Bad blood

11

I parked at the corner of Eleventh Avenue and walked east across Thirtieth Street to the front of the barbed-wire entrance to the construction site at three forty-five in the afternoon. I had called Mike on his cell phone and he was waiting for me at the gate.

“I can’t believe you told Lem about this Lawrence Pritchard business before you even found out who the guy is.”

“It’s a little thing called ethics, Mike. If it has anything to do with our case, Lem would be likely to move for a mistrial. This one won’t get any better the second time around.”

“He’s baiting you. That’s all it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lem Howell? Dropping a piece of paper on the floor by mistake? There’s a guy who never had a spit curl where he didn’t want it to be and he’s playing loose with a clue or a potential suspect’s name? Not his style, Coop. You know your players better than that. You know he wanted you to be misled by that business card. What’d he tell you?”

“He was very gracious about it. Said it had nothing to do with the trial. Thanked me for the call and said I could make a record of it when we resumed next week.”

“Sucker,” Mike said, and started to walk through the yard.

“I googled this guy Lawrence Pritchard,” I said, stepping over enormous pieces of mechanical equipment and walking between two tall cranes to keep up with Mike. The site was a beehive of activity. The sandhogs were in work clothes, the detectives had eschewed sports jackets for T-shirts, and the officials from a mix of city agencies were the only ones standing around in suits, kibitzing with each other. I hadn’t smelled this much cigarette smoke in any one place since my first midnight visit to a homicide squad.

No one seemed happy to see me, but that was hardly a new crime-scene experience.

“What’d you get on him?” Mike asked, calling to me over his shoulder.

“Former chief engineer on this project. Fired two years ago. Has his name come up?”

“Watch your step,” he said, waiting for me and holding out his hand. “It gets really sloppy over here from the fire hoses last night. Never heard of him.”

“There are a few articles about it. Max is going to pull them for me. Looks like he was involved with kickbacks. Pocketed more than a hundred thou, took lots of expensive gifts, went on a few gambling trips and boondoggles.”

“And Quillian knows him?” Mike was standing at the bottom step of a trailer, a dust-covered double-wide that seemed to be the headquarters of the operation. He climbed the four stairs and held open the door, which was draped with black bunting. “Welcome to hog house. No kidding, that’s what they call it.”

“Thanks,” I said, pausing at the threshold. “That’ll be your job to figure out, don’t you think? We’ll be looking for a link between Duke Quillian and Pritchard. Obviously, I think Brendan was trying to put Lem Howell on Pritchard’s trail for some reason. Lem said it has nothing to do with my murder case, but he must figure there’s a connection to Duke’s death.”

“We’ve got the main man from the Department of Environmental Protection here. The entire tunnel project-everything having to do with the water supply in New York-is under their watch. He’s supposed to tell us what we need to know. Later, we can ask him if he’s got the scoop on Pritchard.”

Several desks and lots of folding chairs were in the long room. Stacks of paper, small tools, lunch boxes, and ashtrays covered the tabletops. Stained yellow slickers and protective gear were hanging from hooks on every side. Several workers were clustered near the entrance, manning a bank of phones, and appearing to be exhausted from long hours of vigil for their lost colleagues. A few more were glued to the local all-news channel on the television set mounted on a stand in the corner. Most of them stared at me as I passed through but offered no greeting.

Mercer introduced me to George Golden, a senior geologist with the city’s DEP. “Four of your task-force detectives are already in the tunnel. Are you expecting anyone else?” Golden asked. He was about fifty-five years old, with a deep tan, hooded eyes, and a sharply pointed nose that looked like a hawk’s beak.

“That’s it,” Mike said. “Start from the top. What have we got here?”

“We’re standing directly above the main artery of Water Tunnel Number Three. I’m talking about a sixty-mile-long tube that sits six hundred feet below street level and is going to cost more than six billion-not million-six billion dollars before it’s completed. And we don’t expect that until 2020, if we get lucky.”

“Why so deep?” Mike asked.

“Construction on New York’s first tunnel began in 1911. For more than a century, we’ve been building a subterranean city under your feet, a whole maze of pipelines that nobody but these workers will ever see. You’ve got subways and electrical systems and sewers down there, and farther below that is the second water tunnel. So there was nowhere for this one to go but deeper underground.”

“How much water does it take to quench our thirst?” Mercer asked.

“And bathe you? And flush your toilets? Start with 1.4 billion gallons every day.”

I could tell from Mike’s pensive expression that his fascination with history was driving his need to know more about this dig.

“I’m missing something here. When the island of Manhattan was settled in the seventeenth century-when they kicked the Indians off to the mainland-weren’t those Dutchmen smart enough to know they needed something to drink?”

“Sure, they knew they were completely surrounded by salt water, Mike. But it wasn’t so much a problem a few hundred years back,” Golden said. “The major settlements were all on the southern end of the island, as you’re probably aware.”

