Alex Cooper 01 - Final Jeopardy

by Linda Fairstein

  “What’ll you do until then?”

  “See what other information came in today. If I don’t speak to you before dinner, you should let the Gorilla take you home from the restaurant. Then Maureen and I will come up for a nightcap when we see him pull away, and we can compare notes on the day, okay?”

  “Yeah. See you later.”

  I called Mark Acciano’s office to see how the deliberations were going in his trial. His paralegal answered and explained that Mark was still in the courtroom. The jurors had asked for a lot of readback—most of the testimony of the complaining witness, which meant that at least one person, maybe more, were fighting on her behalf. That process alone would take several hours, so it was unlikely there would be a verdict this evening. “Please tell Mark I can’t wait it out with him tonight. I’m sort of working on something else. But my beeper will be on in case he gets a result sooner than I think.” I wished the team good luck and hung up.

  Pat McKinney was standing in the doorway. “I just got a call from Maureen Forester. She’s bodyguarding that pros who’s a material witness in a drug conspiracy murder case that Guadagno’s on trial with. She says you’ve got an emergency—need a female undercover—that I’ve got to relieve her for the evening. Do I need to know about this?”

  Shit. Not if I can help it. Oh, Mo—I wouldn’t exactly have called this an emergency. “Well, you know that pattern we’re trying to break up—the Con Ed guy?”

  “Oh, it’s related to that?”

  “Not ex—”

  “You’re not using her for a decoy or anything, are you?”

  “No, of course not.” I wasn’t lying, I was just stalling for an excuse. I think all the people who’d been testing my good nature all week had something contagious that I had picked up. Well, it was very unlikely that Pat would ever find out about my evening plans.

  “Okay, Alex, you can have her but you’re going to have to call around and get somebody to replace her on the bodyguard. My wife and I have theater tickets tonight, and I just don’t have time to hang out here begging the squad commander for a replacement. It’s in your lap, okay?”

  “Fine.” Don’t let your current state of despair get the better of you, Alex, I tried to tell myself. How does a sour, mean-spirited grouch like Pat get himself a wife who he can take to the theater at the end of a busy day, while I can’t find a decent guy to save my life? Karen McKinney’s a boring, computer science techno-nerd professor at Brooklyn College, but it still must be awfully nice to have someone to go home to and leave all this bad news behind.

  I called Chapman at the office and told him what I needed. “Pat dumped it back on me. If you want Maureen, I’ve got to get someone to bodyguard Mo’s witness at the hotel overnight. Any ideas? Is she difficult?”

  “Nah. We’re just trying to keep her straight during the trial. Junkie. We call her the Princess. She’s from the suburbs, very agreeable. Shoots up in her armpits so she doesn’t leave any tracks for her old man to see. Easy to baby-sit—no problem as long as you keep her away from the stuff. I’ll make some calls and have someone up there in an hour. Don’t worry about it.”

  My second line was flashing. Laura signaled that Joan Stafford was on the telephone. “Can you believe how bad it is? Even Pat McKinney has more of a life than I do,” I moaned into the line.

  “Little wonder, Alex. I’m thinking of having a Cooper family crest designed for you. A symbol of Athena, with a broken heart, and an inscription in Latin: ’I sure know how to pick ’em.’ ”

  “Why? More from Jed?”

  “Alex, he’s going over the edge. Now he’s calling me constantly. I love you dearly, but I’ve got a deadline with my editor and I’ll never make it if I try to keep Jed at bay for you. I can’t keep up with his calls. Maybe you should just hear him out for an hour tonight and get it over with. He can’t understand why you won’t respond to his messages.”

  “Joan, there are no messages. He’s manipulative and dishonest. Look, I’ll speak with his secretary and have her tell him to leave you alone, but don’t suggest for a minute that I see him. I’m busy tonight, working. You’re an angel—I’ll get you out of this one, promise.”

  The last call of the afternoon was to David Mitchell.

  “How’s everything been going today, Alex?”

