Lethal Legacy

TWENTY-FOUR

It was only eleven-thirty in the morning, but I felt as though a week had passed since Mike called me about Tina Barr’s body.

A patrol car had backed in to the receiving bay of the library and the three of us were able to get through, without incident, the crowd of photographers, reporters, and local ghouls feasting on rumors of the dead girl in the park.

Mike examined the key wrapped in his handkerchief. It was old-fashioned-a long, cylindrical shaft with a notched tip, and an ornate bow to grasp and turn.

“You got an evidence bag?” he asked the driver of the patrol car.

“Yeah.”

Mike dropped the key in the manila envelope and made a note of the cop’s name and shield number. “Get this down to the lab right now and voucher it. Ask for Ralph Salvietti. He’s been assigned to the case. Tell him Chapman needs this yesterday, okay?”

It was a short drive up Park past the corner of Fifty-ninth Street, where a new luxury tower had opened a couple of years ago amid the stately old buildings that lined the avenue for the next thirty-five blocks.

We were throwing out ideas as we walked to the building, adding to the ever-growing list of chores.

“Who’s going to check with the shipping companies and post office to see whether Tina mailed some of her belongings off, like to her mother?” I asked. “She must have done something with her possessions when she cleaned out of the apartment.”

“I got Al Vandomir doing postal, UPS, FedEx, and all the storage locations near the apartment and the library,” Mercer said.

Every item one of us thought to add to the list led to three or four more. The squad working on each murder-Karla Vastasi and now Tina Barr-would be expanded to a task force and the media would pump up the fear factor across the city. Any witnesses we couldn’t reach today would be on notice of the scope of the investigation by the time the morning news dropped on their doorsteps.

I asked the concierge for Jonah Krauss’s office, and we were directed to the forty-third floor. The elevator interior was sleek and high-tech, with two small-screen televisions-one that ran the local all-news station and the other, a stock ticker.

When we got off, an attractive young receptionist greeted us with a polished plastic smile. “How may I help you?”

Over her head was a sign with the company name and logo: MONTAUK WHELK MANAGEMENT.

“We’re here to see Mr. Krauss.”

She looked at a schedule on her desk and frowned. “Is he expecting you?”

“It’s a condolence call,” Mike said. “One of those sudden-death things.”

“Oh, my,” she said, startled by the news. “Jonah is in the gym. He should be finished there in a few minutes. Is it somebody close to him? May I tell him about it?”

“Thanks, but we’ve got to do it ourselves,” Mike said. “What block is the gym on? We can pick him up.”

She pointed at a frosted-glass door twenty feet away. “It’s right there. But he’s wheels-up from the Thirty-fourth Street heliport in an hour and I’ve got to get him there. Are you guys the police or something?”

“Something. And I’m wheels-up from the morgue at four o’clock, so we should be fine.”

The girl swallowed hard and told us to take a seat.

“What’s a hedge fund, anyway?” Mike asked me.

I sunk into a leather sofa and took my lip gloss out of my pocket. “They’re private investment funds, usually only open to a limited range of investors. Hedge funds are exempt from direct regulation by the SEC, the way brokerage firms or mutual funds are managed. So they’re considered riskier than a lot of traditional investments.”

“Riskier how?”

“They often invest in distressed securities-like companies going into bankruptcy. Many of them aren’t very transparent, since they don’t have to disclose their activities to regulators. Sort of secretive.”

“Like you, Coop,” Mike said. “Krauss runs one?”

“The thumbnail sketch on the library contact sheet said Krauss manages hedge funds. Forty-six years old, graduate of Dartmouth, with homes in Manhattan, Montauk, and Lyford Cay. Still on his first wife-Anita.”

“That’s refreshing,” Mercer said.

“And still wanting to use his new money to elbow out the good ole boys on the board to be the chair, according to Alger Herrick.”

“Don’t you think it’s supposed to be wealth management?” Mike asked me, looking at the firm’s name on the wall sign.

“I get that all the time,” the girl said, looking up at Mike. I hadn’t realized she could hear us talking. “Don’t you know what a channeled whelk is?”

