Of course Charlotte Voight would have liked it here. She w an outcast herself, isolated from whatever home and family she had come to New York to escape, and alienated from many of t kids her age at the college. This, the centuries-old island of outcasts, had worked its spell on her, too.
"During last winter, there were many nights Charlotte had come to my apartment. It's easy to be disapproving, but I was a hell of a lot safer company than the hoodlums who were trying to keep her doped up all the time. But then, one night last April, she wanted to come here, to the island.
"It was a beautiful spring evening. She thought it would be romantic to make love out in the open, looking back at the city."
"That sounds more like your idea." It sounded exactly like what Shreve had told Mike and me he had done when Lola Dakota first introduced him to Roosevelt Island. "A romantic evening on a blanket in front of the ruins, watching the tall ships and the fireworks, drinking wine, looking back over at River House, where your father grew up."
Why could I remember last week's interviews so well and have no idea about what had hit me today?
"It hardly matters whose idea it was at this point, does it? The unfortunate part is that I couldn't get Charlotte to give up the drugs, no matter how hard I tried. She'd been using them back home in South America since she was thirteen, experimenting with anything that anyone offered to her. So on her way to meet me, she stopped to score some pills. But I didn't know it at the time, you've got to understand that."
"We spoke with her friends. She never got to Julian's. Is that what you mean, pills from what they called the 'lab'?"
Shreve sat in the window frame to answer me. "When Charlotte said she was going to the lab, this is what she meant."
How stupid of me. Strecker Memorial Laboratory. The pathology lab.
"Ghoulish, you'll say. But that was Charlotte's humor. She wanted to get high and wander around the lab and the old hospital. See what ghosts she could conjure. These things didn't scare or repulse her as they do most young people. She thought it was almost mystical, like a connection to another generation, another period of time."
"And that night?"
"We drove over here together. I've got a master key, of course to get inside the gates. I'd brought a couple of bottles of wine Charlotte got to explore all the hideaways she'd wanted to see and we lay on the blanket for hours, looking at the constellation and talking about her life. But she became agitated, the more she drank. Got up and started climbing around the old buildings, was afraid she was going to fall and hurt herself. I tried to slow her down, but she was euphoric, acting like she was hallucinating
"That's when I realized she must have been taking pills, in addition to the alcohol."
"Did you ask her what?"
"Of course I did. She was behaving so irrationally that it was obviously something that had reacted badly with the alcohol, Ecstasy, she told me. Lots of Ecstasy."
Lessen her inhibitions. Enhance her sexual experience. Create a false euphoria. Turn an evening at the lab with Winston Shreve into a psychedelic delight.
I asked my question softly. "What happened to her?"
"A seizure of some sort. First she had a panic attack. I tried to grab her and convince her to get in the car so I could take her to doctor. But she screamed at me and ran farther away. I chase after her, but she was breathless and agitated. I wasn't aware, at first, that it was some kind of overdose, but that must have been what happened. She was flailing wildly, twitching and shaking uncontrollably. And then she just collapsed in my arms."
"Didn't you try to get her to a hospital?"
"Charlotte was dead. What good would that have done? She had a massive paroxysm."
I'd seen cases like that related to my work. Kids who overdose with what they considered a harmless drug at nightclubs and rave parties. Dead before the ambulance arrived. "I know that can happen, Mr. Shreve. Why didn't you call the police? Get help?"
"At the time, I didn't understand why she died. Now I've read about the drugs and realize they can be deadly, but I had no idea of that the night Charlotte OD'ed. I, I guess I just panicked. I saw my entire career wiped out. I sat on the far side of that wall," he said, and pointed to the entryway, "holding Charlotte's body in my arms, and I knew that everything I had worked for in my professional life had been destroyed."
"So you just left her here?" I looked around at the decaying rubble of the young girl's tomb.
