“Rise and shine, blondie,” Mike said, rolling up the blinds on my bedroom window. “Four hours’ sleep ought to hold you.”
I put a pillow over my head and ignored him.
“Places to go, people to see, murder to solve.”
I lifted the edge of the pillow and opened one eye. “It really happened, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, babe. The district attorney is dead. Still dead.”
“I didn’t do it, did I?”
“Depends who you ask,” Mike said. He was dressed only in a pair of light blue boxers, holding a coffee mug.
“Newspapers?” I said.
“Shooting was after midnight. Too late for the early editions on your doorstep.”
“Have you looked online?”
“Ask me that again in a few hours, if you really want to know,” Mike said. “Right now it’s a sloppy mix of gossip and leaks and conspiracy theories. And right now, you’re just part of the gossip, not anyone’s coconspirator.”
“What gossip?”
“Not good for you on an empty stomach.”
“What time is it now?” I asked, rolling over and pulling back the covers, hoping to entice Mike to lie down beside me again. “Come back to bed and just hold me for a while, okay?”
“Can’t say it’s not tempting, but no can do, Coop. The federales want your ass,” Mike said. “It’s already eleven o’clock.”
Detectives Stern and Tinsley had finished questioning me at about five A.M. They spent an hour with Mike before letting him bring me home, and were still talking to Mercer when we left the morgue.
I closed my eyes again. My head was pounding. The Tylenol I’d taken before I’d climbed into bed had long ago worn off. It was only Tuesday morning. “The feds are taking this over? What’s the jurisdictional basis?”
“That you’d need an independent prosecutor to oversee this anyway,” Mike said. “And Battaglia had a hand in some federal cases, too, as he always did.”
“They really want me today?” I asked.
“They’re putting together a team,” Mike said. “Don’t take it personally, Coop. The feds will have to interview Battaglia’s entire senior staff and dig into all the big cases, open and closed, to see if this could have been revenge for someone he sent up the river.”
I crushed the pillow against my forehead like it was a cold compress. “Why did that Jaxon Stern bastard have such a hard-on for me?”
“I don’t have the answer yet, but I’m on it.”
“Have you showered?” I asked.
“Next stop,” Mike said, leaving his mug on my dresser. “Leave it on for you?”
“Please,” I said, sitting up and swinging my legs over the side of the bed. “Mike, did you tell Stern and Tinsley about the last time we saw Battaglia?”
“What the hell did you think they were talking to me about?” he said, stepping out of his shorts and dropping them in the hamper.
“Not the shooting,” I said. “I mean, last week, when we spotted him coming out of the town house.”
“That didn’t come up,” Mike said. “Why? Did they know about it? Did they ask you?”
I hesitated. “Not exactly.”
He backed up a few paces and turned to look at me. “‘Not exactly,’” Mike said, mimicking me. “I want to know what questions Stern asked you.”
“When had I seen the DA last, before the shooting.”
“So you told them about when he stopped you on the street, near the apartment the other day.”
“Of course I did,” I said. He was with his driver then. I’d have been screwed if I’d covered that one up.
“Then you mentioned the bit about being in my car and seeing him when we least expected it?”
“That’s what I mean, Mike,” I said. “I left that one out.”
“So you forgot it,” he said. “No big deal. You can just remember it next time you sit down with the team.”
I reached for the Tylenol bottle and the water glass next to my bed. “It wasn’t a mistake, Mike. I lied about it,” I said. “I lied to Jaxon Stern.”
He leaned one arm on the doorframe in my bedroom. “Now, why the hell did you do that?”
“I was getting confused by the questions, Mike.”
“You’re not that easily confused. Trust me on that.”
“All right, then. I was trying to second-guess what would be important in this investigation and what wouldn’t be.”
“Jesus, that is so damn like you to be second-guessing someone else’s MO, Coop. And to do it with a guy like Stern, who’ll be totally unforgiving if he figures it out,” Mike said, slapping the wall and turning to walk out again.
“He can only figure it out if you tell him about it,” I shouted after him.
Mike rotated back to face me and pursed his lips. He was mad at me. “You don’t go to a doctor when you’re really sick and leave out some of the symptoms to see how smart the guy is, to see if he can make a diagnosis with only some of the facts that you’ve chosen to tell him.”
“No, but—”
“But people do it to cops all the time, right? See if us dumb schmucks can put the puzzle together with some of the facts missing.”
“What difference does it make, Mike?” I asked. “The DA was coming out of George Kwan’s town house the afternoon we saw him. And George Kwan was sitting in the museum last night, watching the events at the gala. He was one of the last guys to leave. His alibi is as solid as yours or mine.”
“Give it up, Coop,” Mike said. “You’re a witness in this case. A very critical witness. You’re not driving the investigation, are you? This team isn’t going to let you anywhere near the wheelhouse, okay? The sooner you understand that, the better.”
“Yeah,” I said, standing up and wrapping my robe around me. “I’m beginning to get it.”
“So the minute you walk in the door of that office in another hour—all clean and shiny-bright and eager to work your way back off the ice floe you found yourself on after the kidnapping and into respectability again—you get ready to regurgitate every last secret you think you and Paul Battaglia had on each other.”
“I’ve got so many questions to ask them, Mike,” I said, taking a sip from his coffee mug as I followed him into the bathroom. “They must have caught a license plate on one of the traffic cameras, didn’t they?”
“You got it wrong, Coop. They’ve got a million questions to ask you. They’re going to want to dig into what the hell was going on between you and Battaglia and the Reverend Hal Shipley.”
“Oh, God,” I said, running a washcloth under the cold water faucet and placing it over my eyes. “Talk about a man with a motive.”
Shipley was a minister of sorts—a former backup dancer for a sixties R and B band and failed television commentator who scammed his Harlem flock with scheme after fraudulent scheme.
“There’s a paper trail in that contretemps with Shipley that Battaglia tried to tamp down,” I said. “And he really turned on me for getting in the middle of it.”
“Those days of tamping down are over, kid. All that paper comes out of your desk drawer and into the sunlight,” Mike said. “Not to mention one of the coconspirators in the Savage murder escaped not long before Battaglia came looking for you.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” I said.