The DeadHouse

by Linda Fairstein

  "I'm taking the tram over to talk to the police. I should be back in less than two hours."

  That meant it could not be much later than midnight. The tram shut down at 2 A.M., and he was planning to return before it stopped operating.

  Shreve wasn't telling me any more details about how he had gotten me here, but I was beginning to understand it. After Sylvia and I passed out, eagerly gulping down our potions, he must have driven across town and come onto the island with his van. It would already have been dark when he let himself into the deserted southern end and deposited my body in the Strecker Lab before taking Sylvia back to New York Presbyterian Hospital.

  He would then have spent four or five hours making himself visible to the nurses and doctors in the waiting area, inquiring solicitously about his dear colleague. In the meantime, inches of snow would have completely obliterated the tire tracks that had taken me to the old morgue, and I would have been sleeping off the toxin that had felled me.

  He must have redeposited his car safely in his garage so that it would be dry and warm if the police decided to examine it, and then returned by tram to begin his encounter with me. He obviously hadn't counted on a mandatory midnight visit to the detective squad.

  "Don't worry, Ms. Cooper. I am coming back for you. You don't have to die, you know. If that were my intention, it would have happened already. As I said before, you can help me out of all this." Although Shreve had removed the gag, he left me tied in place. He had not wanted me to scream in the background while he had been on the telephone, but now there was no one to hear me.

  "I just need to calm your colleagues," he went on. "Chapman's brought in this other fellow called Wallace. They're worried that they haven't heard from you."

  "I can tell you an easy way to relax Chapman about me," I said to him softly.

  Shreve looked back at me quizzically.

  "I mean if that would get you back here faster so you'll let me go." I wasn't taking odds on the fact that he truly might release me at the end of this ordeal, but I was hoping to send a signal to my friends.

  "What would you suggest, Ms. Cooper?"

  I twisted in my seat and the old wooden slats creaked in response. "We watch Jeopardy! almost every night."

  "You watch what?"

  "It's a game show, on television. Do you know it?" Shreve had PBS written all over him and he stared at me blankly. I explained the final question to him and he laughed at me in disbelief.

  I racked my brain for ideas, trying to make this work. I reminded him that Mike had known about Petra and discussed it with Shreve when we first met him. "You, uh… you could tell him we were watching the show together while we were waiting at the hospital for word about Sylvia. You could tell him that I insisted on watching the last question."

  He was beginning to think about the idea. "There'd be no other way for you to know that about me, and about Detective Chapman, unless you and I had been together at seven-thirty tonight. You know, we were just chatting and I was telling you about these silly bets we make against each other." I was trying not to sound too much as though I was pleading with him, but everything about me was on edge. "He'll be convinced I was all right while the two of us were together."

  For God's sake let him go along with me on this one. I took the next step. "I'll make up something for you. Mike was obviously much too busy to have been watching television tonight. He was probably talking to old Orlyn Lockhart, or had left White Plains on his way back to the city when the show was on. Just make it some category he doesn't know very well."

  I furrowed my brow and pretended to come up with a question. "Like feminist stuff. Tell him-I know, tell him that the last answer was the name of the first woman doctor in America. And if you add that it stumped me, too, he'll buy right into it."

  Please do exactly what I'm telling you and please let Chapman recall that we were together last week when that very subject came up: Who was Elizabeth Blackwell? I needed Chapman to remember that and then Chapman would know that Shreve was lying through his teeth. And with any luck he would also realize that I was somewhere on Blackwells Island.

  "We'll see whether that helps things, Ms. Cooper. Then when I come back, I want you to think about how cooperative you're going to be about helping me find the diamonds that are buried on the island."

  I was stunned. Winston Shreve believed that the diamonds were really still here? And what did he think I knew about how to find them?

  "We'll talk about Lola later. Perhaps you're not even aware of the information you have," he said. I hadn't even thought about Lola Dakota since regaining consciousness. Shreve must be after something I had come across in the investigation. But what?

