Linda Fairstein - Final Jeopardy

It had started at two-thirty so I had missed the first few scenes, but I could practically recite the lines from memory for all the times I had seen it.

There was the splendidly youthful Ingrid Bergman and the dashing Gary Grant. They were already in Rio and she had agreed to the perilous plan to seduce the evil Claude Rains, and ultimately to move into the palatial home he shared with his monstrous mother. Ingrid and Gary were daring to have her debriefings in the most public of places, the park in the middle of the city where they pretended to meet by chance on horseback.

I lost myself in the Hitchcockian brilliance of the double crossings and treacherous dealings, the principled spies and the demonic Nazis. I marveled at Ingrid’s willingness to accept Gary’s dare and actually marry the enemy, though she ached for Gary to love her. I tensed as I always did at the champagne reception and the riveting scene in the wine cellar with the missing key and the broken bottle.

And as the very large, bright moon outside my window threatened to disappear into daylight, I wanted to be saved just as the deceived Ingrid had been: by Gary, sweeping me into his arms and down the grand staircase and out of all danger. Just what I needed an escape from my troubles into a cinema life of intrigue and romance and lovers not knowing whether they could trust each other. Worked like a tonic.

Now I was wired. It was almost 5 A.M. and I clicked the dial past an endless array of gadgets like Veg-O-Matics and Ginzo knives and tummy-slimmers. Nothing engaged me on any channel and I was resigning myself to the fact that this was going to be an allnighter – I was much too edgy to sleep.

I leafed through the current New Yorker, hoping for a long piece on the most current Washington scandal, but finding instead a dull treatise on ozone levels in the Brazilian rain forest.

The buzz of the intercom in my kitchen, connected to the phone of the building’s doormen in the lobby, nearly lifted me out of my chair when it shattered my quiet daze a few minutes later. It would be Jed. Should I let him in when I was alone? The ringing kept up interminably, but I held my resolve not to pick up the phone and acknowledge his presence. I was annoyed that the doormen had ignored my instruction not to admit him if he showed up, and I assumed he had greased their ever-open palms with some large bills.

I had stopped counting rings at sixty-five, and was now toying with the idea of calling 911 to have the cops usher him away. That would be a terrible waste of police resources, as I knew better than anyone, so I let it ring on instead.

Then I heard the elevator doors open in the hallway. He was actually upstairs and was going to try to get in to me.

What if Mike Chapman was right that Jed’s greatest fault had not been his infidelity, but that he was, indeed, a murderer? Maybe he was coming to kill me, to silence me because I had implicated him in Isabella’s death? My mind didn’t seem to work. I simply didn’t know what to do next but I had clearly waited too long to call the police. There were voices in the hallway now. That meant he had come back with at least one other person and I was terrified that he had found some thug to do his dirty work for him. I stepped over to the bar next to the television set and picked up the wine-bottle opener which lay on top the ‘screw-pull’ version with the wickedly sharp-pointed tip that projects into the cork. I had no idea what I would do with it but its mean metal point felt good in the palm of my hand as I tiptoed closer to the front door.

“Coop, Coop? It’s Mike. Open up, I got a surprise for you.”

Lucky I didn’t have a gun because I probably would have blasted it through the door at Chapman at precisely that point, for freaking me out and heightening my growing sense of paranoia. I looked out the peephole for a confirmatory sighting, threw back the bolt, and turned the lock to open the door.

I was fuming, again.

“Do you have any idea-‘ That’s when I saw Mercer Wallace standing next to him, holding three pints of Haagen-Dazs ice cream the most direct way to my heart stacked up in a pile as his deep bass hummed the melody of ”What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?“ while Mike laughed.

“Great music, Mercer. But I can’t dance to it tonight.”

“This shit’s gonna melt all over your hall carpet if you don’t let us in, Alex. Move it.” Chapman pushed past me and the two of them headed straight for the kitchen to dish up the portions.

“What happened since I left you off, kid?” he asked, eyeing my tattered chenille robe.

“You look like Ma Kettle in that getup. Here you got the two most eligible guys in the city banging at your doorstep and you won’t open up. Look at her, Mercer, she’s prayin‘ for somebody to show up at this hour with some vintage Chateau Lafite. Who ya gonna kill with that bottle opener? Okay, we got Cookie Dough Dynamo, Chocolate Chocolate Chip, or Vanilla Fudge? What’ll it be, blondie let’s put a little meat on those bones.“

“Now that we’re having this cozy breakfast party, boys, who wants to explain to me what it’s all about? Chocolate for me, of course.”

“Not my fault. I was lookin‘ deep into the most beautiful pair of ebony eyes, in a gentrified townhouse – we used to call ’em tenements- on West Ninety-third near Amsterdam ” – Mercer was dropping a hint that was supposed to suggest the identity of the recipient of his enormous charm, undoubtedly one of my colleagues’ “when my beeper went off an hour ago. Seems Brother Chapman’s knowledge of Motown is a bit shallow. It started and ended with ”Respect.“ The man wanted help with some lyrics life-will-go-on-after-your-man-is-gone kind of stuff. When he told me it was you he was gonna serenade, I volunteered to do backup for him.”

“What’s the story, Mike?” I asked once more, leading the three of us, each with a bowl of ice cream, back into the den.

He hemmed and hawed and stalled a bit more before coughing up the real answer. Chapman had waited in his car at the parking space at the end of the driveway, thinking he would watch for an hour or so to make sure Jed didn’t stop by and try to see me.

“I walked down to the all-night coffee shop to get a cup of brew to keep me awake. Called the office from a phone booth outside the place to explain the situation to the lieutenant can you believe it, the City of New York is paying me to do this little ”power breakfast“? When I looked up at your apartment – I can always pick it out ‘cause it’s on the corner, and it’s got those fancy-drooped drapes your mother had done for you – your lights were all off. While I stood out there drinking my coffee, I looked up again and every few minutes another light went on, till you got comfy in front of the TV.”

“Geez, you put that much deduction into one of your homicides you might close a case now and then.”

“By that time it was almost three o’clock. Figured I might as well sleep in my car instead of dragging home.” Mike didn’t live very far from my apartment, actually, in a tiny studio off York Avenue near the East River in the Sixties.

He had been in the rent-controlled cubicle – he referred to it as ‘the coffin’ – for almost fifteen years and paid very low rent, but it was a sixth-floor walk-up, which got harder to go home to the later the hour.

“I napped for a while, checked to make sure your lights were still blazing, then decided if neither of us could sleep we might as well be miserable together I beeped Mercer for some inspiration never dreamed the guy would crash my party. But he did have the good sense to find a twenty-four-hour Food Emporium with a great selection of ice cream. Cheers.”

I thought of Nina Baum and how happy it would make her when I told her later that I had not been alone. That two of the most decent guys I had ever known had taken it upon themselves to hang out with me through the last desolate hours of the morning, and tried to entertain me at a time when I was content to wallow in my misery.