The Deadhouse (8 page)

I parked the car and we went upstairs. As soon as I put the key in
the door, I could smell the delicious scent of the Douglas fir that I
had bought two nights ago on my way home to serve as a Christmas tree.
I had been raised as a Jew and was observant in the Reform tradition,
but my mother's religious upbringing was entirely different. Her
ancestors were Finnish, and she had converted to Judaism when she
married my father. Our family tradition combined elements from both of
their backgrounds, and although I had lighted the candles on a Hanukkah
menorah earlier in the month, I always looked forward to decorating a
tree and rediscovering the boxes of antique ornaments that my mother
had collected throughout her life.

"I'm going to freshen up. Make yourself useful. Pour us a drink."

"Mind if I use the phone? I was gonna meet some of the guys down the
street at Lumi's for a drink before the party."

"Of course. Anybody I know? Invite them over here. And while you're
calling, check with your office to see whether there's a final on the
autopsy results. Then you can start putting some of those bulbs on the
top branches of the tree that I can't reach. Don't peek at the pile of
presents. I haven't finished wrapping yours yet."

I went inside to wash my face, add a colorful scarf to my black
suit, slip into a pair of higher heels, and spritz some Caleche on my
neck. I played back the messages on my answering machine. The usual
freeway greeting from Nina Baum in L.A., a callback from one of my
sisters-in-law in response to my question about what the kids wanted
for Christmas, and the persistent voice of
Post
reporter
Mickey Diamond begging me to give him any kind of scoop about the
Dakota investigation. I held my finger down on the delete button.

Chapman had rested my Dewar's and his Ketel One on the coffee table
while he hooked and hung some of the fragile old ornaments. "That one
belonged to my grandmother. She landed at Ellis Island when she was an
infant, just before Christmas in 1900, a century ago. It's a glass
bird, hand painted, that her father bought for her that year."

"Think she'd approve of the way you make a living?"

"She would have liked me to have gotten married by the time I was
twenty and had six kids in pretty short order. Made her crazy that I
never learned her recipes for Finnish icebox pudding or blueberry pie."

I thought of the time I had almost made her happiest. In my
grandmother's last years, when she was living as an invalid in my
parents' home, I had come up from Virginia during my final semester of
law school to tell my family that I was going to marry Adam Nyman, a
young medical student with whom I had fallen in love. Although in her
nineties and quite infirm, Idie had insisted on coming to the Vineyard
to be with us at the wedding. I know it hastened her death and
literally broke her heart, as it did mine, when she learned that Adam
had been killed on the turnpike the night before the wedding.

"Wipe that frown off your puss and stay with me, Coop. My Granny
Annie wanted me to go back to the old sod as the ambassador to Ireland.
Live in Phoenix Park. Ride to the hounds. If she ever thought for a
minute I'd be sniffing around dead bodies like my pop, she'd have
locked up all the liquor and never let me watch
Dragnet
or
read Dick Tracy in the Sunday funnies. Ready for the latest?"

I sipped at my scotch and nodded my head.

Mike glanced at his steno pad to read the notes of his conversation.
"The ME spoke to Lieutenant Peterson an hour ago. Lola's death was
asphyxial. No question she was strangled, probably with a ligature.
Kestenbaum will do some more tests on the pattern of injury, but he
thinks the killer used her own woolen scarf. Thrown overboard just for
show. The elevator cab certainly crushed the body, which was designed
to disguise the homicide. But somebody made sure she took that header
without any air in her lungs."

"Any semen?"

"Nope. Not in the body. He hasn't checked the bed linens yet. That
takes more time. But there were two strands of hair—just loose, no
roots. Kestenbaum can't say for sure that they were in her hand, like
she'd grabbed at anybody. Could be they just transferred from someone's
clothing earlier in the day—or from the first cops who came to the
crime scene. They're not going to be of much value at the moment.

