“Then think how Mike feels. Gets a very public whooping from the department,” he said, glancing over his shoulder to step off the moving staircase, “just when he’s breaking a major case that seemed impossible to crack.”
The hot air blasted my face like the exhaust from an oven when we walked onto Lexington Avenue. Patroon, my favorite restaurant, was a short walk—only three blocks from the Waldorf—with the most fantastic rooftop bar that was truly an oasis on a steamy Manhattan evening.
“For some reason, Mercer, he turned a three-week rip into a two-month odyssey abroad.”
“Feeling sorry for yourself, Ms. Cooper? Sounds like a slight whine dripping into that sultry, rarely-on-the-losing-side-of-an-argument, jury-box delivery.”
“But—”
“When’s he ever going to get a chance—or the time—for a trip like that?”
“Not till he retires, I guess.”
“And that’s a word you can’t say to him.” Brian Chapman had been determined to see that his son had a college education and didn’t wind up in uniform. Within twenty-four hours of retiring, he died of a massive coronary. Mike got his degree but immediately applied to the NYPD and started at the academy. Police work was as much a part of his DNA as the physical traits he inherited.
“Ten years of carefully balancing our relationship, I go out on a limb and all I wound up doing with Romeo was having a go at footsie in a rowboat, chaperoned by half of Manhattan North and a flotilla of EMTs.”
“The man is all nervous about you. You get that, don’t you?”
“About me?” I reached out and grabbed Mercer’s handkerchief, dabbing my own forehead after he wiped his brow.
“Other-side-of-the-tracks thing going on. Upstairs, downstairs. Mike’s blue-collar as far back as the family tree roots grow in county Cork, and you’ve got a trust fund that so far as I can tell could have helped with the Louisiana Purchase.”
“Et tu, Mercer? That really stings.”
He pulled me back to the curb as a taxi swerved toward us when I tried to cross Lex against the light.
Mercer knew my family well. My maternal grandfather had been a fireman, and my mother—descended from Finnish immigrants who were farmers—had been a nursing student with a great head for medicine, green eyes that caught everyone’s attention, and long legs that she passed on to me. My father, Benjamin—whose ancestors had fled Russia a century ago—was a brilliant physician who, with his partner, had invented a plastic tubing device that was used worldwide in a certain type of cardiac surgery. The Cooper-Hoffman valve had been a godsend to patients and had provided my family with a financial cushion that not only paid for my college education, as well as that of my brothers’, but also allowed me the privilege of dedicating a legal career to public service.
“Just sayin’, Mike’s finding it all a bit intimidating.”
“It’s not like he doesn’t know me better than I know myself.”
“Hey, girl. Vickee and I assumed you’d road tested and rejected all the warm and fuzzy types, the Latin lovers like Luc who darling’ed you to death. You have deliberately chosen new territory. Going Wolverine on us. Brooding, moody, and pound for pound the toughest creature out in the wild. You ought to realize you’ve settled on the most solitary animal I know. Anybody else in your world live in a black box?”
Mike’s studio apartment, not very far from the high-rise co-op in which I lived, was such a tiny walk-up—dark and short on décor—that he had long ago dubbed it “the coffin.”
We were approaching the front of Patroon. The owners, Ken and Di Aretsky, were dear friends of mine who made us comfortable whenever we arrived, and I had a mad crush on Stephane, the maître d’ who saw to it that my glass was never empty.
“Why is it we women always think we can change guys?”
Mercer pulled open the heavy red door. “I know you like a challenge, Alex, but there’ll be no turning this dude into something he isn’t.”
The super-efficient hostess, Annie, kissed me on both cheeks before turning me over to Stephane, whose French accent charmed all comers. “Very late for you two, no?” he asked. “Monsieur Chapman is waiting for you on the roof. Ça va?”
“Très bien, Stephane,” I said, as he led us to the small elevator.
