“That when Edgar Allan Poe lived in his little cottage in the Bronx, while his wife was dying, he’d console himself with long nocturnal walks across the river. On this? The High Bridge?”
“You got it.”
We were directly beneath the series of vaulted arches that held up the span on this side of the river.
“You know, I would think that if Anita was going to jump-going to really try to kill herself-she would have gotten farther out on the bridge, to the middle, so she’d land in the river. That’s the sure way to a suicide.”
“Yeah. But the condition of the walkway is such a mess up there, it may not be easy to get out that far,” Mike said. “Whether she jumped or got pushed, the boulders she landed on are pretty unforgiving.”
“Mind if I catch my breath?” I asked, stopping as we neared the top.
“I can pull you the rest of the way,” Mercer said jokingly, grabbing my hand. “You got the wind at your back.”
“I feel like I’ve got the wind everywhere. It’s brutal.” The bitter cold made the landscape even more stark and miserable. “Was the bridge ever used for carriages or cars?”
“No. Just pedestrians. It was always a walkway.”
“Why was it closed?” I asked.
“Some morons threw rocks off the bridge. Almost killed several tourists on the Circle Line boat.”
“And it never reopened?” We had almost crested the grade.
“No. The aqueduct was replaced by the underwater tunnel system you got to know so well,” Mike said, reminding me of a case we had worked a year earlier. “This bridge hasn’t been used to carry water to us for a hundred years. So nobody’s ever invested the money to open the walkway again.”
The three of us stood together at the walled-off entrance to the crumbling span and looked across at the stone masonry piers and arches. “It really does look like a Roman aqueduct,” I said.
“That’s the ancient principle they used to bring water here from the mountains, Coop.”
I had learned the hard way, through a murder case, that Manhattan had no natural water supply of its own.
“Wait a minute, Mike,” Mercer said. “High Bridge, right?”
“Yeah. A low one would have been cheaper to build, but they needed the height so that boats going through to the Hudson could get under it.”
“But it was built as an aqueduct, you said.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s one of Kendall Reid’s fake funds,” Mercer said, warming his ears with his gloved hands. “That’s one of the phantom charities Tim Spindlis named at the press conference. Save the Aqueduct Bridge.”
“Dead on, Mr. Wallace,” Mike said, processing Mercer’s logic. “Reid should have patched some holes in this bridge instead of stuffing his cash in shoe boxes and cargo ships full of immigrants.”
“Time for a wake-up call to your pal Spindlis, Alex.”
“All Battaglia’s horses and all his men may not be able to put Anita’s cracked head back together, Coop. Get on the phone and tell him to give us everything he’s got.”
FORTY-EIGHT
It was only six thirty on Sunday morning. I didn’t have Tim’s home number programmed on my cell, so I called the cop on duty in the lobby of the DA’s office and asked him to reach out and have Spindlis return my call.
“Maybe somebody gave Anita a boost up to get over this,” Mercer was saying to Mike as they examined the stone wall blocking off the old walkway, fronted by an iron gate. “Makes it a lot more likely she wasn’t out there planning to jump if she didn’t go onto the bridge alone. If she was pushed, then whoever did it found the perfect place to mimic a suicide.”
“Coop? You off the phone? See if you can get a toehold on that wall. Put your Pavlovas to good use.”
I stuck the phone in my pocket and walked to the imposing gate. Weeds had broken through the brickwork on the path and cracks were everywhere. I put one foot on the guardrail and hoisted myself up.
“It’s not hard to do. The question is why she would have agreed to go out on the bridge with anyone,” I said.
“Well, she either trusted the guy enough to follow him, or he had a gun to her head.”
“Follow him where, Mike?” I asked.
“Leighton said Anita told her cousin that it was an old friend who had set her up for the night. It must have been someone she could count on to lead her around up here.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Well, she trusted him more than Leighton, ’cause she wouldn’t even get in his car, baby and all.”
“So maybe the guy-this friend of hers-tells her that he’s parked in the Bronx,” Mercer said. “It’s just a short walk across this old bridge. That’s the Bronx, right at the end of the footpath.”
“I get it. So if anything illegal was going on at the mansion-prostitution, at least-then the police wouldn’t even see this guy’s car anywhere near the Jumel House. The car wouldn’t actually be in Manhattan. Could be a useful escape route, especially if this friend was already in trouble-say, a guy like Kendall Reid.”
I peered over the top of the wall at the surface of the bridge. Just below me, stored on the other side, were four large wooden barrels.
“Take a look for yourselves,” I said, as I jumped down.
Mercer lifted one of his long legs onto the railing iron and looked over the wall. “Easy enough, Alex. You’re right. Up over the top. Climb down onto the barrels. And assuming there are more like those on the other end, you’d be home free.”
“Interesting idea,” Mike said, positioning himself beside Mercer to look for himself.
“Are we going to stand out here in the cold and debate this, or do something about it?” I asked.
“Your lips are turning blue, kid. Why don’t you wait in Leighton’s Jag? Get comfy,” Mike said to me, then turned back to Mercer. “Let me call the lieutenant and see if he can get Bronx Homicide to do a plate check on the cars parked around on the other side. See if anybody was ticketed during the night. Someone could have led Anita out on the bridge to her death, and there’d be no trace that he’d even been in Manhattan.”
“That’s true,” Mercer said. “If your perp was smart enough to have planned all this-worried about getting caught-then he’d know that even a check of EZ pass plates would show he left Manhattan by bridge or tunnel the night before, and never came back.”
“See what I mean? And all the time, he’s just a hop, skip, and walk across the bridge away from the action in the Jumel Mansion.”
The two uniformed cops were approaching us. They must have taken all the information and sent the dog walkers on their way.