Ben swallowed some of his bourbon. “I don’t buy it. I’m telling you, neither one of them was what they looked like on the surface.”
“Uh-huh. And now let me tell you something, Lieutenant. There’s a lot happening you don’t know about. Certain people are interested in making this whole fucking thing go away, and the sooner the better. Not just people in the department, either. Chief Houlihan told me the commissioner’s been getting calls on it, and some of them were about you.”
“About me?”
“Right. Inquiring about your background and your record, things like that.”
“Who from?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“That’s correct. At least as far as you’re concerned, it is. I’m doing you a favor to tell you even that much.”
“But—”
“Listen to me, will you? You want your career to stay on track? Then pay attention. The senator’s funeral is tomorrow. After that, you wrap it up, give Oppenheimer his report, and that’s it.”
“Who says Oppenheimer’ll be satisfied? He’s not stupid, you know. He just might throw it back in my face.”
“No he won’t. There’s pressure on him, too. So handle it the way I’m telling you. You gonna have another drink?”
Tolliver drained his glass. “Yeah, I think I’d better.”
19
The senator’s funeral was grander than any New York had seen in years. As Tolliver had expected, it went off in two stages: first, a private ceremony in the Bennett Chapel that was attended by civic leaders, friends of the family, and persons of importance; and second, the public presentation, which was held at Riverside Church.
Although the church was one of the largest in the city, it was jammed to the last pew with mourners, and with people who knew history in the making when they saw it. The choice of the church was appropriate; built in 1930, it had been funded by Colonel Cunningham’s idol, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Its massive tower loomed twenty-one stories above Riverside Drive and offered a splendid view of the Hudson, and its seventy-four-bell carillon was bigger than any other in the world.
The cortege, led by a phalanx of mounted police, stretched for several blocks and included more Rolls-Royce and Mercedes limousines than it did Cadillacs. Four flower cars followed the hearse, which in turn was followed by eight more vehicles containing various members of the Cunningham family.
As a media event, the funeral was unsurpassed. Because of the implications of scandal stirred up by the tabloids and TV, especially with Jessica Silk’s suicide coming on the heels of the senator’s death, audiences couldn’t get enough of the story. Not since Crazy Joey Gallo was gunned down in Umberto’s Clam House while celebrating his forty-third birthday had the public imagination been so aroused.
The newspapers led the attack. Especially the Post, which outdid even its own rabid approach to reporting, mixing the weird with the bizarre. One article quoted an unnamed source who said the senator had been planning to divorce his wife and marry Jessica, after learning the writer was pregnant. Upon Cunningham’s death, according to the piece, Silk was so depressed, she leapt off her terrace.
Not to be outdone, the Daily News interviewed a female psychic who claimed the senator had been running a ménage à trois with Silk and Ardis Merritt and that the exertion was the cause of his fatal heart attack. Silk jumped, the psychic said, when she learned she wouldn’t be named a beneficiary in the senator’s will.
Meantime, TV dredged up its own shticks, including asking people in the streets what they thought. Only the most outlandish opinions were aired, including one expressed by a guy in Queens who said he’d heard Cunningham wasn’t dead at all but was shacked up in Hollywood under an assumed name.
As a result of all this, Riverside was packed. The service was conducted by the bishop and the eulogy was delivered by the mayor, even though he and the senator had personally despised each other. His Honor spoke glowingly of Clayton Cunningham and of his works for the people of New York, going on for almost an hour.
Tolliver watched quietly from the extreme rear of the church, sitting among a number of lesser city officials. Many of the NYPD brass were also in attendance, but Ben steered clear of them. He hated funerals and had rarely been to one at which he believed a word that was said about the departed. The only reason he attended this one was because experience had taught him you could sometimes learn things that would help you with what you were working on.
Which was another problem he was struggling with. He’d been told how to handle this case in no uncertain terms: back off. Let both Cunningham and Silk rest in peace. Yet he still had to live with himself. Was a promotion that important? Was the job?
He looked over the audience, making mental notes of what he saw. Clay Cunningham, the senator’s son, was sitting in a front pew. His father’s widow was on one side of him and his actress wife on the other. Even in a black hat with a veil, Laura Bentley was stunning.
Rounding out the group were Ingrid, not as showy as Laura but just as lovely, and her German husband. A sprinkling of teenaged children sat among them, but Ben didn’t know which kids belonged to what set of parents.
Behind the immediate family was a large number of what he assumed were relatives, males and females of all ages. Sitting with them were Ardis Merritt, the administrator of the Cunningham Foundation, and a few places away, the security chief, Evan Montrock. Ben supposed other members of the staff were here as well, but the only one he recognized was the butler he’d seen on the morning he’d gone into the mansion.
When the service was concluded, pallbearers who had all been political allies of the senator bore the casket out to the waiting hearse. The family members then filed from the church, got into their cars, and were whisked away. Interment, Tolliver had learned, would be at the Cunningham estate on Long Island. Stepping outside, Ben continued to look over the crowd, recognizing many prominent people who had come to see and to be seen.
