Hell Gate

by Linda Fairstein

  “He’ll be lucky if he finds room in Westchester or Suffolk County. All those facilities are crammed with illegals and detainees. This is going to move slowly,” Nan said.

  “I’ve got plenty to keep you busy in the meantime.” I flopped my papers on top of the shortest pile on my desk and sat down. “Get everybody over the holiday slump. You want to handle finding the interpreters?”

  “Sure. The four of us will set up teams. We ought to get someone undercover in the Ukrainian bars and clubs, don’t you think? Check the network for connections, for word about the anticipated arrival of this new group.”

  These women, all in their late thirties and early forties, were consummate professionals. They had seen the darkest side of human nature, sharpened their litigation skills against lawyers for murderers, rapists, and child molesters, and restored hope and dignity to the most traumatized victims ever to pass through a precinct door. Yet at the end of their long days they went home to their families and functioned as loving wives and mothers-their humor, compassion, and souls somehow intact, their style never compromised.

  “Mercer will take the lead on this, won’t he?” Marisa asked. “Did you have much chance to talk?”

  “He was one of the last men to arrive at the beach, actually.”

  “Will you have the lead on the trafficking?”

  I shook my head. “Donovan’s going to be calling the shots. I’ll fight to keep some NYPD in the mix, but the feds want to run this,” I said. “The reason Mercer was late is that he’s got a piece of Ethan Leighton.”

  “Sounds like everyone but Claire has a piece of Ethan Leighton,” Kelli said. “What’s the dish on that?”

  “This doesn’t leave the room, ladies, okay? There’s a girlfriend named Salma, and Ethan’s fathered a child with her.”

  “I knew he had political ambitions,” Catherine said. “This puts him well on his way to the top.”

  “Mercer said there was a big battle last night at Salma’s apartment.”

  “Like a Jewish Selma?” Marisa asked. “Upper West Side? Too creepy, but I’m picturing a blue-rinse old lady who could be Ethan’s mother.”

  “Think again. Like Salma Hayek. This one’s from Mexico. Twenty-two years old.”

  “Only has a couple of years on Ethan’s twins, then. Ugly.”

  “He’s apparently installed Salma in a brand- new condo on East End Avenue.”

  “Condo, of course. No co-op, so no board approval necessary. And his own district, so she gets to vote for him too.”

  “Stop the commentary, Marisa,” Nan said. “Let Alex finish.”

  “The baby was sick,” I said, standing to notch up the numbers on my thermostat, as the draft from the cracked window behind me chilled my neck. “Spiked a really high fever and Salma wanted Ethan to go with her to the emergency room. He refused, a screaming match followed, and two neighbors called nine-one-one. Ethan had been drinking. Must have figured Salma’s antics were attracting a little attention, so he made it out of there before the cops arrived. Maybe you have seen the clips. Flipped the car and all that.”

  “Hungover in handcuffs is not Ethan’s best look,” Catherine said. “What happened to the baby?”

  “She’s doing fine, according to Mercer. Probably home with Mama by now.”

  “I swear if I see Claire Leighton standing by her man for the postarraignment perp walk, I will lose all my sympathy for her,” Marisa said. “My guy did that to me I’d hang him out to dry. For this little story you swear us to secrecy?”

  “She’s got more,” Nan said. “So far, all you’ve given us is what everybody else will read in tomorrow’s Post.”

  “It’s Lem who told me the rest,” I said. “He was dashing down to the arraignment, but gave me a heads-up that the congressman will be painting Salma as a whackjob. Volatile and all that. Lem says she’s claimed Ethan’s tried to kill her in the past.”

  “Blame the victim-blah, blah, blah. Lem’s just going to use you because you’ve always been so loyal to him, Alex,” Kelli said, pulling on strands of her naturally curly hair. “Unlike your experience learning from him, my first bureau chief was a total bitch. Watch out for Lem. I bet he had his hands all over you. Besides, who’d she claim it to?”

  “All Lem had time to tell me was to check the nine-one-one records. That Salma’s called for help a couple of times before.”

