Lethal Legacy

FORTY-SEVEN

The night watchman at the Provenzano funeral home had opened it up for the chief of detectives while he was waiting for us to be led out of the cavernous burial ground.

Mercer brought me inside the large parlor, decorated for old-fashioned comfort-sofas and armchairs of burgundy silk, with antimacassars-meant to soothe grieving relatives. It wasn’t where I wanted to be right now, but I had no choice in the matter.

Detectives and uniformed cops, huddling in small groups to gossip about the case now that the emergency had passed, moved out of the way as I walked through the room.

I lowered myself onto one of the sofas and rested my head against the pillow.

The watchman was telling some of the officers about the old cemetery. “I bet you didn’t even know it was here, did you? We get asked about it all the time,” he said. “It was because of the terrible contagion in Manhattan back then-yellow fever, tuberculosis, scarlet fever. The city banned aboveground graves, so these rich guys decided to excavate this block and build marble vaults ten feet under. Regular plague pits, they must have been.”

I shivered, wrapping a blanket around myself as I waited for Lieutenant Peterson to clear the room.

I saw a couple of the guys who were leaving make way for Shalik Samson. Mercer brought him over to me to say good night.

“You saved us, you know,” I said to him, mustering a smile.

“You gonna say that to the judge?”

“Of course I will, if you tell me how you did it.”

“Mercer was helping that sick man, you know? He made me go wake up the chauffeur ’cause the amb’lance took so long. Carmine-that guy? He had a baseball bat in the car. Guess he thought I was gonna rob him. Mercer was like gonna shoot him if he didn’t drop the damn thing.”

“How’d you get down into the burial vault?”

“That way you went in got locked, you know,” Shalik said. It happened when Alger Herrick dropped the lid. “Me and Mercer, we just went around the whole garden, all along that crumbly stone wall, looking for another entrance. Had to be, he kept telling me. Couldn’t have just one way in or out for all those bodies.”

“And you found it,” I said.

“Back behind a tree. Mercer didn’t fit, but I did.”

I hadn’t been wrong. That sliver of light I thought I saw had been Shalik opening the lid of the second hatch.

“So you tripped the guy with the backpack?”

“Dude didn’t even see me. That dungeon’s as black as I am.”

“What do you think, Mercer? Gold shield?” I asked.

“First, we’re taking him home. I’m not ready to give Shalik any commendations yet, but we’ll get those charges thrown out.”

The kid high-fived me, and Mercer handed him off to the cops who were going to drive him home.

Mike came into the room a minute later. He had cleaned himself up, and brought some hydrogen peroxide and a bandage to cover the cut on my neck.

“You know the river Styx, Loo? Greek mythology?” Mike asked as he leaned over me, dabbing the small wound before he dressed it. “The river of hate, it was called. An old guy named Charon ferries the dead across the river to the underworld. I swear, Coop and me-we were on that ferry tonight.”

“I don’t care if the whole magilla is made of marble or papiermâché,” Peterson said. “Couldn’t get me down in there for all the money in the world. Are you telling me, Alex, that Alger Herrick is the half brother of Minerva and Talbot Hunt?”

“The lab is hot on this new familial search technology. Howard Browner says he can prove it with a sample from the father.”

“Think of it, Loo,” Mike said. “Jasper the Third spent a lot of time in England, liked the ladies-young ones-as much as he liked his books. Herrick’s mother was a single girl who deposited him in an orphanage. Alex thinks Hunt’s father might even have paid to steer the infant to a good home. Placed him so well, they wound up with the same friends.”

Mercer sat down beside me and held my hand. “You want us to put this together for you?” he asked the lieutenant.

“It’s all about the map, isn’t it? The rarest map in the world?”

“Seems to be.”

The backpack that Travis Forbes had been wearing when Shalik brought him down with the first blow of the bat was on a table next to me.

While Mercer talked, Mike removed the large folio from the bag. It was a volume of the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt-the atlas of the world-the same book in which the Grimaldis had concealed the panels for centuries.

All conversation ceased as Mike lifted the cover. There were four folded sheets of paper, which he slowly and carefully opened before us.

“The four corners of the earth,” he said. “Magnificent, Coop. Aren’t they?”

We all leaned in to look. The three of us had seen a fake earlier in the day, and a real one in the library, under Bea’s tutelage. Experts would confirm it for us, but everything about these papers looked authentic.

The first one, the top left section of the entire map, represented the North American continent, with exquisite drawings of Zephir and Chor-the wind and the sea-surrounding the land.

The second piece, from the top right position, was Cathay and Japan, mapped with more detail than the previous segment, since they had actually been described as a result of Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century journeys.

Mike opened the third of the large pages that would form the bottom right corner. Below the Spice Islands of Indonesia was the legend written by the mapmaker, attributing the name of America to Vespucci.

The bottom panel, to the west, documented the extension of the new land-the South American continent-that Vespucci had explored as far down as the River Plata. The word America showed up for the first time, south of what is now Brazil.

“You’re looking at history, Loo. Not many people beside the Hunts even knew this baby existed, and as time went by, scholars began to think it was a myth.”

“How’d the Barr girl get mixed up in all this?” Peterson said, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“Eddy Forbes, the map thief, he seems to have been the driving force keeping the legend of this treasure alive. First he tried to get Minerva to back him in finding the panels. You’ll have to ask her, but I don’t think she believed him until Jane Eliot called her a few months back to give her a gift-a book she didn’t want, which happened to have a piece of the map inside,” I said. “I’d guess it was Eddy Forbes who educated Minerva about the Strassburg Ptolemy, and the panel inside it. That’s the book that Grandpa Hunt reclaimed from the library during the war.”

