Linda Fairstein - Likely To Die

“Get up.” His voice was sharp now, not quavering as it did the night I first spoke with him about Gemma’s death. He was standing and pulling me along with him, but the soft wool at the collar of my sweater wouldn’t keep his grip. It stretched and pulled out of shape and he grabbed at my hair instead.

I was trying to spit the wool sock out of my mouth so that I could implore him to release me and get out of there but he pushed it farther in as he saw me attempt to cough it loose.

He wasn’t taking me to the kitchen, I realized, which caused me a sigh of temporary relief. Images of Gemma’s mutilated corpse flashed through my mind and I was almost glad that he was pulling me in the direction of the window.

Each of his hands was holding one of mine as he walked in back of me with my arms crossed behind me. We were near the corner of the desk when one of his hands released me and I saw him reach for the telephone. I knew he wasn’t planning to make a call. He wanted the cord to wrap around my neck.

Likely to die.

I waited until Harper stretched one arm across the width of the table to pull the phone wire out of the wall socket. Then I swiftly bent forward from the waist, kicking back my left leg as I moved, trying to hit his kneecap with the heel of my loafer. I must have come close to my mark as he shifted his weight and cursed when my foot made contact. It hadn’t unbalanced him as I had hoped and he turned back to me with a vengeance-and with the heavy telephone appliance swinging from the end of the liberated line.

I had run out of prayers moments ago and I didn’t know how to whisper a more urgent one than those I’d been murmuring. I only knew that I didn’t want that length of cord wrapped around my slender neck. I had tried cases of ligature strangulation and knew what a slow, torturous manner of death it was.

My head was facing away from Harper and I could only see his movements out of the corner of my eye. He was trying to free up the loose end of the long wire that had run from the base of the phone on the desktop to the floorboard outlet, and when he finally grasped it he looped it over the top of my thrashing head.

Now I pulled my right hand out of his hold and reached it up to cover my throat. He let go of my left one as well while he worked to secure the cord around the middle of my windpipe and I struggled to sneak all of my fingers between his murder weapon and my crawling skin.

Keep them in there, I lectured myself frantically. Don’t let that ligature tighten around your neck.

I was rocking back and forth, kicking occasionally, tugging against the stricture of the cord while Coleman Harper looked for a place to anchor the body of the phone so he could pull its wire tighter around me.

Again my brain was doing cartwheels. Random thoughts pushed themselves to the fore and I fought to get them out of sight. When my mother and father loomed in mental view, I shook my head more violently and tossed them away, not wanting them to visit this scene. Mercer and Mike were the people I wanted to see and to have save me.

Harper was trying to pull me farther back from the bookshelf, so I tried to find something to cling to that would keep me in place, keep me apart from wherever he wanted to take me. I kept bringing up Chapman’s voice inside my head.

Now I remembered what was familiar about this scene. I was almost giddy with thoughts of how Chapman would react to finding my body. I continued to twist against my captor, thinking how Grace Kelly had been attacked by the killer inDial M for Murder. I’d be strangled from behind, just like Kelly almost was, and Mike would be telling the uniformed guys how much he loved her in that movie-even as they bagged my corpse.

The letter opener. I was fighting against Harper’s right hand, which was trying to pull one of my arms out from under the cord so he could finish off the job. My eyes scoured the top of Gemma’s desk for a letter opener or sharp pair of scissors but nothing was in sight. C’mon, kid, my voices were telling me. Grace Kelly did it. You can do it, too.

Let him take one hand out, I thought to myself, grabbing onto my throat even more tightly with the other, to protect it. As he let go of my right one to use both of his to pull on the cord, I thrust my palm up against his face and scratched at the socket of his eye with my fingers. Again a howl and a spit at the side of my head.

But I knew what I wanted now and I knew I would only need a few inches to get at it.

I was gasping for air as he jerked on me harder this time. He could see the sweat that was dripping from my scalp, stinging my eyes, and hear my irregular intake of breath. My left side was facing him and I had leaned my entire upper body away from his as I pawed at the bookshelves for support. I had few things to be thankful for at that very moment, but the rigor of my exercise over the years was giving me an edge against his greater girth and strength.

A sudden bend toward Harper, which surprised him, left me with several inches of play in the cord. With my left hand still guarding my neck, I pitched away from him and grabbed Gemma’s prize surgical award from its ebony stand on the third row of shelves. I whirled back with the gold-handled scalpel in my palm and ripped it across the wrist of the mad doctor. His blood spurted everywhere from whichever artery I had cut.

The cord fell from his hand as I began to slash at him savagely. I let up only to pull the gag out of my mouth. I wanted to find a place to cripple him seriously enough for me to have time to get out of the room but I wasn’t sure I could find the right spot through his clothing. As he hunched over the desk, trying to wrap his own sleeve around his most serious wound, I stabbed at his upper thigh, digging the scalpel in it repeatedly. When he fell to the ground wailing, I ran to the door and unlocked it-as I had tried to do so many minutes ago-sprinting out this time and slamming it behind me.

The twelfth-floor corridor echoed with my screams as I pounded on the few doors between Dogen’s apartment and the elevator. I could hear the peephole cover slide open behind the door of the nearly deaf neighbor and I realized what a sight I presented. Two lengths of black vinyl cord were wrapped around my neck while I held up the telephone machine that was hanging from one end of it to prevent the sheer weight of it from choking me to death. My yellow sweater was drenched in Harper’s blood and stretched out of shape so that it appeared to be coming off one of my shoulders completely.

No sane New Yorker was going to let me into his or her home in that condition. All I really wanted to do anyway was get a police officer to respond. I began banging on the neighbor’s door. “Let me in,” I shouted. “I just killed a man. I’m crazy! I escaped from Stuyvesant last night and I came here to kill him. Let me in, NOW!”

Exactly as I thought the little feet inside shuffled over to the telephone and whoever they were attached to dialed 911. Then she immediately called the doorman to complain about the madwoman who was ranting in the hallway outside her apartment. I kept the scalpel firmly in my hand and my eye on Gemma’s door, for the forty-seven seconds it took the superintendent to bring the service elevator up to the floor.

I unwrapped the phone from around my neck while the two of us waited on the silent corridor for the police. The response time was less than seven minutes. I guess it was fortunate that Harper had tried to kill me on a quiet Sunday afternoon and not during a weekday rush hour. Three cars answered the call. Two cops stayed with me while the other four broke down the door to find Harper, who was unconscious on the floor of the apartment.

“We gotta take you to be checked out and examined, Miss Cooper. What hospital you wanna go to?” one of the rookies asked me when I explained to him who I was.