Likely To Die

27

I WAS RELISHING THE SOLITUDE OF MY own apartment on a rainy Sunday morning, reading the Times and filling in the answers to the puzzle. My telephone tape had been loaded with messages from friends but I didn’t intend to start returning any of them until later in the afternoon. I had unpacked my suitcase and had nothing that needed doing other than to organize my notes and police reports for the week ahead.

Mercer’s call caught me in the middle of noshing on a toasted bagel. “Hey, Alex, it’s me. Two things, one you may be able to help me with.”

“Shoot. You sound like you’re on another planet!”

“I’m on a cell phone up in Connecticut. Drove up to my cousin’s house for a family party today. Almost forgot about it. First thing is, I got beeped by a little police department in Pennsylvania. Bluebell, to be exact. Seems like DuPuy made a U-turn somewhere near the Mason-Dixon line and reversed his tracks. Coming back north.

“Commissioner’s concerned enough about it to be moving Maureen again to a different location, just as a precaution. Everyone assumes he’ll start using a new credit card or ID any hour now. Steal one, buy one, con one off somebody. Surprised we’ve had this much of a run on him using the Perkins cards.”

“Maybe he’s coming back to get his wife and kids.”

“Well, that’s a very generous view of the weasel, but it’s a point. There’s a tap on her phone and the lieutenant’s had a team sittin‘ on the house since we heard he fled.

“Which leads to my question. Peterson asked me if we had inventoried the files in Dogen’s office and apartment. I told him that you and I took some notes but they were pretty general. At least mine were by topic, not by specific name. He wants to know if she had a folder on John DuPre. And, frankly, I couldn’t remember. Sound familiar to you?”

“Hold on. I can look through my materials and check it for you right now. Off the top of my head, I know I was listing the categories of things she had but I don’t remember even seeing any individual names.” I was trying to visualize the reams of documents we had plowed through that afternoon and whether the neurologist’s name would have had any significance to me at that particular point in time.

“Not that important. I tried to reach George Zotos but he’s upstate fishing with some of the guys from his old squad. He was goin‘ through a lot of them with us that day.”

“Just give me a minute and-”

“It’ll keep ‘til during the week. I can promise you the Chief isnot bringing me back in on my RDO unless there’s a major break in the action.” Regular days off were sacred in the NYPD’s high command, since the rate of a second-grade detective’s overtime scale was quite costly.

“Okay. Have a good time at the party.”

I hung up, refilled my coffee cup, and took it into the bedroom while I showered and dressed. I thought I might walk around the corner to the Frick Collection for an hour or so and threw on an old cashmere sweater-a pale yellow cable-stitched tunic-over some velvet leggings to dress myself up a bit for the weekend art crowd.

I poured one more hit of coffee from the pot and sat at the dining-room table reviewing the notes I had jotted down while talking with Geoffrey Dogen. It bothered me that Lieutenant Peterson had questions about the files in Gemma’s apartment for which I didn’t have answers, especially since I had offered myself to go there to look for information that might be relevant to our case. I was even more annoyed that I couldn’t make a connection between some of the file names I had seen and facts that Gemma’s friends had not been able to fit into her life.

I didn’t have any way to get into Dogen’s office at Minuit without alerting the hospital administrators, but her own house keys had been sitting on top of my dresser ever since the afternoon Mercer had taken me to her apartment almost ten days before. I had forgotten to return them and no one had needed to claim them on her behalf. Rent was paid up through the end of this month and Geoffrey Dogen had sent directions to donate her clothes to a thrift shop and have all her other personal belongings packed up and shipped home to England for distribution to relatives and friends.

I walked into the bedroom to call a couple of my girlfriends to see if anyone wanted to meet me at the Frick. It was a toss-up whether to just hang out for a few hours or try to accomplish something useful on the case by spending some time in Dogen’s files. I picked up the miniature model of Tower Bridge and played with the keys as I dialed the familiar numbers. Lesley Latham’s husband told me she was in Houston on a business trip, and Esther Newton was on her way out the door to a Huskies game at the Garden.

