Devil's Bridge

by Linda Fairstein

  “For a change.”

  “And the cat’s out of the bag,” I said as we pulled up in front of the restaurant. “That’s kind of a relief, too.”

  Giuliano, the owner of Primola, was seating people at a table by the window as we walked in. “Signorina Cooper,” he said. “Ciao, ladies. Good to have you here. The guys are all waiting for you in the back.”

  He pointed past the bar to the area in the rear of the crowded room. Several tables had been pushed together for the dozen or so men—and Vickee—who had worked relentlessly since summer to find the elusive Raymond Tanner.

  I saw Mike’s dark hair, his back to me, and we made our way through the hungry New Yorkers who were three deep the length of the room as they waited for turnover.

  Mercer was the first to see us and raise a glass in our direction.

  “I’d hardly call it waiting for us,” Catherine said. “The team seems to be throwing back some celebratory drinks in anticipation of our arrival.”

  “Hey, Coop,” Mike called out to me. “Grab yourself something from the bar.”

  I gave him a thumbs-up and we stopped at the end, next to the waiters’ station. I ordered a Dewar’s on the rocks and for Catherine a glass of pinot grigio. We mounted the two steps that separated the rear room from the main floor of the restaurant, and the detectives greeted us with whistles, cheers, and a toast to the young rookie—unknown to all of them—who was on his way down to the courthouse to take Tanner to his arraignment.

  “Here’s to you, Alex,” one of the men said. “Bet you’ll sleep like a baby tonight.”

  “I’ve slept well every night, because you guys were on the job.” No need to tell them about the times I closed my eyes and still was sure I could see the image of the letters that spelled KILL COOP on Tanner’s hand.

  “They were all just a little slow on the draw, Coop,” Mike said.

  “You leave my task force alone, Detective Chapman. They had a few things more urgent on their plates than my stalker,” I said. “Now, why don’t you sit and we’ll get some dinner for you?”

  Vickee came around from the far side of the table to give me a hug. “Way to go, girl. Raymond Tanner was a great big accident waiting to happen, wasn’t he?”

  “To put it mildly.”

  “All good?”

  I smiled at Vickee. “I guess stranger things have happened, but yes, all good.”

  “Five more minutes till you take your seats, guys,” Mike said, motioning to me with his forefinger. “C’mon, kid. Time for the final question.”

  Mercer, Mike, and I had a long-standing habit of betting on the last Jeopardy! question whenever we were together on a weeknight evening. These detectives were two of the smartest men I knew, and our vastly different areas of interest made it fun to be challenged, whether at the morgue or my place, crime scenes or chic restaurants.

  The small television was in the short corridor behind the dining room, hung out of sight but close enough so that diners could track sports scores or breaking news.

  Mike followed me into the space, off to the side of the busy kitchen. “You feeling okay?”

  “About this news? I couldn’t be happier,” I said, sipping my Scotch. “The rest of my afternoon cratered, but that’s not your problem.”

  “You’d be wrong about that, Coop. Antonio Estevez and his crew?”

  “Correct. Possibly related to the Reverend Hal Shipley. I’ll tell you later.”

  “Am I breaking something up?” Mercer asked.

  “We were just waiting on you, Mr. Wallace,” Mike said. “Time for the big question.”

  Mercer clinked his glass of vodka against my drink, and Mike reached over my arm to hit us both. At the same time, Alex Trebek had come onto the screen after a commercial break and was about to reveal the final answer to the trio of contestants.

  Mike Chapman was a graduate of Fordham University, where he had majored in military history. He’d been obsessed by that subject since childhood and knew as much about it as any scholar I’d ever encountered. Mercer Wallace was raised by his widowed father in Queens. The Delta mechanic had papered the walls of his son’s bedroom with maps of the world, and there was barely a square foot of it with which Mercer wasn’t familiar. Geography was where his depth of knowledge was concentrated.

  Mike grabbed the clicker off the top of the monitor and unmuted the sound.

  “All right, gentlemen,” Trebek said. “You’re each within a hundred dollars of the others, so I assume any one of you can win.”