Mike reached for one of the candies in a silver bowl on her desk. “I’m drawing a blank.”

“They’re these clams that are in the ocean all over the eastern tip of Long Island, and the white part of the whelk is the most valuable. That’s what wampum comes from-you know, Native American money. And Jonah is from Montauk, so it’s his play on words.”

“Must have a great sense of humor, your boss.”

“Excuse me. Jonah, these guys-and her,” she said, waving in my direction. “They’re here to see you.”

Teeth whiteners must have come with the firm’s annual bonus. Jonah Krauss picked up his head and flashed a broad smile at us as he crossed between the reception desk and our seating area. “Whatever you’re selling, come back next week,” he said. “I told you time was tight today, Britney. I’m out of here.”

The girl couldn’t have been anything but a Britney.

“They’re cops, Jonah,” she said, standing up to grab his arm before he disappeared between the sliding glass doors that opened automatically as he neared them.

Krauss turned to look at the three of us. Still smiling-more cheesily than did most people on whom we dropped in-he introduced himself and offered a handshake to each of us. His curly brown hair was still wet from the shower I assumed he had taken after his workout. He was dressed in a warm-up suit and sneakers, ready for his weekend getaway.

“What’s this about, folks?”

“A homicide investigation,” Mercer said.

“Really? Murder?” Krauss said, some of the sparkle gone. “Who died?”

“Tina Barr.”

“Tina? From the library? She does conservation work. Let’s take this inside my office, shall we? Brit-hold all my calls and tell the pilots to expect a delay.”

The doors parted again and we followed Krauss a few steps to another set of doors that slid apart on our approach.

I stood at the threshold, surprised by the sight. Most corporate executives who pay forty-third-floor midtown rents want forty-third-floor Manhattan views, river to river.

Instead, Krauss had created a thoroughly modern, high-tech, translucent glass-and-steel library-carefully lighted and hermetically sealed-within the core of this new business tower. The only clue that we were anywhere near a corporate office was the four television screens-one in a bookcase on each wall, so that they could be viewed from every angle in the room-on which the Bloomberg channels ran continuously.

“No windows?” Mike asked as Jonah glanced at the numbers as they glided by.

“Can’t do. The books have to be protected from the sun, from any dampness or dust that seeps in,” Krauss said. “But it suits me fine. I’d rather be surrounded by them all day than staring out at the city. The kids who work for me have their offices on the perimeter. Big views, so they can dream bigger. Keeps them hungry. Want to tell me about Tina?”

“Somebody killed her,” Mike said.

“How did it happen? Why?”

In the fifteen-second intervals when Krauss wasn’t distracted by the ticker, he seemed genuinely surprised by the news.

“We’re still trying to figure that out. Nobody from the library called you?”

“What does her murder have to do with the library?”

“Everything, apparently. How well did you know Tina Barr?”

“Not much better than I know you, Detective. I met her when she worked at the library. I guess you got to me because I’m on the board. She was handling some important restoration projects, the kind of thing it interests me to learn about. I looked over her shoulder a few times, but that’s as close as it got.”

Mercer was making his way around the room, tilting his head to study the titles of the books. “Did she do any work for you directly?”

“No. No, she didn’t. I have someone in England who handles all my books. I just hadn’t any need for Tina’s services, although I admired her talent. Look, guys, what happened to her?”

“Somebody killed her,” Mike said.

“Where? I wasn’t sure Tina was still in town.”

“I expect it happened in the basement of the public library.”

“What?” Krauss seemed truly shocked. He sat at his desk, gesturing to us to take seats as well, giving Mike his complete attention. “That’s impossible. Right under our roof? That’s got to be the safest place in town.”

“Once upon a time, maybe.”

“And who do you think is responsible? A workman? A trespasser? I know our security isn’t foolproof, Detectives, but the idea of a murder inside the building is preposterous.”

“More likely it’s going to be someone who knew Tina,” Mercer said. He was standing behind me, his large body framed by shelves of books with gilt and silver-tooled decorations and lettering on their spines.

“Such a quiet girl. I can’t imagine she made many enemies. How can I help?”

“When’s the last time you spoke with her?” Mercer asked.

