Killer Heat (10 page)

Where's Barbara?"

“Cooling her heels in the squad room. Talk to Arthur Huff
first. The girl can use the time to lose some attitude.”

I followed Mike up the staircase to the third floor of the old
station house on West Eighty-second Street. Elise and Barbara had
shared an apartment just blocks away, on Amsterdam Avenue. It was
Barbara who had called the Huffs when Elise had not come home for
two nights. Arthur Huff was sitting in the captain's office sipping
coffee from a mug when Mike opened the door for me.

I had been spared the heartbreaking assignment of telling him
the circumstances of his child's death. Detective Draper and his
team had delivered that news the night before, dashing the family's
hopes- against most odds-that Elise would be found alive.

I introduced myself and offered words of consolation for his
unimaginable loss. He had heard the same thing too many times today
for it to have any meaning.

He had just come from his daughter's apartment, collecting a few
of her personal effects that he wanted to keep with him. “I forgot
to ask about her little ring,” Huff said. “Did they find anything
on-on Elise?”

“No, sir. You can tell me about it if it's something you think
she was wearing. Perhaps it will turn up in the investigation.”

“She never took it off, from the day her grandmother died four
years ago. My father was a West Point man, Ms. Cooper. Graduated in
1943. The cadets all had rings back in those days. That's the USMA
emblem.” Huff held out his hand to me to show me the writing on his
father's ring, a thick gold setting with a yellow stone. “Mine's a
citrine, like hers, only larger. When the men became engaged, they
had identical ones made for their fiancées-miniatures, of
course. Elise wouldn't go anywhere without her ring.”

“I'll add that to the report. We'll certainly return it to you
when we find it.” I wasn't hopeful that it would ever surface in
the Brooklyn marshland.

He removed a pair of hoop earrings, a cameo pin, and a thin gold
necklace from his pocket and cupped them in his hands. "Not much
to go back home with, is it? Her little sister's going to want
these things.

She worships Elise."

“I'm sure she has good reason to do that.”

“I'd like to know why I can't talk to Barbara again,” Huff said,
adopting a more businesslike tone. I guessed him to be in his
early fifties-with red hair the color of his daughter's-although
the fact that he hadn't slept in a week made him appear older.

“It's important that we get some information from her first,”
Mike said.

“I think you've had your chance to do that, Detective.”

“She wasn't honest with you or your wife, either.”

I had met with Barbara Gould for an interview when Battaglia
first assigned me the case. She repeated to me then that she had
called the Huffs at the end of the preceding weekend. She told
them, and then the police, that she and Elise had gone out
drinking after work. But she lied about the time of night they
parted company, where she last saw Elise, and how intoxicated both
young women were.

“Barbara's like my own child,” Huff said, dismissing Mike
completely. “She'd never lie to us.”

“Well, we're going to try to find out why she did.”

“I spoke to the captain tonight, before he left,” Huff said,
getting up from the desk and walking to look at the pegboard wall
behind him, which was covered from floor to ceiling with artists'
sketches and mug shots of wanted perps. "He told me about another
girl-another body found somewhere downtown this week.

“Tell me, Detective,” he said as he turned back to Mike. “You
don't think these two cases are connected, do you?”

Mike brushed back his hair with his hand. “Too early to say.
More likely just a coincidence that-”

“Good. Because I don't expect my baby had anything to do with a
man who was killing whores. Do you understand that, Mr. Chapman?
Elise is-Elise was a good girl, and I don't want the Huff name
mixed up in that other woman's business.”

“We don't spend a whole lotta time blaming our victims, Mr.
Huff,”

Mike said. “We just leave that to the newspapers. Are you
comfortable here while Alex and I have another run at
Barbara?”

He slumped back down into the chair. "I want answers,
Detective.

I've got our congressman putting some heat on y'all. I expect
results.

I'm expecting you to solve this damn thing quickly. My wife and
I would like some closure. And we'd like it soon."

