The Kills

by Fairstein, Linda

  I picked my head up, relieved to see that the turn had taken us away from the direction of the Verrazano. Instead of going to the ocean, he had steered to the right, to the body of water that separated Staten Island from New Jersey.

  There was land on both sides of us rather than endless fathoms of water, and I was unrealistically euphoric at that thought. Then I made the mistake of asking where he was taking me.

  “The Kills, Alex. Don’t you know your geography? We’re going to the Kills.”

  40

  What a fitting place to meet a violent end. The Kills. Much smarter of Hoyt than heading out to the Atlantic, which had been my greatest fear. He probably figured that Mercer Wallace would have marshaled every coast guard boat and NYPD harbor launch in that direction. So vast and far too obvious. I had to give Hoyt credit for his quick thinking.

  The green sign posted at the entrance to the waterway said: KILL VAN KULL. I knew there once were “kills” all over Lower Manhattan, a vestige from the Dutch colonization that meant “channels” or “creeks.” This one was obviously a viaduct to the shipyards along the Jersey shore, so busy with traffic that no one would give special notice to an innocuous little Whaler weaving among the mix of commercial and sport vessels.

  “Why don’t you anchor somewhere?” I asked, my voice trembling. “I can call my office and someone can search for whatever it is you want.”

  “You’re not going back, Alex. You know that. And I’m not looking for a plea bargain here. It’s very simple. You tell me what I need to know, or you don’t. And if you don’t, more people will have to die, don’t you think?”

  He was talking about Mercer and Mike. Hoyt had to kill me, whether I told him what he wanted or not. I knew too much about what he had done. He could still hope the others hadn’t figured everything out.

  But if he wasn’t just going to dump me in the water, on the open seas, he must be figuring to torture me before he finished me off. That’s why he chose this route.

  There was a small bridge ahead and a sign that said SHOOTER’S ISLAND. Hoyt opened the deep compartment on the dashboard in front of him, the one from which he had pulled the rope. He lifted something out, a metal tool that looked heavy as he hoisted it and let it fall with a loud clang on the countertop. I guessed it was a wrench.

  “So what’s your plan?” I asked, sitting back on my heels, my arms bracing me against the side of the boat behind me.

  “To find out where you’ve got it, Alex. A simple piece of paper. That’s all I want. Then no one has to get hurt. No one else, I mean.”

  So Graham Hoyt and Peter Robelon both thought Paige Vallis had the means to legitimize the little gold coin that they both coveted. A legal form, signed by the secretary of the treasury more than half a century ago, that would monetize the Double Eagle. One sheet of paper, smuggled out of Egypt by Paige’s father, perhaps, after King Farouk was deposed. The document that together with Queenie’s coin would make their possessor a multimillionaire.

  Why couldn’t there have been two Eagles validated for the great Farouk? An identically matched pair, one of them undiscovered until now? No one had ever been sure of the exact count of the handful of coins smuggled out of the Mint, then or now.

  “I meant your plan for me,” I said.

  Graham Hoyt had studied the lives of the great collectors, the greedy Farouk among them. There were newspaper accounts at the time of the king’s lover, the exotic dancer from Harlem. He had schoolmates like Tripping and Robelon, who also knew the legends and the myths of the accumulated treasures. They’d all heard the story of the tutor who didn’t want gold or jewels, but who busied himself with Farouk’s documents. Then, too, Hoyt must have followed the great auction, the amazing story of a twenty-dollar piece of gold that fetched millions because of the paper that made it legal.

  He was slowing the speed as we neared Shooter’s Island. There was no sign of any human life ahead. No people around, no one to call out to. It looked like a wildlife preserve.

  “Terrible place for an accident,” he said, steering with his left hand and picking up the wrench in his right.

  “The cops won’t buy it. You told your captain I wanted to see the Statue of Liberty, not some goddamn bird sanctuary.” I was fidgeting wildly now, trying in vain to make him worry about people doubting why we were here. I glanced at the desolate scrap of land, nestled off the northern coast of Staten Island, New Jersey’s border in the distance, and nothing but the Kills behind me.

