The Deadhouse (25 page)

"You wanna come up for air, Mr. Frankel, or you wanna just babble
on?"

"Sorry, Mike. It's Mike, isn't it? Exactly what can I help you with?"

I answered, trying to set a pace for the conversation. "I hadn't
spoken with Lola in months, as I think I told you when you and Anne
Reininger came to my office. I'd really like to get a sense of what her
life was like those last six weeks. How she was spending her time, who
she was in touch with, what your contact was with her."

"Me?
My
contact with Lola?"

"Hey, who do you think she's talking to? You got somebody under your
desk we can't see?"

"No, it's just, I mean—well, Anne's the prosecutor assigned to the
case. I had to meet with Lola on a few occasions, just to oversee what
was happening with the sting. Anne's the one who spoke to her almost
every day. She can answer your questions."

"I'd like to begin with you, as long as we're here. Why don't you
give us an idea of how many times you met with her? Where and when."

Frankel thought for a moment and opened his large red desk calendar.
"All of my business appointments are logged in this. Let me just see."
He opened the book about midway, to June, and began to flip through the
pages. "I guess the first time I met Lola was in the early fall.
September twenty-third, to be exact. Anne brought her up to me to
introduce us. High-profile case and all that. Vinny likes me to keep an
eye on things."

The intercom buzzed. "Excuse me, Mr. Frankel. I've got your daughter
on line two. She wants to know if she can use the car tonight after you
get home. Would you like to speak with her now?"

"Hold my calls, will you? Tell her yes, and try not to interrupt us
till I'm through here, okay?"

"How many meetings after that?""Skimming through here, it looks like
six, at the most."

"Where were they?"

"That was the only one in my office. The other times I went down to
the second floor, to Anne's bureau. Family Violence Unit."

"Did you ever meet with her anywhere else, outside the office?"

"Yes. I was at her sister's house—Lily's—the day we staged the
shooting. We went over, Anne and I, with the detectives just to make
sure we approved the setup and to stroke the rest of the family. Pump
Lola up."

Frankel was on his feet now, adjusting the blinds on his window as
the sunlight bounced its glare off the icy surface of the parked cars
in the lot below.

"Must have been a very tense morning. Were you there when the scam
went down?"

He did the "me" thing again. "Me?"

"Yeah."

"No, I did what I had to do and got out of there. Had stuff to work
on back at the office."

"What stuff?"

"Had to meet with one of the guys on a home-invasion case. Had to
help him draft a bill of particulars."

"Got that in your big red book?" Mike asked.

"Got what?"

"Your meeting on the case you just told us about."

"That, um, that came up kind of unexpectedly. It's probably not in
here." Frankel patted the cover of the book.

"Mind if I take a look through those entries?"

"I just told you, I doubt that one's in here."

"I mean the references to Lola. Mind if I jot down those dates?"

Frankel opened the book to the first September date and passed it
across to Chapman.

"Help yourself, Detective."

Mike rested his notepad on the desk. He turned the pages and copied
the dates and times of the Dakota-Reininger-Frankel appointments. When
he got to the day of the shooting, he paused and read aloud: "'Thursday
morning, December nineteenth. Nine A.M. Meet Reininger at Dakota scene.
Sting preparation. Noon. Lunch with Vinny. Two P.M. In the field.'

"Strangest thing. When my partner uses that expression—'in the
field'—it means he took the rest of his tour off to get laid. But then,
we're just cops. What does it mean to you, Mr. Frankel? What kind of
home invasion were you working on?"

"Who's in control of this operation, Alex, you or this rude—?"

"Mike and I want to know exactly the same information. How did you
spend that afternoon?"

"I, uh, I must have gone ... I guess I left here early. I probably
did some holiday shopping."

"Like Ms. Cooper tells the street mopes that sit in her office and
lie to her all day, 'probably' and 'I guess' and 'I must have' don't
cut it. This ain't ancient history, Mr. Frankel. It's one week ago this
very day. When you and Fat Vinny pushed back from the lunch table,
where did you go and what did you do?"