The media was also in attendance, of course, but a cordon of police was keeping them at bay. As Tolliver walked toward the spot where he’d left the Ford, he heard one of the reporters call his name.
Turning, he saw that the voice belonged to the newscaster from WPIC TV, Shelley Drake. For a moment, he was tempted to keep going, but then he thought again of their last conversation. He stepped over to where she was standing. A cameraman was with her, shooting tape of the scene. He paid no attention to Ben.
Drake had on the trench coat again, and the breeze was stirring her honey blond hair. This time, she wasn’t at all aggressive. “Hello, Lieutenant.”
Ben nodded.
“I saw you when you came out of Jessica Silk’s apartment,” she said, “on Sutton Place.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to you. Before I could catch up, you were in your car and gone. I was hoping you were ready to hear what I could tell you.”
“You’re still trying to make a deal?”
“Of course. And if you’d only listen, I think you’d agree what I’m offering is fair.”
“Okay, what is it?”
“If I can help you, all I’d ask is that you give me a little information in return—and only if my help is as valuable as I say it is.”
“You that confident?”
“Yes.”
He glanced again at the throng that continued to flow out of the church, a vast stream of people dressed mostly in black. “I’ll think about it.”
“You do that.” She handed him a card. “Call me anytime.”
He put the card into a pocket of his raincoat and walked away. Getting chummy with a member of the press was something he’d always assiduously avoided. But now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was time to forget about his rules and grab anything that came his way.
At the moment, however, there was another lady he wanted to call on. But whether he’d learn anything from her was questionable. Twenty stories was
a long way to fall.
20
The morgue was in the basement of one of the seven brick buildings in the Bellevue Hospital Center on First Avenue, the oldest general hospital in the United States. Tolliver went down the steps into the dank, chilly corridors, following the passageway to the autopsy room. He showed his shield to the cop on the door and walked inside.
Jessica Silk looked nothing like the way she had the last time Ben had seen her. Now she was naked, lying on her back on one of the tables, her abdomen laid open from crotch to sternum. There were gaping ruptures in her flesh and the top of her skull had been removed, exposing her brain.
Two white-coated medical examiners were working on the cadaver. One of them was speaking into a microphone, recording his procedures as he removed each organ, then examined and weighed it. He glanced up as Ben entered the room. “Hey, Lieutenant. You do have an eye for pretty girls.”
“Hello, Ed,” Tolliver said. “You still trying to become a doctor?”
The ME grinned. He had red hair and a beaklike nose that always put Ben in mind of an oversized woodpecker. His name was Edgar Feldman. Tolliver had worked with him on a number of homicide cases.
“Anybody can be a pill-pusher,” Feldman said. “Pathology requires a real virtuoso. And besides, you’ll note that when it comes to autopsying somebody important, they turn to the old master himself.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“It’s true. This was Senator Cunningham’s girlfriend, right? Our celebrity of the week.”
“She knew him,” Tolliver said.
“Knew him? Hey, Ben—you of all people wouldn’t buy that shit about her interviewing him, would you? Unless interviewing is a polite way of saying she was shtupping the old boy. I think the papers and the TV got it right.”
“Don’t believe everything you see or read,” Ben said.
“Okay, but that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“Possibly.”
“I thought so. At least you cared enough to attend our little party. None of your fellow officers bothered, as you can see. Say hello to my assistant, Dave Wilkison.”
The second ME raised a gloved hand in greeting, the latex smeared crimson. Ben nodded and then stepped closer to the table, peering down at the corpse.
Silk’s appearance was also very different from that of the last dead body he’d seen. Among other things, her color was chalk white—except for the yawning abdominal cavity and the many places where her flesh had burst open. Those areas were purplish red.
Maybe the embalmers had been right; the senator’s countenance had been considerably improved by Lifetone. Certainly he’d looked better than Silk did now. Even his expression of pained horror was preferable to the way the skin of her forehead had been rolled down over her face and the way her body had split apart, as if her life had leaked out of the holes.
The ME was watching Tolliver’s reaction. “That’s the thing about jumpers,” he said. “When they hit, it all hangs out.”
“Uh-huh. What’ve you found?”
“Several points of interest.” Feldman gestured with a scalpel. “One, she landed flat on her back, which is unusual.”
“What’s unusual about it?”
“Because when somebody jumps, they almost always go feet-first, like kids hopping into a pool. Don’t ask me why, they just do. I’ve done posts on dozens of them, and I’d say over ninety percent hit that way. You can’t miss it, because it drives the femurs, the thighbones, all the way up into the abdomen.”
Ben had seen a few himself. The picture wasn’t pleasant.
“This lady, however, didn’t land that way. She did a back whopper, I guess you could call it. When she hit, she popped open, which is to be expected. Like dropping a paper sack filled with water from a height.”
