In the Shadow of Gotham

by Pintoff, Stefanie

  “Where is the body? Have they taken her to the morgue yet?” I asked.

  “Not yet. McGinty called right after they got word at headquarters. The coroner’s still on site where her body washed up, near Seventy-ninth Street.” She handed me the paper where she had written the address.

  “Then that’s where I’m headed,” I said. “You’ll let Alistair know?”

  Of course she would have anyway. I was simply trying to give her something to do that might distract her from asking to come with me. I did not want Isabella’s company, not for this. Not when I felt such a strong sense of failure—and when I knew what horrors most likely waited down by the riverbank.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Hudson River loomed cold and gray before me. There was a biting chill in the air that seemed to sharpen my perception of everything—from the trees that displayed their few, last, withering leaves to the hulking black barge that roiled the water downstream. Odd how cold temperatures can generate an effect that is uniquely visual.

  A group of policemen huddled together by the riverbank near Seventy-ninth and Riverside. They were obscured by the coroner’s wagon, a rickety contraption that had somehow managed to lumber over the rough, rocky earth all the way down to the river. I suspected they had not wanted to risk carrying the body far in light of its condition, for even just a few hours in the water badly decomposed a corpse.

  I quickly recognized Jennings, the coroner with whom I’d had many dealings in the past. He was a short man, overstuffed and unevenly shaped. But I had seen him at work on the autopsy table and, in complete disproportion to the rest of his body, his hands moved swiftly and expertly, as did his keen mind.

  The officer in charge, a strapping Irishman with a shock of red hair and strong accent, was addressing a group of young men who were obviously rookies. “Okay, lads, let’s get to work. We need to search up and down the shore, the whole perimeter.” One young man looked positively green with nausea, and all were decidedly uncomfortable. I suspected few had ever seen a dead body before. This was not to say that those of us more familiar with the sight never felt ill—I could already sense my own stomach beginning to churn—but I liked to think we veterans learned to disguise it better.

  The officer waved his hands broadly, gesturing up and down the waterfront. “And remember, anything that may be relevant, just bring it to someone’s attention. Anything at all.”

  I approached Jennings, greeting him in a louder voice than usual, for his hearing seemed to grow worse with each passing year.

  He looked up in surprise. “Ziele, why, I thought you were working upstate now.”

  “Not upstate—I’m just north of Yonkers, in one of the river towns,” I said, accustomed to this sort of comment. It was all a matter of perception, and not long ago, I would have thought of Dobson in exactly the same way. Even our current location on the Upper West Side was considered to be very far north by many.

  “I’ve got a case in Dobson that brings me back to the city,” I said.

  For a moment, I thought even more explanation would be necessary; the redheaded officer came over to question me, but retreated after noticing that Jennings seemed to know me quite well.

  “It may relate to your business here.” I indicated the large covered corpse Jennings had been working over. “What have you found out?”

  Jennings cleared his throat. “River dumps are tough cases, you know that.” It was an admonishment, one I well understood. When a corpse was in the water even a short period of time, much of the evidentiary information a coroner might obtain was destroyed.

  “I do,” I said. “But I also know that you still have opinions.” I continued in my most persuasive, reasonable voice. “I won’t hold you to anything until you’ve done the full autopsy.”

  Somewhat mollified, Jennings grunted; then began to speak slowly. “Here, we’re relatively lucky that the cold, moving water of the Hudson helped slow the body’s decomposition.”

  He trudged over to the side of the wagon where the corpse would be more accessible, and I followed. Though it helped that we were outdoors, I could already detect the distinctive smell of rotting flesh. We approached the form covered by a thick black blanket, and I watched with trepidation as Jennings lifted its edges and pulled the blanket to expose the body’s head and upper torso.

  I staggered back in shock. It couldn’t be—and yet, there was no mistaking what I saw before me.

  “This is a man,” I managed to say. The words caught in my throat.

  Jennings looked at me in amazement. “Well, of course it is.”