  "I've got a legitimate right to those diamonds, Ms. Cooper. Not like those other fortune hunters. They belonged to my grandfather."

  "Your grandfather?"

  "Yes, Ms. Cooper. There were men like Orlyn Lockhart who were, shall we say, the gatekeepers of the island at the time. And then there were the men who spent their time here on the inside. The patients in this hospital, doomed as they were. And just a hundred yards away, the prisoners in the penitentiary.

  "Freeland Jennings, Ms. Cooper. Freeland Jennings was my grandfather."

  35

  "Really, Ms. Cooper, you don't believe that all of us who grub around in the groves of academe have purely intellectual motives? Each of the scholars you've met has a selfish goal, whether it stems from the Blackwells project or his or her own special interests. Grenier stands to make a fortune from the drug companies for his research, Lavery's success would solve all his problems with the scandal, Lockhart gets on a fast track for tenure-" He interrupted himself when he mentioned that name.

  "Do you have any idea how sick it made me to hear Skip pontificate about his grandfather leading the raid on the corrupt scum of the penitentiary? My grandfather died in that raid. My family was destroyed by those events."

  "Did Professor Lockhart know that Freeland Jennings was your grandfather?"

  "He's blinded by his own greed. And I had no intention of telling him, anyway. It just would have made him and the others more intent on their own ends."

  "I'm not sure I understand the connection either," I said. In fact, I couldn't make sense of anything any longer. Dizziness had yielded to simple exhaustion, and the cold was numbing.

  "My grandmother was Ariana, Freeland Jennings's beautiful young wife. The eye-talian, as Orlyn Lockhart used to say. After my grandfather was convicted of killing Ariana, his sister took my father in. He was only seven years old. But once Granddad was murdered during the raid on the island, that sister and the rest of the Jennings family put my father in an orphanage."

  He paused. "They weren't quite sure whether Freeland was really his father, after all. So why bother to split that lovely Jennings' fortune with a possible bastard? No one protested when it was decided to send the child out West. Out of sight, out of mind. Out of the will."

  "And that's what became of your father?"

  "That was the plan. But in the end, Ariana's lover took him off their hands. You see, it was the Church orphanage that was making all the arrangements to send the boy out West-very common in those days. Brandon Shreve apparently had reason to believe that he might be the father. Either that, or he loved Ariana enough to want to keep her child." He hesitated, then said what we both were thinking. "I suppose your DNA technology would answer all this for us today. But not in those times.

  "So Brandon Shreve just gave the Church double the money the Jennings family had offered to lose every trace of the child, and both sides were happy. Shreve adopted my father and, of course, changed his name."

  "But the boy remembered, didn't he?"

  "Vividly. He talked to me about it all the time. Shreve was a good father, but my father's first seven years as a Jennings had instilled in him an interest in the Jennings birthright. Those diamonds were meant to be his, Ms. Cooper. Now they're meant to be mine.

  "So I'm going to leave you f
or just a little while. If the snow breaks off, it's not a bad view. It's the same vista my grandfather had from his room in the penitentiary-straight across the water to his home in the River House. I'll be sure to give your regards to the gendarmes."

  Shreve led himself out with the tiny flashlight and I was once again surrounded by darkness in my frigid quarters. Outside and on the ground just below the window frame, a spotlight beamed up at the brilliant architectural detail of the building's trim. If I could concentrate its aim just thirty feet lower, someone far away might be able to see the ghostly outline of a desperate woman and come to save me.

  Dreaming about rescue didn't help. I tugged at my ties and squirmed to loosen the knots around my ankles. I told myself to slow down and make the attempts one at a time. I was far too rattled and weak to take on both tasks at once.

  My efforts to work myself free were unsuccessful. I slumped against the back of the chair and closed my eyes. Think, I commanded myself. Do anything but give in to the paralyzing cold. Think. All I could think was why we should have smelled a rat in Winston Shreve.

