Death Angel (4 page)

“Didn’t I just say she could come along? By then, Scully will have announced the formation of a task force, right?”

Every major case that wasn’t solved immediately and might benefit from the collaboration of some of the special agencies within the NYPD wound up being run by a task force. Mike and his superb team of detectives who worked the Manhattan North Homicide squad would rather keep this case—like all their others—to themselves, taking it down methodically and strategically with the vast experience and knowledge that made them such pros.

“Undoubtedly,” Mercer said.

“So Peterson’s holding Monday afternoon for a crash course on the geography of the Park. Scully already has a promise from the parks commissioner, Gordon Davis, to lead the session himself.”

“Davis is a big deal,” I said. “He’s one of the mayor’s favorite players.”

“No kidding.”

Central Park seems so integral to the life and landscape of Manhattan that most people assumed it had existed in its present form naturally and forever. Instead, as the city grew from its commercial roots and settlements on the southern tip of the island in the 1600s, landowners and merchants became increasingly aware that the open land north of 59th Street was likely to be overrun and strangled by the growth of this nineteenth-century metropolis—which had spread without any thought for a public park in its master plan. At last, in 1857, legislation was finally passed to enable the creation of this glorious enterprise, known first as the Greensward.

“So what’s the deal with the Park?” Vickee asked. “I had to make a lot of notifications today, not just to Davis’s office. It’s a public-private joint enterprise, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. The Department of Parks and Recreation is responsible for setting all policy—that’s why Gordon Davis is in charge. He’s a mayoral appointment. But it’s a monster to maintain. The budget is almost fifty million dollars a year, just for the Park. So when the city was in financial trouble in the ’70s and the Park was deteriorating from neglect, some philanthropic New Yorkers created the Central Park Conservancy. That’s the private fund-raising piece, which does most of the heavy lifting now. They come up with eighty percent of the money to run the place. So we have to make nice with them, too.”

“You’re right, Mike. I feel that task force coming on strong,” Mercer said.

“I get the sense that if this poor girl had been dumped behind a bodega on the Lower East Side,” Vickee said, “there wouldn’t be quite this frenzy, no matter who she turns out to be.”

“Homicide rule number three,” Mike said. “Never kill anybody in a landmark location. It always ups the ante.”

“Amen to that,” Mercer said.

“Did you talk to Battaglia about keeping the case?” Mike asked me.

“Yes. Both he and McKinney are fine with it.”

“Then I’ve got a present for you. When you and Vickee take a break from gossiping this weekend,” he said, handing me a thick brochure, “you can get familiar with the Park. I realize we all think we know it, but I’m talking about the ball fields and waterfalls and streams and glacial rocks and all the other hideaways that we’ll have to look at. Study up.”

I started to unfold the map on the table in front of me.

“This whole thing is the vision of two men,” Mike went on, “who planned it down to the number of trees and rocks and footpaths, gates and promenades and terraces. Nothing between 59th Street and 110th Street is there naturally. Nothing. And none of it was left to chance. These two guys—Olmsted and Vaux—they were geniuses.”

Mike tapped his glass to tell the waiter he wanted a second drink.

“Who?” Mercer asked.

“Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the two dudes who created Central Park.”

“They were landscape architects. They won a major competition to design the Park. And it’s not Vaux,” I said, pronouncing the name as Mike had, rhyming with “so.” “It’s Calvert Vaux—sort of rhymes with ‘hawks.’”

Mike slammed his hand on the table, sloshing my wine over the rim of the glass. “What is it about you that you can’t stop yourself from telling me I’m wrong? Telling me I’m wrong with more regularity than I bet you have when you go to the bathroom?”

“What did I do? The commissioner will correct you on Monday if I didn’t do it now. You might as well go in on top. Let him know how smart you are.”

“This morning it was about the lake that you had to tell me was a pond. Now I call Monaco a country and you say it’s a principality. The architect’s not Vaux like ‘so,’ he’s Vaux like ‘hawks.’ I haven’t seen you in more than a month, and I was actually beginning to look forward to hanging out with you on this one. Not anymore, I’m not. You wanna know why you’re spending a weekend alone?”

