Forgotten City

by Carrie Smith

  Maybelle told Brandon, “You just say a nice prayer for her. She gonna be fine where she gone to.”

  “What you crying about it?” Josie called out from the other side of the dining room where she was taking a sponge to a sticky spot someone must have missed during last night’s dinner cleanup. Josie had only worked at Park Manor for two weeks, but she had taken an immediate dislike to Brandon and attacked him whenever she could. “Why you care?” she demanded. “They just a bunch of rich folk. It’s not like they your family.”

  Brandon did not agree. How could you not become attached to someone you fed, changed, bathed, and rubbed with body lotion every night? In the past few months, Lucy had rarely uttered more than two or three words at a time, yet he had always known when she was hungry, thirsty, or upset. He had made her laugh. He could coax her to eat, play catch with an inflated beach ball, and swallow her medicine. And he had meant something to her, too. Why else had her face lit up whenever she saw him? She exuded no judgment, only gratitude for what he did for her.

  Josie moved closer, shaking her head in disgust. “You call yourself a man, crying like that?”

  Brandon let the comment go unanswered, but Maybelle snapped, “You stop that right now, Josie. When my mama pass, my brother cry like a baby in my arms—and he were a big six-foot-four-inch man. You let Brandon alone. Let him be. He got a right to espress his feeling.”

  “Well, he espress them like a girl.” Josie returned to her work with a new hostile vigor.

  Maybelle sat down and leaned in confidentially. “Don’t you pay her no mind, Brandon. Josie from Jamaica, and the Jamaicans is different from the Bajans. We don’t hate on nobody just because they different.”

  The irony of Maybelle’s remark was not lost on Brandon. Everybody had his or her own brand of prejudice. At least Maybelle’s wasn’t directed at him. In fact, she had defended him in front of more than one caregiver who objected to working with “someone like him.” Brandon knew he had done nothing overt to provoke Josie’s outsized anger. Either he deeply offended her fixed and narrow definition of normal, he had concluded, or she felt personally insulted by his decision to abandon her gender for another.

  “Thanks, Maybelle.” He forced himself up and into the kitchen. He might as well stay busy, he thought, until Ms. Hodges debriefed them.

  CHAPTER 4

  Codella flashed her shield at the guards just inside the New York Presbyterian revolving doors. She opened her leather jacket to reveal the Glock in its holster, and the guards made way for her to step around the metal detector. It occurred to her that they probably thought she was here on a case. She wished she were here on a case.

  She passed the waiting area, admissions office, and information desk. She glanced into a small glassed-in cafeteria where nurses, orderlies, and doctors stood like zombies in front of the caffeine options. She would have liked to stop and sip a green tea. Instead, she rode the elevator to the fifth floor and pushed open the door to the nuclear medicine department. She knew this drill all too well: check in at the desk, take a seat, and wait for the pitcher.

  She chose the same couch she had occupied in October. Her scan then had been clean, and she was not immune to the superstitious belief that repeating her steps of that day might bring another good result. She looked out on the always-congested York Avenue and the East River just beyond. During her treatments, she had occupied rooms with views of the river and had watched for hours as cigarette boats, barges, tugs, and Circle Line tours plied the river’s heavy currents. She had followed the movements of pedestrians on the footpath on Roosevelt Island. She had even found herself thinking, I wish I could be taking a walk on that island right now, although in precancer days and now, she dismissed that island as a depressing concrete outpost cut off from the lifeblood of Manhattan.

  She checked her e-mails and opened a text from Haggerty. Thanks for last night. She still couldn’t quite believe last night had actually happened, and she didn’t want to think about what it meant to her or what Haggerty would think it meant. Not now. She looked out the window and searched her mind for something else to focus on.

  She would have liked to distract herself in the tangled threads of a complex investigation, but she hadn’t had a challenging case for three very long months. Dennis McGowan, her lieutenant, was making sure of that. When she had accepted the promotion to Manhattan North Homicide—just months before her cancer diagnosis—she’d felt like the teenager who finally graduated to the grown-ups’ table. But the grown-ups weren’t all that grown up, she had discovered, and they weren’t enthusiastic about sharing their table with the detective who had solved a case they’d let go cold.

