“Not a thing.”
“So someone took everything out—wallet and cash and identification—but either left this in place if it was actually his, or planted it there.”
“It’s not your case, Coop. Spinning wheels in that anxious little brain isn’t going to help anything. I’m just giving you a heads-up.”
“I’m grateful for that.” I’m not sure I really was grateful. I felt like I’d been standing in quicksand since the earliest hours of Sunday morning, and now it had covered my ankles and was pulling me down as it aimed to swallow my kneecaps.
“Is Luc involved in any trouble that you know of, any business problems at all?”
I shot Mike a glance, confident he would recognize the mix of pain and anger I was trying to express, without my saying a word.
“I’m not being funny, kid. I’m not being mean to you,” he knelt in front of me and put one hand on my knee.
“I know that.” I focused on the phone, which was the only thing still left on the old wooden desk. “I don’t think that he is. It’s a huge undertaking, opening a business like this in New York. It’s very risky.”
“Does Luc talk about it with you? Would you know if there was a problem?”
“I just arrived in Mougins on Friday, so we never got around to discussing business. We weren’t even together for forty-eight hours before the woman’s body was pulled out of the pond. And that was after I found the bones.”
“What bones?” Mike stood up in front of me.
“Old ones. Some kind of joke, the cops think, from the catacombs in Paris.”
I knew I needed to tell Mike that the same type of matchbox was recovered from the floater in the pond, but I couldn’t make myself do it. I didn’t want Luc to be dragged any deeper into the quicksand beside me.
“You mean there are people with worse senses of humor than me?” Mike asked.
I smiled and nodded.
“Now I know you’re in a bad way, Coop. You didn’t correct my grammar.”
“That’s a full-time job,” I said, as I got up and walked to the desk. It was three in the afternoon in Mougins. Luc was probably in his office. “Who’s going to handle the case for Brooklyn Homicide?”
“You have to forget I was even here today. Don’t ask questions like that. Read the story in the tabs like everyone else. You don’t know about the matchbox, you’ve never seen a photo of the corpse. Play dumb, kid. It could be a refreshing change.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to burn you with the brass at One PP. I’m thinking about Luc and all the pressure on him now. He’s trying to figure out how to spend so much time away from his kids, whom he adores, and he’s already put a ton of money into this deal.”
“And you should be back in your office with the team. There’s as much pressure on you as there is on Luc. I’m almost sorry I came by,” Mike said. “No good deed, as the saying goes.”
“Thank you. I really mean that. Go on your way and just give me a minute to compose myself. Tell Mercer I’ll be right there.”
Mike watched me for a few seconds, then turned to leave. “I’ll talk to you later.”
When he closed the door, I waited twenty seconds then lifted the receiver and dialed the DA’s office switchboard. “Hi, Mona. It’s Alex Cooper. Would you please give me a line for an international call, and charge it to me personally?”
She asked for the number, so I slowly recited the country and city codes for Mougins.
The door opened and I swung around. Mike charged at the desk and grabbed the phone from my hand, slamming the receiver into its cradle. “I told you to play dumb, Coop, not be completely stupid. Do I have to cuff you to a chair till the evening news breaks the story, or can you just sit tight on this little secret for the rest of the day like I’ve asked you to do?”
SIXTEEN
I didn’t need a distraction of this magnitude to interfere with navigating the MGD case work ahead of us. I needed more focus than I was struggling to regain at that moment.
When Mike escorted me back to my office, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Blanca Robles had made the right choice. She’d told Byron Peaser she would see him at the end of the day. To my mind, that reaffirmed her commitment to prosecute Mohammed Gil-Darsin and let the civil suit be secondary to the criminal trial.
Mercer and I led Blanca down to the conference room where Ellen Gunsher and Ryan Blackmer, backing me up as a witness from the Sex Crimes Unit, waited for us. June Simpson was out of the picture because of my return. Since Ellen had started the questioning yesterday, it made sense to leave it in her hands. She and Blanca exchanged greetings and she got to work.
“I’m going to ask you to go over exactly what happened when you entered suite twenty-eight-oh-six, is that all right?”
“Again?”
“Yes, once again. When you testify before the grand jury, both Alex and I will be with you. I’ll ask all the questions, and you’ll know exactly what they will be before you go inside. No surprises. That’s why I want to be sure we have all the details correct.”
“Mr. Peaser told me there are a lot of people in the room. You know how many?”
“There are twenty-three grand jurors,” Ellen said, going on to describe the ampitheatrical shape of the room. “But only jurors. There’s no judge, and there’s no defense attorney to cross-examine you.”
“Twenty-three people?” Blanca seemed startled by that large a number. She looked up at the ceiling and made the sign of the cross. “Is he there, too? This man who attacked me?”
“No, no. He’s in jail. After you testify, he has to appear before the judge on Friday.”
“But I don’t have to see him, do I?”
“No, you don’t,” Ellen said, as Blanca crossed herself again. “Do you mind starting your story from the beginning, from the time you were sent upstairs to clean the suite?”