“A month ago, maybe two. I hosted a cocktail party for the opening of our Dickens exhibit. We’ve got an extensive collection that hadn’t been seen all together in a dog’s age. I know Tina was there. Everyone in the conservation lab had done some work on that over the last couple of years, and I thanked her for that. I don’t think-wait a minute,” Krauss said. “I did see her again.”

“When?” Mike asked.

“Within the last couple of weeks. I had stopped in at the lab because one of the girls had been working on an illuminated manuscript of Petrarch’s poems. Stunning little book-brilliant pigments and elaborate detail. I was surprised to see Tina there. I didn’t think she worked at the library any longer.”

“And so you went over to talk to her?” Mike said.

“Actually, no. She said hello to me, and then-then she asked me a question, something to do with an investment idea I’d had earlier. Something I’d abandoned a while back. She was at her desk, and I guess we chatted for three or four minutes.”

“Had Tina ever talked with you about investments?” I asked.

His expression suggested my question was ridiculous. “Never.”

“Then why?”

Krauss put his hands in the pockets of his warm-up jacket and swiveled his chair back and forth. “I had a crazy idea a few years ago. Tried to put together a consortium of investors to acquire something for the library. Some bull-excuse me, Ms. Cooper-some cockamamie plan that started with board gossip. I was surprised Tina even knew anything about it.”

“But she did,” Mike said.

“Well, Detective, she wanted to.” Krauss took his left hand out of his pocket and looked at his watch. “I had nothing to tell her.”

“What was your plan?”

“I was approached by a guy who goosed me to do a joint venture. Wanted me to put up most of the money to try to buy a valuable property that would fetch a fortune, if the damn thing even existed. I figured I could find some buddies in the business to ride it with me, but the whole thing turned out to be a hoax.”

“Who told you about it?” Mike asked.

Krauss threw back his head. “You don’t want to know.”

“Try me.”

“His name’s Eddy Forbes.”

“The map thief?”

Krauss gave Mike a thumbs-up. “What’s this? Know your library felons? At the time Forbes sniffed me out, he was a scholar and a private dealer, helping some of my fellow trustees elevate their tastes and shape their collections. He fooled a lot of people in the library world.”

“What is it that Forbes wanted you to buy?”

“An old map, Mr. Chapman.”

It was the answer I expected from the lead-in Krauss gave us. What he didn’t expect was Mike’s comeback.

“The 1507 Waldseemüller world map?”

Krauss turned on the dental brights again. “Anytime you get tired of working for the department, I might have a job for you, Detective. Now, how’d you know about that?”

“Some guys are good at missing persons. I got a sixth sense about missing things,” Mike said. “Seems like everybody on your board wants a piece of it.”

“Yeah, but they’re just spinning their wheels. ’Cause if Eddy Forbes couldn’t find it or steal it, then that map is just one more piece of the legend of Jasper Hunt Jr., made up to get the rest of the rich boys buzzing.”

“You gave up on the project?” Mike asked.

“I shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place. I’m not into maps,” Krauss said. “There was a well-known bibliophile named Holbrook Jackson, famous for saying, ‘Your library is your portrait.’ Look around this room. There’s not a single map on display.”

“So why did you entertain Forbes’s folly to begin with?”

“The deal, Detective. The deal always grabs me. Could have been searching for a rare map or Captain Kidd’s sunken treasure or King Solomon’s mines. It would have been spectacular if the damn thing even existed,” Krauss said, picking up a model helicopter from his desk and twirling the rotors as he talked. “People would have been throwing money at me left and right if I’d come up a winner. Instead I got hosed. Probably all went to Forbes’s defense attorney anyway.”

“And you haven’t heard from Forbes since?”

“That’s one of the conditions of his probation,” Krauss said. “He can’t be anywhere near a library and he can’t communicate with any staff or trustees.”

“Why’d he pick you in the first place if he knew you didn’t care about maps?” I asked.

“Money.”

“Everybody on your board has money.”

“Hard to get those tough old guys to part with their dough. Most of their money is older than they are.” Krauss smiled again. “I figure there’s always more to be made where the last pot of gold came from.”

