The DeadHouse

11

Hoppins followed us into the hallway to an alcove near the elevator bank.

"You handled a case several years back, Ms. Cooper. David Fillian, do you remember him?"

"Of course." Fillian was a street kid from Manhattan with a serious cocaine habit who supported himself by selling drugs to the rich prep school students of Carnegie Hill and upscale collegians. One night, after delivering a load of blow to a senior in one of the Columbia College dorms, he partied with his customer, who let him sleep over. When everyone had fallen asleep, Fillian prowled the dormitory halls, looking for things to steal. In one suite, he accidentally awakened a girl during the theft, who resisted and struggled when he tried to assault her. Fillian stabbed her in the chest, leaving her for dead. A roommate's quick response and the surgical team at St. Luke's saved her life.

"I've been doing some of the offender counseling in state prison. Fillian's in my program. You probably know that he wants to become a CI for the department."

Confidential informants-CIs-were a staple of narcotics investigations. Fillian had been hammered by the judge at his sentence, as we requested, and had been trying everything possible to reduce the time he spent in jail. I hoped no power on earth could speed his release.

"Hard to be useful to cops with current street news when you're as far north as Dannemora." He was incarcerated just miles away from the Canadian border.

"Some of the kids he ran with still keep in touch with him. He thinks he's in the know. Anyway, he's been telling me that one of the King's College professors has been selling drugs to the students-a regular candy shop. You ask for it, the prof's got it." "Who is it? What's the guy's name?" Chapman asked. "I don't have a name for you. There was no point in my asking him for the information, since I couldn't do anything with it professionally, and it has nothing to do with the treatment program. David was just complaining to me that nobody in the correction department seemed to be interested in the fact. I see from the papers that you've got this murder case, and also that one of the students with-shall we say, an alternative lifestyle?-disappeared last spring."

"How often do you see Fillian?"

"I'm not due to see him again until the end of January. I spend one week a month traveling around to the maximum-security jails, supervising the sex offender groups. I thought that if, perhaps, David had some valuable information to help you on the King's College cases, you could support his request for an early release to parole."

It was my devout wish that Fillian's parole officer had not yet been born. And I doubted that an occasional session, up close and personal, exchanging techniques with other convicted rapists had "cured" him of his habits. I was anxious to dismiss Hoppins and get on to our more immediate work. "We'll see if we can get him produced at a prison downstate to interview him. If he doesn't have any more details than this, he won't be much use to us."

We thanked her and walked away. I'm sure she detected the chill in my voice, as I questioned the sincerity of her patient's bona fides.

Joe Roman was waiting for us when we reached my office. "You still have that photo of the Denzig girl?" he asked.

"Sure. It's attached to her folder, on my desk."

"Talk about archaeological digs," Mike said, shaking Joe's hand. "That's what the pile on your desk looks like."

I flipped through the manila case jackets till I found Shirley Denzig's file. "What did you learn from the Baltimore cops?"

"That her papa has a licensed handgun. Kept it in a locked storage box in his garage. Sometime during the week he noticed it had been taken, so he reported it to the local detectives. I'm going to have copies of this photo made to give to Security downstairs here and to keep with the doormen at your building. Bad news is, she finally was evicted from her apartment. Captain's going to let Frankie and me work on it. See if we can find her and tell her what a lovely person you really are."

"Remember that Shirley's not wrong about herself. She doesn't look that good anymore. Tell them to add seventy or eighty pounds to that image, okay?"

"You're doing something wrong, Alex. It's supposed to be the bad guys who are after us, not the victims," Joe said, shaking his finger at me as he walked out of the room.

"Wanna fill me in?" Mike asked.

"I'll tell you later. Just an old complainant resurfacing when I need her least."

I dialed Ryan Blackmer's number. I needed more information about the assault near Washington Square Park. "Hey, I wanted to catch you before I go up to the college. Did your NYU graduate student show up for her interview?"

"Not only did she come in, but she recanted the entire story. Hope it's okay with you, but I locked her up. Filing a false report." "What's the deal?"

"The girl was frantic when she got here. She had made the whole thing up. Her last exam was supposed to be this morning, and she had two major papers due before the winter recess. She just couldn't cope, so she figured if she told the dean she'd been accosted on the street and was too traumatized to finish the semester, she wouldn't flunk the courses. They'd let her make up the work in January."

"And for that she identified somebody out of the blue and actually had him locked in jail overnight?" The fabricated reports of assault were the most pernicious actions I could imagine women taking.

