Likely To Die

7

THE RESTAURANT ON FIFTY-FIFTH STREET was nearly empty when the three of us walked in at eleven o’clock. Patrick Chu bowed his head in greeting and led us back past the bar and single row of tables to the large dining room area. Deep cobalt blue walls, hung with shadowboxes framing porcelain antique plates and scent bottles, created an atmosphere of luxe and style uncommon in Manhattan’s Chinese eateries.

“Good to see you, Madame Prosecutor,” Patrick said, smiling as he handed us each a menu.

“That’s better than last time,” Chapman remarked to Wallace. “Coop and I came in here a few weeks after the end of the Lascar case, when her face had been plastered all over the papers. I hear Patrick, the maître d‘, telling the owner that the ’famous prostitute‘ had just come in.”

“My English much better now, Mister Mike. Never make that mistake again.”

“Lucky you survived it once, Patrick. Prostitute-prosecutor-no big deal in my book. I don’t know which one ought to be more insulted by the mix-up.”

We ordered our drinks and told Patrick the menus weren’t necessary. “Hot-and-sour soup, spring rolls, shrimp dumplings. A Peking duck, and a crispy sea bass,” said Chapman without missing a beat. “If I’m still hungry after that, we’ll add to that. Did I miss anything?”

“I don’t know about you, Alex, but I guess that’s what I wanted for dinner,” Mercer said with a wink. “What’s the plan, Mike?”

“I’ll be at the morgue first thing in the morning. Why don’t you pick Alex up at her office and bring her there around lunchtime? I’m sure Kirschner will go over his results with us then. I’m helping with the hospital personnel interviews in the afternoon, and maybe that’s a good time for you two to check out Dogen’s apartment.”

I raised my idea of setting Maureen up to go in undercover as a patient. Both Chapman and Wallace jumped on it, but we all agreed that once we cleared it with Peterson it would be foolish to let anyone on the Mid-Manhattan staff know about our mole.

Maureen Forester and I had worked on dozens of cases together. She was the daughter of one of the NYPD’s first black detectives, and her petite frame and pretty face belied the strength, speed, and tough spirit that made her such a fine cop. Battaglia had petitioned the Chief of Detectives four years ago to move her to his own unit-the District Attorney’s Office squad-so that she could work with us on sensitive investigations. Frequently, I was the beneficiary of her talent, and always of her loyal friendship.

“How will we get her in?” Wallace asked.

“David Mitchell.” My close friend and neighbor was one of the most prominent psychiatrists in the city. “I’ll call him in the morning. Migraines, double vision, memory lapses-he’s got the weight to get her in for a neurological observation the same day he asks for it.”

“Does Mo know yet?”

“I thought you’d call her, Mercer. I can’t imagine she’d ever object. Probably be thrilled to get away from the kids for a week and have some room service and breakfast in bed. Her husband will take it better coming from you than from me, don’t you think?”

“Consider it done. You know that none of us’ll be able to visit with her, don’t you? We’ve all been made as investigators on this one.”

“Of course. And if Charles doesn’t like the idea, we’ll get a detective to be her designated spouse and some friends like Sarah to hang out with her for a while. I think we should wire her up and install a hidden camera in the room just so someone from the tech unit can monitor it while she’s sleeping. There’s too many things creeping around there at night to leave her unobserved.”

The dank and chilly March evening, combined with my fatigue, made it a perfect soup night. I sprinkled some noodles over the steaming bowl that the waiter set in front of me and told him to follow my Dewar’s with a Tsingtao. The warmth of the thick broth soothed me even as its piquant taste revived me.

I spaced out of the conversation going on between the two detectives. Who in the world would be missing Gemma Dogen tonight, I wondered? I reminded myself of my own good fortune in the friends and family relationships I was able to count on to sustain me through the emotional intensity of my work. And I raised my glass in a silent toast to Mike and Mercer, who had become as close to me as any of my lifelong companions.

