Lethal Legacy (14 page)
Authors: Fairstein Linda
“You want a bite?” Mike asked, holding his hot dog
out to me.
“Thanks, I had lunch at my desk.” I took a napkin
from his hand and wiped the mustard from the corner of his mouth.
Mike grinned at me. “The guy must be a real gent
if you’re cleaning me up for him.”
“Very upper-crust, this Mr. Herrick. He’s English,
he’s rich, and he’s very proper. I thought it would be refreshing for him to
meet you.”
“Four fifty-five Central Park West. If he’s so
rich, how come he’s living in the DMZ?” The area that bordered the park on the
Upper West Side, north of Ninety-sixth Street, has seen more than its share of
violent crime.
“According to the search I did today, when that
landmark building was renovated and apartments went on the market three years
ago,” I said, “Alger Herrick paid eight million dollars for the most coveted
space in the joint.”
“And just seven years ago,” Mike said, shaking his
head, “it was like a big old haunted house. The deadbeat hotel next door was a
crack den and it was worth your life to walk down the block without being
robbed by junkies or hit up by prostitutes.”
“So you know the building?”
“Had a nightmare of a case in four fifty-five back
then. Three teenage boys from the ’hood killed up on the third floor, execution
style, ’cause they were playing in there and witnessed a buy. The place had
such a spooky history, most of the neighbors would cross the street rather than
pass by too close to it. Only things inside were stray cats, dead pigeons, and
half-dead crackheads.”
“I’d never heard of it until I just read the story
about Herrick.”
“It was the New York Cancer Hospital in the
1880s,” Mike said. “The first one of its kind in the country to devote itself
to the care of cancer patients.”
“The photo of it online looks more like a French
château. The article said it was built with money from the Astor family. I
guess they really did round up a load of real estate.”
“Wait till you see it. It’s got turrets on each
side, round towers like in a castle,” Mike said. “The architect actually
designed them on the theory that germs and dirt wouldn’t collect in corners. I
can’t exactly say we had a guided tour, but Peterson and I got to know every
nook and cranny in the place. It was the predecessor to today’s Memorial
Hospital on the East Side.”
Mike’s late fiancée, Valerie Jacobsen, had been
treated at Memorial a couple of years before—successfully—for breast cancer,
only to be killed in a skiing accident. During those months, he had applied
himself to learning as much about the disease as he knew about military
history.
“And now it’s been transformed into elegant co-op
apartments,” I said. “Maybe it’ll bring the rest of the neighborhood along with
it.”
“Everything in New York used to be something
else,” Mike said, tossing his trash into a pail on the corner as we waited for
the light to change. “These old buildings have stories, Coop. They’re here to
tell us who we were, who we used to be.”
“Herrick’s home seems to have mostly sad stories.”
“The mother of one of the boys who was killed
there became a one-woman campaign to clean it up. Learned everything there was
to know about its history. She told me she used to sit in the same desolate
room where her kid was offed, just staring out at the park, thinking about how
many people had come to the end of their lives in that forsaken place.”
“Back when it was built,” I said, “cancer was
incurable. Treatment was just palliative.”
“Patients went to that hospital to die, eased by
morphine and champagne, Sunday carriage rides in the park,” Mike said. “Story
was that the hospital whiskey bill was higher than the one for medical
supplies. Even Marie Curie came to visit.”
“She did?” I asked as we crossed the broad street,
dodging taxis and buses, to get to Mike’s car.
“The Curies discovered radium in 1898, and doctors
here pioneered the first techniques to burn cancers away with it. The largest
repository of radium in the country was kept in a steel vault right in that
building.”
“I don’t know that I could live in a place like
that,” I said. “Too many ghosts.”
“Life goes on,” Mike said. “The Octagon—the old
lunatic asylum on Roosevelt Island—has been turned into a housing development,
and the building where more than a hundred people died in the Triangle Waist
Company fire in 1911 is a biology lab at NYU now. Like a phoenix from the
ashes.”
I had just cleared the passenger seat of half a
dozen empty soda cans, a tie, a book on the Crimean War, and a gross of Tic-Tac
boxes when I heard Mike’s beeper go off.
He looked at the display and slammed the car door.
“It’s Peterson.”
My cell was in my hand. I speed-dialed Mike’s boss
and handed him the phone.
“Hey, Loo, what’s up?” Mike listened to the
answer. “Got it. Yeah, she just bought me lunch at the medical examiner’s
outdoor café. We’re on it.”
“Detour?” I asked.
“Quick stop on Ninety-third Street,” Mike said.
“Tina’s apartment? Why?”
“Because Billy Schultz played hookey from his
office today. He’s working from home.”
“So?”
Mike was driving up First Avenue, weaving between
cars to catch the lights while he talked. “Precinct guys spent the morning
canvassing the buildings that face the garden behind the apartment. Got a
rear-window thing going on. Remember Billy told us he hadn’t seen much of Tina
since the summer? Well, the little old lady who takes the fresh air on her fire
escape saw Billy out back with Tina over the weekend. Saturday, right around
dusk.”
“Doing what?”
“Digging.”
“You mean gardening?”
“I would have said it if that’s what I meant. She
says digging. With a great big shovel and mounds of dirt. No pansies, no
tulips, no vegetables.”
“Why didn’t he tell us?” We were cruising past the
United Nations, and Mike put on his whelper to cut a course through the
slow-moving traffic. “Did you see any disturbance in the garden?”