I was certain that Alger Herrick had told us that Minerva Hunt was involved in a deal with Eddy Forbes.

“Didn’t you try to discuss this consortium idea with Jasper Hunt the Third? Doesn’t he still sit on the board with you?” I asked.

“What was that saying about Boston Brahmins? The Lowells talk only to Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God?” Krauss asked of no one in particular, reciting the singsong doggerel. “The Hunts talk only to Astors…and maybe to God, as long as he isn’t a Jew or a black man. Or even worse, a woman. Jasper hasn’t been on the scene much the last four or five years. And he’s not exactly a fan of mine.”

“Why’s that?”

Krauss wound the screw on the side of the helicopter and launched it, watching it crash to the carpet beside him. “I guess he doesn’t like my style.”

“How about Talbot Hunt?” I asked. “How well do you know him?”

“Only in the boardroom.”

“Get along?”

“I wouldn’t turn my back on Tally for very long,” Krauss said. “We have different ideas about the direction the library should be going. Nothing deadly, I wouldn’t think.”

“Didn’t he have any interest in Forbes’s idea? After all, the map was supposed to have been his grandfather’s purchase.”

“I don’t think Eddy Forbes and Talbot Hunt are on the same page either. Would have surprised me if they were even before all of Forbes’s legal troubles. Besides, Talbot’s sister, Minerva, wanted a piece of the action. I’m sure once she was in, her brother wouldn’t have been a likely partner. There’s bad blood between those two.”

“But you know Minerva?”

“We’ve met a handful of times. Eddy introduced us. She was willing to put up some of the seed money. She’d done that for Forbes before. I guess she was the one who told him the story of the missing map. He had access to most of the inner circle then. Minerva got all psyched up when the Library of Congress bought the only original that was thought to exist, because she remembered hearing stories about the second one-her grandfather’s-when she was a kid.”

“So what was in this for you?” Mike asked.

Krauss leaned over and picked up his little toy. “Like I said. I put up a couple of million dollars. A few partners kicked in. We find this sucker? Forbes told me it would sell for maybe twenty million today.”

“Sell…to the library, you mean?” I asked.

“Not likely. We’d get a much bigger bang from a private collector. That’s what Eddy Forbes did. He helped these map nuts build their collections. The whole time, he was probably stealing from one of them to feed the others.”

“Maybe it’s naïve of me,” I said, “but I just assumed that as a member of the board, your loyalty would be to the library.”

Krauss launched the whirlybird again and this time it circled his desk and came to a gentle landing on the table beside me. “You know why I get in trouble at the library? ’Cause I happen to think the place should be all about books. Screw the maps, screw the art. That’s why so many of those guys have no use for me.”

“But the maps-” I started to say, thinking of Alger Herrick’s description of their beauty and importance.

“So your cousin Sally marries a dentist from St. Louis and moves out there, Ms. Cooper. You stroll up Madison Avenue to some overpriced gallery looking for a wedding present and you buy a map of the city as it looked in 1898, framed and all. Three hundred bucks. Probably sliced out of an atlas in a library-maybe even by the master thief himself, Mr. Forbes,” Krauss said, standing up and walking to a bookshelf behind his desk. “Or your buddy builds himself a ranch in Montana -Jewish investment banker cowboys-we’re resettling Montana and Wyoming like they were the promised land. Some shyster will sell you a hand-colored print of whatever prairie town you want, at whatever your price point. It’s not great art, it’s not even a book you can hold and read and reread. What’s the point?”

“Did you inherit your collection?” Mercer asked.

“I didn’t inherit squat, Detective. My father sold used cars in Merrick, Long Island.”

“How did you get into this…this…”

“Addiction. That’s what it is. The first time I ever bought a book-I mean an old book, something I didn’t have to read for school or to get me through a long plane ride-I was in Paris, walking around those little shops on the Left Bank after dinner one night. It was my first time there, I was flush with my first Wall Street bonus and some serious Bordeaux, and I stopped to look at the titles. I needed something for the flight home. I saw Gatsby and picked it up. I’d always loved the story when I was in college, figuring out how I could get me a piece of the American dream. You should have heard the proprietor scream when I pulled that copy off the shelf.”

