The Kills

by Fairstein, Linda

  The second one was a short message, overridden by the static of a bad cell phone connection. I couldn’t tell whether the caller was male or female, and the only word I could make out clearly was “tomorrow.” I pressed the caller ID function and got only the indication that the message had come from out of the area.

  I walked to the elevator and met the guys, who were deep in conversation about how far ahead of Boston the Yankees would end the season. The cop who had the lobby security post bid us good night. “Full moon, Ms. Cooper. I’d get rid of Chapman first shot you get.”

  I gave him a thumbs-up and got into the passenger seat of Mercer’s car, parked up the street on Hogan Place, telling Mike we’d meet him at the restaurant on Sixty-fourth Street.

  “Mercer, before you get in, remember to dig out the pictures, okay?”

  He nodded and opened the trunk, handing me four packages of snapshots of the baby who had been born in the spring to him and his wife Vickee. As we pulled away from the curb, I turned on the interior light and flipped through the photographs.

  “It’s amazing how much they change in just one month. He’s enormous.”

  Mercer Wallace was forty-two, six years older than Mike and me. He was one of a handful of African Americans who had been promoted to the coveted first-grade rank in the detective division of the NYPD. After his mother died in childbirth, he had been raised by his father, Spencer, in a middle-class neighborhood of Queens, where the elder Wallace had worked as a mechanic at Delta Airlines.

  His second marriage, to an equally talented detective named Vickee Eaton whom he admired and adored, had ended a few years ago when she walked out on him. But after Mercer was wounded in a shoot-out during a murder investigation, Vickee had come back to help him heal, and the quietly charismatic man had rejoiced at his great good fortune. The remarriage and recent birth of Logan Wallace marked the first go at establishing a family among what Mike, Mercer, and I liked to think of as our modern urban trio of musketeers.

  I listened to Mercer’s description of his new lifestyle, my head against the car window, mindlessly watching the overhead lights as we streaked past them up the East River Drive. Sleepless nights were nothing new for any of us. But bottles, feedings, formula, disposable diapers, and a wonderful little life for which both Mercer and Vickee were completely responsible was a whole new dynamic.

  “I know I’m boring you to pieces, Alex.”

  “Not at all. I love hearing about him. I intend to try very hard to spoil him beyond imagining and be his favorite auntie,” I said. “On the other hand, the minute you start proselytizing like Mike, I’ll treat you the same way I treat telemarketers who call in the middle of my dinner hour.”

  I listened to him tell me about the joys of fatherhood while my mind wandered for the rest of the ride. Something had brought me close enough to formalizing my relationship with Jake that I had tried living with him in the middle of the previous winter. When I took a step backward from that move, it was without any regret that I was putting off a decision about marriage and raising a child.

  I had often tried to figure out what it was that made me so content with my present single situation, since I had experienced all the benefits of a warm and loving family throughout my youth and adolescence. My mother, Maude, had met my father while she was at college getting her nursing degree. She had every superb nurturing quality of a great RN, but had diverted her skills and her own career to the paramount feature of her life: her marriage. My two older brothers and I were brought up in a household in which family came first-parents, grandparents, and siblings. Now it seemed the independence that everyone had worked so hard to instill in me had firmly taken root and made me entirely comfortable in my own skin.

  “What do you hear from your folks? They okay?”

  “They’re fine. They’re out West, visiting my brother and his kids,” I said to Mercer.

  My father, Benjamin, had retired from his cardiology practice years ago. The simple plastic tubing that he and his partner had developed three decades earlier had been used in all open-heart surgery in virtually every operating room in the country. It was the Cooper-Hoffman valve that had cushioned my lifestyle, providing a superb education-my degree in English literature from Wellesley and the subsequent Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia-as well as the means to maintain my apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and my beloved farmhouse on Martha’s Vineyard.