On the fourth-floor rooftop, a smartly designed space featuring an enormous wraparound bar cooled by a canopy holding large overhead fans, Mike was in an animated conversation with Ken Aretsky. The gaggle of thirtysomethings that made this site such a popular attraction was still three deep, many of them sipping pastel-colored confections while hatching hookup plans.
“This looks too serious for me,” Ken said, holding up both hands and yielding his stool to me as Mercer and I approached. “Mike was just telling me about the murder. You three have your work cut out for you.”
Ken caught the bartender’s attention and circled his finger in our direction before tapping his chest. The first round was his treat. He moved on to greet other customers as we started to talk.
“Dewar’s on the rocks for me,” I said.
“Double down on Blondie’s drink, will you?” Mike said, ordering another Ketel One martini for himself and one for Mercer.
I had an elbow on the tall mahogany bar, and Mike stood a foot away, his back against the brick wall of the building.
“I want to explain—”
“Not necessary,” I said to him, watching the bartender pour.
“Peace between you two before I get back from the men’s room, okay?” Mercer said, walking away.
Mike reached for my hand and turned me toward him. He crooked his forefinger and wiggled it, summoning me to come closer to him.
I laughed. “You actually think I’ll respond to your silent commands?”
“It used to work for me. Have I lost my touch?” Mike put his hands on my arms and drew me toward him, picking my head up to kiss me on the mouth.
I broke away and smiled, licking my lips. “They make a good martini here. Do I only get that little taste?”
He pulled me close again and we kissed. Then I rested my head against his chest.
“I’ve missed you, Mike. Seven weeks is a long time.”
“For me, too. I didn’t mean to put you in the middle of things tonight. In the hotel suite with Rocco and the guys, to just show up like that. Scully sniffed me out, heard I’d come back to town and—”
“I get it. I didn’t think you were flying in until Friday, so I was just totally off guard. We still on for Saturday?” As much as I didn’t want to be the one asking that question about our long-awaited romantic dinner, I was too anxious about the time gone by not to know.
“Sure we are. Sure,” he said, stroking my hair, which had curled into ringlets around my neck. “It may be sandwiches in the squad room till Pug collars the bastard who did this, but—”
“Your mother,” I said, pushing back. “Tell me about your mother. That’s the most important thing.”
“She’s going to be okay. Bad scare, and my sisters called me to come home.”
“What is it? Her heart again?”
“Yeah, it’s the ticker. Aortic fibrillation.”
“You should have let me know. I would have been happy to take a shift by her bedside.” Growing up as a cardiac surgeon’s daughter, I probably knew as much about A-fib as any amateur. And I adored Mike’s mother, to whom he was devoted.
Mike smiled his best grin at me. “She’d have liked that, Coop. I just didn’t think to do it. No surgery, though. They just changed her meds. Another forty-eight hours in ICU to monitor her and she goes home. You can call her next week.”
Mercer was making his way back to our side of the bar. We picked up our glasses to clink against his.
“That’s a happier sight,” Mercer said as I stepped out of Mike’s embrace. “I almost hate to break it up.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said, savoring the cold shot of Scotch and thinking of a warm night on top of the Arsenal in the park.
“I just needed a little TLC from Detective Chapman. Rooftops are a good place for us, don’t you think?”
“I wasn’t afraid of intruding on your intimacy, Alex. I just had a call from Pug. A couple of transit cops found some derelicts hauling around a beat-up piece of luggage, a couple of blocks from the hotel, on Madison Avenue. It’s big and it’s empty—”
“Anything inside? Any potential evidence?” Mike asked.
“Seems to have been doused with Clorox or some kind of bleach, the kind of thing that would destroy any residue of DNA or prints.”
Mike swallowed more vodka. “I’m traveling with you, Mercer. Where’d they find it?”
“The Northwest Passage.”
I knew he wasn’t talking about the open sea route through the Arctic from the Atlantic to the Pacific. “Where’s that?”
“You spend entirely too much time in turban town,” Mike said, referring in his politically incorrect way to the headdress of many of the city’s yellow cab drivers. “Public transportation wouldn’t kill you, you know.”
