David Mitchell? David and Prozac was it possible?
My eyes were riveted to the top of the great staircase as David, snapping his fingers as though to attract a wandering dog, moved into sight, flooded in the full light of the moon.
“Hey,” he called out again.
“Anybody there? Anybody see a Weimaraner loose around here?”
It was impossible to know whether he could see Goldman from his angle, but I was certain that he wouldn’t be able to tell that I was seated below her on the ground. She didn’t speak. I assumed that she hadn’t recognized him, but she had done so much research about me that I couldn’t be sure she hadn’t checked my building and neighbors as well.
“Yes!” I screamed out at the top of my lungs, and she swung around to stick the tip of her knife against the back of my neck, without uttering a sound.
David started down toward us at a trot.
“Great,” he was enthusing, ‘which way did you see her go?“ He was still acting as though he were simply looking for a lost dog, so it was impossible to tell if he had anyone else with him, or if he had identified the sound of my voice.
He was coming at us too quickly now, and I feared that Goldman wouldn’t let him intrude on our session without penalty. I could feel her body leaning over, from behind me, and although she was out of my range of vision, I was afraid she was going to make a move to reach for her holster.
“David!” I screamed out, ‘she’s got a gun.“
I lurched forward by my own motion and pulled one hand out of the rope. But it was my left hand, and as I broke away from Goldman’s grasp, I was useless to do anything to disarm her with it. My right one was still entangled in the cord. As she dropped the knife to the ground and reached for her pistol, four or five dark figures ran down the steep incline and the staircase heading for us, as David dropped to his knees in place.
I could hear Chapman’s voice yelling orders from somewhere in this small charging force. First at me, to stay flat, and then at the others to move in slowly, and next at Ellen to throw down her gun.
A shot rang out from just inches above my right ear and I looked for a place to shelter myself without success. I had no idea who Goldman was aiming at, but if she chose to focus her attention on me again, there was no way she could miss.
Someone on Mike’s team had apparently been waiting for Goldman to shoot first, and fired back in our direction.
I flattened myself on the ground, my face crushed against a sharp rock my left arm out to the side and my right one pinned beneath me.
Chapman shouted at her once more: “Drop it!”
Goldman fired again and again. I ached so badly from every bloodied joint and bruised skin surface that I wasn’t sure I would know if a bullet struck me or not.
Seconds later, I heard footsteps approaching Goldman from the rear a crunching on the dry leaves as someone ran down the slope from the north. She must have heard the sound as well, since she swung herself around to point her pistol in the direction of the man coming in behind her.
But he got a shot off first, and she screamed as she dropped backward, her body falling across my own.
The gun was still in Goldman’s hand as she lay writhing in pain, her body cushioned against mine. I couldn’t tell where she had been hit, but her legs were still twitching and kicking like a frog on a dissection table in a high school biology class.
I didn’t know whether to try to wrest the weapon from her grip, but within moments the cops were on her, and I was relieved of that decision.
I could see, from my limited angle of vision, that the shooter was the first to get to us, landing on her right arm with his foot and bending down to take the small pistol away from her as he pressed her elbow against the rocks with his heavy boot. I didn’t know who the guy was or whether I would ever lay eyes on him again, but I was certain I would be in love with him for the rest of my life.
Goldman was coughing and crying at once, and in an instant we were surrounded by six or seven other men, Chapman and Mitchell among them. They were all talking over each other, as two of them lifted her off my body and David leaned in to help me raise myself up from my awkward position on the ground.
“Where’s she hit?” I heard someone ask, while Mike got to his knees in front of my face, questioning me at the same time “Are you shot?”
I rolled onto my back, biting the corner of my lip to prevent myself from crying, and shook my head in the negative.
“Looks like the gut,” was someone’s answer to the question about Goldman, and the men carrying her between them started up the pathway to the street. Another guy was on a walkie-talkie ordering two ambulances stat to meet us at the pavement above the Bethesda Terrace.
David was on one side of me, asking where I was injured and checking my vital signs. He pressed my shoulder back against the ground as I tried to sit up, cradling my head in place with his sweater and stroking my hair to calm me, telling me not to try to talk yet. Chapman was on my other flank, working his cell phone, telling someone probably his boss where we were and what had gone down. He reached for my right hand, inspecting the abrasions and rope burns that covered its surface, and I grabbed him back, squeezing as hard as I could and holding on to him, because it was so much easier than saying anything aloud.
“Just rest for a few minutes,” David urged me.
“Listen to your doctor, Coop. We’ll explain it all later,” Chapman said, laying the phone on the ground and trying to muster up something that resembled a smile.
I closed my eyes, keeping hold of Mike’s hand and attempting to make myself breathe more evenly. The noise and commotion of people running up and down the incline continued to swirl around me, and I relished the sound of sirens coming closer and closer to the roadway above.
Within minutes, two EMS workers came pounding down the staircase, carrying a stretcher which they placed beside me on the ground.
“Which one we got here, the perp or the victim?” one asked.
“You got the victim,” Mike said, rising to his feet and flashing his badge at the pair.
