"Or Lola."
"Don't be a horse's ass, Detective. Don't sit in my office and even presume to treat me like I did something wrong." His voice was raised now, shrill and strident. "I never went inside Lola Dakota's apartment last Thursday." Frankel spit each word at us, slowly and angrily.
"Then how come there's seminal fluid all over the sheets on her sofa bed? And how come if you just spit over at me one more time, I'm gonna have enough of your goddamn body fluid from this slobbering saliva all over the new tie my aunt Bridget gave me for Christmas to let the lab match it up before your kid gets home with the car tonight."
"If there's semen on those sheets, and if it happens to be mine, Detective… let me stop right there. That's a really big 'if,' 'cause Lola and I did not exactly have what I would call an exclusive relationship."
"Maybe we can narrow it down a bit. Coop, how much you wanna bet that Mr. Frankel here has a pack of gum, white wrapper with that distinctive green arrow, right in his pants pocket?"
"I'm not betting against you, Mr. Chapman."
"What's the point of that?" Bart was furious.
"We've got DNA from the sheets, and DNA from the gum. You know where the bed linens were, and the two of us happen to know exactly where we found your chewed-up ball of saliva. Now all you have to do is remember how many places you were when you tossed your gum. Was it in Lola's bedroom? In the kitchen? For a guy with a regular habit like yours, it's gonna be hard to single out every stick you got rid of. Leave out an important stop, and I'll nail your ass to the wall. The easiest thing for you to do is just to retrace your steps for us, honestly this time. We know damn well that you're leaving something out."
"Well, I sure as hell wasn't in the elevator shaft when she was murdered. Alex, please. You've got to believe that I was never, never inside Lola's building the day she was killed. Of course I won't deny that we'd been intimate. But whatever you found on the sheets must be there from two or three weeks ago. We slipped away from Lily's one afternoon, and I took Lola to run some of the errands she needed to get done around school. Then we stopped by at her apartment and yes, we made love. She never spent another night there, so she obviously didn't have any time to do the laundry.
"And the gum? Yeah, I chew gum all the time. It's probably in every wastebasket in the apartment. It's a nervous habit. Started when I gave up cigarettes, and now I do it all the time."
Chapman fisted both hands and leaned his knuckles on the desk, bending toward Frankel. "If you didn't go into Lola's building that day, where else did you go? Help me. Tell me one other stop you made that I can verify."
Bart twisted and squirmed. Mike tried to nudge him in the right direction. "Start with the campus. Did you go anywhere near the college?"
"Columbia?"
"Or King's."
"I'm not familiar with King's. Didn't exist in my day. So I walked around Columbia a bit. But it was too cold. I got in my car and drove down Broadway. Manhattan has a bunch of these great little mystery bookstores. Four or five of them, all over town. It took me a while to find one. Just took a book into a coffee shop and read for a while. I told you that before, and it's true. I'll check at home and see if I can find a receipt."
Both of us knew, from the gum that Mike had spotted in the trash basket, that Bart had made a stop in Lola's office. I wondered if he had done that because she had asked him to pick something up, or if he had gone there on his own. Why wouldn't he give that to us? Why did he continue to lie about it? And what else did it mean he was lying about?
"Was there a reason Lola didn't want you to come upstairs with her?" I asked.
Bart reached into his pocket and stripped the wrapper off another stick of Wrigley's spearmint.
"Not really." He rolled his head in a circle and pressed his hand against the back of his neck. "I mean, what we had originally planned was to spend a few hours there. But when we pulled up in front of the building, one of her friends was on his way inside. We just decided that I should get lost for a few hours and come back later. Lola didn't want anyone asking questions, didn't want anything to happen to screw up the case. Like for Ivan to find out she was sleeping with a prosecutor. Shit, was I stupid."
"How the hell would Ivan find that out, just 'cause you were driving her home?"
"And staying overnight? He had eyes everywhere. Lola was paranoid. Thought he was paying people to find out information. Just figured it would get back to Ivan if we were caught together. She told me to stay loose and she'd give me a call later that afternoon on my cell phone." He looked pained. "The call that never came."
"And the friend, the guy who was going in when you pulled up to the building? What's his name?"
"Her friend, not mine. I never saw the guy before in my life. I think he teaches with her. Black guy with dreads and a kind of wild-looking beard."
Lavery, I thought. "Claude? Claude Lavery?"
"Yeah. That's the guy. Held the door for her and they walked in. I never saw her again after that."
18
Chapman was itching to get out of Frankel's office. Bart followed us past the receptionist's desk and into the hallway. "What do you think, Alex, do I have to tell Vinny about this?"
"Hey, schmuck. Get real. You're now a permanent part of my files on the case, and we're not even out of the box. Coop and me have a few dozen questions for you we haven't even thought of yet. We haven't talked about Ivan, we haven't asked you about the work Lola was doing, we haven't asked whether you know anything about a load of cash she was hiding. Or about drugs."
Mike gave up on the elevator and tugged on the strap of my bag as he turned to trot down the three flights of stairs to the exit. "Next stop for you is my office. Pick a day. Make it easy for yourself, Counselor. And try telling Vinny the truth. Might be a new thing for you. Or, you can tell him you're in the field. That seems to have worked for you before."
"Let's try and schedule an appointment for the beginning of the week, Bart," I said. "You know how this is going to break, so why don't you tell the district attorney about it before Battaglia gives him a call?"
Frankel was leaning over the banister, calling down to us as quietly as he could. "Do you think I'm going to need a lawyer?"
"Line up a good proctologist first, Mr. Frankel. It's rough in those maximum-security pens."
Mike started the engine and we sat in the lot while it took its time warming up. "Born loser. Knew it the minute I saw him. Know how I could tell? Grown man with a backpack. There's just no excuse for it. Half of those twerps in your office use 'em, too. I get on the elevator at Hogan Place, one of those guys from Appeals gets in after me and turns around. Bam! I get smacked right in the puss with nine pounds of law books. By the time you get out of high school, you should figure out some other way to carry stuff around. What are you thinking about?"
"The position Frankel put himself in. That he'll be out of a job before New Year's. Whatever his involvement is in Lola's death, he was terribly indiscreet to be sleeping with her. And we'll have to tell Sinnelesi that he withheld evidence from us. Not to tell us that he had been with Lola after she left Lily's, and that he actually saw her go into her building with a witness who we didn't even know about before this? Irresponsible and unethical."
"There's some reason that Bart wouldn't give up the fact that he went to Lola Dakota's office," Mike said. "Before we have him back over to interview, let's be sure and examine the inventory of stuff that was there, and get the photos Hal Sherman took at the college. It's even creepier to think that he might have gone there after he found out she was dead.
"Want to swing by the county jail and see if Ivan has anything to tell us? Talk to him about his student snitch, Julian Gariano? See what kind of mood he's in?"