  I’m not looking for a diagnosis of my condition, I just need help with the case. “Much better, David, thanks. Got something for me?”

  “Yes. I checked first thing this morning. There is no psychiatrist in England named Cordelia Jeffers, nor is there any record that there ever has been. At least she’s not a licensed M.D., and there was never anyone by that name who was admitted to the Royal Academy.”

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  David went on. “I’d like to look at the letters again, if I may. I’ll probably have a few more questions for you after I do. Did you remember to make copies?”

  I told him I’d make them right now and slide them under his door before my dinner date.

  I closed up for the day and walked out of the office to look for a cab. The fall air was heavy and the thick clouds made an evening rainstorm likely. I grabbed a Yellow on the corner of Worth Street and gave him my address. The inside of the taxi smelled like a corral for a herd of camels, and like so many of the new additions to the fleet of drivers in the past few years, the man at the wheel didn’t seem to recognize too many words in the English language. We attempted to make ourselves clear to each other by a combination of waving arms and grunts, but I yielded to the fact that I would have to stay on top of him for the entire ride to make sure he knew where I wanted to go.

  “Here she is now,” I heard Anthony, the second doorman, tell the young delivery boy, who was barely visible behind the tall array of two dozen yellow roses. “Miss Cooper, want me to send the kid up with you?”

  “No thanks, Anthony.” I stepped to the table along the wall near the mailboxes and withdrew a pen and a twenty-dollar bill from my pocketbook. I removed the card, ripped up Jed’s pathetic note—“Please—I really need your help”—and gave the kid back the flowers along with the tip. I scratched on the envelope the words “With gratitude for all you do,” relied on the old theory that anonymous giving was really the most generous form of the art, and directed the kid to New York Hospital, which was just a few blocks down the street. “Sorry, this was a mistake. They were supposed to be delivered to the burn unit at the hospital. Just leave them there, at the nurses’ station, okay?”

  The young man didn’t seem too annoyed, and I continued on my way upstairs. I heard Zac bark as I slipped “Dr.” Jeffers’s letters under David’s door, and I unlocked my own apartment and went inside to change for my rendezvous with Johnny. No mail of any interest except a postcard from Nina and a request from the Wellesley alumni magazine for an update on my activities for the class notes. My schoolmates would be about as interested in my goings-on as I am in the news of their Zen weddings on hilltops in the Rockies, their inventive mothering styles, and the impractical topics of their postdoctoral theses. I ripped up the request and saved the notice to send in my annual dues before the end of the month. No messages on the machine, either, so I showered and selected a slinky black outfit to wear for dinner.

  I was ready to go and called for a car service to take me uptown, as I waited for the Final Jeopardy question to come on, just before the seven-thirty close of the show.

  The topic was world geography—Mike and I could split this one down the middle, but I figured he was already on his way to the bar with Maureen. The Final Jeopardy answer was: “A town in France, famous for its tapestry, which was in fact an embroidered chronicle of the Norman Conquest.”

  Alex Trebek began to go on about the tapestry not being an actual tapestry, but rather an embroidery made of coarse linen. I was sssshing him through the television screen as I tried to concentrate as hard as his contestants, who appeared to be as puzzled as I was. Alencon? Cluny? I probably would have bet my whole stash for th
e evening on a topic I figured I was pretty good at, but I was actually stymied by the time the stupid music of the jingle stopped playing. I made a last-ditch stab at Aubusson.

  “No, I’m sorry. Aubusson is not the right answer,” Alex gently rejected one of the players who had come up with the same guess as I had. Player number two had just left her card blank, shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head. Player number three, an obese musicologist from Indianapolis with one arm and five children, surprised Trebek with the right question: “What is Bayeux, France?”

  “That’s absolutely correct, Mrs.…” I clicked off the television before I could hear how much money she had won and picked up the ringing phone at the side of my bed.

  It was the polite, slightly Southern-accented voice of FBI agent Luther Waldron, greeting me with a “Hello, Alex, I never thought I’d find you at home tonight.” Well, I might ask, why did you bother to call me here then? But I didn’t.

