.
I walked through the other rooms to get a sense of the layout. The small kitchen, still decorated in the drab avocado tones of the sixties, was quite bare, which fit with the fact that she had been living in New Jersey for almost a month. The dining room featured an old oak table, pushed up against the window, overlooking a glorious view of the park and river. It, too, was stacked with boxes, with the word BOOKS scrawled on the sides of almost every one.
The master bedroom had the same view, outside and within. Here, some of the cartons had been opened and the volumes were spread around the floor and partially scattered on shelves.
"What'd she teach?" Mike asked, moving into the room with me.
"Political science. When I first got the case and met her, she was still on the faculty at Columbia. Had a spectacular reputation as a scholar and a teacher. Lola was a brilliant lecturer."
I glanced at a small stack of books on her nightstand. They were all novels rather than textbooks. I wondered whether they were favorites she kept at hand to reread. A bookmark stuck out from the pages of the one on top of the pile-an early Le Carre, one that Lola would never finish.
"Students loved her because she brought the classroom alive. I remember one day last winter, I was going up to the school for a meeting with her. She said I could catch part of her class. Municipal institutions in the early part of the twentieth century-the mayoralty, the corrupt officials of Tammany Hall, the city jails and courthouses. Of course I was intrigued, so I made a point of getting there in time to walk in and sit in the back of the classroom."
"Busman's holiday," Mike said, opening drawers and examining their contents.
"Lola lured me right into that one." I smiled, remembering the day. "She'd spent the week on the politics of Gentleman Jimmy Walker, the mayor of New York City in the late 1920s. But she had a unique method of showing the students the tone of the period. She was parading around the podium, doing a perfect imitation of Mae West, describing the actress's arrest and prosecution for the stage performance of her play-called Sex-in 1926. She was reading from West's autobiography, describing the condition of the prison cell in the Tombs, and how the confused, diseased women were herded inside like animals."
"A bleeding heart, under all that flesh, you're gonna tell me."
I ran my finger across the spines of a row of books, checking the titles and noting that most in that section were treatises about nineteenth- and twentieth-century government in New York City, which was her specialty. "She ended by describing how the jail system was run by greedy and stupid civil servants, worse than the prisoners. She looked over the heads of her students and quoted West right to me. 'Humanity had parked its ideals outside.'"
"Staged just for you?"
"I was there to make her understand how important it was to prosecute Ivan, and she wanted me to know that she wasn't about to see him stuck in a jail cell. The typical ambivalence of a survivor of domestic abuse."
Chapman lifted the dust ruffle to look under the bed and continued to poke around the room.
"Doesn't sound like scholarship to me. Sounds like two-bit, second-class theatrics. Same kind she went for with those Jersey jerk-off prosecutors yesterday."
"She was capable of both. I'll give you some of her published articles to read. You'll like her writings about the Civil War period and the Draft Riots." Mike knew more about military history than anyone I had ever met and read extensively on the subject.
"Save 1863 for another day and transport yourself back to the twenty-first century."
Mike was impatient with my diversion, with good reason, and I turned away from the bookshelves and moved on to the desk. "The computer?"
"Leave it alone. Jimmy Boyle's coming to pick it up tomorrow."
Boyle headed our cybercop squad and was a genius at retrieving files and information that literally, to my view, were lost in space.
The rest of the desktop was a maze of spiral notepads, computer disks, phone messages dated three and four months earlier, which detectives would scour in the days to come, and small framed photographs. I recognized a young Lola in her cap and gown, at what must have been her graduation from Barnard, and then a Dakota family shot of more current vintage, taken in front of her sister Lily's home in Summit.
There was a black knit cardigan sweater over the back of the desk chair. "Any idea what she was wearing today?" I asked.
Mike called to George, but he hadn't seen the body either, so Mike added that question to the list he had started in the memo pad he kept inside his blazer. "They'll have it inventoried at the ME's office in the morning. Then I've got to check with the sister to see if the clothes she had on when she died are the same ones she left Jersey with."
I used my forefinger to pull at the pocket on the chest of the sweater. "Hey, Mike, want to take out this piece of paper?"
I didn't want to be responsible for touching anything that might raise an issue of chain of custody. For all intents and purposes, I wasn't there tonight. He slid his gloved fingers in and came up with a folded page from a telephone pad printed with the words king's college at the top, and beneath that, the single handwritten notation, in bold print:
THE DEADHOUSE
Below the words was a list of four numbers: 14 46 63 85.
Mike read the words aloud. "Mean anything to you? A person? A place?"
I shook my head.
"Probably what the other tenants will start calling this building," George said.
"Is that her writing?"
I had seen enough of her correspondence to recognize it at once. "Yes. Any date on it?"
"Nah. I'll voucher the note and the clothing. When we go to Jersey, remember to ask the sister if she can tell us whether Lola had this sweater there with her yesterday."
