Engage her. Do it gently. She’s not crazy, the book says, in any other way. She just has this delusion about Jed. Apart from that, she’s not odd or bizarre. I hope these fucking shrinks know what they’re talking about.
“Didn’t you meet him when he was running for the Senate, in California? You were in graduate school out there.”
Goldman cocked her head and looked back down at me.
“Why, did Jed talk to you about me?”
“Yes, yes he did.”
“Did he say I was crazy? Did he tell you he didn’t want anything to do with me?”
Keep lying. They all do it to you.
“No, Ellen, he never said that.” Flatter her, tell her what she wanted to hear. Tell her that the unfaithful bastard really wanted her.
“I never had the idea he got to know you very well, but he used to tell me you came to all his speeches, his events said you were very smart.”
She was thinking now, thinking about what I was feeding her, and whether there was any kernel of truth in it. It had to at least intrigue her, I told myself, that Jed had spent any time talking about her when he moved East. At least it kept her on her feet, with that blade away from me, as I sat in place, my body aching and my mind trying to give her some thread back to life.
“Jed was in love with me, you know. There was a time when we first met that he wanted to go out with me,” Goldman told me.
“I didn’t know that.” Let her talk. Let her tell me any bizarre imagining that popped into her twisted brain.
“I’m not surprised he didn’t tell you that. That’s what got him in trouble with his wife.”
That and the thirty-six other women he had probably screwed behind her back.
“I know he felt terrible when the police arrested you in L.A.” I said. Find out why that didn’t make her turn against him. It’s hard to believe anybody sane wouldn’t give up after that.
“That wasn’t his fault, Alex. Didn’t he tell you that? His wife was insanely jealous. Every time he saw me at a rally or a cocktail party, the minute he wanted to make his way across a room to me, his miserable wife would get one of his aides to stop him. You were much luckier he finally got smart enough to get rid of her before he moved to New York. She was the reason I was in jail until the end of the summer. They arrested me because she complained that I was harassing her.
That explains a lot. No wonder Jed never mentioned anybody bothering him here, in New York, when we started dating in June. There was no interference from Goldman, that I was aware of, as of the last week. But obviously, her approach to me which started before Isabella’s death was a pivotal part of it. I had never even asked Jed the name of the California stalker. It hadn’t seemed relevant.
Goldman kneeled in front of me again.
“What else did Jed tell you about me, anything?”
Maybe this is part of my lifeline. Enough about you, Goldman must be thinking, now let’s hear what Jed thinks about me. Use your imagination, Cooper. Fill her with whatever will fuel her fantasies of life with Segal. Keep talking to her.
“Well, yes, Ellen. You must know that what we had is over, ended. Maybe that’s why he was talking about you so-‘ ”Don’t lie to me, Alex, you know it wasn’t over.“
“But for me it is, I swear to you. I can talk to him about you, I can arrange for you to be with him.” You two creeps really deserve each other, I thought. I’ll even spring for the hotel room just let me out of this deathtrap alive, please.
Why did Ellen Goldman think it wasn’t over with me and Segal? She knew about Jed and Isabella. She must have thought I would break up with him once I found out about it, too. Didn’t she kill Isabella because that temptress, that irresistible goddess, stood in the way of her reunion with Jed? I wanted to remind her of that, to give my breakup with Jed more credence. And yet I didn’t want to make her think of Iz the rational part of her must have some consciousness of guilt for shooting another human being to death.
I tried it out on her gently.
“I – I broke up with Jed this week, Ellen. I’m not going to see him anymore.”
“That’s what you say tonight, but I’ve heard him talk to you, I’ve heard him beg you,” she sneered at me.
Where? I thought. What could she have heard?
She went on.
“You still got in his car, didn’t you?
Accepted his flowers?“
The same observations that “Dr‘ Cordelia Jeffers made in the letter that arrived today. Were those letters also a device of Goldman’s?
“No, Ellen I’ve ended the whole goddamn thing. It was much too painful for me. I don’t want to be with Jed Segal and he isn’t begging me to come back to him, I swear to you.”
“I’m the one who knows exactly what he’s up to, and you’ll fall for it sooner or later. You’ll take him back, too, now that your competition Isabella Lascar is out of the way. I know you won’t throw away everything he offers you. I’m sick of his pleading with you.”
“Don’t believe him, Ellen,” if she’s really spoken with Jed, I thought. Maybe he’s told her, like he’s told Joan and Mike that he has tried to reach me.
“He’s telling people he’s begging me, but I swear to you that he hasn’t said a word to me.”
“That’s because I’ve been picking up those messages, Alex. I know how he feels about you, and you’ll give in eventually.”
“You’ve been picking up my messages?” My face distorted itself in puzzlement, as I looked over at Ellen, not believing what she had just said.
“You couldn’t possibly have-‘ She interrupted and seemed pleased to carry forward this part of the dialogue an opportunity, it was dawning on me, to tell me how much smarter she was than I. My hands twisted and turned against the cord on my wrists as she showed off her superior intelligence, but it didn’t feel as though I was making any progress.
She fixed her gaze on me.
“Did you know Lascar had a Filofax, you know, a date book and address directory?”
