Linda Fairstein: Final Jeopardy

I didn’t know whether to try to wrest the weapon from her grip, but within moments the cops were on her, and I was relieved of that decision.

I could see, from my limited angle of vision, that the shooter was the first to get to us, landing on her right arm with his foot and bending down to take the small pistol away from her as he pressed her elbow against the rocks with his heavy boot. I didn’t know who the guy was or whether I would ever lay eyes on him again, but I was certain I would be in love with him for the rest of my life.

Goldman was coughing and crying at once, and in an instant we were surrounded by six or seven other men, Chapman and Mitchell among them. They were all talking over each other, as two of them lifted her off my body and David leaned in to help me raise myself up from my awkward position on the ground.

“Where’s she hit?” I heard someone ask, while Mike got to his knees in front of my face, questioning me at the same time “Are you shot?”

I rolled onto my back, biting the corner of my lip to prevent myself from crying, and shook my head in the negative.

“Looks like the gut,” was someone’s answer to the question about Goldman, and the men carrying her between them started up the pathway to the street. Another guy was on a walkie-talkie ordering two ambulances stat to meet us at the pavement above the Bethesda Terrace.

David was on one side of me, asking where I was injured and checking my vital signs. He pressed my shoulder back against the ground as I tried to sit up, cradling my head in place with his sweater and stroking my hair to calm me, telling me not to try to talk yet. Chapman was on my other flank, working his cell phone, telling someone probably his boss where we were and what had gone down. He reached for my right hand, inspecting the abrasions and rope burns that covered its surface, and I grabbed him back, squeezing as hard as I could and holding on to him, because it was so much easier than saying anything aloud.

“Just rest for a few minutes,” David urged me.

“Listen to your doctor, Coop. We’ll explain it all later,” Chapman said, laying the phone on the ground and trying to muster up something that resembled a smile.

I closed my eyes, keeping hold of Mike’s hand and attempting to make myself breathe more evenly. The noise and commotion of people running up and down the incline continued to swirl around me, and I relished the sound of sirens coming closer and closer to the roadway above.

Within minutes, two EMS workers came pounding down the staircase, carrying a stretcher which they placed beside me on the ground.

“Which one we got here, the perp or the victim?” one asked.

“You got the victim,” Mike said, rising to his feet and flashing his badge at the pair.

“She’s a prosecutor,” he went on, summarizing the story in a couple of sentences.

“V.I.P treatment or else she’s likely to drop a dime on you.”

My mouth curled up in a grin as he used police lingo for ratting someone out.

“I’m a physician,” David added, “I’d like to ride with you.

She’s my friend.“ He began to describe his observations of my condition as they gently lifted me onto the canvas.

“I don’t need this, really. I can walk,” were my first words as they carried me toward the staircase.

“Relax, blondie. You’re going first class. You’re my case now I make all the decisions,” Chapman replied.

It wasn’t exactly Notorious, but I was every bit as grateful as Ingrid Bergman must have felt as my saviors swept me up the grand steps toward the waiting ambulance. It was almost 5 A.M. by the time I was comfortably settled into a nightgown and robe, sipping some warm, exotic combination of herbs that was prepared for me by Joan Stafford’s Asian housekeeper, after David had refused my request for a double Dewar’s. He had called Joan from the Emergency Room of New York Hospital, when I admitted that the only way I could get any sleep during the next few days was in the care of a friend I could trust.

Mike had known the triage nurse in the ER from years of working the same midnight shifts. She had taken me into an examining room after the domestic stabbing and before the alcoholic who cracked her elbow tripping off a curb. By the time the resident came into the cubic leto inspect me, the nurse had wiped all my scrapes with alcohol, determined that the wound on my thigh was too shallow to need stitches, and ordered that a set of x-rays be taken to make sure the injuries to my ankle were not serious. The doctor finished the once-over and prescribed some medication for pain and sleep.

Ellen Goldman had been taken to a hospital on the West Side. Mike was smart enough not to tell me which one, although I overheard him phoning the captain to say that her condition was critical but stable when she got out of surgery shortly after four, about the same hour of the morning I was released from the Emergency Room.

Mike and David drove me to Joan’s apartment, where she had dressed to meet us in the lobby.

“I didn’t think you could look any worse than you did when we had dinner on Tuesday, but you’ve reached a new low, girl. We’ll get you back in shape,” she said as she embraced me, preparing me for what I would see when I got up my nerve to look myself over.

She lived in a eight-room duplex in one of the most elegant buildings in Manhattan, and her guest bedroom, overlooking the East River, was plumped and fluffed for my arrival, like a soft aqua-toned cocoon, ready to shield me from the real world. I spent a few minutes checking myself out in the bathroom mirror, appalled by the number of lacerations and marks that crisscrossed my cheeks and neck, and the variety of bruises that had swollen and discolored my slender fingers and hands. I changed into Joan’s lingerie and velvet robe, and descended to the library, where she had poured a brandy for herself, David, and Mike.

“Anybody want to tell me what took you guys so long?” I asked, directing my question to Mike. I screwed up my face at the first swallow of the tea, which was sour and tasteless,

Joan came to sit beside me on the thick arm of my lounge chair, offering me a mouthful of her Courvoisier.

“Next time I call you, don’t tell me you can’t take the call,” Mike fired back at me.

“In the middle of a line-up? The first time you called, right after I got to the Special Victims Squad, nobody said it was urgent.”

“Well, it wasn’t then. I hadn’t spoken to David yet. After I started to get information from him, I called back twice.

Got some old hair bag who didn’t seem to know what was going on.

Finally, when we put most of it together, I called there frantically, telling them to find you and get you back upstairs to take the call. That’s when the desk sergeant told me you’d gotten into a car with a woman.“

“Start over,” I said.

“Tell me how you figured it out.”

David started to talk, describing his meeting with Jed.

“He showed up in my office a bit earlier than expected, at seven-fifteen, eager to tell me to tell anyone who would listen, I think what had been going on. I asked him to describe the details of the case of the woman who had been stalking him in California he said her name was Ellie Guttmann-‘ Mike interrupted him.

“Yeah, I had already gotten that from the Threat Management Unit during the afternoon, when they pulled up Segal’s case for me in Los Angeles.

I just had no way to connect it to Ellen Goldman then.“

“Jed insisted to me and I believe him, Alex that he never had any kind of relationship with Goldman or Guttmann, whichever is her real name.”

“It’s Guttmann,” Mike broke in again.

“I checked with Immigration. Israeli passport.”