Linda Fairstein - Final Jeopardy

We gossiped about prosecutors and cops, we told each other war stories we had told dozens of times before, and we took turns doing impressions of the most outrageous defendants we had encountered.

“Remember the first case I ever brought you?” Mercer asked.

“Of course. The two brothers who assaulted the woman on Lenox Avenue, the rooftop?”

“I was still in uniform, Mike. Got a 911 to the address, civilian holding two in a stairwell. Some guy heard a woman screaming in his building. Started to go toward the noise on the roof and these two teenagers were running down from the top landing, zipping up their pants as they came down. Guy had a licensed gun stopped ‘em in their tracks. Yelled to his wife who called us.”

Mercer went on.

“My partner holds the kids and I go up to the roof to see what happened. Fifty-five-year-old lady, pretty hysterical, tells me these two kids she never saw before followed her onto the elevator, the bigger one pulled out a knife and forced her to the roof. Stripped her and tried to rape her. When the tall one put down the knife to unzip his fly, she began to scream and they ran off.

“I radio for a bus’ police jargon for ambulance ‘to take her to the hospital, and I go back down to cuff the kids.

They’re jivin‘ my partner like crazy.

“That’s our mother, man,” they’re tellin‘ him.

“That’s our mother she’s just mad at us ‘cause she says the rent money is missing. Man, we didn’t do nothin’ to her.”

“So I say, ”What’s her name, your mother?“ For the first time, they’re both real quiet. They look at each other but that’s no help. Finally, the older one looks up at me with one last try, ”I don’t know we jus’ call her Mom.“

It wasn’t his best story but it always made him laugh.

“Not as good as when we almost screwed up that murder trial for Cooper, when you got promoted to the squad,” a case Mike loved to remind both Mercer and me about.

A few years back I had worked on an investigation that involved the discovery of a murder victim who had been sexually assaulted and whose body had been found near the Lower West Side piers, left in an alley in a large packing crate. She hadn’t been identified for weeks, and the detectives working on the case observed their usual tradition of giving an identity of their own to the victim.

Eventually a truck driver was arrested and charged with the crime. I never heard the casual references to the young woman which the cops had dared not make in my presence nor did they appear anywhere in the police reports, so it came as just as much a surprise to me as it did to the jury when the defense attorney drew it out on his cross-examination of Mercer.

Mike played all the parts for us.

“Did you know the name of the deceased when you commenced your investigation on April 10, Detective Wallace?”

“No, sir.”

“And how did the medical examiner refer to the deceased in her report of April 11, Detective Wallace?”

“As Jane Doe, Number 27, 1991.”

“And how did you refer to her in your D.D. 5 of April 12, Detective Wallace?”

“Case number two hundred thirty-four of 1991, Counselor.” Mike finally reached the point at which Detective Wallace had admitted that by the end of the first week, when the late-lamented unknown hooker had ceased to interest the editors of the local tabloids and had dropped off the evening news shows, his team had given her the rather callous nickname of “The Fox in the Box.” It had been a very uphill battle to try to restore the jury’s faith in the able young detective as the judge threatened in the presence of the panel to bring the matter to the attention of the commissioner. But somehow, as usual, justice was done.

That led us to a discussion of the nature of the dark humor that seemed to be the province of law enforcement types all over the world.

And that led Chapman to his next attempt to occupy my wandering attention.

“Ya know, I got an idea for you to make a lot of money, Alex, when you’re ready to go private. It came to me last Thursday when I had to go through all the files in your office.”

“Let’s hope it’s not a step I’m going to have to take today, Mike. I’ll bite what is it?”

“A dating service. Now, you take a look at the women first.

You got a twenty-three-year-old receptionist, a Libra. She likes reefer, jazz clubs, and picking up guys in Washington Square Park on weekends. She likes regular intercourse and oral sex, she just doesn’t like-‘

“You’re a pig, Chapman. You are an insensitive, disgusting pig. No wonder you have to work Homicide. You shouldn’t ever be allowed to work with a living, breathing human being who has been traumatized.” I looked at my watch and stood up to go inside to dress for the next battle.

Mike barely missed a beat. He didn’t need my approval – he was content with his audience of one.

“Then you get a perp, Mercer. Not a real violent one. There’s that thirty-five-year-old cook from that restaurant in SoHo who got collared last month. He’s a Capricorn. Are they good together, Mercer, Libra and Capricorns? Anyway he likes reefer, too. Prefers Battery Park City to Washington Square Park, but she might be flexible. He’s also into oral…”

I was out of earshot by then and into the bathroom to shower and wash my hair.

Mike would never understand the cases that Mercer and I liked to handle. He really did prefer working on murder investigations, as he had told me many times. You didn’t have to hold the victims’ hands, as it were, and deal with the emotional struggle of their recovery. You didn’t have to help them manage the pain of reliving the devastating event the pain and torment were long over by the time Chapman got to a crime scene. And you didn’t have to deal with victims who lie on occasion, even when we’re trying to help them convict their assailants. Mike was happiest when he could work on the intricate pieces of a puzzle silent clues, words offered by or cajoled out of occasional bystanders, pathological findings slowly and carefully unraveling the mystery of a brutal, untimely death.

Death. Which brought me back to Isabella Lascar and then to Jed. I finished toweling myself off and began the tedious process of blow-drying my hair as I re-examined the damage of a sleepless night in the bathroom mirror.

I dressed in a navy blazer, red-and-white wide-striped Charvet shirt and red skirt businesslike but not somber.

I refused to look as if I was in mourning for a lost love. Mike and Mercer were sitting at the dining-room table with cups of coffee they had made while I primped for the day. It was just after seven when I rejoined them. “Can I get on the school bus by myself, or do you have to escort me?”

“I’m on this watch for another hour. Mercer’s got the day off. I’ll drop you at your office then go home and crash. I have to be back at the squad for the four to twelve.”

We all walked out together. Mercer saw the two of us into Mike’s car and continued on his way with a wave.

“Do something to make me look good for a change,” I called after him. “Catch that bastard in the serial rape case, will you?” He nodded his head and gave me a thumbs-up.

I spent most of the car ride fumbling for a way to thank Mike for looking out for me the night before.

“Cut it out, blondie. That’s what friends are for. Besides, defenestration is the fuckin‘ worst. I couldn’t bear the sight of your body splashed and splattered all over the sidewalk.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That’s what I was really afraid of last night. What if you threw yourself out of a window because of that asshole? I hate jumpers. Give me shootings, stabbings, bludgeonings, but no defenestration. I was gonna stay down there all night even if the boss didn’t offer to pay me to do it just to make sure you didn’t go out on a ledge.”