Hell Gate Page 6

  “I don’t care whose idea it was. It’s lousy.”

  “Look, I used to be a prosecutor. I understand how you feel.” Tonight, in the dim lighting of the limo, Leighton’s eyes resembled the beady stare of an animal in the sights of a predator. The long, bony fingers of his hands twisted and then untangled from each other, knuckles cracking as he tried to find the words to calm me.

  “My least favorite introduction. ‘I used to be . . .’ ” Every new defense attorney opened with the lame attempt at bonding by claiming former prosecutorial understanding.

  “Don’t throw a scene and storm out of the car,” Lem said.

  “I’m actually too tired to do that. Too tired and too disappointed in you.”

  “Sit back, Ethan. Listen to me, Alex.” Lem eased himself forward to try to get me to look at him while he talked. “Ethan was in the holding pens while I was in your office. He wasn’t arraigned for another hour after that. Then I did my little dog-and-pony show on the courthouse steps. Already one of the detectives has called to accuse us of threatening Salma. I swear to you, Ethan hasn’t left my sight.”

  There was no point arguing with Lem. Mercer hadn’t yet heard a translation of Salma’s 911 call. The threat she reported could just have easily been phoned in from 100 Centre Street.

  I leaned my head against the padded headrest. “What are you guys setting me up for?”

  “It’s nothing like that, Alex. Please don’t take this the wrong way. I have nothing but respect for you, professionally. Donny Baynes says you’re reasonable and measured. He suggested—”

  Lem held his hand up to stop Ethan’s sudden flow of information. The congressman dug his front teeth into his lower lip, almost deep enough to draw blood, as though it was the only way to stop himself from spilling his guts.

  “When did you talk to Donny?” I asked.

  Had Baynes been playing dumb when Mercer told him about the car crash this morning? Or if Ethan had reached his best friend from the jailhouse, maybe he had managed to place a call to Salma too.

  “Let’s slow this train down,” Lem said. “You will always be my go-to person in that office, Alexandra. I’m the one who called Donovan Baynes. Then Ethan reminded me you’d once worked together. I’d like to lay a foundation here before certain aspects of this case snowball out of control.”

  “I swear to you I never called Donny,” Leighton said, lurching forward at me, almost as though unable to control his movements. Instinctively, I pressed back against the cushioned leather seat.

  Lem Howell reached out an arm to push Leighton back. “What’d I tell you, son?”

  “What’s your suggestion? I tell Battaglia the three of us cruised around town to celebrate Ethan’s release? I’m missing the point where I describe to him how honorable this meeting has been. Sort of the minute after he tells me I’ve lost my judgment.”

  “Let’s say you don’t tell Paul Battaglia anything, Alex. This is just you and me together for a short ride. Ethan’s not talking to you. It’s only me, my idea. I just want you to see there’s a human being behind these tabloid headlines that his enemies will try to use to bring him down. Flesh and blood. There but for the grace of God go you and I.”

  The space between the streetlights played games through the tinted windows of the car. There were seconds when I couldn’t see Leighton at all, and then he darted forward and his close-set eyes bored into me with a frightening intensity.

  Lem saw me clutching the door handle. “Well, then, Alex. Maybe not you. Maybe you’re above that. Surely we all make mistakes, we all—”

  “I’ve made my share of mistakes, too, Lem. I try not to drag down people I love when I do.”

  “I never meant to hurt anyone, Alex.” Leighton held his arm out as though to stop my response. “You’ve got to believe I never meant to do anything to bring my wife into this.”

  “Ethan—”

  “Don’t muzzle me, Lem.” Ethan was on the edge of the seat now, demanding to speak for himself. “None of this was supposed to happen, Alex. I’m a public servant—just like you. I’ve given every ounce of my wisdom, my soul, my energy, my good works—all for the people of this city and for building a better government.”

  I opened my mouth to speak but he was directly in my face, punctuating his remarks with his bony fingers. He may have thought he was pitching to help his case, but he was scaring me instead. Leighton was leaning too close to me, jabbing at my shoulder, boring into me with those icy eyes.

