Alex Cooper 01 - Final Jeopardy

by Linda Fairstein

  “I know that. I just want to explain what’s going on. My name is Alexandra Cooper, and I am the assistant district attorney who’s going to handle your case. I’ll be with you from today through the day Mercer catches your attacker and we convict him. I know he’s already asked you a lot of questions, and I’ll have to ask most of them again. But from now on we’ll be working on this together, and my job is to get you through this as comfortably as I can. Do you want to ask me anything before I begin?”

  Katherine Fryer wanted the normal assurances—that her name wouldn’t be in any newspapers and that her parents in Pennsylvania wouldn’t have to be told about the rape. “And if there is a trial, will they be able to question me about my personal life, about my sexual activity?”

  “No, Katherine, there have been a lot of improvements, a lot of changes in the law. In a case like this, when you’ve been attacked by a man you never saw before, nothing about your sexual history is relevant to the trial. I promise you: this stuff isn’t like all those awful made-for-TV movies. Detective Wallace does the heavy lifting in this case—the worst is behind you. Once he finds the man and you identify him, we won’t have you on the witness stand for more than an hour.

  “Let me just go through the story with you one time, then you can help with the sketch and go home and get some rest.”

  “I can’t go home, Miss Cooper. I’ll never feel safe there again. I’m going to my sister’s house in New Jersey. Mercer is going to go with me to the apartment to pack some clothes, but I’ll give you my sister’s number until I find a new place to live.”

  This stuff really sucks. A woman alone in her home, minding her own business, is victimized there—then has to move out because it’s so saturated with the memory of that devastating violation.

  I asked Katherine what had happened yesterday afternoon, shortly before one o’clock, as she sat alone in her kitchen.

  “Well, I was eating my lunch when the doorbell rang and I said, ‘Who is it?’ and a voice outside the door said, ‘It’s Con Edison.’ I said I wasn’t expecting anyone from Con Edison, that I didn’t have any problems. He told me, as I looked through the peephole, that the super had called him in because there was trouble on the gas lines in all the rear apartments. So I could see that he was, you know, dressed like a Con Ed workman and I opened the door.”

  I already knew the answers to the questions I was about to ask, and I already knew how many times Katherine Fryer had blamed herself for the same things, but I had to ask them anyway.

  “When you say he was dressed like a Con Ed repairman, can you tell me more about his clothing?”

  “Well, it was just a flannel shirt and jeans, with a work jacket over them, and a hard hat.”

  “Did the hat say ‘Con Ed’ on it, specifically? Did it have any lettering on it?”

  “No. It didn’t say anything.”

  “Did he have any kind of identification that, he showed you, like any tag on his shirt or anything he pulled out of his pocket?”

  Katherine was avoiding eye contact now, admitting, with regret, that she hadn’t asked for any ID, she had just assumed he was telling the truth.

  “I let him in and he walked right into the kitchen, where my lunch was on the table, and he opened the stove and looked in. And I kept talking to him as he looked, and I said I didn’t ever report a problem with my oven even though the gas had been kind of poor. It’s an old building—everything needed repairs at one point or other. Then he said, ‘Maybe you could get your husband to come out here and give me a hand with this.’” Katherine paused and winced as she went on, “So I told him, ‘I don’t have a husband—I mean, maybe I can just help you.’”

  That’s exactly what he wanted to hear, as Mercer and I were well aware. Home alone.

  “That’s when he stood up from the oven, turned around and faced me. That’s the first time I saw the knife.”

  “Take a breath, Katherine,” I said, leaning over to put my hand on top of hers. “You’re doing fine. Just take it easy—I know this is difficult to do.”

  “It was a long knife—it had a long, narrow blade. I think he pulled it out of the tool belt he had around his waist. It seemed like it was fifteen or sixteen inches—very, very long. He grabbed me and held the knife right in front of my face. He told me not to make a sound or he would cut up my face. Then he said he’d kill me if I didn’t do what he wanted.

