Free Bad Blood by Linda Fairstein Page B

totally stumped. Where’s there a desert in Greece?”
    “Out of my league,” I said, waving the bills at him. “We’ll use this for drinks.”
    “I’m sorry that none of you guessed it correctly,” Trebek said to his three dejected contestants. “The Sphinx. The Great Sphinx at Giza, which for many people symbolizes the country of Egypt, is named from the Greek word for a fantastic creature with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of a bird. Legend has it that she strangled travelers who couldn’t solve her riddle.”
    Mike zapped Trebek off with the clicker. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you work that image into your summation. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant testified in this courtroom, no longer silent like the Sphinx, the great ancient strangler of the desert — ’”
    “‘Half-man, half-beast.’ You’re on. And it’s all providing I survive Lem’s motion to dismiss at the end of the People’s case. Where are you meeting Mercer?”
    “Primola,” Mike said, referring to my favorite Upper East Side Italian restaurant on Second Avenue, not far from the high-rise building in which I lived. The consistently great fare, the casual ambience, and the personal attention we received from the owner and his crew made it one of my regular haunts. “My car’s on Baxter Street. Wait in the lobby and I’ll come around for you.”
    We rode down together in the elevator and I chatted with the Fifth Precinct officer who had been assigned to lobby security, a quiet post on this warm summer night. When Mike’s car pulled in front of the orange cones that kept Battaglia’s parking space reserved, the cop walked me out and opened the car door. I threw the paper bags full of empty coffee containers and soiled napkins onto the seat behind me and settled in on the passenger side for the ride uptown.
    Mike Chapman and I made an unlikely pair. I had turned thirty-seven at the end of April, six months after he’d celebrated the same birthday, but we had few other traits in common beside our age. His father, Brian, had been a legend in the NYPD, known for his street smarts, his guts, and his investigative style, who’d retired after twenty-six years on the job only to die of a coronary forty-eight hours from the time he gave up his gun and badge. His widow, born in Ireland, made good on her promise to see that Mike graduated from college, but was just as proud when he used those qualities of his father’s that seemed to have passed to him through the genes and joined the force the day after completing his degree at Fordham.
    I rested my head against the back of the seat. The bright lights over the sign at the entrance to the northbound FDR Drive beat down at me from above, so I shifted and stared at Mike for a minute or two before closing my eyes. He had all the instincts of a great cop plus the benefits of a good education. The coveted gold shield of the detective division had been awarded to him early in his career, for his role in arrests in a drug-related massacre on Christmas Day of his first year in uniform, followed by the daring rescue of a pregnant teenager who had threatened suicide from atop the George Washington Bridge.
    “You fading out on me?”
    “I’m tweaking my summation.”
    “That’s weeks away, if you’re lucky.”
    “One of things I learned from Lem Howell,” I said. “You write your closing argument before you ever open to the jury. It forces you to organize your case more thoroughly, to structure it with a logic that the jury can follow as you put the pieces of the puzzle together.”
    Mike looked over and smiled his great wide grin that warmed me no matter how bad my mood. “Back to the drawing board, huh, Coop?”
    “Forget my ‘Kate Meade, pillar of the community’ remarks. I’ll have to toss them. Did you get an update on Marley Dionne, or do I write him off, too?”
    “The Rasta disaster? He may not talk, but he’ll live.” Mike ran his right