The DeadHouse

36

Shreve talked to me but I could not take my eyes off the rope. He crouched in front of me to remove my bindings, and they seemed like doll's clothes compared with the powerful weapon he had just dropped onto the fraying, stained mattress pad.

"That's only if things go terribly wrong, Ms. Cooper. Don't let it scare you."

I see. So far, things are right on schedule. Going really well. What had I unleashed when I'd stormed out of Jake's apartment on Sunday night? I shut my eyes tight and willed myself back on his living room sofa, thinking about how good it would feel to have him caress me and make love to me. What could go more terribly wrong than the events of the past twenty-four hours?

I played with my wrists and ankles, trying to limber the feet tingled from the deadening effect of pins and needles hours of restricted circulation.

Shreve had a plastic bag from some twenty-four-hour deli he must have passed on his way back to the Second Avenue tram. He unwrapped sandwich halves from their aluminum foil and took the lids off two large Styrofoam cups of coffee.

"Here, perfectly safe." He took several sips from the container to show me that it had not been doctored. I drank the lukewarm liquid and it heated a few of the cold-restricted inches throat as I downed it. Maybe I didn't care if it was drugged. Sleep might be better than whatever I was facing in this urban finished the entire container in three minutes. Something-the caffeine or Shreve's return-had jolted me to full attention.

He passed the foil to me but I refused the sandwich. My hunger had been intense for hours, yet now I was gripped again by and unable to look at solid food.

"What do you know about my grandfather's miniature of the island, Ms. Cooper?"

I didn't speak.

"You'll feel better if you put something in your something in your stomach. You're going to fight me, aren't you?" He helped himself to some turkey while I watched in silence. "Trying to drag this out until daylight?"

I knew that Mike and Mercer would never have let Shreve walk out of the station house without putting a tail on him, especially once he came up with the phony line about the Jeopardy! question. If I could stall for a bit, I was certain that the homicide squad would find me.

"What did Detective Chapman say?"

"I'm sorry. I should have started with that. Mr. Chapman was nowhere to be seen tonight."

My right hand flew to my face to cover my mouth and I gnawed on the damp glove leather to mask my emotion. It wasn’t possible that Mike hadn't been there to intercept the one clue I thought might lead him to me.

"Something about following a lead on another part of the investigation in New Jersey. A different fellow took all the information. An African-American gentleman, Mr. Wallace. He's getting married tomorrow, on New Year's Day. Everyone was quite cheerful there, actually. Bottles of whiskey out, toasting him and his bride. A bit distracted from the business of finding you, I would say.

"Wallace seemed to know about this television game, too. Said that sounded just like you. Always watching the final question."

Dammit. He was right. The information would have been reassuring to Mercer. The idea that I would have watched the quiz show in the hospital waiting room would have made perfect sense to him, and he had not been with Mike and me when the question about Elizabeth Blackwell had been aired last week. It would not set off any alarms in his mind. Would he even think to tell Mike about it when they next spoke?

"I believe Mr. Wallace understood my concern about your walking out of the emergency room at nine o'clock or so to find a taxicab by yourself. He said that neighborhood is plagued with drug dealers and youth gangs. I hope they double their efforts there to look for you. Seems they found an elderly woman in an alley just a few hours ago, beaten to a pulp by some young hoodlums, just to rob her of seven dollars and a crucifix on a gold chain. Brought her to the same emergency room where you and I waited for Sylvia."

Shreve paused. "And then another detective reminded Mr. Wallace that some woman had been harassing you as well. Some lady with a gun." He shook his head in mock dismay, and I thought how easily the detectives could be off on a red herring now, combing the East Seventies for my unhappy stalker.

I sank deeper into my frosted terror. What if Mike wasn't worried about me at all? What if he and Valerie were home together, enjoying each other's company like a normal couple? Maybe he'd gotten fed up with my repeated rituals of independence, believing that I'd walked out of Sylvia Foote's hospital scene just as I'd run away from Jake's conversation with an informant and run again from Mike's scene of domestic intimacy. Maybe I deserved to be marooned in an abandoned ruin with a killer.

"The miniature model that my grandfather had built, Ms. Cooper. You seem to be as interested in it as I am. Shall we talk?'

Shreve had let me live so far because he thought I either knew something about the model's whereabouts or the key to its treasures. Now he was determined to get the answers.

