my breath away to think how close I had come to losing one of my dearest friends. Mike and Mercer had been partners in Homicide for several years, until Mercer was transferred to the Special Victims Unit, where he carried the lead role in some of the most complex rape investigations in the city.
Grand old apartment houses lined up along Riverside Drive, to our east, and Mike took the Ninety-sixth Street exit to wind his way up the quiet streets till we saw the array of NYPD cars and trucks that blanketed the intersection and rested on the snowy slopes of the park entrance opposite Lola's building. 'Must be the place, kid.'
Two uniformed cops were stationed on either side of the front door, and one nodded at Mike as he flashed his badge and asked the way down to the basement. 'Press hasn't crawled all over this yet?' he asked, puzzled by the lack of interest from the media.
'Been and gone,' the younger guy answered, jiggling one foot at a time and flexing his fingers, trying to keep warm. 'They pulled out after a few shots of the body bag.'
'Is there a doorman?'
'Not all day. Just came on at midnight. The entrance is only covered from twelve till eight A.M. And I think we're cramping this guy's style already. He likes to hang on to his flask pretty tight, and he's really spooked out by this. You gotta use the stairs or the north elevator to get down to where they found her. The south car has been shut off altogether. That's where the body was.'
A couple in formal dress glanced at the police officers and brushed past Chapman on their way inside. They were still in the rear of the lobby as we entered, standing in the recessed area off to the right, by the mailboxes, trying to find out from the confused doorman what the commotion was about. Two elderly women in flannel bathrobes and one grad student type with purple-streaked hair had beaten them to the old guy for a chat, and I expected that by dawn, most of the tenants would have some version of a rumor from one of these sources.
Chapman pulled open the heavy service door that led to the fire stairs. There was no lightbulb at the top of the landing, and I followed him slowly down the two flights of steps.
Lieutenant Peterson was sitting at a bare desk in what I assumed was the super's office at the foot of the staircase. His cigarette dangled from his lips as he clutched the phone receiver with one hand and held up his other in our direction, palm outward, signaling Chapman to be quiet.
When he finished the conversation, he rose to his feet to greet us. 'Alexandra, how've you been? That was the deputy commissioner, Mike. Can I talk to you alone for a minute?'
'Jeez, and I brought Sonja Henie all the way up here just to see you, Loo.'
Peterson wasn't amused. He motioned Mike into the small room and closed the door. I turned the corner and said hello to the rest of the team from the Homicide Squad. Four of them were standing in front of the open space of the elevator shaft, and the bottom of the deadly cab was posed eerily above their heads and behind them, like a huge weight ready to drop again. They were talking about the squad's Christmas party, planned for the next evening, with no mention of the gruesome death that had brought them to this filthy room.
'You in on the pool?' Hector Corrado asked me.
'Only if you make sure I don't win. Battaglia thinks it's in such bad taste that we shouldn't humor you guys by chipping in.'
'Pick a number, Alex. It'll only run you twenty bucks, and it's a big pot this year. You wanna lose, go low. Man, things always get crazy around the holidays, and this one's starting off wild. You're too young to remember, but it's beginning to look like the eighties around here.'
Homicide cops had a tradition of betting on the number of murder cases they expected to occur before the end of the year. Hector kept track of the field, since choices had to be made by late summer. If there were open slots left, prosecutors were invited to kick in before the night of the party.
'So far, we've only had three hundred sixty-two in Manhattan this year. I just missed by six bodies back in eighty-eight. Total was seven sixty-four, can you believe it? And these wimps think they're overworked now when they're carrying a handful of investigations.'
Chapman had left his overcoat in the super's office and emerged holding an oversize flashlight. He held out his right hand to Hector and asked the guys if the Crime Scene Unit had finished its work.
'Hard to make this a crime scene. Super was selling it to the first guys who responded as an accident. Peterson pulled in every chit he could think of to get Crime Scene to come over and give it a look, sort of unofficially. They're treating it as a suspicious death, not a homicide yet. Not every day you get a broad who lays down and rolls out her front door into an elevator shaft just hours after somebody else paid a lot of money to have her knocked off,' Hector opined. 'They took some photos of the body before she was scooped out. You could look. All you're gonna see is some dark stains.'
Lieutenant Peterson, the veteran detective who ran the Homicide Squad, could get the Crime Scene Unit to do almost anything he requested. He had the best instincts in the business when it came to death investigation, and the finest track record in the department for solving cases. When he asked for backup, men knew he wouldn't be wasting their efforts.
Mike squatted and pointed the beam into the dark shaft. I rested one hand on his shoulder and looked in over his head. 'You want to step aside, blondie? I know you think you give off quite a glow yourself, but you're blocking the little bit of help that seventy-five-watter is shining down at me from over your head.'
I straightened up and stepped back.
'Hector, anybody get down here and scrape some of this crap up? It's impossible to tell what's blood and what's oil from the works, just by looking.' Mike was standing, too.
'Yeah, that's all been done.'
'They dust for prints?' I asked.
'Nobody even knew what parts of the building to include in the scene, Alex. We don't know if she had been dead for one hour or four by the time she was found. In the meantime, one super, two handymen, and a bunch of teenagers had been all over this area. They didn't know who she was, so they couldn't figure out which floor she'd dropped from or which elevator button she'd pushed. Sure, they went up and down all twenty-two landings, dusting for latents, looking for signs of a struggle, canvassing to see if anyone was at home who heard any noise. Pretty futile runaround so far. You go try that other elevator bank. It's not impossible that she just missed her footing and went off into a swan dive. You'll see, these things are on their last legs.'
'Anyone been inside her apartment yet?'
'Waiting on that now. Peterson sent someone down to the morgue to get the keys they found on the body. Emergency Services is on their way back with a ram. Whoever gets here first, that's how we're going in.'
'Super doesn't have a key?'
'Nope. She didn't trust nobody with nothin', is what he says.'
That would be Lola. Chapman motioned to me to follow him back up the staircase to the lobby. There was a pair of stuffed armchairs against the wall, covered in a dreary tapestry fabric, sorely in need of reupholstering, and we sat opposite each other in them while he told me about his conversation with the lieutenant.
'Loo's really ripped. The commissioner's sticking with the accident story. It certainly can't be Ivan who had anything to do with this, they figure, since he was already under. That's what Peterson took me inside to tell me. That, and to get you off the premises pronto. If the mayor says this is an accident, then there's no need to have an assistant district attorney meddling in it.'
For the moment, we both ignored that point. 'They never heard of backup? What if Kralovic didn't trust the guys he hired in Jersey and wanted a little security, some extra insurance, to make sure his plan to kill Lola worked?'
'I don't need convincing. City Hall does. The first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a shove in the back and a trip to the morgue, right? The mayor doesn't want to add to the murder tally for the end of the year. And he's getting additional pressure from the powers that be at Columbia University.'
'But Lola didn't even work there anymore.'
'They farmed her out to a new, experimental school-King's College. It's got an entirely separate administration, but it bought some of the old Columbia buildings, so it's adjacent to the Columbia-Barnard campus. Somebody up there's got a direct pipeline to the mayor's office. The school officials don't want to open the whole can of worms about the history of their own tortured relationship with Lola Dakota, so they'd like this shoved under the carpet as well.'
'They're leaving out a great big stumbling block, in the oversize form of the rotund, thick-skulled, and