“Closure,” Mike said, shutting the door behind us.
“Closure is the most bullshit word in the English
language. I'll find this beast and you'll send him up the river
for the rest of his life. The day of the verdict, Huff will have
that short-lived rush of happiness that comes with a homicide
conviction. Some news jock will stick a microphone in his face on
the courthouse steps and ask how he feels about the conviction and
he'll tell them it's great and now he's got closure. Next day he
and the missus will wake up and realize their kid is still dead.
There's no such thing as closure when you lose someone you love to
a murderer.”

I knew that, too, and it was part of the reason it was so much
more satisfying for me to work with survivors of sexual assault,
who never forgot what happened to them but were most often able to
move on with their lives.

“Heads, you can be the good cop,” Mike said.

“Not a contest. I want another shot at her.”

“Bad cop it is. This kid doesn't know yet what it's like to be
in your crosshairs, Coop.”

Barbara Gould was in the small cubicle used by the Twentieth
Precinct detective squad for interrogations. It held a table and
four chairs, and the walls were completely bare. Her head was
resting on her forearms until she picked it up when we entered the
room. “Hello, again,” I said.

“Hello. Look, Detective, if you give me back my cell, I've got
to be going now. It's almost nine o'clock and I've got a lot of
stuff to do.” The twenty-year-old had practiced her pout well. The
moment she recognized me, she put it on and began to pull and
twist a strand of her long brown hair around her forefinger.

“Ms. Cooper needs to talk to you,” Mike said, leaning back
against the door.

“We've had that conversation.”

“And now we're going to have it once more. Only this time you're
going to tell me the truth.”

“I tried to tell Mr. Huff. So I was wrong the first time,”
Barbara said, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling and clicking her
tongue against the roof of her mouth. “What happens if I leave?
Can I just go now?”

“No, you can't leave.”

I had no authority to keep the petulant young woman in the
station house, but she accepted my answer and didn't move from her
seat.

I started, calmly, to go through the story she had told me
originally. “We're going to start over, Barbara, from the time you
and Elise left your apartment.”

Two years younger than Elise, Barbara had come to New York first
and was about to enter her junior year at Marymount College. Elise
had finished college in Tennessee and landed a job working at La
Guardia Airport as a counter agent for Jet Blue.

The first part of the story was consistent with what she had
told me a week earlier. Elise had come home from work at seven,
and after eating a light supper together they went out to meet
friends. Barbara was dressed in leggings and a tube top, and Elise
had kept on the navy blue pants and crisp white short-sleeved
uniform shirt-complete with small gold wings on the collar-that she
wore at work. She liked to do that, Barbara had said with a laugh
when she first talked to me about Elise, because guys often took
her for a flight attendant.

“What time did you leave your apartment?”

“I don't know. Around eleven, I guess. Between eleven and
twelve.”

What passed for closing time in many other parts of the country
was the hour at which Manhattan's cosmopolitan young ladies set
out to meet guys.

“Where did you go?”

Barbara looked over my head at Mike, still twisting her hair. “I
told you.”

“Tell me again.” I needed to know how much of the original story
was true.

“Gleason's, over on Columbus. Just around the corner from our
apartment.”

“What did you have to drink?”

“White wine.” She had surrendered her fake ID to me when I first
met her. It was a forged driver's license, readily available
almost everywhere in the Manhattan bar scene.

“The same for Elise?”

“Yeah.”

“How many glasses?”

“Two. We each bought a round, and then some guy was hitting on
me. He bought us the third drink. But we hardly touched them.”

“I wish I could get a refund for every glass of wine a witness
tells me she ordered but never touched,” Mike said. “Eight bucks a
pop, I could retire tomorrow.”

“Did you see anyone else you knew?”

Barbara thought for a few seconds. “No.”

“How long did you stay there?”

She rolled her eyes again. “I'm not sure. It's like more than a
week already.”

“And your friend Elise is dead. Mike and I need a timeline for
everything she did that night. I'm not asking you about ancient
history, Barbara. Think hard.”

“An hour. Maybe a little longer. You're like really pushing
me.”

