“Would you please top me off?” I asked, tapping the side of my glass.
“Certainly, Alexandra.”
“We’ll be four, Stephane,” I said as he headed toward the main dining room.
“Oui, Mademoiselle. Detective Chapman already called to reserve.”
“Are you feeling any better for a few weeks on the Vineyard?” Vickee said.
I knew the answer people wanted when they asked how you felt after an ordeal or a tragedy. The questioner meant well, whether you just buried a relative or had your third round of chemo or were the survivor of a sexual assault. They rarely wanted to know about the dysfunction or disarray in your life caused by the traumatic event. They wanted the short answer. They wanted, “I’m okay” or “I’m over it.”
“So much better, Vickee. I think I’m back on my feet again.”
Her reaction would tell me whether Mike was spreading the news that I was hanging on to my marbles by a thread.
“What did you do today, Alex?”
She met my stare with a poker face. But that’s how good a friend she was, too. Good enough to ask me to be godmother to her son, Logan, when he was born four years ago. Good enough not to judge me by one of Mike’s reports on my condition.
“Voted. Shopped for groceries. Took some things to the dry cleaner. Started to sort out one of my closets.”
Best to leave out the hour or two I spent in a fetal position on my bed, and the uncontrollable tremors that started when my cell phone beeped with an AMBER Alert about the kidnapping of a Brooklyn toddler.
“That’s the way, Alex. Take it slow. Nobody’s expecting you to be slaying dragons in the courthouse anytime soon,” Vickee said. “The guys will be here any minute.”
“Mike and Mercer are together?”
“Yes. The commissioner figured he ought to put a Special Victims detective on the Tanya Root matter till they get a handle on how and why she died.”
Mercer Wallace—Vickee’s husband—was one of a handful of first-grade African American detectives in the NYPD. He was a rock-solid investigator, four years older than Mike, and the person with whom I had worked more rape cases than any man in the department.
My professional antennae stood up at attention. “Why? Does Scully think she was raped?” I said. “I’d better get someone assigned from the office to team with them.”
“Slow down, girl. You’re on leave, remember?” Vickee said. “Catherine Dashfer is handing out the assignments for you. She’s on it herself.”
No wonder I hadn’t been able to reach her yesterday. She was my trusted deputy and close pal, but I suspected she had orders from Battaglia to shut me out of the trail of information.
“There are some things I ought to tell her,” I said to Vickee. “I’ve had some ideas since I heard about this last night. Like next week’s big fashion show at the Met.”
“Tell Mike,” she said. “Tell Mercer.”
“You don’t think Catherine will talk to me about it?”
I was beginning to sound paranoid now, which was bound to make all my buddies take note. There didn’t seem to be a PTSD symptom that was passing me by.
“Of course she’ll talk to you, Alex. It’s just that you’re going to see the guys in a few minutes,” Vickee said. “What other ideas have you had?”
I didn’t answer. I took a slug of my wine, looking around for Stephane to fill my glass before Mike arrived.
“What? You don’t trust me anymore?” Vickee said, rubbing my back.
“You don’t seem to think my Met suggestion is the way to go. I mean, I know very few supermodels ever have big breasts,” I said. “Kind of ridiculous this woman wanted to enhance them at this point.”
“Kate Upton,” Vickee said. “She’s got a chest, Alex.”
“But she was discovered when she was sixteen.”
“Maybe the girl wanted to be like Tyra Banks. Huge ones.”
“But Tyra was even younger,” I said, nodding at the bartender, who had taken his place opposite us in time for the evening crowd. “Fifteen when she was picked up to hit the runway and the cover of Vogue.”
“Whatever your point is, Alex, I don’t think the current wisdom in the department is that Tanya Root is a supermodel, by any stretch.”
“I get what you’re saying. But if the guys have no way to jumpstart this, they might at least talk to people in the fashion community,” I said. “Or do you already know something that Mike didn’t tell me?”