“Yes, I did.” Iz’s bible.
“Well, I guess the stupid cops never knew it. At least, I never read that it was stolen, in any of the newspaper accounts of her death,” Goldman said.
That’s because one of the smart things we do is to keep a few critical details away from reporters so we know when we’re talking to the real culprit, Ellen. I knew about its disappearance before anyone else did, but it certainly hadn’t been in the papers.
“No, I never read about that either. Was it with her, in my house?”
“No. It was right in her tote, on the front seat of her car.
And now I’ve got it.“
I am looking at a woman who could kill a person she thought was in the way of her love object, and then step up to the bloodied murder scene and reach her hand in to remove a diary from the car seat next to the warm body. I shivered at the reminder that I was being confronted by a professionally trained killer, who had learned her trade for a good cause and had thereafter been hideously derailed.
“Why did you want the Filofax, Ellen?”
“You know as well as I do that it would have every number and every detail I wanted. Most women keep their lives recorded that way these days phones, faxes, birthdays, anniversaries, shoe sizes, maitre ds, unlisted information. I knew she’d have numbers for Jed and for you private lines, home phones, apartment locations things I’d never be able to get from public directories for months. It was just an afterthought, but it was too good to walk away from.”
“Iz had all my numbers, of course, but she didn’t have my answering machine code.” I hoped I wasn’t risking an outburst by challenging Goldman, but this bit about the messages had me upside down. What was she talking about?
“I couldn’t convince Jed how smart I was all those months. Maybe this will help him see it. You can’t figure out how to pick up a message on somebody’s machine? Ha.
Wait’ll I tell him.“
I was barely computer literat
e and completely mechanically dysfunctional. But I had never had a reason to give anyone else the code to pick up my messages.
Goldman loved to display her cleverness.
“Once I had Lascar’s Filofax, the rest was easy. All these machines are the same. People like you only buy one or two models.
You’re like Jed totally name brand, top of the line.
You’re Sony, Panasonic the expensive models. Look at you once and it’s obvious you’re too materialistic to buy a discount, no-name item. That’s just a guess, but it didn’t fail me.
“Then you look at the instruction book for how they do the remote pickup. They’re all basically alike. That’s how I used to get all Jed’s messages, from his campaign office in California. That’s how I knew he was going to the Vineyard. Press three-three to see if there are messages. Press two-two-two to see if there are messages. Press seven-seven to see if there are messages. Try it a couple of times and you can figure out what brand of machine you’re dealing with.
His headquarters was a Sony. So is your apartment. Jed’s is a Panasonic.“ Ellen Goldman was puffing now, standing as though she needed to stretch her legs, and pleased with the demonstration she was giving me.
“I do have a Sony, you’re right, but-‘ ”I know I’m right.“
“There’s also a personal code you need to program in.
How did you get to that?“ Let her know how impressed you are with what she’s done. Every time I thought I heard footsteps or voices in the distant background, the noise soon faded to quiet, blending in with the natural sounds of squirrels stepping on dry leaves or birds flapping wings as they landed on nearby branches. Cars whizzed by on the cross-drive from time to time, but the steady hum of their wheels suggested that none even braked at the sight of a car pulled in off the roadway. Lights from above in the apartment windows at the majestic San Remo were shutting off throughout the building as people all over the city were going to sleep, and my only companions were the scores of blue rowboats behind my back, beached on their sides and chained together near the boathouse.
“The Filofax,” Goldman said, smiling.
“There’s always stuff in that, if you’ve got half a brain.” So much for me.
She continued.
“People are too lazy to be subtle. Most of us use the obvious significant dates, ann iv-‘ ”But you didn’t have my Filofax, you had Isabella’s.“ I wasn’t playing coy I simply didn’t know what she had done to get into my code.
“That’s all I needed. When Jed was in L.A.” he used to use his anniversary as the code. A lot of married people do, especially the women. His was February eighteenth two eighteen. I’m surprised he could remember it it didn’t seem too significant, given the state of his marriage. It was probably his wife’s idea, you know, for the home machine. Here, in New York, I got his unlisted number from Isabella’s book, then guessed he was using his birthday, now that he’s divorced.
“For you, the birthday was my first guess. Never been married, no special anniversary date. Lascar had your birthday in her book, along with her other information about you. April thirtieth. Four three zero. You’re probably stupid enough to use it for your banking code and all your other pin numbers.”
She had me there. Goldman was rapt in her own self congratulatory explanation and didn’t seem to notice that I was making headway against my binds. I wasn’t free, but they were loosening.
“And you picked up messages from my home machine‘ all week? And you erased them after you listened?” I had ignored Jed’s protestations that he had called repeatedly, and I had been depressed that there were so few calls from any of my other friends and family. This was not the moment to find out who else had been intercepted and erased from my radar screen. No wonder Jed had been trying so frantically to get me and my network of friends to believe him. Goldman had found him again, had reapplied herself to the effort to attract him in the days after Isabella’s murder, and he indeed was asking for my help these past twenty-four hours.