"My daughter was coming home from college the next day. I went over
to the mall to pick up a few gifts for my kids."

"What stores? I assume you can tell me what you bought and give me
receipts for the things."

"You know, Detective, I'm the executive assistant district attorney
for this county. You blow in here like you're auditioning for a bit
part as a wise guy on
The Sopranos.
All bluff and bluster
and bullshit, and I actually let you rattle me, like I have something
to worry about. Well, you came to the wrong place this time. I
supervised this investigation. I'm not the subject of it. Why don't you
two just crawl back through the tunnel, or however you dragged
yourselves here, and go solve your case like professionals, okay?"

"Did you drive Lola back to Manhattan with your own wheels, or did
you use a government car to take her home?"

Frankel strode to the door of his office and opened it wide.

Mike got up from his chair as though to leave, then walked behind
the desk. He leaned over and reached into the trash, removing from it
the Kleenex-wrapped piece of gum that had been discarded when Frankel
first brought us into the room. He held it up to the light and admired
it as though it were a trophy.

"What the f—?"

"I'm sorry. Would you prefer that I have the office sealed off while
Ms. Cooper gets us a search warrant to take your droppings? You a
Wrigley's man? Or would you suggest we compare your underwear to the
things we found in Lola's apartment? I'd say those size-forty shorts
would fit him pretty well, don't you think, blondie?"

Frankel walked over to Chapman and grabbed the tissue from his hand
without meeting any resistance. "You two must have lost your minds."

He was like an animal trapped in his own lair. He was patently
unhappy with our presence, but afraid that we would walk out without
telling him what we knew. Then he put his hand to his eyes and shook
his head. "Or maybe I have."

He walked to the windowsill and sat on its edge. "Lola was
desperately lonely. She was looking for somebody to cling to, some kind
of safety net. I took her out a few times. Never here, in New Jersey,
where anyone could see us. In the city, up near the college. I'm not
married, if that's what you're thinking. I've been divorced for a
couple of years."

"That wasn't my first thought," I said. "I actually wondered how you
could get involved with a victim while her case was pending in your
office."

"My shrink wants to know the same thing." He sat at his desk and
again his fingers tapped steadily against the wooden top. "I had
thought about calling you, Alex. I just couldn't pick up the phone to
do it. I realize that it's selfish, but if I get myself in the middle
of all this, I obviously have to walk out the door here. Give up my
job. Make waves for the district attorney."

I was waiting for him to invoke his right to counsel. Like most
lawyers, he was loath to do it, figuring—I was certain—that he was
smarter than any young prosecutor and the average cop alone or in
combination. I was trying to stay calm, wondering how Frankel could
explain being with Lola in her apartment last Thursday afternoon, and
how much we should consider him a suspect in her death.

He retraced his steps to his September meeting with Lola and filled
in more of the blanks. She had called him again, he said, in October,
and invited him to a presentation she was making at an academic
convention at the New York Hilton. Her speech was magnificent, Frankel
told us, and despite all the professional prohibitions, he began to
come into the city to see her from time to time, becoming intimate with
her before Thanksgiving. "Does Vinny know?"

"He'd break my neck. I suspect this could cost him a few votes in
the next election, and that's the bottom line."

Chapman worked him a bit more, and then I tried to move things along
to the day of the murder. "After Lola called you, what happened that
afternoon?"

"I was the only one who knew she was going to leave her sister's
house. Lily was driving her crazy. The histrionics, the crying, the
busybody nature of her personality. We had all we could do— Anne did,
really—to keep Lola there long enough to execute the plan. I had
promised to drive her home afterward. She didn't want detectives
sitting around her apartment. She was tired of being watched and waited
on. She just wanted to go home and get back to work."

"So she called you here at the office."

He looked at me quizzically. "Surveillance?"

"Even easier. Telephone records."

"I went back to Lily's neighborhood and waited around the corner.
Lola was in great spirits. Felt she'd helped us nail Ivan, and that she
would begin to regain a bit of control over her life.

