by Triss Stein
It wasn’t long before Henderson came through the unlocked door, followed by a colleague and uniformed cops. He seemed surprised to see us on the floor, hands still on the elderly woman who was breathing but not talking.
He knelt next to me and with a few quick questions had a complete grasp of the situation. He called an ambulance for Mercer and moved us so his team could handcuff her. He talked to me and to Skye and saw we confirmed each other’s statements and would swear to it. I gave him the papers I had found, and told him where to find the metal box and he summoned another cop to go up to the attic with me and bring it down.
The situation was finally in good hands. I realized I was shaking but I knew I had finally found some answers. I was sure there would be more.
Chapter Twenty-two
Eventually Mercer did have a quite a lot to say. As Henderson described it to me one night, when he pointed out that there might be murder charges, and they could certainly make a charge of accessory stick she saw that she’d better tell her story her own way.
“Could you have made it stick?”
“Maybe. That’s the DA’s call. But don’t forget, as I was happy to tell her, there is still the not-so-little matter of the thefts. We had a few different departments involved.” He grinned. “Gridlock in the interrogation room.”
He had explained to her how easy it would be to get rough translations of the documents. “Of course we’d have to have them all translated officially, nice and conclusive, but we could have started on it right away. I told her we had a Russian-speaking secretary on duty in the morning and my friend Sergeant Diaz already said the Spanish paper is documentation for the purchase of a Tiffany window. We knew she provided both the art and the background information—it seems there are photos attached—and someone paid her a whole lot of money.”
“What did she say? What could she possibly say?”
“That it was not so much money.”
He met my incredulous gasp with a grin.
“Oh, yeah, she protested that.” In a little lady voice, he went on, ‘But I had a team to pay off, and it was split with the go-between who found the customers.’ So then we had a conversation about that mystery man, but that wasn’t me. It was the art-squad guys. They’re salivating to get his name. So right then was the point where she started thinking she had said too much, and we laid out for her the benefits of full cooperation.”
This was cop talk over dinner with Henderson, whose first name was Mike. I loved getting the whole story at last. There was an advantage to dating a cop.
“And Vladimir? What was his role? Was Natalya right all along?”
“It’s a definite yes and no.” He grinned and I smacked his hand. “Of course the macho Vladimir spent a long time telling us he knew nothing and we were only harassing him because he was an immigrant. So we told him how we were harassing Mercer. That threw him and Mercer’s story did him in.
“They did meet through Dima, one time when Vladimir was visiting him at the cemetery. Mercer sized him up and saw her chance, and it didn’t take long for a deal. He provided the muscle and tools.”
I put my fork down, suddenly unable to taste the lasagna. “Did he kill Dima? That was your real job, wasn’t it? Dima.”
He put a hand over mine, still gripping my fork, and said, “Not exactly to the first question, and yes to the second. His story was that he wasn’t there that night. He wasn’t about to rob his own brother at work.”
“But I bet he knew all about the place because of visiting Dima.”
“Ah, clever girl. He did the planning and collected the men, but he wasn’t there himself.”
“That’s a mighty fine line!”
“Yah, well, these guys don’t exactly think like the rest of us. The deal was they weren’t even supposed to use guns. Vladimir’s no dope. He knows the difference between larceny and homicide. However, one bozo got nervous and brought a gun and used it. We’ve got him, too, by the way. Evidently Dima tried to be a hero, when he stumbled on them mid-job. Poor bastard. You can imagine what Vladimir said about his good, stupid brother!”
And I could.
“So he was happy to give up the guy with the gun and explain that he’d stayed in touch with Mercer, planning more work, so he could trap her and get his own revenge.”
“What? That’s ridiculous! Did you or anyone believe him?”
Mike shrugged. “Kind of yes and no. Because he kept notes, like a diary, of his findings about Mercer and his plans. Kind of backed up his story and they’re very useful to us. Seems he blamed her for the whole thing.” He helped himself to salad. This disturbing discussion didn’t upset him at all. “That’s because she was there that night.” He saw my surprise. “Yes, she lied to you. She was there that night. According to Vladimir she liked the excitement almost as much as the money.”
“What’s going to happen to him? Volodya?”
He shrugged again. “The legal eagles will be working that one out. Not clear for now.”
“So Dima died because some stupid punk got nervous?” I felt sick.
Natalya did too when she found out. I was there, and not by accident. Mike had given me a heads-up that he was calling on her that day and I was able to just drop by for a little mom time.
Mike described the botched robbery, implied Dima was a hero for standing up to them, expressed admiration and sympathy. I could tell he had done this before.
Natalya, turning pale, then red, cut to the core.
“My Dima died for that?” Her voice seemed to get higher with each word. “Because a criminal couldn’t even do his own crime right? It is that stupid?”
Mike nodded, warily.
