Alex Cooper 01 - Final Jeopardy

by Linda Fairstein

  “So who’s Dr. Mitchell? Good-looking guy—didn’t he ever ask?”

  “As a matter of fact, no, he never did.”

  David and I had been neighbors for more than two years. He was in his late forties, divorced, and with a thriving private practice that made him one of Manhattan’s most successful shrinks. For someone like me, convinced that psychobabble and therapy are for other people, I had an abundance of free sessions just by having cocktails with David once a week. He listened to my problems, jogged with me on the occasional mornings he could coax me off my treadmill and around the reservoir, and regularly critiqued my social companions.

  “I must be losing my touch, Mike. Anyway, I’ll get the ice out. You call Steve’s Pizza—it’s auto dial number four.”

  “Who are the first three?”

  “My parents, and each of my brothers. And they should consider themselves very fortunate to be placed above Steve’s in my list of priority numbers. When I’m on trial, Steve’s is my lifeline.”

  Most of my acquaintances were pretty quick to learn that one of the things I had never managed to take time to master was cooking. I had dinner out most evenings—it was usually when I spent time with friends—and when I was at home by myself, I could whip up a very tasty tuna salad by opening a can of Bumble Bee and adding a dollop of mayo. But I lived on a block surrounded by great take-out stores and delivery places: Steve’s for superb pizza, which always arrived hot; P. J. Bernstein’s, the best deli in town when I craved a turkey sandwich; Grace’s Marketplace for elegant dinners that simply needed a five-minute microwave zap; and David’s for a moist roast chicken when I felt like being virtuous.

  “What do you like on it, Coop? I can never remember.”

  “Extra-thin crust, well done, no anchovies, and any combination you want. I’m just going to change—help yourself to a drink. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  I went into the bedroom and closed the door behind me. I walked over to the dressing table next to my bed and stared at the answering machine, flashing its red light in the dark. There was no one I wanted to hear from, not even my friends, because I couldn’t deal with calling anyone back right now and explaining the situation. Sitting at the table, I laid my head on my arms and let the tears slip out, debating whether to play the messages now or later.

  Later. At least two Dewar’s later.

  I rested a few minutes then picked my head up, turned on the lights, pulled off my panty hose, and draped my suit over the grip on the treadmill. My leggings and T-shirt felt much more comfortable, and I washed my face in the bathroom sink, spritzing on some Chanel 22, before going out to join my baby-sitter in the den. There was something about my favorite perfumes that always soothed me, and I was sorely overdue for soothing.

  Mike muted the television as I walked into the room, handed me my drink, and let me settle into my chair before he asked me whether I still wanted to talk about the case.

  “Is there anything else we have to talk about tonight?”

  “No,” he responded. “It just bothers me. You know as well as I do that most homicides are completely random. I mean if they’re not domestic or drug-related, then the killer and victim have absolutely no connection. The best cop in the world can spend a lifetime on a case and never solve it unless somebody walks into the station house and confesses. An outdoor shooting like this, there’s no fingerprints, no DNA, no clue. Maybe it’s just a hunter who let off some shots and Isabella was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s how most victims get it. Bad timing.”

  “It isn’t hunting season, Mike.”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Let’s knock it off—you’re right. Dinner will be here in another fifteen minutes. Then I’ll get out of your hair till the morning.”

  “I’ll drink to that. Cheers.”

  We watched CNN until the pizza arrived—Third World civil wars were generally a diversion from a day at the criminal courthouse—and then moved to the dining room table to eat, working on our second drinks.

  “You know what you said when we came in tonight, about your father thinking you’ve been at it too long? Were you kidding, Alex?”

  “No, but that won’t change anything. You know how I feel about my job. It’s just that no one in my family—no one in my life—understands that attraction. It’s not quite what they envisioned for their kid.”

  I had been raised in a comfortable suburban neighborhood north of Manhattan, the third child—only daughter—of parents who were old-fashioned and uncompromising in their devotion to each other and their families. My father’s parents were Russian Jews who emigrated to this country in the 1920s with his two older brothers, then he and his sister had been born in New York. My mother’s background was entirely different. Her ancestors had come from Finland at the turn of the century and settled on a farm in New England, re-creating the life they had known in Scandinavia, down to the primitive wooden outhouse and sauna on the edge of an icy cold lake.

  She and my father met when he was an intern just out of medical school and she was a college student, both caught up one night in the same disaster. Manhattan’s most famous nightclub in the fifties—the Montparnasse—was a major attraction because of the combination of its glamorous crowds and its great jazz. My mother was there with a date one November evening, while my father was trying to get in the door with three of his pals who had just finished a tour on duty at the hospital. A raging fire broke out in the kitchen and spread quickly through the crowded club, igniting damask tablecloths and chiffon dresses and silk scarves. The four young doctors turned the Park Avenue sidewalk into a makeshift emergency room, triaging the fleeing patrons and performers, socialites and staff, as people trampled each other in an effort to escape the treacherous inferno.

