“With all due respect, Paul, I don’t think-”
“McKinney, go up to court with Alex this afternoon. Help her float this one past the judge.”
“Will do,” he said, sporting his smug attitude like a new suit. “Gertz practically eats out of my hand when I feed him enough law. I play him like a violin.”
I followed Pat McKinney down the corridor, which was lined with the stern-faced black-and-white portraits of Manhattan’s district attorneys going back more than a century. Dewey, Hogan, Banton, and the others seemed to gaze down at me, investing me with a sense of mission and duty.
Pat held open the door. As I stepped out past the security guard, I could hear a woman’s screams coming from halfway down the wide eighth-floor hallway.
I broke into a trot as I saw Joe Roman, the squad detective, pushing open the door of the ladies’ bathroom. I ran in behind him.
He reached the figure, collapsed on the floor, before I dropped to my knees at her side.
It was Carol Goodwin, the stalking victim I’d assigned him to watch. The razor she had used to cut her wrist was beside her hand, blood pooling next to her on the cold gray tile.
25
The EMTs responded within minutes from nearby Beekman Downtown Hospital. They had stemmed the bleeding and bandaged the hysterical young woman, who had attracted the attention of dozens of staff members within earshot, before taking her out to the ambulance.
I had stood by the elevator doors as they closed, having tried for half an hour in the restroom to calm Carol Goodwin, to talk her down from her frenzied ranting while the EMTs worked on her. She took that last opportunity to yell out her accusation.
“This is your fault, Miss Cooper! You’re supposed to help people like me. You’re supposed to believe in me. If I die, it’s going to be all your fault.”
I rested my head against the wall, eyes closed and arms crossed, waiting for the gathering of lawyers, secretaries, witnesses, cops, and student interns to disperse.
Joe ordered everybody to get back to work.
“I’m not moving until they all go away,” I whispered to him. “Whatever fumes I was running on to start this week, I’m out of emotional gas. I don’t want to talk to any of them, I don’t want to explain things to anyone. I’ve got a murder trial that I’ve got to focus on, but life-such as it is-seems to be going on for everyone else in all the old familiar ways.”
“Chapman’s right. You do attract a lot of whack jobs, don’t you?”
“It’s my specialty, Joe. What set this one off?”
“Carol Goodwin’s on me. I did just what you told me to do. I followed her when she got on the train after work on Thursday, picked her up at her house the next morning, and tailed her all the way to her office. Reversed it again on Friday, both directions. I knew by the time we got to her subway stop that she was making the whole thing up.”
“How?” I asked, starting back to my office.
“Alex, she claims she’s been stalked for months, right?” Joe was taller than I, with straight brown hair and an irrepressible smile. He was always animated, talking with both hands to underscore his points. “Terrified by some guy for a reason she can’t fathom, but nobody’s been able to flush him out. She complains about the police and everybody not doing enough for her.”
“That’s Carol.”
“The girl gets on the subway with her book, sits down, and starts to read.” Joe was imitating her now, opening a book with the palms of his hands. “The train stops ten times between her office and her home. She never looked up once-not a single time-to see who got on at any of the stops. Wasn’t worried about who was sitting near her or who got off at her station. Kept right on reading, not jumpy and nervous like somebody who’s truly in fear, waiting for the stalker to show up again. She doesn’t have any way to know who I am, so that wasn’t the reason. She had no way to make me. The girl is just a complete phony.”
Laura had a hot cup of coffee waiting for me as we turned into my office.
“And I take it you chose this morning, on my doorstep, to break that news to her?”
Joe tried to keep a straight face. “Carol didn’t go nuts on me until I locked her up.”
“For?”
“Filing a false report.”
“Help me here, Joey. We got something besides your hunch?”
He laughed. “When I tailed her home Thursday night, she stopped off at a Chinese restaurant. Walked in and came out five minutes later with her take-out bag and holding a menu in her hand. Lucky I waited around. Friday morning she dropped an envelope in the mailbox near her house. She called Steve Marron on Saturday, saying she was freaked out of her mind.”
“By what?”
“Carol told him that when she opened her mail, there was a menu from the restaurant she had eaten in on Thursday.”
“The menu?”
“Exactly. Said she had dinner at the restaurant-which wasn’t true-and that the guy had obviously followed her there while Steve wasn’t doing anything to help and mailed her the menu to creep her out, show that he’d been stalking her. If ten or fifteen other clients hadn’t had their mitts all over the menu, too, we’d have lifted clean prints, I can bet you.”
“So you jumped?”
Joe raised his hands and shrugged his shoulders. “I had to lock her up. There was no stalker, and she obviously mailed the damn thing to herself, like she’s been making up the rest of this nonsense, driving the cops crazy.”
“Where’d you get her?”
“I picked her up in front of her house this morning. She came like a pussycat at first, until we got here and she asked to use the ladies’ room. I shouldn’t have let her go in by herself.”
“The EMT says it wasn’t a serious cut. He thinks Carol was just acting out.”
“All she wanted to do was talk to you. I read her the rights, asked her if she wanted to call a lawyer, but she just needed to explain things to you,” Joe said. “I figured I’d come by to see whether you were in court or not-if you had a few minutes to hear her spiel-and let Laura give me someone to write up the case.”
I looked at my watch. “Carol probably just wanted to distract me from what I’m supposed to be doing. Suck a little more time and energy out of me. It worked fine.”
It had rattled me to see one of my own witnesses moved to the point of self-mutilation. I needed every ounce of concentration for the courtroom events of the coming week, and Carol’s words-placing the blame for her arrest on me-had shaken me up.
“The ambulance is waiting for me to go with them over to have her stitched. You making a bail recommendation?” Joe asked.
I dug on my desk for the Goodwin file. The legal charge wasn’t as serious as the young woman’s psychological problems. I scribbled some notes to be attached to the arraignment papers and handed them to Joe.
“Let’s ask for a remand for psych observation. Be sure they put a suicide watch on her, too. Call me later and let me know how she’s doing.”
I walked him out to Laura’s desk. “McKinney just called,” she said. “What time are you going up to see Judge Gertz?”
“Tell him Lem Howell is meeting me there at four. Gertz wanted to check with us after the funeral to make sure we’re ready to go in the morning. Mike expected to have Brendan Quillian back in the Tombs by midafternoon.”
“I’ll tell Pat to pick you up here at quarter of?”
“Thanks, Laura. Would you hold everything, except Mercer or Mike?”
I spent the next couple of hours at my desk, reworking my direct examinations of Mike and several of the other detectives, based on the rulings that Gertz had made throughout the past week. I was hampered by his indecision on my domestic-violence expert and was hopeful he’d give me the green light today.