“I disagree with Battaglia,” Mike said.
It was two-thirty on Thursday afternoon, and he was eating his second hot dog, leaning against the blue brick wall of the building that housed the morgue on First Avenue at Thirtieth Street.
“I was hoping you would.”
“Not about taking you off the murder case. About how you look when you pout.”
“Maybe you’ll ask the lieutenant to go to bat for me. Keep me on the team.”
“You should get your feelings hurt more often, Coop. Kind of cute. You look almost vulnerable.”
“All these years together and I thought you liked edgy and cool. You want to see vulnerable, watch McKinney try to undermine me.”
“Nah, that’s when you go all pit bull on me. Did Battaglia set ground rules?”
“For the time being, I can work with you and Mercer on Tina Barr. I guess setting up this interview with Alger Herrick, the man she’s been working for lately, is my consolation prize. Pat’s sitting on the larger matter of the library, and the DA may force him to let me in on it.”
“What’s McKinney ’s reason for bumping you off Vastasi’s murder?”
“I may be needed as a witness if there’s an arrest and trial, so I can’t be the prosecutor. What did we see during the surveillance?
Did I touch the body or the evidence? What did Billy Schultz and Minerva Hunt say to me? That’s why I thought we could get back to work on Barr. The two crimes can’t be unrelated.”
“Why did McKinney call Tina Barr a thief?” Mike asked.
“He interviewed Jill Gibson last week, before any of this happened. She was talking about some of the things that have disappeared from the library in the last couple of years. In order to get your hands on the most valuable items you’d really need to have special access to the best collections. That’s why the executives think most of the thefts had involved insiders.”
“This Gibson woman fingered Tina Barr?”
“No, she actually likes Barr. But it’s clear that the conservators work on materials from different parts of the library. Her name was one of the common denominators that kept coming up as the individual curators were interviewed. It’s McKinney who’s drawn a bead on her.”
“Stealing these priceless objects for herself,” Mike said, “and the best she could do was live in a basement in one of the Hunts’ buildings?”
“Thefts to order, Mike. That’s apparently the big scam. Rich collectors are all scrambling for the same limited goods. They know that thousands of these artifacts are shelved in stacks that nobody ever sees, or warehoused for decades, like the little book Karla Vastasi hid inside her jacket. And Barr was courted by many of these collectors because she’s so extraordinarily talented and had such unique access inside the building.”
“You have time to Google this Alger Herrick after Battaglia booted you from the inner sanctum?”
“Yes,” I said. “ McKinney only interviewed him by phone, last week when Herrick was still in England. That was about the problems at the library, so Barr’s name came up in the conversation, but I thought we should go deeper.”
“He was here in New York when Barr was attacked?”
“Yes, and for Vastasi’s murder, too,” I said. “He arrived last weekend.”
“You want a bite?” Mike asked, holding his hot dog out to me.
“Thanks, I had lunch at my desk.” I took a napkin from his hand and wiped the mustard from the corner of his mouth.
Mike grinned at me. “The guy must be a real gent if you’re cleaning me up for him.”
“Very upper-crust, this Mr. Herrick. He’s English, he’s rich, and he’s very proper. I thought it would be refreshing for him to meet you.”
“Four fifty-five Central Park West. If he’s so rich, how come he’s living in the DMZ?” The area that bordered the park on the Upper West Side, north of Ninety-sixth Street, has seen more than its share of violent crime.
“According to the search I did today, when that landmark building was renovated and apartments went on the market three years ago,” I said, “Alger Herrick paid eight million dollars for the most coveted space in the joint.”
“And just seven years ago,” Mike said, shaking his head, “it was like a big old haunted house. The deadbeat hotel next door was a crack den and it was worth your life to walk down the block without being robbed by junkies or hit up by prostitutes.”
“So you know the building?”
“Had a nightmare of a case in four fifty-five back then. Three teenage boys from the ’hood killed up on the third floor, execution style, ’cause they were playing in there and witnessed a buy. The place had such a spooky history, most of the neighbors would cross the street rather than pass by too close to it. Only things inside were stray cats, dead pigeons, and half-dead crackheads.”
“I’d never heard of it until I just read the story about Herrick.”
