The DeadHouse

28

"Hey, Quick Draw, wanna put out an APB for me?"

I was sitting inside the Nineteenth Precinct squad commander's office, shielded from the detectives' desks by the clouded glass window on the door, when I heard Chapman's voice, at top volume, calling across the room to Walter DeGraw.

"I'm looking for a dumb blonde. Big-time bad judgment written all over her. Put it out on the wires in case any of your guys see her skating around the city streets on the midnight tour. About five feet ten inches, too skinny for my taste, too stubborn to ask a cop for help, too vain to shed tears and run her mascara, too stupid to put a hat on her head in a snowstorm so her blonde hair's looking a little bedraggled from the sleet. But great wheels. And well dressed. They find her alive, she's likely to kill me if I didn't add those things. You seen her around or I oughtta try the psych ward down at Bellevue?"

DeGraw pushed open the door and Chapman reached out his arm to balance himself against the frame of it and stare down at me. I was sitting in the lieutenant's armchair, holding a steaming mug of coffee in both hands to warm them up, and wearing a turtleneck sweater that one of the guys had taken from his locker to put over my wet clothes.

"For a smart broad, sometimes you got the brains of a pigeon."

DeGraw started to excuse himself and get out of the room.

"Don't go, Walter," I implored him. He had begun to type the complaint report and the sooner I finished giving him the details, the faster I could get out of the cold station house.

Chapman stepped into the room and squatted in front of me. He placed his palms against my knees and realized when I jerked reflexively away from him that I had hurt them in my fall. He pried the coffee cup away from my clutches and pressed my hands between his own, rubbing them together gently but firmly.

"What's this all about, kid?"

I shook my head, not wanting to tell the whole story here and now, and DeGraw shuffled nervously, knowing that he was in the middle of something more personal. A uniformed cop knocked on the door, which was still ajar.

"Excuse me, Detective DeGraw? The desk sergeant sent me up." He was clutching my shoulder bag. "My partner found this on the sidewalk, about two blocks south of where she was hit. Nothing in it. Sarge wants to know if you can identify it, Counselor."

"There wasn't much in it anyway. Yes, it's mine."

DeGraw called over his shoulder to another detective in the squad room. "Hey, Guido. Wanna bring me a voucher for Ms. Cooper's bag?"

Now we were five, crowded into the tiny office, filling out police forms and documenting my thickheadedness.

"Word's out on the street, Coop. Even the perp knew it wasn't worth wasting his time to make you do it."

Don't bite, I urged myself. He's trying to make me laugh but I wasn't in the mood.

Chapman's grip on my hands was comforting, and it felt good to be with people who would care about finding the murdered woman Jake had been called about.

"What word?" Guido asked, suckered into Chapman's bait. "Make her do what?"

"The guy who mugged her's the one who's been chasing women around up here. Making them perform oral sodomy. But he didn't even slow down his pace for Cooper. Just took the money and ran. Must have heard she's no good at blow-"

"Why don't you back off, Chapman?" Lieutenant Grier had returned from his meal and walked upstairs to see what was causing such a late-night commotion. "There's a Mr. Tyler on the phone, Alex. Says he's a friend. Wants to know if he can come over here."

"Tell him no, please. Tell him I'll call him tomorrow." I pulled my hands away from Chapman and he stood up. I pressed my damp hair down and pulled the dangling strings of it behind my ears. "I don't know how he knew where I'd be. You either."

"You ran out of my place like a bat out of hell. Said you were going to Jake's. I waited five minutes and called him to make sure you got there." The men were listening to our conversation with interest, forgetting they had other things to do. "When he told me you'd had a fight and it had something to do with a missing woman, I just called over here, figuring that you had come to me to get information from the police. Next place you'd probably go was the precinct. I phoned and got Walter, who told me he had a hallucinating homeless woman, who looked like a vaguely familiar waterlogged prosecutor, dragging in a few minutes back with her tail between her legs. Told me what happened to you. Never dreamed you'd march in here as an aided case instead of an amateur dick."

"I'm not an aided case. I don't need an ambulance." I pulled my hands back and lowered them to my lap.

"Listen, Coop, you got less than forty-eight hours to turn your karma around before the New Year starts. Understand?"

Lieutenant Grier had walked away and returned from his own desk with a bottle of Glenfiddich. He chased the uniformed cop back downstairs, poured us each a shot into drinking glasses, and apologized to the three detectives as he served them in paper cups. "Happy New Year, everybody."

I drank the warm scotch and the rich single-malt stung as it went down my throat.

"Want to tell us about the call Jake got?" Mike asked.

I wasn't sure everyone in the room needed to hear the conversation.

"She gets real moody whenever she gets jealous, Loo," Chapman said, taking off his jacket and sitting on the edge of the desk. "Threw a tantrum 'cause she caught me with another broad. There probably isn't any missing woman at all. Just Coop trying to get my attention back."

"'Missing' isn't the operative word, Lieutenant. 'Murdered' is a bit more accurate." Maybe I had overreacted when I saw that Mike had been in bed with a woman. I had run down the stairs without waiting for an introduction or an explanation, and now I was trying to convince myself that it was not jealousy that had sent me reeling back out to the treacherously icy street.

"See the extremes she goes to when the green monster rears its ugly head? The lights were out, the candles were lit, my clothes were tidily stacked on a chair, and for once in a blue moon I'm in bed with a-"

"We ain't all that interested in your wishful thinking, Chapman. Guido, Walter-why don't you go out and finish up what you need to do with the paperwork on Ms. Cooper's mugging." The two old-timers reluctantly picked up their cups and reports and shuffled off to the larger squad room. "Alex, you want to tell us what set off this whole thing?" Grier asked, closing the door behind him.

