Mercer Wallace phoned in shortly after six. "Heard your weekend took an interesting twist."
"Mike called you?"
"Let's say I hunted him down."
"Does he know Battaglia's put me on Talya's case?"
"Good going. No, he didn't say. He's at Lincoln Center. He's going to meet me for something to eat at Shun Lee West at seven o'clock. Want to join us?"
"Is it okay with him?"
"Hey, who's making the ask here? You're my date."
"I'll be there."
"You're not passing off Dr. Sengor's case, are you?"
"Not a chance. I'm getting antsy about the tox results. You think Jean and Cara are willing to hang around this week?"
"Another day or two. What are you going to do about the grand jury?"
"I'm ready to go as soon as we get confirmation on the drug testing."
"You talk to anyone in administration at Sengor's hospital?"
"Yes," I said. "Our perp has been suspended. Risk management didn't want to take the chance he'd be exposed to any other patients."
Liability in medical centers had become such an expensive prospect that most legal offices had been renamed "risk management units," responsible for the oversight of all problems that might lead to litigation.
"Double-edged sword. I hated to think he'd still be with patients, but this way we have no idea of his daily whereabouts."
"They wanted him to keep his beeper so they can stay on top of him, too. They've required him to respond to them twice a day. Suspended with pay is the way they handled that one. He's already called in twice, so the doctor in charge of the psychiatric department says he's cooperating."
"I'll see you at the restaurant?"
"Absolutely." I called my friend Lesley Latham to break my dinner date, apologizing for the last-minute cancellation. I took the cab to West 65 th Street and found Mercer and Mike seated at the bar.
I walked past his stool and patted Mike's shoulder.
"Of all the gin joints in all the Chinese restaurants in the world, you had to walk into mine?" he asked. "Who invited you?"
"Maybe I'm in the wrong place. I was supposed to meet a couple of my friends here. I guess that really is a gun in your pocket and you're not so happy to see me."
"I'll take the weight," Mercer said, embracing me. "I needed some Peking duck and the service is so much better when we cut Alex in. Figured it was time to get back in the Jeopardy! habit, don't you think?"
For as long as I could remember, since we'd started working on cases as a team more than a decade ago, the three of us stopped whatever we were doing when we were together to bet one another on the Final Jeopardy question at the end of the show. Mike had kept witnesses waiting at the morgue, interrupted cocktail partiesin full swing, and put the police commissioner on hold more than once to test his trivia knowledge against ours for twenty bucks a shot.
By the time the bartender served my drink, Mercer had coaxed him into turning the wall-mounted television set to the quiz show. We made small talk until Alex Trebek revealed the category the final question: Sports.
Mike and Mercer were both jocks who followed college and professional sports with great enthusiasm. Mercerhad turned down a football scholarship at the University of Michigan to join die NYPD. I put my twenty-dollar bill on the bar and brightened only slightly when Trebek's final answer involved a Yankee legend.
"Field named for Native American tribe where Babe Ruth hit his longest home run."
I could think of rival teams in the long history of my pinstriped favorites, but nothing about the names of any of their fields that qualified in this category. Fenway and the Jake wouldn't do it. Mike wanted to double the stakes, but Mercer was as puzzled as I and we held our ground.
The music ticked away the time as all three of the contestants seemed to be stumped.
"I'm so sorry," Trebek said, ready to reveal the question.
"What is Sing Sing prison?" Mike asked, sweeping the three bills off the bar. "Home of the Sint Sinck Indians as well as the aforementioned Old Sparky. Yankees played an exhibition game against the inmates every year and the Bambino slammed the longest ball of his career there one time. Something like six hundred and twenty feet or more. You know why the state built the prison on the Sint Sinck land? 'Cause there was enough marble for the thugs to be put to work quarrying it-it was murderers and rapists who dug the stone that built Grace Church and New York University."
Mercer led us to our table, a corner in the sunken pit beneath the giant mouth of the long black dragon that was suspended from the ceiling.
"You know that I'm officially catching Talya's case, don't you?" I asked Mike.
"The lieutenant just gave me the news."
"I figure you could bring me up to speed over dinner and then I'll go back to the Met with you."
The West Side branch of our favorite Chinese restaurant was just across Broadway from the Lincoln Center complex, a popular dining spot for theatergoers.
Mike was crunching on a handful of crispy noodles as we waited for our order of hot-and-sour soup. Not only did the task force have to deal with the several hundred employees who were in the opera house on the day and evening of the murder, but they learned that more than two thousand other workers had been on the payroll within the last year.
"Each time we start to question somebody, seems he adds three names nobody gave us before. It's a union shop, and most guys who work there have had a father or uncle or cousin who got their foot in the door earlier. If someone's covering for a relative, we'll never get to first base."
It was rare to hear Mike sound so discouraged in the initial stage of an investigation.
"We've still got forensics to shed some light."
"The droplets of blood near the place she went down?" Mike said. "Preliminary run of the DNA looks like it's Natalya's. Autopsy findings included dried blood in her nasal cavity, probably from the same blow that knocked the contact lens out of her eye. Hair seems to be torn out of her scalp. That figures, too. Those don't connect to anyone else."
