The DeadHouse

by Linda Fairstein

  "There's been a dingbat on the loose after Miss Cooper, hasn't there? Saw a scratch on it back at the house."

  "Yeah, but this was definitely not a handgun. Besides, nobody knew it was going to be us on that tram. Maybe it's just some loose cannon, warming up for New Year's Eve."

  I thought of Lola Dakota. Was I getting to be as paranoid as she had been? "Remember the kid who hanged himself last weekend? Lola wasn't so crazy. He was selling information to Kralovic about where she was and what she was doing. Maybe someone snitched that I was out on the island today, and this attack really was aimed at you and me."

  "She's just out on a day pass, Sarge. I'm taking her back to Bellevue right now." Mike stepped out of the car to talk with the sergeant before he left, then slid back onto the seat beside me, closing the door behind him. "You want people to think you're nuts? That was just some earful of kids from Long Island being frisky on the ride home after an outing in the Big Apple. Don't start seeing your cases in every odd thing that happens."

  He was running his fingers through his thick black hair, a sure sign that he was more upset than he was willing to acknowledge. Mike didn't believe this was random mischief any more than I did. "They'll beep me if their search turns up any goofballs with shotguns. My guess is that whoever did it was off the bridge before the nine-one-one call went through."

  A couple of the cops returned to the patrol car and asked where we wanted to be dropped off.

  "Let's go to my place to meet Mercer." This unexpected event had chewed up more than an hour of our time. "I'd like to put on some sliver-free, clean clothes for dinner, okay? Wash my face and hands."

  "Dab some perfume on, too, Coop. You didn't smell so sweet when I was breathing down your neck."

  Mercer was already waiting in the lobby of my building. The doorman stopped me as I crossed to the seating area to greet him. "Miss Cooper? The super asked me to tell you, if I saw you, that your window still hasn't been replaced. The glazier they use is on vacation, so it can't be fixed until January second. Is that okay?"

  I didn't have much of an alternative. "As soon as they can get it done, I'd appreciate it."

  On the way upstairs in the elevator, we told the story of our harrowing tram ride. Perhaps it was a result of his own recent attack, but when I left them in the living room to go change, Mercer was insisting to Mike that we make the cops work to identify the shooters.

  Despite the tarp on the empty window frame, the apartment was as cold as the inside of a refrigerator. I changed into a casual outfit, packed some more clothes to take to Jake's place for the weekend, and returned to find Mercer and Mike pouring drinks in the den, the pocket doors closed in an effort to keep out the cold.

  "Here's to our own little Christmas. Looks like it'll be the last one for this trio without significant others, spouses, offspring. Chokes me all up inside." Mike lifted his glass and we clinked together. "Too bad you didn't have your hardware on your chest today. This thing Jake gave her, Mercer? It must be like kryptonite. Probably could have melted that buckshot on the spot. We can't top it, blondie, but we have some trinkets-"

  Mike interrupted himself and hit the television remote to eliminate the mute function. Alex Trebek announced that the Final Jeopardy! category was an audio question, and the topic was the Oscars. "How much, guys?"

  Mercer and I smiled at each other. There were categories in which we didn't stand a chance against Mike, but we could both hold our own at the movies. "Fifty bucks."

  "I'm in," I said to Mercer.

  Mike was reluctant. "Probably some dumbass song from a Disney flick. Make it twenty."

  Mercer held his ground and Mike yielded.

  "Here's the music," Trebek said. The introduction to the song played, and the Main Ingredient did the opening lines of "Everybody Plays the Fool." Mercer took my hand and started to dance with me as Trebek gave the clue.

  "Tonight's answer is, the Oscar-winning actor whose father was the lead singer in this group."

  Mike protested as Mercer and I danced around him. "That's a really misleading category. What did the guy win the award for?" Mercer and I answered at the same time. "Supporting actor." "We'll split the pot on this one, Ms. Cooper, okay?" Mike, like the three contestants, did not know the right question. "That's not cricket. You two know more about Motown than I know about the Civil War."

