Hell Gate

TWENTY

“Did you call the commissioner yet?” Mike asked.

He was the last one to arrive in the conference room, where Mercer and I had taken our place with Nan and Catherine, and a large chalkboard to map out the links between the various crime scenes.

“Scully, Battaglia, the mayor,” Mercer said. “They’re all tied up at City Hall. Coop’s been assured by Rose Malone that it doesn’t involve us.”

“He’s going to be ripped that his department got spoofed,” Mike said. “He’ll be loaded for bear.”

“It’s not a first,” Nan said. “There was a major incident in a Carolina town last year. Someone spoof-called a hostage situation and the entire SWAT team responded. The lady inside had a heart attack.”

“Bet that lawsuit set the department up for a pretty settlement. Remind me not to tell that one to Scully.”

“I’ll get you some better examples.”

Mike reached up and turned on the television set that was mounted over the long conference table. “Might as well see what’s got their blood boiling at City Hall.”

He was flipping to the local all-news channel when he stopped on the Jeopardy! game board.

“I know better than to say it’s inappropriate, don’t I?” Nan asked.

“I’ve already got a mother. Two, if you count Coop’s more-than-occasional nagging,” Mike said, reaching for half of a ham-and-cheese sandwich. “A few minutes too early for the big prize. Let’s check the Blue Room.”

There were a handful of reporters standing on the steps at City Hall. They were the young men and women assigned to the local political beat, not the raucous tabloid crowd that I presumed was still keeping vigil outside the Zunega apartment.

We picked up the sound as the NY1 correspondent was talking. “… don’t know why this flurry of activity escalated inside the mayor’s office, but he was joined this evening by District Attorney Paul Battaglia and Commissioner Keith Scully. Those names put crime on everyone’s mind, as we wait out these unexpected appearances.”

“I think it’s all a ruse so the mayor doesn’t have to show up at Gracie Mansion and face that music,” Mike said.

“Ssssh,” I said. “You want to know what’s happening or not?”

I was at the board, drawing a map of the location of the shipwreck in Queens and the various sites in Manhattan that seemed to be in play.

“And over my left shoulder,” the reporter continued, “you can see that the lights are still on in the City Council, where some kind of special session seems to be in progress.

“In the meantime, at the bottom of the steps here, the security detail made an interesting discovery this morning.”

“Coop made one too,” Mike said. “That her formerly skinny ass was taking on so much fromage-am I right? How’s that for a cheesy Frenchman?-that she crashed right through the tarp and went jawbone-to-jawbone with a colonial corpse.”

“That’s not where I fell, Inspector Clouseau.”

“No, Alex,” Mercer said, moving closer to the screen. “But this guy’s talking about the other burial pit right below the front steps. See?”

The reporter was standing with a Parks Department employee who had removed a section of fence to expose another piece of green tarp like the one I had fallen through behind the building.

“A minor accident here today refocused attention on the abandoned project that involved determining the occupants of these centuries-old graves that predated the construction of City Hall. Budget cuts put a halt to the excavations years ago, and a previous mayor’s protocol mandated that intact remains were not to be excavated.

“Uncovering the tarp today, which is riddled with large tears and damage from foul weather, we learned that these burial grounds have become a resting place for a wide assortment of objects that probably wouldn’t make it past the metal detectors at the top of the staircase, in the lobby of City Hall.”

“Nice take,” Mike said, swigging his soda.

“Mixed among the human remains, park crews found four switchblade knives, two box cutters, a whole bunch of sharp tools and instruments that were made long after the Half Moon sailed through these waters. You’d be surprised at the number of papers and identification cards that were just discarded like junk, here at the very entrance to the controls of our city government.”

“No different than the courthouse,” I said.

Every morning, perps and their entourages approached our building, often forgetting until they walked in the doorway that the metal detectors would reveal any weapons they were carrying. The first shift of court officers searched the two-foot-wide dirt perimeter daily, looking for discarded weapons.

“This is creepier than doing it in front of our building,” Nan said. “Imagine tossing all this stuff into someone’s grave? They really need to solve that problem.”

