Devil's Bridge (22 page)

I was getting more and more agitated, and paranoid, too, but I forced myself to think rationally. “Nobody likes having a cop appear on his doorstep, Jimmy,” I said. “Can’t say as I blame ’em.”

I was inhaling a bologna sandwich like it was an aged New York strip steak.

Walter was on the phone with his son, telling him he’d be able to pick up concert tickets sometime tomorrow morning from the desk at the Twenty-Eighth Precinct. He had generously parted with the stale leftovers in the office refrigerator so the three of us could eat.

“Your men did a great job cleaning up after themselves,” I said.

“We’ve got a red-carpet list coming. The National Park Service didn’t give us much choice.”

“I’d like to see the names of your work crew.”

“Why’s that?” Walter asked. “You think we’ve got a security risk on board?”

“Just routine.”

He walked to an old file cabinet and riffled through some folders until he found the one he wanted. “Local 46,” he said. “Metallic Reinforcing and Lathers Union. A bunch of really good guys we got here.”

“That local is harder to get into than Yale Law School,” Mercer said.

The union had been around for a long time, and jobs in this hardworking brotherhood of construction workers were more likely to come by inheritance rather than application.

Mercer and I ran through the names together before xeroxing the pages. It looked like my class list from parochial school. Rourkes, O’Connells, Boyles, Doyles, Cavanaughs, Dolans, Lanigans, Cooneys, Coonans, Fitzsimmonses, Kilduffs, Hallorans, and more Macs than I could count.

There was an occasional Finelli or Fernandez, but most of the men who did this dangerous work found the courage to walk on those steel beams in their bloodlines going back for generations.

“Got any slackers?” I asked, shaking the papers at Walter.

“Not a one. I’ve seen most of them climb up inside the body of the statue on those horizontal bars, three hundred feet high without a safety net, or shimmy up the ladder to the torch to change out a floodlight for the electricians,” he said. “Like a buddy of mine remarked, once you’ve stood on the ground below and watched a man flapping around out in the wind high up on the nose of Lady Liberty, trying to patch a hole in her skin, you know there’s no dress rehearsal for it. You’ve either got the nerve or you don’t.”

“Amen to that.”

“How about ex-cons?” Mercer asked.

“Not very likely. At least not that I know of,” Walter said. “I’ve been told the rangers have to do a thorough background check on everyone because it’s federal property.”

“I’d like a shot at climbing that ladder up to the torch,” Jimmy said.

“Now, that’s really out-of-bounds,” Walter said.

“Did you have anybody up there this week?” I asked with heightened interest. I was looking for places that were totally out-of-bounds.

“Oh, sure. I’m just not looking for a lawsuit. That’s why I left it locked up. Somebody misses their footing on that ladder and they’re toast. But we cleaned it up in there for sure.”

“Then, can you let us see it?” I asked.

“I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

“The caretaker’s house, too?”

“Let’s get a move on, then.”

Walter led us out of his makeshift office and started to walk toward the redbrick residence.

“I don’t blame you for looking in the house, Mike, now that we’re here,” Mercer said, folding the list and putting it in his pocket. “But the torch? Let’s get home before sunset, man. Nobody took Alex single file up a ladder to—well, there’d be no purpose to it. You’re clutching at straws.”

Everything we were doing was an act of desperation. I knew that.

Mercer’s phone signaled the arrival of a text.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Vickee. She’s telling me that the Coopers won’t be flying in till tomorrow,” he said. “Dr. Cooper had some significant—well, Vickee’s calling it palpitations. He’s hospitalized overnight and they’ll evaluate him for travel in the morning.”

“So she thinks I’ve dodged another bullet, doesn’t she? Vickee thinks I’m avoiding them.”

“Give your friends the benefit of the doubt, okay? All she wants to do is let us know what’s going on,” Mercer said. “You’d be mighty peeved if she didn’t.”

Walter had walked ahead with Jimmy North while Mercer let me vent.

I heard footsteps on the gravel path behind me. The same two workmen who had passed us on our way from the statue to Walter’s office were headed back this way, coming from the pedestal.

One of them, the tall one with tats, was carrying something rolled up under one arm. It looked like a sheet or thin blanket.

“Yo!” I shouted to them. “Hold up there.”

They both ignored me.

“What’s he carrying?” I asked Walter as I took off in their direction.

“A tarp. It looks like a tarp to me,” Walter said. “They’re all over the place.”

“I want to talk to those guys,” I said, breaking into a trot. “We just went up and down the whole statue and I didn’t see a single tarp.”

“Mike,” Mercer called after me, “you’re chasing shadows now. C’mon.”

“They’re probably not coming from the statue, anyway,” Walter said. “That kid likes to wander off by himself from time to time. Quiet type.”

“Still waters run deep,” I said. “And sometimes foul.”

I followed the workers to the trailer at the edge of the easternmost point on the island. I tried the door but it was locked, so I knocked.

“Yeah?”

“NYPD. Mayor’s security detail.”

“Yeah?”

“Come on out. I’d like to talk to you.”

“We’re getting dressed,” one of them said. “We’ll be out in a few.”