  “Don’t you think somebody would have put those complaints right under your nose? He’s a congressman, for heaven’s sake.”

  “According to Lem, the cops got there each time but Salma refused to cooperate. Never named the perp.”

  “Want me to ask headquarters to hunt down Salma’s phone number and run a check on calls from it?” Catherine asked. “I won’t mention what I’m looking for.”

  I nodded and then smiled at Kelli. “And if you think I can’t read Lem Howell and his hand signals after all these years, give me a little more credit than that. Want to check and see who McKinney assigns to handle the Leighton case?”

  The head of the trial division, Patrick McKinney, didn’t play well with me in the sandbox. He was the most unpleasant individual in a famously collegial office, and resented the fact that I bypassed him and reported directly to the district attorney. His on-again, off-again affair with the head of the Firearms Trafficking Unit had not only broken up his marriage but soured his already difficult personality and exacerbated his penchant for privacy.

  “You going to tell Pat what you learned from Lem?”

  “Kelli, you’re giving me zero points for my judgment today, aren’t you? I’ll tell Battaglia, of course, and see if he wants me looking over the shoulder of whoever gets the Leighton DWI case. Do we have a plan, ladies? Will you figure out everything there is to know about human trafficking before we meet tomorrow? Do a crash course on Ukraine and where these women were likely to end up living and working? Identify who their runners were to be?”

  “Done,” Marisa said. “I have no life anyway. You’re planning an evening at the morgue?”

  “Yes. None of the feds would know how to find the place anyway,” I said. There were very few homicides that fell under federal jurisdiction. Our senior prosecutors knew the morgue as well as the courtroom. “Gives me the jump on learning what happened to the young woman who was apparently murdered on the boat.”

  “Well, be sure to ask Mike what his New Year’s resolution is when you see him later,” Catherine said as she gathered her papers and stood up to leave.

  “Sorry?”

  “He hasn’t told you yet?”

  “What?”

  “Roger Hayes had a party on the thirty-first,” she said, referring to the popular jurist who had run the trial division in the DA’s Office before ascending to the bench. “Lots of Supremes, prosecutors, court personnel, detectives who worked his cases when he was here. Unfortunately, none of us made the cut.”

  “What about it?”

  “My sources tell me that Chapman left the party with Fanny Levit.”

  “You know who she is?” Marisa asked.

  “No. Should I?”

  “Perfect name for Chapman,” Catherine said, checking the polish on her nails. “He’d be the first guy to make a joke about dating a woman named Fanny. Really.”

  “The mayor just appointed her to the civil court. She was in private practice at one of the big firms,” Marisa said. “Judge Levit now. Very fine-looking brunette with a big brain. Heard she had herself wrapped around our Mikey like a python on a mongoose by the time they left Roger’s party.”

  The phone rang. The plastic button that illuminated told me it was Paul Battaglia himself, dialing me directly on what he liked to call his hotline.

  “And-?” I placed my hand on the receiver but waited for Catherine to make her point.

  “That’s all,” she said as they filed out. “Just wondered whether he’s told you anything about it-his new romance with a judge.”

  The phone rang for the third time and I picked i
t up as I tried to figure out why I was distracted by a knot that tightened in my stomach while my pals fed me the rumor about Mike.

  “Alexandra?”

  “Yes, Paul.”

  “I’ve left dozens of messages for you all day.”

  For each of the four I received, he must have repeatedly hectored his longtime executive assistant, Rose Malone, to try to find me.

  “I apologize, Boss.” Battaglia hated to be the last to know anything-on the record or off-that related to any case pending in the office. “I can come in now to tell you what’s been going on.”

  “No, actually, you can’t.”

  I recoiled at the sound of his sharp voice barking at me on the phone.

  “Meet me in front of the building in two minutes, Alexandra. No powdering your nose, no spiffing up. I’ll be waiting for you in twenty-two hundred.”

