“Did you see anyone else in the park before you got to this point?” I asked. “Or jogging away?”
The dog walkers looked at each other. The same one spoke for both. “Just the regulars. Maybe a few less runners and people out for exercise. A little chilly, no? We’re only out because the dogs have to be.”
“But you didn’t hear people fighting with each other? Shouting? Nobody running through the park?”
“Nothing. We didn’t see nothing unusual.”
“Crime Scene on the way?” Mike asked the cops.
“After the triple homicide in Brooklyn and a gang rape in the Bronx. They want us to cordon off the area and they’ll deal with it by afternoon.”
“Keep an eye open for that Leighton weasel, pal.”
“You think he’s dangerous?”
“I know he’s self-destructive and angry. Don’t know what he’s liable to do.”
“I’ll put it out on the radio.”
“Good man,” Mike said. “C’mon up top, Coop. Let’s see what it looks like.”
My driving moccasins and Mike’s loafers were not the best shoes for managing the rocky incline, which in places was coated with ice. It took us almost ten minutes to climb from the edge of the Harlem River up to the Manhattan end of the High Bridge, which connected the island to the Bronx.
Mike tried to distract me as we made our way up. He knew me well enough that my first thoughts were about the baby, who was probably this woman’s child. Mercer brought up the rear.
“What if she’s Ana’s mother?”
“Steady as she goes, Coop. Don’t go there yet. You hear that guy? This is the oldest bridge in town.”
“Older than the Brooklyn Bridge?” I asked.
“Way. It was built in the eighteen forties as part of the system bringing water to New York from upstate. From the Croton Reservoir. It’s the very first structure that linked Manhattan to the main-land. To the rest of America. Don’t you remember what that lady told us when we were in Poe Park?”
“That when Edgar Allan Poe lived in his little cottage in the Bronx, while his wife was dying, he’d console himself with long nocturnal walks across the river. On this? The High Bridge?”
“You got it.”
We were directly beneath the series of vaulted arches that held up the span on this side of the river.
“You know, I would think that if Anita was going to jump—going to really try to kill herself—she would have gotten farther out on the bridge, to the middle, so she’d land in the river. That’s the sure way to a suicide.”
“Yeah. But the condition of the walkway is such a mess up there, it may not be easy to get out that far,” Mike said. “Whether she jumped or got pushed, the boulders she landed on are pretty unforgiving.”
“Mind if I catch my breath?” I asked, stopping as we neared the top.
“I can pull you the rest of the way,” Mercer said jokingly, grabbing my hand. “You got the wind at your back.”
“I feel like I’ve got the wind everywhere. It’s brutal.” The bitter cold made the landscape even more stark and miserable. “Was the bridge ever used for carriages or cars?”
“No. Just pedestrians. It was always a walkway.”
“Why was it closed?” I asked.
“Some morons threw rocks off the bridge. Almost killed several tourists on the Circle Line boat.”
“And it never reopened?” We had almost crested the grade.
“No. The aqueduct was replaced by the underwater tunnel system you got to know so well,” Mike said, reminding me of a case we had worked a year earlier. “This bridge hasn’t been used to carry water to us for a hundred years. So nobody’s ever invested the money to open the walkway again.”
The three of us stood together at the walled-off entrance to the crumbling span and looked across at the stone masonry piers and arches. “It really does look like a Roman aqueduct,” I said.
“That’s the ancient principle they used to bring water here from the mountains, Coop.”
I had learned the hard way, through a murder case, that Manhattan had no natural water supply of its own.
“Wait a minute, Mike,” Mercer said. “High Bridge, right?”
“Yeah. A low one would have been cheaper to build, but they needed the height so that boats going through to the Hudson could get under it.”
“But it was built as an aqueduct, you said.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s one of Kendall Reid’s fake funds,” Mercer said, warming his ears with his gloved hands. “That’s one of the phantom charities Tim Spindlis named at the press conference. Save the Aqueduct Bridge.”