I had met Mike Chapman almost ten years earlier, in my rookie stint as a prosecutor in Paul Battaglia’s office. My background of privilege and comfort had secured me a first-rate education at Wellesley College and the University of Virginia School of Law. But my parents had instilled in me as well a devotion to public service, which had attracted me to my job as an assistant district attorney. Serendipity-and Paul Battaglia’s unerring instincts-landed me in the newly created specialty of sex crimes prosecutions after my initial rotation through the Trial Division, in which general felony cases were investigated. The satisfaction of this work, the rich rewards of guiding victims through the process with better results than the criminal justice system had ever been able to offer, kept me in the office years longer than I had planned to stay.

Chapman’s background was a sharp contrast to mine. His father was a second-generation Irish immigrant who had met his wife on a visit to the family birthplace in Cork and brought her back to the States. Brian Chapman had been a cop in the NYPD for twenty-six years and dropped dead from a massive coronary two days after he turned in his shield and gun. Mike and his three older sisters had been raised in Yorkville, a working-class neighborhood in Manhattan still known more for its corner pubs and German butchers than for the chic restaurants and Korean nail salons of the Lenox Hill area that bordered it to the south.

Mike was in his junior year at Fordham, courtesy of student loans he had taken out to supplement his jobs waiting tables, when his father died. He completed his degree and went right to the Police Academy, unabashedly following in the footsteps of the man he had idolized. Brian Chapman had spent his entire career in uniform, walking a beat in Spanish Harlem where he had known every shopkeeper, schoolchild, and gang member by name, face, and alias. Mike had distinguished himself as a rookie cop with arrests in a drug-related massacre of a Colombian family in Washington Heights on Christmas Day of his first year on the job. He broke the case using informants his father had developed on the street and was pulled out of line for an early promotion eight months later after rescuing a pregnant teenager who had jumped into the rough water from the shoreline beneath the George Washington Bridge.

Mike, at thirty-five, seemed hopelessly single, living to a tiny fifth-floor walk-up studio apartment he called “the coffin.” He and Mercer Wallace had worked together in the Homicide Squad, before Wallace transferred to Special Victims, where he was the lead man on most of the serious rape investigations in Manhattan.

Mercer, now thirty-nine, was almost five years older than I. His mother had died in childbirth and he was raised by his father in a middle-class neighborhood in Queens. Spencer Wallace worked as a mechanic for Delta at La Guardia Airport and liked to remind his son that it nearly broke his heart when Mercer turned down a football scholarship to the University of Michigan in order to become a cop.

In whatever command or precinct he had worked, Mercer Wallace was known for his meticulous and detailed approach to investigations. His brief marriage to a woman who had owned a small clothing business in his old neighborhood ended in divorce. He claimed she never understood or believed the demands of his job, which kept him away from home such erratic hours of the day and night. A second marriage to a detective he had worked with at headquarters ended just as unsuccessfully for reasons she never articulated to him. And this big, sweet guy was always looking for someone to give him his distance, his freedom, but also his three squares a day.

My parents were both alive, enjoying good health and a comfortable retirement on an island in the Caribbean. It was strange for me to enter this world of a medical center as crime scene because I had always been so at ease among healers in white lab coats and medical professionals who saved lives.

Benjamin Cooper, my father, was a cardiologist who had invented a plastic valve that had revolutionized open-heart surgery. It was used in nearly every such operation in this country for more than fifteen years after he and his partner created it, and I was vividly aware of the lifestyle that little piece of pliable tubing made possible for me.

No aroma from any kitchen impressed itself upon me in my childhood as it does for so many children. My clearest olfactory memory is the strong odor of ether that permeated my father’s handsome face and graceful hands from long days spent in the operating theater and was passed along to me when he bent down to kiss me goodnight after he came through the door late in the evening. It was before the use of sodium pentothal as an anesthetic, and I welcomed the unpleasant smell because it signaled the return home of my busy and adoring father.

