The Kills

by Linda Fairstein

  "Let me hear you turn that dead bolt when I walk out, Coop," Mike said, kissing the top of my head and walking to the door.

  I got up and followed him, locking the door and putting the safety chain across. I took a long bath, then massaged my shoulder with Tiger Balm before climbing into bed, too exhausted to read or even relive the evening's chase.

  The next morning Mercer and I rode up to McQueen Ransome's apartment and let ourselves in. It looked pretty much as it had when I was last there. The closet door was still ajar, wire hangers still displayed a few cotton housedresses, and dozens of silver coins were spread out over the floor.

  Mercer and I put on rubber gloves. He had a pack of plastic evidence envelopes that he stacked next to us, and we both kneeled to gather the coins.

  "Anything unusual about these?" I asked.

  "So far, they all look American," he said, examining them front and back before bagging them. "Different denominations, but nothing too unusual, it seems to me."

  "I don't know about your pile, but everything I've got is old," I said. "There's nothing here minted after 1930."

  "I see what you mean. There's about ten of them here from 1907."

  "We'd better take them to an expert, who can give us an idea of their value."

  Mercer scooped up a handful and reached back to the floor to retrieve a small white piece of paper that looked like some kind of ticket stub. He examined it before speaking. "I know he had an appointment here with McQueen Ransome, but I hardly think that would have required him to crawl around on her closet floor-especially if it was after he'd found out she'd been killed."

  "What are you talking about?" I asked.

  Mercer held out the piece of paper to me. "Spike Logan said he drove here from Martha's Vineyard, didn't he? Well, he must have dropped his ferry ticket stub when he was in here yesterday. Guess he wasn't too despondent to be searching for something that belonged to Queenie."

  25

  "Get me Monica Cortellesi on the line," I said to Laura, as I unlocked the door to my office. I had explained to Mercer that she was in charge of our frauds bureau and would know who the best experts were for evaluating any unusual artifacts.

  "Who's your contact in the Oak Bluffs Police Department?" he asked.

  "What's the point in tipping off Spike Logan that we realize he wasn't entirely candid with us? As long as we know where he is, let's hold the calls until we decide what to do with the information we get."

  "Alex," Laura said. "That's Cortellesi on your backup line."

  "Monica? Quick question. Who do I want to talk to about rare coins?"

  "I can give you the head of the American Numismatic Association. It's in Colorado Springs. They do a lot of-"

  "Too far to go. Today. Closer to home."

  "How's Fifty-seventh Street?" she asked.

  "Perfect."

  "Stark's. Probably the preeminent firm in the nation for private dealers."

  "Reliable?"

  "Like Fort Knox. Family business, started by two brothers in the 1930s. There probably isn't much they can't help you with."

  "Thanks, Monica," I said, handing Mercer a piece of paper with the name on it. "Want to call and get us an appointment while I work on those FOIA requests for the CIA?"

  Laura came in with a handful of messages. "Call Christine Kiernan. She's been up all night on a new case. The others can wait."

  "Would you see if you can book me on a flight to the Vineyard tomorrow?" I asked.

  "Don't you have to be in front of Judge Moffett in the morning?"

  "Yes. A mercifully short appearance, I hope. Something late in the day. If I can wrap up the Tripping case early, I may take a long weekend."

  I sat at the computer working on the requests for the old CIA files while I talked with Christine, the phone propped between my shoulder and ear. "What'd you get?"

  "Rape-robbery in Hell's Kitchen. Can I come up?"

  "Sure. You got a victim?"

  "Nope. She's still at the hospital. Took a bad beating when she resisted the guy."

  By the time I had completed the boilerplate applications for the information I wanted and sent Laura to get Battaglia's signature for the cover sheet supporting the urgency of my request, Christine had appeared with her file.

  "I got the call at threeA.M.," she said, handing me copies of the detective's scratch sheet.

  "This all the paperwork you have?"

  "Yeah. The cops haven't had time to type up the police reports yet."

