“Don’t the police—?” I started to ask.
Jo blew me off. “Old guys, they sleep on benches out in the open, but most of the kids I hang with go deep in the woods. Hard to find us, and cops never give us a hard time.”
“Isn’t it dangerous?”
“So was being at home for me, and for—well, Angel. This is much easier,” Jo said, reaching out to pat the filthy blue bag beside her. “Me and my girl, we have a favorite tree we like to sleep under. And I got everything I need in my backpack. Did you find her—Angel’s—pack?”
“No,” I said. “Something special in it you can tell us about?”
“No, ma’am. Just we all keep everything we own in these. At night, it’s my pillow. Nobody could get to it without waking me up.”
“Can you describe her backpack?”
“Nope. I had no reason to notice. She just had one, like we all do.”
“What else did she have?” Mercer asked. “Do you remember anything else, anything about her clothing?”
Jo thought for several seconds. “A dark hoodie, last time I saw her. Cargo pants. Maybe a month ago or so is when I remember being with her, she had two shirts. Real pretty ones with ruffles and such.”
“Where did she get them?” I asked. “Did she have any money? Did she have a job?”
Jo looked out the window and hesitated before answering. “She told me she lifted them.”
“Shoplifted?”
“Yeah. From Macy’s.”
The idea that Angel had stolen things gave me a new source of hope. “Do you know if she was ever arrested?”
“She never said. But I don’t think so. She was good at swiping food from bodegas,” Jo said, remembering something that made her happy. “Last time I saw her she had one of those big jars of peanut butter and must have been five of us that ate dinner and breakfast off her.”
“Where in the Park did Angel stay, Jo?” I asked. “Where is your favorite place, and where was hers?”
She looked back and forth between Mercer and me. “I’m not telling you where I go. I don’t want any trouble.”
“You won’t get in any trouble,” I said. “I promise you. We want to find the man who killed Angel. We want to give her a decent burial. This isn’t about you, Jo.”
“Did she have a spot?” Mercer asked.
“Yes, sir. She was staying in a place they call the Ravine. You know where that is?”
“I do,” I said. “Up near 110th Street.”
“I’d never seen anything like it. Me and my girlfriend couldn’t believe we were in New York City. Angel said the woods were so thick there and it was so far off the road, down this big hill, that nobody would bother us. So we slept there, I think it was two nights.”
“Was Angel with anyone else?”
“Two other people.”
“Tell us about them,” I said. “Anything you can remember.”
“Guys. They were both guys. One was a tranny,” Jo said. “A white kid, maybe sixteen, from Long Island, who’d been beaten up pretty bad when one of the men he came on to found out.”
A wounded transsexual who sought shelter with Angel sounded just right.
“The other one was African American. Old, like maybe my grandfather’s age. Skin color dark like yours,” she said to Mercer, “with his hair all white. I don’t know where the tranny is now, but the old guy is Vergil. Folks call him Verge. Everybody in Central Park knows him, even the cops.”
“Knows him because he’s done bad things?” Mercer asked.
“Oh, no. ’Cause he’s lived there forever. Verge looks out for people. He knew Angel’s story, about her being abused and all. It’s Verge who made her leave the Ravine. Told her that bad stuff had happened there. He said there was a guy going around at night attacking people.”
Raymond Tanner? Could he have been Verge’s concern? Tanner’s work release had started in April and by mid-May he’d been AWOL. We needed to find Verge as soon as possible.
“When he made her leave the Ravine,” I said, “do you know where Verge took her?”
“Yeah. Yes, I do. We went together. Me and my girlfriend, and her and the tranny.”
“Where to?”
Jo hesitated again. “Verge took us to the Ramble. He said we’d be better off there.”
Again I kept a poker face.
“The Ramble covers a huge part of the Park,” Mercer said. “Can you describe where you were?”
Jo held her hands out to the side. “Verge said it was called Muggers Woods. That’s what I remember ’cause it sounded like a bad place. He said it used to be that way a long time ago, but not so much anymore. And it was perfectly fine.”
“Do you know it?” I asked Mercer.
“As of yesterday I do. It’s far north of the Point, way back off the paths,” he said to me. Then to Jo, “Does Verge have some kind of problem? Is there a reason our girl was with him?”
Jo smiled. “Yeah. Verge is real slow. I had an uncle like him, my mama used to call retarded. But fortunately people don’t use that word now. He’s simple, is what I’d say. Can’t read, and sometimes he talks nonsense.”
“What kind of nonsense?”
“Verge talks like a child, really. Likes to spend his time at the zoo, panhandlin’ for money. Speaks about the animals like they’re his friends. Says his family used to have a house in Central Park. Silly things like that.”
I leaned forward when Jo mentioned a house in the Park. “Does Verge say he lived in that house?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. He talks about it like there were houses there a hundred years ago. I told you it’s nonsense.”