  Just looking at his resume, Mike and I should have known the Blackwells project didn't suit his professional interests. This man had devoted his academic career to classic historical sites and digs on ancient civilizations like Petra and Lutetia. This little strip of land was too modern and too devoid of cultural importance to pique his interest.

  And wasn't it Lola Dakota who had told him about the diamonds? She knew he was Freeland Jennings's descendant, must have known. That night, so many years ago, when L brought him out to the island and made love to him while t watched the fireworks, they, too, had looked back at the fat apartment building. What had he said to Mike and me in describing that romantic scene?-"Where my father lived before I born"-not too far from the view that his grandfather had in jail cell.

  My weariness was fueled by my growing anger at myself wondered if Mike would remember the fit Shreve had thrown when we said that we'd be getting a tour of the island. How had insisted that he wanted to be the one to bring the two of us here. What better control could a killer have? I could picture his demeanor and attitude. He would have let us in the security and driven us within spitting distance of the hospital and laboratory, cautioning us against the dangers of falling granite and broken glass. For the sake of our safety. All the time, he would known that Charlotte Voight's body was under our noses.

  It was probably Winston Shreve who had called Paolo Recantati's wife and pretended to be Professor Grenier. Shreve smart enough to know that Recantati was thoroughly insecure about the growing scandal at the college. He could have easily prodded into retrieving an envelope from Dakota's office especially if such a harmless action could make all the trouble fade away. And Mrs. Recantati hadn't met any of them, she wouldn't have known the difference between Shreve's voice and Grenier's.

  For the first hour after regaining consciousness I had wanted to believe Winston Shreve. I wanted to believe that I would be and could trust him. He hadn't killed Charlotte Voight. But cruder fate could he have masterminded than to leave her be this desolate place?

  And what about Lola Dakota? Why had Lola Dakota Her death, unlike Charlotte's, was not an accident.

  And then I remembered what Claude Lavery had told us. He had tried to convince us that he had not seen Lola since almost a month before her death. From Bart, we knew otherwise. But Claude was firm in his recollection that the last thing Lola had told him was that she knew where Charlotte Voight was, and that she was going to see the girl.

  That statement had raised in Mike and me the false hope that Charlotte was still alive. Now my brain fought the sedatives that had slowed its normal processing and focused on the logical sequence of events.

  If Bart had been right, then Lavery and Lola had encountered each other on their way into the building. Lavery was already facing a jail sentence from the feds. He didn't need to become a scapegoat in the murder investigation, the last person to see Lola Dakota alive.

  But suppose she trusted him enough to tell him what she had finally figured out? That she knew where the Voight girl was, and she was going to see her, to find her. Like me, Lavery had assumed that meant that Charlotte was alive. Lola knew better. Did she confront Shreve with that fact, between the time she got to her apartment and the time she tried to leave, less than one hour later? Did she threaten to go out to the island to prove her theory? And was it Shreve who prevented her from doing that?

  Now I was squirming again. Feet first, exerting every remaining ounce of my energy against the restraints. I couldn't tell if they truly felt looser or whether I just wanted to believe that they did.

  I stopped to rest. Wind rushed in the oversize hole that had once been a window. It found every crevice around me, blowing in the sides of my parka's hood to sting my ears and whooshing up my sleeves to test the strength of my thermal underwear.

  Homeless people survived this every winter night, I told myself. Older men and women, infirm and insane, were at this very moment hunkered down in cardboard boxes and storefront doorways all over the city streets and sidewalks. You can make it, little voices whispered to me. People know you're missing and they're looking for you. How many empty morgue trays were there on either side of Charlotte? What did I have to do so that I didn't wind up in one of them, waiting for the spring thaw?

  I heard the footsteps packing down the thick snow before I saw the narrow sliver of light. Winston Shreve was back, carrying with him a six-foot-long piece of thick rope.

  36

  Shreve talked to me but I could not take my eyes off the rope. He crouched in front of me to remove my bindings, and they seemed like doll's clothes compared with the powerful weapon he had just dropped onto the fraying, stained mattress pad.

