The Night Caller (7 page)

Coop met Deni Green at the Sapphire Coffee Shop after she called the next morning telling him she’d organized the material he wanted. When he walked in, he saw her seated in the same booth where they’d met the last time. She was wearing black again, a baggy dress of some sort of crinkly material. Coop wondered if she always dressed in black.

The Sapphire was more crowded this time, with office workers taking brunches or early lunches, but Coop and Deni could still talk privately. He said hello and slid into the booth so he was seated facing her. Before Deni on the table was a plate of fried eggs, sausage, and buttered toast. Late breakfast, delayed because of Coop and his request for information.

“It’s delicious,” Deni said. “I eat here all the time and I know. I recommend you order the same.”

“I’ll just have coffee.”

“Sure? It’s my treat again,” she said. “I have an expense account.”

“I’m sure.”

She let it drop and went back to her meal while Coop ordered a cup of coffee from the same waiter as before, the guy who looked like an anarchist poisoner. With her free hand Deni removed a fat yellow file folder from the black briefcase on the bench beside her and laid it on the table in front of Coop. “Here’sh the shtuff you ashked for,” she said around a mouthful of egg. “Photographsh an’ all.”

He opened the folder and studied its contents, aware of Deni washing down the bite of egg with a long swig of coffee.

The waiter had brought his coffee and glanced over Coop’s shoulder. “My God!” he said.

“We’re writers,” Deni told him.

He nodded and hurried away.

“So what do you think?” she asked Coop.

“I’ll take it home, read it all, and get back to you.”

“But your first impression?”

“My first impression is we have a long way to go before we can convince any law enforcement agency we’re dealing with a serial killer.” He’d asked Billard to contact the police departments in the cities where the other murders on Deni’s list had occurred and inquire about plastic saints. None of the departments had such information and was withholding it from the public.

“What about the footprints?” Deni asked.

“What about the fact that the women were murdered in different cities, with different weapons, in different ways, and that in one case an arrest and conviction was obtained, and in two others the police think they know who did it?”

“Well, that’s how it works: He kills in different states and jurisdictions because he knows the local police won’t run everything through national computer banks and make the connections.”

“Don’t be too sure you can read his mind,” Coop told her. “You have to guard against making too many assumptions or you’ll head off in the wrong direction.”

Deni stared at him. “I could have sworn you were trying to tell me there was nothing there.” She pointed her egg-yellowed fork at the file folder.

“There might be something there,” Coop assured her. “Just cool your jets so we don’t make a mistake.”

Deni grinned. “I’m rocket powered, haven’t you heard?”

This woman was beginning to irritate him. “You and Cozy Cat.”

“Cozy Cat’s not the main character in my novels.”

“So what is your detective’s name?”

“Deni. I’m the main character. Deni Green. Like Ellery Queen’s character was Ellery Queen.”

As Coop closed the file folder and moved it aside so coffee wouldn’t dribble on it, he noticed Deni staring beyond him. He turned and saw a frail, fortyish woman, whose prettiness prevailed despite a militarylike buzz cut, approaching them. What was left of her hair was red and she was wearing light makeup and bright red lip gloss. She had on a black blouse and black jeans, a men’s oversize black blazer, black platform shoes. Coop wondered when they would get over dressing in black.

“Alicia!” Deni said, grinning broadly. “How funny running into you here!”

“I came to get some takeout so I could eat in my office,” Alicia said.

“Alicia’s my editor at Whippet Books,” Deni told Coop. “Coop, Alicia Benham.”

Coop reached across the table and shook Alicia’s delicate hand gently. “I figured that.”

She looked at him with emerald eyes made to seem huge by her frailty and close-cropped hair. “Oh?”

“I tried to call you at Whippet yesterday,” he explained. “You aren’t easy to get in touch with.”

The glossy red lips arced up in a slight smile. “If you met some of the people who try to get in touch with me, you’d understand why.”

“Coop’s helping me on
The Killer Inside,
” Deni said. She glanced at him. “That’s only our working title.”

“You’re a writer?” Alicia asked.

“No. Former cop, NYPD.”

“Ah! Well, whatever you are, if you’re collaborating with Deni I suppose we do need to talk.”

“We’re not exactly collaborating,” Deni said. “This is my book.”

“I can come by your office this afternoon,” Coop told Alicia.

“That’d work. Know where it is?”

