Alex Cooper 01 - Final Jeopardy

by Linda Fairstein

  “That is fantastic. Where are you now?”

  “Still at the bank. Listen, take your time. We’ll take him back over to my office and process him.” Photographs, fingerprints, palm prints, background information. “The boss’ll start assigning guys to call the victims and pick ’em up for the line-ups. I’ll chat him up, nice and easy, see if he wants to talk to my favorite prosecutor, tell her why he likes to do this shit to women. You go home, get comfortable—it’s gonna be a long evening—and get yourself over to the office by seven, seven-thirty. Sound okay?”

  “Perfect. I’ll just go home and change, then be right there. Let me know if there’s anything you need.”

  “You got somebody who can work on a search warrant for his mother’s place while you’re up with us? See if any of his clothing, any of the women’s jewelry’s there?”

  “No problem. I can phone it in when I’m over with you. It’s all on the word processor in ECAB,” our early case assessment bureau, where whoever was on duty could help me through the evening’s paperwork.

  “And, Mercer? One more thing. Can you control your boss on this? No perp walk. Please, beg him for me. Not before the victims have a chance to see the line-up. Take him into the station house with a jacket over his head, will you?”

  “You bet. See you later.”

  Publicity on these cases could get out of control. Too often, police brass staged a scene taking a suspect in or out of the patrol car, resulting in the defendant’s face being plastered all over the local TV and newspapers. For those victims who saw the “perp walk” before they got to view a formal line-up, it often meant that defense attorneys challenged the propriety of the identification process, and the victim was barred from pointing out her attacker at the trial. We were too close to a great result to screw it up now.

  I packed up all the supplies I would need to run the investigation from Mercer’s office, left Laura a note telling her I might be late in the morning—depending on how long I had to be at the precinct throughout the night—and called Rose Malone. “Is Battaglia in?”

  “He’s in a meeting, Alex. He’s got the governor’s Criminal Justice Coordinator in there. Do you want me to interrupt?”

  “Nope. Just wanted him to be the first to know that we think we’ve got the Con Ed rapist. Tell him I’m going out on the case myself to do the line-ups and try to take a statement. He’ll get a complete briefing in the morning.”

  “Congratulations, Alex. He’ll be really pleased. I’ll put you in his book for lunch. I’m sure he’ll want to hear all the details.”

  “Thanks, Rose.” I hope I’m here in time for lunch. This kind of case could be an all-nighter, by the time we round up the witnesses and get the video team up to the squad.

  My last call was to the video technicians. For most of the history of police work, statements or admissions made by suspects in criminal cases were recorded by officers in their notepads. Then for several decades, our office used stenographers who accompanied us on call and took down, verbatim, the questions and answers of an interrogation, to read back to a jury at trial. For almost twenty years in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, we had developed a sophisticated unit of trained video professionals, who taped these critical sessions—always with the knowledge and consent of the accused—whenever a defendant was willing to participate.

  This process eliminated the age-old complaint about police interrogations: that the cops coerced or beat the confessions out of the suspects. Instead, the video camera captured the entire scene. The defendant sitting calmly at a table in a detective’s office, unshackled and unharmed, often munching on a doughnut and drinking a Sprite while the prosecutor repeated the Miranda warnings and got his informed consent to go ahead without a lawyer present.

  I can remember the first time I went out on call with a cameraman, incredulous that any criminal would agree to film a confession to a crime and have it permanently recorded for use against him in the case. I read the guy his rights, showed him the camera, and explained its purpose. Instead of refusing to go forward, he sat up straight, combed his hair and reset his baseball cap neatly on his head for the movies, and spoke into the microphone as if it was his finest moment in the spotlight. I think that jury finished its deliberations in about twenty minutes. Guilty.

  Bob Bannion answered the phone in the tech office. “Great, I never dreamed I’d be lucky enough to get you tonight,” I said when he picked up. Bannion had started the system for us and he was superb at his work. He was a pro, with a keen, dry sense of humor, which helped get you through a long night in a squad room. Bob was also on call for any homicides or major cases that occurred in the next twelve hours, so I was delighted to try and wrap him up first. I explained a bit about the job we would be working on so he knew what to expect. “Anything else cooking, or can I ask you to meet me at Special Victims by nine tonight?”

  “I’m just on my way to film a crime scene. Multiple homicide in Alphabet City,” the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the streets were named avenues A, B, and C. “Looks like a couple of teens in a wild shoot-out. No arrests yet and nothing even close for tonight, but Rod asked me to do some interior shots of the apartment.” One of the valuable techniques Bob had developed was making videos of crime scenes as soon as they were discovered, so that there would be a permanent record of every detail in its place. The importance of objects or clues near a murder victim often did not become obvious until much later in the investigation, when detectives could refer back to their original relationship to the bodies or the evidence by looking at the video.

  “When you’re done there, will you come on up to Eighty-second Street? They’ll be starting with the line-ups, so there’s no need to rush. I’ll beep you to call it off if he’s not talking. The guy’s a predicate, so maybe he’s smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Give me a call if you get anything hotter than this, okay?” Predicate felons—criminals with records of convictions for serious offenses—often were savvy enough not to make admissions that would help sink them before a jury.

