Alex Cooper 01 - Final Jeopardy

by Linda Fairstein

  Mercer was around the desk and slammed the defendant back into his seat by his shoulders before I could even open my mouth again. “Bannion, keep this video rolling,” Mercer shouted. “Get every minute of this, so the judge can see how gently I treated this scumbag. You, Cooper, out of the room, now. NOW.”

  I hesitated and Mercer screamed at me again. On my way out I was almost trampled by three other detectives who heard the shouting and ran in to give Mercer a hand. There was the sound of scuffling from the small room, punctuated by laughter from Montvale, who knew these guys were dying to land a few gut punches on him, but thanks to Mercer’s quick thinking, the video was actually keeping him safe.

  I was annoyed and deflated. I thought we had been so close to getting admissions to the string of rapes. They were not essential to a prosecution, just icing on this particular case, but I wanted to hear how it felt, from the rapist’s perspective, to do these despicable things to other living beings.

  I wondered if it was my approach that made him flip, as I paced back and forth in the filthy hallway. Sometimes these guys will talk to men, but not to women—and I kicked myself for not having had one of my male colleagues from the unit here as a backup to try to do the interrogation in case the suspect went dry on me. I knew Mercer would tell me not to take it personally, but whenever this kind of thing happened, I did.

  “Hey, Coop, nothing personal,” Mercer said, as if on cue, when he stuck his head out of the room a few minutes later. “Montvale had this one planned. He was no more gonna give you a story on videotape than I’m gonna give him a lobster dinner. He was just in the mood to play with you—a little variety in his day—for the last time in a very long while.”

  He stepped out of the way as two teammates led the shackled prisoner out of the sergeant’s office and back to his wooden bench. Montvale laughed out loud all the way down the hall, and I fought to hold my tongue so my comments wouldn’t be repeated back to whichever judge we stood before together tomorrow morning.

  Mercer had no time to deal with my long face and wounded ego. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Alex. You got everything you need here, plus whatever we get from the warrant. D’you really think that a guy with that many felony convictions and so much state time behind him’s gonna sit here and weave you some kinda tale of his exploits? You got a rock-crusher of a case, what more do you need? Now just take yourself outta here and get some sleep. I’ll do the warrant first thing, then we’ll have the arraignment by early afternoon and you can make the Grand Jury dates for next week.”

  As high as I had let the adrenaline and caffeine carry me, as quickly did I drop when Montvale brought it all to an abrupt end.

  “I hate it when they beat me,” I moaned in disgust.

  “Beat you? How long you figure this guy’s gonna spend in Dannemora? A hundred, a hundred-fifty years? That enough for you, or you want longer?” Mercer asked me.

  “I’ll take three lifetimes, consecutive. No parole.”

  “Not likely that anybody’s gonna parole Mr. Montvale early again. I bet they’ve got the editorials written for the morning edition already. Give it a rest.”

  “I’m ready to pack it in,” I told him. “Do you need anything else from me tonight? I’d like to get out of here before that press conference starts. Battaglia will never believe I tried to talk them out of doing it. Whew, those guys are stubborn.”

  “I’m fine. Want me to call downstairs and see if they can free up someone who can take you home?”

  I looked at my watch. “No, it’s not even ten-thirty. If there’s anybody loose, I’ll grab him. If not, I can get a Yellow right on Columbus Avenue. It’s still early.”

  “Want the phone? Some privacy? You can use the sergeant’s office—I’ll close the door.”

  “Mercer, I am going directly home. Not passing Go, not collecting two hundred dollars. Directly home. I’ll return my calls from there. I’m whipped.”

  “Thanks for coming out on this. I’ll be in your office right after we hit his mother’s apartment.”

  Mercer picked up his case folder, escorted me to the stairwell, and held the door as I walked out. Most of the guys were too busy chowing down their hero sandwiches and uncapping bottles of beer to notice my departure, but I gave a general wave in the direction of the squad room and leaned on the banister as I plodded down the steep flights of steps to make my exit.