“Eddy had a romance with Tina Barr at one time,” Mike said. “Once you interrogate him, check their phone records. I bet you’ll find they were still in touch. He may be a convicted felon, but he’s still a scholar. I’m sure he did all his research on the Hunts. He probably set Tina up with Minerva, suggested that she move into the apartment. That would have enabled him to steal the panel right out from underneath her nose.”

“Using Tina,” Peterson said, “like Eddy Forbes seems to have used everyone else over the years-librarians, curators, trustees. So why the gas mask? Do you think that Billy Schultz had anything to do with all this?”

“Nothing at all. I’d bet it’s just what he claimed,” Mercer said. “The guy did the right thing and called the police after Tina was attacked. He probably was just stupid enough to pick up the gas mask and try it on.”

“Will you have someone call the lab in the morning?” I asked, rubbing my forehead to ease the tension headache that was building up. “Run that mixed sample against Travis Forbes.”

Peterson stood up and rested his elbow on the mantel over the fireplace with the faux logs. “Why’d Travis go in with a mask? Did Tina know him?”

“He told us she didn’t,” I said. “But Travis apparently looks so much like his brother, Eddy, he was afraid she’d make him.”

“Why was he there?” the lieutenant asked again.

The three of us-Mike, Mercer, and I-had lots of time to work through these answers. Now we were only making educated guesses.

“Because the double cross was already under way,” I said. “Tina had quit her job with the Hunts and was working for Alger Herrick. Is he talking?”

“Not yet,” Peterson said. “Your boss has Pat McKinney at the station house doing the questioning.”

I closed my eyes and groaned.

“Get her some pain relievers and a scotch,” Mike said.

“I hope that jackass remembers to separate Herrick and Forbes.” I was joking with Mike, trying to regain my sea legs, but it would be like McKinney to screw up the most basic rules in his rush to get back in the case.

“Don’t be such a control freak,” Mike said to me, walking over to a uniformed cop and handing him some bills. “There’s a pub on the corner of Third Street. Fill a plastic cup with Dewar’s and don’t spill any of it running back. Coop’s indicted guys for less than that.”

“This was the once-in-a-lifetime score, Loo,” Mercer said. “Herrick wanted to put this map together to cap his collection, no matter what it cost him.”

“And Forbes?” Peterson asked.

“For him, it was his last great scam. Lead these greedy fools like the pied piper, and his endgame, with his brother’s help, was to wind up with this masterpiece for himself,” Mike said. “Sell it to the highest bidder-twenty, maybe thirty million.”

“For this, Tina Barr had to die?” the lieutenant said.

“She must have panicked when Travis showed up in the library, just a night after she’d been attacked,” Mike said.

“Tina walked away from the emergency room because she knew this was all tied into the stolen books and maps,” I said. “She wasn’t giving up a thing that would lead us in that direction, even if she didn’t know exactly who Travis was the first time she encountered him.”

“But she probably recognized him when he came into the conservation lab in the library,” Mike said. “And in her own devious little mind, began to put the pieces together. Realized she was in way over her head, playing with the bad guys.”

“Too late to help herself,” I added, thinking of what Jill Gibson had first told Battaglia. “That’s why some of the people in the library thought she was a thief. She really had been in bed with Eddy Forbes.”

“That’s why Travis killed Tina with one of her own tools,” Mercer said. “He didn’t go to the library meaning to do it. He was probably looking for the key that opened the compartment in the basement. Maybe Eddy sent him to get the job done right the second time. The key might have dropped out of her clothing when he was carrying her through the stacks, after she was dead, without his knowing it. I doubt the murder was premeditated-just a flare-up about the missing goods that ended with him slitting her throat.”

“That’s what Travis Forbes does,” Mercer said. “He cuts. He mutilates. She couldn’t have known that.”

“Then he dumped Barr’s body the next night. Probably called Herrick when he took off for his night job at the pub,” Mike said. “Must have been Herrick who watched us bag the body. He’s the one who called Tina’s cell phone-and laughed.”

That would chill the jurors as much as it had sickened me.

“It’s the housekeeper who gets lost in all this,” I said. “Karla Vastasi.”

“That has to be Minerva’s doing,” Mike said. “She in the hospital, Loo?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me at her when she’s ready to squeal. Minerva had Karla dressed up as her double, carrying a forged copy of one of the panels in her tote. Travis had never met Minerva-wouldn’t know her if he fell over her,” Mike said.

“My money’s on Eddy Forbes,” I said.

“I read you. You think Eddy was waiting in Barr’s apartment with Travis that afternoon. He knew the lady in black wasn’t Minerva and realized the panel she was carrying was a fake. Queered the whole deal.”

“Karla saw that Tina had left behind another treasure when she moved out-the jewel-encrusted psalm book,” I said. “The one Tina stole from Talbot’s bedroom. So Karla tried to take it to her mistress, clutched on to it with what turned out to be her life. One of the Forbes boys caught her and went ballistic. Whacked her over the head with the garden ornament.”

The pieces were coming together as nicely as the panels of the great world map of 1507.

“You better get some sleep, Alex,” the lieutenant said. “Battaglia wants all of us in his office at ten o’clock.”

“Don’t stretch out here,” Mike said, sweeping his arm along the back of the old sofa. “You stay still for very long, they’ll find a box that fits.”

“Make me a better offer,” I said as Mercer helped me to my feet.

“That cemetery had me craving some fresh air. Feel like walking up the avenue to the pub? I could use a drink out of a real glass.”

I thanked the rookie who’d returned with the plastic cup of scotch. “Give that one to the lieutenant. I’ve got a date.”

Out on the sidewalk in front of Provenzano’s funeral home, I looped arms with Mike and Mercer. I took several deep breaths of the cool October air, steadied myself between my friends-fortitude and patience-and headed off into the night for a bracing bit of cheer as our manhunt ended.