He nodded. “The address is in Deni’s previous book.”

Coop continued looking at Alicia. “Who’s Smurger and Bold?”

The question seemed to take her by surprise. “My husband’s attorneys. I’m in the process of getting a divorce.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not necessary. You know Smurger and Bold?”

“Only their names. They came up when I was getting the brush-off on the phone from the receptionist at Whippet Books.”

“Oh. I thought for a moment you were going to hand me some sort of summons or court order.”

“Not my game. Two o’clock okay?”

The counterman called Alicia’s name to let her know her order was ready. She said good-bye and it was nice meeting Coop, not answering his question.

“At your office,” he reminded her.

“Two’s fine,” she said over her shoulder, headed for the register.

He watched her walk away. He’d sensed a glint of dismay in Alicia’s eyes when Deni had called her name. Maybe the editor and the famous author weren’t all that compatible.

Coop thought it couldn’t hurt to have an ally at Whippet, to know what Deni might be writing about Bette in her book.

“She’s going through a horrendous divorce,” Deni said. “Her husband is an abusive son of a bitch.”

“He abuse her physically?”

“Worse than that—psychologically.”

Coop remembered some of the women he’d seen on domestic violence calls after physical abuse. Did people like Deni think that kind of damage left little psychological effect?

“The world can be a shitty place for women,” Deni said.

“For men, too. For cats.”

Deni smiled around a bite of egg. “I betcha we get along just fine, Coop.”

Coop had done his research. Whippet Publishing was an imprint of a larger publisher that was a division of a major publisher that was owned by a French conglomerate specializing in commercial concrete applications. All of this resulted in Alicia Benham having an office on the fifth floor of a building on Hudson Street.

After a brief wait in a quiet, carpeted anteroom done in shades of blue and gray, Alicia had appeared and led Coop to the office. It was Coop’s idea of an editor’s office, small and book-lined, with a window that afforded a distant view of the Statue of Liberty. Alicia sat in a gray upholstered swivel chair behind a gray desk. There were a few yellow file folders on the desk, a gooseneck reading lamp, a stack of rubber-banded manuscripts, and on one corner a notebook computer with the lid raised. It was a prewar building of generous construction; no sound from the street made it all the way up five stories, through the thick walls, and into the office. All in all it was a good place to work, to ponder punctuation.

Coop sat in a gray chair in front of the desk. Alicia leaned back in her chair and smiled at him. The harsh sunlight pouring through the window revealed fine lines in her face but seemed only to add to its delicacy. She seemed to have had pain in her life and dealt with it in an objective way that hurt all the more and left its imprint.

“Know anything about commercial concrete applications?” Coop asked.

She laughed, surprised. “Should I?”

“Guess not.” He nodded toward the stack of manuscripts. “Those what authors hope will turn into books?”

“By the time they get to me it’s already been decided that they’ll be books.” She motioned with her right arm. “Like those.”

Coop followed her glance and saw a lineup of about a dozen Cozy Cat novels on one of the bookshelves. “If Deni’s such a successful mystery novelist,” he said, “why does she want to try writing a fact crime book?”

“You asking as her collaborator or a cop?”

“Former cop,” Coop reminded her. “And more of a researcher than a collaborator. I’m also the father of one of the victims who’ll appear in Deni’s book.”

Alicia’s expression changed. Crows’-feet deepened around her blue eyes. “I’m sorry. Really.” Then another, more subtle expression entered her eyes. “Is that why Deni?…”

“It’s how she got me to help her,” Coop said.

Alicia clasped her hands together and leaned forward. “Listen, Mr. Cooper—”

“Coop.”

“Okay, Coop. I asked Deni to venture into the field of true crime. There’s pressure on me to provide Whippet with writers who sell. Her Cozy Cat series has gotten stale and sales are slumping.”

“Why?”

Alicia regarded him carefully, weighing whether she should confide in him further. “The book business being what it is, you could get a lot of different answers to that. Frankly, I think it’s because the main character is becoming rather unlikable.”

“Isn’t the main character Deni?”

“That might be the problem. Too much of the real Deni is creeping into the books. You might have noticed she’s somewhat self-involved.”

Coop nodded. “I figured what the hell, she’s a writer.”

“Do you know many writers?”

“None other than Deni.”

“Well, she’s only typical of today’s writers in some ways. The fact is, Deni’s an egocentric, devious opportunist who’s constantly calculating what she can do for herself at anybody else’s expense.”