Mike had turned back to Alex Trebek, just as he announced the Final Jeopardy! category. “That’s right, I said DEATH VALLEY LIFE. You’ve got sixty seconds to figure out how much you’d like to wager.”

“Mercer and I have this one. He’s big on wildlife. We’ll take on you three girls. Twenty bucks.”

“Fine, guys.” I was drawing the links between Salma’s apartment and the well on the Gracie Mansion lawn that overlooked Hell Gate, and the place on the FDR Drive where Ethan Leighton crashed his car. I circled the Leighton home and wrote Claire’s name, with a big question mark beside it. “Then we get to work.”

Each of us was nibbling on halves of the large sandwiches that Laura had ordered when Trebek revealed the answer and repeated it twice. “Devil’s Hole denizen facing extinction.”

The three contestants each seemed to be struggling to write a question.

“You think California condors live in a hole, or the hole name is just to throw us off?” Mike said to Mercer as he started on his second bag of chips. “Gotta be some kind of prairie dog or burrowing owl. You call it, Mercer. You give it the what-is that’s about to become a what-was.”

The theme music was playing in the background. I started to chalk a list of local political figures recently tainted by possible links to scandal. Congressman Ethan Leighton, former governor Eliot Spitzer, Lieutenant Governor Rod Ralevic, former police commissioner Bernard Kerik.

“What’s the Devil’s Hole pupfish?” Catherine said, surprising me as she took the chalk from my hand. “Humor me, Alex. Let’s just put Tim Spindlis here to round out the list.”

“He didn’t do anything bad,” I said. “And he’s not a politician.”

“But I so enjoy seeing him in such lousy company, even if you erase him later. Exonerate him whenever you’d like.”

“Now, how’d you know that about pupfish?” Mike asked, offering her some chips as Trebek consoled the three men who had guessed wrong.

“Studied the case in law school. It’s a little blue minnow that’s lived only in that hole, in a spring-fed pool in that hellishly hot desert, for tens of thousands of years,” Catherine said. “One of the original fish protected in a landmark water rights case before the Supreme Court.”

Nan and I looked at each other and laughed.

“You two girls must have been too busy partying to do your homework, I guess. Used to be five hundred of those fish. Probably aren’t even fifty today. The court curtailed groundwater pumping meant to develop irrigation in the Mojave to save these guys. They had to put up a chain-link fence to keep all the law students from peering down into the little pupfish pool.”

“Probably wouldn’t let Coop anywhere near the hole for fear she’d crash through that fence too,” Mike said. “Crush all those little minnows to death.”

“Okay, kids, recess is over,” I said, sitting down at the table. “Somebody want to take a stab at suggestions about Salma and where all this leads?”

Mike muted the volume but turned the set back to NY1 so that we could keep an eye on developing events at City Hall.

“First we got to figure out who she was,” Mercer said. “I’m assuming you’re right, because of the tattoo, that she was trafficked in. When did she get to the States? Did the snakehead pick her out to breed her for high-end customers, and bring her to New York?”

“Who introduced her to Ethan Leighton and how often were they together?” Nan asked. “Was there any paper in her apartment? Passports, bank records.”

“Not that Hal and Jack had come up with by the time we’d left.”

“That’s really unusual. Most of the time, if these women make the transition and become legal, they cling to that documentation like a life jacket.”

“Maybe Salma thought she had a better form of protection,” I said. “Maybe her local congressman offered all the coverage she needed.”

“I’ll call Hal in the morning. If he took any paper out of there, I’ll let him bring it here to voucher and I’ll go through every piece of it,” Catherine said.

“So we’ve got to talk to Ethan Leighton,” Mercer said. “That’s clear.”

“Which means I have to offer Lem Howell everything under the sun to bring his man in to sit down with us.” Maybe I shouldn’t have hustled out of the limo so quickly.

“Look,” Mike said, leaning on the table, “Battaglia’ll toss the drunk-driving case to get a leg up on the murder investigation, don’t you think?”

“He tosses that, and what’s to prevent Leighton from keeping his seat in Congress?” I asked. “Not so fast. Battaglia may have a horse in that race. I have no control over offering to drop the charges.”

“Who’s handling the vehicular?” Catherine asked.