"You've tried to convince me that you're not a killer, Professor That Charlotte Voight was responsible for her own death." Hi looked at me but didn't speak. "But Lola Dakota is dead, too. And if you're going to tell me that was also an accident, then we've go nothing to discuss."

"It wasn't a murder, Ms. Cooper. Nothing was premeditated, didn't go there to kill her."

Most lawyers didn't know the distinction between premeditation and intention, so why should Winston Shreve? He didn't have to plot the murder of his friend Lola before he went to se her that day, he simply had to form the intent to kill her in the moments before he executed the plan. Maybe it was a genetic thing, inherited from his grandfather.

All I knew is that I didn't want to be another notation in his agenda of women who had met their demise accidentally. "In fact, it was Claude Lavery who caused her death."

"I don't believe that." As soon as I snapped those words at Shreve, I didn't know why I had said them. I was overwhelmed with confusion-from the sedatives, the situation, and the snow

"I spoke to Lola often while she was out in New Jersey at her sister's house." He was standing again, swinging his arms as though to keep warm. "Both of us had been certain that the old laboratory-"

"Strecker?"

"Yes, that the Strecker building was the deadhouse. It's an old Scottish word meaning a morgue, or a place where dead bodies are kept."

How fitting that it has kept in character after all these years, I thought, not daring to imagine the condition of Charlotte Voight's remains.

"While Lola was hiding out at her sister's house she was also researching the island, using a lot of primary source material that student volunteers had come up with while assigned to the Black-wells project. Things they had found in the municipal archives, records from the Department of Health and Hospitals. Papers no one had touched for the better part of a century. Documents that explained exactly what the deadhouse was."

"And it wasn't the laboratory?" Could there have been a more ghastly place than Strecker?

"Its purpose was plain. It was just a theater for autopsies and a lab to examine the specimens. But there wasn't enough room to keep the bodies from all the plague-ridden institutions on Black-wells Island.

"Deadhouses were the wooden shacks they built all along the waterfront. Places to store and stack the corpses until they could be taken back home for burial."

The first sight from the Manhattan side of the water that patients bound for the island would see. The reason that some of them jumped into the deadly current to chance escape rather than a sure sentence of death by contagion. Deadhouses.

"Weren't they destroyed?"

"Moved, actually. Torn down and hauled to the other coast of Blackwells, to face the factories and mills on the Queens side of the river. No patients were shipped in from that direction, so the buildings were simply reerected out of sight of the arriving population. To give the patients hope, Ms. Cooper, to give them something to believe in."

Exactly what I needed at the moment. Something to make me believe that I could get off the island alive, too.

"But what did the deadhouses have to do with your grandfather?"

"It took Lola to figure that out. There was Freeland Jennings, a realist if one ever existed, stuck in a penitentiary with those lower-class criminals, most of them immigrants, f their primitive superstitions. All of the papers make reference to the fact that none of the laborers would go anywhere near wooden deadhouses."

"Those hospitals had all been closed years before your j father was sentenced to prison."

"Yes, but the buildings still stood there, much as you set today. The Smallpox Hospital, Strecker, the Octagon Tower even the row of grim little shacks that had housed the dead land wrote about the circumstances in the letters he sent sister-the same one who was taking care of my father. First, months of observations of the other inmates and their manners and odd habits. Then his fascination with the way these seemingly fearless street thugs would avoid, like a ritual, haunted remnants of all the places that had sheltered the terminally ill.

"It didn't take him long to figure out a safe place to hide the diamonds, the jewels he considered his lifeline."

"Under the deadhouses." I thought of the map Bart I had mailed to me shortly before he died, and how it diagram every inch of the island, signed by Freeland Jennings.

"Luigi Bennino was the prisoner who created my grandfather’s model of the island. And it was Luigi he hired to dig the places for his gems. No one would think to go where a disease and pestilence might still lurk. Even today, lots students and faculty won't go near this building, fearful they'll unearth some encapsulated germs that still bear their lethal poison."

"Bennino was an uneducated peasant, too. Why wasn't he just as superstitious about contamination?"

"Don't forget his crime, Ms. Cooper. He was a grave robber. Young Luigi had clearly overcome his concern about contact with the dearly departed long before he reached Blackwells Island. He was the perfect henchman for my grandfather's needs.

"It's just that Freeland had learned never to put all his trust in another human being. And although it's kind of veiled in his correspondence, it would appear that he paid a second prisoner to double-cross Bennino and move the diamonds. Still in the dead-houses, but in entirely different locations in the ground."