  "What's the story?" I asked.

  "My complainant is in her twenties. She's a medical student at NYU. Just moved into a renovated brownstone in the west Forties. Dicey block."

  Every time a run-down section of Manhattan was gentrified, there was a period of increased violence before the neighborhood reinvented itself. Thirty years earlier, when TriBeCa was transformed from an area of commercial buildings and warehouses to residential lofts, the first tenants were exposed to muggings and assaults on a regular basis. There were no streetlights, no local merchants with familiar faces, no grocery stores to duck into when being followed, and many marginal transients who squatted in abandoned spaces. A similar fate befell the residents of Alphabet Town-Avenues A through D-when they reclaimed their streets from the drug dealers and prostitutes who had made the neighborhood so unsavory for so long.

  "Coming home from the hospital?"

  "You got it. Twenty-four-hour shift, she was exhausted and completely oblivious to her surroundings. She had the hood of her anorak pulled up over her head because it was raining so hard."

  "Tell me about it."

  "Never heard the guy coming. Got her as she was going into the vestibule of her building."

  "A push-in?"

  "Yeah. He held something against the small of her back, sharp and pointed. She thinks it was a box cutter. Told her to get under the stairwell and keep her mouth shut or he'd slit her throat."

  "I hope she obeyed," I said quietly. I had seen too many autopsies of victims who had unsuccessfully tried to resist an armed attacker.

  "She did exactly what he told her to do. Took off her clothes and laid down on the floor. He was about to penetrate when a hypodermic needle fell out of his jacket pocket. She freaked and started to scream."

  "AIDS?"

  "That was her first thought. She was sobbing to me at the hospital, asking me what the point of surviving the attack was if the rapist transmitted a terminal illness."

  "So he beat her to shut her up."

  "Broke several bones in the orbital socket of the right eye. Knocked out a tooth."

  "And raped her anyway?" I asked.

  Christine nodded her head.

  "Have they offered her the prophylactic to prevent HIV transmission?" There were powerful drugs that physicians believed would block the virus, but they were only effective if taken within twenty-four hours of the assault.

  "Yes. She's probably going to start them this morning."

  "What did he take?"

  "Her briefcase."

  "Was she wearing scrubs when he attacked her?"

  "Yeah, he figured out she was a doc. Kept asking if she had drugs in her bag, or any blank prescriptions."

  "Did she?"

  "No. Just books. A ton of medical texts, a wallet, a cell phone."

  I looked up at Christine. "You do a trap-and-trace yet?"

  "I haven't done anything. I just got down here from Roosevelt Hospital and knew I had to give you the details."

  "Ever done one?"

  "Nope," she said, with obvious hesitation in her voice. "What is it?"

  "It's a triangulated cell phone call. It works like GPS-global positioning satellites. If the perp is using the stolen phone to make calls, the cell company can tell us exactly where he's standing when he's on the line. Just one catch. You've got to get it done before the battery charge runs down and he tosses the phone away."

  Most thieves who took victims' cell phones, even as an afterthought, used them unti
l the batteries ran out, for sport if not necessity. Before the recent successes of the GPS technology, we could often connect them to the crime weeks or months after it was committed by tracking calls on the stolen phone to long-lost relatives and friends. This gave us the chance to find the assailant before he attacked again.

  "You need to call TARU," I said, referring to the NYPD's high-tech-equipment unit. If there was any way to eavesdrop surreptitiously or use electronic surveillance of any kind, these teams were the leaders in the field. "Get started with a court order and they'll have tracking devices up and running within the hour."

  I could smell Battaglia coming. The cigar smoke wafted into my room before the district attorney turned the corner. I sent Christine on her way and offered him a chair.

  "Let me guess," I said. "Judge Moffett called. Wants you to convince me to let Tripping take the misdemeanor plea without any further complaining-or research."

  "Can you tell me this weekend's Yankees-Red Sox scores, too?"

  "Hardly clairvoyant, Paul."