  “I expected a woman,” I said, aware that I now sounded idiotic.

  Jennings dignified that only with a grunt. “As I was about to explain,” he began, “this is a river dump, so—”

  I cut him off. “I need you to back up a moment. I understood there was evidence connecting this corpse with Michael Fromley. How is this man connected to Fromley?”

  Now it was Jennings’s turn to stare. “This man isn’t connected with Michael Fromley,” he said in exasperation. “We believe this man is Michael Fromley.”

  Silence followed—and time stood still.

  I regarded the misshapen mass of flesh and bone in front of me. The man’s features had been rendered unrecognizable by his time in the water. Was it really him—the man we had hunted and almost despaired of finding?

  And by slow degrees, the logical conclusion dawned on me: If it were Fromley, then this case might be over. Sarah’s killer would be present and accounted for, his guilt sealed by circumstantial evidence. It would be a phenomenal end to the case.

  But first, I needed some confirmation from Jennings. “May I see the identification you found on him?” I asked, gesturing toward the pile of soggy personal effects.

  Jennings shrugged. “Fine with me if it’s okay with Bobby.” The short, square man snapped to attention upon hearing his name and nodded. Like most rookie policemen, he was slightly intimidated by Jennings.

  “What do you have?” I asked him. He stepped aside to let me examine the things.

  “Mainly soggy odds and ends, sir,” he replied. He was right. There was a sock, as well as a thick bundle of cloth that I determined to be a coat. Some papers fished from its pockets had been carefully laid aside to dry. And there was a small pile of rocks—pebbles, really—next to the papers.

  “Those rocks were in his pockets and mouth, sir—probably intended to weigh him down,” Bobby explained. “Didn’t work particularly well; whoever wanted him to stay down should have used heavier ones.”

  I recognized a couple of theater tickets and what appeared to be a pawnshop receipt. But there was no wallet or ring—in short, nothing that might identify the corpse. “Why do you think this corpse is Michael Fromley?” I asked, puzzled. “I see nothing to indicate it here.”

  “Sorry, sir.” The young man flushed with embarrassment as he pulled a watch and chain from his own vest. “It’s because of this, sir. They told me to keep it safe, and I’d forgot I put it in my own pocket to do so.”

  I cradled the gold pocket watch in my hands. On the back was clearly etched an inscription: Michael J. Fromley, 8–11–98 from your loving Aunt Lizzie. I did not yet allow myself to feel more than initial relief. Watches were often stolen or borrowed; only a proper autopsy would firmly establish whether this was truly Michael Fromley. I dared not hope just yet.

  “Any other identifying information?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Jennings replied. “They’ll have already contacted the family for dentals, as this corpse has got a gold tooth. If that matches Fromley’s dental records, then I’ll have no trouble making a positive identification during the autopsy. But now all I’ve got is that watch. And of course, the fact that Fromley has been reported a missing person.”

  So the Wallingford family had filed an official report. My one-time meeting with Clyde Wallingford had left me skeptical as to whether they would do so. Wallingford had seemed to believe Michael Froml
ey was entirely Alistair’s responsibility.

  “Tell me how he died,” I said, returning to Fromley’s corpse—for I had begun to accept that it probably was Fromley’s body that lay exposed on the coroner’s wagon.

  “He was killed before he went in the water,” Jennings said as he put on his gloves. He motioned for me to come closer to the corpse’s head. “First, look at the eyes.” He pried open one of the dead man’s eyes and explained something I did not quite follow about lines. “Furthermore, see how his head is rotated all the way to one side?” he instructed. “You never see that position in a drowning victim. His head got that way because rigor mortis set in while he was still on land.”

  “Any sign of violence to the body?” I asked, knowing from my quick glance at the swollen, discolored remains how difficult a question I was asking. If the river had not erased signs of foul play, it may have actually created them. Underwater branches and rocks could take a toll upon whatever came near them.

