Killer Heat

SIX

Isat on a bar stool at Primola, sipping my sparkling water like it was aged Scotch. Mike was next to me, stirring the ice cubes in the vodka with his finger. Every table in the chic East Side restaurant was full of people escaping the August heat with a good meal. "Is the air-conditioning blowing on you, Alessandra?" Giuliano asked. "I'll have a table for you in five minutes."

"We're fine right here."

The owner had been my friend for many years. He was used to seeing me with Mike or Mercer and kept us well fed through many long nights of highly charged casework.

"Fenton," he said to the bartender. "Give Signora Cooper a drink.

On me."

"She's like Ali before a big fight, Giuliano. Can't be flirting with a hangover when she faces the jury in the morning."

"I'll take a raincheck," I said, nibbling on a bread stick as thin as a straw.

Mike turned to me and rested his feet on the rungs of my stool. We made an odd couple, from backgrounds as different as anyone could imagine, but had forged a real intimacy over a decade of working on some of the grisliest cases the city had seen.

"Have some pasta, Coop. You need the carbs."

"I just want a bowl of gazpacho. It's too hot for anything else." He turned back to Fenton. "I'll start with linguine. White clam sauce. Then I'll have a veal chop, thick as they come."

Murder never got in the way of Mike's appetite. His father, Brian, had been one of the most decorated cops in the NYPD's history, retiring after twenty-six years on the job. Mike had been weaned on investigative skills and instincts, but he was also the first in his family to attend college. When Brian died of a massive coronary less than fortyeight hours after turning in his gun and shield, his only son became even more determined to follow in his footsteps. Immediately on graduation from Fordham, where he had waited tables to supplement his student loans, he, too, joined the department.

"Have you ever been to Dylan's?" I asked.

There weren't many watering holes in Manhattan that Mike had missed, between his personal barhopping and the complex directions of many of his cases.

"Too preppy for a blue-collar guy like me."

"How did an Irish pub get to be so preppy?"

"When I was in college, the place had more of a neighborhood feel." He had turned thirty-seven the previous fall, six months before me. "Jimmy Dylan was good to the cops. Happy to have guys from the precinct going off duty drop in when he was trying to get the drunks out at the end of a long night."

I chewed another bread stick and leaned closer to Mike, trying to hear over the laughter of the patrons at the closest table. Mike's eyes were almost as dark as his hair, and I was pleased to see that they had regained some of the sparkle that had disappeared for the better part of a year after the accidental death of his fiancée, Valerie. "Dylan started to make some money for himself, so he began to send his kids-the oldest three are sons-to private schools. Junior- that's what they call the eldest son-he must be almost thirty now. All his high school pals hung out at the joint, 'cause Jimmy served them liquor when they were too young to get it anywhere else. He didn't really give a damn what anybody thought. Once you had all that teenage testosterone mixed in with a little alcohol, Dylan's became a magnet for the prep school girls, too. Fancy broads like you, looking to get lucky."

"I didn't-"

"Yeah, sorry. You were too busy memorizing Shakespeare sonnets and sublimating your sexual desires swimming laps to hang out at pubs," Mike said, opening one of the linen napkins on the bar and spreading it across my knees as he saw our waiter, Adolfo, approaching with my chilled soup.

I had been raised in Harrison, an affluent suburb of New York City.

My mother was a registered nurse who stopped working to raise her three children-my two older brothers and me. My father's medical career took a radical upturn when he and his partner designed and patented an innovative device that became a staple of cardiac surgery.

The Cooper-Hoffman valve moved us to northern Westchester, where much of my adolescence was spent training for swim team competition, and paid for my superb education at Wellesley College and then the University of Virginia School of Law.

Mike tucked his napkin into his open shirt collar and started twirling his linguine-filled fork against a large spoon, even as steam still rose from the clam-covered pasta.

"You ever see the bodies on the guys who swim the thousand-meter crawl?" I asked, reaching out to pinch Mike's side. "Totally buff. No NYPD doughnuts. No chips."

"They're always soaking wet and they wear bathing caps. Nothing sexy about it. Soup cold enough for you?"

"Very refreshing. Does Jimmy Dylan know you?"

"Nope. He knew my pop," Mike said. "Brian worked on a case back when I was twelve or thirteen. Two kids who met at the Brazen Head, drinking at the bar. Girl wound up dead in Gracie Square Park, just south of where the mayor lives."