  Mercer told Trebek that the question was "'Who is Cuba Gooding Junior?' Now," he continued, turning to Mike, "Mr. Chapman, show us the money." We each took twenty-five from Chapman and began to open our presents.

  "For you, Detective Wallace," I said, passing a wrapped package to him. He ripped at the paper and smiled when he lifted the cover off the box to reveal a photograph in an antique sterling-silver frame. I had asked the mayor to inscribe the picture of himself with Mercer and his father taken at City Hall, when Mercer had received an award for his work on a prominent art dealer's murder. It had been taken the week he had gotten out of a wheelchair and was walking without assistance, and the expression on Spencer's face told the whole story.

  I gave Mike his gifts. First was a complete set of Alfred Hitchcock videos accompanied by gift certificates for two tickets to his local movie theater good every month of the coming year.

  For each, I had sketched an IOU for a plane ticket to the Vineyard, with dinners at the Outermost and the Beach Plum Inns, so we could all go up for a long weekend in the spring.

  They had a bag full of surprises for me, including a little red voodoo doll, with a set of pins, labeled with Pat McKinney's name. They had wrapped a complete collection of Smokey Robinson CDs and had somehow managed to get Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte to sign a note inviting me to the dugout after the opening game at Yankee Stadium in the spring, for which we all had tickets.

  The last box was a tiny one, wrapped in shiny gold foil with white ribbon, with a card that read, For our favorite partner.

  Inside was a pair of cuff links. Each was a miniature blue and gold NYPD detective shield, one bearing Mike's number and the other Mercer's. I took the navy silk knots out of the French-cuffed shirt I was wearing with my blazer and jeans and replaced them with their gift.

  Mercer drove us across town to West Forty-ninth Street, where I had reserved an eight-thirty table at Baldoria's. The bouncer held open the door and we were greeted inside by Frank. Since the chic downtown offshoot of Rao's had opened last year, it was one of the hottest tables in town. The great buzz, the classy brown and white decor, the same superb jukebox selections, and the outstanding food combined to make the place an instant success.

  Bo Dietl was at the bar. He had retired from the police department after solving the Palm Sunday Massacre in Brooklyn several years back, but he was a dogged private investigator who seemed to keep tabs on every crime that went down in Manhattan.

  "Buy them a round," he told the bartender. He had Mike corralled in a bear hug as he got off his stool to offer it to me. "What are you drinking?"

  "Make it doubles all around. We had a rocky ride this afternoon." The story of the tram shooting became more embellished with each telling. Bo was chewing on his cigar as Mike described how he knocked me to the ground and had to cover my mouth because I was screaming so frantically.

  "I didn't scream. I was so terrified, I think the words froze in my throat."

  Bo asked what we were working on and Mike explained where we were in the Dakota case. "Did you remember to call Professor Lockhart this afternoon?" he was reminded to ask, turning to me.

  "Yes, from the hospital, when the hearing was over. He lives just north of the city, in White Plains. If we drive up there tomorrow morning, he'll be happy to talk with us."

  Bo kept looking over my shoulder, at the table closest to the end of the bar. "Guess the case they had in Jersey is falling apart."

  "Not that I'm aware of-"

  "Hey, Alex. The Bo reads the newspapers, y'know." He had a Bob Doleish way of talking about himself in the third person. "That guy, sitting with the broad wi
th all the hair poofed up on top of her head? That's Ivan Kralovic, isn't it?"

  My head snapped in the direction Bo's cigar was pointing. The face of the man in the booth was obscured by an upswept bouffant hairdo, but the retired detective kept talking. "Heard it in the car on the radio when I was on my way over here. Sinnelesi's number two man was putting the wood to the dead professor. Sleeping with her in the middle of the investigation. I'm telling you, it would take a prosecutor to be that friggin' stupid. Sorry, Alex. Kralovic's lawyer made a bail application this afternoon. Seems the defense team had known about the affair for weeks. The judge was ripped about it, and granted the application today. Looks like old Ivan knew where to get his first good meal."

