We finished undressing and got under the covers, making love again before we drifted off in each other's arms.
Our internal alarm clocks each went off as usual at about six-thirty, as the morning sky was attempting to brighten. We ignored the signals and decided to sleep late, reveling in the fact that neither of us had a deadline or a decision to make the entire day. It was eleven o'clock by the time I was up and dressed and had brewed the first pot of coffee. After calling our families and friends, we bundled up in thermal underwear and heavy jackets and set out on a hike to Squibnocket Beach. For more than a mile, packed snow crunching beneath our boots, we walked along the ocean, hand in gloved hand, talking about things we had never explored with each other before.
Jake asked me questions about my relationship with Adam, and about my slow recovery from the nightmare of his death. He spoke about his broken engagement, when the woman he had dated for four years moved out and married one of his closest friends, tired of the instability of his life on the road and anxious to start a family.
The only people we passed were several of my neighbors, walking dogs along the vast expanse of Atlantic beachfront. Back at the house, we converted the remains of our dinner into a lobster salad, and then spent the afternoon in front of the fireplace with our books. My Fitzgerald novel was constantly interrupted by Jake's discovery of something in his new Keats that he wanted to read aloud to me.
After a simple supper of chowder and some greens, we watched a DVD of The Thirty-Nine Steps and put ourselves to bed early. We were up before dawn, on a seven o'clock flight to Boston, connected to an eight-thirty shuttle back to La Guardia. Jake's car service picked us up in front of the terminal and we drove into Manhattan. I dropped him at the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center and we kissed good-bye.
"I'm expecting you at my apartment tonight. Till you get confirmation that your window has been replaced and that your pistol-packing victim isn't waiting by the front door, we're doing a test run of my proposition. See you later."
The driver took me down to Hogan Place and let me off in front of the entrance. It was after ten, and the place seemed like a ghost town. Only a skeleton staff would be at work today and tomorrow, and I expected to be able to get a lot done.
Laura had taken the day off, so I signed for the packet myself when the FedEx deliveryman appeared with an overnight letter from the New Jersey telephone company.
I opened the envelope to study the jumble of digits that comprised the incoming and outgoing calls made to and from Lola Dakota's temporary shelter at her sister Lily's. It could take hours for a detective, using a reverse directory, to put the numbers together with the subscriber to whose home or office the calls had been placed. Each was coded with the date, hour, and minute the connection was made, as well as its duration.
I scanned the pages until I found the day, one week earlier, of Lola's murder. I ran my finger down the rows of figures. There had been dozens of calls in the morning, when people had been coming and going to arrange the faked homicide performance. Then the activity had slowed to a standstill.
Lily had heard Lola make the call presumably to be picked up by a cab company. And then Lily had medicated herself and gone to bed.
I stopped at 1:36 P.M. A single call, made to a local Jersey number from Lily's home. Maybe I wouldn't need a detective to help decipher and track the telephone connection. The number looked familiar. What if Lola hadn't called a stranger to transport her safely to Manhattan, but had reached out for a friend instead?
I dialed the exchange and waited while the phone rang three times.
An operator answered. "Office of the District Attorney, may I help you?"
I swallowed hard. "Perhaps you can. I'm not sure if I dialed the right number. Is this Mr. Sinnelesi's office?"
"It's his office. But it's not his direct line."
"The extension I dialed," I said, looking down at the printed record, "is 8484. Can you tell me whose number that is?"
"Who are you trying to reach, ma'am?"
The last person to see Lola Dakota alive, I thought to myself. I stammered. "I, uh, I've got a message to call this number. I just can't make out the name my secretary took down."
"Oh, okay. This is Bartholomew Frankel's office. He's the executive assistant district attorney, Mr. Sinnelesi's number two man. Mr. Frankel stepped away for a bit. Shall I put you through to his secretary?"
17
"You saved me from a miserable afternoon with my mother." Mike had been at his desk in the squad when I called, and instantly agreed that we should drive out to Sinnelesi's office to confront Bart Frankel with our new information. The secretary had assured me he would be around all afternoon, so we were soon on our way through the Holland Tunnel.