Conversation at the dinner table, on those nights Ben made it home in time to eat with us, was always about medical subjects. My mother’s nursing degree made her equally conversant in the field and my brothers and I were exposed to the day’s surgical procedures throughout most of our meals. I had often accompanied my father to his office in the hospital on weekends and so was accustomed to the sights and smells, antiseptic and medicinal, of every wing of the medical center.

“Watch this guy move that machete,” Mike urged.

I stopped daydreaming and rejoined Chapman and Wallace in conversation, as the waiter hacked at the carcass of the duck with amazing speed and accuracy, wrapping and twisting the slivers of fowl in paper-thin pancakes stuffed with scallions and hoisin sauce.

“That’s one I never had yet, Mercer, have you? I mean, I’ve had lots of killings by Latino machetes, but I’ve never had a Peking duck carver. This guy’s like lightning.” Mike was biting into his first serving before ours even hit the plate.

“What’s new with your love life, Miss Cooper, anything I should know about?” Mercer asked.

“I think I’ve been waiting for the spring thaw.”

“I’m giving her another few months before I sign her up with the Sisters of Charity. Don’t you think she’d make a great nun, Mercer? All those little parochial school boys would remind you of me or McGraw, Blondie, and you could go around all day whacking ‘em on the ass with rulers. Wouldn’t have to moan about getting your roots done, and there’d be no feeling sorry for yourself when the phone doesn’t ring on Saturday night. Oscar de la Renta could design a special habit for you, Mercer’d get Smokey Robinson to craft some tunes-”

“Stop laughing, Mercer. Don’t humor him. Let’s switch it toyour love life, shall we? What’s with you and Francine?”

Wallace had been dating one of my colleagues, Francine Johnson, who was assigned to the Special Narcotics Division of the office.

“It’s still alive, Cooper, still alive. If I don’t mess this one up, you can be a bridesmaid, okay?”

Mike was eager to divert the conversation away from the topic before it turned to his own social life. “What do you know about neurosurgery? We’re going to need to find out exactly what Dogen’s practice consisted of and what her duties were, so we know what we’re looking for when these docs start to talk to us. Both in the hospital and in the medical school ‘cause they’re really two separate roles she had.”

“Who are you scheduled to see after the autopsy?” I asked.

“William Dietrich, the director of the hospital who toured me around today, is setting up the first interviews. I’ve got most of what I need from him. Then I’ll sit down with Spector, the guy who invited Gemma to assist in the surgery.”

“Neurosurgeons really consider themselves the elite of the profession,” I offered. “It’s a prized specialty, brain surgery, and one of the highest-paying fields in medicine, too.”

“After Spector, I got a couple of other professors lined up, and a mix of students and practitioners. Dietrich wants me to see the two guys who subbed for Dogen in the OR when she didn’t show up. Whaddaya think, Coop, it’s like42nd Street, no? Ruby Keeler as the understudy who steps in for the star and makes it big on Broadway.

“This time-” he flipped open his steno pad to check the names on his list with his left hand, while his chopsticks kept working the sea bass with his right. “Yeah, it’s a combination. A Paki and a WASP, the kind with two last names. The Paki-Banswar Desai-I know that guy is destined to wind up in my HIP program. I ought to tell him not to bust his ass working too hard in this classy joint. Every doctor on my list has a turban, I swear.”

“When are you going to learn that it’s really obnoxious to talk that way?” Mike’s ethnic slurs were a constant irritant in our conversations.

“Easy, Coop. I’m an equal opportunity offender. The other guy is Coleman Harper-don’t you hate those fancy names? I’ve probably insulted him already-he’s undoubtedly a third or a fourth or a fifth, named after granddad’s maternal great-grandmother.”

“My favorite’s that orthopedic surgeon who had the office next to Dogen,” said Mercer, “the young guy with the slicked-back hair and the phoniest grin I’ve ever seen. Bonded teeth, of course. D’you see him? I swear he thinks he’s Ben Casey. I think the only thing he’s worried about is whether they can get the bloodstains out of Dogen’s office so he can move into it. It’s one doorway closer to the dean’s office, and he’s awfully keen on moving up.”

