Night Watch

ELEVEN

I was in my seat in the business-class section of the Air France flight, about to depart from Charles de Gaulle Airport. I had been texting and e-mailing all morning, confirming that I would meet the team in the office as soon as I got into Manhattan, which I expected to be after six on Monday evening. The BlackBerry vibrated again and I saw Joan Stafford’s name flash. I pressed to answer and held the phone to my ear. “Are you crazy?” she asked me without saying hello or greeting me.

“You have two minutes before they close the door on this plane for takeoff. I am neither crazy nor entirely stupid. You’re my pal, Joanie. You’re supposed to slobber over me with love and support. Don’t lay any more guilt on me than I’m already lugging around.”

“I spoke to Luc this morning. He’s désolé, Alex. I thought you two had a deal.”

“I envy you the writer’s life. You make your own schedule, your work is portable, nobody’s well-being depends on your output. But that’s not the kind of job I have.”

“You promised him-”

“It’s not like I cheated on him, Joan,” I said, drawing a sidelong glance from the man settling in next to me. “Yes, I used my phone. I blew off Mike and Mercer and Vickee and all the peeps I trust in that job. And then Paul Battaglia himself called.”

“He doesn’t own you, Alex. You’re entitled to a vacation. If Battaglia has a primary challenger next year, I’ll bet he’ll step down. How old is he already? He’ll be a lame duck by then.”

“I work for the man, Joan. I can’t just twiddle my thumbs for eighteen months till the next election. He’ll stay in this job till he’s ninety.”

“I still think Battaglia’s lame, whether he’s a duck or not.” She was laughing as she talked. “Do you have any idea what Luc planned to do on your birthday?”

“We talked about a quiet dinner at the house.”

The announcement came on that all electronic devices would have to be powered down in two minutes, when the doors closed.

“Obviously dinner, Alex. I didn’t mean that. What’s happened to your sense of romance? Do you remember that day I took him shopping after you two came back from the Vineyard last month? Do you understand the man has been looking at rings?”

I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth.

“Are you still there? Can you hear me? Great big shiny diamond rings, girl. His money, my uncommonly good sense of taste and style. Luc’s madly in love with you.”

The butterflies in my stomach were fluttering wildly. “Don’t go there, Joan. If you’re really my pal, back off this subject. Way too premature.”

“Is it the commitment thing? Swear to me it’s not that.”

“I don’t know him, okay? The last forty-eight hours have proved that beyond-”

“Don’t give me ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ babe. Forget the law in your brain and flex those underused muscles in your heart.”

“You’re spoiling Luc’s surprise, Joan, if that’s what it was supposed to be.”

“Well, clearly the Hope diamond won’t be jumping out of your birthday cake if you’re spending that evening alone. Forget I said anything.”

“Forgotten.”

“He told me you’re bent out of shape about Brigitte.”

“Not true.”

“What are you hoping to find at our age? A guy who’s a forty-year-old virgin with no prior love life or involvements? No ex, no kids-maybe even an orphan so you won’t have in-laws either? The Dalai Lama’s been off the table for quite some time.”

“How well do you know Brigitte?”

“Total pain in the ass.”

“Would you trust her, Joan? I mean between Brigitte and Luc, who-?”

“Luc, of course. How can you even ask that?”

“Because if he’s so over her, why does he keep her photograph in the drawer of his night table?”

“What were you doing going through his drawer?”

“I wasn’t going through it. I was looking for some nail clippers, okay?”

“He probably hasn’t cleaned it out in months. What is it, like a family shot with the boys?”

“Like Brigitte on the beach in Cannes. Topless.”

The man next to me coughed and lowered his newspaper to look at me again.

“Get over it. Everyone in France is topless, especially those fat old tourists from Eastern Europe you’d rather not see, even when they have clothes on.”

The flight attendant signaled me to turn off my phone. “Gotta go. I’ll call you tomorrow. We’re taking off now.”

By the time we climbed out of Paris and through a cloud cover that blanketed the view for the first half hour of the route, I found a comfortable position, reclined my seat and covered myself with a blanket.

Hurtling across the ocean miles above the earth gave me a surfeit of hours to think about my personal situation. When I was immersed in the work that I found so challenging and rewarding, it was easy to put off analysis of my emotional state. Until this weekend, all my time spent with Luc was joyful and loving, and I often fantasized about leaving behind the high pressure of my prosecutorial position for more intimacy with him. Neither one of us had talked about marriage yet, but Joan had succeeded in delivering a shot across the bow of my unsteady ship.

I was a natural for a life of public service because I had been encouraged by my parents to use the opportunities they’d bestowed on me to “give back” to others less fortunate. But it would have been more logical for me to have put down roots in the medical community from which they both came.

