“No way.”
“I know it doesn’t happen in federal prisons, but New York State allows it.”
“Seriously?” he asked.
“Clean sheets and towels. Soap. Toothpaste,” I said. “In a trailer outside the prison walls, for anywhere from twelve to twenty-four hours. Oh, and the state provides condoms, too.”
“What’s this? A plea for Chapman?”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday. If you’re not going to parole me, you can at least let me have a shot at enjoying myself. The Sunday Times crossword puzzle and a date.”
Prescott removed his phone and handed it to me.
“Thanks, James,” I said, dialing Mike’s number. It rang twice and Mike picked it up. “Hey. What’s up?”
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Heading home.”
“Anything good come out of this?” Mike said.
“I’m not quite sure, but I’ve got happy news for you.”
“What’s that?”
“Mr. Prescott has allowed me to invite you to spend the night at Three Sisters.”
“Are you serious? You have a debrief for me?” Mike asked.
“Save that thought till we’re alone,” I said.
Prescott looked over at me. I knew I didn’t want to tell Mike about the day until I was out of the presence of the US attorney. I could see Prescott didn’t want me to talk to him about it at all.
“Just be sure and bring me a turkey sandwich on rye from P J Bernstein’s, okay? Extra Russian dressing,” I said. “We’re due to land at ten fifteen, unless we get a good tailwind. See you at the airport.”
“Roger that.”
“You’ll make me,” I said. “I’m the one who smells like I’ve been stepping in sheep scat all day.”
I handed the phone back to Prescott. “Thanks. I appreciate the gesture.”
“I can’t tell you not to talk to him, but I hope you let us absorb what we’ve got—let my guys check out these names, and maybe we’ll have a team meet up at Three Sisters on Monday.”
“I’m good with that,” I said.
I wasn’t ready to tell Prescott that I had phoned Mike earlier, to start putting facts together. Twenty-four hours would buy us both time.
“I say we get on top of all the names before we meet, and then I’ll call Charles Swenson on Monday morning,” Prescott said. “I want to insist on a more substantive meeting with Chidra, in case you’re right on her efforts to take my eyes off the ball. I can be up to your place by nine and back in my office to take her on by one.”
“Toss her in the grand jury,” I said. “Get her under oath.”
“Maybe.”
We had stopped on the tarmac before boarding, letting Chidra and her assistant settle in while we finished talking.
“Think of it, James,” I said. “Paul was killed by a sharpshooter.”
He raised his head to look at me.
“Who knew, between the preserve in Texas where Scalia died and this trip—or these trips—to Montana,” I said, “that he was hanging around so many people who were capable of killing with such deadly accuracy?”
“That’s certainly one way to think of it,” Prescott said.
“I’m telling you. You want sworn testimony from this woman,” I said. “Try locking her in on Monday.”
I knew we had different prosecutorial approaches, but I thought he needed to take a hard line with Chidra Persaud, sooner rather than later.
Once airborne and heading east, Prescott continued asking Chidra questions. He was getting stonewalled, most politely, on just about everything that would have been helpful to us.
When she sidestepped the subjects that were of interest to us and went on to discuss the new tariff plans, I felt myself nodding off. The attendant covered me with a cashmere blanket, and I reclined my seat and closed my eyes, telling her that I would skip the meal service.
Rough air bounced us most of the way home, so I slept in fits and starts.
We touched down at 10:05 and taxied to a stop at the private aviation section of the airport.
The attendant opened the door and lowered the steps. The two agents were first out, and I could see them shaking hands with Mike as they walked off the field onto the pathway.
I went down next, followed by Prescott. He reached the bottom and held up his hand for Chidra’s assistant. Then we waited for Chidra herself to come down.
She stood in the doorway and cupped her hands over her mouth. “Give me five minutes, James. I’ll pick up my things and meet you inside the terminal.”
Mike had his arm around my shoulders and we were walking, against the wind, toward the door.
Prescott called my name and I turned back to see what he wanted.
“I think you’re right, Alex,” he said. “I’m going to tell Chidra to be in my office Monday afternoon with Swenson. There’s no point giving her the chance to back out of it.”
“I’m all for that.”
“I might as well let her know now,” he said.
I watched as the flight attendant raised the staircase and the pilots fired up the engines and started to roll to the runway.
“I think she does know already, James. I think she figured it out all by herself.”
The smart-looking jet was on its way to airborne as soon as the tower gave the pilot the all clear to take off.
“Where’s that plane going?” Mike asked the two men in blue overalls who must have been the ground crew.
“Gander, Newfoundland,” one of them said.
“Gander,” I said. “Gateway to Europe.”
“She’s got enough fuel to make it there—two and a half hours,” the workman said. “Then refuel for the trip to London.”
“Whatever we asked her,” I said to Prescott, “she spooks more easily than sheep.”
“I don’t get it, Alex. The district attorney was going to be handling a case about supposed thieves in her company,” he said. “She was Battaglia’s witness, for Christ’s sakes.”
