The DeadHouse

by Linda Fairstein

  I began to think of all the cases I had handled with students from schools throughout the city and to make a mental list of what the relationship was between victim and offender, so I could pull the files and examine the facts. For the students at King's, the illusion of the sanctity of the university setting was about to be shattered.

  "Want to stop by my place and relax for a bit before we head to the soiree?" The party was held at the Park Avenue Armory, on Sixty-sixth Street, just a few blocks from my home.

  "Sure. Is Jake gonna be there tonight?"

  "No. He doesn't get back to New York until Sunday." The schedule Jake Tyler had as a political correspondent and stand-in anchor for Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News made his life even less predictable than my own. It was a pleasure, for a change, to be involved with a lover who had no complaints about my unavailability when I was called out on a major case.

  I parked the car and we went upstairs. As soon as I put the key in the door, I could smell the delicious scent of the Douglas fir that I had bought two nights ago on my way home to serve as a Christmas tree. I had been raised as a Jew and was observant in the Reform tradition, but my mother's religious upbringing was entirely different. Her ancestors were Finnish, and she had converted to Judaism when she married my father. Our family tradition combined elements from both of their backgrounds, and although I had lighted the candles on a Hanukkah menorah earlier in the month, I always looked forward to decorating a tree and rediscovering the boxes of antique ornaments that my mother had collected throughout her life.

  "I'm going to freshen up. Make yourself useful. Pour us a drink."

  "Mind if I use the phone? I was gonna meet some of the guys down the street at Lumi's for a drink before the party."

  "Of course. Anybody I know? Invite them over here. And while you're calling, check with your office to see whether there's a final on the autopsy results. Then you can start putting some of those bulbs on the top branches of the tree that I can't reach. Don't peek at the pile of presents. I haven't finished wrapping yours yet."

  I went inside to wash my face, add a colorful scarf to my black suit, slip into a pair of higher heels, and spritz some Caleche on my neck. I played back the messages on my answering machine. The usual freeway greeting from Nina Baum in L.A., a callback from one of my sisters-in-law in response to my question about what the kids wanted for Christmas, and the persistent voice of Post reporter Mickey Diamond begging me to give him any kind of scoop about the Dakota investigation. I held my finger down on the delete button.

  Chapman had rested my Dewar's and his Ketel One on the coffee table while he hooked and hung some of the fragile old ornaments. "That one belonged to my grandmother. She landed at Ellis Island when she was an infant, just before Christmas in 1900, a century ago. It's a glass bird, hand painted, that her father bought for her that year."

  "Think she'd approve of the way you make a living?"

  "She would have liked me to have gotten married by the time I was twenty and had six kids in pretty short order. Made her crazy that I never learned her recipes for Finnish icebox pudding or blueberry pie."

  I thought of the time I had almost made her happiest. In my grandmother's last years, when she was living as an invalid in my parents' home, I had come up from Virginia during my final semester of law school to tell my family that I was going to marry Adam Nyman, a young medical student with whom I had fallen in love. Although in her nineties and quite infirm, Idie had insisted on coming to the Vineyard to be with us at the wedding. I know it hastened her death and literally broke her heart, as it did mine, when she learned that Adam had been killed on the turnpike the night before the wedding.

  "Wipe that frown off your puss and stay with me, Coop. My Granny Annie wanted me to go back to the old sod as the ambassador to Ireland. Live in Phoenix Park. Ride to the hounds. If she ever thought for a minute I'd be sniffing around dead bodies like my pop, she'd have locked up all the liquor and never let me watch Dragnet or read Dick Tracy in the Sunday funnies. Ready for the latest?"

  I sipped at my scotch and nodded my head.

  Mike glanced at his steno pad to read the notes of his conversation. "The ME spoke to Lieutenant Peterson an hour ago. Lola's death was asphyxial. No question she was strangled, probably with a ligature. Kestenbaum will do some more tests on the pattern of injury, but he thinks the killer used her own woolen scarf. Thrown overboard just for show. The elevator cab certainly crushed the body, which was designed to disguise the homicide. But somebody made sure she took that header without any air in her lungs."

