Hell Gate

by Linda A. Fairstein

  Adolfo, the head captain, placed a steaming hot bowl of stracciatella in front of me, serving Mercer the same hearty pasta that Mike had eaten.

  “I’ve made the mistake of thinking that way before.” Just months earlier, I had delayed my follow-up on a woman who had been reluctant to report a rape. Her decision to pull away from the police investigation was a deadly one. “I called Battaglia and Commissioner Scully on the way back here. We’ve got the same dilemma. No missing persons report for forty-eight hours.”

  Most police departments had a firm policy on adults who disappeared without evidence of foul play. They were presumed to have removed themselves from their homes or businesses, and no professional wild goose chases would be launched in the absence of evidence of related criminal conduct.

  “You check with her sister?”

  “She’s fine,” Mercer said. “Just a little surprised that Salma isn’t home. The baby’s okay too.”

  “Chow down, Coop,” Mike said, clicking his martini glass against my scotch. “What did the wide-awake doorman have to say?”

  “He never saw Salma leave. Swears it. One of the porters covered him for his dinner break and didn’t see her either.”

  “How many doors?”

  “Front and rear. And the garage. But that’s attended day and night, and nobody there saw any sign of her. Rear door gets locked at six o’clock.”

  “There must have been deliveries after six,” Mike said.

  I spooned the hot soup while Mercer answered all of Mike’s questions.

  “Yeah. Guys come to the front door. Fitz sends them around to the rear entrance and buzzes them in.”

  “Has he got a list of tonight’s action?”

  “Nothing written down, but he says it was the usual. Supermarkets, florists, liquor. They were still coming till close to ten o’clock.” That was routine in a city where stores stayed open throughout the night and people were willing to pay for—and tip for—every kind of convenience to suit their busy lives.

  “Fancy building like that must have a security system. They video the entrances or elevators?”

  “Nothing recorded. Fitz has four monitors of the door, the basement corridors, and the laundry room. But that’s only when he remembers to watch them.”

  “You think he could have missed her if she walked out the front door?”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “If she had a coat on with a hood up against the cold or a scarf bundled around her I guess he could have mistaken her for someone else. Even if his back was turned for a minute. I can’t say that she didn’t walk out. It just doesn’t feel right.”

  “Don’t go getting all spooky on me, Coop,” Mike said, reaching out and clasping my hand. “That last one wasn’t your fault. Just work with the facts.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do. The facts suggest Salma should be home in her bed, sound asleep. She can’t go to Leighton’s place—”

  “Look, it’s still early and she’s still erratic. Who’s the man that showed up? Maybe she went to hook up with him. Maybe she’ll get to her sister’s before the night is over.”

  “Please? Just do this for me tonight? I’ll owe you, Mike. Anything you want. Scully will put a team on this instead of waiting forty-eight hours if we can just give him a scintilla of evidence. Anything, Mike.”

  “You heard her, Mercer. Now, how do I collect on this one? Do what, blondie?”

  “Call Hal Sherman. Ask him to bring a crew to process the apartment.”

  Mike stood up and downed his martini, then sucked the olive into his mouth and chewed on it. “Tell you what, let’s go over and poke around. If I find anything of interest, I’ll call CSU. But if Salma walks in on the middle of it, I’m going with your excellent circumstances legal argument. And I’m already drawing up a monster list of what you owe me.”

  I pushed away from the table. “Mercer’s parked right across the street.”

  When we reached East End Avenue, Mercer left the car near Gracie Mansion and threw his police identification placard on the dashboard.

  “Pretty swell digs,” Mike said, looking up at the sleek residential tower. “Maybe there is something to being kept after all. You check out the rear entrance?”

  “Nope,” Mercer said. “It’s a good place to start.”

  We crossed the avenue and followed the sidewalk past the garage entrance and around to the rear of the building. The pavement was bordered by the building on one side, and the solid dark brick wall of an older apartment on the other.