“And I suppose the fall also broke a lot of her bones?”
“A lot? All of them, just about. She would have been doing around a hundred-thirty miles an hour when she smacked that roof. It was made of copper, and she put a dent in the surface.”
Ben tried to envision Silk climbing over the railing, making her leap. “I wonder how she went off. That is, if she landed on her back, she must have had her body turned around and facing the terrace before she let go.”
“It would seem that way. Odd, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“But not the oddest, not by a long shot.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve been saving the best parts.”
“Okay, what are they?”
“Take a good close look at her neck and her shoulders. See the bruises?”
Tolliver bent over the body. Just as Feldman had said, there were small bluish marks in her flesh, many of them. Because of the way her skin had ruptured, Ben might well have overlooked them or ascribed them to injuries caused by her fall.
The ME pointed. “Some of these are from pinches, I would say, somebody grabbing hold of her and twisting. But some of them were made by teeth. Love bites, the kind of thing you see when people have been involved in what we so delicately describe as rough sex.”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “I do see them.” He also saw an image in his mind’s eye of Jessica standing in her doorway when he’d gone to her apartment, looking tall and beautiful in black slacks and a black turtleneck. The sweater would have covered the marks on her neck. Was that why she’d been wearing it?
“And that’s still not all,” Feldman said. “Look at these.” He brought the point of the scalpel close to Silk’s right thigh. Clearly visible in the skin were a number of small red sores. Some of them apparently were fresh, seeming raw and angry. Others were scabbed over.
Tolliver stared at the wounds. “What caused them, do you know? They look like burns.”
The ME beamed. “Spoken like a true detective. That’s exactly what they are. Some are recent; some are weeks old. And there are more of them on her buttocks.”
“So what caused them?”
“In my opinion, they were made by somebody touching her with something very hot. Not a cigarette—the burns are too big for that. Best bet? A lighted cigar.”
“I’ll be damned.”
Feldman shook his head; “What some people won’t do for pleasure. Ay, Lieutenant?”
“Couldn’t have been very pleasurable for her,” Ben said.
“Oh? And why not? Has masochism gone out of style? Maybe she loved it. Wouldn’t be the first time a man and woman had a weird relationship … or the last.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Spices up the story, too, right? Could be that she and the senator liked to work each other over.”
“Come on, Ed, don’t get carried away. You sound like you should be writing for the Daily News.”
“Just trying to be helpful.”
“Yeah. What else?”
“Turns out she was a heavy smoker herself; lung tissue was in bad shape. Probably would have died of cancer in a few more years. Also she drank more than she should have. Blood-alcohol level was point-oh-nine at the time of death, and there was some evidence of liver damage.”
Once again a picture of Jessica Silk formed in Ben’s mind—the one of her standing at the bar in her apartment, smoking a cigarette and pouring herself a drink.
“Worried a lot, too,” Feldman went on.
“What makes you say that?”
“I found an incipient ulcer in her duodenum.”
“Interesting.”
“Isn’t it, though. I said this was a fascinating branch of medicine, didn’t I?”
“That you did. What more can you tell me?”
“What more do you want? The brand of cigar that caused those burns? You should be grateful for all I’ve given you as it is.”
“I am. But let me tell you about why I came here. First, however, I want to point out that this is not my case. So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention that I dropped by.”
“Okay, done.”
“I came because I
’m not convinced this was a suicide—even though no evidence turned up at the scene to suggest it wasn’t.”
“Ah. I thought that might be what was on your mind.”
“What I want you to do is this. Look for anything that could be labeled suspicious. Those burns, for instance, have some meaning, I feel sure. See if there might be something else, something that could support the theory that she didn’t go off the terrace of her own accord.”
“Sure, will do.”
“You scrape her nails?”
“No.”
“Do it. Maybe there was a struggle and she scratched somebody.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“And keep an eye out for anything else you might come across. Any other injuries, for instance, that weren’t from the fall.”
Feldman glanced down at the cadaver. “That one’s a little tougher. Look at her.”
“Yeah, I know. But try, anyway. You just might come up with something I can use. Okay?”
“I’ll do my best, Lieutenant.”
“Thanks, Ed. You’ve already been a terrific help.”
Feldman bowed. “Where shall I send my bill?”
“Try the mayor.” Ben turned and left the room.
21
Wanted to stop by and say hello,” Tolliver said. He was standing in the doorway of Capt. Daniel Brannigan’s office. “Appreciate the hospitality.”
The captain was another one-time detective in the NYPD, according to Mulloy. He struck Ben as much like a lot of other senior officers, men who’d built their careers by establishing connections, playing the game. They traded favors, looked the other way when there were things they chose not to see. Brannigan had that same well-fed sleekness, same laid-back style. With his prominent nose and thinning hair, his dark blue suit, he might have been a city councilman or the head of some minor agency. But a bureaucrat, without question.
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