  The courthouse had been built as a WPA project in the 1930s, with a private elevator shared by the district attorney and the judges. The 2200 New York State license plate number had been assigned to the DA for half a century, made anew every two years by prisoners we had sent up the river for every crime in the book. Battaglia kept his SUV in the only parking spot at the entrance to our office on Hogan Place.

  “Don’t you want-?”

  “Yes, I want everything. But the mayor is demanding to see you, too, Alexandra. You can brief me on the way to City Hall.”

  FIVE

  “You don’t say anything at all, Alexandra. Understand that?”

  I was in the backseat of the SUV with Tim Spindlis, the longtime chief assistant district attorney. Tim was more like a jellyfish to Pat McKinney’s pit bull, the yes-man that Battaglia seemed to need as his second-in-command. To the troops he was known as lazy and spineless, the latter an easy play on his name. The detective from the DA’s Squad who served as Battaglia’s bodyguard was driving, and the district attorney had a cigar clamped in the right side of his mouth as he talked to me out of the left.

  “He’s going to ask me questions, Paul.”

  The five-minute walk to City Hall was quicker than any car could make it through the narrow one-way streets of Lower Manhattan, but Battaglia preferred the statement of passing through the mayor’s tight security detail in his own vehicle with his own bodyguard. During the short ride, I told him everything that had happened since the moment I got to the site of the beached Golden Voyage.

  “I’ll answer them. Give him nothing about Leighton, Alex. Am I right, Tim?”

  “Absoutely, Boss.”

  I turned my head away from Spindlis. His constant toadying to Battaglia was embarrassing.

  “Vin Statler has a real hard-on for Leighton’s old man. Failed business dealings from ages ago,” Battaglia said. “You hate to see a smart young comer like Ethan fail, and fail so publicly, but I’ll bet Statler’s only too delighted with this news. You know Mayor Statler?”

  “Not really. I’ve seen him at a few press conferences and shaken hands at meetings, but I’ve never spoken with him apart from that, or met him socially.” Statler, a fifty-two-year-old divorcé, had been in office for one year, and although I’d been at many functions with him, I had no personal connection to him.

  “Well, he’s no Bloomberg. Made a lot of money in business but can’t seem to translate his talent to the public sector.”

  The police detail at the tiny City Hall parking lot, at the very hub of the Civic Center, recognized the district attorney and let his driver pull in close to the gated entrance.

  We had come to this building together more times than I could count, usually providing facts and details for Battaglia’s legislative proposals or budget arguments he made before City Council members who met within.

  Battaglia was out the door and trotting up the front steps before I could unbuckle my seat belt, with Spindlis at his heels. He turned at the top of the staircase, under the portico, and yelled to me. “Hurry up, Alex. It’s getting late.”

  City Hall, one of the finest architectural achievements of the early nineteenth century, looked like a miniature palace-a mix of Federal form and the detail of French Renaissance architecture, with a copper statue of Justice sitting as its crown. I knew, from meetings that Mike and I had attended together, that it was the oldest City Hall in the country that still housed its original government function.

  I followed the two men through the front door, where we were ushered in around the side of the metal detector that filled half of the foyer.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Battaglia,” a mayoral assistant said, rushing toward us from the direction of Statler’s office, in the northwest corner of the first floor. “Thanks for coming over. He’d like to see you alone first, sir, if you don’t mind.”

  “My chief assistant, Tim Spindlis, will be with me. It’s fine for Ms. Cooper to wait.”

  “Would you mind following me upstairs? The council’s in session and the mayor is waiting for an important vote. He’s in the Governor’s Room.”

  The aide led Battaglia, Spindlis, and me up one of the twin spiral staircases-all marble-to the Corinthian-columned rotunda that served as the staging area for both the City Council Chamber and the old Board of Estimate Chamber. Overhead, in sharp contrast to the public works décor of our own building, the stunning coffered dome soared above us, recalling the Roman Pantheon.

  “Before you go in, your cigar, sir.”

  “Can’t you see it’s not lit?” Battaglia said, walking past the young man and opening the door to the ceremonial room that fronted the building, between the two chambers. Still chewing on the Cohiba, he called out to me, “Stay put, Alex.”