Coop stared at her. “You
are
her editor?”

“Sure, but I don’t have to be her friend.” She squinted up her eyes and regarded him. “Whatever the reason, I decided to warn you about her.”

“You haven’t asked me not to repeat any of this.”

“My feeling about you is that I don’t have to ask.”

“And you are going to buy the true crime book if she writes it?”

“Sure, I have no choice. But I wouldn’t tell her that. And if she doesn’t make deadline, my replacement will buy it. If Whippet doesn’t publish it, someone else might. And the way things are going, if nobody buys it, it might still turn up on the damned Internet. Be assured, when an author like Deni writes a book, it will be read. The only question is, how many copies will it sell? Make no mistake, Coop, I’m acting out of self-interest here. I need a big seller from Deni, and I’m going to make sure she delivers the manuscript on time to save my job.”

“You’ve been candid,” Coop said. “I appreciate it, but I’m wondering why you’re talking this way.”

“Deni’s not the gentle soul some of her readers still think she is. She isn’t to be trusted. I learned that the hard way in my dealings with her over the years. She uses people. I don’t want to see her use you, especially under the circumstances.”

“Would you be talking this way if Cozy Cat sales weren’t slumping?”

She smiled. “Of course not.”

One of Coop’s reasons for wanting to talk to Alicia was to get added insight into Deni Green. He’d sure gotten that in a hurry. His other reason was to feel out Alicia to see if she’d become his ally and source of information if Deni proved to be a problem. To have some idea if she would squelch whatever defaming passages about Bette might be in Deni’s manuscript. He now had a pretty good idea that she’d cooperate. Out of self-interest if not because she was basically a pretty decent sort.

He stood up.

She seemed a bit surprised, maybe slightly disappointed. “Interrogation over, Officer?”

“Only for the moment, I hope. Your husband…”

“My soon-to-be ex.”

“It’s none of my business, but I understand he mistreated you. If there’s an ongoing problem with that, I have friends in the department.”

“Deni tell you he mistreated me?”

“Well, yes. Abused you verbally.”

“Deni doesn’t know.”

“No, I suppose she doesn’t.” He shrugged, embarrassed. “Sorry. You were candid with me, so I thought I’d be candid back. But I shouldn’t have gotten into anything so personal.” He moved toward the door.

“You be careful, Officer Coop.”

“Of Deni?”

“Her, too.”

He wanted to say more to her, but she’d turned her attention to her work and was already snapping the rubber bands off one of the manuscripts.

Coop knew Sue Coppolino was twenty-three, but she looked too young to be in a women’s prison rather than a juvenile detention center. She was about twenty pounds heavier than the attractive woman in her newspaper photos taken shortly after Marlee Clark’s murder. Her face was pale, with cheeks reddened and puffed slightly by acne, and she wore no makeup. A ruined child. Her dark hair was cut short in a way that reminded Coop of Alicia.

From the moment a guard had brought her into the interviewing room, her eyes had been fixed on Deni Green. She paid no attention to Coop.

“I thought you forgot about me,” she said to Deni, as soon as the door closed behind the guard.

“No chance of that,” Deni said. She put her hand across the table and Sue grasped it with both of her own. “I told you, you’re the main reason I’m writing this book. You don’t belong in here.”

Coop was sitting next to Deni, facing Sue Coppolino. They were alone in the small, pale green room, at a wooden table bolted to the floor, with three wooden chairs. That was the only furniture. One wall was a mirror that was probably two-way glass. An overhead fixture encased in a wire cage provided the only illumination. The locked door had a tall window in it, outside of which stood the guard, who appeared disinterested even though he glanced into the room every four or five seconds. The room held the scent of stale sweat and desperation that Coop recognized from his days in the department. Hopelessness had seeped with tears and perspiration into the scarred wooden table.

“Have you got any news for me?” Sue asked. “What did your friends say—the ones you were going to talk to about my case?”

Deni hesitated.

“You know,” Sue hurried on, “your friends at NBC News and
Time
magazine and—”

Deni smiled and shook her head. “You’re going to have to be patient, Sue. I know it’s hard. But all that has to wait until my book comes out. That’s the time to start beating the drums. To raise a media outcry about correcting this miscarriage of justice and freeing you. Remember some time ago that convict Hurricane Carter, how he was finally freed after years in prison? Well, I’m going to make freeing you my personal crusade, I promise you.”