“She’s not alone, Mike,” Vickee said, getting to her feet and fanning herself with her napkin as though the heat was too much to take. She smiled and patted me on the head. “Alex will have me. I’ll show her what my cougar talent can do to spice up her life. Is the restroom down those stairs in the back?”

I nodded.

“You’re alone because you are so damned critical and picky and self-righteous.”

“I’m nothing like that, am I, Mercer? I—I just corrected the pronunciation thing. I didn’t mean anything by it.” I started to reach for my drink, but my hand was shaking so visibly that I rested it in my lap.

“You are so doomed to be alone in your ivory tower, blondie. Waiting for King Louis the twenty-something of France to return and rescue you.”

“Back off, Mike,” Mercer said, catching the dig at my relationship with a Frenchman—Luc Rouget—that had recently splintered and left me with a heavy heart. Luc and I were trying to figure out whether to pick up the pieces, and how to do that with an ocean between us. “That’s over the line.”

“No, it’s not. When Coop’s unhappy, she thinks we all need to be unhappy with her.”

“I’m not unhappy.”

“Get honest with yourself. You’re miserable. And have you figured out
why
Pat McKinney and the district attorney were so agreeable about giving you this case? Isn’t it strange that your weasel-faced supervisor didn’t try to pull it out from underneath you today, like he always does?”

Mike sucked in more vodka before he answered his own question. “They want you to fail, Alex Cooper. This case, this woefully sad murder that is going to play out in the media all over the world, has all the earmarks of a dog. I expect it’ll be barking at me from now till the day my pension vests, like the rest of those ice-cold cases from the Park. McKinney wants you to fall on your face so he can grind his shoe into the back of your neck. They’re all looking for you to fail for a change, and just maybe, they found the case that will accomplish that for them.”

I picked at my salad while I waited for Vickee to come back to the table. I was determined not to go downstairs to splash some cold water on my face, for fear I would lose my composure if I were alone.

Mercer tried to lighten things up by making small talk, but that didn’t engage either Mike or me. “Remember that Preppy Murder case?” he said. “Robert Chambers, the scumbag who killed a friend of his behind the Metropolitan museum in ’86? That’s the only murder in the Park I can think of except for the Brazilian jogger in ’95. And the two kids who stabbed the homeless guy to death in ’97. The squad had both of them in custody within hours, just like they did with Chambers. I don’t know why you’re so pessimistic.”

“Robert Chambers’s friend was Jennifer Levin. Eighteen years old. Nice girl. Trusted the bastard and walked into the Park to her death, hand in hand with him. But she had ID in her jacket pocket, a loving family that threw themselves into helping the cops, and twenty kids who saw them together an hour before she was killed,” Mike said. “Not happening here. It’s not like that at all. If this girl’s been dead two or three days already—or more likely, as Johnny Mayes said, at least a month—how come nobody’s even reported her missing?”

Mike’s father, Brian Chapman, was a much-decorated detective who had worked many of the city’s most high-profile cases before his son came on the job. Chambers had been one of his perps.

“Mike, I’m sorry for being so rude. I really am.”

“Forget it, Coop. My mother says ‘rude’ is my middle name. It’s the part about being miserable that I hate to see. Get over it.”

Foolish advice coming from Mike. He had been engaged a couple of years back to a great girl named Valerie Jacobson, who had survived breast cancer only to be killed in a freak skiing accident. Mike had internalized his grief so completely that he’d never been able to fully open himself to a relationship ever since.

“Want me to check on Vickee?” I asked Mercer, looking for an excuse to break away.

“No, she’s just making a call to Logan, I’m sure.”

Mike took three plastic bags from a case he was carrying and put them on the table. “Just so I’m not holding back anything, I’ll be dropping these things at the lab. Back burner, of course. We picked up a lot of crap today: used condoms and a lead pipe that could have crushed someone’s skull; a few kid-sized baseball bats that might have done the same; bits and pieces of tiny sailboats that had been smashed on the Lake—every kid in walking distance of the Park has one of those—and all the dirty laundry, underwear in every size and color you can imagine. The ME’s going to give us a small conference room. We’ll get a wall-sized map of the Park and put pins where everything was found. A field guide to the detritus of Manhattan’s park people.”