  “You’re in luck there.” Jennings’s eye glinted as he looked at me slyly, proud of himself. “We think he was a gunshot victim. I’ll know more when I do the autopsy, but there were holes in his clothes consistent with a gunshot wound to the chest. Including on the coat you examined over there.” He gestured to a pile of effects that had been pulled from the river.

  My mind raced with possibilities. If this were indeed Fromley, perhaps he had committed suicide, as his mind became unhinged by the murder he had committed and the gruesome fantasies that haunted him night and day. Or had he been killed in the heat of a fight? It had been clear that his volatile temper repeatedly got him in trouble. If this proved to be Fromley . . .

  “What’s your interest in him, anyway?” Jennings asked.

  I opted for the truth, knowing I could count on Jennings to be discreet. “Actually, he’s the prime suspect in a murder I’m investigating—that of a young woman in Dobson this past Tuesday.”

  “Tuesday?” He looked at me sharply, standing up straight. “You surely don’t mean Tuesday of this week?”

  “Yes,” I replied, and wondered why he seemed so surprised.

  “Well, if this corpse is indeed Michael Fromley”—he returned to the disfigured body in the wagon and removed the blanket entirely, revealing the corpse’s full state of decomposition—“I’d say you can clear him of that suspicion.”

  The corpse was a grotesque mass of black, with little remaining semblance of humanity.

  Jennings continued to talk. “Look at the protruding eyes and tongue, the distended abdomen, and the extensive skin maceration. This bloke’s been dead, by my guess, for at least two, maybe even three weeks.”

  It was impossible.

  And yet, as I gazed at the dark, mottled, distended corpse in front of me, I knew Jennings spoke the truth.

  And if so, I realized with dizzying certainty, then everything we had learned and thought about the case up to this point was utterly, stupidly, and senselessly wrong.

  CHAPTER 20

  Dead for at least two weeks. I walked north on the riding path along the Hudson River with no particular destination in mind; I simply needed to walk. Maybe Jennings was wrong. Maybe the corpse wasn’t Fromley. Maybe it was some poor sod murdered so Fromley might fake his own death. Until Jennings’s autopsy was complete, I could believe it was possible. But the pit in my stomach told me not to pin my hopes in that direction.

  Quite literally, I had been chasing a ghost—and that must have been the real killer’s plan. As long as we tracked the long-stale movements of a dead man, the real killer remained safe. What had foiled his plan was the unpredictability of the Hudson waters, which had washed up Fromley’s corpse too soon. Only a few more months in the water, and—if it were still possible to identify the body as belonging to Michael Fromley at all—it would have been impossible to determine an accurate time of death. We would have continued to blame Fromley as the killer for lack of other evidence.

  I lost all track of time as I continued to think. I considered those whom we would now treat with renewed interest as suspects. Angus MacDonald, who had devoted his life’s work to the Riemann hypothesis, only to have a young female graduate student beat him to the solution, immediately came to mind. I wanted to believe the older man’s attestation of innocence, but now we would need to revisit the possibility he was involved. Lonny Moore, the student who had tried to sabotage Sarah Wingate’s academic success, was also a likely suspect—along with any of the other men at Columbia who had resented Sarah’s feminist agitation. One of them might have managed access to Fromley and the research center without much difficulty. I would need to discuss that with Alistair come morning.

  Whichever culprit I sought, somehow Fromley remained the key. It had to be someone with access not only to Fromley’s thoughts and murderous fantasies, but also to Fromley himself—assuming the confession letter sent in the box to Isabella proved to be Fromley’s real handwriting. So Fromley remained important: no longer as a suspect to be tracked down, but as a guide to the real killer. The murderer we sought had the ability to kill—but more important, he had the ability to frame a murder scene that had deflected all our suspicions to Fromley.

  That thought led me unavoidably back to two uncomfortable suspicions. The first involved Mamie Durant and her mysterious connection with Michael Fromley. She had known where he lived—when even Alistair and the Wallingfords had not. Why? The second involved Alistair, whose own secrets were now inextricably connected to this case. I could no longer consider Fromley without examining Alistair’s methods at the same time. What information was he still withholding from me? And how did it bear on this strange twist involving Fromley?