“Then where did you go?”

“There's that little place I told you about, like halfway down
the block from Gleason's, with an outdoor café. We went there,
so we could sit outside. Columbus Café.”

“Did you order anything to eat? Or to drink?”

“Nothing to eat. Just another glass of wine. I only had like
half of it.”

“And Elise?”

“Same thing. She didn't drink that much.”

“Did you know anyone there? Talk to anyone?”

A few seconds of hesitation, again. A few too many. “No.”

“Barbara, who did you see?”

She lowered her eyes and changed hands, twirling the hair on the
left side of her part. “Oh, God, I don't want to bring anybody
else into this.”

“That's not a choice you have, don't you understand?”

“It's not going to bring Elise back,” she said, as tears welled
up in her eyes. “Nothing's going to do that.”

“It's about the truth, dammit. Who are you trying to hide from
us?”

“Nobody. Why can't we just leave my statement the way it
was?”

“You didn't split from Elise at that café, did you? You
didn't leave her there and walk home, like you told me last
week.”

“What happens to me if I change my story?”

“If you do it now? Nothing. If you wait until you've testified
falsely under oath, then we get to figure out if you've committed
perjury.” Barbara pulled the strand of hair across her lips and
began to chew on it.

“You're doing a lousy job, Coop. You're gonna give bad cops a
good name,” Mike said, stretching his arms out and cracking his
knuckles. “Isn't this when you tell her to get the friggin' hair
out of her mouth and stop whining about herself?”

Barbara's face soured at the sharp sound of his words. "It
wasn't my idea. Elise was the one who wanted to go downtown.

I told her it was stupid."

“Every minute you waste, you make it harder for us to find her
killer. We've had detectives in and out of Gleason's and that
café every night since Elise went missing,” I said. No one
recalled seeing anyone fitting her description in the early hours
of the morning, either with friends or alone. “I believed you,
Barbara. I believed that's where you left her. Obviously it's not
true. Now, when did you leave Columbus to go downtown?”

“I don't know.”

“There's a little operation called the Taxi and Limousine
Commission, Barbara. They've got the trip sheets of every yellow
cab-where and when the driver made his pickup and where he dropped
his passengers off. I'll have those records tomorrow.”

“Really?” She twisted her neck and screwed up her mouth. “It's
all in their computer by now. I just have to give them the address
of the café and ask for the fares that got in after one a.m.
The TLC will tell me how many riders, and where they went.”

“Okay, all right. There were three of us. Is that what you want
to know? I hooked up with this guy I knew at the Columbus
Café.”

“What's his name?” She was watching Mike as he took out a pad
from his rear pants pocket and began to make notes.

“He doesn't want to get involved.”

“He's involved up to his eyeballs, simply because he was with
you and Elise. Maybe he saw something or someone you didn't
see.”

“He's going to hate me.”

“Did you hear what Mike said? This isn't about you.”

“Look, I told Mr. Huff tonight. I told him I forgot that we
stopped at another place downtown. I just didn't remember at the
time is all. It seemed so unimportant, and I was so upset.”

“Who's the guy?” I asked.

She picked up her sunglasses from the table and put them on.

“Cliff. His name is Clifford Trane, okay?”

“Take those off, Barbara.” I needed to see her eyes. I needed to
gauge whether she was feeding me more nonsense.

“I don't have to take them off. I don't have to be here if I
don't want.”

“Tell me about Cliff.”

She wiggled her head back and forth, as though deciding what to
tell me.

Mike took three steps forward and pulled the sunglasses off
Barbara's nose. She was beginning to cry.

“He plays basketball for St. John's. He'll be a senior this
year.”

“Coach would flip out if his name was in the paper anywhere but
the sports pages, I guess. Booze and clubbing don't fit with
preseason training,” Mike said. He would have to fill me in later
on the college basketball scene. “Sometimes I think the media
drives the criminal justice system, everybody worried about their
fifteen minutes of fame instead of doing the right thing. That
didn't hurt much, did it? Give Coop the rest.”