I wasn’t sure what she would do next—maybe start throwing things—but she surprised us by collapsing into a ball on a chair and weeping, silently at first, then with great sobs. Finally she stopped, accepted the box of tissues I handed her, and sat up straight.
“I am done. I thank you, Detective. And my dear Erica. I am done for now. He will go to jail for a very long time?”
Mike nodded again.
“Good. You will make sure of that? Perhaps someone will kill him there for just such a stupid reason—that would be justice—but for now, he is not my concern. Erica, come. You have time for lunch? We will talk about our children. Or fashion. Or house decorating.”
Later I learned the NYPD found the stolen window while searching Bright’s house for more evidence. It was wrapped in moving blankets and stashed behind a massive Victorian wardrobe. It was a perfect place to hide it until it was time to ship it out to a customer in Qatar.
So it seemed Mrs. Mercer’s friendship with Bright Skye was even more calculated than I thought. Bright’s house provided a perfect hiding place, right next door where Mercer could keep an eye on it. And I thought all along she merely planned to profit from the sale of Bright’s antiques.
After those discoveries, I heard a different team of officers went to work on Mercer about Ryan. When forensics put her there at the scene, she finally admitted to everything. She had been tracking him online, me and Flint too, wanting to know everything we learned from Skye’s letters, and she saw Ryan’s own foolish words. There would be a fortune in her pocket if she could lay hands on a lost Tiffany window. She already had an interested buyer. She hoped some of the information was at Flint’s house and she knew Flint was socializing. She insisted Ryan was never supposed to be there. She even claimed to feel badly about it. There was a tussle, she said, that ended with his head hitting a corner of the elegant marble countertop, entirely an unfortunate accident.
And she’d slipped the boxes of letters back into Bright’s house because, after all, she was fond of her and wanted her to have them after she’d made copies. Or so she said. Perhaps it was part of her fantasy that she was a good person. Bright Skye still believed there were higher powers at work.
&
nbsp; I went over to see Natalya and Alex one Saturday. We walked along the beach and Alex skimmed rocks on the surf while Natalya laughed at him because it was too windy and called him “You American boy!” When our hands turned blue in the cold fall wind, we repaired to a café for scorching glasses of hot Russian tea and a round of cherry blintzes. The look of sadness in their eyes was still there and I knew it would remain, but I had seen them laughing together that day.
Walking back she told me they had already had a simple funeral for Dima. “I did not invite you because it was all Russian. We got through it, me and Alex together. Just barely, but we did. We will have a memorial service soon, I think, maybe at school, for all our American friends. No, I mean, for all Dima’s American friends. He had a lot.” She paused. “Alex told me Dima and Volodya were sort of working on making up. So,” she shrugged, “we will see. It was Alex saying it, so I had to believe him. You know? Even if I didn’t believe it. It’s my son talking.”
“I know.”
I certainly did know. My own offspring came home one day, just like that. She walked in, dragging her big duffle bag, and said, “I’m back. Don’t ask me questions. I don’t want to talk.” She went upstairs, cranked up some music and that was that.
I was too surprised to ask her anything then, and later my father claimed he had no idea. Chris had simply asked for a ride home. I was torn between begging her to talk, forcing her to talk (the power of the allowance might help there), and just letting her slide back into normal life, hers and mine. Was it cowardly to choose the latter? Maybe, but I was exhausted by all the recent drama in my life and glad to have her home. For a time, she made a special effort to be thoughtful to me, and I knew it was her way of apologizing. I’d take it.
One day Dr. Flint sent me a link to a page at Pratt’s website. Yes, Dr. Flint. I assumed he must have found a new assistant. It was a memorial page for Ryan. His funeral had been back home in Nebraska, but there was a contact for his parents. I wrote to them on dignified writing paper, a hard note that took me many days to get right. I received a printed thank-you and that was that.
Almost. Because one day Flint showed up and said, “Come with me now. I have a driver.” Ah, the old Flint was back.
Our destination was, I hoped for the very last time, Green-Wood. I followed him to the Konick mausoleum. He had a bag of equipment and he measured and tapped and used some small tools, conferred with a man who met us there. The focus was the white-washed side wall that threw the whole design off so oddly. He finally explained with a big smile, “It’s a false wall. It hit me just the other day that it might be.” He shook his head at his own stupidity. “I must have stopped thinking for a while. It’s so obvious now.”
The other man, an architect, had a couple of workmen with him to take the wall down, very, very carefully, and there it was, emerging bit by bit: the lost Tiffany window.
It depicted a tidy Dutch garden, with tulips streaked with flames of color and others shaped liked lilies. There were carnations, and perhaps roses. Or peonies. There was a windmill in the far background, to tell us we were on Dutch land. Just beyond the low brick garden wall was the great untidy wilderness, with trees and wildflowers and a few animals peeping from under the leaves. I recognized the tulips, the iris, the ironweed, the wild turkey family and the fawn from Maude’s sketches.
