Terminal City (Alex Cooper)

by Linda Fairstein

  Paul Battaglia couldn’t hide his contempt for the new mayor. During my entire twelve-year tenure as a prosecutor, a brilliant, creative, if not somewhat idiosyncratic chief executive ran City Hall. He had been respectful of the DA and our staff and had a truly collaborative relationship with his much-admired police commissioner.

  The new regime was proving to be a crapshoot. Too many campaign promises that made no sense except to curry favor with voting blocs, and meddling into a pending civil lawsuit that undermined long-standing police procedures—setting off a frenzy of picketing against the new mayor by the detective union.

  “C’mon in, Alexandra.” He motioned to me to sit opposite him, in a chair beside Battaglia. He held out his hand and reintroduced himself to me. I’d met him after the resolution of the murders in Central Park two months earlier. “Scully will be here any minute. I just wanted your take on something before we get started on these horrific crimes.”

  “Certainly, sir. I’d like to apologize for my appearance. The cops and I have taken on the somewhat dusty veneer of the terminal regulars.”

  “Dress-down Friday. No worries,” he said. “Look, Alex—may I call you Alex? I wanted to ask about a case you’ve been handling. Nothing inappropriate, nothing off the record. I’d just like a better understanding of what makes it a crime.”

  I looked at Battaglia, who seemed to have caught the same vibe I did. Someone to whom he owed a political favor was pushing for the mayor to intervene on the Gerardo Dominguez case.

  “Oh, Christ. Don’t play with me, Mr. Mayor,” Battaglia said. “You’ve got us here for a much more important reason. It’s almost five o’clock. First day in four without a murder and we’ve only got seven hours till midnight. Don’t sandbag me with this bullshit.”

  The mayor feigned surprise. “Sandbag you? You’re a lawyer, Paul. I’m not.”

  “Then what business did you have stepping in the middle of a ten-year-old lawsuit? You’re lucky you still have a police officer willing to walk a beat for you.” Battaglia stood up and walked to one of the tall windows overlooking City Hall Park. “Whose dirty work are you doing now?”

  “Not fair, Paul. You know better than that. I don’t have a pony in this race. I’m just asking questions. What’s the basis for your case, Alex?”

  “It’s not my case anymore. I don’t think I should be speaking about it.”

  “Really? I’d just like to know when it’s against the law for me to be thinking about something really evil, and then getting arrested for it. What’s the tipping point?”

  The mayor looked like a goofy, overgrown kid. He couldn’t have been more disingenuous, but then, he’d apparently formed his judgments about the workings of the city’s criminal justice system by watching bad movies and TV shows.

  “You can tell him, Alexandra,” Battaglia said.

  Someday I wouldn’t be working for a bureaucrat—even one I admired as much as Battaglia on most days—for whom I’d have to toady up from time to time. Someday I’d be free to tell the mayor that I thought he was a total asshole.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I think you have a teenage daughter, Mr. Mayor. Don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “Suppose this—this man who has a different set of values than you do—”

  “He’s entitled to those, isn’t he?”

  “He certainly is. No problem for me there,” I said. “Suppose in between doing a Web search for recipes that involve the use of chloroform and then buying a Taser online, suppose his next search is for the name of your sixteen-year-old daughter—”

  “Let’s leave my daughter out of this, shall we?”

  “Sure, sir. Let’s make it somebody else’s daughter. It’s always somebody else’s daughter when you don’t want the reality to seem quite so immediate,” I said. “So Keith Scully has a teenager, too. And she might be harder to find than a girl who lives in Gracie Mansion. Everyone knows where to find that one.”

  The mayor wasn’t amused. But it wasn’t my purpose to amuse him.

  “So the guy with the odd thoughts searches out the name of the police commissioner’s daughter. Then he goes one further, trying to find out her address and which high school she attends. All pretty easy stuff to do.”

  “It is.”