"Mom's been begging me to help her plan her funeral. Pick out the coffin, go to-"
"Has she been ill?" I had known his mother for years and had no idea that anything was wrong. Perhaps that's why Mike had been delayed at the hospital on Monday morning.
"Fit as a horse. But at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, she got me to promise I would take her to get everything arranged. Peace of mind and all that. She's so excited you'd think she was going to Disney World with John Elway, for chrissakes. Told her I was breaking the date 'cause of you. That's the only way I could get a reprieve."
"Tell her that when we solve this one, we'll both come out and take her to lunch… Does it bother you as much as it does me that Frankel's the guy who got Lola's call?"
"Hey, if the escort was strictly professional, they would have had detectives taking her out of Lily's home and making sure she got inside her apartment safely. Your big guns in the Manhattan DA's office do witness escort and protection? I can just see Battaglia asking Pat McKinney to run somebody uptown to Harlem. Not a chance. You know Frankel?"
"I've only met him once, when Sinnelesi sent a delegation to talk to us about helping them stage this shooting of Lola. Anne Reininger was doing a very professional job with the investigation. She had some really good ideas about wiring an undercover cop and proving the case just through incriminating admissions from Kralovic. But the district attorney thought this sting would be great press for him, just in time for his reelection campaign. Battaglia and I disagreed. The plan was over-the-top hokey, dangerous, and unnecessary. Frankel came to our office to try to get me to change my mind."
"Any sense of what he's like?"
"I heard he's a law school buddy of Sinnelesi's, so he's probably the same age. About fifty. They were at NYU together. Frankel started with the Brooklyn district attorney, right out of school-"
"Which means he was rejected by your office, no doubt."
"He did six or seven years there, before my time. Then went into private practice, doing criminal defense work in New Jersey. When Sinnelesi was elected, he brought Bart in as his right-hand man. He really runs the shop."
"Did Lola ever mention him to you?"
"No. But we really weren't in contact often once Jersey got involved in the case. And when Bart came to see me with Anne, he was just acting like a supervisor. I never imagined he had any hands-on connection to the case."
"Hands on? How about private parts m? Can't wait to hear his explanation for this."
We parked behind the civic center and found our way up to Sinnelesi's office a bit after one o'clock. The receptionist was startled to see visitors on this quiet, postholiday afternoon.
"We're here for Mr. Frankel," Mike announced.
"Is he expecting you?"
Mike jerked his head in my direction. "She's an old friend of Bart's. Passing through town. I think we'd just like to surprise him."
"How nice," she said, smiling in my direction. "I'm sure he'll be pleased. He called to say he'd be stopping for a sandwich on his way back here, so he should be in any minute."
I took off my coat and hung it on the rack in the waiting room. "What the hell is that frigging glob you got stuck on your suit?" Mike was staring at the gift Jake had given m
e for Christmas.
"Well, I didn't stop at the apartment, and I was afraid to leave it in my office with the suitcase."
Self-consciously, I unpinned the bird and wrapped it in my handkerchief, putting it inside my shoulder bag.
"Guess Mr. NBC went to the well for that one. Don't let me cramp your style, blondie. You could probably wipe out the entire national debt of Sri Lanka if you-"
"Alex? How nice to see you."
Bart Frankel came through the front door and approached me to shake hands. I introduced him to Mike. "Are you here to meet with the district attorney?"
"No, Bart. We want to speak with you."
A large brown paper bag in one hand, Frankel pushed open the entrance to his wing with the other. "Come on in. I still can't get over what happened to Lola. Such a tragedy." He ushered us into his corner suite, removing his backpack and his coat. This prosecutor's small modern office complex in a suburban corporate park was far more gracious and comfortable than ours. Two chairs faced Frankel's desk. Mike and I seated ourselves while he unwrapped his lunch and put it to the side.
I couldn't help but notice that he was chewing gum.
