"What kind of setup, Joe?" Mike said, softening his tone. "You looking at Coop? There's nothing you can say to shock her, trust me. She's seen and heard just about everything."
I was slowly moving back to the far wall, knowing that Berk would be more likely to disclose something he found embarrassing if I faded out of the room.
"She doesn't look as tough as you," Berk said, lifting his head to stare at me.
"They got a whole wing at Attica named in her honor, Joe. A pavilion, packed to the gills. SRO in your business. Full of the most depraved men you'd ever hope not to meet in a dark alley. And they didn't wind up there because of Coop's charm. Where most women have a heart? She's got a pair of steel balls. That's how come you know when she gets excited-you can hear them clanging against each other from miles away. Feel free to speak your mind in front of her. I always do."
Berk's mouth twisted in a half-smile.
"You were telling me you think someone set you up. You mean, with Lucy?"
"I got a weakness for women. Not babies, not teenagers, not little girls. I like the ladies. Nothing wrong with that, is there?"
Mike was silent. He probably had the same visual I did, which made the thought of getting anywhere near Joe Berk's satin pajamas repugnant at any age.
"And the truth is, the ladies like Joe Berk," he said, raising the same half-smile as he patted his belly. "A good-looking young guy like you might find it hard to believe they throw themselves at me, but they do. I know, I know-you're thinking it's the money or the casting couch or the connections. Lemme tell you, Mr. Chapman, women are suckers for guys with a lot of class and a lot of clout."
"Lucy DeVore, Joe. How'd you meet her?"
"Dancing. I saw her perform in something, a month or two ago. Somebody introduced her to me after the rehearsal and bingo, she was looking for my help."
"Who made the introduction? Dancing in what?"
Joe's head was back against the pillow now, his eyes closed. "I said a rehearsal, in a studio. Day in, day out, that's what I do everyday to make a buck. You expect me to remember what house, what stage, what the tune was? It don't work like that, sonny."
"She's pretty striking looking. Hard to forget that long platinum hair, longer legs."
"What kind of stupid are you, Chapman? She's platinum this month because that's the name of the show she wants to be in. I met her, she was something else. Maybe dark-haired, maybe red. If she was blond, I might have shtupped her. I might have given her a run for her money."
"Joe, look me in the eye. You telling me you had a shot at that sexy kid and didn't even make a stab at it?"
"May my late wife rest in peace. Izzy Berkowitz, too. Nothing."
"What kind of help did she want?"
"What they all want. Put her in a show, make her a star. Hey, she was practically at the end of her rope when I met her. Back-to-back auditions, with every unemployed gypsy in the business showing up."
"Was she living at the Elk then?"
"I don't make house calls, detective. I don't know where she was living. You'd leave this place if you owned it?" Berk said, waving his hand in a circle around the room. "They come to me, Chapman."
"Did you give her money?"
"Yeah, I gave her a few hundred bucks. Told her to get a decent meal, buy some clean clothes."
"For nothing in return, no reason at all?"
"You the only one that gets to ask questions, Chapman? I'm just the answer man?"
"Your turn, Joe. Ask away."
"You're so interested in my love life. Lemme ask-you and Ms. Cooper here-you two an item?"
I had to bite the inside of my cheek to stop from laughing out loud. Joe Berk stopped Mike in his tracks and seemed pleased to have done it.
"Like you said, Joe, the broads like guys with class and clout. I come up short on both."
"C'mon. You're a handsome kid, full head of hair, you're built like an athlete, and you got that kind of John Wayne swagger about you. You might even be smart-how the hell do I know. What's wrong with you, Ms. Cooper?"
I walked up behind Mike's chair and tousled his hair. "I've tried everything in the book, Mr. Berk. He just won't give me a tumble. I'll have to come back and get some pointers from you when you're feeling better."
"Think, Joe. Anything Lucy might have told you that would help as with her?" Mike had warmed up the old guy, now he wanted results.