  “Funny thing about that. My captain will probably remember-once I remind him-that when you were on board yesterday I mentioned this little island to you. How curious you were about its spectacular heyday a century ago, when Teddy Roosevelt came here to launch the Meteor III -Kaiser Wilhelm’s racing yacht. You asked to see it and I obliged.”

  “So now you have a problem with the steering, you crash-land on the shore, and I go overboard, which accounts for the terrible crack in my head,” I said, pointing at the wrench. “An accidental drowning.”

  “Save a friend, Alex. Just tell me what Paige gave you, one last time?”

  He was maneuvering the boat into place, looking around behind him to make sure that no one was anywhere near us on the wide side of the Kill, far from landfall in Jersey. On my right, the only living things were egrets and herons, surrounded by tall stands of salt-marsh cordgrass.

  Hoyt was making his last reconnoiter before, I assured myself, he got ready to use the wrench to torment me into some kind of cooperation.

  With my left arm balanced on the side rail, I pulled on the plastic line of the fishing rod that I had found when I cracked my head against it, stowed in its place along the length of the boat. I yanked it until I could grasp the cold metal hook in my right hand. Sitting back on my haunches, I lunged at Hoyt’s left hand, ripping the skin with the long, sharp claw of the silver hook.

  He screamed, and the wrench dropped to the floor as he reflexively grabbed at his bloody left hand with his right. I stabbed again, catching on a bone in his right wrist this time, doubling him over and bringing him to his knees as he shrieked in pain. A cacophony of birds began mocking him from the island, screeching in reply to his ungodly sounds.

  I reached behind me and pulled my feet out of the noose he had made. I looked up and there was blood everywhere. Hoyt had buried his face in his hands and was trying to bite out the hook that was embedded in his wrist.

  I didn’t know how to stop the boat, which was moving slowly past the tip of Shooter’s Island, headed south into the next kill that separated Staten Island from New Jersey. I crawled across the floor and picked up the wrench, striking Hoyt on the back of the head. He collapsed onto the floor and continued to writhe and moan.

  Once on my feet, I checked our distance from the small island preserve, which was blessedly close. I sat on the side of the boat, swung both legs over, and, careful to avoid the engine, kicked away and threw myself into the water. I swam the ten feet to shore, startling all the wildlife, and pulled myself up onto land to catch my breath.

  I looked back and the boat was still moving, farther away, with no sign of Hoyt at the wheel.

  As fast as I could travel in my bare feet, I ran in the opposite direction from which we had come. The brush and rocks were rough on my soles as I tried to pick my way through the under-growth. Bird droppings were everywhere, and my feathered companions squawked and flew off as I invaded their habitat. Gulls circled overhead in protest, and I plugged along as best I could, until I finally caught sight of a tanker coming toward the entrance to Arthur Kill.

  My frenetic gesticulations did nothing to stop the larger vessels that passed through the channel, but someone must have radioed to the authorities the sight of a human trespasser on Shooter’s Island. Fifteen minutes later, an NYPD harbor launch was steaming at me, and I waded out into the chilly water to greet it.

  41

  I only had to say my name and the cops on harbor patrol knew what to do with me. Mercer had called headqua
rters when Hoyt cut off my cell phone, which started a search of the waterfront. Then he’d spoken with the Pirate ‘s captain, who mentioned the Statue of Liberty as a possible destination. Mercer and Mike had met up at the East Thirty-fourth Street heliport and been choppered to Liberty Island to set up a command post there.

  When we docked at the small pier on the southwest side of the statue, Mercer was waiting for me. He lifted me down from the rear of the boat, embraced me, and held me close against him. I couldn’t control my shivering as I rested my head against his chest.

  “Let’s get her inside,” he said, passing through a group of other cops and security agents who wanted to be helpful. “You,” he said, pointing at a National Parks Service officer, “get into the gift shop and-”

  “It’s closed for the day, sir.”

