"Why?"
"You're axing a lot of questions I can't answer. I guess that's how come you're a lawyer. Somebody smelled that kind of electrical-like, rubber-burning smell. We don't want to panic nobody, but they says you should come downstairs."
I threw my purse in the bottom of my linen closet, put my keys and cell phone in my pocket, and tossed on a leather jacket in case I decided to leave the lobby for a friend's house as events developed closer to morning. The last thing I brought was the flashlight.
The twentieth-floor hallway was quiet, and as I passed the elevator bank I paused to sniff the air to see whether I smelled anything unusual. If there was something on fire, that odor was overwhelmed by the remains of a neighbor's curried takeout, in containers still sitting next to the trash compactor.
I opened the door to the stairwell and was surprised to find that it was pitch black. I backtracked into the hallway and flipped open the phone to call the concierge desk again, but the number was busy.
After three more attempts and growing impatience, I pushed open the heavy fire door and shined the long, narrow beam of the flashlight into the deep tower of stairs and grabbed the steel handrailing to begin my descent.
The supposed fireproofing of the emergency staircase served as a sound barrier as well. The only noise was the clicking of my loafers against the cement steps. I picked up speed as I rounded the landing on nineteen, becoming more sure-footed as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
When I reached eighteen, I stopped in my tracks. Someone was breathing heavily, not far away from me, perhaps winded from going up or down the stairs. I tried to stay calm, assuming that it was a neighbor in some sort of distress.
"Hello?" I swiveled in place and turned the beam above me, in the direction from which I had just come, but saw nothing, and no one answered.
I grabbed the door handle to get back into the well-lit landing of the eighteenth floor, but it was locked. I flashed the beam below me and seeing no one, I went as fast as I could down the stairs to seventeen. Again, I tried the door for reentry, throwing my body against it as I pushed, but with no success.
Now the sound of my own deep breaths and loud heartbeats made it impossible for me to tell whether there were other noises.
I gripped the rail and dashed down farther, to sixteen, and now I could hear the footsteps racing from behind me, rubber-soled sneakers or shoes squeaking as they quickened coming toward me.
"Who's there?" I screamed out, sounding as panicked as I felt, knowing that my shouts couldn't penetrate the thick walls to alert adjacent tenants.
I leaned forward and slid my arm along the metal railing, trying to take two steps at a time but fearful of falling. As I turned on the next landing, I swung the light upward. Someone taller than I, dressed completely in black, with only the slits for eyes showing out of a ski mask, was trying to overtake me.
I let go of the support to reach into my pocket, bracing against the wall with my right arm to keep my balance, the friction of the leather jacket slowing my descent. Still clambering down and still shining the beam ahead of me, I felt for the redial button on the cell phone and pressed on it.
A gloved hand clamped around my neck, squeezing it with tremendous force, while the other hand locked on my shoulder. The person powering them knocked me to the ground as I tumbled to the next landing and rolled to a stop with my back wedged into the corner, wheezing to catch my breath.
"Benito!" I screamed as the shiny silver cell phone dropped out of my pocket and slid across the floor.
I could hear a faint voice calling out from the little device, "Hello? Hello? Who is it?"
The figure was standing over me now, pulling on my legs, twisting me onto my stomach and trying to grab the hair at the nape of my neck to hold my head still.
I thrashed and kicked at him, screaming again to Benito. "It's Alex Cooper. I'm in the stairwell, Benito. Fire! Benito. Fire!"
I was yelling as loud as I could, knowing from years of professional experience that someone was more likely to come to my aid if I screamed "fire" and not "rape."
The man had one knee on the floor and the other planted in the middle of my back as he reached for one of my arms, stretching at the same time to try to grab for the phone. He made a weird, grating sound-like the tip of his tongue hissing against his front teeth- as his chin grazed the top of my head.
"In the stairwell, Benito," I screamed again, unable to remember exactly which floor of the building I had reached. "I'm on-I'm not sure, Benito. I'm think I'm on sixteen. Help me! Help me!"