If I went down to Beekman Place and detailed information from Gemma’s records, I told myself, then I’d deserve a late-afternoon visit to the museum-see the current exhibit and pick up some new postcards to send Nina-and a stop for a cup of hot chocolate on my way home. I left a message on David Mitchell’s tape telling him I was back from London and asking if he and Renee wanted to come in to watch60 Minutes this evening. Then I called Mike’s machine to pass on the news from Mercer about DuPre’s change in direction.

Still undecided about which route I would take, I stuck a blank legal pad in my tote, dropped in the key chain, and put on my hooded red rain slicker. The museum was only four blocks away, but as I stood in the drizzle on the corner of Park Avenue waiting for the light to change a gentleman in a green mackintosh coat stepped out of a yellow taxicab and made it easy for me to shift course.

The cab discharged me at the entrance to Dogen’s building. I saw only one doorman inside the lobby. I smiled and started to approach him to explain my purpose but he barely looked up from hisDaily News comic section, so I continued on back to the right and waited for the elevator to descend and bring me up to the twelfth floor.

The nervous feeling I had experienced when I first came to the apartment with Mercer fluttered back as I knew it would. This time, it was just the spookiness of being alone with the keepsakes and belongings of the dead woman, which didn’t seem to hold much meaning or value for any of her heirs or acquaintances. How odd for the accumulation of such an interesting life to pass with so little notice or concern.

The double locks gave easily as I turned a key in each of them. Once again I was startled by a noise behind me, but this time it seemed to be the door resounding as it slammed shut at my back. I thought of William Dietrich and the other people who still might have had Gemma’s keys, so I twisted the lock and chained the bolt before throwing my slicker onto the back of an armchair.

Things were more or less as I had left them on my earlier visit. I knew that detectives had been in and out of here on a number of occasions since then on orders from the lieutenant, but whether the superintendent or rental agents had scavenged any of Gemma’s belongings I doubt I’d be aware. I spent a few minutes walking from room to room looking for differences that I might notice but finding few.

The book on spinal cord injuries was no longer on the bedside table and the closet door in that room had been left open, revealing its empty innards. I put my finger on the bottom edge of a furled-up yellow Post-it someone had stuck onto the wooden trim around the closet with a handwritten arrow pointing beneath to the words, “Deliver to Hospital Thrift Shop, Third Avenue.”

Back in the living room, I looked at the photographs with renewed interest. Now I could pick out the faces of Geoffrey Dogen, Gig Babson, several colleagues from Minuit, and London backdrops of Gemma’s favorite setting. Books and CDs were still in place, but someone had made off with the disc player and the little television set I had seen there last time. I took out my notepad and wrote a reminder to find out whether the removals were authorized or not-a typical problem at the scene of a homicide when there was no family member to keep up a presence.

There was an old clock radio on the back of the desk and I turned it on to a classical music station to fill the room with something other than the stillness that hung in the air. People in the adjacent apartment must have been more hard of hearing than my late grandmother as the noise from their television set almost boomed through the wall at me with the shrill voices of Home Shopping Network announcers. Today was obviously Capodimonte day and prices were being slashed by the minute. The neighbors couldn’t have heard me turn Gemma’s little radio knob up a notch.

I sat down again in the seat I had worked in from the day Mercer and I tried to catalogue some of the property. I could remember remarking about the lack of logic of some of the files, but there were far too many cabinets to put my finger on the ones that had stood out to me at the time.

At random, I slid open drawers and started to rifle through the subject tabs, looking for names that were now more familiar from meetings with the hospital staff and the expanded scope of our investigation. I was interested in information Dogen might have had about the men we had since interviewed and especially wanted to please Lieutenant Peterson by coming up with something that Gemma might have known about Jean DuPuy.

Inches and inches gave me nothing but medical research and clippings from journals about brain injury and surgical techniques. I checked my original notes and matched the third drawer from the left with a list that earmarked her files on “Professional Ethics.” Grabbing a handful of them, I swiveled around to place them on the desk and began to skim through them.

Some of them went back years, almost to her first days at Minuit, and none of the names they referenced had anything to do with the current staff or student body. With a red marker, Dogen had annotated the official school documents, commenting in the margins on the suitability of a candidate or her opinion of his worthiness to enter the program.

