The Kills

by Fairstein, Linda

  “That ratchets up her fear factor,” Mike said.

  “So then we went back to my office, and before she left, she made her decision to pull out the Yankees jacket from her bag and give it to me.”

  “But didn’t even give you a hint that she’s hidden something in it.”

  “She was frightened, Mike, but I don’t think most people cope with the fact that their lives might actually be in imminent peril. She had been flirting with this particular danger for months.”

  “Besides,” Mercer added, “she was never too direct with Alex unless she was pressed to be. She let everything come out piece by piece, when she was ready to tell it. Right up to the minute she testified.”

  “Step one was giving me the jacket for safekeeping. Getting it out of her possession and into the hands of the law. Step two would be swearing that she no longer had it to anyone who tried to get it from her over the weekend.”

  “Not too successfully, obviously,” Mike said.

  “You know, when Hoyt lured her out of her apartment by telling her she could see Dulles, and then waylaid her in the laundry room,” I thought aloud, “I’ll bet she pleaded for her life by telling him she had given me-sent me is what he thought-the paper.”

  “Once she admitted that,” Mike went on, “she was as good as dead. He didn’t need her anymore.”

  “I think she figured if someone hassled her over the weekend, she had a chance to unload the whole story to me on Monday. She just didn’t know how very dangerous Hoyt was.”

  Mercer’s phone rang and he took the call. It was a short conversation but it confirmed what we had already guessed. Paige Vallis had sewn the mistakenly issued 1944 document that made the second Double Eagle legitimate legal tender into the lining of the pocket of Dulles Tripping’s favorite Yankees jacket.

  “That Polaroid photo of Queenie and Dulles that Mrs. Gatts gave me today, Alex,” Mercer asked. “Did Hoyt talk about that?”

  I smiled at him. “Me and my big mouth. Hoyt overheard me talking to you about Fabian and the picture. That’s what almost bought me a piece of muddy real estate at the bottom of the Kills.”

  Mike hadn’t heard Mercer’s news yet.

  “Get somebody good to sit down with Dulles, as soon as possible. I think whenever Hoyt had a visitation period with him, they were keeping a little secret between themselves. Hoyt was taking the boy to visit McQueen Ransome.”

  “But why?”

  “She was a sucker for kids. We know that from the neighborhood. Here comes Hoyt, pretending to be a great admirer of her career, full of stories he knew about Farouk, ready to dignify her glory days by funding an exhibit at the Schomburg. And he brings along a fair-haired boy-the exact age of her son when he died-with a sad story to go with the kid. Who does Queenie have to leave her few belongings to? Why not this deserving child, who had no mother?”

  “Something misfired, though.”

  “Yeah, I think Queenie was every bit as smart as Graham Hoyt, and even tougher. I don’t think she liked the smell of his offer. She probably realized that what he wanted from her had more value than he was telling her.”

  I could barely hear Mike when he spoke. “So he killed the old lady.”

  “And was ready to let Kevin Bessemer take the weight. After all, who’s going to believe a convicted felon-and a crackhead to boot-that Queenie was already dead when he got there?”

  “He even controlled all the legal proceedings, all the players.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Why does anybody with his kind of dough need another seven million?” Mercer asked.

  “Because he really didn’t have the money you think he did,” I said.

  “The art collection, the yacht, the country house-”

  “Graham Hoyt had been stealing from his law firm for years. He has an addiction every bit as pathological as Bessemer’s addiction to cocaine. He needed to own, to possess, to collect, like all the men he idolized. It was a sickness with him.”

  “None of it fit on a lawyer’s salary. You said that when he first showed up in the case.”

  “He’s been stealing money from his law partners for years, claiming he was writing checks to his favorite charities and getting the firm to reimburse him. Only, those checks went right into his own pocket, right into the gas for his yacht and the art on his walls.”

  “So get the Double Eagle, get the sheet of paper that makes it legal, and with one auction, he’d make a seven-million-dollar score that would get him out of hock and keep him afloat for a lot longer. Phony little prick.”

  “Think about what else he was telling me. Hoyt was really anxious for Tripping to take the guilty plea. That way, Andrew would be in jail and out of the chase for the golden bird.”

  Mercer also remembered what I was talking about. “It was Hoyt who stopped by your office late one evening and made a point of telling you that Robelon was dirty, that Robelon was a target of an investigation in the DA’s office?”

  “True, he delighted in diverting me by painting a tinge of guilt on each of the other players. And I fell for it.”

  “We all fell for it,” Mike said.

  Another knock on the door and the ranger came in. “We’re losing the daylight, Mr. Wallace. You’ve gotta get that helicopter out before the sun sets. We aren’t equipped for flying after dark.”

  Mike got to his feet. “What do you say, Coop? We got our own wings right outside. Take you anywhere you want to go.”

  I leaned my head back and tried to clear my mind of its deadly whirling images of the past week. Dark shadows in the hurricane, Hoyt’s sneer as he reached for the wrench in the cockpit of his boat, the sailor’s knot that was probably looped around Paige Vallis’s neck.

  “Fly you to the moon?”

  I ignored Mike’s chatter. “Where’s the boy? What’s going to happen to Dulles?”

  Mercer took me by the hand and helped me up. “Ms. Taggart and the folks at child welfare have been looking into that for weeks. They never much cared for Hoyt or his wife. Seems Mrs. Hoyt was always too worried about Tripping’s involvement and probably afraid of her husband, too.”

  “I can’t bear to think of what becomes of the child in all this.”

  “Could be good news. Tripping’s second wife-the one who left him because he beat her? She always had a good relationship with Dulles. She’s married now, living in Connecticut with her husband and two kids. Says if Andrew is ready to do the right thing and let go for good, she’d be willing to adopt Dulles.”

