"I've got to call Skip Lockhart."
"It's almost eight-fifteen. Can it wait until after dinner?"
I read the section about Jennings's secret model to Jake. "Maybe this miniature tableau of the island has something to do with Lola's murder. Why hasn't anyone mentioned it to me? Just five minutes and I'll be ready."
Jake looked annoyed. "Dinner will be on the table in three. Care to join me?"
I went into the den and opened one of my files. I dialed the number Skip Lockhart had given us for his apartment in Manhattan and got the answering machine. "It's Alexandra Cooper. Could you please call me first thing tomorrow morning? It's about your grandfather's diaries." There was no point being coy about this. I assumed he had read the volumes before letting Lola get her hands on them. "I'd like to talk to you about the model of Black-wells that Freeland Jennings kept in his jail cell."
Then I tried the Lockhart number in White Plains. A woman answered and when I told her who I was, she told me that Skip had gone back into town. "Would it be possible for me to have a few words with your father-in-law?"
"I'm sorry, dear. He ate his dinner at six o'clock and I'm afraid he's sound asleep now. Why don't you try him again tomorrow?"
I called Sylvia Foote's machine at the office to leave her a message, too. "It's Alex. I'm expecting to hear from you in the morning about the faculty meeting you may be planning later in the day. I'd like to be there for part of it, to explain to the group exactly what's going on and what I might need from them." As casually as I could, I dropped in an additional request. "And when you speak to them, Sylvia, tell them I'm interested in talking to them about the Lockhart diaries. You know, the ones kept by Skip's grandfather. And what any of them know about the model of his secret garden on Blackwells. Thanks a lot."
The old volumes had been kept in Lola Dakota's office, without any particular safeguarding. Even now, no one had claimed them or spirited them away. I assumed that any of the people with a particular interest in the project had already scoured the books for information anyway, and that there were likely to be dozens of photocopies floating around.
I didn't think the mention of the diaries would trigger any unusual response, but I was curious to see whether my inquiry about the miniature model of the island fueled a reaction.
Jake was seated at the dinner table when I returned to join him. The salmon and baby asparagus awaited me, and he had already begun eating. He was annoyed, and rightly so. Now, I wish I had put off those calls until after the meal, as he had suggested.
shapeType20fFlipH0fFlipV0lineWidth3175posrelh0fLayoutInCell0fLayoutInCell0"I apologize. I'm sorry for getting so carried away with this investigation. Why don't you tell me about the rest of your afternoon. Any calls?"
"Joan called about New Year's Eve. Wants to know if you can bring some of that great caviar you served at her birthday party. I reminded her that we had to fly back first thing in the morning for Mercer's wedding. I lined up most of my plans for next week. Nothing as exciting as what you're in the middle of."
He was cool and removed now. Not the right moment to remind him that prepositions weren't good words with which to end sentences. I could usually tease him about grammar whenever he made an on-air slip.
"I'm going to have to pick up some things from my apartment after work tomorrow. I'll need an outfit for Joan's dinner and my travel kit."
"We're not even going to be away for twenty-four hours." Jake realized he was snapping at me and tried to bring it down a notch. "If Mike can't drive you by there after work, we can meet at my office and I'll take you over." We were both thinking about Shirley Denzig and whether she was still lurking in the neighborhood.
I reached over and put my hand on top of his, and he loosened up as we both ate and chatted. It was my fault that the fish was dry and overdone, so I finished all of it, so as not to be berated for that, too.
"Go ahead inside. I'll clean up." The job was quick and easy, and ten minutes later I joined him in the living room, where he was reading briefing papers for his next day's assignments. I sat on the far end of the sofa and entangled my legs in his while I carefully read the 1935 volume of the Lockhart diaries from cover to cover.
At 10:35 the phone rang.
"How've you been?" he asked the caller. Usually he mouthed to me the name of the person he was speaking to, if I could not recognize who it was from the context of the conversation. This time he did not.
