Linda Fairstein - Cold Hit

Wrenley was on me now, coming directly at me with his arms outstretched. His right hand looked like a road map, trickles of blood forming streets and highways. As he prepared to lunge at my neck, I shattered the bottle against the steel frame of the Hi-Line and screamed at him to keep back.

His right hand landed on my shoulder. I anchored my foot in the open grille of the banister and pivoted out of his grip, my pants leg ripping as it twisted against the steel trim. He grasped again and caught a hunk of my hair, trying to pull me toward him, back onto the tracks. Gripping the billboard top to stay in place, I swung my right arm at Wrenley’s head, slashing him with the fractured end of the broken brown bottle.

This time his screams were louder than mine, as I opened up a gaping hole between his ear and forehead, with blood erupting from the gash and spilling down into his eye.

He staggered back for a step or two, then vaulted at me like a wild animal that had been mortally wounded in a hunt. His hands still wanted my neck, and as he charged toward me I shifted my weight and swung my leg onto the track, flattening myself against the back of the billboard.

Blinded by the blood, Wrenley hurtled himself over the guardrail headfirst, onto the street below.

I bent over to see his body crumpled against the blacktop like a deer on a dark country road, with cars screeching to a halt to try to avoid him.

With in seconds the two police cars pulled up from the north, directly under the tracks. From above I watched Brigid Brannigan’s ponytail swinging as she yelled to Lazarro to check the body, while she ran in my direction, looking up to see whether I was the woman slumped over the railing, staring down at the corpse of Frank Wrenley.

“Are you hurt?”

I shook my head from side to side, not daring to try to speak. More sirens, and the large square shape of an ambulance lumbered into view. Too late to be of any use for Wrenley. What had Chapman called this street? I thought to myself. Death Avenue.

“Can you stay up there till I get the Fire Department here with a ladder?”

I nodded to her, then turned my back and sat down on the ground. I leaned against the railing, rubbing my calves with my scraped hands and trying to breathe at regular intervals.

Fifteen minutes later, after the body had been removed from the scene, I heard Brannigan calling my name again. I stood and looked down at the long red engine that had been summoned, watching as the ladder was hoisted into place. Two of the firemen climbed up it and over onto the Hi-Line tracks, introducing themselves and shaking my hand.

“Can you make it down?”

“I hate heights.” I gave them as much of a smile as I could muster, not able to explain to them what it had taken for me to be poised on the edge of the railing when Wrenley had come at me just a little while ago.

“Nothing to it. I’ll be one rung below you, guiding you down. Harry’ll stay on top and load you on. Just close your eyes and trust me.”

When I opened them again, I was on the street. The ad on the billboard plastered above my head was visible for the first time. It was a six-foot-tall vodka bottle in the shape of the fuselage of a jet airplane, with words beneath it in bold yellow paint: Absolut Escape.

The cluster of uniforms around me, all meaning to be helpful, was stifling. Police and firemen were having a cordial turf battle over who would take me into their care-cops as first on the scene, or firemen as my rescuers.

I pulled Brigid Brannigan aside. “Tell them I’d like to ride with you.”

“Will you go to Saint Vincent’s so they can check you out?”

“Yes. I think I’d like a tetanus shot.” I wasn’t sure what my knees and hands had been raked against. “But I want to make a stop on the way there.”

She explained to the others that I was going with her. I got in the front seat of the RMP. Someone handed me my bag, which I had dropped in the gallery. The beeper was going off, so I removed it and saw that it was my office number. Brannigan began driving up Tenth Avenue, about to turn east to loop around downtown to the hospital. “Would you just go straight a few blocks, to the corner of Twenty-first Street?”

I called Laura from Brannigan’s cell phone. She sounded concerned. “Mike’s been beeping you. He’s probably through the tunnel now, back in Manhattan. Says he hasn’t been able to find you. Are you okay?”

“I guess I didn’t hear it. Would you call him back and tell him to meet me in Chelsea, the northwest corner of Twenty-first and Tenth, okay? I’ll wait for him till he gets there.” She’d know the rest of the details soon enough.

The car came to a stop just past the traffic light. “Here?”

“Yes.”

Brannigan looked at the small graceful building that I had noticed when we circled the block earlier today. “Want me to come in with you?”

“No thanks. I just want to wait there for Chapman. Think anyone would mind?”

She smiled back at me and simply said, “No.”

I got out and walked up the four steps of the Church of the Guardian Angel. Its lovely Romanesque facade is bordered by two slim columns and a round stained-glass window. I pulled on the wooden door and walked inside, sitting down in the cool silence. I didn’t know where the nearest synagogue was, but I needed to be in a place where I could be alone and pray. Somehow the name of this lovely church lent itself to the circumstances of the day.

Twenty minutes later I heard the door open and close, and the noise of a pair of footsteps walking toward me. I didn’t turn my head.

Mike Chapman slipped into the pew beside me and looked at me, grimacing as he shook his head back and forth. He started to say something.

“Not right now.”

He put his arm around my shoulder instead. I closed my eyes and rested my head against him until I was ready to leave.

Mike was singing background for Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias-“To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”-when Jake and I walked through the door at Rao’s a week later. He got off the bar stool when he saw us come in. “They’re playing my song. Best jukebox in the world.”

Joey Palomino came out of the kitchen to greet us. “You got the first booth, Jake. Good to see you. Nice to have you back, Alex.”

The tiny restaurant on the corner of 114 th Street and Pleasant Avenue was like a private club. An unknown caller might hope for a reservation six months ahead, but the handful of tables were filled by regulars who came on a steady basis when Joey gave them their dates. Once in, since there is no second seating, you could sit for the night and feast on luscious Italian food and wine for hours, to the accompaniment of great music from the fifties and sixties. Mike and I had been guests there a couple of times over the years, but Jake had worked his way up to a weekly berth after he hit the national news desk. Mike had asked Jake to set up a dinner to get me out of my dismal mood and to mark Mercer’s move from intensive care to a regular hospital room. It looked like he’d be released in another ten days.

We settled into the booth as Vic, the bartender, came over with the first round of drinks. He forgot names from time to time, but never faces or beverage favorites. “Salute.”

“To Mercer’s recovery,” Jake said, clicking glasses with us.

“So now you know why Caxton was packing up,” Mike began.

“Let’s not talk about the case tonight, please?” I looked from one to the other.

“You gotta face the music sooner or later, blondie.”

I had avoided most discussions of the whole matter for the last week, immersing myself in the case folders that had been buried on my desktop since the evening I had learned of Denise Caxton’s death. Jake hadn’t pushed me, letting me ease back into my own apartment and assure family and friends that everything was fine.