Devil's Bridge

by Linda Fairstein

Alex Cooper could be cooler than a glacier in the courtroom. We had all seen her take on cold-blooded killers and hotheaded adversaries. She was amazing grace under pressure and indefatigable in standing tall for the vulnerable, for the victims without voices.

  But Coop had a hair-trigger temper that she managed to keep in check in professional settings. Up close and personal she lost her shit way too often.

  “Pat McKinney?” I asked. He was the immediate supervisor who had tried to wreck Coop’s career several times. “Or Battaglia himself?”

  “The district attorney. I don’t know whether Alex had time to tell you last night,” Catherine said, “but he totally laced into her about the Estevez business. He actually told her that if anything that came out of it embarrassed him, she might as well make herself disappear. I’m worried that maybe she took him literally and is playing hard to get.”

  “I clocked out at eight A.M. I should have called her then like I told her I would, but it got kind of busy at the Wilson apartment,” I said. “Haven’t seen the morning news. Anything there to suggest trouble for Coop?”

  “Not in print. The radio reports claim Hal Shipley showed up at the scene of a homicide last night,” Catherine said. “Is that the domestic you went out on?”

  “Yeah, but it has nothing to do with Estevez. Nobody’s talking. There’s only a daughter and she’s helping us. Maybe neighbors saw Shipley pull up and go inside, but we threw him out pretty quick.”

  “Well, Alex didn’t assign it to anyone, either.”

  “Could be my fault,” I said. “Didn’t see the need to wake her up for no good reason. We didn’t make an arrest. And I didn’t want her to go in to talk to the DA with information about Shipley that could only have come from me. He wouldn’t have liked that.”

  “Good plan.”

  “While I got you, can you draft me a search warrant for Shipley’s office? I told him I’d be there today, looking for records that might relate to the murder. Follow-the-money kind of stuff.”

  “Wait for Alex. I don’t know who she’ll assign to this.”

  “Suit yourself. Let me look for her, Catherine. I’ll call you later.”

  “I’ll let you know if she graces us with an appearance.”

  I dressed quickly and grabbed two cups of black coffee at the corner deli before I walked the block to my car. Coop’s apartment wasn’t very far from mine, but the few avenues to the west of me represented miles between the style of my old tenement building and her fancy co-op.

  I was sipping the first cup when my phone buzzed. I stopped and put the paper bag on the roof of my car. “Hello?”

  “Chapman? Peterson here. You don’t sound like yourself.”

  “Hey, Loo. I just burned my tongue on some java.”

  “You need to get up to the squad and fill me in on the new case.”

  “I can talk to you about it now. I’m working midnights this week.” Peterson knew my schedule. He was never difficult about this kind of thing. “I wasn’t planning to come by the office till then.”

  “I asked you to get up here. Now.”

  “What for?”

  “Do you look for trouble, Chapman, or does it just attach itself to you like a remora to a shark? All natural and such?”

  “Wait, Loo. Give me a break,” I said. “The mayor’s chief of staff got to Scully? That’s sick. You know that?”

  “Not that nitwit. The mayor’s wife herself.”

  “Oh, that nitwit.”

  “Yeah, well she’s working her voodoo on the commissioner. He wants me to get your side of the story—eyeball-to-eyeball, face-to-face, chapter and verse.”

  “Voodoo, too? I didn’t know that was part of her skill set,” I said. “Can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “Scully called me at home. I’m on my way in to the city,” Lieutenant Peterson said. “How fast can you be at the office?”

  “An hour. Sorry to break up your day, Loo. Give me an hour.”

  “Make it faster than that, Chapman.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ve got one stop to make on the way.”

  FIFTEEN

  “What’s up, Vinny?” I asked the doorman standing at the front desk of Coop’s building.

  “Everything’s calm, Mike. The way I like it.”

  I stopped and leaned an elbow on the desktop. “You might as well go into hibernation with the Yankees done for the season.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “You see Ms. Cooper this morning?”

  Vinny thought for two seconds, then shook his head.

  “Not going out?” I asked, then thought—unhappily—that maybe she had come in early this morning if she had spent the night somewhere else. “Or in?”

  “Nope. I’ve been on the door since seven thirty. The guys relieved me a couple of times for my breaks, so could be I just didn’t see her. But I didn’t.”

  “And who was working last night?”

  “Oscar was here till one a.m. Then Patrick, till I came on.”

  “Thanks, man. I’ll just take a run up,” I said, slapping the marble top and walking to the elevator to press the button for the twentieth floor.

  The doormen in Coop’s well-run building had known me for years. The shift from being her professional colleague to something more personal must have thrown them off, too.

  I stood in front of her door and rang the bell, but there was no response and no noise coming from within. The daily papers, which she still preferred to read in hard copy rather than online, were on the hallway floor. I picked them up to take inside.

  Coop had installed an electronic keypad a few months back, after the last time she had left her keys in the office. I knew the code and tapped out the four numbers that unlocked the door.

  “Yo! Alexandra Cooper,” I said, stepping into the foyer.

  Silence.

  “Coop?” I didn’t think about it often, but I was the only person in her world who called her Coop. To everyone else she was Alex or Alexandra, the formal name she liked best.