  “Then his next e-mail to one of his fetish-friends talks specifically about what the best way is to kill a teenage girl.”

  The mayor appeared to be uncomfortable. “Still not a crime, is it?”

  “No, sir. I just think it’s a bit reckless, a bit out of control. But I’m still with you. No prosecution,” I said. “Now, may I ask what your favorite restaurant is?”

  “I’m a Brooklyn kid. Why?”

  “So pick one of those chic Park Slope places.”

  “Got it.” He was twiddling his thumbs now, moving them around faster than a wheel in a gerbil cage.

  “Suppose one of the waiters told you that the chef had a powerful fantasy about poisoning his customers. That he’d been saying that one evening it was going to come to that.”

  The mayor laughed. It was the same inappropriate kind of giggle that had come out of him late one night at a press conference about the sixth snowstorm of the season this past February, when he announced the city was just plain out of salt and rich folk on the Upper East Side should think about sledding to work the following day.

  “Then, every few days your chef would engage in conversations with other people about his desire to poison his customers—especially the regulars—and that he had gone online and was pleasantly surprised to find how many recipes for hard-to-trace poisons were actually posted on the Internet.”

  Battaglia had his hand on the edge of the dark-blue curtains, smirking at the mayor while he listened to me.

  “Now one of the guys in his chat room came to see him in the kitchen a few times a week. The chef shows him the list of names he wants to target. Elected officials at the top. ‘Hates those whores,’ he says.”

  “My chef wouldn’t talk like that.”

  “In my version, the chef has you in his sights. Says to his cyber buddy, ‘I just can’t wait to watch the top dog drop dead. The mayor of New York City. Know those french fries he loves? Just a tablespoon of cyanide—it looks so much like salt crystals—he’ll be drooling in his plate in fifteen minutes.’”

  “Got me on the fries, Alex.”

  “You going back to that restaurant, Mr. Mayor? You just going to play Russian roulette till the chef decides it’s your night to die? Actually, I think not. I think you might want to come with me to Rao’s or to Fresco for dinner. Much safer bets.”

  “Give him the rest of it, Alex. Give him the facts.”

  “She’s making her point, Paul. She’s—”

  There was a sharp rap on the door, and Keith Scully walked in without waiting for an invitation.

  “Mr. Mayor, Paul,” he said. “Sorry to keep you. I’m sure Alex has been filling you in.”

  He patted me on the back before taking the seat on my other side.

  “Actually no, Keith,” I said. “The mayor doesn’t like my take on Gerry Dominguez.”

  “I told you he’s a sick puppy, sir. You’ve got to stay out of that one. And you’ve got bigger issues on your plate. Way bigger.”

  “I know that.”

  “I was held up at Federal Plaza,” the commissioner said. “My team was over meeting with the head of the Secret Service in New York. You won’t like this, Mr. Mayor, but the feds are closing down Grand Central Terminal for the weekend. They called me in to tell me the plan. My men are working with theirs right now.”

  “They’re doing what? That’s impossible.”

  “A little inclement weather and your constituents can all sled to wherever they’ve got to go, even in the summer. That line worked for you once,” Battaglia said.

  Scully
talked over Battaglia. “The terminal closes at two A.M.”

  “I know that.”

  “The feds want to take charge of the operation and—”

  “And you’re willing to let them?”

  “I’m willing to do anything to keep the public safe, Mr. Mayor. Transportation hubs—and this one is the most beautiful in the world—they’re magnets for trouble,” Scully said.

  The mayor was practically foaming at the mouth. “I’m in charge of running this city. It’s what the people elected me to do.”

  “Trains out of here go to a number of other states. That alone gives the feds jurisdiction,” I said. “And all the way to Canada. That’s international territory, in case you weren’t sure.”

  “Watch your mouth,” the mayor said, pointing a finger at me.

  “I’ve seen the bodies of the murder victim, Your Honor. It’s hard to swallow, sir.”