Blanca spoke clearly, making eye contact with each of us at different points in her narrative. She explained that the door to the room was ajar, and she had just seen a man from Food Services removing the table tray, which confirmed her belief that the guest had vacated.
“I knocked on the door a couple of times and called out ‘Housekeeping.’ We always do that, announce ourselves, in case the guests are still there. I didn’t hear anything, so I went inside.”
As she spoke, Mercer unfolded a diagram of the large suite. “The hotel sent this over to my office last night.” He spread it out so that we could follow Blanca’s story and see where each act transpired.
“See this corridor here?” She pointed at a long, narrow hallway that led into the enormous bedroom suite. “I was just at the end of this the first time I saw the guy. He was coming out of the bathroom. Right here. And he was naked. Totally naked.”
“What did you do?” Ellen asked.
“I—I kind of froze.”
That would be the first point of attack for the defense. Blanca was putting them ten feet apart, with nothing separating her from the exit. Why didn’t she back up and out, why didn’t she turn and walk away?
“Who spoke first?”
“Me,” Blanca said. “I did. I remember calling out ‘¡Dios mío! Oh my God! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’”
“Then what?”
“He told me not to be sorry. He started walking toward me and told me again there was no reason for me to be sorry.”
And why didn’t you move when he walked toward you? I wanted to ask. That was your chance to get out of the room. I don’t expect he would have chased you into the common hallway stark naked.
“Is that when he grabbed you?” Ellen asked.
“Yes, exactly. That’s when he grabbed me.”
Why are you putting words in her mouth? Did he “grab” her or motion to her or command her to come to do what he wanted? It’s Blanca who has to tell the story. Grabbing, pushing, pulling—and forcing—would be the most critical words in her narrative, and she needed to be the first person to use them.
>
“He grabbed you by the arm?”
“Not yet. First he grabbed—you know—he put his hand on my breast. He told me I was beautiful.”
“What did you do then?”
“I—I told him to stop. I told him I could lose my job for what he was doing.”
So far MGD had made no threats or used any force. We had a misdemeanor unconsented touching of a breast at most. Blanca Robles was concerned about her job, not about her physical safety and well-being.
She paused and lowered her head. When she raised it, both eyes had filled with tears. “That’s when he grabbed me and pulled me toward the bed. He just pulled me and threw me onto the bed.”
Blanca’s hand gestures were getting very dramatic now. I wanted Ellen to stop and break down every conclusory description offered by the witness to a second-by-second account. How did this smaller man overpower such a large, strapping woman and get her the distance—maybe twenty feet—from the vestibule of the room to his king-size bed?
“That’s when he pulled down your stockings and penetrated?”
“Exactly that.”
I leaned forward. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Ellen. Can we just get a few more specifics?”
Blanca turned her tear-filled eyes to me. “For how long would you say the man had his hand on your breast?” I asked.
“Maybe a couple of minutes.”
That was a stock answer that witnesses gave when they were uncertain about time. “Why don’t you look at the clock on the wall, Blanca? Use the second hand to count out two minutes for me.”
Within thirty-five seconds, Blanca spoke up. “That’s way too long already. So maybe I meant seconds. It wasn’t a couple of minutes. Five seconds, ten seconds? That’s how long he touched my breast.”
“I don’t want you guessing, Blanca, like you did the first time you answered and said ‘a couple of minutes.’ Guessing doesn’t help either of us.”
“It’s not a guess. It was seconds—maybe ten—but no more than that.”
That made much more sense. “Then what did he do?”
“He grabbed me and he—”
“What part of you did he grab?”
She gave me an empty stare.
“Can you show me?”
Blanca Robles stopped to think about it. I flipped through the case folder for the medical records. The body chart prepared at the hospital showed no finger marks on her wrists or forearms.
“I’m not exactly sure. Maybe he just pushed me.”
“Did he push you? Or did he grab you?” I asked. “Do you understand the difference between the meaning of those two words?”
“Yes, I understand,” she said, closing her eyes to rethink it. “Pushed. The man pushed me.”
“So, you don’t think he held on to you with his hand?”
“I’m not remembering that so good. I think he just got behind me and pushed.”
Lem Howell would have a field day with the visual of getting Blanca Robles from the hallway onto the bed. I looked to Mercer for backup, but he signaled me to ease up on the witness.
Ellen Gunsher picked up the narrative and got through the entire crime. The encounter lasted less than twenty minutes from the time Blanca entered the room—a good sign that it was not likely a consensual affair—but still leaving many points that needed to be firmed up before eliciting her sworn testimony.
How did he get her from the bedroom to the bathroom and onto her knees? If he held her down with one or both of his hands, what was she doing with her hands? And—the argument that Lem would undoubtedly tease the jury with—why didn’t she bite him when she had the opportunity to end the attack?
There might be perfectly logical answers to these questions, but Ellen hadn’t coaxed them out of her witness yet, and I wanted to know them before Blanca took an oath to tell the truth to the grand jury.
“Now, there’s something you said yesterday, Blanca, that we have to go over again. You explained to me, just like you told Detective Wallace on Sunday, that you left the room before Mr. Gil-Darsin did, isn’t that right?”
