Killer Heat

FOURTEEN

Where's Barbara?"

"Cooling her heels in the squad room. Talk to Arthur Huff first. The girl can use the time to lose some attitude."

I followed Mike up the staircase to the third floor of the old station house on West Eighty-second Street. Elise and Barbara had shared an apartment just blocks away, on Amsterdam Avenue. It was Barbara who had called the Huffs when Elise had not come home for two nights. Arthur Huff was sitting in the captain's office sipping coffee from a mug when Mike opened the door for me.

I had been spared the heartbreaking assignment of telling him the circumstances of his child's death. Detective Draper and his team had delivered that news the night before, dashing the family's hopes- against most odds-that Elise would be found alive.

I introduced myself and offered words of consolation for his unimaginable loss. He had heard the same thing too many times today for it to have any meaning.

He had just come from his daughter's apartment, collecting a few of her personal effects that he wanted to keep with him. "I forgot to ask about her little ring," Huff said. "Did they find anything on-on Elise?"

"No, sir. You can tell me about it if it's something you think she was wearing. Perhaps it will turn up in the investigation."

"She never took it off, from the day her grandmother died four years ago. My father was a West Point man, Ms. Cooper. Graduated in 1943. The cadets all had rings back in those days. That's the USMA emblem." Huff held out his hand to me to show me the writing on his father's ring, a thick gold setting with a yellow stone. "Mine's a citrine, like hers, only larger. When the men became engaged, they had identical ones made for their fiancées-miniatures, of course. Elise wouldn't go anywhere without her ring."

"I'll add that to the report. We'll certainly return it to you when we find it." I wasn't hopeful that it would ever surface in the Brooklyn marshland.

He removed a pair of hoop earrings, a cameo pin, and a thin gold necklace from his pocket and cupped them in his hands. "Not much to go back home with, is it? Her little sister's going to want these things.

She worships Elise."

"I'm sure she has good reason to do that."

"I'd like to know why I can't talk to Barbara again," Huff said, adopting a more businesslike tone. I guessed him to be in his early fifties-with red hair the color of his daughter's-although the fact that he hadn't slept in a week made him appear older.

"It's important that we get some information from her first," Mike said.

"I think you've had your chance to do that, Detective."

"She wasn't honest with you or your wife, either."

I had met with Barbara Gould for an interview when Battaglia first assigned me the case. She repeated to me then that she had called the Huffs at the end of the preceding weekend. She told them, and then the police, that she and Elise had gone out drinking after work. But she lied about the time of night they parted company, where she last saw Elise, and how intoxicated both young women were.

"Barbara's like my own child," Huff said, dismissing Mike completely. "She'd never lie to us."

"Well, we're going to try to find out why she did."

"I spoke to the captain tonight, before he left," Huff said, getting up from the desk and walking to look at the pegboard wall behind him, which was covered from floor to ceiling with artists' sketches and mug shots of wanted perps. "He told me about another girl-another body found somewhere downtown this week.

"Tell me, Detective," he said as he turned back to Mike. "You don't think these two cases are connected, do you?"

Mike brushed back his hair with his hand. "Too early to say. More likely just a coincidence that-"

"Good. Because I don't expect my baby had anything to do with a man who was killing whores. Do you understand that, Mr. Chapman? Elise is-Elise was a good girl, and I don't want the Huff name mixed up in that other woman's business."

"We don't spend a whole lotta time blaming our victims, Mr. Huff,"

Mike said. "We just leave that to the newspapers. Are you comfortable here while Alex and I have another run at Barbara?"

He slumped back down into the chair. "I want answers, Detective.

I've got our congressman putting some heat on y'all. I expect results.

I'm expecting you to solve this damn thing quickly. My wife and I would like some closure. And we'd like it soon."

"Closure," Mike said, shutting the door behind us. "Closure is the most bullshit word in the English language. I'll find this beast and you'll send him up the river for the rest of his life. The day of the verdict, Huff will have that short-lived rush of happiness that comes with a homicide conviction. Some news jock will stick a microphone in his face on the courthouse steps and ask how he feels about the conviction and he'll tell them it's great and now he's got closure. Next day he and the missus will wake up and realize their kid is still dead. There's no such thing as closure when you lose someone you love to a murderer."