  The master bedroom was off to the left. I walked in and glanced around. The king-size bed was made up with the Porthault sheets that she loved—a trust-fund luxury, not affordable on a DA’s salary. It was as neat as a pin.

  That didn’t tell me anything. Coop was religious about making her bed. She did it as soon as she—as soon as we—were out of it, even before she showered. She liked the feeling, she’d told me not long ago, of getting into the crisp, cool, high-thread-count cotton percale sheets at the end of a difficult day.

  I walked to the bed and stroked the pillow on her side. I leaned over and sniffed the case for the scent of her Chanel perfume but couldn’t make it out.

  She wouldn’t like me snooping around her apartment without reason, and I wasn’t sure that I had a good one. I was still conflicted about the change in our relationship—not because I didn’t love Coop, but because I worried that the gap in our backgrounds was too enormous to overcome.

  I looked on the night table for messages or notes. She was an inveterate scribbler—a compulsive list maker, a hoarder of paper with sentimental expressions of affection, a woman with a deadly memory for detail who nevertheless left reminders to herself for every chore that needed tackling. There were no notes or lists needing action today.

  There was a postcard from her best friend from college, Nina Baum, on top of the dresser. The two corresponded that way every day of the week.

  Taped to the mirror was a photograph of Coop and me ripped from one of the tabloids. It was taken after the confrontation at Grand Central Terminal, when I escorted her off a railroad car that had stopped for us on 125th Street. I had covered her shoulders with a blanket and held her close to me with an arm around her. It was a night that had broken down the barriers between us, and Coop liked the photo—despite the terror in the hours before it was taken—because she said she liked what my embrace represented.

  There was a white wicker hamper in the dressing room bet
ween the bed and bath. Coop’s loyal housekeeper would be here on Friday.

  I lifted the lid and looked in. There was underwear and lingerie and a pale pink cotton shirt, but none of the clothing she had been wearing when I left her at Primola.

  Her shoe fetish was a bit ridiculous. She rarely wore the same ones two days in a row. I looked at the lineup of heels but didn’t have the faintest recollection of which ones she had been wearing the night before.

  I passed the guest room on my way back to the foyer, and that was undisturbed. I swept through the living and dining rooms, but nothing was out of place or suggested a visitor. The den was neat, too, and in the kitchen there was not even an empty cocktail glass in the sink.

  My last thought was the hall closet, to see if any outerwear was gone. The weather reports last night suggested a drop in temperature. But the camel-hair coat was hanging in place.

  I dialed Catherine’s number and she picked up after two rings. “You got anything?” I asked, trying to sound neither annoyed nor anxious.

  “Battaglia backed off, so I let it drop,” Catherine said. “He’s got a meeting with the governor about decriminalizing marijuana. Alex caught a break.”

  “But you still haven’t heard from her.”

  Catherine hesitated briefly before answering, but I caught the hitch in her voice. “No.”

  “You cool with that?”

  “Yes, actually. I am.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  I turned to look around once more before leaving the apartment.

  “I mean, after you and I talked, I called Vickee. They were sitting together before Alex left the restaurant,” Catherine said.

  “What am I doing here, playing twenty questions?” I asked. “This conversation is like pulling teeth.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Vickee.”

  “I’m talking to you now, Catherine. Is there something you want to tell me?” I had the sense, actually, that there was something she didn’t want to tell me.

  “Vickee thinks Alex was really peeved. That Vickee set her off, without meaning to.”

  “Who walked Coop out? Last to see her? Was it Vickee?”

  “No,” Catherine said. “She wouldn’t let anyone walk her out.”

  “Figures. Stubborn to a fault.”

  “She said Giuliano would put her in a cab.”

  “Got it.” I could talk to him if I couldn’t get straight answers from Coop’s team. “I’m at her apartment now. I don’t think she ever came home last night.”

  A bit too much hesitation, again, before Catherine spoke. “You might want to talk to Vickee before you get yourself more wound up, Mike. I think Alex had a plan to hang out with some friends.”

  SIXTEEN

  “You want me to give Ms. Cooper a message when I see her?” Vinny asked.

  “No, thanks, pal,” I said, walking out of the lobby. “See you.”

  Coop didn’t owe me explanations for any of her behavior at this point in our relationship, and I shouldn’t have been disappointed that she didn’t let me in on her social plans. I had more important business waiting for me at the squad office. My job had always been my first priority. I needed to keep it that way.

  Lieutenant Peterson had made it into his Manhattan North command from Rockland County before I had motored uptown from my pad with a slight detour to Coop’s apartment.

  He was a chain-smoker, and grandfathered into the department by such long service—or so he thought—that he gave no mind to nonsmoking rules inside police buildings.

  His ashtray already had four butts in it by the time I went into his office. “Sorry you had to come in, Loo. Wish you had been there with me so you could have seen this for yourself.”

  Peterson was old-school. He hated it when I put my feet up on his desk, but that was the kind of mood I was in. He had no use for foul language either, so I opted for my physical comfort.

  “What do I look like to you, Chapman?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do I look like a clown?”

