Bad blood

6

“He only wanted to publicly humiliate you, kid. Like you did to him this morning.”

“Me? I didn’t do anything to him except-”

“Except completely misjudge the character of your first witness,” Mike said. “Mr. Meade was probably hoping that if he made a big enough stir inside the courthouse, it would trump the news story of his wife’s infidelity.”

Judge Gertz had quelled the commotion and allowed Lem Howell to end the session-keeping the jury later than planned-with his cross-examination of Dr. Genco. It was after six when Mike and I returned to my office to make the phone calls confirming the appearances of the next day’s witnesses.

“You changing the batting order?”

I was scratching out names and shifting some of the civilian witnesses to the next week. “You bet. I’m sticking with forensics at the moment. Cold, clinical facts.”

I dialed the beepers and home numbers of the crime-scene analysts who had scoured the Quillian town house unsuccessfully for fingerprints, photographed the entryway and the parlor, and tried to give the lab techs something to work with, as well as the forensic biologist who had spent painstaking hours vainly trying to find nanograms of DNA on items that had been on or around the victim’s body. By seven fifteen, I had restructured my case presentation and was ready to quit for the night.

“Let’s check the tube and see how they play the day,” Mike said, starting out for the public relations office on the main corridor of the eighth-floor hallway. The press secretary, Brenda Whitney, had the responsibility of monitoring media accounts-on television and in print-of all the office cases that attracted attention for daily reports to Paul Battaglia, the longtime district attorney of New York County.

“Did Brenda leave you the key?” She had a bank of television sets that ran all day so that her staff could follow national news stories-Battaglia’s creative white-collar investigations that frequently shook up the financial industry-and feeds from the local networks that replayed around the clock.

Mike dangled the key over his shoulder as he walked out my door. “Follow me. One cycle of breaking news and then you can feed me. Mercer will meet us for dinner in an hour.”

“I’ve told you I can’t eat,” I said, picking up some folders to take home and turning out the lights.

“We need to keep your strength up for the rest of the battle. I think Lem’s been chewing steak knives to sharpen his teeth for the kill.”

We let ourselves into the pressroom and Mike flipped on one of the TVs. The local all-news channel repeated its headlines three times an hour, and it took only minutes until they reran the end-of-the-day broadcast from the courthouse steps.

Mercer had done his job well. He had spirited Kate Meade out the back door so the press had no photo ops, no footage with which to tell her story. Instead, they got shots of Preston Meade being led away from the building by three uniformed officers who had surrounded him when Judge Gertz ejected him from the proceedings.

The telegenic Lem Howell smoothed his hair back and smiled for the cameras. He’d never met a microphone he didn’t like. “I think you’ll see that the state rushed to judgment in this tragic matter,” he said to the reporter, who was eager to get a quote from a principal in the case.

“You have any idea who the killer actually was?”

“No more so than the prosecutor does, I’d have to say.”

“Give those glib jaws a rest,” Mike called out to the image on the screen as he switched channels. “You didn’t come off too badly in all that.”

“Only because Preston Meade hasn’t found a path to Battaglia yet to complain.”

“C’mon, blondie. The way your luck is blowing, I got a shot at Jeopardy! tonight and then we’re off, okay?”

For as long as I’d known Mike Chapman, it had been his habit to watch the last five minutes of the perennially popular quiz show in order to bet against whoever was in his company on the final Jeopardy! question. Mercer and I were the usual combatants, wagering twenty dollars or more, depending on whose favorite subject was the topic of the evening. Squad commanders, prosecutors, morgue attendants, and dead bodies had all been kept waiting while Mike tested his wits against the on-screen players.

Alex Trebek was smiling at us as the commercial break ended. “Tonight’s category is Greek Mythology. Let’s see what the answer is, folks.”

“Double or nothing,” Mike said. He had majored in history at Fordham College before joining the NYPD and had encyclopedic knowledge of military figures and events, both American and worldwide. If the subject was an ancient Greek warrior, he would beat me cold. “You can always hope for Leda and her swans.”

