Lethal Legacy

SEVENTEEN

I was waiting in the lobby of my building when Mike and Mercer pulled in the driveway just after seven a.m. that morning.

“Did you two get any sleep?” I asked, climbing into the back seat.

“Catnap on cots up at the squad,” Mercer said. “How about you?”

“I rested.” No matter how many murder victims I had seen, it never got easier to find a peaceful zone that wasn’t already inhabited by killers and cops.

“No whining, then, Coop,” Mike said. “We got a long day ahead of us.”

“You never heard that girl whine, Mr. Chapman. Mind your mouth.”

I had been comforted to have Luc beside me when I got home several hours ago, holding me and not asking any questions once I told him the bare outline of what had happened. At six, I had gotten out of bed again to call Battaglia with the news, knowing that he would prefer to be awakened with information from me rather than learning it from a newspaper headline on his doorstep.

“What’s first?” I asked.

“How about the New York Pubic Library?” Mike said. “Thanks for giving me Jill Gibson’s number. I phoned her after you left, to tell her about Tina. She agreed to be here early to have security let us in. Said we’d meet her at seven-thirty.”

Mercer opened the lid on a cardboard cup of black coffee and passed it to me as Mike pulled out of the driveway.

“Still no contact for Tina’s mother?”

“The lieutenant is sending someone to the Mexican consulate first thing. See if they can smoke her out that way.”

“My paper hasn’t been delivered yet. Is there a story?”

Mercer held up the Times and tabloids. “Lucky for us, the body was found too late for the morning news. May give us a few hours’ jump on talking to people.”

“I’ve got to get through to legal at the phone company. Let them know that subpoena I sent out covers the call that came in this morning,” I said. Tina Barr was dead, but her cell phone account was still live.

“Freaked me out when that sucker started to ring,” Mike said.

Mike got onto the drive in Central Park, looping around to the West Side and exiting on Central Park South. He cruised down Seventh Avenue, turning east onto Forty-second Street -the Deuce, in police parlance-and parked beside the corner entrance to Bryant Park.

The mild weather was a break for the cops. Plainclothes detectives were lined up along the balustrade on the western border of the park, doing one-on-one interviews with men who appeared to be from the JumboTron construction crew. Huge trucks bordered the avenue, waiting to be loaded with equipment that should have been taken off-site in the early hours of the morning, before Tina Barr’s body was found.

We walked over and Mike listened in on ten minutes of an interview. “This’ll take all day. They’re checking each guy’s ID so they can run record checks. Getting them to re-create every minute of the setup and breakdown, whether there were any strangers lurking around,” he said, shaking his head. “And the bus lanes will be tied up till midnight with these trucks stuck on the street.”

Commuters emerged from the corner subway station, confused to find the cheerful breakfast and sandwich kiosks within the park still shuttered and closed, cordoned off by police tape.

We started down the path toward the library building. The phalanx of uniformed cops that Mike had demanded were already in place, clustered in groups to search for anything that might provide a clue.

“Look at all the litter,” I said. Ice-cream wrappers and soda cans had been discarded by kids who had watched the ball game. “I can’t imagine any items of evidentiary value would survive the presence of the Scout troops.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t get my hopes up, Coop. Hair bags and hot-heads,” Mike said. “Looks like all the commish came up with on short notice to do the search are old-timers who never made it out of uniform and kids fresh from the academy. Cross your fingers.”

“They’ve found needles in bigger haystacks,” Mercer said.

“It’s kind of ironic that whoever killed Barr left her here,” Mike said, stopping to stomp his foot on the ground. “You know what’s underneath this park?”

“No,” I said.

“Dead people. Nothing but dead people.”

“What do you mean?”

Bryant Park was a green oasis in the middle of one of the city’s busiest commercial districts. Thousands of office workers in nearby skyscrapers escaped their buildings every day-until the middle of winter, when it was turned into a skating rink-to eat lunch, read books, meet friends, enjoy the carrousel, and relax in the atmosphere of a French formal garden.

Mike turned and walked backward, sweeping his hand around the park. “During the Revolutionary War, this site was a killing field for Washington ’s troops when they fled the British after the Battle of Long Island.”

“Well, they’re surely not below the park now,” I said.

“Listen to me, Coop. The whole feng shui of this place is death. After the war, the city made this ground a potter’s field. Final resting place for the indigent and unbefriended. Dead folk down there, one on top of the other, I’m telling you.”

“I thought this place used to be the site of the reservoir,” Mercer said.