  "Any semen?"

  "Nope. Not in the body. He hasn't checked the bed linens yet. That takes more time. But there were two strands of hair-just loose, no roots. Kestenbaum can't say for sure that they were in her hand, like she'd grabbed at anybody. Could be they just transferred from someone's clothing earlier in the day-or from the first cops who came to the crime scene. They're not going to be of much value at the moment.

  "The other news is from the building inspector, who was at Lola's apartment with Lieutenant Peterson. He's confirmed that the elevator's been out of whack for weeks. First of all, it was under repair, and wasn't even supposed to be in operation yesterday. The out-of-order sign that had been posted in the lobby had been taken down at some point, which could easily lend itself to an accident theory. Besides, people had complained that the cab was stopping between floors all the time, so it wouldn't have been tough to catch it a foot off the ground on the fifteenth floor and roll the body in."

  Chapman glanced at his watch and walked into the den to click on the television. A series of commercials preceded Alex Trebek's close-up, announcing the subject of the Final Jeopardy! answer. Mike and I had a long-standing habit of betting on the last question. The rest of the show didn't interest us, but I had seen him ferret out a television screen at crime scenes, sports bars, and the morgue. Once, outside a concert at Madison Square Garden, he even commandeered Tina Turner's chauffeur to let him watch the end of the show in the back of her stretch limo while she was in her dressing room warming up for the big performance.

  "Tonight's category is Famous Quotes," Trebek said, pointing up at the card displayed on the screen.

  "Twenty bucks," Mike said, taking the bill out of his pocket and dropping it on top of the coffee table. "I'm feeling lucky. Jake's out of town, I've got a new murder on my hands, and there's no reason for Santa to put coal in my stocking this year."

  I laughed and told him to make it thirty, pulling the bills from my wallet.

  "Pretty cocky, blondie." He withdrew another ten and tossed it on the pile. We knew each other's strengths and weaknesses inside out after a decade of this trivia exercise. My four years of major concentration in English literature before going to law school raised my expectation of taking the evening's pot.

  "Well, gentlemen," Trebek enthused, turning to the three contestants poised at their buzzers. "The answer is, the majestic leader who urged his troops to battle with the phrase: 'Soldiers, forty centuries are looking down on you.'"

  Dead meat. Chapman had not only studied military history at Fordham, but the subject had become a passion for him: he read about it voraciously and visited battlefields whenever the opportunity presented itself. The butcher from Kansas City and the ophthalmologist from Louisville seemed as clueless as I was, neither one writing anything on his electronic screen.

  "Belly up, blondie. What's your best guess? Double or nothing?"

  "Not a prayer." I watched the pastry chef from Baltimore record his answer with furious determination, as I tried to think of a civilization with that long a heritage. "Who was… Genghis Khan?"

  Chapman gloated as he picked up the sixty dollars, giving the correct response while Trebek was telling the chef he had guessed incorrectly. "Napoleon, 1798. Rallying his men to fight the Egyptians at the foot of the great pyramids of Giza. Enjoying a brief success, actually, like ten days, before m'man Horatio Nelson arrived in time to destroy the entire French fl
eet."

  I sidled up next to him and reached my fingers into his pants pocket, pulling out the wad of money. "But you forgot to put it in the form of a question, so-"

  As he slapped my hand away, the doorbell rang.

  "And one more surprise for the night," Mike added. "Hope you don't mind, I told the doorman your guest didn't have to be announced." I walked behind him as he went to the entrance, and gasped with delight to see Mercer Wallace.

  He towered over both of us, six feet six inches tall with dark black skin and a rock-solid chest that had stopped a bullet just four months ago. Mercer grabbed me in an embrace as we swayed each other back and forth. "This is the very best of Christmas presents," I said, pulling his face down to mine and planting a kiss on the top of his head.

  "So this was the date you were meeting at Lumi's, huh?" I said to Mike. "And not planning to invite me? Santa may have to rethink whether that was naughty or nice."