"Yeah. Claims she never expected the police to take her seriously, and by the time they had driven around for almost an hour, she felt like she owed it to them to pick out somebody." "How's the poor guy doing?"

"I released him without bail the other night. The cops thought she was flaky from the get-go, and they called his employer, who backed him one hundred percent. Did I do the right thing by having her arrested?"

"You always do the right thing. See you later." Laura buzzed me on the intercom. "There's someone named Gloria Reitman on the phone. Says to tell you she knew Professor Dakota, and she's supposed to meet with you at school." "This is Alexandra Cooper. Ms. Reitman?" "Thanks for taking my call. Ms. Foote asked me to talk to you. I was just wondering if you'd mind meeting with me at the law school building, over at Columbia? I'm a first-year there. But I knew Professor Dakota. I'd just be more comfortable alone, not being asked questions in front of all the administrative types at King's. Can you do that?"

"No problem. We were supposed to be in Ms. Foote's office at two."

"If you come a little earlier, I can meet you at one-thirty. I'll be in the Drapkin Lounge. We can talk privately there."

The scene on College Walk was a lot calmer now than it had been last week. The campus seemed almost deserted, emptied of the students who had moved so briskly down the library steps and between buildings the last time we were here. Mike and I entered the law school and asked the guard for the meeting room that had been named, undoubtedly, in honor of some fat-cat generous alumnus.

Gloria walked toward us and introduced herself. "We've actually met before. Not that I expect you to remember, but I heard you speak at the public service lecture you did here last year." She smiled at Mike as she shook his hand, then looked back at me, blushing slightly with embarrassment. Brunette ringlets framed her narrow face. "The reason I came to law school is because I've always wanted to be a prosecutor. In your office."

She had arranged some chairs in a corner of the room, and we sat together to talk. "The dean went through the lists of Professor Dakota's classes from the last two years and picked a few of us to talk to you. Of course, lots of the students have already gone home. I don't know how many are still here."

Gloria took a deep breath, apparently having difficulty saying what came next.

"The easiest way for me to start off is to tell you straight out that I hated Professor Dakota. Despised her. Shall I go on, or are there specific questions you want to ask me?"

I tried not to show my surprise. I didn't want to stifle what might be a candid portrait from an intelligent source. "Why don't you just tell us everything you think we should know, and we'll take it from there."

"Professor Dakota joined the faculty at King's during my junior year, from Columbia. All my friends who'd studied with her there thought the world of her. Brilliant scholar, great instructor. Told me not to miss the chance to get to know her. I even sat in the back of her classroom once or twice the first semester 'cause everyone raved about how she brought the past to life. I had a double major at King's-history and poli sci-so it was a natural for me to sign up for her courses. It almost cost me admission to law school."

That was about the same time that I, too, had first met Lola Dakota. Maybe her domestic problems had created a change in her nature. I knew that kind of stress could alter a victim's entire personality.

"Second semester, junior year. 'Gotham Government-New York City, 1850 to 1950.' Sounded good to me, and I needed it for my major credits. I worked like a dog on my research paper. It may seem immodest, Miss Cooper, but I hadn't had a grade below A-minus since I started college. I was terrified about getting into a good law school, coming from King's, since it's so experimental, without any record of achievement by its students. All I could do was try to get as close to a four-point-oh grade average as possible, and study hard for my law boards.

"Dakota gave me a D. Only one I'd ever had in my life."

"Shit. I used to go home with one of those every semester. Stood for Damn Good, I told my old man." Chapman was giving her the full press now, putting her at ease, so he could ferret out whatever she had to tell us.

How could I measure her complaint? Every disgruntled student who'd ever fallen short wanted to blame the teacher for the grade. "Did you appeal it?"

"The dean of students almost drowned in appeals from Dakota's classes. She'd pick one or two pets for the semester- usually guys-and the rest of us would struggle to stay on board. We used to joke that she had a twenty-four-character alphabet, which began with the letter C."

Mike leaned forward, one elbow on his knee, supporting his chin in his hand. "Did you know she was in the middle of a pretty ugly marital situation at the time? That her husband had-"

"I didn't know she was still married till I read the story in the obituary. We thought she was having an affair with another faculty member."

Mike stayed focused on Gloria's face. "Who was that?" "Oh, no one in particular. You know how college students are. Anytime we saw two of them together in the faculty lounge, or she showed up five minutes late for class, rumors would spread. Goofy stuff, and we knew it."

