Lethal Legacy (48 page)

Mercer had his arm around Shalik’s shoulder,
trying to cut him a deal.

“We’re taking him from here, Terry,” Mike said.

“I could lose my shield for this, anything happens
to the kid. Rules are different for juvies.”

“I’ll stay with him,” I said. “I’ll go to the
judge myself.”

She walked back to her car, got inside, and
slammed the door, while Mike and I followed Mercer and Shalik down the dark
side street until we hit Fifth Avenue and went around the block.

“How are we going to raise the fat bastard?” Mike
asked. “Yesterday he wouldn’t even take my call.”

“Let Alex do the talking. He won’t blow her off so
fast,” Mercer said.

“You’d better script it for me.”

“Tell him you’ve got something urgent to discuss
with Minerva,” Mike said. “He must have driven her to Jane Eliot’s apartment.
Let him know the old lady’s talking about what she gave to Minerva. He’ll want
to collect on that tidbit. Makes him look useful. Eliot’s safe, isn’t she,
Mercer?”

“Cops are with her in the hospital room. Not a
problem.”

“If TARU can find his cell phone pings, we’re in
business,” Mike said, as he and I got into the front seat of the car. The
Technical Assistance Response Unit had the latest gadgetry and technology to
solve almost every communication and surveillance problem investigators needed.

“Who’s this? Hey, Sonny—Mike Chapman here. I got
two known numbers; one’s going to place a call to the other. The caller’s in
the car with me, midtown. If I give you both, can you pinpoint the other guy’s
location for me?”

The answer was short and obviously positive.

“Ready for me? First one is Assistant District
Attorney Alexandra Cooper,” Mike said, dictating my number. “The receiver is
Carmine Rizzali. Yeah, used to be on the job. I need to find him pronto. The
nearest cell phone tower would be great. Coop’ll dial him to see if he picks
up. I’ll stay on with you.”

I punched Carmine’s number into my key pad. My
caller ID would be blocked, so he’d have to answer in order to know who was
calling at this late hour.

One ring and Carmine spoke into the phone.
“Hullo?”

“Carmine? It’s Alex Cooper. I met you with Mike—”

“Is this more of his bullshit?”

“No, no. This is something urgent that I’m trying
to speak to Ms. Hunt about, just between the two of us. I think Mike’s on his
way to her home now—”

“What is he, nuts? It’s the middle of a Saturday
night. She ain’t even there.”

“Look, there’s a woman who lives in the Village,
on Bedford Street. She’s made a complaint that Minerva Hunt stole something
from her. I…uh…I—” I held my hand out, palm upward, trying to figure a
direction to go.

Mike just nodded at me and mouthed the words
You’re
doing fine.

“She didn’t steal nothing. I drove her there
myself. The lady had a present for her. All very civilized.”

“I think Mike’s blowing this totally out of
proportion,” I said. “I disagree with him completely. I thought you might want
to give her a heads-up, and maybe I can set up a meeting with her tomorrow.”

He wasn’t ready to trust me.

“Is Minerva with you now?”

“Cute, Ms. Cooper. Real cute. Then you tell the
homicide dick whatever I tell you, so I’m just the schmuck who’s out of a job.”

He disconnected me the second he finished the
sentence.

“Sonny? You got a location for me?” Mike asked.
“Thanks, buddy. I owe you big-time.”

He dropped the phone on the seat and started the
engine, making the turn from Forty-second Street onto Fifth Avenue.

“You did good, Blondie. It seems that Carmine took
the odd couple downtown—Second Avenue, between Second and Third streets.
Nearest cell tower is in front of Provenzano’s, a funeral home.”

“A little late for a condolence call, isn’t it?”
Mercer said.

Traffic moved well on the straight run south to
the point at which Broadway intersected Fifth Avenue, then Mike wound his way
farther east.

As we crossed Third Street, I could see the
limousine parked on the west side of Second Avenue.

Mike pulled over to the curb, several cars behind
Carmine, and turned off the engine and headlights. “What do you think, Mercer?
Him sitting in the limo all these hours, don’t you think all that weight would
have flattened one of his tires by now?”

“I could do that,” our young charge said.

“You stay with me, Shalik.”

“C’mon, Coop,” Mike said. “Let’s all have a look
around.”

As we got out, Mike walked ahead and peered into
the window of Carmine’s car. Then he kneeled down. I tried to keep Shalik
occupied while Mike scored one of the tires with his Swiss Army knife.

“I don’t think he should eat such heavy meals at
night,” Mike said, coming back to get us. “He’s sleeping like a baby. Least
they can’t make such a quick getaway if Minerva and Travis aren’t happy to see
us.”

Mercer was on the sidewalk, checking out the block
on either side of the avenue. “There’s a pizza joint, a Thai restaurant, and a
neighborhood pub. We can look in each of those.”

He kept one arm on Shalik’s shoulder, and I walked
on the other side of the kid, closer to the buildings. We watched as Mike tried
the front door of the funeral home, but it was locked and all the lights were
out.

We passed an alleyway fronted by a wrought-iron
gate, and kept going. The night was clear and getting cooler. Mike went into
each of the open restaurants and bars on both sides of the street but didn’t
spot Hunt or Forbes in any of them.

“Go another block north,” Mercer said. Mike did,
while I tried to find out from Shalik whether he had gotten inside Travis
Forbes’s apartment before getting caught.

