The Kills

by Fairstein, Linda

  “The Pirate ?” I asked. Not a very original name, but an exact translation of corsair.

  “J. P. Morgan’s my personal hero.”

  “A robber baron as role model. Is that the part of him you admire?” I asked, with a smile.

  “No, no. The greatest collector of all times. That’s what I love about the man. One of those passions you either have or you don’t understand.”

  “I’ve got a similar taste for rare books-just a different budget.” The Pierpont Morgan Library housed one of the most exquisite collections in the world.

  “He had brilliant accumulations of paintings and sculptures, manuscripts, Steinway pianos, Limoges enamels, Chinese porcelains, snuffboxes, Gothic ivories. Imagine being able to indulge every one of your fantasies.”

  “And yours?” I asked. “What do you like to collect?”

  “Several things. Pretty eclectic. Contemporary art, watches, medieval prints, stamps. Nothing out of my range. I imagine, when you’re ready to leave the district attorney’s office, that half the law firms in the city will be clamoring to take you on board, and pay you what you deserve to be earning. How do you manage to keep up a house on the Vineyard on a prosecutor’s salary?”

  “I get a lot of help from my family,” I said. His question put me in my place. I hated being asked that kind of thing, and knew what great good fortune it was that my father’s invention had provided me with such extraordinary rewards. I had been on the verge of questioning Graham Hoyt about how he’d amassed the money for such high living from a couple of lucky investments and the ordinary practice of law, but now-on the defensive-I thought better of it.

  “Well, I don’t know how Battaglia continues to attract the best and the brightest. My father used to say, ‘Pay people peanuts, you get monkeys to work for you.’”

  I swallowed the urge to respond to his backhanded compliment. The young lawyers with whom I worked shoulder to shoulder every day had chosen public service as a career path, as I had, out of a desire to give back to society. Their starting salaries were less than one-quarter of the money that associates going to corporate law firms were paid, and the only bonus they received was the psychic satisfaction of their work. They didn’t need yachts or art collections to make them happy.

  I stopped beneath the oil painting of a tall black-skinned man in a loincloth, carrying a long staff with the flag of the New York Yacht Club aloft. I doubted he was a member.

  “The Nubian?” Hoyt asked.

  “It’s a curious sight.”

  “It was James Gordon Bennett-you know, the publisher of the New York Herald -who paid for one of his reporters, Henry Stanley, to go to Africa and find the great Dr. Livingstone, who’d been missing for months. Bennett was our commodore, of course, back then, in the 1870s. When Stanley rode out of the jungle on the back of a mule, this fellow emerged first, carrying our club burgee. Quite a crew of intrepid sportsmen.”

  “A lot of history in here,” I said, scanning the portraits and plaques stretching from floor to ceiling. “Thanks for suggesting we meet. Do I have to worry about Peter Robelon being indicted before I finish my case? The last thing I need, after all this, is a mistrial because we lost the defense attorney.”

  “Not a chance. They’re just in the early stages of gathering all the information and building a case.”

  “Is there anything I can offer to Paul Battaglia as an olive branch? He’d love me to get rid of the Tripping case,” I said.

  “You mean something that his own Jack Kliger doesn’t know about Peter Robelon yet?” Hoyt asked.

  “That would be a good place to start.”

  He put both hands in his pants pockets and shuffled his coins. I smiled at him and assured him that anything he told me could only help soften Battaglia to back me on any decisions that had to be made.

  “Remember what happened with ImClone a few years back? Sam Waksal started dumping the stock when he got word that the FDA was not going to approve the drug the company was testing.”

  “Sure. Classic insider trading. Even his father and daughter were involved, not to mention catching up Martha Stewart in the whole thing.”

  “Tell your boss that Robelon’s been drawn in by the same kind of net. The SEC’s computerized alert system picked up his brother’s company on the radar screen. Small business that normally traded five hundred thousand shares was spiking to three million a day. Peter’s cell phone was more active than the One Hundred and First Airborne during a shock-and-awe campaign.”

