He retraced his steps to his September meeting with Lola and filled in more of the blanks. She had called him again, he said, in October, and invited him to a presentation she was making at an academic convention at the New York Hilton. Her speech was magnificent, Frankel told us, and despite all the professional prohibitions, he began to come into the city to see her from time to time, becoming intimate with her before Thanksgiving. "Does Vinny know?"
"He'd break my neck. I suspect this could cost him a few votes in the next election, and that's the bottom line."
Chapman worked him a bit more, and then I tried to move things along to the day of the murder. "After Lola called you, what happened that afternoon?"
"I was the only one who knew she was going to leave her sister's house. Lily was driving her crazy. The histrionics, the crying, the busybody nature of her personality. We had all we could do- Anne did, really-to keep Lola there long enough to execute the plan. I had promised to drive her home afterward. She didn't want detectives sitting around her apartment. She was tired of being watched and waited on. She just wanted to go home and get back to work."
"So she called you here at the office."
He looked at me quizzically. "Surveillance?"
"Even easier. Telephone records."
"I went back to Lily's neighborhood and waited around the corner. Lola was in great spirits. Felt she'd helped us nail Ivan, and that she would begin to regain a bit of control over her life.
We drove into town and I took her up to Riverside Drive. She had some things she wanted to do at home, and then she was going to meet me, at seven o'clock, for dinner at a Chinese place on Amsterdam Avenue. She never showed up. I called and called, and when I finally decided to drive back to the apartment to see what the problem was, cops were swarming all over the place. The last time I saw her was when I let her out of my car in front of her building."
We were all silent. Frankel had taken us halfway there, but I didn't believe that he was telling the truth about how he left Lola. I was thinking of the semen-stained sheets, and I'm sure Mike was, too.
"Where did you go? How'd you spend the rest of the afternoon?"
Frankel was fidgeting again. "Let me think a minute. Um, I-I drove down to, um-there are a couple of bookstores on Broadway. I wandered in and out of those. I had some coffee and read a newspaper."
Mike took the pencil he'd been writing with and snapped it in half. "I hate it when people lie to me."
"I don't remember exactly what I did that afternoon. But you don't want me to say I don't remember, so I'm telling you what I would have done. I was wandering around Columbia, I was walking in and out of shops, trying to keep warm and pass the time. It had no significance at the moment because I had no idea anything was wrong. I was just killing time-"
"Or Lola."
"Don't be a horse's ass, Detective. Don't sit in my office and even presume to treat me like I did something wrong." His voice was raised now, shrill and strident. "I never went inside Lola Dakota's apartment last Thursday." Frankel spit each word at us, slowly and angrily.
"Then how come there's seminal fluid all over the sheets on her sofa bed? And how come if you just spit over at me one more time, I'm gonna have enough of your goddamn body fluid from this slobbering saliva all over the new tie my aunt Bridget gave me for Christmas to let the lab match it up before your kid gets home with the car tonight."
"If there's semen on those sheets, and if it happens to be mine, Detective… let me stop right there. That's a really big 'if,' 'cause Lola and I did not exactly have what I would call an exclusive relationship."
"Maybe we can narrow it down a bit. Coop, how much you wanna bet that Mr. Frankel here has a pack of gum, white wrapper with that distinctive green arrow, right in his pants pocket?"
"I'm not betting against you, Mr. Chapman."
"What's the point of that?" Bart was furious.
"We've got DNA from the sheets, and DNA from the gum. You know where the bed linens were, and the two of us happen to know exactly where we found your chewed-up ball of saliva. Now all you have to do is remember how many places you were when you tossed your gum. Was it in Lola's bedroom? In the kitchen? For a guy with a regular habit like yours, it's gonna be hard to single out every stick you got rid of. Leave out an important stop, and I'll nail your ass to the wall. The easiest thing for you to do is just to retrace your steps for us, honestly this time. We know damn well that you're leaving something out."