"Like what kind of rumors? What names do you remember?" "One week it might have been Professor Lockhart-he teaches American history. Then it was one of the science guys-biochem, I think. I can picture his nerdy little face-wire-rimmed glasses with urine-colored lenses. When Recantati showed up this fall to take the temporary presidency, some of my friends thought she was slobbering all over him. Every now and then someone tossed a student's name into the mix."

"But did you hate her as much before you got the lousy grade?" "There was something very mean-spirited about her. In the classroom, actually. She loved performing, so we'd be mesmerized during lectures. All the detail she had and her willingness to give it to us so openly. But then she'd snap into a rage for no reason at all, especially on the days that we had to make presentations. Maybe some of the kids weren't as smart as her students used to be at Columbia. Maybe she took out on us the fact that she'd been asked to leave that faculty and start up a program at King's.

"But there was no excuse for the way Professor Dakota made fools out of us. Made students stand up for ten or fifteen minutes at a clip, firing questions at us about obscure political events of 1893. Questions nobody could answer unless you'd gone beyond the course materials and guessed correctly which year she might focus on that particular day. She reduced a couple of my classmates to tears, and she seemed to enjoy doing that. That sign on Dakota's door-badlands? She relished that reputation."

"Was Charlotte Voight one of those students? Was she in your class?"

"Who?"

"A junior, the one who disappeared from school last April."

"Never heard of her."

"What do you know about the drug scene there?"

"Like every other college campus, it was huge. Just happens not to be my thing, but you can find plenty of people to talk to about that."

"D'you have anything to do with the dig that Professor Dakota was working on, on Roosevelt Island?"

"No, but Skip knows about that. Professor Lockhart." Gloria blushed again, this time as though she had slipped in a too familiar reference.

"The one you said Dakota was rumored to be involved with?"

She twisted the ringlets behind her right ear. "Well, that's one rumor I know wasn't true. I mean, I was involved with Skip, junior year. We were sort of having an affair."

That helped account for the A in American history, I guessed. "Mind telling us about him?"

"I mean, he was single. There wasn't anything wrong with it." Gloria was looking at Mike for approval now. She seemed proud of herself, in that foolish way that girls sometimes are when they take a lover under inappropriate circumstances. "But I'd been seeing him since the summer after my sophomore year. That's why I confronted him about the stories that he and Professor Dakota were involved." She looked so earnest. "I guess I was jealous." "What did he tell you?"

"Not to be ridiculous. Skip told me that he used to spend a lot of time with her, because their intellectual interests were the same. But he said she was a real gold digger. Not his type at all."

"What did he mean, gold digger? Was that his word for her, or yours?" From what I had learned during my initial investigation of Lola's marital situation, she seemed to have a very comfortable nest egg of her own. She had invested her money intelligently, with Ivan's professional assistance at first, through all the years of their marriage. She didn't seem to have a penchant for jewelry or fancy clothes, as I had observed in our many meetings, and it was obvious that she hadn't spent big dollars on decorating her new apartment.

"It was something like that. Treasure hunter. Gold digger. That's all I could get out of him, really. You can ask Skip yourself. I'm sure you'll be speaking with him. He's part of that multidisciplinary project they were working on at some old loony bin. Just don't tell him I told you about our relationship, okay? The administration wouldn't approve."

"So what was the buzz on campus before everyone left town? Who killed Lola Dakota?"

"I went to the service on Friday night. Not 'cause I was heartbroken about the professor. But a lot of my old friends were going to be there, so we figured we'd go out together before everybody split town.

"By midnight, after a few drinks, we all began to look guilty to each other." Gloria laughed. "A few of my friends-the ones who'd done well in class-defended her. The rest of us had gripes to air and stories to tell. A lot of guys figure it's just some bum from the neighborhood who knocked her off. Everybody worries about getting mugged up here. It's a constant problem, on campus and off. One guy was a suitemate of that kid who hanged himself the next night. Julian? You know who he is? That's how I heard about Lola and her crazy husband." "Heard what?"

"Apparently Julian used to brag about being on Ivan Kralovic's payroll. That the husband paid him for information about Professor Dakota-what her hours were, when she was at her office, where she had moved, when she was out in the field on her new project. In fact, that's the reason some of the guys think Julian hanged himself. That he didn't realize Kralovic wanted the information so he could kill his wife. Julian just thought he was harassing her. And believe me, there were plenty of people on campus who wanted her harassed."

I was thinking out loud, directing my question to Mike. "Where in the world do you think Julian Gariano would have crossed the path of Ivan Kralovic?"