I opened the closet door and we poked around the contents. An ordinary mix of skirts and slacks, dresses and blouses, sizes consistent with Lola's large chest and slim hips.
"What do you know about a boyfriend?" George called out to me from the second bedroom.
"News to me." I closed the closet and went into the smaller room.
There was a couch and a chair, and George was standing in front of a chest of drawers, having pulled open each of the three levels. He was dangling a pair of Jockey shorts on the end of his pen. "Get me some bags from the kitchen. Let's see if we can find out who Mr. Size 40, Briefs-Not-Boxers, might be."
Mike noticed the end of a striped sheet sticking out below the edge of the couch. He threw the cushions onto the floor and rolled out the metal frame of the sleep sofa. He stripped the sheets off the narrow mattress and folded the top and bottom ones separately. "Let's see if the lab comes up with any love juice." He wrapped each one in an ordinary brown paper bag, to avoid contamination from one surface to another, and because sealing damp materials in plastic could cause them to deteriorate.
George chuckled. "So much for the mayor's theory that she threw herself in the elevator shaft 'cau
se she was so despondent about having Ivan arrested. Peterson told me the first thing I had to look for in here was a suicide note. Damn, seems like she squeezed in one last fling before it was lights out."
"Let's just leave this all here and send a team in for the morning with an Evidence Recovery Unit. Someone needs to go through this stuff," Chapman said, waving his hand at the several pieces of men's clothing hanging in this room's closet. "Got to check the labels, look for ID. It'll take hours. We'll just seal off the apartment now and have them put a uniformed post outside the door for the night."
"Any mail here?" I was taking one more look around as I put on my coat.
"No. The brother-in-law said all her mail was being forwarded to her office at school, then she went through it there. We'll have to pick it up tomorrow."
"Fat chance. I've had dealings with the legal departments, both at Columbia and at King's. I can only tell you that if Sylvia Foote gets to Lola's office first, everything will be so sanitized that you'll think it had been swept by a CIA operative. Never a trace of Professor Dakota."
Foote was the general counsel of King's College, having served in the same post at Columbia for more than a quarter of a century. She would opt for protecting the institution every chance she had.
"You know her personally?"
"Yeah. And she's like fingernails on a chalkboard. 'Don't disturb the students' is her mantra, but what she really means is that the university's golden rule is not to scare the parents. Nobody paying those tuition rates wants his kids to go to a school where there might be a hint of scandal. We'd better try to get in there as fast as we can."
Chapman called the two-six and asked the desk sergeant for an extra body to sit on the door of 15A. Then we said good night to George and retraced our steps downstairs and out the rear door of the building, around to Riverside Drive, where the car was parked.
As we let the engine warm up, I reached for the radio and moved the dial to 1010 WINS, the all-news station, to see when this arctic front would pass through the city. I caught the tail end of the traffic cycle, warning about icy patches on the bridges leading in and out of town, and shivered again at the top of the early morning news.
"This just in: the body of a Yale University senior, missing from her New Haven dormitory since the day after Thanksgiving, was found shortly after midnight, floating in the Hudson River, near the promenade off Battery Park City. The content of the letters left behind by Gina Norton have not been released to the press, but police sources say that there are no signs of foul play."
"So much for my mother's theory that the school yard was a safer place to be than the streets-one more corpse tonight, we'll have a hat trick. And how handy for Hizzoner. No foul play declared before she's even been dried off, thawed out, and taken apart by the medical examiner," said Chapman, flipping off the radio, turning on the headlights, and easing out of the parking space to take me home.
4
I heard The New York Times slam against my apartment door at six-thirty, flung there by the porter who distributed the papers throughout the building every morning. Drops of water from my hair, still wet from the shower, dripped onto the front page as I leaned over to pick it up and check the headlines for the story of Lola Dakota's death.
Three pages back in the Metro section was a photo of Lola, standing at a lectern in full academic dress, mortarboard atop her head. The caption read "University Professor Dies in Bizarre Accident," above a subheading printed in smaller type describing her as a "Witness for the Prosecution." The reporter had managed to incorporate every stereotypical expression of reaction into his brief story. The administration was shocked and saddened by news of the beloved professor's death, students were puzzled by the ironic twists of fate in Dakota's final days, and her husband's family was outraged at charges that he was alleged to have been involved in the thwarted plot to kill her.
The phone rang and Chapman gave me the morning weather report. "You're gonna need a dogsled to get downtown this morning. The streets are coated with ice and the windchill brings it down to about five degrees. I'm on my way home to catch a few hours' sleep."
"Anything develop during the rest of the tour?"
"Nope. Made the usual notifications, took care of all the paperwork, got the preliminary reports down on the chief of detectives' desk so he's in the know first thing he walks in. Subway's the only way to go today, kid, much as you hate it. The driving is treacherous. See you around lunchtime."
