I could hear Mike unlatch the dead bolt. He cracked the door about a foot wide and stood in the opening, his chest bare and a towel wrapped around him and knotted at his waist.
"Sorry, it never occurred to me you'd be asleep at this hour." I walked toward the door, expecting him to let me in. "Don't be modest, Mikey. I won't rip it off you. That could be the first thing I've had to laugh about all evening."
I reached my arm out to push at the door. I assumed he thought I'd want him to get dressed before I came into the small room. He held his ground as he gave me a once-over, as though looking from head to toe for an injury. "You okay?"
"Cold and wet. And furious. You've got to help me."
I brushed past him and stepped over the threshold as he started to speak. "Alex, just give me a minute to-"
I gasped as I stood beside him. There was a woman asleep in his bed, and I cringed as I realized how rude I had been to burst in and impose on his friendship so abruptly.
I put my right hand up in front of my face and tried to whisper an apology. "I'm mortified," I said, fighting off tears and backing out of the doorway. "It was so inconsiderate of me to rush up here without calling."
He grabbed for my wrist as I pulled away and turned toward the staircase. "Alex, don't be ridiculous. I just want to-"
"I'll call you in the morning," I said over my shoulder. "Don't worry. I'm on my way to Jake's. I'm fine." I was flying down the steps, calling up to him from two flights below. There was no way I'd go back to Jake's apartment now, but I didn't want Mike to worry about me heading for my own place. I ignored Mike's shouts to me to slow down and stop, and instead was planning the most direct route to the station house to get someone in the squad to help me.
There was very little traffic on the slick street so I dismissed the traffic light and dashed across York Avenue, moving west. If Mike had been dressed, I knew he would have been chasing me by now, so I broke into a trot and started running, in case he even thought about putting clothes on to follow me.
My mind was short-circuiting with irrelevancies. What would he do when he called Jake's apartment in five minutes and learned that I hadn't returned there? Maybe I should just suck up what had happened and go back to confront Jake, call the police in his presence. But if he objected to my doing so, I would be forced to walk out on him again anyway. Who was the woman in Mike's apartment, I wondered, and why had he been so closemouthed about her? And how sorry I felt for her to have this madwoman burst in on her in her boyfriend’s home at a most unsuitable time for a house call.
I stood on the corner of First Avenue to wait for a bus to pass, panting as I came to a halt. Maybe she slept through the whole thing, I thought to myself. And what would he say to explain the situation to her if she had not?
I reached the curb on the far side of the street and practically lost my balance as I stepped on a slippery patch of black ice. Calm down, I tried to urge myself. Just a few blocks more and I could sit in the detectives' squad room making my calls, warm and secure.
Footsteps smacked at the pavement off in the distance behind me. Some other fool was out on this miserable night. I spun around to make sure that it was not Chapman coming after me, but saw only the dark figure of a man crossing the avenue against the traffic. If it were Mike, he would have called out to me by this point, and I assured myself that I would have stopped and explained to him the reason for my untimely visit.
I started loping along again, wiping the freezing rain from my eyelids and ducking my head to avoid the wind.
The running steps grew closer to me now and I turned again. This time the man was almost upon me and I could see him clearly. His face resembled the sketch of the young assailant who had been attacking women in this neighborhood for the past two months. My heart beat wildly as I tried to think of a way to get out of his path. Second Avenue was a long sprint from the middle of the block, but the brownstone buildings on either side of the quiet street required keys to get inside their front doors.
I accelerated and ran into the middle of the roadway, racing toward the busier thoroughfare ahead that would be bound to have taxi and bus traffic. Before I could reach the corner, the man had lapped me from the back. His muscular arms stabbed my shoulder blades and he tried to clutch at my mouth, muttering at me in a soft accented voice, repeatedly telling me to shut up.
I fell to the ground and my knees smashed against the concrete. My gloved hands flapped out in front of me and broke my fall. In a flash, my attacker ripped the strap of my bag off my arm and ran toward the avenue as I lay sprawled on the icy street.
