Linda Fairstein - Death Dance

"Open the card," Mike said.

He caught my hesitation.

"Open it. I'm not all that curious about your admirers, Coop. I just want to make sure the note doesn't explode in your puss."

I unsealed the small card. "Alex-to make up for the daffodils, and for alarming you with my doorstep delivery. Dan Bolin."

"What could possibly be in that note that makes you turn red?" Mike asked, reaching for it.

I dropped it on the top of my desk. "That's ridiculous. I'm not blushing. I don't even know the guy."

"A hundred bucks' worth of petals and you don't know him? Imagine what'll happen when you start putting out for him. Why is he sending stuff like this if you don't know him? We gotta put him in the suspect pool for last night?"

"Joan knows him. I don't mean she knows him, but she's talked to him. He was on the Vineyard this weekend."

"You're not making sense with this 'know him but we don't really know him' stuff. Guess I picked the wrong weekend to take a pass on your invite. You do a three-way or something to deserve this?"

Laura was standing in the doorway; when she started to talk to me, I stepped toward her and Mike picked up the card. "Mike, Mr. Alden is downstairs. Shall I have them let him up?"

"Yeah, he didn't want to accept my hospitality for the ride. Told me his driver would bring him down here. Given the choice, I'd pick the backseat of his limo, too," Mike said. "So who's this Bolin guy?"

"Oh, Alex? A gentleman named Bolin called this morning and asked if it was okay to have flowers sent here. Something about not wanting to upset you by asking for your home address, but I gave him this one."

"That's fine, Laura."

I bent over the desk, trying to make order out of the scattered folders and newly accumulated mail, but Mike knew I was just avoiding his glare.

"You didn't answer me. Who's this guy you know but you don't know? Where does he live? What does he do? Where was he last night?"

"Look, it was a harmless flirtation on his part. I sat next to a guy on a plane for half an hour and he tried to ask me out. Not interested."

"The florist and I would both have to say you didn't make that very clear, did you? Don't you think we have to talk to him, put him in the mix?"

Laura was still in the doorway, probably feeling responsible for the appearance of the flowers, disliking as she did any tension between Mike and me. "He sounded like a perfectly nice man, Mike. I wouldn't have given the green light if I'd known-"

"Can we leave him out of this entire discussion unless it becomes necessary to go in a new direction?"

"I don't know why you're protecting him, Coop."

"That's not what I'm doing. I'm trying to keep him out of my personal life-and my business-until this murder investigation and all its offshoots are resolved."

"Maybe last night had something to do with Dr. Sengor's case," Laura said, trying to be helpful.

"Sengor's in Turkey, his accomplice is in jail-"

"What if he had more than one accomplice?" Mike asked.

"Joan Stafford thinks I'm paranoid. Maybe it's from hanging around this place too much. Both of you see suspects everywhere."

Laura turned away from us when we heard Hubert Alden's voice from the hallway. "Is this Alexandra Cooper's office?"

Mike lifted the flower arrangement and started out of the room. "I'm putting this on Laura's desk for the time being. Doesn't exactly look like a serious prosecutor's lair with half of the Versailles gardens looming between you and your target."

He walked back in the room followed by Hubert Alden, who removed his hands from the pants pocket of his well-tailored navy pinstripe suit and rubbed them together as he surveyed the gritty surroundings of my small office-cramped, in need of a paint job, and decorated with court exhibits that were reminders of cases won and lost over the last decade.

"And you're a bureau chief, Ms. Cooper?" Alden said, watching a peeling paint chip on the ceiling as though it were about to fall on his shoulder and mar the surface of his jacket. "I can't imagine how the Indians live."

"One of the perks of public service. You never have to waste time thinking about how to redecorate. Whichever shade of gray the city uses every twenty years is fine with me. I'd like to thank you for coming down here. We have a few more things we'd like to discuss with you."

"Has there been a resolution yet about the release of Ms. Gali-nova's body from the morgue? I'm flying to Europe at the end of the week and it would truly set my mind at ease if we could get her out of the morgue and put her to rest with some dignity."

I made a note to call the ME's office. "I should be able to finalize that."

"If you're leaving town, that is," Mike said, settling into the chair next to Alden.

"How dramatic of you, detective. Now, what do you know that you think might put the brakes on my plans?"

"I remember standing in the back of the theater with you the day that Lucy DeVore had her tragic-well, let's still call it an accident. And if I'm not mistaken, that's when you told us you were not in New York on Friday night, when Ms. Galinova was murdered. Did I get that right?"

"Exactly so. I spent that weekend at my house in Vail."

"Maybe dead dancers don't talk, but cell phones can still tell tales, Mr. Alden. There's a message on Talya's phone," Mike said. I knew he was bluffing now because her phone had never been found. We were only going on Joe Berk's statement that he claimed to have listened to Hubert Alden's invitation to take the ballerina out for a late supper the night she went missing. "Your voice, offering to pick her up that same evening."

Alden raised his head, looking out the window over mine, face-to-face with a gargoyle who laughed back at him from the building cornice across the narrow street, its tongue extended from its wide stone mouth.

"Dinner, Mr. Alden? That ring a bell?"

"I never got an answer from Talya. I made that call from my office, late in the afternoon, I think. Naturally, I would have stayed in town if she'd responded that she wanted to see me. I keep the company plane at Teterboro, in New Jersey, right over the George Washington Bridge."

"You didn't happen to stop by the opera house on your way to the airport, did you?"

"Mr. Chapman, I was scheduled to fly out at around seven o'clock that evening. I didn't stop anywhere, because I was anxious to get into the Vail airport before they shut it down for the night."

"But it's your own wings, no? You tell the pilot it's ten or it's midnight, and that's when the flight goes."

"We were wheels up before Natalya went onstage, detective. The first act started at eight p.m., didn't it?" Alden was steaming now, unhappy about the implied accusation and perhaps also unhappy that we may have heard something more intimate in the phone conversation than he had revealed to us. "The flight records on both ends will confirm my departure and arrival times."

"Those records will tell me about the movements of the aircraft, Mr. Alden. Whether they account for where you were that night is another matter."

Alden leaned forward with his elbows on the arms of the wooden chair and shook his head while he looked down at the floor. "You brought me down here for this? You'll be embarrassed when you get the answers you're looking for."

Mike could shift gears as suddenly as moods. He backed off the subject of Galinova's murder, and sensed from our first conversation with Alden that he would be more comfortable talking about his theatrical ancestors.

"I'll be first in line to apologize if I'm wrong, Mr. Alden. I mean, there it was in your own voice, the night of the murder. I had to ask you, since you didn't tell us about your dinner invitation the first time we talked. And the main reason we asked to see you again is that we really wanted your help about something else, something that involves Joe Berk."