  I was out the door and into a taxi by the time I got to the corner of Worth Street, prepared to creep along the Drive uptown at the height of rush hour to get to my apartment. I brushed past the doorman, skipped the mailbox, waited with several of the neighbors to get on the elevator, and was inside my bedroom and stripping off my work clothes in seconds. I changed into a pair of jeans, a tailored shirt, and a blazer for the long evening of sitting on coffee-littered desktops and making notes while propped against dusty file cabinets. No need for a pocketbook—I clipped my beeper onto my belt and stuffed cash into my jacket so I could send out for food and soda for the crew working on the case throughout the course of the evening.

  My turn-around time was less than twenty minutes. I thought about calling David’s office to see if he had studied the faxed version of Cordelia Jeffers’s letter, but when I looked at my watch and saw that it was a few minutes after seven o’clock, I didn’t want to risk calling just as Jed arrived to meet with him. Instead, I left a message on David’s home machine, explaining where I would be for most of the evening and that I would try to reach him if I had any free time at the station house.

  Chapter

  23

  I went back downstairs and out onto the street, grabbed a Yellow Cab and directed the driver across the Eighty-fifth Street transverse to Columbus Avenue, and got out at the corner of Eighty-second to walk the short distance to the Twentieth Precinct. The uniformed cop at the front desk stopped me as I entered the building, so I identified myself to him and walked up the two flights to the Special Victims Squad, which had come to feel like my second home during the past few years. Every felony sexual assault which occurred on the island of Manhattan was referred to this little outpost of seasoned professionals.

  When I reached the landing, I pushed open the heavy fire doors that separated the ugly brown-tiled stairwells from the dilapidated office space of the thirty-year-old squad. The place was electric
with the activity that accompanies a break in a major case. Detectives in every shape, size, and color had been pulled in from days off and borrowed from other details to help round up victims, witnesses, and the stand-ins or fillers needed to be the ringers in the line-up array with the defendant. Every shirtsleeve was rolled up, every collar was open, and the handful of ties I could see were unknotted and worn in the loose criss-cross fashion of the detective world.

  “Hey, Wallace, Cooper’s here,” I heard a guy I didn’t recognize call out in the direction of the sergeant’s office.

  Mercer appeared in the door frame and waved me in. I started to offer my congratulations, but he talked over me. “The captain is really pissed off. Stay out of his way.”

  “At me? What did I do? I just got here.”

  “He did not like your order about the perp walk. Thinks you’re just doing that so that Battaglia can get the press release instead of the PD. He’s mad at me for letting you know about it so early—didn’t want me to call you till we’d wrapped everything up tonight.”

  “What a fucking baby he is. I can’t believe you gave me up on that. When is he going to learn that it’s just the wrong thing to do at this point in the case? That’ll be like the last pattern he messed up. Didn’t want to call us for a search warrant, so he gets the suspect to sign a consent. The judge threw out the whole thing, all the evidence—said once he was cuffed and asked for a lawyer, he couldn’t consent to anything. C’mon, what’s been going on since you called me?”

  “First I had to accompany Mr. Montvale to the men’s room so he could relieve himself. There’s a fuzzy birthmark on his thigh all right, just to the southeast of his penis, the way Katherine Fryer had described it.”

  “Great. Get a photo of it before he gets to Riker’s and somebody tells him to paint it green.”

  “Already done. Now, we’ve also got most of the people we need. The couple from the attempt this morning, they’re here. We reached Miss Fryer. Detective Manzi just left to pick up the first victim, and the third one’s on her way in from Westchester with her daughter. She moved out of town after the rape. I think we’re only missing one. No answer at her house, so we may have to do her down at your office next week.”

  “Everybody in separate cubbyholes?”

  “Yeah. We’re using the juvenile room and the detective squad on the second floor. None of the witnesses will see any of the others before the line-up. I’m telling you, you’ve got us all pussy-whipped, Cooper. We’re doing this exactly the way you want us to,” Mercer laughed.

  It was important that the victims who were going to view the array were separated before the identification process. In the old days, I had watched many of them cross-examined about the police procedures. When brought to the station house in the same patrol car or kept in the same waiting area, the conversation invariably turned to the only thing the women had in common: their assailant. “What did your guy look like?” “The man who raped me had a mustache.” “My attacker had an accent.” “No, I think mine was taller than that.” The defense could argue to the jury that the witnesses’ recollections were enhanced by each other’s descriptions, and it became difficult to tell what each woman remembered before she talked with the others. It took three times the manpower to escort each one in individually, and every empty closet in the building became a holding place for a nervous witness before the procedure got underway. But it would all hold up in court.

  “How do the stand-ins look?”

  “See for yourself. You can take a peek in the viewing room. Glad it was such a beautiful evening—not like last night’s rain. Lots of mopes hanging out on street corners who’re happy to help out for ten dollars from the captain.”