Sue’s lips tightened. She blinked back tears.

Deni freed her hand from Sue’s and reached for a notepad. “Right now, though, we have to ask you a few questions.”

Sue’s face hardened. “I’ve heard that so many times….”

“You have nothing to fear from questions, Sue. You’re innocent. I know that.”

“What about him?” Sue asked, seeming to notice Coop for the first time.

Deni looked with Sue at him.

“Do you know I’m innocent?” Sue asked Coop.

“No. But I think there’s a chance you are, or I wouldn’t be here.” It had sickened Coop, the way Deni was playing this young woman’s hopes to get information out of her. He was going to be straight with her.

“Deni said on the phone you were an ex-cop. I don’t trust ex-cops.”

Coop smiled at her. “You’re right in that. Most of us don’t have much compassion for the bad guys.”

“She’s not one of the bad guys,” Deni said. She sounded exasperated. Coop wasn’t buttering up Sue enough.

“I’m being honest,” he said. “Most ex-cops are that, too.”

“I haven’t noticed such a trait,” Sue told him.

“You can start noticing it. If I think you’re innocent I’ll do what I can to help you. If it looks to me like you’re really guilty, I’ll work to leave you right where you are.”

“Take it easy on her,” Deni said. “She’s been put through a horrible ordeal and there’s no justification. She’s completely innocent.”

Sue’s eyes drifted back to Deni. She could never hear that word
innocent
from her supposed savior often enough. She must have spent hours every day thinking about Deni, imagining what Deni was doing for her in the outside world. Prisoners were so helpless, so easily manipulated by the unscrupulous.

Like Deni Green.

The writer was all business now, opening her notepad, fixing a cool, appraising gaze on Sue. “You’ve told me Marlee showed you a route into her condo complex that would keep you from being seen. And when she was expecting you, she left a gate open and deactivated an alarm.”

Sue nodded. “Right. Marlee was so paranoid about anybody finding out she was a lesbian. She didn’t even want her neighbors to set eyes on me.”

“But the killer got in completely unseen. He must have known about your route in. Could Marlee have told anyone she was expecting you that night?”

“No,” Sue said quickly. She’d been asked that question many times and was bored with it.

“Sue—” began Deni.

Sue squirmed in her chair and made pale fists of her slender hands and fingers. “That’s all I’ve been thinking about in here, and I can’t come up with an answer.”

“She must have let it slip to somebody. Must have let her guard down sometime. Think, Sue, did she mention anyone—”

“No,” said the prisoner stubbornly. “She didn’t let her guard down. Couldn’t. She was a wealthy and famous person. You have no idea how people tried to take advantage of her.”

“But if she met someone who was charming and easy to talk to—”

“You’ve told me about your Ted Bundy theory,” Sue said, “and I’m sorry but I just can’t believe it. Marlee was a public person with a secret she thought could destroy her, or at least cost her a fortune. She would have been very suspicious of a charming stranger trying to worm his way into her confidence. She’d assume he was a reporter.”

“If there had been some man she was close to,” Coop said, “would Marlee have told you about him?”

“Of course! We didn’t have any secrets. She told me often enough I was the one person in the world she trusted. Anyway, she’d had enough of men and simply wouldn’t have been vulnerable in that way to one of them.”

Coop had to ask. “What about another woman?”

Sue stood up from her chair. The guard outside the room caught the sudden movement with one of his sidelong glances and stiffened and stood square to the window in the door.

“I’ll never believe that!” Sue hissed.

“Sit back down,” Coop said. “I told you I’d be honest with you. You’re no fool, and you know I had to ask that question.”

Sue settled back into her chair. “Now you know the answer.”

But Coop wondered if he did.

“We did have to ask you about the possibility of someone else,” Deni said.

Sue shook her head. “Not another woman.”

Deni looked her in the eye. “I told you the footprint we found was made by a man.”

“The man who killed Marlee,” Sue said.

There was another question Coop had to ask. “Did Marlee ever mention a woman named Bette?”

Sue looked down at the table. This question was new, and she gave it careful thought. But in the end she shook her head no. “Not that I can recall.” She looked up at Coop. “Who is she?”

“My daughter. If she and Bette were killed by the same person, I thought there might have been some sort of connection between them in life.”

Sue looked at him for a moment in silence. “Deni told me about that on the phone. I’m sorry.”