  “Get in it. Bring me a sweatshirt and anything else that’s dry and clean. I don’t care if you have to break in.”

  One of the cops had covered me with his own windbreaker. It hardly mattered. Cold, wet, and numb were feelings I was getting accustomed to this week.

  We walked into the entrance of Fort Wood, the War of 1812 garrison that formed the statue’s base, and Mercer guided me to an office door down a long corridor.

  “What happened?” Mike asked, hanging up the phone and flashing me one of his priceless grins. “Hairdresser couldn’t take you today? Look like that, it’s no wonder you can’t hold on to a man.”

  There were six other cops in the room, working phones and computers, now calling off the search and alerting the patrol boats that I was safe.

  “Tried my best to hook a guy just half an hour ago,” I said, knowing that if I didn’t keep up the banter, I was likely to dissolve into tears. “Did he get away, too?”

  “Glad to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor entirely, blondie. Nope. Mr. Hoyt is in an ambulance on his way to the hospital. Mild concussion and a couple of holes in his hands. The Port Authority cops picked him up on the Jersey side.”

  “C’mon next door,” Mercer said. “There’s an empty office.”

  “Figures,” Mike said. “Coop’s the only little girl I ever knew who preferred Captain Hook to TinkerBell.”

  The parks service guard returned with a large fleece shirt, a huge logo of Liberty’s torch on the front. I went inside first and changed into the dry top before opening the door for Mercer and Mike. They wanted to know what had gone on this afternoon with Graham Hoyt and how I had handled it. I gave them a clinical version. The prospect of what could have happened on the river was overwhelming.

  “You’ve got to call security at Hogan Place,” I said. “The DA’s squad has a skeleton crew on Saturday. Get some of the guys to go down to my office. The key to the file cabinet is in Laura’s desk. Tell them to examine the Yankees jacket that’s behind the Tripping file in the first cabinet, second drawer-check the pockets or, more likely, cut the seams open and look inside the lining.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ll bet that’s where Paige Vallis hid the piece of paper that her father had been holding on to for fifty years, thinking it might someday be his passport to a fortune, if he could ever match it up with the gold coin it would legitimize. The paper Victor Vallis took from King Farouk’s palace.”

  Mercer got on the phone while I settled in and warmed up.

  “But you’d told Graham Hoyt about the kid’s baseball jacket, hadn’t you? I remember you telling him that you were going to give it back to Dulles. Why didn’t he figure it out?”

  I shook my head. “No, I told him the kid left the jacket at the hospital. It was logical for him to think it was vouchered there that same day as police property, as something that came out of the crime scene, maybe had the kid’s blood on it. I never mentioned that it was Paige who took it home from Bellevue with her and held on to it for all those months.”

  “And Paige put the document in your hands because she knew that her life might be in danger.”

  “Probably so.”

  Mercer flipped his phone closed. “They’re on their way down to your office. They’ll call me back as soon as they’ve checked the jacket.”

  Another ranger knocked on the door and came in with a tray of hot coffee and sandwiches left over in the cafeteria at the end of the tourist day.

  Mike stood behind me, massaging my shoulders and neck, trying to calm me while we talked. “You got this all figured out? You sitting in that rowboat with Hoyt and all of a sudden get one of those ‘Holy shit!’ moments?”

  “I think I’ve got a good idea of what was going on, don’t you?”

  “I guess it all got into high gear in the summer of 2002. Sotheby’s holds the auction of the only valid Double Eagle known to exist and sells it for seven million dollars.”

  “And that,” I said, “probably revived old rumors that had swirled around expatriate types after World War Two about the most famous coin in history. The myth of a second Double Eagle. The possibility that Farouk’s delegation had gotten two of the fabled birds out of the U.S. at the same time.”

  “You mean, that had been gossiped about in 1944?” Mercer asked.

  “The feds can tell us that. It was such a great embarrassment to the government that a group of the gold pieces had survived the presidential order to have them destroyed, no one could put an exact count on how many there actually were.”

  “So who was aware of the second Double Eagle?” he asked again.