Most New Yorkers were familiar with the tale that Mannahatta had been purchased from the Lenape Indians by the West India Company for sixty guilders-the equivalent of twenty-four dollars. New Amsterdam was colonized close to the tip of the waterfront, and the population pushed northward slowly over the next two centuries.

“In those days, there were a lot of freshwater streams and brooks all over the island,” Golden went on. “Sherman’s Creek up in Washington Heights, Harlem Creek, Lispenard Meadows. And there were several kills-like the Great Kill, right at Forty-second Street, and the Saw Kill in Central Park.”

“Yeah, we happen to know some of the kills pretty well,” Mike said, looking over at Mercer. The Dutch word for “channels” had given its name to inlets and waterways all throughout the New York harbor.

“The greatest natural feature of Manhattan was probably the Fresh Water Pond. Seventy acres of perfectly pure spring-fed waters. Added to the neighborhood wells that were dug near many of the residences and the cisterns that folks filled with rainwater, it seemed like more than enough for everybody.”

“Fresh Water Pond? Never heard of it,” Mike said.

“How about the Collect?” Golden replied. “That’s what it was called when the English took over. Kolck is Dutch for a small body of water.”

Mike shrugged. “So where is it today?”

Golden pointed to me. “You work in the courthouse, Alex? One hundred Centre Street?”

“Yes.”

“Well, right about there. The pond covered most of the area east of Broadway, from Chambers to Canal streets. Your offices were built right on top of the Collect.”

That acreage now encompassed the grid of concrete government buildings in lower Manhattan, from City Hall to Federal Plaza to all of the civil and criminal court structures that exist today-the ones the original city planners had called the Halls of Justice.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Mike said. “Why build over a water source when the stuff was so scarce? Did it dry up?”

“Easiest to say a combination of population expansion and sanitary implosion did in whatever fresh water there had been. The wells were stressed by the growing numbers of people arriving in the city every day, and it didn’t take long for the streams to become putrefied by carcasses of dead animals and human waste. Totally polluted,” Golden said. “Then throw in some plagues-it was yellow fever in the 1790s that caught the city fathers’ attention about clean water, followed by a typhoid outbreak from time to time. And the cholera epidemic of the 1830s that got them off their asses.”

It embarrassed me to realize I had never given much thought to these things. I knew that cholera patients developed an insatiable need for drink, and that ironically, the disease is caused by exposure to contaminated water in the first place.

“You know how many New Yorkers died of cholera in 1832?” Golden asked.

“No idea,” I said.

“More than thirty-five hundred people. Thousands more fled to the country just to avoid the spread of the disease. There simply wasn’t any clean water in the city by that point in time. Not a drop.”

“So what did they do to get it?” Mercer asked.

“Same thing the Romans did, three hundred years before the birth of Christ,” Golden said. “It’s been our model for all this time-the eleven ancient aqueducts built by Roman slaves, all working from the basics of gravity and the downhill flow of water, brought millions of gallons a day into that city from rivers and lakes in the faraway hills.”

“So we’ve got the Croton watershed,” Mike said, referring to what was today a twelve-reservoir system, created in Westchester County by harnessing the Croton River.

“Exactly.”

“But that’s almost fifty miles north of the city,” Mercer said.

“It’s a piker, compared to the distance covered by the original Italian aqueducts,” Golden said. “The Croton River starts much farther north, in Dutchess County. Its watershed covers more than three hundred and sixty square miles, capable of putting out four hundred million gallons a day.”

Mike gave out a low whistle. “And what gets it to Gotham?”

“First they had to create a plan to dam the river, by flooding acres and acres of homes and farmland in the area. Breaking the hearts and spirits of everyone who had settled in that fertile part of the state. Just like the government does today-pay them a few bucks and claim eminent domain.”

Golden continued, “Miles of pipeline were laid, zigzagging south through Westchester County, cutting through rock ridges and valleys, water being forced down the hills by the sheer force of gravity and then entering Manhattan in very dramatic fashion via the High Bridge.”

That fabulous structure, the oldest remaining span connecting the island to the mainland, must have been spectacular when it was built in the 1840s. It had sported fifteen of the same elegant arches that characterized the Roman aqueducts and had carried water to New York County over the Harlem River.

“How big were those tunnels?” Mike asked.

“Only eight feet wide.”

“And how was the water distributed once it reached Manhattan?” I asked.

“Well,” said Golden, “it flowed into the Receiving Reservoir, which looked like a giant fortress, capable of holding one hundred and eighty million gallons of water.”

“But where was that?”

“It was built on York Hill, Alex. You know where that is? The land all belonged to one gentleman, a fellow named William Mathews, and it was pretty prime real estate, both then and now.”

Mercer laughed, but the name meant nothing to me. “A brother, if I’m not mistaken. Deacon of the African Union Methodist Church, back in the 1840s. That neighborhood was the Harlem of its day.”