My mother, Maude, was the daughter of Finnish immigrants, raised on a dairy farm in New England and later moved to New York to study nursing. She had the skills and compassion of a superb RN, and that talent-along with the deep green eyes, winning smile, and great long legs-attracted the attention of my father.

Benjamin Cooper-my father-was the son of Russian Jews who fled political oppression there, the first of their three boys to be born in America. It was during his medical internship that he fell in love with Maude, who converted to Judaism when she married him.

He was a young cardiologist in private practice when he and a partner fashioned a half-inch piece of plastic tubing into a device that was adapted for use in almost every operation involving the aorta. The Cooper-Hoffman valve revolutionized cardiac surgery and changed the financial circumstances of our family. Unlike both my parents, my two older brothers and I were raised in the upscale Westchester suburb of Harrison. The trust fund they set up for each of us enabled my first-rate education at Wellesley College, where I majored in English literature before deciding that I wanted a legal career, which I prepared for at the University of Virginia School of Law.

“Something to drink?” the attendant asked me as she passed through the cabin.

“Just water.”

“A newspaper?”

“Yes, please. Le Figaro and also Le Monde.” I wanted to see how the French press-from the far right to the left-was reacting to the news of Gil-Darsin’s arrest.

“I’ll be right back with Le Figaro. I just gave this gentleman the only copy of Le Monde I had left after first class devoured them.”

Now my seatmate looked up again. “The news is interesting today, no?” he said in heavily accented English. “You’re welcome to the paper when I’m finished.”

I forced a smile. The last thing I wanted was to be a captive audience for a lecture from a Frenchman about MGD for seven hours of air travel. “Thanks. I’m hoping it will put me to sleep.”

“You’re going home to a big scandal. You’ve heard?”

“No. I haven’t followed the news. Just visiting friends.” I reached for my tote to take out sunglasses to make my unwillingness to engage more obvious.

The man put the front page in my lap, patting the photograph of the perp walk. “Disgusting what you Americans do. This kind of thing wouldn’t be tolerated in France before someone’s convicted of a crime. You’ve ruined the career of a brilliant economist.”

The attendant returned with a copy of Le Figaro and passed it over to me. Not surprisingly, the same photograph was displayed, with a caption calling for the WEB chief to step down immediately.

“I heard you say on the phone-forgive me-that you know Paul Battaglia. That you work for him.”

“You must have misheard me. I’ve got a friend in his office.”

“He’s known all over Europe for his work. Sounds like a fine man. You should tell your friend to convince him that he must do the right thing, or he’ll lose the respect of the world.”

“The world?” I asked. “Really? Well, I’m just a stay-at-home mom with three kids, so I don’t have much to say to the district attorney.”

I knew from experience that that description of my life was likely to shut down our exchange. He leaned back in his seat and I rested my head against the window, closing my eyes again.

I couldn’t help but think about Mercer and Mike, and what these last twenty-four hours had been like for them. Mercer Wallace, five years older than I and whip-smart, had earned the coveted gold shield with daring undercover exploits in his early days on the job, then continued to be promoted because of the brilliant detail work he had put into a series of homicide investigations.

But like me, he didn’t thrive on murder cases. The department valued them as the most important crimes and the most elite units, but Mercer preferred the more sensitive matters of a special victims detective squad. He surprised the top brass years ago by asking for a transfer to the Manhattan unit that corresponded to my prosecutorial bureau, after solving a serial rape case involving more than seven teenage girls who’d been brutalized on East Harlem rooftops and in project stairwells.

Mercer’s work, like mine, was a specialty that combined his investigative talents with a measure of compassion that allowed him to earn the trust of the most traumatized survivors-victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse. The feature that Mike Chapman relied on most-no need to take up any time hand-holding the dead-was what made special victims work so satisfying to Mercer and me.

Mercer’s mother died in childbirth, and he’d been raised in Queens by his father, Spencer, a mechanic for Delta Air Lines assigned to LaGuardia. He turned down a football scholarship at Michigan to join the NYPD. His second marriage was to Vickee Eaton, with whom he had a four-year-old son named Logan. There was as much heart in Mercer as his six-foot, six-inch frame could hold, and he had covered my back in court and on the street more times than I could count.

My relationship with Mike Chapman was more complicated, both professionally and personally, in style and in substance. Mike’s father, Brian, had been one of the most decorated officers on the force throughout the twenty-six years he’d served. He raised his family-Mike had three older sisters-in the then working-class section of Yorkville in Manhattan. His great pride was his only son’s success as a student whose knowledge of military history ranked him near the top of his class at Fordham University, guaranteeing the father that his son wouldn’t be risking his life every day on the city streets.