“Actually, Coop, I was distracted by the broad on
the floor with the bad headache. I thought there was a messy patch in the yard,
and I just figured it was where the perp pulled the armillary out of the ground
to whack her. Anyway, Crime Scene will have photos,” Mike said. “Peterson’s got
a uniform outside his apartment, rope-a-doping him into answering questions
about all the other tenants till we get there. And I buried the lead.”
“What’s that?” I held the dashboard as Mike
slammed on the brakes to avoid an Asian deliveryman, then accelerated again.
“That gas mask the cops picked up a few doors away
from the building the night Barr was attacked?” Mike asked.
“Don’t look at me. Look at the road,” I said.
“What about it?”
“Preliminary on the DNA inside the mask. There’s a
mixture, of course,” Mike said. “I’d expect that with something like a
mask—especially if it isn’t brand new. And one of the profiles matches Billy
Schultz.”
“Are you serious? I never thought of him that way
for a minute. He was wearing the damn thing?”
“Skin cells, sweat. I don’t know what else they
got.”
Once we passed the turn-off for the Fifty-ninth
Street Bridge, we made the left onto Ninety-third Street in less than three
minutes.
I could see an officer talking to Schultz on the
sidewalk as we pulled up in front of the building. He looked over when he heard
the car door shut and started up the steps as Mike approached.
“Yo, Billy,” Mike said. “I need a couple of
minutes of your time.”
Schultz was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, sleeves
rolled up, and he frowned as he checked his watch before telling Mike that he
had to get back upstairs for a conference call. “I can’t talk to you now.”
“A guy could get a complex. Only person who’s ever
happy to see me is my mother,” Mike said. “It’s just a little thing.”
“Really, I’ve got to make a call.”
“This Minerva Hunt thing’s got me puzzled.” Mike
was doing his best Columbo imitation, a look of complete befuddlement on his
face. He seemed too dense to be able to figure out much of anything. “When you
phoned 911, you told the operator you thought the dead woman was Minerva Hunt,
right?”
Schultz looked annoyed. “That’s what I said.”
“That you’d seen her in the building on other
occasions.”
“Exactly.”
“You were standing with me when the
real
Minerva Hunt walked into the kitchen, weren’t you?”
“In the garden, yes.”
“Did you see her?”
“I did.”
“I’m just trying to get straight which of the two
women you’d seen around the building before that night. That’s all I want to
know.”
“The way you came speeding up the street, I
thought it was something more urgent,” Schultz said, seemingly relieved that
was the reason for our visit. “I—uh—I was mistaken when I called for help. The
outfit, the general physique, the bag with her initials. I couldn’t really see
her face—it was such a mess—I just jumped to that conclusion. As soon as I saw
that other woman talking to you, I knew I’d been wrong.”
“Very helpful, Billy. I didn’t mean to hold you
up,” Mike said with a wave of his hand. “What are you growing this time of
year? Pumpkins?”
“Excuse me?”
“In your garden. My lieutenant asked me to find
out what’s in bloom.”
“It’s all put to bed, Detective. Come back next
spring and see what we’ve got,” Schultz said, heading up the stairs.
“The big dig, Billy. Last Saturday. What was that
about?”
Schultz continued on his way.
“People saw you with Tina out in the yard. You
want to tell me what you were doing together?”
Schultz stopped but didn’t answer.
“Don’t be going back out there for a while, Billy.
Cops are on their way to seal it up now, till we have a chance to check it out.
It’s off-limits.”
The man turned to look at us, clearly displeased.
“Tina asked to borrow my shovel, okay? I didn’t ask her why. I didn’t need to
know. I took it down to her and talked for a minute or so. That’s her little
plot. I don’t care what she does with it.”
“But you told us you hadn’t talked to her—” I
said.
“Maybe I just forgot. It was such an insignificant
exchange, I simply forgot.”
Mike took a step closer and put his hand on the
railing of the staircase. “Easy to understand, Billy. A lot easier to
understand than the fact that you left your droppings in that freaking mask you
ran around in the other night.”
“What are you talking about? That’s not my mask,”
Schultz said, angered. He raised his voice and his face flushed.
“The lab got your DNA sample last night, and they
say it looks pretty good that you were the guy who had his mug in that
contraption. You forget to tell us that, too? Why don’t we take this
conversation inside, Billy. Your place or mine?”
“Don’t come any closer, Detective. Yeah, did I see
the fireman—the guy who ran out of here—throw something on the ground? Sure I
did. It was only two, three car lengths up the street. Yeah, I picked it up and
looked at it—and maybe I did just hold it up over my face. I couldn’t figure
how he could see out of it. Then I just dropped it back down. Figured your
buddies would pick it up.”
“I think you’d be doing yourself a favor if you
came up to the squad and sat down to go over all this a little more carefully,
you know?”
“I’ll do you a bigger favor,” Schultz said,
opening the vestibule door and shouting before he disappeared inside. “I’ll
have my lawyer call you.”
A doorman admitted us at the entrance of the
elegantly restored Gothic building on Central Park West and directed us to the
concierge.
“We’re here to see Alger Herrick,” I said, taking
in the opulence of the décor in the lobby. The architectural detail of the last
century had been carefully preserved, but there were discreet signs pointing to
an indoor lap pool and the spa.