Death Angel (5 page)

“I had hoped to skip town before the first tantrum,” Vickee said, returning to the table as the three of us were finishing our appetizers. “Sorry for taking so long. You’d think it was life-threatening to run out of Cocoa Puffs.”

We rushed through our dinner, the others doing most of the talking while I tried to think about how much of my stress I’d been imposing on everyone at work. I had not known Vickee as long as my two closest friends—Nina Baum, who had been my roommate at Wellesley College, and Joan Stafford, a playwright who split her time between Washington, DC, and the city—but she was a straight shooter and a terrifically loyal pal, so I expected to get some tough feedback over the weekend.

I told Giuliano to put the bill on my tab as we were just about ready to leave. Mike asked him if we could go down to his office to check out the Final Jeopardy question, which had been a habit of Mike’s for as long as I’d known him. Crime scene, cheap bar, morgue, or my apartment, there was no setting in which he didn’t stop everything until someone around him—often Mercer or me—put down twenty dollars as a bet on the night’s big answer.

I was the last of the four of us down the narrow steps to the basement office. Mike used the clicker to turn on the small television propped on a high corner shelf. His timing was never off, and within a minute of finding the right channel, Alex Trebek revealed the large game board and announced that the final category for tonight was “MEDICINE.”

“I owe you twenty,” Mike said, pointing a finger at me. “See me after payday next week.”

“It’s not like you to throw in the towel,” Vickee said.

“It’s the Benjamin Cooper theory. Coop’ll slam-dunk this one ’cause her old man taught her as much about medicine as she knows about the law. Just watch her double down.”

My father, the son of Russian Jews who had fled political oppression to come to the States, had started his medical practice as a cardiologist. Soon after leaving med school, he and his partner fashioned a half-inch piece of plastic tubing into a device that had been adapted for use in almost all surgery worldwide involving the aorta. The Cooper-Hoffman Valve not only changed our modest family circumstances and allowed me a very privileged upbringing, but also, more important, changed medical procedures in his field for the entire profession.

“The usual twenty,” I said. “You’re up, Mercer.”

“What does she do if she knows the answer, Mr. Chapman?” Mercer asked. “Is she supposed to keep her mouth shut and lose, like you do with my four-year-old when you play checkers, to make him feel better?”

“That would help,” Mike said, chewing on the olive from his drink.

When the commercial was over, we had all bet the minimum and waited for the answer to be posted. “Term for rare condition of individuals who share the same brain.”

Trebek read the answer aloud twice.

Mike turned away and started to walk out of the room. “What is Alex Cooper and a jackass? That would have been my answer.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Trebek said to the first contestant.

“Not me,” Mike said. “I’m not the least bit sorry.”

“We don’t call them Siamese twins anymore,” Trebek chided the player. “Politically incorrect, don’t you think?”

I was relieved that I didn’t know the proper term either. Vickee looked to me for guidance, but I just shrugged my shoulders.

It was Trebek who announced that the question was “What are craniopagus twins? Craniopagus is the word we were looking for to describe twins joined at the head, who sometimes actually share the same brain.”

“No winners tonight,” Vickee said. “Time to get ourselves on the plane to paradise.”

I tugged at the bottom of Mike’s blazer as I tailed him up the stairs. “I promise to come back on Sunday with a new attitude if you’ll be a bit kinder. How’s that?”

“Works for me.”

I could barely hear him. He wouldn’t turn around to look at me, just hit the landing and kept on walking through the growing crowd of Friday night customers, straight to the bar.

Vickee put her arms around Mike from behind and kissed his cheek.

I said, “See you Monday,” and walked out with Mercer.

It took less than twenty minutes to get from the door of Primola to the terminal at LaGuardia. We said good-bye to Mercer and checked in, boarding half an hour later.

The short flight—fifty minutes from takeoff to landing on a crystal-clear night—was right on time. It was always hard to talk over the noise of the two turboprops, so I closed my eyes and thought about Mike’s tirade while Vickee worked on a memo about the day’s press inquiries. One of the minivan cabs drove us from the airport to my home on a hilltop in Chilmark—an old farmhouse on a lovely piece of land, surrounded by ancient stone walls and overlooking the water.