  The walk was well-maintained and lighted. The security camera was visible above the door, but appeared to be raised too high to capture visitors in its lens. Several grocery shopping carts were stacked inside each other, like luggage carts at an airport awaiting the arrival of the incoming flights.

  Mercer pulled on the door but it didn’t give. Next to it was a bell marked RING FOR ENTRY. When he pressed the buzzer, several seconds elapsed before we heard the crackle of the intercom.

  “Yeah? Who’s that?”

  “Fitz?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Mercer Wallace here. I’m at the back door, Fitz. Can you see me?”

  “Where?”

  “At the back door of the building. Check the monitor.”

  “I’ll buzz you in.”

  “But can you see me, Fitz?”

  “I recognize your voice, Wallace. When you hear the buzzer, come on in.”

  Mercer, standing on his toes to extend his six-foot-six-inch height, reached up and pulled the neck of the camera back into proper aim.

  “High-tech security,” Mike said. “The Fitzpatrick try-not-to-bother-me-while-I’m-on-duty voice-identification system. Follow me.”

  Small signs with arrows pointing east and west indicated the service elevator, the laundry room, the passenger elevator to the lobby and apartments, and the staircase.

  Mercer had given me latex gloves while we were in the car. We each put on a pair and I watched as Mike lifted the lids of the four supersize trash containers on wheels that were lined up adjacent to the service elevator.

  He led us up the stairwell to the lobby, and Mercer introduced him to Harry Fitzpatrick.

  “Ten-C has already complained to the super,” Fitz said, taking off his hat and mopping his bald head. “I’m going off at midnight. You back to make more trouble?”

  “We’re going up to Ms. Zunega’s apartment,” Mercer said. “She comes along—or anyone else asking for her—you buzz up immediately.”

  Each of us had our hands in our jacket or pants pockets. The latex gloves would have puzzled most of the residents.

  The uniformed cop sitting on a folding chair outside Salma’s apartment door stood up when he saw us get off the elevator. He assured Mercer that nothing had occurred in the forty-five or so minutes we were gone.

  Mike turned the doorknob and followed us into the apartment. He adjusted the dimmer to brighten the hallway, then walked to one of the windows to take in the view.

  “I’d say Salma landed on her feet, all right.”

  “This place is too sterile, too impersonal, for my taste,” I said.

  There was so much glass that there was little wall space in the living room to hang any art. But there were also no photographs—not even baby pictures—displayed on any of the tabletops or surfaces.

  Mike looked at the wine bottle and two empty glasses.

  “Can’t we take those for prints?” I asked.

  “You’re always harping on me about getting a search warrant. You want to wake up some judge in the middle of the night and make your case, go for it. I don’t happen to have one in my back pocket.”

  “A search warrant or a judge?”

  “Neither, Coop.”

  Mercer led him down to the bedroom and nursery, and I watched as they used their gloved fingers to open closet doors, look under the dust ruffle of the undisturbed king-size bed, and pull the handles of dresser drawers.

  The master
bathroom was perfectly neat. I could see that Salma used the same makeup that I did. The distinctive black-and-gold packaging with the C logo stamped in white was everywhere on the countertop and bath shelf.

  “Tomorrow I’ll need to get a court order to get the baby’s DNA—and Ethan Leighton’s,” I said, making my checklist out loud while the guys looked for any minor sign of trouble. “I’d love to know who else claims to be the father.”

  “You’re so far ahead of yourself with court orders and search warrants. Somebody has to report a crime.”

  “Leighton’s up to his eyeballs in trouble, Mike.”

  We retraced our steps through the living room to the kitchen.

  “You beginning to feel any better?” Mercer asked.

  “I’ve got no choice. We’re coming up empty.”

  “Nothing out of place,” Mike said. “Plenty of milk in the refrigerator for the kid and food on the shelves for both of them. Not a dish in the sink. She gets triple points for being a neat freak.”

  A long corkscrew wine-bottle opener with a carved wooden handle was resting on its side on the counter next to the sink.