By the time Mike doubled back, the kid had
described how the cops had arrived and nabbed him just after he’d jimmied the
back door and wriggled in.

“No trace of them,” Mike said. “Time to interrupt
Carmine’s dream cycle and have a chat. Worst he can do is call and alert them
that we’re here to break up the party.”

We turned around and started walking back toward
the limousine.

The light from the street lamp bounced off the
gold paint on the narrow archway above the wrought-iron fence that closed off
the alley to my left.

I read the words on the large sign, first to
myself and then aloud:
NEW YORK MARBLE CEMETERY
.
INCORPORATED IN
. 1831

Below them was a smaller tablet, also engraved. I
held on to one of the bars of the fence as I read again:
A
PLACE OF INTERMENT FOR GENTLEMEN
.

“Gents like Jasper Hunt Jr. and his cronies,” Mike
said. “Get the kid in the car, Coop. I’m going in.”

FORTY-FOUR

“Stay here, Alex,” Mercer said. “I don’t know
how Mike thinks he’s going to get past this gate.”

Shalik Samson grabbed two of the vertical iron
bars with his hands and tried to shake them. “You put me on your shoulders,” he
said to Mercer, “I could be over that easy.”

“Getting you out might be the problem. Let go of
those.”

Traffic was light on this part of the avenue, and
there were no pedestrians to bother us.

“You think somebody inside?” Shalik asked, craning
his neck to look up at Mercer. “It look like a little park in there.”

Mike was studying the lock, which was a single
keyhole. There was no sophisticated equipment in place to protect the entrance,
which seemed well groomed and tended.

“Pretty clever. If you’re going to break in to
someplace right on the street,” he said, “dress Travis Forbes up like a cop to
give you cover.”

Shalik was back against the bars, standing on the
sharply pointed pieces that jutted up from the base of the heavy gate.

“Cut it out, Shalik. You’ll hurt yourself,” Mike
said. “Coop, I told you to put him in the car.”

“Yo, look! It ain’t even locked no more.”

The teenager had reached his slim arm between the
bars and retrieved a metal rod that must have temporarily held the bars in
place. Someone had indeed broken in to the old cemetery, and in all likelihood
was still somewhere inside.

Shalik pushed on the right side of the gate, and
it creaked open against his weight. Before I could stop him, he ran ahead down
the alleyway, which was bordered on both sides by brick walls.

Mercer gave chase and overtook him twenty feet
away, where the passage opened onto a large grassy area, almost the length of a
football field but half as wide. He put his hand up to his lips and told the
boy to be quiet.

I closed the gate behind me and caught up with
Mike, who had stopped to read a plaque on the wall.

“What does it say?” I asked as he turned away and
headed toward Mercer.

“The oldest nonsectarian cemetery in the city. A
hundred and fifty solid marble vaults,” he said, breaking into a trot. “All of
them were built underground as a health precaution against nineteenth-century
contagious disease.”

We were suddenly in a gardened oasis in the middle
of the East Village that I had never known existed.

The tall walls around the open green space seemed
to be made completely of stone, many parts obscured by the bushes and trees
that had grown up around the borders.

Mercer was deputizing Shalik, trying to extract a
promise from him to stay close and obey directions.

Mike jogged along the perimeter of the north wall,
stopping at smooth marble tablets to note names of the occupants of the
subterranean vaults. I was just a few steps behind him.

“Charles Van Zandt. Uriah Scribner. James
Tallmadge,” Mike said, stopping to run his hand over the names, one above the
other, as he read them from the engravings.

Ten feet farther along, another tablet, with numbers
I assumed corresponded to the graves below. Some listed three or four vaults,
though only one or two individuals’ names had been added to the list of the
dead.

There were Auchinclosses and Randolphs, Phelpses
and Quackenbushes, grand names that together created a history of New York
City. I paused at the marker for the infant son of Frederick Law Olmsted, the
man who had landscaped Central Park.

Mike crossed to the south wall and continued his
search. Before he had moved very far along, he signaled me to join him.

“Here they are, kid. Jasper Hunt. Jasper Hunt
Jr.,” he said, showing me the names of father and son, and their wives, the
first dates for the family patriarch etched in the wall more than a century
ago. “Four Hunts, six burial vaults.”

Beneath the neatly carved names and dates were the
numbers: 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66.

“They were obviously buried here originally,
before the reinterment,” I said.

“And Minerva must know what’s in Millbrook—and
what isn’t. She’d certainly have access to the family digs up on the property.”

“So maybe when they moved the bodies, nobody gave
any thought to whether there was anything in these other two vaults they
owned—whether any books were interred with the Hunt bones. There was certainly
no record of other descendants on this plaque.”

“Wait here with Mercer,” Mike said.

“What are you going to do?”

“There’s got to be a way to get below to the
vaults.”

“Mike, let’s get help.”

“And if something bad’s going on right now? You
going to live with yourself if somebody’s down there, left for dead?”

Mercer was motioning to Mike. “Check out that
corner.”

The dim light filtering in from the street and
wind blowing the bushes played tricks with my vision. It looked like Mercer was
right—that there was a hatch open in the southwest end of the enclosed area, a
wooden door of some sort, against the far wall of the garden.

Mike sprinted forward and I followed, practically
slamming into him when he stopped short just ten feet from the spot.