He slugged his vodka and gritted his teeth. "Serology lifted two different profiles from that white kid glove that was found near the bloodstains in the corridor. Remember, that man's glove I told you about? One profile from skin cells on the inside, another from the outer surface. For whatever it's worthy they don't match eachother. He might have something more to work with by late tomorrow."
"And the white hairs? Did you ask him to submit them to the FBI for comparison to the samples we got from Berk's office?" The more difficult processing of mitochondrial DNA still had to be outsourced to the FBI lab.
"Forget you ever saw Joe Berk's hair, Coop. The strands that were found with Galinova's body? They weren't human. The guys at the M.E.'s office didn't need the feds to tell them these came from some kind of animal."
15
I was at my desk at eight the next morning, structuring a grand jury presentation on the drug-facilitated-rape case in hopes I'd have the toxicology results before my witnesses got restless and bolted home to Canada.
By eight thirty, Mike was standing in my doorway, looking more together than he had last evening, now dressed in a navy blazer, pink oxford-cloth shirt, and neatly creased chinos.
"Have I forgotten that we were supposed to meet?"
He walked to my desk, took my unopened second cup of coffee, and began to drink. "Won't be the last time I take a bullet for you, kid."
"What now?"
"I got a call from the PC in the middle of the night. Had to be in his office at seven. And no, it wasn't for a promotion," he said, sitting opposite me and stretching his legs out in front of him.
"Something on the case?"
"Can you believe this dirtbag, Joe Berk? Gets his personal physician to check him out of the hospital around dinnertime and send him home with private-duty nurses. Calls the precinct and reports a theft from the apartment. Says the thief is either the niece, or more likely, whichever member of the
department was present."
I thought of all the valuable artworks and antiques that filled the duplex. "What'd he say was stolen?"
Mike smiled as he answered me. "Three television sets from his bedroom."
"The monitors he had hooked up so he could watch women undressing?"
"Not the way he tells it. Just his entertainment center. Any theatrical mogul would have multiple screens to watch different presentations simultaneously. He didn't happen to mention that they were wired into somebody's bathroom."
"So how about Mona? Didn't you tell the commissioner we left before she did?"
"Mona denies ever being inside the apartment. LAB goes to interview her at midnight," Mike said, referring to the Internal Affairs Bureau detectives who would have been assigned to a complaint of official misconduct. "They pry her out of bed, away from her boy-friend. She says she was stopped at the door by me when she showed up at Uncle Joe's home to help her cousin through the night-and that I was inside with another woman, going through the place. Never let her inside."
"Tell Joe to check the nipples of that little device that dimmed the lights if he wants a few of Mona's skin cells." I kicked back my chair from the desk. "Were the monitors really gone? Did someone take them out after we left and before Berk got out of the hospital?"
"IAB searched the apartment. No sign of them."
"Well, I'll certainly tell the commissioner-"
"Your name never came into this. You were right about Mona paying no attention to you at all. She assumed you were another detective."
"I'll let Battaglia know as soon as he gets in."
"Let it go. Don't you see what Berk's trying to do? He just wants to jam it down my throat that he knows we're on to the concealed cameras. It's a great big 'fuck you' he's sending me, telling me to keep away from his private perversions. He could have said I took ten thousand bucks in cash from the apartment or some other valuable object. This is mainly to stick me under the PC's nose and remind me that Berk can play rough any time he wants to."
"And the PC?"
"C'mon, Coop. The commish had to stroke the old bird but he knows I'm not rolling over for a few lousy television sets. He just wanted to know how I got into the apartment and make sure my ass was covered on that."
The phone rang. "Alexandra? Dr. Kestenbaum here. I'm looking for a little legal guidance, if you don't mind. It's on Galinova."
"Sure. What's come up?"
"There's a gentleman who called last evening. He says he's cleared it with her estranged husband and he's going to claim the body and take it home to London for burial. I'm going to have written confirmation from the husband later today, but I just wanted to make sure it's okay with you and the police that I release the remains."
"Who is he? What's he to-"
"His name is Hubert Alden. I don't know much about the ballet, but this guy claims to be Galinova's patron. Does that mean anything to you?"
"Yeah. I'd like to talk to him before you sign off on it. Do you have a way for us to contact him?"
Kestenbaum gave me the number. "He's flying in on the shuttle this morning. He's got some meeting to attend today. You'll be able to reach him at his office after five."
I repeated the news to Mike. "What do you mean, patron?" he asked.
"One of the more controversial subjects in the refined world of the dance. There's very little public funding of the arts these days, so some ballet companies are offering this kind of sponsorship as a way to raise money."
"I don't get it."
"American Ballet Theater, the Atlanta Ballet, the other companies that do this, they actually hold auctions. For the right price-"
"How much?"