“Dead on, Mr. Wallace,” Mike said, processing Mercer’s logic. “Reid should have patched some holes in this bridge instead of stuffing his cash in shoe boxes and cargo ships full of immigrants.”
“Time for a wake-up call to your pal Spindlis, Alex.”
“All Battaglia’s horses and all his men may not be able to put Anita’s cracked head back together, Coop. Get on the phone and tell him to give us everything he’s got.”
FORTY-EIGHT
It was only six thirty on Sunday morning. I didn’t have Tim’s home number programmed on my cell, so I called the cop on duty in the lobby of the DA’s office and asked him to reach out and have Spindlis return my call.
“Maybe somebody gave Anita a boost up to get over this,” Mercer was saying to Mike as they examined the stone wall blocking off the old walkway, fronted by an iron gate. “Makes it a lot more likely she wasn’t out there planning to jump if she didn’t go onto the bridge alone. If she was pushed, then whoever did it found the perfect place to mimic a suicide.”
“Coop? You off the phone? See if you can get a toehold on that wall. Put your Pavlovas to good use.”
I stuck the phone in my pocket and walked to the imposing gate. Weeds had broken through the brickwork on the path and cracks were everywhere. I put one foot on the guardrail and hoisted myself up.
“It’s not hard to do. The question is why she would have agreed to go out on the bridge with anyone,” I said.
“Well, she either trusted the guy enough to follow him, or he had a gun to her head.”
“Follow him where, Mike?” I asked.
“Leighton said Anita told her cousin that it was an old friend who had set her up for the night. It must have been someone she could count on to lead her around up here.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Well, she trusted him more than Leighton, ’cause she wouldn’t even get in his car, baby and all.”
“So maybe the guy—this friend of hers—tells her that he’s parked in the Bronx,” Mercer said. “It’s just a short walk across this old bridge. That’s the Bronx, right at the end of the footpath.”
“I get it. So if anything illegal was going on at the mansion—prostitution, at least—then the police wouldn’t even see this guy’s car anywhere near the Jumel House. The car wouldn’t actually be in Manhattan. Could be a useful escape route, especially if this friend was already in trouble—say, a guy like Kendall Reid.”
I peered over the top of the wall at the surface of the bridge. Just below me, stored on the other side, were four large wooden barrels.
“Take a look for yourselves,” I said, as I jumped down.
Mercer lifted one of his long legs onto the railing iron and looked over the wall. “Easy enough, Alex. You’re right. Up over the top. Climb down onto the barrels. And assuming there are more like those on the other end, you’d be home free.”
“Interesting idea,” Mike said, positioning himself beside Mercer to look for himself.
“Are we going to stand out here in the cold and debate this, or do something about it?” I asked.
“Your lips are turning blue, kid. Why don’t you wait in Leighton’s Jag? Get comfy,” Mike said to me, then turned back to Mercer. “Let me call the lieutenant and see if he can get Bronx Homicide to do a plate check on the cars parked around on
the other side. See if anybody was ticketed during the night. Someone could have led Anita out on the bridge to her death, and there’d be no trace that he’d even been in Manhattan.”
“That’s true,” Mercer said. “If your perp was smart enough to have planned all this—worried about getting caught—then he’d know that even a check of EZ pass plates would show he left Manhattan by bridge or tunnel the night before, and never came back.”
“See what I mean? And all the time, he’s just a hop, skip, and walk across the bridge away from the action in the Jumel Mansion.”
The two uniformed cops were approaching us. They must have taken all the information and sent the dog walkers on their way.
“We’re just going back to the street to get some tape to block off the scene,” one cop said to Mike. “You guys need anything?”
“Take Ms. Cooper with you, okay? My little hothouse flower looks like she’s about to freeze her ass off.”
“I’m not going to the car, Mike. I’m with you two until you figure out what’s next.”
“The park rangers opened up the tower for us this morning,” the cop said.
“They around to give us a hand?” Mercer asked.