"The other news is from the building inspector, who was at Lola's
apartment with Lieutenant Peterson. He's confirmed that the elevator's
been out of whack for weeks. First of all, it was under repair, and
wasn't even supposed to be in operation yesterday. The out-of-order
sign that had been posted in the lobby had been taken down at some
point, which could easily lend itself to an accident theory. Besides,
people had complained that the cab was stopping between floors all the
time, so it wouldn't have been tough to catch it a foot off the ground
on the fifteenth floor and roll the body in."

Chapman glanced at his watch and walked into the den to click on the
television. A series of commercials preceded Alex Trebek's close-up,
announcing the subject of the
Final Jeopardy!
answer. Mike
and I had a long-standing habit of betting on the last question. The
rest of the show didn't interest us, but I had seen him ferret out a
television screen at crime scenes, sports bars, and the morgue. Once,
outside a concert at Madison Square Garden, he even commandeered Tina
Turner's chauffeur to let him watch the end of the show in the back of
her stretch limo while she was in her dressing room warming up for the
big performance.

"Tonight's category is Famous Quotes," Trebek said, pointing up at
the card displayed on the screen.

"Twenty bucks," Mike said, taking the bill out of his pocket and
dropping it on top of the coffee table. "I'm feeling lucky. Jake's out
of town, I've got a new murder on my hands, and there's no reason for
Santa to put coal in my stocking this year."

I laughed and told him to make it thirty, pulling the bills from my
wallet.

"Pretty cocky, blondie." He withdrew another ten and tossed it on
the pile. We knew each other's strengths and weaknesses inside out
after a decade of this trivia exercise. My four years of major
concentration in English literature before going to law school raised
my expectation of taking the evening's pot.

"Well, gentlemen," Trebek enthused, turning to the three contestants
poised at their buzzers. "The answer is, the majestic leader who urged
his troops to battle with the phrase: 'Soldiers, forty centuries are
looking down on you.'"

Dead meat. Chapman had not only studied military history at Fordham,
but the subject had become a passion for him: he read about it
voraciously and visited battlefields whenever the opportunity presented
itself. The butcher from Kansas City and the ophthalmologist from
Louisville seemed as clueless as I was, neither one writing anything on
his electronic screen.

"Belly up, blondie. What's your best guess? Double or nothing?"

"Not a prayer." I watched the pastry chef from Baltimore record his
answer with furious determination, as I tried to think of a
civilization with that long a heritage. "Who was . . . Genghis Khan?"

Chapman gloated as he picked up the sixty dollars, giving the
correct response while Trebek was telling the chef he had guessed
incorrectly. "Napoleon, 1798. Rallying his men to fight the Egyptians
at the foot of the great pyramids of Giza. Enjoying a brief success,
actually, like ten days, before m'man Horatio Nelson arrived in time to
destroy the entire French fleet."

I sidled up next to him and reached my fingers into his pants
pocket, pulling out the wad of money. "But you forgot to put it in the
form of a question, so—"

As he slapped my hand away, the doorbell rang.

"And one more surprise for the night," Mike added. "Hope you don't
mind, I told the doorman your guest didn't have to be announced." I
walked behind him as he went to the entrance, and gasped with delight
to see Mercer Wallace.

He towered over both of us, six feet six inches tall with dark black
skin and a rock-solid chest that had stopped a bullet just four months
ago. Mercer grabbed me in an embrace as we swayed each other back and
forth. "This is the very best of Christmas presents," I said, pulling
his face down to mine and planting a kiss on the top of his head.

"So this was the date you were meeting at Lumi's, huh?" I said to
Mike. "And not planning to invite me? Santa may have to rethink whether
that was naughty or nice."

"Well, if you hadn't suggested stopping here, I was going to take
you there. But they don't have a TV and I didn't want to miss the
chance to score a few bucks off you, Coop. You allowed to drink yet,
Detective Wallace, or does it still pour out through that mean-looking
exit wound in your back?" He headed back to the bar to fix a club soda
for Mercer.

I had visited Mercer at his home at least once a week since the
shooting last summer, and I knew his recovery from the chest wound that
had threatened to rip him apart had progressed well. He was due to come
back to work on modified duty early in the new year, but I thought it
would take more than a holiday party to bring him to my doorstep.

