She was overwhelmed by the reception, pleased to take her place on a stool and be congratulated by prosecutors and cops, most of whom were too young to fully comprehend the enormity of her triumph.
Mercer and I were making dinner plans with Hastings when the bartender handed me the portable phone.
"I tried your cell," Mike said. "You probably can't hear it over the noise of all those ice cubes knocking around in your glass. Nice job, Blondie."
"This was a good win. You want to meet up with us?"
"I'm working. I just asked Dempsey to turn on the TV for you. You're in for twenty bucks."
"Mike, forget it. We'll do it another time." I looked up at the small screen mounted on the wall above the end of the bar. The Final Jeopardy answer was about to be posted.
"I gave you a pass last night. What's your bet?"
"Tonight," Trebek said, "the category is 'Leading Ladies.' 'Leading Ladies.' "
"Double or nothing," Mike said. If he wasn't reading treatises on military history in his downtime, he was watching old movies.
"You're on."
"Put your money on the bar where Mercer can see it."
I took two twenties out of my pocket as I explained to Mercer what the call was about and pointed at the screen. Both he and Kerry laughed and put up forty dollars each.
Just as we saw the printed statement against the bright blue square of the game board, Trebek read it aloud. "Hernando Cortés proclaimed that God and this woman were responsible for the Spanish conquest of Mexico."
Mercer and I shook our heads, while the bartender interpreted the cash on the bar as a request for another round of drinks and served us a refill.
"How misleading is that?" Mike said. "They're not talking about a film."
"I thought you knew every bit of history from the conquistadores to the Alamo."
Kerry Hastings offered a question, just as the three contestants were chided for their faulty guesses. "Who is La Malinche?"
"What'd she say?" Mike asked.
"The correct question is, 'Who is Doña Marina or, as the Aztecs called her, the traitorous La Malinche?' That's right, the young woman given to Cortés as a slave, who became his mistress and helped with his conquest of Mexico. She's very controversial, folks, but an important figure in history."
Mercer handed Kerry Hastings the money. "We'll get the rest of the pot from Mike."
"I read all I could find about strong women who overcame adversities when I was trying to grope my way out of the dark," she said. "Cortés' mistress was one of them. She was called a harlot, too."
"What do you say to dinner, Mike? I've got to get off the phone."
"I hope you don't think the only reason I called is to keep you up to speed on your trivia. Dinner is you and me, kid. I'll buy whatever you want from the vending machines in the Twentieth Precinct. Looks like you messed up another interview."
"Thanks for letting me have a couple of hours to relish my verdict. What now?"
"I'm trying to broker a peace. I've got Elise Huff's father here," he said. "And her best friend."
"Barbara Gould? Mr. Huff's known her forever. She told me they're very close."
"Maybe they were-until she lied to you last week, Coop. You'd better get up here right now and straighten this mess out.
FOURTEEN
Where's Barbara?"
"Cooling her heels in the squad room. Talk to Arthur Huff first. The girl can use the time to lose some attitude."
I followed Mike up the staircase to the third floor of the old station house on West Eighty-second Street. Elise and Barbara had shared an apartment just blocks away, on Amsterdam Avenue. It was Barbara who had called the Huffs when Elise had not come home for two nights. Arthur Huff was sitting in the captain's office sipping coffee from a mug when Mike opened the door for me.
I had been spared the heartbreaking assignment of telling him the circumstances of his child's death. Detective Draper and his team had delivered that news the night before, dashing the family's hopes- against most odds-that Elise would be found alive.
I introduced myself and offered words of consolation for his unimaginable loss. He had heard the same thing too many times today for it to have any meaning.
He had just come from his daughter's apartment, collecting a few of her personal effects that he wanted to keep with him. "I forgot to ask about her little ring," Huff said. "Did they find anything on-on Elise?"
"No, sir. You can tell me about it if it's something you think she was wearing. Perhaps it will turn up in the investigation."
"She never took it off, from the day her grandmother died four years ago. My father was a West Point man, Ms. Cooper. Graduated in 1943. The cadets all had rings back in those days. That's the USMA emblem." Huff held out his hand to me to show me the writing on his father's ring, a thick gold setting with a yellow stone. "Mine's a citrine, like hers, only larger. When the men became engaged, they had identical ones made for their fiancées-miniatures, of course. Elise wouldn't go anywhere without her ring."
"I'll add that to the report. We'll certainly return it to you when we find it." I wasn't hopeful that it would ever surface in the Brooklyn marshland.
He removed a pair of hoop earrings, a cameo pin, and a thin gold necklace from his pocket and cupped them in his hands. "Not much to go back home with, is it? Her little sister's going to want these things.
She worships Elise."
"I'm sure she has good reason to do that."
"I'd like to know why I can't talk to Barbara again," Huff said, adopting a more businesslike tone. I guessed him to be in his early fifties-with red hair the color of his daughter's-although the fact that he hadn't slept in a week made him appear older.
"It's important that we get some information from her first," Mike said.
"I think you've had your chance to do that, Detective."
"She wasn't honest with you or your wife, either."
I had met with Barbara Gould for an interview when Battaglia first assigned me the case. She repeated to me then that she had called the Huffs at the end of the preceding weekend. She told them, and then the police, that she and Elise had gone out drinking after work. But she lied about the time of night they parted company, where she last saw Elise, and how intoxicated both young women were.
"Barbara's like my own child," Huff said, dismissing Mike completely. "She'd never lie to us."
"Well, we're going to try to find out why she did."
"I spoke to the captain tonight, before he left," Huff said, getting up from the desk and walking to look at the pegboard wall behind him, which was covered from floor to ceiling with artists' sketches and mug shots of wanted perps. "He told me about another girl-another body found somewhere downtown this week.
"Tell me, Detective," he said as he turned back to Mike. "You don't think these two cases are connected, do you?"
Mike brushed back his hair with his hand. "Too early to say. More likely just a coincidence that-"
"Good. Because I don't expect my baby had anything to do with a man who was killing whores. Do you understand that, Mr. Chapman? Elise is-Elise was a good girl, and I don't want the Huff name mixed up in that other woman's business."
"We don't spend a whole lotta time blaming our victims, Mr. Huff,"
Mike said. "We just leave that to the newspapers. Are you comfortable here while Alex and I have another run at Barbara?"
He slumped back down into the chair. "I want answers, Detective.
I've got our congressman putting some heat on y'all. I expect results.
I'm expecting you to solve this damn thing quickly. My wife and I would like some closure. And we'd like it soon."
"Closure," Mike said, shutting the door behind us. "Closure is the most bullshit word in the English language. I'll find this beast and you'll send him up the river for the rest of his life. The day of the verdict, Huff will have that short-lived rush of happiness that comes with a homicide conviction. Some news jock will stick a microphone in his face on the courthouse steps and ask how he feels about the conviction and he'll tell them it's great and now he's got closure. Next day he and the missus will wake up and realize their kid is still dead. There's no such thing as closure when you lose someone you love to a murderer."