“Where?” I asked.

Golden answered, “Smack-dab in the middle of Central Park. The Receiving Reservoir fed fresh water to Manhattan until 1940, when it was drained and completely filled in to create the Great Lawn.”

“So recently-just a few generations ago? That doesn’t seem possible.”

“Take it one step further. The water flowed downtown from that facility to what was called the Distributing Reservoir. That’s where it was provided to homes and businesses in the city. Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. Imagine that where the New York Public Library now stands was once another enormous fortification filled with water.”

“And it’s come to us that way for almost two centuries,” Mercer said.

Golden stroked his beak and nodded. “Croton sort of maxed out at the beginning of the twentieth century. So the engineers just kept digging farther north, reaching into the mountains above the city, tapping into the Catskills and the Delaware River.”

Mike said, “I got a whole new respect for all the liquid gold.”

The door to the shack opened and a workman stuck his head in and called out, interrupting Mike, “Hey, George! You got an all-clear in the shaft.”

“Thanks a lot. The cops tell you anything else?”

We all turned to listen to the answer. “They’ve been doing that test all day-what do you call that stuff?”

“DNA,” I said. My three favorite letters of the alphabet. The science hadn’t even been reliable enough to be admissible in any courtroom in America until 1989, when it took six months for a lab to return a preliminary result to police and prosecutors who submitted evidence to the few facilities then capable of doing the work. Now it had reached the point that we could get a positive identification by dusk on human remains found at daybreak at a homicide scene like this.

“Yeah, they’re working on those-um, those pieces of flesh in a truck down the street. It’s got to be Duke. Duke and those two guys from Tobago.”

“What two guys?” Mike asked.

George stood up and reached for a slicker from a peg on the wall. “Tough break. There’s nobody any one of our men would rather have working shoulder to shoulder with them than Duke Quillian. Third generation in the hole-a real lifer. And these other two were just kids. Cousins who came up from the Caribbean to work in London with their uncle. Did a big piece of the Chunnel dig. Moved to the States just a couple of months ago.”

“Who reported them missing?” Mike asked. “Their families?”

“Nope. Neither one had any relatives here. Shared an apartment in Queens. They were set to work the evening shift yesterday. Landlord says they never came home.”

“These guys work evenings, too?” I asked. It was hard enough to imagine being so far down in the bedrock in daylight, but even creepier to think of being in that tunnel in the dark.

“Twenty-four/seven, Alex. We’re a few years behind our due date.”

Mike followed George toward the door. “What’s the difference, Coop? There’s no natural light down there anyway.”

“You game to go down with me?” George asked, pointing a finger and sweeping it around from Mike to Mercer to me.

The answer caught in my throat, but Mike and Mercer were quick to say yes.

George stood next to the solemn group of sandhogs who had just heard the news about their Tobagonian colleagues. “I need one of you guys to take us in, okay?”

Five of them stood up as though they hadn’t heard the question and excused themselves to get out the door. The others, elbows on the table and their chins resting on their hands, ignored Golden and listened to the commercial for hemorrhoidal cream as intently as they had followed the news stories of the blast.

“Bobby-Bobby Hassett,” Golden said to the man leading the group out the door. “Be a gent, will you? One way or the other, we’re going down there.”

“Sorry, Georgie. I’ve been helping since daybreak. Got a ride home waiting for me,” Hassett said, holding the door open for some of the others and then following them out.

“C’mon, somebody step up to the plate,” he said to the ones who remained. “Give me a hand. These detectives are here to figure this out, make us safe.”

Water Tunnel #3 had been designated a crime scene for the purpose of the investigation-to determine whether the blast was intentional or accidental. Even an accident could be declared a criminally negligent homicide.

No one responded.

Golden patted the back of the sandhog closest to him. “Get your gear on and come along.”

The surly-looking workman kicked back from the table and stood up, letting his chair fall over on its side. “Not if she’s comin’ down,” he said, cutting the air with a thick brogue and a sneer in my direction.

I started to say I’d prefer to wait right here, my usual eagerness to visit a crime scene-in order to understand every dynamic and detail of it-overcome by my fear of journeying so far into the ground.

“What’s your problem?” Mike asked. “She’s been places you wouldn’t have the balls to go to if I walked in front of you with an AK- 47.”

Golden waved off the hog with one hand and pulled on the doorknob with his other.

“Ignore him, Alex. It’s an old wives’ tale. These guys all cling to their myths and their macho bullshit. Bad luck to let a woman in the tunnel.”

From the reaction Golden’s request had drawn, it was a tale that still had legs.

“’Tisn’t bad luck,” the man said to him, striding past Mike out the door. “It’s no luck. No luck at all. It’s death to us down there, Georgie. We’ve already lost over thirty men since we started the dig for this job. How many more have to die?”