"Not hard to figure," Gloria responded. "My friend was there the day they met. Julian's dad had just hired a lawyer to handle his drug case. Turned out to be Ivan Kralovic's defense attorney, too. They met in the waiting room at the lawyer's office. Julian was wearing a King's College sweatshirt. Said Kralovic started asking him a million questions. That same night, back in the dorm room, Professor Dakota's husband called to talk to Julian again. Offered him a ton of money to rat on his wife. There was nothing Julian wouldn't do for money. He didn't think anyone would get hurt." Mike gave Gloria his card. "Call me if you hear anything else." We thanked her and walked back across Amsterdam Avenue, passing the car and continuing on to keep our appointment with Sylvia Foote at the King's building on Claremont Avenue.

This time, she was expecting us. I suspected it gave her a good deal of pleasure to tell us that she had been unable to comply with our request to have students lined up ready to talk with us. "You know what this season means to so many families. Despite my best efforts, most of the young people from out of town wanted to keep to their plans and get home to their folks. I've got a few local students here, and you're welcome to use my deputy counsel's office now."

She smiled wanly and I guessed she had sanitized their stories pretty well.

Mike had opened his notepad and was ticking off his new requests. "We'll move on to the permanent residents, Ms. Foote, faculty and administration. Here's a list of the people I'd like to see tomorrow. At my office. Let's start with the acting president, Mr. Recantati. I'd like Professor Lockhart-he's the historian, right?-and Professor Shreve, from anthropology, and the heads of each department involved in the project Professor Dakota was working on. I want-"

"I'm just not certain of the availability of these people on such short notice."

"Coop, have you got any paper with you?"

I opened my folder and removed several grand jury subpoenas. Foote knew exactly what that meant. "They can be in Detective Chapman's office in the morning, or they can come directly to the courthouse at the end of the week and be questioned by me, under oath, before the grand jury. Their call, Sylvia." I scribbled in the names and dates while Chapman kept talking.

Foote ushered us into a small room adjacent to her own. For the rest of the afternoon, we saw a stream of young adults who attended King's College and lived in the five boroughs or surrounding suburbs. Most of them acted as though they would rather be boarding the Titanic than talking to a detective and a prosecutor. Not one of them admitted to having any personal knowledge about Lola Dakota or Charlotte Voight. Drugs were everywhere on campus, they seemed to agree, but none of these kids had ever inhaled and didn't know who the dealers or steerers were.

One of the last to straggle in was a senior who had lived on the same floor as Charlotte during the spring semester. Kristin Baymer was also twenty. Her home was a Fifth Avenue apartment, where her father and stepmother were raising her infant half brother. She parked herself on the sofa opposite the desk at which I had been working and curled up with her knees underneath her, stifling a yawn as she greeted us.

"I'm not gonna get in trouble for this, am I?"

"Depends what you did," Mike said, trying to apply his charm, along with his best grin and most collegiate affect.

"Drugs. You probably know that I was on academic probation sophomore year. Got caught with some pills. Amphetamines tranquilizers. That kind of stuff."

"We're not here on a drug bust, Kristin. We've got a murder to solve and a girl to find. Hey, I'd like it if nobody stuck needles in their arms or snorted coke, but I'm not the Vice Squad. What you say to us about any of that stays right in this room "

Foote hadn't given us the student files, so we hadn't known Kristin's background. She looked too wasted and too tired to worry about whom she could trust. She just started talking

"Charlotte and I had a lot in common. Both loners, both stubborn both enjoyed getting high. My mom died a few years ago hke hers. And my father married my big brother's girlfriend. My stepmother's two years older than I am, and now I've got an eight-month-old brother. Classy, huh? And they call me dysfunctional."

Did you and Charlotte spend a lot of time together?"

"Only when we were doing drugs. Otherwise, neither one of us was very sociable."

"Did she have a favorite? Not person. I mean drug of choice "

"Charlotte? She'd try almost anything. Pills were nothing for her. She'd take ups when she was depressed. Then she'd get so manic she needed something to bring her down. She liked cocaine a lot. And heroin."

Heroin had ravaged the drug users in urban America throughout the sixties and seventies. It had rarely appealed to young women, experts thought, because so many of them were averse to injecting themselves in the arm and developing track marks. The late nineties saw a surge of heroin use, with a new and potent strain that could be snorted and smoked, just like the more fashionable cocaine.

Kristin was biting at a hangnail now, twisting the torn skin between her teeth. "And Ecstasy. That girl loved her Ecstasy." She said it like an endorsement for cornflakes. Good old wholesome Ecstasy.

