“About how much I want to go home. Can we get this over with soon?”
“Did you see the district attorney between the afternoon—was it afternoon?—when he dropped by to talk with you, and this past evening, just to be clear?”
“No, Detective,” I said. “I did not.”
I had looked Detective Jaxon Stern in the eye and lied. I had a clear choice to tell the truth, about sitting with Mike Chapman in his unmarked car and spotting Paul Battaglia coming out of a town house on the Upper East Side, but I deliberately chose not to tell the truth.
My heart started racing again. I knew why I didn’t tell Stern about the sighting. Mike was the only other person who’d witnessed it, and at the time, both of us had been puzzled about why Battaglia was at the location where we’d seen him. I didn’t know whether that moment had any significance in this investigation, but I wanted the chance to talk to Mike about that before I gave it up to Jaxon Stern.
Stern was asking more questions, but I was stuck in my lie as if I were up to my knees in quicksand and was unable to focus.
“Sorry,” I said. “Could you please repeat what you just said?”
“You seem to be in the twilight zone, Ms. Cooper,” Stern said. “Come on back to us.”
I was trying to calm myself down. Mike wouldn’t be the reason I got caught in the lie, because there was no point for Stern to question him about having seen Battaglia.
“I was just spacing out, Detective. My apologies. What did you ask?”
“I’m back with you at the top of the steps at the Met, this evening.”
Of course you are, I thought. I was getting dizzier than a Mexican jumping bean, which was always the likeliest time for a witness to be tripped up.
“Oh,” I said. “There.”
“What happened from the time you walked outside?”
I closed my eyes for a second. “We used the revolving door,” I said. “Mike went through first; then I followed. He reached for my hand and held on to me.”
Stern looked over my head at Tinsley and smirked again.
“What did you see?” he asked me.
“Nothing. I was looking down. I had my eyes on the steps because it was kind of dark, and I was so exhausted.”
“There came a point when you saw Paul Battaglia, right?”
“I heard him before I saw him,” I said. “I heard footsteps, that is. I didn’t know whose they were. I was halfway down to the sidewalk when I heard footsteps.”
“Then?”
“I looked up because of the sound. I saw a man, but I couldn’t make out who it was at first.”
“Wait a minute,” Stern said. “You’ve worked with this guy for at least a decade, and you couldn’t figure out who he was?”
“I told you it was dark at that point, and he was wearing a dark suit,” I said. “It was Chapman who told me the man approaching us was Battaglia.”
“You’re telling me that Chapman made him before you did?”
“Yes. He recognized the DA and told me that’s who it was.”
Stern looked back at Tinsley again. I was supposed to be rattled by all his smirking and sneering. But it was just rude, not unnerving.
“Like a warning?” Stern asked.
“No, Detective. I didn’t need to be warned about Paul Battaglia. Chapman was just reassuring me that it wasn’t a stranger.”
“What did you say to him?”
“Nothing.”
“Cat had your tongue, Ms. Cooper? I understand that’s not usually the case.”
“Battaglia spoke first,” I said. “He called out my name and told me he needed to talk with me. Five minutes with me, is what he said.”
Stern started tapping his forefinger on the desk again. Four times. Five. Six. “Now, about what?”
“What?”
“The five minutes, Ms. Cooper. You know what I mean. What was it that he wanted to talk with you about?”
“I don’t know.”
“C’mon, now.”
I paused. I remembered a car pulling up on Fifth Avenue. I remembered movement from the street—which must have been an arm coming out of the car window.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t know then. I told him I wouldn’t talk to him there.”
I stopped again, biting my lip, as the image in my mind’s eye seemed magnified.
“And I certainly don’t know now,” I said. “There wasn’t another word spoken between us.”
It was the image of Battaglia’s face—his eyes opened wide and his mouth forming a word as he reached the step below me.
“Wild guess, Ms. Cooper. Take a wild guess.”
“Bad form, Detective. I don’t prosecute cases based on guesswork.”
“Sometimes we get lucky this way, don’t we, Tinsley?” Stern said. “Wild guesses sometimes hit the mark.”
“Sure we do,” she said. “We do get lucky. You must be wracking your brain, Alex, to think what drove the man to seek you out when someone was chasing after him. Maybe Battaglia knew his life was in danger, and he was coming to you for—well, you must have an idea for what.”
“And all this time,” I said to her, without turning my head, “I thought you were Stern’s silent partner.”
“Taking it all in, Alex. Taking it all in,” Tinsley said.
A smart cop never did an interview like this without another cop to witness it. That way I couldn’t deny something I’d said to them later on. I couldn’t change my facts without two of them to swear to what I’d told them tonight.
“Wracking my brain,” I said, “but I’m coming up empty. There must be word on the street, Detective Stern—to borrow a phrase.”
I left out the sentence that had run through my mind at that moment—the last few seconds of Paul Battaglia’s life—but then I hadn’t said it out loud to Battaglia either. That I wouldn’t talk to him then and there. That I wouldn’t talk without a lawyer present. I didn’t know if he was running up the steps to fire me for insubordination—for disobeying his orders to back off a murder case—or coming to me, as he had so many times over the years, because he wanted my help. It was the wrong time and place for either conversation.