"I've given you all the help I can. How do you figure Rinaldo Vicci comes into the act? You think he represents street urchins? I know my niece won't consider the girl for a role if I make the call, so I told Vicci to take her to the audition. He talks out of both sides of his mouth. See if either stream of his bullshit makes sense."
Maybe if Mike pulled on the fringe of Vicci's cashmere scarf Rinaldo would remember that Lucy DeVore got to him directly from Joe Berk. Now I had to figure why Vicci had lied to me about that.
The nurse was in the doorway of the room, tapping the face of her watch to signal that she was about to cut short our visit.
Mike stood up and swung the chair back into place. He reached for the plastic drinking cup on the bedside table that Berk had been sipping from and crumpled it in his hand, tucking it in his pocket. "Sleep on it, Joe. Anything comes to mind and you don't want to bother your pal the commissioner tomorrow, give me a ring. By the time Lucy's out of the anesthesia, she'll tell us the rest of the story."
Berk cocked his head and opened one eye to look at Mike. "Fairy tales, detective. Little girls make up stories like they were fairy tales. Watch out for that."
I was headed for the staircase when I heard Mike tell Berk he was still working on the murder investigation of Natalya Galinova. "This patron of hers, Hubert Alden, you know him, too?"
"If I came from his kind of background, they'd call me a patron, too. It's all in the bloodlines, Chapman. You oughta know that by now. Sure, Joe Berk knows everybody."
"Any idea why he was at the Imperial today?"
"What do I care? I'm still trying to figure out why he thought he was entitled to take Talya out to dinner after her performance last Friday. Maybe Vicci called him, maybe Mona invited him. They'd probably be looking for him to pick up the tab for your girl, Lucy, if they really thought she had a future."
"The night she was killed?" Mike asked, aware that Alden had just claimed to us that he had been in Vail the night of the murder. "I had the impression Mr. Alden was out of town last weekend."
"Why? Because he told you that's where he was?" Berk shook his head. "If I tell you I'm the Count of Monte Cristo, you're gonna believe me? No, but him, you take his word for it."
"You know different?"
"When I got to Talya's dressing room, she was still onstage. I picked up her cell phone to call my driver. I saw she had a message, so I played it back. It was Alden, telling her he'd pick her up and take her for a late supper if she gave him a ring."
"How come you didn't tell us that when we talked to you on Saturday?"
"It slipped my mind, Mr. Chapman. My short-term memory is bad." He gave Mike his crooked smile, the one that expressed his delight at being a hard-ass.
"You didn't happen to collide with Mr. Alden backstage, did you, Joe?"
"I didn't stick around, buddy. I don't do time-shares with my ladies. I'm a very exclusive kind of guy."
21
Mike was sprawled on the sofa in my den while Mercer read to him from the delivery menu of PJ Bernstein's deli. I had just gotten off the phone with Maxine, who told me that Lucy was in the surgical recovery room. Her condition was guarded, and the doctors had decided to place her in what they called a controlled coma because of the concussion, the possible brain damage, and their ability to better manage her pain. It was clear she wouldn't regain consciousness for several days, and I told Max there was no reason for her to stay at the hospital any longer tonight.
Mercer had poured us each a drink. Just over an hour ago, the toxicologist had called to give him good news on the case of the two Can
adian women. Large quantities of Xanax had been found in the residue of the blender and in two of the three drinking glasses that had been taken from the dirty sink of Dr. Selim Sengor.
He raised his glass to toast the results and I swirled my scotch around before enjoying its smooth taste.
"Cara and Jean are getting a bit stir-crazy. They were ready to hit the road and head for home," Mercer said.
"Now I can put them in the grand jury first thing in the morning."
"How about Sengor? You going to wait until his court date on Friday to give him the news?"
"Not a prayer. Eric's a decent guy," I said, referring to his lawyer. "I'll call him tomorrow, tell him I'm going toadvance the case and ask him to surrender Sengor first thing on Thursday. I not only get to raise the bail, but I get it out of Judge Moffett's courtroom and upstairs for a Supreme Court arraignment."
