be frigid.
I braced for the lecture I was about to receive and opened the door. Battaglia was standing behind his enormous desk, barking into the phone as he motioned me to sit at the large conference table at the far end of the room. I pretended to make notes on my legal pad while I tried to figure who the conversation involved, and was a bit relieved to see that this burst of anger was directed at the federal prosecutor in our district, with whom the D.A. was feuding over jurisdiction in a major mob investigation.
He hung up the phone and slowly walked over to sit across the table from me.
“What the hell is going on here, Alex do you have any idea?” Battaglia spoke quietly, as he began his interrogation.
“Paul, I…”
“Do you know how this kind of notoriety distracts from the serious business of this office? Do you understand how it compromises your ability to get work done?”
As my color deepened and my embarrassment grew, so the D.A.“s voice escalated. There was no point in my responding to any of his questions because he already knew the answers to those he was asking. I was familiar with his technique, and knew that in a few moments he would stop yelling and begin to press for details. The booming jabs didn’t bother me half as much as the next phase, when he could make you feel like a complete idiot if you were unable to provide him with the details he wanted. I had watched unsuspecting colleagues present him with information for an impending press conference, confident in their mastery of the facts of the case, to have him come back with questions like, ”Do you know what church the suspect’s mother attends?“ or, ”Which junior high school did the witness go to?“ or some other point that was of potential value to a politician and none to a junior prosecutor.
Battaglia talked at me for quite a period of time before he began to ask for facts that he didn’t yet know. And then it was time to give him every shred of detail from the moment Isabella first was introduced to me and spent time in our office through our most recent correspondence and her request to escape to a private hideaway.
The District Attorney waited for my presentation to conclude before he leaned in, eyeballed me, and asked:
“Can you think of any aspect of this, any hint of scandal, that’s going to come back to hurt this office, Alexandra?”
The unspoken portion of that sentence, I knew, was…
“Because if there is, Alex, you’d better start cleaning out your desk drawer and thinking about the advantages of the private practice of law.”
“No, Paul,” I said, shaking my head repeatedly, “I’ve been thinking about it all of last night and this morning. There’s nothing more that I haven’t told you, really.”
He sat back upright in his chair and reflected for several seconds before his mien began to soften and he took on the aspect of the Paul Battaglia I idolized.
“Okay, Alex, how do you come out in all this? What are we going to do about you?”
“I’m practically numb today, Paul. I think it’s actually good for me to be at work because it gets my mind-‘ ”Good for you, maybe, but I don’t know how good it is for the office. Patrick McKinney thinks I ought to put you on leave for a few months and wait till this all clears up.“
“Oh, Paul, that’s ridiculous. What he really thinks is that I should throw my body on top of Lascar’s coffin and be burned alive. Of course Pat wants me to take a leave he can’t bear having me around in the first place.”
“Well, I spoke to the District Attorney up there in Massachusetts this morning the one in charge of the murder investigation. He and the police chief would like you to fly up for a few hours tomorrow. They need a lot of background from you, and they have to go through your house so you can tell them what things are yours and what were Isabella’s… and what belonged to the mystery guest.
“So make your arrangements and, let’s see, tomorrow is Friday I want you to go up and give them whatever they need. And your detective goes with you, understand?
Who’ve you got?“
“Mike Chapman, Manhattan North.”
“Fine. Just keep in touch with me every step of the way.
I think you know that I don’t like surprises, Alex.“
“Yes, sir.”
“Two other points. You are not to go to Lascar’s funeral. No Hollywood, no photo-ops, no way for the press to keep tying this back in to us. She’s dead say your farewells privately. Understood?”
I nodded in agreement.
“And the other thing. You are not a cop, Alex. As I’ve told you before, you could have gone to the Police Academy and saved your old man a lot of money. You are an assistant district attorney, an officer of the court, a lawyer. Let the boys and girls in blue play police officers and keep your nose out of it.”
I nodded again.
“Oh, I meant to ask you, do you have any idea who was paying her a visit up there?”
“No, I don’t, Paul. She never mentioned it and I never asked.”
“Well, when did she get to the Vineyard?”
Whoops, I could feel it coming. I had a rough idea of the answer, but not an exact time. Two “I don’t knows’ in a row. Bad form with Paul Battaglia.
“How seriously should we be looking for this second stalker?”
I was about to make the third strike.
“Paul, I just don’t know the answer to that we’re trying to evaluate it now.”
“All right, Alex, be sure and let me know whenever you get some answers. Take care of yourself, that’s the most important thing right now. Oh is there any progress on that serial rapist, Upper West Side? I’m getting a lot of crap from that local community board can’t your guys wrap this one up?”
Yeah, and if I have a free hour this afternoon I’m going to go out looking for Judge Crater, too, I thought, as I told the District Attorney, “We’re trying, boss.”
Mike Chapman was sitting at my desk eating one of the sandwiches that Laura had ordered in for lunch when I returned from Battaglia’s office.
“How bad did it hurt?” he asked as I walked in, picking up the growing pile of messages from Laura’s desk.
“Not too bad,” I replied.
“The mayor must have given him the money he wanted. He’s clearly annoyed, but not wild. Have you heard about the plans for tomorrow?”
“Nope. What’s up?”
“I’m taking you to Martha’s Vineyard show you how a real police investigation gets done,” I said, chuckling at the thought of Mike meeting the town police. A few house burglaries when the summer people leave after Labor Day, loads of moped accidents in season, and endless cases of Driving Under the Influence all winter long, but I couldn’t remember a murder that had occurred on the Vineyard in my lifetime.
“Whoa, an overseas trip, and with the Cooperwoman! You know, I think Patrick McKinney is right. This whole thing with Lascar is just a ruse for you to get a weekend alone with me on an island, so we can…”
“Detective Chapman, if you don’t control yourself I’m going to leave you behind with that needle-nosed prick.
It’s not a weekend, it’s a day trip. I’ll have Laura make the plane reservations. It’ll save a lot of time if you leave your gun home we won’t have to deal with all that security stuff at the airport.
“And, Mike,” I added, “Battaglia asked me a question which raised an obvious point. Exactly when did Isabella get to the Vineyard? I’ve got an idea maybe Chief Flanders has thought of it-‘ ”Unlikely, unless his wife supplied it to him. He didn’t sound like he was into ideas,“ Chapman replied.
“Well, there are only two ways to get there. I mean, you’re right, we are going overseas. It’s not like most places in the country where a killer could just drive to a murder scene and then just drive away. You can only get to the Vineyard by sea and by air.”
“Yeah, Alex, but thousands of people still do it every year, don’t they? And they don’t need passports.”
I knew that the Vineyard had a small year-round population of about fifteen thousand, which swelled to almost eighty thousand in the summer vacation months of June, July, and August. Then, after Labor Day, the crowds