  “And Jack Kliger knows���?”

  “He’s only aware of the tip of the iceberg, Alex,” Hoyt said, cutting me off as he sensed my instinct to press further. “I’ll call you Monday morning, before you head up to court.”

  I turned left on Forty-fourth Street and walked up Fifth Avenue. It was a spectacular fall afternoon, but despite the clear skies and mild temperature, I made a mental note to call my Vineyard caretaker and remind him to batten down the house. If the prediction of approaching hurricanes Hoyt had mentioned was accurate, I’d be glad I did it.

  By four-thirty I was comfortably settled into the chair at my hair salon, so that my friend Elsa could refresh my blonde highlights and Nana could give me an elegant “do” for tonight’s theater date.

  There were no messages on the machine when I got home at half past six, no update from anyone. Jake came in from a late-afternoon run in the park shortly after I arrived.

  “Is there a plan?” he asked.

  “We’re meeting Joan and Jim at the theater, just before eight. Would you be sure to take the tickets?” I said, pointing to the dresser, as I pulled a black silk sheath out of my closet and began to dress. “Dinner after the play, at ‘21.’ Can you hold out?”

  “Yeah. I went into the office to research a story. Grabbed some lunch while I was there.”

  We took a cab to the Barrymore Theater, where our friends were waiting below the marquee. Ralph Fiennes was starring in Othello, and the reviews from London’s West End had been smashing. We settled into our seats, and Joan and I caught up on gossip until the lights dimmed and the curtain rose. I had turned my beeper to the vibrate mode and put it in my evening bag on my lap so that I could slip out of my aisle seat in case anyone tried to communicate with me about Dulles in the next few hours.

  At the intermission after the second act, the four of us stretched our legs and went to the lobby for a drink. When we reached the bar, I saw Mike Chapman standing against one of the pillars, cocktail in hand, flipping through the Playbill.

  There had been so much tension with Jake lately that I hoped Mike had only chosen to interrupt one of our few social evenings for good news about the missing child. Jake followed me over to where Mike was standing, and I tried not to show my disappointment at his arrival.

  “‘To be, or not to be: that is the question.’”

  “Wrong play,” I said. “Look, is there-”

  “‘There’s the rub-that sleep of death-the shuffling off of this mortal coil,’” Mike said, doing his Hamlet with a vodka gimlet in one hand. “Hate to do this to you, Jake, but the next dance is mine. It’s the kills again. Always the kills.”

  “What? Make sense for a change, Mike. Stop joking with me,” I said.

  “There’s been another homicide.”

  He downed his drink and stepped to the bar to replace his glass.

  “Not Dulles?” I covered my hand with my mouth, relieved to see Mike shaking his head as he swallowed.

  “This one’s going to hit you hard, Coop. C’mon with me-I’m on my way to the First Precinct,” he said, reaching out and taking me by the hand. “Paige Vallis has been murdered.”

  16

  I couldn’t grasp the fact that Paige Vallis was dead. And I couldn’t stop thinking that Andrew Tripping had the best reason to kill her.

  Mike led me up the two flights of stairs to the squad room. I assumed from the somber-faced team of detectives who greeted me that they knew how personally shattered I would
be by the death of my own witness.

  Over and over again, I played in my mind the words that Judge Moffett had said at the start of Andrew Tripping’s trial: “Murder. You should have charged the defendant with murder.”

  He hasn’t killed anyone, I had thought. Not that I could prove.

  The questions I had thrown at Mike on the long ride down to the southernmost station house on the island of Manhattan, none of which he could answer, were the things we started with now.

  “Do we have a time of death on this?” I asked, after saying hello to some of the guys I recognized and had worked with before. No one answered.

  “Who’s in charge here?” Mike asked.

  We were out of his territory now, on the turf of the Manhattan South Homicide Squad. There wasn’t a man in the room who took pleasure in being second-guessed by a colleague from the north, or a prosecutor in a black couture dress and peau-de-soie shoes with three-inch heels.