I pushed the pile to the side of the desk and reached back for a more recent assortment on the same topic. Fanning them out across the top of the blotter, I started from the rear of the pile. Midway through, the titles changed and I realized I had passed from the ethics folders into her personal records.

The tabs I was reading were labeled in Gemma’s hand with the names of sports teams. Clipped together in one lump were the Saints, the Braves, and the Redskins. I lifted the metal clasp and opened the three packets as Gemma’s filing system became obvious to me. This was her stash on John DuPre, the team name representing the city in which an academic institution or professional connection was located-Tulane was in New Orleans, his practice and lawsuit were in Atlanta, and Georgetown, where he claimed to have received his undergraduate degree, was in D.C. Somehow, she had figured the information she collected would be less obvious or desirable to an interloper if it looked like it related to a sporting event.

I thought of the briefing session at which we’d been told that one of the cops from the 17th had found file folders in a trash barrel in the hospital parking lot that bore similar labels. Perhaps this was a duplicate set that Dogen kept at home, where she had a greater assurance of privacy.

The find excited me. I dialed Chapman’s number but he still wasn’t there. I left him a message and told him to call me at Gemma’s apartment if he got in within the next hour, reading the number off the printed slot on the base of her phone. I beeped Mercer, then returned to ferreting through the drawers for more things like DuPre’s records while I waited for him to call me back.

“Who’s this?” Mercer asked when I picked up the receiver.

“It’s Alex.”

“Where are you? I didn’t recognize the number.”

“Gemma’s apartment. Peterson is going to smother us with kisses when we get through with what I’ve got here.”

“You first, Coop. That’s not exactly the reward I’ve been looking for.”

I started to explain what I had found and that I was continuing to search for more pieces. “What time are you coming back to the city?”

“You tell me.”

“Why don’t I take a few armloads of these with me, stop at Grace’s Marketplace and pick up something that you guys can feed me for dinner, and we’ll start the week off with gold stars.”

“What time is it now? Two-thirty. Plan on me gettin‘ there about seven.”

“Fine. I’m still trying to come up with the one we saw when we were here together. She had labeled it ‘Met Games.’ Remember, I remarked how out of place it was that Laura would have refiled it in better order? Only now I can’t come up with what it was stuck in between. It’s got to have something to do with her whistle-blowing, too, since she never went to a ball game.”

“It was close to something like ‘degenerates’-that’s why it stuck out in my mind.”

“That’s Sex Crimes for you, Mercer. We’ve got degenerates, medicine has ‘regenerative tissue.’ I knew you’d remember.”

“I’ll hold while you look for it.”

I put the receiver down on the desk, scanned my notes, and found the reference to the drawer that held both a series on ethics and another on specific medical topics like tissues. I opened it up and saw that crammed right in between the two was a green Pendaflex holding the file I was looking for.

I cradled the phone on my shoulder as I separated the sides of the folder and removed a thick sheaf of papers. “Curveball, Mercer. ‘Met Games’ looks like it’s all about Coleman Harper. This stuff goes back a lot longer than Dietrich’s archives do. It’s Dogen’s notes from her first year at Minuit. Harper was finishing his internship just like he told us. Only these records make it clear that Gemma’s the one who blackballed him from Mid-Manhattan and the neurosurgical program.

“Spector got him parked over at Metropolitan Hospital while he tried to appeal the decision.” I flipped through some of the documents. “Met Games is right. Spector was trying to find supporters uptown who would go to the mat for his boy Harper, and Dogen dug her heels in to track the guy’s every move. It’s too much to skim through right now but it looks like she’s been documenting every mistake Harper’s ever made in the past ten years-and there are plenty of them.”

“Like what?”

“She’s got a few things circled in red ink-someone up at Met who wasn’t happy with his technical skills in the operating room, another one complaining to Spector that Harper had a poor medical knowledge base. And it’s clear they weren’t going to keep him there, either.”

I looked at Dogen’s meticulous handwriting in the margin of the files. “Her notes read like Coleman Harper had something on Spector-like some secret about his personal life. At least, that’s why she thinks he’s backing Harper for admission, even though by most accounts he wouldn’t make it at Minuit.”

