Likely to Die (24 page)

 “And the issue?”

 Janine looked uncomfortable with the language that made up the fabric of my daily work. She hemmed and hawed as she glanced over at Chapman explaining the facts to me. “Well, this—um—this defendant, Anthony Gavropoulos, he was, like, on the other platform, across from the cop.

 “The cop says he saw the defendant move in behind the woman who was standing all by herself. He claims Gavropoulos, well, that he could see him expose himself—”

 “His penis?” I asked.

 “Yeah. And that he had—um—an erection and was, like rubbing against the woman.”

 “Likerubbing against the woman or rubbing against the woman, Janine? One is a crime, the other isn’t.”

 “I’m sorry, it’s just—”

 “Look, if you’re going to handle these cases, you’re going to have to deal with the language and the body parts. No euphemisms, no embarrassment. It’s a business.”

 She gathered her composure and started over. “The offer is a plea to the charge. Misdemeanor sexual abuse. And a condition of the sentence is that the defendant go to a sex offender program.”

 “Fine. So?”

 “Defense attorney says his client won’t take the plea. Says his defense is going to be that the cop is lying. Gavropoulos says, well, he claims he’s too small. That the cop couldn’t have seen him from across the tracks even if he had an erection. Have you had any other case like this?”

 Chapman cut her off, jabbing his finger in the air to make his point. “You don’t need any law, you don’t need any research. Here’s what you do. Go down to court, tell the lawyer to step out of the picture. Get lost. We don’t need him. And you tell Mr. Gavropoulos to take this like a man. ‘Anthony, be proud. Take the damn plea,’ you tell him. I’d rather have a conviction than admit I’ve got one that’s too small to be seen.”

 Janine’s jaw dropped, believing as she did for a moment that Chapman’s advice was to be followed.

 “He’s just kidding, Janine.” I walked her out of the office into the hallway and told her how to handle the judge by giving her some case citations on point before sending her on her way back to the courtroom.

 Chapman was holding my coat for me when I went back into the room. “C’mon, Blondie, let me take you away from all this. Let’s go pick up Mercer and get to work on a real case. Remember what your Granny Jenny told me that time your mother had the surprise party for you a couple of years ago?”

 I knew exactly what he was going to say. It was my Jewish grandmother’s favorite lament, having come to this country from Russia as a young adult, priding herself on having put her sons through college and professional schools.

 She had looked at Mike when he was introduced as one of my colleagues and said, as she often did, “Seven years of the best education my son could afford for her and Paul Battaglia makes her an expert on penises and vaginas.Oy. Only in America.”

 17

 LOVE OR MONEY?“

 “Fifty-fifty. It’s a toss-up.”

 “I think it’s one more than the other.”

 “How’re you counting lust? How’re you counting just out and out rage? Sex-related homicides? As love? That is no good.”

 “Doesn’t matter. I think it’s money way more often than it’s love.”

 “Take all your domestics. It’s not ‘love’ like you might think of it. But it’s love gone bad.”

 “Yeah? Well those domestics are about money just as often as they are about any kind of emotional miswiring.”

 I came out of the ladies’ room in the Mid-Manhattan Hospital cafeteria to rejoin one of the Chapman-Wallace dialogues on murder.

 “What’s your tally, Coop?”

 “Don’t know. Probably money.”

 “Mercer, most of what we got is Paco shoots Flaco over red tops and blue tops.” The typical homicide squad investigation these days centered over arguments about crack vials from drug wars in all their rainbow glory of plastic stoppers—scarlet, navy, lavender, yellow, and so on.

 “Sometimes, Flaco stabs Paco ‘cause his woman cheated on him,” Mike went on. “But he usually only gets pissed off about it if she’s a moneymaking part of the operation. Certainly not ’cause he loves her. These guys love their pit bulls and their pythons and their cockatoos. Not their broads.”

 “So what hit Gemma Dogen? Love or money?” Mercer asked, knowing that neither Mike nor I had an answer. “C’mon, let’s go see what Spector says.”

 The three of us wound our way through the maze of double doors and elevators from the cafeteria in the hospital complex to the quiet sixth-floor wing of Minuit Medical College. Mike gave his name to the receptionist at the main desk.

