Linda Fairstein: Final Jeopardy

I don’t suppose Wally could hear me but I was sitting on my bedroom floor, crying as he finished his story.

“We had a call during the evening to go up to the Patterson house, out your way. My boys found the body – couldn’t tell much about anything from looking at her and she didn’t have no ID. They called in the license plate and found that the Mustang had been rented in your name. Hell, it was your driveway, a rented car, and a girl with a similar build and size – it made sense that it was you.”

“I guess so,” I whimpered back to him.

“Well, I’m glad it’s not you, Alex. Everyone will be glad to know it’s not you. I figured the investigation would be a monster, tryin‘ to track down every pervert and madman you’ve sent to jail. That’s why I called in the FBI – figured we’d be hunting’ all over the place.”

Wally actually laughed a few times at that point.

“It’s a relief, really. I guess the off-island papers won’t even bother with us now.”

The chief had no idea how wrong he was and how bad this was going to be for that tranquil little island.

“Can you help us, Alex? Can you give us her name and who to notify?”

I mumbled the name into the phone, but Wally heard it loud and clear.

“Isabella Lascar.”

The news wires were about to explode with the information that the face of the dazzlingly beautiful actress and film star, Isabella Lascar, had been obliterated, and that what was left of her body lay in the tiny Vineyard morgue, with a toe tag mislabeled in the name of Alexandra Cooper.

Mike waited in the den, surfing the TV channels for clips about the murder, while I showered and dressed to go down to my office in the criminal courthouse. There wasn’t enough makeup in Manhattan to conceal the puffy circles beneath my eyes, so I just rolled on some lipstick and grabbed my sunglasses from the bedside table.

“You look like shit, blondie,” Mike offered as I headed for the front door.“Very bad for my image – doorman thinks I spent the night with a broad who looks like that.”

“If you think I look bad now, you’re going to love it when the District Attorney gets done with me in a few hours.

C’mon, let’s get going.“

Chapman is as dark-featured as I am fair – lots of thick, straight black hair and what people usually call an infectious grin, when he chose to display it. He was tall and lanky, and his years at Fordham University, where he graduated with a degree in history before following in his father’s footsteps and entering the Police Academy, left him with a taste for dressing in an almost preppy style which set him apart from most of his colleagues.

When I called the District Attorney after my conversation with Wally Flanders, he told me that he would assign a detective to stay with me for the next twenty-four hours, and I was as grateful for Mike Chapman’s jibes as I was for his company.

It was just before 6 AM when we walked to the department car he had parked around the corner on Third Avenue. Mike unlocked the door and I got in, kicking aside the usual littered remains of empty cardboard coffee cups, crushed cigarette packs, and a month’s worth of tabloids.

“Fill me in, will you? Who’d you speak to last night, after you got the call?” he asked, as he started toward the FDR Drive.

“I began with the easy stuff. My parents first, just to let them know I was alive. My brothers. Next Joan, since we’d just had dinner, and I gave her the assignment of calling friends. Then, armed with a loaded glass of Dewar’s, I called the D.A.”

Paul Battaglia, the District Attorney of New York County, believed that your name belonged in a newspaper only three times: when you’re born, when you die, and when he announced your indictment at a press conference – at a date and time entirely of his choosing. Assistant district attorneys, as the five hundred and seventy-six of us who worked for him were called, flourished best out of the harsh glare of media light.

Battaglia was the only D.A. most New Yorkers remembered, and with good reason. He had been in office almost twenty years and, at the age of sixty-two, had a national reputation for his impeccable integrity and for running the best prosecutor’s office in the country.

Like most of my colleagues, I had joined the office immediately after law school, confident that it was the best training ground for trial attorneys anywhere. I had planned to stay the four years that Battaglia required as a commitment when he extended our job offers, and then move on to the more lucrative private – practice of law.

But like the overwhelming number of young lawyers on the staff, I fell in love with the challenge of the work – trying complicated felony cases to juries, working around the clock with cops in station houses and at crime scenes, and generally being on the side of the angels in the endless battles against violent crime in the big city.

And a major aspect of my happiness was my respect for Battaglia, who had given so much to me in the eleven years since he had hired me. I liked to think that I had not done anything to disappoint him, until last night.

“You know the man almost as well as I do, Mike. The kind of publicity this thing could generate will make him very unhappy.”

“Tell me what Lascar was doing at your country house in the first place.”

Isabella and I first met three years earlier, at the suggestion of Nina Baum, who had been my roommate at Wellesley. Nina was the head of the legal department at Virgo Studios and in charge of all the contract negotiations for the superstars in most of the company productions.

The three of us were about the same age, although Isabella’s official bio shaved a few years off, and she and Nina had become great friends after working together on a number of projects.

Lascar had a few minor speaking roles in some major movies in the late eighties, but it was her love scenes with Warren Beatty in Delirious cast as his mistress, living in the Hotel du Cap, while Beatty played a roguish bank robber working the Riviera – which brought her celebrity recognition.

When Virgo bought the rights to the best-selling novel Probable Cause, Nina called me to ask a favor. Isabella had been awarded the starring role in the movie, playing the part of the federal prosecutor who investigated and convicted a powerful senator for the hired killing of his wealthy wife in their Washington, D.C.“ townhouse. I had tried a number of high-profile rape and murder cases by then, and Nina wanted me to let Isabella spend time with me, in and out of court, to give her some flavor of the work and lifestyle of a woman litigator.

Battaglia and Isabella first met when I introduced her to him at lunch one day, at a restaurant near the courthouse. He had never heard of her at that point, and he mispronounced her name, calling her Miss Lasker. She placed her hand on his forearm, leaned into him with a smile, as she made the correction.

“It’s Lass-CAR, darling.

Accent on the second syllable. It’s French.“ She had come across the name of a character – a Lyonnaise courtesan in a De Maupassant short story, Isabella later told me, and had taken it for her own.

I reminded Mike of Battaglia’s reaction to my request.

“He was very good-natured about that nonsense. I asked him if Isabella could shadow me in the office and he agreed.

As usual, his instincts were right, though. He insisted that Virgo not list us in the credits at the end of the movie, just in case the depiction wasn’t too flattering.“

“So the scenes where she slept with her boss, three senators, and one of the jurors weren’t based on you?”

Mike chuckled.

“Neither were her devastating cross-examinations, Mike.