28
"Hey, Quick Draw, wanna put out an APB for me?"
I was sitting inside the Nineteenth Precinct squad commander's office, shielded from the detectives' desks by the clouded glass window on the door, when I heard Chapman's voice, at top volume, calling across the room to Walter DeGraw.
"I'm looking for a dumb blonde. Big-time bad judgment written all over her. Put it out on the wires in case any of your guys see her skating around the city streets on the midnight tour. About five feet ten inches, too skinny for my taste, too stubborn to ask a cop for help, too vain to shed tears and run her mascara, too stupid to put a hat on her head in a snowstorm so her blonde hair's looking a little bedraggled from the sleet. But great wheels. And well dressed. They find her alive, she's likely to kill me if I didn't add those things. You seen her around or I oughtta try the psych ward down at Bellevue?"
DeGraw pushed open the door and Chapman reached out his arm to balance himself against the frame of it and stare down at me. I was sitting in the lieutenant's armchair, holding a steaming mug of coffee in both hands to warm them up, and wearing a turtleneck sweater that one of the guys had taken from his locker to put over my wet clothes.
"For a smart broad, sometimes you got the brains of a pigeon."
DeGraw started to excuse himself and get out of the room.
"Don't go, Walter," I implored him. He had begun to type the complaint report and the sooner I finished giving him the details, the faster I could get out of the cold station house.
Chapman stepped into the room and squatted in front of me. He placed his palms against my knees and realized when I jerked reflexively away from him that I had hurt them in my fall. He pried the coffee cup away from my clutches and pressed my hands between his own, rubbing them together gently but firmly.
"What's this all about, kid?"
I shook my head, not wanting to tell the whole story here and now, and DeGraw shuffled nervously, knowing that he was in the middle of something more personal. A uniformed cop knocked on the door, which was still ajar.
"Excuse me, Detective DeGraw? The desk sergeant sent me up." He was clutching my shoulder bag. "My partner found this on the sidewalk, about two blocks south of where she was hit. Nothing in it. Sarge wants to know if you can identify it, Counselor."
"There wasn't much in it anyway. Yes, it's mine."
DeGraw called over his shoulder to another detective in the squad room. "Hey, Guido. Wanna bring me a voucher for Ms. Cooper's bag?"
Now we were five, crowded into the tiny office, filling out police forms and documenting my thickheadedness.
"Word's out on the street, Coop. Even the perp knew it wasn't worth wasting his time to make you do it."
Don't bite, I urged myself. He's trying to make me laugh but I wasn't in the mood.
Chapman's grip on my hands was comforting, and it felt good to be with people who would care about finding the murdered woman Jake had been called about.
"What word?" Guido asked, suckered into Chapman's bait. "Make her do what?"
"The guy who mugged her's the one who's been chasing women around up here. Making them perform oral sodomy. But he didn't even slow down his pace for Cooper. Just took the money and ran. Must have heard she's no good at blow-"
"Why don't you back off, Chapman?" Lieutenant Grier had returned from his meal and walked upstairs to see what was causing such a late-night commoti
on. "There's a Mr. Tyler on the phone, Alex. Says he's a friend. Wants to know if he can come over here."
"Tell him no, please. Tell him I'll call him tomorrow." I pulled my hands away from Chapman and he stood up. I pressed my damp hair down and pulled the dangling strings of it behind my ears. "I don't know how he knew where I'd be. You either."
"You ran out of my place like a bat out of hell. Said you were going to Jake's. I waited five minutes and called him to make sure you got there." The men were listening to our conversation with interest, forgetting they had other things to do. "When he told me you'd had a fight and it had something to do with a missing woman, I just called over here, figuring that you had come to me to get information from the police. Next place you'd probably go was the precinct. I phoned and got Walter, who told me he had a hallucinating homeless woman, who looked like a vaguely familiar waterlogged prosecutor, dragging in a few minutes back with her tail between her legs. Told me what happened to you. Never dreamed you'd march in here as an aided case instead of an amateur dick."
