“Which one we got here, the perp or the victim?” one asked.

“You got the victim,” Mike said, rising to his feet and flashing his badge at the pair.

“She’s a prosecutor,” he went on, summarizing the story in a couple of sentences.

“V.I.P treatment or else she’s likely to drop a dime on you.”

My mouth curled up in a grin as he used police lingo for ratting someone out.

“I’m a physician,” David added, “I’d like to ride with you.

She’s my friend.“ He began to describe his observations of my condition as they gently lifted me onto the canvas.

“I don’t need this, really. I can walk,” were my first words as they carried me toward the staircase.

“Relax, blondie. You’re going first class. You’re my case now I make all the decisions,” Chapman replied.

It wasn’t exactly Notorious, but I was every bit as grateful as Ingrid Bergman must have felt as my saviors swept me up the grand steps toward the waiting ambulance. It was almost 5 A.M. by the time I was comfortably settled into a nightgown and robe, sipping some warm, exotic combination of herbs that was prepared for me by Joan Stafford’s Asian housekeeper, after David had refused my request for a double Dewar’s. He had called Joan from the Emergency Room of New York Hospital, when I admitted that the only way I could get any sleep during the next few days was in the care of a friend I could trust.

Mike had known the triage nurse in the ER from years of working the same midnight shifts. She had taken me into an examining room after the domestic stabbing and before the alcoholic who cracked her elbow tripping off a curb. By the time the resident came into the cubic leto inspect me, the nurse had wiped all my scrapes with alcohol, determined that the wound on my thigh was too shallow to need stitches, and ordered that a set of x-rays be taken to make sure the injuries to my ankle were not serious. The doctor finished the once-over and prescribed some medication for pain and sleep.

Ellen Goldman had been taken to a hospital on the West Side. Mike was smart enough not to tell me which one, although I overheard him phoning the captain to say that her condition was critical but stable when she got out of surgery shortly after four, about the same hour of the morning I was released from the Emergency Room.

Mike and David drove me to Joan’s apartment, where she had dressed to meet us in the lobby.

“I didn’t think you could look any worse than you did when we had dinner on Tuesday, but you’ve reached a new low, girl. We’ll get you back in shape,” she said as she embraced me, preparing me for what I would see when I got up my nerve to look myself over.

She lived in a eight-room duplex in one of the most elegant buildings in Manhattan, and her guest bedroom, overlooking the East River, was plumped and fluffed for my arrival, like a soft aqua-toned cocoon, ready to shield me from the real world. I spent a few minutes checking myself out in the bathroom mirror, appalled by the number of lacerations and marks that crisscrossed my cheeks and neck, and the variety of bruises that had swollen and discolored my slender fingers and hands. I changed into Joan’s lingerie and velvet robe, and descended to the library, where she had poured a brandy for herself, David, and Mike.

“Anybody want to tell me what took you guys so long?” I asked, directing my question to Mike. I screwed up my face at the first swallow of the tea, which was sour and tasteless,

Joan came to sit beside me on the thick arm of my lounge chair, offering me a mouthful of her Courvoisier.

“Next time I call you, don’t tell me you can’t take the call,” Mike fired back at me.

“In the middle of a line-up? The first time you called, right after I got to the Special Victims Squad, nobody said it was urgent.”

“Well, it wasn’t then. I hadn’t spoken to David yet. After I started to get information from him, I called back twice.

Got some old hair bag who didn’t seem to know what was going on.

Finally, when we put most of it together, I called there frantically, telling them to find you and get you back upstairs to take the call. That’s when the desk sergeant told me you’d gotten into a car with a woman.“

“Start over,” I said.

“Tell me how you figured it out.”

David started to talk, describing his meeting with Jed.

“He showed up in my office a bit earlier than expected, at seven-fifteen, eager to tell me to tell anyone who would listen, I think what had been going on. I asked him to describe the details of the case of the woman who had been stalking him in California he said her name was Ellie Guttmann-‘ Mike interrupted him.

“Yeah, I had already gotten that from the Threat Management Unit during the afternoon, when they pulled up Segal’s case for me in Los Angeles.

I just had no way to connect it to Ellen Goldman then.“

“Jed insisted to me and I believe him, Alex that he never had any kind of relationship with Goldman or Guttmann, whichever is her real name.”

“It’s Guttmann,” Mike broke in again.

“I checked with Immigration. Israeli passport.”

Joan had joined in the hunt.

“After you guys called me from the hospital, I checked-her name in Nexis, on my computer. Just territorial on my part I couldn’t believe a writer had tried to kill you, Alex. There must be fifty Ellen Goldmans with published articles in the last year alone. My guess is that it was a pretty safe alias, close to her real name, if anybody was going to try to check out her press credentials and see if she had ever written anything before.”

David went back to his story.

“My secretary had pulled some of the recent publications on erotomania. I read them on the shuttle yesterday, and then Jed and I went over the information. He had never heard whether there was a diagnosis in Goldman’s case, but it’s true that Jed’s wife was the complaining witness. He had wiped his hands of the matter once the police locked her up, and he was moving East.”

“No diagnosis was made, according to the LAPD,” Mike reported.

“They had an easy conviction for aggravated harassment, based on the telephone records of her calls to Segal’s home and office, and the letters to his wife. Just a lock-up, no psych report.”

“Ellen Goldman is a classic case. I read Dietz, Zona, Sharma all the current experts on the subject.”

“What’s a ”classic“ erotomaniac?” I asked.

“To begin with,” he responded, ‘most of the subjects of the disorder are women, young women like Ellen Goldman in their early thirties. Their victims are male, usually older, and usually men of a higher status, socioeconomic class or even an unattainable public figure, like a celebrity or politician. Jed fit every one of those categories when she first encountered him in California.“

We were all listening attentively.

“It’s interesting, too, that almost half of the subjects studied were foreign-born.

Again, like Goldman. And a lot of them adopt different persona that they use for writing letters to their subjects, because they’re so smart and articulate in this instance, the Cordelia Jeffers correspondence.“

“How long before they give up this delusion?” Joan wanted to know.

“With other obsessions, so-called ”simple“ obsessions,” David told her, ‘the subjects only made contact for less than a year. With erotomaniacs, these episodes have gone on for ten or twelve years, with repeated efforts to keep in touch with the man. They make phone calls, write letters, stalk their subjects at home, in offices, on airplanes, in hotels you name it. They are convinced that’s the delusion that if they can get the obstacle, the other woman, out of the way, the man they’re obsessed with will be united with them and able to declare his love.“

“Wasn’t Jed aware of any of this, with Isabella? Didn’t it ever occur to him that Goldman was her killer?” I wanted to know.