Terminal City (23 page)

“How far does Terminal City extend to the east and west?” Mike asked. “The UN is four blocks from here—due east.”

“Sit tight. Gleeson’s gone to get us an expert,” Mercer said.

“Ironic that this neighborhood was known for its slaughterhouses,” I said. “It’s like déjà vu, with humans on the chopping block now.”

“Always looking at the bright side, kid.”

“Both of you need to be patient. We can manage this,” Mercer said. “Girl gets ID’d tomorrow, that’s my bet. We learn our way around. The motive becomes more obvious.”

“Yeah, like laying all those railroad tracks straight in a line,” Mike said, checking his watch, then picking up the remote and clicking it at the wall of monitors. “The yellow brick road will take Coop right to Oz. What we need is a wizard to tell us the strategy.”

Eight television sets powered on. Mike played with the controls until he had all the screens set to the channel with
Jeopardy!

In the early days, when we’d first worked together, I often took the high road and reminded Mike that there was a body in the next room, still warm, that made his obsession with betting on the final question rather chilling. There was no changing him, and the habit he relished was something that all of his colleagues tolerated. Mercer and I had actually grown to enjoy the competition.

“Right after the commercial,” he said, raising the volume.

“There’s got to be some central place in here with surveillance cameras that capture the terminal interior,” Mercer said.

“Gleeson says there’s a room with monitors that security staffs. But there are too many blind spots—staircases, ramps, archways—to capture every bit of the place at any given time.”

“So if you’ve got an insider’s knowledge of the building, you might know how to avoid getting caught on film, right?” I said.

“No such thing as film, Coop.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Did you hear the man? The main concourse is thirty-six thousand square feet. That’s just the start of things for us. It’s not like looking for a needle in a haystack. More like a needle in an iceberg,” Mike said. “Whoa. Here’s Trebek.”

“Two of you are tied for the lead here, ladies,” Alex Trebek said. “Let’s see if we can break that open and find a winner.”

The “card” on the large board flipped aside and crisp white letters appeared on the cobalt-blue field. “Tonight’s category, ladies, is Native American history.”

“I’m golden,” Mike said, as the three contestants screwed up their faces waiting for the answer to be revealed. “I’ll go forty on this.”

“Didn’t know it was one of your areas of expertise,” I said.

“I’ve got a better chance than you, babe. The answer’s not going to be some great piece of literature, is it? Or a Motown hit? Geronimo and the Miracles. Or a classic film noir? You’ll be out of your element.”

“Sometimes the depth of your political correctness takes my breath away.”

“It’s a realistic risk assessment,” Mike said, checking his pocket for cash. “Just saying I can take you on Pontiac’s Conspiracy or the Trail of Tears or the Yamasee War. Double or nothing, am I right, Mercer?”

Mercer laughed. “I’m holding at forty.”

“Native Americans have known what terrorism is since 1492, Coop. I’m totally on their side. Manifest Destiny be damned.”

“Forty it is for me, too.”

“Yellow-bellied. Both of you.”

Trebek looked up as the answer to the night’s final question appeared on the screen:
OSAGE TRIBESWOMAN WHO BECAME AMERICA’S FIRST PRIMA BALLERINA
. Trebek read it aloud.

Mike rolled his money into a ball and threw it at me. “Now that really sucks. That’s a very misleading header. The question isn’t about history, it’s culture. And I don’t know anything about culture.”

“Who is Maria Tallchief?” I said, flattening the bills on the conference table and counting them to make sure I had it all. “I keep offering to take you to the ballet with me.”

“Too many swans, too little time.”

I had taken ballet lessons since early childhood, still preferring my hours in the studio every Saturday to a workout at the gym. I loved the discipline of dance, the way the music always elevated my spirit, and the grace of the movement.

Two of the three contestants, both in their sixties, were also right. The young computer programmer who had briefly been tied for first place had left the question blank.

“So you’re the winner after all,” Trebek said, congratulating the woman on her third victory. “Betty Marie Tallchief came out of Oklahoma, to star in New York, Paris, and Monte Carlo—both an inspiration to and wife of the great George Balanchine. Congratulations to you, Mrs.—”

Mike shut down the televisions. “If you spent half as much time on your back, Coop, as you do dancing on your toes, you’d be a much more interesting woman.”