"Another grave robber?" How fortunate for him to find two such thieves.

"No. A murderer. A man who had killed a prostitute down at the Five Points," Shreve said, referring to a once notorious area of the city where our courthouse now stood. "Freeland talks about him in the letters, a much too solicitous concern for the man who was dying of syphilis. One last charitable thing that Granddad could do for him, so that his family would have enough money for a proper burial. And so that he would take Freeland's secret with him, well rewarded for his trouble."

"So three men knew about the diamonds and where they were buried."

"And all three died on the rock, as it were. My grandfather's death in the raid could not possibly have been anticipated. He never had time to retrieve his fortune. That's why I'd like the map, Ms. Cooper. The map and the model of the island." Shreve sat in the frame of the window, hands on his knees, and stared me in the eye.

"And Lola had them?"

"And Lola's dead."

"But if you hadn't killed her-"

His gloved hands slapped against his thighs as his temper flared. "Why would I have killed her without getting what I needed from her? It's Claude Lavery's fault that she's dead."

How could I evaluate what he was telling me? Maybe Chapman and I had given him an opportunity to blame Lavery telling the group of professors that Lavery had been seen going into Lola's building with her the day she died. Maybe Shreve hadn't known that until we gave the fact away. And now he was just using it to make me think he wasn't the killer. Or perhaps both of them were involved, and they were both responsible her death. How could I know?

I was more tentative now, talking softly to Shreve, aware he might keep me alive as long as he thought I could give him he wanted.

What had I done with the map before Mike and I had dashed out of the office on the way to King's College? Is it possible I had been less than twenty-four hours since all that had happened? I bit my lip and took myself back one day. I had given my paralegal the map to copy, telling her to lock the original in one of the file cabinets until Mike could voucher it. And I had given one of the copies to him, then folded the other to slip in the pocket gray slacks, to examine later that night when I got home. Shreve overheard Mike ask me, in Sylvia Foote's office, whether I had secured Jennings's blueprint of the island?

I looked down at my pants leg to make certain that I was still wearing that same suit. My pocketbook and case folder were either in Shreve's van or his apartment. Perhaps he had gone through them in search of the map or any references to it, but if he hadn't thought to search my clothing, he would not have found the map.

The adrenaline pumped again and I swallowed hard.] knew that what Shreve wanted was here under his nose, and if he found the small slip of paper, there would be no reason to maintain our dialogue. I would be as good as dead.

"But Lola was telling you all these things while she at Lily's house, doing the research. What did you two have to fight about the day she was killed?"

"I didn't go to see her to argue about anything. I was excited, thrilled that she might have solved the puzzle about my grandfather's fortune. I wanted to see the map for myself."

"Did she have it?"

"She was mad that I had come to her apartment. She stalled and tried to put me off. Told me she didn't have it with her. Told me the prosecutor from New Jersey was going to be arriving shortly and that she'd call me the next day. Of course, I didn't know at the time that she wasn't kidding about the prosecutor. He actually was coming over." Shreve sneered. "Not for Lola, but for his money."

"What money?"

"Apparently the guy had all kinds of financial problems. Lola was doling out cash to him to keep him afloat. Probably to keep him coming back to bed with her, which wasn't necessarily a pleasant place to be."

"How do you know that? I mean, about the cash?"

"After she died, Claude Lavery told me. That's what drove the two of them apart. Lola knew that Claude took an unorthodox view of his grant money. She pleaded with him to let her borrow some of it, claiming she needed it for the Blackwells project. Claude called me last week and asked me to return the money. I had to tell him she hadn't used a nickel of it for the dig. Then I remembered what she'd told me about the prosecutor and his financial problems. The money must have all been going to the deadbeat boyfriend."

Lola's shoe boxes full of cash. She had put the squeeze on Lavery to share some of his stash, pretending it was for her professional needs, but she was using it to solve Bart Frankel's personal problems.

I leaned forward and tried to look sincere when I asked the next question. I didn't believe what I was saying, but I wanted Shreve to think I did. "So why did Claude kill Lola? Was it about the money?"

He took too long to answer. I shivered again and put my hand to my side, trying to feel the piece of paper through the layers of clothing. Was it there? I could not be sure.

"She had called me earlier in the week to tell me she would be home that afternoon. Not to worry about the news stories Ivan's attempt on her life, if I should hear them. I stopped by the building-I was on the way to the college, actually. I tried her and she was home. Had just gotten there. She let me come was anxious to get rid of me."