"Well, I sure as hell wasn't in the elevator shaft when she was murdered. Alex, please. You've got to believe that I was never, never inside Lola's building the day she was killed. Of course I won't deny that we'd been intimate. But whatever you found on the sheets must be there from two or three weeks ago. We slipped away from Lily's one afternoon, and I took Lola to run some of the errands she needed to get done around school. Then we stopped by at her apartment and yes, we made love. She never spent another night there, so she obviously didn't have any time to do the laundry.
"And the gum? Yeah, I chew gum all the time. It's probably in every wastebasket in the apartment. It's a nervous habit. Started when I gave up cigarettes, and now I do it all the time."
Chapman fisted both hands and leaned his knuckles on the desk, bending toward Frankel. "If you didn't go into Lola's building that day, where else did you go? Help me. Tell me one other stop you made that I can verify."
Bart twisted and squirmed. Mike tried to nudge him in the right direction. "Start with the campus. Did you go anywhere near the college?"
"Columbia?"
"Or King's."
"I'm not familiar with King's. Didn't exist in my day. So I walked around Columbia a bit. But it was too cold. I got in my car and drove down Broadway. Manhattan has a bunch of these great little mystery bookstores. Four or five of them, all over town. It took me a while to find one. Just took a book into a coffee shop and read for a while. I told you that before, and it's true. I'll check at home and see if I can find a receipt."
Both of us knew, from the gum that Mike had spotted in the trash basket, that Bart had made a stop in Lola's office. I wondered if he had done that because she had asked him to pick something up, or if he had gone there on his own. Why wouldn't he give that to us? Why did he continue to lie about it? And what else did it mean he was lying about?
"Was there a reason Lola didn't want you to come upstairs with her?" I asked.
Bart reached into his pocket and stripped the wrapper off another stick of Wrigley's spearmint.
"Not really." He rolled his head in a circle and pressed his hand against the back of his neck. "I mean, what we had originally planned was to spend a few hours there. But when we pulled up in front of the building, one of her friends was on his way inside. We just decided that I should get lost for a few hours and come back later. Lola didn't want anyone asking questions, didn't want anything to happen to screw up the case. Like for Ivan to find out she was sleeping with a prosecutor. Shit, was I stupid."
"How the hell would Ivan find that out, just 'cause you were driving her home?"
"And staying overnight? He had eyes everywhere. Lola was paranoid. Thought he was paying people to find out information. Just figured it would get back to Ivan if we were caught together. She told me to stay loose and she'd give me a call later that afternoon on my cell phone." He looked pained. "The call that never came."
"And the friend, the guy who was going in when you pulled up to the building? What's his name?"
"Her friend, not mine. I never saw the guy before in my life. I think he teaches with her. Black guy with dreads and a kind of wild-looking beard."
Lavery, I thought. "Claude? Claude Lavery?"
"Yeah. That's the guy. Held the door for her and they walked in. I never saw her again after that."
18
Chapman was itching to get out of Frankel's office. Bart followed us past the receptionist's desk and into the hallway. "What do you think, Alex, do I have to tell Vinny about this?"
"Hey, schmuck. Get real. You're now a permanent part of my files on the case, and we're not even out of the box. Coop and me have a few dozen questions for you we haven't even thought of yet. We haven't talked about Ivan, we haven't asked you about the work Lola was doing, we haven't asked whether you know anything about a load of cash she was hiding. Or about drugs."
Mike gave up on the elevator and tugged on the strap of my bag as he turned to trot down the three flights of stairs to the exit. "Next stop for you is my office. Pick a day. Make it easy for yourself, Counselor. And try telling Vinny the truth. Might be a new thing for you. Or, you can tell him you're in the field. That seems to have worked for you before."
"Let's try and schedule an appointment for the beginning of the week, Bart," I said. "You know how this is going to break, so why don't you tell the district attorney about it before Battaglia gives him a call?"
Frankel was leaning over the banister, calling down to us as quietly as he could. "Do you think I'm going to need a lawyer?"
