The DeadHouse

17

"You saved me from a miserable afternoon with my mother." Mike had been at his desk in the squad when I called, and instantly agreed that we should drive out to Sinnelesi's office to confront Bart Frankel with our new information. The secretary had assured me he would be around all afternoon, so we were soon on our way through the Holland Tunnel.

"Mom's been begging me to help her plan her funeral. Pick out the coffin, go to-"

"Has she been ill?" I had known his mother for years and had no idea that anything was wrong. Perhaps that's why Mike had been delayed at the hospital on Monday morning.

"Fit as a horse. But at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, she got me to promise I would take her to get everything arranged. Peace of mind and all that. She's so excited you'd think she was going to Disney World with John Elway, for chrissakes. Told her I was breaking the date 'cause of you. That's the only way I could get a reprieve."

"Tell her that when we solve this one, we'll both come out and take her to lunch… Does it bother you as much as it does me that Frankel's the guy who got Lola's call?"

"Hey, if the escort was strictly professional, they would have had detectives taking her out of Lily's home and making sure she got inside her apartment safely. Your big guns in the Manhattan DA's office do witness escort and protection? I can just see Battaglia asking Pat McKinney to run somebody uptown to Harlem. Not a chance. You know Frankel?"

"I've only met him once, when Sinnelesi sent a delegation to talk to us about helping them stage this shooting of Lola. Anne Reininger was doing a very professional job with the investigation. She had some really good ideas about wiring an undercover cop and proving the case just through incriminating admissions from Kralovic. But the district attorney thought this sting would be great press for him, just in time for his reelection campaign. Battaglia and I disagreed. The plan was over-the-top hokey, dangerous, and unnecessary. Frankel came to our office to try to get me to change my mind."

"Any sense of what he's like?"

"I heard he's a law school buddy of Sinnelesi's, so he's probably the same age. About fifty. They were at NYU together. Frankel started with the Brooklyn district attorney, right out of school-"

"Which means he was rejected by your office, no doubt."

"He did six or seven years there, before my time. Then went into private practice, doing criminal defense work in New Jersey. When Sinnelesi was elected, he brought Bart in as his right-hand man. He really runs the shop."

"Did Lola ever mention him to you?"

"No. But we really weren't in contact often once Jersey g_ot involved in the case. And when Bart came to see me with Anne, he was just acting like a supervisor. I never imagined he had any hands-on connection to the case."

"Hands on? How about private parts m? Can't wait to hear his explanation for this."

We parked behind the civic center and found our way up to Sinnelesi's office a bit after one o'clock. The receptionist was startled to see visitors on this quiet, postholiday afternoon.

"We're here for Mr. Frankel," Mike announced.

"Is he expecting you?"

Mike jerked his head in my direction. "She's an old friend of Bart's. Passing through town. I think we'd just like to surprise him."

"How nice," she said, smiling in my direction. "I'm sure he'll be pleased. He called to say he'd be stopping for a sandwich on his way back here, so he should be in any minute."

I took off my coat and hung it on the rack in the waiting room. "What the hell is that frigging glob you got stuck on your suit?" Mike was staring at the gift Jake had given me for Christmas.

"Well, I didn't stop at the apartment, and I was afraid to leave it in my office with the suitcase."

Self-consciously, I unpinned the bird and wrapped it in my handkerchief, putting it inside my shoulder bag.

"Guess Mr. NBC went to the well for that one. Don't let me cramp your style, blondie. You could probably wipe out the entire national debt of Sri Lanka if you-"

"Alex? How nice to see you."

Bart Frankel came through the front door and approached me to shake hands. I introduced him to Mike. "Are you here to meet with the district attorney?"

"No, Bart. We want to speak with you."

A large brown paper bag in one hand, Frankel pushed open the entrance to his wing with the other. "Come on in. I still can't get over what happened to Lola. Such a tragedy." He ushered us into his corner suite, removing his backpack and his coat. This prosecutor's small modern office complex in a suburban corporate park was far more gracious and comfortable than ours. Two chairs faced Frankel's desk. Mike and I seated ourselves while he unwrapped his lunch and put it to the side.

I couldn't help but notice that he was chewing gum.

"Can I order something in for you?"

"No, thanks."

"What can you tell me about how the investigation is going?" He took a tissue, swiveled in his chair, removed the gum, and threw it in his wastebasket. Mike gave me a thumbs-up.

"It's actually going really well, Bart. Faster than I expected. We've had some lucky breaks."