The caretaker had readied the house for our arrival. Vickee had been here many times, so she carried her tote upstairs to the main guest room while I went into my bedroom and changed down to a T-shirt and leggings.

She was in the kitchen five minutes later. “Nightcap on the deck?”

“The perfect complement to a full moon.”

Vickee opened a bottle of chardonnay while I put ice cubes in a glass and filled it with as much Dewar’s as it could hold. I grabbed shawls for each of us to wrap around our shoulders in case it got chilly, and we went out onto the deck in bare feet, carrying our drinks.

We clinked our glasses together, and I stretched out on one of the lounge chairs. Vickee stood on the edge of the deck, looking off at the horizon, where the only lights in the distance appeared to be from the gas dock across the water in Menemsha.

“This is about as close to heaven as I expect to get until I die,” she said, coming back to pull up a chair beside me.

“It’s a pretty special place. I can come up here carrying all the aggravation and anxiety that the job imposes, and by the time I wake up the tranquility and peacefulness of this island have overtaken me. It’s like I’m a different person.” I sipped the Scotch so that it didn’t overflow the glass. And then I laughed. “I guess that’s the fix Mike is hoping for.”

“Mercer’ll tune that boy up, too. He needs his own attitude adjustment,” Vickee said. “One of the things I like best is sitting out here in the dark and seeing all these millions of stars. Folks in the city don’t know what they’re missing.”

She was right. The bright lights everywhere in big cities made it impossible to glimpse the total brilliance of the night sky. Here, the deep navy background looked like a velvet ceiling with sparkling white lights dangling from it.

“Can you see the North Star?”

“Help me out.”

“That’s the Little Dipper,” I said, pointing to the familiar outline within Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, one of the prominent constellations of the Northern Hemisphere in June.

“Got it.”

“The two stars that form the lower half of the cup, or the dipper? Make an imaginary line straight up above them, and that really bright one, that’s Polaris, the North Star.”

“Is that the brightest star in the sky?”

“Most people think so, but there are forty or so that beat it out,” I said. “Don’t tell Mike I knew that.”

“I’m too much of a city girl. How
do
you know that anyway?”

I picked up the pace of my sipping. “I bought this house with Adam Nyman. I don’t have to tell you that story, do I?”

“I know it all too well.” Vickee reached over and put her hand on top of mine. “I didn’t mean to make you sad, Alex.”

I’d met Adam when I was in law school at the University of Virginia. He’d been a med student there, and then a resident on duty when I was thrown off a horse on an afternoon I should have been studying constitutional law. Instead I wound up being treated in the ER. Our affair led to an engagement twelve years ago, and we bought this house together, planning our wedding for the great lawn that Vickee and I were looking out over. On the long night drive to get to the island, Adam’s car was sideswiped. He crashed to his death from a bridge on the highway in Connecticut, a heartbreak from which I knew I would never fully recover.

“You didn’t make me sad at all. It’s wonderful to think about Adam.” I stretched my neck back and looked for more stars. “He taught me all about the constellations. We’d take a night swim in the ocean and then come lie down on the lawn, right below here. I can show you Lupus, the Wolf, if you look to your left. And that’s Boötes, the Herdsman. He circles and circles the North Pole, keeping all the celestial beasts together.”

“But they’re not the same all the time, are they?”

“They change every month,” I said. “You know, the zodiac.”

“So this is just June?”

“The month Adam and I were supposed to get married,” I said, squeezing Vickee’s hand. “It was a sky just like this one the night he was killed.”

“It must be so hard to—”

“It’s actually wonderful to have such intense memories, such happy ones. I see Adam in the stars whenever I look up. That’s a good thing, I promise you.”

Vickee’s cell phone rang, and she ran in to the kitchen counter to pick it up. She came back to the screen door and it was obvious she was talking to Mercer. “No, I just forgot to call is all. My bad. We’re sitting outside, and yes, we’ll go to sleep soon. Love you very much. G’night.”

She came back out and extended her cell to me. “You want this?” she said. “I just got chewed out for neglecting to call my man. Did you forget to say good night to anyone?”