  Mike wouldn’t stop. “See, there’s nobody to worry about anymore except you. Forget these sandwiches. They’re already stale. We’ll pack a picnic basket and fly-um, can we make it to Paris in this buggy? Anybody know?”

  “The coin, Mercer, is anybody looking for the coin?” I asked. “Hoyt must have taken it from the apartment the day he killed Queenie.”

  Mercer hooked his elbow in mine, as we walked out of the building toward the blue-and-white helicopter with the NYPD logos on it. “Teams have blocked off Hoyt’s apartment, his office, and the yacht till they can get warrants for all that and his bank vaults. We’ll find it.”

  Mike took my other arm and guided me down the path as the pilot started the engine and the rotors began to spin. “It’s going to be a perfect night. The moon is waxing to full; we can set this baby down in the middle of Times Square and dance till dawn.”

  Mercer made a signal of some kind over my head, probably telling Mike to cut it out.

  “It’s okay,” I said. Mike Chapman knew me every bit as well as I knew myself. I didn’t want to go home just yet. I didn’t want to spend the night alone.

  I ducked under the blades and climbed up on the pontoons, into the seat behind the pilot. I had been in a similar chopper scores of times, riding with the DA’s office photographer to take aerial photos of crime scenes. Someone would return tomorrow to do that over the river and bay, down to the Kills.

  After Mike and Mercer got in, the pilot lift
ed the helicopter in the air, hovering behind the great green lady. He swooped down and to his left, circling from behind her enormous arm holding the torch aloft, past her strong face, illumined at dusk by the lights in her crown.

  “Lady Liberty, Coop. She watched over you today. Quite a beauty.”

  My head rested against the window and I stared back at her, saluting her silently in gratitude.

  “Personally,” Mike went on, “the Liberty on the gold piece is a bit sexier, in my book. This one’s got her hair all tied up neat in a bun. The one on the Double Eagle? Hers is all loose and wild, kinda like yours looks right now.”

  The sun was setting behind us, west of the Hudson, and straight ahead the elegant Manhattan skyline was showing off its stunning array of lights.

  We were over the river, then above the Chelsea Piers, passing close to the Empire State Building and the Art Deco spire of the Chrysler Building, coming in for an easy landing along the East River, in sight of the old deadhouse at the tip of Roosevelt Island.

  A phalanx of detectives was waiting at the heliport to brainstorm with Mike and Mercer, and to hear my story of the day’s events.

  “The commissioner wants to see Ms. Cooper before he goes home tonight,” one of them told Chapman as he brushed them out of the way.

  “Give me an hour. I gotta buy her a new pair of shoes. Then we’ll have her down to headquarters.” He spotted a friend in the crowd. “Joey-get us uptown fast as you can, lights and sirens. The broad needs a bath bad. She got too close to Jersey today-smells like Secaucus.”

  We were at my front door fifteen minutes later. I unlocked it and the three of us went inside. “Clean yourself up, blondie. Go heavy on the perfume.”

  “Do I really have to go to headquarters tonight? I’m drained,” I said, opening the bedroom door and pausing there while Mike and Mercer headed for the ice cubes and the bar glasses respectively.

  “You bet your sweet ass you do. The commish had all of Manhattan South scouring the town for you-air, sea, scuba-every hand on deck. And after you’re done thanking him, you’ve got the two of us to deal with.”

  I called back out to Mike, “What do you mean by that?”

  Mercer answered. “It’s payday. We’re going to keep you out all night. Dancing, wining and dining, hanging out with your friends.”

  “And when we deliver you back here at daybreak, you’ll be so exhausted you won’t be able to give me any orders for at least a month. You’ll sleep like a baby,” Mike said.

  “I’m not sure I can keep up with-”

  “Unless you’d rather we go on ahead and you just take your shower, pull the covers up over your head, and stay here feeling sorry for yourself. Sulking, pouting-your usual MO.”

  “Give me half an hour,” I said. “Don’t leave without me.”

  I went into my bedroom and stripped off the sweatshirt and damp pants. The message light was flashing on the answering machine, and I could see there were seven calls. I pressed the erase button and held it down until every one of them was deleted. Whoever had been looking for me today could try again tomorrow.

  *

  Acknowledgments

  The rare and magnificent object that captured my imagination-“such stuff,” the Bard once said, “as dreams are made on”-first came to my attention in an article in The New York Times. Other helpful sources included William Stadiem’s Too Rich-The High Life and Tragic Death of King Farouk ; the Sotheby’s/Stack’s catalog of the July 30, 2002, auction of the 1933 Double Eagle; John Rousmaniere’s history of the New York Yacht Club; and Seitz and Miller’s The Other Islands of New York City.

  I am grateful to Susanne Kirk and all my friends at Scribner and Pocket Books who have made my transition from the prosecutor’s office to my writing room such a delightful step.

  Esther Newberg is the best friend any writer could hope to have.

  My friends and family give me more joy than I can express. And although Justin Feldman is only a cameo in the world of Alexandra Cooper, he is everything to me.

  About the Author

  Linda Fairstein, America’s foremost expert on crimes of sexual assault and domestic violence, led the Sex Crimes Unit of the District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan for twenty-five years, leaving in 2002 to write and lecture full-time. A fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, she is a graduate of Vassar College and the University of Virginia School of Law. Her first novel, Final Jeopardy, which introduced the character Alexandra Cooper, was published in 1996 to critical and commercial acclaim and was made into an ABC Movie of the Week starring Dana Delany. Likely to Die, Cold Hit, The Deadhouse, and her most recent novel, The Bone Vault, also achieved international-bestseller status. Her nonfiction book, Sexual Violence, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1994. She lives with her husband in Manhattan and on Martha’s Vineyard.