  But it was my father’s devotion to public service in his medical career that led me to try something comparable in the law by applying to the Office of the District Attorney following my graduation more than twelve years earlier. I had anticipated spending five or six years there before moving on to private practice. As I rotated through the routine assignments of the young prosecutorial staff, I’d been fascinated and engaged by the work of the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit. The endless challenges-legal, investigative, scientific, and emotional-kept me riveted, and committed to making a professional home for myself in this new specialty within the law, created just a generation earlier.

  We pulled off the drive and circled the block before Mercer spotted a parking place on Second Avenue.

  Mike was standing on the sidewalk with Giuliano, the owner of the restaurant. Both seemed to be enjoying the warm September evening.

  “Ciao, Signorina Cooper. Com’e stai? How was your holiday?” He held the door open and ushered us to the corner table at the window, where Adolfo seated us and started to describe the specials.

  “Fine, thanks. And Italy?”

  “Bellissima, like always. Fenton,” he called to the bartender. “Dewar’s on the rocks for Ms. Cooper. Doppio. And your best vodka for the gentlemen. On me.”

  “You oughta stay away more often, Coop. Giuliano’s so happy to see you he’s giving away his booze. That’s a first.”

  I ordered the veal special, a paillard pounded thin and lightly breaded, with arugula and chopped tomatoes on top. Mercer asked for sausage and pepper with a side dish of fettuccine, and Mike settled on the lobster fra diavolo.

  “How’s Valerie?” I asked.

  “Pretty good. She never seems to pick her head up from the drafting table long enough to tell me.” Mike had been dating a woman for the past year, an architect who was involved in planning the redesign of the Museum of Modern Art. They’d met when Valerie was in the early stages of recovering from a mastectomy, in treatment at Sloan-Kettering Hospital, where Mike had gone to donate blood.

  “How did the trip to California go?” Valerie had taken him home to Palo Alto to meet her family over the Labor Day weekend.

  “I’m not sure Professor Jacobsen’s first choice for his daughter’s beau is a New York City detective, but the old lady handled it pretty well.”

  Michael Patrick Chapman was the son of a legendary street cop, a second-generation immigrant who had met his wife on a visit to the family home in County Cork. Brian was on the job for twenty-six years, dying of a massive coronary barely two days after turning in his gun and shield. That had been during Mike’s junior year at Fordham, and although he’d completed school the following year, he’d applied for admission to the police academy before he handed back his cap and gown. He had idolized his father, longed to follow in his footsteps, and distinguished himself in his rookie year with a major arrest following the drug-related massacre of a Colombian family in Washington Heights.

  I raised my glass and clinked it against the others’. For the better part of the last decade, these two men had become my closest friends. They’d taught me the creative investigative skills they themselves had mastered, they covered my back whenever I was exposed to danger or double-dealing, and they could make me laugh at the darkest moments of my life.

  Dinner was casual and easy. We caught up on each other’s personal lives and reminded Mike of the details of the Tripping case. I wanted an early night, so Mercer dropped me in front of my building before ten, and Mike went on to his office to do paperwork, ready for the long tour ahe
ad.

  The doorman let me in and handed me the mail and dry cleaning that had been left in the valet’s room. I rode up the twenty stories in the elevator, key in hand, opening my apartment door and flipping on the lights.

  I spent an hour at my desk organizing my questions for the morning. Jake called at eleven-fifteen, when he got off the air after delivering his piece.

  “Hope you don’t mind that I stayed in D.C.”

  “Good timing, actually. I get to concentrate on the trial. The sooner I have it behind me, the happier I’ll be.”

  “Remind me what we’ve got on for the weekend.”

  “Saturday night we’ve got theater tickets with Joan and Jim. Friday night I thought we’d have a quiet evening at home.”

  “That means I cook.”

  “Or Shun Lee delivers. Or we starve, and just nibble on each other.” I was useless in the kitchen. Whipping up a tuna salad and removing ice cubes from their tray was a slim repertoire.

  “Thatflight I won’t consider missing.”

