Linda Fairstein: Final Jeopardy

That’s because one of the smart things we do is to keep a few critical details away from reporters so we know when we’re talking to the real culprit, Ellen. I knew about its disappearance before anyone else did, but it certainly hadn’t been in the papers.

“No, I never read about that either. Was it with her, in my house?”

“No. It was right in her tote, on the front seat of her car.

And now I’ve got it.“

I am looking at a woman who could kill a person she thought was in the way of her love object, and then step up to the bloodied murder scene and reach her hand in to remove a diary from the car seat next to the warm body. I shivered at the reminder that I was being confronted by a professionally trained killer, who had learned her trade for a good cause and had thereafter been hideously derailed.

“Why did you want the Filofax, Ellen?”

“You know as well as I do that it would have every number and every detail I wanted. Most women keep their lives recorded that way these days phones, faxes, birthdays, anniversaries, shoe sizes, maitre ds, unlisted information. I knew she’d have numbers for Jed and for you private lines, home phones, apartment locations things I’d never be able to get from public directories for months. It was just an afterthought, but it was too good to walk away from.”

“Iz had all my numbers, of course, but she didn’t have my answering machine code.” I hoped I wasn’t risking an outburst by challenging Goldman, but this bit about the messages had me upside down. What was she talking about?

“I couldn’t convince Jed how smart I was all those months. Maybe this will help him see it. You can’t figure out how to pick up a message on somebody’s machine? Ha.

Wait’ll I tell him.“

I was barely computer literate and completely mechanically dysfunctional. But I had never had a reason to give anyone else the code to pick up my messages.

Goldman loved to display her cleverness.

“Once I had Lascar’s Filofax, the rest was easy. All these machines are the same. People like you only buy one or two models.

You’re like Jed totally name brand, top of the line.

You’re Sony, Panasonic the expensive models. Look at you once and it’s obvious you’re too materialistic to buy a discount, no-name item. That’s just a guess, but it didn’t fail me.

“Then you look at the instruction book for how they do the remote pickup. They’re all basically alike. That’s how I used to get all Jed’s messages, from his campaign office in California. That’s how I knew he was going to the Vineyard. Press three-three to see if there are messages. Press two-two-two to see if there are messages. Press seven-seven to see if there are messages. Try it a couple of times and you can figure out what brand of machine you’re dealing with.

His headquarters was a Sony. So is your apartment. Jed’s is a Panasonic.“ Ellen Goldman was puffing now, standing as though she needed to stretch her legs, and pleased with the demonstration she was giving me.

“I do have a Sony, you’re right, but-‘ ”I know I’m right.“

“There’s also a personal code you need to program in.

How did you get to that?“ Let her know how impressed you are with what she’s done. Every time I thought I heard footsteps or voices in the distant background, the noise soon faded to quiet, blending in with the natural sounds of squirrels stepping on dry leaves or birds flapping wings as they landed on nearby branches. Cars whizzed by on the cross-drive from time to time, but the steady hum of their wheels suggested that none even braked at the sight of a car pulled in off the roadway. Lights from above in the apartment windows at the majestic San Remo were shutting off throughout the building as people all over the city were going to sleep, and my only companions were the scores of blue rowboats behind my back, beached on their sides and chained together near the boathouse.

“The Filofax,” Goldman said, smiling.

“There’s always stuff in that, if you’ve got half a brain.” So much for me.

She continued.

“People are too lazy to be subtle. Most of us use the obvious significant dates, ann iv-‘ ”But you didn’t have my Filofax, you had Isabella’s.“ I wasn’t playing coy I simply didn’t know what she had done to get into my code.

“That’s all I needed. When Jed was in L.A.” he used to use his anniversary as the code. A lot of married people do, especially the women. His was February eighteenth two eighteen. I’m surprised he could remember it it didn’t seem too significant, given the state of his marriage. It was probably his wife’s idea, you know, for the home machine. Here, in New York, I got his unlisted number from Isabella’s book, then guessed he was using his birthday, now that he’s divorced.

“For you, the birthday was my first guess. Never been married, no special anniversary date. Lascar had your birthday in her book, along with her other information about you. April thirtieth. Four three zero. You’re probably stupid enough to use it for your banking code and all your other pin numbers.”

She had me there. Goldman was rapt in her own self congratulatory explanation and didn’t seem to notice that I was making headway against my binds. I wasn’t free, but they were loosening.

“And you picked up messages from my home machine‘ all week? And you erased them after you listened?” I had ignored Jed’s protestations that he had called repeatedly, and I had been depressed that there were so few calls from any of my other friends and family. This was not the moment to find out who else had been intercepted and erased from my radar screen. No wonder Jed had been trying so frantically to get me and my network of friends to believe him. Goldman had found him again, had reapplied herself to the effort to attract him in the days after Isabella’s murder, and he indeed was asking for my help these past twenty-four hours.

“If you’re telling the truth about not wanting anything to do with him,” she scoffed at me, ‘then you wouldn’t have missed his calls, anyway. Pleading for forgiveness and complaining about me. Those things were bad enough.

But telling you how much he loved you that you were his golden girl, that Isabella was just a mistake, that he wanted to marry you more than anything in the world all that made a mockery of what I had risked my life to accomplish. I didn’t want you to hear any of them, if I could help it. Maybe he was getting that through to you some other way, but not with the messages I could stop.“

Ellen Goldman was intense now, concentrating her anger on me again.

“I followed him to New York when I got out of jail. I found him again. But he had become distracted because of you,” she said, with obvious disdain.

“I wanted to meet you, to see what you were like. So I arranged the interview.”

“Don’t you really work for the Lawyer’s Digest?” I asked, knowing that the Public Relations Office had vetted her before letting me set an appointment with her.

“What a joke,” she blasted back at me.

“I just said I was freelancing for them I’ve never published anything in my life. I never finished graduate school. Your people were so hungry for good press about the office that once I told them how much I admired your work, I could have said I was writing for Popular Mechanics and they would have given me carte blanche. Nobody ever checked my credentials.”

My thoughts flashed back to the day after Isabella’s shooting, when Mike brought me home to the apartment from the office, and Ellen had left flowers with the doorman. I had been so pleased to see them I had assumed Laura had given her my address. How easily I had been misled, to have commented to Mike then about what a nice reporter she was. Oxymoron, he had said.