“I’m grateful for that. Seriously.”
“I must have told Jessica that it was your birthday. That I might be spending it with you. I was using that as an excuse ’cause I knew I wanted out,” Mike said, his fingers back in his thick shock of black hair. “I think it’s what really set her off. Made her believe it was all about you. End of story.”
“Except that somebody tried to kill her right after that?” Chirico asked.
Mike spoke the words slowly: “So she says.”
“How? I mean what was the attempt?”
“Pell has a house in the Hamptons. Claimed she was followed into her driveway late at night by two masked men in a car who got out and tried to jump her as she was opening her side door.”
“Anything forensic to back it up?” the sergeant asked.
“No evidence. No neighbors home to hear noise. No tire tracks. Just a lot of broken glass and one hysterical judge,” Mike said. “And she admitted she broke the glass herself because she was too nervous to get the key in the lock.”
“So what does the prisoner who hired the hit men have to say about it?”
“It would have been awfully hard for him to pay off the hit men if they’d been successful, Manny,” Mike said. “The schmuck had a heart attack and dropped dead in state prison last winter. You know any hit men who work without an advance and no insurance for the final payment? That’s why I think she’s off her rocker.”
ELEVEN
“What are you doing, Coop? We’ve got most of the police force saturating the Park,” Mike said. “You look like you’re ready to undress.”
“I am only half ready, but maybe it makes sense to do it all the way.” I held on to the railing and stepped out of my driving moccasins and onto the seat of one of the chairs, hoisting myself up to the top of a dining table. Then I pulled off my cotton crewneck sweater. “Hold my belt for me, will you, Sarge?”
I unbuckled it and whipped it out of the loops.
“What do you think-?”
“C’mon, Mike. Off with your blazer.” I crossed my arms and looked at my watch. “We’ve got fifteen minutes. Ready for this? I bet you’re quick about it, aren’t you? No foreplay. Not too much small talk.”
Manny Chirico got my point first and started to nod his head, laughing with me. “I’m trying to quench the rumors, Alex, not stoke the fires.”
“Be careful what you wish for, guys. The rumors about Mike and me pale in comparison to his-his-”
“Stupidity, Coop. You can say it.”
“Stupidity it is. Thanks for that, Mike. And apparently half the department and everyone in my shop from Battaglia on down-you might as well throw in your mother and mine, too-think that we’ve been in each other’s pants, Mike. So maybe if we just get it on in broad daylight-”
“Keep your voice down, Coop. You’re sounding wacky.”
“I figure you like wacky. I can do wacky, too, Mike-you know that. I can do over-the-top crazy as well as Jessica Pell, I promise you that. In fact, I feel it coming on,” I said. “Here we’ve got the other half of the department watching us, in this beautiful setting all around the Lake, so maybe we can defuse the gossip and let people know that we know that they know about us. Whaddaya say? Get naked right now. Who knows? You might even enjoy it.”
“Why’s that?” Mike asked. “Because you think so many others have?”
“Legions. More than I can count.”
He grabbed me around the knees and pulled me toward him, folding me over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry to plant me on the ground next to Manny Chirico. “I give up, Sarge. She’s all yours. I can’t handle her right now.”
“At least I tried. I thought a little comic relief would beat blowing my top. Besides, I’m better for your sorry reputation than Pell is, don’t you think?” I picked up my sweater and knotted it around my shoulders. Then I waved my arms at the cops who had stopped in their tracks to watch the commotion I’d tried to create. “Back to work with all of you.”
“Where’s the big meeting?” Mike asked. His phone rang, and he walked toward the exit to answer it.
“At the Arsenal,” the sergeant said, turning to me. “That’s where the commissioner’s office is.”
“64th Street. We can walk from here,” I said. “Would you mind telling me what you’re going to do about Judge Pell and her-well, her story about Mike? I hear she gave you a deadline.”
“Better you don’t know, Alex. I’m working on a plan.”
The boathouse parking lot had become a staging area for different teams sent in to relieve officers walking the grid. Chirico and I threaded our way through them, stopping to examine plastic toys, fragments of cloth, and all the other objects that had been recovered in the search.
“That was the lab,” Mike said when he caught up with us. “You know those two miniature statues and the angel I dropped off on Friday night?”
He was directing his conversation to the sergeant, not to me.
“Yeah.”
“No forensic value. I thought maybe one of those metal sculptures could have been the weapon. Either one of them is heavy enough to have cratered the girl’s skull. But no luck.”
“Any DNA?” Chirico asked.
“Smudges and overlays. Nothing there.”
“Do you mean smudges or mixtures?” I asked. “You know I’m doing a Frye hearing on mixtures in two weeks. If there are only three samples in a mix-”
“I probably would have said ‘mixtures’ if that’s what I meant, Coop, don’t you think? Those items are hopelessly smudged, okay? And coated in mud on the parts that aren’t smudged.”
“Seventy-two hours and the clock is ticking,” Chirico said, leading us on the roadway-closed off to traffic for the next three days of police activity-to the southeast. “I really hoped to turn up something this morning.”
The three of us knew the age-old policing rule that homicides went cold after forty-eight hours. Modern forensics had breathed new life into old investigative styles, but outside crime scenes were always the worst, then and now. It was rare to have fingerprints on any surfaces, weather wreaked havoc on evidence of every kind, and boundaries were often hard to fix.
“Seventy-two since we found her, Sarge,” Mike said. “And she was killed weeks before that.”
“Miracles happen.”
“Rarely on my watch,” Mike said.
“That’s not the way the judge tells it.”
“Are you going to let that subject be or what, Coop?”
“I thought this relentless approach would resonate with you, but I guess I’m wrong,” I said. “Do either of you know anything about the parks commissioner?”
“My City Hall sources tell me he’s a great guy,” the sergeant said. “Brilliant lawyer, passionate about civic causes-don’t you remember, he’s on the Public Library board?”
“No wonder the name sounds familiar,” I said, thinking back on the murder of a rare book conservator we’d worked more than a year ago. “Gordon Davis. A very elegant man. Witty and charismatic. African American, almost as tall as Mercer. Light skin with piercing green eyes.”
“You talking Match.com or the parks department?” Mike asked.
“Did I leave out the part that he’s got a fabulous wife who’s a law professor? Just saying he’s a man you notice,” I said. “Now, the strange part is why anyone would create a public park and build an arsenal inside it, storing all that ammunition right where you’re inviting everyone in the city to hang out.”
I knew I had hit a ground ball to Mike. If there was a question about military history that Mike was unable to answer, I hadn’t yet come upon it. The staid Arsenal building, dark brick and turreted, was a Fifth Avenue landmark. With hand railings carved in the shape of muskets, it had a façade as serious as the zoo directly behind it was whimsical.
“There’s a lot I don’t know about the Park, but that part I do,” Mike said. “There are only two structures left inside the Park-between 59th Street and 110th Street-that predate the Park itself. The Arsenal was opened in 1851, far north of most of the residential population of the city, to hold all the munitions for New York’s National Guard. A pretty short-lived purpose, once the plan changed.”