"Can I order something in for you?"
"No, thanks."
"What can you tell me about how the investigation is going?" He took a tissue, swiveled in his chair, removed the gum, and threw it in his wastebasket. Mike gave me a thumbs-up.
"It's actually going really well, Bart. Faster than I expected. We've had some lucky breaks."
"What do you mean?" He glanced back and forth between Mike's stone face and mine. He laughed nervously, or so it seemed to me. "I get it. Need to know. Tell me and you'll have to shoot me." He nodded his head up and down. "Maybe it's sour grapes 'cause Battaglia wouldn't let you buy into our sting plan. Well, he was right, Alex. Tell him from me, off the record, that once again he made the right choice. Vinny's getting lots of heat from everybody. Starting with Lola's family. The dancing Dakotas, he calls them. A whole chorus line of whining siblings, waiting for their fifteen minutes of fame. That's what their mama primed them for." Bart was talking nonstop, tapping the fingers of both hands on his desktop.
"I got the governor on my back, too. She's big on domestic violence and all that political garbage. Then we got victims' rights groups. You name it, we got it. And you know the drill, Alex. When the shit hits the fan, the number one man is always unavailable for comment. Mr. Sinnelesi had to leave town. Family emergency down in Boca. Vinny, I tell him-Vinny, first I take a huge pay cut to come work for you and do public service, instead of making a real living for me and my family. Now I got to have my balls on the chopping block, too?"
"You wanna come up for air, Mr. Frankel, or you wanna just babble on?"
"Sorry, Mike. It's Mike, isn't it? Exactly what can I help you with?"
I answered, trying to set a pace for the conversation. "I hadn't spoken with Lola in months, as I think I told you when you and Anne Reininger came to my office. I'd really like to get a sense of what her life was like those last six weeks. How she was spending her time, who she was in touch with, what your contact was with her."
"Me? My contact with Lola?"
"Hey, who do you think she's talking to? You got somebody under your desk we can't see?"
"No, it's just, I mean-well, Anne's the prosecutor assigned to the case. I had to meet with Lola on a few occasions, just to oversee what was happening with the sting. Anne's the one who spoke to her almost every day. She can answer your questions."
"I'd like to begin with you, as long as we're here. Why don't you give us an idea of how many times you met with her? Where and when."
Frankel thought for a moment and opened his large red desk calendar. "All of my business appointments are logged in this. Let me just see." He opened the book about midway, to June, and began to flip through the pages. "I guess the first time I met Lola was in the early fall. September twenty-third, to be exact. Anne brought her up to me to introduce us. High-profile case and all that. Vinny likes me to keep an eye on things."
The intercom buzzed. "Excuse me, Mr. Frankel. I've got your daughter on line two. She wants to know if she can use the car tonight after you get home. Would you like to speak with her now?"
"Hold my calls, will you? Tell her yes, and try not to interrupt us till I'm through here, okay?"
"How many meetings after that?"Skimming through here, it looks like six, at the most."
"Where were they?"
"That was the only one in my office. The other times I went down to the second floor, to Anne's bureau. Family Violence Unit."
"Did you ever meet with her anywhere else, outside the office?"
"Yes. I was at her sister's house-Lily's-the day we staged the shooting. We went over, Anne and I, with the detectives just to make sure we approved the setup and to stroke the rest of the family. Pump Lola up."
Frankel was on his feet now, adjusting the blinds on his window as the sunlight bounced its glare off the icy surface of the parked cars in the lot below.
"Must have been a very tense morning. Were you there when the scam went down?"
He did the "me" thing again. "Me?"
"Yeah."
"No, I did what I had to do and got out of there. Had stuff to work on back at the office."
"What stuff?"
"Had to meet with one of the guys on a home-invasion case. Had to help him draft a bill of particulars."
"Got that in your big red book?" Mike asked.
"Got what?"
"Your meeting on the case you just told us about."
"That, um, that came up kind of unexpectedly. It's probably not in here." Frankel patted the cover of the book.