"And Professor Lavery?"

A slight hesitation. Shreve wanted to tell a story that weave Lavery into the murder, but he was not doing it convincingly. "Lola wouldn't let me in the door. Kept me in the hallway. Lavery was inside, although I didn't know it was him at the time. Lola told me that she was going over to the island."

"Then? Right then?"

"The next day. I wanted to go with her. She had no right to my grandfather's possessions."

The wind seemed less ferocious now, and my tone had lowered as well. "She had figured out about Charlotte, Mr. Shreve. Hadn’t she? She was threatening to expose your-your accident." not to choke on the last word. "She let you know that she told Lavery that she'd figured out where Charlotte Voight was.”

I remembered Lavery saying that to Mike and me, but had interpreted Lola's words to mean that Charlotte was still alive. Shreve, on the other hand, must have panicked about Charlotte's body being found just as he was about to locate his grandfather's fortune.

"Lola wanted something in exchange for the map, didn’t she?”

"She had no right to any of those diamonds, Ms. Cooper. She was trying to blackmail me, just like she had coaxed Claude Lavery out of his grant money."

Shreve was standing now, poised in the doorway of the small room. "Lola slammed the door on me, but I wouldn't leave. She came out later, maybe five, maybe ten minutes. I asked where she was going but she wouldn't answer me. I knew she was going to the island. To Strecker, to find Charlotte. I tried to stop her but she pushed past me and got on the elevator."

"Just the two of you?"

"Claude. That's when Claude came out of her apartment. I was shocked to see him there. The elevator lurched and I grabbed at Lola to pull her off. All I got was her scarf, her long woolen scarf.

"But the doors closed and caught the ends of the scarf as the cab started to move. I yelled at Claude to push the buttons and I pried the sides apart with my hands. There was Lola, completely blue in the face, flailing her arms and trying to fight for air or to catch her breath to scream. She thought I had done it on purpose."

Perhaps that part was true. He had painted such a vivid picture of Lola, almost hanged to death by a piece of clothing caught in the elevator doors. A soft piece of woolen material, on top of the thick fabric of a winter coat collar, that would not even leave ligature marks.

"But she was still alive then?"

"Oh, yes. She couldn't speak, she couldn't loosen the scarf. 'It was an accident,'' I said to her. I reached for the coat to undo it and she recoiled.

"That's when she started to scream."

I imagined that she did, also having figured that Shreve had somehow been responsible for Charlotte Voight's disappearance. I would have been shouting what I wanted to say to his face right at that moment. Murderer!

He stumbled now, stuttering instead of delivering a clear narrative. "It was Claude who did it. He wanted her to stop screaming, to make her be quiet."

It made no sense to me for Claude to want to kill Lola. But I had given Shreve the opening to insert an accomplice into his recreation of the events.

"Claude grabbed at the scarf and pulled it tighter. He dragged her off the elevator and onto the floor of the hallway. He was calling her names, he was-"

It's not a fast death, strangulation. Not like a gunshot wound to the head or a knife in the chest. No doubt it had been hastened in this instance by the fact that she was almost hanged by the jaws of the elevator door. She was already weakened and had a compromised airway, so it would not have taken much effort to finish her off.

Shreve searched for words and actions to attribute to Lave but I knew better now.

"She, she didn't scream very loud. I, uh, I tried to pull Claude back but he wouldn't let go. He was so mad at her." He lowered his head and tried to add convincing facts. "That's when he told me that Lola had been blackmailing him for cash from his grant money."

"And Lola's body?"

"I wanted to call the police. I know you won't believe that because of-" He broke off midsentence and nodded his head the side, in the direction of the Strecker building. Toward Charlotte Voight's body. "This time it was Claude who refused. He was about to be indicted by the federal authorities for fraud. He, uh, he told me to leave. That he would handle this himself. And I did, assuming he would take care of things in an appropriate way.

"I never imagined that he'd roll her body into the elevator shaft. I mean, Claude's the one who lives there. I wasn't even aware anything was wrong in the building, that the elevator sometimes stopped between floors. How could I have possibly known that?"

He had me for a moment. It made sense for Lavery to know that fact. But any fool who had visited the old building and been on the elevator when it malfunctioned could have known it, too. It happened with the three elevators in our office building every day of the week.

"You put that map in my hands, Ms. Cooper, and when you prosecute Professor Lavery, I'll come back from Paris and testify at the trial. Now, who has the map? In what safe place did you leave it this morning?"