“You’ve got that wrong,” I said. “Some of the haze is lifting, I think. She wasn’t Battaglia’s witness at all. Chidra Persaud was his snitch.”
THIRTY-NINE
I was back in my cell at Three Sisters. But at least I had Mike with me, and a thick deli sandwich, and a cooler with a chilled bottle of my favorite Chardonnay—Au Bon Climat.
Prescott had called ahead to give Tinsley and North the night off. They were instructed to return at noon on Sunday.
“What a stunt,” I said. “Taking off to London without a bit of notice, and no way to stop her. She’s running from Prescott—from this investigation. That much is certain.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice to know why?” Mike said.
I kept thinking of the playback of Battaglia’s phone messages to me the night he was killed, the night he came after me on the steps of the Met. He had worked himself up over Diana—asking me what I knew about her, telling me that she was none of my business. At this moment—other than connecting that name to Chidra Persaud and a hunt club—I had no more of an idea than I had when I heard the calls in Prescott’s office.
“Go back to my ‘ghost’ theory,” I said. “If I got nothing else out of the trip, I got that by stumbling along with Karl Jansen.”
“It’s got possibilities,” Mike said, “but Persaud dragged Prescott a long way just to see the scenery.”
“And he dragged me,” I said. “She wanted him out of town for a reason. Did anything at all happen yesterday that would affect the case?”
“Battaglia’s murder?” Mike asked. “I haven’t heard anything from anyone. I doubt it.”
“Maybe Persaud wanted to defang James Prescott,” I said. “Her tax investigation is going to end up in his lap—Battaglia had no business entertaining it. It’s a federal case
, after all. Now he’ll have to recuse himself.”
“So the trip could have been a total red herring,” Mike said. “Pretty clever of her.”
“Devious, too. But I think it was more than that.”
“Why?”
“When Prescott came to Three Sisters to get me in the middle of the night, he told me that he had talked to Amy Battaglia. That she insisted the DA’s trip involved a case.”
“So what was Chidra snitching about?”
“I think she must have been looking for leverage against possible prosecution.”
“On the theory that if she was defrauding the Brits, she was playing fast and loose with her tax issues here?” Mike asked.
“Probably so,” I said. “It’s entirely like Charles Swenson to have her bat her eyelashes at Battaglia and for him to bring her in as a possible victim. Make a preemptive strike.”
“Swenson’s close enough to Battaglia that he might have encouraged the trip to Montana,” Mike said. “Who do you think Chidra was ratting out?”
“Well, there’s the mystery man—the guy Battaglia was supposed to bring for the bighorn sheep hunt,” I said. “And I can’t stop wondering about George Kwan.”
“Does Chidra know him?”
“She denied that. But she says he was trying to work some kind of merger with her business. She refused to team up with him.”
“So—?”
“So maybe her ‘due diligence’ turned up dirt on Kwan Enterprises,” I said. “Maybe that was to be her ace in the hole if Battaglia turned on her.”
“Wish you had asked her more about it.”
“I didn’t have a clue that might be the case until she pulled that fast one at the airport and disappeared into the wild blue yonder.”
“Look on the bright side. At least you got the ghost news,” Mike said. “Let’s see where we go with that.”
“Did you and Catherine turn up anything on Tiger Tail?” I asked, biting into my sandwich.
Mike was uncorking the wine and pouring it into the plastic cups—no glass allowed in the psych ward—from my bathroom.
“All the public information is homogenized. Wall Street Journal profile of Persaud, lots of articles about her in the foreign press, active presence on social media. All created to enhance her image,” Mike said, coming back into the room and handing me a cup.
“What about the company?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full. I can’t understand you.”
I swallowed hard. “Tiger Tail? How about the business side of things?”
“Almost one year ago, the British tabloids started in on her tax troubles,” Mike said. “But it all simmered down within months.”
“I’d love to link that to the point in time Charles Swenson brought her in to meet Battaglia.”
“Good luck,” he said. “Catherine came up empty.”
“What do you mean?”
“She called the chief of the Frauds Bureau—Mimi Hershenson—like you asked her to, and she’s got no record of Chidra Persaud—not as a witness, not as a target. Mimi’s not aware of any pending appointment with the woman.”
“Damn. I should have gone right to Rose Malone,” I said.
Rose had been Battaglia’s executive assistant for his entire tenure. She was my good friend, often alerting me—like an early warning system—to his dark moods, encouraging me to wait a day or two when I was asking for professional favors. He trusted her with every secret he had ever held close to his chest.
“That window has closed for the moment,” Mike said.
“Why?”
Rose would have been as devastated as anyone in Paul Battaglia’s family by his death. In my own self-involved mourning, I hadn’t even called her.
“She stayed through the end of the day Thursday,” Mike said. “Pretty much ripped raw. She was really helpful to Prescott and the detectives, going through Battaglia’s desk—”
“An unenviable task,” I said. Papers, clippings, notes, phone messages, were stacked more than a foot high in piles on his desk and on the credenza behind it. The ones on the bottom were yellowed with age—calls that had never been returned, applicants who had been pushed on the DA by some political hack to whom they were related, and stock market tips that had not been taken seriously. “But I’d like a go at his appointment book. Where’s Rose now?”