My assailant couldn't have it both ways. He had to release my arm to snatch the phone from the floor. As he did, we both heard Benito giving commands in Spanish to one of the handymen, directing him to run up the stairs to find me.
The attacker dropped the phone and I heard it clatter down the steps. Then he kicked me once in the side so that I remained writhing on the floor, doubled up in pain. He took off into the darkness above me, and thirty seconds later, somewhere on a high floor between the landing and the penthouse on thirty-five, I heard one of the heavy emergency doors open and slam shut behind him.
32
I was able to crawl down the steps to retrieve my phone and dial 911 before the building workmen reached me.
By the time the sergeant and two uniformed cops from the 19th Precinct arrived in the lobby, the team of Con Ed repairmen had restored power to the A line and started the elevators running again. There was no electrical fire and it would be hours before they could determine the reason for the blackout.
The sergeant took me up to my apartment while the cops called for a backup unit to go through the building from top to bottom.
I poured each of us some scotch and we sat in the living room, his police radio on the coffee table so that we could hear the conversations back and forth as the guys searched the staircases and hallways in vain.
When the doorbell rang, Sergeant Camacho walked to the door to let his men in.
"Yo, sarge. I didn't know you and Coop had hooked up. Am I breaking anything apart here? A cocktail? Last dance?" Chapman was leaning against the entrance to my apartment, gnawing on a toothpick as he held the door open with his foot.
Camacho blushed and started to protest that he'd only responded to a call and was starting to fill out the paperwork on my complaint.
"Relax, pal. Take it easy. Not enough I spent the last six hours checking out a jumper off a project rooftop in East Harlem, now I got blondie seeing shadows in the stairwell. The least you could have done is invite me to the after-party, too," Mike said, walking into the den, toward the bar. "Mind if I turn in the brew for something more refreshing?"
"Good news travels fast, I guess."
"The commanding officer of the Nineteenth called in an unusual on you. Lieutenant Peterson heard it on the scanner and told me to get my ass over here ASAP. And by the way? Peterson says the CO thinks you've got Munchausen syndrome. That you make these whacko stories up just because you like my company."
"The only thing I like better than your company is a good night's sleep. I'm forgetting how that happens."
An unusual report was filed in matters that might be of some significance to the commissioner and higher-ups in the department. The fact that a prosecutor working on a high-profile matter had been rousted from her home during the night and had been the target of an attempted assault would be of interest to everyone.
"You know your guys are coming up empty, don't you, sarge? I just saw one of them in the lobby and there's no trace of an intruder."
I bit into my lip and tried to calm myself.
"This place is big. If it wasn't the midnight shift, we woulda had more guys on duty, bigger response to sweep the building. Do it faster."
"It can't be that difficult. He fled up the stairs. He eventually had to go down to get out of the building, didn't he?" I asked. "You're telling me nobody saw him?"
Mike sat opposite me, his hand on the knee of my jeans. "Give the gu
ys time to canvass people. Maybe we're dealing with a pro. He got in without anybody knowing about him, could be he slipped out that way, too. You okay?"
"Considering the alternative? I'm great."
"You have any idea what this guy was trying to do to you?"
I glanced at the sergeant, afraid he would think I was crazy if I said what I really thought.
"C'mon, Coop. Tell me."
"You don't really believe I was flushed out of my apartment randomly, do you?" I looked back and forth between their faces but neither answered. "You think this perfectly prepared-I don't know what to call him-lunatic? Will that do? A guy dressed completely in black, head and hands covered-no I.D., no trace evidence. You think he just happened to be there when my lights went out? Not for a minute. This has to be connected to something I'm working on."
"Did he talk to you? Say anything that suggests he knew who you were?"
"Talk to me? It wasn't a pickup, Detective Chapman. The plan was obviously to kill me by choking or-"
"Whoa. A little dramatic tonight, aren't we? Kill you?"