“So what happened next?” Stern asked.
“I don’t know, exactly.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
I slumped down in the chair. The next minute of the evening’s rerun was a jumble of sound and sight.
“I’m not sure what came first,” I said. “Whether I actually heard the gunshots or I saw the DA fall forward, against me.”
The fact of it didn’t really matter, but it was the kind of detail that Stern and Tinsley would push me on over and over again.
“Being sure would help us,” Stern said.
I raised my eyes to meet his.
“Two shots—one right after the other,” I said. “I must have heard the shots.”
They had split the quiet of the late city night.
“You’re saying you heard them first?” Stern asked, looking down to make a note.
“I’m not sure,” I said, shaking my head. “It seemed like it was all at once.”
“What was all at once?”
“The loud noises, and then Battaglia almost lunging into my arms, against my body.”
I thought the DA’s brain had exploded in my face.
“I collapsed beneath him, on my back against the steps of the Met,” I said. “We were a tangle of arms and legs. I tried to pull up and free myself from him.”
I wanted the dead man off my body.
“But I couldn’t move, Detective,” I said, meeting his eyes with mine.
“Why not? Why couldn’t you move?”
“Like I just said. The impact of the shots thrust Battaglia forward. His arms flew upward and so
mehow wrapped around my own as I crashed down too.”
The DA and I were completely intertwined with each other when he died, just as we had often been in life.
“It was a deadfall, Detective.”
“What does that mean, Ms. Cooper?” Stern asked. “No need to show off your vocabulary now. Just tell it straight.”
“It’s nothing but nature, Stern. You ought to get yourself off the street more and commune with the spirits,” I said. “When you’re deep in the woods, it’s what you call a messy tangle of trees and limbs and underbrush.”
I stood to stretch my legs. “That’s exactly how Paul Battaglia and I wound up in the end—in a deadfall.”
FIVE
“Rise and shine, blondie,” Mike said, rolling up the blinds on my bedroom window. “Four hours’ sleep ought to hold you.”
I put a pillow over my head and ignored him.
“Places to go, people to see, murder to solve.”
I lifted the edge of the pillow and opened one eye. “It really happened, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, babe. The district attorney is dead. Still dead.”
“I didn’t do it, did I?”
“Depends who you ask,” Mike said. He was dressed only in a pair of light blue boxers, holding a coffee mug.
“Newspapers?” I said.
“Shooting was after midnight. Too late for the early editions on your doorstep.”
“Have you looked online?”
“Ask me that again in a few hours, if you really want to know,” Mike said. “Right now it’s a sloppy mix of gossip and leaks and conspiracy theories. And right now, you’re just part of the gossip, not anyone’s coconspirator.”
“What gossip?”
“Not good for you on an empty stomach.”
“What time is it now?” I asked, rolling over and pulling back the covers, hoping to entice Mike to lie down beside me again. “Come back to bed and just hold me for a while, okay?”
“Can’t say it’s not tempting, but no can do, Coop. The federales want your ass,” Mike said. “It’s already eleven o’clock.”
Detectives Stern and Tinsley had finished questioning me at about five A.M. They spent an hour with Mike before letting him bring me home, and were still talking to Mercer when we left the morgue.
I closed my eyes again. My head was pounding. The Tylenol I’d taken before I’d climbed into bed had long ago worn off. It was only Tuesday morning. “The feds are taking this over? What’s the jurisdictional basis?”
“That you’d need an independent prosecutor to oversee this anyway,” Mike said. “And Battaglia had a hand in some federal cases, too, as he always did.”
“They really want me today?” I asked.
“They’re putting together a team,” Mike said. “Don’t take it personally, Coop. The feds will have to interview Battaglia’s entire senior staff and dig into all the big cases, open and closed, to see if this could have been revenge for someone he sent up the river.”
I crushed the pillow against my forehead like it was a cold compress. “Why did that Jaxon Stern bastard have such a hard-on for me?”
“I don’t have the answer yet, but I’m on it.”
“Have you showered?” I asked.
“Next stop,” Mike said, leaving his mug on my dresser. “Leave it on for you?”
“Please,” I said, sitting up and swinging my legs over the side of the bed. “Mike, did you tell Stern and Tinsley about the last time we saw Battaglia?”
“What the hell did you think they were talking to me about?” he said, stepping out of his shorts and dropping them in the hamper.
“Not the shooting,” I said. “I mean, last week, when we spotted him coming out of the town house.”
“That didn’t come up,” Mike said. “Why? Did they know about it? Did they ask you?”
I hesitated. “Not exactly.”
He backed up a few paces and turned to look at me. “‘Not exactly,’” Mike said, mimicking me. “I want to know what questions Stern asked you.”
“When had I seen the DA last, before the shooting.”
“So you told them about when he stopped you on the street, near the apartment the other day.”