  "That's only if things go terribly wrong, Ms. Cooper. Don't let it scare you."

  I see. So far, things are right on schedule. Going really well. What had I unleashed when I'd stormed out of Jake's apartment on Sunday night? I shut my eyes tight and willed myself back on his living room sofa, thinking about how good it would feel to have him caress me and make love to me. What could go more terribly wrong than the events of the past twenty-four hours?

  I played with my wrists and ankles, trying to limber the feet tingled from the deadening effect of pins and needles hours of restricted circulation.

  Shreve had a plastic bag from some twenty-four-hour deli he must have passed on his way back to the Second Avenue tram. He unwrapped sandwich halves from their aluminum foil and took the lids off two large Styrofoam cups of coffee.

  "Here, perfectly safe." He took several sips from the container to show me that it had not been doctored. I drank the lukewarm liquid and it heated a few of the cold-restricted inches throat as I downed it. Maybe I didn't care if it was drugged. Sleep might be better than whatever I was facing in this urban finished the entire container in three minutes. Something-the caffeine or Shreve's return-had jolted me to full attention.

  He passed the foil to me but I refused the sandwich. My hunger had been intense for hours, yet now I was gripped again by and unable to look at solid food.

  "What do you know about my grandfather's miniature of the island, Ms. Cooper?"

  I didn't speak.

  "You'll feel better if you put something in your something in your stomach. You're going to fight me, aren't you?" He helped himself to some turkey while I watched in silence. "Trying to drag this out until daylight?"

  I knew that Mike and Mercer would never have let Shreve walk out of the station house without putting a tail on him, especially once he came up with the phony line about the Jeopardy! question. If I could stall for a bit, I was certain that the homicide squad would find me.

  "What did Detective Chapman say?"

  "I'm sorry. I should have started with that. Mr. Chapman was nowhere to be seen tonight."

  My right hand flew to my face to cover my mouth and I gnawed on the damp glove leather to mask my emotion. It wasn’t possible
that Mike hadn't been there to intercept the one clue I thought might lead him to me.

  "Something about following a lead on another part of the investigation in New Jersey. A different fellow took all the information. An African-American gentleman, Mr. Wallace. He's getting married tomorrow, on New Year's Day. Everyone was quite cheerful there, actually. Bottles of whiskey out, toasting him and his bride. A bit distracted from the business of finding you, I would say.

  "Wallace seemed to know about this television game, too. Said that sounded just like you. Always watching the final question."

  Dammit. He was right. The information would have been reassuring to Mercer. The idea that I would have watched the quiz show in the hospital waiting room would have made perfect sense to him, and he had not been with Mike and me when the question about Elizabeth Blackwell had been aired last week. It would not set off any alarms in his mind. Would he even think to tell Mike about it when they next spoke?

  "I believe Mr. Wallace understood my concern about your walking out of the emergency room at nine o'clock or so to find a taxicab by yourself. He said that neighborhood is plagued with drug dealers and youth gangs. I hope they double their efforts there to look for you. Seems they found an elderly woman in an alley just a few hours ago, beaten to a pulp by some young hoodlums, just to rob her of seven dollars and a crucifix on a gold chain. Brought her to the same emergency room where you and I waited for Sylvia."

  Shreve paused. "And then another detective reminded Mr. Wallace that some woman had been harassing you as well. Some lady with a gun." He shook his head in mock dismay, and I thought how easily the detectives could be off on a red herring now, combing the East Seventies for my unhappy stalker.

  I sank deeper into my frosted terror. What if Mike wasn't worried about me at all? What if he and Valerie were home together, enjoying each other's company like a normal couple? Maybe he'd gotten fed up with my repeated rituals of independence, believing that I'd walked out of Sylvia Foote's hospital scene just as I'd run away from Jake's conversation with an informant and run again from Mike's scene of domestic intimacy. Maybe I deserved to be marooned in an abandoned ruin with a killer.