"What do you mean?" He glanced back and forth between Mike's stone face and mine. He laughed nervously, or so it seemed to me. "I get it. Need to know. Tell me and you'll have to shoot me." He nodded his head up and down. "Maybe it's sour grapes 'cause Battaglia wouldn't let you buy into our sting plan. Well, he was right, Alex. Tell him from me, off the record, that once again he made the right choice. Vinny's getting lots of heat from everybody. Starting with Lola's family. The dancing Dakotas, he calls them. A whole chorus line of whining siblings, waiting for their fifteen minutes of fame. That's what their mama primed them for." Bart was talking nonstop, tapping the fingers of both hands on his desktop.

"I got the governor on my back, too. She's big on domestic violence and all that political garbage. Then we got victims' rights groups. You name it, we got it. And you know the drill, Alex. When the shit hits the fan, the number one man is always unavailable for comment. Mr. Sinnelesi had to leave town. Family emergency down in Boca. Vinny, I tell him-Vinny, first I take a huge pay cut to come work for you and do public service, instead of making a real living for me and my family. Now I got to have my balls on the chopping block, too?"

"You wanna come up for air, Mr. Frankel, or you wanna just babble on?"

"Sorry, Mike. It's Mike, isn't it? Exactly what can I help you with?"

I answered, trying to set a pace for the conversation. "I hadn't spoken with Lola in months, as I think I told you when you and Anne Reininger came to my office. I'd really like to get a sense of what her life was like those last six weeks. How she was spending her time, who she was in touch with, what your contact was with her."

"Me? My contact with Lola?"

"Hey, who do you think she's talking to? You got somebody under your desk we can't see?"

"No, it's just, I mean-well, Anne's the prosecutor assigned to the case. I had to meet with Lola on a few occasions, just to oversee what was happening with the sting. Anne's the one who spoke to her almost every day. She can answer your questions."

"I'd like to begin with you, as long as we're here. Why don't you give us an idea of how many times you met with her? Where and when."

Frankel thought for a moment and opened his large red desk calendar. "All of my business appointments are logged in this. Let me just see." He opened the book about midway, to June, and began to flip through the pages. "I guess the first time I met Lola was in the early fall. September twenty-third, to be exact. Anne brought her up to me to introduce us. High-profile case and all that. Vinny likes me to keep an eye on things."

The intercom buzzed. "Excuse me, Mr. Frankel. I've got your daughter on line two. She wants to know if she can use the car tonight after you get home. Would you like to speak with her now?"

"Hold my calls, will you? Tell her yes, and try not to interrupt us till I'm through here, okay?"

"How many meetings after that?"Skimming through here, it looks like six, at the most."

"Where were they?"

"That was the only one in my office. The other times I went down to the second floor, to Anne's bureau. Family Violence Unit."

"Did you ever meet with her anywhere else, outside the office?"

"Yes. I was at her sister's house-Lily's-the day we staged the shooting. We went over, Anne and I, with the detectives just to make sure we approved the setup and to stroke the rest of the family. Pump Lola up."

Frankel was on his feet now, adjusting the blinds on his window as the sunlight bounced its glare off the icy surface of the parked cars in the lot below.

"Must have been a very tense morning. Were you there when the scam went down?"

He did the "me" thing again. "Me?"

"Yeah."

"No, I did what I had to do and got out of there. Had stuff to work on back at the office."

"What stuff?"

"Had to meet with one of the guys on a home-invasion case. Had to help him draft a bill of particulars."

"Got that in your big red book?" Mike asked.

"Got what?"

"Your meeting on the case you just told us about."

"That, um, that came up kind of unexpectedly. It's probably not in here." Frankel patted the cover of the book.

"Mind if I take a look through those entries?"

"I just told you, I doubt that one's in here."

"I mean the references to Lola. Mind if I jot down those dates?"

Frankel opened the book to the first September date and passed it across to Chapman.

"Help yourself, Detective."

Mike rested his notepad on the desk. He turned the pages and copied the dates and times of the Dakota-Reininger-Frankel appointments. When he got to the day of the shooting, he paused and read aloud: "'Thursday morning, December nineteenth. Nine A.M. Meet Reininger at Dakota scene. Sting preparation. Noon. Lunch with Vinny. Two P.M. In the field.'

"Strangest thing. When my partner uses that expression-'in the field'-it means he took the rest of his tour off to get laid. But then, we're just cops. What does it mean to you, Mr. Frankel? What kind of home invasion were you working on?"

"Who's in control of this operation, Alex, you or this rude-?"

"Mike and I want to know exactly the same information. How did you spend that afternoon?"

"I, uh, I must have gone… I guess I left here early. I probably did some holiday shopping."

"Like Ms. Cooper tells the street mopes that sit in her office and lie to her all day, 'probably' and 'I guess' and 'I must have' don't cut it. This ain't ancient history, Mr. Frankel. It's one week ago this very day. When you and Fat Vinny pushed back from the lunch table, where did you go and what did you do?"