 “Is Dr. Spector expecting you?”

 “Yes, ma’am. We’re homicide detectives and Miss Cooper’s from the D.A.‘s office.”

 He hadn’t said that we were typhoid fever carriers but our job titles elicited about the same kind of response. She frowned once at us, rolled her chair away from our direction, and then avoided all further eye contact as she rang Spector’s office to tell him that “those” people were here.

 “Last door on your right, before the library.”

 We proceeded down the corridor, past the darkened office that had been Gemma’s.

 Spector stood in the doorway to welcome us, his easy smile and open manner exuding the confidence that his reputation suggested he owned. At five foot six inches, he was shorter than each of us, and his reddish brown hair was beginning to recede.

 Still, he appeared to be younger than fifty-two, which is what Mercer’s notes had given as his age.

 Like Gemma’s, Spector’s office was crammed with an assortment of professional items and devices, photographs and awards. But unlike hers, his was also alive with signs of personal connection—children’s faces beamed out of Plexiglas frames and humorous tributes from students were painted on posters as well as on plastic vertebrae.

 “So you’re the people who are trying to restore some order to our little household, are you?”

 “You wouldn’t think so, from the way the receptionist greeted us just now,” Mike answered.

 “As you might guess, things haven’t gotten anywhere near back to normal yet, if you can ever describe a complex like this as ‘normal.’ The press hasn’t been very kind to us. Makes us sound like we’re not running a very tight operation.

 “And you, young lady,” he said, gesturing toward me. “Well, once you bring a lawyer into the mix, a lot of the doctors just panic. The stereotypical distrust between the two professions is like a bad joke. I’ve tried to reassure my staff that you don’t do malpractice work, you’re just a prosecutor.”

 “We thought you could help us understand Dr. Dogen a little better,” I began. “It’s been very difficult to find out much about her. She seemed so very private.”

 “That she was. I can give you some of the occupational information, and Dr. Babson, whom you’re going to see later, knows more about the personal side.

 “Gemma came to Mid-Manhattan before I did, about ten years ago. A real coup for a woman—for anyone, really—to get an invitation to join this department, then to go on and head it. She was a brilliant intellect, very innovative in the field.”

 He talked animatedly for twenty minutes about the care with which Dogen had built up the neurosurgical faculty at Minuit and the pride she took in recruiting students for the grueling work of her specialty.

 When Mike had heard enough of the lavish praise, he interrupted the narrative. “Enough about Florence Nightingale, Doc. Who’d want her out of the way?”

 Spector started at the abrupt question and sat back with one arm stroking the back of his head. “Shall I put myself at the top of the list or is that being too immodest?”

 “Wherever you’d like.”

 “I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors already. Gemma was planning to go back to England and chances are very good that I’ll be the one to succeed her as chief. That’s if Bill Dietrich and his boys don’t try and bring someone in from the outside, over my head.”

 “How certain was it that she was going?” Mercer asked.

 “None of us knew for sure. She played it as close to the vest as everything else she did. I know that on her last trip to Bosnia she stopped in London on her way home. Heard from friends at the university there that they’d welcome her back with open arms. Great credentials. And, of course,” he said, nodding in my direction, “the ‘woman’ thing.”

 “Did she have any kind of deadline here for that decision?”

 “A lot of things at the medical college are going to be decided in the next couple of weeks. April fifteenth, really. That’s when the faculty appointments and contracts have to be tied up for the next fall and that’s when we make the final decision about which students are accepted into the neurosurgical program.

 “You’ll have to ask Dietrich, of course. His office is in charge of all those administrative decisions.”

 “Yeah, we’ve been talking—”

 “And be sure to take some of what he tells you with a grain of salt. He had a real weakness for Gemma even though their affair broke up months ago.”

 The three of us were well trained enough to let that bombshell hit us without comment or reaction.

 Mike tucked it away in his head and brought the conversation back around to Spector. “So supposeyou became chief of the department next month. How does that change life for you, Doc?”

 “If you’re looking at me as a suspect, Mr. Chapman, the answer is, in very minor ways.”

 “Salary?”