  My father spent the rest of the night riding the ambulances back and forth from nearby hospitals, unable to help the eighteen men and women who had perished inside the club, but saving scores of lives and calming dozens more who had been overcome by the combination of smoke and fear. The untrained volunteer who worked beside him for hours had been among the fortunate few to emerge unharmed from the Montparnasse. He learned only her first name that night—Maude—but was taken as much by her strength of spirit and gentle manner as by her perfect smile, green eyes, and wonderful long legs which she disappeared on when the ambulance delivered its final two patients to New York Hospital. When he told the story of that night he always used to say that the only way he could get the deadly images of the injured out of his mind’s eye was to conjure up the vision of my mother, sitting across from him in the ambulance all night, holding the hands of the patients he labored over, and then the nightmares subsided.

  Two weeks later, when Life magazine printed the story of the fire and the rescue, my mother called to thank the young doctor whose name was printed beneath one of the photographs of the HEROES OF JINXED JAZZ CLUB: Benjamin Cooper. She had tried to find him before that, and knew only that his friends had called out to him as “Bones” the night of the fire. She assumed that was a med school nickname that had something to do with an orthopedic specialty and so had called that department at several hospitals with no success. When she finally reached him and he invited her to meet for dinner, she laughed to learn that the name had been given to him as a child by his grandmother, in Yiddish, because he was so thin—only skin and bones.

  They married a year later and my father went on to do his residency in cardiology. I was twelve years old when he and his partner invented a half-inch piece of plastic tubing called the Cooper-Hoffman Valve, which changed our comfortable suburban lifestyle as much as it changed the face of cardiac bypass surgery. For the next decade, barely an operation of that nature in North America proceeded without the use of a Cooper-Hoffman, and although my father continued to do the lifesaving surgery that he found so rewarding, the income that he amassed from the distribution of the valve—and the trust funds it endowed for my brothers and myself—gave each of us the invaluable freedom t
o pursue our own dreams and our own careers. For me, that had developed into a devotion to public service, with the luxury of a personal lifestyle not possible for most of my colleagues, but which certainly helped to relieve the relentless intensity of my particular specialty.

  Four years ago, my mother had convinced my father to retire from his surgical practice. They sold the house in Harrison, kept a condo in Aspen to be near their sons and grandchildren in the West, and moved to an exquisite Caribbean island called St. Barth’s. When they weren’t traveling so Ben could lecture at medical schools around the world, they were primarily working on nothing more arduous than improving their French, reading all the books that I never seemed to have time to get to, and worrying about why their daughter was still single and so content to be immersed in a steady diet of sexual violence.

  Mike had met my parents many times and knew exactly what I was talking about. “Maybe they’re right, Alex. You can still be a prosecutor and do other things—frauds, organized crime, drug cartels.”

  “Not for me. You know what I love about this? Most women who survive a sexual assault come to the criminal justice system not expecting that any kind of justice will be done. They doubt that the rapist will be caught, and both fiction and made-for-TV movies have taught them that even if he is, he’ll never be convicted. It’s great to be part of changing that, of making the system work in these cases, of putting these bastards away. And it’s so new. Twenty years ago we had laws in this country that literally said that the testimony of a woman in a rape case was not enough evidence to convict her attacker. It was the only crime on the books like that. Imagine, your guys could be found guilty just on circumstantial evidence, but a woman was not competent to be an eyewitness to her own rape. It’s very exhilarating to be a part of these victories.”

  “Well, it’s obvious there’s something about it you love. But if you’re not serving dessert tonight, I’m outta here.”

  I carried the dishes to the sink and walked Mike to the door. He’d be back at six-thirty to pick me up so we could make an early shuttle to Boston in the morning. “Lock up after I go, kid. The Nineteenth Precinct has a uniformed cop in the lobby all night—he was supposed to arrive at eight tonight and be on till I get here in the morning. I’ll check on the way out.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I murmured, although I was actually glad to think someone would be backing Victor up at the door.

  “Don’t invite him up and distract him, blondie. If you get lonely, call for the doc next door. The cop they send for a job like this is likely to be too young for you, don’t you think?”

  “Too tired to think, Mike. Good night.”

  I took the copy of W that arrived in today’s mail into the bathroom, ran the water as hot as I could stand it, poured a few more drops of Chanel into the tub, and climbed in to decompress.

  As hard as I tried to lose myself in the smashing outfits for spring and the gaunt models who obviously didn’t indulge in a lot of Steve’s pizza, my mind kept making its own connections. I thought back to what I had told the serial rape victim—Katherine Fryer—in my office earlier this morning: like it or not, try or not, you will have flashbacks; things you see and hear will trigger memories of events or conversations, and some of them will be significant to the investigation.

  Now things were forcing themselves through my own head. Mike’s parting joke about calling the doc next door and the earlier coincidence of running into David Mitchell and the fact that David is a shrink and my skepticism about my own need for a shrink. It all connected back to where I did not want to go at that precise point in time: Isabella.

  Why had I blown her off so abruptly when she talked about a second stalker? I knew I was feeling guilty for having done it, since he might have been her killer. Now my mind was racing as the chain of thoughts kept triggering portions of her phone calls to me. What had she said about a shrink? I know she had used that expression in one of our talks, but I couldn’t remember whether she said she was seeing one because of the stalker or that she was imagining that the stalker was a psychiatrist.