"My daughter was coming home from college the next day. I went over to the mall to pick up a few gifts for my kids."

"What stores? I assume you can tell me what you bought and give me receipts for the things."

"You know, Detective, I'm the executive assistant district attorney for this county. You blow in here like you're auditioning for a bit part as a wise guy on The Sopranos. All bluff and bluster and bullshit, and I actually let you rattle me, like I have something to worry about. Well, you came to the wrong place this time. I supervised this investigation. I'm not the subject of it. Why don't you two just crawl back through the tunnel, or however you dragged yourselves here, and go solve your case like professionals, okay?"

"Did you drive Lola back to Manhattan with your own wheels, or did you use a government car to take her home?"

Frankel strode to the door of his office and opened it wide.

Mike got up from his chair as though to leave, then walked behind the desk. He leaned over and reached into the trash, removing from it the Kleenex-wrapped piece of gum that had been discarded when Frankel first brought us into the room. He held it up to the light and admired it as though it were a trophy.

"What the f-?"

"I'm sorry. Would you prefer that I have the office sealed off while Ms. Cooper gets us a search warrant to take your droppings? You a Wrigley's man? Or would you suggest we compare your underwear to the things we found in Lola's apartment? I'd say those size-forty shorts would fit him pretty well, don't you think, blondie?"

Frankel walked over to Chapman and grabbed the tissue from his hand without meeting any resistance. "You two must have lost your minds."

He was like an animal trapped in his own lair. He was patently unhappy with our presence, but afraid that we would walk out without telling him what we knew. Then he put his hand to his eyes and shook his head. "Or maybe I have."

He walked to the windowsill and sat on its edge. "Lola was desperately lonely. She was looking for somebody to cling to, some kind of safety net. I took her out a few times. Never here, in New Jersey, where anyone could see us. In the city, up near the college. I'm not married, if that's what you're thinking. I've been divorced for a couple of years."

"That wasn't my first thought," I said. "I actually wondered how you could get involved with a victim while her case was pending in your office."

"My shrink wants to know the same thing." He sat at his desk and again his fingers tapped steadily against the wooden top. "I had thought about calling you, Alex. I just couldn't pick up the phone to do it. I realize that it's selfish, but if I get myself in the middle of all this, I obviously have to walk out the door here. Give up my job. Make waves for the district attorney."

I was waiting for him to invoke his right to counsel. Like most lawyers, he was loath to do it, figuring-I was certain-that he was smarter than any young prosecutor and the average cop alone or in combination. I was trying to stay calm, wondering how Frankel could explain being with Lola in her apartment last Thursday afternoon, and how much we should consider him a suspect in her death.

He retraced his steps to his September meeting with Lola and filled in more of the blanks. She had called him again, he said, in October, and invited him to a presentation she was making at an academic convention at the New York Hilton. Her speech was magnificent, Frankel told us, and despite all the professional prohibitions, he began to come into the city to see her from time to time, becoming intimate with her before Thanksgiving. "Does Vinny know?"

"He'd break my neck. I suspect this could cost him a few votes in the next election, and that's the bottom line."

Chapman worked him a bit more, and then I tried to move things along to the day of the murder. "After Lola called you, what happened that afternoon?"

"I was the only one who knew she was going to leave her sister's house. Lily was driving her crazy. The histrionics, the crying, the busybody nature of her personality. We had all we could do- Anne did, really-to keep Lola there long enough to execute the plan. I had promised to drive her home afterward. She didn't want detectives sitting around her apartment. She was tired of being watched and waited on. She just wanted to go home and get back to work."

"So she called you here at the office."

He looked at me quizzically. "Surveillance?"

"Even easier. Telephone records."

"I went back to Lily's neighborhood and waited around the corner. Lola was in great spirits. Felt she'd helped us nail Ivan, and that she would begin to regain a bit of control over her life.

We drove into town and I took her up to Riverside Drive. She had some things she wanted to do at home, and then she was going to meet me, at seven o'clock, for dinner at a Chinese place on Amsterdam Avenue. She never showed up. I called and called, and when I finally decided to drive back to the apartment to see what the problem was, cops were swarming all over the place. The last time I saw her was when I let her out of my car in front of her building."

We were all silent. Frankel had taken us halfway there, but I didn't believe that he was telling the truth about how he left Lola. I was thinking of the semen-stained sheets, and I'm sure Mike was, too.

"Where did you go? How'd you spend the rest of the afternoon?"

Frankel was fidgeting again. "Let me think a minute. Um, I-I drove down to, um-there are a couple of bookstores on Broadway. I wandered in and out of those. I had some coffee and read a newspaper."

Mike took the pencil he'd been writing with and snapped it in half. "I hate it when people lie to me."

