The Deadhouse (2 page)

"Temper, temper, Ms. Cooper. Dakota's not likely to win the Oscar
for her performance. You peeved 'cause you didn't get a chance to do
the film direction?"

I turned off the light and closed the door behind us. "I don't
begrudge her anything. But why did the Jersey DA have to take a shot at
us? He knows it hasn't been our choice to let this thing drag on as
long as it did." There wasn't a seasoned prosecutor anywhere who didn't
know that the most frustrating dynamic in an abusive marriage was the
love-hate relationship that persisted between victim and offender, even
after the violence escalated.

My heels clicked on the tiles of the quiet corridor as we snaked our
way down the long, dark hallway from Video to my eighth-floor office.
It was almost eleven-thirty at night, and the tapping of an occasional
computer keyboard was the only noise I heard to suggest that any of my
colleagues were still at their desks.

Only a handful of cases went to trial this time of year, in the
middle of December, with lawyers, judges, and jurors all anticipating
the two-week court hiatus for the holiday season. I had been working
late—reviewing indictments for the end-of-the-term filing deadline, and
preparing to conduct a sex offender registration hearing after the
weekend—when Detective Michael Chapman came over to tell me the eleven
o'clock news was leading with the Dakota story. He had been down the
street at headquarters to drop off some evidence at the Property
Clerk's Office and called to see if I wanted a drink before knocking
off for the night.

"C'mon, I'll buy you dinner," he now said. "Can't expect me to last
the midnight shift on an empty stomach. Not with all the dead bodies
I'm likely to encounter."

"It's too late to eat."

"That means you got a better offer. Jake must be home, cooking up
some exotic—"

"Wrong. He's in Washington. Got the assignment on that story of the
ambassador who was assassinated in Uganda, at the economic conference."
I'd been dating an NBC News correspondent since early summer, and the
rare nights he was free in time for dinner took me away from my usual
haunts and habits.

"How come they keep giving him all that Third World stuff to cover
when he seems like such a First World guy?"

The phone was ringing as I opened the door to my office.

"Alex?" Jake's voice sounded brusque and businesslike. "I'm at the
NBC studio in D.C."

"How's your story coming?"

"Lola Dakota is dead."

"I know," I said, sitting down in my chair and turning away from
Chapman for some privacy. "Mike and I just watched the whole bit on the
local news. I think she's got a real future on the stage. Hard to
believe she went for all that phony ketchup and—"

"Listen to me, Alex. She was killed tonight."

I turned back to look at Mike, rolling my eyes to suggest that Jake
clearly had not seen the entire story yet and didn't understand that
the shooting was a setup. "We know all that, and we also know that Paul
Battaglia is not going to be thrilled when the tabloids point the
finger at me for not putting this mess to bed a couple of—"

"This isn't about
you,
Alex. I've heard the whole story
with the Jersey prosecutors and their sting operation. But there's a
later headline that just came over the newsroom wires a few minutes
ago, probably while you and Mike were watching the story run on the
air. Some kids found Lola Dakota's body tonight—her dead body—in the
basement of an apartment building in Manhattan, crushed to death at the
bottom of an elevator shaft."

My eyes shut tight and I rested my head on the back of my chair as
Jake lowered his voice to make his point. "Trust me, darling. Lola
Dakota is dead."

2

"I'm sorry, Miss Cooper, but Lily doesn't want to talk with you just
now. It's almost midnight, and our doctor is about to sedate her to let
her get some rest. She thinks Lola would still be alive if you
prosecutors hadn't talked her into this ridiculous scheme and exposed
her to so much risk by faking her death."

My first impulse had been to call the victim's family, despite the
late hour, to offer our assistance in the aftermath of this tragic turn
of events. I knew they were unlikely to accept my help. It was her
brother-in-law who answered the call. "I'm sure you must be aware that
my office didn't think it was wise to—"

"It's all the same to us. None of you was able to protect Lola from
this insanity of Ivan's."

Chapman had taken over my phone and I had moved to the alcove to use
the one on my secretary's desk. My conversation ended abruptly and I
stared at the calendar hanging on the wall in front of me.

