Cold Hit

by Linda Fairstein

  “Stop dancing around, Pridgen. I’m getting to you. What else is your crew doing about this one?”

  The sergeant stood to answer. “We’ve got Traffic giving out summonses on the midnight tour, tagging all the unregistered and uninsured plates. Mounted’s working the area on weekends, which is mostly when he hits.”

  I could see Lunetta rolling his eyes even as I stared at the rear of his head. Mounted cops riding up and down West End Avenue at midnight on a Saturday. Not the most subtle way to patrol the neighborhood. Even the rapist might catch on and change his movements.

  Pridgen continued. “We’ve called in the Profiling Unit at Quantico and-”

  Say the magic word and the duck comes down, hitting Lunetta square on the head. “Feds? Feds? Whose stupid idea is that? Aren’t you guys up to handling this one yourself? Answer me, Pridgen. Whose idea was it?”

  Lunetta saw Pridgen flash a glance in my direction. “ District attorney calling the shots on this one, Sarge? You just sit back and let them take right over and run the show, huh? Maybe you’re moonlighting on the side, too busy to do major investigations? We got an opening over at the auto pound, looking after towed vehicles, if you think this is too tough for you. What does Cooper use on you guys anyway, a nose ring? Just leads you around on a leash all day? Let me know if you start rolling over on your back or baying at the moon.”

  The woman researcher from Justice bit into her lip and looked at me for a reaction. I didn’t know whether I was blushing for Pridgen or for myself. I ripped some paper from my legal pad and dashed off a note to Lunetta, passing it forward, in which I asked his permission to explain where we were going with the investigation. By the time it reached him, was opened and read, he had continued to pepper the sergeant with questions and then kept on going at Pridgen even harder, choosing to ignore my offer. If he had intended to call on me before I asked to speak, I had just sealed my fate by assuring him that I wanted to give him answers to these questions.

  “Last week’s attack-was this girl coming from one of those Columbus Avenue bars, too?”

  “No sir,” Pridgen answered.

  “Where from, then?”

  “Actually, her boyfriend drove her home, just before two in the morning. Let her out of the car about half a block from her apartment, up at the corner. She walked to the front of the building alone. The rapist pushed in behind her, after she unlocked the vestibule door.”

  “So much for the boyfriend. I guess chivalry’s dead, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant? I want some progress on this one before the next time you come back here. Take your seats. I want the Three-four up now. Let’s hear about last night’s homicide.”

  Chairs pushed back and the podium assembly changed over, with Lieutenant Peterson and Chapman accompanying the CO up to the stand.

  The general precinct figures were good. Lunetta was pleased that the deputy inspector in charge had taken the story of one of his burglary patterns to a local cable TV program, ¿Que Pasa NY?, which resulted in an informant breaking the case. He liked that kind of creative policing, as he would call it. What he never had liked was wisecracking, not even back when he had been Chapman’s boss in the Street Crime Unit, almost a decade earlier.

  “Who’s going to bring me up to speed on the new case?”

  Peterson pointed at Chapman and stepped aside. Mike rested his notes on the podium and ran his fingers through his thick dark hair. He dug one hand into the pocket of his blazer, then started his description of how he was summoned to the scene. He was thorough, detailed, and professional-the best homicide cop in the business-but I fidgeted and recrossed my legs when he got to the end of the narrative and closed his description with Dr. Fleisher’s directive to load “Gert” into the EMS van.

  “ ‘Gert’? I didn’t know she’d been identified.” Lunetta was annoyed. His head whipped from side to side as he checked with each of his aides to see if they had failed to give him the morning update on the city’s most visible crime of the moment. The case was the cover of both daily tabloids, and he should have had the newest information about the unfortunate victim before the public did.

  “She hasn’t been identified yet, Chief.”

  “Well, is her name Gert, or isn’t it?”

  Don’t go there, Chief, I urged quietly from the peanut gallery. All of us who worked with Mike knew that he named his victims in every case. Always did it, and often stuck with his nickname, no matter what the eventual I.D.-his own perverse way of personalizing his cases.

