“The captain has us in lockdown,” the first officer answered Blakely. “I can’t let you in till we get backup here. The prisoner went out your way. We got Elsie down. Artie and Oscar are waiting for medics.”
I walked to counsel’s table and slipped my jacket off the back of the chair. I brought it over to where Elsie lay and covered her head and upper body with it. There would be no shelter from the way the media pundits would blame her for her own death-for allowing Quillian to overpower her, take her gun, kill her, and endanger everyone else, as well as possibly make his escape from the massive building with its dozens of entrances and exits.
I could only offer her a bit of dignity now, in case the reporters and photographers flooded the room when we admitted the rescue team.
“Lockdown?” Gertz shouted. “I want to get out of here now. Right now.”
“I’d like you in that last row,” the officer said, “so they can remove you as soon as they deal with Artie.”
“Not that way. I’m going through my chambers,” Gertz said, resisting and pointing to his own exit. “I don’t need an ambulance. I don’t want any of those people to see me.”
The deep red blood stained through the turquoise of the fabric of my suit jacket, turning it to cobalt blue as the silk quickly absorbed it.
As much as the sight of Elsie’s gaping head wound had revolted Jonetta, she had not been able to stop staring at it. Her sobs subsided as I put my arm around her and guided her out of the well to a seat closer to the main hallway entrance.
Lem was crouched beside Artie, trying to keep him calm. He was writhing in pain, sweat dripping from his face, drenching his hair and his mustache. The more he rolled around, the more the blood spread through the tear in his dingy shirtsleeve.
I squatted behind Lem’s back.
“The great white whale,” Lem said.
Artie mustered a laugh.
“That’s why he got away, Artie. Brendan Quillian is the great white whale in this friggin’ criminal justice system. Damn, if he’d been a brother-or just a lowlife from the Bowery-you’d have been on his ass like every other prisoner. That whole Upper East Side rich-boy attitude was just a veneer. Nobody took him seriously. Nobody saw the risk.”
Artie opened his eyes. “Make me a promise, Lem. Tell me you’re not gonna represent that bastard for shooting me. For killing Elsie, okay?”
“I think Alex and I are grounded on that one. We’re gonna be your star witnesses.”
There was a loud banging again, this time from the hallway. The walkie-talkie crackled in my hand. “Open up in there, Part 83. Artie, can you hear me?”
I held the device in front of Tramm. He gulped for breath and answered with a weak “Yeah.”
“Open up, dammit. I got four cops and some EMTs here.”
“You know who that is? Recognize the voice?” Lem asked.
Artie nodded.
Lem walked to the door and unlocked the large brass bolts.
Two of the medics got right to work on Artie, one ripping open the polyester uniform shirt to examine the wound as the other started taking his vital signs.
The next two asked if we were okay, and we signaled them on to Elsie’s body and to Oscar, who still seemed dazed and disoriented.
The four cops, dressed in flak jackets and helmets, positioned themselves around the other door, relieving the court officer who had been the first to arrive. The knocking started again.
“Who’s there?” one asked.
“Blakely. Captain Blakely, for chrissakes. Lemme in.”
The cops turned to us. Artie nodded again at Lem.
“You alone?” one cop asked, while another motioned to Lem, Jonetta, and me to get down on the floor, in case Blakely had been taken hostage by the escapee.
“Yeah.”
Another unlocked the door, and as Blakely entered, we got the all clear to get up.
“Where’s Artie?”
They pointed Blakely back to the cluster of people in the aisle of the courtroom, and the crusty, white-haired captain barely stopped to look down as he passed Elsie’s body.
“We owe this to you?” Blakely said to Lem Howell. “You the brains behind this operation?”
“I appreciate the thought, Captain. But I was about to whip Ms. Cooper’s tail fair and square at the end of this trial, so, the answer to that would be no.”
“Has Quillian been caught?” I asked.
Blakely raised his thick, white eyebrows and frowned at me.