  Chapter

  24

  When I reached the ground floor, I could see through the glass partition that the lobby was swarming with activity. Men and women officers were beginning to trickle in for the late tour, and several uniformed cops were trying to hold reporters and cameramen at bay on the front steps of the station house.

  I pushed through the door, lowered my head, and began to wind my way through the ranks of thick, uniformed bodies and around the side of the news crews. The reporters were listening attentively to an announcement from the desk sergeant about the fact that the Deputy Inspector would be speaking in a few minutes, and there would, indeed, be a photo-op of Montvale himself being booked at the desk.

  Dammit. I kept walking and was only made by one cameraman as I reached the pavement. “Hey, Miss D.A.—this your case?”

  I shook my head in the negative and kept going, turning right to head to Columbus Avenue and the steady flow of cabs that I assumed would be making their way to nearby Lincoln Center for the after-theater pickups.

  “Alex? Alexandra Cooper?”

  My head lifted up at the sound of my name, and I saw Ellen Goldman step toward me from the front of the car she had been leaning against, at the edge of the precinct driveway, adjacent to the station house.

  I smiled in relief. She didn’t have a camera in her hand and she wasn’t on a deadline for an 11 P.M. broadcast or a morning tabloid.

  “The news of the case is all over the radio and local TV. My editor called me at home and asked me to get over here. We thought perhaps I could watch you do a line-up or something like that for our profile.”

  I kept walking and her shorter legs tried to keep pace with my stride. “Sorry, I could have saved you the trouble of coming out. I couldn’t have let you up there—you might have become a witness in the case, you know, if you had been present for any of the crucial events, or the defense claimed you had seen or heard something important. Sorry. I wish I had known you were there—I could have told you not to waste your time.”

  “That’s okay. I kept trying to call upstairs but they wouldn’t put me through to you.”

  “I know,” I told her. “My orders. Again, I apologize.”

  “Don’t be silly. That’s the kind of job this is. You know we always keep trying. Listen, can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “Ellen.” I stopped to face her, dropping my shoulders and letting her look at the dark circles I’d been growing under my eyes for the past week. “Coffee? I think I’ve had half of El Exigente’s North American supply in the last eight days. I don’t want to be rude, but I just need to go home and get a decent night’s sleep.”

  I didn’t mean to be as clipped as I was when I spoke to her, but I heard the edge in my own voice and I immediately tried to soften my response with a small bribe.

  “There’ll be an arraignment tomorrow, probably by mid-afternoon, and if you call Laura around eleven, I’ll tell you exactly when to be in court, if you’d like to see it. Then, once the fireworks are over, it’ll be a typical Friday afternoon—slow, I hope—and I’ll give you an hour or so on the case and the investigation.” Battaglia wouldn’t mind, I thought, because she’s writing a piece that won’t appear for months, rather than a story about this particular arrest.

  Ellen obviously liked that offer and thanked me for it. “Why don’t I give you a lift home?” she countered warmly. “Really, I won’t pester you. I see how tired you are and I’ll just drop you off and plan on seeing you and having all my questions answered in the afternoon.”

  I hesitated and she seemed to sense exactly why. M
y reflexes were slowing down and she continued to speak. “Don’t worry about your privacy, Alex. I already know where you live. Remember, I dropped those flowers off for you the day after your friend was killed? You had canceled our first interview, don’t you remember? I told you I’ve done my research—that’s not the kind of thing I want to write about.”

  I was relieved and, of course, her reminder was correct. It made me smile ’cause I remembered Mike’s comment when I referred to the sender of the flowers as a “nice reporter,” and he told me that was an oxymoron.

  “Sure, Ellen, that’d be lovely. As long as you don’t think I’m abrupt for not asking you up for a nightcap.”

  “C’mon. I understand. I’m parked right across the street.”

  We checked the traffic and jaywalked over to the car she pointed out at the corner of the block. She unlocked the driver’s side and my door latch popped up automatically. As I lowered myself into the passenger seat, I could hear someone calling my name from the front of the station house. “Cooper, hey, Miss Cooper! Miss District Attorney!”