“It was the New York Cancer Hospital in the 1880s,” Mike said. “The first one of its kind in the country to devote itself to the care of cancer patients.”
“The photo of it online looks more like a French château. The article said it was built with money from the Astor family. I guess they really did round up a load of real estate.”
“Wait till you see it. It’s got turrets on each side, round towers like in a castle,” Mike said. “The architect actually designed them on the theory that germs and dirt wouldn’t collect in corners. I can’t exactly say we had a guided tour, but Peterson and I got to know every nook and cranny in the place. It was the predecessor to today’s Memorial Hospital on the East Side.”
Mike’s late fiancée, Valerie Jacobsen, had been treated at Memorial a couple of years before-successfully-for breast cancer, only to be killed in a skiing accident. During those months, he had applied himself to learning as much about the disease as he knew about military history.
“And now it’s been transformed into elegant co-op apartments,” I said. “Maybe it’ll bring the rest of the neighborhood along with it.”
“Everything in New York used to be something else,” Mike said, tossing his trash into a pail on the corner as we waited for the light to change. “These old buildings have stories, Coop. They’re here to tell us who we were, who we used to be.”
“Herrick’s home seems to have mostly sad stories.”
“The mother of one of the boys who was killed there became a one-woman campaign to clean it up. Learned everything there was to know about its history. She told me she used to sit in the same desolate room where her kid was offed, just staring out at the park, thinking about how many people had come to the end of their lives in that forsaken place.”
“Back when it was built,” I said, “cancer was incurable. Treatment was just palliative.”
“Patients went to that hospital to die, eased by morphine and champagne, Sunday carriage rides in the park,” Mike said. “Story was that the hospital whiskey bill was higher than the one for medical supplies. Even Marie Curie came to visit.”
“She did?” I asked as we crossed the broad street, dodging taxis and buses, to get to Mike’s car.
“The Curies discovered radium in 1898, and doctors here pioneered the first techniques to burn cancers away with it. The largest repository of radium in the country was kept in a steel vault right in that building.”
“I don’t know that I could live in a place like that,” I said. “Too many ghosts.”
“Life goes on,” Mike said. “The Octagon-the old lunatic asylum on Roosevelt Island-has been turned into a housing development, and the building where more than a hundred people died in the Triangle Waist Company fire in 1911 is a biology lab at NYU now. Like a phoenix from the ashes.”
I had just cleared the passenger seat of half a dozen empty soda cans, a tie, a book on the Crimean War, and a gross of Tic-Tac boxes when I heard Mike’s beeper go off.
He looked at the display and slammed the car door. “It’s Peterson.”
My cell was in my hand. I speed-dialed Mike’s boss and handed him the phone.
“Hey, Loo, what’s up?” Mike listened to the answer. “Got it. Yeah, she just bought me lunch at the medical examiner’s outdoor café. We’re on it.”
“Detour?” I asked.
“Quick stop on Ninety-third Street,” Mike said.
“Tina’s apartment? Why?”
“Because Billy Schultz played hookey from his office today. He’s working from home.”
“So?”
Mike was driving up First Avenue, weaving between cars to catch the lights while he talked. “Precinct guys spent the morning canvassing the buildings that face the garden behind the apartment. Got a rear-window thing going on. Remember Billy told us he hadn’t seen much of Tina since the summer? Well, the little old lady who takes the fresh air on her fire escape saw Billy out back with Tina over the weekend. Saturday, right around dusk.”
“Doing what?”
“Digging.”
“You mean gardening?”
“I would have said it if that’s what I meant. She says digging. With a great big shovel and mounds of dirt. No pansies, no tulips, no vegetables.”
“Why didn’t he tell us?” We were cruising past the United Nations, and Mike put on his whelper to cut a course through the slow-moving traffic. “Did you see any disturbance in the garden?”
“Actually, Coop, I was distracted by the broad on the floor with the bad headache. I thought there was a messy patch in the yard, and I just figured it was where the perp pulled the armillary out of the ground to whack her. Anyway, Crime Scene will have photos,” Mike said. “Peterson’s got a uniform outside his apartment, rope-a-doping him into answering questions about all the other tenants till we get there. And I buried the lead.”
“What’s that?” I held the dashboard as Mike slammed on the brakes to avoid an Asian deliveryman, then accelerated again.