  “Yo, Squeeks. You the man?” Mike said, pointing to a guy who was hanging up a phone on a desk in the rear of the room.

  Will Squeekist had been a detective in Narcotics for five years before a recent promotion to Homicide. The nickname that Mike had given him when they were in the academy years earlier had stuck, and fit the small-framed man with a high-pitched voice.

  “Come on back here. Let’s get started,” Squeeks called out to us. “Hey, Alex, how you been?”

  “Doing fine until this news.”

  “Sit down,” he said, stepping away from his desk chair and turning it over to me. Space was at a premium in the outdated old squad rooms of most precincts.

  “No, thanks. Stay where you are,” I said, refusing the offer.

  “I need to have my back to the guys while I say a couple of things to you. Get something off my chest. Do me a favor and sit down.”

  Squeeks went around the desk so that he could talk directly into my face. “Sorry about the frigid greeting, Alex. A couple of them have a problem with this.”

  “With what?” What I had thought was empathy was something else altogether.

  “We understand the deceased was a witness of yours. Paige Vallis. That right?”

  “Yes. What’s the problem?”

  Squeeks paused. “I mean, they want to know why she didn’t have any kind of protection, any-”

  Mike jumped to my defense. “What are you, nuts? This broad’s a complaining witness in a garden-variety sexual assault case. She was-”

  I was steamed, too. “There’s no such thing as a ‘garden-variety’ rape, Mike. Let me handle this myself. What do you guys think this is-Hollywood? When’s the last time you know a witness who’s been guarded during a trial in Manhattan Supreme Court? We’ve got forty felony cases going every day, and witnesses walk in and out of the place like it’s an ordinary office building. This isn’t a mob case, there’s no drug cartel connection, Tripping wasn’t a gunrunner or a Mafia kingpin. Who’s the asshole who’s blaming me for this murder?” I stood up. “Let’s clear the air about this right now.”

  I came around from behind the desk and started for the group of detectives huddled between the coffee machine and the door to the lieutenant’s office. Mike grabbed me by the arm and tried to hold me in place, but I shook loose.

  “She feels like shit already, Squeeks,” Mike said. “The broad is dead. What was Coop supposed to do different?”

  “Could have let the Terrorist Task Force know what was going on,” he answered.

  I stopped in my tracks and turned back. “What?”

  “A couple of the guys are just saying you could have told the task force your witness was at risk because of her background,” Squeeks said.

  “Well, I’d have to know about it first in order to tell them, wouldn’t I? The defendant claimed a lot of things that turned out not to be true. There’s no middle ground with you guys. I ask you to go to the mats in order to get me evidence for my cases and you tell me there’s no manpower to do it, or that no one will authorize the overtime. Now you’re accusing me of not seeing conspiracies where I don’t believe they exist-like the task force would have taken this schizophrenic wanna-be spy seriously if I had thought to call them? That’s a load of crap.”

  “Not Andrew Tripping. I don’t mean him.”

  “Exactly who do you mean, Squeeks? I’m running clean out of guesses.”

  “The terrorist. The guy she killed down in Virginia.”

  Mike was sitting on the edge of the desk. “Who’d she kill?”

  “Let’s back up a few steps,” I said. “I know she accidentally killed a man, and I thought she had told me everything I needed to know. You obviously know more about that incident than I do.”

  “That’s unusual, Alex. The guys who’ve worked with you,” Squeeks said, cocking his thumb over his shoulder to point behind him, “they say you know more about your victims than they know about themselves. Say you don’t go to trial until you’ve pulled every last ounce of information out of them.”

  “That’s the truth,” Mike said. “Get your hands off your hips, blondie, and lighten up. That’s a good thing.”

  “They figure you’re aware of all this, Alex.”

  I raised both arms in bewilderment and shook my head at Squeeks.

  He went on. “After we found the body, we ran her. Just a name check, not even fingerprints. That’s routine. Never expected to get anything-and bingo-came back with a homicide arrest down in Fairfax.”

