Terminal City

NINE

By one fifteen, Mercer and I were standing under the spectacular tiled ceiling of the Acme Garage on East 44th, almost kitty-corner from the Yale Club. The Catalan vaulting, as it was known, had once been a gateway to a luxurious hotel but was now as dirty and grim as any underground commercial parking space in the city.

The young man in charge was as surly as befit someone spending all his hours below the street, inhaling gas fumes and jockeying cars to get them as close together as possible without scratching fenders or sides.

“A guy with a trunk? Nothing unusual about luggage.”

“A big old leather trunk. You might notice,” Mercer said. “Maybe think it wouldn’t fit in a car.”

“We got vans, we got SUVs, we got pickups and panel trucks. I park ’em, I don’t pack ’em.”

“How about surveillance cameras? You must have them in here for security.”

Garages were easy targets for armed robbers because they did so much business in cash.

“We got ’em. They’re just on a loop, though. They record over themselves after twenty-four hours. No reason to save tapes if nothing happened,” the garage attendant said, pausing to spit on the floor. “And nothing happened.”

“We’d like to go through receipts with you. See if anyone charged their parking fee or one of you jotted down plate numbers.”

“You told me you don’t have a date. How you gonna do that?”

“We’ve figured it within a day or two,” I said. “Will you let us into your office to check them out?”

“I don’t keep ’em here, lady. The owner has eight garages. All the stuff gets forwarded next day to Queens, where he operates. Go there if you want, or call my manager. I’ve only worked here two months.”

A car nosed down the ramp and squealed to a stop a few feet away from us. The attendant walked over to the machine on the wall that dated and timed the receipts and handed a ticket to the woman who got out of the car.

“How long you gonna be, lady?”

She told him she planned to retrieve the car at five. As she turned to walk away, he gave her sculptured body a thorough top-to-bottom once-over, then spit again.

“What’s in here besides a garage?” I asked. I was wondering if there was a place for someone to conceal himself-or a large trunk-for any period of time. Whoever stole the piece of luggage could not have been certain the opportunity to grab the object would present itself on a busy Manhattan street in the middle of the day.

“My cage,” he said.

I looked over at the glass-enclosed booth, which had a stool for the attendant, a small desk, and a cash register, and space for little else.

“Restrooms around the corner. Help yourself to a look.”

I walked thirty feet away and found the doors to two unisex bathrooms. The narrow stalls held a toilet and sink. With an occupant, there would be no room for a steamer trunk.

“Any other way out?” Mercer asked, as I was on my way back.

“Used to be this was connected to a hotel that was demolished,” the man said. “Long before my time or yours. The ramp swings around to a lower level. Holds a load of cars down there.”

He turned away from us to take the receipt and payment from a man in a business suit who had come for his car.

Mercer had been excited to follow this lead. Now it appeared to be as much a dead end as the garage with a once-elegant history. “I’ll get uniform to come over and sweep the place. Check out the basement, too.”

“Look, it’s possible the man who swiped the luggage just came down the ramp from the street to get out of sight for a while,” I said.

“With a steamer trunk? Somebody in here would have noticed that.”

“So there are a bunch of other employees the guys will have to talk to. I mean he may have just waited till he thought the coast was clear. Put the trunk in a corner at the rear of the garage. Tucked it next to a van in the basement and waited a few hours.”

We walked up the ramp and back out into the sweltering afternoon sun, a sliver of which seemed to find us in between the tall buildings.

“You want lunch?” Mercer asked.

“A bucket of water and something light.”

“We’ll pass a takeout place on our way back to the Waldorf.”

We squared the block and started walking north on Park Avenue. The wide boulevard carried traffic north- and southbound, three lanes each divided by a median that was maintained as a garden throughout the year. The begonias were a great touch of color in August, the only plants seemingly able to withstand the intense heat and direct sunlight.

“So nothing from Mike this morning?” I was unable to suppress my curiosity and anxious to confront him about his deception.

“I’d tell you to chill, but it’s too hot for that word to have any meaning.”

“You want to know what happened this-”

“I most distinctly do not. Got that, Ms. Cooper?”

I stared ahead at the sidewalks filled with pedestrians for as far ahead as I could see. Boxy glass office buildings lined both sides of the broad avenue, eventually giving way to some of the priciest residential real estate in Manhattan.

“I thought you and Vickee were in favor of our-uh, flirtation.”

“I’m in favor of minding my own business. It’s my wife who’s in the advice-to-the-lovelorn business. Don’t put me in the cross fire between you and Mike.”

Mercer had been a rock throughout many of my most difficult moments in the last ten years, and I understood completely that he did not want to be caught in the middle of this complicated relationship that Mike and I were attempting to work out.

We found a salad and sandwich place off Park on 47th Street and stopped to pick up some lunch. We had almost reached the Waldorf when Mercer’s cell phone rang.

“Hey, Rocco. We’re two blocks away.” Mercer listened to the lieutenant for more than a minute, looking at me as he responded. “Alex and I will do that. We’ll be ready to go.”

“News?”

Mercer pocketed his phone. “The ME gave out a photo of our vic two hours ago and it went viral immediately. She’s been identified.”

I pushed my sunglasses on top of my head, squinting at Mercer. “A name? It’s reliable?”

“Her father called it in. Saw the photo in a news bulletin on TV. Doesn’t get more reliable than that.”

“Or more devastating.”

“Corinne Thatcher. Twenty-eight years old.”

I didn’t know which was worse. A corpse that lay in the morgue unidentified for more than a week-like my last case-or the instant a loved one put a name to the body that was still on the steel table in the autopsy room.

“What does Rocco want us to do?” I asked. The girl who had died such an unthinkable death was exactly ten years younger than I.

Mercer put his long arm around my shoulder. “He’s got cops bringing the parents into town from their home on the North Fork. He wants us to talk to them.”

I bit my lip and nodded.

“Rocco wants us to figure out,” Mercer said, “why somebody wanted to torture this girl to death.”