“That gas mask the cops picked up a few doors away from the building the night Barr was attacked?” Mike asked.
“Don’t look at me. Look at the road,” I said. “What about it?”
“Preliminary on the DNA inside the mask. There’s a mixture, of course,” Mike said. “I’d expect that with something like a mask-especially if it isn’t brand new. And one of the profiles matches Billy Schultz.”
“Are you serious? I never thought of him that way for a minute. He was wearing the damn thing?”
“Skin cells, sweat. I don’t know what else they got.”
Once we passed the turn-off for the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, we made the left onto Ninety-third Street in less than three minutes.
I could see an officer talking to Schultz on the sidewalk as we pulled up in front of the building. He looked over when he heard the car door shut and started up the steps as Mike approached.
“Yo, Billy,” Mike said. “I need a couple of minutes of your time.”
Schultz was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up, and he frowned as he checked his watch before telling Mike that he had to get back upstairs for a conference call. “I can’t talk to you now.”
“A guy could get a complex. Only person who’s ever happy to see me is my mother,” Mike said. “It’s just a little thing.”
“Really, I’ve got to make a call.”
“This Minerva Hunt thing’s got me puzzled.” Mike was doing his best Columbo imitation, a look of complete befuddlement on his face. He seemed too dense to be able to figure out much of anything. “When you phoned 911, you told the operator you thought the dead woman was Minerva Hunt, right?”
Schultz looked annoyed. “That’s what I said.”
“That you’d seen her in the building on other occasions.”
“Exactly.”
“You were standing with me when the real Minerva Hunt walked into the kitchen, weren’t you?”
“In the garden, yes.”
“Did you see her?”
“I did.”
“I’m just trying to get straight which of the two women you’d seen around the building before that night. That’s all I want to know.”
“The way you came speeding up the street, I thought it was something more urgent,” Schultz said, seemingly relieved that was the reason for our visit. “I-uh-I was mistaken when I called for help. The outfit, the general physique, the bag with her initials. I couldn’t really see her face-it was such a mess-I just jumped to that conclusion. As soon as I saw that other woman talking to you, I knew I’d been wrong.”
“Very helpful, Billy. I didn’t mean to hold you up,” Mike said with a wave of his hand. “What are you growing this time of year? Pumpkins?”
“Excuse me?”
“In your garden. My lieutenant asked me to find out what’s in bloom.”
“It’s all put to bed, Detective. Come back next spring and see what we’ve got,” Schultz said, heading up the stairs.
“The big dig, Billy. Last Saturday. What was that about?”
Schultz continued on his way.
“People saw you with Tina out in the yard. You want to tell me what you were doing together?”
Schultz stopped but didn’t answer.
“Don’t be going back out there for a while, Billy. Cops are on their way to seal it up now, till we have a chance to check it out. It’s off-limits.”
The man turned to look at us, clearly displeased. “Tina asked to borrow my shovel, okay? I didn’t ask her why. I didn’t need to know. I took it down to her and talked for a minute or so. That’s her little plot. I don’t care what she does with it.”
“But you told us you hadn’t talked to her-” I said.
“Maybe I just forgot. It was such an insignificant exchange, I simply forgot.”
Mike took a step closer and put his hand on the railing of the staircase. “Easy to understand, Billy. A lot easier to understand than the fact that you left your droppings in that freaking mask you ran around in the other night.”
“What are you talking about? That’s not my mask,” Schultz said, angered. He raised his voice and his face flushed.
“The lab got your DNA sample last night, and they say it looks pretty good that you were the guy who had his mug in that contraption. You forget to tell us that, too? Why don’t we take this conversation inside, Billy. Your place or mine?”
“Don’t come any closer, Detective. Yeah, did I see the fireman-the guy who ran out of here-throw something on the ground? Sure I did. It was only two, three car lengths up the street. Yeah, I picked it up and looked at it-and maybe I did just hold it up over my face. I couldn’t figure how he could see out of it. Then I just dropped it back down. Figured your buddies would pick it up.”
“I think you’d be doing yourself a favor if you came up to the squad and sat down to go over all this a little more carefully, you know?”
“I’ll do you a bigger favor,” Schultz said, opening the vestibule door and shouting before he disappeared inside. “I’ll have my lawyer call you.”