I often had trouble sleeping, but never more so than after witnessing the kind of brutality I’d seen today. Soft music, relaxing scents, an excess of alcohol, and even the knowledge that I would be working around the clock until this case was solved rarely calmed me enough to do the job. I was fearful of dreaming, fearful of where my subconscious would take me. Eventually, though, I stopped tossing and nodded off.
I was out of bed before six, showered again-cool water this time-to get a fresh start on the day.
It was early enough for me to have a car service take me to Bay Ridge, wait for me while I ran in to say hello to Mike’s mother in the Lutheran Medical Center, and then deposit me downtown at the DA’s office well before Battaglia would be in for his briefing. I dialed the service and asked for a pickup in twenty minutes.
I dressed, made a cup of coffee, and toasted the last remaining piece of food in my refrigerator-an English muffin. There would be no flowers allowed in the intensive care unit, so I sketched a bouquet on a note card with an IOU for a dozen roses to be delivered when Mrs. Chapman got home.
The newspapers were on my doorstep and I picked them up on my way out to read in the black car on the way to Brooklyn. The Post, never known for its good taste, had a banner headline: ASTORIA HYSTERIA-WALDORF TOWERS TRAGEDY. No surprise that I had to dig inside the Metro pages of the Times’ first section to find a story, below the fold, about the body on the forty-fifth floor of the landmark hotel.
Someone had managed to leak a few details to the Daily News reporter-either a hotel staffer or one of the first responders: SLASHER SOUGHT IN SOCIETY HOTEL. The article had a grisly account of the victim as I saw her-deep wide slit in her throat, bathed in blood, and completely naked. I dropped the papers to the floor of the car.
I e-mailed Mike and Mercer, without telling them about my surprise detour. I asked what they had learned about the abandoned trunk, in preparation for my meeting with Battaglia.
Shortly before the car pulled up in front of the medical center, Mercer replied. Trunk is at least sixty years old. Sort of a burgundy leather exterior, with brass fittings. Must have been pretty snazzy once. Interior has that name brand you mentioned in a few scattered places, but the bleach wiped out most of the design. It’s at the lab now. By the way, reported stolen a week ago, with all its contents. From the Yale Club, on Vanderbilt Avenue, just a few blocks from the Northwest Passage.
Those facts saved me the exercise of finding out when and by whom the trunk was bought. It would be easier for the cops to interview the Yale alum to learn how it went missing.
I told the driver that I didn’t expect to be in the hospital more than fifteen minutes. There weren’t many visitors in the rotunda when I entered, so I stopped at the desk and asked for the ICU. The only people in the elevator with me were medical personnel who appeared to be changing shifts.
I pushed through the two heavy doors to the unit. There was an administrator at the nurses’ station, sitting amid the beeping and flashing monitors.
“Good morning. I’d just like to say hello to Mrs. Chapman, if she’s awake.”
“Mrs. Who?”
“Chapman. Margaret Chapman. I’ll be really quick. I just want to give her a hug and leave this note.”
The woman lowered her reading glasses and scanned the patient names on her clipboard.
“Honey, I hate to ruin your morning, but we don’t have any Mrs. Chapman.”
“But she was here last evening. Admitted a couple of days ago. She didn’t-?” The word stuck in my throat. What if something had happened to her during the night?
“This is my fourth midnight shift in a row. There’s been no Mrs. Chapman in ICU. She didn’t die. She didn’t disappear,” the woman said, shaking her head at me as she scrolled down the computerized list of names on her desk. “Hon, she just never was in this hospital.”
SEVEN
I was sitting in the anteroom of Paul Battaglia’s office by 8:10 A.M. Even Rose Malone, his trusted executive assistant and my good friend, was not in yet. I started up the large coffeepot and tried to control the range of emotions that had overtaken me with the thought that Mike had betrayed me.
Rose was only a few minutes behind me. “I just spoke to the boss, Alex. He’ll be on time for your meeting.”
“Thanks so much,” I said, pouring a mug for each of us.
“It’s going to be another brutal day, isn’t it? And you’ve got this horrible new case.”
She didn’t waste a minute setting up the papers on her desk and triaging them for Battaglia’s attention.
“Yes. He wants to be brought up to speed.”
“Go on in and turn on the lights. I’ll hold all his calls.”
I settled into the wooden chair opposite Battaglia’s oversized desk. The original campaign poster from his first run for DA more than six terms ago occupied the wall space behind his desk. The slogan “You Can’t Play Politics with People’s Lives” had become rather oxymoronic, since the man spent much of his day doing exactly that. His plush green leather armchair beneath the poster was a reminder that he expected to be more comfortable than anyone sitting where I was, in the position across from him.
I smelled the district attorney’s cigar before I heard him trumpet his greeting to Rose. No one was actually sure whether he brushed his teeth at night or just kept the last expensive Cohiba of the day clenched in his mouth until he got out of bed.
“Who did Scully think he was fooling by not answering the question about rape at the press conference?” Battaglia said as he entered the room.
“Just trying to keep the reporters out of the trash bins till the ME confirms the findings. The guys are also trying to figure whether it’s a known perp and if she had sex before she was killed. Always that possibility.”
“Glad you kept your mouth shut, Alex.”
Of course he was. Battaglia got credit for having one of his troops visible, in the fray early on, but no chance for a misquote yet.
“I had nothing to say, Paul.”
“What don’t I know?”
I described the scene in the hotel room to him, told him about Fareed Azeem, dropped in the fact that Mike Chapman was back in play, let him know Johnny Mayes’s theory about the trunk, the late-night discovery of the luggage, and the fact that it was stolen from the Yale Club.
“Holding back on anything?” the district attorney asked me, one hand poised on his telephone.
Battaglia wanted a juicy tidbit to dangle in front of the mayor. He would ask Rose to dial City Hall before I was ten feet away, just to show how in touch he was with events.
“You’ve got it all. I’ll be working out of the Waldorf for the next few days. I’m going to grab Ryan Blackmer to second seat me on this.”
“Regular updates, okay?”
I walked out the door, told Rose where I’d be, and headed across the corridor to my office. Laura Wilkie, my longtime secretary, was already fielding calls.
“I guess you never made it to dinner with your law school buddies last night, did you? I saw you behind Scully on the late news.”
“Slight detour on the way to the restaurant.” Five of my closest friends from the University of Virginia tried to meet once a month. Tales from the civilized lands of mergers and acquisitions, corporate litigation, estate planning, and mogul management were occasionally trumped by an intrusive felony.
“Did you ever get fed?”
“Watered is more like it. I’ll survive.”
“You’ve already got some messages,” Laura said, following me to my desk and handing me the slips with numbers written out. “And Mike, too. You must be glad he’s back in town.”
“Over the moon,” I said. I knew my dry delivery would disappoint Laura, who was Moneypenny to Mike’s droll James Bond imitation.