  “I can’t be drummed out of office by rumors and innuendo, by things that don’t matter in the grander scheme. You’ve got to make Paul Battaglia keep his perspective on all this.”

  The driver braked to a stop and Leighton lost his balance, tipping forward so that his hand landed on my thigh. He gripped it for just a moment to regain his seating. I brushed him away.

  “Get off me,” I said. The thought of his touch was revolting. “Save the laying on of hands for Mr. Howell. He does it so much more deftly.”

  There was a gas station at Houston Street that all the cab fleets used to fill up. As we approached it and the driver paused for the light, I reached over Ethan’s shoulder and knocked on the glass panel dividing the rear compartment from the driver.

  He pulled it back and I asked him to stop on the left, so that I could get out.

  “You call me when your cops get snarled up in all the lies they’re going to hear, Alexandra,” Lem said, following me out of the limo to put me in a yellow cab. “I wanted you to look Ethan Leighton in the eye for yourself. He’s got a bright future ahead of him, if he isn’t sidetracked for some inappropriate horseplay. Let him speak the truth, is all I wanted.”

  “Creative thinking, Lem. But he’ll have to tell it to the judge.”

  SEVEN

  “Battaglia’ll be over it by morning,” Mike said. He was sitting in Dr. Pomeroy’s chair, his feet on the desk, throwing back a mouthful of M&M’s while he riffled through autopsy photos of a young man who’d been shot in the head and chest. “No need to go downstairs and lay down on a slab in the fridge, blondie.”

  “He totally jammed me up. Even had that sycophant Spindlis along for the ride, just to humiliate me even more. Battaglia didn’t want me giving anything to the mayor without his permission, but then Mercer called before I could get him alone to tell him about the conversation.”

  “Don’t get yourself in a swivet. We got work to do.”

  “I’m telling you, something’s got the boss in a horrible mood. Something bigger than today’s news. He tried to control me like a puppet. Didn’t do anything when we walked out of City Hall but berate me for holding out on him. The world is upside down when Paul Battaglia is nipping at my tail and Rowdy Kitts is trying to save face for me.”

  “Tell me you took the subway. Good for you to mingle with the people every now and then.”

  “That’s not my favorite station,” I said. I hardly needed to remind Mike about our trip together around the loop that snakes under City Hall, an incident neither of us would ever forget. “Beside that, I was totally sandbagged. Lem was waiting for me in front of the office.”

  “You ride up here in his pimp-buggy?”

  “The first ten blocks. It’s worse than that. Ethan Leighton was in the car.”

  “Talk about burying the lead. What was that about?”

  I told Mike exactly what happened. “It was creepier than I can possibly describe. So if Battaglia’s already set off at me, imagine when I tell him I actually got in the car.”

  “You take that little factoid to the grave with you. I know. We’ll tell Mercer. Sit on that piece of information for now, okay?”

  “Maybe Kelli’s right. Maybe Lem’s trying to use me for something I’d rather not be in the middle of. Where’s Dr. Pomeroy?”

  “Scrubbing down. Give him ten.”

  “And Mercer?”

  “I thought he’d beat you here. He must be close. You mind turning on the telly?”

  Pomeroy kep
t a small set on a high shelf in a corner of the room that he used to monitor stories of fatalities that would involve his staff.

  I reached up and pressed the power button. The TV was set to the local all-news station. The reporter was describing the still-unfolding scene on the beach in Queens, the hood of a parka pulled over his head, muffling his voice.

  Mike searched the desktop, then opened drawers till he found the remote clicker. “Almost time. Get your twenty bucks ready.”

  For as long as I had known him, Mike had a habit of tuning in to the last five minutes of Jeopardy! to bet on the final question. Although the son of a decorated police officer with a legendary reputation in the department, Mike had set out on a different track, majoring in history at Fordham College. When his father dropped dead of a heart attack just two days after retiring from the job, Mike decided to honor that legacy by following in his footsteps.