“She’s a prosecutor,” he went on, summarizing the story in a couple of sentences.
“V.I.P treatment or else she’s likely to drop a dime on you.”
My mouth curled up in a grin as he used police lingo for ratting someone out.
“I’m a physician,” David added, “I’d like to ride with you.
She’s my friend.“ He began to describe his observations of my condition as they gently lifted me onto the canvas.
“I don’t need this, really. I can walk,” were my first words as they carried me toward the staircase.
“Relax, blondie. You’re going first class. You’re my case now I make all the decisions,” Chapman replied.
It wasn’t exactly Notorious, but I was every bit as grateful as Ingrid Bergman must have felt as my saviors swept me up the grand steps toward the waiting ambulance. It was almost 5 A.M. by the time I was comfortably settled into a nightgown and robe, sipping some warm, exotic combination of herbs that was prepared for me by Joan Stafford’s Asian housekeeper, after David had refused my request for a double Dewar’s. He had called Joan from the Emergency Room of New York Hospital, when I admitted that the only way I could get any sleep during the next few days was in the care of a friend I could trust.
Mike had known the triage nurse in the ER from years of working the same midnight shifts. She had taken me into an examining room after the domestic stabbing and before the alcoholic who cracked her elbow tripping off a curb. By the time the resident came into the cubic leto inspect me, the nurse had wiped all my scrapes with alcohol, determined that the wound on my thigh was too shallow to need stitches, and ordered that a set of x-rays be taken to make sure the injuries to my ankle were not serious. The doctor finished the once-over and prescribed some medication for pain and sleep.
Ellen Goldman had been taken to a hospital on the West Side. Mike was smart enough not to tell me whic
h one, although I overheard him phoning the captain to say that her condition was critical but stable when she got out of surgery shortly after four, about the same hour of the morning I was released from the Emergency Room.
Mike and David drove me to Joan’s apartment, where she had dressed to meet us in the lobby.
“I didn’t think you could look any worse than you did when we had dinner on Tuesday, but you’ve reached a new low, girl. We’ll get you back in shape,” she said as she embraced me, preparing me for what I would see when I got up my nerve to look myself over.
She lived in a eight-room duplex in one of the most elegant buildings in Manhattan, and her guest bedroom, overlooking the East River, was plumped and fluffed for my arrival, like a soft aqua-toned cocoon, ready to shield me from the real world. I spent a few minutes checking myself out in the bathroom mirror, appalled by the number of lacerations and marks that crisscrossed my cheeks and neck, and the variety of bruises that had swollen and discolored my slender fingers and hands. I changed into Joan’s lingerie and velvet robe, and descended to the library, where she had poured a brandy for herself, David, and Mike.
“Anybody want to tell me what took you guys so long?” I asked, directing my question to Mike. I screwed up my face at the first swallow of the tea, which was sour and tasteless,
Joan came to sit beside me on the thick arm of my lounge chair, offering me a mouthful of her Courvoisier.
“Next time I call you, don’t tell me you can’t take the call,” Mike fired back at me.
“In the middle of a line-up? The first time you called, right after I got to the Special Victims Squad, nobody said it was urgent.”
“Well, it wasn’t then. I hadn’t spoken to David yet. After I started to get information from him, I called back twice.
Got some old hair bag who didn’t seem to know what was going on.
Finally, when we put most of it together, I called there frantically, telling them to find you and get you back upstairs to take the call. That’s when the desk sergeant told me you’d gotten into a car with a woman.“
“Start over,” I said.
“Tell me how you figured it out.”
David started to talk, describing his meeting with Jed.
“He showed up in my office a bit earlier than expected, at seven-fifteen, eager to tell me to tell anyone who would listen, I think what had been going on. I asked him to describe the details of the case of the woman who had been stalking him in California he said her name was Ellie Guttmann-‘ Mike interrupted him.
“Yeah, I had already gotten that from the Threat Management Unit during the afternoon, when they pulled up Segal’s case for me in Los Angeles.
I just had no way to connect it to Ellen Goldman then.“
“Jed insisted to me and I believe him, Alex that he never had any kind of relationship with Goldman or Guttmann, whichever is her real name.”
“It’s Guttmann,” Mike broke in again.
“I checked with Immigration. Israeli passport.”
Joan had joined in the hunt.
“After you guys called me from the hospital, I checked-her name in Nexis, on my computer. Just territorial on my part I couldn’t believe a writer had tried to kill you, Alex. There must be fifty Ellen Goldmans with published articles in the last year alone. My guess is that it was a pretty safe alias, close to her real name, if anybody was going to try to check out her press credentials and see if she had ever written anything before.”
David went back to his story.
“My secretary had pulled some of the recent publications on erotomania. I read them on the shuttle yesterday, and then Jed and I went over the information. He had never heard whether there was a diagnosis in Goldman’s case, but it’s true that Jed’s wife was the complaining witness. He had wiped his hands of the matter once the police locked her up, and he was moving East.”
“No diagnosis was made, according to the LAPD,” Mike reported.
