We walked the gauntlet together, the locked executive wing hallway-lined with photographs of the stone-faced white men who had preceded Battaglia as DA-that led to his executive assistant’s desk.
“He’s ready for you, Alex,” Rose said, smiling at me. “Pat yourself on the back for calling him last night, even though it was late. The mayor thought the boss was at the crime scene, he seemed to know so much.”
Paul Battaglia had no use for the new mayor, who had no understanding of the criminal justice system. It suited Battaglia’s personality to walk all over a politician in whom he sensed a point of weakness, of vulnerability. New York City’s latest leader wouldn’t have a clue how to handle the DA and the police commissioner in front of the media, with all the frenzy surrounding a serial murderer.
The smell of Battaglia’s expensive Cohiba at ten in the morning was like a breath of cool mountain air after the oppressive odors in the Grand Central tunnels.
The cigar was lodged in a corner of the DA’s mouth when he said hello to Mercer and me, and he showed no intention of removing it. Words occasionally slurred as he talked around the brown stub, but it never got in the way of expressing his strong opinions.
“You two figured this one out yet, Alex?”
“This second kill has thrown us way off track, Paul.”
“You’re sure it’s the same guy?”
“Or team,” Mercer said. “No doubt.”
“You’ve got a young woman in a top-tier hotel, throat slit and body violated. Good family, important job. Now tell me about this guy.”
Mercer had done a quick study of the criminal history. “Carl Condon. Twenty-six years old. Originally from Apalachicola, Florida. Dropped out of FSU and moved here six years ago. Four collars for larceny and three for prostitution.”
“Common denominator?”
“Marks on their bodies,” I said. “Drawings that might represent train tracks.”
“Might? I can’t do a stand-up on might. The department never declares a serial case till there are three crimes. Why go on two?”
“I agree with the commissioner this time, Paul. People have to be made aware before the body count grows. Maybe these few clues will resonate with someone who knows the killer. They are especially brutal crimes.”
“There’s a homicide that isn’t brutal?”
“I’d say there’s a good chance that Carl Condon was an accomplice in getting the Thatcher girl into the Waldorf. He might have stolen the trunk-”
“I get that,” the DA said, blowing me off and turning to Mercer. “Did this guy really live in a hole in the ground? In a tunnel?”
“Yes, sir.”
Battaglia leaned forward, on the scent of a hit. “Were you there? Did you see it yourselves? Am I safe in actually saying people make their homes down there?”
“Alex and I went in this morning, with an officer from Grand Central. It was only Chapman who actually saw where Condon lived.”
“But the moles Alex described last night,” he said to Mercer, “they actually exist in numbers?”
“No question about it. We met a few dozen of them.”
“So the mayor’s been in office almost nine months,” the sixth-term incumbent noted. The DA’s office relied heavily on funding from the city, and the new mayor had not been Battaglia’s candidate. “He’ll get pummeled on his homeless problem once this gets out, am I right?”
“In all likelihood, sir.”
Paul Battaglia leaned back, sensing a hole in the mayoral armor. “All his blather about New York as a tale of two cities, and he hasn’t done a goddamn thing about the homeless problem yet. It’s an absolute disgrace on a human level, driving the murder rate back up after all the successes of my crime-strategies approach.”
“But, Paul-,” I said, trying to interject a thought.
“Cavemen lived underground, Alex. Troglodytes and other subhuman cultures burrowed into cliffside dwellings. Egyptian slaves lived and died in their mines. Cimmerian monks cut their cells into rocks, coming out only to minister to passing pilgrims.”
Battaglia was revving up a speech for his fall appearance at Riverside Church. I tried not to choke on his rhetoric as I stared at the sign hanging behind his head, reminding me that he couldn’t play politics with people’s lives.
“Scully and I may have two homicides to answer for this week, but City Hall has allowed the larger problem to exist, to flourish under this new leadership.” The cigar bobbed up and down furiously, marking the tempo of Battaglia’s prattle. “And if the mayor thinks that by spending all his time trying to raise taxes on my most loyal constituents while every John Doe Lunatic takes up residence in a train tunnel, he’ll be a one-termer faster than you can say Jimmy Carter.”
“Is there a problem you want to tell us about?” I asked.
Paul Battaglia had known Mercer for almost as long as he had known me, and trusted him as the loyal NYPD partner that he was.
“My application to the city council for twenty million dollars for the international cyberbanking initiative I want to create-remember that?”
It was part of the program for my counterparts in the white-collar crime unit of the office, which was Battaglia’s pet division. They did more intellectual work than street crime, cleaner and without any element of violence. “It was discussed at the last bureau chief’s meeting. That’s all I’ve heard.”
“The Speaker called me yesterday and told me the mayor’s going to veto it. Straight-out veto. No discussion, no money for this office.”
If the mayor wasn’t yet familiar with Battaglia’s form of payback, he was in for a rude awakening.
“He and I-Keith Scully, too-have been invited to the reception for the president when he arrives for the special UN meeting. You need to solve these cases before that. Let the mayor be the one who’s embarrassed about the homeless. His policies allow the situation in this city to deteriorate, while the commissioner and I tackle all the scum thrown our way.”
“You can’t put these homicides in the middle of a political skirmish,” I said. “That’s way too transparent for your style.”
The district attorney of New York County rarely left fingerprints, but this mix of money and murder was a formula that could lead him onto the rocks.
“The reception is Monday night. Get everything else off your plate, Alex. Give Rocco what he needs to get this done. There’s only one clown in town,” Battaglia said, “and unfortunately for me he’s running City Hall. I want results from you before the weekend’s over.”
SEVENTEEN
“Don’t mess with him, Alex. Hand off the Dominguez case to Catherine or Nan,” Mercer said, referring to two of my closest friends in the bureau.
“Let me run up to the courtroom and see what Drusin is filling the judge’s head with. It’s just some motion nonsense, I’m sure. If there are immediate issues to deal with-substantive ones-I will put someone else on it.”
“I hear you.”
“Would you mind getting an update from the team at the Waldorf? Do we have any idea whether they’ve seen anything on the surveillance cameras they’ve been checking? We should certainly know more by now.”
“We’d have heard something for sure if they’d gotten lucky. I’ll do the catch-up.”
Over the years, the route to the courtrooms from the DA’s office had become more circuitous, even though we occupied several floors in the massive building. I jogged down the staircase one flight from the executive wing on eight, since the only direct entrance was by way of the lone security guard at the seventh-floor desk.
The thirteenth-floor hallway-which held eight trial “parts,” as they were called-was beginning to fill up with defendants, lawyers, families and friends of the accused, and some of the court-watchers who hung out, hoping for salacious proceedings to fill the long, quiet days of their retirement. Some of them were like Sex Crimes Unit stalkers who knew if one of my colleagues showed up, there might be enough references to sexual acts to keep them awake and engaged-better than the best soap operas on television.