"Line up a good proctologist first, Mr. Frankel. It's rough in those maximum-security pens."
Mike started the engine and we sat in the lot while it took its time warming up. "Born loser. Knew it the minute I saw him. Know how I could tell? Grown man with a backpack. There's just no excuse for it. Half of those twerps in your office use 'em, too. I get on the elevator at Hogan Place, one of those guys from Appeals gets in after me and turns around. Bam! I get smacked right in the puss with nine pounds of law books. By the time you get out of high school, you should figure out some other way to carry stuff around. What are you thinking about?"
"The position Frankel put himself in. That he'll be out of a job before New Year's. Whatever his involvement is in Lola's death, he was terribly indiscreet to be sleeping with her. And we'll have to tell Sinnelesi that he withheld evidence from us. Not to tell us that he had been with Lola after she left Lily's, and that he actually saw her go into her building with a witness who we didn't even know about before this? Irresponsible and unethical."
"There's some reason that Bart wouldn't give up the fact that he went to Lola Dakota's office," Mike said. "Before we have him back over to interview, let's be sure and examine the inventory of stuff that was there, and get the photos Hal Sherman took at the college. It's even creepier to think that he might have gone there after he found out she was dead.
"Want to swing by the county jail and see if Ivan has anything to tell us? Talk to him about his student snitch, Julian Gariano? See what kind of mood he's in?"
"I'd love to, but his lawyer called on Tuesday while I was up at your office. Said Anne Reininger gave him my name and number. Left me a message telling me who he was and how to get in touch with him. And that under no circumstances was anyone to attempt to speak with his client out of his presence. Does Ivan still bother you, too?"
"Sure does. It's too neat to assume he didn't have something to do with Lola's murder, when he had already gone to such lengths to get rid of his wife. Suppose he figured out or got tipped off that the hit men were part of a government sting operation? It's too late to remove his voice from the tapes and get out of trouble completely. But say he sets up some kind of defense that proves he- what do you call it in legalese?-that he had withdrawn from the plan and he just let these mopes go ahead with it to show what grandstanders they were.
"Meantime, he makes a backup plan to kill Lola. Paying someone in the city to let him know when she's returned to Manhattan. Lola gets knocked off… splat, all over the bottom of the elevator. So even if you don't believe it's an accident, Ivan the Terrible's got a rock-solid alibi for the rest of last Thursday, sitting behind bars, waiting to be arraigned in a Jersey courtroom. And Fat Vinny looks like the incompetent that he is."
People like to think of domestic violence as an issue of the underclass, as something that occurs in minority communities, among the poor and uneducated, as something personal that is not "our problem." Both Mike and I, just like every cop and prosecutor in this country, have investigated and charged doctors, lawyers, judges, businessmen, and clergy with beating, raping, abusing, and murdering their spouses. I was not about to ignore Ivan Kralovic, who had already proved that he was at best abusive, and at worst a potential killer.
"Am I dropping you at your office?"
"Let me check my messages. It was slated to be a slow day. There's no point going there if I don't have to." I used my cell phone to dial into my voice mail. The mechanical voice told me that I had four new messages. I played them back and the first two were from assistants in the unit, telling me about the new cases that had come in over the holiday. The third call was from Sylvia Foote.
"Your pal Sylvia called an hour ago," I told Mike. "About Professor Lockhart, from the history department-"
"The guy who was, shall we say, 'tutoring' the law student we interviewed?"
"Yes. He's returning to town tomorrow afternoon. She left his number. He's agreed to speak to us over the weekend anytime we like. Sylvia says Lockhart is willing to cooperate. Was very fond of Lola. That's the gist of it. She's still looking for Grenier and Lavery." I hit the prompt to save the message so that I could retrieve Lock-hart's number and call him when he reached New York.