  "Put this whole thing to bed, Alex. You got bigger fish to fry. While I have your ear, got a piece of advice for a friend of mine?"

  "Sure."

  "What do you do with an employee-single mother, law degree, supervises young attorneys-goes on an office business trip paid for by the government and gets herself featured in a glossy woman's magazine headlining an article called 'Romance on the Tracks'?"

  "Meaning what?"

  "Gives them an actual photo of herself to run with the article. Describes meeting a guy on a train ride from Albany, having a few drinks with him, and then going back to his apartment for a one-night stand."

  "If she admitted it was job-related? I'd can her. That's a stupid and dangerous message to send to the public in my line of work, not to mention to your own troops. But then, not everyone's a sex crimes prosecutor."

  "Well, the woman I'm talking about is. DA's office in another borough. Can you imagine what a role model she must be?"

  "Don't tell me-"

  Battaglia chomped on the cigar and stood up. "Yeah, your friend Olivia. Do me a favor, Alex; if you decide to go public with your sex life, no illustrations, please. Check the October issue of that sex-and-the-single-girl's magazine. The DA's wife saw it in the dentist's office."

  "Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Battaglia. Alex, Will Nedim says it's pretty important."

  "Hold on a minute, Paul. This might be of interest. The Nedim kid is handling the female defendant who was caught with McQueen Ransome's mink coat. We've been trying to flip her."

  I picked up Nedim's call. "Will? I've got the boss here with me. Any developments?"

  "We may have a change of heart on Tiffany Gatts."

  "Way to go. Helena Lisi call you?" I said, referring to Tiffany's lawyer.

  "Nope. Tiffany herself just called. Left a message that she wants to talk to me after all."

  "You have a plan?"

  "I thought I'd have her produced in my office tomorrow."

  "With the lawyer, of course."

  "Certainly. I thought you might want to be there."

  "No way," I said. "You'll never get anything out of her in my presence. I'm like a lightning rod for Tiffany Gatts. If she's getting along with you, let's leave it at that."

  I cut Nedim short, realizing that I was holding up Battaglia. "Nothing to report yet, Paul. This girl could give us a big break on Kevin Bessemer, if we're lucky."

  He waved his cigar in the air as he left, a sign that I was to carry on with whatever I had been doing before he came in the room. I sorted out the usual problems of the day and ordered in lunch for Mercer and me.

  "Bernard Stark will see us at four o'clock," he reported to me. "He's the patriarch of the firm. Happy to help. Mike's going to meet us in their offices on West Fifty-seventh Street. That's the good news."

  I smiled at him. "What's the bad?"

  "The phone company in Massachusetts confirms that a call came in to Spike Logan's house on the Vineyard the afternoon before he drove into the city."

  "You think he wasn't as surprised about Queenie's death as he told us he was?"

  "The records show the caller's address-the deceased's next-door neighbor. I've checked with the squad. The guy had already been interviewed by the time he called Logan, no doubt to give him the sad news. No way that jerk didn't know she was dead."

  We were eating our sandwiches at my desk at two-thirty when Laura came in with a sheaf of papers she had pulled out of the fax machine. "I got a call from an administrative assistant at the CIA," she said. "There will be a hard copy of these in the mail, with all the formal signatures and seals, but that's going to take another month. The agent said he was told to comply with Mr. Battaglia's requests as soon as possible."

  "Must be nice to have a name so big you can throw your weight around gracefully and get answers the same day," Mercer said. "Maybe these papers will resolve some questions about our odd group of players."

  I thumbed through the photocopied documents, knowing that the pile wasn't thick enough to contain anything of value. The answers for the file requests of Victor Vallis, Harry Strait, and McQueen Ransome had exactly the same explanation as the one for the late King Farouk.

  As the agency's coordinator of information and privacy, I must advise you that the CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of any CIA records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or non-existence of records containing such information would be classified for reasons of national security under Section 1.3 (a)(5)-Foreign Relations-of Executive Order 12368.

