"Keep it that way, if you can. The last thing I want for Christmas is a high-profile case that sets me up as Sinnelesi's whipping boy."
"No problem," I promised him, and kept my word for almost two hours.
Chapman sounded groggy when Laura put through his eleven o'clock phone call. "The news from both ends is bad."
"Hey, you're supposed to be sleeping. How can anything bad have happened?"
"Peterson just woke me up with the results of the inventory that some of the guys have been doing. You know all those shoe boxes in Lola's apartment? Well, she didn't share your fetish for high heels, slinky sandals, and velvet slippers. A few of those cardboards have some worn-down leather pumps, most are crammed with index cards that look like notes or research for a project, and two tired old boxes are stuffed full of cash."
"Like savings for a rainy day?"
"Like a stash for the monsoon season, Coop. Not kosher."
"Glad I wasn't on the scene for that discovery. What else?"
"And then there's the latest word from the ME's office. Autopsy won't happen until the end of the day, but Dr. Kestenbaum has already noted a few things that don't make him happy. Like some hairs-not Lola's-that she had gripped in her tight little fist, and, more to the point, lots of petechial hemorrhages in her eyes."
I knew the significance of the findings before Chapman went on. The tiny red pinpoints were the classic forensic hallmarks of strangulation.
"Kestenbaum thinks she actually struggled with her attacker while he choked her to death. Then he rolled her into the elevator shaft to make it look accidental. Fasten your seat belt, Coop, while he takes a close look at Lola's innards. He's just getting ready to declare this case a homicide."
5
I called Sylvia Foote. She was not an easy person to reach.
"She'll be in meetings all afternoon," her secretary said. "I don't think she'll be returning any calls until the beginning of the week."
"Tell her it's about Lola Dakota. About the murder of Lola Dakota."
"Murder?" she asked, taking down my number.
By the time I had left a similar message with Rose Malone for Battaglia, Sylvia Foote was on the line.
"Miss Cooper, my secretary just repeated your conversation to me." Foote was in her late sixties-humorless, rigid, and entirely protective of the administration's concerns. "I need to tell my president about this immediately. I'd like you to answer some questions for me."
"And I'd like you to answer some questions for us." "Perhaps we can schedule an appointment for the end of next week."
I knew that the Jersey prosecutors would move in as quickly as possible, looking for clues that would connect Ivan Kralovic to Lola's death. If, in fact, Dakota had been murdered in Manhattan, then Sinnelesi would have no jurisdiction here. But if he wanted to keep his name in the headlines, as Battaglia figured, Sinnelesi would argue that he had a duty to investigate whether Lola had been kidnapped from his side of the river and follow the trail to our doorstep.
By Monday, New Jersey police might already be swarming around the King's College campus and Lola's apartment building, scouring students and neighbors for information, gossip, and potential witnesses.
"I think we need to talk this afternoon. One of the detectives can bring me up to your office."
"I simply don't have time to do that."
"Don't have time?" A prominent member of the university family was dead, and I was only hours away from formal confirmation that we were dealing with a homicide, but Sylvia Foote was stonewalling me already. "I'll be up at your office by two o'clock."
"I'm sorry I won't be here to discuss this with you today."
"In that case, I'll start with the students over in the political-"
"We'd prefer that the students are not involved in this."
Where was Chapman when I needed him? He'd be telling Foote that either she could play hardball with him or do this the nice way. He'd be up there with grand jury subpoenas that she could ignore at her own risk, or she could cooperate and be treated like a lady. And the first time she looked down her long crooked nose at him and attempted to dismiss him with an arrogant order to leave, he'd stick out the subpoena and tell the sour old bag to take it.
"Not involved? It would be lovely if nobody had to be involved, and even nicer if Lola Dakota was alive. That's simply not one of your choices. We're going to have to sit down with you and go over everything that will need to be done, identify every individual we'll need to interview and each document we'll need to access."
Laura walked into my office and placed a slip of paper on my desk as I listened to Foote drone on: Mickey Diamond is on your other line. He's looking for confirmation that Dakota's death has been declared a homicide by the ME. I shook my head in the negative and mouthed back to her to get rid of him.
"I've already got the Post calling me," I tell Sylvia. "Somebody's leaked the story to the press and the autopsy hasn't even been started yet. You'd better give some thought to how the students- and their parents back home in Missouri and Montana-are going to react to news of a murder in your comfortable little community. It's going to get their attention a lot more quickly than the obituary page did." How would Chapman punctuate that point? "Especially if word gets out that the president's office is stalling our investigation."
Foote was silent. I expected that she was balancing the reality of what I was saying against the bet that her old friend Paul Battaglia would not approve of my heavy-handed style. But she was also smart enough to know that he would back me in my effort to get to the campus before Sinnelesi's troops arrived on the scene.
"My office is in the new King's College building on Claremont Avenue, half a block in from 116th Street. Did you say you could be here by two?"
I phoned Chapman and told him that since I'd left my Jeep at the office the night before, I would swing by to get him in front of his place and head uptown to interview Foote. I told Laura to beep me if any urgent calls came in, and that I would check with her for messages when the meeting was over. The ice was still caked thick on the windshield, and I struggled with the scraper as the defroster worked slowly to melt it.
Chapman was standing in front of the coffee shop next to his apartment building on First Avenue. His only concession to the bitter cold was the fact that he wore a trench coat over the navy blazer that he had adopted as his uniform once he had been assigned to the detective bureau. His black hair was blowing wildly in the wind, and he kept reaching up with his hand to chase it. He opened the passenger door and got in. "So what else do I need to know about Columbia beside the fact that its football team sucks?"
"You'll drive Foote crazy if you don't keep it straight that Dakota was teaching at King's College when she died, not at Columbia. They'll be very jumpy about that. They use some of the same facilities, and students enrolled in either school can take courses at the other, but they are entirely separate institutions."
I had spent a lot of time in Manhattan during my undergraduate years. My best friend and roommate at Wellesley, Nina Baum, met her husband, Gabe, when we were sophomores. He was a junior at Columbia, and I had often accompanied Nina when she came to the city to spend a weekend with Gabe.
As we drove uptown, I tried to fill Mike in on the bits of college history that I remembered. Columbia was founded in 1754, by royal charter of King George II of England, and its original name was King's College-the name recently adopted by the experimental school that carved out a piece of the neighborhood for itself at the start of the new millennium. The university's first building was situated adjacent to Trinity Church on lower Broadway, and some of its earliest students included the first chief justice of the United States, John Jay, and the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. The institution closed down during the American Revolution, and when it reopened eight years later, it had shed its imperial name in favor of "Columbia," the personification of the American determination for independence.