“Why?” Mike asked.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. I’m not talking about the paperback you read in high school,” Krauss said, moving his hand along the bookshelf and lifting out a small volume, running his hand lovingly over the dust jacket, protected in its mylar sleeve. “This is the first edition. Modern firsts, that’s how I started. Have you ever seen a more perfect image? It’s totally iconic.”

Jonah Krauss handed me the book. The jacket was cobalt blue, and the features of a woman’s face looked down on an amusement park version of New York City at night.

I turned it over and noted the faint spots on the rear cover and the slightly faded lettering on the spine.

“Open it.”

“That’s okay?”

“Open it,” he said again.

I lifted the cover and read. Ernest-I think this book is about the best American novel ever written. Scott Fitz. 1925.

“See what I mean?” Krauss took the book back and turned the pages. “Fitzgerald handled this himself. You touch these things, you imagine who held them before you did, you smell them and breathe in the print, the history, the romance. Guess what I paid?”

I had a few modern firsts, but nothing like this. “I can’t.”

“Fifteen years ago, thirty-five thousand bucks. My entire bonus and then some, gone in a flash,” Krauss said, snapping his fingers.

“I’ll be lucky if my pension’s that good,” Mike said under his breath.

“Stopped the Frenchman in his tracks when I told him to wrap it up for me. At auction today, it would draw double. After that I had to have everything Fitzgerald I could find. Hemingway next. Dos Passos. Wolfe. It’s totally addictive.”

“You obviously moved on to older collectibles, too,” I said, scoping the room.

“I had to teach myself about them. See, the great private libraries have been amassing rare books for centuries.” Krauss crossed the room, pausing in front of the Bloomberg, then continued on to shelves stocked with leather-bound books of all sizes. “I didn’t know Keats from Yeats, Samuel Johnson from Samuel Pepys. But I’m a quick study.”

He stopped in front of a shelf on which an open book rested in a cradle, two matching volumes standing beside it. He picked them up and offered them to Mike and me to admire. Each was bound in black leather, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “Beautiful, huh?”

The silver writing, embellished with an intricate floral design, announced that we were looking at Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. “Three volumes, 1847. The library has a set of its own, without the inlay. It’s even got the writing desk Brontë used when she traveled.”

His excitement seemed quite genuine, and he clearly wanted us to appreciate the collection.

“Do you have any atlases?” Mike asked. I figured he was testing Krauss about his interest in maps.

“Not my thing,” Jonah Krauss said, as he saw Mercer reach for a book that was displayed on a shelf at the far end of the room. “Whoa, you don’t want to pick that one up, Detective. Some of the pages are loose.”

“Sorry,” Mercer said, replacing the large book on its stand and repeating the title on the spine. “It looks like the court record of an old English trial. The 1828 proceedings against the murderer Aaron Keyes.”

Krauss looked nervous. He stepped in front of Mercer and rested his fingers on the open page. “It’s, uh…different.”

“Different how?” Mercer asked.

“It’s…it’s an anthropodermic binding, Mr. Wallace. Extremely rare. Most unusual to find.”

“Anthropodermic?” Mike asked. “Help me out, Coop. Means what?”

“Don’t know.”

“The binding is made from human skin,” Jonah Krauss said, folding his arms and speaking quietly. “That inquest record is bound in the skin of the murderer, Detective.”

Mike lowered his head. “It doesn’t get much creepier than that.”

“Aaron Keyes raped and killed a young girl in the English countryside. He was sentenced to be hung, and after that his skin was tanned and used to make this binding.”

“Human skin?” Mike asked. “You’re not joking?”

“Not at all, Detective. Most libraries don’t want books like these, of course-although Harvard has a few-but many private collectors do. It’s a very specialized market, human skin. Not for everyone’s taste.”

Krauss turned away from the book and went back to his desk. His lips parted and the whitener on his teeth reappeared. “Lighten up, guys. It’s from the murderer, not the dead girl.”

Mike Chapman wasn’t amused. “Like you said, Mr. Krauss. Your library is your portrait.”