  Four years ago, Elaine DeFarge, a nurse at Columbia Presbyterian, never made it home to her apartment in Fort Greene after her shift. Waste disposal workers found her body two days later, covered by rotting mangoes and bananas in a dumpster behind the uptown Fairway Market. The initial call came into the 171st, and Detective Marty Blackstone caught it. But Captain Reilly knew his detective squad didn’t have the manpower to handle the case alone, so it was shifted up to Manhattan North, and Dan Fisk led a task force that worked the murder for six months without finding DeFarge’s killer.

  The files gathered dust for another year, and then Codella asked Reilly if she could study the file. She spent her evenings reading the reports. Manhattan North detectives had investigated family, friends, and hospital staff meticulously. They had considered and ultimately ruled out any connection to the unsolved murders of three other New York City hospital workers killed in the prior five years. Codella didn’t retrace their steps. Instead, she zeroed in on a detail the detectives hadn’t been able to explain and that they had ultimately dismissed as insignificant to the investigation—a three-inch-long lock of Elaine DeFarge’s hair that was missing at the back of her head. Had she cut it off herself, or had someone else snipped a souvenir and left a signature the detectives hadn’t been able to read?

  Codella called up cold case murders from every database she could access. She ran keyword searches and looked for any link to the hair. She knew she was searching for a needle in a haystack, but if the needle were there, she was determined to find it. And then one night she had a breakthrough. Six years earlier, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department had found the body of a woman whose hair appeared to have been snipped in the back—the forensic team had found strands of her cut hair next to the body. The victim was a rental manager at an apartment complex two blocks away from St. Vincent Hospital. The only link to DeFarge Codella could think of was the hospital, so she requested St. Vincent’s employee records from that time period and cross-checked them with the staff working at Columbia Presbyterian when DeFarge had disappeared. A name came up—one name—Wainright Blake, a contract nurse in the postanesthesia care units of both hospitals.

  When Codella discovered the connection, Blake had already moved on and was working at White Plains Hospital in Westchester County, twenty-five miles north of Manhattan. When she and county police showed up at his apartment with a warrant, she found a cigar box under his bed with six locks of hair—a souvenir from each of his victims. DNA from those locks helped police in five states put cold cases to rest. New York magazine dubbed her “a genius of deductive reasoning.” The Washington Post featured her in a story on analytical detective work and the need for more integrated crime databases. The LA Times ran a three-part exposé focusing on all the uncorroborated conclusions that had led the original Manhattan North detectives to their dead end. And one night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow asked her how it felt to bring closure to six families’ grief. The NYPD brass really had no choice but to hand her the promotion Captain Reilly recommended.

  So she had joined the “big leagues”—for a little while, at least, until cancer took her on a ten-month detour. And then she’d made her comeback solving the murder of Hector Sanchez. When McGowan had thrown her the body of that dead school principal, he hadn’t counted on the case giving her the equi
valent of a Broadway stage on which to make her comeback from cancer oblivion. He had assumed he was throwing her the smelly, days’ old corpse of some unlucky New Yorker who had choked to death on his Seamless order or collapsed from cardiac arrest all alone in his West Side apartment. A detective had to go to the scene, and nobody wanted that job, so he had given it to her. But Sanchez had been anything but a natural death, and the case made not only the tabloids but also the front page of the New York Times. Three months later, op-ed writers were still debating whether Hector Sanchez was a flawed hero or a tyrant. And magazines like People and Vanity Fair had staked their claim on the story because it involved the box office star Dana Drew. McGowan’s attempt to cast Codella as an insignificant extra in his homicide squad had been royally fucked, and now he was doing his utmost to make sure she never got on any stage again.