“The prisoners’ elevator must have been very busy at this hour,” Lem said. “I kept thinking he’d be trapped because of that. I was waiting for him to burst back in here.”
“Forget the elevator. He used the stairwell. Nobody else seems to have gone that way. He must have run down a few flights. Probably reentered the main corridor on four or five,” Blakely said.
The rooms in which misdemeanor cases were heard were on the lower levels of the courthouse. The sixth through ninth floors, in the bizarre architectural scheme of the WPA building, were occupied by the District Attorney’s Office. No access was possible from the courts except where they connected on the seventh floor.
“Then he’s somewhere in the building?” I asked. “You know he’s still got a fully loaded piece-he took Oscar Valenti’s gun with him, too.”
“Too bad there are no metal detectors when you exit the damn place,” Blakely said.
“Why? You think he can escape? There are hundreds of cops and court officers around at this hour of the day,” I said.
“He was out before the word spread-out before any of them knew.”
“What do you mean?”
“If Quillian crossed over on the fourth or fifth floors, he must have gone down on the public elevators from there, passing off like a lawyer with the rest of you suits,” Blakely said, fingering the lapel of Lem’s jacket.
“What makes you think he got away?” I was shocked that a breakout of this magnitude could happen at 100 Centre Street.
“’Cause a man fitting his description just hijacked a car on the corner of White Street, opposite the courthouse steps. Shot the guy who was putting his money in the meter and drove off in a black Toyota,” Blakely said. “Brendan Quillian’s on the loose.”
30
Flashbulbs popped as Captain Blakely swung back the wooden door to lead us into the corridor, still full of reporters and press photographers held there since the lockdown two hours earlier. The EMTs had treated the injured court officers, and a deputy medical examiner had declared Elsie dead-long after the fact-before she was loaded into a body bag and removed from the courtroom.
Lem took off his suit jacket. He held it open, and I slipped my arms into it, wrapping it around my dress to cover the bloodstains and the long tears in the fabric. He put his arm around my shoulders as we entered the gauntlet formed by the eager press hounds.
“Hey, Alex! Who’d he shoot at first-you or the judge?” a voice called out.
Court officers and cops formed a human chain, holding back the impatient spectators.
“Lem! Hey, Howell!” It was Mickey Diamond’s voice. “Give me three words, Lem. We’ll make the headline your signature triplicate.”
We both stared straight ahead as we walked, counting the steps left to the elevator doors, half a corridor away.
“‘Gunned. Gone. Guilty.’” Diamond was relentless.
“Is it true Judge Gertz is still hiding under the bench?” A local crime reporter thrust his microphone over the linked arms of two cops.
“‘Murder. Mayhem. Manhunt.’” Diamond was stuck behind one of the film crews and I could barely hear him now.
Lem stepped up the pace. “Shit. I could write better copy in my sleep. Can you keep up with me? We’re almost there.”
“You get paid up front, Mr. Howell?” another news jock asked. “You bank your money before Quillian skips town?”
A detective-his gold shield flopped over his breast pocket-was holding the elevator ope
n for us. “I got you from here.”
He held up his hand and the cops who had been following us from the rear turned to face the crowd as the doors closed.
“You okay?” Lem asked, letting go of me.
“I will be. It’s Elsie-it’s what happened to Elsie that just breaks my heart. And you?”
“You know me well enough to understand how much I hate it when I can’t see something coming. I thought I had Quillian convinced he was walking out a free man. I was going to blow every argument you had right out of the water.”
“Did you talk with him last night?”
“After the funeral? Yeah, he called.”
“Did you tell him what McKinney said about the possible exhumation of Bex Hassett’s body?”
Howell’s face twisted into a grimace, but he wouldn’t answer my question.
When the doors opened on the seventh floor, four detectives from the District Attorney’s Office Squad were waiting to take both of us upstairs to the Trial Division conference room, one flight above. All friends, all trusted colleagues, they surrounded me in a cocoon as we moved down the hallway and up the dark staircase-a protective shell that would have been more useful several hours back.
