“Well, I can’t imagine that the underwear delivery would upset you, so there must be something about the call from the newscaster that has you jumping, Ms. Cooper. Go easy on her, Ryan, it’s been a long morning.” Mike always liked to tease me about my social life, but I hadn’t yet told him that I had been dating Jake and knew this wasn’t the right moment to explain the relationship to him.
Ryan was as good-natured as he was competent, and for every serious case that he indicted, five or six more bizarre situations wound up on his desk. “You got any time next week to help me with an interview?” he asked me. “I’d really like your opinion.”
“Sure, which one?”
“Remember the Cruise to Nowhere you assigned to me? Four girls from Jersey celebrated their high school graduation by taking a weekend cruise,” Ryan reminded me. “Boarded the ship in New York harbor, then it sails out past Long Island for three days. I didn’t know there was anything that could float capable of holding the amount of liquor on board this thing. Or that any land-roving mammal could imbibe as much as these kids did and still be alive.”
“I don’t remember any of the facts. Sorry, but I’ve been preoccupied with my hearings.”
“The girls started drinking mimosas at breakfast Saturday morning. Stacey, the victim-and I am using that word loosely, Alex-got seasick and went down to their cabin to throw up for a couple of hours. Bounced back in the afternoon for some Bloody Marys and beer. Wine and champagne with dinner. Doesn’t remember anything after ten p.m. She was a bit surprised to find the ship’s magician in her bunk with her- starkers-when the ship pulled into the dock on Sunday morning. She’s screaming rape. And by the way, suing the cruise ship.”
“The
“Well, that’s what her bunk mates say, but she’s insisting she would never have done anything like that if she were sober. Personally, I don’t even think we have jurisdiction if this happened more than three miles out of the harbor, but I know you believe in seeing everybody who makes a complaint.”
For far too long, when rape laws prevented prosecutions and the system was not open to its survivors, women had no place to turn for justice or advocacy. One of our goals in setting up a special unit was to see all those women who wanted to report cases, and give them the appropriate guidance- whether their matter belonged in the criminal court or elsewhere.
“Make an appointment with her for the Friday after next and have Laura put it on my calendar. Just give me all your witness interview notes before then, so I know where the inconsistencies are when we start talking to Stacey. Be sure you check with Laura on Thursday, ’cause if I’m still tied up with this new homicide, I’ll have to move you back a couple of days. And Ryan, what are you doing for lunch?”
He brightened and looked back at me, waiting for the offer. “Take Chapman across the street and feed him. Stick it on my tab. I’ve got work to do.”
“I’ll give you a call when we’ve taken care of Gertie, Ms. Cooper. Personally, I’m a little bit worried about
Alex Trebek told the noisy crowd of prosecutors and cops packing “Part F”-the name affectionately given to the bar at Forlini’s, since at many points on a Friday afternoon it was likely to have more office personnel in it than most of the dozens of court parts across the street-that the Final Jeopardy category would be New York State History.
I could see Chapman’s dark head positioned beneath the television that was hung in the far corner of the room, surrounded by six of the guys from Trial Bureau 50, celebrating the end of another workweek.
“Get it up, blondie!” Mike shouted down the bar at me as I squeezed through friendly packs of coworkers who were reliving their cross-examinations and telling one another about their latest triumphs and travails. “How are you on the Empire State?”
“I’ll go the usual ten,” I said, sliding into the space cleared for me by Ed Broderick and Kevin Guadagno. Dempsey had seen me arrive, too, and my Dewar’s on the rocks was already on the countertop.
“All right, then,” Trebek continued, fighting for our attention over the noise of the jukebox and the banter of more than a hundred of law enforcement’s thirstiest troops. “The answer is: City that was the site of the largest Confederate prison camp during the Civil War.”
I shook my head and rested it in my right hand, ready to acknowledge defeat, while I sipped my scotch with the left. Chapman was writing furiously on the back of a cocktail napkin. “I’ve been had. This isn’t a New York question-it’s military history,” I moaned.
Mike Chapman had majored in history at Fordham College and amassed a limitless knowledge of battles, gunboats, warriors, and even the names of the stallions on which they rode. Our long-standing habit of betting on the Final Jeopardy questions-whether in the middle of a crime scene, a good meal, or a round of cocktails-had taught each of us to stay away from the categories that were the other’s strong points, and I was about to be taken down in front of my colleagues on Chapman’s principal strength-much to his delight.
As the timer ticked and the theme music jingled on, my mind sped through lists of upstate names, but all I could think of were prisons to which my convicted rapists had been sent over the last decade-Green Haven, Ossining, Clinton, Auburn, and so on. Nothing conjured up the Civil War. Mike was singing an Irish ballad in my ear, confusing me further, and substituting the name of one of the grimmest institutions for the town in the classic song. “How are things in Dannemora?” he crooned as I tried to brush him away from me.
Trebek picked up the card lying on the podium in front of the septuagenarian wallpaper hanger from Minnesota, saw that it was empty, and commented that it was too bad he hadn’t ventured a guess.
“Take your best shot, Cooper?” Mike said.
“What is Attica?” I asked, stirring the ice cubes with my finger.
“
The Stanford professor who had won on the show four days this week also had the correct answer, and was beaming no less proudly than Chapman as Trebek congratulated him and announced that his five-day total was $ 38,000.
“Cooper’s got the next round, Dempsey. For me and everybody in Trial Bureau 50. Elmira, the flower of Chemung County. Treaty of Painted Post proposed there in seventeen ninety-one, to end the settlers’ war with the Iroquois. Wouldn’t expect you to know that, kid. But three thousand Confederate soldiers are buried there. Actually, called it ‘Hellmira’ during the war, ’cause the conditions were so bad. What’d you think they were going to ask, Coop-where’s Niagara Falls? Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? Too much time wasted at Wellesley with those Elizabethan poets and that Chaucerian crap you’re so full of.”
“I’m going back to the office, Mike. You want to talk autopsy before I go?”
“You gotta be kidding. We got a table in the back room- we’re all having dinner together. Aren’t you going to stay for that?”
“I’m taking a salad back with me. Honestly, I’ll be in the library all weekend. Just tell me what happened this afternoon.”
Chapman and I walked out of the bar toward the rear of the restaurant and sat at an empty table for two. “Still no I.D. Dr. Fleisher makes her out to be about forty years old, and in very good health-except for that crater in the back of her head. No kids-never given birth. He was also right about the cause. Blunt force injury-dead long before she hit the water.”
“Does he know what’s responsible for the laceration?” I asked.
“You can start with the fact that this wasn’t a ‘slip and fall.’ Whatever she was hit with was hard enough to cause a skull fracture. Could have been a gun butt, a brick, a rock. Doubtful that it was a bottle or anything like that-no residue or fragments in the wound,” Mike went on. “The impact was probably a glancing blow, but it was so deep that the subcutaneous tissue separated from the underlying muscle fascia.”