"I'm not an aided case. I don't need an ambulance." I pulled my hands back and lowered them to my lap.
"Listen, Coop, you got less than forty-eight hours to turn your karma around before the New Year starts. Understand?"
Lieutenant Grier had walked away and returned from his own desk with a bottle of Glenfiddich. He chased the uniformed cop back downstairs, poured us each a shot into drinking glasses, and apologized to the three detectives as he served them in paper cups. "Happy New Year, everybody."
I drank the warm scotch and the rich single-malt stung as it went down my throat.
"Want to tell us about the call Jake got?" Mike asked.
I wasn't sure everyone in the room needed to hear the conversation.
"She gets real moody whenever she gets jealous, Loo," Chapman said, taking off his jacket and sitting on the edge of the desk. "Threw a tantrum 'cause she caught me with another broad. There probably isn't any missing woman at all. Just Coop trying to get my attention back."
"'Missing' isn't the operative word, Lieutenant. 'Murdered' is a bit more accurate." Maybe I had overreacted when I saw that Mike had been in bed with a woman. I had run down the stairs without waiting for an introduction or an explanation, and now I was trying to convince myself that it was not jealousy that had sent me reeling back out to the treacherously icy street.
"See the extremes she goes to when the green monster rears its ugly head? The lights were out, the candles were lit, my clothes were tidily stacked on a chair, and for once in a blue moon I'm in bed with a-"
"We ain't all that interested in your wishful thinking, Chapman. Guido, Walter-why don't you go out and finish up what you need to do with the paperwork on Ms. Cooper's mugging." The two old-timers reluctantly picked up their cups and reports and shuffled off to the larger squad room. "Alex, you want to tell us what set off this whole thing?" Grier asked, closing the door behind him.
I explained to Lieutenant Grier who Jake Tyler was and why he had a professional obligation to protect his sources.
"Yeah, but not even to tell you! It don't make sense to me."
"Believe me, Loo. I understand the principle, but it doesn't make any sense to me, either. There's no question that the information Jake got from the legal assistant who called him is that their client had killed his wife-"
"In Manhattan?"
"I'm not sure, Mike."
"Where, then?"
"Maybe Suffolk County. Jake said something about a summer-house on Long Island."
The lieutenant had less patience than I had expected. "Give me a place to start, Alex. There's five counties in the city and fifty-seven more in the rest of the state. You expect me to call every single one of them?"
He took a slug of his neat scotch and paced the floor. "What else do you know about these people? How old are they? How many children are we talking about? What does she do for-"
"I told you everything I know, Loo, and I realize it isn't much to go on. I just thought if we checked with a few of the precincts, maybe someone would have reported that a colleague hadn't shown up for work, or a sister didn't make it to a family birthday party, or that the baby-sitter was alarmed 'cause the kids were gone."
He looked at his watch as Mike walked behind me and stood at my back, rubbing my neck and shoulders. "More likely people would think the whole family's away for the weekend. I'll have the guys call around, but I wouldn't expect to hear nothing until tomorrow."
"Mind if we stay here awhile and use your phones?" Mike asked.
"Suit yourself. Seems like a shot in the dark to me." He walked out of the room.
"That's what you want to do, isn't it?"
I leaned forward, pushing the bottle out of my way, and rested my head on the desktop. "I just can't bear the thought that a woman's body is somewhere out there, exposed to this storm, while some member of my esteemed profession-for the right price-is probably arranging for the killer to get out of the jurisdiction."
"They can't do that, can they?"
"Not supposed to. But while the lawyer gets all his ducks in a row, hoping to bargain for a deal before the surrender, who knows where a financier with international connections will wind up?"
Mike refreshed his drink and sat opposite me, trying to make eye contact. "You and Jake going to be all right?"
I was silent.
"He hasn't got a choice in this, does he, Coop? He did what he had to do. You guys are good together."