  “The Service is also fighting with the president,” Scully said. “But he’s bound and determined to ride that train right into the terminal. Gateway to the Continent. He wants to connect to all that history. And I understand that he feels the need to show the country he’s not afraid.”

  “It’s impossible to close the terminal,” the mayor said, stuttering and sputtering at the same time.

  “As I started to say, it shuts down at two this morning. So there’s a natural break in the train schedule, and that’s when the police get to move all the stragglers out. It just won’t reopen at five thirty A.M. on Saturday. That’s the plan we’re going to put in motion. Jointly, with the feds.”

  “It’s Saturday. The terminal should be crawling with tourists, full of people from the suburbs bringing their kids in to see Broadway shows and go shopping all over town. It’s an enormous amount of revenue for the city every minute that building is open, do you get that?”

  “It’s better than doing this on a weekday, sir. It’s better than having all the commuters unable to get to work on Monday morning. Chances are with a joint task force manning this operation, we’ll have it solved within twenty-four hours.”

  “You can’t close it, Scully,” the mayor said, pounding his fist on the desk. “I own Grand Central Terminal.”

  There was silence in the room.

  “Actually, Mr. Mayor, you don’t,” I said. “You don’t own it.”

  “Not me personally, Alex. I realize it’s a public-private partnership. But I have control of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Don’t get in my way, Scully.”

  “The MTA just rents the terminal, Mr. Mayor. There’s actually a landlord. There’s actually a man who owns the entire Grand Central building itself, as well as the tracks below—seventy-five miles up to Poughkeepsie—and the air rights above it.”

  “Commodore Vanderbilt is long dead,” the mayor said, throwing one arm up in the air. “It’s like the old joke that the Brooklyn Bridge is for sale. Don’t take me for a fool, Commissioner.”

  Keith Scully stood up, ready to make his exit. “The terminal was sold out from under you in 2006, sir. It’s owned lock, stock, and barrel by a fifty-five-year-old real estate developer. An hour ago we got his permission to shut the place down.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I took the short walk from City Hall to the DA’s office with Paul Battaglia and his security detail. The cops who had driven me down from the terminal tailed us up Centre Street to the courthouse.

  “I’ve got to confess to you, Alex, I had no idea that Grand Central is privately owned, but I damn well loved seeing Scully shove it down the mayor’s throat.”

  “None of us knew about it either till we had our introductory tour last night. Seems the developer and a couple of institutional investors bought the whole thing for eighty million dollars.”

  “Are the feds doing the right thing?” Battaglia asked. “I mean, closing it.”

  “I think it’s the only way to go. Rocco and both squads—North and South—are chasing down every lead, but this perp is moving faster than we are. There’s too much at risk—too many lives—if he has the terminal as the centerpiece of his master plan.”

  When we got to the eighth floor, I followed Battaglia into his office to debrief him on my meeting with Jean Jansen and the story of what happened in the morning when we were trapped in M42.

  “Have you had time to get a list of every employee in the terminal?” he asked.

  “Mike asked for it last night. The stationmaster had it waiting for Rocco first thing this morning. Every task, like going through those names, takes so much manpower, takes so many men off the street. It’s terribly discouraging.”

  “What’s your plan? Are you staying at Mercer’s again tonight?”

  “I guess so. The cops who are watching over me will drive me back uptown. I thought I’d pick up some dinner for the team, then go on to Queens. Vickee’s off tonight, so she’ll be home with me. The terminal should be saturated with law enforcement types from every agency under the sun by the time I get back there.”

  “We’ll be in town all weekend. Don’t leave me hanging, Alex.”

  “I’m on it, Paul. Have a good one.”

  It was almost six P.M. Both Rose and Laura left before we returned to the office. I put the lights on and sat down at my desk, relishing the quiet.

  I called Evan Kruger, who was still working. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “The boss called me down.”

  “I’ve got this one, Alex. I went up to court and made a record of my appearance on the case. I’ve fielded four nasty phone calls from David Drusin about his client—and some venting about you, personally—and I’ve spent the afternoon reading the evidence.”