“Not so crazy, Jo,” Mercer said. He didn’t stop to tell her about Seneca Village, but I knew that’s what he was thinking.
“Did you find her notebook?” Jo asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “Tell us about it.”
“Lots of us write in journals. Especially the girls. You know when you sleep outdoors, it’s always good to keep a book by you, ’cause then the cops think that you’re a student. But it really doesn’t have anything to do with that. Like my girlfriend, she makes lists. People she misses and people she doesn’t, stores where she lifted things so she can pay them back someday when she gets a job, which churches serve food and what times of the day.”
“And you? Do you write?”
“Mostly about places I’ve been on the street so I can tell other people about them—what’s good and what’s bad. Angel, she mostly wrote descriptions of folk. What their problems were, what she tried to do to help them. Sometimes she even sketched their faces. She could draw really good.” Jo paused for a few seconds. “She wrote in it every night, the times I was around her. You find that notebook, and you’ll pretty much find her life.”
“Did she let you read any of it?” Mercer asked.
“Not exactly. She showed me her drawings every now and then. Even made one of me with my girlfriend.”
“Was she afraid of anyone, Jo? Did she ever confide in you about that?”
“Just her father is all she told me. She told me nobody could hurt her as bad as he did.”
“How about Verge?” Mercer asked. “Did you ever see him get violent, get angry with anyone?”
I was sure he was thinking, as I was, about someone who knew the remote places of the Park so well and had attached himself to a vulnerable young woman. We needed to find to out who and where he was as quickly as possible. We needed to know whether he had a criminal history.
Jo rolled her eyes at Mercer. “No way Verge ever got angry. I told you he wanted to protect Angel. He’s got this thing he carries with him all the time, this little thing that he told her would make her safe. I guess that didn’t work.”
“What kind of thing?” I asked. “Was it a weapon of some kind?”
“No, ma’am. Nothing like that. I only saw it once, the last time we were with her,” Jo said. “It was some kind of cherub, some little creature that was painted mostly black with gold trim.”
Mercer was already reaching for the folder with the photographs of the ebony statue.
“Did she tell you that Verge gave her the cherub?” I asked.
“She never told me how she got it,” Jo said. “But there can only be two ways, don’t you think? Verge either gave it to her, or she stole it.”
“Your head looks like it’s spinning and ’bout to fly off your body,” Mercer said.
“We’ve suddenly got so many directions to go in that I don’t know where to start.”
My paralegal was making the short walk to Canal Street to buy clean clothes—T-shirts, pants, and underwear—for Jo. She had welcomed our invitation to shower in the restroom and was playing the vending machines for snacks and chips like they were Vegas slots.
“Where’s Mike?”
“Don’t know. He was going to check the Panoscan from the center of the crime scene to see what the views were from Bow Bridge. We’re waiting to hear from the head of the Conservancy to see if she can get us into Lavinia Dalton’s apartment. Now we need to find Verge.”
“I’ll call Manny Chirico about that. Get him ID’d, picked up, record checked, and tease everything he knows out of him—good guy or not. And I’ll go back at Vickee.”
“About what?” I asked.
“Whether she knows of other Seneca Village descendants. If there are family names that survived the generations, and whether Verge is one of them, walking around with that little black angel.”
“Maybe St. Michael’s Church has records about All Angels’,” I said. “And you’ve got to set up some system to keep a daily tab on Jo. She may pick up more information out there from her homeless buddies, and we have no way to reach her.”
“A little respect and a lot to eat will go a long way with her. I’ll set up a twice-a-day check-in. She can stop at a fixer in the Park or wherever she is, and she’ll have my card so any cop anywhere can loop me in.”
“I’ll hunt down Mike and push the visit to Dalton, but first I’m going up to Jessica Pell’s chambers to have a face-off with her.”
“Not a good idea, Alex.”
“It wasn’t a great one of hers to stake out my driveway last night. Today’s Thursday, and her big threat was to take Mike down by tomorrow. I’m not expecting a physical confrontation. Her court officers and law secretary will be right outside the door.”
Mercer laughed. “I have no doubt you’d win if it was mud wrestling, but Pell’s on a mission.”
“So am I,” I said, with renewed anger because of the tenderness of last night.
“I’ll wait for Jo to clean up, then take her where she wants to go and get on top of Verge. But you have to promise me you’ll stay away from Pell, you hear?”
“I’ll do my best, Mercer.”
After we separated and I thought through Mercer’s admonition, I told Laura that I had to watch one of the assistants on trial. I respected the judgment of my friends, but it was my own conscience that was nagging at me.
I walked up to the DA’s squad on the south end of the ninth floor. Ever since the office had been established, the NYPD had staffed it with a team of detectives—more than forty of them—whose assignment was to work with prosecutors on investigations and witness interviews. Some of them took turns guarding Battaglia, and all were available to work with us on serious matters.
