Likely To Die

13

I WAS UP AT 6:45 ON FRIDAY MORNING AND out of the shower by seven when Chapman called. “Shut off your radio and turn on the tube. I haven’t checked theToday show yet but Jim Ryan’s leading with the story on the local news. He’s got great sources. Says we’re holding a blood-stained psycho in the med center murder case.”

I clicked the remote to activate the set but Ryan was already on to the story of the subway shooting in the Bronx IRT station. “Damn. I just missed it.”

“If you’re coming to the station house before you go to your office this morning, I’ll give you a lift, okay?”

“Fine. I’ll be ready in twenty minutes. Pick me up around the corner, in front of P. J. Bernstein’s.” I finished blow-drying my hair and tried to bring myself to life with some mascara and a touch of blusher. I was sick of the somber colors of the winter wools I had worn throughout this dreary week and decided to lighten the palette and perhaps, thereby, my mood. I sifted through my clothes for a favorite Escada suit-lipstick red with black trim on the collar and around the kick pleat.

The deli owner greeted me warmly when I walked into Bernstein’s and ordered two dozen bagels, rolls, doughnuts, and enough coffee cups to earn me a moderately pleasant welcome to the squad room.

Mike’s car was curbside when I emerged with my small load. He drove downtown to the 17th Precinct station house, gnawing at a piece of coffee cake held in one hand and steering with the other. I picked up thePost from the car seat and found Mickey Diamond’s byline on page 3:DOC DIES DEFYING RAPIST-SUSPECT HELD IN QUESTIONING.

There were no reporters outside the building when Mike and I arrived. We walked in together, past the sergeant on duty at the front desk and the uniformed cops in the muster room who were about to turn out for a day on foot patrol, 8A.M. to 4P.M.

Lieutenant Peterson was already at the desk that had become his command center since Wednesday morning. He lived fifty miles outside of the city but had spent the night-or the three hours’ sleep he had allowed himself-on a cot in the Homicide Squad office farther uptown.

“Good morning, Alexandra. Morning, Mike. Had some progress overnight. Albany came up with a hit on the fingerprints and we got an ID on Pops.”

Peterson handed Mike the printout of the New York State Identification System rap sheet. Chapman read from it aloud. “ ‘Austin Charles Bailey. Date of birth, October 12, 1934.’ Makes him sixty-three. Looks like he’s got about twenty priors. Burglary, grand larceny, possession of stolen property, burglary again.” He flipped the pages, his eyes scanning the list faster than he could call out the charges.

“Last one, twelve years ago. Murder. Not guilty by reason of insanity.”

Peterson had already checked out the rest. “Yeah, institutionalized in the state loony bin for the criminally insane in Rockland County. Only problem is, he walked off the campus two and a half years ago and nobody reported him missing.”

“Who’d he kill?”

“His old lady. He’d been in and out of mental hospitals most of his life. Both of ‘em were drinking. She hit him with a sixteen-ounce bottle of Colt.45-a broken one. That accounts for the scar that runs across his cheek and down his neck. He went loco and-”

Chapman broke in. “Let me guess. He stabbed her with, what? A kitchen knife?”

“Serrated steak knife.”

“Not once or twice, right, Loo?”

“About twenty-two points of entry. Not to mention some extra slashes on the face just for good measure.”

“Typical domestic,” I murmured. It fit the pattern of most familial homicides. Not only the fatal wounds but the savage disfigurement of the victim in addition, usually saved for someone the killer knows well enough to hate.

Many batterers were never violent outside the home against strangers, saving their venom for the people closest to them while presenting a different face to the world. But for scores of others, the first killing broke down the boundaries and expanded the focus of the rage.

“Still feeling sorry for the old guy, Coop?”

I was already shifting gears, mentally and emotionally. The challenge was no longer figuring out who had killed Gemma Dogen. Now I needed to think in legal terms, to build the careful and logical blocks toward cementing a circumstantial case that would withstand procedural challenges in a court of law.

“Is he talking this morning?”

“I haven’t let anybody near him yet. Mercer’s got the best rapport with him so far. I’ll send him back in as soon as he arrives.”

“Mike, why don’t you take him some breakfast and see if you can make nice to him while we’re waiting for Mercer.”

My beeper went off as Mike opened the shopping bags of food and coffee to distribute to the guys in the squad room. I unhooked the little black device from my waistband and checked the number that appeared on the screen.

“Schaeffer,” I said. Chapman paused at the door and waited for me to return the call to Bill Schaeffer, the serologist who ran the laboratory at the Medical Examiner’s Office.

