“Let me tell you about lying in a court of law. Did the detective tell you that it’s a crime, too? That if you take an oath to tell the truth but you lie on the witness stand, you can be arrested?”
“Felix raped me. I’m not lying about that. You can’t arrest me for nothing. I’m too young.” The pout had passed momentarily, and she was emboldened by the thought that her age would protect her from my lightly veiled threat.
Don’t test me today, Angel. “Actually, wecan arrest you. Your case is heard in family court because you’re not sixteen. But the judge there can send you to a foster home upstate, take you away from your mother-”
That snapped her to attention. “I don’t want to be doing this now. I want to go home.”
“I’m afraid that’s not one of your choices. A man has been arrested because of the story you told Detective Vandomir. He’s been in jail for a couple of days, charged with the most serious thing one human being can do to another, short of murder. And he belongs there, if he held a knife to you and raped you. He belongs there for a very long time.
“So we’re going to go over your statement one more time. There’s only one thing you can do wrong, from this point on.”
“What’s that?”
“Lie. You cannot tell any lies, Angel. Not about anything. No matter how insignificant you think the question is, no matter what it concerns, you can’t lie about it. If I ask you whether it was raining or sunny the day you met Felix, you’ve got to tell me the truth.”
“Like what does that have to do with my being raped?”
“Every single thing you say has to do with how we know what to believe when you get to the point of telling us what happened with Felix in your bedroom. If you lie about the little things that led up to that, then it means you’re very capable of lying about the big ones. Tell me you never gave him the number of your beeper, and I get records back from the phone company in a few days showing that he beeped you every day last week, then I know you’ve told enough lies for me not to trust anything you say. And if you do it under oath, before the grand jury, I’ll have you arrested before you leave the building.”
There were gentler ways to do this, but I was out of patience and short on time. It was almost nine-thirty, and as soon as my assistant, Laura, clocked in and got to her desk, she’d be leaving a message for Battaglia that I needed to see him.
Vandomir was a smart cop with good instincts. If he doubted the veracity of Angel’s narrative, he had reason to do so. Four and a half hours with her in the emergency room at the hospital had given him a concrete sense of where the holes in her story were. I tried to soften my tone and get back to the beginning of her meeting with Felix.
Each time she answered a question, Angel looked at Vandomir for a reaction. I had become the bad cop, and she was sticking with the version that she had originally given, even though the details did not hold together. But I couldn’t discount the complaint of any rape victim on a hunch, so I drilled away at every hour that had passed between the first cab ride in which they met and the night in question.
I was up against a stone wall. Angel wasn’t convincing, but she was tough. Vandomir wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me across my desk.
His note suggested a weakness to get us over the threshold. “Ask her if one of her girlfriends has a tattoo on her butt. The wordRalphie, inside the outline of a bull.”
“Who are the girls you hang out with at school?”
“Jessica. Connie. Paula. Why you gotta know?”
“Last names.”
“I don’t know their last names.” She was pushing me.
“I’ll go to the school myself and find them.”
She murmured “Bitch” just loud enough for me to hear it.
“Tell me about Ralphie’s girlfriend.”
Angel glared at Vandomir. “You been to my school already?”
“Which one is Ralphie’s girl?”
“She ain’t got nothing to do with this. You stay away from my-”
“Every single person you know who Felix met has something to do with this. The fact that he knows that one of your pals has Ralphie’s name engraved on her ass tells me that he knows more about you than I do right now. And that’s okay for me but it’s very bad for you.”
She was as startled as I was when the intercom buzzed and Laura interrupted us. “Now’s your chance, Alex. Rose said to get in there as soon as you can. Battaglia wants to know what you’ve got before he starts his ten o’clock with the deputy mayor, okay?”
“Tell her I’ll be there in five.”
I turned my attention back to Angel. “Do you know what a lie detector test is?”
“Yeah. I seen them on TV.”
“You know how they work?”
“Some cop puts like a…um, I don’t know. They ask you questions, that’s all.”
“We’ve got brand-new ones now. Computerized. Impossible to beat. They’re hooked up to your brain waves, your pulse, your blood pressure. First, we put a needle in your arm-”
“Aneedle? I don’t want no f-”
“It’s not a question of what you want. This is the point you’ve taken us to, and it’s full speed ahead from now on. It’s a big needle. It just stings for a few minutes when they inject you.”
Her bottom lip was quivering. “I don’t like no needles. I’m afraid of needles.” She had turned her whole body toward Vandomir and was begging him to intercede. The fourteen-year-old kid hiding inside the attitude of a thirty-year-old was beginning to reveal herself.
I pressed the intercom and Laura came on immediately. “Get me Detective Roman, will you, please? Immediately. Tell him I need a lie detector test in one hour. Juvenile subject. May have to make an arrest, so he better bring his handcuffs.”
Tears were poised on the bottom lids of Angel’s eyes, ready to pour down her cheeks.
“I’m going to have you wait across the hall until the detective gets up here. Come with me.”
“Ihate needles.”