Mike was telling Mercer about the painstaking police work at the Met in the Galinova investigation while we ordered dinner and waited for the end of Jeopardy! He removed Joe Berk's plastic water cup from his pocket, holding it by its base in his fingertips.
"Bag it for me, Coop."
"What were you thinking when you took this?"
"When Berk said that he hadn't laid a glove on Lucy, it reminded me of the glove-you know, the man's glove the guys found at the crime scene at the Met. Serology developed two DNA profiles on that. Here we've got a little saliva from Joe's lips, just lor comparison. Piece of cake."
"I can't use this in court. You walked out of his house with it. And it's not like the night when we thought he was dead. This time you were standing right next to him."
"It's just a long shot, for investigative purposes only, I'm telling you, we can call it abandoned property. Thenurse had a whole stack of ' em there. He wasn't going to use this cup again, I just helped clean up after him."
"Toss it, Mike. If we're going that route, we'll do it the right way."
"And tonight's Final Jeopardy category," Alex Trebek said, interrupting our legal squabble, "is Geography."
We each had areas of strength, and this was Mercer's. His father's longtime job as a mechanic at Delta Airlines had exposed young Mercer to a world far beyond his middle-class neighborhood in Queens. He had studied the maps and charts his father used to bring home to him and knew about place-names in foreign lands of which I'd never heard.
Mike put his twenty on the coffee table and walked to the kitchen during the commercial break. "I'm going south on this one. Anything in the fridge?"
I had never mastered the basics of cooking and rarely had more than survival food, usually in the form of takeout from Grace's Marketplace, a block away. "Your favorite pate and some heavenly Stilton."
The answer to the question was posted for the three contestants: "In 1754, Horace Walpole coined this word, which refers to the original name of the country we now call Sri Lanka, and means 'accidental discovery.'"
"You can't trust this guy Trebek. He tells you it's geography and then he throws one right in the lap of the English Literature major," Mike said, slathering the rich cheese on a cracker and biting into it. "Coop's already spent the money on her next pedicure. You know this one, bro?"
"I couldn't do any better than that guy," Mercer said, laughing at the computer software designer from Michigan who guessed, "What is Ceylonese?"
"Well, for a time Sri Lanka was known as Ceylon, but that's not what we're looking for," said Trebek. "Sounds like an artificial fabric, doesn't it? You're thinking of Celanese, probably. Different spelling, of course."
"What is serendipity?" I asked. "If I'm right, Mike, I get you to come to the Vineyard with me this weekend."
"If you're right, you get your forty bucks and another chance for me to tell you that you spent way too touchtime with your nose in the books and not nearly enough in the local frat house getting some practical experience."
"You're exactly right about that, sir," Trebek said.
"The ancient name of Ceylon was Serendip," I said, picking up the two bills, "and there was this wonderfullywhimsical folktale about the three princes of Serendip and a lost camel, which Walpole came across in his reading. So he created this very expressive word, and now it's used for everything from the discovery of X-rays to penicillin, both accidental side effects of the things for which Wilhelm Roentgen and Sir Alexander Fleming were actually searching. You should spend more time reading and a little less on the bar stool at Sheehan's."
"And you need to get out a little more," Mike said, smiling at me as I got up to put more ice in my drink. "Youknow, Mercer, come to think of it, there might be a better way-perfectly legal-to get DNA from Joe Berk."
"You sound like a man with a plan."
"I think, Detective Wallace, that what Coop needs is to take one for the team."
"I what?"
"You should have seen the way that sleazebag was looking at her this afternoon. I'm telling you, Mercer, with very little effort and a little time on her back, she could wind up as the queen of Broadway. We'd kill two birds with one stone-get some valuable evidence from Joe Berk and improve Coop's disposition all at once."
Mercer was Mike's best audience. He was glad to see his grieving friend find humor in anything once again, happy that I was the target. "Now don't go rejecting it out of hand, Alex. Taking one for the team has a nice ring to it."
The doorman buzzed on the intercom to announce the food delivery.
