Death Dance

by Linda Fairstein

  Wong walked back to Berk's bedside. "I don't want him agitated, detective. He needs plenty of rest."

  "Agitate me? What do they care, doc? They're looking to beat up on an old man, they came to the wrong place."

  "We're not here to do that," I said, stepping closer to calm Berk, knowing Mike would want to ask a few questions and hoping he would ease his way into them. "It's a good thing your son was with you last night."

  "Thank God for Briggs is damn right. You meet him? He still hanging around?"

  "No. No, we haven't met him yet."

  "Handsome kid. Takes after his mother. But I'm the one who gave him the name. Briggsley."

  "That's his real name?" Mike asked.

  "Briggsley Berk. Found it in a book, something about the peerage. Imagine what a favor I did him. Yussel Berkowitz. Try growing up here with a name like that."

  "Does Briggs work for you?" I asked.

  "So I go to court, here in Manhattan. Supreme Court. Must have been the late fifties," Berk said, not interested in paying attention tome. "I made an application to change my name. Who's the judge? You're a lawyer, listen to this. You ever know Judge Schmuck?"

  I laughed. "Before my time, but I've heard of him."

  "Why should I grant your motion? the guy asks me. What's wrong with being Yussel Berkowitz? he wants to know. What's wrong? I hated the damn name. I wanted to sound like I was an American, not some hustling immigrant. The judge, he says to me, 'You know what my name is? I'm Peter J. Schmuck. My father was a Schmuck, my grandfather was a Schmuck, and I've lived all my life being a Schmuck.' Bang! He slammed down the gavel and kicked me out of the courtroom."

  "So you waited a bit and went back to a different judge another day."

  "Waited, my ass. I asked around, found a friendly clerk who liked the color of my money, and next thing you know I'm Joe Berk. Whole thing took five minutes. Figure the one sure thing I could do for my kids was give them good old Anglo-Saxon names."

  "How many children do you have?"

  "Five. You really interested in this personal stuff about me or you still nosing around where you don't belong? You catch whoever killed Natalya?"

  "Not yet."

  "You do, I got a manhole cover you could sit him on."

  "Does Briggs work with you?"

  "Nobody works with me. They work for me. They'd all be living in a trailer park somewhere if I didn't put this empire together for them."

  My elbows were resting on the metal railing on the side of the bed. Berk lifted his arm, which seemed to be trembling, and took one of my hands in his.

  "All by yourself?"

  "Me and my brother. Izzy, he was my older brother. Smartest man I ever knew." His eyes were closed now and he seemed overwhelmed by the realization of how he had escaped death so narrowly.

  I looked to Mike and he cupped his hands, waving his fingers toward himself. He wanted me to keep Joe Berk talking.

  "Did Talya tell you that she was going to be leaving her husband?" I asked.

  "What? You don't want to know about Izzy? You just asked me whether I built the business myself. You know what we got?" He was patting my hand now, anxious to show off. "Real estate. We own more commercial real estate than there are square acres in the state of Rhode Island. It's true. Don't look at me like that, young lady. I'm telling you the truth. You like hotels? The Berkleigh chain. Makes the Hyatts look like they ran out of properties on a Monopoly board. Jet plane leasing? BerkAir's got the biggest private fleet in the world."

  I tried to disengage my hand from Berk's grasp. He opened his eyes and reached out for my wrist. "We're going to have to go, Mr. Berk. You need to rest."

  "I'll rest when I'm good and ready."

  "Mike and I have to get to work."

  "You mean if I don't answer your questions, you're gonna leave me alone in this place? Don't go until my son gets back. It won't be very long. You want to talk about Talya?"

  "That would help us."

  "First I gotta explain how Izzy and I got into the theater business, right? I wouldn't be having anything to do with fancy dancers and Tennessee Williams and all that jazz if we hadn't moved the organization into the stage world. Can't make sense of my relationship with Talya until you understand what my business is about."

  The man didn't want to be alone. He didn't have the least interest in cooperating with us, but he didn't want to be on his own in the alien and uncontrollable world of the sterile hospital room.