“No, no, no. The reservoir was right over where the library stands,” Mike said, pointing at the back of the elegant structure. “This spot was the burial ground. I know there’s dead people under here, Coop. It’s a fact. The city decommissioned the potter’s field in the 1850s to build a crystal palace for the first World’s Fair. When that burnt down, they turned it into a park.

“When my old man came on the job-the 1970s-Bryant Park was one of the most treacherous places in Manhattan. Dope dealers ran the place, he used to tell me. All crime all the time.”

“Over here, Sarge,” a voice called out, and a hand went up in the air. The three of us stopped in our tracks.

“Whaddaya got?”

The young cop was wading through a bed of pachysandra. “Used condoms. Do I pick ’em up?”

The sergeant’s answer was drowned out by three other officers yelling that they had also found condoms. “Everything goes to the lab.”

Mike continued walking east. “Be prepared. Isn’t that the Scouts’ motto? Glad they came to the game with condoms. Maybe they were cross-pollinating with the Brownies while the Yankee bullpen was falling apart. Those techs are going to have their hands full, testing all the crap that turns up.”

At the end of the pathway, we found an exit onto Forty-second Street and left the park to elbow our way to the front of the library, which stretched down two long blocks. The midtown crossroads at the corner of Fifth Avenue was a hub of pedestrian and vehicular traffic.

“Is that Gibson?” Mike said.

I looked ahead and could see Jill, talking on her cell, as she paced below the statue of one of the two spectacular marble lions-iconic New York City landmarks-that stood on guard at the foot of the terraced steps of the great building.

I introduced her to Mike and Mercer, reminding her that Mike was the detective who had called her early that morning.

“I’m heartbroken about this, Alex. It’s just unthinkable that someone could have done this to Tina. We were all so willing to help her, but I couldn’t get her to come in,” Jill said, turning to lead us up the first tier of steps. “I’ve called security. They’re sending someone to the front door to open up.”

“You ought to put some mourning ribbons around the lions’ necks,” Mike said, patting the large paw of the one to his right as he passed by it.

“You know their names, Mike?” Jill asked.

“I didn’t know they had names.”

“During the Great Depression, Mayor LaGuardia called them Patience and Fortitude. He felt those were the qualities New Yorkers needed to endure the hardships of the times.”

“The same traits will serve us well this week,” Mercer said.

Mercer was as quiet and steady as ever, knowing that we were moving deeper into a tangled thicket of characters and motives, that we had a series of crimes that would not be solved as quickly as Mike might like. Mike, on the other hand, was long on fortitude and short, as always, on patience.

We continued our climb, and I admired the stunning array of sculptures and reliefs-sphinxes, winged horses, allegorical figures, and literary inscriptions-that decorated the massive portico of the library. At the very top, we passed under one of the arches and waited at the front door for a worker to admit us.

Mike reached into his jacket pocket and removed some folded papers. “This is a Xerox of the call slip that Tina had in her pocket when she was killed,” Mike said. “The one I mentioned to you on the phone.”

Jill Gibson read the notations on the first piece of paper-Tina’s name, the date, and the book she must have been about to request. On the second page was the partial quote that had been scrawled on the back of that slip.

Jill looked at them both again, just as the man inside opened the series of locks and pulled back the huge wood-and-glass door.

“Tina didn’t write this,” Jill said. “Someone made this call slip out in her name.”

“You mean one of the librarians?”

“Well, you saw the original, Mike. Was it made out in pencil or in ink?”

“The front side, with her name and the book title, was done in ink. The notation on the back-see how faint it is here on the copy? That was written in pencil.”

“The librarians in the reading room don’t allow ink in there. Most research libraries are like that. You can only use pencil,” Jill said. Her hand was trembling as she folded the slip in half. “I know Tina’s handwriting well, Detective. It’s quite distinctive, whether in print or script. She didn’t write that information on the call slip. And it’s unlikely any of the librarians did, either. Certainly not in ink.”

Mike took the papers back and compared the two writing styles. I knew what he was thinking. We’d have to bring in another expert-someone familiar with the very unscientific field of handwriting analysis. One clue that seemed promising at two o’clock in the morning now created a new level of obfuscation.

“The second page-that quote on the back of the slip-that’s Tina’s writing,” Jill said. “But she didn’t fill out this form. We have several early editions of the Lewis Carroll work, all of them quite rare. Maybe another person asked her to make the request to see one of these books.”

Maybe someone who didn’t want to be associated with the request filled out the call slip, counting on the fact that he-or she-could persuade Tina to deliver it and retrieve the book. Maybe it was the person who killed her.