Vespers

Seven

Robert Gentry spent the night at the Hotel Windermere on West End Avenue and Ninety-second Street. The manager, Dale Rupert, was one of his oldest and closest friends.

Rupe used to run the Hotel Dixie on West Forty-fourth Street. When Gentry was still a beat cop, the Dixie Hotel was the “Midtown Eden” for junkies and pushers. Rupe hated the drug traffic and had Gentry boot the pushers out. The one-armed Vietnam veteran hated it even more when swaggering drug boss Stevie “Cool” Kuhl came to see him one day. Cool threatened to break Rupe’s remaining arm with a mallet if he stopped Kuhl’s people from dealing in the lobby.

That was all Rupe had to hear.

With the veteran’s full cooperation, Gentry brought in the Special Narcotics Enforcement Unit. The SNEU fitted Rupe with a wire, and thanks to his efforts they sent Stevie Cool to prison for fifteen years.

But the Dixie operation uncovered a larger New York-southern Connecticut drug chain that SNEU agents in both states wanted to break. Having completed his requisite two-year tour as a patrolman, Gentry asked then-Precinct Commander Veltre to be transferred to SNEU. He spent several weeks undergoing intense tactical training at Camp Smith in upstate New York, then came back to Midtown South and worked as a plainclothes narc running buy-and-bust operations. Later, in order to break the Mizuno ring, he went undercover. Tearing down that smuggling-and-dealing chain consumed the next five years of his life. It sent fourteen major dealers to prison and earned Gentry a Medal of Valor for bravery. He gave the medal to Rupe. He wasn’t sure why, but his partner Bernie was gone, and it seemed like the right thing to do. Gentry and Rupe remained friends. Rupe stayed at the Dixie until it was torn down in 1990.

There were no rooms available at the Windermere, but Rupe let Gentry have the couch in a psychiatrist’s office on the first floor. The leather couch was comfortable, though Gentry had trouble sleeping for more than an hour at a time. Some paranoid kept calling the answering machine and waking him. The man was complaining that his apartment building was too quiet. He was sure the neighbors were listening to him. He said he could hear them putting drinking glasses against the wall and moving them around. By fourA.M. Gentry seriously considered calling the man back, informing him he was listening from the room next door, and telling him to go the hell to sleep.

Early the next morning Gentry pulled on the beige slacks and white shirt he’d brought with him. He had coffee with Rupe at the front desk and looked at theNew York Post. A front-page article said that the “bat boy and bat man” up in Westchester were recovering, though wildlife officials still had no idea why they were attacked. Thanking Rupe and throwing his overnight bag over his shoulder, Gentry took the Number 2 subway down to Twenty-third Street. The shrink’s paranoid caller would not have liked the ride. The passengers seemed unusually quiet. As if they were waiting for something to happen.

Or maybe it was him waiting for something…or imagining that people were quiet. Either way, it was weird.

Gentry felt better as he walked crosstown through the warm, bright morning to the police academy building on Twentieth Street between Second and Third Avenues. He always felt good visiting the thirty-four-year-old academy. Whether it was to talk to plebes about the Accident Investigations Squad or his days with the SNEU, recruit new talent for the precinct or to see Chris Henry, it was exciting to watch enthusiastic young cadets move in and around the eight-story building. Just like the kids at the Fashion Institute, it renewed his spirit to see the up-and-coming generation. To see that they cared, that they weren’t afraid to put everything on the line for others.

The forty-nine-year-old Henry was the head of the crime lab-more formally known as the Scientific Research Division-specializing in ballistics, bombs, and what they called “unidentifiables” found at crime scenes. Though the FBI lab at Federal Plaza had the whiz-bang public reputation, and the NYPD Crime Scene Unit on Tenth Street got the press and big bucks, Henry ran the smartest little group of scientific sleuths in town.

The short, chunky physician was sitting at the chrome table that filled his laboratory. He was reading theDailyNews and drinking coffee when Gentry stepped into the open doorway.

“Get your big goddamn nose out of the personals,” Gentry said. “You’re married.”

Henry looked up and smiled. He slid off his stool and extended his hand. “Well, look who’s here! You know, Bobby, I was just telling my new lab assistant about you yesterday.”

“Male or female?”

“The latter. Bright, and gorgeous, and engaged, so forget it. How the hell’ve you been?”

“Not bad.”

“You look tired.”

“I am.”

“Been working late on a case?”

Gentry shook his head. “It was something else.”

“Well, pull up a stool and tell me all about it. Iam married. I need to live vicariously through my single male friends.”

“Sorry, Chris,” Gentry said. “It wasn’t that either.”

“Too bad.” Henry sat down heavily. “What I was telling my assistant, Laurette, was that I miss the days when you were with the SNEU. While everyone else was giving us bullets and bomb parts, you gave us real nutbusters to unravel. ID-ing dried blood on a safety razor, looking for traces of gunpowder in water from a fish tank, trying to find heroin in saliva somebody spit onto the street.” Henry frowned. “ Lot of liquids, now that I think of it. But challenging.”