The pills, originally patented by the E. Merck pharmaceutical company in Germany, in 1914, were now made in Holland, Belgium, and Israel. They were being smuggled into the States in enormous quantities and had taken over the drug scene faster than any substance tracked before. The euphoric condition Ecstasy produces, along with its reputation for enhancing sexual enjoyment, made it hugely popular among young adults. The tablets stimulate the nervous system like speed, but at the same time create a sense of well-being and an almost hallucinogenic haze. So new on the scene that it wasn't even a controlled substance in New York until 1997, it was now a staple on high school and college campuses.

"Where'd you get it? The Ecstasy, I mean."

"Are you kidding? It's easier than getting a pack of Marlboros. Kids need proof of age for cigarettes these days. Ecstasy's everywhere." Kristin smiled.

"It's expensive, isn't it?" I thought the pills went for at least thirty dollars a pop. Fine for models and stockbrokers, but tough on a college allowance.

"Charlotte used to call my prep school friends 'Trustafarians.' No shortage of funds for a good time. My dad would rather send me money to keep me away from home than have me bitching about his wife all the time." She looked Mike up and down, then switched her scrutiny to me. "I don't know when either of you was last in a bar in Manhattan. But a Cosmopolitan costs nine bucks per drink. I can get the same buzz off one Ecstasy that it takes me five cocktails to match. Do the math.

"Besides, Charlotte was sleeping with Julian for the better part of a year. When you're putting out for the guy who's dealing the pills, there's an endless supply." "Were you close to Julian, too?"

Now she was picking at her lavender nail polish. "Never slept with him. Didn't have to. Like I said, I could afford to buy most things that I wanted." "What was he like?"

Kristin shrugged her shoulders and went on flaking off the chips. "He was an okay guy. He actually seemed to care about Charlotte. Maybe that's why she dumped him. I don't think she liked anybody getting that close to her."

"Did she leave him for someone else?" Mike asked.

"What's the difference?"

"'Cause maybe she's still alive. Maybe someone can help us find her."

"Some of us figure she doesn't want to be found. Just went off to lead her own life." Kristin's cavalier attitude about Charlotte's disappearance was disturbing.

"Did you know Professor Dakota?"

"Only by reputation."

"But Charlotte was a friend of the professor's, wasn't she?"

"No way," Kristin said, looking at me as if I were crazy.

"What makes you so sure?"

"Fall semester, last year, okay? Charlotte flunked Dakota's class. Capital F in some bullshit course about the mayoralty in New York, La Guardia to Lindsay. Set her off in a complete funk. It was one thing for her to sweet-talk a guy like Julian into feeding her pills, but if she was kicked out of King's, then she'd have no choice but to go home to South America. Tuition was the only thing her father would pay for. No frills. If she wasn't at college, hasta la vista, sweet Charlotte. You two look surprised."

"I am a bit surprised," Mike led off. "Lola Dakota kept a bulletin board behind her desk. Had some pictures of her relatives, had some snapshots of famous people. But she also had a photograph of Charlotte Voight. Like something from a freshman mug book. We just assumed it meant she took an interest in the girl. Cared about her. Missed her."

Kristin nipped at her raw skin again. "Julian would have keeled over at that one. He used to tell Charlotte that Dakota would get what was coming to her someday. I just thought he was being macho for her sake. Never thought anyone would kill the SOB. Must be some other reason that Charlotte's picture's on her board."

"Who else can we talk to about Charlotte?" I asked. "There must have been other people she confided in about her plans. You don't just disappear into thin air."

"Can't think of a soul. I was the last person to see her alive, far as I know."

"Where was that?"

"I was coming into the lobby of the dorm about eight-thirty at night. She was on her way out, going to Julian's. She never got there. Must have changed her mind. Found another source."

"Did she seem to be in distress? Unhappy? De-"

"Nope. She seemed just fine. Cheerful almost. I asked her if she wanted to come up to my room to do a few lines with me. Charlotte laughed and said she had a better offer. She was going to the lab."

"Where's that?"

"That's what she used to call Julian's room. If he didn't have what you wanted, just wait ten minutes and he'd cook it up for you," Kristin said, obviously pleased by the memory. "He was wasting his time in the criminal justice department. He should have been a science major."

Chapman was disgusted. "Better living through chemistry," he said, looking at his watch.

"Anyway, Charlotte walked out the door and I never saw her again. I just assumed she was partying over at the lab."