Night Watch (32 page)

For once, I believed Pat McKinney when he told me he felt sorry for me as we walked back to the conference room.

He began handing out assignments to the team. He would call sources at the State Department and the Department of Justice to get access to French government officials, while he directed Mercer to tackle Interpol. Ellen and Ryan were responsible for revising the indictment and getting all the facts bullet-pointed for the bail application.

I returned to my desk. Laura was manning the busy phone lines and had set me up with more coffee. “Nobody from the press gets through,” I told her. “Absolutely nobody. And yes, Luc is here in New York, and no, he won’t be calling in today. You don’t need to worry about me in that regard.”

She knew me well enough not to say another word about him.

“Lem won’t be trying to get me either. Some rough stuff going on in his camp, which will keep him from triplicating me about his client’s bail all morning. And Mike? Send him directly to Mercer, who’s using the conference room. I’m working on something for the district attorney.”

I sat at my desk and scrolled through the avalanche of e-mails that had come in since the morning papers had saturated subway riders. Most of my well-meaning pals had checked in with humorous or consoling remarks. I couldn’t help but wonder how Luc was feeling and what he was doing for the day, undoubtedly overwhelmed by everything that had come crashing down on his world, personally and professionally.

I searched my document file for several of the speeches I had prepared in the last few months. The office had triumphed in many cases with an uneven power dynamic—a teenage girl against a physician who had molested her during an office procedure; a mentally challenged young adult over a teacher at a vocational school; and a woman who cleaned offices late at night who had convinced a jury that the head of a world-renowned ad agency had sodomized her in a deserted corridor after he drank too much at an office party.

Each of these cases would fit into the template for Battaglia’s remarks, although the timing of the piece wouldn’t allow for subtlety. I channeled myself into his speaking style—rougher than mine, with fewer adjectives and all traces of feminine style made to disappear—and began to fashion a narrative.

There was no way I could concentrate. I was more attracted to e-mails and outreach from friends and certain that this was an exercise in futility, created by Battaglia to keep me out of harm’s way and headlines for the better part of the day and night.

At one-thirty, with the bare outlines of a draft under way, I drifted down to the conference room to chill with Mercer for a while. Laura had called out for lunch, and I nervously ate half a turkey sandwich—still hungry because I hadn’t eaten last night—while Mercer told me about his slow progress. He had made more
than a dozen calls, but the small police unit in Lille had been swamped with attention from media everywhere in Europe and America.

Shortly before two, Ellen came in with the revised indictment. We went upstairs to the grand jury to get the required signature, then took the elevator to the tenth floor and filed the papers with the clerk of the court.

We returned to the conference room to gather the rest of the team. Then another elevator ride to the eleventh-floor courtroom in which Donnelly presided. The enormous double-wide corridor was packed with journalists and photographers from just about every newspaper on both sides of the ocean. Uniformed court officers marched our formidable band of MGD prosecutors, followed by Mercer Wallace, into Part 30 of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Every seat on every bench in the room was full, except the front row, from which Pat, Ryan, and Mercer would watch the arraignment.

Lem Howell was already planted in the well of the courtroom. On the right-hand side, next to the counsel table at which Ellen and I sat, two sketch artists had taken up positions in the jury box, at work on Lem’s profile.

Jan Donnelly took the bench as soon as we were in place. Lem smiled at her and got up to walk toward her.

“Step back, Mr. Howell. Is there anything to discuss before we bring the defendant in?”

“I just thought I could give Your Honor a brief overview of—”

“On the record, Mr. Howell. We’ll do this all on the record. Both sides ready to proceed?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Ellen Gunsher said. She seemed intimidated by the stature of the judge, whose stern demeanor seemed incongruous with her pretty face and warm smile, on those occasions that she chose to smile.

“Bring in the defendant.”

The court officers exited through the door on the far side of the
courtroom. I could hear the sound of the handcuffs jingling as they were removed from Gil-Darsin before he was brought inside. The door opened and he walked in, head held high, dressed in a suit, shirt, and tie that Lem had taken to him in his jail cell. He looked every bit as imperious as though he was about to call to order a meeting of the top dogs of the World Economic Bureau.