“Good hunting.”

“Look, I’ll bring these with me. And I think I’ll swing by Minuit on my way home. I’ve got my ID with me so maybe someone from security can let me in Gemma’s office. That way I can examine her folders there before Spector gets on to us during the week.”

“No. That’s a serious, emphatic, Battaglia-inspired capitalN, capitalO. There’s absolutely no way of knowing who’s around there on a Sunday afternoon and who you’re gonna bump into. Remember, we know we’ve got one loose cannon running around out of control. Who knows whether DuPre left anything at the hospital that he’s coming back for.”

“Mercer, I can’t get in there on a Sunday unless someone from security opens the door for me. It’s not exactly a big risk to take in the middle of the day-”

“No! Get it? First of all, a lady was killed in that room just a couple of weeks ago, remember? Second, we don’t know who to trust in that entire hospital, do we? Go directly home. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, and definitely do not stop at Minuit Medical College. Am I understood?”

“What if Mike gets back and can meet me there?”

“You really are stubborn, girl.”

“I’ll be good, Mercer. See you later.” I didn’t want to lie to him and tell him I wouldn’t go to Mid-Manhattan. I was only a couple of blocks away and anxious to see what was in Dogen’s office now that I knew what to look for. I could always get the Police Department to secure her apartment by this evening so no one could get into it even if they had keys. But we’d have far less control over circumstances at the medical school if someone wanted to purge her files, unless we acted quickly.

I gathered up the folders, turned off the radio, and walked across the room to put on my raincoat. April fifteenth was only ten days off and Coleman Harper was once again waiting for a decision about whether he would be admitted to the neurosurgical residency. I wondered how much of Dogen’s determination not to tell the Board at Minuit whether she was leaving was tied to the ten-year struggle she had waged to keep him out of the program. How desperate had he been to get in this time? And were there other candidates whom she had tracked and thwarted in exactly the same way? Gemma Dogen’s principles had made her a lot of enemies and I thought about how powerful a motive revenge could often be.

I reached out to unlatch the chain on the back of the door. There was a flash of movement over my left shoulder that startled me and in the split second that my head whipped around to look for its source I was slammed against the wall into the corner where it met the door frame. A fist pounded into the rear of my skull, blinding me with its force and causing me to drop everything in my arms as I shrieked from pain. The second blow landed on the knuckles of my hands, which I had instinctively thrown up behind me to cover my head. Again my forehead crashed into the doorjamb as my arms flailed behind me, striking wildly at the body that was pressing in against my back.

I braced myself against the wall and turned to confront my tormentor, hoping to reason with him when I looked him in the eye. But my feet slipped on the shiny tops of the dozens of folders that had dropped to the floor and spread across it like a giant-sized version of fifty-two pickup. My left leg slid out from underneath me as I pivoted and fell onto one knee, staring up to see Coleman Harper plowing his fist into the place on the wall where my face had just been.

I screamed at him to stop but he pushed me onto my back and straddled me, one of my legs locked in place beneath me, as he pinned my shoulder to the floor and stuffed something that smelled like a dirty sock in my mouth to muffle my shouts. Harper’s eyes were darting madly around the room while he pressed his knee into my abdomen, holding my throat with his left hand and trying to keep both of my wrists in his right. It seemed as though he was searching for something to use as a weapon but hadn’t decided yet what it would be. I knew I could probably break loose of his hold but the pain was burning fiercely in my forehead and I was trying to conserve every ounce of my strength to counter whatever his next move would be.

Likely to die.

My mind was cartwheeling as I tried to figure some way to defend myself against whatever device he would turn on me. The only person who knew where to find me-Mercer Wallace-was hours away from here with no idea that I was in any danger. There would be no one to save me from Coleman Harper if I couldn’t do it myself.

I watched his facial expression change as he looked from shelf to shelf mentally evaluating the deadliness of the objects his eyes passed over. I prayed he hadn’t seen the expensive set of kitchen knives I had noticed in the next room when Mercer and I first visited the apartment. Silently, I begged the neighbors to turn off their blaring television set instead of cluttering their home with more of that wretched-looking pottery that the salesman was offering. I wanted them to hear the struggle, which I knew was going to get worse.

