“White. He was a white man with dark hair, is all I can say.”
“C’mon now,” Mercer said. “You can do better than that. Was he a kid? Was he your age?”
“Somewheres right in between. Maybe thirty, maybe older.”
“Tall? Short? Fat? Thin?”
“Regular.”
Johnson White was beginning to show his annoyance with all the questions.
“Tall or short, I’m asking you.”
“About as tall as this lady here,” he said, pointing at me. “Tall for a lady, but kind of regular for a guy.”
“Well, did he look like a man who would have owned a fine piece of luggage?” Mercer said, leaning over to try to get in the witness’s face.
“Now I’m supposed to be the judge of that?”
“You told us you had lots of practice at it. Grandest hotel in New York,” I said, trying to reignite a spark in the man.
“So long ago I’ve forgotten everything except how pretty the place was.”
“The man,” Mercer said, “did he look clean? How was he dressed? Give me something to work with, Mr. White.”
Johnson White was sweating profusely. “Can’t think in here. You gonna let me up for air?”
“Soon as you tell me what I want to know.”
“Pants. Shirt-not a T-shirt. Noticed the collar because he had on a baseball cap and I saw dark hair hanging out the back of the cap, over his collar.”
“Keep going.”
“That’s all I took in. Man walking like he didn’t have a worry in the world, rolling that big trunk across the street.”
“You saw where he went?” I asked. “Back into Grand Central?”
“I never said he came out of the train station. Just crossing from in front of it. And I saw exactly where he went.”
“Tell us,” Mercer said, leaning in again.
“There’s a ramp that comes from the street on the 44th Street side.”
“What kind of ramp?”
“For vehicles. Cars and such,” White said. “Has a special ceiling in it. A real pretty place.”
“Ceiling?”
“You two ever been to the Oyster Bar?”
White was talking about the famed seafood restaurant, one hundred years old, which still anchored the lower level-once the hub of all commuter traffic-of Grand Central.
“Sure we have. You never met the oyster Ms. Cooper here didn’t like.”
“Then you know the ceiling? The beautiful tiles?”
“Guastavino tiles,” I said. The terra-cotta free-span timbrel vaults, the invention of a Spanish architect named Rafael Guasta- vino, were landmarked in the famed restaurant as well as in sophisticated building designs throughout the city. “Fancy tiles on a ramp? Ramp to what?”
“Used to be that ramp led to the basement of the Biltmore Hotel, miss. That’s how come it was all spiffed up back in the day. I spent a lot of time going in and out there,” White said. “But it doesn’t go anywhere anymore. It’s just a parking garage under there now.”
NINE
By one fifteen, Mercer and I were standing under the spectacular tiled ceiling of the Acme Garage on East 44th, almost kitty-corner from the Yale Club. The Catalan vaulting, as it was known, had once been a gateway to a luxurious hotel but was now as dirty and grim as any underground commercial parking space in the city.
The young man in charge was as surly as befit someone spending all his hours below the street, inhaling gas fumes and jockeying cars to get them as close together as possible without scratching fenders or sides.
“A guy with a trunk? Nothing unusual about luggage.”
“A big old leather trunk. You might notice,” Mercer said. “Maybe think it wouldn’t fit in a car.”
“We got vans, we got SUVs, we got pickups and panel trucks. I park ’em, I don’t pack ’em.”
“How about surveillance cameras? You must have them in here for security.”
Garages were easy targets for armed robbers because they did so much business in cash.
“We got ’em. They’re just on a loop, though. They record over themselves after twenty-four hours. No reason to save tapes if nothing happened,” the garage attendant said, pausing to spit on the floor. “And nothing happened.”
“We’d like to go through receipts with you. See if anyone charged their parking fee or one of you jotted down plate numbers.”
“You told me you don’t have a date. How you gonna do that?”
“We’ve figured it within a day or two,” I said. “Will you let us into your office to check them out?”
“I don’t keep ’em here, lady. The owner has eight garages. All the stuff gets forwarded next day to Queens, where he operates. Go there if you want, or call my manager. I’ve only worked here two months.”
A car nosed down the ramp and squealed to a stop a few feet away from us. The attendant walked over to the machine on the wall that dated and timed the receipts and handed a ticket to the woman who got out of the car.
“How long you gonna be, lady?”
She told him she planned to retrieve the car at five. As she turned to walk away, he gave her sculptured body a thorough top-to-bottom once-over, then spit again.
“What’s in here besides a garage?” I asked. I was wondering if there was a place for someone to conceal himself-or a large trunk-for any period of time. Whoever stole the piece of luggage could not have been certain the opportunity to grab the object would present itself on a busy Manhattan street in the middle of the day.
“My cage,” he said.
I looked over at the glass-enclosed booth, which had a stool for the attendant, a small desk, and a cash register, and space for little else.
“Restrooms around the corner. Help yourself to a look.”
I walked thirty feet away and found the doors to two unisex bathrooms. The narrow stalls held a toilet and sink. With an occupant, there would be no room for a steamer trunk.
“Any other way out?” Mercer asked, as I was on my way back.
“Used to be this was connected to a hotel that was demolished,” the man said. “Long before my time or yours. The ramp swings around to a lower level. Holds a load of cars down there.”
He turned away from us to take the receipt and payment from a man in a business suit who had come for his car.
Mercer had been excited to follow this lead. Now it appeared to be as much a dead end as the garage with a once-elegant history. “I’ll get uniform to come over and sweep the place. Check out the basement, too.”
“Look, it’s possible the man who swiped the luggage just came down the ramp from the street to get out of sight for a while,” I said.
“With a steamer trunk? Somebody in here would have noticed that.”
“So there are a bunch of other employees the guys will have to talk to. I mean he may have just waited till he thought the coast was clear. Put the trunk in a corner at the rear of the garage. Tucked it next to a van in the basement and waited a few hours.”
We walked up the ramp and back out into the sweltering afternoon sun, a sliver of which seemed to find us in between the tall buildings.
“You want lunch?” Mercer asked.
“A bucket of water and something light.”
“We’ll pass a takeout place on our way back to the Waldorf.”
We squared the block and started walking north on Park Avenue. The wide boulevard carried traffic north- and southbound, three lanes each divided by a median that was maintained as a garden throughout the year. The begonias were a great touch of color in August, the only plants seemingly able to withstand the intense heat and direct sunlight.
“So nothing from Mike this morning?” I was unable to suppress my curiosity and anxious to confront him about his deception.
“I’d tell you to chill, but it’s too hot for that word to have any meaning.”
“You want to know what happened this-”
“I most distinctly do not. Got that, Ms. Cooper?”
I stared ahead at the sidewalks filled with pedestrians for as far ahead as I could see. Boxy glass office buildings lined both sides of the broad avenue, eventually giving way to some of the priciest residential real estate in Manhattan.