  “No, sir.” I took my feet down immediately. Peterson was one of the men in the department for whom I had total respect.

  “I’m not talking about your feet. I’m talking about your work, Chapman,” the lieutenant said, pulling on another cigarette. “I’m talking about your mouth. I get the feeling you just think I’m your rodeo clown.”

  “What—?”

  “You think my job is to keep the men in headquarters at bay every time you get thrown off a bucking bull. I ought to just run around with a clown suit on, making sure you get yourself out of the arena before you get gored to death.”

  “You know that’s not so, Loo. You know I think the world of—”

  “Keith Scully’s getting fed up with you, too. What’s the story on the Wilson scene?”

  “Sure. Nine-one-one call comes in. Vic’s daughter, totally legit, finds her father’s—”

  “Fast-forward.”

  “You want details, I thought.”

  “Scully trusts you to get the investigation right, Chapman. It’s the human intercourse you screw up to a fare-thee-well.”

  More than you have any idea, Loo.

  “Tell me about Shipley,” Peterson said. “How and when he got there. Every word he said, and more important what you said to him.”

  I spent the next fifteen minutes reconstructing what I could of the conversation.

  “That’s all there is? You square with me?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Totally.”

  “He’s claiming you insulted him, Chapman. That you were too rude to a well-respected ally of the mayor to represent the NYPD.”

  “Rude would have been telling him what I really thought of him. I held back, Loo, out of respect for you,” I said, smiling at Peterson, who didn’t find any humor in the situation.

  “The cash you found—twenty-seven thousand—did you tell Shipley about that?”

  “No way. But I’m sure he was there looking for dough.”

  “Why?”

  “I assume Wilson was skimming some off the top. Keesh had to have a sense of Wilson’s weekly draw and how much he spent on her to keep her around. No real way for anyone at the center to know how much money people were mailing in or offering the reverend under the table, and that’s just the way Shipley liked it. Long as he could trust Wynan Wilson …”

  “The minute you find out anything from the lab, you let me know. Got that, Chapman?”

  “So I’m on the case, right?”

  “Yeah. Shipley had no business being at the apartment while you were working it, and the mayor’s wife certainly doesn’t get to call the shots in my squad.” The ashes on the tip of Peterson’s cigarette were about to singe his lips. He removed the stub and used it to light the next one.

  “Then I’m back in business,” I said. “Thanks, Loo. I’ll head down to the DA’s office and get a search warrant.”

  “Pug McBride does the warrant. Talk him through it. Sending you into Shipley’s place today would be like sticking the reverend with a red-hot poker.”

  “Pug? Give me a break, will you? He won’t have a clue what he’s looking for. And I can’t tell him. It’s like porn, boss. I’ll just know it when I see it.”

  “What kind of search warrant would that be, Chapman? A little too loosey-goosey to pass muster in a court of law,” Peterson said. “We go in tight and clean on this operation.”

  “Let me pick who searches with Pug?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Jimmy. Jimmy North.”

  Peterson tilted his head and took another drag. “Good choice. Smart kid.”

  Jimmy North had been third grade for a couple of years. He was new to homicide, but he was a really fine detective. He was a third-generation cop, with two younger brothers in uniform. North was that rare combination I sort of identified with my own policing skills—his college education hadn’t fucked up his street instincts. We all liked teaching him and he soaked up the know
ledge like a sponge.

  “Alexandra isn’t handling this one with you, is she?”

  “She took the day off, Loo. I haven’t talked to her.”

  He seemed not to trust my answer. “Well, best if she stays on the sidelines. She and Shipley have a history.”

  “That’s where she’ll be,” I said. “You keeping me on a leash, too?”

  “Now that I dragged you in, why don’t you work this shift, Chapman? Get your case loaded up in the system. Stay close in the event Commissioner Scully gets pushback.”

  “Where’s Jimmy?”

  “In the field. Who do I send him to at the DA’s office?”

  “Talk to Coop’s secretary. Someone in the white-collar division has Shipley on a fraud watch. But this homicide has all the signs of domestic violence. The DV assistant who’s catching today should work on the warrant together with him.”

  I closed Peterson’s door behind me and walked through the grim squad room to my desk.

  I settled in with my steno pad to do my case reports. I punched in the UF 61 number for the homicide of Wynan Wilson—the Uniformed Force document that had been filled out by the first cop on the scene—and the file came right up on my screen.

  The NYPD was probably the last institution to join the computer age. Until very recently, I had done all my reports on a typewriter. Now every crime was entered into the Enterprise Case Management system, and every person working on the matter could access it and contribute as evidence developed. Officers in patrol cars had iPads that gave them rap sheets of suspects and case dispositions in real time, and could even provide information on the number of gun arrests at a building location when they responded to a robbery in progress.

  Not only was the Wilson 61 already uploaded, but so were Lee Petrie’s digital photographs of the crime scene and evidence.

  I closed the screen without starting my report. I pulled up the motor vehicle bureau site and searched for cars registered to Hal Shipley and the Gotham City Humanity Activists’ center.

  Shipley owned two cars—a silver Mercedes sedan and a light-blue BMW two-seater convertible. I guess activists like their money going to well-wheeled leaders.