The intercom buzzed and he got up to answer it. “The only thing more miserable than Coop being in a dark mood like this is Coop being in a dark mood like this when she’s not drinking.”

He came back and smiled at Mercer. “Dinner is served. Vickee’s here with the vittles.”

I got up and went to the door with Mercer to greet her. She handed the packages to him and put her arms around me.

“Don’t get her started again, Vickee,” Mike said. “We’ve barely got the tear ducts and tissues under control. None of this estrogen emo-show, okay?”

“Just help Mercer heat up the meal, Mike. Can you handle that?” Vickee said, turning to him and running her hands up and down his sides. “You better go double on my potatoes, Mr. Chapman. You’ve dropped too much weight.”

“What can I get you?” I asked.

“I’d love some white wine. And your doormen asked me to thank you for their dinner. They said it was delicious-some kind of veal? Now where did that come from, girl?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Mike was holding one of Vickee’s shopping bags. “Yeah, I meant to tell you. They wanted me to bring the food up on my way in. The cops said that some guy from a restaurant came by-one of your snooty French bistros, no doubt. Must have been a waiter who was sent to surprise you with food. A care package. Mercer had already told me we were getting a special delivery from Vickee, so I just told the guys to split it up. No note or anything. Your bloody puss was all over the news. Everyone in town knows you had a rough day.”

I bit my lip. It was almost worth laughing at the notion of Luc being taken for a waiter. He had probably tried to get through to me with a four-star meal. “Guess so.”

“When do we eat?” Mike asked Vickee.

“Half an hour.”

“You mind if I call Teddy O’Malley?” he said to me, after depositing the food in the kitchen. “See if he’s got any ideas about who might hide Brendan Quillian.”

“Go right ahead. I think it would be harder to go undercover with sandhogs than to infiltrate the Mob.”

Mercer busied himself in the kitchen with the food and Mike took out his notepad to make a series of calls from the den, where he was watching the local news. Vickee and I curled up on the living room sofa while she listened to me vent about the day while Dr. John sang background about his gris-gris.

At eight thirty, Mercer called us to the table and served the meal.

The breakout of Brendan Quillian seemed as if it had happened in a bad dream. Here, safe in my own home with my loyal friends, it was almost easy to think of murder for hire, domestic abuse, and dynamite blasts as other people’s problems. But then I would have a flashback to the face of Elsie Evers on the courtroom floor, and I knew we’d all be back to business as usual by daybreak.

“Take some more, Alex,” Vickee said, passing the platter of chicken. “Alex likes the breast. Give her that piece of white meat, Mike, will you? It’s her favorite.”

“Speaking of that, Coop. You ever do Lem Howell back in your rookie days?”

I laughed and shook my head.

“They were just replaying that shot of him walking you out of the courtroom today, you wrapped in his jacket and him looking at you like he wanted the rest of your dress to just slice off in two.”

I pushed my plate away. “I’m full. And if I wasn’t, you once again have the flawless ability to take my appetite away.”

Mike reached for a third helping of potatoes and tore off a fistful of bread. “You were good buddies, right? Don’t you credit him for half of your courtroom success?”

“I had a lot of help from a lot of guys. And from the handful of women who broke me in. And I didn’t do them all, thanks.”

I stood up to clear my place, but Vickee pointed at me and told me to sit.

She came out of the kitchen with a pecan pie and a carton of vanilla ice cream. “Nobody says no to this dish. My mama’s recipe and it’s the very best.”

“Your money on Lem Howell and Coop, Detective Wallace?”

“I spent a lot of time in Ms. Cooper’s office in those early years,” Mercer said, gnawing on a chicken wing. “I may have to go to the grave with some of the messages that steamed off that telephone when I sat out those long days at her desk while she was upstairs on trial, but Mr. Howell was not among those in hot pursuit.”

I wagged a finger at him. “Don’t give me up, Mercer. We’ll see how good Mike’s detecting skills are. I don’t have a lot of secrets from you guys, but the ones I do, I’m keeping close to the vest for the time being.”

The phone rang and I walked to the den to answer it.

“Alexandra? It’s Paul Battaglia. How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay. I’ll be fine.”

“What were your plans for tomorrow?”

“Well, Judge Gertz wanted to give the jury a couple of days away from the courthouse. He’ll probably bring them back on Friday to declare a mistrial. I’d like to go to Elsie’s wake, certainly.”

“That starts tomorrow night. You’ll come with me.”

I would have preferred to avoid the political statement and show up without the district attorney, but he might leave me no choice.

“So, for the morning-”

“Exactly. Here’s what I’d like. Jefferson just called me,” Battaglia said, referring to the Bronx district attorney. “You know where Mike Chapman is?”

“Yes, yes, I do.”

“Get in touch with him and coordinate. Jefferson just got an expedited ruling from the administrative judge up there. He’s ordered the immediate exhumation of the body of that teenager-what’s her name?”

“Hassett. Rebecca Hassett.” When I said her name, Mike and Mercer both looked up. The candles on the dining table seemed to flicker with the breeze that wafted through the open windows behind them.

“Tomorrow morning. You and Chapman have to meet the Bronx homicide prosecutor at the grave site. Woodlawn Cemetery. Can you do that?”

“Of course, boss. Sure we can.”

“Who knows. May be good for nothing, may give us a clue or two. But the media’s all over this case now. Your job is to be there so this doesn’t get away from us and wind up on Jefferson’s plate in Bronx County,” Battaglia said.

“I understand.” The district attorney was turning the screws and I could feel the pressure throbbing in my head.

“He’ll try to pull it out from under you if you don’t sit on it. Make sure Chapman gets that body to the morgue. You’ve brought Quillian this far, Alex. Let’s not let him slip away from my jurisdiction completely. I want that bastard brought in.”

“Teddy O’Malley thinks his subterranean empire is a necropolis,” Mike said. “But this is what I call a city of death.”

We had parked in front of the tall wrought-iron gates of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, four hundred acres of elegantly landscaped grounds that had been a burial place for New Yorkers since the time of the Civil War. Evan Silbey, the funeral coordinator who would escort us to Rebecca Hassett’s grave site, met us there.

Silbey settled into the backseat of the car. “The word cemetery means ‘place of sleep,’ Mr. Chapman. It’s more calming than the word death.”

“The big sleep, buddy. No disrespect to Raymond Chandler.”

“My point is that cemeteries are a very recent concept, historically speaking,” Silbey said. “The necropolis style was mainly driven by architecture-funerary monuments just stacked upon each other with no sense of nature. The ancients buried their dead along the roadsides leading out of the cities. Via Appia, if you will.”

Mike walked around to the driver’s side and got into the car.

“In medieval times, it became the custom to bury people in churchyards, right inside the cities,” Silbey went on. He was slightly built and quite pale, with horn-rimmed glasses and the flattest monotone of a voice. “But most urban areas eventually ran out of room. By 1800, many city dwellers wanted more rural retreats that would offer places for meditation and contemplation while visiting the departed, so people could use these grounds as public parks, too.”