Shreve was unhappy to be challenged. "I never planned to do that. I needed the night to think. I needed to figure out how I could walk into a medical center on a spring morning with this beautiful child in my arms and tell them that a terrible accident had occurred. I needed to find a way to explain her death to Sylvia Foote and the people at the college who believed in me."
All he was concerned with was his own predicament.
"This was, after all, a morgue," he went on. "I put my blanket around Charlotte, and I carried her inside here and put her down for the night." I filled in the blanks: on a rust-covered metal morgue tray in a rat-infested skeleton of a building, for the next eight months.
"And you never came back?"
"I thought I'd have a plan by the next morning, that I'd drive back over and-. And I couldn't do it, I couldn't bring myself to come back over here to see her. I knew that occasionally there would be workmen in this area, and I expected one of them to find the body long before now.
"In fact, I wanted them to find the body. But this part of the island spooks everyone. I never expected it would be this long before she could be taken out of here. If they autopsied Charlotte, everyone would know she wasn't murdered. Don't you think they can still tell that, I mean about the toxicology and how she died? There have been other cases like this in the city, haven't there?"
"Other deaths like that, yes." Other bodies left to rot by a brilliant self-centered anthropology professor? I doubt it.
"This building is actually designated to be converted into equipment station for the new subway line. It will be renovated soon. Then they can give Charlotte a proper burial."
Had he lost his mind completely, that he could walk away from here and leave the girl behind another time?
I was certain, now, that I had left the administration building in the company of Sylvia Foote when this afternoon's meeting broke up. I forced myself to look in the direction of Charlotte body, to see whether any of the other trays were occupied, snow fell steadily and the shadows made it impossible for me to see.
"Sylvia Foote? Is she here, too, Mr. Shreve?" I thought of all my battles with her over the years and all the times I had wished her misery. "Is she dead?"
He pushed himself up from his windowsill seat and brushed his hands together to clean off his gloves. "Not at all, Alex. Sylvia's my alibi for this evening. I've spent hours with her a hospital, since late this afternoon. Took her there myself, into the emergency room. Stayed with her while they exam her and pumped her stomach. I was at Sylvia's side the whole time. Treated her with kid gloves until she was out of the woods and the resident cleared her to be admitted for the night, just to be safe.
"Some dreadful attack of food poisoning. Must have been something she drank."
34
"We're going to take a short walk," Shreve said, working to undo the knot on the piece of fabric that bound my ankles. "Perhaps it will calm you to get you away from Charlotte."
He placed his hand around my elbow and hoisted me onto my feet. The blanket slipped to the ground and he bent to lift it, then replaced the hood of my parka over my matted hair. I tried to steady myself without touching him for support, but my legs were numb from the combination of the cold and the hours of immobility.
Shreve guided my tentative steps past the cabinet of morgue trays and the frozen body of the young student toward the entrance arch and out of the ruined building.
A hundred yards away, to the south, stood the massive remains of the Smallpox Hospital. He led me that way on the slick footpaths, bot
h of us bowing our heads against the ferocious gusts of wind that kicked up off the East River. When I lifted my eyes from time to time to check our course, I could see the crenellated parapets of the eerie giant looming before us.
I chided myself for the scores of times I had looked across from the FDR Drive at the elegant outline of this Gothic masterpiece and imagined it as a place of romance and intrigue. Now this hellhole where thousands of souls had perished before me might become my snowy tomb. What had Mike said to me on our drive to work? The luckiest girl he knew? The thought was almost enough to make me smile.
Wooden posts, like elongated stilts, supported the rear walls of the ancient granite structure. Shreve stepped around them, leaving our footsteps to be covered again by falling snow. When hi stepped inside a doorway, he withdrew from his pocket a small flashlight and turned it on to ease his way through the littered flooring of the abandoned rooms. The light from the tiny plastic instrument was too dim and too concentrated to be seen across the river. Besides, I knew it would be masked completely by the floodlights that were focused on the great facade of the hospital from the ground outside, the ones that had made it possible for me to admire Renwick's skeleton as I drove home most nights.