  “Any autopsy results yet?”

  “Waiting on Pomeroy. He wanted to get two done today—one of the supposed drowning victims, and the girl with the mysterious injuries. Compare and contrast the findings.” Mike switched channels and muted the commercial. “What did the mayor have to say?”

  “Nothing to me. Keenly interested in Ethan’s situation.”

  Mike saw Alex Trebek on the screen above my head and clicked on the sound. “That’s right,” Trebek said, “the category of tonight’s question is THE COLOR PURPLE. THE COLOR PURPLE, folks.”

  “I spoke too fast. Literary stuff.”

  “Double or nothing.” I had majored in English literature at Wellesley before deciding that my interest was a career in public service, and went on to study at the University of Virginia School of Law.

  “That’s taking candy from a baby, Coop,” Mike said, offering me the small brown bag of chocolates. “Wipe the grin off your face. All I’ve got is my M and M’s and twenty-four bucks. It’s almost payday.”

  “Spent too much on the holidays?” I bit my tongue to prevent myself from making a crack about New Year’s Eve.

  “Back to purple. Spielberg movie,” Mike said. “Eleven Oscar nominations.”

  “Walker novel. Pulitzer Prize.” I could take him on a handful of topics like literature, but Mike knew more about military history than anyone I’d ever met. Mercer’s father had serviced planes for Delta and he’d grown up with maps of the world’s airline routes papering his bedroom walls, so he took the kitty whenever the subject was related to geography.

  One of the attendants came to the doorway. “Dr. Pomeroy would like to see you downstairs.”

  Mike put one foot on the floor. “Be right there.”

  At the morgue or in fashionable mansions, at crack dens or social clubs, very little interfered with Mike’s evening ritual of watching the final question, even if it delayed for a few minutes the crews bagging bodies and recovering evidence.

  “Here’s your answer, gentlemen,” Trebek said, as the board pulled back to reveal the phrase. “The answer is ‘City from which this purple hue, worn for centuries by royalty, derives its name.’ ”

  Trebek repeated the answer while his three bespectacled contestants studied the words before starting to write on their video tablets.

  “I can see it in your face, Coop. Not on your reading list, as you’d expected, right?”

  I was walking to the door. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait a minute. You doubled me down, didn’t you? Check it out.”

  Trebek approached the first young man, who hadn’t been able to come up with a good guess. “What is—?”

  “Sorry. Oooh, and you wagered seven thousand five hundred on that one. Very sorry.”

  “And you, sir? You’ve written ‘What is Maroon?’ ”

  “Like where in the world would that city be?” Mike said, balling a piece of paper and throwing it at the screen. “Maroon, Italy? The guy’s a jerk. Won the last three nights on sheer luck.”

  He had drowned out Trebek, who moved on to the third player. “You’re shaking your head already, Scott. And your question is, ‘What is Indigo?’ Wrong again.”

  Mike had both feet on the floor. “What is Tyre? I’m telling you, get me on that show and I’ll make enough money to quit this job tomorrow.”

  “What is Tyre? That’s what we were looking for,” Trebek said. “The color Tyrian purple. That’s the name we wanted. Also called imperial purple, first produced by the ancient Phoenicians in the city of Tyre, and royal figures everywhere used it almost exclusively to flaunt their stature.”

  “And you know that because . . . ?” I asked, as we headed down the quiet corridor to go to the basement where the grim work of the medical examiners was performed.

  “Alexander the Great crushed the Tyrians. Three thirty-two B.C. Tyre was one of the great early seaports of the world. The people dissed Alex—wouldn’t let him enter the city when his troops arrived—so he practically wiped them out. All the great ancient emperors wore Tyrian purple robes, Coop. Very expensive stuff. And you know what it was made from? Mucus. A mucus secretion from the gland of a predatory sea snail in the Mediterranean.”

  Mike opened the door to the basement and I could smell a strong antiseptic odor, as though someone had just cleaned up the autopsy rooms and overwhelmed the familiar chemical smells with even harsher fluids.