Lem leaned over to whisper something to him. I scanned the row behind their seats and was surprised that Baby Mo’s wife wasn’t there in his support—not even as a prop, to weigh on the conscience of the judge. Knowing Lem, he was saving her for a more dramatic appearance at a later time.

The judge introduced herself to the defendant. The clerk read the charges from the indictment and asked Mohammed Gil-Darsin what plea he wished to enter.

“Not guilty.” Two words, spoken firmly in his best upper-class British accent, with a twinge of his native Ivorian French.

“Please be seated, sir,” the judge said. “I’ll hear the People on bail.”

Ellen rose to her feet, armed with a detailed list of facts in support of her request to keep the defendant remanded without bail. She did well until she ventured into today’s news of the Lille-based prostitution scandal.

“Do the French authorities intend to charge Mr. Gil-Darsin with a crime, Ms. Gunsher?” Donnelly asked.

“I don’t have that information at this time.”

There were six more rapid-fire questions that Ellen could answer only with guesses and gossip. “Sit down then, Ms. Gunsher. Save those arguments for a day when you’re more properly informed of the facts. Mr. Howell?”

“Good afternoon, Judge Donnelly. My client and I thank you for this opportunity to correct the terrible injustice of the original bail application,” Lem said, grandstanding for the audience at the same time as he struck a pose for the scribbling sketch artists. “As you can see from the criminal court arraignment proceedings, my
client—who commands, who deserves, who enjoys worldwide respect for his financial acumen and diplomacy—has been deprived of his liberty when he most needs it: to help to prepare for his defense in this case that apparently takes—let me see—four,
four
prosecutors to shepherd through the treacherous waters of the criminal justice system.”

“What’s your point?”

“Remand status, Your Honor, is generally reserved for the most heinous of criminals, for homicides and murder cases—like the one in which my dear friend Ms. Cooper finds herself entangled today.”

Low blow, Lem.
I fixed my eyes on the portrait of Lady Justice hanging on the wall behind the judge.

“Strike that remark from the record,” Donnelly said. “Go on. Any circumstances of which the court was not aware on Sunday, when bail was set at remand?”

“First, Your Honor, my client’s family was not able to be here with him at that time, which presents a very different picture of any man. But now his wife has arrived in New York. Madame Gil-Darsin—Kalissatou, as she is known—is an exceptional woman, an international superstar, and a woman of great character as well as independent means. The only reason she is not present today is that she is actually securing a lease—a twelve-month lease—on a furnished apartment on Central Park South. So we can assure you that my client will indeed have roots in this community—very expensive roots, I might add—for as long as it takes to dispose of the allegations against him.”

“Is that all, Mr. Howell?”

Lem covered every angle. He went on about Blanca Robles’s fifty-million-dollar civil suit, the connection to an imprisoned lover, the possibility that she had lied to police about her grounds for asylum.

“How about DNA, Mr. Howell? How does DNA lie?” Judge Donnelly asked. “Do you care to offer any explanation about how it came to be on the uniform of the complaining witness, as well as the walls and floor of your client’s hotel room?”

Unlike me, Lem never gave the slightest hint that the wind had been taken out of his sails. He bent his head in the direction of the judge and in a clipped voice said, “Not at this very moment, Your Honor. I’ll save that conversation for another day, after the prosecution has provided me with their lab reports so that our own experts can advise about any improprieties. We all know that mistakes can happen.”

“Very well then. You’re welcome to return to me when the ink dries on your client’s lease and you have any new grounds for reconsideration of his bail. I agree with you that remand on these charges, for a first offense, is a highly unusual position for Mr. Battaglia’s office. Feel free to renew your application when you think it’s appropriate.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

“Until such time, however, the defendant is remanded.”

Mohammed Gil-Darsin stood up, appearing far less sanguine about the news than did his lawyer. Lem chatted with him, and patted him on the shoulder as he sent him off to the holding pens behind the courtroom to await the bus ride to Rikers Island, then tried to make his apologies to me before we could follow the crowd out into the hallway.

