Linda Fairstein - Final Jeopardy

“Do you want me to leave the room, Katherine?” Mercer asked, hoping it might make her more comfortable.

“No, no it’s not you. It’s just, well, it makes me nauseous to think about. I’m not a prude or anything, but…”

Again, Katherine Fryer braced herself and went on with her story.

“It was odd,” she continued, ‘because he kept going back and forth between the sexual stuff and asking me where my money was. When I undressed, he told me I had big breasts he told me he liked that. Then he went right on saying he wanted my money and my credit cards. I pointed to my pocketbook. Once he had me on the bed with the pillow on my face, that’s when he really talked a lot.

“He wanted to know if his prick excuse me, that’s his words I’m using now if his prick was bigger than my boyfriend’s… Was it better for me?… Why did I have such big breasts and a little pussy?… Then, in the middle of that, how much money was in my wallet? Then, right back to how good my boyfriend was in bed. And then he kept saying that he would kill me if I didn’t make him come.”

Mercer caught my eye as Katherine rested her forehead in her hand. We had more than enough to know it was the same guy as in the earlier cases. He was trying to tell me to wrap it up so he could take her on to headquarters.

Even the ending was identical. After the rape and robbery, he bound Katherine to the bed with an extension cord, stuffed a dishcloth in her mouth, and replaced the pillow over her head. He ripped the telephone cord out of the wall, and she heard him rummage around in her dresser drawers before the final sound of the front door as it shut behind him. It took more than one hour for the determined young woman to free herself from the cord he had wrapped around her wrists and summon help from a neighbor.

I was glad Mercer had signaled me to cut the interview short. Katherine Fryer was running on empty, and I had found an outlet for my own predicament in trying to lose myself in her case.

“Okay, Katherine, we’ve given Miss Cooper enough to keep her busy for a while. Let’s get some fresh air and walk over to headquarters. We’ll let you stop talking and start sketching.” Mercer Wallace stood up and opened the office door, determined not to let me wear out his witness.

‘I’ll call you later, Coop see if we can figure out where to go from here.“

I thanked Katherine and explained that I would be available to her for any kind of help she needed.

“Keep a pad next to your bed,” I urged her.

“More detail will come back to you. Like it or not, you’ll have flashbacks triggered by conversations you hear or reminders you see on the news or TV shows. Write down anything else you remember, no matter how insignificant it seems to you, ‘cause Mercer and I will want to know it.”

We exchanged good-byes and the two of them walked around the corner to the elevator bank. As soon as they were out of view, Laura blurted out, “Battaglia called from his car. He’s on his way back to the building and he wants you waiting for him in his office when he gets there.”

“Great. If I’m not back in an hour, send reinforcements.”

The walls lining the corridor into the executive wing of the office were covered with portraits of a century’s worth of New York County District Attorneys. Grim-vis aged no-nonsense men, most of whom had held office without ever being troubled by the presence of women lawyers on their staffs. I walked the gauntlet below their icy stares as I headed in to face Battaglia, sure that they would come alive to talk behind my back about the terrible scandal I had visited upon their successor.

I reached the desk of the D.A.“s executive assistant, Rose Malone, a great-looking woman in her late forties, who had started in the office secretarial pool as a high school graduate but had been hand-selected by Battaglia to run the front office and had done so for almost twenty years.

She and I had spent long hours together throughout my tenure in the office, and we were good friends. Rose was the best gauge of the boss’s moods, and a great ally on the occasions when I needed one.

“You might want to save that request until tomorrow,” she would say, on a day the D.A. had been criticized on a particular case action by the Times editorial page; or, “Go right in, Alex he was so pleased with the verdict your team had on that gang rape.”

“Good morning, Alexandra,” Rose said, courteously this time. Cool, it seemed to me.

“That’s terrible, what happened to Miss Lascar. Are you doing okay?” she went on.

Once I assured her that I was fine, she told me to go right into Battaglia’s office, and went back to her word processor. No chatter, no gossip, no mood summary, no advice. If Rose was cool, then the District Attorney would be frigid.

I braced for the lecture I was about to receive and opened the door. Battaglia was standing behind his enormous desk, barking into the phone as he motioned me to sit at the large conference table at the far end of the room. I pretended to make notes on my legal pad while I tried to figure who the conversation involved, and was a bit relieved to see that this burst of anger was directed at the federal prosecutor in our district, with whom the D.A. was feuding over jurisdiction in a major mob investigation.

He hung up the phone and slowly walked over to sit across the table from me.

“What the hell is going on here, Alex do you have any idea?” Battaglia spoke quietly, as he began his interrogation.

“Paul, I…”

“Do you know how this kind of notoriety distracts from the serious business of this office? Do you understand how it compromises your ability to get work done?”

As my color deepened and my embarrassment grew, so the D.A.“s voice escalated. There was no point in my responding to any of his questions because he already knew the answers to those he was asking. I was familiar with his technique, and knew that in a few moments he would stop yelling and begin to press for details. The booming jabs didn’t bother me half as much as the next phase, when he could make you feel like a complete idiot if you were unable to provide him with the details he wanted. I had watched unsuspecting colleagues present him with information for an impending press conference, confident in their mastery of the facts of the case, to have him come back with questions like, ”Do you know what church the suspect’s mother attends?“ or, ”Which junior high school did the witness go to?“ or some other point that was of potential value to a politician and none to a junior prosecutor.

Battaglia talked at me for quite a period of time before he began to ask for facts that he didn’t yet know. And then it was time to give him every shred of detail from the moment Isabella first was introduced to me and spent time in our office through our most recent correspondence and her request to escape to a private hideaway.

The District Attorney waited for my presentation to conclude before he leaned in, eyeballed me, and asked:

“Can you think of any aspect of this, any hint of scandal, that’s going to come back to hurt this office, Alexandra?”

The unspoken portion of that sentence, I knew, was…

“Because if there is, Alex, you’d better start cleaning out your desk drawer and thinking about the advantages of the private practice of law.”

“No, Paul,” I said, shaking my head repeatedly, “I’ve been thinking about it all of last night and this morning. There’s nothing more that I haven’t told you, really.”

He sat back upright in his chair and reflected for several seconds before his mien began to soften and he took on the aspect of the Paul Battaglia I idolized.

“Okay, Alex, how do you come out in all this? What are we going to do about you?”