As with the Strecker Laboratory, there was no roof left covering this building. Although abandoned for the better part of century, its crumbling interior was clearly familiar to Shreve. Without hesitation, he led me through a maze of half-walled spaces that had once been patients' rooms.
Nan Rothschild had not exaggerated her description of how abruptly the city had abandoned these haunted properties. Old bedsteads were still in place, pairs of primitive crutches were scattered on the splintered floorboards, and glass-fronted cabinets with broken windowpanes held empty bottles on their dilapidated shelves. We had crossed through what I assumed had once been the formal central hall of the hospital and continued on to a room in the very corner of the building. For the first time in hours, the precipitation seemed to have stopped. I looked up and saw, instead, that someone had fashioned a makeshift ceiling out of a thin layer of plywood.
Shreve moved forward and my eyes followed the track made by his light. Here was an alcove that had been transformed into a sort of shelter in this outpost of exposed ruins. On the floor in the corner was a slim mattress from one of the old hospital beds. Not even two inches thick, the mattress had faded ticking that barely showed from decades of wear and exposure. A small table sat beneath the long stretch of open space that had once been a window, and assorted pieces of rubble had been carried in to prop up the boards overhead.
"Sit there," Shreve said, pointing to a wooden seat with a high back that had once been a wheelchair. He eased me onto the slats, which tilted backward and tottered as he knelt to retie my ankles. He stood behind me and reached around to place the handkerchief in my mouth again, tying it in back.
He walked out through the threshold of this small chamber and disappeared into the blackness of the adjacent rooms. What was he up to now? I wondered. Chills raced through my joints, my head still pounded, and my empty stomach ached and growled at me in the quiet of the very late night.
I stiffened my neck, shook off an array of grim thoughts, and pulled myself upright. Glancing out between the stone blocks, mitred at the top to form a pointed window frame, I could see from this direction the glitter of Manhattan's skyline muted by the endless flakes of falling snow. Straining my eyes, I could make out the spire of River House directly across the water from my corner seat.
Shreve must have made a call from his cell phone and left me alone so I would not overhear his conversation. But his voice echoed from within the thick gray walls of the neighboring area and I heard him ask for Detective Wallace. Why would hi anything about Mercer?
"Mr. Wallace? Winston Shreve here. Professor Shreve." Something about having just returned to his apartment and finding a message on his answering machine from Wallace. I had no idea what time it was now, whether it was still late Monday eve the early hours of Tuesday morning, the very last day of the year.
Of course, if I had been missing for any period of time, even Mercer would have been brought in from home in the effort to find me.
Shreve, in his most professorial manner, was telling him didn't mind repeating something he had told Detective Chapman earlier in the evening. "The two ladies got into my car in front of the school and I headed onto the West Side Highway to go up to Westchester. Sylvia was complaining of nausea and dizziness. We thought perhaps it was something she had eaten for lunch was making her sick. We'd just gone over that bridge into Riverdale when she sort of fainted, I guess you'd say."
Wallace must have asked a couple of questions and Shreve mumbled more answers that were inaudible to me. Flashbacks were coming to me now, just as drugged victims described emerged from the haze. I remembered being in the minivan and drinking the cocoa that the professor had bought for us.
"No, no. It was Ms. Cooper's idea. She suggested I get turn around. We drove immediately back to New York Presbyterian Hospital. Ms. Cooper knew where the emergency room was. Said she'd been there many times to see victims. I didn't waste time looking for a place to park, so she waited in and I carried Sylvia inside.
"Then when the doctor made the decision to admit her, I went back out to tell Ms. Cooper that I wasn't going to leave the hospital until I knew that Ms. Foote would be all right."
Wallace had questions. I rooted for him to break this goddamn alibi.
