done.'
The snow had tapered off to a flurry as we walked around to the rear of the courthouse and got into the black Crown Vic that was Mike's duty car. 'Body's already been taken down to the morgue. Thought you'd like to grab a look at the scene with me.'
'Why didn't Peterson beep me about Lola? Nobody reached out for me…'
'Don't take it personally, Coop. The lieutenant didn't even get this one till an hour ago. Seems that as soon as Dakota heard the ex had been arrested, she told her sister she needed a break. She'd been cooped up in the burbs for three weeks and wanted to go home for a few hours. Nothing to worry about with Ivan in custody, so those schmucks from the Jersey office let her drive off into the sunset. Alone. Four seventeen Riverside Drive-must be somewhere near 116th Street. Peterson says it's one of those old prewar apartment houses, in the process of going co-op. Scaffolding out in front 'cause they're repointing the building, and lots of repairs under way inside, too.'
'Jake said some kids found her. Did the lieutenant mention anything about that?'
'Yep. Just around dinnertime, some of the boys from the 'hood came into the basement from Riverside Park to hang out. Get warm and get high, probably in reverse order. When they pressed for the elevator to come down, the doors didn't open completely, since the cab couldn't get all the way even on the bottom.'Mike was driving north to Canal Street, then heading over to the West Side Highway for the ride uptown. Tacky aluminum holiday decorations bordered the closed stalls on this dismal downtown shopping strip, where every kind of counterfeit designer product would be back on sale, out on the crowded sidewalks, by daybreak.
'The super heard a commotion and started to chase the kids outside. He thought they'd screwed up the equipment by playing around with it. So they offered to help him raise the cab a few feet to see whether something was stuck beneath it. When they looked into the shaft, they saw the body.'
'Did they know-?'
'Whether she was dead? Fuggedaboutit.'
'No, did they know that it was Lola?'
'You know what happens when you step on a cockroach? Any idea if it was Willie or Milton? The one that was crawling on your desk, or the one that was living in your file cabinet? The super hadn't even seen her in the building for months. Emergency Services responded to help get the remains up, and she was carted off to the ME's office.'
'But they didn't treat it as a homicide?'
'Everyone involved assumed, up to that point, that it was all an accident. The elevator's been on the fritz, stopping between floors when it wasn't quitting altogether. The super told the first cops on the scene that some broad-probably just visiting in the building-must have stepped off into the black hole without even noticing that the elevator wasn't there.'
'No one had any reason to know what she had been going through,' I mumbled aloud as I struggled to recall whether I could have pushed Lola any harder when I had wanted her to press charges.
'Hell, it wasn't till one of the morgue attendants found a few papers in the pocket of her blouse that anyone even knew the identity of the deceased. Called back up to the Twenty-sixth Precinct, and they passed the news on to the lieutenant. Could still easily be an accident, according to what the super's been telling the cops. But then, in light of all the other bad news in her life, I'd have to think Ms. Dakota had outlived her string of lousy luck and was due to win the lottery.'
Mike hit the brakes and I jerked forward, restrained by the seat belt. He had tried to pass a Yellow Cab at the entrance to the highway, and the turbaned driver gestured obscenely and cursed at us as he fishtailed on an icy patch of road.
'Move it, Mohammed!' Chapman yelled back, blasting the words into my ear as he aimed them across me toward the cabbie. 'Those camel-humpers can guide a herd across the burning sands of the Sahara, but there oughtta be a law to keep them off the snow.'
'I thought we had a deal for the new year?'
'I got a couple of weeks to go, kid. Don't expect any mouthpiece miracles overnight.'
The New York City skyline glittered against the cobalt ceiling stretched out above and beyond it. From the Chelsea Piers, outlined against the water off to our left, to the red-and-green-lighted spire of the Empire State Building, across the middle of town in the distance, everything was gaily dressed for Christmas. I stared out at the assortment of blinking lights while Mike dialed up the numbers on his cell phone to check the whereabouts of his team.
I had known Chapman for more than ten years, and accepted the fact that he was no more likely to change his ways than I was able to explain the nature of our friendship, intensely close and completely trusting, despite the vast differences in our backgrounds. It had been almost twelve years since I joined Battaglia's office, and I smiled, remembering my father's prophecy that I wouldn't last there much past the three-year commitment required by the district attorney when I signed on. No one in my family believed that my training at Wellesley College and the University of Virginia School of Law would prepare me for the grim realities of life in an urban prosecutor's office.
My father, Benjamin Cooper, was a cardiologist who had revolutionized surgical procedures when he and his partner invented a plastic valve that was used in virtually every heart operation in the country for more than fifteen years following its introduction to the field. To this day, he and my mother, while aware of the great personal satisfaction I derive from my work, worry about my ability to separate myself from its constant emotional drain- and its occasional dangers.
'Tell Peterson I'm on the way.' Chapman turned to me and winked. 'I'm bringing the lieutenant a little surprise.' He clicked off the phone and was quiet for a few minutes. 'I just assumed you'd want to come with me tonight. If I'm wrong, I can cross over to the East Side and drop you at your apartment.'
Mike knew me well enough to know that I wouldn't have missed the opportunity to go with him to Lola Dakota's home and see for myself, firsthand, what the police were about to learn. It was logical for onlookers to presume some kind of freak accident, but the odds should truly have been in Lola's favor at this point, and the lieutenant was not going to let go of someone who had met an unnatural death on what he would consider his watch.
'Did you like this Dakota dame, blondie?'
I rolled my head back away from Mike, staring at the vista as we drove up onto the elevated portion of the highway.
'She was a tough character to like. Admire, maybe, but hard to warm up to. Very smart. And even more arrogant than brilliant. But she was willful and shrill, rode herself really hard, and from what I understood, rode her students even harder.'
'And the husband? What made him so irresistible?'
'Who knows what goes on inside anyone else's marriage? I'll pull my files together in the morning and check my notes. I've got all kinds of details from our conversations and meetings about the case.' I remembered again the many hours I had spent with Lola throughout the past two years, trying to convince her that we could make the criminal justice system work for her, and to let me take Ivan to trial for assault.
Chapman came from another direction altogether. His father, Brian, had been a second-generation Irish immigrant, who worked as a cop for twenty-six years and then died of a massive coronary two days after turning in his gun and shield. Mike was in his third year at Fordham when he lost his father, and although he completed his degree the following spring, he immediately took the exam and enrolled at the police academy, in honor of the man he most admired and respected. He was half a year older than I, and had recently celebrated his thirty-sixth birthday. Mike was one of the few people I knew who was thoroughly comfortable in his own skin, doing exactly what he most wanted to do in the world. That was simply to come to work every day at the Manhattan North Homicide Squad, with the best detectives in the city of New York, and spend all his waking hours restoring some dignity and a bit of justice to victims who had been murdered on what he liked to think of as his half of the island.
'Maybe we can stop by Mercer's house over the weekend. He's got some case folders on this one, too,' I added. 'And probably some good insight about Lola.'
We had both been counting the days until Mercer Wallace would come off sick leave and back to the department on limited duty. Four months had passed since the attack that had almost taken his life, and it still took