"I called out to him, thinking maybe he was a neighbor. He never answered. All he wanted to do was overtake me and pin me down so that he could-well, he could do whatever it was he intended to do to me." I rubbed my neck. "I'm telling you he gripped me so hard that if I hadn't gotten away from him he'd have stopped my breathing within seconds."
The sergeant was emboldened by Mike's skepticism. "Maybe, ma'am, he was just coming along behind you and fell on the staircase. My guys are knocking on-"
"Oh, my masked neighbor? The one who dresses for blizzards in April? The clumsy one who can't stay on his feet?" I stood up and walked to the front door. "Why am I wasting time with you two? Sergeant, I'd like you to take me down to the lobby so I can see who these guys are from Con Edison."
"Coop, stay here and I'll bring up their supervisor so you can satisfy yourself that none of them have anything-"
"I wasn't talking to you, Mike. You might as well go home and keep wallowing in your own misery. No need to take me seriously."
Mike grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me away from the door. "Wallowing? Is that what I've been doing for three months? Is that what Val-"
"I'm sorry. That's not what I meant to-"
"You don't usually have any difficulty expressing yourself. I get your point."
"I apologize, Mike." I squared off to face him directly. "I'm scared and I'm tired and I'm the one who's feeling sorry for myself tonight. Please accept my apology."
"Whoever did this to you was either inside another apartment or out of the building by the time the first RMP got here."
"Mike, will you forgive-"
"It's not the time for this, Coop. The sergeant doesn't need to know my backstory, okay? These Con Ed guys who are here-"
"You've seen them yourself? They're legit?"
"There's bad wiring, they say, that took the electricity in this whole line down."
"Bad, like it's damaged? Or like it was intentionally altered?"
"It's two o'clock in the morning. Bad is all they know so far." Mike took a slug of vodka and adjusted the collar of his jacket.
"You know more than you're telling me."
"I always know more than you give me credit for, kid, don't I?"
"I'll give you an acknowledgment in my next legal brief. What is it?"
"It doesn't take a law degree to know that the source for all the electricity in the building comes in through the basement. The basement is accessible from within the building, isn't it?"
I nodded. "From the garage, too. And from the outside, although I assume those doors are locked at night. It's huge. There's a storage room, a laundry room. I've never even been inside the custodial area."
"Working a toaster oven is high tech for you," Mike said. "Once inside that boiler room, a guy with a few high school vocational classes under his belt could easily find the main electrical panel that connects to the A-line apartments and with not much more than a pair of needle-nose pliers, put you and anyone else he wanted out of business for the night."
"And the elevator banks?" I asked. "Was the super really ordered to shut them down?"
"Yeah. You can smell the burnt rubber in the basement. They had to take that precaution with both banks of elevators."
"You believe there was a man after me, right?"
"I'd believe you if you told me you saw a UFO, kid. I'm not the enemy here," Mike said, steering me back to the living room sofa to sit down. "Face it. This building is a block long. You've got the north and south wings, two elevator banks for residents plus the freight elevator, and two sets of fire stairs. All your stalker had to do was make the place go dark, then walk up the staircase and wait for all the pigeons to come out of their cubbyholes. It's not the how that's hard to figure, it's the why."
"Security cameras?" the sergeant asked.
"Too snooty here," Mike said. "Management wanted them installed after an incident a few years back. Coop's neighbors were up in arms. Invasion of privacy and all that crap. No cameras."
"All he had to do after the attack," I said, "was go back up to one of the floors above me and walk across the hallway to the other side of the building-"
Mike took over from there. "Take off his mask and gloves, drop them and the black sweater in the garbage chute, and walk down and out like any other respectable citizen, unnoticed because of all the commotion that's going on in the lobby and outside the building."
"The CO has a man on each entrance of the building. Everybody passing through this morning will have to stop to be identified, residents or not," Camacho said.
