Linda Fairstein - Final Jeopardy

“Hey, Miss D.A. this your case?”

I shook my head in the negative and kept going, turning right to head to Columbus Avenue and the steady flow of cabs that I assumed would be making their way to nearby Lincoln Center for the after-theater pickups.

“Alex? Alexandra Cooper?”

My head lifted up at the sound of my name, and I saw Ellen Goldman step toward me from the front of the car she had been leaning against, at the edge of the precinct driveway, adjacent to the station house.

I smiled in relief. She didn’t have a camera in her hand and she wasn’t on a deadline for an 11 P.M. broadcast or a morning tabloid.

“The news of the case is all over the radio and local TV.

My editor called me at home and asked me to get over here. We thought perhaps I could watch you do a line-up or something like that for our profile.“

I kept walking and her shorter legs tried to keep pace with my stride.

“Sorry, I could have saved you the trouble of coming out. I couldn’t have let you up there you might have become a witness in the case, you know, if you had been present for any of the crucial events, or the defense claimed you had seen or heard something important. Sorry.

I wish I had known you were there I could have told you not to waste your time.“

“That’s okay. I kept trying to call upstairs but they wouldn’t put me through to you.”

“I know,” I told her.

“My orders. Again, I apologize.”

“Don’t be silly. That’s the kind of job this is. You know we always keep trying. Listen, can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

“Ellen.” I stopped to face her, dropping my shoulders and letting her look at the dark circles I’d been growing under my eyes for the past week.

“Coffee? I think I’ve had half of El Exigente’s North American supply in the last eight days.

I don’t want to be rude, but I just need to go home and get a decent night’s sleep.“

I didn’t mean to be as clipped as I was when I spoke to icy her, but I heard the edge in my own voice and I immediately 0 n tried to soften my response with a small bribe…

“There’ll be an arraignment tomorrow, probably by midafternoon, and if you call Laura around eleven, I’ll tell you exactly when to be in court, if you’d like to see it. Then, once. the fireworks are over, it’ll be a typical Friday afternoon t slow, I hope and I’ll give you an hour or so on the case and the investigation.” Battaglia wouldn’t mind, I thought, because she’s writing a piece that won’t appear for months, rather than a story about this particular arrest.

Ellen obviously liked that offer and thanked me for it.

“Why don’t I give you a lift home?” she countered warmly.

“Really, I won’t pester you. I see how tired you are and I’ll just drop you off and plan on seeing you and having all my questions answered in the afternoon.”

I hesitated and she seemed to sense exactly why. My reflexes were slowing down and she continued to speak.

“Don’t worry about your privacy, Alex. I already know where you live.

Remember, I dropped those flowers off for you the day after your friend was killed? You had canceled our first interview, don’t you remember? I told you I’ve done my research that’s not the kind of thing I want to write about.”

I was relieved and, of course, her reminder was correct. It made me smile ‘cause I remembered Mike’s comment when I referred to the sender of the flowers as a ‘nice reporter, and he told me that was an oxymoron.

“Sure, Ellen, that’d be lovely. As long as you don’t think I’m abrupt for not asking you up for a nightcap.”

“C’mon. I understand. I’m parked right across the street.”

We checked the traffic and jaywalked over to the car she pointed out at the corner of the block. She unlocked the driver’s side and my door latch popped up automatically.

As I lowered myself into the passenger seat, I could hear someone calling my name from the front of the station house.

“Cooper, hey, Miss Cooper! Miss District Attorney!”

I could see in the rearview mirror that a couple of heads turned from the crowd of news people to see if I was somewhere in the vicinity. But I had already climbed into the car and was not about to walk back into that media circus without a pithy sound bite the last thing Battaglia would want to hear from me anyway.

The voice shouted out, “Cooper, call for you! C’mon back.”

Ellen put the key in the ignition and the engine started, but she looked over at me with concern before she set the car in drive.

“It’s okay,” I told her, ‘you’ll have me home in five minutes and I’ll return my calls from there. It’s just a feeding frenzy with all those reporters at the precinct. I’ll be much happier once I’m home. Let’s go.“

I leaned my head against the backrest of the seat in Ellen Goldman’s car, somewhat grateful that I had exchanged the adventure of a cab ride home in a fleet car with no springs or shock absorbers for the smoother trip in her later model rental that would simply cost me some chatter and forced girl-talk “What’s the best way to get through the park from here?” she asked as we pulled away when the traffic light changed to green.

“South on Columbus. You can pick up the transverse on Sixty-fifth Street.”

I closed my eyes against the bright reflection of the overhead streetlights as the car moved down the avenue, and wondered whether Montvale’s victims would sleep any differently tonight.

“Must be very satisfying to get someone you’ve been after for a while, isn’t it?” Ellen asked.

I had hoped she would have had the good sense not to interview me on the way home, but her natural curiosity apparently took over. I reminded myself not to let my guard down completely and not to answer the question as though I were talking to a friend who could be trusted with the information. Yeah, I would say to Sarah or Nina or David or Mike, it feels better than you could ever imagine, and it is one of the great satisfactions of my professional life to know this bastard is going to spend the foreseeable future in a woefully unpleasant place where he can’t hurt anybody else. But because I knew how a reporter could twist my words in print to make me sound like Torquemada or some man-hating witch, I simply said, “Yes.”

Goldman made a left turn on Seventy-second Street and headed toward Central Park West.

“Don’t you ever worry that one of these guys you prosecute is going to come back after you?” she queried.

I had been asked that question a million times, most often by my mother. That’s not the kind of thing that keeps people in my business up at nights.

“That happens in the movies, Ellen. You can’t let that drive you when you do this work. We’d never get anything done.”

“I read the clips about that case of yours that was just overturned on appeal. The serial rapist in Central Park wasn’t his name Harold McCoy?” she continued. It was the case I had just reminded Wallace about, in which the judge had thrown out half the evidence we had seized because the captain had refused to call us to get a search warrant.

“Does that mean he’s out of jail now?”

“Don’t remind me about him, Ellen. Yeah, Harold McCoy is out. We get to retry him after the first of the year. But in the meantime, his brother posted bail for him and he’s on the street.”

“I don’t know how you do it, Alex. That would give me the creeps every time I go through the park. I’d be looking I’M for him everywhere I went.”

“You think I don’t? It’s not even conscious at this point, I told her.

“Certain places just evoke connections, memories on and they’re not always good ones. It’s ironic. I happen to think that Central Park is one of the safest places in as the city. Look at the size of it, more than eight hundred?er acres. You’ve got more crimes committed in any two- or -he three-square-block area around the park every month than -St. you have inside it. But when something does happen here, ier especially because it’s so isolated at night, it’s a legitimate public safety issue. It’s awfully hard for the police to patrol a space like this.”