  I sat down on a bench and gazed blankly at the river, watching the interplay of light and dark cast by the shadows of early-evening dusk. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the locket Sarah had worn, and stared at her picture. Who had killed her? And why?

  I would find the answer only once I had uncovered the oddest triad of connections: among Sarah Wingate, Michael Fromley, and the real murderer himself.

  Sunday, November 12, 1905

  CHAPTER 21

  The autopsy results came swiftly the next morning and they were definitive. Dental records confirmed that the washed-up corpse was indeed Michael Fromley. And, by measuring the extent to which it had decomposed, Coroner Jennings was confident that Fromley had spent at least two to three weeks in the river. Together with the bullet fragment found lodged beneath the corpse’s sternum, which suggested Fromley had been shot before his body was dumped into the Hudson, this information placed us firmly back at square one. It did not matter that Fromley had died within the city’s jurisdiction, and thus, technically speaking, was not ours to investigate. His death called into question everything we thought we had discovered about the Wingate murder.

  I delivered the news confirming Fromley’s death to Alistair personally at his apartment on West Seventy-second Street and Central Park West. He lived at the Dakota, a sandstone and yellow brick building with some Gothic features. The low iron fence surrounding it, which was decorated with grotesque human and serpentine figures, made it seem particularly uninviting this dismal Saturday morning, as cold rain poured from dark clouds that all but obscured the daylight. Alistair proved equally unwelcoming; the moment I told him the news, he skulked away to his library in silence.

  Isabella—who must have heard voices in the hallway from her apartment next door—came almost instantly to Alistair’s apartment to offer me coffee and breakfast. At her request, Alistair’s housekeeper, a matronly woman named Mrs. Mellown, put on coffee, eggs, and toast. I ate as Isabella tried to raise my spirits.

  “This is a setback, of course,” she had said. “But the things you have learned in the last few days will help you, I’m sure of it.”

  “We owe Sarah Wingate nothing less. But this case was going to be tough—potentially unsolvable—from the very beginning. It was the information Alistair brought to the table that made it seem
possible. I’ve no solid leads of my own.”

  Her tone had been adamant. “Then you will keep looking. You have seen for yourself that Alistair’s experience and intellectual breadth will not solve your case. Focus upon what you know, and let your own common sense and instincts lead you.”

  Yet, what Isabella and others called my “good instincts” actually was something I considered more akin to dumb luck. It was a sudden flash of understanding when all the pieces of a puzzle came together in a pattern that made perfect sense. But with every case, I worried that my luck was about to run out. And this case was certainly no exception.

  Disheartened and frustrated, Alistair finally emerged from his library a half hour later. He looked as dejected as I felt, the heavy bags under his eyes attesting that he, too, had passed a night of sleepless anxiety and worry. We needed the strong coffee in front of us as we retraced our steps to figure out where we had gone wrong. We finished breakfast in silence, as the rain pounded its steady drumbeat against the windowpane.

  “I suppose we’ve still a case to solve,” he said, offering a weak smile. “Shall we begin?”

  “Everything I need is uptown. Should we head to the research center?” I asked, though the thought of returning outside into the pouring rain was decidedly unappealing.

  “Nonsense. It’s all right here. Come.”

  We followed Alistair into his dining room, where Mrs. Mellown had already laid a crackling fire. It was a large room, painted in tones of gold and white, and decorated with treasures accumulated during his travels to the Far East. Tapestries, gold vases, and even a pair of samurai swords were placed in different areas of the room. Two piles of folders were stacked at one end of Alistair’s eight-and-a-half-foot dining room table, for Alistair had brought home the most relevant files. As Isabella set to work organizing them in chronological order, I was reminded of all we had lost: Our efforts of the past four long days had been for nothing.