I knew that, too, and it was part of the reason it was so much more satisfying for me to work with survivors of sexual assault, who never forgot what happened to them but were most often able to move on with their lives.

"Heads, you can be the good cop," Mike said.

"Not a contest. I want another shot at her."

"Bad cop it is. This kid doesn't know yet what it's like to be in your crosshairs, Coop."

Barbara Gould was in the small cubicle used by the Twentieth Precinct detective squad for interrogations. It held a table and four chairs, and the walls were completely bare. Her head was resting on her forearms until she picked it up when we entered the room. "Hello, again," I said.

"Hello. Look, Detective, if you give me back my cell, I've got to be going now. It's almost nine o'clock and I've got a lot of stuff to do." The twenty-year-old had practiced her pout well. The moment she recognized me, she put it on and began to pull and twist a strand of her long brown hair around her forefinger.

"Ms. Cooper needs to talk to you," Mike said, leaning back against the door.

"We've had that conversation."

"And now we're going to have it once more. Only this time you're going to tell me the truth."

"I tried to tell Mr. Huff. So I was wrong the first time," Barbara said, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling and clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "What happens if I leave? Can I just go now?"

"No, you can't leave."

I had no authority to keep the petulant young woman in the station house, but she accepted my answer and didn't move from her seat.

I started, calmly, to go through the story she had told me originally. "We're going to start over, Barbara, from the time you and Elise left your apartment."

Two years younger than Elise, Barbara had come to New York first and was about to enter her junior year at Marymount College. Elise had finished college in Tennessee and landed a job working at La Guardia Airport as a counter agent for Jet Blue.

The first part of the story was consistent with what she had told me a week earlier. Elise had come home from work at seven, and after eating a light supper together they went out to meet friends. Barbara was dressed in leggings and a tube top, and Elise had kept on the navy blue pants and crisp white short-sleeved uniform shirt-complete with small gold wings on the collar-that she wore at work. She liked to do that, Barbara had said with a laugh when she first talked to me about Elise, because guys often took her for a flight attendant.

"What time did you leave your apartment?"

"I don't know. Around eleven, I guess. Between eleven and twelve."

What passed for closing time in many other parts of the country was the hour at which Manhattan's cosmopolitan young ladies set out to meet guys.

"Where did you go?"

Barbara looked over my head at Mike, still twisting her hair. "I told you."

"Tell me again." I needed to know how much of the original story was true.

"Gleason's, over on Columbus. Just around the corner from our apartment."

"What did you have to drink?"

"White wine." She had surrendered her fake ID to me when I first met her. It was a forged driver's license, readily available almost everywhere in the Manhattan bar scene.

"The same for Elise?"

"Yeah."

"How many glasses?"

"Two. We each bought a round, and then some guy was hitting on me. He bought us the third drink. But we hardly touched them."

"I wish I could get a refund for every glass of wine a witness tells me she ordered but never touched," Mike said. "Eight bucks a pop, I could retire tomorrow."

"Did you see anyone else you knew?"

Barbara thought for a few seconds. "No."

"How long did you stay there?"

She rolled her eyes again. "I'm not sure. It's like more than a week already."

"And your friend Elise is dead. Mike and I need a timeline for everything she did that night. I'm not asking you about ancient history, Barbara. Think hard."

"An hour. Maybe a little longer. You're like really pushing me."

"Then where did you go?"

"There's that little place I told you about, like halfway down the block from Gleason's, with an outdoor café. We went there, so we could sit outside. Columbus Café."

"Did you order anything to eat? Or to drink?"

"Nothing to eat. Just another glass of wine. I only had like half of it."

"And Elise?"

"Same thing. She didn't drink that much."

"Did you know anyone there? Talk to anyone?"

A few seconds of hesitation, again. A few too many. "No."

"Barbara, who did you see?"

She lowered her eyes and changed hands, twirling the hair on the left side of her part. "Oh, God, I don't want to bring anybody else into this."

"That's not a choice you have, don't you understand?"

"It's not going to bring Elise back," she said, as tears welled up in her eyes. "Nothing's going to do that."

"It's about the truth, dammit. Who are you trying to hide from us?"

"Nobody. Why can't we just leave my statement the way it was?"

"You didn't split from Elise at that café, did you? You didn't leave her there and walk home, like you told me last week."

"What happens to me if I change my story?"

