"So Bly checked into a women's boardinghouse, claiming to be a Cuban immigrant called Nellie Moreno. Within days of her arrival, feigning insanity and babbling in an incomprehensible tongue, she was escorted to the police station and then to court. First stop was Bellevue, where doctors ruled out the delirium of belladonna, the deadly nightshade poisoning of so many nineteenth-century mysteries, and actually declared her to be insane. On to Blackwells."
"Committed to the asylum?"
"Spent ten days there, documenting everything from the filthy ferry that brought her over, to the vicious prison attendants from the penitentiary who choked and beat their patients, to the baths that consisted of buckets of ice water being thrown on her head, to the descriptions of the perfectly sane women who were just sent away because they couldn't be understood. 'Inside the Madhouse' made a pretty compelling story in the World, and then your office exposed the whole operation."
"Did that close the asylum down as a result?"
"Certainly helped make it happen. All the mental patients were moved away from the island at the turn of the last century. My building became the first incarnation of Metropolitan Hospital."
"The one that's now on the Upper East Side?"
"Exactly right."
Mike had checked off Bly's name from his list in the steno pad. "About Lola, would you know why someone would call her a treasure seeker or gold digger?"
"That's what we all are on this project, of course." Nan smiled. "Each of us is looking for a different kind of mother lode. For me, the treasure is as simple as a stone ax or a porcelain teacup, coal boxes or ox yokes. One of my interns actually found a handful of pearls last fall."
"Pearls?"
"In those days, men were able to discipline insubordinate wives by committing them to the asylum for a spell."
Chapman winked at me, nodding his head in approval.
"Some of the well-to-do women sewed jewels in the hems of their skirts when they were sent to Blackwells, hoping to buy favors from their keepers. Or perhaps their escape. I've got one volunteer on the project, Efrem Zavislan, who dreams of stumbling across Captain Kidd's buried gold. No one's ever found the million-dollar lode the pirate was bringing back from Madagascar to New York, before his capture. Talk to Efrem, he spent lots of time with Lola. She sure wasn't interested in my kind of booty.
"My view of it is that if all those prisoners were digging for years, and they didn't come up with any treasure, then there's none here to be found."
"What were the prisoners digging?"
"Every inch of the place. The island's bedrock is gneiss. Ford-ham gneiss. And there's lots of granite, too. From the time the penitentiary opened in 1835, until it was shut down a hundred years later, the healthier prisoners were forced to do hard labor. All of the stone for these many buildings on the island was quarried from its own land. No rock had to be brought in.
"The granite was used to build a seawall around the entire circumference. And the gneiss is what they mined to create the exteriors of the notorious Blackwells institutions. If there were treasure to be found, some miscreant would have dug it up long before now." "This gives us a great head start, Nan. We're hoping to meet with some of the faculty members tomorrow. At least we'll have an idea about what has had all of you so absorbed."
Nan walked us down to the front door, retrieved my coat and gloves, and waved us off into the cold night air.
We made the short drive down Second Avenue and Mike stuck his laminated police department parking permit on top of his dashboard as he left the car illegally positioned in front of a bus stop near the corner of Sixty-fourth Street. "C'mon, Coop. There's not a brownie in town who'd brave this weather to stick a ticket on my wreck."
We weaved our way across the late-hour Christmas shopping traffic that was blocking the intersection and pressed through the crowd around the bar at Primola, hoping that Giuliano had not given away my eight-thirty reservation.
"Buona sera, Signorina Cooper. Your table will be ready in a minute. Have a drink on me, please. Fenton," he called over to the bartender, "a Dewar's on the rocks and a Ketel One, subito."
People were five-deep waiting to be seated at my favorite restaurant. Most had drinks in one hand and shopping bags in the other, adding to the volume of the pack. It was too noisy to talk murder in their midst, so we relaxed with our cocktails till the maitre d', Adolfo, led us to a corner table in the front of the room.
I didn't hear the chirping sound of my cell phone ringing until I had lowered myself into the chair and hung my bag over the armrest.
"Alex, can you hear me? It's Bob Thaler." The chief serologist usually started his day in the lab at 6 A.M. That he was still working at 9 P.M. meant that he had pulled out all the stops to do the testing on the Lola Dakota case. "Am I catching you at a bad time?"
"Never. Any results?" The DNA testing that had routinely taken six months to yield information when I first submitted samples to the FBI ten years ago now came back to us from the medical examiner's office in less than seventy-two hours.
"Dr. Braun and I worked on your evidence all through the weekend. I've got some preliminary answers you might want to get going with. All I'll need from you are some suspect controls, when you come up with them."
"That's Chapman's end of the deal. He's working on it."
"Dakota's vaginal swab was negative for the presence of semen. But we did find some seminal fluid on the sheets the cops sent in for testing. From a sofa bed, is what the voucher says. I worked that up and got a profile from it for you.
"The wad of gum Chapman pulled from the wastebasket in the deceased's office? Dr. Braun handled that piece. He also got a DNA sample from it. Just thought you'd like to know as soon as we confirmed them that it's a match. Whoever was sleeping in Dakota's bed is the same guy who paid a visit to her office. Does that help you?"
14
"Anybody out there blowing bubbles?" I asked, greeting Mike at the office of the Manhattan North Homicide Squad at eight-thirty Tuesday morning. I had walked up the stairs and in the rear door, near the Special Victims Unit, to avoid any members of the King's College faculty who had responded to Sylvia Foote's directive to appear to answer questions.
"It wasn't bubble gum. It was Wrigley's spearmint. Just keep that in mind if you see any of those jaws masticating." He motioned me to sit at the table that was back-to-back with his own.
"Won't Iggy need it when she gets in?"
"Nope. Gone to Miami for Christmas."
Ignacia Bliss was one of the only women in the squad. They had tried to team her with Mike when she first arrived from the Career Criminal Apprehension Unit, but her humorless nature and plodding investigative technique were not suited to his style. The banner he had hung over her desk more than a year ago was still tacked to the windowsilclass="underline" ignorance is bliss.
"Who's here to chat with us?"
"Only got three. The rest of them seem to have scattered to the north and south poles." Mike's jacket was hanging from the back of his chair. He swung around and put his feet on the top of my desk, reading from his pad. "Skip Lockhart, the project's history professor, is out of town till the end of the week. Grenier's the biologist who's had the semester off. He's due back in the middle of January. May have to hunt those two down.
"Here with us for bagels and brew are Mr. Recantati, Professor Shreve, and Foote herself."