“Ryan Blackmer. But he’s cool with it. The front office has told him it gets folded into whatever direction we take with Salma,” I said.

“So we probably have to work with Ethan’s father too,” Mercer said.

“Moses Leighton? He’s tougher than nails. And not above trying to bribe his kid’s way out of any situation.”

Catherine walked to the board and added Moses Leighton’s name. “Let him give it his best shot. I’ve always wanted to wear a wire.”

“Well, then, how about Claire?”

“I don’t think I could look Claire Leighton in the eye,” Nan said. “She must be crushed.”

“Not half as crushed as she’s going to be unless she comes up with a decent alibi,” Mike said.

“Let me try to get Claire in,” I said. “We’ve got a number of mutual friends.”

“Don’t go there unless you’ve got Mercer or me with you. She’s got a shitload of proverbial beans she might be looking to spill, Coop.”

“Yes, but I think the source of all our trouble-all of Salma’s trouble-comes back to the spoofing. Who would have done that to her-and why?”

“Five days, at best, is how much time the phone company is telling me it’s going to take to see if they can source the calls,” Mercer said. “The software to do the scam and even the voice scrambler is available all over the Internet. Really tough to trace.”

Catherine hadn’t left the blackboard. Off to the left of the main list, she drew an arrow from Claire’s name and made a subgroup, including Moses Leighton and Lem Howell.

“Oh, Catherine,” I said. “That’s really a stretch. Lem’s all talk but he’d never do anything that unethical.”

Days ago, I would have said those words sincerely. Now I questioned everything that had been going on.

“He’s in this deep, Alex. I’m not saying he’s the player, but he’s capable of being the puppeteer pulling the strings. Don’t let your affection for him blind you.”

“Shit, Catherine. Coop never lets affection get in the way of anything. You know that,” Mike said. “Used to be I was her favorite guy on the planet. Now that X-ray vision of hers just slices through me like a laser.”

“You’ll always be my favorite, Mike,” I said, walking over beside him to hand him one of Laura’s chocolate chip cookies. “Would I take your kind of abuse from anyone else?”

“What’s in it for Lem?” Mercer asked.

“Get the congressman off the hook. Paid dearly to do that by Moses Leighton,” Catherine said. “After all, in Lem’s very first conversation with you in court yesterday, he was hell- bent on convincing you that Salma was wacky. He set you up for that from the minute you talked, didn’t he?”

I paused for a moment. She made a fine point. It would never have occurred to me that Ethan’s girlfriend was emotionally unstable had Lem not planted that seed.

“Good thinking, Catherine,” Mike said. “Now we need a common denominator between a dinghy full of Ukrainians and a bus-load of Mexicans.”

“Snakeheads aren’t partial to any ethnic groups, Mike. People are trafficked from every corner of the globe, wherever there’s poverty and hunger and a strong desire to get to a better place,” Mercer said. “The day laborers can work anywhere in this country they can get to, and there’s always a market for pretty girls, whether they’re twelve or twenty-five.”

“It’s a sick world we live in,” Mike said.

“Will you be able to focus tomorrow?” Nan asked me. “Do an interview here with one of the Ukrainian girls? I’ll do the other.”

“Sure. Mike will stay out of my hair and we’ll get the first few done.”

“I thought you said Donny Baynes was coming over tonight,” Mercer said.

“He should be here any minute. I don’t know what’s holding him up,” I said. “There’s Battaglia on the City Hall steps. Turn it up, Mike.”

On the television screen, I could see the phalanx of cameramen turning on their high beams as Battaglia joined Mayor Statler and Commissioner Scully at the top of the staircase.

“Good evening, folks. It’s cold out here, so we’re going to make this announcement mercifully short. You all know the district attorney,” Statler said, stepping back so that Battaglia could move to the microphone. “Paul, it’s yours.”

As they shifted positions I could see Tim Spindlis over Battaglia’s shoulder.

I nodded to Catherine. “Put Tim on your list. What if the rumor about him and Spitzer and the prostitutes has a basis in fact?”

Mike smiled. “So Battaglia tries to hide him in plain sight. I like that idea, Coop.”