"Looks like I'm the one who has a choice to make. It never occurred to me that he'd have to cover criminal cases until this happened. I'm not about to sit on the floor of the closet with the door closed and my hands over my ears when the phone rings and somebody confesses to homicide in the middle of the night."
"You want to come back up to my-?"
"I called David Mitchell as soon as I got here. He and Renee were still awake. David promised to take a spare key down to the doorman. I've slept on their couch dozens of times." Mike knew my neighbor, a prominent psychiatrist who had become a close friend over the years. He and his fiancee lived down the hall from me, and I had often spent the night, sharing the sofa with their dog, Prozac. "A wet nose snuggled up against my neck might be just what I need."
Chapman was dialing the phone as I spoke. "Mike Chapman, Manhattan North Homicide here. Who's this?" He paused to listen. "You got any missing persons reports in the last forty-eight hours? Yeah, I'll hold." A minute passed. "Fifteen-year-old runaway. Left home Thursday after a three-week correspondence with some guy she met on the Internet-" I shook my head in the negative.
"-and a female black, topless dancer from a joint on Pine Street, last seen getting into a car with a Japanese businessman two nights ago. DWA oughtta be a crime, Sarge. Thanks."
Driving While Asian was one of Chapman's favorite legislative proposals for an amendment to the Penal Law. He could never resist running his mouth at a politically incorrect target.
"Nothing unusual in the First, blondie. You keep thinking about how to put your love life back on track and I'll-" "I'm not thinking. I don't want to think anymore." "I'm on the case." He dialed again, working from the list of precinct numbers in the department telephone book in the top drawer of the desk. From the lower end of Manhattan moving north, Mike called squad after squad. At some, the phone rang interminably and he never got a response. At most, the answers were predictable. The occasional missing adolescent, the husband not back from a weekend jaunt with his pals, the family of a mentally handicapped adult who had wandered away from a vocational training program and hadn't been seen since Friday.
I walked out among the maze of old wooden desks and found the rest room. By the time I came back, Mike was waiting for a detective to check the blotter in the Twenty-fourth Precinct, on the Upper West Side. I lifted my empty purse from the metal tray of the out box and looked in the zippered compartment, knowing the cash was gone.
"Hope you had the good sense to take your Christmas present w
hen you blew out of Jake's place. We could hock that heap of glass and run off to the Keys, live the rest of our lives down there without ever working again. I could go bonefishing all day and you could drink margaritas and listen to Jimmy Buffett. D'you bring it?"
I smiled and shook my head. It was Mike's way of making sure that my pin hadn't been stolen in the mugging, knowing I would be too embarrassed to want to tell him.
"Boa constrictor? West Eighty-third Street? No thanks." He hung up and checked the number for the Twenty-sixth Precinct, talking as he dialed. "Woman moved into a sublet last week. In the middle of the night, an eight-foot boa comes slithering up on the pillow next to her, trying to give her a kiss. Last guy who lived in the place raised 'em. Seems he left one behind as a housewarming gift. Speckled band and all that…
"Who's this? Yo, Monty, it's Chapman. Looking for a missing broad." The guy who answered asked a few questions of Mike. "No, schmuck. If I knew who or where then she wouldn't be missing very long, would she?" Chapman listened. "Why'd they go up to King's College at this hour of the morning?" After a moment he placed the receiver back on the cradle.
"Time for forty winks, blondie. I'll look for your damsel in distress tomorrow. Somebody broke into the administration building at your favorite school after they locked up tonight. Must have gotten spooked in the middle of the getaway. Cartons of books were piled up next to the back door. The thief only made off with a few of them. They're the boxes marked with Lola Dakota's name on them."
29
Renee and I caught up over morning coffee. I had finally fallen asleep about 3 A.M., and had not even heard David slip out to walk the dog at seven o'clock. I borrowed her bathrobe and the spare key to my apartment. It was too cold to shower there, with the window still not repaired, but I needed a set of my thin silk thermal underwear to put on beneath my charcoal-gray pantsuit. For once the weatherman's prediction seemed to be on target, and just the news reports of the impending snowstorm chilled me again.
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