  Mercer pointed to it. “Maybe she was expecting someone who never showed, Alex. That could explain the wineglasses and the setup.”

  The edge of a shiny black object was protruding from beneath the front of the toaster oven. Mercer saw it, too, but couldn’t slide his large fingers under to reach it.

  I stuck my forefinger in and pushed out a razor-thin cell phone, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand and slimmer than a compact.

  “Now, I don’t know anybody who would leave home at night with all this turmoil going on and not take her cell,” I said, fumbling with my latex gloves to pick up the lid.

  “Hers?” Mike asked.

  I pressed the button to light up the small screen, which showed the evening’s time and date. “I’ll figure that out next. Right now, all I can tell you is that whoever had it last got as far as punching in three digits, Mike. Nine-one-one. But they’re still in the display box, so it doesn’t look like the caller ever got to hit Send.”

  “You may be sneaking up on some probable cause, kid.”

  Mercer took the phone from my hand while Mike picked up the corkscrew opener.

  “And I don’t think you’re going to like the vintage of the stain on the tip of this lethal weapon,” Mike said. “Here’s your scintilla, Coop. I’m guessing it’ll likely come up human blood.”

  ELEVEN

  “You’re late, Alexandra,” the mayor said on Thursday morning. “You asked for this seven-thirty meeting and here we are.”

  “I’m very sorry, of course.”

  “It’s the hair thing with Coop,” Mike said, getting up from his seat to close the door behind me. “She doesn’t leave home until it’s perfect. Busy times like this, you never know when you’re going to get caught in a perp walk.”

  I knew he was covering for me. Battaglia had refused to come back to City Hall for the emergency meeting I suggested to Tim Spindlis—he didn’t want to take direction from the mayor—but insisted on being briefed before I filled Vin Statler and Keith Scully in on last night’s events. I had lost ten minutes talking to him.

  “Sit down, please,” Statler said, pointing to the chair next to Mercer. We were in the Blue Room—the mayor’s public receiving suite on the ground floor, resplendent with its ceiling medallions, rope molding, and wainscoting.

  “It was actually my suggestion that we bring you in on this, Vin,” Scully said. The commissioner had been appointed by Bloomberg, but had done such an extraordinary job reducing the city’s violent crime statistics and improving the quality of the police force that Statler had kept him on. “You wanted to know more about Ethan Leighton’s lady friend.”

  “Well, in the sense that there have been so many political scandals lately that this kind of nonsense is likely to trump the more important news, like the human trafficking story.”

  “Why don’t you tell the mayor what happened after you left here,” Scully said to me.

  It was just the five of us in the room, and I told the mayor everything from the autopsy results to our efforts to talk with—and then to locate—Salma Zunega.

  Mike had the morning’s additional fact. The substance on the tip of the wine opener was indeed human blood. He’d had one of the precinct cops drop it off at the lab when we left East End Avenue shortly after midnight, and had stopped there to get that report on his way to City Hall.

  “I’m struggling with whether to go public with this,” Scully said. “It’s going to bring more heat on Leighton and—”

  “What’s wrong with that?” the mayor asked, tossing his head back so that we might not see his smirk.

  “I don’t need an all-out manhunt if this woman just slipped away for a few days to catch her breath, but like Alex says, it’s unusual to leave home without a cell phone these days.”

  “And it’s unlikely she was giving herself a manicure with the corkscrew,” Mike added.

  “I’ve got Crime Scene going over her apartment now, Vin. I’d like to be ready to ramp up full bore on this if we get a break on where she is and what her condition is.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  “What I’d like, actually, is to borrow the mansion,” the commissioner said.

  “What? Gracie Mansion?” Statler raised himself out of the chair, striking a pose almost identical to the Charles Jarvis portrait of Thomas Jefferson behind him. “Impossible.”

  “I just need it for a couple of days, Vin. Think about it. The girl’s apartment is right across the street. Once word gets out, the press will be camped on your doorstep anyway.”

