“So it was only an Arsenal for ten or fifteen years?” the sergeant asked.
“Yeah. Then they had to move all the dangerous explosives out of the area. It actually became the first building of the Museum of Natural History, before the one we have today. Now it’s headquarters for the parks commissioner and the zoo.”
“What’s the other building? The one that’s even older than that,” I asked.
“The Blockhouse.”
“Yeah, Peterson mentioned that. But I don’t remember it.”
“Do you know where the Cliff is?”
“Inside the Park?” I asked. “No.”
“Up on 109th Street, on the far west side, at the edge of a very high precipice. The Blockhouse is the last remaining fortification built in 1814 to defend against the British. It’s a great-looking stone stronghold, but I wouldn’t advise a visit at night without a police escort.”
“Why?”
“’Cause it’s in such a remote area-roofless now and hopefully securely locked.”
“Have we checked it out, Sarge?” I asked. “What if someone got into it?”
“It’s happened before,” Mike said. “Not murder or rape, but a great place for kids to use a makeshift ladder and scramble inside. I’m not thinking any individual could get a body out of the Blockhouse and down to the Lake without running into someone. They’re more than thirty city blocks apart.”
“Good place to hold a hostage till you figured out what to do with him or her,” I said. It was fast becoming obvious that the Park was a small city within Manhattan, with more places to hide out than I had ever imagined.
Chirico tipped his head my way to assure me he’d have it checked out.
The roadway led us directly down to the Central Park Zoo. A harem of California sea lions was rafted together on top of their pool, basking in the sun to the amusement of scores of tourists. Chirico led us around to the front steps of the Arsenal. He and Mike tinned the guard with their gold badges and we were admitted to the lobby for our meeting with Commissioner Davis.
The anteroom was full of detectives from Manhattan North Homicide, Major Case, and the Central Park Precinct squad. We milled around, trading ideas about what had brought the dead girl to such a brutal ending, until the secretary guided us into the conference room.
There was almost a spark of electricity when Davis entered. He introduced himself, instantly engaging and vibrant. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the People’s Park.” Davis was the only one standing. The rest of us were seated around a long rectangular table. “What many have called the most important work of American art in the nineteenth century.”
Lieutenant Peterson thanked Davis for taking the time to talk with us.
“I’ll tell you whatever you need to know about this place, and you make sure to solve the crime before tonight. Deal?”
“It doesn’t look like murder’s bad for business, Commissioner,” one of the detectives said. “I almost got trampled by a pack of tourists getting in here.”
“Almost forty million visitors a year, including the folks who use the Park every day.”
“Not exactly a crime wave when you got one dead body in forty million,” Harry McAvoy, a senior Major Case detective who’d been on the job almost thirty years, said half under his breath. “I don’t get the big deal here.”
“I’ve been asked to give you the lay of the land, and to make all our experience available to you,” Davis said as he walked to an enormous map hung on the far wall. “For management purposes, the Park is divided into ten sections, and each section has five zones. I’d advise you to break down the same way for this week’s work. Each of our sections has a supervisor, and every zone has a gardener. Those are the guys who have to drop their pruning tools to pick up a candy wrapper. So if anything is out of place or unusual, it’s your zone gardeners who are likely to have spotted it.
“Then we’ve got roving crews that move between the zones. Tree experts, turf and soil monitors, rodent control-”
“You oughta step that one up a bit, Commish,” McAvoy said.
“I have a few emerald boa constrictors in the zoo who could take care of most of the city’s rats in a couple of nights, Detective. Anytime you want to borrow my snakes for an evening tour of duty, give a call.”
“We’re looking at 843 acres, am I right?” the lieutenant asked.
“Yes. Six percent of Manhattan’s total size. Seven bodies of water, including the Lake and Reservoir; twenty-one playgrounds; nine thousand benches, which would stretch seven miles if you put them end to end; and twenty-four thousand trees. You’d be very smart to use our ground crews and our rangers-they’ve walked every inch of this place and can tell you things you couldn’t begin to imagine about it.”
All the guys had questions and started shouting them out. “Got any suggestions about where to do a quiet kill?”
“We spend a lot of our time ensuring that kind of thing doesn’t happen.”
“Well, it just did, sir, so if you can cut to the chase.”
I guessed Gordon Davis to be in his early sixties. “You’re all too young to remember what happened to this Park in the 1970s.”
“Seen it myself, Commissioner,” Lieutenant Peterson said.
“During the fiscal crisis of those years,” Davis said, “it was city services that suffered the most cuts. All of the parks-in every borough-were in an advanced state of deterioration. There were mobile task forces that cleaned them on a weekly basis. Weekly-can you imagine what this place looked like under those conditions? The parks were not only filthy and unkempt, but vandalized and virtually abandoned to the poor and the criminal element. The Sheep Meadow-which actually had sheep grazing on it until 1934-”
“I think I stepped in some sheep shit yesterday,” one of the clowns from Major Case said.
“I expect that stuff is petrified by now, Detective. But don’t be surprised if you come up with animal bones,” Davis said. “Every now and then, when the earth turns over after a big storm like Hurricane Sandy or kids dig a new spot off the beaten track, the remains of the sheep and pigs who lived here before the city fathers took it over come to the surface.
“As I was saying, though, the Sheep Meadow had become a dust bowl in the ’70s, petty thefts and muggers forced the closing of Belvedere Castle, and there was more graffiti covering Bethesda Terrace than there was grass on the ball fields.”
“What turned it around?” Manny Chirico asked.
“The public-private partnership,” Davis said. “The establishment of the Conservancy and its ability to fund-raise at a time of such fiscal austerity. Just to be clear, the annual budget for Central Park is forty-six million, eighty-five percent of which comes from the Conservancy, not the City.”
“Didn’t one individual give a fortune to Central Park just last year?” I asked.
“The largest monetary donation in the history of the city’s park system,” Davis said. “John Paulson, an investment banker, gave one hundred million dollars to thank the city for all that the Park meant to him throughout his life. As a teenager, he told us, he used to hang out at the statue of the Angel of the Waters-which was bone-dry back then. He called that statue the heart of the Park. Most of us who work here think it’s the heart of the city-and I’m expecting you gentlemen to make that right again.”
“Did he give you enough money so we can drain the Lake?” Mike asked.
“We’re starting by dredging it first, Detective. Those efforts begin tomorrow.”
“So in the meantime,” one of the Major Case guys asked again, “give me a hint, Mr. Davis. Where would you go to off somebody?”