  There would be more flashbacks to conversation, I knew, especially if I tried to ignore them. Tomorrow I could call Nina in L.A. and she would undoubtedly know more about it. She probably listened to Isabella more seriously than I did and would know the significance of the reference to the shrink. I took my own advice and got out of the bathtub, wrapped myself in a towel, and walked to the desk to write down my chain of thoughts, just as I told my victims to do. Then I started to dry myself off and set the alarm for 6 A.M. Before I could settle comfortably onto the bed, the telephone rang. I picked it up and said, “Hello,” only to be met by dead silence. I repeated my greeting and again got no response. I reached over to replace the receiver in its cradle, shivering from head to toe as I did so, and convincing myself that the chills were caused by my emergence from the late night bath, and not by the eerie stillness on the phone line. I pulled the covers up and concentrated on the hopeless task of falling asleep for a few hours, before setting off to see how my beloved Vineyard road had been turned into the scene of a murder.

  Chapter

  7

  Mike was in front of the building exactly on time, with a cup of black coffee for each of us. Neither he nor I function well in the early morning, so we were quiet on the short ride to La Guardia. He parked his car at the Port Authority Police Building and the cops dropped us off at the old deco Marine Air Terminal that services the Delta Shuttle.

  My bodyguard happened to be terrified of flying, so he was also a bit subdued for that reason. It always amazed me that a guy who was so fearless in the face of homicidal maniacs and bloodthirsty drug lords was frightened of airplane travel, but we had been to Chicago and Miami together for extradition hearings, so I knew that Mike would be saying novenas until we were up and down safely on each leg of the trip. The odds of an NYPD detective being killed by crossfire on a street in Washington Heights were far greater than his dying in a plane crash, but we each have our own demons and I wasn’t about to mess with his.

  The jet lifted quickly off runway three-three on the cloudless morning, and as the copilot suggested that the passengers on the left-hand side of the plane enjoy the sweeping view of the Manhattan skyline on a clear day, Mike’s gaze was fixed out the window on the sight of something below us to the left.

  “There’s only one thing that takes the edge off a flight out of La Guardia for me,” he remarked. “If we go down around here, there’s a good shot that we wind up plastered all over Riker’s Island, and I get to take a few of those scumbags with me to their final resting place.”

  “A generous thought.” Riker’s Island, four hundred acres of sanitary landfill sitting in the East River just opposite the extended airport runways, houses the main inmate population for the City of New York. It’s not quite Alcatraz, but the strong currents curtailed efforts at water escapes, and unlike the Tombs, it also holds sentenced prisoners.

  As we headed out over Long Island Sound, I tried to distract Mike by telling him more about Martha’s Vineyard. “It’s not just the beauty of its beaches and the fact that it’s such a popular summer resort, but it’s a truly unusual place with a fascinating history.”

  I had been going to the island for so many years that I had to think back about things that it had surprised me to learn on those first trips. “The Vineyard’s a bit longer than twenty-two miles and about ten miles wide at the deepest point—the largest island in New England—but the topography is incredibly varied, quite unlike Long Island or Nantucket. There are six separate towns, and each one is entirely different in character and appearance.”

  “People live there all year?”

  “Yeah, probably not more than fifteen thousand permanent residents. Then the population swells to close to eighty thousand when the ‘summer people’ and vacationers swarm on.”

  I explained to Mike that it was settled by the English in 1642 and governed by the Duke of York, hence the fact th
at it is located in Dukes County. It was actually a part of the state of New York for its first half-century—like Kings, Queens, and Dutchess counties—then annexed to Massachusetts, which is only seven miles across Vineyard Sound.

  “How can each of the towns be so different, all on the same island?”

  “Two ways, actually,” I answered. “One is simply the variety of the land. There are great harbors that launched the whaling industry in America centuries ago, thousands of acres of protected forest in the middle of the island, rolling hills that supported sheep farming and an agricultural base farther west, and miles of the most glorious beaches you’d ever want to see that stretch from one tip of the island to the other.

  “And the other is the way each of the towns has grown up around one way of life or another, as a result of the varied geography. Start with Edgartown at the eastern end of the Vineyard. It’s a classic New England village with rows of elegant white houses and churches and shops, quite formal in the Federal style, trimmed with fences and fabulous gardens which spill onto the brick sidewalks in summer. The large old homes are the legacy of the whaling captains who built them in the early nineteenth century, when the island was the center of that industry.”

  I went on to describe each of the others. Oak Bluffs has an entirely different architecture and feel. Huge Victorian houses line the seaside area, adjacent to the Camp Meeting Grounds property which grew up around the enormous wrought-iron Tabernacle built by an evangelical association of followers of John Wesley in the late-1800s. In winter, Oak Bluffs is home to a lot of the workmen who are permanent islanders, while in summer its main street comes alive with almost a honky-tonk resort feel. It’s also got a summer population of black professionals from all over the Northeast—New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Washington—women and men who have vacationed on the Vineyard for generations.