"I'm about to wine and dine you with the best corned beef sandwich in town, and you're talking about farming me out to Joe Berk?"
"You mind if we eat in here so we can watch the game?" Mike asked, switching channels to the Yankees game. "If Jeter or A-Rod asked her to take one for the team, Mercer, she'd have her clothes off before the question was out of their mouths."
"Guess what? You'd do exactly the same thing for both of them, Mikey."
I took the bag of food to the kitchen to plate the sandwiches. We ate in front of the television and then I went into my study to organize my presentation for the morning grand jury while the guys watched till we pulled out a victory in the bottom of the ninth.
The next morning, Wednesday, Mercer had Cara and Jean in my office at eight fifteen to prepare them for the testimony each would give separately to one of New York County's six daily grand juries, the groups of twenty-three citizens who were impaneled for a month to hear evidence and vote a true bill of indictment, if indicated, that would propel a felony charge on its way to trial. When the prep was done and the quorum was assembled in the ninth-floor jury room one flight above me, Mercer and I led our witnesses up to the waiting room.
I filled out the slip for the drug-facilitated-rape charge, and was reminded by the warden that the jurors had not heard any other similar cases this month, which meant I would also have to instruct them on the law. Colleagues with grand larceny auto and commercial burglary cases let me jump the line, knowing my victims might be fragile and more nervous about testifying for the first time than those in less emotionally charged matters.
Jean was my first witness. She presented more straightforwardly than Cara, and I stood behind the third tier of jurors in the amphithe-atrically shaped room, next to the foreman, taking her through the events of the preceding week and pacing her so the stenographer could capture all the words of her narrative.
From my position in back, I could identify four or five skeptical citizens-those who turned their heads to look at me in puzzlement, those who leaned in to whisper to a neighbor in spite of directions not to, and one who just shook his head from side to side and stared off at the empty wall beside him rather than make eye contact with the victim.
It was not until the forensic toxicologist took the stand, reeled off her impressive qualifications, and then gave the results of her testing that most of the panel appeared to sit more upright in their seats.
"Are you familiar with the prescription drug called Xanax?"
"Yes, I am."
"Would you tell the jury, pleas
e, what kind of drug it is?"
"Xanax is a benzodiazepine. That's within the class of pharma-ceuticals known as sedative hypnotics."
"What effect does a benzodiazepine have on the body?"
"These drugs work on the neurotransmitters in the brain to inhibit the body's ability to function. It's used to relieve anxiety, to help people sleep. It sedates them," Dr. Babij said, going on to describe the specific scientific function of the drugs.
"What is the effect of taking Xanax with alcohol?"
"It's contraindicated, Ms. Cooper. They are both sedative hypnotics, and because they interact with each other, they will potentiate-shall I say, increase-each other's effects. The desired reaction-sedation of the patient-occurs faster, longer, and with more severe results."
When Dr. Babij reached the discussion of the dosage that had been added to Cara and Jean's drinks, she extrapolated from the trace residue found in their glasses. She went on to describe symptoms she'd expect to find in the patient-everything from the nausea, vomiting, gastrointestinal upset that the jurors had just heard about, to falling asleep, loss of memory, and the possibility that these depressants would cause cessation of breathing.
"Are there tests that can be performed, doctor, after these drugs have been ingested, to help determine the amount of benzodiazepine administered?"
"Yes, if the witness has presented herself to a hospital in a timely fashion. We can check the blood or the urine. The drug is broken down in the body by metabolites. Some of the drugs are so toxic that they're evacuated from the body very rapidly. In this instance, we can get a reading from the metabolites because the women were treated so promptly after they awakened."
Dr. Babij studied her reports before looking up at the jurors to explain the results to them. She recited milligrams and numbers that were meaningless without interpretation. Her punch line would assure me of an indictment within minutes of concluding my case.
"Jean Eaken ingested enough of the benzodiazepine, mixed with an ounce of alcohol," she said, "to sedate a two-ton racehorse for the better part of a week. In my opinion, that young woman is lucky to be alive."
Death Dance Page 17