It was a work of art, of craft, of history. It told a story about the planned and the wild, the neat and the natural, two kinds of beauty. Maude didn’t show us which side of the garden wall she was on. Perhaps she wanted both.
It was dusty and grimy and had a few cracks and it was beautiful. We all stared and stared as the last piece of the wall came down. The two men conferred. There would be cleaning and stabilization of the frame and who knows what else. I just looked at it and whispered, “Nice work, Maude. You did it.”
A full-size reproduction of the window became the highlight of our museum exhibit about Maude. We called it “Lost Tiffany Girl, Lost Tiffany Window” and it was quite a success. I had a credit, assistant curator, and I did most of the work.
And then of course I behaved like a scholar (or scholar-to-be) and wrote a scholarly paper, too, my first publication. Dr. Flint, in an unheard of fit of modesty, did not want to be my co-author, and so I mentioned him as a consultant. Ryan was listed as the co-author. I sent a copy to his parents and hoped they found some meaning in it.
And I found my own parental meaning in this: Chris threw me a birthday party. She planned it all herself, with some advice from Darcy and, I suspect, financial help from my dad. Natalya came with a warm hug for me, and a huge cake; Alex and Melanie, Chris’ best friends; Mel’s parents; and Darcy, with fabulous stylish shoes for a birthday gift. Joe came without that redhead from the glass shop, and just shook his head when I asked him about it. I caught him looking at me when Mike Henderson came in with a big hug of his own and a bigger bouquet of roses. My dad was there and he actually brought a funny card from Leary and a book of old newspaper cartoons.
That wasn’t quite the end though, because Darcy had another gift for me, a phone number for the Konick descendent she knew.
“He’s expecting to hear from you.”
He heard from me that night.
So a week later I had tea, tiny sandwiches and all, at a very old private club in Brooklyn Heights, with a very old, charming man, James Gerard Konick. He told me a story about his uncle who was the skeleton in the closet when he was growing up. How no one would explain what had happened to his father’s oldest brother and the less they said, the more curious he was. How, when he was all grown up, he had an interest in genealogy and tracked Gerard to a beautiful house in a suburban area of Brooklyn.
Gerard and his wife Maude turned out to be charming and warm, not at all like his parents. They encouraged his interest in art and his dream of studying in France. Gerard had a successful career as an architect and she painted all her life and was active in arts programs for schools. He remembered how she chided him when he expressed doubt about uncultured, foreign public school students. She said—and he never forgot it—“Do you think art is only for the wealthy? Like your conventional grandparents? Art is for anyone who has eyes.”
They only had one child, a daughter. They had lost another daughter in the flu pandemic and there were never any others to fill up the big house with many bedrooms. Gerard’s parents never spoke to him again after he jilted the Beekman daughter for Maude, but he was not completely cut off from the world of his childhood. Years later their daughter married the descendent of another old Dutch family, John Opdyke. And then I knew that their daughter was Ginny Updike, Bright Skye’s mother. Bright was Maude’s great-granddaughter.
“So I did go to Paris,” he told me, “and I stayed until the war trapped me there. Before I made it home, they had died in the same year, as if they could not live without each other. They were buried in Staten Island, of all places. I really didn’t know their daughter and I had no real interest in my Konick connections either, so that was that.”
He didn’t know how the letters to River Bend ended up in Maude’s Brooklyn home and we never did find out. My guess is that they were sent back to her after her mother’s death, when the house in Illinois was sold. Or her sister kept them with other family papers and they were sent back to Maude’s daughter years later. It was just one of those little family stories that got lost along the way.
One warm spring day, before he went to the shore for the summer, I picked James Konick up in Brooklyn Heights and drove him over to Green-Wood. He was silent in the car all the way up the hill to the Konick mausoleum. It wasn’t until we got there that he said to me, “I loved her, you know. Loved her as an aunt and maybe a bit more. She was middle-aged by the time I met her, but still a lovely woman in every way.”
Maude’s window was in its full beauty that day, the spring sun streaming through the brilliant glass. He had a bouquet of flame-
striped tulips to put in front of it and he stood there for a long moment, his hat against his heart.
Afterword
Since Brooklyn Graves is a blend of actual history and fictional (but possible) history, here is an explanation of which is which.
Green-Wood Cemetery is, of course, a real place and is even more beautiful and fascinating than I have described here. The facts and most of the physical description are as accurate as I can make them. All the events, personnel and policies are entirely products of my imagination.
The earlier theft of valuable windows and statues from old churches and cemeteries, discussed here, did happen and was, in part, the inspiration for this book. The all-female Tiffany design studio did exist and Clara Driscoll, mentioned here, was its director. Maude and her letters are my own creation.
Erica’s museum may resemble a real place in its physical description and location but everything else I have written about it is entirely a product of my imagination.
The Konick family is also imaginary, but grounded in the history of the Dutch in New York, including the centuries-long pride in their heritage and continuing social connection among the descendents.
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