  I had majored in English literature before deciding that a career in public service would be my focus. Reading the Romantic poets and dense nineteenth-century British novels was my favorite way to escape from dry legal briefs. All three of us were on sound footing when the categories touched on Motown music or classic movies of the 1930s and 1940s.

  “Tonight’s Final Jeopardy category is ‘The Wild Wild West,’” Trebek said as the words were revealed on the giant game board. “What will each of you wager on the Wild Wild West? We’ll see in just a minute.”

  “I’m in for forty,” I said, doubling our usual bet of twenty dollars.

  “Just because you grew up on reruns of Bonanza?” Mike said.

  “You obviously don’t know that my childhood dream was to be Annie Oakley.”

  “Hard to imagine since you’re so skittish around guns. Double or nothing.”

  “Don’t you two go all sky-high on me,” Mercer said. “I’m in at eighty bucks. I’ve got a little mouth to feed at home.”

  Trebek’s voice boomed from the speaker as he revealed the answer. “He was the first man executed by the federal government in the Dakota Territory.”

  “See that?” Mike said. The three contestants grimaced as they struggled—or appeared to be doing so—to write the proper question as the show’s iconic “Think” music played loudly. “We’re all on equal footing. It’s about murder.”

  His encyclopedic knowledge of all things homicidal took Mike back through generations of killers and their weapons of choice.

  “You’re up, Alex,” Mercer said as the music stopped and Trebek pointed at the first of the three men standing on the stage.

  “Who was—?” I couldn’t pull up the name I wanted. “Who was Billy the Kid?”

  “So wrong in every direction that you ought to pay triple the ante,” Mike said, reaching out his hand for my money. “Billy the Kid’s real name was William Bonney. Killed so far south of Dakota that it was practically part of Mexico. New Mexico. And shot by Sheriff Pat Garrett, not hung by the feds.”

  The first two contestants had drawn blanks also.

  “You’re next, Mercer,” Mike said.

  “Who was Jack McCall?” Mercer asked, just as the contestant who had been in the lead revealed to Trebek that he had written, “Who was the man who shot Bill Hickok?”

  “That’s almost the right question,” Trebek said, “but we were looking for his actual name. And that’s Jack McCall. Who was Jack McCall? I’m sorry, gentlemen. Let’s see what you wagered.”

  Mike slapped Mercer’s hand in a high-five as he clicked off the TV. “Broken Nose Jack, they called him. Shot Wild Bill in the back of the head during a poker game. A pair of aces and a pair of eights. That’s why they call it the dead man’s hand when you draw those cards. McCall was acquitted by the first jury and then retried …”

  “Now, that’s double jeopardy,” I said. “You can’t have a second trial after an acquittal.”

  “First trial was in Deadwood,” Mercer said. “When the feds heard about the acquittal, they said the trial hadn’t been a formal legal procedure because Deadwood was an illegal town in Indian Territory, so double jeopardy didn’t apply. No constitutional violation.”

  “Yeah, they nailed McCall in Yankton, tried him again, and strung him up from the tallest tree,” Mike said. “You gotta love a place where the prosecution gets two bites of the apple. It would have helped your batting average a whole lot, Coop.”


  I smiled and took another sip of my drink. “We don’t keep scorecards, Detective. One and done works fine for me.”

  Mike led us back to the tables where everyone in the group had seated him-or herself, counting the twenty-dollar bills to split with Mercer. Vickee motioned me to an empty chair beside her. One of my favorite SVU detectives, Alan Vandomir, was on my other side.

  Mercer stayed on his feet to make the first toast. “I’ve got a candidate for rookie of the year,” he said, naming the young officer who had collared Raymond Tanner. “Puts all you gold-badged first and second graders to shame. You’ve been running around town for two months without a scintilla of perp progress and—”

  “We were looking for love in all the wrong places,” one of the guys shouted out.

  “And now some kid gets the job done in your stead. The commissioner asked me to send you his best and to announce that the Raymond Tanner Task Force is officially disbanded.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Vandomir said.