  I hung up, undressed, and drew a steaming-hot bath, filling the tub with something bubbly that smelled like vanilla. My friend Joan Stafford had written another thriller, and I took the manuscript with me into the tub, trying to discern the players who were so deliciously portrayed in the roman �� clef.

  Sleep came easily and I awakened at six, with time to make coffee and read the newspaper before making my way to the garage in the basement of my building.

  “Good morning, J.P.,” I said to the attendant, who pointed to my Jeep, which he had positioned at the top of the ramp.

  “You got company, Ms. Cooper.”

  I opened the car door and found Mike Chapman dozing in the front passenger seat.

  He didn’t move a hair as I settled into the driver’s side. I pressed the button to play the first CD in the deck, turning the volume up so that the letters R-E-S-P-E-C-T blasted out of the speakers.

  Mike opened his left eye and shifted his weight. “If I had wanted to wake up with Aretha Franklin, I would have gone to bed with the woman.”

  “I guess you didn’t exactly want to wake up with me, either. You could have rung the doorbell. There’s always the sofa bed in the den.”

  “And all that temptation in the bedroom? Sorry, just came to pick your brain. Only got here fifteen minutes ago and I was afraid I’d miss you if I didn’t head you off in the garage. Wild night in the naked city.”

  “What happened?”

  “Caught two kills, so I gotta go right back uptown to sort things out.”

  That’s what homicides were to Mike Chapman. Kills. Hunters used that word to describe the slaughter of their prey, and fighter pilots spoke the same language when referring to the downing of enemy planes-the unnatural termination of lives.

  “What kind of cases?” I asked.

  “One’s a shooting, probably justifiable. Bodega owner on One Hundred Tenth dropped a guy who pulled a knife on him and tried to steal a six-pack of Bud. Other one’s really ugly. Thought you could help.”

  “Sure. How?”

  “Breakin at a brownstone in Harlem, West Side. Place was ransacked, lots of old junk strewn all over the place,” Mike said, shutting off the music. “Eighty-two-year-old woman. Looks like she was raped and then smothered to death with her own pillow. Thought you could tell me why.”

  “Why what?” I asked.

  “Why somebody does that? Who am I looking for? What’s inside his head? What the hell’s the motivation for a sexual assault on an octogenarian who’s already had a stroke and was partially paralyzed?”

  “I can give you hours on this, but I probably still won’t be able to answer your question. No one can. Last time I had one like that, I called my favorite court shrink. ‘The guy either hates his mother, or he loves his mother too much. Your perp either has an Electra complex, or his mother beat him when he was a child. The guy either needed to control his victim, or has a thing about-’”

  “How much does it take to control a semi-invalid eighty-two-year-old? I realize profilers are useless.”

  “Have you checked burglary patterns? Try Special Victims. We’ve had a few cases with a guy who pretends to be a plumber, sent by the superintendent. Gets in, beats the women up pretty badly, and usually tears the place apart looking for cash and jewelry. Then he rapes them, almost like an afterthought.”

  “Women as old as this?” Mike asked.

  “No. But he’s just opportunistic. He takes whoever is there.”

  He opened the car door to get out. “Will you look at the crime scene photos with me, and go over the autopsy report, in case I’m missing anything?”

  “I’m in court all day today.”

  “What’s this?” he asked, checking the date on his watch. “Thursday morning? I won’t have much to show you in the way of pathology results until Saturday.”

  “Fine. Meanwhile, I’ll get Sarah to assign someone to work on it with you.”

  Mike closed the door and I started the engine. He walked around to my side and leaned on the roof of the Jeep. “Did your mother let you wear white shoes in September when you were a kid?”

  I was anxious to get down to the office. “What are you talking about?”

  “The Chapman babes,” he said, referring to his three older sisters, “after Labor Day my mother never let them be seen in white.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.” I laughed, remembering my own mother’s stories of the fashion rules of the fifties.