I kicked the dirt around until the door opened. Neither one of the guys seemed to have changed clothes. They’d just put jackets on over their T-shirts.

“You are—?” I asked.

“I’m Pete Fitzgerald,” the short redhead said. “This here’s Cormac Lonigan.”

“You got an uncle on the job?” I asked Lonigan. “Queens Robbery Squad?”

“Not so’s I know,” he said, swinging his backpack over his shoulder. “Lots of Lonigans out there. Construction, bartending, firemen. None that I know of on the force.”

“What were you guys doing today?”

“Same as the others. Finishing the cleanup for the concert.”

There were a handful of construction workers in and around the sheds, closing up—it seemed to me—and getting ready to get on the ferry that was docking for the ride back to Manhattan.

“Where were you two coming from?”

“Over by the statue,” Fitzgerald said. “Picking up our things.”

“We were just over there ourselves. I didn’t see any blankets or tarps. Where’s the one you were carrying, Cormac?”

“That? It’s tucked in the trailer till Monday. Where they all are.”

“Show me.”

Cormac Lonigan stood in front of the trailer door like a hawk on top of his nest. “We got a ferry to catch.”

“I’ll see that it waits for you,” I said. “Did Walter tell you we were on the island?”

“He didn’t have to,” Lonigan said. “Some of the men seen the three of you walking off your boat, talking to him. Then he started bragging about you getting tickets from the mayor and all that. Security detail.”

“Would you lighten up if I got you some tickets, too?”

“Not my kind of music, Detective.”

“Maybe Bono will do the warm-up for Kanye,” I said. “Now, open the door.”

I was certain that Lonigan and Fitzgerald had gone back to the statue—to the fort, in fact—because they heard there were three cops on the island. Maybe that was true. Or maybe I just wanted to beat up on somebody.

Lonigan pushed open the door and stepped out of the way.

“Mercer,” I said, “Jimmy. Why don’t you walk these gentlemen back to the statue to let them show you exactly where they picked up the tarp? I’ll join you in a minute.”

“You don’t have to get all bossy,” Fitzgerald said. “We didn’t do nothing. I’ll take you back.”

I walked inside the trailer and scanned the room. It made my apartment look like a centerfold in
House and Garden.

There was a row of lockers, mostly open, with jackets and overalls and baseball caps hanging from every hook. There were three cots without bedding, with clothing strewn about on top of them, a couple of small refrigerators, a space heater, and a bathroom at the far end.

A pile of tarps was stacked between two of the cots. I walked over and pulled at the edge of the one on top, but it was much heavier and a darker shade of taupe than the material Lonigan had been carrying.

I took a photo of the pile with my phone, and a video as I turned around the room once before going outside.

I jogged down the steps of the trailer to catch up with the group.

“Find what you needed, Detective?” Walter asked.

“Yeah. Exactly.” Cormac Lonigan wouldn’t look up from the path, but I could see him smirking.

“I promised these officers that everything would be shipshape for the dignitaries, boys,” Walter said. “They want to see where you were working.”

Pete Fitzgerald was looking to Lonigan to take the lead.

“My fault,” Lonigan said. “I was coming down from the crown early this morning after taking up the speaker system for its installation. The piece I was carrying was wrapped in a tarp. I dropped off the speaker, and when I was ready to leave, the elevator was full of more equipment being unloaded. So I took the stairs down.”

“He dropped one,” Fitzgerald said. The loyal friend backing up the lie, figuring that if we had gone into the statue, we must have taken the elevator. “One of the tarps, I mean. I went back with him to fetch it.”

Jimmy North was champing at the bit to jump in but didn’t want to step on my toes. I nodded at him to go ahead.

“That’s so weird,” he said, “’cause just before we saw you this afternoon, I walked up every one of those three hundred and ninety-three steps. There wasn’t even a dust bunny on the staircase, much less a tarp.”

Lonigan didn’t flinch.

“Could be the boys are mistaken, Detective,” Walter said. “Like I said to you, Cormac here likes his privacy.”

I doubted they were mistaken about something that had happened twenty minutes ago. But Walter’s heart wasn’t in his mouth, like mine was.

“Why don’t you show these gents around the old fort, Cormac? More likely than not it’s where you left your stuff.”

Cormac Lonigan trudged along ahead of me like he was on a forced march to a death camp. I told the others to wait outside for us while he led me into the fort.

“What’s your problem, Lonigan?”

“I got no problem.”

“What is it you like about the fort?” I asked.

I knew it had been garrisoned and abandoned several times from when it was constructed until after the Civil War. At least nine of the wings of the original structure that had formed the eleven-point star had been cemented shut in the last restoration of the statue. Engineers had deemed it too dangerous—and too expensive—to try to maintain the granite and concrete that made up the once-armed and important coastal defense station.

“It’s quiet in there,” he said. “The walls are so thick it keeps the place quiet from all the banging when the men are at work. Sometimes I take my lunch break here. The granite makes it cooler inside, too.”

The only way into the fort itself, even though it was actually beneath the level of the huge pedestal, was to climb the steps of the pyramid-shaped base and then go down a staircase, where there was a small office and a gift shop. That was the part I had visited before with Coop, quite unexpectedly one night.

