Likely To Die

16

COURT OFFICERS ON THEIR HANDS AND knees were backing out of the row of sickly looking shrubs that lined the front of the Criminal Courts Building when I got out of the cab at eight-thirty on Monday morning. It was a well-kept secret that one of the best places in Manhattan to find a loaded gun was behind those pathetic bushes, some civil servant’s ludicrous notion of urban landscaping.

Directly inside the main doors of the building were groups of metal detectors set up to screen everyone who passed through. Each day hundreds of present and future felons arrived in the halls of justice to appear for the calendar call of their cases. Many of them were too dense to realize, at least on the first visit, that they would have to be searched and scanned. Occasionally, throughout the day and night, you could watch men and women mount the stairs, then turn back and step behind the scrawny growth to deposit guns, knives, and assorted homemade weapons.

Those who entered via the front but failed to anticipate they might be leaving the building through the back door-in a green bus with caged windows, courtesy of the Department of Correction-regularly deposited their debris behind the greenery. Two or three court officers who swept the area several times a day retrieved the overflow.

“Find anything good?” I called out to Jimmy O’Mara as he stood up and dropped some items into a leather bag.

“Two automatics and a box cutter. Slow night, Alex.”

I ran into Sarah at the bagel cart. We bought our coffee and went upstairs together to open the office. Chapman had beat me to it and was sitting in my chair, feet up on the desk, laughing hysterically into the phone. He slammed down the receiver when we entered and stood up, his voice booming in his best imitation of a television announcer.

“No more calls, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!”

“What are you talking about?”

“The hospital follies have reached a new height and Detective Forester may have snagged the big one.”

I winced at the idea that Maureen had been in any danger while I was enjoying my evening with Drew. Sarah and I spoke over each other as we asked what happened to Mo.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing. She’s fine. Had the husband and kids with her all day. Right before it’s time for lights out, the nurse comes in with an order to give Maureen an enema before bedtime. From her doctor.

“Mo knows it’s not possible ‘cause her doctor’s out of town until today. The R.N. was insistent, so she and Maureen battled back and forth for twenty minutes while the broad goes to get her supervisor.

“Meantime, half an hour later Maureen’s phone rings. Man introduces himself as Dr. Haven. Says he’s covering for the night and her doctor left orders for a soapsuds enema. Mo pretends to go along with him. Says she just had it. Then the guy starts asking her all kinds of weird questions, telling her to describe how it felt-I mean, he wanted detail.”

Sarah shook her head and eased herself into one of the chairs.

“While Mo has him on the phone, she signals the guys on the monitor to trap the call. Little does this idiot know he’s talking to the one patient who’s wired up. She jerks the guy around for eight minutes, he thanks her for the information and hangs up.” New technology allows us to literally trap the source of incoming telephone calls and recover the originating number.

“Let me guess. Someone on the staff at Mid-Manhattan?”

“Don’t be silly. The call came from the private line, home office, of Arthur J. Simonsen. 710 Park Avenue.”

“Sorry, doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Mr. Simonsen is the president and CEO of PILLS-Pharmaceutical Industry Life Line Support. Biggest distributor of capsules and tablets in the country.”

I groaned at the thought of what the tabloids would do when they got hold of this story.

“Not a first, ladies. Peterson reached Bill Dietrich a little after eleven last night to tell him the facts. Apparently, the same scam’s been going on here, at Lenox Hill, and at Mount Sinai. At least half a dozen hospitals. Dietrich knew all about it but the administrators had been trying to keep it quiet.

“Because of the business they’re in, Simonsen’s company gets the patient logs from each of the medical centers, which also tell who the attending physician is. Then he goes through the lists, apparently, and looks for names of women in private rooms. He calls the nurses’ station in the early evening, when the doctors have all made their rounds and left. Says he just got a call from the attending who admitted the patient or examined her-and orders the enema and a rectal thermometer.

“He gives himself about an hour until he calls the patient, assuming the procedure’s been done. What he wants is to make the patient describe it back to him in exquisite detail, while he listens and, well-who the hell knows what he’s doing on the other end of the phone.