  "I think I'm more interested in your personal relationship with Talya than your professional one."

  Again he ignored me. "Real estate. Simple as that. We were buying up so much commercial land in midtown when the market went to hell in 'seventy-six, we found ourselves competing with the Shu-berts and Nederlanders for property. We wound up with four legitimate theaters. The stage-I told Izzy-that's where the magic is. Forget television and the movies, people still want to come out at night and touch the stars."

  I looked to Mike and now he was shaking his head.

  "We've got to go, Mr. Berk. Is there someone you'd like me to call to come sit with you? One of your children?"

  "Briggs'll be back any minute now. He promised me. The others are scattered all over the country. We got offices in L.A., in Chicago, in Miami. I only got the youngest kid here with me."

  "How about nephews or nieces? Izzy's kids."

  "Same story. Spread out all over the place. I'll give you my secretary's number. Let's get her over here, okay?"

  "We can do that," I said. "How about Mona?"

  "Who?"

  "Mona, your niece. Izzy's daughter."

  "Oh, so now she's Mona? Desdemona Berk, Ms. Cooper. The first Broadway show Izzy ever saw was in 1943. Othello. Paul Robeson as the Moor. Trust me, that's an actor who'd never have done bull-shit ads for the telephone company like-like-what's his name? What a talent Robeson was. Uta Hagen, she was Desdemona. Izzy was a kid, but he was entranced. Another marriage and four sons later, he finally gets the baby girl."

  "Mona's office is here in town, though, isn't it? Would you like me to call her?"

  Berk dropped his hold of my arm, turned his head to the other side of the bed, and pretended to spit on the floor. "Bite your tongue. I'd rather eat nails."

  Mike walked to the foot of the bed. "Briggs called your niece last night, while the ambulance was on the way to the hospital. She came over to the theater right away. Maybe he can tell you why he wanted her to be there."

  "Where? In my office? My home?" Berk was trying to pull himself up. "I'll tell you why she was there. She wanted to be the first one to drive a nail in my coffin. Nobody let her in, did they? Did they?"

  He was shouting now and a nurse opened the door and displaced me at the side of the bed. This was a giant step beyond the level of agitation that Dr. Wong didn't want us to provoke.

  "We're not the ones who let her in," Mike said, omitting the fact that she hadn't needed anyone's help in gaining access through the secret elevator in the apartment.

  "Talk to my lawyers, detective. That little vonce-that cockroach-shouldn't be anywhere near my place. She's filed a lawsuit against me. She's trying to break up the business organization and my family. Desdemona Berk-my brother Izzy should rest in peace-she's a greedy little bitch."

  14

  "Want to grab some coffee before I go downtown to my office?" I said to Mike.

  "Nah. I'll go up to the squad and put in a few hours."

  "So how come you didn't ask him about the monitors in his apartment?"

  "He was holding your hand, not mine. I thought you'd get to it. That's not homicide work, that's some kind of Peeping Tom stuff, right up your alley."

  Mike was a detail guy. It was rare for him to let a single fact slip from his grasp. It was even more unusual for him to turn down my offer of a free breakfast.

  "Are you going to talk to Mona?" I asked.

  "About what? Right now all I'm interested in is who else saw Natalya Galinova before she disappe
ared and why her personal life seemed to be in such turmoil."

  "I'll be in my office if you want anything," I said, hailing a Yellow Cab on the corner of Tenth Avenue and 59th Street.

  It was only eight fifteen when I bought two cups of black coffee from the cart on the corner of the Hogan Place entrance to the court-house. I scanned my I.D. card and pushed through the turnstile, greeting the cop whose fixed post was security in the cramped lobby of the District Attorney's Office.

  The eighth-floor corridor was still empty when I pushed open the anteroom door, passing my secretary's desk and turning on the lights in my office. I had left hurriedly on Friday evening to get to work with Mercer on the Jean Eakens case up at the Special Victims Squad. The case memos and screening sheets from the forty senior assistants who worked in my unit were still scattered on my desktop for review and response, so I spent time making comments on them until the phones started ringing at nine.