  The pitcher of contrast arrived. The technician who delivered it was the same one who had prepped her for her October scan, and she decided this was another hopeful sign. “Your cocktail, Madam,” he said as he lowered the plastic vessel to the coffee table with a flourish and handed her a paper cup.

  “Did you spike it for me?”

  “Don’t think you’re the first one to ask me that.” He winked.

  She poured some of the unpleasant liquid and held it up to him. “Here’s to boring results.”

  Then he was gone, and she was left with her anxiety and the liter of liquid to drink. What if lymphoma cells lit up the scan this time? What if she had to go back to round one and begin the fight all over?

  “Take off your jewelry,” a nurse instructed her forty-five minutes later as they walked to the locker area. “Earrings, necklaces, rings. No metal.”

  Codella just nodded. Only the uninitiated came to scans naively adorned. She peeled out of her clothes, put on the blue hospital gown, and tucked her service revolver and backup gun below her other belongings in the tiny locker. Then she followed the nurse to a small room with three desks, the kind in high school classrooms. She slipped into a seat, propped her arm on the narrow desktop, and watched the focused, efficient nurse tie a tourniquet around her left bicep. While her veins expanded under the pressure, the nurse lifted the lid on a lead-lined box, removed the syringe within, and flicked it several times as she held it toward the light. Then she untied the elastic and pressed needle into flesh. Codella felt the electric prick. She watched the plunger push the radioactive tracer into her vein. She visualized the ionized particles heating her whole arm and spreading through her circulatory system, marking the scenes of any crime her B cells had committed in the last four months.

  The nurse led her to a tiny room where she lay on her back while the tracer circulated. Thirty minutes later, she entered the chilly, windowless room that housed the state-of-the-art scanner. She knew this drill, too. Swing your legs up. Lie back. Hands over your head. Do not move. The technician pushed a button and the slab she was on retracted slowly. At this juncture in the familiar routine, she always had the impulse to pray. Instead, as usual, she closed her eyes and whispered, “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  CHAPTER 5

  Constance Hodges glanced up as Heather Granahan tiptoed into her office and set a clear glass mug on the desk. The first time Heather had made one of these unsolicited coffee deliveries, Hodges had assured her the task was not part of her job description, but the young administrative assistant had continued—apparently perceptive and ambitious enough to know that Hodges appreciated small acts of subservience—and this morning Hodges was more grateful than usual. She watched her assistant make a discreet exit, and then she took a sip. The taste was disappointing. She closed her eyes and wished for a little more of the steadying Courvoisier.

  She stared at Thomas Merchant’s cell number on her laptop screen. She did not look forward to calling him. Tolling the bell for Park Manor’s fallen was not a vocation she had ever envisioned for herself, and she felt a sudden and unexpected longing for the Central Park West office where she had once counseled fifteen or more patients a week. Several large ad firms and financial companies sent her their executives who needed to do “penance” for sexual harassment, anger issues, or alcohol problems. They’d show up for eight or ten sessions to get “rehabilitated.” And there were the self-involved artists and academics, the anxiety-ridden graduate students from Columbia University, and of course the clients questioning their sexual identities. These confused souls always stayed with her the longest. But it had been exhausting and mind-numbing to absorb everyone else’s problems day in and day out. The practice of psychotherapy had never satisfied her as much as the study of human psychology. Her patients’ predictable issues had never truly held her interest. Although she had been a skillful psychotherapist, she was not a woman who enjoyed the passive role of engaged and insightful listener. And even affluent clients had not paid her nearly as well as Park Manor did.

  Hodges lifted the phone and dialed. Thomas Merchant picked up on the fourth ring. His “hello” sounded as groggy as hers had an hour ago, and she imagined him in his Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment lying in one of those luxurious handmade Savoir Beds. Was there a woman next to him listening to their call? She seriously doubted that Thomas had spent many solitary nights since his wife had moved into Park Manor—not that any of his overnight guests would last. She knew Thomas better than he knew himself, she thought. She knew exactly how to read people. Even in the superficial interviews she held with family members of prospective residents, she could distinguish between those who came to Park Manor because they wanted the best for a loved one and those who chose the venerable institution as a glorified Manhattan Mini Storage in which to stash an unwanted burden, freeing them from years of caregiving or freeing up a Park Avenue townhouse. A year and a half ago, when Thomas Merchant had entered her office wearing his bespoke suit and subtle, expensive cologne, she had known exactly what he wanted from her.