  “Hi, Luther. I’m just on my way out the door.”

  “Wanted to let you know I’m in town. I’ve arranged for some of Isabella’s disgruntled suitors to be here for interviews.”

  “Yes, so I’ve heard.”

  “Course none of them look quite as likely as that character you had yourself mixed up with. That was certainly a shocker. Next time you get serious with somebody, you let me help you with a little background check, young lady.”

  I’ll just ignore that one for the moment. “How can I help you, Luther?”

  “Just thought you’d like to know I was in on this. Your Homicide guys may do fine with street criminals, but I’m not sure they know how to carry off the interrogation of Hollywood types, businessmen. You know, the more intelligent kind of suspect. I’m staying right on top of it.

  “Couple of other items. Just tried to pass them along to Chapman, but he’s out the field. I’ll brief him when I see him tomorrow.”

  “What are they?”

  “Well, for one thing, Burrell’s back into the ice. Cocaine. We’ve got a snitch in Boston who says his main man made a delivery to Burrell’s hotel room the same day Isabella checked out. You add that to his secret trip to the Vineyard, spice it up with his rage at her, and who knows what he did, without ever planning it in advance. We’ll be talking to him before the end of the week, and I hear he’s mighty nervous already.”

  “What else?”

  “One of our L.A. agents tracked down the local psychiatrists whose names were on the pill bottles in Isabella’s bathroom. Three of them had been fired over the years for not giving her the ups and downs she wanted. The current guy seems pretty cool, but he’s pulling all kinds of patient-doctor privilege stuff now. You know, he can’t divulge things Isabella said to him because she was his patient. Claims he has no information about her that has anything to do with the murder anyway. Wants to confer with his lawyer first to find out, legally, whether the privilege survives her death. How can he know what’s relevant to her murder without knowing half the details we know? The only thing he’d give up was that the lover she was talking to him about—sorry, but we figure that’s Segal—he’d had an experience with a stalker, too. That’s one of the reasons she was so comfortable with him. The shrink’ll talk about Segal—says that he wasn’t the patient, so there’s no privilege with whatever things he told Isabella. He never met with Segal directly—just says Lascar told him Segal had also been stalked by some woman while he was running for political office. Did you know about that?”

  “Yeah, we did.”

  “We’ll keep working the psychiatrist, Alex.”

  “Okay, Luther. I’ve got to run.”

  “Hey, got a couple of jokes for you, Alex. Heard them at Quantico the other day—right up your line of work, so I saved them for you.”

  The guy just doesn’t get it, I guess. “Anybody down there tell you the one about FBI agents—about why each male agent has a hole in the end of his penis?” I asked him, cutting him off at the pass, before he had another chance to offend me.

  “No,” he replied cautiously, “haven’t heard it yet.”

  “So oxygen can get to their brains.” Have a nice day, Luther. “See you tomorrow.”

  I put out my lights and locked the door behind me as I went off to meet one more of the men who might have had a motive to take the life of Isabella Lascar.

  Chapter

  21

  I walked into Rao’s a few minutes before eight, while Tina Turner was asking the gathering of diners what love has to do with it, and reminding me once again, as if the lessons of the last week had not been enough, that it was a secondhand emotion. There was no sign of the Gorilla, but I got a warm hello from Joey Palomino when I reintroduced myself to him and said I was happy to wait at the bar. I walked over and sat on one of the handful of stools, next to a very attractive black woman—Maureen Forester—who was sipping white wine, while her, date—Mike Chapman—was working on what looked like a vodka and tonic.

  The bartender was opening a bottle of wine at Woody Allen’s booth, so I began to make small talk with the couple sitting beside me at the bar while I waited for him to return to take my order.

  “I’ll bet you twenty dollars you don’t know the answer to tonight’s question,” I said, leaning across Maureen and grinning at Mike.

  “What’s the subject?”

  “World geography.”

  “You’re on.”

  I knew I had a winner. I gave Mike the final answer, but before I could sit up straight, he came back at me with Bayeux.