The small cluster of cubicles known as the wire room was one of the most sophisticated operations in law enforcement. Several detectives whose specialty was electronic surveillance were geniuses at installing video equipment pursuant to search warrants the lawyers obtained. I had partnered with them on scores of undercover operations—from a dentist who was abusing his sedated patients in his office to child molesters who had lured adolescents to meets at hotel rooms. They were the teams who had mastered the art of setting up wiretaps and bugs, bringing down everyone from financial scammers to drug dealers with international cartels.
The door to the equipment-filled room was open, and three of the guys had headphones on and were listening to playback.
“Got a minute?” I asked Artie Scanlon, who was seated closest to me.
“Sure. What do you need, Alex?”
“I have a witness coming in—total sleazebag—and Mercer Wallace won’t be there to second me. Would you wire me up? The inconsistencies are all over the map, and I just don’t want to get burned by being alone.”
“Easy enough. Got a case number, or is it something I’ve been working on already?” Scanlon stood up and reached on a shelf above him to pull down a small recording device that could be concealed inside the front of my silk blouse.
“One thirty-nine,” I said. It seemed as good a number as any.
“Do you need video? I got a camera that will fit over the button of your shirt,” he said while he checked the batteries in the audio device.
“I just need the voice, thanks.”
Scanlon handed me the tiny microphone and showed me how to clip it onto my bra. I turned around so that he could attach the control package to the rear waistband of my slacks.
“Flip that switch to activate when you’re ready to start and you’ll be good to go.”
“Thanks, Artie. I’ll have it back to you within the hour.”
I returned to my desk to pick up a file folder so that I looked like I had a legal matter to discuss with the judge.
“Mike wants you to call him,” Laura said.
“Will do when I get back. Have to go up to the fifteenth floor on a case.”
“I told him you’d get back to him right away. He thinks you two can get into the apartment of a Mrs. Dalton this afternoon.”
“Fine, Laura. Please just tell him I’ll meet him wherever he wants at two.” I reached for my blazer on the back of the door, to cover the bump on my waistband.
“I would have had your case file ready, Alex. Which one is it?” Laura was efficient and loyal and always ready to cover my back.
“Not to worry. Just something Battaglia asked me to do. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
I raced down the staircase and crossed the seventh floor to get to the elevators that fed into the main section of the courthouse. When the doors opened, defense attorneys and perps, girlfriends and rent-a-baby toddlers stepped back to make room for me.
Jessica Pell was in the middle of a calendar call when she saw me enter the crowded courtroom. She sat bolt upright and adjusted her robe over the lacy white camisole that showed beneath the opening.
I waited for a break between cases before I approached the court officer. “I don’t have anything scheduled today, but I’d like a brief appearance before the judge.”
“No problem, Ms. Cooper. I’ll tell the clerk to fit you in next.”
I waited while Pell listened to a bail application on a burglary case. She appeared to be distracted by my presence, trying to keep an eye on me while she responded to counsel. I sat in the front row and flipped on the recorder when the clerk called my name.
“Do you have a case before me, Ms. Cooper?” Pell asked, the right side of her mouth twitching occasionally when she addressed me.
“A matter to discuss, Your Honor.”
She rose to her feet and told the court officers she wanted to recess and take me in the robing room.
“I’d like this on the record, Judge Pell,” I said, well aware that she was not about to let me talk in open court.
Pell directed her question to the stenographer, pointed one of her long fingers—nails painted a deep burgundy—at the machine on which all the proceedings were memorialized. “You didn’t get that, did you? I’d like you to strike it if you did.”
The stenographer held up the narrow strip of paper with one hand and drew an X across the part where I had spoken.
“Follow me, Ms. Cooper.”
She came down from the bench, and one of the officers led us into the robing room, closing it behind us to ensure our privacy.
The corner of Pell’s mouth continued to twitch. “What problem brings you up here, Ms. Cooper?”
“You, Your Honor. The problem I have with you.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Not for a minute. There are a few things I was hoping to put on the record.”
“Not until I hear them first,” she said, walking behind the desk to put some distance between us. I had no doubt the microphone would pick up our conversation just fine in the empty room.
“I can begin by asking what you were doing at my apartment building last night.”
She put her palms on the desk as though to steady herself.
“I beg your pardon?”
Pell was stalling while she thought of what to say.
“Midnight or a little later. Waiting in your car at my front door.”
“That’s absurd. I don’t know anyone in your building. I don’t even know where you live,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “Listen to me—trying to defend myself against your ridiculous statements as though I had to. I was at home, Ms. Cooper. Now, take your accusations out of my courtroom and keep your mouth shut.”