"For a regional company, maybe ten or twenty thousand. For a prima ballerina at ABT, maybe one hundred thousand or more. We can get a copy of last week's program. It'll have a photo of Talya and say something like 'the artistry of Natalya Galinova is supported by'"-I looked at the name I had scribbled on myPost-it-
" 'Hubert Alden.' "
"So Mr. Alden, he owned her?"
"I think the dancers would tell you no. But that's what makes the whole concept so awkward. Most of the companies claim they urge distance between the patron and the artist, but other directors want them to bond with each other. They want them to hang out so that the rich donor can introduce his or her friends to the dancers and hope they want to jump on the same bandwagon."
"So Alden after five? Then you can take a ride with me right now."
Mike was much more animated now than he had been at dinner last evening. Berk's antics had goosed him and he was getting back into the chase.
"I'd like to polish up this presentation. Where are you going?"
"To drop in on Mona Berk. Leave a note for Laura. Tell her you're in the field."
Laura would find assistants to cover the walk-ins who appeared on my doorstep when they were apprehensive about calling the police to report a crime. There was nothing on my desktop that couldn't wait until the afternoon.
We drove to midtown in Mike's department car, littered with empty soda cans, packs of red licorice twizzlers, and a stack of the weekend's tabloids announcing Talya's death.
Mike's NYPD laminated parking plaque allowed us to leave the ear just off Times Square in a loading zone on the already double-parked length of West 45th Street. The first of the tour buses was beginning to disgorge passengers into the eclectic canyon that remained the cross-roads of the city, if not the world. Above the tacky billboards rose the gleaming profiles of the Conde Nast and Reuters buildings, new entries in the booming and gentrified district.
The army recruiting station was already open and operating at Duffy Square, tourists were lining up for the evening's half-price seats at the TKTS booth, a palm reader was reaching for my arm and urging me to come upstairs for holistic healing and advice on all matters of mind and spirit, and a street missionary was handing out cards that told me exactly what I could do and how much it would cost to save my soul.
The electrified morning headlines were crawling around the ledges on several of the skyscrapers that had revitalized a neighborhood which had boasted little more than XXX-rated movie houses when I first started working in the prosecutor's office. Galinova's death and the fact that it was being mourned by balletomanes all over the world ran fifth behind the dismantling of a terrorist cell and a political scandal in New Jersey.
"You know what that's called?"
I looked up at the moving signage. "No idea."
"It's a Motogram. First one in the world was here, running on the old New York Times Tower, starting with the presidential election returns in 1928. Used fifteen thousand lightbulbs to wiggle the news around four sides of the building."
"Your dad?" Mike's father had filled the boy's head with stories of every corner of the city's history.
"Nope. This one's my mother. You know her postcard collection," he said, referring to the vintage photographs she had saved since childhood. He pointed at the giant Barbie billboard display that now garishly controlled the airspace in Times Square. "In the 1930s, there was a forty-two-foot-long angelfish advertising Wrigley's Spearmint gum. In the forties, there was a thirty-foot-high waterfall with a gargantuan woman-like an Amazon-draped in a Grecian toga. In the fifties it was a huge Pepsi bottle, which gave way to pouring Gordon's Gin a decade later. First one I remember is that giant Camel cigarette ad-don't you?-with the huge smoke ring blowing out of it. Those images are all classics-it's the most monumental advertising arena in the world."
Broadway was a throwback to another age. The business center of the theater world, its gilt-and-marble lobby had been refurbished to reflect its century-old splendor. The directory of offices listed on the wall reflected a warren of cubbyholes in which production deals and partnerships were made, and wannabes hitched their wagons to star vehicles.
Mona Berk's company was on the eighth floor. The old wrought-iron elevators still required a manual operator, who knew the stops of all his re
gulars and punched them into the keyboard.
We got off the elevator and found the entrance to 807, the corner suite. The secretary, who didn't appear to be more than eighteen, looked up from her fashion magazine as we entered the reception area.
"Mona Berk, please? We're here to see Ms. Berk," Mike said.
She scanned her appointment book. "She expecting you?"
"More or less."
"She'll be here any minute. She's already got a nine thirty, though."
"We'll be quick."
She picked up her pencil to make a notation in the book."Is it about a property? Would you mind giving me your names?"
"Yeah. I'm Jack Webb. It's about a musical version of Dragnet."
"Cool. Have a seat, Mr. Webb. And you are?"
"Alice. She just knows me as Alice."
Ten minutes later, Mona Berk walked in the door, laughing and talking to the man who accompanied her. She pulled up short when she saw both of us.
"Well, good morning. It's detective-detective…"
"Chapman. Mike Chapman. This is Ms. Cooper, from the District Attorney's Office. Mind if we come in for a few minutes?"
"Does this mean you haven't solved that murder case yet?" Mona said, turning to her companion to explain who we were. "These are the officers who were figuring poor Uncle Joe had taken enough Viagra last week to attack that poor ballerina."
She picked up her mail from the in-box and motioned us to follow her into her office.
The man held the door open for us.
"And how about that encore performance for your uncle? That must have made you and your cousin very happy," Mike said, taking a seat in a black leather armchair and pulling one up beside it for me.
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