Bad blood

28

We had a quick dinner together at Primola before Mike put Nan in a cab for her ride home to Brooklyn Heights and dropped me in front of my door.

I left the apartment at 7 a.m., driving myself to the courthouse and parking on the empty street behind the small park in Chinatown that Mike called Red Square. Fishmongers were packing ice chips onto their sidewalk display cases, filling them with wriggling crabs and lobsters and fish whose odor would grow less appealing with the heat of the June day, while Asian farmers from rural New Jersey were unloading mounds of fresh, exotic vegetables.

I stopped at the cart on the corner of Centre Street for two large cups of black coffee and a Danish-caffeine with a sugar boost of pastry to get me through the morning.

I didn’t expect to see two detectives from the Special Victims Unit-Alan Vandomir and Ned Tacchi-waiting for me at my desk when I walked in the door at seven thirty.

“Don’t worry, we know you’re on trial,” Alan said. “We’ve got Ryan Blackmer writing up the case downstairs. But he said you’ll be the one to deal with the administrative end of this. That Battaglia would handle the politics. I was just leaving you a note. Hope that you don’t mind that we let ourselves in.”

“Of course not.”

Vandomir and Tacchi were two of the best detectives in the department, in both investigative style and in their manner of relating to victims of sexual violence.

I dropped my case folders on the desk. “What have you got?”

“Viagra,” Alan said. Neither one had a good poker face.

“What do you mean?”

“Around midnight last night, we locked up an old friend of yours. Derrick Ferris, remember him?”

“I certainly do. We convicted him for three rapes in the Taft Housing Projects. Must have been one of my first patterns with you guys. That’s going back.”

“Yesterday, we got a hit to the data bank from these two new cases-the girls up on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in May. The one you assigned to Ryan.”

“Great.”

“Got a tip from Parole that his mama still lived in one of the buildings at Taft. We just staked out her apartment till he came home from his night’s prowl. You know how these two victims said he never lost his erection-that each of them said the rapes went on for an incredibly long time?”

“I do.” I had struggled to convince many jurors over the years that the sexual dysfunction some rapists exhibited was usually quite different from consensual coupling. It was exhibited in a variety of behaviors, including-as with Ferris-the ability to maintain an erection for hours.

“Well, we patted him down at the scene for weapons-”

“Get the knife?” I interrupted.

“Nope, but CSU is searching the stairwell. We had a bit of a chase. Then Ned searched Ferris back at the stationhouse and took this out of his pocket.”

Alan held out a baggie with a white plastic pill bottle inside.

“Viagra,” I said, studying the label. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s probably easier to get this on the street than smack.”

“It isn’t street stuff, and it didn’t fall off the back of the truck. This is your tax dollars at work, Ms. Cooper.”

“What?”

Ned handed me a piece of paper. It was a receipt for a prescription with Derrick Ferris’s name on it-for Viagra-from a pharmacy that filled the request and received payment from Medicaid funds.

“It doesn’t make any sense for the government to do this. Derrick Ferris is a level-three offender,” I said. “I did the hearing myself.”

Ferris was eighteen at the time of his conviction and had been released after serving only eight years of his twenty-five-year sentence. But he had been designated the most-serious-level sex offender, to be tracked by the convicted-felon registry on the underlying facts of his original case and his risk to the community-far more likely to commit similar assaults again than most other criminals.

“I spoke to his parole officer yesterday,” Ned said. “Ferris is actually supposed to be on medication that-what do I say? Suppresses the urge.”

“You know how this stuff works?” I asked, shaking the bottle. “It increases blood flow to the penis. If he was having any trouble performing, this just enhances his ability to complete an act of intercourse. How many of our guys is Medicaid enabling?”

“Sit down for this one, Alex. We did a check last night. All the level-three offenders are registered online. The sergeant’s calling in the names this morning to the Medicaid office as soon as they open, but there’s more than two hundred convicted rapists in this county alone, and they’re all eligible for the drug. He thought you’d want to let Battaglia know this one’s going to hit the media.”

“Thanks a lot. Ask Ryan to do a memo to the boss for my signature. Remind him to emphasize that level-three offenders don’t change their colors. I’ve never met one who’s been ‘rehabilitated’ by a visit to jail.”

“Good luck today,” Alan said.

“My first witness is Curtis Pell,” I said. They both knew the detective who worked Manhattan North, in the office adjacent to theirs, with Chapman. “I’ll be prepping him as soon as he gets here and we go upstairs to Gertz before nine. If the jurors are all there on time, we’ll be on at nine fifteen. If you hear anything from Medicaid on this by then, give me a heads-up.”

Curtis Pell arrived half an hour later with more coffee and breakfast for himself and Laura. We had been over his involvement in the investigation and his written reports four or five times in the last month, so I just walked him through the trim version of his direct that I had fashioned yesterday.

The chatter of assistants arriving filled the eighth-floor corridor as Curtis helped me maneuver my shopping cart from my office to the first of two elevator banks that connected to the courthouse tower above the DA’s Office.

The hallway outside Part 83 was already lined with spectators and a handful of local crime reporters. Two court officers were standing between the metal detector through which they all had to pass and the long wooden table on which handbags and backpacks and briefcases would be searched.

Curtis Pell opened the door for me and we walked down the aisle to counsel’s table.

Lem Howell had the Wall Street Journal spread out before him. His cream-colored suit looked like the cleanest thing in the drab courtroom, a cool contrast to my slim turquoise sheath.

Lem didn’t pick his head up from the market listings but heard the tap of my heels as we approached him. “Good morning, Alexandra.”

