I took a picture of the obelisk while Mercer read from the tiny reproduction plaque carved at its base that it was installed in the Park, on East 81st Street, in 1880.
“I’d guess that these are part of a very valuable collection,” I said. “Someone with an entire miniature reproduction of Central Park. They don’t look like ordinary street garbage to me, and they don’t look like kids’ toys.”
“Yeah, we’re checking the burglary squad and some of the antique shops, and the Conservancy is putting a notice on its Facebook page. It’s probably got nothing to do with my girl, but you never know.”
The third item was something different altogether. It was not the same scale as the others, a single figure almost as tall as the nine- or ten-inch obelisk. It was made of a different substance, too.
I lifted the bag and turned it over gently in my hand, admiring the beauty of the small form.
“She’s an angel.”
“The Central Park angel? The Angel of the Waters?” Mercer asked, reaching for her while I took another photograph.
“No, she’s clearly not that,” I said.
“Could have been a lucky break,” Mercer said. “Murdered girl, thrown in the Lake, clutching a statue of the Bethesda angel. Might have tightened up the search a bit.”
Not only was the little angel entirely different in shape from her world-renowned counterpart, but her arms didn’t reach out to bless the waters in front of her, nor were her wings lifted and spread. She was very old, a figurine molded from clay or bisque, chipped and worn over the ages. Her clothing was painted, highlighted by some sort of gilt. Her skin was painted, too-the color of ebony.
I held the bag up to the light to look more closely at her. I knew the Bethesda angel in the Park quite well. She had a finely chiseled nose, slim and straight. Her lips were narrow, and her short hair-only slightly wavy-was parted in the middle to frame her face. She looked like a young beauty from a Botticelli painting. This dark form in my hand had a handsome face with rounded cheeks outlined by long ringlets of black hair that reached her shoulders. Her eyes had been colored the deepest brown, her nose short but wide, and her lips quite full. It seemed to me that these idealized figures had been created in the same time period-different in function and spirit, perhaps, but each representing the beauty of her race.
I couldn’t help but wonder whether these two angels-one white, one black-both had a connection to the dead girl who had been found so very close to them.
SIX
“I had hoped to skip town before the first tantrum,” Vickee said, returning to the table as the three of us were finishing our appetizers. “Sorry for taking so long. You’d think it was life-threatening to run out of Cocoa Puffs.”
We rushed through our dinner, the others doing most of the talking while I tried to think about how much of my stress I’d been imposing on everyone at work. I had not known Vickee as long as my two closest friends-Nina Baum, who had been my roommate at Wellesley College, and Joan Stafford, a playwright who split her time between Washington, DC, and the city-but she was a straight shooter and a terrifically loyal pal, so I expected to get some tough feedback over the weekend.
I told Giuliano to put the bill on my tab as we were just about ready to leave. Mike asked him if we could go down to his office to check out the Final Jeopardy question, which had been a habit of Mike’s for as long as I’d known him. Crime scene, cheap bar, morgue, or my apartment, there was no setting in which he didn’t stop everything until someone around him-often Mercer or me-put down twenty dollars as a bet on the night’s big answer.
I was the last of the four of us down the narrow steps to the basement office. Mike used the clicker to turn on the small television propped on a high corner shelf. His timing was never off, and within a minute of finding the right channel, Alex Trebek revealed the large game board and announced that the final category for tonight was “MEDICINE.”
“I owe you twenty,” Mike said, pointing a finger at me. “See me after payday next week.”
“It’s not like you to throw in the towel,” Vickee said.
“It’s the Benjamin Cooper theory. Coop’ll slam-dunk this one ’cause her old man taught her as much about medicine as she knows about the law. Just watch her double down.”
My father, the son of Russian Jews who had fled political oppression to come to the States, had started his medical practice as a cardiologist. Soon after leaving med school, he and his partner fashioned a half-inch piece of plastic tubing into a device that had been adapted for use in almost all surgery worldwide involving the aorta. The Cooper-Hoffman Valve not only changed our modest family circumstances and allowed me a very privileged upbringing, but also, more important, changed medical procedures in his field for the entire profession.
“The usual twenty,” I said. “You’re up, Mercer.”
“What does she do if she knows the answer, Mr. Chapman?” Mercer asked. “Is she supposed to keep her mouth shut and lose, like you do with my four-year-old when you play checkers, to make him feel better?”
“That would help,” Mike said, chewing on the olive from his drink.
When the commercial was over, we had all bet the minimum and waited for the answer to be posted. “Term for rare condition of individuals who share the same brain.”
Trebek read the answer aloud twice.
Mike turned away and started to walk out of the room. “What is Alex Cooper and a jackass? That would have been my answer.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Trebek said to the first contestant.
“Not me,” Mike said. “I’m not the least bit sorry.”
“We don’t call them Siamese twins anymore,” Trebek chided the player. “Politically incorrect, don’t you think?”
I was relieved that I didn’t know the proper term either. Vickee looked to me for guidance, but I just shrugged my shoulders.
It was Trebek who announced that the question was “What are craniopagus twins? Craniopagus is the word we were looking for to describe twins joined at the head, who sometimes actually share the same brain.”
“No winners tonight,” Vickee said. “Time to get ourselves on the plane to paradise.”
I tugged at the bottom of Mike’s blazer as I tailed him up the stairs. “I promise to come back on Sunday with a new attitude if you’ll be a bit kinder. How’s that?”
“Works for me.”
I could barely hear him. He wouldn’t turn around to look at me, just hit the landing and kept on walking through the growing crowd of Friday night customers, straight to the bar.
Vickee put her arms around Mike from behind and kissed his cheek.
I said, “See you Monday,” and walked out with Mercer.
It took less than twenty minutes to get from the door of Primola to the terminal at LaGuardia. We said good-bye to Mercer and checked in, boarding half an hour later.
The short flight-fifty minutes from takeoff to landing on a crystal-clear night-was right on time. It was always hard to talk over the noise of the two turboprops, so I closed my eyes and thought about Mike’s tirade while Vickee worked on a memo about the day’s press inquiries. One of the minivan cabs drove us from the airport to my home on a hilltop in Chilmark-an old farmhouse on a lovely piece of land, surrounded by ancient stone walls and overlooking the water.
The caretaker had readied the house for our arrival. Vickee had been here many times, so she carried her tote upstairs to the main guest room while I went into my bedroom and changed down to a T-shirt and leggings.
She was in the kitchen five minutes later. “Nightcap on the deck?”
“The perfect complement to a full moon.”