Message four. Three twenty-six P.M. I looked at my watch. It had been only ten minutes since that message was recorded. Hey, Alex. It's Teague. I'm up at Special Victims with a new complaining witness. Just reaching out to see whether anyone could interview her before she heads back out to L.A. tonight.
The Special Victims Unit occupied space in the same office building to which Manhattan North Homicide had been transferred more than two years ago. Just above 125th Street, in an unlikely-looking brick structure that faced the elevated subway tracks on the West Side, the two squads were on the same busy corridor. I dialed the number and the civilian aide who answered passed me along to Teague Ryner, another bright young detective who often teamed with Mercer.
"Thanks for calling back so quickly. I was hoping you'd make a decision on this one before she hops on a plane. I don't want to make an arrest unless you think we've got something. Want me to give you the facts?"
"Sure."
"Girl's name is Corinne. Twenty-eight years old. Lives in Santa Monica, says she works in the music business. It all started after she had a few Brain Tumors-"
"Brain tumors? How awful. Is she-"
Teague laughed. "Not that kind. It's a drink. A pretty lethal one."
"What's in it?"
I had seen women's vulnerability increase dramatically after downing multiple Tequila Sunrises, Long Island Iced Teas, Sex on the Beach, and other creations that bartenders invented with every new season. They woke up in strangers' apartments, on the backseats of taxicabs, beneath trees in Riverside Park, and on sidewalks in midtown. "It's my right," they would often tell me, "to drink whatever I want, and as much of it as I want." Detectives, prosecutors, advocates, and jurors were supposed to deal with the aftermath. This was my first Brain Tumor.
"About six different liqueurs mixed together," Teague told me. "She can't remember how many of them she drank. In fact, that's the trouble. She can't remember much of anything."
"Did she drink them voluntarily? I mean, she's not claiming someone drugged her, is she?" Two different kinds of problems, under the law.
"Voluntarily? She was chugging them like they were root beer."
"Tell you what. I'm with Chapman, on our way back from an interview in New Jersey. Since he's got to go up to the squad, I'll just come with him to your office and we'll figure it out together." No point spoiling the end of another colleague's day, as long as I was working.
"I'll check with you before I leave, okay?" I said to Mike as he let me out in front of the building. I headed upstairs while he parked the car.
The day tour had just ended, and the teams working four to twelve had come on duty. Teague had caught the case in the morning, when the victim had called the police from the emergency room at New York Hospital to ma
ke an official report. Even though many of the cops took vacation leave during Christmas week, sexual assaults continued to occur at an alarming rate. Despite the drastic reduction in street-crime statistics, the volume of acquaintance-rape cases remained steady. Women were far more likely to be attacked by men who were known to them rather than strangers-not the public perception but a well-documented fact. And the alcohol that fueled so many of the holiday parties, at people's offices as well as their homes, led to an alarming number of new incidents.
"Hey, Sarge, how've you been?"
"We can hardly keep up with everything. What a wild week."
"Where's Teague?"
The sergeant led me to a small cubicle in the back of the squad room. Ryner and his witness were talking quietly, as he took notes while she recalled more events of the night before. "Corinne, this is Alexandra Cooper. She's the prosecutor who can answer your questions."
Before I could be seated, Corinne asked the first one. "What kind of case do you think I have? I mean, like, I really don't want to go through, like, all the hassle if nothing's going to happen to this guy."
"I'll try to give you an answer, but I'm going to have to get a lot more detail from you about everything that went on during the evening."
"Well, that's part of the problem. I don't remember much of the night. I met this guy at a party. He told me he's a vocalist. Sings with the Baby Namzoos."
"Who?" Whatever happened to rock and roll?
"They're kind of a hot group now." She could barely disguise her disdain for my ignorance. "Anyway, I started drinking with him. Next thing I know it's ten o'clock in the morning, and I wake up in his hotel room. Naked. There's no way I would have done that unless he forced me to be there."
"Did he have sex with you?"
"Why else would I be naked and in bed with him? He must have. That's what I went to the hospital to find out."
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