“And I hate people who lie to me. Especially about being raped. You know how busy Detective Vandomir and his partners are? They get called out on three, four, five cases a day. Young girls and grown women who need their help. Badly. They work all night most of the time, just trying to keep families like yours and mine safe. Every extra minute we spend trying to get the truth out of you is time taken away from someone else who was the victim of a crime, some other person who wants to cooperate with us.”
“Can I talk to my mother first?” She was whimpering now.
“Here’s what we’re going to do. You’ve got one hour until the detective comes to give you the test. I’m going in to talk to my boss. Sit in that room and think about the choice you have. If there’s something about your story that you want to change, you just tell Detective Vandomir. He’s your best hope. If you tell him a story that makes sense, you won’t need the needle.”
I kneeled beside her chair and tried to make contact with her moist eyes. “Felix was wrong. It’s against the law for a man as old as he is to have sex with you. That’s a crime. We can still punish him for that. But if he didn’t have a knife, Angel, then you’re making up an entirely different kind of crime. If you made a mistake by starting that story and you got in over your head without meaning to, then tell us the truthnow before you dig yourself in any deeper.”
I grabbed a legal pad off my desk and told Laura to hold everything while I went over to see the district attorney.
My identification tag released the security lock on the door to Battaglia’s inner sanctum. The chief assistant was refilling his coffee mug as I walked past him. Rose Malone, the DA’s executive assistant, had the phone wedged between her shoulder and her left ear, working at the computer as she waved me into the boss’s suite. I tried to stall long enough for her to get off, so that I could get a reading on his mood, but she gave no sign of ending the call quickly.
I had practiced my approach several times on my way down
to the office in the cab. A casual “By the way, I thought you’d want to hear what happened to me at the museum last night” wouldn’t work. I was confident Battaglia would back my shipyard decision if it was presented as an homage to his style, and smiled in anticipation of his reaction as I pushed open his door.
The first thing I saw was the smirk on Pat McKinney’s face. He was standing, arms akimbo, between Battaglia and me, and I knew before a word was spoken that he had gotten wind of last night’s maneuvers. The deputy chief of the trial division and my most driven in-house adversary, McKinney would have delighted in pitching this to the boss as a political embarrassment.
“I knew you and Chapman were movie buffs, Alex, butThe Mummy Returns meetsInvasion of the Body Snatchers wouldn’t even rate buttered popcorn in my house.”
No point asking him how he knew. He’d be only too happy to regurgitate the details. His fingers tapped excitedly on the conference table behind him and his mild overbite looked like it had grown into fangs overnight.
“Paul, I’d like to-”
But Battaglia seemed content to let McKinney play out his hand. “Your pal Chapman was a bit out of control last night. Tried to push the Crime Scene Unit to drag themselves down to the ME’s office to take photos in the middle of cleaning up a job at a triple homicide in Midtown. Chief of D’s had to call me at three-thirty in the morning to referee the decision.”
I had no idea that some other sensational crime had occurred after midnight.
“Jeez. And I know how you hate to be bothered at home about anything job-related.” More than half the legal staff of six hundred lawyers were on felony call at any given point in time, and all of the supervisors knew that being beeped and contacted twenty-four hours a day came with the territory. Most of us welcomed the opportunity to have input on case actions that would affect the way they would later move forward through the system. McKinney was an exception to the rule. He lived without an answering machine, didn’t give out his beeper number, and punished all but his handful of pets who dared to find him once he left his office.
“I hated having to say no to something you were working on, Alex. But we had a real serious investigation going on, not some cute publicity stunt.”
Battaglia usually couldn’t stand that kind of bickering. There was no point defending my actions in front of McKinney. But I had insisted that Chapman get the sarcophagus photographed before it was removed from the back of the truck at the morgue and was incredulous that my own colleague had prevented such critical documentation of the findings.
“Paul, may I talk to you about this alone?”
“Not until I return the phone calls I’ve got here.” He flapped a stack of messages at me. “I’m trying to understand why the press found out this happened before I did.”
My face reddened. “Boss, I’ve talked to no one about this, except-”
“Just find out who the girl is, where she was when she was killed, some reason for anyone to want her dead, and then we’ll figure out what to do with this mess you’ve created for me.”
“I’d like you to understand that I had Jake’s word that he would not tell anyone about the case.”
I tried to convince myself that I believed what I was saying, but Battaglia wasn’t even interested in my denials. “Maybe McKinney’s right about this. You can’t be expected to keep confidences while you’re personally involved with a newshound. We should leave you off some of these high-profile cases.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but McKinney spoke over me.
“This might be the perfect place to start.”
5
“What did you do to that pitiful-looking kid who’s sitting in the conference room crying?”
“Get away from my office before Pat McKinney sees you talking to me or I’m dead.”
“That case anything I should know about? She the girl who was attacked outside Port Authority last week?”
