The second story was even stronger, headlining with the question: BÉBÉ MO-VICTIM DE COUP MONTÉ?
I didn’t know that phrase. My legs were crossed and I was working the keyboard, searching for the Larousse French-English dictionary. Monter un coup. A setup. A frame. Could it possibly be, as the journalist suggested, that this woman knew that the wealthy man in the expensive suite had political ambitions, and had she been hired to bring them to a crashing halt with this claim? I wondered whether the cops gave any thought, as some of the French did, to the idea that this crime report was a scam by political rivals out to ruin Gil-Darsin.
I wanted to see how the American news sources were handicapping the case. I went to the New York Times website and entered MGD’s name. The first story had been filed within an hour of his arrest. The reporting was cautious and recapped the same facts that had been given to me by Mike. The victim was described as a hardworking immigrant from Guatemala, a single mother who had sought asylum in the United States with her child after the civil war that had ravaged that Latin American country in the 1990s.
My fingers were typing as fast as they could move. I went to a CNN story, predicting turmoil in the powerful World Economic Bureau in the aftermath of this scandal. The WEB chief’s arrest would result in a power struggle for control of the agency, amid rumors that he would have to resign if the prosecution moved forward. Deputies in line to compete for the position-from America, Great Britain, and Japan-all refused to engage in speculation about the character of the accused.
The Daily News had already interviewed a coworker of the accuser, who described her as a deeply religious woman. The sidebar story-MGD’S CROSS TO BEAR-OR BARE?-was illustrated with a large crucifix that observers said was always visible against the black collar of her uniform. The implication was that a woman of faith wouldn’t fabricate a claim. I fretted about how Pat McKinney would deal with that issue.
Gaspard barked at something or someone near the house. I sat bolt upright and listened, but he quieted down, so I assumed no one was entering. I got up to stretch and reached for the BlackBerry.
I climbed back onto the bed and looked at the tiny screen. I had accumulated 246 messages since Friday, when I left New York. Even if a third of them were spam, there were people looking for me on what I had hoped would be a quiet spring weekend.
There was a red star on the voice mail icon. Luc wouldn’t have to know I had reneged on my promise to him, so I hit that button and listened to the recorded voice tell me that I had twenty-two messages in my mailbox.
I had gone too far to stop myself now. Lack of curiosity would be a lousy trait in a prosecutor.
The first messages were frisky. Joan Stafford called me on Friday night to test whether my pledge to keep the phone under lock and key had been successful and to ask me to call in with all the social gossip. Nina Baum, my Wellesley roommate and best friend, who lived in Los Angeles with her husband and young son, bet that I would never be able to fulfill the promise, and urged me to stay grounded against the fantasy of the Mougins lifestyle.
There were six calls on Saturday-a couple of old friends who were in town on business and some invitations to upcoming dinners. Nothing had any urgency until I heard Mercer Wallace’s voice at three o’clock this morning, which would have been 9 A.M. in Mougins.
“Alex. Mercer here. Look-I know you’re on vacation with Luc and the last thing I want to do is bust into that, but would you call me when you pick this up? It’s kind of urgent. New case. I could use your eyes on this one. Just a call please, so I can run some of the facts by you.”
Mercer never hit the panic button. He was “grace under pressure” personified, calm and dignified even when doing the dirtiest job in the NYPD, which is what the Special Victims Unit mandate was. The understatement in his tone was in sharp contrast to the hour of the call.
His next message was ten minutes later, still unruffled. “Scratch that last one, Alex. Mike just told me you’re out of the loop for the week. I apologize for hunting you down. We’re doing fine.”
The next five calls were from Mike Chapman, all made shortly before he reached me on the beach this afternoon. Unlike Mercer, there was no subtlety to Mike’s approach.
“Rise and shine, blondie. Get your ass out of bed. Where the hell are you two, anyway? This is 911, Coop. Urgent. Mercer needs you.”
He waited about fifteen minutes before dialing again. “Ignore me all you want, kid. I’m down with that. Just call Mercer pronto.”
As fast as I hit the erase function, the next message loaded. “Pat McKinney knows as much about how to deal with a rape victim as Al Sharpton would. Don’t blow this one on me.”
Someone must have cautioned Mike to back off me for an hour. Then another call. “This will rattle you, Coop. McKinney showed up at the office with his lover. He’s making this case a team project-benching you and sticking Ellen Gunsher in as a DH.”
Pat McKinney was involved in an affair with an assistant who’d been nicknamed “Gun-Shy” for her reluctance to take cases to trial. She was the daughter of a television journalist who’d been the kind of celebrity Battaglia liked to court until her career imploded because of a series of on-air temper tantrums. Gunsher had failed in a number of other positions, but the chief of the Trial Division had left home for her last year and sought to inject her in every possible new position in hopes of a fit.
“I’m warning you, Coop, you can’t taunt an alligator till you cross the creek, you know that?” In Chapman’s fifth call, he was imitating Ellen Gunsher’s Texas drawl, using the tired aphorisms with which the clueless prosecutor regularly peppered her conversations. Mike knew they would get under my skin, as they always did. “McKinney gets a hold of Baby Mo, and that half-breed Frenchman will think a West Texas rattlesnake has its teeth in his dick.”
I smiled instinctively but realized at the same moment that one of McKinney’s goals was to elbow out the talented members of the Sex Crimes Unit by taking advantage of my absence. That would give him complete control of the case.
I heard Vickee Eaton’s voice next. She was Mercer’s wife-also a detective-and one of my closest friends. She worked at DCPI, in the office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, with access to inside scoops since she would be providing the minute-by-minute updates to Commissioner Keith Scully. She was not-so-subtly leaning on me to help her husband, and that meant more to me than just about anything.
Now there were friendly calls from the women and men who worked with me in the unit. Catherine Dashfer, Ryan Blackmer, Marisa Bourges, and Nan Toth, each giving me the heads-up that a big case was on the table. Like the district attorney, I had developed an aversion to being the last to know when something happened in my professional orbit, and my good friends always covered my back. These were interspersed with a robocall from a political candidate, the new dry cleaner in the neighborhood surfing for business, an invitation to the resort season trunk show at Escada, and my local bookseller reminding me that the novels I had ordered were in stock.
I deleted them all and held the phone to my ear again. More of the same. Nothing I couldn’t ride out from this side of the ocean.
The voice on the next-to-last message was Rose Malone, Battaglia’s executive assistant. As close as she and I were, she was also my barometer to read his moods. The fact that she was working on a Sunday was unusual enough, and the edge in her voice meant she was calling on orders from him, not as a favor to me.