“And you lose all your charm the minute you open your mouth, Detective,” I said, pushing back my chair. “It’s not exactly like you’re channeling Nick Charles, is it?”

“Chill, guys,” Mercer said. “What we need are the keys to Terminal City.”

Mike’s phone rang. It was obvious from the conversation that the caller was Rocco Correlli.

“The ME’s going to stitch the girl up and get some photos ready for the eleven o’clock news. It won’t be very good-looking, but we’ve got to know who she is.”

The door opened and Bruce Gleeson reentered with an older man, whom Gleeson introduced to us as Don Ledger. “We got lucky,” Gleeson said. “I grabbed Don just as he was leaving his office for the night.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Mike said.

“Same here, Detective.”

“Don’s what we call our living history. He’s worked in the maintenance department since he was eighteen. He turned seventy-eight two weeks ago.”

“Sixty years?” Mercer said. “Hats off, sir.”

“You do what you love, Mr. Wallace. If you’re fortunate, that is.”

“Amen to that. Would you mind sitting down and letting us ask you some questions about the terminal?”

Ledger was shorter than I, with a slim build and a headful of white hair. He wore hearing aids and had reading glasses in the pocket of his work shirt, and I doubted that his teeth were his own. But he was warm and good-natured, eager to help us get a picture of Grand Central.

“Happy to try,” Ledger said, taking a seat.

Mike looked over his shoulder at Bruce Gleeson. “Were you able to come up with a blueprint of the place for us?”

“Not yet.” Gleeson winced. “The building was completely renovated more than a decade ago. There are a good number of interior structural changes that won’t be accounted for in the original plans. But we should have copies for you to work from by morning.”

“You mean there have been changes big enough to make a difference in looking for people who are inside the joint?” Mike asked.

“Oh, yeah. There were entire walls taken down; there were staircases constructed. The one on the concourse that leads up to the Apple store? That didn’t exist until a decade ago. It was part of the original plan but it wasn’t built till the terminal was restored. The original builders ran short on money for the Italian marble, so the blueprints will only get you so far,” Ledger said, poking his finger to the side of his head. “You got a few of us with institutional memory.”

“Good. Let’s get started now, but then we’ll meet you back here at eight
A.M.
,” Mike said. “You hang with us for a few days, okay?”

“If Mr. Gleeson frees me up to assist you, I’ll be here.”

“Anything the police need, Ledger. That’s what you’ll be doing.”

“Thanks to you both,” Mike said. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Tomorrow the three of us—Mercer, Coop, and I—will start the day here. The commissioner will undoubtedly have teams saturating the station. Feds, too. First, Don, it would help if you give us some background. Help us figure how to get to know this place. We’ll be tripping all over one another if we don’t know half of what you do.”

Ledger leaned back in his chair and twisted the end of his white mustache. “That could take most of the night.”

Mike pulled his chair closer in to make his point. “We may not have that many hours, Don. Give us what we need to know.”

Ledger wagged his finger and practically put his nose against Mike’s. “You’ve got a colossus here, young man. One hundred years old and full of secrets. If you all don’t know what you’re looking for inside her walls, then how in hell can I pick out what’s important? I’d prefer to start at the get-go, run through it as fast as I can, then let you gents decide for yourselves.”

“Secrets?” Mike said, half grinning at the old man’s choice of words.

“Dead serious, young man. Don’t mock me. There’s basements you won’t find on any floor plan, hidden staircases, isolated platforms for dignitaries, and enough mystery down below us that Hitler thought he could change the course of World War Two by penetrating Grand Central.”

Don Ledger had me when he uttered the words “secrets” and “hidden.”

“You’re in charge, sir.”

Mercer handed me an extra steno pad, and Ledger got to work.

“The first rail line in New York City was laid in 1831, from Prince Street to Union Square. Until that time, steamboats ran passengers and freight up and down the Hudson, so no trains were allowed to operate on the west side of town near the river, as a matter of law.”