  “So he walked me into the bedroom and told me to undress with my back toward him, to take all my clothes off and get on my knees. That’s when he made me do oral sex on him.”

  When she stopped, Mercer offered her a glass of water, and as she sipped it I talked softly to her.

  “You’re doing fine, Katherine. I’m going to interrupt you from time to time to ask for some details. The questions may sound stupid and trivial, but I need to ask them. You may know some of the answers, and you may not remember others. Just tell me what you can, okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Did he undress himself, Katherine, or did he just expose his penis?”

  “He didn’t undress completely. But he did take off his jeans and the heavy belt. He kept his shirt on. And he wasn’t wearing any underpants.”

  “When you say ‘oral sex,’ you mean he made you put your mouth on his penis?”

  “Yes, yes, he did. He kept saying he’d kill me if I didn’t. Then he told me to stop. He picked me up, he lifted me up, and he put me on my bed. He pushed me down on the bed—face up—and he put a pillow over my face.”

  “Was he talking during any of this, Katherine, or was he not saying anything at all?”

  “Yes, he talked. He talked a lot of the time. But, but… I really can’t remember too much of what he said. It was disgusting.”

  I leaned in to try to get her to look me in the eye. There aren’t many honest people who can lie when they look you right in the eye—just the pathological types. I knew Katherine Fryer could tell me exactly what her assailant said to her if I forced her through it.

  “Katherine, you can remember the things he said to you—you may not want to, but I know you haven’t forgotten them. And as unpleasant as it is, and as much as it may make you mad at me, I want you to say every one of them to me. They’re part of his signature, Katherine; they’re part of what will help Mercer find him, because he’s probably said them to someone else and he’ll say them again the next time. And there will be a next time unless we stop him. It’s what helps him get off on this stuff, so it’s one of the ways you can get back at him. Please help us with this, trust us.”

  “Do you want me to leave the room, Katherine?” Mercer asked, hoping it might make her more comfortable.

  “No, no—it’s not you. It’s just, well, it makes me nauseous to think about. I’m not a prude or anything, but…”

  Again, Katherine Fryer braced herself and went on with her story. “It was odd,” she Continued, “because he kept going back and forth between the sexual stuff and asking me where my money was. When I undressed, he told me I had big breasts—he told me he liked that. Then he went right on saying he wanted my money and my credit cards. I pointed to my pocketbook. Once he had me on the bed with the pillow on my face, that’s when he really talked a lot.

  “He wanted to know if his prick—excuse me, that’s his words I’m using now—if his prick was bigger than my boyfriend’s… . Was it better for me?… Why did I have such big breasts and a little pussy?… Then, in the middle of that, how much money was in my wallet? Then, right back to how good my boyfriend was in bed. And then… he kept saying that he would kill me if I didn’t make him come.”

  Mercer caught my eye as Katherine rested her forehead in her hand. We had more than enough to know it was the same guy as in the earlier cases. He was trying to tell me to wrap it up so he could take her on to headquarters.

  Even the ending was identical. After the rape and robbery, he bound Katherine to the bed with an extension cord, stuffed a dishcloth in her mouth, and replaced the pill
ow over her head. He ripped the telephone cord out of the wall, and she heard him rummage around in her dresser drawers before the final sound of the front door as it shut behind him. It took more than one hour for the determined young woman to free herself from the cord he had wrapped around her wrists and summon help from a neighbor.

  I was glad Mercer had signaled me to cut the interview short. Katherine Fryer was running on empty, and I had found an outlet for my own predicament in trying to lose myself in her case.

  “Okay, Katherine, we’ve given Miss Cooper enough to keep her busy for a while. Let’s get some fresh air and walk over to headquarters. We’ll let you stop talking and start sketching.” Mercer Wallace stood up and opened the office door, determined not to let me wear out his witness.

  “I’ll call you later, Coop—see if we can figure out where to go from here.”