“This afternoon, we unsealed the indictment of two aides to members of the City Council,” Battaglia said. He looked at the paper in his hand and read the names aloud, explaining that the charges were conspiracy, money laundering, and witness tampering.

“No wonder the lights are burning so bright in the council chamber,” Mike said, whistling before he spoke. “The DA trots Spindlis out, I guess, to keep his whipping boy’s credibility rating high. Tim rubs against the pure prosecutorial patina of Battaglia’s shoulder in front of all the reporters. What’s this about?”

“For months, my chief assistant has been overseeing the investigation looking into the council’s finances, which involves more than twenty million dollars in discretionary funds that were earmarked to entirely fictitious-I said fictitious-organizations. Tim, I’d like you to explain how this scheme worked.”

Spindlis’s opening line was inaudible-delivered with his usual lack of enthusiasm-and one of the reporters yelled to him to speak up.

“Last year, in addition to all of the city’s carefully budgeted monies, each council member received almost half a million dollars in discretionary funds-some allocated to youth programs, some for senior initiatives, some to be used as chosen by the individual council member.”

“Pork barrel spending, Coop. Isn’t that what it’s called?” Mike asked. “Which little piggy is it?”

“Much of the funding reached legitimate groups-neighborhood sports programs for kids and soup kitchens for the homeless-but it turns out that a good number of the designated charities were fake. They simply didn’t exist. For example, Informed Citizens for a Clean Water Supply is a bogus operation,” Spindlis droned on, naming several other phony setups.

“How would anybody know?” Mercer asked. “Sounds like a decent cause.”

“Save the Aqueduct Bridge,” Spindlis said into the bank of microphones. “The Alexander Hamilton Memorial Restoration Fund is a nonexistent organization that was supposed to provide money to aid the city’s Historic House Trust in preserving the Grange Mansion, which was Hamilton’s home. There simply are no such funds.”

I looked at Mike when I heard the word mansion. There weren’t that many of them on the island of Manhattan.

“And instead,” Spindlis said, “that fund primarily served as a conduit to provide cash and other personal benefits to the aide involved. Stolen city funds walked out of here by council employees.”

“What’s the timing on this?” Mercer asked. “What’s the rush to judgment, do you think, that made the district attorney unseal this thing today?”

Paul Battaglia took control of the microphone from Spindlis. “Kendall Reid is charged with skimming almost two hundred thousand dollars cash, so that you’re clear on this, designated for an agency he selected that doesn’t even exist. So far as we can tell, this is a practice that has been going on for more than twenty years, a result of the charter revision of 1989.”

“There’s part of your answer, Mercer,” I said, as Battaglia identified the other City Council aide involved. “Kendall Reid was Ethan Leighton’s aide before he gave up his council seat to run for Congress. The DA’s decided to turn the screws on Leighton as well as on the City Council members.”

“Depends on which way Battaglia spins it,” Nan said, aware of how well the boss liked to control leaks to the press. “That’s the way we’ll know whether he’s trying to tie this to Leighton, or take the heat off the congressman.”

“The tabloids will have a field day. That’s what I’m going to do in my next life. Write headlines for the Post. The bad guys make it so easy. CITY HAUL, that’s what I’d dub this scandal. SLUSH PUPPIES,” Mike said, boxing the banner headlines with his hands. “Meanwhile, someone walks out the door with all that slush.”

“Or it’s cash stashed away in shoe boxes in someone’s closet,” Mercer said. He was thinking of the find at Salma Zunega’s apartment today.

“Sounds like Battaglia’s firing a salvo over the bow of Leighton’s ship,” Mike said. “Wipes out all his political enemies in one fell swoop.”

There was a knock on the door and Donovan Baynes let himself in before I could get over to open it. “Sorry to be late. I got held up on another matter,” Baynes said. “What’s the matter, Alex? You all look shell-shocked.”

“If all politics is local like they say, it just never occurred to me how filthy it is right around here, in government offices.” Mike was chewing on his second chocolate chip cookie.

Donny Baynes looked up at the television screen and recognized the press conference participants. “What’s got your boss all fired up tonight?”

“Phantom funds, Donny,” I said. “Just a few million city dollars missing from these phantom funds.”