"Can't wait till I get my eviction notice," I said. "Talk about a nuisance tenant."
"Give me your keys."
"What?"
"Your keys. I'm going to take the sergeant downstairs to see where things stand while you grab a few hours of that sleep you say you need. I'll let myself back in for a nap. Better than wallowing alone at home."
"Mike, I feel like-"
"The keys," he said, holding a hand up in my face to stop me from going on. "Rest up 'cause we got an early-morning meeting with Joe Berk."
"I'm not sure I have the fortitude for him first thing in the morning. He's so crude. You got something I don't know about?"
"I've been working on that photograph of Lucy DeVore. You know, the recent one, looks like it could have been taken since she got to New York."
"Wearing the fez, leaning on a doorknob with a word inscribed in the metal that begins with the initial M?"
"Yeah, that one. So first I stopped by the task force operation at the opera house. Not even close. There's nothing that looks like the same design or lettering on anything at the Met. So I got a list of the other legitimate theaters from one of the old-timers who works the box office, for all the Broadway houses that begin with M. I started at the Music Box."
"What a beauty, isn't it? It was designed to house musicals by Irving Berlin. That's why my father always loved to go there-reminded him of his childhood."
"Too delicate. Not a match. So I tried the Majestic."
"That one's huge."
"No good. Forever Phantom. Even threw in the Martin Beck. Nada. And there used to be a theater called the Morosco, the old broad told me, but it was demolished a long time ago."
"I can't think of any others."
"I couldn't, either. But the same dame told me about the Brooks Atkinson, whoever the hell he was."
"A critic. He wrote theater reviews for the Times."
"Yeah, well, that was built back in the 1920s. And it was called the Mansfield then," Mike said, not even trying to suppress a smile. "Why you'd name anything for a critic is beyond me. I still thought it was worth checking out the original fixtures despite the change on the marquee."
"I take it you found your doorknob."
"Nope. But hanging in the theater lobby was a whole bunch of blowups of famous actors from forty, fifty years ago, celebrating at Sardi'
s after some kind of award show. In one of them, you can see Yul Brynner, Zero Mostel, and Richard Burton, each raising a glass, with Joe Berk smack in the middle of the group. And on top of his foul-mouthed fat head is the same, exact kind of tasseled red fez that Lucy DeVore was wearing in that photograph we found in her hotel room."
33
When we left my building in the morning, detectives were still canvassing neighbors, crime-scene technicians were going over the exits and basement for trace evidence, and the lobby was abuzz with curious tenants who wanted to know about all the police activity that they paid so dearly not to experience.
"Speed it up, blondie. You're getting the fish eye from the super," Mike said, pushing me through the revolving door and pointing to his department car, parked at the curb at the end of the driveway.
"Are we calling to say we're on the way? Seven thirty's a pretty unsociable hour for a drop-in."
"We'll get Berk's pump working early. Might be good for him."
We stopped in front of the Belasco, right opposite the manhole that had jolted Berk's heart just a week ago. Mike rang the buzzer of the apartment's front door and several minutes later, a woman's voice asked us to identify ourselves. It was a different private-duty nurse who admitted us to the office at the bottom of the winding staircase.
"Mr. Berk's having a bad morning. I can't allow you in without permission from his physician."
"I've got some medicine that might help him breathe a little better," Mike said, ignoring the white-capped sentry and climbing the wide steps two at a time.
I shrugged at the nurse and followed.
The patient's nile green satin pajamas had been replaced by a pair of magenta ones, but all else looked the same. Berk came shuffling out of the bathroom, wrapping the tie of the robe around his waist. He was obviously startled to see us in his bedroom.
"You're pariahs, both of you. What's left of me that you want this time? Here," he said, holding his arm straight out ahead of him, pushing up the sleeve. "My blood? Take it. C'mon, drain it out of me. Maybe I'll get a deduction for a charitable contribution."
Death Dance Page 27