Lethal Legacy (11 page)

“It helps if you ride underground every now and
then, even though you act like you’re allergic to public transportation.” Mike
hummed the
Jeopardy!
music to time me out. “Hurry it up.”

“What is forty-five miles an hour?” Mercer asked.

“Not a bad guess, Mr. Wallace, but not the right
one. Don’t be thinking of that City Hall station, Coop. You got big curves like
that and grade, the steel wheels go much slower.”

“Thanks for the reminder. An afternoon with you two
on that platform was enough to keep me in taxis for a lifetime. I’m going with
thirty-five.”

“And once again, you would be wrong, ma’am. What
is fifty-five miles per hour, folks? I’ll trust you to pay up after we eat.
It’s a speed rarely reached because it requires long, uninterrupted
acceleration, but that’s what they’re made to do. My pop used to ride me up
front on the trains when I was a kid. Loved all that stuff. No subways in the
suburbs, kid. That’s one of your problems.”

My privileged upbringing in Westchester County,
along with my education at Wellesley College and the University of Virginia
School of Law, had been made possible by the loving encouragement of my mother
and father, Maude and Benjamin Cooper. In addition to her long legs and green eyes,
I’d inherited a fraction of the extraordinary compassion Maude exhibited as a
nurse. My father and his partner’s great contribution to cardiac surgery—a
small plastic invention called the Cooper-Hoffman valve—had endowed me with
more tangible assets. Despite the enormous differences in our backgrounds, I
had never made better friends than Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace.

“Fortunately,” I said, “it’s way too late tonight
to ask what you think my other problems are.”

I pushed the soup bowl away and concentrated on my
scotch. The image of Karla Vastasi’s crushed head would be with me all through
the night.

“There’ll be no more picking on you for now,”
Mercer said. “Soon as Mike finishes his dinner, I’ll drop you at home.”

My feelings about Mike had grown more complicated
over time. His teasing and humor got me through the worst situations
imaginable—some devastatingly traumatic to witness, like the one this evening,
and others actually life-threatening moments in which he and I had faced off
against deranged killers. Occasionally I questioned whether my concern for
maintaining our productive professional relationship stopped me from exploring
the attraction I felt for him.

“I’ve got the autopsy in the morning,” Mike said.
It was part of his duties to attend the medical examiner’s procedure. “You’ll
call me when you finish up with Battaglia?”

“Will do,” I said, getting up from the table.

“I hope they’ve got good insurance at the morgue,”
Mike said, taking a last slug of his drink. “Between that murder weapon and the
little psalm book, there’s enough burglary bait there to tempt the dead.”

NINE

I was surprised to hear voices when I
approached the door to Battaglia’s suite. I had assumed that I would beat him
to his office, even though he told me to be there at eight a.m. Rose Malone
wasn’t at her desk yet, so I turned the corner to present myself.

The district attorney stopped midsentence, a cigar
gripped between the knuckles of two fingers. “C’mon in, Alexandra. Figure out
how to get that damn coffeepot working and then we’ll get started. Jill, I’d
like you to meet Alex Cooper.”

“Hello, Alex. I’m Jill Gibson.”

I walked behind the conference table at which the
pair were seated, measured the coffee, and started the machine, reminded of how
much Rose had spoiled Battaglia.

“Good to meet you,” Jill said.

The tabloids were spread out in front of
Battaglia. I had picked up copies on my way downtown and seen that the item
about Karla Vastasi’s murder was buried in a single paragraph near the end of
the news section. The difference in status between the housekeeper and the
heiress had put this story on the back burner and given us breathing room to
work on the case without a media frenzy.

“Jill’s an old friend, Alex. Came here two years
ago from Yale, where she ran the Beinecke Rare Books Library,” he said. “She’s
the deputy chief executive at our NYPL now—the number three job—and the first
woman in that position.”

“That’s impressive.”

There was a quiet elegance about Jill Gibson. She
was probably in her mid-fifties, with frosted hair and an easy smile.

“I want you to describe what happened last night,”
Battaglia said, planting the unlit cigar in his mouth. “It’s okay, Alex. I’ve
already told Jill the little I know.”

The DA had caught my momentary hesitation. It was
unlike him to debrief me about a pending case in the presence of an outsider.
It was clear that Jill Gibson had his confidence and might even be the person
who alerted him to the situation earlier in the week about Tina Barr.

I described the events from the time Mercer, Mike,
and I had arrived uptown to wait for Barr to get home. Battaglia double-tasked,
making notes in the margin of a wiretap application that one of my colleagues
from the Frauds Bureau had submitted for his signature. He didn’t look up until
I mentioned Minerva Hunt’s name.

Then he asked Jill, “Do you know Minerva?”

“No, I don’t. I’ve seen her around from time to
time, but we’ve never been introduced.”

“She’s not involved with the library?”

“Not in any major way. Her father’s still on the
board, and she’s called in occasionally on matters that concern him. He was
chair at one time, as you probably know. Jasper Hunt the Third. A hugely
powerful force there for quite a while, in the 1980s and ’90s. And Tally, her
brother, is also on the board. From what I understand, Minerva has other
interests.”

The super rich have plenty of avenues for
charitable giving, whether for causes about which they are passionate or for
structuring the tax benefits of their estates. Art, ancient or avant-garde;
dance, classical or modern; museums, paintings or extinct animals, cultures or
ethnic heritage; and poverty, local or global, are among the competing
enterprises that attract major donors.