  “What’d you do, call your mother?” Mike’s widowed mother was glued to the television most of the day and night in her little condo in Bay Ridge, and she was his shill when he couldn’t count on seeing the show.

  “No. I swear to God, that was an easy one.”

  “Bullshit. How’d you know?” I couldn’t believe it. And Luther’s worried that Mike’s too unsophisticated to interview a cokehead producer, an illiterate stuntman, and a cheating businessman.

  He laughed. “I was there in ’94—fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. Bayeux was the first French city liberated by the Allies. June 8, 1944.” Mike and his military history. “Went with my uncle Brendan, who landed with the invasion force, remember? The only other thing in town is the tapestry museum. Had to take Aunt Eunice through it twice. Relax, blondie, you can pay up tomorrow.”

  Vie came back behind the bar, shook my hand, told me he was sorry he couldn’t remember my name but he was dead straight on the drink order. Maureen and I pretended to become acquainted white I waited for my host to show up. She complimented my outfit and thanked me, under her breath, for getting her out of the fleabag hotel where we stashed our recalcitrant witnesses during trials.

  We three chatted about the music, the changing weather, and what the prospects were for the Knicks this season. About ten minutes later the door pushed open and Johnny Garelli stood in the frame, striking a pose and waiting to be fussed over by Joey. He was big and solid, as good-looking as the magazine photos, but with the most awful hair plugs dotting the front half of his head.

  “Jesus, Mo, would you take a look at those implants? How’d she ever get in bed with that guy?”

  “Now, now, now, Alex. You know better than that. A man’s hair is like his penis—they get very sensitive about comments like that. I’ve had at least three domestics”—men who killed their wives—“caused by fighting over that kind of insult about hair. Be nice to the man.”

  Joey and Johnny finished embracing each other, and I walked toward Garelli as Joey pointed in my direction. He had put us in the second booth—Woody had the best table, of course—and Johnny gave me the once-over as we made our way to our seats. I didn’t think I was exactly his type, but at least my hair was my own.

  “Nice of you to call. How’d you know I was in town?”

  “Actually, one of the cops told me, when he was talking to me this morning. I’ve been interviewed by them a lot, too.”

  “I forgot what you do. Are you in
soaps? Acting?”

  “No, I’m a lawyer.”

  “Like a defense attorney, that kind?”

  “Sort of.” Not exactly that kind, but then, he’s not really an actor either, if you want to be truthful.

  “D’you know Isabella for a long time?”

  Longer than you, I thought to myself. “About three years. I gave her some help back then, when she was starring in Probable Cause. We became friendly after that.”

  Johnny and I reminisced for a while over our drinks, and by the time Vic brought him his second Ketel One martini, Joey was ready to take our dinner order.

  “No menus here. You gotta tell Joey what you want.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Rao’s had the best roasted peppers I had ever eaten, so I chose them for an appetizer, while Johnny got both the baked clams and the seafood salad for himself. Joey suggested the shells with cabbage and sausage, and the lemon chicken. Johnny added another pasta and some salad, as if he had been pumping iron without eating for five days.

  “So did Iz talk about me a lot?”

  “She told me a lot about you, yes.”

  “Good things, mostly?” he said jokingly. “We had some kinda good times together, her and me.”

  The English major in me winced. He may have been great in bed, but his syntax was as atrocious as his manners. He was shoving the bread in his mouth each time he came up for air, rinsing it down with the vodka.

  “Did Isabella tell you how we met and everything? We was a hot ticket for a while.”

  Enough about me, now let’s talk about what Iz thought about me. This was going to be a long evening.

  Garelli wanted to make sure I knew all about his career. The appetizers came and he inhaled his clams without missing a beat, taking me through his days in the Marine Corps. Stallone was his role model; he’d discovered Garelli when he got out of the service and cast him as a soldier of fortune in one of those blockbuster summer movies that I would have paid dearly never to have to see in my life. “He was good to me, man, still is. Semper Fi.”