Fairstein, Linda - Final Jeopardy (38 page)

This is the part of doing interrogations where I always hold my breath and rely on whatever inexplicable phenomenon has made confession work so well for centuries in the ecclesiastical settings. Ignore what I am about to tell you about your legal entitlements, Mr. Montvale, and spill your guts to me. Tell me what you did. Every raw minute of it, so that you can pay for it for the rest of your miserable life.

“You have the right to remain silent and to refuse to answer questions, do you understand that?”

His head moved up and down, but he didn’t speak.

“Mr. Montvale,” I pushed him softly, ‘it would help if you spoke your answers aloud, instead of just nodding.“ ton ”Yes, yes, Miss Cooper.
I got it. Understood.“ stk ”Anything that you do say tonight may be used against you later in court, do you understand that?“ ”I certainly do.“ the ”You have the right to consult with an attorney before est you answer our questions, and to have an attorney present her during this questioning, as well as in the future. Do you understand that?“

“Loud and clear, Miss Cooper. I understand you.”

I was almost there.

“If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you without cost, do you understand that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“If you don’t have a lawyer available, Mr. Montvale, you have the right to remain silent until you’ve had the chance to speak with one.
Understand?”

“Yeah.”

“Now that I have advised you of your rights, just as Detective Wallace did, are you willing to answer my questions?”

The leer was still there.

“Try me. Let’s see what you want to know.”

A wise-ass. I’ve been there before. Stay cool and he’ll settle in.
He’ll be fine, just don’t let him rattle you.

“Mr. Montvale, let’s begin with this morning. I’m going to ask you some questions about what happened today, in an apartment at 246 West Sev-‘ ”Well, shit, Miss Cooper. I don’t want to talk about that.

I don’t want to discuss that with you or your dumbass detective friend here.“ Montvale’s voice began to escalate as he rose to his feet and began pounding on the desk.

“I WANT A LAWYER. GET ME A FUCKING LAWYER.”

Mercer was around the desk and slammed the defendant back into his seat by his shoulders before I could even open my mouth again.

“Bannion, keep this video rolling,” Mercer shouted.

“Get every minute of this, so the judge can see how gently I treated this scumbag. You, Cooper, out of the room, now. NOW.”

I hesitated and Mercer screamed at me again. On my way out I was almost trampled by three other detectives who heard the shouting and ran in to give Mercer a hand.

There was the sound of scuffling from the small room, punctuated by laughter from Montvale, who knew these guys were dying to land a few gut punches on him, but thanks to Mercer’s quick thinking, the video was actually keeping him safe.

I was annoyed and deflated. I thought we had been so close to getting admissions to the string of rapes. They were not essential to a prosecution, just icing on this particular case, but I wanted to hear how it felt, from the rapist’s perspective, to do these despicable things to other living beings.

I wondered if it was my approach that made him flip, as I paced back and forth in the filthy hallway. Sometimes these guys will talk to men, but not to women and I kicked myself for not having had one of my male colleagues from the unit here as a backup to try to do the interrogation in case the suspect went dry on me. I knew Mercer would tell me not to take it personally, but whenever this kind of thing happened, I did.

“Hey, Coop, nothing personal,” Mercer said, as if on cue, when he stuck his head out of the room a few minutes later.

“Montvale had this one planned. He was no more gonna give you a story on videotape than I’m gonna give t on him a lobster dinner. He was just in the mood to play with you a little variety in his day for the last time in a very long while.” He stepped out of the way as two teammates led the shackled prisoner out of the sergeant’s office and back to est his wooden bench. Montvale laughed out loud all the way down the hall, and I fought to hold my tongue so my comments wouldn’t be repeated back to whichever judge we stood before together tomorrow morning.

Mercer had no time to deal with my long face and wounded ego.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Alex. You got everything you need here, plus whatever we get from the warrant. D’you really think that a guy with that many felony convictions and so much state time behind him’s gonna sit here and weave you some kinda tale of his exploits? You got a rock-crusher of a case, what more do you need? Now just take yourself outta here and get some sleep. I’ll do the warrant first thing, then we’ll have the arraignment by early afternoon and you can make the Grand Jury dates for next week.”

