Laura Wilkie had been the secretary for the Sex Crimes Unit even before I joined the staff and, fortunately for me, had stayed on as my assistant ever since. She was almost twenty years older than I – in her mid-fifties and lived alone in a small apartment on Staten Island where she devoted her off-duty hours to tending her cheerful flower garden and painting imaginary landscapes. Laura was terrifically loyal to me and responsible for keeping the work of the twenty-five lawyers who reported to me in better control and order than I ever could. When Laura came in she was pleased to see me in place and plopped the pile of daily papers in front of me, as she always did.
“Well, somebody besides me really didn’t like Isabella, did they?” she offered with a wry expression.
“Don’t say it too loud, Laura, or Chapman will add you to the suspect list. What did you have against her?”
“Oh, nothing really, Alex. She just used people like you so much, and she had no use for people like me. She wasn’t a very nice person, that’s it.”
“She wasn’t all that bad. I know she could be rude and insensitive, which was inexcusable. But she was also clever and funny and extremely talented, once you got past that artificial veneer. Anyway, let me bring you up to speed on what lies ahead today,” I went on, repeating last night’s events to Laura, who would serve as the shield between me and the outside world. On a good day, no one got past Wilkie on the phone or in person without her knowing their purpose, except for close friends. And on a bad day like this, she would be impenetrable, if that’s what I asked for.
“Mike’s in charge – anybody who shows up without an appointment gets cleared by him.” Laura nodded. She knew that Mike Chapman and I had met on one of my first cases more than ten years ago, and even though the constant macho banter was not Laura’s style, she enjoyed Mike’s friendship and knew I respected his ability as a cop.
“The D.A.”s at a budget meeting at City Hall, which should go a couple of hours,“ I went on.
“He’s going to call for me the minute he gets back, so that’s the big one I’m waiting for.
“Mercer Wallace should be on his way down with a victim. Make her comfortable in the waiting area and let me see him alone first. I want to get the story from him before I talk to her, because it’s part of the pattern, the serial rapist we’ve been looking for. I’ll take calls from any of the guys on trial – Gina may have some questions during jury selection ‘cause she’s got a tough drug issue in her case.
“And no personals, not one, not any, nobody.” In addition to the three lines on Laura’s desk, I have a private line that rings only on mine, so I knew that Jed and my closest friends could get through when they wanted to.
“Tell everybody that I’m fine and I’ll call them later.”
“What about press calls?” Laura asked, as Mike came back into my room with several case jackets under his arm.
“Hey, Wilkie, you want to lose your job? You ever know her not to take a call from a reporter? Get a grip, Laura.”
“He’s kidding, Laura. All press calls go into the Public Relations Office. Please tell Brenda I’ll give her a full update as soon as I can.” The District Attorney had a well-trained professional staff to deal with media matters, and my friend Brenda Whitney had her hands full trying to keep tabs on the hundreds of thousands of cases that passed through our office every year. She didn’t need the complications of our private lives to make her job more miserable, and it was essential to bring her in on details that were likely to surface in the press.
“Alex,” Laura questioned timidly, ‘how about people from the office? Everybody’s going to come by to check out how you’re taking this. Who do you want to see?“
“Uh,” I groaned and tried to make a mental barricade between myself and the real world. But it was impossible to ignore that there were at least three colleagues I would simply have to see during the course of the day.
Rod Squires was chief of the Trial Division, the man who supervised several hundred lawyers responsible for all the violent crime prosecutions in the office, and who reported directly to Battaglia. He was smart and personable, and at forty-five, had come up through the ranks in the office, having tried some of the toughest murder cases the city had witnessed. He had been a generous mentor to me and a great supporter of mine from my earliest days in the office.
“If Rod asks for me, I’ll go down to his office as soon as I’m done with Wallace’s case.
“And of course I’ll see Sarah.” My unit deputy was a terrific young lawyer. She was a few years younger than I, married to a former prosecutor who had just gone on to the bench, and she had returned from her first maternity leave to assist me with the operation of Sex Crimes. Sarah Brenner was petite, dark, and as attractive as she was competent.
I trusted her, I liked her, and I selected her to work with me to oversee the complex and sensitive range of cases that included sexual assault, child abuse, and domestic violence.
“In fact, tell her she’s got to review everything new that comes in. I’ll be out of commission till I know what’s happening with the murder investigation.”
Laura screwed up her courage to ask me about the third one: “Patrick McKinney?”
“Try to keep him as far away from me as you can, Laura,” I snarled.
“He’ll be the first one sniffing around here, hoping to find me miserable, and I’ll break his fat fucking neck if he says a word to me.”
Mike laughed: “Whew! Women in the workplace!”
“Listen, Mike, I don’t know what happens in parochial schools – most of the guys survive the nuns and come out with a sense of humor some a little more tasteful than yours, but humor nonetheless. This guy came out like Mother Superior himself, with a stick up his ass that should have punctured his brain by now.”
Pat McKinney was one of Rod’s deputies. He was senior to me by a couple of years, and as rigid and humorless as any man could be. I’ve never figured what made him such an angry person, but something seethed inside him and most frequently found its outlet when directed at the women professionals in the office.
“Laura thinks he blames the crab incident on me, don’t you?”
She nodded as I told Mike the story.
“Pat refused to sign off on an extradition request for one of the assistants in the Asian Gang Unit, who wanted to fly in a witness from Los Angeles and put the kid up in a hotel during the trial.
McKinney said it was too expensive and that there was a strong enough case without the witness. I told the assistant that Pat was just crabby that day, and if he wrote up a new request I would walk it in to Rod for approval.
Rod signed and the jury convicted. You know those fish stores on the corner at Canal Street?“
Our office was smack in the middle of the part of Lower Manhattan where Little Italy overlapped with Chinatown, and the south side of Canal Street was lined with Chineserun fish stores that daily displayed open crates of live fish on the sidewalks.
“Well, a few days after the trial ended, Pat arrived to find his office door unlocked. He flew to his desk to call Security to come upstairs, and when he pulled open the top drawer, about forty live crabs came rushing over the lip of the drawer onto his lap – frisky little suckers that had been packed in on top of each other all night. I’m surprised you didn’t hear his screams on Ninety-fourth Street.”
Mike liked the story.
“You do it?”
“Are you crazy? I assume it was the cops from the case, but he knows that I’m the one who called him ”crabby“ that time, so he blames me.”
We were interrupted by the appearance of a uniformed cop in the doorway beyond Laura’s desk. He looked like a rookie – baby-faced, polished shoes, new equipment, and a sheaf of arrest papers in his hand.
“I’m looking for Mr. Cooper,” he announced to the, three of us.
“You got him. Only I’m Cooper. It’s Alex Alexandra.”
“Oh, sorry. I’m Officer Corchado. They sent me up from the complaint room – I’ve got a new case.”
Laura moved to her desk to start working the phones and I waved Corchado into my office and introduced him to Mike as we seated ourselves.
“I won’t be able to write this up for you ‘cause I’m involved in something else today, but my assistant, Sarah Brenner, will work on it with you as soon as she gets in.”