  Half of the morning was occupied with phone calls to press for special attention to the new cases. I needed the toxicologist to do the routine drug screening in the Eakens case, but also to be aware that Xanax had been recovered from the doctor's kitchen counter. I begged the chief serologist to rush the DNA profile from the blood on the teeth of the dog who saved his owner from a rape in Riverside Park. A match to a known felon would launch a search that might prevent other women from being victimized.

  I had no official role in the death investigation of Natalya Galinova, but knew that Mike could navigate the most professional medical examiner's office in the country with a skill that would produce the best results possible in a timely fashion.

  At eleven, after I had set my secretary, Laura, to work on some correspondence, I walked across the hall to the executive wing, to see whether Rose Malone, the district attorney's assistant, could fit me into his schedule. I waited through a series of phone calls from the governor and several lesser public officials before I was summoned into the large office from which Paul Battaglia supervised the work of the six hundred lawyers on his staff.

  There wasn't an hour of the day or night that Battaglia was without a cigar stub in his mouth. He could talk straight for thirty minutes without hobbling the unlit Cohiba that was stuck to his lips, and when he was actually smoking, as he was now, he would remove it occasionally to waft a ribbon of smoke in my direction.

  "Good morning, Paul. Thanks for giving me some time. There are a couple of new cases that are likely to get some ink, that I thought you'd want to know about."

  "Like what?" he asked, drawing back one side of his lip and speaking out of the corner of his mouth.

  "Like a physician who drugged two women in order to rape them. Canadian tourists."

  The press always played up the foreign element in crime stories. Politicians hated any mentions that might scare people away from the city's most profitable industry. "And the good news is that we finally have DNA from the Riverside rapist, so we're likely to have a profile to put in the databank by midweek."

  I expected his usual barrage of precise questions about the pedigree of the doctor who'd been arrested or the breed of the heroic dog. "You think I think that's why you're in here to see me?"

  I blushed and that drew a wide smile around the cigar clenched in his teeth.

  "The commissioner called me about the Galinova woman. He seems to know that you were up at the crime scene."

  And didn't call to tell Battaglia about it, which was the unspoken part of the district attorney's "gotcha."

  "We were working on my rape case up at the squad when Homicide got the news she'd gone missing. Chapman thought I might be useful because of my familiarity with the ballet world, and the possibility that Galinova had been assaulted before she was killed."

  "Chapman always finds a way to make you useful, doesn't he?"

  I ignored the shot. There wasn't a rumor that circulated anywhere within the office that escaped Battaglia's radar. "Paul, I'd really like to ask you to assign me to the investigation."

  Homicide cases were controlled in the Trial Division by Pat McKinney, a rat-faced prosecutor whose legal ability was obscured by the pettiness of his personality and the longtime affair he'd conducted with an incompetent young lawyer for whom he'd carved out a protected place in the bureau. I had challenged McKinney too many times to be favored with investigations that fell on the outer borders of my own unit. Battaglia's reliance on my sex crimes prosecutors for the resolution of so many high-profile cases-our ability to exonerate falsely accused suspects before charging them and to nail those guilty of such heinous crimes-had given me direct access to him whenever I wanted it.

  "Nobody's got the case for us?"

  "No suspects yet. The squad's just getting on all the employees today. Nobody's been tapped to work on it."

  "It's not a rape, according to the commissioner. Any reason to think the perp was trying?"

  I had gone online to find the old news stories about the first murder at the Met. I reminded Battaglia of the facts, since the case had occurred before he was in office.

  "That wasn't a completed rape either, Paul, but it was certainly an attempt at one. The best those detectives could reconstruct, the violinist ran into the stagehand when she was lost. He got her in an elevator and tried to assault her. He probably killed her when she resisted, when she was struggling."

  "So you want to keep that option open?"

  "Yes. We've got four hundred guys who were somewhere backstage that afternoon and evening, so detectives have got to talk to every one of them, in case this was random-or to see whether one of them had been stalking Galinova since she'd arrived here. And we're developing a very complex personal life. A lover's quarrel-a domestic-isn't so far out of the question."

  "How so?"