  I thanked Katherine and explained that I would be available to her for any kind of help she needed. “Keep a pad next to your bed,” I urged her. “More detail will come back to you. Like it or not, you’ll have flashbacks—triggered by conversations you hear or reminders you see on the news or TV shows. Write down anything else you remember, no matter how insignificant it seems to you, ’cause Mercer and I will want to know it.”

  We exchanged good-byes and the two of them walked around the corner to the elevator bank. As soon as they were out of view, Laura blurted out, “Battaglia called from his car. He’s on his way back to the building and he wants you waiting for him in his office when he gets there.”

  “Great. If I’m not back in an hour, send reinforcements.”

  Chapter

  5

  The walls lining the corridor into the executive wing of the office were covered with portraits of a century’s worth of New York County District Attorneys. Grim-visaged, no-nonsense men, most of whom had held office without ever being troubled by the presence of women lawyers on their staffs. I walked the gauntlet below their icy stares as I headed in to face Battaglia, sure that they would come alive to talk behind my back about the terrible scandal I had visited upon their successor.

  I reached the desk of the D.A.’s executive assistant, Rose Malone, a great-looking woman in her late forties, who had started in the office secretarial pool as a high school graduate but had been hand-selected by Battaglia to run the front office and had done so for almost twenty years. She and I had spent long hours together throughout my tenure in the office, and we were good friends. Rose was the best gauge of the boss’s moods, and a great ally on the occasions when I needed one. “You might want to save that request until tomorrow,” she would say, on a day the D.A. had been criticized on a particular case action by the Times editorial page; or, “Go right in, Alex—he was so pleased with the verdict your team had on that gang rape.”

  “Good morning, Alexandra,” Rose said, courteously this time. Cool, it seemed to me.

  “That’s terrible, what happened to Miss Lascar. Are you doing okay?” she went on.

  Once I assured her that I was fine, she told me to go right into Battaglia’s office, and went back to her word processor. No chatter, no gossip, no mood summary, no advice. If Rose was cool, then the District Attorney would be frigid.

  I braced for the lecture I was about to receive and opened the door. Battaglia was standing behind his enormous desk, barking into the phone as he motioned me to sit at the large conference table at the far end of the room. I pretended to make notes on my legal pad while I tried to figure who the conversation involved, and was a bit relieved to see that this burst of anger was directed at the federal prosecutor in our district, with whom the D.A. was feuding over jurisdiction in a major mob investigation.

  He hung up the phone and slowly walked over to sit across the table from me.

  “What the hell is going on here, Alex—do you have any idea?” Battaglia spoke quietly, as he began his interrogation.

  “Paul, I…”

  “Do you know how this kind of notoriety distracts from the serious business of this office? Do you understand how it compromises your ability to get work done?”

  As my color deepened and my embarrassment grew, so the D.A.’s voice escalated. There was no point in my responding to any of his questions because he already knew the answers to those he was asking. I was familiar with his technique, and knew that in a few moments he would stop yelling and begin to press for details. The booming jabs didn’t bother me half as much as the next phase, when he could make you feel like a complete idiot if you were unable to provide him with the details he wanted. I had watched unsuspecting colleagues present him with information for an impending press conference, confident in their mastery of the facts of the case, to have him come back with questions like, “Do you know what church the suspect’s mother attends?” or, “Which junior high school did the witness go to?” or some other point that was of potential value to a politician and none to a junior prosecutor.

  Battaglia talked at me for quite a period of time before he began to ask for facts that he didn’t yet know. And then it was time to give him every shred of detail from the moment Isabella first was introduced to me and spent time in our office through our most recent correspondence and her request to escape to a private hideaway.

  The District Attorney waited for my presentation to conclude before he leaned in, eyeballed me, and asked: “Can you think of any aspect of this, any hint of scandal, that’s going to come back to hurt this office, Alexandra?” The unspoken portion of that sentence, I knew, was… “Because if there is, Alex, you’d better start cleaning out your desk drawer and thinking about the advantages of the private practice of law.”

