Linda Fairstein - Hell Gate

“No, really. I’m being sincere now. Can’t you tell me if you had a good time?”

“I had a very nice time, Mike. Luc’s an easy guy,” I said, putting down my fork and reaching for the wineglass. Luc adored me and seemed to understand my commitment to the erratic lifestyle of a big-city prosecutor. “His life is so different from ours. There’s no urgency to anything he does, people’s lives don’t hang in the balance. A crisis is whether someone in the biz gets two stars or three.”

“I hear the great chefs kill themselves over that, Coop. I wouldn’t make fun.”

“I’m not. It’s just like living in a fairy tale to fly away from home, leave all my cases for a week, and suspend time in a kind of fantasy life in the middle of the most beautiful village in the world.” I stopped for a minute and put my head back on the thick chenille pillow. “I just don’t know where this is all going.”

“Mind if I take this other end piece?” Mike asked without waiting for the answer. He was eating through all the conversation, as he always did. He handed me one of the enormous onion rings and I munched on it while I watched the flames dance in the fireplace.

“What about you?” I said.

“I’m chewing. You know how you always tell me not to talk with my mouth full?”

I leaned forward and cut a few more bites of steak for myself. Mike had been in love with an architect named Valerie who had survived a bout with breast cancer, only to die in a freak skiing accident more than a year ago.

“I know what Val’s death did to you,” I said. I thought I knew its impact as well as anyone, because of my own immeasurable loss. “She wouldn’t want you-”

“Here’s what’s stupid, Coop. Number two on my list of stupid things people say, okay?”

Mike’s number-one peeve was the word closure. He hated that families of murder victims thought the arrest or conviction of a killer would bring closure to their painful journeys. Instead, while it offered some sort of resolution, he knew that nothing could ever provide what people really wanted-to see their loved ones again, to undo the crimes themselves and the irreplaceable loss of a human life.

“Sorry, Mike. I didn’t mean-”

“Number two, Coop. How does anyone know what Val would want? She’s dead. Why are folks always so sure what the dead would want? People use that expression all the time and I happen to think it’s stupid. Maybe she’d want me to go to a monastery and meditate. Maybe she’d want me to try out at first base for the Yankees. I didn’t know she was gonna die so I really never asked her what she’d want.”

I could see that I’d touched a raw nerve.

“Objection sustained,” I said, and Mike smiled at the legalese. “Let me rephrase that, Detective Chapman. Does what I want count for anything?”

“Depends on what it is,” he said, stabbing another piece of steak and holding it out like an exhibit before putting it in his mouth. “If it was this particular piece of meat, I’d have to say it doesn’t matter what you want.”

“I take it you’re dating again.”

“Spinach is good for you, blondie. Put some on your plate,” Mike said. “I’m trying to get myself out there.”

“That’s great. I really think it is. It’s time, Mike.”

“You know me. Most of the broads I meet are too high maintenance.”

“Rumor has it you met a judge at Roger’s Christmas party.”

“I-I met a lot of people at the party. Saw a lot of old friends.”

“And left with a very attractive judge. Want to tell me about her?” I pushed my plate away, kicked off my shoes, and curled up on the sofa.

“You crack me up, Coop. You got me tailed? Which of your girls has the big mouth?” Mike said, reaching over and taking the steak from my plate.

“What’s to say the judge isn’t talking?”

“I’m here, aren’t I? Not with her.”

“Judge Levit,” I said. “Fanny Levit. Just appointed, Civil Supreme. Age?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“Hmmmm. An older woman.” Mike had turned thirty-eight in the fall, six months ahead of me.

“By a year.”

“Lighten up, Detective,” I said, sticking my toe in his side. “How many times have you seen her?”

“I met her at Roger’s. Took her to dinner the other night,” he said, getting to his feet and carrying our dinner dishes into the kitchen.

“So why are you here?” I called after him. It wasn’t the few sips of wine I’d had that was making me feel frisky.

Maybe Mike was stuck with the same dilemma I was, wondering how our superb professional partnership would be affected by a change in personal direction. At the same time it both interested and frightened me. Once we crossed the line of intimacy, we’d never be able to work cases together again.

He returned from the kitchen carrying a bowl stacked high with profiteroles-Patroon’s best dessert and one of my sweet-tooth weaknesses-covered with chocolate sauce.

“I’m here ’cause of you,” he said, handing me a spoon and offering first dibs on dessert.

“Sometimes you come out of nowhere at me, Michael Patrick Chapman, and I am so pleasantly surprised,” I said, reaching over to brush the crumbs off his sweater.

“I’m here because you never even bothered to call me today about the autopsy on Salma, and you got to help me figure something out.”

We’d had mixed messages before, but this one caught me totally off guard.

“You drove out to talk to me about the case?” I asked. I sat up and folded my legs beneath me, feeling like a fool for having put any kind of personal spin on his Friday-night drop-in. “You could have just called, you know?”

“Yeah, but then I wouldn’t have seen Logan, and I didn’t want to bother Mercer before the big family prom.”

I was embarrassed by my ridiculous assumption that Mike had driven out to see me for some reason other than the case. Of course this hadn’t been a social visit, or at least it was no more personal than two friends and colleagues catching up before inevitably turning the conversation back to our work.

“What’s the news on the autopsy?” I asked. I tried to focus again.

Mike stood up with his glass in one hand and leaned against the mantel. “Cause of death was obvious. The wine opener pierced Salma’s trachea. Asphyxia due to blood inhalation.”

I’d had cases like that before. Death was usually quite rapid, the victim often convulsing as blood obstructed the air passages. It was as ugly a picture as I had imagined.

“You expected that.”

“Yeah, well, what do you know about pregnancy?”

“Precious little.”

“Dr. Kirschner says he’s willing to bet that Salma never gave birth.”

I put my glass down to try to clear my head and rethink things. Claire Leighton had told Mercer that Ethan admitted fathering Salma’s little girl. The baby had been in the apartment shortly before Mercer’s visit. The doorman described the woman who had taken her.

“What do you mean, Mike?”

“You know MEs, Coop. They’ll never say never. But it’s something about the cervix that has Dr. Kirschner convinced.”

“Like my Riverside Park homicide victim two years ago. When a woman has given birth to a full-term baby,” I said, “there are changes in the cervix. The opening gapes a bit-the medical term is patulous.”

“That’s the word. He said she wasn’t patulous. There’s nothing in Salma’s body to reflect any signs she gave birth. No scars on the abdomen to suggest a C-section. He took one look at the uterus and said there was no way anything that small had ever held a baby.”

Now, there was an entirely new set of concerns to deal with. Whose baby was it and what had become of the child? Who was the man who had shown up on Wednesday night, claiming to be the baby’s actual father?