“I’m not sure I’m ready to take the next step and find out exactly what the thrill of this little prank is. I’m leaving that to Mickey Diamond.”

Diamond, the veteran courthouse reporter for theNew York Post, thrived on the bizarre and berserk. “He’ll be breaking his neck to get this on page one, for his wall of shame,” I added. Mickey’s office was papered with the yellowed remains of headlines trumpeting the city’s most outrageous crimes. Sarah and I were cover girls in his world, since our cases drove his stories from the middle of the crime section to the front of the sheet.

“Don’t worry, Mickey beat you here by fifteen minutes. Got the info from headquarters this morning. He’s going with ENEMA MAN IN HOSPITAL HOAX.

“And the patient? How’s Maureen in all this?”

“She’s great, naturally. Nobody laid a glove on her and she broke the whole thing with one phone call. Simonsen admitted everything. They’ve got him under a suicide watch at Central Booking. They’re going to use the witnesses from the other hospitals, along with his confession, so Mo doesn’t have to be identified at this point.

“She’s happy as a clam. Waiting for your pal David Mitchell to come back, eating bonbons in her fancy robe and reading murder mysteries faster than we can bring ‘em in to her. Give her a call. I know she wants to hear your voice.”

Mike shifted his remarks to Sarah. “What are you looking so glum about this morning?”

She rubbed her hands over her stomach and laughed. “Just thinking. I was going to quit working three weeks before the baby was born so I didn’t go into labor on my way to the office on a subway car. You know, then we’d have to name the kid Vito or Jesús after my fellow straphangers who deliver him and wrap him in a slightly usedDaily News from the day before. But with all these things going on in hospitals, a subway birth may be the way to go.”

“Hey, you know Warren Murtagh’s rules.” One of my friends, the longtime chief of a trial bureau, had created a set of canons that seemed to apply to a wide range of office events. “Murtagh’s Rule Number Nine: ‘All nuts congregate in the same time, place and case.’ So far, we’re on a roll.”

I was still standing. “Figure this one out.” I removed the sheet of paper from my pocketbook and handed it over to Mike.

His demeanor changed abruptly as he sat upright in my chair and dropped the paper onto the desk in front of him. “Where did this come from? Why didn’t you call me?”

Sarah reached for a corner of the page. “Let’s get you in to Battaglia, pronto. He’s not going to like this.”

“Get me a plastic folder-that kind you use to hold your trial exhibits. Might as well take it over to look for prints.”

“Yeah, but first you’ve got to do eliminations on your favorite weimaraner. Some guy slipped it under the door. Zac’s paws were on it-probably some drool, too. I don’t know what you’ll get off it even though I was careful with it.”

“What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you hear anything at the door, see anybody-?”

“I wasn’t home, Mike. I’d gone out for dinner and the doorman just let some delivery guy type on upstairs. It was there when I got home.”

“I’m just as curious about the dinner date as I am about the note,” Sarah said.

“Look, whoever left it is just trying to throw a scare into me. The doorman didn’t even know I wasn’t home and the guy didn’t wait around to see.”

“Yeah, and you’re not going to have Zac there all the time to scare him off if he had tried. How do you know what he was doing at your door? This time you just happened to have a dog who was likely to bark at an intruder, am I right?”

He probably was. I called Battaglia’s office and Rose answered. I told her that I needed to see the District Attorney about something urgent that had come up, and she told me to come right over.

“Let’s go. Might as well all hear what he has to say.”

The three of us left our coffees on my desk, crossed the corridor, and were buzzed into Battaglia’s suite by the security officer on duty. Rose looked happy to see us and told us to go right into the boss’s office. He was on the phone and waved us over to the conference table in the middle of the room while he finished his conversation.

“Another three-quarters of a million dollars in that grant proposal and we can knock those garment district thieves out of the ballpark. I’ve got to finish my speech before I go out of town at the end of the week. The Congressional committee meets in mid-April and I’m the floor show. The usual pitch-figures don’t lie but liars figure. Tell the Senator I’ll be there.”

Battaglia joined us at the table, nodding to Sarah and me and shaking Chapman’s hand. “Cigar, Mike? Ladies?”