"No, I don't remember ever meeting him. I've heard of him, of course. I think Tom did a feature piece about his firm, if I'm not mistaken."
The other party spoke.
"You're kidding." Jake sat bolt upright, both feet on the floor. "When?"
Presumably an answer.
"In Montauk? Where is he now? Where are the kids?"
Another brief reply.
"What makes you think it was murder?"
I put down the book and stared at Jake, who was looking straight ahead.
"Just hold on a minute, will you? I want to go into the den." He turned to me. "Darling, would you mind if I take this one inside?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Just hang it up for me when you hear me get on, okay?"
He walked toward the den and I held the receiver until I heard him ask if his caller was still there. She answered, "Yes."
For almost fifteen minutes while they talked, I sat in the living room and fumed. Less than a week ago Jake had invited me to move into his home. I had done so reluctantly, encouraged by the circumstances inside and outside my own apartment. The intimacies that had begun to make me savor our days and nights together were fragile enough to be shattered by one conversation he refused to have in my presence.
I got up to pour myself a drink.
"Don't I get one, too?" he asked as he came back into the living room.
"Sorry. I didn't know when you'd be off the phone." I returned to the bar and fixed him a scotch. The mood shift had been completed. Now I was cool and abrupt to Jake and he was fired up with the adrenaline rush created by an exclusive piece of breaking news.
He sensed my pout immediately. "You're not jealous, are you?"
"Of whom? I don't even know who called." He didn't offer to tell me her name.
"She's just an old friend. A paralegal at one of the big white-shoe firms."
"I wouldn't care if it was Gwyneth Paltrow or Emma Thompson. I am just stunned that there is something you can't talk about in my presence." I steered away from the sofa and sat in an armchair across the room. "You go through this whole big deal about me needing to let you more into my life and me needing to open up to you. You try to convince me that I should move in with you, and then the first time you get a serious telephone call you fly out of the room because there's a conversation that I'm not permitted to be privy to."
"There's your preposition, darling."
"I'm not amused, Jake. You can be damn sure"-I got up and walked in a circle around the chair as I talked-"damn sure that I'm not ever about to live with someone who takes private calls in a separate room. And especially when I hear the word 'murder.' Now, do you want to tell me what that was about?"
He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs, his glass in one hand. He was smiling as he looked over at me. "Am I talking to my lover, or am I talking to a prosecutor?"
"When you say 'murder' and 'kids' in the space of a few minutes, I regret to inform you-darling-that I am a prosecutor."
He sat back. "That's the problem. My sources are privileged. I got this information in confidence, so don't ask me anything I can't tell you." He was too anxious to repeat the story not to go on. "She was working-"
"She?"
"The source. My friend. She was called in to assist a partner who had a business appointment with a client. Emergency meeting on a Sunday evening because the client's a stock analyst, specializing in foreign securities. He was supposed to be off to Europe in the morning. Very well-known guy in the financial community."
"What's his name?"
Jake looked at me. "Can't do that."
He paused. "They sit through half an hour of the meeting, then the senior partner takes a break to go to the men's room. Client follows him in and, standing next to him at the urinal, tells him that he killed his wife on Saturday and-"
Mike Chapman would have had an appropriate comment about the guy's timing, but the moment and its humor were lost on me. "In Manhattan?"
"They live here, but this happened somewhere between New York City and their beach home on Long Island. Nassau or Suffolk County, Madam Prosecutor. Not your jurisdiction."
He couldn't possibly think that I would fail to be appalled about a homicide that had occurred outside the confines of the city limits of my legal responsibility. "And the kids? What's the part about children?"
Jake paused slightly before answering. "This guy actually put his wife's remains in the trunk of his car. Then he got the two kids and drove upstate to dump the body."
"Where?"
"Where what?"
"Where is that woman's body right at this very moment? And where the hell are the children?"
"They're fine. She assures me that they're perfectly okay."
"And you're not going to tell me who this victim is and whether she's lying out in the woods or dumped in a lake or-?"