“And what should I do with the photographs, Judge Pell? The pictures I took with my cell phone?” She was as easy to bluff as a six-year-old. “The JSC 421 plate.”
She lowered her voice, gritting her teeth and pointing her finger at me as though it was a talon. “You are about to find yourself in contempt, Ms. Cooper.”
“The photos, Judge. What would you like me to do with them?”
She was pretty close to snapping. “Do you have any idea of the kind of pressure I’m under? Do you know that I have been threatened and harassed and stalked, and I have been trying to get your goddamn office to take me seriously?”
“And you thought that a house call to me would accomplish that?”
“It’s not about you. There—there’s someone else who lives in your building.”
“You just told me you didn’t know where I live.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” the judge said, unable to control the pitch of her voice. “You’re the one who’s responsible for putting my life in danger, Ms. Cooper. It was you who pulled the detail off me, even before the death threats landed on my desk.”
“I had nothing to do with whoever was guarding you, for whatever reason. So you made up some bullshit story to tell Paul Battaglia because Detective Chapman came to his senses and got out of bed with you?” I asked.
“None of your business, you jealous bitch,” Pell said.
“Jealous of what? I’ve never slept with Mike Chapman.” Last night’s kiss had given urgency to my idea to confront Jessica Pell while I could still speak the truth.
“That’s a lie.”
Not yet it isn’t.
“So you told the district attorney that you blamed the security lapse on me, right, with absolutely no regard for the truth of the situation?”
“Our conversation is none of your business, Ms. Cooper.”
“You are going to be so screwed, Judge, when the results of the handwriting analysis and the DNA on the envelopes in which your so-called death threats arrived are released to the
New York Post.
”
“Why—?”
Her anger was changing to fear as I started to talk about the evidence. “I’ve talked to Commissioner Scully about this.”
“What I reported to Chapman’s supervisor was in full confidence. If I had gone to Commissioner Scully directly, Mike Chapman would be looking for work by now.”
“He is too well respected in the department for anyone to take you seriously for very long,” I said. “Scully gets—we all get—that you are completely strung out, Judge Pell. That having been dumped by the deputy mayor was a—”
“You’re outrageous, Ms. Cooper. I—”
“Was a form of public humiliation you might not have deserved. But Mike Chapman doesn’t deserve anything like it either, nor do I. So I happened to stop by the lab this morning, and I can promise you that finding your DNA in the mixture of the fingerprints on your so-called death threats will undercut anyone’s belief in the crap you’re trying to sell and may—most thankfully—get you bounced right off the bench.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Most of the time I actually do, Judge. And I’m presenting witnesses at a hearing in ten days in front of your colleague, Judge Heller, about the admissibility of FST—fragmentary mixtures of DNA. So I’m pretty much up to speed on the science of it, and that—along with the comic book antics of your imaginary hit men—well, I’d say the likelihood of your reappointment to the court is about as promising as an encore hookup with Detective Chapman.”
“You’re going to pay for this, Alexandra Cooper.”
“Threaten me again, Your Honor, why don’t you? I have a fierce loyalty to my friends and to the colleagues I respect, and I’m not about to let you bring one of the best detectives in the city down because you think you’ve been seduced and abandoned.”
“Even if my DNA is on that stationery, I can explain that to Scully and the analysts. My relationship with Chapman has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the threats I’ve received.” Jessica Pell looked like a caged animal now.
“Legitimate, my ass. Which headline will come first, do you think?
JILTED JUDGE FEIGNS FEAR
?”
I asked. “Or
PELL PENS POISON EPISTLES
?”
Jessica Pell was ready to bring our conversation to an end. She came out from behind the desk and started to walk past me to the door.
“You’ve got quite a mouth on you, Ms. Cooper.”
“Just warming up, Judge.” I took a step back to get out of her way. “I think the ultimatum you gave to Sergeant Chirico was that he find some way to discipline Mike Chapman by the end of this week or you’d go to the commissioner. So I guess if you haven’t withdrawn your complaint by noon tomorrow, we get to take our gloves off and get down and dirty.”
Jessica Pell stopped in her tracks. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
“I’ve asked the lab to rush the results of the analysis of your letters. And I hate when law enforcement officers leak information, Your Honor, but they’d make such a great story for the Sunday papers—along with the photo of your car parked in front of my building last night. It will be hard to find someone to believe you after that.”
The judge pivoted to face me, lifting her right arm to take a swipe at my face. I turned my head to try to avoid the slap, but two of her nails caught the edge of my cheek.
“They won’t believe this either,” she said. “But you deserve it, and a kick in the gut to go with it. I suggest, Ms. Cooper, that the prosecution rests.”
My face stung, and I could feel a trickle of blood run down the side of it. Before I wiped it away, I reached for the battery pack on my waistband and held it in front of Pell’s nose.