As high as I had let the adrenaline and caffeine carry me, as quickly did I drop when Montvale brought it all to an abrupt end.

“I hate it when they beat me,” I moaned in disgust.

“Beat you. How long you figure this guy’s gonna spend in Dannemora? A hundred, a hundred-fifty years? That enough for you, or you want longer?” Mercer asked me.

“I’ll take three lifetimes, consecutive. No parole.”

“Not likely that anybody’s gonna parole Mr. Montvale early again. I bet they’ve got the editorials written for the morning edition already.
Give it a rest.”

“I’m ready to pack it in,” I told him.

“Do you need anything else from me tonight? I’d like to get out of here before that press conference starts. Battaglia will never believe I tried to talk them out of doing it. Whew, those guys are stubborn.”

“I’m fine. Want me to call downstairs and see if they can free up someone who can take you home?”

I looked at my watch.

“No, it’s not even ten-thirty. If there’s anybody loose, I’ll grab him. If not, I can get a yellow right on Columbus Avenue. It’s still early.”

“Want the phone? Some privacy? You can use the sergeant’s office I’ll close the door.”

“Mercer, I am going directly home. Not passing Go, not collecting two hundred dollars. Directly home. I’ll return my calls from there. I’m whipped.”

“Thanks for coming out on this. I’ll be in your office right after we hit his mother’s apartment.”

Mercer picked up his case folder, escorted me to the stairwell, and held the door as I walked out. Most of the guys were too busy chowing down their hero sandwiches and uncapping bottles of beer to notice my departure, but I gave a general wave in the direction of the squad room and leaned on the banister as I plodded down the steep flights of steps to make my exit.

When I reached the ground floor, I could see through the glass partition that the lobby was swarming with activity.

Men and women officers were beginning to trickle in for the late tour, and several uniformed cops were trying to hold reporters and cameramen at bay on the front steps of the station house.

I pushed through the door, lowered my head, and began to wind my way through the ranks of thick, uniformed bodies and around the side of the news crews. The reporters were listening attentively to an announcement from the desk sergeant about the fact that the Deputy Inspector would be speaking in a few minutes, and there would, indeed, be a photo-op of Montvale himself being booked at the desk.

Dammit. I kept walking and was only made by one cameraman as I reached the pavement.

“Hey, Miss D.A. this your case?”

I shook my head in the negative and kept going, turning right to head to Columbus Avenue and the steady flow of cabs that I assumed would be making their way to nearby Lincoln Center for the after-theater pickups.

“Alex? Alexandra Cooper?”

My head lifted up at the sound of my name, and I saw Ellen Goldman step toward me from the front of the car she had been leaning against, at the edge of the precinct driveway, adjacent to the station house.

I smiled in relief. She didn’t have a camera in her hand and she wasn’t on a deadline for an 11 P.M. broadcast or a morning tabloid.

“The news of the case is all over the radio and local TV.

My editor called me at home and asked me to get over here. We thought perhaps I could watch you do a line-up or something like that for our profile.“

I kept walking and her shorter legs tried to keep pace with my stride.

“Sorry, I could have saved you the trouble of coming out. I couldn’t have let you up there you might have become a witness in the case, you know, if you had been present for any of the crucial events, or the defense claimed you had seen or heard something important. Sorry.

I wish I had known you were there I could have told you not to waste your time.“

“That’s okay. I kept trying to call upstairs but they wouldn’t put me through to you.”

“I know,” I told her.

“My orders. Again, I apologize.”

“Don’t be silly. That’s the kind of job this is. You know we always keep trying. Listen, can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

“Ellen.” I stopped to face her, dropping my shoulders and letting her look at the dark circles I’d been growing under my eyes for the past week.

“Coffee? I think I’ve had half of El Exigente’s North American supply in the last eight days.

I don’t want to be rude, but I just need to go home and get a decent night’s sleep.“

I didn’t mean to be as clipped as I was when I spoke to icy her, but I heard the edge in my own voice and I immediately 0 n tried to soften my response with a small bribe..