From my twisted position on the floor, I could see the coat closet Harper had secreted himself in before my arrival. It had been emptied out for delivery to the thrift shop, too, no doubt, and had given him an ideal place to hide while I searched the files and until I left. If only I hadn’t called Mercer to brag about my discovery. Maybe he would have let me walk right out the door.

Stay calm, I tried to tell myself. He doesn’t have a weapon because he didn’t come here to kill people. He didn’t expect me or anyone else to be in Gemma’s home. It isn’t like the night he went to her office intending to pay her back for ruining the career he had wanted for himself.

I closed my eyes and willed myself out of the apartment with all the faith in me, but I opened them again when the doctor spoke to me and I found I was still very much in the middle of this bad dream.

“Get up.” His voice was sharp now, not quavering as it did the night I first spoke with him about Gemma’s death. He was standing and pulling me along with him, but the soft wool at the collar of my sweater wouldn’t keep his grip. It stretched and pulled out of shape and he grabbed at my hair instead.

I was trying to spit the wool sock out of my mouth so that I could implore him to release me and get out of there but he pushed it farther in as he saw me attempt to cough it loose.

He wasn’t taking me to the kitchen, I realized, which caused me a sigh of temporary relief. Images of Gemma’s mutilated corpse flashed through my mind and I was almost glad that he was pulling me in the direction of the window.

Each of his hands was holding one of mine as he walked in back of me with my arms crossed behind me. We were near the corner of the desk when one of his hands released me and I saw him reach for the telephone. I knew he wasn’t planning to make a call. He wanted the cord to wrap around my neck.

Likely to die.

I waited until Harper stretched one arm across the width of the table to pull the phone wire out of the wall socket. Then I swiftly bent forward from the waist, kicking back my left leg as I moved, trying to hit his kneecap with the heel of my loafer. I must have come close to my mark as he shifted his weight and cursed when my foot made contact. It hadn’t unbalanced him as I had hoped and he turned back to me with a vengeance-and with the heavy telephone appliance swinging from the end of the liberated line.

I had run out of prayers moments ago and I didn’t know how to whisper a more urgent one than those I’d been murmuring. I only knew that I didn’t want that length of cord wrapped around my slender neck. I had tried cases of ligature strangulation and knew what a slow, torturous manner of death it was.

My head was facing away from Harper and I could only see his movements out of the corner of my eye. He was trying to free up the loose end of the long wire that had run from the base of the phone on the desktop to the floorboard outlet, and when he finally grasped it he looped it over the top of my thrashing head.

Now I pulled my right hand out of his hold and reached it up to cover my throat. He let go of my left one as well while he worked to secure the cord around the middle of my windpipe and I struggled to sneak all of my fingers between his murder weapon and my crawling skin.

Keep them in there, I lectured myself frantically. Don’t let that ligature tighten around your neck.

I was rocking back and forth, kicking occasionally, tugging against the stricture of the cord while Coleman Harper looked for a place to anchor the body of the phone so he could pull its wire tighter around me.

Again my brain was doing cartwheels. Random thoughts pushed themselves to the fore and I fought to get them out of sight. When my mother and father loomed in mental view, I shook my head more violently and tossed them away, not wanting them to visit this scene. Mercer and Mike were the people I wanted to see and to have save me.

Harper was trying to pull me farther back from the bookshelf, so I tried to find something to cling to that would keep me in place, keep me apart from wherever he wanted to take me. I kept bringing up Chapman’s voice inside my head.

Now I remembered what was familiar about this scene. I was almost giddy with thoughts of how Chapman would react to finding my body. I continued to twist against my captor, thinking how Grace Kelly had been attacked by the killer inDial M for Murder. I’d be strangled from behind, just like Kelly almost was, and Mike would be telling the uniformed guys how much he loved her in that movie-even as they bagged my corpse.

The letter opener. I was fighting against Harper’s right hand, which was trying to pull one of my arms out from under the cord so he could finish off the job. My eyes scoured the top of Gemma’s desk for a letter opener or sharp pair of scissors but nothing was in sight. C’mon, kid, my voices were telling me. Grace Kelly did it. You can do it, too.