  "Galinova recently put her husband on notice that she wanted a legal separation. She had something going on with this guy called Joe Berk, and a former lover is the artistic-"

  "Slow down, Alex. Don't just throw Joe Berk's name in here and slide by it."

  "Is he a friend?"

  "He's everybody's friend. And he'd be your worst enemy."

  There were no powerful businessmen or -women who had somehow not been in Battaglia's orbit throughout his several terms in office as one of the most influential law-enforcement figures in the country. Every prominent New Yorker had been solicited for campaign contributions over the years, and most had benefited from the services of the great lawyers mentored in their careers by Paul Battaglia. Among his prosecutorial alumni were partners in every major firm, litigators sought to battle in the most controversial trials, judges on the state and federal bench, commissioners leading government agencies of every type, and one protege who had been a contender for the position of attorney general of the United States- the country's premier legal post.

  "Anything I need to know?"

  "Don't turn your back to him, Alex. He's vicious."

  "I assume the commissioner told you he was with Galinova- arguing with her-just before she disappeared?"

  "Take it wherever it goes. You don't need a pass from me." Battaglia's mantra had been consistent, no matter where the tentacles of an investigation led. I'd been given green light to do the right thing, which is all he asked of each one of us.

  "So year answer is yes? I can stay on die case? And you tell

  McKinney, please. I don't even want to see him."

  "I want to know everything you develop before I read it in the Post with a Mickey Diamond byline. Got that?"

  Diamond was the veteran courthouse reporter who snagged the best leaks from the NYPD brass, and when facts failed to fall in his lap, he fashioned the most creative sidebars in journalism.

  "And when you know where you're going with Berk, I'll give you some background about his other run-ins with the law."

  Battaglia always delivered one of his throwaway lines while I was on the threshold of the door. I turned back. "Crimes?"

  "Nothing violent. Tax fraud. Some pretty sophisticated
planning that's made him and everyone around him worth billions. Not millions. The B word. I've been trying to get the bastard for years. The feds took the investigation away from me when I couldn't put together a case that'd stick, but then in the end, neither could they," he said, smiling broadly again. "I may have some leverage for you when you come to need it."

  "You want to tell me now?"

  "I don't want to muddy the waters."

  Maybe another tidbit would help. "The commissioner fill you in on the fact that Berk got hotfooted on a manhole cover late last night? And survived it?"

  "Yeah. I wanted to make sure the PC thought it was accidental. You agree?"

  "Had all the right signs. His favorite son was taking him out for a lobster dinner, and his driver was parked next to the manhole. Con Ed said they'd had more than-"

  "I know, I know. Forty reports this year. We're going to do a grand jury investigation on the one from downtown. Throw last night's matter into it, too. See if it rises to criminally negligent homicide on that poor dogwalker who got hit last month."

  I left out the fact of the television monitors in Berk's bedroom.

  There would be time for that story when we figured out where the cameras were concealed. Otherwise, it would be one more question for which I couldn't provide an answer-a very bad way to start a Monday morning with Paul Battaglia.

  Rose interrupted on the intercom. The mayor wanted Battaglia immediately, which suggested there was friction between him and the governor on an issue in which the district attorney figured centrally. He wanted me out of the room before he talked and made it clear by dismissing me before he picked up the phone from its cradle.

  I called the squad to tell Lieutenant Peterson that I was officially attached to the case. From this point on, anylegal decisions-whether applications for warrants or sufficiency of probable cause for a suspect's arrest-would be made in consultation wartime. Peterson mentioned that he had seen Mike earlier in the day but didn't know whether he had gone down to the Met to work or was sitting out this shift.

  The rest of my day was filled with the routine of my prosecutorial duties in the sex crimes unit. Lawyers on trial took precedence with often urgent issues that had arisen during the current courtroom proceedings. Detectives dropped in regularly for guidance about how to handle new complaints for which our pioneeringunit bad developed protocols. Advocates and victims themselves called to ask questions about the process they faced if they chose to report their crimes to the police. And friends came by every day to hangout with one another, tell war stories, and vent about the array of characters who presented themselves to us with endless stories of bad and bizarre human behavior.