"I don't remember exactly what I did that afternoon. But you don't want me to say I don't remember, so I'm telling you what I would have done. I was wandering around Columbia, I was walking in and out of shops, trying to keep warm and pass the time. It had no significance at the moment because I had no idea anything was wrong. I was just killing time-"

"Or Lola."

"Don't be a horse's ass, Detective. Don't sit in my office and even presume to treat me like I did something wrong." His voice was raised now, shrill and strident. "I never went inside Lola Dakota's apartment last Thursday." Frankel spit each word at us, slowly and angrily.

"Then how come there's seminal fluid all over the sheets on her sofa bed? And how come if you just spit over at me one more time, I'm gonna have enough of your goddamn body fluid from this slobbering saliva all over the new tie my aunt Bridget gave me for Christmas to let the lab match it up before your kid gets home with the car tonight."

"If there's semen on those sheets, and if it happens to be mine, Detective… let me stop right there. That's a really big 'if,' 'cause Lola and I did not exactly have what I would call an exclusive relationship."

"Maybe we can narrow it down a bit. Coop, how much you wanna bet that Mr. Frankel here has a pack of gum, white wrapper with that distinctive green arrow, right in his pants pocket?"

"I'm not betting against you, Mr. Chapman."

"What's the point of that?" Bart was furious.

"We've got DNA from the sheets, and DNA from the gum. You know where the bed linens were, and the two of us happen to know exactly where we found your chewed-up ball of saliva. Now all you have to do is remember how many places you were when you tossed your gum. Was it in Lola's bedroom? In the kitchen? For a guy with a regular habit like yours, it's gonna be hard to single out every stick you got rid of. Leave out an important stop, and I'll nail your ass to the wall. The easiest thing for you to do is just to retrace your steps for us, honestly this time. We know damn well that you're leaving something out."

"Well, I sure as hell wasn't in the elevator shaft when she was murdered. Alex, please. You've got to believe that I was never, never inside Lola's building the day she was killed. Of course I won't deny that we'd been intimate. But whatever you found on the sheets must be there from two or three weeks ago. We slipped away from Lily's one afternoon, and I took Lola to run some of the errands she needed to get done around school. Then we stopped by at her apartment and yes, we made love. She never spent another night there, so she obviously didn't have any time to do the laundry.

"And the gum? Yeah, I chew gum all the time. It's probably in every wastebasket in the apartment. It's a nervous habit. Started when I gave up cigarettes, and now I do it all the time."

Chapman fisted both hands and leaned his knuckles on the desk, bending toward Frankel. "If you didn't go into Lola's building that day, where else did you go? Help me. Tell me one other stop you made that I can verify."

Bart twisted and squirmed. Mike tried to nudge him in the right direction. "Start with the campus. Did you go anywhere near the college?"

"Columbia?"

"Or King's."

"I'm not familiar with King's. Didn't exist in my day. So I walked around Columbia a bit. But it was too cold. I got in my car and drove down Broadway. Manhattan has a bunch of these great little mystery bookstores. Four or five of them, all over town. It took me a while to find one. Just took a book into a coffee shop and read for a while. I told you that before, and it's true. I'll check at home and see if I can find a receipt."

Both of us knew, from the gum that Mike had spotted in the trash basket, that Bart had made a stop in Lola's office. I wondered if he had done that because she had asked him to pick something up, or if he had gone there on his own. Why wouldn't he give that to us? Why did he continue to lie about it? And what else did it mean he was lying about?

"Was there a reason Lola didn't want you to come upstairs with her?" I asked.

Bart reached into his pocket and stripped the wrapper off another stick of Wrigley's spearmint.

"Not really." He rolled his head in a circle and pressed his hand against the back of his neck. "I mean, what we had originally planned was to spend a few hours there. But when we pulled up in front of the building, one of her friends was on his way inside. We just decided that I should get lost for a few hours and come back later. Lola didn't want anyone asking questions, didn't want anything to happen to screw up the case. Like for Ivan to find out she was sleeping with a prosecutor. Shit, was I stupid."

"How the hell would Ivan find that out, just 'cause you were driving her home?"

"And staying overnight? He had eyes everywhere. Lola was paranoid. Thought he was paying people to find out information. Just figured it would get back to Ivan if we were caught together. She told me to stay loose and she'd give me a call later that afternoon on my cell phone." He looked pained. "The call that never came."

"And the friend, the guy who was going in when you pulled up to the building? What's his name?"

"Her friend, not mine. I never saw the guy before in my life. I think he teaches with her. Black guy with dreads and a kind of wild-looking beard."

Lavery, I thought. "Claude? Claude Lavery?"

"Yeah. That's the guy. Held the door for her and they walked in. I never saw her again after that."