The chief of detectives himself was at the head of the table. He greeted both of us and had Laura standing by to get anything we needed. Jude Rutling, the head of the office’s elite Homicide Investigation Unit, had been put in charge of the investigation.
“Let’s get you comfortable first,” the chief said. “Why don’t you each go to the restroom. Alex, we’ll need you to give us your clothes. Did they get pictures of you-that blood and all-upstairs?”
“Yes. Yes, they did. Crime scene.”
“We’ll be debriefing you one at a time. Jude can start with Alex, and my men will take you in another office, Lem.”
“I’d like some coffee, please,” I said, shivering, even though Lem’s jacket was still over my shoulders. “May I talk to Laura?”
A detective escorted me down the hall, past Laura’s desk, on the way to the ladies’ room. Laura reached out to give me a hug and I pushed back. “Wait till I clean myself off. Can you dig anything up in the closet? I used my jeans for that trip to the tunnel last week.”
“Marisa’s already been over,” Laura said, walking into my office to grab a hanger from the closet.
“These should fit.”
I took the black track suit into the restroom-the same one in which Carol Goodwin had cut herself a day before. My head was spinning as I looked in the mirror-blood smears had been transferred from my hands to my face, and the layer of dirt that had previously coated the courtroom floor was on my skin and in my hair.
I undressed and changed into Marisa Bourgis’s gym clothes. I filled the sink with warm water, leaned over it, and plunged my entire head into the bowl. There were no showers in the women’s bathrooms throughout the old offices-built in the days when there had been no women on the legal staff of the district attorney.
I scrubbed my face with brown-paper toweling and ran my fingers through my wet hair. The detective standing guard at the door was startled to see my new look when I emerged minutes later. He walked me back to the conference room where Jude-and my coffee-and two Major Case Squad detectives were waiting to take me through the details of the morning’s events.
Quillian’s outburst had been sudden and short. I knew this drill as well as the men who were questioning me and tried to be patient as they went at me again and again for every nuance, every sequence of how each of us in the room had responded to the gunshots and action.
The door opened behind me and I rested my head against the back of the tall leather chair. Laura interrupted the grilling. “Excuse me, Jude. Mr. Battaglia’s back from City Hall. He’d like to see Alex.”
“We’ll be done shortly.”
“Right now.”
I stood up, grateful for the break, even though I knew I was in for a different kind of interrogation from the boss. “You think the hallways are safe enough for me to make it the next fifty feet by myself?”
“Laura’s in charge. But the chief’s giving you a detail once you leave this building-Lem Howell, too-till they find Quillian. Two detectives with you round the clock. You’ve got your choice of someone sleeping at your place during the night. The other one will be in the lobby.”
“Ignacia Bliss,” I said, smiling at Jude. “Unless Lem picked her first. Or Sue Morley. It’s just more comfortable for me to have a woman there.”
“I understand. See you later.”
Laura walked me across to the executive wing and stopped to fill Rose Malone in on what had been happening, as Rose waved me into Battaglia’s suite.
Mike Chapman was sitting at the district attorney’s desk, his feet on top of a file drawer and a Cohiba between his lips. “You gotta be the most high-maintenance broad in the universe, Coop. You can’t even be in the courtroom without drawing fire.”
Mercer Wallace walked toward me and put his arms around me, drawing me tight against his chest. He had always been as easy at expressing emotion as Mike had been restrained. Paul Battaglia was seated at the far end of the long table, holding up a finger to tell me he’d be off his call in a minute.
“And you got that drowned-rat look on top of it,” Mike said. “Very becoming. Your only hope is an earthquake in some third-world country that swallows an entire village tonight so you’re not on the cover of the papers looking like that.”
Mercer whispered to me, “You’re shaking, Alex.”
“I can’t stop it. I’m cold.” I didn’t need to add that I was also scared.
“Rose had a late lunch sent in. There’s some soup here for you.”
“What time is it?”