“Are you kidding? Rangers on a frigid Sunday morning in January? We had to call to get them over here. They said they’d check back in before too long. Want me to tell them to be available if you need them?”
“Please.”
“It’s warm in there. Go on in and make your calls.”
The graceful granite water tower, almost two hundred feet high, was just a few yards away from the end of the bridge, much closer than the street where Mike and Mercer had left their cars. It was octagonal in shape, like the unusual room in the Jumel Mansion. It looked like a Renaissance church tower that had been lifted from the Tuscan countryside and planted on a Manhattan hilltop.
“Good idea,” Mike said to the more talkative cop. “You got enough tape with you so we can rope off the gate at the entrance to the bridge?”
“No problem. I’ll be back with it in a few minutes.”
The two cops led us toward the tower. Mercer walked on ahead. “Yeah, it’s open. Thanks.”
Mike was explaining that when water was originally pumped across the Harlem River over the High Bridge, it coursed through two iron pipes that still ran up the interior of the handsome structure, to equalize the pressure in the nearby holding reservoir.
“And now?” I asked.
“Just decorative. The tower’s got views from the top that you wouldn’t believe. You can practically see Paris.”
We went inside and even though the building wasn’t heated, it was a welcome shelter from the morning’s fierce winds.
“Hey, Loo?” Mike said, talking into his phone. “Time to rise and shine, Boss. Let me explain what’s happened since last night.”
Mercer and I listened while Mike tried to tell Peterson what had developed, and enlist his help in getting detectives from Bronx County on board to help.
“Yeah, and the congressman went AWOL. Don’t know. Maybe he’s getting the picture that the kid isn’t his. Maybe he had something to do with the scene on the bridge. He’s off the charts.”
“I’ve never been in here,” Mercer said. “But at least somebody spent a few nickels restoring this beauty, which I’m glad to see.”
“I didn’t even know about it.”
The redbrick walls in this small lobby were punctuated by twenty-foot-high windows on each of the eight sides. Running up from the basement below were the two iron pipes that had once carried all of Manhattan’s drinking water from upstate—painted a shiny black—and surrounding them was a wrought-iron staircase that twisted in a narrow spiral to the top of the tower.
Mike was still arguing with Peterson. “I appreciate how hard it is to get anyone to help at this hour of the morning, Loo, but we can’t cover the territory ourselves. There’s a lot going on, okay?”
“Want to check it out with me?” Mercer asked, as he craned his neck to point above us.
My shoulders shook with chills. “You know how much I hate heights. I trust you’ll tell me about it.”
“Even if it is Kendall Reid, he didn’t run this operation himself, Boss. Mercer and I need reinforcements, that’s what you’ve got to tell Commissioner Scully,” Mike said. “No, no. Battaglia doesn’t know she’s here with us. We’ll dump her at home on the way downtown.”
Mike flipped his phone shut
“Dump me?”
“Your teeth are chattering so loud, Coop, I can’t hear myself think.”
“I’m warming up in here,” I said. “This helps a lot.”
“What did Peterson say?” Mercer asked.
“He gave me a firm no to letting us go to Mayor Statler’s home to knock on the door and question him again. We can’t touch Kendall Reid until we bring Battaglia and Spindlis in on what we’ve got.” Mike paused to smile. “Peterson doesn’t miss a trick. Asked me whether I’d heard the rumors about Spindlis. Says if this whole thing has to do with hookers and escorts, maybe there’s fire behind that smoke. Maybe that’s why the DA jumped so fast on the Reid indictment, to clamp everybody down so Spindlis’s name didn’t come up.”
“Leave me out of that brainstorm,” I said. “Tell the lieutenant he can raise that errant thought with Battaglia because I sure as hell won’t.”
“Peterson also doesn’t want us to do anything about Donny Baynes unless the feds are part of it. He doesn’t have the manpower to have guys tracking down Ethan Leighton as well as sitting on Moses twenty-four/seven. Everything’s a friggin’ manpower issue in the department.”