  Most of the time the cops scoured parks and playgrounds to find reasonable facsimiles of the suspects—similar size, weight, skin color, hairstyle. Drug treatment centers and homeless shelters were also good places for fillers, eager to get the ten spot for a guarantee that they wouldn’t be arrested for a crime, even if they were picked out by the victim. A couple of hours’ work, standing in the room with the perp and holding a number in front of their chests, and then walking out with the funds for a bottle of Thunderbird or a couple of vials of crack.

  The squad had a regular line-up area, which consisted of two separate rooms, connected by a “two-way mirror.” Montvale and five stand-ins would be in the larger one, with a couple of detectives standing inside the door to monitor his behavior and make sure he didn’t say or do anything inappropriate. He would be allowed to pick his position—One through six—and each man would hold a large square sign depicting his number in front of his chest. All the men would be able to see as they faced forward was a large glass mirror, reflecting the image of the array.

  Mercer, each witness, and I would be in the small room on the other side of the glass. We would take the victims in one at a time, darken the room, step them up to the glass and ask them to look at the men, who could neither see nor hear them. From our side, the mirror functioned as a window. Each woman would examine the array and tell us whether or not she recognized anyone in the room, and if so, what number identified him.

  I stepped inside to check out the assembled group of skells. “Nice going. I hope none of these guys walk out of here when I’m leaving tonight. Wait a minute, Mercer. Number three. Make him go to his locker and change out of his uniform pants and shoes, will you. It’s a dead giveaway.”

  In typical fashion, one of the fillers was a cop from the Twentieth Precinct. But once the Legal Aid attorney saw the photograph of the line-ups, he would argue that detectives had placed him there on purpose, still in half of his uniform, to make the selection even easier for the women.

  Mercer yelled into the open door of the other room. “Yo, number three. You got jeans and sneakers in your locker? The fashion director wants you out of those brogues and your nicely creased navy blue pants. Move it.”

  “I tell you, he’s as frightening-looking as those other guys you got off the street.”

  “They can’t all be as good-looking as I am, Cooper. You want to see Montvale?”

  “Yeah. Might as well.”

  We walked down the hallway, past the captain’s closed door, and stood in front of the small cell which held a single prisoner. William J. Montvale was sitting on the narrow wooden bench that ran across the back wall of the barred area. His arms were crossed, his legs were outstretched and apart, and his face broke into a wide smirk when he saw us approach. “Is this my district attorney, Mr. Wallace? The one you been promisin’ me? You’ll excuse me if I don’t stand, won’t you, ma’am, but I’m havin’ myself a very bad day.” I had my look and turned to walk away, as Montvale called to Mercer, “She’s better-looking than that fat pig who tried my case in Jersey, but I bet she’s no Marcia Clark. What d’ya think, Mr. Wallace?”

  It was going to be a pleasure to send Montvale up the river.

  In the background the phones were going like crazy. Some cop who owed a favor had undoubtedly leaked news of the arrest to a reporter and calls were coming in faster than they could be answered.

  “Can we get this thing underway?” Mercer asked one of his teammates, who was coordinating the arrival of everyone we needed. “I’d like to get these women out of here before the news trucks sit down at the door like vultures.”

  “Ready to go. We’re just waiting for you to get Montvale in the room.”

  Mercer left me and went back to pull the defendant out of his cell. His wrists were cuffed behind his back and Wallace had one of his own enormous hands wrapped around the rapist’s upper arm, leading him with a firm grip into the area with the five stand-ins. He was whispering in Montvale’s ear, telling him—as I had heard him do so many times—that if he moved one motherfucking muscle or did so much as cross his eyeballs after Mercer uncuffed him and while those women were looking through the window, he could expect to be sporting a new asshole before the end of the evening.

  While I stood outside the roo
m, Mercer offered Montvale his choice of numbers for the line-up. He selected the fourth position, and all of the other men switched the cardboard figures around at Wallace’s order and held them on their laps as they were asked to sit in a row of chairs. The instructions were that upon command, the group would rise to their feet, each man would approach the mirror one at a time and face it directly before turning his profile to the viewer, and then they would return to their chairs and be seated.

  Wallace stationed two of his teammates in with the prisoner, took several Polaroid photographs of the array to use for the pretrial hearing, and called to his sergeant to bring us the woman who had been attacked earlier this morning. I waited for her in the hallway outside the captain’s office, then quietly introduced myself to her and explained the procedure that would follow.

  “I’d like you to come into this room with me and Detective Wallace. Please don’t be scared, we’ll be right next to you. You’re going to look at six men through a glass window. You can see them and hear them, but they cannot see you, I promise. We’ll turn out the lights and I’ll ask you to take a good, close look. I’d prefer that you don’t say anything to us until after you’ve seen each of them up close. Then I’ll just ask you three or four questions, and it will be all over. It won’t even take two minutes. Are you okay?”

  Mrs. Jeter appeared to be a few years older than I was. She was understandably tense and nodded in compliance as I went through the steps. “Can’t my husband be with me?”

  Mercer was gentle and reassuring. “In a minute, ma’am, we’ll have you right back to him. But he’s a witness, too, so each of you has to do it separately. I’ll be right beside you. Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”