  I could see in the rearview mirror that a couple of heads turned from the crowd of news people to see if I was somewhere in the vicinity. But I had already climbed into the car and was not about to walk back into that media circus without a pithy sound bite—the last thing Battaglia would want to hear from me anyway.

  The voice shouted out, “Cooper, call for you! C’mon back.”

  Ellen put the key in the ignition and the engine started, but she looked over at me with concern before she set the car in drive. “It’s okay,” I told her, “you’ll have me home in five minutes and I’ll return my calls from there. It’s just a feeding frenzy with all those reporters at the precinct. I’ll be much happier once I’m home. Let’s go.”

  Chapter

  25

  I leaned my head against the backrest of the seat in Ellen Goldman’s car, somewhat grateful that I had exchanged the adventure of a cab ride home in a fleet car with no springs or shock absorbers for the smoother trip in her late model rental that would simply cost me some chatter and forced girl-talk.

  “What’s the best way to get through the park from here?” she asked as we pulled away when the traffic light changed to green.

  “South on Columbus. You can pick up the transverse on Sixty-fifth Street.”

  I closed my eyes against the bright reflection of the overhead streetlights as the car moved down the avenue, and wondered whether Montvale’s victims would sleep any differently tonight.

  “Must be very satisfying to get someone you’ve been after for a while, isn’t it?” Ellen asked.

  I had hoped she would have had the good sense not to interview me on the way home, but her natural curiosity apparently took over. I reminded myself not to let my guard down completely and not to answer the question as though I were talking to a friend who could be trusted with the information. Yeah, I would say to Sarah or Nina or David or Mike, it feels better than you could ever imagine, and it is one of the great satisfactions of my professional life, to know this bastard is going to spend the foreseeable future in a woefully unpleasant place where he can’t hurt anybody else. But because I knew how a reporter could twist my words in print to make me sound like Torquemada or some man-hating witch, I simply said, “Yes.”

  Goldman made a left turn on Seventy-second Street and headed toward Central Park West. “Don’t you ever worry that one of these guys you prosecute is going to come back after you?” she queried.

  I had been asked that question a million times, most often by my mother. That’s not the kind of thing that keeps people in my business up at nights. “That happens in the movies, Ellen. You can’t let that drive you when you do this work. We’d never get anything done.”

  “I read the clips about that case of yours that was just overturned on appeal. The serial rapist in Central Park—wasn’t his name Harold McCoy?” she continued. It was the case I had just reminded Wallace about, in which the judge had thrown out half the evidence we had seized because the captain had refused to call us to get a search warrant. “Does that mean he’s out of jail now?”

  “Don’t remind me about him, Ellen. Yeah, Harold McCoy is out. We get to retry him after the first of the year. But in the meantime, his brother posted bail for him and he’s on the street.”

  “I don’t know how you do it, Alex. That would give me the creeps every time I go through the park. I’d be looking for him everywhere I went.”

  “You think I don’t? It’s not even conscious at this point,” I told her. “Certain places just evoke connections, memories—and they’re not always good ones. It’s ironic. I happen to think that Central Park is one of the safest places in the city. Look at the size of it, more than eight hundred acres. You’ve got more crimes committed in any two-or three-square-block area around the park every month than you have inside it. But when something does happen here, especially because it’s so isolated at night, it’s a legitimate public safety issue. It’s awfully hard for the police to patrol a space like this.”

  Goldman was driving east. She passed the guardhouse at the Dakota, and then continued straight on into the park. As soon as she entered the roadway, I realized her mistake. “Whoa, I meant the transverse—the road that cuts through, from West to East. This is the long way,” I complained.

  “Oh, damn. I just saw this opening and thought it was what you were referring to. My fault,” she apologized.

  The few extra minutes hardly mattered at this point. Instead of going directly across, this would lead us on the more rambling route down the West Drive and back up to the exits on the East Side. No big deal, Ellen. It’s a prettier ride.”