He answered his own phone. “Didn’t want to disturb you during the night but thought you’d want to know first thing. Thatis human blood on the pants you sent down to me last night. Sure you all knew that but I figured you’d want it confirmed.”

Things were falling into place. I thanked Doctor Schaeffer and nodded at Chapman, mouthing the word “blood” as I gave him a thumbs-up.

“What else can you tell me?”

“I’ll have preliminary DNA results for you in the next day or so. We’re working on it. Can you get me a sample of the suspect’s blood, too? Just on the chance he nicked himself anywhere and it’s on the deceased’s clothing.”

“Great. Sure thing. Sarah can write up a court order to get a sample from the defendant this morning. You want to send someone up here to draw his blood?

“And thanks for the call, Bill. I’ll speak to you over the weekend.” Setting up the gels and running the probes for DNA results, the genetic fingerprinting that could determine to a virtual certainty the source of the blood on Pops’s pants, was a process that could take as long as two or three months. A new technique, known as the PCR testing of DNA, would give Schaeffer an early reading, which could be confirmed by later tests, in as short a time as forty-eight hours.

“Nothing much in these but I’ve made copies of all of ‘em for you,” Peterson said, handing me the police reports he’d been reviewing. Each one summarized an interview with a hospital employee or official concerning their whereabouts and activities in the hours before and after the stabbing.

I glanced at the contents but my thoughts were in the room with Austin Bailey. I fast-forwarded to worries about how tough an adversary the judge would appoint to represent him. I knew that every step we took from this moment on would be scrutinized under the harsh and unforgiving eye of the trial and appellate courts.

“Mercy, mercy,” Wallace said, looking at his watch as he walked into the squad room and saw Peterson motioning him over to where we stood. “I didn’t realize you were holding a sunrise service today or I would have been on board hours ago.”

“Get in here. We need you to go to work on Pops right away. We’re going to have to get him downtown to be arraigned by the end of the day or some knee-jerk’s likely to void the arrest,” Peterson said. “I want you to see who you’re dealing with.”

The courts in New York have a very strict rule about the length of time during which a defendant may be held without the opportunity to appear before a judge for a bail hearing. The latest trend was the complete dismissal of the charges when police and prosecutors dragged their feet getting the suspect into the courtroom.

Peterson briefed Wallace on Bailey’s sheet and background. “Sounds like he ain’t goin‘ anywhere except back to his padded cell. Lemme see what he’ll give me this morning.”

Wallace picked up two cups of coffee, a bagel, and a doughnut. He walked to the still open door of the holding pen and greeted Austin Bailey, who was stretched out the length of the wooden bench. The prisoner-we’d all assumed his status as a “guest” had been downgraded to a custodial relationship during the night-sat up and appeared to smile as he talked to Mercer.

After the detective handed Pops his breakfast, he led him back down the hallway to the interrogation room.

Wallace emerged briefly to come back to Peterson’s office, pick up a pad, and suggest to us that we watch some of the conversation through the two-way mirror. “Don’t want to lose this good thing, baby,” Mercer said aloud, to no one in particular. Then he nodded at me. “Think Eddie Floyd, Coop,” he urged, smiling and whistling the chorus of the R amp;B singer’s only big hit, “Knock on Wood,” as he turned around to head back to talk with Bailey.

“Anybody Mirandize him since last night?” I asked, referring to the Supreme Court ruling that had crept into the criminal justice lexicon as a verb, a noun, and a landmark decision.

“Don’t worry, that’s what I’ll start with. I’ll read him his rights but I don’t think it’ll much matter. I’m not sure we’re talking on the same wavelength.”

Mercer returned to start his session with Pops. I walked over to the adjacent room and peered through the glass. Both men sat at the Formica-topped table in the bare room. Mercer was clean-shaven and well dressed, sitting erect and talking with Bailey, who was taking bites of his food and sips of his coffee. The older man was slumped over the table, his few front teeth nipping at the doughnut while he slurped from the cup without lifting it to his mouth.

Detective Wallace was warming up his subject, chatting about himself and his father, trying to find some level on which to connect with the broken figure he was hoping to engage in a coherent conversation.

I walked into the hallway, chastising myself for mingling the pity I felt when I looked at Pops with the outrage I had internalized because of Gemma Dogen’s murder.

Chapman came toward me and we reentered the room with the viewing window. Mercer had thrown away the paper cups and was eyeballing Austin Bailey across the table. He was explaining the right to remain silent to his target, using language and paraphrases that a second-grade child would have been able to understand.

I wondered if Mike was thinking, as I was, about the futility of this questioning. A killer with this kind of psychiatric history would necessitate a competency hearing and I was already cross-examining the shrinks who would testify for the defense that Arthur Bailey was unable to stand trial.