“If you’re telling the truth about not wanting anything to do with him,” she scoffed at me, ‘then you wouldn’t have missed his calls, anyway. Pleading for forgiveness and complaining about me. Those things were bad enough.
But telling you how much he loved you that you were his golden girl, that Isabella was just a mistake, that he wanted to marry you more than anything in the world all that made a mockery of what I had risked my life to accomplish. I didn’t want you to hear any of them, if I could help it. Maybe he was getting that through to you some other way, but not with the messages I could stop.“
Ellen Goldman was intense now, concentrating her anger on me again.
“I followed him to New York when I got out of jail. I found him again. But he had become distracted because of you,” she said, with obvious disdain.
“I wanted to meet you, to see what you were like. So I arranged the interview.”
“Don’t you really work for the Lawyer’s Digest?” I asked, knowing that the Public Relations Office had vetted her before letting me set an appointment with her.
“What a joke,” she blasted back at me.
“I just said I was freelancing for them I’ve never published anything in my life. I never finished graduate school. Your people were so hungry for good press about the office that once I told them how much I admired your work, I could have said I was writing for Popular Mechanics and they would have given me carte blanche. Nobody ever checked my credentials.”
My thoughts flashed back to the day after Isabella’s shooting, when Mike brought me home to the apartment from the office, and Ellen had left flowers with the doorman. I had been so pleased to see them I had assumed Laura had given her my address. How easily I had been misled, to have commented to Mike then about what a nice reporter she was. Oxymoron, he had said.
“But why Isabella?” I asked her.
“I can understand you were mad at me for taking up with Jed while you were in jail, but Isabella Lascar?”
“All of a sudden, last month, I began to find out about his meeting her. I could deal with you, I was sure. There was nothing that special about you,” she said.
“I knew if I made him aware of me again, you wouldn’t be in my way.
But then when she began calling him and seeing him, here and in L.A.” I knew it was a serious problem. I may be able to compete with you, but she was a movie star people idolized her, adored her, worshiped her. He’d never come back to me as long as she was in his life. Once I learned they were going to Martha’s Vineyard together, it just seemed so easy for me. I drove right onto the ferry, didn’t need any reservations off season. Got up to your house easily between the listing in the phone book and those locals in the post office who’d trust anybody pulled off the main road, just like I did tonight… and waited. I was back on the boat within hours. I just never meant for Jed to get blamed for it.“
Psychose passionelle. I tried to recall more facts from my reading the night before. Ellen Goldman really believed that Jed loved her, that he would actually return her affection, were it not for some external influence. The person in jeopardy is not the beloved she’d have no reason to harm him. The most likely recipient of the violent act, I had read, is the person perceived to be standing in the way of the desired union: Isabella Lascar. Get her out of the way and Jed Segal would be free to devote himself to Ellen.
And then, once she was dead, instead of turning his attention to Goldman, he tried to repair his romance with me. I wasn’t interested, but that didn’t lessen the annoyance of his calls and entreaties in her mind. For me, this was final jeopardy, too. Ellen was too impatient to wait for Jed’s ardor to subside. She had seized the moment of my precinct visit this evening when she learned about it on the radio, and used the fact that it drew me through Central Park, to come up with a scheme. Kill me, in the style of Harold McCoy who had a reason to want me out of the way and it wouldn’t look anything like the death of Isabella. Abduct and stab me to death, don’t s
hoot another one. She was right the tabloids would love it, and more importantly, no one would connect it to the death of Isabella Lascar.
How sadly ironic for me, to have spent a decade prosecuting men for crimes of violence against woman, and now to meet my peril at the hands of a woman. Perhaps that’s what had me blinded in this case all along.
I thought of the lines of poetry scribbled in Isabella’s manuscript, sent to her by Goldman, in the guise of the letters of “Dr. Jeffers‘: ”Is it… a crime… to love too well?“
Pope named it aptly a most unfortunate lady. The crime was not the loving, but the murder.
I tried to give her more incentive to back off.
“Let’s call Jed together, Ellen. Let’s talk with him about-‘
”I don’t ever want him to talk to you again, don’t you understand that? If you’re out of his life, he’ll come back to me. I know that.“
“I’m leaving New York. I’m going out of town this weekend. I – I won’t come back till you work it out with Jed.” I’d go anywhere, forever, if you’d let me out of here.
I was almost able to work loose my hands, but had no idea what I could do with them, against her weapons and her physical ability, if I were free.
“You’re playing with me again, Alex. You won’t leave for long. This is where your work is, you can’t stay away.”
Shit, maybe they need a sex crimes prosecutor in Wyoming or Montana. Someplace without investment bankers and without erotomaniacs.
A man’s voice from the top of the staircase on the Bethesda Terrace, to our south, broke the stillness. Both of our heads snapped in that direction, vainly trying to see who he was and where he stood, as he called out, “Hey, girl, hey, pooch. You down there? C’mon back up here to me.”
A dog walker. Goldman tensed and held a finger in front of her mouth, warning me to stay quiet. I prayed whoever he was would venture down the steps to my hellhole.
“Hey, Zac. C’mon back up here. Zac? Zac? C’mon, let me put your leash on.”
Final Jeopardy Page 32