  The moon was full—maybe that had helped us catch Montvale, I thought to myself, if the cops were right about all the lunatics coming out under its spell—and it would probably result in an overflow of business in my office tomorrow. Not the quiet Friday I had just predicted. The park showed itself brilliantly in the lunar glow, the foliage with its dapplings of yellows and auburns having replaced much of the verdant color of summer. The fallen leaves made it possible to see farther off the road, into the beautiful park grounds, than you could when the trees were full of thick greens.

  I was relaxed now, taking in the quiet view as we rounded the south end of the drive, and noting that the number of late night runners and dog walkers tapered off as we left the areas of the park closest to the entrances and coursed up the Center Drive, almost smack in the middle of the two sides. Hard to believe this pastoral setting, with its fifty-eight miles of paths, was once the site of stench-filled swamps and pigsties. I enjoyed the tracks it provided for jogging, the lawns that hosted concerts I had attended with friends, and the cheerful zoo where I took my niece and nephew when they visited me in town.

  But I knew better than most who loved its lush comfort the danger that could lurk in its bushes, the terrors hidden behind its trees and stone walls. I had enormous respect for the splendor it added to the city, and just as much respect for the power with which it controlled that gift.

  We were past the Carousel now, almost parallel to the Bandshell, and nearing the fork that led to the first East Side exit at Seventy-second Street. Ellen knew my address, so it didn’t occur to me to remind her to bear right at that point. When she missed the turn and veered off to the left, I groaned at the thought of having to circle around that long loop again.

  “Shit, Ellen, you missed the turnoff.”

  “Oh, sorry, Alex. I’m not that familiar with the park, especially at night. I haven’t spent that much time in New York. I… I guess I just lost my bearings. It’ll just be a couple of minutes. It’s generally when I’m rushing to do things right, if you know what I mean.”

  I did. I guess that’s why they always used to say most accidents happen close to home. I straightened up in my seat to try to observe the directions more carefully in order to get us back to my apartment as soon as possible.

  Now we were traveling north
again, on the portion of the road just beyond the curve that cuts off to the West Side at Seventy-second Street. I was watching the light from the sky dance on the small pond which was below me and off to my right, but was jolted back to attention when the car plunged off the drive to our left and Ellen braked to a stop, almost flush against a large elm tree.

  I had instinctively thrown my arms up against the dashboard to protect myself, but my head still smacked against the roof of the low car from the impact it made jumping the curb.

  “Jeez, Ellen, take it easy,” I mumbled, shaking my head, as though that would clear the stars that started flashing in my eyes, and rubbing my neck, which already seemed to be sore. “What happened, what’s your prob—”

  “I need to talk with you, Alex. You’re going to get out of this car, and walk down that path with me—”

  I hadn’t looked up yet and I was massaging my temples with my fingertips. Everybody wants to talk to me except William Montvale, everybody wants to tell me their troubles. “Ellen, this is stupid. If you’d like me to drive, I’ll be happy to do it, but I’m not wasting another minute here…”

  “Look at me, Alex. This is my investigation. I’m the one in charge now, and you’re going to take orders from me.”

  I lifted my head to try to see whether the words I was listening to bore any relation to the speaker or the circumstances I was in, or whether I had been knocked around in the car by that bad bounce so that I was truly a bit foggy. I was staring directly into the muzzle of a small handgun.

  “Ellen, my God, Ellen—put down that gun and talk to me, tell me what you want!” My body had reacted immediately to the signals my tired brain was sending out, and I was shaking uncontrollably as I tried to shield myself from the pistol with my quivering hands.

  “You’re even more stupid than I thought if you haven’t figured out what I want by now. You like everybody to think you’re so smart—that’s so important to you—but even I know the ridiculous mistakes you’ve made this time, and you’re about to find out that I’m more clever than you are. Get out of the car, get out very slowly and stand right next to the door. This is not a joke—do it now.”