  "Well, if you hadn't suggested stopping here, I was going to take you there. But they don't have a TV and I didn't want to miss the chance to score a few bucks off you, Coop. You allowed to drink yet, Detective Wallace, or does it still pour out through that mean-looking exit wound in your back?" He headed back to the bar to fix a club soda for Mercer.

  I had visited Mercer at his home at least once a week since the shooting last summer, and I knew his recovery from the chest wound that had threatened to rip him apart had progressed well. He was due to come back to work on modified duty early in the new year, but I thought it would take more than a holiday party to bring him to my doorstep.

  Chapman was in the den pouring drinks against the background noise of Win Ben Stein's Money on the Comedy Central channel. The brainiac host was, as usual, about to knock off all the contestants with a string of good answers to tough questions, while I watched Mercer-still limping slightly-walk ahead of me and sit down. "Just took enough money off Coop to buy you a Kwanza present, Detective Wallace."

  Mercer raised his glass and we all clinked. "To a better year for each of us. And to Lola Dakota, may she rest in peace."

  "Mercer started beeping me this morning with a million things he wanted to know. Said he was coming into the office to bring his case folder and notes for us, so I figured he might as well make a guest appearance at the armory."

  We spent close to an hour talking about all the facts Mercer remembered from handling the domestic assault investigation that was part of Lola's original complaint. She had loved the quiet calm and dignified manner of the detective, which had made him such an outstanding member of the Special Victims Unit, the police department's companion unit to my bureau. Lola had called him often when she was indecisive or frightened, and he had talked her through some of the toughest moments of her ordeal with Ivan. I could tell how it pained him that, in the end, nothing he could do had saved her.

  "Time to bundle up and boogie." Mike was on his feet, taking our coats out of the closet and getting ready to leave. "Who gets the first dance, Chief Allee or Inspector Cutter?"

  "What are you doing tomorrow night, Alex?" Mercer asked.

  "No plans. I had been thinking about going to DC. to meet Jake, just for Saturday night, until Mike got that preliminary report from the ME this morning telling him this was probably going to be declared a homicide. I called Lola's sister, Lily, right after I got the news, to see whether we could go out to her house to talk with her. It's not a very smart time for me to leave town."

  "Come out to my place for dinner. Mike'll drive you. I'm having some friends over to do my tree. Seven o'clock."

  "Sounds good."

  "Still nice to get a crack at Miss Lonelyhearts when her own personal talking head is out of town, isn't it, Mercer? Just like old times."

  I rode with Mike and Mercer to the Seventh Regimental Armory, an enormous fortress on Park Avenue, built in 1879, which took up an entire city block. The interior was a throwback to another era, its vast halls-designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany-lined with plaques honoring war dead from the last century, and its rooms decorated with moose heads and other dusty antlered animals whose glass eyes stared down at the festivities. The original function of its drill hall had given way to use as rental space for endless rounds of weekend antiques shows and the occasional rubber-chicken dinner meetings of organizations too penny-wise to engage private salons at real restaurants.

  As we entered the fourth-floor room in which the squad party was being held, we were swamped by detectives and cops who had not seen Mercer since the shooting. I stepped back and walked over to greet the chief of detectives before I made the rest of the rounds.

  "Heard you and Chapman were up at King's College this afternoon. Any headway?"

  "They're beginning to see the light."

  We talked for several minutes until I felt my beeper vibrating on my waistband. There was a phone booth on the main floor and I excused myself to go downstairs to return the call. I recognized the number displayed as the main line from ECAB-the Early Case Assessment Bureau-which was the intake unit through which every arrest in Manhattan entered our office. The expediter answered.

  "Hey, it's Alex Cooper. Any idea who beeped me?"

  "Ryan Blackmer's looking for you, Alex. Hold on a minute."

  "Sorry to bother you, but I figured you'd want a heads-up," Ryan said. He was one of the brightest and best lawyers in the division, and had drawn the Friday night supervising position in ECAB. "Uniformed guys in the Sixth Precinct just collared a mope for sex abuse tonight."

  "You got the facts yet?"