  “I call her that, Chief, so she’s not just some number, some cold statistic for the mayor to get off on. I named this one in honor of Gertrude Ederle-three Olympic medals and the English Channel. I figure, given the way somebody tried to send her to sleep with the fishes for keeps, she must have had the soul of a great swimmer to stay afloat.”

  There were a few snickers around the room, but most of the group knew it wasn’t the safest direction to follow.

  Lunetta wouldn’t bite twice. He moved away to the next questions. “What are you looking at here?”

  Chapman went on. “After the autopsy results today, we’ll work on a press release and sketch.”

  “Can’t you give the papers a photo from the scene-a closeup? Get an I.D. more quickly?”

  “I don’t think the way she looked coming out of the water is the way any of her loved ones would want to see her featured. We’re working with Missing Persons and each of the precincts.”

  “You checking every area that borders the creek? May turn out to be a Bronx homicide after all, Chapman. The numbers get tallied in the precinct where the crime occurred, you know.”

  “I don’t care where she dove in, Chief. We got her now.”

  Fat chance, Lunetta. Count it as an outer-borough murder so we keep the Manhattan numbers down? Nope, I’m with Chapman. She landed here, and no matter where she was killed, that gives us jurisdiction.

  “I see from the newspapers that you had Miss Cooper up at the scene last night. You throwing in the towel, too, Detective? Ready to call in the Feds? I can’t help but wonder what it is you need a pet D.A. for at all these crime scenes and station houses. D’you carry her lipstick case for her, or her hairbrush?” The chief smirked at his put-down, jabbing the detective and me in the same thrust.

  But trying to embarrass Chapman that way wouldn’t quite work. He’d simply use the opportunity to get more laughs, even if they would be at my expense. “No, no, sir. She never lets me near the makeup. You know me, Chief-I’m strictly a leg man. I’m in charge of her spare panty hose. Each time there’s a run in one of those suckers, I pull out a replacement pair. Best I can do at the moment.”

  A couple of my friends around the room raised their eyes cautiously to meet mine, to make sure I was rolling with the flow. Not a problem. Battaglia had trained me well. I could control my short fuse with the knowledge I’d get some shots back at the chief eventually. The district attorney might even take them on my behalf.

  Lunetta’s number-two man leaned over and whispered something to him, flipping through the briefing book to an earlier page. He scanned it and looked up. “Is that case of the body that came out of the East River last month related to this one, you think? That’s still open, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but no connection. That one, a homeless man was fishing, hooked up and pulled an arm out of the water. Right out of its socket, actually. Scuba went in and found the rest of the body, weighted down with concrete blocks. She’d been in the water more than half a year. Feet bound, ligature round the neck. That’s a mob case-got a good snitch who’s working with us. We know who we’re looking for, just haven’t been able to find him yet.”

  Great restraint, Mikey. He had resisted the temptation to tell Lunetta that he had christened that victim “Venus.” A onearmed Italian woman in a cement overcoat didn’t lend herself to any appellation except Venus de Milo.

  The aide whispered to Lunetta again. “We had Bronx South here on Wednesday of last week. They’ve got a
rape pattern as well in a couple of the housing projects. You might check over there to see if there are any similarities.”

  Chapman looked less than interested. The likelihood that the well-groomed, silk-clad woman he had dubbed Gert had anything to do with ghetto dwellings in a run-down neighborhood that wasn’t his official territory didn’t engage him very seriously.

  Lunetta listed off a punch list of places to go and things to do that would have been elementary for a rookie homicide detective. Mike listened patiently and assured the chief that as soon as they figured out who the deceased was, he’d be off and running. “I assume we’ll know who she is by the end of the day.”

  “That’s great, Chapman. Then I’ll expect an arrest within the week. Maybe next time you’ll do a better job keeping the shutterbugs away from the scene you’re working. No reason for a case like this to be front-page news, except for the photo opportunity you gave them. Now it’ll take a couple of days to make these headlines go away.”