But Brian suffered a massive coronary two days after turning in his gun and shield, and although Mike Chapman stayed on course to get his degree, he enrolled in the police academy immediately after graduation because he admired his father so deeply. Even in his rookie year he distinguished himself with arrests made in the drug-related Christmas Day massacre of a Colombian family in Washington Heights. His only interest was in working homicide, and he fast won a place in the Manhattan North squad, which was responsible for every murder case on the island above 59th Street.

I met Mike my first year as a prosecutor. All the men and women who’d taught me the ropes-evaluating case merits and witness credibility, giving the job every ounce of one’s intellect and intuition, learning when it was essential to visit the scene of a crime and how to interrogate the vilest of criminal types-all of them required of us the most professional responses.

Then I was introduced to the Chapman modus operandi. Mike trusted no one except the closest of his colleagues, had a sixth sense about people that was rarely off target, was able to keep an emotional distance from his victims and their families, and without ever breaking the law he had a keen ability to go a bit rogue, a bit wild cowboy, and constantly tried to push me to take that ride with him.

Somewhere along the line, Mike Chapman had become my closest friend. Maybe it was because even though I had fiercely loyal bonds to Nina, Joan, and the girlfriends who kept me grounded, there was no one else with whom I’d spent so many days and nights who understood the pressures of the job and what it meant to live with such extraordinary responsibility-the fate of victims and perps alike-while going about the ordinary business of daily life.

Mike’s intelligence was often unexpected by adversaries or upper-crust witnesses who figured the blue-collar background limited him in some fashion. His dark humor, whether appropriate or not, undercut almost every situation in which we’d found ourselves. His courage was a constant reminder to me of my own irrational phobias. And then there were his good looks-at about six-two, he was three or four inches taller than me, with a thick head of jet-black hair, strong features, and a ready smile.

It was an attraction that confused me as much as it delighted me. There were times I had felt the pull of a romantic entanglement, but I knew that it wouldn’t work because of the jobs we had. If I gave any thought to dating Mike-even though he’d never suggested as much-I knew that Battaglia would relieve me of my position. He wouldn’t allow the impression that a top detective was closing cases or eliciting confessions because he was sleeping with a supervising prosecutor.

Mike’s one great love-an architect named Valerie Jacobson-died in a skiing accident two years back, and he had slipped into one of his darkest moods as a result of her death. I thought he was beginning to come out of that depression, but there was so much of himself that he kept encased in an impenetrable shell that there were times I was the last to know what went on inside his head.

I ate a bit of the snack that was offered and read a few news articles. In the feature section of the paper was a photograph of a woman, strikingly pretty and dressed to the nines as she exited a restaurant near the Champs Élysées after dinner on Saturday. The subject looked vaguely familiar to me-a light-skinned black woman, tall and too thin to be anything but a model. It wasn’t Iman, but I looked down for the caption because I thought I recognized her from similar single-name runway fame. Kali. Of course, Kali. Her magnificent face had graced scores of magazine covers. KALI BLESSÉE! the headline read.

The French word blessé seemed oxymoronic to me. It caught my eye because the Anglo-Saxon meaning was so benevolent-to sanctify or make holy-so I scanned the piece to see what good luck had befallen the glamorous woman. It took me a second to recall that the translation here was “wounded.” I read on.

The supermodel Kali, also Ivorian, was the wife of Mohammed Gil-Darsin, as this article made clear. I was dumbfounded to learn that. The piece quoted her closest friends who had been with her Sunday morning when she got the call about her husband’s arrest. “Her screams pierced the air like a wounded animal,” the reporter claimed, when Baby Mo’s lawyers told her the story.

The wounded wife. I had spent countless hours in the presence of women who sat in the front row of a courtroom behind husbands charged with rape, murder, child abuse, and every other brutal act. Some obviously believed in the men they stood by, others were advised by counsel to suck it up through trial because jurors would be impressed that the women loved their spouses enough to disbelieve the charges, and yet a few more had been known to stick close first, then lash out later at the offenders, after the verdict was delivered.

I had heard those shrieks of wounded wives, had seen them scratch and kick at Mercer Wallace as their husbands were handcuffed and taken away. I’d been cursed by them in just about every dialect under the sun, on my way out of station houses or into the courtroom, even stalking me through the streets when I left the office at night.

My seatmate saw me staring at the photo of Kali. “You know her in the States?”

“She’s very famous, actually. Very beautiful.”

“Show that to your police, will you? They think a man who gets into bed with a woman like that any night he chooses wants to get it on with a peasant who takes out the trash? An illegal immigrant, I heard today, from Central America. Gil-Darsin’s got filet mignon at home, but he’s forcing down a helping of rice and beans on his way to the plane? It’s too ridiculous to believe.”

For some, it always comes down to the physical appearance of the accuser. If she’s too good-looking, then she must have asked for it. If she’s homely or overweight, then what sane man would bother with raping her?