“Do I have any choice?” I asked, removing the bills from my wallet.

Trebek revealed the answer on the giant blue game board as he spoke it aloud. “Iconic desert figure whose original Greek name means ‘the strangler,’” Trebek said, repeating the word I had hoped not to hear again tonight. “The strangler.”

“Brendan Quillian isn’t Greek, is he?” Mike said. “I’m totally stumped. Where’s there a desert in Greece?”

“Out of my league,” I said, waving the bills at him. “We’ll use this for drinks.”

“I’m sorry that none of you guessed it correctly,” Trebek said to his three dejected contestants. “The Sphinx. The Great Sphinx at Giza, which for many people symbolizes the country of Egypt, is named from the Greek word for a fantastic creature with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of a bird. Legend has it that she strangled travelers who couldn’t solve her riddle.”

Mike zapped Trebek off with the clicker. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you work that image into your summation. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant testified in this courtroom, no longer silent like the Sphinx, the great ancient strangler of the desert-’”

“‘Half-man, half-beast.’ You’re on. And it’s all providing I survive Lem’s motion to dismiss at the end of the People’s case. Where are you meeting Mercer?”

“Primola,” Mike said, referring to my favorite Upper East Side Italian restaurant on Second Avenue, not far from the high-rise building in which I lived. The consistently great fare, the casual ambience, and the personal attention we received from the owner and his crew made it one of my regular haunts. “My car’s on Baxter Street. Wait in the lobby and I’ll come around for you.”

We rode down together in the elevator and I chatted with the Fifth Precinct officer who had been assigned to lobby security, a quiet post on this warm summer night. When Mike’s car pulled in front of the orange cones that kept Battaglia’s parking space reserved, the cop walked me out and opened the car door. I threw the paper bags full of empty coffee containers and soiled napkins onto the seat behind me and settled in on the passenger side for the ride uptown.

Mike Chapman and I made an unlikely pair. I had turned thirty-seven at the end of April, six months after he’d celebrated the same birthday, but we had few other traits in common beside our age. His father, Brian, had been a legend in the NYPD, known for his street smarts, his guts, and his investigative style, who’d retired after twenty-six years on the job only to die of a coronary forty-eight hours from the time he gave up his gun and badge. His widow, born in Ireland, made good on her promise to see that Mike graduated from college, but was just as proud when he used those qualities of his father’s that seemed to have passed to him through the genes and joined the force the day after completing his degree at Fordham.

I rested my head against the back of the seat. The bright lights over the sign at the entrance to the northbound FDR Drive beat down at me from above, so I shifted and stared at Mike for a minute or two before closing my eyes. He had all the instincts of a great cop plus the benefits of a good education. The coveted gold shield of the detective division had been awarded to him early in his career, for his role in arrests in a drug-related massacre on Christmas Day of his first year in uniform, followed by the daring rescue of a pregnant teenager who had threatened suicide from atop the George Washington Bridge.

“You fading out on me?”

“I’m tweaking my summation.”

“That’s weeks away, if you’re lucky.”

“One of things I learned from Lem Howell,” I said. “You write your closing argument before you ever open to the jury. It forces you to organize your case more thoroughly, to structure it with a logic that the jury can follow as you put the pieces of the puzzle together.”

Mike looked over and smiled his great wide grin that warmed me no matter how bad my mood. “Back to the drawing board, huh, Coop?”

“Forget my ‘Kate Meade, pillar of the community’ remarks. I’ll have to toss them. Did you get an update on Marley Dionne, or do I write him off, too?”

“The Rasta disaster? He may not talk, but he’ll live.” Mike ran his right hand through his hair. “He’s out of surgery.”

I hadn’t seen much of Mike’s humor in the last six months. His fiancée had been killed in a freak skiing accident, and he had withdrawn from Mercer and me-the two friends whose personal relationships had become as close as our professional ones over the last decade.

