"What do you think happened to Charlotte?"
"I just assume she went home to South America. Probably wandered around Manhattan until she ran out of contacts to keep her high, then packed her bags and went home." He brightened as he spoke his next thought. "Charlotte will come back round, Ms. Cooper. I'm sure of it. Hungry to learn, anxious to be accepted, though she didn't like to show that side to people. She's not the first college girl to take a breather."
Mike was back to Lola Dakota. "Lola must have told you what went wrong with her marriage, didn't she?"
"Ivan's right hand, so far as I know. And occasionally his left. He beat her, Detective. And once she realized there could be life without him, and that his rages weren't confined to days of the month that she could predict and avoid, she was ready to walk away from it."
"Another man?"
"I hope so."
"Any guesses?"
"I'll let you know if I come up with any. Skip Lockhart, maybe. Lola seemed to be spending a lot of time with him. Perhaps even President Recantati," Shreve said, finishing his cup of coffee and recapping the empty container with its plastic lid. He laughed, adding, "But Lola would have been on top in that arrangement. He seems a bit passive for my old friend. She was vying for his attention from the moment he arrived, so I wouldn't put anything past her. Still waters and all that."
"What do you know about Ivan's business dealings?"
"That I wanted to be at arm's length from them, Detective. I don't know what he was up to, but Lola thought he'd end up in jail."
"Was she still getting money from him?" Chapman was thinking, like I was, of the shoe boxes full of cash that had been stashed in her closet.
"I don't think he'd give her a nickel, and I doubt she would have accepted anything from him. She wanted out. Over and out."
"What attracted you to the Blackwells Island project, Professor? Seems that some of you who were involved have favorite parts of the place that were of particular interest." I was curious about what drew Shreve to this site.
"Like Lola, I was attached to the work planned on the southern end, everything from the original mansion, which is about midpoint, down to the lower tip."
"The Smallpox Hospital, the City Penitentiary? That area?"
"Precisely. It was Lola who first brought me to the island, the same summer we met in Aspen. I was on my way back to Paris, and New York was hosting one of those parades of tall ships. The harbor was filled with magnificent old sailing vessels that evening. Lola packed a picnic and we took the tram over. She told me it would be the very best vantage point from which to see the schooners sailing up and down the East River, and the fireworks exploding above the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. In those days, you could traipse on foot right down to the southern end.
"Do you know du Maurier, Ms. Cooper? That's how Lola introduced me to Blackwells. Ever the actress-would have made her mother proud. 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,' she said, laying a blanket below the blackened windows of the old facade."
"That's exactly what the old hospital looks like. No wonder it's always attracted me." I turned to Mike. "That's the opening line of the novel Rebecca."
"Same as the movie," he snapped back at me. I may not be as well read as you, he was telling me, but don't push me.
"The most startling thing that night was looking back at the incredible view of the Manhattan skyline. We were spread out on the ground, drinking warm white wine from paper cups, and staring directly across the water at River House. It's where my father lived before I was born, and I'd never seen it from that angle."
So Winston Shreve came from money. The fabled apartment building, east of First Avenue on Fifty-second Street, was constructed in 1931 as a palatial cooperative apartment, complete with squash and tennis courts, an interior swimming pool, and even a ballroom. It boasted a private dock, right on the spot where the FDR Drive was later built, at which Vincent Astor kept his famous white yacht called Nourmahal. Lived in then by the rich and the royal, today it was home to world-famous personalities like Henry Kissinger and the great international beauty Lady Lynn de Forrest.
"Can't you do that now? Walk down to that vista, I mean?" I asked.
"Not till we've finished our dig, Ms. Cooper. And not unless the money is raised to reconstruct Renwick's fabulous building. Now the hospital's completely in ruins, like an old Gothic castle. No floorboards to speak of, crumbling walls, falling granite blocks. That portion of the island is blocked off from public access by metal fencing across the entire plot, east to west. Topped by razor wire. It's far too dangerous to let people near it."
Chapman poked at me with his pen. "If you're nice to me, blondie, I'll get you a pass for Christmas. The 114th patrols there." Present-day Roosevelt Island had its very rare criminal statistics tallied as part of Manhattan's Nineteenth Precinct, the same Upper East Side neighborhood in which I lived. But patrol duty fell to the auto-accessible Queens cops, and I didn't know any of the guys assigned to that precinct. "I'll get you in for an up-close-and-personal."
Shreve's territorial grip took hold and he spoke, brusquely, over Mike's words. "I'll take you myself, anytime you'd like to see it."
"You got a key?"
"All of us supervising the project have access, Detective. We've got security clearance to come and go as we please for the duration of the study. The grounds are a bit more inviting in the spring, but as soon as some of this ice melts I'll take you both over."
"Did you ever hear Lola refer to 'the deadhouse,' Professor?"
"All the time, Mr. Chapman. You know the island wasn't a very inviting place, even into the twentieth century. When the city finally abandoned these properties, the officials just walked out and closed the doors behind them. Things were left exactly as they were on the last days in use. Sheets were made up on the hospital beds, stretchers stood in hallways, wheelchairs and crutches were propped in doorways and against walls. People were afraid to go there for years, frightened that some of the contagion still lurked in the empty corridors or beneath the eaves.
"Lola liked it that way. When she called the place a 'dead-house,' it conjured up ghosts of the people who perished there. Kept the amateurs away, which suited her fine."
"I hadn't seen her in months, Professor. She had chosen to work with the prosecutors in New Jersey rather than my office, as you certainly know now. My boss thought their plan to stage her murder was absurd. Can you tell us, had she been worried about Ivan lately?"
"Constantly. Fear consumed her, wherever she was. Somehow, he seemed to know just how to spook her, whether she was walking on Broadway to meet a friend for lunch or getting off the tram when she came to the island. He always kept tabs on her whereabouts. Lola was certain that she was being followed and didn't know whom to trust. I think that's why old friends were so important to her, in the end."
"Was she afraid, even when she went to the island?" I thought immediately of Julian Gariano, and of the thought that he had been hired by Ivan Kralovic to sell information about her comings and goings.
"That's what she told me. I had no reason to disbelieve her. You see," Shreve said, his elbow resting on one knee, "she really did have a phobia that Ivan would finish her off. She was awfully prescient, Detective, wasn't she?"
"So you think that whoever killed Lola was working for Ivan?"
"As opposed to doing the job for Sylvia Foote, Ms. Cooper?" Shreve chuckled. "That's an idea I hadn't thought of until this moment. A King's College cabal? Possible, I guess, but most unlikely. You'd have to give me a pretty good reason."
"Anything else?" I said to Mike.
"I'm not going to let you go without asking a few things about Petra, Professor. D'you mind?"
Shreve rose to his feet and stretched. "If you know of it, I can only tell you that it's as spectacular as everything you've ever heard." He spoke directly to me, quoting the Burgon poem. "A rose-red city half as old as time.' Have you ever been?"