“After two.”
“Have they-have they found Quillian yet?”
Mercer shook his head.
“Any other bodies?”
“No,” he said, stroking my arm.
I sat at the table and opened the cardboard container of lukewarm tomato soup. My stomach growled as I tried to fill it with something nourishing.
“I really underestimated your trial skills this time,” Mike said. “Maybe you were actually gonna pull a rabbit out of a hat and put that boy away.”
Battaglia hung up the receiver. He did his best to ask about my well-being-no more anxious than Mike to bring out any emotional reaction-and to confirm the courtroom encounter as it had already been reported to him. Then it was on to business.
“I’ve been talking with the guys here, Alex. It’s quite puzzling, this desperate attempt at an escape by Brendan Quillian.”
“Attempt my ass, Mr. B,” Mike said. “You might take note that he made it.”
“Without your snitch, your case didn’t appear to be all that airtight.”
“No, Paul. It wasn’t. But-”
“Well, what the hell do you think spooked him so that he would go to this extreme, at this point in the trial? Now he’s got a cold-blooded murder witnessed by Freddy Gertz and Lem and you.”
“From what I hear,” Mike said, “the justice was really blind this time. Forget about Gertz.”
I looked from Mike to Mercer. “What do you two think?”
“We got under his skin somehow,” Mercer said. “And I don’t believe it had anything to do with Alex’s case against him for the killing of his wife.”
I turned to Battaglia. “I think the things we’ve been digging at-things that still seem so remote and unrelated-must have struck Quillian right in the gut.”
“Like what?”
“The day we met with his sister-the day before her brother’s funeral,” I said. “Trish told Brendan when she saw him for the first time in years that she was planning to talk to Mike about the Hassetts.”
“Why?”
“She’s convinced that Duke Quillian’s murder was arranged or committed by the Hassett brothers. And yet, Brendan demanded that she not tell that to the police.”
“If there was
any truth to her reasoning,” Mercer said, “you’d think Brendan would want her to dangle that before our noses. Makes you wonder what he knew-what Trish didn’t know-that made him crazy at the thought she might tell us.”
“What else?” Battaglia asked.
“I’m in,” Mike said. “On the drive back from the funeral with Quillian, I brought up the unsolved case of the murdered teenager, Rebecca Hassett.”
“You asked him about it? You questioned him?” Battaglia was annoyed enough to remove his cigar from his mouth and clearly articulate his concern.
“Nah. I just goosed him. I didn’t think it would set him off on a rampage. I wanted to see if I could raise some hairs on his neck, and like I told Coop, I think I did.”
“Add one more straw to the camel’s back,” I said. “Quillian called Lem Howell last night. Just the usual daily update, I’m sure. But that was after Lem and I left the meeting with Judge Gertz-and McKinney. I asked Lem if he told Brendan that McKinney had talked about an exhumation. If he mentioned that the girl was named Rebecca Hassett.”
“Yes? He said yes?”
“For once Lem didn’t have his best poker face on. I’m assuming he mentioned to Brendan that the subject had been raised in front of Gertz, without any way of knowing that it was a follow-up to the bombshell Mike dropped in the car. Lem wasn’t going to give up any privileged conversation with his client-so if he doesn’t drop a hint of it to whoever is interrogating him now about the shooting, I’m just saying that I think I caught him off guard when I asked about it.”
“But this one issue…?”
“Not one, Paul,” I said. “Three points, each of them coming from a different direction-his sister, the cop who locked him up, and then his own lawyer.”
“I think he was so close to beating the rap on Amanda’s case,” Mercer said, checking my reaction to Battaglia’s dismissal of my effort, “at least in Lem’s view, that he was devastated at the idea of being trapped by something more deadly, from his past-maybe something more readily connected to him-than what he faced with this jury.”
“Makes you wonder,” Battaglia said, replugging the cigar in his mouth, “why he didn’t try for a clean kill of Alex while he had the chance.”
Bad blood Page 24