“Don’t be silly, Alex,” Vickee said. “I have no idea what the guys found out today. I’m just talking common sense. The woman’s age, the surgery to increase her breast size, the fact that if a top model has gone missing there’d be someone—an agency head, a boyfriend, a designer—someone to blow the whistle on her disappearance.”
I didn’t have anything else to offer about Tanya Root. I knew that before I opened my mouth. But I didn’t like the feeling of being out of the game. Mike, Mercer, and I had worked scores of these cases as a team, feeding ideas off one another’s insights and experience.
“Keep an eye on my glass,” I said, smiling at the bartender. “If you see me getting low, just add some more and put it on my house tab.”
I could go a lot longer on wine for an evening than I could on whisky.
“Sure thing, Ms. Cooper.”
“Logan would love you to come for an overnight at our place,” Vickee said, changing the subject entirely. “You could spend a few days with us. Readjust to city life.”
“I’m dying to see him,” I said. “Maybe after I get settled in back at home.”
I saw Mercer coming to join us while Vickee was doing her best to offer me another safe haven. He was much taller than Mike—almost six-foot-six—and had his arms spread wide to embrace me.
“You look a hell of a lot better, Alexandra, than the last time I saw you,” Mercer said.
“That’s a good thing,” I said. “My psych-ward pallor was off-putting to everyone.”
“It wasn’t a psych ward. It—”
“Might as well have been,” I said. “Everybody poking and prodding me like I was an alien creature, just set down on Earth for a short visit.”
Mike followed Mercer into the small wood-paneled room and stepped behind me, planting a kiss on my neck.
“Got that one right, Coop,” he said. “Klaatu barada nikto.”
Mike was quoting from his favorite movie about aliens: The Day the Earth Stood Still. I had watched the original and the remake with him more times than I could count.
“Coop believes she was saucered in from another planet to save all the Earthlings, just like Gort,” he said to Vickee. “Why don’t you convince her that other people have the situation under control?”
“I’m trying to do that, Mike,” Vickee said.
“She’s got this messianic complex, like the world will really come to a stop if she isn’t solving sex crimes twenty-four/seven.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Tomorrow is manicure and pedicure, then haircut and color. Relaxed enough for you, Detective Chapman?” I doubted that I could sit still long enough to be pampered, but I so desperately wanted to give it a try.
“Sounds perfect to me,” Vickee said.
“Sparkling water all around,” Mike said to the bartender.
“Don’t do that on my behalf,” I said. “Not-drinking, I mean. I’m off the scotch.”
“Why would you think that’s the reason, kid? Mercer and I have worked up a real thirst today. Might be that something we stirred up by snooping around will have us going back at it later on.”
That was pure bullshit. Mike could throw down vodka all night and, with a few cups of espresso, be back on the job with no sign of overimbibing. Besides, nothing was going to heat up on Tanya Root’s case tonight.
“Progress?” Vickee asked.
“Nothing to speak of,” Mercer said.
“Anyone come up with something helpful on Tanya Root?” I had already perked up at the prospec
t of talking about a real investigation.
“Not yet,” Mike said. “There should be a sketch ready to go public by tomorrow or Thursday.”
“No missing persons?”
“Always. Calls galore, but nothing that fits,” Mike said.
“The model angle?” I asked.
“More likely a hooker. Model wannabe,” he said, turning to the bartender. “You mind switching on that TV, m’man?”
The bartender picked up the remote and clicked the power on. The small set was hung in the corner, above the rows of bottles of aged liquors that had such rich color and, I imagined, soothing taste.
Mike took the remote from the bartender and began searching for Jeopardy!. He had an unerring sense of timing and had rarely missed the last question of the show, whether at a crime scene or the Medical Examiner’s Office or a dinner with friends. For as long as I could remember, Mike and Mercer and I had bet on Final Jeopardy!, passing twenty-dollar bills back and forth throughout any given week as though they were Monopoly money.
“Were there any signs of sexual assault on the vic’s body?” I asked Mercer as Mike found the channel and upped the volume.