"Yes, Detective, Alex insisted on coming inside and waiting with me. I called the Lockhart house and told Skip's mother that we'd encountered a problem and wouldn't be able to keep the meeting after all. Alex came into the waiting room and-"
Shreve must have turned around and faced the other direction. It was more difficult to hear him but it sounded as though he was explaining how I'd passed the time while Sylvia was being treated by the medical team.
Whatever Shreve had drugged us with, I had no memory of the hours after the session in Sylvia's office broke up. It must have had amnesiac qualities. Is it possible that I actually had been inside the emergency room waiting area at New York Presbyterian? And if not, what a clever ruse. That place was a perpetual zoo. An endless procession of gunshot wounds, stabbings, car accidents, drug overdoses, women in labor, and miscellaneous misery of every sort. Most admissions were accompanied by strings of relatives and friends-whining, wheedling, bawling, and generally filling every inch of the enormous holding tank in which they waited for news of a loved one's condition.
The wind carried Shreve's words back to me. He must have shifted position again.
"For hours, Detective. She was there for hours. Watching television a bit, like everyone else. Making some phone calls."
Wallace was trying to figure out when I had left the hospital.
"Must have been close to nine o'clock. Yes, yes, of course. It was after they told us that Sylvia was awake and responding, but that they were going to keep her overnight for observation. I didn't want to leave without seeing her myself, but Ms. Cooper seemed impatient at that point. Told me she'd just grab a cab out on Broadway and get herself downtown."
Shreve hesitated before he threw in the next suggestion. "Seemed to be in a bad mood, Mr. Wallace. Something about a row with her boyfriend. Her beeper had been going off repeatedly and she paid it no attention. Rather willful, I'd say."
No one would argue with him on that point.
Shreve hadn't missed a detail. How stupid of me to have announced aloud to Mike that I had an unhappy boyfriend when my beeper had gone off at the beginning of the meeting in Sylvia's office.
"You mean come into the station house? Right now? But I've just told you everything that I know about-"
Break his balls, Mercer. Shreve'll never make it through a fact to-face encounter with you.
"Certainly, Mr. Wallace. No, no, thanks, I don't need a ride.'
Shreve's footsteps crunched again on the packed snow as r walked closer to my little sanctuary and
bent his head to come in under the plywood covering. He ungagged me and stood in front of me to explain that he was going to leave for a short while.
"What did you give me to knock me out? What did you do to Sylvia?"
"You needn't worry. Nothing with long-term effects. Just sedative to make sure I could get you here and get her out of the way."
"A lot of a sedative. I can't remember anything."
Shreve smiled. "Gamma-hydroxybutyrate."
"GHB?" I knew it better than most. A colorless, odorless, tasteless designer drug, and I had quickly ingested it in my hot choc late in a matter of minutes. Most ironic of all is that it was making the rounds as a date-rape drug, being slipped into drinks of unsuspecting women to render them unconscious for several hours.
"Amazing what you can buy on the Internet. I didn't know anything about these drugs until Charlotte died, but it's all there on the Web."
He wasn't exaggerating. Earlier in the year, a joint task force city detectives and DEA agents had run a sting in which they bought two gallons of GHB from a Web site called www.DreamOn.com for several thousand dollars. It was simple to do.
"But surely the doctors will find traces of it when they Sylvia." I didn't believe that he had really taken her to the hospital and was trying to challenge him to admit that.
"You should know better than that, Ms. Cooper. The ER admission is for a seventy-year-old woman who became ill after lunch while sitting in a car with a college professor and a prominent prosecutor. Why in the world would anyone suspect something like a date-rape drug to be the cause? They just pumped her stomach and were thankful when she came round. Keep her in overnight and she'll be released in the morning."
Shreve was right once again. Unlike cocaine and heroin, which leave trace material in the bloodstream for days, GHB doesn't even show up in blood. And it's evacuated from the urine within twenty-four hours of ingestion. No one would even think to look for it in Sylvia's case, and they would be likely to credit this brief physical disturbance in an elderly woman to a bad reaction to something in her last meal.
The DeadHouse Page 34