  “I know that. I spoke to the DA there myself,” I said. “He gave me the whole file. There was nothing in it about a terrorist.”

  “Maybe someone sanitized the file,” Mike said. “Can you show them what you’ve got, Coop?”

  “Drive me over to my office and I’ll get the whole thing. What I thought I had was a copy of the original court papers. You can see the entire record,” I said to Squeeks.

  I picked up the phone on the desk and dialed Battaglia’s home number. “Paul? Sorry to wake you. I’ve got some very tough news,” I said, telling him about the murder of Paige Vallis, which would certainly be Sunday morning’s headlines in a few hours.

  “And I need a couple of things from you. Right now, if you can. There’s a prosecutor in Virginia who gave me information on an old case. There’s a chance his boss made him purge some details from it,” I said, asking him to place an emergency call to the district attorney in Fairfax, to grease the wheels to get the real story.

  “One more thing. Your contact at the CIA? Would you call and ask them for information on an agent called Harry Strait? He may have something to do with this.”

  I paused and waited for a response. “I know it’s the middle of the night, Paul, but they’re not going to give this stuff to anyone else.”

  Squeeks was waiting for me to get off the phone. “Why don’t you tell me what you did know about Vallis’s case.”

  Mike listened as I laid out the facts for both of them.

  Paige’s eighty-eight-year-old father had died, of natural causes, at his home in Virginia. Paige had gone down there to organize the funeral service and arrange for his personal belongings to be moved or sold.

  “The prosecutor told me it was a part of a pattern, a scam that a burglary team was operating,” I said. “The obituary listed the date and time of the funeral, as they always do. That’s when the burglars check out the address of the deceased, figure that anyone who knew and loved him would be in church at the ceremony, and they break into the house because they figure it will be unattended.”

  I went on, “Paige said she came home from the cemetery and went in via the back door, surprising the burglar. He lunged at her with a knife, they struggled, and when they fell to the floor, he landed on it.”

  “Hoist on his own petard,” Mike said.

  “Exactly. The case went to the grand jury, Paige told her story, and if I remember correctly, the jurors actually stood up and applauded her.”

  Squeeks opened his case folder and looked at his notes. “You got the g
uy’s name?”

  “In my office. I want to say it’s something like Nassan. Abraham Nassan.”

  “Close. It’s Ibrahim.”

  “What’s your point?” Mike asked.

  “That it’s clearly an Arabic name. That Cooper should have known-”

  “I’m telling you that the court papers I have say Abraham. I even have a photograph of the guy. What should I have known?”

  “They didn’t tell you he was part of a cell? An arm of al Qaeda?” Squeeks asked.

  “They told me he was Abie the burglar. Abie the second-story man,” I said, slamming my hand on the desktop. “A rash of funeral-related thefts. Close this case out, close them all.”

  “Coop thought he was one of her boys, not Abie the Arab,” Mike said.

  I fished in my evening bag for my set of keys. “Send one of the guys over to Hogan Place. Here’s the key to my office. The folder’s in the third cabinet from the bookcase. Bring the whole goddamn case and look at it for yourself. Why the hell is any prosecutor going to purge a file to give to me?”

  Squeeks answered me. “The police chief thinks the district attorney in Fairfax had orders from the feds. There was a major investigation in progress, a follow-up to the Pentagon plane crash, and the feds were running a pretty tight ship. They didn’t want the public to panic. Figured if one of the terrorists was dead and the death was justifiable, no need to alarm the good citizens of the Commonwealth. Still can’t believe they didn’t tell you the truth.”

  “Well, start believing it. And let’s send out for some coffee. Black for both of us. We’ve got lots of other people to talk about,” I said.

  “You know what Victor Vallis did for a living?” Squeeks asked.

  “Paige’s father? I know he was in the diplomatic corps.”

  “Posted in Egypt, actually. Paige testified about that.”

  Squeeks gave Chapman a look, again suggesting I should have divined a connection to some kind of international intrigue, rather than a simple break-and-enter.