37

"I'll catch up with you two later in the day. Let me go on down to the hospital and sit by his bedside. Maybe when Bessemer sobers up, he'll be willing to talk to me," Mercer said.

I got into the passenger seat and while Mike drove downtown toward my office, I tried to page the child welfare lawyers-Irizzary and Taggart-to learn what had happened at the meeting with Andrew and Dulles Tripping.

The phone was ringing as I walked in. It was Peter Robelon. "You've got news?" I asked him.

He was still angry about this morning. "Can we strike a deal? I act like a gent and you keep your goons away from me when you want to talk."

"Depends on whatever deals you've worked out with Jack Kliger."

Robelon was silent. It was obvious he had thought I didn't know that he was the target of an investigation in our office. "That's below the belt."

"So is everything that's happened to this poor kid for his entire life. Don't use Dulles as a pawn, Peter. Why are you fighting to keep Andrew Tripping out of jail?"

Why hadn't I played hardball earlier in the day? He seemed to be loosening up.

"Look, Alex, the boy's meeting with Andrew didn't go as well as expected. Mr. Irizzary told me Dulles was-well-was kind of freaked out by his father."

"And that surprises you? Your client's a very weird guy. So what's next?"

Robelon was squirming. "The lawyers are considering another possibility."

"Giving the Hoyts temporary custody?"

"Yeah. They're taking him over to the Chelsea Piers where Hoyt's docked. Play some ball, shoot some hoops, let him go out on the river for the weekend."

"Don't you think that's good for Dulles?"

He was silent again.

"Put aside your personal feelings for Graham Hoyt," I said. "Do you think he and his wife are sincere about wanting to adopt the boy?"

"Actually, I do. Hoyt's a pretentious bastard, but he adores Jenna, and she's devastated about being childless. She'd be a great mother, and they both have a lot to give to Dulles-between Jenna's warmth and Graham's, well, material blessings."

"Look, Andrew's your client, so I'm not asking you to say anything about him. But he's the last guy I'd want to see playing Mr. Mom."

"Doesn't mean he killed anyone, Alex. Doesn't even mean he raped anyone."

"We're just going around in circles. Thanks for letting me know the conversation is over," I said, ready to end it.

"That's only part of the reason I called."

"What's the rest?"

"Any chance I could meet with you alone, just to talk over some ideas I had about Paige Vallis's murder? Just the two of us-no cops?"

Not a prayer. "We're alone right now, Peter. Why don't you tell me what's on your mind?"

"I'd prefer not to do it on the phone."

"That's all I have time for at the moment."

He didn't pause for very long. "Andrew has a theory."

"I was almost ready to go along with you," I said. "His theories don't really interest me all that much, Peter."

"Hear me out, Alex. The reason Paige Vallis left her apartment and went downstairs the night she was killed? It's about you."

I sat up and started writing notes as he spoke. "That's ridiculous, Peter. If you're trying to make me feel worse about her death than I already do, then just keep on talking full-speed ahead."

"It's true. We're sure of it."

"'We' being you and that terribly unhinged psycho you represent?"

"Listen for a minute. Andrew thinks he can prove that the reason Paige went downstairs from her apartment last Friday night was to mail a letter to you, to send something she needed you to know, to have."

I was sweeping aside documents and law journals and case reports that had stacked up on my desk while I was out of town. Laura had sorted the mail from the past two days but I had buried it under the papers I had carried in this morning, so I looked for return addresses or unmarked envelopes that might possibly be from Paige Vallis.

"Like what?" I was making more of a mess, agitated by Peter's suggestion.

"I'm not sure, Alex. But Andrew-well, when I see you-"

"I'll call you back later. Let me look around." There was also three days of mail at home that I had not even touched, other than to pay some of the bills.

Mike had followed me in. "What'd that loser want?"

"To see me alone. Without you-or my goons, as he so politely implied. He says Tripping thinks Paige Vallis ran into her killer on her way from sending some midnight missive to me. Does that make sense to you?"

"That I'm a goon?" Mike was lifting papers and shuffling through things on my desktop. "Nah."

"I mean the letter to me."

"Like a suicide note? Like she sent you an apology for causing you such a hard time at the trial and then choked herself to death in her hallway? I don't think so."

"I don't either. Wouldn't she have called to tell me what she wanted to say, or if she was frightened, left me a message that she was mailing me something?"

"He's a whackjob, the Tripping guy. A complete paranoid. Next thing Robelon's going to tell you is that she sent you a letter recanting her allegations, saying she made up the whole story about the rape. That's what he and Tripping want you to believe. That and the fact that the mailman lost the letter."

"You're probably right."

"Sure I am. This way, you don't just dismiss the indictment against him in a couple of weeks, you get to exonerate him completely, with Vallis permanently out of the way."

I looked up at Mike. "Good thinking."

"Yeah, that one goes in the dead-letter department. What's next?"

"I thought we'd take a ride over to Chelsea Piers. Try to catch up with the happy campers before the child welfare agency lawyers cut out. See what went wrong at this morning's meeting between Dulles and his dad, and what the thinking is about the Hoyts as prospective parents," I said, and filled him in on what Robelon had told me.

"Nice day for an outing. Saturday afternoon on the river. Sure you didn't have enough water this week?"

"The sun's out now, it's a crisp fall day. I'll spring for hot dogs. If we get lucky, Hoyt's chef'll cook you a meal."

It was a little after one o'clock when we left the office and drove across Canal Street to get to the West Side Highway. "Don't ever tell my mother I took you to the Chelsea Piers. You know her and her superstitions. All bad things come in threes," Mike said.

"So what were the first two?"

"That's where the Titanic was supposed to dock on its maiden voyage, before that ice cube got in its way. And the Lusitania? She sailed from Chelsea on her regular run to London when the U-boat got her."

"You look at the place now and it's hard to believe it was the world's premier passenger ship terminal once." We drove north to Twenty-third Street, crossing onto the Hudson River Boulevard and parking in one of the large lots.

The Chelsea Piers, opened in 1910 to house the Atlantic's luxury liners, were a stunning urban design complex by the same firm that built Grand Central Terminal. The elegant row of gray buildings, edged with pink granite facades, took the place of a mess of crumbling, old waterfront structures of the nineteenth century.

In both world wars, the piers became the embarkation point for soldiers heading off to battle. By the 1960s, when air travel had made most ocean crossings obsolete, the decaying buildings were converted to cargo facilities. And when that part of the business relocated to the ports of New Jersey a decade later, the once-grand piers were demoted to use as warehouses, car pounds, and sanitation-truck repair stations.

By 1995, after a few years' work based on a proposal by three smart developers, the four surviving Chelsea Piers-numbered 59 through 62-were transformed through a $100 million project into a spectacular center for public recreation right on Manhattan's waterfront. Golf driving ranges, batting cages, roller rinks, bowling, an equestrian center, and a marina that could handle yachts like Graham Hoyt's were only some of the amusements available on the Piers.