“It’s the northeast corner of 47th and Madison,” Mercer said. “A thousand-foot-long corridor that leads to Grand Central.”
“And to the subways going in every direction out of this hood,” Mike said. “However the killer got this broad into the Waldorf, I’d say he’s comfortably on his way back home.”
“But it sounds like he left us a trophy,” I said, referring to the trunk.
“What are the odds it’s of no forensic value?” Mike asked. “Saddle up, Mercer, and let’s check it out. Northwest Passage to nowhere.”
SIX
Mike and Mercer walked me to my SUV, which I’d parked between Patroon and the Waldorf. The drive home took only six minutes. I used the interior staircase to get into the lobby from the garage, picked up my mail, and said good night to the two doormen on duty.
It was late enough, almost midnight, to forget topping off the night with a cocktail, since I’d left most of mine behind on the bar. But my empty stomach was growling and the liquor was likely to knock me out and prevent nightmarish flashbacks to the image of the young woman in the hotel suite.
A hot shower, no matter the weather, always helped to wash away the detritus of the day. I scrubbed myself, then toweled off and carried my drink into the bedroom.
I often had trouble sleeping, but never more so than after witnessing the kind of brutality I’d seen today. Soft music, relaxing scents, an excess of alcohol, and even the knowledge that I would be working around the clock until this case was solved rarely calmed me enough to do the job. I was fearful of dreaming, fearful of where my subconscious would take me. Eventually, though, I stopped tossing and nodded off.
I was out of bed before six, showered again—cool water this time—to get a fresh start on the day.
It was early enough for me to have a car service take me to Bay Ridge, wait for me while I ran in to say hello to Mike’s mother in the Lutheran Medical Center, and then deposit me downtown at the DA’s office well before Battaglia would be in for his briefing. I dialed the service and asked for a pickup in twenty minutes.
I dressed, made a cup of coffee, and toasted the last remaining piece of food in my refrigerator—an English muffin. There would be no flowers allowed in the intensive care unit, so I sketched a bouquet on a note card with an IOU for a dozen roses to be delivered when Mrs. Chapman got home.
The newspapers were on my doorstep and I picked them up on my way out to read in the black car on the way to Brooklyn. The Post, never known for its good taste, had a banner headline: ASTORIA HYSTERIA—WALDORF TOWERS TRAGEDY. No surprise that I had to dig inside the Metro pages of the Times’ first section to find a story, below the fold, about the body on the forty-fifth floor of the landmark hotel.
Someone had managed to leak a few details to the Daily News reporter—either a hotel staffer or one of the first responders: SLASHER SOUGHT IN SOCIETY HOTEL. The article had a grisly account of the victim as I saw her—deep wide slit in her throat, bathed in blood, and completely naked. I dropped the papers to the floor of the car.
I e-mailed Mike and Mercer, without telling them about my surprise detour. I asked what they had learned about the abandoned trunk, in preparation for my meeting with Battaglia.
Shortly before the car pulled up in front of the medical center, Mercer replied. Trunk is at least sixty years old. Sort of a burgundy leather exterior, with brass fittings. Must have been pretty snazzy once. Interior has that name brand you mentioned in a few scattered places, but the bleach wiped out most of the design. It’s at the lab now. By the way, reported stolen a week ago, with all its contents. From the Yale Club, on Vanderbilt Avenue, just a few blocks from the Northwest Passage.
Those facts saved me the exercise of finding out when and by whom the trunk was bought. It would be easier for the cops to interview the Yale alum to learn how it went missing.
I told the driver that I didn’t expect to be in the hospital more than fifteen minutes. There weren’t many visitors in the rotunda when I entered, so I stopped at the desk and asked for the ICU. The only people in the elevator with me were medical personnel who appeared to be changing shifts.
I pushed through the two heavy doors to the unit. There was an administrator at the nurses’ station, sitting amid the beeping and flashing monitors.
“Good morning. I’d just like to say hello to Mrs. Chapman, if she’s awake.”
“Mrs. Who?”