Coop smiled at her and nodded, believing her. She
was
sorry, and that more than anything else made him think there was a real chance she was innocent.

“Had Marlee done any traveling in the weeks before her death?” Deni asked.

“Oh, sure. She was always flying somewhere or other to film a commercial or do commentary on a tennis match. She got back from the U.S. Open only a few days before she died.”

“Sometime, someplace, Marlee met her killer,” Deni said. “And so did Bette Cooper and a lot of other women. We have to find the connecting thread.”

“I wish I could help you!” Sue said, sounding as if she might begin to sob.

Deni smiled beatifically at her, the way Nero might have smiled gazing at a fire. “You are helping, dear! Just keep trying and you’ll remember something critical. Keep thinking about what happened the night of the murder and before.”

Sue didn’t look at them as she said sadly, “Don’t you know that’s all I do think about?”

Outside again, in the bright sunlight, Deni looked at Coop. “I suppose you think I’m an asshole after the way I questioned Sue.”

“You’re using her,” Coop said.

“No more than I have to.”

“For what? So you can write a best-seller?”

“A best-seller that will reveal she didn’t kill Marlee Clark, and set her free,” Deni said.

During the flight back to New York, Deni sat quietly beside Coop. They were flying first class, paid for by Whippet. Deni had made a show of that and reminded Coop of it three times since they’d boarded. But that was all she’d talked about. He knew she was disappointed by the way the interview with Sue Coppelino had gone. Despite the careful preparation Deni had obviously made over the phone, no new ground had been broken.

Somewhere over the Carolinas, Coop noticed Deni staring at the flight steward who’d brought her her third Bloody Mary. The man was handsome in a clothes catalog way and well into his forties. He moved about the cabin smoothly and professionally, smiling warmly, making sure passengers’ needs were being met.

Coop knew Deni was aware he was watching her, but he didn’t ask her why she was observing the attendant so closely. She told him anyway.

“See that attendant?” she said.

“Sure. He’s six feet tall, the only one standing up, and wearing a uniform.”

She ignored his sarcasm. “Consider the opportunities somebody like that has.”

“It’s no way to make pilot.”

She looked pityingly at him and shook her head. “You’re making a joke out of a very serious matter.”

“Only because I think you’re about to make a digression. You remind me of a partner I worked with in the department a long time ago. He’d always look for clues outside if the weather was good, inside if it was raining. And always where the light was best.”

“I know what you mean, but that’s not what I’m doing here. That’s a good-looking, personable guy.”

“It’s part of his job to make people like him.”

“So he’s good at it. That’s my point. On a long flight, in a half-empty plane, he could chat with a woman for a long time. He could give her drinks, make them stronger than she suspected. He could work on her, all seemingly very innocent. People will talk freely with a flight attendant, thinking they’ll never see him again.”

“True enough,” Coop admitted. He knew it was a fallacy that people opened up the most to friends and family. Some matters were more freely discussed with bartenders or even perfect strangers, anonymous confessions that were like trial balloons in the face of God.

“Did your daughter fly anywhere recently?” Deni asked.

He thought back. “She went to California on business a few months ago.”

“Uh-huh.” Deni took a sip of her Bloody Mary. “I bet I’ll find that all the victims took flights not long before their deaths.”

“You may well, but it won’t necessarily mean anything.”

“If there’s any correlation, I’ll find it. You’d be surprised what I can find on-line. I’ll cross-check victims’ flights with airline personnel records and crew rosters. I’m a dedicated hacker, Coop. I don’t give up.”

This new sense of direction had jolted Deni out of her uncharacteristically quiet mood. She talked the rest of the way to La Guardia.

She was still hot on her theory when Coop’s cab dropped her off in front of her Manhattan apartment.

As the cab pulled away, he watched her enter her building. He thought of his own apartment, his own bed, only twenty blocks away. He wondered if he could stay awake until he got there.

He felt utterly exhausted. And he felt like a criminal himself, after the way he and Deni had worked Sue Coppolino, held hope in front of her nose like a carrot. There was actually little hope. It saddened him that a young, vital woman like Coppolino would probably spend the rest of her life in prison, where she would die.

In the dim backseat of the cab rocketing through Manhattan, a mood darker than the night took him over.

“Where we goin’ now, buddy?” the driver asked over his shoulder.

I wish I knew,
Coop thought, and recited his address like a lost child.