As we watched Wallace try to hold his subject’s attention, Bailey reached for the old black rotary phone on the end of the table. He was ignoring Mercer and picked up the receiver to dial a series of numbers.

“Hello, Ma? Yeah. Charlie’s back-”

Mercer’s long arm gently wrested the phone from Pops’s grip and replaced it on the hook.

“I wish he’d just let the guy talk,” I said under my breath to Chapman. “Now he’s going to claim he wasn’t allowed to make his phone call.”

“Coop, you know where that phone goes? It’s a friggin‘ intercom. You can’t dial out-it only goes to extensions in the station house. He’s not talking to his mother, he’s talking to Harvey the rabbit, for Chrissakes. I don’t even know why we’re wasting our time with this nonsense. Let’s just take him down to Criminal Court and get on with it,” Mike said, walking out of the airless room.

I followed him back to Peterson’s office. We were trying to figure out what to do next when Wallace joined us.

“He says he’ll talk to you, Cooper. Might as well come in and see what you think. I wouldn’t bother with your video unit. This is either an act worthy of the Ringling Brothers or he’s really deranged. I think this is one scene you wouldn’t want to show a jury on videotape.”

I shrugged my shoulders and retraced my steps, this time going into the interrogation room with Mercer.

Pops looked up at me when I closed the door behind us and offered a grin in my direction. “Ruthless and toothless, ma’am,” Bailey said by way of introduction. “That’s what the doctors always say about me.” Dead on.

Wallace told him who I was and why I was there as I pulled one of the chairs alongside Mercer’s position.

“I want to talk with you about some things that happened at the hospital, Mr. Bailey. D’you understand me?”

“I’m sorry about the hospital, ma’am. I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

How much more frightening, it seemed to me, Gemma Dogen’s struggle must have been against a madman with whom she had been unable to reason when she was pleading for her life.

“That’s what I want to talk about. I want you to tell me what you’re so sorry about so I can tell the judge.”

It would be imperative for me to prove to a judge, and then to a jury, that Bailey had been given his rights in a manner he comprehended if there were any statements he was about to make that I wanted to introduce into evidence.

“Did Detective Wallace tell you that you don’t have to talk to me, Mr. Bailey?”

“Ido want to talk to you, lady. I haven’t talked to a nice girl since my wife passed on.”

“You see, you don’t have to answer any-”

“She talked to the knife, didn’t she? That doctor talked to the knife.”

A chill passed through me like a bolt of lightning. Was he talking about Gemma?

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t talk to me. Didn’t talk to nobody. She talked to the knife all right.”

Now I had to bring him back to a logical conversation. I had to finish some kind of Miranda warning but not lose his willingness to talk about the killing.

Suddenly Pops’s facial expression changed, his mouth drew tightly closed and his hands clasped against both ears as though responding to a loud noise. I leaned forward toward him as Mercer reached for one of his arms and pulled it away from the side of his head. Pops rocked back and forth in his chair, wailing for us to get him some Kleenex. Mercer nodded at me and I got to my feet, running down the hallway to grab some tissues from my purse. I returned with a handful of them and placed them in front of the prisoner, who smiled and began to shred them into tiny bits, ball them up, and press them in each ear.

He kept rocking as he stuffed the Kleenex, which hung in little strips past his lobes. “Charlie’s talking to me. See?” he said, looking at Mercer. “I told you that’s who tells me what to do. Nothin‘ you can blame on me ’cause everythin‘ I ever done is what Charlie makes me do.”

“Tell her who Charlie is, Pops.”

“He’s my brother, lady. Born the same day I was only he never left the hospital. Kept him there all these years, but he always talks to Mama and me. Every day. Tells me what to do.”

I looked at Mercer and tried to find an outlet for my temper. My elbow rested on the table, head in my hand, as I struggled with a plan for how to proceed.

Could he be malingering and doing it as well as this? Or was I simply wasting my time talking to someone who would never make any sense, never be found competent in a court of law?

“Why don’t you tell me what Charlie told you to do to the doctor? Why don’t we talk about that for a while? Charlie told me to ask you about that.”

Pops smiled at me again when I spoke Charlie’s name. “Yeah, but I can’t hear him now. All’s I can tell you is how I’m sorry that the doctor isn’t feeling good today.”

The three of us chased each other’s words around in circles for the next twenty minutes. We didn’t move Bailey from his senseless ramblings, and when he tired of us altogether he crossed his arms on the table and rested his head against them.