"Snuggle into your snowsuit and mittens, kid. We're going to the
two-six." He hung up the receiver and called out to me as I tried again
to get through to the sheriff's office in New Jersey. The line was
still busy, so I put on my coat, gloves, and boots and followed Mike to
the elevator. "Leave your car here. I'll drop you at home when we're
done."

The snow had tapered off to a flurry as we walked around to the rear
of the courthouse and got into the black Crown Vic that was Mike's duty
car. "Body's already been taken down to the morgue. Thought you'd like
to grab a look at the scene with me."

"Why didn't Peterson beep me about Lola? Nobody reached out for me
..."

"Don't take it personally, Coop. The lieutenant didn't even get this
one till an hour ago. Seems that as soon as Dakota heard the ex had
been arrested, she told her sister she needed a break. She'd been
cooped up in the burbs for three weeks and wanted to go home for a few
hours. Nothing to worry about with Ivan in custody, so those schmucks
from the Jersey office let her drive off into the sunset. Alone. Four
seventeen Riverside Drive—must be somewhere near 116th Street. Peterson
says it's one of those old prewar apartment houses, in the process of
going co-op. Scaffolding out in front 'cause they're repointing the
building, and lots of repairs under way inside, too."

"Jake said some kids found her. Did the lieutenant mention anything
about that?"

"Yep. Just around dinnertime, some of the boys from the 'hood came
into the basement from Riverside Park to hang out. Get warm and get
high, probably in reverse order. When they pressed for the elevator to
come down, the doors didn't open completely, since the cab couldn't get
all the way even on the bottom."Mike was driving north to Canal Street,
then heading over to the West Side Highway for the ride uptown. Tacky
aluminum holiday decorations bordered the closed stalls on this dismal
downtown shopping strip, where every kind of counterfeit designer
product would be back on sale, out on the crowded sidewalks, by
daybreak.

"The super heard a commotion and started to chase the kids outside.
He thought they'd screwed up the equipment by playing around with it.
So they offered to help him raise the cab a few feet to see whether
something was stuck beneath it. When they looked into the shaft, they
saw the body."

"Did they know—?"

"Whether she was dead? Fuggedaboutit."

"No, did they know that it was Lola?"

"You know what happens when you step on a cockroach? Any idea if it
was Willie or Milton? The one that was crawling on your desk, or the
one that was living in your file cabinet? The super hadn't even seen
her in the building for months. Emergency Services responded to help
get the remains up, and she was carted off to the ME's office."

"But they didn't treat it as a homicide?"

"Everyone involved assumed, up to that point, that it was all an
accident. The elevator's been on the fritz, stopping between floors
when it wasn't quitting altogether. The super told the first cops on
the scene that some broad—probably just visiting in the building—must
have stepped off into the black hole without even noticing that the
elevator wasn't there."

"No one had any reason to know what she had been going through," I
mumbled aloud as I struggled to recall whether I could have pushed Lola
any harder when I had wanted her to press charges.

"Hell, it wasn't till one of the morgue attendants found a few
papers in the pocket of her blouse that anyone even knew the identity
of the deceased. Called back up to the Twenty-sixth Precinct, and they
passed the news on to the lieutenant. Could still easily be an
accident, according to what the super's been telling the cops. But
then, in light of all the other bad news in her life, I'd have to think
Ms. Dakota had outlived her string of lousy luck and was due to win the
lottery."

Mike hit the brakes and I jerked forward, restrained by the seat
belt. He had tried to pass a Yellow Cab at the entrance to the highway,
and the turbaned driver gestured obscenely and cursed at us as he
fishtailed on an icy patch of road.

"Move it, Mohammed!" Chapman yelled back, blasting the words into my
ear as he aimed them across me toward the cabbie. "Those camel-humpers
can guide a herd across the burning sands of the Sahara, but there
oughtta be a law to keep them off the snow."

"I thought we had a deal for the new year?"