“Of course I did,” I said. He was with his driver then. I’d have been screwed if I’d covered that one up.
“Then you mentioned the bit about being in my car and seeing him when we least expected it?”
“That’s what I mean, Mike,” I said. “I left that one out.”
“So you forgot it,” he said. “No big deal. You can just remember it next time you sit down with the team.”
I reached for the Tylenol bottle and the water glass next to my bed. “It wasn’t a mistake, Mike. I lied about it,” I said. “I lied to Jaxon Stern.”
He leaned one arm on the doorframe in my bedroom. “Now, why the hell did you do that?”
“I was getting confused by the questions, Mike.”
“You’re not that easily confused. Trust me on that.”
“All right, then. I was trying to second-guess what would be important in this investigation and what wouldn’t be.”
“Jesus, that is so damn like you to be second-guessing someone else’s MO, Coop. And to do it with a guy like Stern, who’ll be totally unforgiving if he figures it out,” Mike said, slapping the wall and turning to walk out again.
“He can only figure it out if you tell him about it,” I shouted after him.
Mike rotated back to face me and pursed his lips. He was mad at me. “You don’t go to a doctor when you’re really sick and leave out some of the symptoms to see how smart the guy is, to see if he can make a diagnosis with only some of the facts that you’ve chosen to tell him.”
“No, but—”
“But people do it to cops all the time, right? See if us dumb schmucks can put the puzzle together with some of the facts missing.”
“What difference does it make, Mike?” I asked. “The DA was coming out of George Kwan’s town house the afternoon we saw him. And George Kwan was sitting in the museum last night, watching the events at the gala. He was one of the last guys to leave. His alibi is as solid as yours or mine.”
“Give it up, Coop,” Mike said. “You’re a witness in this case. A very critical witness. You’re not driving the investigation, are you? This team isn’t going to let you anywhere near the wheelhouse, okay? The sooner you understand that, the better.”
“Yeah,” I said, standing up and wrapping my robe around me. “I’m beginning to get it.”
“So the minute you walk in the door of that office in another hour—all clean and shiny-bright and eager to work your way back off the ice floe you found yourself on after the kidnapping and into respectability again—you get ready to regurgitate every last secret you think you and Paul Battaglia had on each other.”
“I’ve got so many questions to ask them, Mike,” I said, taking a sip from his coffee mug as I followed him into the bathroom. “They must have caught a license plate on one of the traffic cameras, didn’t they?”
“You got it wrong, Coop. They’ve got a million questions to ask you. They’re going to want to dig into what the hell was going on between you and Battaglia and the Reverend Hal Shipley.”
“Oh, God,” I said, running a washcloth under the cold water faucet and placing it over my eyes. “Talk about a man with a motive.”
Shipley was a minister of sorts—a former backup dancer for a sixties R and B band and failed television commentator who scammed his Harlem flock with scheme after fraudulent scheme.
“There’s a paper trail in that contretemps with Shipley that Battaglia tried to tamp down,” I said. “And he really turned on me for getting in the middle of it.”
“Those days of tamping down are over, kid. All that paper comes out of your desk drawer and in
to the sunlight,” Mike said. “Not to mention one of the coconspirators in the Savage murder escaped not long before Battaglia came looking for you.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” I said.
“We’d better let them know about any other dirtbags you’re sitting on.”
“That would be my entire caseload,” I said. “I specialize in dirtbags. Can’t think of a single one that has any respect for the DA, nor for me, for that matter.”
Mike had stepped into the shower and the room was filling up with steam, which actually felt quite good.
“Who’s got it for the feds?” I asked.
“I don’t know who the agents are yet, but for the moment, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York is handling the investigation himself,” Mike said. “The Honorable James Prescott.”
“Skeeter? Damn it.”
“Skeeter, really?” Mike asked, pulling back the shower curtain. “Grown man and that’s the best he can do? Did he get bit by a bug or something?”
“Do you have a problem with names? First Jaxon and now this one,” I said. “It’s a southern thing, Prescott’s name. A kid’s nickname that took.”
“You ever do him?”
“Why is that always your first question?” I said. “No, but thanks for asking. I went to law school with Skeeter’s wife. His ex, actually. I just don’t need him knowing all my business.”
“Once the New York Post gets through with this, what Skeeter or anyone else knows will take a backseat to the tabs,” Mike said, wiping his face and chest with a towel, then changing places with me. “Then there’s the DA’s fight with the mayor.”
“They hate each other.”
“Hated,” Mike said. “Once you’ve got a dead man, the story gets rewritten. The mayor’s a complete horse’s ass, but I don’t think anyone’s going to go with a hired-killer theory.”
“Then there’s all the office politics,” I said. “So much infighting.”
“Yeah. A real hornet’s nest.”
“Five hundred lawyers. Most of them are loyal and collegial, but there’s a handful or two who care about nothing except their own careers,” I said. “All led by an elected official who was so vain he refused to deal with the idea that someone would eventually succeed him.”
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