"Look, my informant's in a tough position, Alex. This is their client and the information he's giving them is privileged. They're trying to do the right thing and deal with getting him surrendered before he leaves the country, but right now he's resisting that idea. When there's more that I can tell you-"
The phone rang again and Jake answered. "Hey, that's fine. No problem. You can call me any hour of the night with a story like this. In the meantime, why don't we plan on lunch tomorrow? You can give me all the details then."
His caller clearly liked the idea.
"Michael's. Fifty-fifth Street between Fifth and Sixth, at twelve-thirty. There's a great table in an alcove in the front. Very private. No overheards. I'll call in the morning and reserve it."
She had a suggestion for Jake.
"No, you're not disturbing anything. Sure, if you get something else, call right back." He hung up and turned back to me. "You can't solve all the world's problems, Alex."
"I'd like to think that even if I were not a prosecutor, this story would be so upsetting that it would make me get off my ass and do something about it. I can't understand how you can sit there and probably just think about whether you can scoop the other networks with some lurid personal detail about this woman's murder. I can't understand why calling the police isn't the first thing you do."
The phone rang again and this time, without asking my permission, Jake held up a finger as if to suggest that I wait a few minutes till he returned from the den to finish our conversation. He trotted off to the other room to take his call alone.
I walked to the window and looked out at the murky night sky. Three minutes of that did nothing to calm me. I picked up my cell phone, Jake's spare set of keys, the forty-seven dollars cash I had left until I hit the ATM in the morning, and I stuffed them in my shoulder bag. I had to get out of the apartment before my temper exploded. And I needed to find out who the dead woman might be.
Jake was still in the den when I put on my coat and walked out to the elevator.
I pushed the revolving door open before the doorman could get to his feet and reach out for it. A fine layer of sleet was falling as I turned the corner and tried to find a coffee shop where I could make some calls to local precincts to see whether any relatives or friends had reported a missing female in the past twenty-four hours.
After going three blocks, it was apparent that nothing in the area was open after eleven o'clock on a Sunday evening. Although I was less than five minutes from my own apartment, I knew it was foolish to go there. I did not want to risk an encounter with the unstable, stalking complainant, Shirley Denzig, and I had not received word that the window had been repaired.
I reached inside my coat and lifted my beeper when I felt it vibrating on my waistband. I held it up under the streetlight and saw it display Jake's number. I replaced it, tightened the collar of my coat, raised it against the sleet, and crossed the street.
If I walked another few blocks north, I would reach the Nineteenth Precinct station house on Sixty-seventh Street. If I went east instead, I could get to Mike's building just as quickly. He knew every homicide detective in a fifty-mile radius of the city. We could sit in his tiny studio apartment, which he had long ago nicknamed The Coffin, making calls all night if need be until we figured out who this killer was and locked him up before he fled the country.
I picked up my pace as I headed east to York Avenue. A coat of ice was forming on the sidewalks and streets and I took care not to slip as I walked briskly along. The only people outside were those who needed to be there. Dog walkers out for the last effort of the evening, hospital workers heading for the midnight shift at Cornell Medical Center, and the occasional homeless person huddled in a storefront or alleyway.
When I reached the entrance to the old tenement that stood dwarfed amid the surrounding high-rise condos and upscale restaurants, I opened the outer door, shook the drops off my sleeves, and looked for the buzzer to Mike's apartment. It was marked with the number of his gold detective's shield rather than his name. As the beeper on my waistband went off a second time, I continued to ignore it and pressed the doorbell.
The several seconds it took for Mike's voice to come over the intercom seemed like an hour.
"Yeah?"
"I've got a problem. It's Alex. Buzz me in?"
The brass handle yielded to my grip as the signal to unlock it sounded in the small lobby. I grabbed at the banister in the dingy hallway and jogged up the staircase, flight after flight, to the fifth floor of the narrow building. I was huffing and puffing when I got to the landing and stopped to catch my breath.