“Weren’t allowed to compete with maritime traffic?” Mercer asked.

“That’s right. It was such a primitive business that the first iron rails were shipped over from England—not even made here. And the man who owned the train line was Thomas Emmet. He had a younger brother you might have heard of named Robert.”

Mike smiled. “The great Irish revolutionary, executed for high treason for plotting a rebellion against the British. One of my mother’s heroes. And all the time his brother a wealthy entrepreneur over here? I never knew that.”

“The population of Manhattan was centered downtown then, as you probably know.”

The island had been settled at its southern tip, at the Battery, and had slowly moved northward with the influx of European immigrants.

Ledger went on. “By 1851, when there were several rail lines—the New York and Harlem, the Albany, the New Haven—the builders had finally blasted through rocks to lay rails up to Yorkville and later extended them through Harlem and across the river into the Bronx. A year after that, a New Yorker could travel by train from City Hall to Albany.

“But because the steam locomotives were so dangerous—starting fires, running over horses and people who dared cross the tracks to get to the other side of the street—they weren’t allowed to operate below 42nd Street.”

“So how did people get uptown, no less to Albany, from City Hall?” I asked.

“The depot that was built on this site was the end of the rail. It was horse-drawn carriages that took folk from here downtown. Part old-fashioned and the other part newfangled.”

“Think of it,” Mercer said, “it’s these railroads that created suburbs outside the city. Gave men the ability to live up in Westchester or Connecticut with their families but travel into Manhattan every day. It’s literally what made commuting possible.”

“But Cornelius Vanderbilt,” Mike said, “didn’t he make all his millions in steamboats?”

“The commodore, now there’s a man for you,” Ledger said. “Started life as a poor farm boy on Staten Island, descended from a Dutchman who came to America as an indentured servant. By the age of sixteen he had bought himself a flat-bottomed boat and was rowing people back and forth across the harbor to Manhattan. Just a kid with a long oar and a dream to make a buck. Twenty years later, he’d pocketed enough money to build his own steamboat.”

“When did he switch his interest to trains?”

“Began investing in them in the eighteen forties. While the Hudson River froze over in wintertime and steamboats couldn’t get to Albany, railroad trains could deliver their passengers practically on time. Twenty years later, Vanderbilt owned two lines in Manhattan with separate terminals and finally became president of a third line—the most powerful, New York Central—which is when he decided to merge them into a single building.”

“On this site?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. The commodore spent more than one hundred million dollars of his own money to pay for the depot, buying up all the land around. A real visionary. He saw the railroads as the future.”

“What became of the original station downtown?” Mike asked.

“Vanderbilt sold it to a fellow named P. T. Barnum. Heard of him?” Ledger said. “Remade it into the Hippodrome, for the circus and all his other spectacles. Till it became the first Madison Square Garden.”

“Where Harry Thaw murdered the great architect Stanford White,” Mike said, “over the girl on the red velvet swing.”

“I guess you guys see murder in everything.”

“Afraid I do, Mr. Ledger,” Mike said.

“Cornelius Vanderbilt came to understand that railroads were changing the face of America. Before the Civil War, we were an agrarian nation. We grew things, and we moved them around on horse carriages or by ships. It took five days to cross New Jersey by the Morris Canal in those days, from the Delaware River to the Hudson. Trains came along? It became a five-hour trip.”

“Moving people and freight at a new speed and efficiency.”

“Moving ideas, too. I think of the trains as the computer technology of their time,” Ledger said. “Now Vanderbilt’s station opened in 1871, so keep in mind, because 42nd Street then was in the middle of nowhere, you still had to shuttle people on streetcars and horse-drawn carriages from 42nd Street to downtown. It was pretty much a mess up here at the depot, even though his ownership of the train lines—and all the real estate—paid off. When the commodore died in 1877, he had a fortune greater than all the money in the US Treasury. And just as he passed away, a blizzard shattered the glass roof of his train station.”

“Time for a new plan, I guess.”

“But it didn’t happen quite yet, nor for that reason,” Ledger said. “Not till 1902. Just like today, there were only four tracks carrying trains down through the spine of Manhattan, even though there were sixteen million passengers a year by then.