  “So around two o’clock this morning, there’s a squad car parked in front of the projects where your buddy Kevin Bessemer disappeared. The guys see this fashion vision walking down the street. White high-heeled patent leather shoes and a white shoulder bag. The whole outfit just didn’t seem to fit.”

  “With what?”

  “Thermometer almost hit ninety last night. I’d give her a pass on the color of her footwear in that temperature, but she was sporting some kind of muskrat at the very same time.”

  “Coat?”

  “Yeah, a full-length fur-bearing rodent. May even be a mink for all I know. Kevin sure was grateful to his main squeeze and her rear window.”

  “You got his girlfriend? Where is she now?” This brought us one step closer to getting a break on Bessemer’s whereabouts. “Talk about burying the lead. No wonder you came to deliver this news in person.”

  He tapped his hand against the car door. “She’s up in the squad. I’ll keep you posted. We’re about to go interview her. Tiffany Gatts. And you can add a charge to Kevin’s arrest warrant.”

  “What now?”

  “Statutory rape,” Mike said, backing away from me up the ramp to the street. “Little Tiffany’s only just turned sweet sixteen.”

  4

  “People of the State of New York against Andrew Tripping. The defendant, his attorneys, and the assistant district attorney are present,” the clerk announced in a flat monotone.

  There were only three other people seated in the pews behind Peter Robelon, on what Mike Chapman referred to as the groom’s side of the courtroom.

  Harlan Moffett put aside the racing sheet he was studying and asked each of us if we were ready to get started. The judge had a fondness for the ponies, and would often interrupt proceedings to check the off-track-betting phone line for the outcome of a wager.

  “Who you got here today, Alexandra?”

  “Your Honor, I don’t think any of the parties in court consider themselves prosecution witnesses. I assume,” I said, turning to look at the two women seated in the second row of benches, “that Ms. Taggart is present. I spoke with her last evening but she hasn’t identified herself to me.”

  The middle-aged woman in a flowered dress that hung to the top of her ankles rose and stepped forward. “I’m Nancy Taggart, sir. I represent the Manhattan Foundling Hospital.”

  She motioned to the woman sitting beside her, who was younger but just as severe-looking. “This is Dr. Huang. She’s the psychologist responsibl
e for the supervision of the Tripping boy.”

  “And you?” Moffett pointed his gavel at the man sitting alone in the first row. “You a legal eagle, too?”

  “Jesse Irizzary. Counsel for the Agency for Child Welfare. We placed the child.”

  “I got more damn lawyers in this case than I got witnesses. What’s the deal here? Can we reach any agreement on how we’re going to proceed?”

  “Your Honor, last week I asked you to issue a subpoena directing the production of Dulles Tripping-”

  “What’d I tell you? I didn’t do it?” Moffett asked me.

  “No, sir.”

  His pinky ring circled in Tripping’s direction. “What kinda name is Dulles? You name your boy for an airport?”

  Both Peter Robelon and Emily Frith leaned in close and began whispering to their client, probably cautioning him not to open his mouth. Everything about Robelon’s physical appearance was in sharper focus than his client’s as their heads came together at the counsel table. His dark hair was well-groomed, his skin was tanned, and there was a reptilian veneer that made me distrustful of the earnest glances he flashed back at me from time to time.

  “The child was named for Allen Dulles. Former head of the Central Intelligence Agency. I’m just reading from the statement the boy himself made during the hospital admission process, the day his father was arrested and Dulles was examined at Bellevue,” I told the court. “It’s relevant to the matter on trial. You’ll hear more about it during the case.”

  Tripping was a control freak. Every detail Paige Vallis had told me confirmed that. He had started disciplining the child in military fashion from the time Dulles was a toddler, intent on being the spy-master for his own little soldier.

  “You were saying?”

  “That the subpoena was issued to direct Ms. Taggart and Mr. Irizarry to bring Dulles Tripping to your chambers, where I might interview him and make a determination, with the help of a forensic psychiatrist, about whether or not he is able to testify in these proceedings.”