  Statler was angry now. “It’s not my doorstep. I don’t live there.”

  “That’s my point. Let us use it to get started. Except for your occasional breakfasts or teas, the house sits empty most of the time. And I’ve got an entire police detail already in place there.” That was routine, since the mansion was the mayor’s ceremonial home. “What’s the harm? This whole thing may blow over if the woman just went back to Mexico for a week.”

  “I don’t want any part of this run from the mayor’s office or Gracie Mansion. Do you understand that? It’ll just look like I’m out to get Leighton. And you—you, young lady. Haven’t you got your hands full with all those women from the ship?”

  “I do, Mr. Mayor. I certainly do. But it will be days until most of them are settled in and physically examined and ready to be interrogated. I’m truly concerned about the disappearance of Salma Zunega.”

  “This isn’t about Alex or the district attorney, Vin. I want a handful of my men operating out of the mansion. Are you saying no to that?”

  “This woman will turn up soon enough. Thank you, Ms. Cooper. Why don’t the rest of you step out while the commissioner and I finish this conversation?”

  “Thanks for your hospitality, Mr. Mayor,” Mike said, pulling back my chair as the three of us accepted the abrupt end to the meeting. “Till next time.”

  We were leaving as many of the City Hall employees were coming in through the metal detectors in the lobby of the building.

  “Pittsburgh Paint. Bohemian blue,” Mike said.

  “What?”

  “In case you wanted to know the color of the paint on the wall. It’s historic, Coop.”

  “I didn’t give it any thought.”

  “It used to be green. Back in the day, I mean. But it had to be made more telegenic, so now it’s Bohemian blue,” Mike said. “I’ve spent so much time in that room waiting for press conferences on homicide cases, I can tell you every detail of the décor. It was a real pleasure to be in and evicted so fast today.”

  “Well, I’ll go on up to my office and get to work organizing my unit for our interviews. Hizzoner was a bit testy with Scully, don’t you think?”

  “Guess it’s his mansion whether he’s there or not,” Mike said.

  “Will you be at your desk all day?” Mercer
asked.

  “I expect to.”

  I walked out the front door and was buffeted by the fierce wind.

  “Hold on to that railing,” Mercer said. “The steps look icy.”

  There had been a light dusting of snow during the night that covered over patches of ice from the most recent storm.

  “I was stupid not to wear boots today. I was running late and just hopped in a cab.”

  There was construction on the east side of City Hall Park between the front steps and Centre Street, the wide thoroughfare that started right there, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. One of the guards asked us to stay on the walkway that led toward Chambers Street, behind the building in the direction of my office.

  “I’ll peel off here,” Mike said. “I’m back at the morgue for the autopsies of more of the bodies from the ship. You good?”

  “My car’s up by the courthouse,” Mercer said. “I need to spend some time with Alex.”

  “Talk later.” Mike waved good-bye to us and turned south to exit the park.

  The badly rutted concrete path hugged the side of City Hall, then wound through the northeast corner of the park under the brittle arms of the bare trees that dotted the landscape. Tall mesh fences stood to the right, protecting dark green tarps that were spread over large sections of the ground.

  “You missed the commissioner’s news, Alex,” Mercer said.

  “What?” I asked, turning my head to better hear him. We were walking single file on the narrow strip of pavement.

  “Careful,” he said, as he watched me balance on the slippery surface. “Two more bodies came ashore this morning. A couple of miles farther out in Nassau County.”

  “Oh my God. Do you know anything about them?”

  “Both young men. Both seem to have drowned.”

  “How many people from the ship are still unaccounted for?” I asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Doesn’t anyone have a manifest for the damn thing?”

  “It’s a slave ship, Alex. When we find our Simon Legree, I expect we’ll find the documentation too.”

  There was definitely black ice underfoot on the unshoveled walk. I paused and grabbed on to the mesh fence so that I could take Mercer’s arm when he caught up with me.