"If you do it now? Nothing. If you wait until you've testified falsely under oath, then we get to figure out if you've committed perjury." Barbara pulled the strand of hair across her lips and began to chew on it.

"You're doing a lousy job, Coop. You're gonna give bad cops a good name," Mike said, stretching his arms out and cracking his knuckles. "Isn't this when you tell her to get the friggin' hair out of her mouth and stop whining about herself?"

Barbara's face soured at the sharp sound of his words. "It wasn't my idea. Elise was the one who wanted to go downtown.

I told her it was stupid."

"Every minute you waste, you make it harder for us to find her killer. We've had detectives in and out of Gleason's and that café every night since Elise went missing," I said. No one recalled seeing anyone fitting her description in the early hours of the morning, either with friends or alone. "I believed you, Barbara. I believed that's where you left her. Obviously it's not true. Now, when did you leave Columbus to go downtown?"

"I don't know."

"There's a little operation called the Taxi and Limousine Commission, Barbara. They've got the trip sheets of every yellow cab-where and when the driver made his pickup and where he dropped his passengers off. I'll have those records tomorrow."

"Really?" She twisted her neck and screwed up her mouth. "It's all in their computer by now. I just have to give them the address of the café and ask for the fares that got in after one a.m. The TLC will tell me how many riders, and where they went."

"Okay, all right. There were three of us. Is that what you want to know? I hooked up with this guy I knew at the Columbus Café."

"What's his name?" She was watching Mike as he took out a pad from his rear pants pocket and began to make notes.

"He doesn't want to get involved."

"He's involved up to his eyeballs, simply because he was with you and Elise. Maybe he saw something or someone you didn't see."

"He's going to hate me."

"Did you hear what Mike said? This isn't about you."

"Look, I told Mr. Huff tonight. I told him I forgot that we stopped at another place downtown. I just didn't remember at the time is all. It seemed so unimportant, and I was so upset."

"Who's the guy?" I asked.

She picked up her sunglasses from the table and put them on.

"Cliff. His name is Clifford Trane, okay?"

"Take those off, Barbara." I needed to see her eyes. I needed to gauge whether she was feeding me more nonsense.

"I don't have to take them off. I don't have to be here if I don't want."

"Tell me about Cliff."

She wiggled her head back and forth, as though deciding what to tell me.

Mike took three steps forward and pulled the sunglasses off Barbara's nose. She was beginning to cry.

"He plays basketball for St. John's. He'll be a senior this year."

"Coach would flip out if his name was in the paper anywhere but the sports pages, I guess. Booze and clubbing don't fit with preseason training," Mike said. He would have to fill me in later on the college basketball scene. "Sometimes I think the media drives the criminal justice system, everybody worried about their fifteen minutes of fame instead of doing the right thing. That didn't hurt much, did it? Give Coop the rest."

"Why did you leave the Columbus Café?"

"Because of Elise. She wanted to meet somebody downtown."

"It's a big place, downtown. Where?"

"The Bowery. A bar called the Pioneer." The strip of land that ran from Canal Street up to Cooper Square had been skid row for more than half a century. Gentrification and the spread of yuppie hangouts across SoHo had encroached on the once-dangerous avenue, replacing some of the flophouses and homeless shelters with pubs and clubs. "Who was she going to meet?"

"Kevin. She said his name was Kevin. Or Kiernan. Maybe it was Kiernan. I don't know him, all right? I don't know anything else about him."

"You, Cliff, and Elise-you all took a cab together?"

"Yes," she said, whining more heavily now. "What happened when you got to the Pioneer?"

"It's a bar, Ms. Cooper. Get it? We ordered drinks," Barbara said. "Cliff was doing tequila shots. I think I had wine. I don't know about Elise."

"Why not?"

"She was upset, that's why. We stayed at the bar and she sat down at a table against the wall. She was talking on her cell."

"To whom?"

"Kevin, I guess."

"For how long?"

"Five minutes, maybe ten."

"Then what happened."

"Elise and I had an argument," Barbara said, as tears streaked down her cheeks.

"About what?" I kept digging at her rather than letting her pause to collect herself. The floodgates had opened and she was telling us the real story for the first time.