We drove into town and I took her up to Riverside Drive. She had
some things she wanted to do at home, and then she was going to meet
me, at seven o'clock, for dinner at a Chinese place on Amsterdam
Avenue. She never showed up. I called and called, and when I finally
decided to drive back to the apartment to see what the problem was,
cops were swarming all over the place. The last time I saw her was when
I let her out of my car in front of her building."

We were all silent. Frankel had taken us halfway there, but I didn't
believe that he was telling the truth about how he left Lola. I was
thinking of the semen-stained sheets, and I'm sure Mike was, too.

"Where did you go? How'd you spend the rest of the afternoon?"

Frankel was fidgeting again. "Let me think a minute. Um, I—I drove
down to, um—there are a couple of bookstores on Broadway. I wandered in
and out of those. I had some coffee and read a newspaper."

Mike took the pencil he'd been writing with and snapped it in half.
"I hate it when people lie to me."

"I don't remember exactly what I did that afternoon. But you don't
want me to say I don't remember, so I'm telling you what I would have
done. I was wandering around Columbia, I was walking in and out of
shops, trying to keep warm and pass the time. It had no significance at
the moment because I had no idea anything was wrong. I was just killing
time—"

"Or Lola."

"Don't be a horse's ass, Detective. Don't sit in
my
office
and even presume to treat me like I did something wrong." His voice was
raised now, shrill and strident. "I never went inside Lola Dakota's
apartment last Thursday." Frankel spit each word at us, slowly and
angrily.

"Then how come there's seminal fluid all over the sheets on her sofa
bed? And how come if you just spit over at me one more time, I'm gonna
have enough of your goddamn body fluid from this slobbering saliva all
over the new tie my aunt Bridget gave me for Christmas to let the lab
match it up before your kid gets home with the car tonight."

"If
there's semen on those sheets, and
if it
happens
to be mine, Detective ... let me stop right there. That's a really big
'if,' 'cause Lola and I did not exactly have what I would call an
exclusive relationship."

"Maybe we can narrow it down a bit. Coop, how much you wanna bet
that Mr. Frankel here has a pack of gum, white wrapper with that
distinctive green arrow, right in his pants pocket?"

"I'm not betting against you, Mr. Chapman."

"What's the point of that?" Bart was furious.

"We've got DNA from the sheets, and DNA from the gum. You know where
the bed linens were, and the two of us happen to know exactly where we
found your chewed-up ball of saliva. Now all you have to do is remember
how many places you were when you tossed your gum. Was it in Lola's
bedroom? In the kitchen? For a guy with a regular habit like yours,
it's gonna be hard to single out every stick you got rid of. Leave out
an important stop, and I'll nail your ass to the wall. The easiest
thing for you to do is just to retrace your steps for us, honestly this
time. We know damn well that you're leaving something out."

"Well, I sure as hell wasn't in the elevator shaft when she was
murdered. Alex, please. You've got to believe that I was never,
never
inside Lola's building the day she was killed. Of course I won't
deny that we'd been intimate. But whatever you found on the sheets must
be there from two or three weeks ago. We slipped away from Lily's one
afternoon, and I took Lola to run some of the errands she needed to get
done around school. Then we stopped by at her apartment and yes, we
made love. She never spent another night there, so she obviously didn't
have any time to do the laundry.

"And the gum? Yeah, I chew gum all the time. It's probably in every
wastebasket in the apartment. It's a nervous habit. Started when I gave
up cigarettes, and now I do it all the time."

Chapman fisted both hands and leaned his knuckles on the desk,
bending toward Frankel. "If you didn't go into Lola's building that
day, where else did you go? Help me. Tell me one other stop you made
that I can verify."

Bart twisted and squirmed. Mike tried to nudge him in the right
direction. "Start with the campus. Did you go anywhere near the
college?"

"Columbia?"

"Or King's."

"I'm not familiar with King's. Didn't exist in my day. So I walked
around Columbia a bit. But it was too cold. I got in my car and drove
down Broadway. Manhattan has a bunch of these great little mystery
bookstores. Four or five of them, all over town. It took me a while to
find one. Just took a book into a coffee shop and read for a while. I
told you that before, and it's true. I'll check at home and see if I
can find a receipt."