“Didn’t Mike tell you there wasn’t much of anything left for the ME to study?”
“Well, how about the interior vaginal vault?”
“Ms. Root was in the water for days,” Mercer said. “Sort of washed out any evidence there might have been.”
“How stupid of me. I should have known that,” I said.
“Saved me from insulting you, Coop. Right on the money. Stupid it is,” Mike said. “Now, pay close attention.”
Trebek revealed the giant blue board with the category: MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL.
I groaned. Things were definitely not going my way.
“Put your money on the bar, kid,” Mike said. “One twenty for us, and another for the bartender, who seems to think you’re the glass-half-full, not half-empty, kind of person.”
“You know as much about baseball as we do,” Mercer said.
“Yankees,” I said, pulling the money from my tote. “Just Yankees.”
“The Final Jeopardy! answer is: HE IS THE ONLY PLAYER TO WIN THE AMERICAN LEAGUE BATTING TITLE WITHOUT HITTING A HOME RUN.”
The timer ticked on while the three contestants seemed as baffled as I was.
“Child’s play,” Mike said. “Okay if we go to our table?”
“I’ll send the Pellegrino over,” the bartender said.
“And my Chardonnay, please?”
“Ixnay on that, kid,” Mike said. “You stay sober and I’ll let you play detective with me this week. Break you back in, if you’re up to it.”
None of the contestants had come up with the correct question. Trebek apologized to them before he got ready to ask the winning question.
“You got this?” Mike asked Mercer.
“Indeed I do.”
They both spoke at the same time. Mercer said, “Who is Rod Carew?” while Mike said, “Who is Sir Rodney, one of the great Zonians?”
The two friends high-fived each other as we walked to the front of the dining room. I looked longingly at the dregs of my drink, left behind us on the bar, while they tossed around statistics about the Twins star who had been born in the Panama Canal Zone.
Mike tried to get me to eat some of his grilled thirty-five-day dry-aged sirloin and sides of onion rings and fries—usually my favorite dinner—but I could barely manage a Caesar salad, which Stephane whipped up at the side of the table.
Vickee chattered on about the social gossip of the last three weeks, trying to keep the conversation away from crime and violence. Keith Scully sent his regards—which signaled to me that Vickee had told him she was on her way to see me tonight—and one of the other women at DCPI was pregnant again and one of the guys from Major Case who’d given me a hard time over the years had been flopped back to a lesser command.
“You can do better than this,” I said. “Something more interesting must have happened while I’ve been in PTSD land. Give me some of the real dope.”
“Why is it always all about you, Coop?” Mike said, leaning back against the smooth leather surface of the booth encircling our table. “Why can’t the four of us just chill for the evening?”
This time I had reason to think it was about me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything in my life had been turned upside down—maybe never to be righted—just a few short weeks ago.
I pushed the salad around my dinner plate, like a six-year-old playing with her food.
“I’m going to go home tonight,” I said. “To my own apartment.”
Vickee flashed a quizzical look in Mike’s direction. “Why don’t you—?”
“I think that’s a great idea,” Mike said.
“Mind your business, Vickee,” Mercer said. “Home is where Alex should be, actually. It’s where she lives, for God’s sake. And there are two doormen on duty ’round the clock.”
I was testing Mike, but he didn’t seem to mind the pushback at all.
I lived in a pricey high-rise close to Park Avenue in the seventies. The trust fund my father had set up for my brothers and me, after he and another doctor he partnered with invented a tiny plastic device used in practically all open-heart surgical procedures, allowed me a lifestyle that public service couldn’t support. The Cooper-Hoffman valve had sent me through Wellesley and the University of Virginia School of Law, and made it possible for me to do the work that I found so deeply rewarding.
Mike’s cell phone vibrated, and he stood up at the side of the booth to take the call. He turned his back to us, listened for close to a minute, then talked for twice as long before rejoining our table.
Mercer and Vickee knew better than to ask him what the call was about. I, on the other hand, felt no need for boundaries at this particular moment.