“No, thanks, Mr. Battaglia,” Chapman said.

“You did a great job with that drug massacre on Forty-third Street. Nice collar-quick and clean. Congratulations.”

“It helps when they’re stupid, Mr. B. Makes my job a lot easier. Shoots four people to death at twenty to eight in a flophouse in the middle of the theater district, then tells the getaway driver to step on it. I think only thirty or forty witnesses had time to get the plate number. It didn’t hurt. Wish this Mid-Manhattan nightmare’d give us a break.”

“What’s new?”

We filled the District Attorney in on everything that had happened since I had phoned him about Bailey’s exclusion and showed him the letter that had been delivered to my home. I even mentioned the episode with the car that I thought had tried to sideswipe me while I was walking Prozac, but I tried to downplay it as best I could.

“Do I have to worry that-”

“Absolutely not, Paul. I just wanted you to know about it and see if you had any other ideas.”

“My best idea is that you solve the damn thing quickly. I’m leaving Thursday for London. There’s an interdisciplinary conference on ethics. Guidelines for the new millennium or some such crap. I promised to participate six months ago, but it doesn’t come at a very convenient time now with Congress trying to take back the money they promised me last fall.”

Chapman teased him. “Hey, Mr. B., while you’re over there, mind interviewing a few witnesses? I’ll show you the ropes before you go, give you a few pointers on technique.”

Battaglia rose and returned to his desk, signaling the end of our meeting. “Might take you up on it. Beats sitting around a stuffy boardroom listening to some European sociologists talking about how their biggest crime problem is hooliganism after soccer games. Watch out for yourself, Cooper, understand?”

By the time we were over the threshold, he was on the phone to City Hall telling the Mayor that his position on narcotics sweeps was untenable and had to be reworked.

We walked back under the glare of dozens of the District Attorneys of bygone days whose unsmiling portraits lined Battaglia’s hallway. I had spent so many hours waiting to see him over the last ten years that I could name each of the long-forgotten lawmen and their periods in office. Put that in the category of “nice to know” as my father used to say, referring to the useless trivia with which Mike and I cluttered our minds.

“Game plan?” I asked as we trailed back to my office. Chapman sat at my desk listing all the people he thought we needed to see and talk to while I gazed over his head at the pigeons perched atop the baroque gargoyles of the building across the street.

“Sarah holds down the fort here at the office. We start with Bob Spector. Then Spector wants us to go to New York Hospital to interview a doctor there. Name’s Gig Babson. Spector says Babson was one of Gemma’s closest friends. We gotta run down this rumor about her leaving the hospital-when and why. That should keep us going through the afternoon.”

My ordinary business traffic began to appear in the doorway.

Stacy Williams stood by Laura’s desk with a voucher in her hand. She needed my signature to authorize the expense of a plane ticket to bring a rape victim in from Kansas City for trial.

“Where you been, Stace?” Chapman asked. A paralegal who worked for one of the guys in the unit, Stacy had been dating one of Mike’s friends from the Homicide Squad for almost six months.

“It’s over, Mike. I broke up with Pete a couple of weeks ago. He lied to me, you know. All that time, he told me he’d been separated from his wife.”

I looked over the flight arrangements and signed the form. Sarah was into her maternal role. “Stacy, don’t you remember Pat McKinney’s orientation speech? When a cop tells you he’s separated, it means that at the moment he’s talking to you he’s at one end of the Long Island Expressway and his wife is eighty miles away at the other end in their house with the four kids. That’s the PD’s definition of marital separation.”

One look at Stacy’s adorable face and figure as she turned to walk away and I doubted she’d be pining for him very long. “Here’s the voucher. Be sure and let me know when the trial starts, Stacy.”

“Not exactly a rocket scientist, Coop,” Chapman said. “Three words printed on the front of the baseball cap that Pete wears every day and she couldn’t figure out he was married? I guess she thought MASSAPEQUA LITTLE LEAGUE was his favorite charity.”

“Leave the girl alone, Mikey.” Sarah got up to go back to her office and organize her day. “Let me know what happens, Alex, okay?”