  “I just want to add,” I said, leaning on Vickee’s shoulder as I got to my feet, “that I am especially grateful to each one of you, personally, for making this work a priority.”

  “We weren’t worried much, Alex,” Pug McBride said, displaying his empty glass over his head to the waiter. “Chapman had your back.”

  “He’s had her back for years,” the sergeant said, reaching for one of the bottles of wine on the table. “Now he’s got a hand on better body parts than that.”

  Most of the guys laughed, so there was no point in protesting.

  “It’s all about Tanner tonight,” Mercer said, knowing the banter, the focus on my vulnerability, would make me uncomfortable.

  “The kid cop sounds like a star,” Pug said. “If that stunt don’t buy him his gold shield, nothing will.”

  “Goes to the head of the class for deceiving the devil,” Mike said. “I told the lieutenant he ought to ask for an interview with him. Grab him now before any bad habits set in. He’s my kind of cop, building the devil’s bridge.”

  SEVEN

  “I’ll bite,” Vickee said. “What is it?”

  “The bridge?” Mike asked.

  “There’s a Devil’s Bridge off the tip of the Vineyard,” I said. I remembered it from the days when I fished with Adam Nyman at the crack of dawn. “It’s a treacherous archipelago of boulders that strings out below the Gay Head Cliffs toward Cuttyhunk Island, under the water where the ocean meets the sound.”

  The deadliest marine accident in New England’s history occurred in 1884, when a passenger steamer—the City of Columbus—ran aground on the shoals of Devil’s Bridge, killing more than one hundred people. I had heard the story from descendants of the dead still on the island, haunted by the tragedy that had occurred within sight of the Gay Head Lighthouse.

  “Brush up on your folklore, ladies.”

  “We’re about to get a touch of Brian Chapman, are we?” Pug McBride said, laying on his thickest brogue. “I miss your father every day, Mikey.”

  Mike’s father, Brian, had a legendary career in the NYPD, much decorated for his heroism and his brilliant investigative work. It was his great pride that Mike pursued a college degree instead of following him onto the job, but when Brian dropped dead within forty-eight hours of turning in his gun and shield for retirement, Mike went directly from his Fordham commencement to sign up for entry in the Police Academy.

  “There are devil’s bridges all over Europe,” Mike said. “Masonry arches from medieval times—in France and Spain and Italy, and of course throughout England and Ireland—each of which comes with its own version of a folktale.”

  “What does it have to do with being a cop?” Vickee asked.

  Mike was sitting directly across the table from Vickee. He placed his glass of vodka on the table and pointed at her with his forefinger, picking up the dialect of his County Cork roots. “So my great-aunt Bronwen—she was from Wales, as you can tell by the name—she came from a town near the great Mynach Gorge.”

  “You giving us blarney, Chapman?” Pug asked. “I heard this one from your old man more times than I can count.”

  “Roll with it, Pug. The ladies seem to be ignorant.”

  “Welsh fairy tales?” I said. “Guilty as charged.”

  “Mynach’s one of the most scenic places in the countryside, with dramatic waterfalls that drop nearly three hundred feet down the gorge. And the problem was, back in the day, there was no way to cross that gorge to get to the other side—to town, to the fields where the cows were grazing, to church—”

  “We get your point.”

  Mike took another slug of vodka. “So Bronwen’s great-great-great-granny made a pact with the devil. She got Satan himself to agree to build a bridge for her,” Mike said, snapping his finger with a loud click, “and to do it overnight. But he wanted something in return.”

  “He always does,” Vickee said.

  “Well, that time he wanted a promise that he could have the first living soul who crossed his bridge the next morning,” Mike said. “Stayed up all night getting the bridge made—you can still see it spanning the gorge today—and then he hid himself right at the end of the rock pile. Just like a rapist hiding amid the boulders in Riverside Park. Waiting for the first living soul.”

  Vickee waved the back of her hand at Mike. “You forget, Detective, that the kids growing up in the projects don’t exactly know the folktales you were brought up on. Might not be the same risk/reward ratio.”

