“I’m sorry, Mike. The last thing I want to do is intrude on your personal life. She’s not answering her phone, her texts, her e-mails. I figured you might be at her place and-”
“I’m home. Which is where I live, in case anybody in your public information office needs to know. The high-rent district gives me agita. Grown men walking their Yorkies and cockapoos look at me like Stanley Kowalski just moved into the building.”
“You’ve got a mighty inferiority complex, Detective Chapman. I’ll have you over to our digs. We’ve got lots of manlier dogs there. You’d be the George Clooney of the black Lab-walking set,” Catherine said. “Now, would you mind trying to raise her up for me?”
“Sure. Sure thing, Catherine.”
I popped open my in-box to look for return messages from Coop. There were none. I pressed the button to dial her cell, which went straight to voice mail.
“Stop pouting, blondie. I don’t want to have to send out the Mounties for you. Call me.”
My apartment-the coffin, as I liked to call it-was smaller than Wynan Wilson’s. I walked past three days of dirty clothes hanging from the back of a chair into the bathroom.
I turned on the shower and stepped in. I like cool water-Coop calls it cold. It’s bracing and better for me than the tons of caffeine I ingest every day to restart my engines. Besides, I don’t have the patience to wait for it to get to its maximum lukewarm high temperature.
I wrapped a clean towel around my waist, grabbed my razor to go over my face, and picked up the phone. Nothing back from Coop.
I hit Catherine’s number and she answered instantly. “No sign of life,” I said. “We’ll just have to wait her out. What time did your party break up?”
“She didn’t leave the restaurant all that long after you did. And she was testy.”
“Welcome to my world,” I said. “I get testy from her in spades. What do you mean?”
“She was all excited about Tanner’s arrest. Like one of the guys said when she walked into Primola, first time she’d be able to sleep like a baby.”
“Could be that. Could be she got wrecked and just turned off her phone, let herself relax with Tanner in custody.”
“She didn’t drink all that much. She wasn’t wrecked.”
“You’re not telling me you’re worried, are you?” I asked.
“Not about Alex,” Catherine said. “I’m actually worried for her, Mike. Afraid her temper has gotten the better of her this time.”
Alex Cooper could be cooler than a glacier in the courtroom. We had all seen her take on cold-blooded killers and hotheaded adversaries. She was amazing grace under pressure and indefatigable in standing tall for the vulnerable, for the victims without voices.
But Coop had a hair-trigger temper that she managed to keep in check in professional settings. Up close and personal she lost her shit way too often.
“Pat McKinney?” I asked. He was the immediate supervisor who had tried to wreck Coop’s career several times. “Or Battaglia himself?”
“The district attorney. I don’t know whether Alex had time to tell you last night,” Catherine said, “but he totally laced into her about the Estevez business. He actually told her that if anything that came out of it embarrassed him, she might as well make herself disappear. I’m worried that maybe she took him literally and is playing hard to get.”
“I clocked out at eight A.M. I should have called her then like I told her I would, but it got kind of busy at the Wilson apartment,” I said. “Haven’t seen the morning news. Anything there to suggest trouble for Coop?”
“Not in print. The radio reports claim Hal Shipley showed up at the scene of a homicide last night,” Catherine said. “Is that the domestic you went out on?”
“Yeah, but it has nothing to do with Estevez. Nobody’s talking. There’s only a daughter and she’s helping us. Maybe neighbors saw Shipley pull up and go inside, but we threw him out pretty quick.”
“Well, Alex didn’t assign it to anyone, either.”
“Could be my fault,” I said. “Didn’t see the need to wake her up for no good reason. We didn’t make an arrest. And I didn’t want her to go in to talk to the DA with information about Shipley that could only have come from me. He wouldn’t have liked that.”
“Good plan.”
“While I got you, can you draft me a search warrant for Shipley’s office? I told him I’d be there today, looking for records that might relate to the murder. Follow-the-money kind of stuff.”
“Wait for Alex. I don’t know who she’ll assign to this.”
“Suit yourself. Let me look for her, Catherine. I’ll call you later.”
“I’ll let you know if she graces us with an appearance.”
I dressed quickly and grabbed two cups of black coffee at the corner deli before I walked the block to my car. Coop’s apartment wasn’t very far from mine, but the few avenues to the west of me represented miles between the style of my old tenement building and her fancy co-op.
I was sipping the first cup when my phone buzzed. I stopped and put the paper bag on the roof of my car. “Hello?”
“Chapman? Peterson here. You don’t sound like yourself.”
“Hey, Loo. I just burned my tongue on some java.”
“You need to get up to the squad and fill me in on the new case.”
“I can talk to you about it now. I’m working midnights this week.” Peterson knew my schedule. He was never difficult about this kind of thing. “I wasn’t planning to come by the office till then.”
“I asked you to get up here. Now.”
“What for?”
“Do you look for trouble, Chapman, or does it just attach itself to you like a remora to a shark? All natural and such?”
“Wait, Loo. Give me a break,” I said. “The mayor’s chief of staff got to Scully? That’s sick. You know that?”
“Not that nitwit. The mayor’s wife herself.”
“Oh, that nitwit.”
“Yeah, well she’s working her voodoo on the commissioner. He wants me to get your side of the story-eyeball-to-eyeball, face-to-face, chapter and verse.”
“Voodoo, too? I didn’t know that was part of her skill set,” I said. “Can’t say I’m surprised.”
“Scully called me at home. I’m on my way in to the city,” Lieutenant Peterson said. “How fast can you be at the office?”
“An hour. Sorry to break up your day, Loo. Give me an hour.”
“Make it faster than that, Chapman.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ve got one stop to make on the way.”
FIFTEEN
“What’s up, Vinny?” I asked the doorman standing at the front desk of Coop’s building.
“Everything’s calm, Mike. The way I like it.”
I stopped and leaned an elbow on the desktop. “You might as well go into hibernation with the Yankees done for the season.”
“You’re telling me.”
“You see Ms. Cooper this morning?”
Vinny thought for two seconds, then shook his head.
“Not going out?” I asked, then thought-unhappily-that maybe she had come in early this morning if she had spent the night somewhere else. “Or in?”
“Nope. I’ve been on the door since seven thirty. The guys relieved me a couple of times for my breaks, so could be I just didn’t see her. But I didn’t.”
“And who was working last night?”
“Oscar was here till one a.m. Then Patrick, till I came on.”
“Thanks, man. I’ll just take a run up,” I said, slapping the marble top and walking to the elevator to press the button for the twentieth floor.
The doormen in Coop’s well-run building had known me for years. The shift from being her professional colleague to something more personal must have thrown them off, too.
I stood in front of her door and rang the bell, but there was no response and no noise coming from within. The daily papers, which she still preferred to read in hard copy rather than online, were on the hallway floor. I picked them up to take inside.