My passage to public service had come from an entirely different direction. I had been raised in Harrison, New York, an affluent suburb of New York City. My parents had melded their diverse backgrounds into a strong, happy marriage-she the descendant of Finnish immigrants who had settled on a dairy farm in Massachusetts at the turn of the nineteenth century, and he the child of Russian Jews who’d fled political oppression before World War II and come to this country with his older brothers, my grandmother giving birth to her first “American son” two years after their arrival.

From my mother, Maude, I’d inherited more than her green eyes and long legs. She had gone to college for a degree in nursing, and although she had given up a career she loved to raise my brothers and me, her superb nurturing skills and great compassion for people in need had found its way into my work with victims of sexual violence, who required more than a law school education from their advocates.

My father, Benjamin, was completing his post-medical-school internship in cardiology when one night he and three friends waited in line after a twelve-hour shift at the teaching hospital to spend the evening listening to jazz at the most famous Manhattan nightclub of its day-Montparnasse. Dozens of people were killed when a kitchen fire swept through the lower floor of the crowded restaurant, the flames fueled by the starched table linens and the gauzy costumes of the chorus girls. For the next several hours, my father and the other young docs rode the ambulances that responded to treat the scores of injured patrons, alongside the beautiful but unflinching young nursing student-who escaped from the inferno with her date to join the small band of volunteers-with whom he fell in love.

Our middle-class, suburban lifestyle changed dramatically when I was twelve years old, the year that my father and his partner in medical practice invented and patented a half-inch piece of plastic tubing that became known as the Cooper-Hoffman valve. The miraculous little device became an essential part of cardiac bypass surgery, used in operating theaters all over the world for more than a decade, and modified to keep current with medical advances to the present day.

This lifesaving invention had supported my education at Wellesley, a first-rate all-women’s college where I majored in English literature, followed by my studies for a Juris Doctor at the University of Virginia School of Law. The trust funds established for my siblings and me had not only allowed me the luxury of buying a home on Martha’s Vineyard, but also made it possible for me to devote a career to public service while maintaining a more privileged lifestyle than many of my colleagues.

I had thought that my own encounter with tragedy-the death of my fiancé, Adam Nyman, in a car accident as he drove to our wedding weekend on the Vineyard-would help me relate to Mike when Val was killed. But Mike had shut down on every emotional front, and my own memories of great happiness cut short by the senseless loss of life roiled up again with fresh pain that belied the passage of so many years.

“I’ve been meaning to find the time-the right time-to ask, you know, how you’ve been doing lately,” I said. Mike’s strong profile was outlined against the car window, backlit by the overhead lights as we sped along the drive. “You want to talk?”

“Not now.” His eyes never left the road.

“I worry that you’re-”

“Worry about yourself. Worry about your case for the next few weeks. You got creatures imploding on you inside and out of the courtroom. Me? I’ll still be on the last stool at the end of the bar at Forlini’s when the verdict comes in, win or lose. We needed someone sticking Marley Dionne like you need another pair of shoes.”

Mike still wasn’t letting me any closer on the personal side. He was telling me something, though, by the way he snapped at me and refused to engage. We were back to the business of the trial, and I trusted he knew I was available for him to lean on whenever he was ready.

“You going to try to talk to Marley tomorrow?” I asked.

“I’ll be bedside in the intensive care unit before I start down to your office, pinching that IV tube from time to time to jog his memory. I’m hoping we got a Samson effect going on.”

“You mean-”

“Someone cut off his dreads and maybe his balls shrunk in the process,” Mike said, wheeling the car off the drive and onto York Avenue, circling the blocks to get to Second.

We parked across the street from the restaurant and walked over, making our way through the crowd at the bar to get to Mercer and Giuliano, the owner, who were sitting together at a table against the front windows.

“Ciao, Alessandra,” Giuliano said, rising to greet us. “Detectivo, come stai?”

“Benissimo, now that I’m here,” Mike said, slapping the taller man’s back.

“Fenton, subito,” the owner called out to the bartender, snapping his fingers to get his attention. Giuliano winked at me as he pulled out my chair. “I think Signorina Cooper needs a double tonight, from what Mr. Mercer has been telling me.”