  I could see Kralovic clearly now as he leaned in to cut the thick veal chop on the plate in front of him. Ivan's mourning period for Lola had ended.

  21

  "We'll be back another time," I said, kissing Frank good-bye and trailing out of the restaurant behind Mercer and Mike. "It's not the food, it's the company." The last thing I needed was Kralovic telling his lawyer I tried to talk to him when I ran into him at dinner.

  "I had a real craving for Peking duck, anyway," Mike said, opening the rear door of Mercer's car to let me in. We drove across town to Shun Lee Palace, and I stopped in the phone booth to try to reach Paul Battaglia to tell him what had happened.

  After eight rings, I remembered that he was out of town until New Year's Day. Reluctantly, I dialed Pat McKinney's home number. "Thanks, Alex. I actually knew a few hours ago. Sinnelesi called me when he couldn't find the boss."

  It would have been courteous, not to mention useful, for McKinney to have beeped me to tell me about Kralovic's release on bail. I hated having to learn it from an outside source, late on a Friday evening when it was impossible to get accurate details. "Did he tell you anything else?"

  "Yeah, he fired Bart Frankel today. It'll be all over the papers tomorrow morning. Ivan's lawyer made a pretty compelling argument to the judge this afternoon that his client only went along with the sting because he knew in advance exactly what was happening, and wanted to be able to argue entrapment to the court."

  "You mean entrapment as a defense to hiring someone to kill his wife?"

  "Yeah. He's saying the tapes will prove the whole operation was Sinnelesi's idea. They're going to argue that Kralovic had himself wired up for months, every time he met with or spoke to the undercovers. And that if the two sets of tapes aren't the same, he'll prove the New Jersey prosecutor was corrupt and simply out to get him."

  It had never occurred to me that Lola's husband might have any kind of viable defense to the charge of trying to kill her. But Sinnelesi's reputation was not beyond question, as Battaglia's was. Perhaps Paul's nose had been even more accurate than usual in detecting a good reason not to participate in the Jersey plan. If our counterparts across the Hudson had been unable to nail Kralovic squarely for his penny-stock fraud, then maybe they had stretched procedure and undermined the attempted murder case.

  All that was certain is that Ivan the Terrible had exactly what he had wanted. Lola was dead, and the evidence pointing to him as the prime mover in her killing was looking muddier and muddier.

  We settled in for the meal. The little bit of appetite that remained after the tram ride had evaporated with our sighting of Kralovic dining at an elegant restaurant. I watched Mike and Mercer go through steamed dumplings and chicken soong and a deliciously crispy duck, but I even refused my fortune cookie for fear that its prophecy would depress me.

  They had dropped me at Jake's apartment by eleven. I called him at the Watergate Hotel to let him know that I had been delivered home safely. Unable to sleep, I drew a steaming-hot bath and tried to escape with the latest issues of In Style and Architectural Digest. When they failed to make me sleepy, I immersed myself in an interminable New Yorker piece on a lost Tibetan temple that had been rediscovered by a group of British trekkers. Midway through the story I was ready to turn out the light.

  Mike was waiting for me outside the building at eight-fifteen. We stopped for coffee on our way north to Westchester County, to the suburban home where Professor Lockhart was staying. The car stops on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge the night before had been unsuccessful, and the ballistics lab confirmed that the pellets had come from some kind of shotgun, not a pistol. I tried to buy into Mike's theory that it was simply pranksters with an early burst of holiday fireworks.

  It was almost nine-thirty when I rang the bell at the neo-Victorian home on a quiet dead-end street in White Plains. The sandy-haired man who opened the door to us looked no older than Mike. He had fine, chiseled features and an athletic build. "I'm Skip Lockhart. Why don't you come inside and warm up?"

  The large living room was filled with antique furniture and decorated in a very formal style. There were pictures on all the tabletops, which I tried to scan as he led us into a study.

  "Thanks for coming up here. I'm kind of stuck for the next week."

  "We just assumed that you lived here."

