“So that text from the restaurant is when she told you she wasn’t coming, right?” I said. “But did she give you any idea of what she was going to do after the dinner with the guys?”
Jake shook his head from side to side. “She didn’t break it off, Mike. That second call just pushed the time back. Alex said she probably wouldn’t get to Patroon until after nine o’clock.”
The girl was sending me mixed signals. It wasn’t like Coop to be all business after dinner and drinks at Primola. She must have really wanted to see Jake, despite the way he was downplaying it. She obviously had no intention of making the short walk home when she left the others. She had ordered a car service to bring her to meet Jake.
“She actually called Stephan herself,” Jake said, referring to the maître d’. “She suggested to him that he put a drink or two for me on her tab-which was really sweet, I thought.”
I never thought of describing Coop as sweet. Kind and thoughtful and warm-except when she wore the armor, the tough veneer she thought conformed to the image of her held by her adversaries.
“But then the owner himself came along. Do you know Ken?”
“Yeah, I do,” I said.
“I hadn’t seen Ken in a year or more. So we had dinner together-time kind of flew by while we talked. Cuban cigars, now that the embargo is lifting, fly-fishing-”
Like I had a life share in a river in Scotland to catch salmon with my fly rod. Not my style, newsboy.
“And I kept on waiting for Alex after Ken left.”
“Did you hear from her again?”
“Nothing. No call, no text, no e-mail. It got to be after ten and I just figured she was-well, that she was with you.”
“Look, Jake,” I said, growing more worried and agitated by the minute. “I’ve got no idea where Coop is. None of us do. No one at the office heard from her all day and the ladies politely assumed she was holed up here with you. Didn’t you think to reach out to Vickee or to Catherine when-?”
Jake held out his arm toward me when the phone rang. “Yes, yes, I’m here in my room,” he said, presumably to someone at the front desk. “Yes, you can send her right up.”
“If you don’t mind, Mike, I’m expecting a guest now,” he said, walking to the door of the suite and holding it open.
“You didn’t wait long to make a backup plan, did you?” I said.
“Looks as though we both got stiffed last night. And like I said to you earlier, Mike, now Alexandra Cooper is your problem.”
NINETEEN
“You look like shit, man,” Mercer said to me when I opened the door of Coop’s apartment to let him in.
It was about an hour after I left Jake at his hotel. Mercer had been working an evening tour but took off early when I told him Coop was gone.
“That’s better than how I feel. I didn’t take this seriously till-”
“Nobody did. Vickee’s been tearing her hair out,” he said, tossing his iPad on the sofa. “Where do we start?”
“Call in every chit we’ve got,” I said. “Get TARU working on her phone and e-mail. Use a contact at the Taxi and Limo Commission to track the car services to see if anyone picked her up. Check whether traffic has video cameras on Second Avenue that might have caught her leaving Primola.”
“We do all those things ourselves starting right now,” Mercer said. “But who do we tell?”
I looked at him like he was crazy. “Tell? How do you mean? There’s nobody to tell till we figure out what’s going on.”
“Wait a minute, Mike. Let’s get on the same page here. Alex walks out of a restaurant to meet a guy for a drink and she gets, what, vaporized?”
“You said it right. She gets what? Where’d she go? We’re all starting from the idea that she’s in the wind ’cause she wants to be. There’s no suggestion of any kind of foul play. We’re not even twenty-four hours out yet.”
“It’s not aliens that swept her away from here, okay?” Mercer said. “That’s the only thing I’ll give you.”
“Good. One group of suspects eliminated,” I said, pacing back and forth. The bright city lights from the living room windows illuminated the dark night sky like search beacons, but we had no ideas about where to look.
Mercer sat down, opening his device to start his compulsive list making. “You know Alex better than anybody.”
“Don’t make that assumption. She doesn’t let people in. Not the parts of her she doesn’t want to expose. Not even to me.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you waited too long to try.”
“Take your best shot, pal.” I turned my back to Mercer and stared out at the slice of Central Park visible between the tall buildings.
“You’ve got to tell someone, Mike.”
“I called you, didn’t I?”
“I mean her parents, for example.”
Coop’s mother and father had retired to the Caribbean. “They’re not in the country. And what do I tell them that doesn’t have them going berserk before we know anything’s wrong?”
“I’d want to know. I’d want to know the second there was a suspicion that something was off-kilter,” Mercer said. “And now there is.”
“Then you call them. I’ve got better things to do.” I flipped my steno pad onto the dining room table and started dialing my phone.
“Battaglia will go ballistic if you leave him out of this.”
“I don’t work for him.”
“How about the lieutenant? You’ve got no secrets from him,” Mercer asked. “And the commissioner? Scully’s been great to you.”
“When’s the last time you looked at the patrol guide?”
Mercer grumbled. He went to the refrigerator, pulled out two cans of Diet Coke, and handed me one. I snapped the ring and took a drink.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” he asked.
“Okay, Detective Wallace. What’s the crime we’re reporting, exactly?”
“I’m hoping to God there isn’t one.”
“Good. What do you expect the police commissioner to do, in that case?”
“We sure as hell have a missing person.”
“Not according to the NYPD patrol guide,” I said. “A missing person can be a lot of things. She can be under the age of eighteen or over the age of sixty-five. Not Coop. She can be mentally or physically impaired. Not the broad I saw yesterday. Possible victim of drowning. Not on the sidewalk on Second Avenue on a clear night in October. A person who indicated an intention of committing suicide. Not one of Coop’s problems. She just invited me to slip away to the Vineyard with her this weekend. Broiled lobster, chilled wine, warm fire, and hot lips, if I can make light of this. Last category in the guide is absent under circumstances indicating involuntary disappearance. Maybe we’ll develop that-you and I. But as of this moment, we don’t have a single one of the categories for the commissioner himself to declare Alexandra Cooper a missing person.”
Mercer picked up a silver-framed photograph of Coop from the sideboard in the dining room. It was taken at Logan’s christening, and she was holding the baby in her arms.
“You’re not wrong,” he said. “We’ll get pushback from the top.”
“Damn right we will. That last category-involuntary disappearance? If you remember this crap half as well as I do, that little group of complaints gets lodged in the local precinct. They don’t go to Major Case; they don’t go to some elite unit. They just sit and rot for an entire week on some squad commander’s desk in the Nineteenth because there isn’t a damn thing to investigate. It’s not even twenty-four hours since one of us has heard from the diva of the DA’s office, Mercer. We’d be laughed out of the station house.”