“Right. The good old days.”

“Hey, they were rewarding days for everyone. You don’t give the crime lab that kind of stuff anymore. A hit-and-run once every three or four months. Mortar analysis of falling cornices. From everyone else it’s still bullets and bomb shards.You ever think of going back to the SNEU?”

“No. You ever think of going back to the army?”

Henry winced. “Touché. On the other hand, you did do it over ten years. Most men would’ve burned out.”

“Flattery won’t work either.”

Henry shrugged. “Anyway, here you are. What can I do for you?”

Gentry unzipped his overnight bag, withdrew the Baggie, and handed it to Henry. “I fished this from the wall of my apartment building last night. I was hoping you could tell me what kind of animal it belongs to.”

Dr. Henry held the bag up to the fluorescent light. He shook it lightly, opened it, sniffed it, then pressed it shut. He handed it back to Gentry.

“Well?”

“Like I told you,” Henry said, “there was a time when you made my life interesting.”

“What do you mean?”

“This was way too easy.”

“You know what it is?”

Henry nodded slowly. “It’s a waste medium consisting primarily of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Also millions of microscopic, undigested insect parts.”

Gentry looked at him blankly.

“It’s bat guano,” Henry said. “Not only that, but it was collected almost straight from the bat.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because very early this morning we were given a sample almost exactly like yours.”

Gentry had been slumping. He straightened. “Explain.”

“Laurette was here and ran the analysis,” Henry went on. “She identified it and also noticed the lack of any bioremediation microbes-meaning no decomposition. Hence the freshness.”

“Who brought the sample to you?”

“A Metro North cop sent it over. He had a strange name-what was it? Arville something? Arvids?”

“Arvids Stiebris. Works under Ari Moreaux. I know him. What happened?”

“One of the MTA maintenance workers went out on his weekly inspection early this morning and didn’t report back or answer his pager. The shift supervisor called for a police escort. Arvids and he went out looking for the guy. They found the man and the guano.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“Physically, not much. He apparently passed out from the smell. There were scratches on his face and neck, but the EMT personnel who were called in said he got them when he fell.”

“Where did all this happen?”

“I’m really not sure. Somewhere along the subway tunnels, Lexington Avenue side of the station, I think. Arvids said the dung heap was a big one, about two feet high.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. That’s a lot of shit.”

“Anything else?” Gentry asked.

“About the sample, no. But totally by coincidence, when I saw the bat attack on the news last night, I called Al Doyle at home. He’s the Health Department’s Dr. Pest Control. You know him? Looks like a field mouse.”

Gentry said he didn’t know him or know of him.

“He’s not one of us I Love New York guys. Sees the burg as a pit stop to the federal level. Anyhow, he didn’t think the Westchester bats were anything to worry about. He said the attack up north probably happened because too many migrating bats tried to feed on too few bugs and ended up colliding with one another and with people who got in the way.”

“The news reports said the two people up there were practically gnawed to death.”

“I mentioned that to Doyle,” Henry replied. “He said bat attacks make good copy.”

“Horseshit. I saw the home video footage on the news report.”

“Me too. What can I tell you?”

“That you’ll call Doyle later and ask him what he thinks about the guano in Grand Central.”

“Actually, we had that discussion last night. He told me that we’ve had bats in the subways before. He said they usually migrate late in the summer or early fall. They look for a warm place to hibernate and give birth, and the subways fill the bill. He said there are thirty to forty thousand bats in the city parks, and it’s not uncommon for many of them to head underground.”

“I’ve lived in the city for eighteen years, Chris. I’ve never had bat guano in my wall. And that maintenance guy was obviously a little surprised by what he found on the train tracks.”

Henry shrugged. “There are renovations going on at Grand Central. There’s been a lot of new construction where you live in the West Village. Maybe that’s opened new niches for the bats or closed some old ones.”

“Oh, come on. How many displaced bats would it take to create a pile of shit two feet deep?”

“Listen,” Henry said, “I’m no bat expert. Maybeyou should talk to Doyle. He gets in around ten o’clock. I’ll give you his direct line at the Health Department.”

“No, thanks.” Gentry zipped his overnight bag and slung it over his shoulder. “I saw a bat lady on TV last night. I’m going to see if I can get in touch with her.”

Henry smirked. “I’d take a lady over Doyle too.”

“She seemed to know her stuff, Chris. That’s all.”

“Sure. Well, let me know what you find out.”

“I will.”

“And it was good to see you,” Henry said. “Come back with a real problem next time.”

“I’ll try.”

Henry waved the Baggie. “You want this?”

Robert shook his head. He had a feeling he’d be able to get more where that came from.