  "The complaining witness was walking home from a friend's house, right along Washington Square Park-on the north side near the Arch-when this clown grabbed her from behind and started to rub against her, trying to drag her into the park. She was able to break away and get home. Called nine-one-one from her apartment. Cops drove her around for almost an hour and she ID'ed him a few blocks from the square."

  "Make any statements?"

  "Yeah, claims he's gay. Not guilty."

  "Anything I can do to be useful?"

  "No. Just didn't want you to read about it in the morning papers. The victim's a graduate student at NYU. It's probably not related to what you're working on, but I thought you ought to know about it. Seems like it's open season on college campuses this week."

  I hung up and took the elevator back to the fourth floor. Lieutenant Peterson had just arrived and was talking to the chief, who summoned me to them with his forefinger.

  "I'm surprised you and Chapman didn't stay for the service."

  "What service?"

  "Peterson's just telling me that President Recantati called for a prayer session and candlelight vigil tonight, then canceled all the classes and exams next week, and dismissed the students for the Christmas recess."

  I was livid. Recantati and Foote must have made those plans before we saw them in the early afternoon, and they had chosen not to tell us. I thanked Chief Allee for the news and worked my way through the crowd to find Chapman, who was in the middle of the dance floor with one of the assistant DAs from my unit, Patti Rinaldi.

  "You can have the next tango with him, I just need him for a few minutes." I took Mike's hand and led him to the side of the room, explaining the news to him. "You realize that means we're not going to have any kids there to interview by Monday afternoon, and possibly not any faculty members? They'll all scatter home over the weekend."

  "Relax, blondie. I'll pay Foote a visit first thing tomorrow morning and get some names and numbers. We'll do the best we can." He shuffled back to the dance floor without missing a step, calling out to Patti, to the Motown beat: "Rescue me! Take me in your arms

  I fumed on the sidelines, annoyed that Chapman didn't seem as distressed as I was by Sylvia Foote's duplicity.

  7

  "Just once, I'd like to read an obituary of a murdered woman who hasn't been canonized overnight." It was Chapman, my Saturday morning 6:45 wake-up call. "Doesn't anybody wicked and ugly ever get blown away? I picked
up the tabs on my way home."

  Home from where? Patti's apartment? I wondered.

  "'King's and Columbia Mourn Death of Beloved Professor.' Who beloved her? Mercer says she was a real ball breaker. 'Raven-haired Prof Slain After Spousal Sting.' The Post, of course. The broad is dead-what frigging difference does her hair color matter? D'you ever read a man's obit that says he was balding or blond? Someday I'm going to write the death notices for all of my victims. Truthfully. 'The despicable SOB, whose face could stop a clock, finally got what she deserved after years of being miserable to everyone who crossed her path.' That kind of thing. So what's the plan for the day? "What time is Lola's sister expecting us?"

  "When I spoke with her yesterday, she suggested one o'clock. Is that okay with you?"

  "Rise and shine, twinkle toes. I'll pick you up at Fifty-seventh and Madison at noon."

  Mike knew that my Saturday routine began with an eight o'clock ballet class, the one constant in an exercise schedule that had long ago been abandoned to the unforeseeable nature of the prosecutorial job. I had been studying with William for years, and relied on the stretches, plies, and barre work of the studio to distract me from the tension of my daily dose of violent crime. From there, I was due at Elsa's, my hairdresser at the Stella salon, for a touch-up on my blonde highlights, for what I had expected to be a cheerful holiday season.

  I picked up the paper from my doorstep, took the elevator down, and waited in the lobby until someone pulled up in a Yellow Cab, not anxious to stand on the corner trying to hail one in the frigid early morning air. On the ride across town, I read the Times coverage of the Dakota story. The reclassification of her death as a homicide bumped the news from the second section to the front page, above the fold: "Academic Community Stunned by Scholar's Death."

  The piece led with the achievements, publications, and awards that the professor had garnered in her relatively short career. A second feature described the reaction of college officials. "Morn-ingside Heights Mourns Neighbor," it began, explaining the decision of both Columbia University and King's College to suspend classes on the eve of the holiday week, while police tried to determine whether the killing was the work of someone stalking Dakota, or a threat to the schools' population at large.