22

“Stop beating yourself up over it, kid. He’s a cop and you’re not. Aren’t we supposed to take bullets for the rest of you ungrateful assholes who delight in calling us pigs? You didn’t shoot him. Some friggin’ mutt who I should have alone in my office for maybe fifteen minutes…”

I had beeped Chapman even before I called the lieutenant and the district attorney. “It’s my fault we kept the meet without telling you about it.”

“Great, blondie. You wanted me pumped full of lead too, huh?” Mike had raced to the hospital, arriving within an hour of my call, and was waiting with me for word from Mercer’s surgeon. He was white with fear about his friend’s medical condition, and his fingers combed through his hair constantly-a sure sign of his agitation.

“What did you tell Spencer?” Mercer’s father was a widower, retired from his job as a mechanic at Delta Air Lines. Mike had stopped by his home in Queens on his way to the hospital, to tell Spencer Wallace about the shooting.

“Man, that sucked. Better me than seeing some chaplain on your doorstep, like it was normal for him to drop in every week to pray for Mercer’s well-being. I just didn’t want his pop to hear it on the news later without some personal contact first. Might be the toughest thing I’ve ever done.” Mike stopped pacing long enough to sit down on one of the institutional beige vinyl chairs in the waiting lounge and rest his head back against the neck cushion.

“Did he want to come here with you?” I knew Spencer had already suffered a mild stroke earlier in the year and had not yet fully recovered. But Mercer was the light of his life, and it tore me apart to think of how the impact of this event would pain him.

“Yeah, but I told him absolutely not. He just looks so weak to begin with, Alex, and I knocked whatever remained right out of his guts. His sister lives down the block, so I called her to come in to sit with him for the afternoon.” Mercer had two ex-wives and no current steady. “Spencer was worried about you, too. He just looked at me and said that you and I are Mercer’s family now. We’re the ones to be with him today.”

Mike was on his feet again, first circling the room, then walking out the doorway.

“Where are you going?”

“I got some calls to make. Sit tight.”

“There’s a phone right here. We can use my credit card number to get an outside line.”

Mike ignored me and walked off. I understood the dynamic and knew that, as close as the three of us were, I was an outsider in these circumstances. The fraternity of police officers who put their lives on the line every day for the rest of us circles the wagons pretty tightly when one of their own is harmed. I had been there today with Mercer, but I had escaped injury. Most cops swear they would rather have given their own life than to have failed to protect a partner. I didn’t carry a gun and would not have been expected to play the role that a police officer would play in this situation. But my heart was heavy with guilt knowing that I had drawn Mercer into a situation that had, perhaps, cost him his life.

“Are you Miss Cooper?”

The halls were swarming with cops-some of whom had responded to the news of a downed colleague, others of whom Mercer had worked with and had heard of the shooting through the department grapevine. The commissioner was coming back by helicopter from a weekend upstate, and the mayor was expected to arrive at the hospital within the next hour to visit Mercer’s bedside.

“Yes, I am.”

“Lieutenant Gibbons asked me to bring these to you. Thought you might need ’em.” The young patrolman handed me a brown paper bag. Inside were my identification badge, wallet, keys, and cell phone. “Said to tell you that he had to keep the pocketbook and the rest of the contents to send over to Latent to be processed for prints.”

I couldn’t remember when I had dropped the bag from my shoulder, and even though I doubted the gunman had stopped to touch my belongings, I knew the routine investigation of a police officer’s shooting would include the most painstaking details. This gunman would be found.

“Tell him thanks.”

Chapman reentered the room. “Man, you don’t want to set foot out in the lobby of this place. The hospital is crawling with reporters. Last thing they need to see is a bloodstained prosecutor, and Battaglia’ll have you begging for a job with the Legal Aid Society’s Baghdad branch office.” I glanced down at the pale yellow suit now covered with blood from Mercer’s wound.

“Maybe Mickey Diamond was right. Maybe his fictitious story saying we were close to a solution and an arrest made the killer nervous and drove him to the surface.”

“Did you call the other emergency rooms?” I asked, pretty certain that the shooter had fled only because Mercer had nailed him in the thigh with at least one shot, and that the wound was serious enough to need treatment.

“That’s a waste of time. He ain’t walking into that kind of trap, if he’s been this smart.”

“Just do it. Remember the Trenta story?” I had handled a case a year before in which a burglar had surprised a woman in her apartment and, after stealing her money, demanded that she perform oral sex on him. As she kneeled on the cold linoleum floor in her kitchen and placed her mouth on the defendant’s penis, she noticed that he put his knife down on the counter. So instead of acceding to his request, she bit him as hard as she could and kept biting as the defendant howled in pain.

An hour later, Harry Trenta walked into Roosevelt Hospital and asked to be treated for an injury to his private parts that occurred, he told the nurse, when he fell out of bed. She examined what she described in her notes as a “shredded penis”-a condition completely inconsistent with a fall-and contacted the local precinct to ask whether anyone had reported a recent attempt at a sexual assault.

As is often the case, we count on the stupidity of the perpetrators to make our jobs easier. In this instance, that kind of slip had not yet occurred. Mike didn’t expect us to get lucky now.

“Someone else can take care of that end of it. I did check out Santa Fe. Marina Sette got back there yesterday afternoon. The airline can probably confirm that for us. In any event, my guess is that she was airborne when that call was made to the squad asking us to come to the gallery. So either she’s a part of this-phoned from the plane or had someone else place the call for her-or whoever set it up knew she was unreachable all afternoon and that’s why her name was used.”

In the hours since Mike had arrived at the hospital, I had also brought him up to date on the contacts Mercer had told me about yesterday. Mike had made appointments to see Preston Mattox and Varelli’s apprentice, Don Cannon, on Monday, but I also knew that he would not step outside the doors of Saint Vincent’s-no matter how long it took-until he could see Mercer.

Again Mike was pacing. “Your faithful pal Mickey Diamond has a new one for his Wall of Shame.” The Post reporter papered the small pressroom in the courthouse with his frontpage stories. “News radio’s already calling this one ‘Slaughter off Tenth Avenue.’ No doubt they’re gonna run that poor girl’s puss all over the tabloids. What a waste of a life-she was just in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. This guy is a monster.”

Mercer had been in surgery for more than four hours at this point. Mike and I were running out of things to distract us. Every half hour brought a new wave of detectives who came by-to console, to pray, to offer blood or whatever aid was needed. The mayor and police commissioner had given their sound bites from the hospital lobby, urged all the citizens of New York to keep Mercer in their prayers, and moved on.