Our cocktail preferences were so well-known here that we had only to enter the restaurant before the good-natured waiters-Adolfo, Tony, and Dominick-delivered them to our places.

“Give us some fried zucchini to nibble on with our drinks,” Mike said to Giuliano, who offered to take our order himself. “The princess here has been giving me a hard time about eating all day. Do up a vat of ziti, with some of that tomato-basil sauce. She’s been working too hard to consider cutting her food or even chewing it. This’ll just slide down her throat, no effort at all.”

“I’ve got some delicious striped bass tonight, gentlemen.”

Mercer nodded and Mike continued ordering. “Two of those, and give us some prosciutto and figs. Blondie’ll just watch.”

“Nice job of getting Kate Meade home without paparazzi,” I said to Mercer as I lifted my glass of Dewar’s to click against each of their drinks.

“I’m not sure she’d ever seen the service entrance of her apartment building or even knew there were handymen who work in the basement, but I’ll be surprised if she doesn’t tip them well come Christmas.”

“How was the ride uptown?”

“Human tear ducts must hold a lot more fluid than I imagined. She never stopped crying.”

“Did she have time to talk before her husband got home?” I asked.

“Alex, that woman was so damned distracted, thinking about what was going to happen to her marriage and her kids and her life, there wasn’t any way to do a serious interrogation.”

“Did you get anything at all?”

“Seems like Preston Meade had been caught with his pants down a few months earlier. They’d been in marriage counseling for a while, but both of them were too uptight to talk their problems out in front of a therapist.”

“So Kate took the more direct route,” Mike said as he moved the ice around in his vodka glass. “Payback, don’t you think? One shot with the guy she’s probably had the hots for since high school. You got to look out for those mousy little ones, I’m telling you. Bad-tempered ballbreakers like Coop let it out now and then, but think about how long all this has been seething inside the very proper Mrs. Meade. Some of those nuns who taught her math, manners, and morals must be doing overtime on their rosary beads tonight.”

“What happened when Preston arrived?” I asked.

Mercer started to answer and I cupped my hand, leaning over the table to try to hear his answer. The chattering customers standing at the bar behind me were competing with the group of eight over my other shoulder that had just come in to wait for a table, and from the street outside came the sudden screeching noise of sirens passing by.

Mike pulled back the white voile café curtain. “Fire engines.”

“What did you say?” I repeated to Mercer.

“Wait till they pass,” he said, pointing to the window.

But the noise didn’t abate. I lifted the curtain on my side as a block-long, red hook-and-ladder wailed its urgent noise, stuck behind several cars that were jamming the intersection. It was joined by a backup chorus of whelping vehicles, so Mike stood to walk to the door, attracted by the growing fleet of patrol cars and ambulances.

Mercer’s waistband beeper started to vibrate just as Mike flipped open his cell phone and hit a single button-speed-dialing his office, I assumed.

Mercer unclipped the beeper and frowned as he looked at the illuminated numerical message. “Ten thirty-three.”

I knew too well the numbers of most of the NYPD emergency codes, from the extremely urgent ten thirteen to assist a fellow officer to the familiar ten thirty-four of an assault in progress.

I reached for Mercer’s arm as he pushed away from the table. “What is it?”

“Possible bomb, Alex. Report of an explosive device.”

Mike had covered one ear with his fingers as he listened to someone on the phone before turning back to speak to Mercer, ignoring me altogether. “Big explosion midtown, somewhere in the West Thirties. Get Coop outta here, will you? She has to be sparkling in the morning to make up for today’s fiasco. I gotta go. My whole squad’s been mobilized.”

I thought the day’s events had drained the adrenaline from my system, but somehow it began coursing through me again. “That’s Manhattan South. It’s not even your jurisdiction.”

Dreadful memories of 9/11 were seared in my brain, and I knew Mike was quick to put himself in harm’s way for anything the department asked of him.

“They’re calling in everyone on the terrorist task force. Could be a hit. Take a slug of your Scotch, kid, and head for home.”