  Lunetta finished snapping at Chapman, looked around the room, and announced to the bosses, “I think you gentlemen realize how much the commissioner hates it when this kind of thing happens. Tourists aren’t scared away by drug dealers killing each other off on their own turf or gang members shooting other gang members to death. But if this woman turns out to be an innocent victim of violence, I don’t think I have to tell you what it means to the city. Last night, at a fundraiser, the mayor was just telling his supporters that murders in New York had dropped to their lowest numbers in more than a quarter of a century-when he got word of this mess.” Lunetta scanned the brass arrayed in front of him. “That’s the point of all these exercises-in case it’s slipped your minds. Letting everyone know how safe this city has become. Our homicide rate hasn’t been this good since nineteen sixty-one.”

  Chapman made sure he muttered into the microphone as he picked up his notes and pocketed them. “I hate to burst Hizzoner’s bubble, but I gotta tell you his numbers are small comfort to the broad who’s laid out in a refrigerator up at the morgue, waiting for her last physical.”

  4

  Mike spent most of the short walk over to my office, three blocks north of One Police Plaza, trying to worm his way back into my good graces. I was used to being the butt of Chapman’s humor and had long ago stopped letting it get to me. It was not even ten thirty and I was already more bothered by the oppressive heat that had blanketed the ugly stretch of asphalt that ran in front of the city and state buildings along Centre Street.

  “Aren’t you going to be late for court?” he asked me as we rounded the corner and I stopped at the cart to buy us each another round of coffee. Mike called up to the vendor to throw in a cruller for him, too. “Couldn’t eat a thing last night. Kept looking into that hole in the back of Gert’s head every time I closed my eyes.”

  “No court on Friday. The defendant’s a Muslim. Today’s his holy day,” I answered, hanging my identification tag on a chain around my neck as we approached the entrance to the District Attorney’s Office.

  “Reggie Bramwell’s a Muslim? I collared him on a gun case five years ago, and he was a full-press Baptist then. I’m sure of it.”

  “Jailhouse conversion, Mike,” I said, pushing through the revolving doors and holding the security gate open for one of my colleagues who was on her way out of the building, headed toward the other courthouse, pushing a shopping cart loaded with evidence. “A week ago Thursday, in fact. Must have been a deeply religious experience. Someone at Rikers Island convinced him of the joys of the three-day workweek. The judge uses Wednesday as a calendar day, and the prisoner-Reggie Bramwell, now also known to the court as Reggie X-gets to worship on Friday. Just prolongs my agony for a few days. In fact, I think he’s just doing this because he knows I wanted some vacation time this month-and if he can’t go to the beach, why should I?”

  We waited for one of the three elevators to return to the lobby floor, while a small commotion started behind us. “Alex, tell this jerk who I am, will you please?” a familiar voice called out.

  My colleague Pat McKinney was standing in front of the security counter dressed in his running clothes, which were drenched with sweat, arguing with the officer on duty. Pat’s already reddened complexion was deepening and appeared to spreading to the tips of his ears and down his neck.

  “I’m telling you I left my I.D. on top of that pad next to the telephone before I went out at nine thirty. Now, if somebody moved it or walked off with it, that’s your problem and not mine.”

  The cop, obviously a summer replacement who was stuck with this security detail, didn’t recognize the deputy chief of the Trial Division. Most of us who jogged from time to time during our lunch hours had taken to leaving our photo identification tags at the entrance desk and picking them up on our way back in. The officers from the Fifth Precinct who regularly worked the desk knew most of us by sight and held the tags in a pile on the corner of the counter, behind the bank of telephones. I had no time for running these days, because of my hearings, and no inclination either, because of the intense heat. McKinney, who liked to take his daily jog earlier than the lunch hour break during the hot summer months, was probably more aggravated by the fact that this police officer didn’t recognize him than that the officer had misplaced his only means of official access to the building.

  I held the bucking elevator door open with my left arm and started to explain to the officer that I would vouch for McKinney, despite the fact that he hated my guts.