“There’ll be an arraignment tomorrow, probably by midafternoon, and if you call Laura around eleven, I’ll tell you exactly when to be in court, if you’d like to see it. Then, once . the fireworks are over, it’ll be a typical Friday afternoon t slow, I hope and I’ll give you an hour or so on the case and the investigation.” Battaglia wouldn’t mind, I thought, because she’s writing a piece that won’t appear for months, rather than a story about this particular arrest.

Ellen obviously liked that offer and thanked me for it.

“Why don’t I give you a lift home?” she countered warmly.

“Really, I won’t pester you. I see how tired you are and I’ll just drop you off and plan on seeing you and having all my questions answered in the afternoon.”

I hesitated and she seemed to sense exactly why. My reflexes were slowing down and she continued to speak.

“Don’t worry about your privacy, Alex. I already know where you live.

Remember, I dropped those flowers off for you the day after your friend was killed? You had canceled our first interview, don’t you remember?
I told you I’ve done my research that’s not the kind of thing I want to write about.”

I was relieved and, of course, her reminder was correct. It made me smile ‘cause I remembered Mike’s comment when I referred to the sender of the flowers as a ‘nice reporter, and he told me that was an oxymoron.

“Sure, Ellen, that’d be lovely. As long as you don’t think I’m abrupt for not asking you up for a nightcap.”

“C’mon. I understand. I’m parked right across the street.”

We checked the traffic and jaywalked over to the car she pointed out at the corner of the block. She unlocked the driver’s side and my door latch popped up automatically.

As I lowered myself into the passenger seat, I could hear someone calling my name from the front of the station house.

“Cooper, hey, Miss Cooper! Miss District Attorney!”

I could see in the rearview mirror that a couple of heads turned from the crowd of news people to see if I was somewhere in the vicinity. But I had already climbed into the car and was not about to walk back into that media circus without a pithy sound bite the last thing Battaglia would want to hear from me anyway.

The voice shouted out, “Cooper, call for you! C’mon back.”

Ellen put the key in the ignition and the engine started, but she looked over at me with concern before she set the car in drive.

“It’s okay,” I told her, ‘you’ll have me home in five minutes and I’ll return my calls from there. It’s just a feeding frenzy with all those reporters at the precinct. I’ll be much happier once I’m home. Let’s go.“

I leaned my head against the backrest of the seat in Ellen Goldman’s car, somewhat grateful that I had exchanged the adventure of a cab ride home in a fleet car with no springs or shock absorbers for the smoother trip in her later model rental that would simply cost me some chatter and forced girl-talk “What’s the best way to get through the park from here?” she asked as we pulled away when the traffic light changed to green.

“South on Columbus. You can pick up the transverse on Sixty-fifth Street.”

I closed my eyes against the bright reflection of the overhead streetlights as the car moved down the avenue, and wondered whether Montvale’s victims would sleep any differently tonight.

“Must be very satisfying to get someone you’ve been after for a while, isn’t it?” Ellen asked.

I had hoped she would have had the good sense not to interview me on the way home, but her natural curiosity apparently took over. I reminded myself not to let my guard down completely and not to answer the question as though I were talking to a friend who could be trusted with the information. Yeah, I would say to Sarah or Nina or David or Mike, it feels better than you could ever imagine, and it is one of the great satisfactions of my professional life to know this bastard is going to spend the foreseeable future in a woefully unpleasant place where he can’t hurt anybody else. But because I knew how a reporter could twist my words in print to make me sound like Torquemada or some man-hating witch, I simply said, “Yes.”

Goldman made a left turn on Seventy-second Street and headed toward Central Park West.

“Don’t you ever worry that one of these guys you prosecute is going to come back after you?” she queried.

I had been asked that question a million times, most often by my mother. That’s not the kind of thing that keeps people in my business up at nights.

“That happens in the movies, Ellen. You can’t let that drive you when you do this work. We’d never get anything done.”

“I read the clips about that case of yours that was just overturned on appeal. The serial rapist in Central Park wasn’t his name Harold McCoy?” she continued. It was the case I had just reminded Wallace about, in which the judge had thrown out half the evidence we had seized because the captain had refused to call us to get a search warrant.