“Morning, Lem,” I said. “Hey, Jonetta, how are you?”

The court clerk waved at me, and Artie Tramm was on his way off the bench to fill the judge’s water pitcher. “We got eight jurors, Alex. We should be able to get started on schedule if the next few mosey in on time. Mind if I put Detective Pell in the witness room?”

“He’s all yours.”

Pell followed Artie out the side door of the courtroom. The hallway behind the jury box had several small rooms-the one in which jurors gathered before proceedings and in which they eventually deliberated, and a windowless cubicle in which witnesses waited before they were called to the stand.

When he came back into the part, Artie called out to Lem and me, “Gertz wants to know if you’re ready as soon as we get our full panel.”

“Good to go,” I said.

“You expecting a visitor?” Artie asked.

One of the court officers had let Alan Vandomir into the room. Lem Howell recognized the detective and got on his feet to sit on the edge of my table. “No more monkey business up your sleeve, is there?”

“It is monkey business, actually, but nothing to do with your case. This will only take a minute. You can listen in, Lem. You’ll hear it on tonight’s news anyway.”

Alan and Lem shook hands. “The sergeant got through to the head of the Medicaid office half an hour ago. These Viagra pills, they cost ten bucks a shot, and the government’s been paying for released sex offenders to get them for five years before anybody happened to notice. The bill for keeping these pervs’ private parts up, just in New York alone, runs over twenty-one million dollars. You better call Battaglia, Alex.”

“Will do, Alan.” He turned to leave the courtroom and Artie Tramm walked him out, locking the door behind him so that Gertz could take the bench without any further interruptions.

“Let me understand this,” Lem said, pacing the well as though arguing to an imaginary jury. He was entertaining me and Jonetta Purvis, the court clerk, and Artie Tramm, the last bit of humor before we hunkered down for a day of testimony about Amanda Keating’s homicide.

The two uniformed court officers who would be guarding Quillian for the remainder of the trial-a stooped older man, Oscar Valenti, and the short African-American woman, Elsie Evers, who had worked the part last week-were leaning against the door to the defendant’s holding pen, also watching Lem perform.

“I am all for the underdog, ladies and gentlemen, do not mistake that fact.” Lem gestured with his forefinger. “But when you are taking food out of the mouths of our hungry children-how much money did he say, Artie?”

“Twenty-one million large, Mr. Howell.”

“When you are using money that could be better spent on a pension fund for Ms. Cooper or a fine new robe for the judge or membership at a gym for Artie Tramm”-Lem patted Artie’s paunch as the officer passed behind him-“and instead, you are correcting, you are fueling, you are-hell, Ms. Cooper, you’re the expert here, what’s going on? You, my dear taxpayers, and the United States government, have just declared an end to erectile dysfunction, is that it? Whose lobby is this? Erectile dysfunction is unfair for sex offenders. Watch the ACLU jump in on their side. It’s mind-boggling.”

“I’ll tell you right up front,” Artie said, “I keep waitin’ for one of those four-hour jobs that I’d have to call my doctor and complain about. Four minutes I’m lucky. I see that ad one more time on TV I’m gonna throw something at the set.”

Fred Gertz swept into the courtroom from his robing room. “Who’s complaining about what? I must say, you’re a happy-looking bunch this morning. How many jurors missing now, Artie?”

“I just checked. We need two regulars and one alternate. Nobody’s called with a problem, so we should be fine by nine fifteen.”

“Anything to discuss? Any housekeeping?”

Lem and I looked at each other, and I said, “No.”

“Shall we bring the prisoner in?” Gertz asked.

Lem walked to the bench for his daily bonding with the judge. “You have to hear this one, Fred. Special Victims Unit locks up a serial rapist last night-a guy on parole for a bunch of attacks Alex got him on years ago. You know what you bought him?”

“Me?” Gertz didn’t get it at first. “What did I buy who?”

“We’ve been paying for his Viagra, Fred. You and I. We’ve been helping to set him up in business in the hood. Helping him get his groove back.”

The two court officers, Oscar and Elsie, had left the room to bring Brendan Quillian in, so that he could take his place before the press, the public, and the jurors were allowed to enter.

“That’s expensive stuff,” Gertz said with a chuckle. “What does one have to do to get the government to pay?”

More than I needed to know about the usually sober jurist.

I walked to the wall phone that was mounted behind Jonetta’s desk. Cell phones were not allowed in court, and this was an internal unit that could only be used to reach extensions within the DA’s Office system.

“Rose? Would you tell the boss that Ryan Blackmer will besending up an urgent notice any minute now? Paul has to pay attention to it and I’m not available till the end of the day. The police commissioner will be trying to get lots of press on this one, and Battaglia needs to know the numbers.” I thanked her and hung up the phone.

Oscar Valenti held open the door for Quillian, and I could hear the distinctive jangling of the metal cuffs as Oscar’s partner, Elsie, unlocked the prisoner’s hands as they paused at the entrance to the court.

“I’ll look into it for you, Fred,” Lem said.

“That’s what they call a stiff dose of medicine,” Artie called across the room, the only one of us laughing at his joke.

The levity would be over the minute Gertz banged his gavel and called for the stenographer and jury to be brought in. But the bizarre news of the Medicaid outrage had broken the tension for all of us before the day’s serious work began.

It had also put us all off guard.

I heard the gunshot before I saw the weapon in Brendan Quillian’s hand. I watched as the petite court officer fell to the floor, shot in the head with her own service revolver.