Wallace stood and motioned me out of the room. Chapman and Peterson had been watching through the window and started back to the lieutenant’s office when they saw us leave. I was frustrated and annoyed and certain that nothing Bailey said would be of any use to us in building the case against him.

“Going nowhere.”

“This is not a scene to memorialize on tape, that’s for sure.”

Mercer took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and announced that he’d go in and keep the conversation up until we made a decision about booking Pops and making the arrest official.

“Let me make some calls to my office. See how Battaglia wants me to go on from here. Make sure Public Relations is ready for the blitz from the press. Give me half an hour on the phone.”

The lieutenant got up from behind the desk. “Use this one. I’ll be out in the squad room.

“You ready for a little more pressure, Alexandra?”

“Shoot.”

“Capital Defenders Office called. Steve Rubinstein. Heard on the news you have someone in custody and they want to represent him. Want to send someone up here to talk to him, make you cut off the questioning.”

“Tell ‘em to call his brother, Charlie,” Chapman said.

New York had reinstated the death penalty in 1996 and the intentional killing of a woman during an attempted rape would make the murderer a prime candidate for a lethal cocktail after his conviction. Battaglia had opposed the legislation and I guessed he would be relieved that Pops’s psychiatric condition might take him out of the running for such a result.

I took the slip of paper with Rubinstein’s number on it from Peterson and added his name to the list of calls I needed to make.

I sat at the desk and dialed Battaglia’s number. Rose answered, told me he was in the car on his way to deliver a speech to the Citizens Crime Commission. She patched me through.

“Good work, Alex. Congratulate Peterson for me.”

“I need your advice on this one, Paul. At the moment, everything we’ve got is circumstantial. Forget statements. Nothing he says makes very much sense.

“It could be another day or so until we get the DNA match on the blood. I’m hoping that by then we’ll turn up some hard evidence, like something he took from Dogen’s office, or maybe even the weapon. I mean, they’re going through all the garbage receptacles and all the alleyways around the hospital. I’m reluctant to stand before a judge and ask to hold the guy with what we’ve got on the case at this point,” I said, outlining Bailey’s history to the District Attorney as I finished up my presentation.

“He’s never been discharged from Rockland State?” Battaglia asked, referring to one of the psychiatric facilities of the New York prison system.

“No. He absconded.”

“Let’s do an end run, Alex. Skip the arrest and arraignment until you have all the evidence you want. Get him over to the psych ward at Bellevue and tell Rockland you want them to do a hearing on the escape charge. That way, he’s held in the prison section of the hospital, which buys you a little time to put the case together while he’s under police guard. We won’t lock him up for Dogen’s killing ‘til you tell me you’re ready.”

“You’ll back me on it, boss?” I asked, knowing that my nemesis, Deputy Chief of the Trial Division Pat McKinney, would be second-guessing every decision I made on the case.

“Absolutely. No point in sticking our necks out ‘til we have the results you need. Screw the Capital Defenders. He hasn’t asked for a lawyer yet and we haven’t charged him with murder. I’ll handle the media on this myself.”

I hung up and dialed Mid-Manhattan Hospital. Maureen Forester had been admitted earlier this morning. The operator gave me her extension number and connected me to the room.

“How do you feel?”

“So far, so good. Even better since I heard you got your man. And thanks for the robe.”

“Well, I understand there’s a solarium at the end of your hallway where all the ambulatory patients wander in and out. I figured if you’re the best-dressed girl in the crowd, you might attract some companions who’ll gossip with you.”

“I take it you still want me to stay in here for a couple of days, then?”

“Yeah. We don’t know what we’ve got yet. Mike thinks Pops may have had an accomplice when he attacked Dogen. Some of his cronies may have heard or seen something after the murder. We’d just like to play it safe if you don’t mind.”

“Mind? This is a piece of cake. My first audition is at eleven-thirty. They’re bringing some interns by to have me describe my symptoms.”

“Show-and-tell?”

“No show, thank you very much. Just a history for the moment.”

“Well, Sarah will be up to visit later. I’ll be in touch. Mercer and Mike send their love. ‘Bye.”

I made some more calls, then opened Peterson’s door and checked what was going on in the squad room. Almost all of the men had gone back to the hospital to continue to canvass for evidence or witnesses. Wallace was still in the room with Bailey but making no progress.

The lieutenant was reviewing the memo books of two of his men. “Battaglia’s got a great idea to keep us from jumping the gun on arraigning Bailey.” I explained the plan to lodge him in the prison psych ward on his old case and avoid a premature statement on the strengths of our case until the evidence was analyzed and asked Peterson to tell Chapman, Wallace, and the rest of the team.