“What’s in the bags?” Mercer asked.

“Some of the few things that didn’t seem like pure trash. Stuff that a few of the guys found off the pathway, at the northernmost tip of the Lake, between the shoreline and the bridle path. Could be where the body went into the water. You never know.” Mike pushed the three bags across the table, toward Mercer and me. “I’m dropping it all off for prints and swabbing.”

I was so cowed by Mike’s outburst that I was afraid to ask questions and have him pound at me again. Mercer picked up the first bag to examine and then handed it to me.

“Look, Alex. It’s a miniature castle. Could be something a kid dropped out of a stroller or backpack. Nice find.”

“You know what I think it is, guys? I think it’s Belvedere Castle.” My voice was tentative, but I was certain about the distinctive shape of the structure.

“That’s the one just above the 79th Street Transverse?” Mercer said.

“Exactly.” It was one of the most distinctive lookouts in the Park, perched high above Turtle Pond and designed in the style of a medieval castle. It had always been a favorite destination for my older brothers when we visited the city as children, and I knew its outline well. For decades it was home to the National Weather Service, and is still the place where meteorological instruments record the amount of snow and rainfall in the Park’s center for every weather report around the country.

“Pretty rich kid to have a model this perfect,” Mike said.

I removed my cell phone from my tote and snapped a photograph of the figurine. “Maybe the Conservancy shop sells this kind of thing, but it is pretty ornate, and it looks like it has some age to it.”

Mercer held up the second bag, and Mike spoke before we all jumped in. “The Obelisk, right? Cleopatra’s Needle.”

“Look at the detail in those carvings,” I said. It was a safer thing to point out than the fact that the Obelisk—twin of the fifteenth-century-
BC
monument that stands on the Thames embankment in London—had nothing to do with the Egyptian queen, who was born centuries after their creation, except that she had moved the striking pair to Alexandria to commemorate Caesar’s death.

I took a picture of the obelisk while Mercer read from the tiny reproduction plaque carved at its base that it was installed in the Park, on East 81st Street, in 1880.

“I’d guess that these are part of a very valuable collection,” I said. “Someone with an entire miniature reproduction of Central Park. They don’t look like ordinary street garbage to me, and they don’t look like kids’ toys.”

“Yeah, we’re checking the burglary squad and some of the antique shops, and the Conservancy is putting a notice on its Facebook page. It’s probably got nothing to do with my girl, but you never know.”

The third item was something different altogether. It was not the same scale as the others, a single figure almost as tall as the nine- or ten-inch obelisk. It was made of a different substance, too.

I lifted the bag and turned it over gently in my hand, admiring the beauty of the small form.

“She’s an angel.”

“The Central Park angel? The Angel of the Waters?” Mercer asked, reaching for her while I took another photograph.

“No, she’s clearly not that,” I said.

“Could have been a lucky break,” Mercer said. “Murdered girl, thrown in the Lake, clutching a statue of the Bethesda angel. Might have tightened up the search a bit.”

Not only was the little angel entirely different in shape from her world-renowned counterpart, but her arms didn’t reach out to bless the waters in front of her, nor were her wings lifted and spread. She was very old, a figurine molded from clay or bisque, chipped and worn over the ages. Her clothing was painted, highlighted by some sort of gilt. Her skin was painted, too—the color of ebony.

I held the bag up to the light to look more closely at her. I knew the Bethesda angel in the Park quite well. She had a finely chiseled nose, slim and straight. Her lips were narrow, and her short hair—only slightly wavy—was parted in the middle to frame her face. She looked like a young beauty from a Botticelli painting. This dark form in my hand had a handsome face with rounded cheeks outlined by long ringlets of black hair that reached her shoulders. Her eyes had been colored the deepest brown, her nose short but wide, and her lips quite full. It seemed to me that these idealized figures had been created in the same time period—different in function and spirit, perhaps, but each representing the beauty of her race.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether these two angels—one white, one black—both had a connection to the dead girl who had been found so very close to them.