I explained to Lieutenant Grier who Jake Tyler was and why he had a professional obligation to protect his sources.

"Yeah, but not even to tell you! It don't make sense to me."

"Believe me, Loo. I understand the principle, but it doesn't make any sense to me, either. There's no question that the information Jake got from the legal assistant who called him is that their client had killed his wife-"

"In Manhattan?"

"I'm not sure, Mike."

"Where, then?"

"Maybe Suffolk County. Jake said something about a summer-house on Long Island."

The lieutenant had less patience than I had expected. "Give me a place to start, Alex. There's five counties in the city and fifty-seven more in the rest of the state. You expect me to call every single one of them?"

He took a slug of his neat scotch and paced the floor. "What else do you know about these people? How old are they? How many children are we talking about? What does she do for-"

"I told you everything I know, Loo, and I realize it isn't much to go on. I just thought if we checked with a few of the precincts, maybe someone would have reported that a colleague hadn't shown up for work, or a sister didn't make it to a family birthday party, or that the baby-sitter was alarmed 'cause the kids were gone."

He looked at his watch as Mike walked behind me and stood at my back, rubbing my neck and shoulders. "More likely people would think the whole family's away for the weekend. I'll have the guys call around, but I wouldn't expect to hear nothing until tomorrow."

"Mind if we stay here awhile and use your phones?" Mike asked.

"Suit yourself. Seems like a shot in the dark to me." He walked out of the room.

"That's what you want to do, isn't it?"

I leaned forward, pushing the bottle out of my way, and rested my head on the desktop. "I just can't bear the thought that a woman's body is somewhere out there, exposed to this storm, while some member of my esteemed profession-for the right price-is probably arranging for the killer to get out of the jurisdiction."

"They can't do that, can they?"

"Not supposed to. But while the lawyer gets all his ducks in a row, hoping to bargain for a deal before the surrender, who knows where a financier with international connections will wind up?"

Mike refreshed his drink and sat opposite me, trying to make eye contact. "You and Jake going to be all right?"

I was silent.

"He hasn't got a choice in this, does he, Coop? He did what he had to do. You guys are good together."

"Looks like I'm the one who has a choice to make. It never occurred to me that he'd have to cover criminal cases until this happened. I'm not about to sit on the floor of the closet with the door closed and my hands over my ears when the phone rings and somebody confesses to homicide in the middle of the night."

"You want to come back up to my-?"

"I called David Mitchell as soon as I got here. He and Renee were still awake. David promised to take a spare key down to the doorman. I've slept on their couch dozens of times." Mike knew my neighbor, a prominent psychiatrist who had become a close friend over the years. He and his fiancee lived down the hall from me, and I had often spent the night, sharing the sofa with their dog, Prozac. "A wet nose snuggled up against my neck might be just what I need."

Chapman was dialing the phone as I spoke. "Mike Chapman, Manhattan North Homicide here. Who's this?" He paused to listen. "You got any missing persons reports in the last forty-eight hours? Yeah, I'll hold." A minute passed. "Fifteen-year-old runaway. Left home Thursday after a three-week correspondence with some guy she met on the Internet-" I shook my head in the negative.

"-and a female black, topless dancer from a joint on Pine Street, last seen getting into a car with a Japanese businessman two nights ago. DWA oughtta be a crime, Sarge. Thanks."

Driving While Asian was one of Chapman's favorite legislative proposals for an amendment to the Penal Law. He could never resist running his mouth at a politically incorrect target.

"Nothing unusual in the First, blondie. You keep thinking about how to put your love life back on track and I'll-" "I'm not thinking. I don't want to think anymore." "I'm on the case." He dialed again, working from the list of precinct numbers in the department telephone book in the top drawer of the desk. From the lower end of Manhattan moving north, Mike called squad after squad. At some, the phone rang interminably and he never got a response. At most, the answers were predictable. The occasional missing adolescent, the husband not back from a weekend jaunt with his pals, the family of a mentally handicapped adult who had wandered away from a vocational training program and hadn't been seen since Friday.

I walked out among the maze of old wooden desks and found the rest room. By the time I came back, Mike was waiting for a detective to check the blotter in the Twenty-fourth Precinct, on the Upper West Side. I lifted my empty purse from the metal tray of the out box and looked in the zippered compartment, knowing the cash was gone.

"Hope you had the good sense to take your Christmas present when you blew out of Jake's place. We could hock that heap of glass and run off to the Keys, live the rest of our lives down there without ever working again. I could go bonefishing all day and you could drink margaritas and listen to Jimmy Buffett. D'you bring it?"

I smiled and shook my head. It was Mike's way of making sure that my pin hadn't been stolen in the mugging, knowing I would be too embarrassed to want to tell him.

"Boa constrictor? West Eighty-third Street? No thanks." He hung up and checked the number for the Twenty-sixth Precinct, talking as he dialed. "Woman moved into a sublet last week. In the middle of the night, an eight-foot boa comes slithering up on the pillow next to her, trying to give her a kiss. Last guy who lived in the place raised 'em. Seems he left one behind as a housewarming gift. Speckled band and all that…

"Who's this? Yo, Monty, it's Chapman. Looking for a missing broad." The guy who answered asked a few questions of Mike. "No, schmuck. If I knew who or where then she wouldn't be missing very long, would she?" Chapman listened. "Why'd they go up to King's College at this hour of the morning?" After a moment he placed the receiver back on the cradle.

"Time for forty winks, blondie. I'll look for your damsel in distress tomorrow. Somebody broke into the administration building at your favorite school after they locked up tonight. Must have gotten spooked in the middle of the getaway. Cartons of books were piled up next to the back door. The thief only made off with a few of them. They're the boxes marked with Lola Dakota's name on them."