  Spindlis followed the district attorney in, looking back once to give me his best shit-eating grin.

  I had stuffed the list of phone messages in the pocket of my ski jacket and took them out to triage the order in which I’d return them. I flipped open my cell and before I could dial, one of the uniform guards with his back to the door of the council room signaled to me. “Take it upstairs, miss. The noise carries.”

  The cantilevered staircase led up to the third floor, directly beneath the cupola. I positioned myself against the banister beneath the beautifully restored ornamental swag so that I could keep an eye on the door to the Governor’s Room, and managed to reach an adversary in a child abuse case, a doc from the Bellevue emergency room, and an anxious victim inquiring about her case status. An incoming call finally interrupted me.

  “Hey, Mercer,” I said, as his number appeared on my cell screen. “Where are you?”

  “Still out at the wreck. Two more bodies. Males, apparent drownings.”

  “Coming in soon?” It was after five o’clock and darkness had enveloped the city.

  “I hope so. Real drop in temperature. We’ve been moving folks off the beach all day. I think we’re almost done.”

  “You must be running on fumes. Are you still planning to be at the ME’s office?”

  “Yeah. Something weird happened, I thought you ought to know.”

  “What?” It was usually this way in complex cases. Rarely was there a linear unfolding of events, with cops taking one clear turn after another.

  “Salma Zunega. Know who I mean?”

  “Yes, Mercer. Lem’s handling Ethan Leighton’s case. He’s already made his first hands-on appeal. This is the girlfriend, right?”

  “Exactly. Well, she called nine-one-one an hour ago.”

  “What for? Something happen to the baby?” That was my worst nightmare in a heated domestic.

  “Not the baby. She was treated and released. You know how kids run high temps,” Mercer said. His son, Logan, was almost three years old. “I haven’t heard the tape yet but Salma was screaming that Leighton was going to kill her. Talking in Spanish, mostly.”

  “Lem knew Ethan was going to be ROR’d today, after he left my office at two fifteen,” I said. A public official with no criminal history would be released on his own recognizance for anything short of murder. “But it’s not possible h
e got out of the courtroom, past the paparazzi, and all the way up to Ninety-first Street to get to Salma by an hour ago.”

  “His behavior in the middle of the night wasn’t exactly what you’d have predicted either.”

  “I’m not saying that after this performance he couldn’t be that stupid, but Lem would have corralled him for a sit-down the minute they left the building. You know how rigid he is about client control.”

  “Did Howell talk to you about the woman at all?”

  “Exactly this way. Says she’s high-strung and hysterical. Kelli thought Lem was just setting me up for Ethan’s defense. What happened when the cops got there?”

  “Nineteenth precinct uniform responded.”

  “She let them in?”

  “Yeah, Alex. But she denied making the call. Said she didn’t do it. Two detectives took a ride over just to double-check that she was okay. Looked like she’d been napping, still wiped out from the night’s activity.”

  “But the call came in from her phone number?”

  “Definitely. Salma’s landline. That’s what shows up on the sprint report.”

  “So, you’re suggesting she’s nuts too? Lem’s already laying that groundwork.”

  I saw the door below open, and the aide poked his head out, probably looking for me. The guard who had shooed me away earlier pointed, and I held up a finger to ask for another minute.

  “I’m only the messenger, Alex. I haven’t met her yet,” Mercer said. “I just think we’re going to have a handful with Salma. Maybe you ought to plan to meet with her pretty soon-nip this in the bud. Reach out to her before the problem officially lands in your lap. Just keeping you up to speed.”

  “I’m at City Hall with Battaglia. About to meet Statler. Call you later.”

  I went downstairs and the aide stepped aside so that I could enter the room.

  Paul Battaglia had his back to one of the five large arched windows that overlooked City Hall Park. Tim Spindlis had tucked himself into a corner of the room, positioned to catch everything that went on. The DA lifted a hand to gesture to me, formally introducing me to Mayor Statler, who came forward to greet me.