Mike called Lieutenant Peterson to get a detective to my office to pick up the papered threat for lab analysis. We called Bob Bannion to arrange a viewing of the video of the crime scene so that we could spend an hour examining it in close-up, to get ideas about what parts of Dogen’s files and shelves had been rifled through.

Sitting in a carrel in the video unit, Chapman and I replayed the scene over and over, zooming in and out of targeted areas in an attempt to determine what had been the goal of the trespasser. Did the files we could see-and we’d obviously have to examine them in person-resemble the files the detectives had found in the garbage? If the killer had taken the files that had been found in the garbage from Dogen’s office, where exactly had he found them? On top of her desk or inside one of the many file drawers?

“Any help?” Bob asked.

“I’m sure it will be when we figure out what we’re looking for. That hasn’t happened yet.”

Janine Borman, one of the misdemeanor assistants in the Trial Division, was waiting for me when we got back downstairs to my office.

“The judge in AP5 gave me half an hour to come up with some law or he’ll grant the defense request for a dismissal. I don’t have time to do the research. Figured you might have had this situation before.”

Great excuse-no time for research. Read that one as doesn’t know how to do the research, I thought to myself. “What’s the problem?”

“I’ve got a sexual abuse case. Happened in the subway-no CW. All I’ve got is the statement of the transit cop.” CW is our shorthand for “complaining witness.” As usually happens with minor crimes that occur in the subway system, local victims rarely wait around long enough to talk to the police. They know from long experience that the odds of anyone being apprehended are slim-and punished, even slimmer. Someone rubbing his private parts against their rear end in a crowded train is part of the price most women pay to get to their jobs every day in the Big Apple. The only advantage of the cold season is the extra padding of a winter coat against the offender.

“And the issue?”

Janine looked uncomfortable with the language that made up the fabric of my daily work. She hemmed and hawed as she glanced over at Chapman explaining the facts to me. “Well, this-um-this defendant, Anthony Gavropoulos, he was, like, on the other platform, across from the cop.

“The cop says he saw the defendant move in behind the woman who was standing all by herself. He claims Gavropoulos, well, that he could see him expose himself-”

“His penis?” I asked.

“Yeah. And that he had-um-an erection and was, like rubbing against the woman.”

“Like rubbing against the woman or rubbing against the woman, Janine? One is a crime, the other isn’t.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just-”

“Look, if you’re going to handle these cases, you’re going to have to deal with the language and the body parts. No euphemisms, no embarrassment. It’s a business.”

She gathered her composure and started over. “The offer is a plea to the charge. Misdemeanor sexual abuse. And a condition of the sentence is that the defendant go to a sex offender program.”

“Fine. So?”

“Defense attorney says his client won’t take the plea. Says his defense is going to be that the cop is lying. Gavropoulos says, well, he claims he’s too small. That the cop couldn’t have seen him from across the tracks even if he had an erection. Have you had any other case like this?”

Chapman cut her off, jabbing his finger in the air to make his point. “You don’t need any law, you don’t need any research. Here’s what you do. Go down to court, tell the lawyer to step out of the picture. Get lost. We don’t need him. And you tell Mr. Gavropoulos to take this like a man. ‘Anthony, be proud. Take the damn plea,’ you tell him. I’d rather have a conviction than admit I’ve got one that’s too small to be seen.”

Janine’s jaw dropped, believing as she did for a moment that Chapman’s advice was to be followed.

“He’s just kidding, Janine.” I walked her out of the office into the hallway and told her how to handle the judge by giving her some case citations on point before sending her on her way back to the courtroom.

Chapman was holding my coat for me when I went back into the room. “C’mon, Blondie, let me take you away from all this. Let’s go pick up Mercer and get to work on a real case. Remember what your Granny Jenny told me that time your mother had the surprise party for you a couple of years ago?”

I knew exactly what he was going to say. It was my Jewish grandmother’s favorite lament, having come to this country from Russia as a young adult, priding herself on having put her sons through college and professional schools.

She had looked at Mike when he was introduced as one of my colleagues and said, as she often did, “Seven years of the best education my son could afford for her and Paul Battaglia makes her an expert on penises and vaginas.Oy. Only in America.”