I grabbed Mickey Diamond’s sleeve and dragged him to the top of the stairwell opposite Laura’s desk. TheNew York Post courthouse reporter was trolling for stories and he had come to the wrong place at the worst possible moment this morning. “You do remember, don’t you, that it’s against the law for me to identify a rape victim to you?”
Diamond had been a fixture at 100 Centre Street for more years and more tabloid headlines than anyone could remember. Our public relations director was headquartered a short walk down the corridor from my office, and Diamond hung out in her anteroom when he wasn’t watching trials, trading tales with reporters from the other papers in the pressroom on the ground floor behind the information rotunda, or making up stories out of whole cloth to keep his byline lively.
“Is she crying in spite of you or because of you?”
“Somebody ought to put a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the entire eighth floor, meant only for you. Just stay here a minute. I need your help. Did you call Battaglia this morning?”
“What for? I got that triple from last night with the transgender victim and the two thugs who were three-card-monte dealers on the Deuce. Right in front of one of the Disney theaters.”
Forty-second Street-the Deuce, in perp parlance-had undergone a major face-lift during my tenure in the DA’s office, but it still attracted sharks who preyed on the tourists who flocked to that neighborhood. “My editor wants to know if the deceased was shtupping Minnie or Mickey, but I didn’t think to bother your boss with that.”
“That’s all you’re working on?”
“Unless you’ve got something sweeter.”
“Nothing yet. But somebody leaked a breaking story and Battaglia’s blaming me. I need you to check with everyone in the pressroom, keep your ears open, be discreet-”
“I was with you until you got to that part.”
“Then forget I said it. Just listen. You’re going to hear something interesting later on. That much I can promise you. Find out for me who had it first. Find out where it came from.”
“I’m gonna give you a source when you won’t even give me a clue about that bawling little adolescent you got in there?”
“You’re going to give me a direction. I don’t need a name, I need to get out of the sinkhole I’m in right now.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“You got any space left on the wall of shame?” Diamond had wallpapered the courthouse pressroom with his page-onePost headlines. He turned every human tragedy and violent crime into an alliterative eye-catcher or tasteless punch line to help sell the tabloid rag. Unfortunately, the work of my unit had provided a rich source of material.
“I might have to cover up some of your old cases, but they’re turning yellow anyway.”
“Get me what I need and I can assure you you’ll be so busy for the next couple of days that you won’t know what hit you. Meanwhile, get lost before McKinney eyes the two of us together.”
“Give me a hint.”
I pushed at Diamond’s shoulder and pointed down the stairs. “Go see Ryan Blackmer. He’s taking a plea this afternoon on the case with the oral surgeon who sexually abused a patient after he gave her nitrous oxide.”
“Today? I already have my piece written. ‘D.D.S.-Dentist Desired Sex.’ Would have been a cover story if the triple hadn’t happened.”
“Where’s Cooper?” McKinney’s voice echoed in the stairwell. I heard Laura tell him that I had gone to the ladies’ room and would be back in a few minutes. Diamond waved over his shoulder and trotted down to the seventh floor.
“Tell her I want to know whose side she’s on. She’s got some witness out here crying and the kid’s mother is complaining that Cooper was going to give her a lie detector test and take her away from home. What kind of crap is going on around here? This office hasn’t used a lie detector since 1973. I want to see her immediately.”
I waited until I could hear McKinney’s footsteps walking away from my office and crossed back to find Vandomir standing beside my desk. “When did you come up with this tactic? You
oughtta patent it. Worked like a charm on Angel,” he said.
“Remember those old Dick Tracy cartoons that were called ‘crime stoppers’? My favorite was the one that said the best lie detector was the threat of a lie detector. I haven’t yet met the teenage girl who isn’t afraid of a needle. I just designed the most unpleasant-sounding imaginary machine I could think of, wait until I catch them in the first concrete fabrication before I describe it, and then give them an hour to decide which is worse-the big needle or ‘fessing up. I’ve never had to wait more than fifteen minutes.”
“This one took exactly eight. She pleaded with me to let her tell me what really happened. Anything but sticking a needle in that skinny arm of hers, and having to seeyou again.”
“What did she give you?”
“Felix was telling the truth. She fell in love about two minutes after getting in the cab and he began to pick her up at school every day. It was her friend Jessica they did a threesome with. She’s the one who’s Ralphie’s girl.”
“So why the 911 call?”
Every false report had a motive, some reason that person decided to pick up the phone and invite the NYPD into his or her otherwise private life. Find that spot, and the need for deception usually became crystal clear to the investigator.
“‘Cause Felix didn’t bring a condom with him that night, and when she told him to pull out or she’d never let him have sex with her again, he told her she wasn’t that good anyway. Said he got it better from Jessica. She was jealous and angry. Figured she’d get back at him by getting him in trouble with the cops. Never thought anybody would take it too seriously.”
“The knife?”
“Didn’t exist.”
“Force?”
“Nope. She invited him in and led him right to the bedroom.”
“And there’s her poor mother, working all night to try to give her kids a good life, and this one’s going to break her heart. Let’s bring this to an end.”
The Bone Vault Page 4