  "It's my parents' home, actually. They've gone out to Scotts-dale to visit my sister for the week, and I promised I'd come up here after Christmas to keep an eye on my grandfather, who lives with them. He's ninety, and as much as he thinks he can take care of himself, we need to keep an eye on him. I was a friend of Lola's. Anything I can do to be helpful, I'd like to try."

  "Where's home?"

  "In the city."

  "Near campus? Near Lola's apartment?"

  "A few blocks away."

  Lockhart told us that he was thirty-eight years old, single, and an assistant professor of American history at King's College. He had known Lola for five or six years, and had never been romantically involved with her. Yes, he admitted that he had dated several students at the school, despite the fact that it was against the administrative guidelines. But he had never known Charlotte Voight and never given any thought to her disappearance.

  "How much time did you spend with Dakota, on campus or off?"

  "Very little, until she got me involved in the Blackwells Island project."

  "What was your interest in that?"

  "Two things, really," Lockhart answered, sitting back in his leather armchair and crossing one leg over the other knee. "Obviously, being a student of Americana, I'm quite familiar with the history of the area. An astounding number of well-known people have spent time there, and as a social phenomenon, it's a great resource for teaching students how we've dealt with society's outcasts throughout time."

  He cleared his throat several times as he talked, looking us over and trying to get comfortable with us, it seemed to me.

  "But I've always had a personal reason to be fascinated with that little strip of land. You see, my grandfather used to work on the island."

  Mike was engaged now, both because of the investigation and because of his own love for historical nuggets. "What do you mean?"

  "You probably know that the place was once covered by institutions-hospitals, asylums, jailhouses. And the New York Penitentiary."

  "We were over there yesterday. That building doesn't exist at all anymore, does it? Just a pile of rubble and rocks."

  "You're right. It used to stand directly to the north of the Smallpox Hospital, but it was demolished before the Second World War. It was the gloomiest place on the island, which is saying quite a lot. Unless you've made a study of it, as I have, there'd be no reason for you to know about the terrible scandal that took place there shortly before it was closed."

  "What kind of scandal?"

  "During the Tammany Hall days, the prison was a cesspool of corruption and graft. The place was actually dominated by mob members who were inmates. You'd have to see photographs to believe the way they lived."

  "You mean how awful it was?"

  "Not for the top dogs. They had quite a luxurious lifestyle, with personal pets and private gardens, food and liquor that was smuggled in to them. A few even dealt drugs inside."

 
; "That piece of it hasn't changed too much," Chapman said.

  "Finally, when Fiorello La Guardia was elected to the mayoralty and Tammany Hall fell, he named a new commissioner of correction. A gentleman named Austin MacCormick. My grandfather was a young lawyer at the time, hired out of your office, Miss Cooper."

  Lockhart leaned over and handed me one of the old photographs from the side table. "He wasn't even thirty years old. MacCormick hired him to work on the cleanup of the penitentiary. He and his cronies planned a huge surprise raid of the prison-a very successful one, which ended up shutting it down. It was quite a big deal. Gramps still has all the clippings to prove it."

  Lockhart stood to adjust the thermostat in the room and check on the heat.

  "Did Lola Dakota ever meet your grandfather?"

  "Meet him? I thought she was going to elope with him." He laughed as he said it. "Once she found out that he had actually spent time on the island, there was no keeping her away from this house. And it was a godsend for my folks to have someone who took a real interest in the old guy, who could listen to his stories day in and day out."

  "What did they talk about?"

  "Everything he could remember. She listened to him describe the raid itself, she looked at his photo albums and read his diaries. In fact, I think she may still have had some of the volumes. I suppose someone will sort that all out and get them back to us. Seems rather irrelevant in light of what happened to Lola."

  I made a note to look for the diaries among the inventory of Lola's books and papers.

  "Were you there for those conversations?"

  "Two or three times, at the outset. But I grew up on these stories and I've heard them all my life. I don't suppose there was anything he told her that I didn't already know. She'd just take the train up here, have lunch with my grandfather, spell my mother for a couple of hours. I don't think any great revelations came of it, Miss Cooper."

  "Can you think of any reason, any motive for someone to kill Lola?"