“Her daughters took her away for a vacation, just to calm her down. I don’t know where,” Mike said, “but she’ll be gone all next week. We can put in a call.”
“I’ll try her cell tomorrow,” I said, washing the sandwich down with wine. “Does Prescott have the appointment book?”
“I can ask. What would it give you?”
“He had his own code for things—for people he liked and people he despised. Maybe Chidra Persaud is in there somewhere,” I said, thinking of the black leather-bound desk diary Rose kept for the DA, an oversize volume that detailed all his meetings, in the office and out of it.
“You think Battaglia had the balls to run a witness like this himself?” Mike asked.
“I know he did,” I said. “He’s done it before.”
“What for?”
“Whenever he thought he had something to gain by it.” I was done with food, totally reinvigorated with thoughts of Paul Battaglia’s penchant for secrecy. “That whole dustup with the Reverend Hal Shipley—the DA ran that by himself, just as one example. He wanted to lock in Harlem in case he ran again. He compromised himself by letting Shipley call the shots on his own investigation.”
I’d had a complaint from a teenager—a statutory sex crime—in which she’d named the publicity-hungry Shipley as her seducer. Before I could make a determination about her credibility—in the end, she had none—Paul Battaglia had already assured the Reverend Shipley that he was not in danger of being charged. Shipley had bought him. Battaglia had compromised me in the letter he wrote to Shipley, and that had set us off on our final series of uncomfortable encounters.
“Did he have a code name for the rev?” Mike asked.
“Not very subtle. Slippery,” I said. “He called the flimflam man Slippery, instead of Shipley.”
“So—Diana?”
“I imagine it’s how he referred to Chidra Persaud.”
“Not subtle either,” Mike said.
“Prescott must know that. It’s probably why he jumped on it—on her—so quickly last night,” I said. “There must be references to her in the desk diary. Prescott’s coming up here to meet with me Monday morning. We can tell him to bring the diary and go through it together. I may spot some references that others who knew the DA less well might have missed.”
“Say Battaglia didn’t bring anyone in to work on Persaud with him; how long could he go on that way?”
“Who’s to stop him?” I said. “Most of that front office is a bunch of head-bobbing yes-men. He’d milk her till he had what he wanted and then pass it on to Frauds. There would be simply no one to stop him at that point.”
“What do you say about his plan to go back to Montana?”
“Persaud claims Battaglia reserved a cabin for November first,” I said. “Taking a guest.”
“Could be that was the climax he wanted to get to,” Mike said.
“Yeah. Killing Horace,” I said, going inside to shower and brush my teeth.
“You’re holding out on me. Is Horace his nickname for someone?” Mike said. “One of Battaglia’s put-downs?”
“It’s a freaking ram,” I said, undressing and willing the water to get warm. “A good-looking ole boy who’s sort of king of the hunting preserve, and Battaglia was ready to blow him to oblivion with—I guess with a ghost by his side.”
“A ghost with no name,” Mike said. “Don’t you think it’s got to be George Kwan?”
“If it looks like a duck, as the
saying goes. Yes, my money’s on Kwan.”
“There’s got to be a way into this for you and me.”
“Prescott will try to run it down, unless we get to it first,” I said. “You can start your guys checking out who won the Montana auctions for sheep tags, just in case.”
I stepped into the narrow shower and soaped up. I got out and wrapped myself in a towel, wringing the water from my hair.
“I know it was an old technique in mental hospitals to bathe patients in ice water—slow the blood flow to the brain to stop their agitation. But I’m really not enrolled here for the hydrotherapy treatment, and I’m not all that agitated at the moment,” I said, coming out of the bathroom. “Warm me up, will you?”
Mike was sitting on the edge of one of the twin beds. I took the iPad out of his hands and stood between his legs, stroking his hair. He put his arms around me and squeezed tight, opening the towel to kiss me on the flat of my abdomen.
“When’s the last time you slept in a bed this small?” I asked.
“Can’t remember.”
“Are you ready to turn out the lights?” I said. “I’m wiped.”
Mike undressed and climbed in beside me. I wanted to be held and be made to feel secure. Mike did that for me. I was asleep before I could say good night to him.
When I awakened in the early morning, Mike was already up and dressed.
“Are you going to church?” I asked, knowing that on Sundays he often took his mother to mass.
“I’ll take a pass. Mom will have to say a few novenas for me anyway. She might as well add missing today’s mass.”
“Then why are you up so early?”
“To spirit you out of here so we can get back before Tinsley and North know you went for a constitutional.”
“You’re springing me,” I said, throwing back the covers and reaching for clean clothes. “AWOL. What a great feeling this is. A walk in the woods?”
“I was thinking more like a ride to the city,” Mike said.
“Risky business,” I said, lacing up the sneakers I had worn to Montana with a burst of energy I didn’t know I possessed. “James Prescott won’t like this one bit.”
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