  “Lose your appetite?”

  “Completely.”

  “I wanted to let you know this weird thing just happened,” I said. “And you’d better watch your back.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Battaglia and I were called over to City Hall with Keith Scully. Of course the main event is figuring out how to deal with Grand Central in light of three murders in its orbit, moving closer and closer to the main concourse. That should have been the only thing on his plate.”

  “It’s a scary situation.”

  “But all the mayor wanted to talk about at first was Dominguez and why taking overt steps to find recipes to cook women in his cannibal café is a bad thing.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Nope. So Battaglia just told me that not too long after the election, some preacher the mayor knows from Brooklyn got pulled over on a traffic stop. He had two outstanding warrants. So what does the mayor do? Calls the precinct and suggests to the CO that his buddy be released.”

  “Before the man’s arraignment? Before seeing the judge? Before clearing the warrants?”

  “Used his mayoral ‘get out of jail free’ card, Evan,” I said. “Used it once and it worked for him. I don’t want our case to be his second try at a fix. Just be on the alert. Somebody’s put a bug in his ear about Dominguez.”

  “Thanks for covering my back, Alex. Do what you’ve got to do. I’m good with this one.”

  “Don’t thank me. It’s entirely selfish,” I said. “If someone has the reach to get to City Hall about a cop with a serious death fetish, then Raymond Tanner might be hanging on his coattails, too. Keep your antennae up for me, will you?”

  “Done.”

  I thumbed through all the messages, crumpling and tossing the ones from journalists with questions about Corinne Thatcher and Lydia Tsarlev. Those from friends got pocketed, and inquiries from adversaries about pending cases would wait on the top of my desk until Monday.

  It was six fifteen when I walked out of the revolving door onto the street. I told the cops who were waiting for me that I wanted to pick up some dinners at Forlini’s, the family-run restaurant behind the courthouse that had
fed and watered more generations of lawyers and judges than anyone could count.

  One of them walked down Baxter Street with me while the driver circled the block. We talked about weather and wondered aloud if tonight’s anticipated thundershowers might bring a break in the heat wave.

  I didn’t even venture into the dining room, which was beginning to fill up with a mix of courthouse regulars who weren’t getting out of the city, but went directly to the bar. The room was cool and refreshing, with delicious smells wafting in from the kitchen and classic Motown sounds on the jukebox behind me.

  “The usual, Alexandra?” the bartender asked.

  “Nothing to drink, thanks. I just need a whole bunch of dinners to take out. Will you please do the order?”

  “Sure thing.”

  There would be a lot of hungry detectives working with Rocco tonight. “Let’s make it easy,” I said. “Give me a dozen veal parm, and throw in every side you’ve got. Spinach, broccoli, fried zucchini. We’re feeding a small army. And plenty of bread. Not garlic bread, please. Just Italian bread. And toss in a few salads.”

  “You got a moving truck?”

  “Better than that. Two cops waiting to drive me uptown. We’ll get the smell of the last hundred prisoners out of the backseat of the patrol car.”

  I spun around on the bar stool and walked to the jukebox. I pulled a couple of singles out of my pocket and played all the Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye the machine had to give.

  When I got back to my seat, there was a very healthy-looking pour of Dewar’s waiting for me. It seemed like a perfectly good way to relieve the day’s tension.

  “Thanks for the drink,” I said, letting the ice cubes rest against my lips before sipping the Scotch. “I forgot to tell you I’ve got to put this on my tab.”

  “You look like you needed a cocktail,” the bartender said, writing my name across the front of the computer-generated dinner bill and stashing it in a drawer behind the bar. “I know you’ll be back.”

  Twenty minutes later, when I had practically sucked the life out of my drink, one of the waiters appeared with several shopping bags full of food and plastic utensils. I walked to the door to ask the two officers to help me carry the meals.