“I feel pretty useless here, Loo. It makes more sense for me to go down to my office and get some work done, don’t you think? If you need me for anything else, just call and I’ll come on back.”

I gathered all of my paperwork and left the precinct, again by the rear exit. I grabbed a cab on Lexington Avenue and continued to read police reports as it plodded downtown through the busy traffic of a midday Friday. I arrived at the office as most of the assistants were breaking for lunch. Laura handed me my messages, offering to bring me something to eat on her way back from a round of errands. I placed my order for some tuna salad and a Diet Coke and settled in to return calls and check on the lawyers in the unit.

The afternoon dragged for me. No word from anyone at the Squad, and Sarah was at the hospital keeping Maureen company. The usual trail of complainants in new cases dropped off as it always seemed to on Fridays after the lunch hour. And for those of my colleagues not on trial, it was a getaway time. If I wasn’t looking for them, they certainly weren’t looking for me.

It was after four-thirty when Laura told me that Jordan Goodrich, my best friend from my first days at law school, was on the line.

“Susan just called me. She knows you’re in the middle of a big case but wonders if you feel like joining us for a simple dinner at home with the kids tonight?”

“Thanks, but I don’t think so. I’m whipped. I’m just going to make it an early night at home. Me and my Lean Cuisine.”

“How about a drink first?”

“I’d love it.”

For the ten years that we had been out of school, Jordan and I had a tradition of meeting every couple of Fridays to catch up on each other’s lives. From a modest background and a small-town Georgia family, Jordan had worked his way through college and outsmarted most of our law school classmates to a position on theLaw Review and a brilliant career. He and Susan had been my closest friends in Charlottesville and there were few experiences of my adult life that we had not weathered or celebrated together.

I checked with Peterson before leaving the office to meet Jordan at our regular haunt, Bemelmans bar at the Carlyle. The lieutenant told me that Wallace and Ramirez would be taking Austin Bailey down to the Bellevue prison ward in a couple of hours and that Chapman and the rest of the team were still at the hospital. Chief McGraw planned to announce to the press crews that there had been a break in the Dogen case but not yet an arrest. That way they’d get Pops out of the precinct after the camera crews disappeared. I said I’d keep the beeper on ‘til I reached home, where I’d be for the rest of the evening.

Jordan was waiting in a corner booth at the Carlyle, below the whimsical mural of the animals skating in Central Park. The piano player was in the middle of a Bachrach medley when I arrived and somehow wound up in an elaborate rendition of “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” as I walked over to Jordan ’s table.

“Timing is everything,” I said, laughing at the musical selection.

George, who had waited on us for as many Fridays as the two of us had been coming there, appeared with my Dewar’s before I could unbutton and remove my coat. Jordan was halfway through his first Stoli martini as I kissed him on the cheek and settled onto the leather banquette beside him.

I had barely gotten past the usual questions about Susan and the children when my beeper went off. I looked at the numbers and saw that it was Bill Schaeffer again, calling from the lab.

“Great. Let me just call him back. Maybe I will join you guys for dinner. This’ll give me a second wind-it’s the news about the blood match I’ve been waiting for.”

I had to go through the hotel lounge to get to the pay phone, weaving around small tables topped with drinks and baskets of homemade potato chips and surrounded by well-dressed patrons from the nearby art and antiques galleries.

I dropped a quarter in the slot and dialed Schaeffer’s number. “Bill, it’s Alex. Got something for me already?”

“Yeah, but you won’t like it. It’s not her blood.”

“It’s what?” I said. I was incredulous. “Ithas to be Dogen’s blood.”

“Well, it isn’t. I know they told you Bailey had no injuries but it’s entirely consistent with his blood type, Alex. I don’t have DNA results on him yet but I’m certain this is going to turn out to be his own blood. I don’t think the man you’re holding is the killer.”

Calm down, I told myself as I tried to absorb the impact of Schaeffer’s information.

I dialed the 17th and told Peterson the news. “I’m coming back over. Get me an EMS crew there immediately. I want somebody to examine Austin Bailey in my presence,now. We’ve wasted twenty-four hours on a false lead. Tell McGraw he should start leaking the fact that wedon’t have a suspect, for a change. And you’d better let Maureen know what’s going on before we do anything else. Somebody may still be on the loose in that hospital.”

Jordan had ordered another round to congratulate me on the good news I had gone out to receive. “Save it for next time,” I snapped at him, grabbing at my things. “Sorry to run on you, but I’ve just been blindsided by a murderer.”

I left him with his mouth hanging open, a setup of drinks on the table, and the bar tab. My head throbbed.