“Tanya Root?” I asked.
“Since when have I been a one-case wonder, Coop?” Mike asked. “All quiet on that front.”
“None of you are talking about your other work. Rape, murder, the load of cases you’ve been handling. You all obviously think it will upset me.”
Mercer and Vickee shifted in their seats, deferring to Mike’s judgment.
“It was Lieutenant Peterson, kid. Picking what’s left of my brain.”
“On what?” I asked, leaning in toward him.
“A suicide in the south.”
Mike’s command was Manhattan North Homicide, which picked up all the murder cases north of Fifty-Ninth Street, to the tip of Manhattan bordered by the Harlem River. The Manhattan South Squad covered the southern half of the island. Both were elite units made up of skilled detectives—mostly men, even at this point in time—who combined classic investigative talents with evolving forensic techniques.
I sat back. The NYPD was required to respond to suicide scenes. They were, after all, unnatural deaths.
“Why you?” I asked. I wanted Mike to come home with me. He hadn’t yet said that he would, so the last thing I needed was a case to take him away.
“It’s a helium inhalation suicide,” he said. “Hotshot businessman in his hotel room.”
“They’re growing in the ‘right to die’ movement, aren’t they?” Mercer said.
“Yeah. We’ve had two of them in the north this year, and one was mine. The south lieutenant called Peterson to see if we had any pointers for the scene investigation.”
“You’re going too fast for me, guys,” I said. “What’s growing? What’s the manner of death?”
“Exit bag over the head, Coop,” Mike said. “Asphyxiation by gas.”
FOUR
Mike drove me home after dinner. He stopped the car in the porte cochere that ran in front of my building like a driveway.
Vinny and Oscar were the doormen on duty. Vinny was at the passenger’s side door as soon as he saw Mike pull in. He opened it for me and waited while I turned back to Mike.
“Coming up?” I swallowed hard—pride too—as I asked
the question.
“I’ve got an early morning. You try to get some real sleep,” he said, flashing his trademark grin to reassure me that things between us were okay. “Tomorrow night, for sure. After all, you’ll be blonder by then.”
I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Don’t give up on me yet, okay? I’m coming back, I promise.”
Vinny walked me inside, where Oscar had already pushed the button for the twentieth floor. There were security cameras in the elevators, and I knew they would be watching me all the way up.
I turned my key in the lock and pushed open the door. I’d left the lights on when I went out for dinner, preferring to come home to familiar things that I could see.
It was only nine thirty. I poured a sensible amount of Dewar’s and took it into the bathroom with me to sip while I soaked in a hot whirlpool tub.
I climbed into bed with a stack of magazines, ignored the doctor’s advice about taking Ativan with my liquor, and started flipping through pages till sometime close to three A.M., when the drugs overcame my insomnia and I fell soundly asleep.
When I woke up it was almost eleven A.M. Mike had left me three voicemails, among others from friends. He had started his day witnessing the autopsy of a young mother caught in the crosshairs of a gang shooting in Washington Heights. From the morgue, he had stopped at the boutique hotel where the suicide had occurred, and the final call was his attempt to express his concern for me.
I slipped into my robe and walked to the front door to pick up the newspapers.
The Post was on top of the others. Its entire front page was devoted to the man who had chosen a stark hotel room in which to end his life. The photograph was a headshot of a face familiar to fashionistas and socialites, as well as to entrepreneurs who had followed—and tried to emulate—his rags-to-riches story.
Wolf Savage, the seventy-two-year-old clothing designer who had built an empire that rivaled those of Ralph Lauren and Oscar de la Renta, had carted two helium canisters to his hotel room, undressed himself, laid down on the bed, and put a plastic bag over his head.
Mike hadn’t mentioned the name of the dead man to me. I was stunned. The well-known designer was the one who had broken away from his competitors months ago and announced he’d be holding his own fashion show—out of season—at the Metropolitan Museum.
Killer Look Page 3