  Mike answered him. “Graham Hoyt must have known. He made a practice of examining the lives of the world’s greatest collectors, so he certainly knew all about Farouk.”

  “I got another piece of the puzzle today. It was Spike Logan who came to my house on the Vineyard. He was working for Hoyt.”

  Mike let go of my neck and came around to sit in front of me, waiting while I inhaled some of the coffee. “What?”

  “Figure it out. Hoyt gave money to the Schomburg. You think it was an accident that Spike Logan was interviewing Queenie Ransome? Graham Hoyt knew exactly who she was, from his interest in Farouk. He hires Logan to get inside, to gain the poor old dame’s trust. He hires Logan mainly to learn whether that precious piece of gold was actually one of the things she spirited out of the palace.”

  “Will Logan talk to us, you think?” Mike asked.

  I looked over at Mercer. “Call Chip Streeter. When Logan showed up empty-handed after ransacking my house during the hurricane, Hoyt realized he already knew too much. Tell Streeter to expect what’s left of Logan to wash up on South Beach, near Stonewall, any day now.”

  “You think Hoyt sent Logan to spook you during the storm?”

  “Worse than that. It was Hoyt who set me up all week, telling me how bad the hurricane was going to be, why I needed to get to the house. You see,” I said, “I think he really believes I knew what Paige gave me. He thinks she confided in me-since she had been so candid in telling me about accidentally killing the man in her father’s house. Hoyt’s sure I had this priceless piece of paper from the Treasury Department, and that once Paige was dead, I would have kept it with me for safekeeping, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what it was.”

  “He sent Logan to the house to get the document, and get rid of you,” Mercer said.

  “So then there’s Hoyt’s competition,” I said.

  Mike was gnawing on one of the sandwiches. “That would be Peter Robelon. He knew about the coin because his father was top dog in the British Secret Service, attached to Farouk’s group when the king was living in exile. Lionel Webster-the guy who pretended to be Harry Strait-he’s a mercenary who was hired by Robelon.”

  “So you had two professional teams working against poor, whacky Andrew Tripping, who knew the whole story from his own Agency experience but just couldn’t put together a plan that worked,” Mercer said. “You think his effort to meet and date Paige Vallis was a setup?”

  “From the get-go. Same with Lionel’s ‘Harry Strait’ character.” I was certain that was no chance meeting.


  “And Paige?” Mike asked. “You think she knew the whole story?”

  “I can’t imagine she did. I’ll give you some more homework, guys. You remember the burglar who died in the struggle, the one she confronted when she got home after her father’s funeral?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Get phone records and bank records and anything else that left a paper trail. Bet you almost anything that guy was hired by Graham Hoyt. Smart enough to pick an Arab to do the dirty work. That way, if the plan failed, it would look like the breakin was related to the consulting job on terrorism that Mr. Vallis was involved in when he died.”

  “You think he went in to steal the document that made the Double Eagle a legal coin?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then you also think���” Mike was mulling my theory over as he chewed.

  “I’ll bet that Paige found the paper on the burglar’s body-maybe they even fought over it when she interrupted him.”

  “She realized what it was?”

  “I’m not sure that she knew its value or meaning, but she was smart enough to figure out it was so important that someone might kill for it. Who knows, maybe her father had explained its significance, figuring the stolen coin that it referred to would eventually surface somewhere in the world. And that he-and then Paige-was the only person who held the key to turning twenty dollars’ worth of gold into seven or eight million.”

  “Assuming we find the document in Dulles’s jacket, why do you think Paige gave it to you, Alex?” Mercer asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t think she had anyone else in her life she could trust at that point. The evening before she testified, she got a phone call from Harry Strait. So the morning she came to my office, she was scared enough to tell me something about him. But she didn’t give me the baseball jacket then.”

  “Wasn’t Strait in the courtroom, too?”

  “Yeah. She gets on the stand and not only is she facing Andrew Tripping, who was way too interested in her father and his career for it to be coincidental, and there’s Strait again.”