After we reached the pedestal plaza, Lonigan went down into the dark stairwell that was the entrance to the fort.

“Here’s what you wanted to see, Detective.”

“It’s pitch-black down here,” I said. “Where are the lights?”

“I wouldn’t know that.”

“What do you mean? Why not?”

“When I come down here the office is usually open, even when the statue is closed to visitors. There’s someone answering phones and giving information,” he said. “And I’ve usually got on a headlamp from working up inside the Lady.”

“That’s not—”

“It doesn’t take me much light to eat a sandwich and hear myself think.”

“Show me around, Cormac.” Walter had given me a flashlight in case I couldn’t find the light switches.

“Nothing to show. This is it.”

“What’s through that doorway?” I asked, pointing the flashlight. There was an archway made of bricks, opening to the next dark area.

“I don’t think anything at all.”

“Why don’t we look?” I said.

“Go right ahead,” he said, fidgeting with his backpack.

“The operative word there is
we,
dude.”

He slipped the backpack off his shoulders and rested it on the stone floor.

There was a room beyond the area of the office where we had first entered. It held a few wooden chairs, which looked neither comfortable nor inviting. On the walls were several old prints of nineteenth-century soldiers on guard duty at the fort, and others depicting the battery of Rodman guns, especially built for seacoast fortifications that were mounted along the bastions of the eleven stars.

“Who was your ticket to the union?” I asked.

“Why? Is that against the law?”

“No, Cormac. It’s a lucky thing. That gene pool of men who founded Local 46 is worth a lot of money, bought with a great deal of sweat.”

There was another archway and I tapped him on the shoulder to follow me through it. My flashlight revealed a long empty hallway ahead. The structure was finally beginning to resemble the interior of an enormous star. This was the side of one of its points.

“My great-grandfather was the first one in the family, on my father’s side. Then so on down the line to me.”

The deeper into the old fort we went, the cooler and darker it seemed to be. There were holes in the wall that offered a bit of fresh air, as warm as it was, but mostly the dankness of the place dominated my senses.

“Any brothers work with you?”

“I got three older sisters. Only one brother. He’s a priest, Detective. Had to happen to one of us in the family sooner or later.”

I laughed with him. Maybe he was just a nervous kid, I thought. Sullen and nervous. Maybe he’d had a bad encounter or two with the NYPD.

“I know the feeling. Would have been me,” I said, “but the nuns figured I’d sprouted an unfortunate mouth and good right hook way too young.”

At the end of the hallway—the tip of one of the star’s points—the archway was completely boarded up. A large red sign that said
CAUTION
was affixed to the wooden crossbars.

“Seen enough, Detective?” Cormac asked.

He leaned against the brick wall and lit up a cigarette. He blew out the match and put it in his pocket.

“Probably so,” I said.

I ran my flashlight over the two-by-fours that blocked farther access to the fort’s other starred points. At the bottom of the left corner, opposite Cormac Lonigan, were ashes. Anthill size but undisturbed, as though recently deposited. There were three or four spent matches around them.

“Is this your place, Cormac?” I asked.

“Nah. Like I said, I just come down near the office, the room behind it.”

“By yourself?”

“Usually so.”

He started to walk back in the direction from which we’d come.

I pressed my right hand against the wooden boards directly above the ashes. He heard the boards shift and turned to look at me.

“Don’t lean on that, Detective.”

“Who put this up, Cormac?”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t come back here.”

But somebody else did. Somebody who wasn’t careful enough to pick up his matches or grind the ashes into the stone floor.

I examined the boards with the flashlight. The nails on the left side of the
CAUTION
sign looked shiny and new. The ones to the right, where Lonigan had been standing, had already begun to rust from the dampness.

I banged on one of the long pieces of wood, about chest-high, with the heel of my hand. It cracked in dead center.

Cormac Lonigan shouted at me to stop.

I pulled at the wood and the end of it snapped out of the board behind, three shiny nails coming with it.

“Why stop?” I asked.

“Because that part of the fort’s been blocked off for years,” he said. “There’s fallen granite inside and the ceiling’s unstable. A man could get hurt in there.”

“I’m a sucker for two things, Cormac. One is exploring old forts,” I said, ripping at the other end of the board, oblivious to the splinters and nails, “and the other is getting hurt.”

I lifted the flashlight from my belt, where I had tucked it when I started to pull at the jerry-rigged wall. I shined it into the space behind the separated boards.

“Give me a hand here, kid,” I said.

I couldn’t see anything in the blackness beyond, but Cormac didn’t wait to hear that. He threw his cigarette to the ground and bolted away from me.

The flashlight dropped from my hand as I turned to give chase.

The kid was faster than I was, but the second’s hesitation when he stooped to pick up his backpack cost him the lead.

He was halfway up the thick stone steps to the pedestal base when I grabbed both ankles and brought him down.

He slid back toward me on his belly. I took a handful of hair at the nape of his neck to lift his head up a couple of inches and turn it to the side, slamming his right cheek against the solid granite slab. I expected the ringing in his ear would last for a month.