I could hear Mike unlatch the dead bolt. He cracked the door about a foot wide and stood in the opening, his chest bare and a towel wrapped around him and knotted at his waist.
"Sorry, it never occurred to me you'd be asleep at this hour." I walked toward the door, expecting him to let me in. "Don't be modest, Mikey. I won't rip it off you. That could be the first thing I've had to laugh about all evening."
I reached my arm out to push at the door. I assumed he thought I'd want him to get dressed before I came into the small room. He held his ground as he gave me a once-over, as though looking from head to toe for an injury. "You okay?"
"Cold and wet. And furious. You've got to help me."
I brushed past him and stepped over the threshold as he started to speak. "Alex, just give me a minute to-"
I gasped as I stood beside him. There was a woman asleep in his bed, and I cringed as I realized how rude I had been to burst in and impose on his friendship so abruptly.
I put my right hand up in front of my face and tried to whisper an apology. "I'm mortified," I said, fighting off tears and backing out of the doorway. "It was so inconsiderate of me to rush up here without calling."
He grabbed for my wrist as I pulled away and turned toward the staircase. "Alex, don't be ridiculous. I just want to-"
"I'll call you in the morning," I said over my shoulder. "Don't worry. I'm on my way to Jake's. I'm fine." I was flying down the steps, calling up to him from two flights below. There was no way I'd go back to Jake's apartment now, but I didn't want Mike to worry about me heading for my own place. I ignored Mike's shouts to me to slow down and stop, and instead was planning the most direct route to the station house to get someone in the squad to help me.
There was very little traffic on the slick street so I dismissed the traffic light and dashed across York Avenue, moving west. If Mike had been dressed, I knew he would have been chasing me by now, so I broke into a trot and started running, in case he even thought about putting clothes on to follow me.
My mind was short-circuiting with irrelevancies. What would he do when he called Jake's apartment in five minutes and learned that I hadn't returned there? Maybe I should just suck up what had happened and go back to confront Jake, call the police in his presence. But if he objected to my doing so, I would be forced to walk out on him again anyway. Who was the woman in Mike's apartment, I wondered, and why had he been so closemouthed about her? And how sorry I felt for her to have this madwoman burst in on her in her boyfriend’s home at a most unsuitable time for a house call.
I stood on the corner of First Avenue to wait for a bus to pass, panting as I came to a halt. Maybe she slept through the whole thing, I thought to myself. And what would he say to explain the situation to her if she had not?
I reached the curb on the far side of the street and practically lost my balance as I stepped on a slippery patch of black ice. Calm down, I tried to urge myself. Just a few blocks more and I could sit in the detectives' squad room making my calls, warm and secure.
Footsteps smacked at the pavement off in the distance behind me. Some other fool was out on this miserable night. I spun around to make sure that it was not Chapman coming after me, but saw only the dark figure of a man crossing the avenue against the traffic. If it were Mike, he would have called out to me by this point, and I assured myself that I would have stopped and explained to him the reason for my untimely visit.
I started loping along again, wiping the freezing rain from my eyelids and ducking my head to avoid the wind.
The running steps grew closer to me now and I turned again. This time the man was almost upon me and I could see him clearly. His face resembled the sketch of the young assailant who had been attacking women in this neighborhood for the past two months. My heart beat wildly as I tried to think of a way to get out of his path. Second Avenue was a long sprint from the middle of the block, but the brownstone buildings on either side of the quiet street required keys to get inside their front doors.
I accelerated and ran into the middle of the roadway, racing toward the busier thoroughfare ahead that would be bound to have taxi and bus traffic. Before I could reach the corner, the man had lapped me from the back. His muscular arms stabbed my shoulder blades and he tried to clutch at my mouth, muttering at me in a soft accented voice, repeatedly telling me to shut up.
I fell to the ground and my knees smashed against the concrete. My gloved hands flapped out in front of me and broke my fall. In a flash, my attacker ripped the strap of my bag off my arm and ran toward the avenue as I lay sprawled on the icy street.