Night Watch

FORTY-FIVE

“I didn’t get the e-mail today,” Mike said, coming into the conference room a little after 10 P.M., carrying two boxes of pizzas which he dropped on the long table.

“Which one was that?” Ryan asked.

“You know. ‘Ignore the sound of gunshots. They’re just shooting a scene from Law and Order on the courthouse steps.’ I don’t know that anybody has ever been so sorry to be ROR’d as Baby Mo,” Mike said. “Or Baby Mort, as they’re calling him now.”

The entire team-Pat McKinney, Ellen Gunsher, Ryan Blackmer, Mercer, and I-was still in shock. It was impossible to absorb that we had witnessed a homicide at our own front door, almost stage-set by the defense counsel for the photo op of his infamous client reuniting with his perfect wife.

Like any group that had gone through a traumatic event together, we were reluctant to leave one another for the weekend, even though our work was done. We kept reliving the day’s events, talking about whether there were any measures that we should have taken that would have changed things.

“Where’s the big cheese?” Mike asked, obviously trying to cut the tension in the room.

“Battaglia? He left about an hour ago,” I said.

“I see you raided the liquor cabinet. Couldn’t wait for me, Coop, could you?”

I’d contributed a liter of Dewar’s that I kept in the bottom of one of my filing cabinets for special occasions. McKinney had vodka and bourbon, and we were making do with plastic cups.

“It was just a horrible sight. A cold-blooded execution, right under our noses,” I said, taking another sip of my drink.

“CSU is still downstairs finishing the job.”

“It took forever to clear the crowd to get Crime Scene and the morgue van in,” Mercer said. “That slowed them down badly.”

“Declared here, or did he make it to a hospital?” Mike asked.

“Before his head hit the sidewalk,” Mercer said, while Ryan handed out slices. “Kali fired four from a LadySmith.38. Then she dropped it and held up her slim wrists to be cuffed and taken away. Stiff upper lip the whole time.”

“Not as stiff as his is.” Mike poured himself a few inches of vodka and touched his cup against mine. “Here’s to Carrie Underwood.”

“Why?”

“Must have been Kali’s favorite song,” Mike said, singing a few bars of Underwood’s hit that scored with the line “maybe next time he’ll think before he cheats.”

“Rough justice,” McKinney said. “I didn’t see that one coming, for sure.”

“How did Battaglia take it?”

“He’s as stunned as the rest of us,” I said.

“Did he get any more airtime?”

“Yeah. He couldn’t do anything on the front steps, but he invited the major press reps in to his office. Said all the right things.”

“And we slipped Byron Peaser and Blanca Robles out the back door,” Mercer said. “Nobody had any interest in what they had to say tonight.”

“Who winds up with Kali’s case?” Mike asked.

“The head of Brooklyn’s DV unit,” I said. “She’s terrific. She’ll be designated a special prosecutor in this county.”

“If she picks her jury right,” Mike said, halfway through his first slice of pepperoni with mushrooms and onions, “those people are likely to pin a medal on Kali. You want twelve angry women in that jury box-the first wives’ club-divorced, dumped, or deserted by the pricks in their lives. They’ll see things just the way Mrs. Mo did.”

“Most women do,” Ryan said, “according to my wife and her pals.”

“The sad thing is she’ll be tortured while she’s a prisoner at the Women’s House. That’s where her elegance and good looks and upper crust will work against her-in a jail cell.”

“Battaglia’s not asking for bail,” I said. “He’s releasing Kali. He figures there’s a whole battered women’s syndrome defense to be worked up here. Psychological abuse and all this public humiliation.”

“How enlightened of him. Are we close to an election year?”

“Must be,” Ryan said.

Pat, Ellen, and I began to nibble at the pizza. The alcohol was starting to calm me, and I could feel a slight buzz replacing the numbness of the afternoon’s experience.

“You should all look a bit more enthusiastic than you do, guys. A day like this one gives new meaning to ‘Thank God It’s Friday,’” Mike said. “Don’t tell me you’re so miserable about MGD’s sudden demise that none of you watched Jeopardy!?”

“There’s nothing funny about today,” I said, getting up from my place at the table. “Do you get that?”

“Where you going, kid? I just got here.”