  “No, Paul,” I said, shaking my head repeatedly, “I’ve been thinking about it all of last night and this morning. There’s nothing more that I haven’t told you, really.”

  He sat back upright in his chair and reflected for several seconds before his mien began to soften and he took on the aspect of the Paul Battaglia I idolized. “Okay, Alex, how do you come out in all this? What are we going to do about you?”

  “I’m practically numb today, Paul. I think it’s actually good for me to be at work because it gets my mind…”

  “Good for you, maybe, but I don’t know how good it is for the office. Patrick McKinney thinks I ought to put you on leave for a few months and wait till this all clears up.”

  “Oh, Paul, that’s ridiculous. What he really thinks is that I should throw my body on top of Lascar’s coffin and be burned alive. Of course Pat wants me to take a leave—he can’t bear having me around in the first place.”

  “Well, I spoke to the District Attorney up there in Massachusetts this morning—the one in charge of the murder investigation. He and the police chief would like you to fly up for a few hours tomorrow. They need a lot of background from you, and they have to go through your house so you can tell them what things are yours and what were Isabella’s… and what belonged to the mystery guest.

  “So make your arrangements and, let’s see, tomorrow is Friday—I want you to go up and give them whatever they need. And your detective goes with you, understand? Who’ve you got?”

  “Mike Chapman, Manhattan North.”

  “Fine. Just keep in touch with me every step of the way. I think you know that I don’t like surprises, Alex.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Two other points. You are not to go to Lascar’s funeral. No Hollywood, no photo-ops, no way for the press to keep tying this back in to us. She’s dead—say your farewells privately. Understood?”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “And the other thing. You are not a cop, Alex. As I’ve told you before, you could have gone to the Police Academy and saved your old man a lot of money. You are an assistant district attorney, an officer of the court, a lawyer. Let the boys and girls in blue play police officers and keep your nose out of it.”

  I nodded again.

  “Oh, I meant to ask you, do you have any idea who was paying her a visit up there?”
r />   “No, I don’t, Paul. She never mentioned it and I never asked.”

  “Well, when did she get to the Vineyard?”

  Whoops, I could feel it coming. I had a rough idea of the answer, but not an exact time. Two “I don’t knows” in a row. Bad form with Paul Battaglia.

  “How seriously should we be looking for this second stalker?”

  I was about to make the third strike. “Paul, I just don’t know the answer to that—we’re trying to evaluate it now.”

  “All right, Alex, be sure and let me know whenever you get some answers. Take care of yourself, that’s the most important thing right now. Oh—is there any progress on that serial rapist, Upper West Side? I’m getting a lot of crap from that local community board—can’t your guys wrap this one up?”

  Yeah, and if I have a free hour this afternoon I’m going to go out looking for Judge Crater, too, I thought, as I told the District Attorney, “We’re trying, boss.”

  Mike Chapman was sitting at my desk eating one of the sandwiches that Laura had ordered in for lunch when I returned from Battaglia’s office. “How bad did it hurt?” he asked as I walked in, picking up the growing pile of messages from Laura’s desk.

  “Not too bad,” I replied. “The mayor must have given him the money he wanted. He’s clearly annoyed, but not wild. Have you heard about the plans for tomorrow?”

  “Nope. What’s up?”

  “I’m taking you to Martha’s Vineyard—show you how a real police investigation gets done,” I said, chuckling at the thought of Mike meeting the town police. A few house burglaries when the summer people leave after Labor Day, loads of moped accidents in season, and endless cases of Driving Under the Influence all winter long, but I couldn’t remember a murder that had occurred on the Vineyard in my lifetime.

  “Whoa, an overseas trip, and with the Cooperwoman! You know, I think Patrick McKinney is right. This whole thing with Lascar is just a ruse for you to get a weekend alone with me on an island, so we can…”