  “Don’t distract me, Vickee. I’m on a high here. I’ve got everybody but Pug spellbound.”

  “Heard it before, Chapman. The little old lady—aye, your auntie Bronwen herself—she deceives the devil. He builds her a beautiful bridge in the most unlikely of places—”

  “And instead of giving him a living soul to ravish, the clever woman sends her dog on ahead of the beautiful young maiden,” Mike said, lifting his glass in the air. “The first living thing, only it happens to have four legs.”

  “So this smart cop used the dog to roust Raymond Tanner from his hiding place,” I said.

  “And like the devil, who was so enraged by the old lady’s trick that he leaped into the falls and was never seen in those parts again, the rookie has rid us of the evil Tanner.”

  “Yeah, he built his own bridge to Rikers Island for the night,” Pug said as the waiter tried to get everyone’s attention to announce the dinner specials. “The devil played right into the kid’s hands.”

  For the next two hours, we did what cops and prosecutors do when thrown together with good food and an excess of alcohol. We told war stories. Pug on the homicidal maniac who had paralyzed the subway for half the summer; Alan on the child molester who dressed in his mother’s clothes to lure kids into the apartment; Catherine on the guy who jumped bail fifteen years earlier only to be nabbed in Georgia by her cold case unit and charged with a dozen more rapes along I-95.

  When Vickee finished her chicken piccata, she left the table to go outside to call the public information office to see whether there was any word on the Tanner arraignment.

  I was still working on my orecchiette con broccoli rabe, enjoying a cool glass of pinot grigio, when Mike walked around the table and took Vickee’s seat next to me.

  “You okay, Coop?”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling back at Mike. “This time I think it’s just mind games, not physical threats. You’ve heard what Antonio Estevez pulled off?”

  Mike nodded. “Yeah, Drew called me about it. Really slick. And sticking stuff into your document files by uploading it from another DA’s office computer? The dude’s got game.”

  “Next time I see him, I’ll tell him you’re a fan.”

  “At least you get a reprieve from the trial. Maybe we can figure something to do with the weekend.”

  “A last Vineyard trip for the season? Give me something to look forward to.”

  Mike and I were still trying to feel our way through the rhythms of a relationsh
ip. We each had apartments of our own and had spent few nights together since we’d starting dating. The irregular assignments of a homicide detective rarely synched with my litigation schedule.

  “Sounds like you’ve got a full plate till then,” Mike said.

  “Tomorrow I get to put my head on the block for Battaglia to chop away at.”

  “Estevez?”

  “You probably haven’t heard the whole story about Reverend Hal yet. I may have lots of time on my hands once the DA finishes with me.”

  “The reverend don’t scare me. I got scores of snitches who’d drop a dime on him in a heartbeat. Federal tax fraud, which means city and state are bound to follow; kids out of wedlock that he supports with money from his phony church; ruining the life of an innocent prosecutor in the Twainey Bowler case ten years back, and still not paying his dues on that. Bring him on, babe, ’cause I’d like nothing better than to spit in his face.”

  “Thanks. I hope whatever you spit is even half as toxic as Hal’s own venom.”

  “Keep drinking, kid. It’s good for your attitude,” Mike said. “I’ve got three more midnights to work and then off for two days. You want me to drop you at home when I leave?”

  “I’ll hang for a while.” I looked at my watch again. “I’m good. It’s nice to see everybody again.”

  “I have to stop at the morgue to pick up the autopsy photos of yesterday’s stabbing. Lieutenant Peterson and the ME don’t see eye to eye on the nature of the wounds. I’m going to take off in a few minutes,” he said, patting my thigh under the table.

  Mike was working a week of midnights. The lieutenant’s to-do list usually added a few hours to the grueling tour of duty he and his colleagues liked so much.

  While he was leaning in, talking to me, Mike’s cell went off. He checked the phone number. “Let me step out and talk to the office.”

  “I’ll get some fresh air with you,” I said.

  Catherine looked up at me from her end of the table when she saw me stand. “I’m coming right back in,” I said to her. “Just walking Mike out to make a call.”