"I got a couple of weeks to go, kid. Don't expect any mouthpiece
miracles overnight."

The New York City skyline glittered against the cobalt ceiling
stretched out above and beyond it. From the Chelsea Piers, outlined
against the water off to our left, to the red-and-green-lighted spire
of the Empire State Building, across the middle of town in the
distance, everything was gaily dressed for Christmas. I stared out at
the assortment of blinking lights while Mike dialed up the numbers on
his cell phone to check the whereabouts of his team.

I had known Chapman for more than ten years, and accepted the fact
that he was no more likely to change his ways than I was able to
explain the nature of our friendship, intensely close and completely
trusting, despite the vast differences in our backgrounds. It had been
almost twelve years since I joined Battaglia's office, and I smiled,
remembering my father's prophecy that I wouldn't last there much past
the three-year commitment required by the district attorney when I
signed on. No one in my family believed that my training at Wellesley
College and the University of Virginia School of Law would prepare me
for the grim realities of life in an urban prosecutor's office.

My father, Benjamin Cooper, was a cardiologist who had
revolutionized surgical procedures when he and his partner invented a
plastic valve that was used in virtually every heart operation in the
country for more than fifteen years following its introduction to the
field. To this day, he and my mother, while aware of the great personal
satisfaction I derive from my work, worry about my ability to separate
myself from its constant emotional drain—and its occasional dangers.

"Tell Peterson I'm on the way." Chapman turned to me and winked.
"I'm bringing the lieutenant a little surprise." He clicked off the
phone and was quiet for a few minutes. "I just assumed you'd want to
come with me tonight. If I'm wrong, I can cross over to the East Side
and drop you at your apartment."

Mike knew me well enough to know that I wouldn't have missed the
opportunity to go with him to Lola Dakota's home and see for myself,
firsthand, what the police were about to learn. It was logical for
onlookers to presume some kind of freak accident, but the odds should
truly have been in Lola's favor at this point, and the lieutenant was
not going to let go of someone who had met an unnatural death on what
he would consider his watch.

"Did you like this Dakota dame, blondie?"

I rolled my head back away from Mike, staring at the vista as we
drove up onto the elevated portion of the highway.

"She was a tough character to like. Admire, maybe, but hard to warm
up to. Very smart. And even more arrogant than brilliant. But she was
willful and shrill, rode herself really hard, and from what I
understood, rode her students even harder."

"And the husband? What made him so irresistible?"

"Who knows what goes on inside anyone else's marriage? I'll pull my
files together in the morning and check my notes. I've got all kinds of
details from our conversations and meetings about the case." I
remembered again the many hours I had spent with Lola throughout the
past two years, trying to convince her that we could make the criminal
justice system work for her, and to let me take Ivan to trial for
assault.

Chapman came from another direction altogether. His father, Brian,
had been a second-generation Irish immigrant, who worked as a cop for
twenty-six years and then died of a massive coronary two days after
turning in his gun and shield. Mike was in his third year at Fordham
when he lost his father, and although he completed his degree the
following spring, he immediately took the exam and enrolled at the
police academy, in honor of the man he most admired and respected. He
was half a year older than I, and had recently celebrated his
thirty-sixth birthday. Mike was one of the few people I knew who was
thoroughly comfortable in his own skin, doing exactly what he most
wanted to do in the world. That was simply to come to work every day at
the Manhattan North Homicide Squad, with the best detectives in the
city of New York, and spend all his waking hours restoring some dignity
and a bit of justice to victims who had been murdered on what he liked
to think of as his half of the island.

"Maybe we can stop by Mercer's house over the weekend. He's got some
case folders on this one, too," I added. "And probably some good
insight about Lola."

We had both been counting the days until Mercer Wallace would come
off sick leave and back to the department on limited duty. Four months
had passed since the attack that had almost taken his life, and it
still took my breath away to think how close I had come to losing one
of my dearest friends. Mike and Mercer had been partners in Homicide
for several years, until Mercer was transferred to the Special Victims
Unit, where he carried the lead role in some of the most complex rape
investigations in the city.