Blanca’s thick eyebrows met over her nose as she frowned at Ellen Gunsher. “I did.”
“And you told us that you hid yourself at the far end of the twenty-eighth-floor hallway until you saw him leave the room and get on the elevator, right?”
Blanca eyed Ellen distrustfully. “So?”
“Well, one of the detectives talked with a guest from that floor who checked out just two minutes before Gil-Darsin. He was in the room opposite the place you said you were hiding,” Ellen said, pointing to the diagram. “And he says there was no one there—no one in the hallway at all when he left his room. Now, he could be wrong—”
“No, no, no,” Blanca said, moving forward in her chair and waving her right hand back and forth. “What I told you? I made a mistake. I was very very nervous and what I told you is a mistake.”
The expression on Ellen’s face froze. She stared at Blanca and then continued. “So you were mistaken on Sunday, when you talked with the detectives?”
“Yes. I’ve been wanting to correct that with you today.”
“And you were mistaken again yesterday when you told all of us the same thing? When did you first realize you had misspoken?”
“I knew it yesterday,” she said, crying again and wringing the handkerchief she took out of her bag. “But I thought you’d get mad at me if I changed my story. I don’t want you to be mad at me, okay?”
Mercer moved his chair closer to Blanca Robles. “Nobody’s going to be mad at you for what you tell us, so long as it’s the truth.”
“As God is my witness, Mr. Mercer, everything I’m telling you is the truth,” she said, making the sign of the cross on her chest before stretching her arms out on the table and putting her head down. She sobbed as I watched her tears flow. “You believe that pig over me?”
“Calm down, Blanca. Everyone is with you here because we believe you. Do you remember what you did when you left the room after you were attacked? That’s what we need to know,” Mercer said.
“How about a fifteen-minute break? You’ll feel better after that,” Ellen said, standing up as she checked the time on her watch. “Maybe Laura can get some coffee ordered in.”
This was the worst possible moment to give Blanca a breathing spell. She had just been caught in a significant inconsistency about the moments after the crime occurred. She was on the ropes, and I wanted to keep her there to find out whether it was just a mistake occasioned by her trauma or an intentional lie.
“I’ll ask Laura to call out an order as soon as we’re finished here,” I said. “Let’s let Blanca explain what happened.”
Blanca picked her head up from the table. “I’d really like some coffee, Miss Ellen.”
“Right away,” Ellen said, walking to the door and opening it. “Alex, you want to show her where the restroom is?”
“Sure.”
Ellen stepped out and I shook my head at Mercer and Ryan.
“I bet you haven’t even had a chance to meet with your priest yet, have you, Blanca?” I asked.
She wiped her tears with the tissue I handed to her.
“Not yet.”
“What church do you go to?”
“’Scuse me?”
“What’s the name of your church?” I asked, walking to the row of windows that faced out on Centre Street, over the courthouse steps.
“Why you want to know?”
“Perhaps I can take you there for an hour or so at the end of the day,” Mercer said. “It might help you to talk with your priest.”
And perhaps I could get one of the answers Battaglia wanted, so he could go to work on the archdiocese to prove his bona fides. The crucifix, the comments relying on God as her witness, the religious gestures—Ellen was convinced of Blanca’s credibility in some measure because of those things.
Blanca’s eyebrows came together again as she tried to figure what Mercer really wanted. “I don’t have ti
me for no church.”
“I don’t make it there every Sunday either,” Mercer said with a smile. “When’s the last time you went? Maybe we can get you back. Maybe you’d like that.”
She waved her right hand over her shoulder. “Dios mío. I haven’t been to church since I left my country. I carry my religion here,” she said, now patting her heart.
Mercer looked over at me and shrugged. So much for Ellen’s reliance on the depth of Blanca’s faith.
“That crucifix you’re wearing,” I said, “is very beautiful. Have you had that for a long time?”
“My boyfriend bought me this, before he left to go back to our country. He likes me to wear it ’cause he says it will keep other men away from me,” Blanca said, fingering the handsome cross as she answered. “I guess it didn’t bother so much this pig in the hotel room. I guess it didn’t do me no good after—”
Her sentence was interrupted by the sound of two gunshots that rang out from the street eight floors below. They startled me, and I turned to look down at the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk directly beneath our windows.
I glanced back to check on Blanca, who didn’t even fidget while I trembled with fear that someone in our small universe at the courthouse—a cop, a lawyer, a court officer, a witness—had been hurt.
Mercer rushed toward me. “It’s okay, Alex. It’s—”
I looked down again to see someone staggering to get back on his feet, falling again as the man being wrestled to the ground by onlookers got off a final shot before the gun was kicked out of his hand.
SEVENTEEN
“I bet you didn’t get a chance to read your e-mails yesterday, did you?” Ryan asked, smiling at me as I watched the gunman and his victim brush off their clothes and reposition themselves in the crowd.
“Laura only printed out the ones related to this case.”
“So you obviously didn’t get the ‘Please disregard the sounds of gunfire in front of 100 Centre Street between eleven A.M. and one P.M. on Tuesday. The crew of Law and Order: SVU will be filming here at that time.’”
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