Stern was asking more questions, but I was stuck in my lie as if I were up to my knees in quicksand and was unable to focus.
“Sorry,” I said. “Could you please repeat what you just said?”
“You seem to be in the twilight zone, Ms. Cooper,” Stern said. “Come on back to us.”
I was trying to calm myself down. Mike wouldn’t be the reason I got caught in the lie, because there was no point for Stern to question him about having seen Battaglia.
“I was just spacing out, Detective. My apologies. What did you ask?”
“I’m back with you at the top of the steps at the Met, this evening.”
Of course you are, I thought. I was getting dizzier than a Mexican jumping bean, which was always the likeliest time for a witness to be tripped up.
“Oh,” I said. “There.”
“What happened from the time you walked outside?”
I closed my eyes for a second. “We used the revolving door,” I said. “Mike went through first; then I followed. He reached for my hand and held on to me.”
Stern looked over my head at Tinsley and smirked again.
“What did you see?” he asked me.
“Nothing. I was looking down. I had my eyes on the steps because it was kind of dark, and I was so exhausted.”
“There came a point when you saw Paul Battaglia, right?”
“I heard him before I saw him,” I said. “I heard footsteps, that is. I didn’t know whose they were. I was halfway down to the sidewalk when I heard footsteps.”
“Then?”
“I looked up because of the sound. I saw a man, but I couldn’t make out who it was at first.”
“Wait a minute,” Stern said. “You’ve worked with this guy for at least a decade, and you couldn’t figure out who he was?”
“I told you it was dark at that point, and he was wearing a dark suit,” I said. “It was Chapman who told me the man approaching us was Battaglia.”
“You’re telling me that Chapman made him before you did?”
“Yes. He recognized the DA and told me that’s who it was.”
Stern looked back at Tinsley again. I was supposed to be rattled by all his smirking and sneering. But it was just rude, not unnerving.
“Like a warning?” Stern asked.
“No, Detective. I didn’t need to be warned about Paul Battaglia. Chapman was just reassuring me that it wasn’t a stranger.”
“What did you say to him?”
“Nothing.”
“Cat had your tongue, Ms. Cooper? I understand that’s not usually the case.”
“Battaglia spoke first,” I said. “He called out my name and told me he needed to talk with me. Five minutes with me, is what he said.”
Stern started tapping his forefinger on the desk again. Four times. Five. Six. “Now, about what?”
“What?”
“The five minutes, Ms. Cooper. You know what I mean. What was it that he wanted to talk with you about?”
“I don’t know.”
“C’mon, now.”
I paused. I remembered a car pulling up on Fifth Avenue. I remembered movement from the street—which must have been an arm coming out of the car window.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t know then. I told him I wouldn’t talk to him there.”
I stopped again, biting my lip, as the image in my mind’s eye seemed magnified.
“And I certainly don’t know now,” I said. “There wasn’t another word spoken between us.”
It was the image of Battaglia’s face—his eyes opened wide and his mouth forming a word as he reached the step below me.
“Wild guess, Ms. Cooper. Take a wild guess.”
“Bad form, Detective. I don’t prosecute cases based on guesswork.”
“Sometimes we get lucky this way, don’t we, Tinsley?” Stern said. “Wild guesses sometimes hit the mark.”
“Sure we do,” she said. “We do get lucky. You must be wracking your brain, Alex, to think what drove the man to seek you out when someone was chasing after him. Maybe Battaglia knew his life was in danger, and he was coming to you for—well, you must have an idea for what.”
“And all this time,” I said to her, without turning my head, “I thought you were Stern’s silent partner.”
“Taking it all in, Alex. Taking it all in,” Tinsley said.
A smart cop never did an interview like this without another cop to witness it. That way I couldn’t deny something I’d said to them later on. I couldn’t change my facts without two of them to swear to what I’d told them tonight.
“Wracking my brain,” I said, “but I’m coming up empty. There must be word on the street, Detective Stern—to borrow a phrase.”
I left out the sentence that had run through my mind at that moment—the last few seconds of Paul Battaglia’s life—but then I hadn’t said it out loud to Battaglia either. That I wouldn’t talk to him then and there. That I wouldn’t talk without a lawyer present. I didn’t know if he was running up the steps to fire me for insubordination—for disobeying his orders to back off a murder case—or coming to me, as he had so many times over the years, because he wanted my help. It was the wrong time and place for either conversation.
“So what happened next?” Stern asked.
“I don’t know, exactly.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
I slumped down in the chair. The next minute of the evening’s rerun was a jumble of sound and sight.
“I’m not sure what came first,” I said. “Whether I actually heard the gunshots or I saw the DA fall forward, against me.”
The fact of it didn’t really matter, but it was the kind of detail that Stern and Tinsley would push me on over and over again.
“Being sure would help us,” Stern said.
I raised my eyes to meet his.
“Two shots—one right after the other,” I said. “I must have heard the shots.”
They had split the quiet of the late city night.
“You’re saying you heard them first?” Stern asked, looking down to make a note.
“I’m not sure,” I said, shaking my head. “It seemed like it was all at once.”
“What was all at once?”
“The loud noises, and then Battaglia almost lunging into my arms, against my body.”
I thought the DA’s brain had exploded in my face.
“I collapsed beneath him, on my back against the steps of the Met,” I said. “We were a tangle of arms and legs. I tried to pull up and free myself from him.”
I wanted the dead man off my body.
“But I couldn’t move, Detective,” I said, meeting his eyes with mine.
“Why not? Why couldn’t you move?”
“Like I just said. The impact of the shots thrust Battaglia forward. His arms flew upward and somehow wrapped around my own as I crashed down too.”
The DA and I were completely intertwined with each other when he died, just as we had often been in life.
“It was a deadfall, Detective.”
“What does that mean, Ms. Cooper?” Stern asked. “No need to show off your vocabulary now. Just tell it straight.”
“It’s nothing but nature, Stern. You ought to get yourself off the street more and commune with the spirits,” I said. “When you’re deep in the woods, it’s what you call a messy tangle of trees and limbs and underbrush.”
I stood to stretch my legs. “That’s exactly how Paul Battaglia and I wound up in the end—in a deadfall.”
FIVE