"Mind if I take a look through those entries?"
"I just told you, I doubt that one's in here."
"I mean the references to Lola. Mind if I jot down those dates?"
Frankel opened the book to the first September date and passed it across to Chapman.
"Help yourself, Detective."
Mike rested his notepad on the desk. He turned the pages and copied the dates and times of the Dakota-Reininger-Frankel appointments. When he got to the day of the shooting, he paused and read aloud: "'Thursday morning, December nineteenth. Nine A.M. Meet Reininger at Dakota scene. Sting preparation. Noon. Lunch with Vinny. Two P.M. In the field.'
"Strangest thing. When my partner uses that expression-'in the field'-it means he took the rest of his tour off to get laid. But then, we're just cops. What does it mean to you, Mr. Frankel? What kind of home invasion were you working on?"
"Who's in control of this operation, Alex, you or this rude-?"
"Mike and I want to know exactly the same information. How did you spend that afternoon?"
"I, uh, I must have gone… I guess I left here early. I probably did some holiday shopping."
"Like Ms. Cooper tells the street mopes that sit in her office and lie to her all day, 'probably' and 'I guess' and 'I must have' don't cut it. This ain't ancient history, Mr. Frankel. It's one week ago this very day. When you and Fat Vinny pushed back from the lunch table, where did you go and what did you do?"
"My daughter was coming home from college the next day. I went over to the mall to pick up a few gifts for my kids."
"What stores? I assume you can tell me what you bought and give me receipts for the things."
"You know, Detective, I'm the executive assistant district attorney for this county. You blow in here like you're auditioning for a bit part as a wise guy on The Sopranos. All bluff and bluster and bullshit, and I actually let you rattle me, like I have something to worry about. Well, you came to the wrong place this time. I supervised this investigation. I'm not the subject of it. Why don't you two just crawl back through the tunnel, or however you dragged yourselves here, and go solve your case like professionals, okay?"
"Did you drive Lola back to Manhattan with your own wheels, or did you use a government car to take her home?"
Frankel strode to the doo
r of his office and opened it wide.
Mike got up from his chair as though to leave, then walked behind the desk. He leaned over and reached into the trash, removing from it the Kleenex-wrapped piece of gum that had been discarded when Frankel first brought us into the room. He held it up to the light and admired it as though it were a trophy.
"What the f-?"
"I'm sorry. Would you prefer that I have the office sealed off while Ms. Cooper gets us a search warrant to take your droppings? You a Wrigley's man? Or would you suggest we compare your underwear to the things we found in Lola's apartment? I'd say those size-forty shorts would fit him pretty well, don't you think, blondie?"
Frankel walked over to Chapman and grabbed the tissue from his hand without meeting any resistance. "You two must have lost your minds."
He was like an animal trapped in his own lair. He was patently unhappy with our presence, but afraid that we would walk out without telling him what we knew. Then he put his hand to his eyes and shook his head. "Or maybe I have."
He walked to the windowsill and sat on its edge. "Lola was desperately lonely. She was looking for somebody to cling to, some kind of safety net. I took her out a few times. Never here, in New Jersey, where anyone could see us. In the city, up near the college. I'm not married, if that's what you're thinking. I've been divorced for a couple of years."
"That wasn't my first thought," I said. "I actually wondered how you could get involved with a victim while her case was pending in your office."
"My shrink wants to know the same thing." He sat at his desk and again his fingers tapped steadily against the wooden top. "I had thought about calling you, Alex. I just couldn't pick up the phone to do it. I realize that it's selfish, but if I get myself in the middle of all this, I obviously have to walk out the door here. Give up my job. Make waves for the district attorney."
I was waiting for him to invoke his right to counsel. Like most lawyers, he was loath to do it, figuring-I was certain-that he was smarter than any young prosecutor and the average cop alone or in combination. I was trying to stay calm, wondering how Frankel could explain being with Lola in her apartment last Thursday afternoon, and how much we should consider him a suspect in her death.
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