I walked slowly, circling the gurney, which caused the rookie cop to begin to fidget.
“Don’t worry. I won’t touch him again,” I said to the kid. “I’ve worked for the man for a long time. I can’t believe this has happened to him.”
I couldn’t believe it had happened to me, either, but that was a rather self-serving observation, of no importance to anyone else.
Paul Battaglia’s body was part of the crime scene, which stretched from Fifth Avenue, where the shooter had leaned out a car window to fire at—well, presumably at the district attorney—to the museum entrance, several yards from where I had been standing.
The blasts had been so powerful that when Battaglia was struck and fell forward, he was lifted out of one of his shoes. The black-laced wing tip was still on his right foot, but his left foot, covered in a dark gray sock with black dots, rested on the gurney as though he had started the process of undressing for the night.
The strong odor of formalin in the room—already coating my hair and clothing, as it always did—made me cough. I finished my circumnavigation of the body and returned to my post against the counter, sticking my nose into the glass of Scotch to steady myself.
I kept thinking of things I wanted to know, but I wouldn’t get any answers from the man on the table.
“Officer,” I said, walking back over to the gurney and leaning against the left side of it. “I wonder if you can tell me—has anyone else from my office been here to see Mr. Battaglia yet? I mean before I came in.”
“Don’t know, Ms. Cooper. I got pulled off scooter patrol in the precinct to be here, like half an hour ago. I relieved the cops who rode with the morgue van to bring the DA down.”
One of the city’s great columnists—often quoted to us by Battaglia—once said, “Never kill anyone in a landmark location.” First, because you make yourself instantly notorious for media purposes, and second, because the site itself was always compromised by a crush of onlookers.
I had never seen a body removed from a crime scene faster than Paul Battaglia was carted off from in front of the Met. The Costume Institute gala had ended a short time before—with hundreds of well-dressed fashion industry elites filling the sidewalks to find black cars and Ubers—and in a city that never sleeps, the museum’s Fifth Avenue venue on the eastern perimeter of Central Park was always a magnet for rubberneckers, day or night.
Mike Chapman had pulled me back into the museum—security made a path for us—and out through a basement door for the ride down here to the morgue. The corpse made better time than we did.
“Ms. Cooper, ma’am,” the rookie said. “You’re leaning against the gurney.”
“It’s just my hand on the metal rim, Officer.” I couldn’t stop looking at the still figure that had been so very alive two hours earlier.
“There’s blood all over your outfit, Ms. Cooper. You don’t want to be contaminating the DA’s clothing, do you?”
“It’s dry, Officer. I promise you that,” I said, looking down at the stained front of my borrowed sweatshirt and leggings.
“Still, it could fleck off and—”
“You’re right,” I said, taking two steps back, clasping my glass with both hands.
“I don’t mean to put you off, ma’am,” the officer said, eyes face forward again. “You mind my asking what he was like?”
“Paul Battaglia? Most people would say he was the best in the business.”
For me, his character was much more complicated. He had been district attorney longer than most New Yorkers could remember. His campaign slogan—from his first run through eight terms—had been YOU CAN’T PLAY POLITICS WITH PEOPLE’S LIVES. But he had lost sight of that sentiment somewhere along the way and was more adept at using people for political purposes than Machiavelli had been.
“This must be so difficult for you,” the cop said.
“It is.” But not for the reasons he or anyone who wasn’t close to me would think. I had once been so devoted to Battaglia that I never looked for flaws, or I had been blind enough that I hadn’t seen them. Much more recently, I had become disillusioned with the man. I distrusted some of his alliances with corrupt figures among the city’s satellite players, just as he had taken to undermining and second-guessing many of my investigative tactics.
It was difficult for me because Paul Battaglia and I had unfinished business, and now there were things that we could never resolve.
I bowed my head and looked again. There was just a slight indentation in the skin on the fourth finger of his left hand where Battaglia had once worn a wedding ring. For reasons unknown to me, he had taken it off months ago.
I lifted the drinking glass and placed it against my forehead. Had it been my usual cocktail, with ice, it would have refreshed me and anesthetized my pounding headache. But this motion was just a senseless habit that was no help to me at all.
The door opened and closed behind me. I didn’t look up.
“How’s the old man doing, Coop?” Mike said. “You making sure he’s still dead?”
The comment took the rookie by surprise. His eyebrows rose and his expression changed. It was obvious he’d never met Mike Chapman before.
“Actually, I’m making sure that if Battaglia has a glimmer of life in him and has anything left to say, he says it to me.”
“Unanswered questions,” Mike said. “I know you don’t like ’em, Coop, but very few people check out leaving a tidy package behind for their heirs, professional or personal—especially when the Grim Reaper shows up out of the blue like this.”
“Why the hell was he rushing up the museum steps, after midnight, saying he had to talk to me?” I asked.
“To rip you a new one.”
“Now, what makes you think that?” I said, turning to face Mike. “That’s stooping lower than I would go.”
“Really? I’ll have to reset the bar a little higher. I thought you were as low as you could possibly get,” Mike said. “’Cause all Battaglia’s done lately is criticize you. Here you are, on a leave of absence, and you disobey all his orders to stay out of a case. Instead, you bring it to a head in front of an audience—”
“I didn’t do anything to make the case break last night.”
“Don’t whine, Coop. It doesn’t become you,” he said. “Break it you did, with the police commissioner doing an instant presser at the museum, without waiting for the district attorney, and crediting you for your involvement too. Maybe Battaglia was charging up to butt heads with you again.”
“What happened to the days when he and I trusted each other implicitly?”
“You—his fair-haired golden girl? Long gone, those days,” Mike said, taking the glass of Scotch from my hand. “And drinking too much of this embalming fluid won’t help, either.”
I grabbed his wrist to hold the glass in place and breathed in one more shot of Scotch. “I wasn’t drinking, Mike. I was sipping. Sniffing and sipping.”
“No games, girl. This is all unfolding live, in prime time.”