“I think she’s disease,” Battaglia said, pointing
at the coffeepot. “Used to be ballet, but I’m pretty sure Minerva Hunt is
running the capital campaign for one of the hospitals.”

Naming opportunities at medical centers for
pavilions and wings and research facilities were fast becoming ways for baby
boomers to insure a jump to the head of the line when a family member needed a
heart transplant or an experimental drug for an aggressive illness.

“Ms. Hunt told me her father was very ill,” I
said. “Do you know what’s wrong?”

“He’s a recluse,” Gibson said. “Old and frail.
That’s what I’ve been told.”

“I haven’t seen Jasper Hunt out and about for the
better part of two years now,” Battaglia said, putting down the sheaf of
papers. “Go back to the murder scene. Tell me exactly what went on. How did
Minerva react when she arrived?”

I took Battaglia through the details of the entire
evening, including the way Karla Vastasi and Minerva Hunt were dressed. I
described the conversation at the squad with Mike and Mercer as I got up to
pour coffee for the three of us.

There was only one thing I left out of the
conversation. I didn’t mention the Bay Psalm Book. I didn’t know Jill Gibson or
the reason the district attorney trusted her enough to include her in this
meeting. The little jeweled treasure was a crucial piece of evidence, and I
needed to figure out its connection to the institution where Gibson worked
before I leaked its existence.

“Does Chapman have a hunch?” Mike had made arrests
in some of the most high-profile murder cases in Manhattan, and Battaglia
respected his unerring street sense.

“Nothing he was ready to let me in on, Paul. There
was some discussion with Minerva about things that might have been in the
apartment. I know Mike vouchered some property to be analyzed at the lab. At
least one book, I’m pretty sure.”

Jill Gibson seemed more interested in that fact
than did Battaglia.

“But no sign of the young woman who lived there?”
he asked.

“Nothing. She’s a librarian, Jill. Her name is
Tina Barr. I thought perhaps you might know her,” I said.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” she said, seemingly
uninterested in the missing girl. “What kind of books did the detectives find?”

This was a no-win situation for me. If I withheld
information that Battaglia wanted Jill Gibson to know, he would be furious with
me. But if I disclosed something that was not going to be made public at this
point in time, who knew what Gibson would do with the information?

“Is there an actual Hunt collection at the
library?” I asked. “I heard Mike say it had something to do with that.”

Jill Gibson pulled her chair up to the table.
“Their family helped establish the library, Alex, more than a century ago. The
collection they’ve amassed is enormously valuable. We make it a practice not to
do anything to disturb the Hunts,” she said, making her point to Battaglia.

“Well, I’m certainly going to have to meet with
each of them,” I said.

“We’ll talk about that after Jill leaves, Alex.
She and I have had a couple of meetings in the last two weeks about some
problems they’ve been experiencing at the library. It may be that this case
isn’t an isolated event.”

Now Battaglia had my complete attention. “What
kind of problems?”

“Do you know the library?” Jill asked.

“I think it’s the most magnificent building in New
York City,” I said, refilling our mugs. The Carrère and Hastings Beaux Art
masterpiece, with its massive triple-arched portico, dominated Fifth Avenue at
the corner of Forty-second Street.

“You’ve spent time there?”

“I majored in English literature when I was at
college. I was fortunate enough to be admitted for a month between semesters to
do research for my senior thesis.”

“You might want to know why the Hunts are so
important to us, Alex. Why we try to tiptoe around them, keep them out of the
headlines,” Jill Gibson said. “I’d also be happy to give you private access to
their collection. It’s got some extraordinary pieces.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“New York City came late to the idea of
establishing a great library,” Jill said. “The French had the Bibliothèque
nationale and in London the fabulous domed Reading Room was built at the
British Museum.

“These institutions were symbols of civilized
societies and cultures, founded in ancient seats of national government, with
documents and books descended from kings and noblemen over the centuries.
Americans, on the other hand, were struggling to emerge from the shadows of
colonialism, with no comparable government funding for these purposes. By the
1890s, our domestic rivals for intellectual prestige—Boston and Chicago—had
already built central libraries, and in Washington, the Library of Congress
moved out of its home in the Capitol to the first of its own buildings.”

“We had no libraries here before that time?”
Battaglia asked.

“There are two very different kinds of facilities,
Paul. One is what’s called a circulating system.”

“Elevate the masses by giving the people books,” I
said, recalling my nineteenth-century history. “Advancement through
self-improvement. Weren’t they usually the work of well-to-do ladies in their
communities, making sure that poor little girls had wholesome stories to read?”

“Exactly. They’re what led to the branch
libraries, here and all over the country. The other type is the well-endowed
reference library. That’s how the NYPL developed—as a research facility, in
which the books are never allowed to leave the building. We were a gift to the
city from some of the richest men in America.”

“Who founded it?” I asked.

“It began with private collections. The largest
was put together by the first American millionaire, John Jacob Astor,” Jill
said.

“Jasper Hunt’s business partner.”

“In some ventures, Alex, that’s correct. Astor
loved literature and had many literary friends. In fact, Washington Irving was
the first president of the Astor Library. By the 1890s, the collection John
Jacob had bequeathed to his younger son, William Black-house Astor, had more
than a quarter of a million books.”