The Deadhouse (41 page)

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."

29

Renee and I caught up over morning coffee. I had finally fallen
asleep about 3 A.M., and had not even heard David slip out to walk the
dog at seven o'clock. I borrowed her bathrobe and the spare key to my
apartment. It was too cold to shower there, with the window still not
repaired, but I needed a set of my thin silk thermal underwear to put
on beneath my charcoal-gray pantsuit. For once the weatherman's
prediction seemed to be on target, and just the news reports of the
impending snowstorm chilled me again.

At eight-thirty I went downstairs to wait for Mike. All of the
Christmas tips had been distributed to the building staff in the
preceding weeks, and they remained unusually responsive to opening car
doors, helping women with baby strollers into elevators, and ferrying
packages from the entrance to the elevator banks. Poinsettias fringed
the tables and glass windows of the marble-trimmed lobby, and everyone
except for me seemed especially cheerful as they set out to work on
this last week of the year.

"How's my little Nanook doing this morning?"

I had left my coat in the apartment and opted to wear my ski parka
over the long Johns and business suit. "Overkill, you think?" I asked
Mike as I opened the car door.

"Not if you're planning to spend the night in an igloo. You get any
sleep?"

"Took a steaming-hot shower and went out like a light. Listen, I
really want to apologize for showing up on your doorstep last night. It
was rude of me not—"

"Yeah, it was."

I turned to look at Mike's face, to see whether he was kidding.
There was no smile. "I mean, it just wasn't like you at all. I didn't
know who the hell was ringing the buzzer at that hour on a Sunday
night. I just figured most people would have called first. You're the
last person I expected to hear when I answered the intercom."

"But—"

"But what? You always get so grouchy when I show up in the middle of
one of your romantic interludes, like it's gonna be the last time
you'll ever get laid."

"How was I supposed to know I'd be interrupting a domestic vignette
in your dark little lair if you never talk about your social life these
days? I'm trying to apologize to you, if you let me get a word in. And
to, to ... ? Does she have a name, Detective?"

Mike concentrated on the slippery road surface as he steered the car
onto the FDR Drive.

"Maybe I'll just refer to your guest as 'her.' That okay with you?"
I barreled off a list of questions about the nameless figure in the
bed. "Did I spoil your evening with her? Are you going to tell me how
you met her? Have you given any thought to when you're going to bring
her out of the closet and let your friends—"

"Valerie."

"That wasn't too tough, was it? Valerie. Nice name. Okay, tell me
about Valerie, Mr. Chapman. Am I moving too fast for you? I'm trying to
start with the easy things."