  Mercer listened to me read him the response before speaking aloud what both of us were thinking. "The King of Egypt was sent into exile almost half a century ago, and he's been dead more than thirty years. What the hell does he have to do with our national security now?"

  26

  I was as captivated by the sparkling gold and silver coins in the window outside the entrance to the Stark brothers' offices as Holly Golightly had been while staring at the diamonds on show at Tiffany. Each was displayed against a deep blue velvet cushion, a setting that was more like a museum's than a retail operation's.

  Mike was the last to arrive, and we announced ourselves to the receptionist in the waiting area. He took a quick inventory of the cases of coins. "Some piggy bank these boys have, huh?"

  "You do anything useful today?" Mercer asked.

  "Just a tidbit here and there. Spent a bit of time trying to figure out who might have smacked Miss Cooper here upside the shoulder last night."

  "You check with the First Precinct to see if they've had other cases?" I asked.

  Mike turned to Mercer. "I guess I'm just fortunate she doesn't stop by the apartment in the morning to make sure I put underwear on."

  "And they haven't had anything like it?"

  "There are a few hot spots downtown. But that area between the entrance to the ferry terminal and the promenade where all the buses stop is kept pretty well patrolled. Too many Wall Street high rollers to complain about bums and hustlers."

  "You check on that Correction Department crew she's investigating?"

  "We're getting information on all of them in the perp's team. What their work schedules are, and even though you can't make a facial ID, I want photos along with descriptions of their height and weight. Got one other piece of info."

  "What's that?" Mercer asked.

  "Throw in court officers. Guys in the area with blue uniform pants. Somebody who could have waited for Coop to leave the building, follow her to the church, and be waiting for a chance when she came outside."

  "I've got no enemies in that department, I'd be willing to swear," I said, laughing. "My unit's probably responsible for more hours of overtime than any group of prosecutors in the office. And Laura bakes cookies for them every time I'm on trial."

  "Well, your friend Etta Gatts? She's got a brother-in-law who's a court officer. Little Tiffany's favorite uncle, the brother of her late fat
her."

  "Criminal court?" I asked, racking my brain to think of an officer named Gatts.

  "Uh-uh. Supreme Court, civil term. Sixty Centre Street."

  "But I never-"

  "She told you her people weren't through with you yet. Remember that moment?"

  "Yeah, but Tiffany just called Will Nedim today. He thinks she's ready to roll over and give up Kevin Bessemer."

  "Well, maybe her mama doesn't know that yet. Think of it, you had to walk directly past the front steps of his courthouse when you walked downtown last night."

  "How could he know who I was?"

  "Don't be naive, Coop. He could have been in the building with Etta Gatts the first day she came down here, after Tiffany was arrested. He's got the right uniform, the right ID-makes sense she would have called him to ask for help. Anybody could have pointed you out to him then. Might even have been the guy who slashed your tires that first night."

  Mercer chimed in. "Motive, opportunity-"

  "Pretty soon, the only joint it'll be safe for me to go is P. J. Bernstein's." My corner deli, fifty feet from the entrance to my building, was the best place for peace, quiet, and chicken noodle soup when I didn't want to stir far from home.

  "Worst that can happen there is the latkes give you a little agita," Mike said.

  "Mr. Stark will see you now," the receptionist said, pressing a button on her desk to open the first locked door leading to the offices. Once the three of us entered the small space, she buzzed again. The metal grating, like the kind in safe deposit vaults, swung open to admit us further, security cameras monitoring our progress.

  Bernard Stark stood behind his desk, in front of a window that gave a sweeping view of Central Park crowned by a ceiling of rain clouds. He was in his late sixties, I thought, and seemed quite robust. He had thinning gray hair, a deep tan, a very warm smile, and was dressed in a nicely tailored suit.

  "I've actually done a lot of work with the federal government, Mr. Wallace-the National Mint, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Treasury Department. It's not that often I'm called in to help you people. What can I do for you today?"