  Chapman nudged me out of the way by bumping his hip up against mine and clamping his hand on the button that said Close. He was also calling out to the cop as the doors came together in front of my face. “Hey, Officer. Don’t let that guy in. He’s a whack job-comes around here all the time, looking to get in. The real McKinney has a huge wart on the tip of his nose and foams at the mouth a lot.”

  “That’ll do wonders to break the ice between me and my supervisor, don’t you think?” I asked as I pressed the button for the eighth floor and replaced my sunglasses in their case.

  “What’s the difference? McKinney hasn’t had a decent word to say about you in the entire time you’ve been here. Screw him. Who’s going to miss him for the next half hour, his girlfriend?”

  “What girlfriend? You mean Ellen? She just works for him, she’s not his girlfriend.”

  We got off the elevator and headed for my office.

  “Don’t tell me you’re as gullible as his wife, Coop. All that platonic crap? ‘Beep me, darling, I’m working on a gun bust tonight with the cops. Field assignment. Midnight grand jury.’ You know anybody else in the Trial Division who gets the kind of close supervision Ellen does? One on one, behind closed doors? Trust me. Next time he gives you any trouble, I’ll run interference for you.”

  My secretary, Laura, had a smile on her face by the time we came into view, no doubt hearing Mike’s voice as we made our way down the hall together. He broke into his best Smokey Robinson imitation as she began to go through the morning’s messages with me. She sailed through the first six, all of which could be returned later, accompanied by Mike’s humming and finger snapping. When he broke out his modified lyrics-“And in case you go to court, then a lawyer is the one you want to see… but in case you want love, Laura… call on me”-I gave up the battle and went in to my desk to see what else awaited me.

  I opened the desk drawer and took three extra-strength Tylenols. The fatigue of the trial schedule on top of my usual duties supervising the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit had been wearing me down. Sarah Brenner, my close friend and second in command, had been ordered by her obstetrician to stay at home, since she was already three days overdue with her second child. I had all weekend to complete the legal memorandum the judge in the Reggie X case expected from me on Monday, so I decided to focus first on the queries from the other lawyers in the unit.

  “Who sounded more critical?” I called out to Laura.

  “If I were you, I’d get Patti down here first.
Want me to call her?”

  “Yeah. Then back her up with Ryan, please.”

  Mike took off his navy blazer and hung it on the back of one of the chairs before picking up the pile of morning newspapers that had been delivered to my desk. He was looking to see whether any clever reporter had scooped him on some aspect of the Gert murder that he might have missed.

  Patti Rinaldi was one of my favorite young assistants-a solid lawyer with sound judgment and dogged courtroom style. Her enthusiasm for her work, and for resolving the plight of her victims, seemed to emanate from her when she entered my small office carrying the case file of her latest problem.

  “A vision in lavender, Ms. Rinaldi,” Chapman said, eyeing the tall, thin brunette carefully over the top of his New York Post. “You look ravishing today. You’re not cheating on me, are you?”

  “Cooper doesn’t leave me any time to even think about it, Mike. I worked the four-to-twelve shift on intake last night. Thought you’d want to know about this one, Alex. Have you had any cases at a sleep disorder clinic yet?”

  “Not so far.”

  “I think we got our first.”

  Mike’s interest was piqued. “What’s a sleep disorder clinic?”

  “Latest psychobabble moneymaker. Almost every medical center has one at this point. Patients who have trouble with sleep-insomniacs, sleepwalkers, snorers, you name it-come in to be ‘examined’ while they sleep. Idea is to find a cure for the problem.”

  Patti added to my description. “And they pay dearly-a thousand, fifteen hundred dollars per visit-just to spend the night on a cot and let somebody ‘watch’ them sleep, measure their dream time and the intervals between dream segments.”

  “Are there job openings?” Mike asked. “I suppose by now someone’s come up with my time-tested solution. Two cocktails, get laid, roll over, and smoke a cigarette-guaranteed to put you out for hours. Maybe I could be a consultant.”

  “Is this one of the legitimate operations, Patti?”