I was full long before the fish arrived, and fading quickly. Patrick had taken the imprint from my American Express card. I told him to give the guys whatever they wanted and add on twenty percent for service.

“I’ll see both of you tomorrow,” I said, pushing away from the table.

“Don’t you want a nightcap?”

“No, thanks. I’m ready to fold.”

“Can’t leave without a fortune cookie. Hey, Patrick, give Miss Cooper a good one, will you?”

“Only have good fortunes at Shun Lee, Mr. Mike. No bad news.”

I ripped off the cellophane wrapper, split the crisp cookie in half, and pulled out the small white strip to learn my fate. “Thanks, Mike, I needed this news: ‘Things will get much worse before they get better. Be patient.’ ” Not my long suit.

“Want me to walk you out?” Mercer asked.

“I’m fine. I’m parked right in front, and I’ll go directly home, into the garage.”

“I’ll see you in your office by noon.Ciao. ”

I told the night attendant I wouldn’t need my car the next morning, unbolted the door leading into the apartment building from the garage, and climbed the stairs to the lobby. One of the doormen handed me my dry cleaning and the stack of mail, which contained too many magazines to fit in the box. I shifted the Redweld to support the pile of paper, tried to hold the hangers in my left hand so they didn’t pinch my fingers in their heavy load, and pressed the twentieth floor. As I opened the two locks and pushed the door in, I spotted a sheet of David Mitchell’s note paper on the floor of my entryway.

When I had unloaded the bundles, I picked up the missive and read it: “Going to Bermuda for the weekend to escape the weather. Can you look after Prozac or shall I use the kennel? I’ll call your office in the morning. David.”

That’s an easy deal. I’ll babysit his affectionate weimaraner, Zac, while he’s off-with his latest squeeze, no doubt-relaxing and catching some rays on the beach. In exchange I can ask him to find a hospital bed at Mid-Manhattan for the newly ailing Maureen Forester.

I stepped out of my shoes in the living room as I scanned the mail. Fashion, decorating, and garden journals were the weightiest of the bunch, as spring approached; four mail-order catalogues filled with schlocky gadgets and gimmicks, destined for immediate dumping in the garbage pail; bills from all kinds of local merchants and take-out places, which I set aside on the credenza; and I carried Nina’s postcard into the bedroom with me while I shimmied out of my panty hose and threw them in the hamper.

As I read about her weekend in Malibu, written on a card with a Winslow Homer seascape, I longed for a heart-to-heart talk with my closest friend. We had been roommates in college, and although separated by three time zones and two hectic lives, we tried to keep in contact by daily messages and mailings of the art postcards we both collected. We filled them with running commentaries of our thoughts and experiences. There were years when she complained, in mock earnest, that my life was so much more interesting than hers. We had penned lively descriptions of our beaus and our romances, and she had eased me through the months of mourning when my fiancé had been killed in a freakish car accident the year I graduated from law school.

Lately, the news of her weekends with Jerry and their son at the beach house, coupled with her high-powered legal job at Virgo Studios, had made my winter seem even duller and lonelier than it was. But tonight, back in the center of the excitement of a breaking case, I was anxious for Nina to know that all was well.

I stripped and hung up my suit as I played back the three messages on the machine. First was my father from his home on St. Bart’s. An old partner had phoned to tell him about the tragedy at Mid-Manhattan and he was offering his assistance if I needed it. Next was Nina responding to my rush-hour call and asking me for all the details of the case. Last was Joan Stafford reminding me that I was expected at her dinner party at eight o’clock Saturday evening-“No far-fetched excuses like murder, if you don’t mind.”

I tried to relax and escape from the day’s gloom by picking up the copy of Trollope that was next to my bed. I had startedThe Eustace Diamonds over the weekend and knew it would take only ten or twelve pages of tasteful nineteenth-century crime to cause my lids to droop and convince me to turn out the lights.

I thought I had pushed all consciousness of Gemma Dogen out of my weary brain but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about whether her death was keeping anyone else awake tonight-out of a need for mourning, out of a sense of loss, or out of guilt.