I finished dressing and reluctantly headed for the Sixty-eighth Street Lexington Avenue station, anxious to beat the rush hour crowds. Once settled into my seat, I scoped out the other passengers and sat back to read the rest of the newspaper. It was early enough so that most of my companions appeared to be people going to their jobs and offices. A bit later and too many of the riders who stayed on board south of Forty-second Street would also be on their way to the courthouse, to make appearances for their criminal cases. On those occasional days that I got on the train at nine o'clock, it was an eerie feeling as we looked each other over for the last ten minutes of the ride, knowing at a glance-the closer we all got to the Canal Street station-that we were combatants on opposite sides of the battle. Usually, I preferred to drive to work.
The cold air bit at my cheeks as I reached the top step of the subway exit and turned south for the short walk to Hogan Place, fighting the strong wind as I walked carefully around icy patches on the sidewalk. The guy inside the small pushcart on the corner closest to the office saw me coming and readied a bag with two large black coffees.
I scanned my identification tag into the turnstile, greeted the uniformed cop who sat at the security desk, and got on the elevator with a few other lawyers from the staff. I stuck my head in at the press office around the corner from my own desk to remind the assistant to include Dakota's story and obituary in the clips she was preparing for the district attorney to read. Each morning, Brenda Whitney's aides combed the Times and the tabloids, the local and national papers, cutting and compiling all the stories related to our cases or to crime stories that might be of interest to Paul Battaglia and his executive staff.
Before I could remove my coat and boots, Pat McKinney stood in the doorway, resting a hand on the back of my secretary's, Laura's, empty chair. "Lost a big one last night, huh?"
I tried not to let my intense dislike for McKinney, who was deputy chief of the trial division and one of the supervisors to whom I answered, affect my response. "After all that woman had been through, you might think about putting it in terms of her life, not mine."
"Lucky for us it didn't happen on your turf. Pretty clever sting they pulled off in New Jersey with the fake hit. How come you weren't so creative with the case?"
"It was Paul's decision not to be involved in such a risky plan, and I think he was entirely right about it."
"That's what you get for not going up the chain of command, Alex. I would have backed you on that one. Our squad wouldn't have let her walk away yesterday afternoon without taking better care of her, tucking her in at home, making sure she was safe and sound. Next time, check with me first. I can often be more flexible than Battaglia. And Lola Dakota would be alive." He slapped his hand against the back of Laura's chair and walked away toward his office at the end of the hall.
The phone rang and I picked it up as I sat down to turn on my computer. Rose Malone, Battaglia's executive assistant, was calling to tell me that he was on his way downtown and wanted to see me as soon as he got in. That gave me half an hour to try to get the Jersey prosecutors to bring me up to speed on what they had learned during the night. The one answer Battaglia didn't like getting too often was "I don't know, boss."
I dialed the number for my counterpart in Sinnelesi's office and left a message in his voice mail to call me back as soon as possible. How did the case against Kralovic look? Exactly what time did Dakota leave her sister's home? How did she travel into Manhattan? What kind of mood was she in? Who saw her last? Battaglia was likely to
ask me what she'd had for breakfast, too, and whether or not she had cleaned her plate. There wasn't anything about her last days on earth that he wouldn't expect me to detail for him as soon as he got into the office.
"Have a minute for me?" Jody Soellner was standing tentatively in my doorway, and I waved her in. Her arms were loaded with notepads, a copy of the penal law, and what looked like an NYPD evidence envelope. "I'm on my way to the grand jury to put in that case I picked up last weekend. The guy who broke into the apartment on West Twenty-third Street and raped the babysitter who was watching the three kids. Remember the facts?"
I told her I did.
"The victim just showed me two of her fingers. When the perp put down his knife on the bed, she tried to roll off, away from him. But he pulled her by the arm and bit down hard." Jody held up her left hand and grabbed her own middle and ring fingers. "She was back at Roosevelt Hospital for her follow-up yesterday and the doctor confirmed that she had two severed nerves. Can I charge an extra assault count-you know, that the perp's teeth are a dangerous instrument?"
"Good try. Unfortunately, the court of appeals disagrees with you. I think the case is People versus Owusu, a couple of years back. The distinguished jurists said it's different from upping the ante by bringing a weapon along to assist the bad guy in his criminal endeavor. His teeth come with him naturally-they're not 'dangerous instruments' and you can't get the extra charge, even though I like your creative thinking. What's in the brown folder?"
Jody unclasped the catch and withdrew a plastic package covered in black ink with a voucher number and case identification. When she flipped it over to the clear side and held it up to show me, I could see the carving knife with the ten-inch blade. This victim was lucky. The jurors wouldn't even need to wait to hear the definition of forcible compulsion before they voted a true bill.
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