Let him take one hand out, I thought to myself, grabbing onto my throat even more tightly with the other, to protect it. As he let go of my right one to use both of his to pull on the cord, I thrust my palm up against his face and scratched at the socket of his eye with my fingers. Again a howl and a spit at the side of my head.

But I knew what I wanted now and I knew I would only need a few inches to get at it.

I was gasping for air as he jerked on me harder this time. He could see the sweat that was dripping from my scalp, stinging my eyes, and hear my irregular intake of breath. My left side was facing him and I had leaned my entire upper body away from his as I pawed at the bookshelves for support. I had few things to be thankful for at that very moment, but the rigor of my exercise over the years was giving me an edge against his greater girth and strength.

A sudden bend toward Harper, which surprised him, left me with several inches of play in the cord. With my left hand still guarding my neck, I pitched away from him and grabbed Gemma’s prize surgical award from its ebony stand on the third row of shelves. I whirled back with the gold-handled scalpel in my palm and ripped it across the wrist of the mad doctor. His blood spurted everywhere from whichever artery I had cut.

The cord fell from his hand as I began to slash at him savagely. I let up only to pull the gag out of my mouth. I wanted to find a place to cripple him seriously enough for me to have time to get out of the room but I wasn’t sure I could find the right spot through his clothing. As he hunched over the desk, trying to wrap his own sleeve around his most serious wound, I stabbed at his upper thigh, digging the scalpel in it repeatedly. When he fell to the ground wailing, I ran to the door and unlocked it-as I had tried to do so many minutes ago-sprinting out this time and slamming it behind me.

The twelfth-floor corridor echoed with my screams as I pounded on the few doors between Dogen’s apartment and the elevator. I could hear the peephole cover slide open behind the door of the nearly deaf neighbor and I realized what a sight I presented. Two lengths of black vinyl cord were wrapped around my neck while I held up the telephone machine that was hanging from one end of it to prevent the sheer weight of it from choking me to death. My yellow sweater was drenched in Harper’s blood and stretched out of shape so that it appeared to be coming off one of my shoulders completely.

No sane New Yorker was going to let me into his or her home in that condition. All I really wanted to do anyway was get a police officer to respond. I began banging on the neighbor’s door. “Let me in,” I shouted. “I just killed a man. I’m crazy! I escaped from Stuyvesant last night and I came here to kill him. Let me in, NOW!”

Exactly as I thought the little feet inside shuffled over to the telephone and whoever they were attached to dialed 911. Then she immediately called the doorman to complain about the madwoman who was ranting in the hallway outside her apartment. I kept the scalpel firmly in my hand and my eye on Gemma’s door, for the forty-seven seconds it took the superintendent to bring the service elevator up to the floor.

I unwrapped the phone from around my neck while the two of us waited on the silent corridor for the police. The response time was less than seven minutes. I guess it was fortunate that Harper had tried to kill me on a quiet Sunday afternoon and not during a weekday rush hour. Three cars answered the call. Two cops stayed with me while the other four broke down the door to find Harper, who was unconscious on the floor of the apartment.

“We gotta take you to be checked out and examined, Miss Cooper. What hospital you wanna go to?” one of the rookies asked me when I explained to him who I was.

“After this investigation, I’m not sure there’s a medical center in this city where I’d be welcome. I’ve got a really great internist, though. If you guys could just take me home and do your interviews there, it’d be much less painful all around. You can look up a number for Dr. Schrem with Information and his service will beep him. I think maybe he’d make a house call in this situation.”

The superintendent’s assistant had seen the cops arrive at the building and had followed upstairs with an old blanket. Police Officer Dick Nicastro wrapped it around my shoulders and took me down to the patrol car for the short ride home.

I sat in the backseat with my head resting against the window listening to the staccato noise from the radio as a call came over of a rape in progress on a rooftop in the 7th Precinct.

“It’s gettin‘ to be that season, Miss Cooper.”

I closed my eyes and wiped the raindrops off my hair, shaking my head at the sight of my bloody hand. “Unfortunately, officer, it’s always that season.”