“It’s been a long one, Mike. I’m packing it in.”

“Ellen, what kind of giant lizard was King Kong supposed to fight in the original movie?” he asked.

“What? Why do you want to know?” Ellen said, wiping the red sauce from her chin.

“’Cause it was the final answer tonight,” Mike said. “You know it?”

Ellen Gunsher shook her head. I announced that I wasn’t playing, and neither Mercer nor Pat guessed at the question.

But Ryan Blackmer was as quirky as Mike. “What’s a Komodo dragon?”

“That’s it, pal. I should have known you were a detail man. Have all the pizza you want.”

“Somebody leave the Scotch bottle on my desk when you’re done,” I said. I was ready to go home and go to sleep.

I understood why they were ignoring me. Each of us had retreated into a space from which we couldn’t see the murder unfolding in front of us. Each of us was going to have to deal with it in our own way.

“Here’s the really cool thing about Komodo dragons,” Ryan said. “They’ve got two penises.”

Mike was helping himself to more vodka. “Awesome!”

“Why do you think that’s so awesome?” I asked, almost out the door. “You hardly know what to do with one.”

“If that’s your best shot, Coop, you ought to sit on it.”

“It’s a strange time of night to start getting frisky, Al,” Ryan said.

I shrugged my shoulders and rolled my eyes. “I thought I was making a joke, Chapman style.”

“I’m actually saving up in case they ship your man out,” Mike said.

“What do you mean?”

“Luc. I mean Luc. He’s looking to be a perfect candidate for the French Foreign Legion, kid. No questions asked. That’s always been how they assemble their troops for combat. Cutthroats and crooks, murderers and-I don’t know, maybe they’ve got an opening for shady restaurateurs.”

I’d been one-upped. I stopped in the doorway. “What did you find out today?”

“Nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow.”

“Please?”

“I’ll walk you out. How are you getting home?”

“My car’s parked right downstairs on Hogan Place.”

I said good night to everyone, stopped in my office to get my keys, and walked with Mike down the quiet hallway to the elevator.

“You’re right about the Gineva Import company. It’s owned by the Dantons and Gina Varona.”

“Is it a dummy corporation?” I asked. “Or for real?”

“I couldn’t get much on the phone. The Brooklyn prosecutors will have to subpoena the records on Monday. All the AG would confirm for me were the owners and the fact that the company bought the building a few months ago.”

“Which would be six months after Luc bought the one next door. Is his name anywhere involved with Gineva?”

“Not so far as the AG’s filings show.”

“So this whole thing gets more tangled. You know Luc wants to go back to France, don’t you?”

“And he should, Coop. He’s got stuff to deal with there. I’ll throw this information over to the Brooklyn techs this weekend.”

“Did you call Luc? Did you find out whether he knows about this?”

“Not yet. That’s not for me to do.”

“But what do you think, Mike?”

“I think that you think too much, Coop. Just let it be.”

“I need to know.”

“That’ll happen soon enough. Just take a time-out for the night, will you?”

We left the building and Mike waited while I opened the door and got in my car.

“You okay to drive?” he asked.

“I’m good, thanks.”

“You did the right thing, Coop. About MGD, I mean.”

“I thought so a few hours ago. Hard to believe it now.”

“Get some sleep,” Mike said, as I started up the engine. “Talk to you soon.”

At this time of night, without much traffic, it usually took less than twenty minutes for me to drive straight up Park Avenue to the Seventies and into my garage.

The bar scene in SoHo was busy, and the mild night invited young patrons out onto the streets with their martinis and cosmopolitans. Every time I stopped for a red light, I looked at the Friday night revelers who seemed to have left work behind them for the weekend.

I thought back ten years and wondered if I would ever know what it was like to have a job that didn’t press on your brain-and nerves-24/7. Every now and then I thought it would be worth trying to find out.

I drove through the canyon of tall office buildings-deserted at this late hour-that lined Park Avenue north of Grand Central Terminal.

I couldn’t get the day’s images out of my mind’s eye. Gil-Darsin himself, smiling at me in the courtroom with an air of arrogance that befitted his delight at the abrupt prosecutorial reversal. And then Kali, so serene and yet severe, staring her husband straight in the face as she took aim at his heart.