“Any help?” Bob asked.

“I’m sure it will be when we figure out what we’re looking for. That hasn’t happened yet.”

Janine Borman, one of the misdemeanor assistants in the Trial Division, was waiting for me when we got back downstairs to my office.

“The judge in AP5 gave me half an hour to come up with some law or he’ll grant the defense request for a dismissal. I don’t have time to do the research. Figured you might have had this situation before.”

Great excuse-no time for research. Read that one as doesn’t know how to do the research, I thought to myself. “What’s the problem?”

“I’ve got a sexual abuse case. Happened in the subway-no CW. All I’ve got is the statement of the transit cop.” CW is our shorthand for “complaining witness.” As usually happens with minor crimes that occur in the subway system, local victims rarely wait around long enough to talk to the police. They know from long experience that the odds of anyone being apprehended are slim-and punished, even slimmer. Someone rubbing his private parts against their rear end in a crowded train is part of the price most women pay to get to their jobs every day in the Big Apple. The only advantage of the cold season is the extra padding of a winter coat against the offender.

“And the issue?”

Janine looked uncomfortable with the language that made up the fabric of my daily work. She hemmed and hawed as she glanced over at Chapman explaining the facts to me. “Well, this-um-this defendant, Anthony Gavropoulos, he was, like, on the other platform, across from the cop.

“The cop says he saw the defendant move in behind the woman who was standing all by herself. He claims Gavropoulos, well, that he could see him expose himself-”

“His penis?” I asked.

“Yeah. And that he had-um-an erection and was, like rubbing against the woman.”

“Like rubbing against the woman or rubbing against the woman, Janine? One is a crime, the other isn’t.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just-”

“Look, if you’re going to handle these cases, you’re going to have to deal with the language and the body parts. No euphemisms, no embarrassment. It’s a business.”

She gathered her composure and started over. “The offer is a plea to the charge. Misdemeanor sexual abuse. And a condition of the sentence is that the defendant go to a sex offender program.”

“Fine. So?”

“Defense attorney says his client won’t take the plea. Says his defense is going to be that the cop is lying. Gavropoulos says, well, he claims he’s too small. That the cop couldn’t have seen him from across the tracks even if he had an erection. Have you had any other case like this?”

Chapman cut her off, jabbing his finger in the air to make his point. “You don’t need any law, you don’t need any research. Here’s what you do. Go down to court, tell the lawyer to step out of the picture. Get lost. We don’t need him. And you tell Mr. Gavropoulos to take this like a man. ‘Anthony, be proud. Take the damn plea,’ you tell him. I’d rather have a conviction than admit I’ve got one that’s too small to be seen.”

Janine’s jaw dropped, believing as she did for a moment that Chapman’s advice was to be followed.

“He’s just kidding, Janine.” I walked her out of the office into the hallway and told her how to handle the judge by giving her some case citations on point before sending her on her way back to the courtroom.

Chapman was holding my coat for me when I went back into the room. “C’mon, Blondie, let me take you away from all this. Let’s go pick up Mercer and get to work on a real case. Remember what your Granny Jenny told me that time your mother had the surprise party for you a couple of years ago?”

I knew exactly what he was going to say. It was my Jewish grandmother’s favorite lament, having come to this country from Russia as a young adult, priding herself on having put her sons through college and professional schools.

She had looked at Mike when he was introduced as one of my colleagues and said, as she often did, “Seven years of the best education my son could afford for her and Paul Battaglia makes her an expert on penises and vaginas.Oy. Only in America.”

17

LOVE OR MONEY?“

“Fifty-fifty. It’s a toss-up.”

“I think it’s one more than the other.”

“How’re you counting lust? How’re you counting just out and out rage? Sex-related homicides? As love? That is no good.”

“Doesn’t matter. I think it’s money way more often than it’s love.”

“Take all your domestics. It’s not ‘love’ like you might think of it. But it’s love gone bad.”

“Yeah? Well those domestics are about money just as often as they are about any kind of emotional miswiring.”

I came out of the ladies’ room in the Mid-Manhattan Hospital cafeteria to rejoin one of the Chapman-Wallace dialogues on murder.

“What’s your tally, Coop?”

“Don’t know. Probably money.”

“Mercer, most of what we got is Paco shoots Flaco over red tops and blue tops.” The typical homicide squad investigation these days centered over arguments about crack vials from drug wars in all their rainbow glory of plastic stoppers-scarlet, navy, lavender, yellow, and so on.

“Sometimes, Flaco stabs Paco ‘cause his woman cheated on him,” Mike went on. “But he usually only gets pissed off about it if she’s a moneymaking part of the operation. Certainly not ’cause he loves her. These guys love their pit bulls and their pythons and their cockatoos. Not their broads.”

“So what hit Gemma Dogen? Love or money?” Mercer asked, knowing that neither Mike nor I had an answer. “C’mon, let’s go see what Spector says.”

The three of us wound our way through the maze of double doors and elevators from the cafeteria in the hospital complex to the quiet sixth-floor wing of Minuit Medical College. Mike gave his name to the receptionist at the main desk.

“Is Dr. Spector expecting you?”

“Yes, ma’am. We’re homicide detectives and Miss Cooper’s from the D.A.‘s office.”

He hadn’t said that we were typhoid fever carriers but our job titles elicited about the same kind of response. She frowned once at us, rolled her chair away from our direction, and then avoided all further eye contact as she rang Spector’s office to tell him that “those” people were here.

“Last door on your right, before the library.”

We proceeded down the corridor, past the darkened office that had been Gemma’s.

Spector stood in the doorway to welcome us, his easy smile and open manner exuding the confidence that his reputation suggested he owned. At five foot six inches, he was shorter than each of us, and his reddish brown hair was beginning to recede.

Still, he appeared to be younger than fifty-two, which is what Mercer’s notes had given as his age.

Like Gemma’s, Spector’s office was crammed with an assortment of professional items and devices, photographs and awards. But unlike hers, his was also alive with signs of personal connection-children’s faces beamed out of Plexiglas frames and humorous tributes from students were painted on posters as well as on plastic vertebrae.

“So you’re the people who are trying to restore some order to our little household, are you?”

“You wouldn’t think so, from the way the receptionist greeted us just now,” Mike answered.

“As you might guess, things haven’t gotten anywhere near back to normal yet, if you can ever describe a complex like this as ‘normal.’ The press hasn’t been very kind to us. Makes us sound like we’re not running a very tight operation.

“And you, young lady,” he said, gesturing toward me. “Well, once you bring a lawyer into the mix, a lot of the doctors just panic. The stereotypical distrust between the two professions is like a bad joke. I’ve tried to reassure my staff that you don’t do malpractice work, you’re just a prosecutor.”