“Chapman. Margaret Chapman. I’ll be really quick. I just want to give her a hug and leave this note.”
The woman lowered her reading glasses and scanned the patient names on her clipboard.
“Honey, I hate to ruin your morning, but we don’t have any Mrs. Chapman.”
“But she was here last evening. Admitted a couple of days ago. She didn’t—?” The word stuck in my throat. What if something had happened to her during the night?
“This is my fourth midnight shift in a row. There’s been no Mrs. Chapman in ICU. She didn’t die. She didn’t disappear,” the woman said, shaking her head at me as she scrolled down the computerized list of names on her desk. “Hon, she just never was in this hospital.”
SEVEN
I was sitting in the anteroom of Paul Battaglia’s office by 8:10 A.M. Even Rose Malone, his trusted executive assistant and my good friend, was not in yet. I started up the large coffeepot and tried to control the range of emotions that had overtaken me with the thought that Mike had betrayed me.
Rose was only a few minutes behind me. “I just spoke to the boss, Alex. He’ll be on time for your meeting.”
“Thanks so much,” I said, pouring a mug for each of us.
“It’s going to be another brutal day, isn’t it? And you’ve got this horrible new case.”
She didn’t waste a minute setting up the papers on her desk and triaging them for Battaglia’s attention.
“Yes. He wants to be brought up to speed.”
“Go on in and turn on the lights. I’ll hold all his calls.”
I settled into the wooden chair opposite Battaglia’s oversized desk. The original campaign poster from his first run for DA more than six terms ago occupied the wall space behind his desk. The slogan “You Can’t Play Politics with People’s Lives” had become rather oxymoronic, since the man spent much of his day doing exactly that. His plush green leather armchair beneath the poster was a reminder that he expected to be more comfortable than anyone sitting where I was, in the position across from him.
I smelled the district attorney’s cigar before I heard him trumpet his greeting to Rose. No one was actually sure whether he brushed his teeth at night or just kept the last expensive Cohiba of the day clenched in his mouth until he got out of bed.
“Who did Scully think he was fooling by not answering the question about rape at the press conference?” Battaglia said as he entered the room.
“Just trying to keep the reporters out of the trash bins till the ME confirms the findings. The guys
are also trying to figure whether it’s a known perp and if she had sex before she was killed. Always that possibility.”
“Glad you kept your mouth shut, Alex.”
Of course he was. Battaglia got credit for having one of his troops visible, in the fray early on, but no chance for a misquote yet.
“I had nothing to say, Paul.”
“What don’t I know?”
I described the scene in the hotel room to him, told him about Fareed Azeem, dropped in the fact that Mike Chapman was back in play, let him know Johnny Mayes’s theory about the trunk, the late-night discovery of the luggage, and the fact that it was stolen from the Yale Club.
“Holding back on anything?” the district attorney asked me, one hand poised on his telephone.
Battaglia wanted a juicy tidbit to dangle in front of the mayor. He would ask Rose to dial City Hall before I was ten feet away, just to show how in touch he was with events.
“You’ve got it all. I’ll be working out of the Waldorf for the next few days. I’m going to grab Ryan Blackmer to second seat me on this.”
“Regular updates, okay?”
I walked out the door, told Rose where I’d be, and headed across the corridor to my office. Laura Wilkie, my longtime secretary, was already fielding calls.
“I guess you never made it to dinner with your law school buddies last night, did you? I saw you behind Scully on the late news.”
“Slight detour on the way to the restaurant.” Five of my closest friends from the University of Virginia tried to meet once a month. Tales from the civilized lands of mergers and acquisitions, corporate litigation, estate planning, and mogul management were occasionally trumped by an intrusive felony.
“Did you ever get fed?”
“Watered is more like it. I’ll survive.”
“You’ve already got some messages,” Laura said, following me to my desk and handing me the slips with numbers written out. “And Mike, too. You must be glad he’s back in town.”
“Over the moon,” I said. I knew my dry delivery would disappoint Laura, who was Moneypenny to Mike’s droll James Bond imitation.
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