 “No change. Oh, it might raise a few honoraria when I go out on the road, but here in the hospital it’s simply the prestige of the title. No extra dollars.”

 “But you’d be happy to have the job.”

 “I’d be a fool not to want it, of course. Look, the truth is, most people in our field regard it asmy department. Dogen was becoming more and more removed, taking herself out of the mainstream here, traveling abroad to third-world countries all the time. When people talk about Mid-Manhattan, with or without your saintly Gemma, they’re talking about Bob Spector’s department. That’s just a fact.”

 “How many neurologists have you got—”

 “Correction, Mr. Chapman. Neurosurgeons, not neurologists.” Spector snapped the answer at Mike like it was a more serious distinction than whether Gemma Dogen was alive or dead.

 “I’m sorry, Doc, I’ve been using the two words interchangeably. Would you just remind me of the difference between them?”

 Spector laughed his response. “The difference? About half a million dollars a year, that’s all.

 “We’re the ones with the saws and the drills, Chapman. We operate, they don’t.”

 “And why is it you think Gemma was leaving Mid-Manhattan?”

 “I don’t think, Miss Cooper, I know. Most of us in this field make our living removing tumors from the brain and doing surgical procedures on disks. Some of us supplement that, intellectually, by doing research on diseases and disorders, like the study I’m running here on Huntington’s.

 “Gemma started out like the rest of us, but she became interested in trauma, in brain injury. Started here in New York for her because of all the gunshot wounds and car accidents. She’d never seen shooting victims in London. The Brits may go for grouse and pheasant but they’ve only recently begun to have the handgun problem we have here. Their guns have traditionally been in the hands of the upper-class hunters, thank goodness. I’m sure you law enforcement types know that.

 “Anyway, once she became fascinated with trauma you couldn’t keep her out of a war zone. Hear about a village decimated somewhere in some unpronounceable country that didn’t exist a decade ago and she’d be on a plane the next day.”

 “Couldn’t she stay at Mid-Manhattan and still do that work? Sounds pretty noble. Seems like they’d benefit from the prestige,” Mercer said.

 “Trauma doesn’t pay the bills, gentlemen. Most of the folks in car accidents and most of the innocent people caught in the crossfire don’t have medical insurance. It may sound crass but I can bring in a lot more money for the hospital than Gemma’s do-gooding ever would.

 “Trauma is, shall we say, more like an afterthought for most neurosurgeons. And besides, the best neurotrauma expert in the world is right here in New York. Jam Ghajar’s his name. Leading man in the field and a real comer. Much younger than Gemma and much more outgoing. I’d guess that was too crowded a field for her. It added to her homesickness.”

 The line between Spector’s confidence and his cockiness was an extremely thin one.

 Chapman tried to ease back into the talk about Dogen’s social life. “What else did you know about her relationship with Bill Dietrich, doctor?”

 “That I wasn’t supposed to know about it, that’s the first thing. I had met Geoffrey—that’s her ex—quite a number of times over the years—conventions and meetings here and there. I’d say he was lucky to get out when he did. Second wife’s a much warmer girl. Lets her guard down, and her hair.

 “Gemma never did much for me, sexually. Always thought getting in bed with her would be like—sorry, Miss Cooper—like putting your private parts in a vise.

 “But lots of men around here didn’t seem to mind that prospect. Dietrich can tell you better than I who some of them were. I think he actually wanted to marry her at one point. Talk about a salary boost. That would have given him a nice cushion. Could have indulged his taste in antique cars.”

 “You started off this meeting with an absolutely glowing review of Gemma Dogen, doctor. Then you sort of trash her. It is true, isn’t it, that you had asked her to assist you in surgery the morning her body was found?” I asked.

 “There’s no question she had superb skills,” Spector said. “It was a very secure feeling to have her by my side in an OR and I invited her often. But once we left that operating theater, she had become like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Hypercritical of a lot of the students, not to mention her colleagues.

 “She did great things for this hospital and this school but I really think it was time for her to move on. No secret about it, I’d have been thrilled to see her leave—by the Concorde, though, not in a pine coffin.”

 Spector was done with us. He rose to his feet, told us that he had a meeting to attend in the library, and ushered us to the door.