"I was mad at her for dragging us all the way downtown, like practically half an hour in the cab. I was really pissed off." She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

"Why? "Because I wanted to go home with Cliff, that's why. I think Elise was jealous of me," she said, growing more sullen as she tried to justify her annoyance at her dear friend. "I mean, I don't know if she made up this Kevin or Kiernan or whoever he is. We went out of our way to go with her to the Pioneer, and the damn guy never showed up. Was I supposed to wait all night?"

"Did she know you were mad?"

"Yeah. Like I said, we had an argument."

"Inside the Pioneer, in front of other people?"

Barbara lowered her head. "In the bathroom. I don't think anyone else would have heard us."

"How did it start?"

"I told Elise that Cliff and I were leaving. It was after three o'clock.

I was tired and starting to feel-you know, sleepy," she said. "I asked her what was up with this Kevin guy, and she like blew me off. Told me to go ahead without her. That'd she'd be fine getting home. I tried to get her to come with me, I really did."

"How hard did you try?" Mike asked.

"I didn't like drag her by the arm and all, okay? Was I supposed to carry her out?"

"Did she know anyone at the Pioneer? The bartender?"

"We'd never been there before. Neither one of us. We only went 'cause this guy Kevin told her he'd meet her there."

"How did she know him?"

"Some party the week before. She said a girl she knew from work introduced her."

"Was she drunk when you left her?"

"Buzzed. I'd say Elise had a good buzz on."

"Was she still drinking?"

"Cliff bought her a glass of wine. Left it on her table. I don't know what she did with it. He was only trying to be nice."

"Where did you tell her you were going?" I asked.

She rolled her eyes once more. "Cliff wanted to come to our place, okay? I told her we were going home. I didn't care whether she came with us or not."

"How big is your apartment?"

Barbara blushed. "It's a studio."

It would be hard for two kids their age, one still in school, to afford more than that on Manhattan's Upper West Side. But the situation didn't offer much privacy when one of them hooked up with a guy. "Maybe she felt like a third wheel," Mike said.

"I can't help that. This isn't my fault. I didn't kill Elise and I don't know who did."

"The last time you saw her, where was she and what was she doing?" I asked.

"She was at the same table against the wall. Sitting there by herself," Barbara said, giving us an additional fact each time she opened her mouth. "I even called her from the cab, just to see if that jerk ever showed up."

"Did you talk?"

"Yeah. She told me she was going to take a walk, go to one of the other bars down there to find him."

"Which one?"

"I don't know, really. I told her not to do that. I told her it wasn't safe to walk around alone down there at that hour," Barbara said, rubbing her eyes. "I told her that I'd stay over at Cliff's place instead. That she just ought to get in a cab and come home."

The detectives would have to play catch-up. Nights wasted in the chic eateries on Columbus Avenue would now be spent in the uneven mix of spots-upscale and lowdown-that bookended the Bowery. Bartenders, bouncers, patrons, and passersby would be canvassed anew.

The photograph of the smiling girl in the white shirt, wings on the collar-and the description of her outfit, including the crested gold ring on her finger-would be posted in the Pioneer and in the other bars on the blocks around it. They'd have to find Kevin-or Kiernan- or whoever it was Elise expected to meet.

"Did you talk to Elise again? Did you try to call her after that?"

"No."

"Weren't you worried when she didn't come home Saturday morning?" I asked.

"I had no idea she wasn't at our apartment," Barbara said. "I didn't get there myself until Sunday night."

"You spent the weekend with Cliff Trane?"

She rested her elbows on the table and placed her forehead in her hands. "Yeah."

"I don't get it, Barbara. Who are you protecting in this?"

"Cliff's going to be so mad at me," she said, sliding down in the chair and twirling her hair again. "He was suspended from school sophomore year. Some girl claimed that she was date-raped by his roommate and that he was an accomplice."

I didn't know where to take this next and looked over to Mike for help.

"The charges were dropped, Ms. Cooper," Barbara said. "But if he's connected to another scandal he'll be thrown out this time."

"It'll be up to Dickie Draper, from the Brooklyn homicide squad, to figure out how connected your man is," Mike said. "In the meantime, you'll be working 24/7 to help the detectives find out who the guy is Elise was supposed to meet."

"I don't want Mr. Huff to hear this," Barbara said, lowering her voice. "I don't know if Kevin or Kiernan even exists, Mr. Chapman.

Like the way she told guys she was a flight attendant? Elise was making things up all the time.