  “Don’t turn up your nose at me. Too much reading about female empowerment with those weepy women’s novels and not enough cold, hard facts.”

  “I wasn’t sniffing at you, Mike. It was the idea of the colorful dye coming from mucus.”

  He took a package of mints out of his pocket and offered them to me. Every detective had different ways of dealing with the strong scent of death, and Mike had something ready for almost every occasion.

  Gurneys lined the wall of the long, narrow staging area, which led from the bay in which the bodies were received from morgue vans and hearses into the autopsy theaters.

  The first room, where Pomeroy usually worked, was empty. Someone had just mopped the tiled floor and wiped down the stainless steel table, ready to receive the next unfortunate voyager.

  “Good evening, Alex. Hey, Mike,” the doctor said as he came out of the locker room, wiping his hands on a towel before extending one of them to us.

  “How’d you do today?” Mike asked.

  “We’ve actually finished three autopsies. Not too much competition on the homicide front.”

  “What’s the news?”

  “We started with the two young women. Jerry also had time to help me with one of the men, so I could make the necessary comparisons,” Pomeroy said, leading us into the second theater, where a sheet appeared to be covering one of the bodies. “Two of them are most certainly accidental drownings.”

  “Most certainly?” I asked.

  “I’ve told you before, Alex, that drowning deaths can be difficult to call.”

  “What’s the mechanism?”

  “Well, submersion in water is usually followed by a struggle to reach the surface. Most often, it’s a panicky process.”

  Panic kills. Exactly what the guys had told me on the beach.

  “The energy reserves get exhausted,” Pomeroy continued. “People try to hold their breath, till the carbon dioxide accumulation builds up. Then they open their mouths and end up inhaling large amounts of water. Once they swallow the water—it’s pretty gruesome, Alex. You really want to understand this?”

  “I need to, of course.”

  “Then the gagging starts. Coughing, sometimes throwing up. The air escapes from the lungs and it’s replaced by water.”

  “So, it’s an asphyxial death?” I asked.

  “Rarely. Less than twelve percent of the time. Though more so in salt water, like these cases, than in fresh. The salt moves into the bloodstream to establish an osmotic balance, which makes it appear more like an asphyxial death.”

  I listened to Pomeroy but looked at the still form covered by sheeting.

  “Me and science weren’t a natural match,
Doc,” Mike said. “What does that mean for these guys?”

  “The victims become unconscious. Often suffer convulsions. It’s anoxia that causes death—low oxygen as a result of the inhalation of large amounts of water.”

  “So the tests you do to say they drowned, those are all done?”

  “There are no reliable tests.”

  “Water in the lungs?” Mike asked. “Water in the stomach?”

  “No real significance to those facts. The water can easily reach those organs after death. In a situation like this with rough ocean movement,” Pomeroy said, “water, sand, seaweed, all get forced into the body.”

  “So what do you need?”

  “The key question is whether or not we have facts that establish whether the person was alive when he—or she—entered the water. All the background observers give to you, what the scene was actually like, what the condition of the deceased’s clothing is when we recover the body.”

  “I got a shipwreck in the middle of the night with a boatload of hysterical Ukrainians. So far nobody can tell us anything I understand. What next, Doc?”

  “For the moment, Mike, while you put the pieces together, I’m quite confident that the first two bodies autopsied—one male, one female—are accidental drowning,” Pomeroy said, stepping to the table and lifting the sheet to fold it down to the waist of the young woman we had seen earlier, at the temporary morgue. “This is Jane Doe Number One.”

  Her eyes were closed now. The auburn hair had been brushed neatly off her face in the postautopsy washing, revealing an uneven line of scrapes and cuts across her forehead.

  Pomeroy pointed his finger to the small bruise on her left chest. “That’s it.”

  “That’s what?” Mike asked.

  “This girl was stabbed to death.”

  “The mark is so small it looks like a bullet wound.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, at first. But it’s a single thrust, right into the heart. Someone knew what he was doing, or got very lucky.”