“I’ve told you I can’t eat,” I said, picking up some folders to take home and turning out the lights.
“We need to keep your strength up for the rest of the battle. I think Lem’s been chewing steak knives to sharpen his teeth for the kill.”
We let ourselves into the pressroom and Mike flipped on one of the TVs. The local all-news channel repeated its headlines three times an hour, and it took only minutes until they reran the end-of-the-day broadcast from the courthouse steps.
Mercer had done his job well. He had spirited Kate Meade out the back door so the press had no photo ops, no footage with which to tell her story. Instead, they got shots of Preston Meade being led away from the building by three uniformed officers who had surrounded him when Judge Gertz ejected him from the proceedings.
The telegenic Lem Howell smoothed his hair back and smiled for the cameras. He’d never met a microphone he didn’t like. “I think you’ll see that the state rushed to judgment in this tragic matter,” he said to the reporter, who was eager to get a quote from a principal in the case.
“You have any idea who the killer actually was?”
“No more so than the prosecutor does, I’d have to say.”
“Give those glib jaws a rest,” Mike called out to the image on the screen as he switched channels. “You didn’t come off too badly in all that.”
“Only because Preston Meade hasn’t found a path to Battaglia yet to complain.”
“C’mon, blondie. The way your luck is blowing, I got a shot at Jeopardy! tonight and then we’re off, okay?”
For as long as I’d known Mike Chapman, it had been his habit to watch the last five minutes of the perennially popular quiz show in order to bet against whoever was in his company on the final Jeopardy! question. Mercer and I were the usual combatants, wagering twenty dollars or more, depending on whose favorite subject was the topic of the evening. Squad commanders, prosecutors, morgue attendants, and dead bodies had all been kept waiting while Mike tested his wits against the on-screen players.
Alex Trebek was smiling at us as the commercial break ended. “Tonight’s category is Greek Mythology. Let’s see what the answer is, folks.”
“Double or nothing,” Mike said. He had majored in history at Fordham College before joining the NYPD and had encyclopedic knowledge of military figures and events, both American and worldwide. If the subject was an ancient Greek warrior, he would beat me cold. “You can always hope for Leda and her swans.”
“Do I have any choice?” I asked, removing the bills from my wallet.
Trebek revealed the answer on the giant blue game board as he spoke it aloud. “Iconic desert figure whose original Greek name means ‘the strangler,’” Trebek said, repeating the word I had hoped not to hear again tonight. “The strangler.”
“Brendan Quillian isn’t Greek, is he?” Mike said. “I’m totally stumped. Where’s there a desert in Greece?”
“Out of my league,” I said, waving the bills at him. “We’ll use this for drinks.”
“I’m sorry that none of you guessed it correctly,” Trebek said to his three dejected contestants. “The Sphinx. The Great Sphinx at Giza, which for many people symbolizes the country of Egypt, is named from the Greek word for a fantastic creature with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of a bird. Legend has it that she strangled travelers who couldn’t solve her riddle.”
Mike zapped Trebek off with the clicker. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you work that image into your summation. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant testified in this courtroom, no longer silent like the Sphinx, the great ancient strangler of the desert-’”
“‘Half-man, half-beast.’ You’re on. And it’s all providing I survive Lem’s motion to dismiss at the end of the People’s case. Where are you meeting Mercer?”
“Primola,” Mike said, referring to my favorite Upper East Side Italian restaurant on Second Avenue, not far from the high-rise building in which I lived. The consistently great fare, the casual ambience, and the personal attention we received from the owner and his crew made it one of my regular haunts. “My car’s on Baxter Street. Wait in the lobby and I’ll come around for you.”
We rode down together in the elevator and I chatted with the Fifth Precinct officer who had been assigned to lobby security, a quiet post on this warm summer night. When Mike’s car pulled in front of the orange cones that kept Battaglia’s parking space reserved, the cop walked me out and opened the car door. I threw the paper bags full of empty coffee containers and soiled napkins onto the seat behind me and settled in on the passenger side for the ride uptown.
Mike Chapman and I made an unlikely pair. I had turned thirty-seven at the end of April, six months after he’d celebrated the same birthday, but we had few other traits in common beside our age. His father, Brian, had been a legend in the NYPD, known for his street smarts, his guts, and his investigative style, who’d retired after twenty-six years on the job only to die of a coronary forty-eight hours from the time he gave up his gun and badge. His widow, born in Ireland, made good on her promise to see that Mike graduated from college, but was just as proud when he used those qualities of his father’s that seemed to have passed to him through the genes and joined the force the day after completing his degree at Fordham.
I rested my head against the back of the seat. The bright lights over the sign at the entrance to the northbound FDR Drive beat down at me from above, so I shifted and stared at Mike for a minute or two before closing my eyes. He had all the instincts of a great cop plus the benefits of a good education. The coveted gold shield of the detective division had been awarded to him early in his career, for his role in arrests in a drug-related massacre on Christmas Day of his first year in uniform, followed by the daring rescue of a pregnant teenager who had threatened suicide from atop the George Washington Bridge.
“You fading out on me?”
“I’m tweaking my summation.”
“That’s weeks away, if you’re lucky.”
“One of things I learned from Lem Howell,” I said. “You write your closing argument before you ever open to the jury. It forces you to organize your case more thoroughly, to structure it with a logic that the jury can follow as you put the pieces of the puzzle together.”
Mike looked over and smiled his great wide grin that warmed me no matter how bad my mood. “Back to the drawing board, huh, Coop?”
“Forget my ‘Kate Meade, pillar of the community’ remarks. I’ll have to toss them. Did you get an update on Marley Dionne, or do I write him off, too?”
“The Rasta disaster? He may not talk, but he’ll live.” Mike ran his right hand through his hair. “He’s out of surgery.”
I hadn’t seen much of Mike’s humor in the last six months. His fiancée had been killed in a freak skiing accident, and he had withdrawn from Mercer and me-the two friends whose personal relationships had become as close as our professional ones over the last decade.
My passage to public service had come from an entirely different direction. I had been raised in Harrison, New York, an affluent suburb of New York City. My parents had melded their diverse backgrounds into a strong, happy marriage-she the descendant of Finnish immigrants who had settled on a dairy farm in Massachusetts at the turn of the nineteenth century, and he the child of Russian Jews who’d fled political oppression before World War II and come to this country with his older brothers, my grandmother giving birth to her first “American son” two years after their arrival.
From my mother, Maude, I’d inherited more than her green eyes and long legs. She had gone to college for a degree in nursing, and although she had given up a career she loved to raise my brothers and me, her superb nurturing skills and great compassion for people in need had found its way into my work with victims of sexual violence, who required more than a law school education from their advocates.