  She cleared her throat and spoke in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. “Thomas, it’s Constance. I’m sorry for the early call, but I’m afraid Lucy passed away early this morning.” She had delivered end of life news to spouses and children of residents so many times that she knew getting directly to the point was the best way. Drawn-out condolences coming from her would only sound scripted and insincere, so she limited herself to “I’m sorry to have to give you this news over the phone.”

  “How? What happened, Constance?”

  “She died in her sleep. Dr. Fisher is here now. I’ll be able to tell you more when he’s done examining her, but I wanted to call you right away.”

  In the silence, Merchant expelled a spontaneous sigh of what sounded to Hodges like unadulterated relief.

  “Will you be coming over this morning?” she asked, carefully withholding expectation or judgment from her voice.

  “I’m in DC. I have to meet with a Senate subcommittee in about an hour. I’ll fly back after that. I should be able to get there by four PM.”

  “And Julia?”

  “I’ll call her right now.”

  “Okay,” said Hodges. “We’ll be ready for you.” She ended the call, sat back, and took another sip of the unsatisfying coffee.

  CHAPTER 6

  The first floor of Park Manor was light-years from Nostalgia, Brandon thought as he, Maybelle Holder, and Josie Burns stepped off the elevator. On this floor, combination locks did not confine wandering sundowners. No one wore adult diapers, or at least they pretended that they didn’t. These residents arranged daily outings through a concierge. They gathered for drinks at the Madison Bar off the main lobby and ordered spa cuisine at the Zagat-reviewed Manor Bistro. They were perpetually happy tourists at a five-star hotel.

  Hodges was sitting behind her desk when the three caregivers entered. Maybelle and Josie claimed the two straight-backed chairs opposite Hodges, and Brandon stood just behind them. Hodges got right to the point. “The three of you were on duty when Mrs. Merchant passed away.”

  Brandon and Josie nodded.

  “T
hat’s right.” Maybelle’s big voice resounded through the room. “She weren’t breathing when I go in there. I always listen for the breathing.”

  “Can you tell me about Mrs. Merchant’s evening?”

  Maybelle turned to Josie. Then she twisted to make eye contact with Brandon. “It were like any evening,” she said, assuming the role of spokesperson.

  Josie nodded her agreement.

  “How did she seem to you?”

  “She seem just fine.” Maybelle shrugged.

  “Did she eat her dinner?”

  Brandon spoke up. “Her daughter was there. She fed her for a while. Then I took over.”

  “At what time exactly?” Hodges’s fingers tapped the keys on her laptop.

  “Six thirty.”

  “She was there when Mrs. Lautner had her fall?”

  “Yes.”

  Hodges frowned, and Brandon could guess what she was thinking: Why had Mrs. Lautner had to fall at mealtime while families were visiting? All Ms. Hodges cared about was appearances.

  “What did she eat?” Hodges asked.

  “Roast chicken. Mashed potatoes. Green beans. She had a good appetite.”

  “And her mood?”

  “Happy. Alert.”

  “Especially when the daughter leave and you feed her the ice cream.” Josie dropped this bomb with a heavy dose of sarcasm.

  Maybelle shot Josie a look.

  “Well, she did. You know she did.”

  “He,” said Maybelle. “It’s he, and you know that.”

  Brandon glanced down at Josie’s purple-streaked hair. He found himself wanting to pluck every strand out of her scalp one by one so that she would be left with pinhole-sized blood spots where the follicles were. He felt a testosterone-fueled call to violence in every flexed muscle and tendon in his body. But he didn’t so much as blink.