I smiled at her. “No, thanks. No one’s looking for me now.”

“It must be almost morning in France.”

“I see where you’re going with this, Vickee, but I haven’t spoken to Luc in more than a week.”

“Mercer says he still calls you all the time. That he wants to try again.”

“I don’t know that we can ever put what we had back together. I think a lot of it was smoke and mirrors. The whole picture was my total escape from the darkness of the work we do, and yet I’m thoroughly invested—emotionally and professionally—in that work.”

“But you loved him, Alex. I thought it was the real deal.”

“I thought so, too. It’s pretty easy to love someone when he’s not around all the time and most of what you see is the fantasy. It’s much more impossible if you can’t trust him.”

“But he was a victim, too. Surrounded by a bunch of vultures.”

“And he didn’t tell me the truth about that either. Mike could have been killed because Luc was holding all the cards about his business dealings so tight to his chest. That sickens me.”

Vickee got up to help herself to another glass of wine. “Ready for a refill?”

“I think this should be enough for me.”

“Since you brought Mike’s name into this, I want to talk to you about him.”

I held out my half-empty glass to her. “About that refill, Vickee, why don’t you bring it on? Although I’m not sure there’s enough Dewar’s on the island to go there.”

She came back and handed me the refreshed cocktail. Then she settled onto the lounger, her legs pulled up beneath her, facing me square on. “What is it with you and Mike, Alex? Mercer and I keep thinking you two get halfway to hooking up and then it blows wide open, like tonight.”

“We’ve never been halfway to hooking up. Are you crazy?”

“You know the man’s a little bit in love with you.”

“In love with me?” I threw back my head and gulped more Scotch. “Tonight he compared me to a jackass, which is one of the milder things he’s had to say about me.”

“Mike met you when? Same time as Mercer and I did, back when you were fighting the ghost of Adam, right after his death. You were so young and fresh, but there was this rift down the middle of your soul—we could all see it like it was a crimson tear in your chest—that I never thought would heal.”

“I don’t expect it ever will.”

“Then there was this parade of—well, unsuitable guys. Totally unavailable men,” Vickee said, working up steam. “Guys who cheated on you, who were never there for you, who didn’t seem to care about the world you live in every day.”

“Luc wasn’t like that.”

“Then give him another shot, if you think he’s so stand-up. But keep him arm’s length from Mike for a while, ’cause if we hear him call you ‘darling’ one more time, I think Mike or Mercer will flatten his nose.”

“What’s wrong with ‘darling’?” The alcohol was getting to me.

“It’s so saccharine. It’s like he might confuse you with the last woman in his life, so he uses the generic greeting. ‘Darling’ this and ‘darling’ that. Mike was ready to take him out.”

“While you’re at it, anything else you want to drop at my feet while I’m feeling really low? I haven’t got any fight in me tonight,” I said.

“Look, half your office and half the blue bloods at One PP think you and Mike have already done the deed. There’s no reputation to save. You might as well give it a try.”

“Done
that
deed? Slept with each other? Was it good for
them
?” I said, mild annoyance beginning to trump my amusement. “Because if it’s ever happened, I have to say it’s pretty much slipped my mind. And if that’s what my troops and your bosses spend their time handicapping, the crime rate in the city should be off the charts.”

“Lowest it’s been in forty-nine years. That’s how come I can concentrate on your love life. What’s to lose?”

I stirred the ice cubes with my finger.

“Alex Cooper. You’re slow on the uptake. I asked what you’ve got to lose?”

My head was beginning to spin. “Maybe the best friend I’ve ever had, although that didn’t seem to be the case the way he talked to me tonight.”

“You’ve thought about it, though, right?”

“Of course I’ve thought about it.” Mike Chapman was six months older than I. Although we had taken strikingly different paths to public service, we both had a passion for doing justice that was pretty much identical. A Fordham University grad, he had majored in history, but his career path took a dramatic turn when his father dropped dead of a massive coronary two days after he turned in his gun and shield. “Mike’s smart, he’s funny—sometimes even when I’m the butt of the joke. He’s the best in the world at what he does . . .”