usher him away. That would be a terrible waste of police resources, as I knew better than anyone, so I let it ring on instead.
Then I heard the elevator doors open in the hallway. He was actually upstairs and was going to try to get in to me.
What if Mike Chapman was right that Jed’s greatest fault had not been his infidelity, but that he was, indeed, a murderer? Maybe he was coming to kill me, to silence me because I had implicated him in Isabella’s death? My mind didn’t seem to work. I simply didn’t know what to do next but I had clearly waited too long to call the police. There were voices in the hallway now. That meant he had come back with at least one other person and I was terrified that he had found some thug to do his dirty work for him. I stepped over to the bar next to the television set and picked up the wine-bottle opener which lay on top the ‘screw-pull’ version with the wickedly sharp-pointed tip that projects into the cork. I had no idea what I would do with it but its mean metal point felt good in the palm of my hand as I tiptoed closer to the front door.
“Coop, Coop? It’s Mike. Open up, I got a surprise for you.”
Lucky I didn’t have a gun because I probably would have blasted it through the door at Chapman at precisely that point, for freaking me out and heightening my growing sense of paranoia. I looked out the peephole for a confirmatory sighting, threw back the bolt, and turned the lock to open the door.
I was fuming, again.
“Do you have any idea-‘ That’s when I saw Mercer Wallace standing next to him, holding three pints of Haagen-Dazs ice cream the most direct way to my heart stacked up in a pile as his deep bass hummed the melody of ”What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?“ while Mike laughed.
“Great music, Mercer. But I can’t dance to it tonight.”
“This shit’s gonna melt all over your hall carpet if you don’t let us in, Alex. Move it.” Chapman pushed past me and the two of them headed straight for the kitchen to dish up the portions.
“What happened since I left you off, kid?” he asked, eyeing my tattered chenille robe.
“You look like Ma Kettle in that getup. Here you got the two most eligible guys in the city banging at your doorstep and you won’t open up. Look at her, Mercer, she’s prayin‘ for somebody to show up at this hour with some vintage Chateau Lafite. Who ya gonna kill with that bottle opener? Okay, we got Cookie Dough Dynamo, Chocolate Chocolate Chip, or Vanilla Fudge? What’ll it be, blondie let’s put a little meat on those bones.“
“Now that we’re having this cozy breakfast party, boys, who wants to explain to me what it’s all about? Chocolate for me, of course.”
“Not my fault. I was lookin‘ deep into the most beautiful pair of ebony eyes, in a gentrified townhouse – we used to call ’em tenements- on West Ninety-third near Amsterdam ” – Mercer was dropping a hint that was supposed to suggest the identity of the recipient of his enormous charm, undoubtedly one of my colleagues’ “when my beeper went off an hour ago. Seems Brother Chapman’s knowledge of Motown is a bit shallow. It started and ended with ”Respect.“ The man wanted help with some lyrics life-will-go-on-after-your-man-is-gone kind of stuff. When he told me it was you he was gonna serenade, I volunteered to do backup for him.”
“What’s the story, Mike?” I asked once more, leading the three of us, each with a bowl of ice cream, back into the den.
He hemmed and hawed and stalled a bit more before coughing up the real answer. Chapman had waited in his car at the parking space at the end of the driveway, thinking he would watch for an hour or so to make sure Jed didn’t stop by and try to see me.
“I walked down to the all-night coffee shop to get a cup of brew to keep me awake. Called the office from a phone booth outside the place to explain the situation to the lieutenant can you believe it, the City of New York is paying me to do this little ”power breakfast“? When I looked up at your apartment – I can always pick it out ‘cause it’s on the corner, and it’s got those fancy-drooped drapes your mother had done for you – your lights were all off. While I stood out there drinking my coffee, I looked up again and every few minutes another light went on, till you got comfy in front of the TV.”
“Geez, you put that much deduction into one of your homicides you might close a case now and then.”
“By that time it was almost three o’clock. Figured I might as well sleep in my car instead of dragging home.” Mike didn’t live very far from my apartment, actually, in a tiny studio off York Avenue near the East River in the Sixties.
He had been in the rent-controlled cubicle – he referred to it as ‘the coffin’ – for almost fifteen years and paid very low rent, but it was a sixth-floor walk-up, which got harder to go home to the later the hour.
“I napped for a while, checked to make sure your lights were still blazing, then decided if neither of us could sleep we might as well be miserable together I beeped Mercer for some inspiration never dreamed the guy would crash my party. But he did have the good sense to find a twenty-four-hour Food Emporium with a great selection of ice cream. Cheers.”
I thought of Nina Baum and how happy it would make her when I told her later that I had not been alone. That two of the most decent guys I had ever known had taken it upon themselves to hang out with me through the last desolate hours of the morning, and tried to entertain me at a time when I was content to wallow in my misery.
We gossiped about prosecutors and cops, we told each other war stories we had told dozens of times before, and we took turns doing impressions of the most outrageous defendants we had encountered.
“Remember the first case I ever brought you?” Mercer asked.
“Of course. The two brothers who assaulted the woman on Lenox Avenue, the rooftop?”
“I was still in uniform, Mike. Got a 911 to the address, civilian holding two in a stairwell. Some guy heard a woman screaming in his building. Started to go toward the noise on the roof and these two teenagers were running down from the top landing, zipping up their pants as they came down. Guy had a licensed gun stopped ‘em in their tracks. Yelled to his wife who called us.”
Mercer went on.
“My partner holds the kids and I go up to the roof to see what happened. Fifty-five-year-old lady, pretty hysterical, tells me these two kids she never saw before followed her onto the elevator, the bigger one pulled out a knife and forced her to the roof. Stripped her and tried to rape her. When the tall one put down the knife to unzip his fly, she began to scream and they ran off.
“I radio for a bus’ police jargon for ambulance ‘to take her to the hospital, and I go back down to cuff the kids.
They’re jivin‘ my partner like crazy.
“That’s our mother, man,” they’re tellin‘ him.
“That’s our mother she’s just mad at us ‘cause she says the rent money is missing. Man, we didn’t do nothin’ to her.”
“So I say, ”What’s her name, your mother?“ For the first time, they’re both real quiet. They look at each other but that’s no help. Finally, the older one looks up at me with one last try, ”I don’t know we jus’ call her Mom.“
It wasn’t his best story but it always made him laugh.
“Not as good as when we almost screwed up that murder trial for Cooper, when you got promoted to the squad,” a case Mike loved to remind both Mercer and me about.
A few years back I had worked on an investigation that involved the discovery of a murder victim who had been sexually assaulted and whose body had been found near the Lower West Side piers, left in an alley in a large packing crate. She hadn’t been identified for weeks, and the detectives working on the case observed their usual tradition of giving an identity of their own to the victim.
Eventually a truck driver was arrested and charged with the crime. I never heard the casual references to the young woman which the cops had dared not make in my presence nor did they appear anywhere in the police reports, so it came as just as much a surprise to me as it did to the jury when the defense attorney drew it out on his cross-examination of Mercer.
Mike played all the parts for us.
“Did you know the name of the deceased when you commenced your investigation on April 10, Detective Wallace?”
“No, sir.”
“And how did the medical examiner refer to the deceased in her report of April 11, Detective Wallace?”
“As Jane Doe, Number 27, 1991.”