"And what did Dylan have to do with it?"

"Nothing. And everything. The boy was nineteen years old, just off the boat from Ireland. Brought a mean cocaine habit with him. Both he and the girl were underage, but Jimmy's crew made them welcome at the bar. Three parts cocaine, two parts tequila shots, and one part homicidal rage when the girl tried to say "no" transformed the perp into a cold-blooded killer-alcohol courtesy of Jimmy Dylan."

"So you'd think the SLA would have shut the place down," I said.

The State Liquor Authority licensed every drinking establishment. "All the publicity just gave Dylan's more cachet. Jimmy paid a big fine, I think, and by then kids from Connecticut and Jersey were queuing up around the block, fake IDs and all, just 'cause the place had its fifteen minutes of fame."

"Are you going to try to find him tonight?" I asked, wiping some sauce off Mike's cheek with my napkin while he sliced into his chop. "Yeah. Spoils it a bit, though, that Janet gave him a heads-up."

"I guess I'll be paying you back on that one for a while." My cell phone vibrated on the smooth varnished surface of the bar.

I picked it up and noted the district attorney's home number in the illuminated display before I answered.

"Good evening, Paul." I plugged a finger in my left ear and walked out to the vestibule, through the crowd waiting for tables, so Battaglia wouldn't hear the background noise.

"How come you're not home yet? I tried you there first. Don't you have a big day tomorrow?"

"I'm on my way. Just having a bite to eat."

"Don't let Chapman's appetite run up your bill. You'll go broke feeding him."

Someday, if I lived long enough, I might get to tell Paul Battaglia something he didn't already know. The longtime prosecutor had developed an incredible array of sources in the unlikeliest of places, and he delighted in putting the information he gathered to good use-to solve crimes, respond to critics, engage reporters, or simply amuse himself. "I'll cut him off at dessert."

"Why didn't you come by to tell me about the case Mike brought you in on last night?"

"I didn't think it was going anywhere, Paul. I was in court all day on Floyd Warren. We never expected to get a name on the woman so fast."

Now I was sweating again. There was no fan in the hallway and the hot air coming in from Second Avenue was stifling. So was the thought that I had done to Battaglia what he liked least-let him be the last to know.

"This Amber Bristol, how was she killed? "Bludgeoned to death."

"With what?"

"Don't know yet." Never a good answer to give the district attorney. "Figure it out, will you? The story's already out on the wire services," Battaglia said, pausing between sentences. "I'm going to tell you something that has to be held in strictest confidence."

"Of course." I walked to the sidewalk and seated myself at one of Giuliano's café tables. It was too oppressive for any customers to have eaten outside.

"Have you ever met Herb Ackerman?"

"No. I've seen him at a few of your press conferences." Damn, the last thing Mike needed was one of the city's best investigative reporters breathing down his neck so early in the process.

"He's going to be in your office first thing tomorrow morning. You need to talk to him."

Battaglia knew all about the Floyd Warren trial. It was the most dramatic cold case we had solved, with national consequences, and he had used it as the best example of his leadership in the recently completed drive to eliminate the New York State statute of limitation for rape.

"It's the main testimony in my case in chief, Paul. I'm meeting with our victim at seven thirty."

I was close enough to know that Ackerman had been one of Battaglia's earliest supporters on the editorial board of the Tribune, the most important local weekly news magazine. And I was keenly aware that their relationship had taken a bad turn two years ago, when the coverage of a vigilante subway shooter in Ackerman's influential column had resulted in a series of critical pieces about the DA's office Major Felony Project.

"I'll tell him to be there at eight. I'd like you to keep him waiting,"

Battaglia said. "Just give him fifteen minutes before you go up to court.

And don't forget that he screwed me on the Metz case."

The district attorney's memory was infallible. And payback was one of his strongest motivators.

"I've got nothing to tell him, Paul." It was uncharacteristic of Battaglia to let his prosecutors meet with the media before a trial. He was the master of the well-timed leak, but I had no information to give away. "He's not coming to get a story, Alex. We're in the driver's seat this time."

"Why? What's he got?" I asked.

"What Herb Ackerman's got is a problem. He tells me he was a client of Amber Bristol's.