“Well, at least Donnelly didn’t close the door on me entirely, did she?” he asked.

“Not so hard as I’d like to do.”

“How about I buy you a cocktail at the end of your long day, Alex? I think you and I have a lot to talk about.”

“It’s such a tempting offer, Lem,” I said, holding my arms out, palms up, imaginarily weighing each side like Lady Justice over my shoulder. “A drink with you tonight or root canal? Tough choice, but I think I’m leaning toward the latter.”

We were interrupted by Mickey Diamond, who’d come forward from the press section to select for tomorrow’s paper one of the sketches the
Post
artist had rendered.

“It’s not my fault, Alex,” he said. “I wasn’t working last night. I hated what they did to you with that headline this morning.”

“I know it wasn’t you. Don’t even think about it.” It was my own damn fault—the entanglement, as Lem called it, in the two murders that had occurred, the fact that Mike had been drawn in to help Luc on my behalf, and my bickering with him last night in the driveway in front of my building.

“How’s this?” Diamond said, holding several drawings in his hands. “Pick your favorite one. I’ll make it up to you. Your best angle, Alex.”

I laughed. “I’d prefer to be left out of it all together. Use this one of Ellen—it’s very flattering. Or this one of Lem, posturing like a peacock. I’ll even write the caption for you.”

“They’re going with the line I got already. I mean, it’s not my fault. I texted it in after Lem made his crack about you to the court.”

“Dare I ask?” I was so low on adrenaline that I couldn’t even muster the juice to blush with embarrassment or engage my bad temper.

Diamond lifted his pad to show me.
SEX CRIMES PROSECUTOR DINING IN HELL’S KITCHEN?

I made it through Battaglia’s press conference without taking any personal hits, then went back to my own office to continue working on his op-ed piece.

When I showed him a partial draft of the essay at 6:40 that evening, he told me the language wasn’t strong enough and I should stay at it. He had clearly given up the idea of placing it in the next day’s paper, so I felt no need to struggle with it any longer after he left.

Mercer was still waiting for me when I returned to my desk. “I neglected to feed you last night, after all that talk at ‘21.’”

“I’m not very good company. I’ve got no focus at all.”

“Mike wants to meet us for dinner.”

“Didn’t we just try that routine? It had a miserable ending for all concerned.”

“You owe it to him, girl. This week you just do. He has some things to tell you, and he wants to pick your brain.”

“There’s nothing left in it to pick. It’s like a flock of vultures went at it on empty stomachs. Is this with or without Luc?”

“Without.”

“No surprises again? Because I couldn’t bear it.” I opened the
door to the narrow coat closet in my office and took a look at myself in the mirror.

“No surprises.”

“Do either of you plan on telling me whether Luc’s on his way to Sing Sing already or just keeping busy around town?”

“Luc’s fine. He had another session with the Brooklyn cops today, along with both of his partners.”

I brushed my hair and put some lipstick on, but nothing was going to help the drained look my face had taken on during the week, or the despair I felt tonight.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Whatever’s left of me, I’m all yours.”

The elevator came down from the ninth floor, half-full of lawyers from one of the bureaus in the Trial Division. Two complimented us on the MGD indictment, while two others made gentle fun of the morning’s headline. I couldn’t wait to get out on the street, away from the office.

Colleagues were coming out of both buildings the DA’s office occupied on Hogan Place—five hundred lawyers strong, with thousands on the support staff as well. Those on trial would burn the midnight oil, but others split off in groups of two and three, headed for the bar at Forlini’s or an affordable dinner in Chinatown to relive the day’s work.

“Hey, Mercer,” Tom Curran, a senior litigator, called out. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Rain check,” the popular detective said, leading me toward his car on Canal Street.

“What’s the matter? You Coop’ed up tonight?”

I waved back at the group that guffawed at his joke. “The next dog of a case that finds its way to my desk will have your name written all over it, Tom.”

“Bring it on, Alex.” There was nothing about a courtroom contest that scared my good-natured friend. “What happened to your boy-toy? Today’s
Post
read like Chapman quit the force to write
copy for them. You need a backup? ’Cause I’m almost as good-looking as he is.”