Linda Fairstein - The DeadHouse

"Yes, from the hospital, when the hearing was over. He lives just north of the city, in White Plains. If we drive up there tomorrow morning, he'll be happy to talk with us."

Bo kept looking over my shoulder, at the table closest to the end of the bar. "Guess the case they had in Jersey is falling apart."

"Not that I'm aware of-"

"Hey, Alex. The Bo reads the newspapers, y'know." He had a Bob Doleish way of talking about himself in the third person. "That guy, sitting with the broad with all the hair poofed up on top of her head? That's Ivan Kralovic, isn't it?"

My head snapped in the direction Bo's cigar was pointing. The face of the man in the booth was obscured by an upswept bouffant hairdo, but the retired detective kept talking. "Heard it in the car on the radio when I was on my way over here. Sinnelesi's number two man was putting the wood to the dead professor. Sleeping with her in the middle of the investigation. I'm telling you, it would take a prosecutor to be that friggin' stupid. Sorry, Alex. Kralovic's lawyer made a bail application this afternoon. Seems the defense team had known about the affair for weeks. The judge was ripped about it, and granted the application today. Looks like old Ivan knew where to get his first good meal."

I could see Kralovic clearly now as he leaned in to cut the thick veal chop on the plate in front of him. Ivan's mourning period for Lola had ended.

"We'll be back another time," I said, kissing Frank good-bye and trailing out of the restaurant behind Mercer and Mike. "It's not the food, it's the company." The last thing I needed was Kralovic telling his lawyer I tried to talk to him when I ran into him at dinner.

"I had a real craving for Peking duck, anyway," Mike said, opening the rear door of Mercer's car to let me in. We drove across town to Shun Lee Palace, and I stopped in the phone booth to try to reach Paul Battaglia to tell him what had happened.

After eight rings, I remembered that he was out of town until New Year's Day. Reluctantly, I dialed Pat McKinney's home number. "Thanks, Alex. I actually knew a few hours ago. Sinnelesi called me when he couldn't find the boss."

It would have been courteous, not to mention useful, for McKinney to have beeped me to tell me about Kralovic's release on bail. I hated having to learn it from an outside source, late on a Friday evening when it was impossible to get accurate details. "Did he tell you anything else?"

"Yeah, he fired Bart Frankel today. It'll be all over the papers tomorrow morning. Ivan's lawyer made a pretty compelling argument to the judge this afternoon that his client only went along with the sting because he knew in advance exactly what was happening, and wanted to be able to argue entrapment to the court."

"You mean entrapment as a defense to hiring someone to kill his wife?"

"Yeah. He's saying the tapes will prove the whole operation was Sinnelesi's idea. They're going to argue that Kralovic had himself wired up for months, every time he met with or spoke to the undercovers. And that if the two sets of tapes aren't the same, he'll prove the New Jersey prosecutor was corrupt and simply out to get him."

It had never occurred to me that Lola's husband might have any kind of viable defense to the charge of trying to kill her. But Sinnelesi's reputation was not beyond question, as Battaglia's was. Perhaps Paul's nose had been even more accurate than usual in detecting a good reason not to participate in the Jersey plan. If our counterparts across the Hudson had been unable to nail Kralovic squarely for his penny-stock fraud, then maybe they had stretched procedure and undermined the attempted murder case.

All that was certain is that Ivan the Terrible had exactly what he had wanted. Lola was dead, and the evidence pointing to him as the prime mover in her killing was looking muddier and muddier.

We settled in for the meal. The little bit of appetite that remained after the tram ride had evaporated with our sighting of Kralovic dining at an elegant restaurant. I watched Mike and Mercer go through steamed dumplings and chicken soong and a deliciously crispy duck, but I even refused my fortune cookie for fear that its prophecy would depress me.

They had dropped me at Jake's apartment by eleven. I called him at the Watergate Hotel to let him know that I had been delivered home safely. Unable to sleep, I drew a steaming-hot bath and tried to escape with the latest issues of In Style and Architectural Digest. When they failed to make me sleepy, I immersed myself in an interminable New Yorker piece on a lost Tibetan temple that had been rediscovered by a group of British trekkers. Midway through the story I was ready to turn out the light.

Mike was waiting for me outside the building at eight-fifteen. We stopped for coffee on our way north to Westchester County, to the suburban home where Professor Lockhart was staying. The car stops on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge the night before had been unsuccessful, and the ballistics lab confirmed that the pellets had come from some kind of shotgun, not a pistol. I tried to buy into Mike's theory that it was simply pranksters with an early burst of holiday fireworks.

It was almost nine-thirty when I rang the bell at the neo-Victorian home on a quiet dead-end street in White Plains. The sandy-haired man who opened the door to us looked no older than Mike. He had fine, chiseled features and an athletic build. "I'm Skip Lockhart. Why don't you come inside and warm up?"

The large living room was filled with antique furniture and decorated in a very formal style. There were pictures on all the tabletops, which I tried to scan as he led us into a study.

"Thanks for coming up here. I'm kind of stuck for the next week."

"We just assumed that you lived here."

"It's my parents' home, actually. They've gone out to Scotts-dale to visit my sister for the week, and I promised I'd come up here after Christmas to keep an eye on my grandfather, who lives with them. He's ninety, and as much as he thinks he can take care of himself, we need to keep an eye on him. I was a friend of Lola's. Anything I can do to be helpful, I'd like to try."

"Where's home?"

"In the city."

"Near campus? Near Lola's apartment?"

"A few blocks away."

Lockhart told us that he was thirty-eight years old, single, and an assistant professor of American history at King's College. He had known Lola for five or six years, and had never been romantically involved with her. Yes, he admitted that he had dated several students at the school, despite the fact that it was against the administrative guidelines. But he had never known Charlotte Voight and never given any thought to her disappearance.

"How much time did you spend with Dakota, on campus or off?"

"Very little, until she got me involved in the Blackwells Island project."

"What was your interest in that?"

"Two things, really," Lockhart answered, sitting back in his leather armchair and crossing one leg over the other knee. "Obviously, being a student of Americana, I'm quite familiar with the history of the area. An astounding number of well-known people have spent time there, and as a social phenomenon, it's a great resource for teaching students how we've dealt with society's outcasts throughout time."

He cleared his throat several times as he talked, looking us over and trying to get comfortable with us, it seemed to me.

"But I've always had a personal reason to be fascinated with that little strip of land. You see, my grandfather used to work on the island."

Mike was engaged now, both because of the investigation and because of his own love for historical nuggets. "What do you mean?"

"You probably know that the place was once covered by institutions-hospitals, asylums, jailhouses. And the New York Penitentiary."