Chapman was in the den pouring drinks against the background noise
of
Win Ben Stein's Money
on the Comedy Central channel. The
brainiac host was, as usual, about to knock off all the contestants
with a string of good answers to tough questions, while I watched
Mercer—still limping slightly—walk ahead of me and sit down. "Just took
enough money off Coop to buy you a Kwanza present, Detective Wallace."

Mercer raised his glass and we all clinked. "To a better year for
each of us. And to Lola Dakota, may she rest in peace."

"Mercer started beeping me this morning with a million things he
wanted to know. Said he was coming into the office to bring his case
folder and notes for us, so I figured he might as well make a guest
appearance at the armory."

We spent close to an hour talking about all the facts Mercer
remembered from handling the domestic assault investigation that was
part of Lola's original complaint. She had loved the quiet calm and
dignified manner of the detective, which had made him such an
outstanding member of the Special Victims Unit, the police department's
companion unit to my bureau. Lola had called him often when she was
indecisive or frightened, and he had talked her through some of the
toughest moments of her ordeal with Ivan. I could tell how it pained
him that, in the end, nothing he could do had saved her.

"Time to bundle up and boogie." Mike was on his feet, taking our
coats out of the closet and getting ready to leave. "Who gets the first
dance, Chief Allee or Inspector Cutter?"

"What are you doing tomorrow night, Alex?" Mercer asked.

"No plans. I had been thinking about going to DC. to meet Jake, just
for Saturday night, until Mike got that preliminary report from the ME
this morning telling him this was probably going to be declared a
homicide. I called Lola's sister, Lily, right after I got the news, to
see whether we could go out to her house to talk with her. It's not a
very smart time for me to leave town."

"Come out to my place for dinner. Mike'll drive you. I'm having some
friends over to do my tree. Seven o'clock."

"Sounds good."

"Still nice to get a crack at Miss Lonelyhearts when her own
personal talking head is out of town, isn't it, Mercer? Just like old
times."

I rode with Mike and Mercer to the Seventh Regimental Armory, an
enormous fortress on Park Avenue, built in 1879, which took up an
entire city block. The interior was a throwback to another era, its
vast halls—designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany—lined with plaques
honoring war dead from the last century, and its rooms decorated with
moose heads and other dusty antlered animals whose glass eyes stared
down at the festivities. The original function of its drill hall had
given way to use as rental space for endless rounds of weekend antiques
shows and the occasional rubber-chicken dinner meetings of
organizations too penny-wise to engage private salons at real
restaurants.

As we entered the fourth-floor room in which the squad party was
being held, we were swamped by detectives and cops who had not seen
Mercer since the shooting. I stepped back and walked over to greet the
chief of detectives before I made the rest of the rounds.

"Heard you and Chapman were up at King's College this afternoon. Any
headway?"

"They're beginning to see the light."

We talked for several minutes until I felt my beeper vibrating on my
waistband. There was a phone booth on the main floor and I excused
myself to go downstairs to return the call. I recognized the number
displayed as the main line from ECAB—the Early Case Assessment
Bureau—which was the intake unit through which every arrest in
Manhattan entered our office. The expediter answered.

"Hey, it's Alex Cooper. Any idea who beeped me?"

"Ryan Blackmer's looking for you, Alex. Hold on a minute."

"Sorry to bother you, but I figured you'd want a heads-up," Ryan
said. He was one of the brightest and best lawyers in the division, and
had drawn the Friday night supervising position in ECAB. "Uniformed
guys in the Sixth Precinct just collared a mope for sex abuse tonight."

"You got the facts yet?"

"The complaining witness was walking home from a friend's house,
right along Washington Square Park—on the north side near the Arch—when
this clown grabbed her from behind and started to rub against her,
trying to drag her into the park. She was able to break away and get
home. Called nine-one-one from her apartment. Cops drove her around for
almost an hour and she ID'ed him a few blocks from the square."

"Make any statements?"