“It happens every day.” Not just with the rich and famous, the prominent and powerful, but in every variable of human interaction one might imagine.

“What did you say?” he asked.

I didn’t have the energy to take him on. I turned my head away, pulled the blanket up to my chin, and slept for most of the rest of the flight because I expected long hours of work ahead.

The descent into JFK was smooth. We taxied to the gate as everyone turned on cell phones and waited impatiently for the plane to dock and doors to open.

I stayed in my seat while those with connecting flights crowded the aisles to make their exit. I hefted my small tote onto my shoulder and started the long walk to retrieve my luggage from the carousel and get to Customs. I knew Rose had dispatched one of Battaglia’s security team to meet me, so it was likely that I would be whisked through the process.

As I approached the queues separating citizens from foreigners, I had my passport in hand and looked on the far side of the customs agents for familiar faces but saw none.

Off to the left, in the last line marked U.S. PASSPORTS ONLY, I saw the striking figure of Kali-all six feet of her-with oversized dark glasses, dressed entirely in black, arguing with a government official. Two men behind him, probably private investigators from the defense team, looked like they were trying to pull strings to get her through.

Kali must have been in the first-class section of my flight and one of the passengers to reach the checkpoint earliest. But she had chosen the wrong line and was meeting resistance from the agent.

I was summoned to the booth next to her and extended my passport.

The agent stood up to look at my two bags and then the dates stamped on my arrival in France. “Not much time for shopping, was there?”

“Not a minute.”

“I take it you’ve got nothing to declare?”

I laughed. “This is a first, but I don’t.” It was also the first time I hadn’t stopped to buy Battaglia the Cuban cigars-Cohibas, still contraband-that he loved so much and counted on whenever I traveled.

He waved me on, and as I closed my tote, I could see that Kali was agitated. She was arguing for an exception despite her foreign passport, in order to move through more rapidly. The louder she got and the more the two private eyes tried to lean on the customs agent, the firmer he stood, pointing to the back of the line.

The automatic doors swung open, and against the waist-high metal fencing were relatives and friends waiting for passengers from around the world. Behind them were dozens of black-suited limo drivers, holding up placards with names of clients they’d been hired to meet. I stood on tiptoes to look for one of the men from the DA’s Squad-an NYPD unit assigned to our offices who had the detail to guard Battaglia.

Instead, I spotted a large cardboard placard on a wooden handle, raised above the heads of the greeters.

Below the logo of the New York Post was the mug shot of Gil-Darsin and the bold headline: MOMO’S MOJO: DNA ENTANGLES WEB HEAD.

I walked through the groups of drivers directly to Mike Chapman, who was holding the jerry-rigged sign. “Welcome home, kid. The DA’s all puffed up like a peacock ’cause he got you here when the rest of us couldn’t make you budge.”

“He’s got a special way with words, Mike. Just charmed me right back to the office.” I reached up and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks for picking me up.”

“Never learned to travel light, did you?” he said, taking my oversize duffel and large wheeling bag from me.

“You might want to dump the sign. Madame Gil-Darsin will be coming through right behind us. She’s having her ‘Do you know who I am?’ moment with customs.”

“Sweet. She might do better if they don’t know.”

“I take it the DNA match is today’s update?” I said as we headed for the exit.

“Confirmed by the lab this morning. The Post hasn’t tweaked yet to half how good the guy’s mojo is, Coop.”

“What do you mean?”

“We just picked up the surveillance tapes from the hotel. He had another woman with him for a nooner that same day. The card swipe clocks her arrival, and she left-hair all tousled and clothes messed up a bit-just after two P.M., a few hours before he jumped the bones of our vic.”

“You know who she is?”

“They’re working on it. We should have her ID’d by morning. Meanwhile I’m fielding all the calls from the senior set. Everybody wants to know Mo’s secret.”

“Secret what?”

“The man is fifty-eight years old. He had a tryst at noon and was loaded for bear again at five. Don’t you listen to those ads, Coop? If it lasts more than four hours, give your doctor a call.”

“Beside the Viagra jokes, is any serious work getting done on this case?”

“Wait till you see the war room McKinney’s set up,” Mike said, grabbing my arm as we reached the curb, then letting go to point out Kali, being rushed to a waiting limo by the pair of bodyguards who’d met her inside.

“Any real progress?”

“Hey, Sunday’s take from the media and the defense sympathizers was that a sexual assault could never have happened. MGD was rushing to meet his daughter and catch a flight. The accuser must have made the whole thing up. The old ‘he said, she said’ crap. Today’s DNA results level the playing field, don’t they? Now he can’t claim nothing happened or that he wasn’t there with her, can he? The perp’s legal eagles have to shift their argument to consent.”

“Here’s where it really gets ugly, Mike. Now the defense will want us to believe that she asked for it.”