He tilted his head, ready to test me again. 'I don't remember.'
'I haven't listened to her answering machine or her cell yet,' I said, happy to be bluffing him. 'Perhaps I can refresh your recollection after I do.'
'Maybe so.'
'Other than your office and your home, did you ever go anywhere with Amber? Did you ever take her anywhere else, like out to dinner?'
Ackerman shook his head. 'She was a nice girl, Ms. Cooper. But our relationship only had one purpose.'
'How much did you pay Ms. Bristol?'
Another deep breath. 'Two hundred fifty dollars, in cash. That bought me an hour of her time. And I must tell you something else that you haven't asked.'
'Yes?'
'You'll see, if your detectives do their homework, that I wrote about that place where Amber's body was found in an article that was published this winter. In my column,' he said.
'Trib-ulations' was Ackerman's sounding board, a weekly opinion piece that let him take on issues of local or national importance.
'The Battery Maritime Building?'
'Precisely.'
'You've been to the terminal recently? I thought it's abandoned and-'
'Ferry service to Brooklyn stopped in 1938, as you probably know. But the army used the slip for years when they owned Governors Island. I've been writing, advocating about converting the empty space for other uses.'
Mike would be as interested in the military history of Amber's death chamber as in Ackerman's familiarity with it.
'Is that something you and she ever talked about?'
He puffed himself up now, unable to resist the opportunity to gloat. 'She made it a point to read everything I wrote. Quite a bright girl. I don't remember discussing that column in particular, but Amber would have been certain to see it.'
'You were smart to call the district attorney, Mr. Ackerman. This way, I can arrange for you to meet with Detective Chapman, and we won't have to come looking for you at an inconvenient time.'
'There'll be no calls to the office, then?' he asked as I stood up. 'No leaks to the media?'
'Mr. Battaglia controls that pretty well,' I said, knowing that my boss played the press like a Stradivarius.
'When Amber left you that evening, what time was it?'
'A little after midnight,' Ackerman said. 'She arrived at eleven o'clock, I'm quite certain of that.'
'There'll be a record of when she signed out.'
'Probably so.'
'And you, did you leave with her?'
'Oh, no. No, no, no. I see where you're going with that, Ms. Cooper. No, no. Even if I walked her out to get a cab, which I may have done. I sometimes did that, as a gentleman would. But I'm sure I went back to my office to lock up.'
'Did Amber tell you where she was going?' I asked, my hand on the doorknob as I tried to escort Herb Ackerman from the room.
'She was meeting someone for a drink. She was mad at her boyfriend, I know that. I think she was planning to meet someone at another bar. Maybe she was trying to make the man jealous. Amber knew just what buttons to push.
NINE
Today we're going to travel back in time,' I told the jurors.
Sixteen people in the box, twelve regular jurors and four alternates. There were an even number of men and women, a racially diverse mix of New Yorkers, but only four of the group had been born at the time Kerry Hastings was raped.
There were few spectators in the room. The trial of an aspiring rap star who had shot up a Midtown nightclub when the manager tried to throw him out had drawn reporters to the courthouse across the street.
That was good news for Hastings, who had no interest in reliving her assault so publicly. But I couldn't ignore the presence of a young man who glared at me from the front-row bench. I recognized him from yesterday's pack of Latin Princes. He had passed through the hallway metal detector, which gave me some level of comfort, but I knew he wasn't there to root for my case
'The events that the witnesses will describe to you took place in the early morning hours of July 10, 1973. You will meet Kerry Hastings,' I said, outlining some of her background in my opening statement for the people who would soon hear her story, 'who was twenty-two years old on the night that Floyd Warren changed the course of her young life'
'Let me give you some context of the times during which these crimes occurred. The president of the United States was Richard Nixon,' I began. I had tested the almanac listings of that year on my summer intern, a college student. She didn't seem to know who Spiro Agnew was, so I left out the fact of his resignation and the subsequent Saturday Night Massacre. The ceasefire ending the involvement of American ground troops in Vietnam didn't register very well either, in light of more recent military engagements'
'A first-class stamp cost eight cents, Elvis-Elvis Presley, not Costello-was a sellout nearby at the Nassau Coliseum, and
And I nodded at number six, the bus driver who spent most of his afternoons at an Off-Track Betting parlor in his neighborhood, when I told them that Secretariat had captured the Triple Crown, the last time that feat had been accomplished in horse racing.
I told them what the prosecution case would prove, in colder, more clinical terms than the excruciating details they would hear from the mouth of Kerry Hastings. I read to them the charges-rape and sodomy, burglary and robbery-in the indictment returned by a grand jury, what used to be called a 'blue-ribbon panel' of carefully selected citizens during the thirty-year reign of District Attorney Frank Hogan
'We will prove these charges by the testimony of witnesses who will tell you what they experienced through each of their five senses: what they saw, heard, felt, tasted, and smelled on that unbearable morning-and in the days and years that followed'
'You will hear from police officers, a doctor, and forensic biologists. You will see crime scene photographs and physical evidence that you can examine yourselves-things that will take you back to the tiny room in which these life-threatening acts occurred.' I was standing in front of the jury box as I turned to the defendant and his counsel. I started to walk toward Gene Grassley, knowing that the sixteen triers of fact would follow my movement, would look at Floyd Warren when I pointed at him and accused him of the crimes
'You will hear from police officers-now retired-who responded to the 911 call made by a neighbor when Kerry Hastings's muffled screams pierced the warm night air. They will both tell you how they chased this defendant from the front door of Ms. Hastings's building, as he crossed the street and vaulted a chain-link fence, trying to escape them but getting caught less than a city block away. He had six dollars in his pants pocket, and there was a serrated steak knife that he had discarded on the ground in the course of his flight.'
I watched as the jurors looked at Warren. He was dressed in a denim shirt, with an orange macrame kufi cap. He met their stares head-on, shaking his head from side to side. He no longer looked able to scale a seven-foot schoolyard fence
'And while Kerry Hastings's case grew cold, while justice stalled, science kept moving forward with a revolutionary technology called DNA.' I gave the jurors the bare bones of the people's case. I wanted to pique their interest, engage them on the victim's behalf, and impress upon them the facts we would present
'And I will stand before you at the end of this case, when I have proven Floyd Warren's guilt beyond