“They had an easy conviction for aggravated harassment, based on the telephone records of her calls to Segal’s home and office, and the letters to his wife. Just a lock-up, no psych report.”
“Ellen Goldman is a classic case. I read Dietz, Zona, Sharma all the current experts on the subject.”
“What’s a ”classic“ erotomaniac?” I asked.
“To begin with,” he responded, ‘most of the subjects of the disorder are women, young women like Ellen Goldman in their early thirties. Their victims are male, usually older, and usually men of a higher status, socioeconomic class or even an unattainable public figure, like a celebrity or politician. Jed fit every one of those categories when she first encountered him in California.“
We were all listening attentively.
“It’s interesting, too, that almost half of the subjects studied were foreign-born.
Again, like Goldman. And a lot of them adopt different persona that they use for writing letters to their subjects, because they’re so smart and articulate in this instance, the Cordelia Jeffers correspondence.“
“How long before they give up this delusion?” Joan wanted to know.
“With other obsessions, so-called ”simple“ obsessions,” David told her, ‘the subjects only made contact for less than a year. With erotomaniacs, these episodes have gone on for ten or twelve years, with repeated efforts to keep in touch with the man. They make phone calls, write letters, stalk their subjects at home, in offices, on airplanes, in hotels you name it. They are convinced that’s the delusion that if they can get the obstacle, the other woman, out of the way, the man they’re obsessed with will be united with them and able to declare his love.“
“Wasn’t Jed aware of any of this, with Isabella? Didn’t it ever occur to him that Goldman was her killer?” I wanted to know.
“Absolutely not,” David said.
“When Goldman got out of jail, there was an order of protection still in effect by the court. She was not allowed to have contact with either of the Segals. And she was otherwise sane enough to avoid them at first, knowing that would land her back in jail.
“So she didn’t bother Jed when she first got to New York last month. At least, not directly not that he knew about.
There was enough publicity about his move to find his office at CommPlex, after the Senate race. But I’d have to guess that she spent more of her energy finding out about you, once she learned you were dating him. Was that fact ever in the newspapers?“
”Yeah, Liz Smith did an item in her column,“ Mike added, ”“SEX CRIMES CRUSADER DOES SENATE LOSER,” Something like that. That’s how she knew about you. We figure she found out about Isabella by intercepting some of Jed’s messages on his voice mail at CommPlex. He said she did that all the time when he was in California.“
“She had her eye on you, Alex,” David continued, ‘trying to figure how long you would last with him. Then along came the ultimate antagonist, in the form of a Hollywood goddess: Isabella Lascar. You were a mere mortal, but Isabella was serious competition.“
Ellen and I apparently had that much in common.
“But I thought Jed and Isabella had discussed their stalkers with each other?” I queried aloud, remembering that snippet of conversation with him.
“Yes, that’s true, in general,” David told us.
“But it had never occurred to either one of them that they were being harassed by the same person. Isabella was a celebrity and had been exposed to a lot of unwanted attention, as you know, Alex. When she started to get hang-up calls at the hotel she didn’t know what their source was, and the letters from Cordelia Jeffers were a complete mystery to her. She never divulged their exact contents to him and Jed thinks that’s because she knew how guilty he felt about betraying you.”
“When David called me tonight after he finished his meeting with Segal, he asked me to come over to his apartment to talk to him about the interview. I got there about nine, with Joe Duffy, one of the other guys who worked the squad with Mike.
“Up to that minute, I was still convinced Segal was the killer.
“But David said Segal could prove his alibi that his lawyer had the Cape Air ticket receipt that would show he was already on the plane off the Vineyard by the time Iz was blown to bits. Just that his lawyer is playing hardball ‘cause we haven’t released the exact time of her death yet.
He doesn’t want to show us the plane ticket till we tell him time of death.“
David was nodding his head in support of Mike’s information.
“The reason Jed was leaving messages for you all over, Alex, was that Goldman finally began to dare to get closer to him. Finding Isabella’s Filofax was a gold mine for her, and made it much too easy. It had loads of information about access to Jed, as well as to you. Not only was she erasing the messages he left you,” David explained, ‘but she waited for him outside his office these last few mornings not to make contact, but just to see him. That’s typical of the disorder.“
“So who figured out that Ellen was the killer?” I looked from David to Mike, but both shook their heads.
“We didn’t exactly figure it out,” Chapman said.
“When David told me about the reappearance of Jed’s stalker, I asked him to make a call and get her description.
Jed told us what she looked like, even mentioned the accent, and told us she was driving a white Celica, with rental plates.
“I gotta say, Alex, my thinking was like yours. It never occurred to me a woman was the killer. I was so sure it was Jed or some other jilted lover boy.
“But by the time David and I had gone over all the stuff about erotomania, and how the person most in danger is the one in the middle, and Jed’s insistence that he was leaving messages that you weren’t getting we just assumed you were in danger, whether or not it had anything to do with Isabella Lascar.”
“So why did you call me back at the precinct, you know, the last call?”
Both David and Mike hesitated, before David answered.
“Actually, it was Jed’s idea.”
I was stone faced but David went on.
Final Jeopardy Page 33