“I’ll take the weight for bringing Alex out in the middle of the night,” Mercer said. “That was my idea.”
“Nice. You’re both making it sound like I’m a liability to you guys. Thanks a million. I’m looking forward to being dumped. I’m sure I can get somebody to drive me home.”
“The lieutenant’s bent out of shape ’cause your car got tagged Friday night,” Mike said. “He’s just soft for you.”
“I’m delighted to know I still have one fan.”
“Does he have anybody for us?” Mercer asked.
“The day tour starts in an hour. He says he’ll round up whoever comes in and send three or four guys over here to give us a hand.”
“Excellent.”
“Yeah. Might as well get going on the bridge. And I’d like to get the guys into the mansion to see what’s been going on there.”
The uniformed cop who had gone to the car to get yellow crime-scene tape returned. “Why don’t you start with this roll?” he asked. “If you need more, I’ll call the house and they’ll bring it over.”
“Thanks,” Mike said. “You going down by the riverbed where the body was found?”
“Yeah.”
“Mercer and I will work up on top, at the entrance to the bridge. We’ll tape it off first. And then, we’ll go over the wall and try to position ourselves directly above your spot, where you found the body. See if we can figure out where she dropped from. You mind spotting that with us?”
“Glad to do it,” the cop said.
“Okay if I wait here?” I asked.
“I told you it was comfortable, right?” the cop said.
“That’s the best advice I’ve had in days.”
I watched through the tall paned glass window as the teams separated to stake out the scene. The two cops dropped out of sight as they maneuvered down the steep incline, while Mike and Mercer were visible off in the distance, headed for the gated entrance to the rotting old bridge.
My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I reached in to remove it but the thick material of my gloves got in the way. As I withdrew it, my fingers fumbled and the cell dropped on the floor and skidded across the room.
When I picked it up, I saw that I had missed the return call from Spindlis. His number had been captured, though, so I flipped the cell open to reply.
“Tim? It’s Alex. I a
pologize for the hour, but I think we really need to sit down together. It’s rather urgent.”
I could barely make out his answer.
“You’re breaking up,” I said. “Give me a minute.”
I walked a few feet to the north side of the lobby, around the spiraling black staircase, and planted myself against one of the windows. I held the phone to one ear and plugged my finger in the other so I could hear him.
“Of course I’ll tell you everything that’s happened,” I said. My skin crawled just talking to him, as though I didn’t really know him at all, despite ten years as colleagues working for Battaglia. The cheap rumors rattled around my head as I thought about how much to tell him.
“Yes, this is much clearer. We didn’t mean to set you off about Kendall Reid. Mike only wanted to talk to him about our case, not yours. The murder and the—well—possible prostitution ring.”
My normally laid-back and spineless colleague was agitated about our drop-by interview yesterday of his perp. He wanted to unload his annoyance on me and the least I could do was listen.
I stared out the window at the breathtaking view of the Hudson River that stretched for miles to the north.
“We got a lot of good stuff in the last twenty-four hours, Tim. Lieutenant Peterson thinks we should all meet and put our heads together. That we might be able to solve some of this.”
I was so absorbed in the tongue-lashing that Spindlis felt it necessary to deliver that I was oblivious to my surroundings.
“If you don’t want to come up here to the station house today, I understand. We can be in your office first thing tomorrow,” I said. “Yes, Tim. I promise we won’t question Kendall Reid again unless you’re there.”
I flipped the phone closed and smiled to myself. We won’t question Reid unless we find him clearing the dirty linens in the Jumel Mansion. Or sitting in his car alongside the Harlem River, in the Bronx, watching how the cops handle Anita’s tragic fall.
I didn’t know there was anyone else in the water tower until I felt the icy metal rim of a gun bore against the skin behind my right ear.
My body seized with fear as I tried to turn my head to see my attacker, but he gripped the back of my neck firmly with his left hand.
Hell Gate Page 32