Lethal Legacy (20 page)

“My paper hasn’t been delivered yet. Is there a
story?”

Mercer held up the
Times
and tabloids.
“Lucky for us, the body was found too late for the morning news. May give us a
few hours’ jump on talking to people.”

“I’ve got to get through to legal at the phone
company. Let them know that subpoena I sent out covers the call that came in
this morning,” I said. Tina Barr was dead, but her cell phone account was still
live.

“Freaked me out when that sucker started to ring,”
Mike said.

Mike got onto the drive in Central Park, looping
around to the West Side and exiting on Central Park South. He cruised down
Seventh Avenue, turning east onto Forty-second Street—the Deuce, in police
parlance—and parked beside the corner entrance to Bryant Park.

The mild weather was a break for the cops.
Plainclothes detectives were lined up along the balustrade on the western
border of the park, doing one-on-one interviews with men who appeared to be
from the JumboTron construction crew. Huge trucks bordered the avenue, waiting
to be loaded with equipment that should have been taken off-site in the early hours
of the morning, before Tina Barr’s body was found.

We walked over and Mike listened in on ten minutes
of an interview. “This’ll take all day. They’re checking each guy’s ID so they
can run record checks. Getting them to re-create every minute of the setup and
breakdown, whether there were any strangers lurking around,” he said, shaking
his head. “And the bus lanes will be tied up till midnight with these trucks
stuck on the street.”

Commuters emerged from the corner subway station,
confused to find the cheerful breakfast and sandwich kiosks within the park
still shuttered and closed, cordoned off by police tape.

We started down the path toward the library
building. The phalanx of uniformed cops that Mike had demanded were already in
place, clustered in groups to search for anything that might provide a clue.

“Look at all the litter,” I said. Ice-cream
wrappers and soda cans had been discarded by kids who had watched the ball
game. “I can’t imagine any items of evidentiary value would survive the
presence of the Scout troops.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t get my hopes up, Coop. Hair bags
and hot-heads,” Mike said. “Looks like all the commish came up with on short
notice to do the search are old-timers who never made it out of uniform and
kids fresh from the academy. Cross your fingers.”

“They’ve found needles in bigger haystacks,”
Mercer said.

“It’s kind of ironic that whoever killed Barr left
her here,” Mike said, stopping to stomp his foot on the ground. “You know
what’s underneath this park?”

“No,” I said.

“Dead people. Nothing but dead people.”

“What do you mean?”

Bryant Park was a green oasis in the middle of one
of the city’s busiest commercial districts. Thousands of office workers in
nearby skyscrapers escaped their buildings every day—until the middle of
winter, when it was turned into a skating rink—to eat lunch, read books, meet
friends, enjoy the carrousel, and relax in the atmosphere of a French formal
garden.

Mike turned and walked backward, sweeping his hand
around the park. “During the Revolutionary War, this site was a killing field
for Washington’s troops when they fled the British after the Battle of Long
Island.”

“Well, they’re surely not below the park now,” I
said.

“Listen to me, Coop. The whole feng shui of this
place is death. After the war, the city made this ground a potter’s field.
Final resting place for the indigent and unbefriended. Dead folk down there,
one on top of the other, I’m telling you.”

“I thought this place used to be the site of the
reservoir,” Mercer said.

“No, no, no. The reservoir was right over where
the library stands,” Mike said, pointing at the back of the elegant structure.
“This spot was the burial ground. I know there’s dead people under here, Coop.
It’s a fact. The city decommissioned the potter’s field in the 1850s to build a
crystal palace for the first World’s Fair. When that burnt down, they turned it
into a park.

“When my old man came on the job—the 1970s—Bryant
Park was one of the most treacherous places in Manhattan. Dope dealers ran the
place, he used to tell me. All crime all the time.”

“Over here, Sarge,” a voice called out, and a hand
went up in the air. The three of us stopped in our tracks.

“Whaddaya got?”

The young cop was wading through a bed of
pachysandra. “Used condoms. Do I pick ’em up?”

The sergeant’s answer was drowned out by three
other officers yelling that they had also found condoms. “Everything goes to
the lab.”

Mike continued walking east. “Be prepared. Isn’t
that the Scouts’ motto? Glad they came to the game with condoms. Maybe they
were cross-pollinating with the Brownies while the Yankee bullpen was falling
apart. Those techs are going to have their hands full, testing all the crap
that turns up.”

At the end of the pathway, we found an exit onto
Forty-second Street and left the park to elbow our way to the front of the
library, which stretched down two long blocks. The midtown crossroads at the
corner of Fifth Avenue was a hub of pedestrian and vehicular traffic.

“Is that Gibson?” Mike said.

I looked ahead and could see Jill, talking on her
cell, as she paced below the statue of one of the two spectacular marble
lions—iconic New York City landmarks—that stood on guard at the foot of the
terraced steps of the great building.

I introduced her to Mike and Mercer, reminding her
that Mike was the detective who had called her early that morning.

“I’m heartbroken about this, Alex. It’s just
unthinkable that someone could have done this to Tina. We were all so willing
to help her, but I couldn’t get her to come in,” Jill said, turning to lead us
up the first tier of steps. “I’ve called security. They’re sending someone to
the front door to open up.”

“You ought to put some mourning ribbons around the
lions’ necks,” Mike said, patting the large paw of the one to his right as he
passed by it.

“You know their names, Mike?” Jill asked.

“I didn’t know they had names.”

“During the Great Depression, Mayor LaGuardia
called them Patience and Fortitude. He felt those were the qualities New
Yorkers needed to endure the hardships of the times.”

“The same traits will serve us well this week,”
Mercer said.

Mercer was as quiet and steady as ever, knowing
that we were moving deeper into a tangled thicket of characters and motives,
that we had a series of crimes that would not be solved as quickly as Mike
might like. Mike, on the other hand, was long on fortitude and short, as
always, on patience.

We continued our climb, and I admired the stunning
array of sculptures and reliefs—sphinxes, winged horses, allegorical figures,
and literary inscriptions—that decorated the massive portico of the library. At
the very top, we passed under one of the arches and waited at the front door
for a worker to admit us.

Mike reached into his jacket pocket and removed
some folded papers. “This is a Xerox of the call slip that Tina had in her
pocket when she was killed,” Mike said. “The one I mentioned to you on the
phone.”

Jill Gibson read the notations on the first piece
of paper—Tina’s name, the date, and the book she must have been about to
request. On the second page was the partial quote that had been scrawled on the
back of that slip.

Jill looked at them both again, just as the man
inside opened the series of locks and pulled back the huge wood-and-glass door.

“Tina didn’t write this,” Jill said. “Someone made
this call slip out in her name.”

“You mean one of the librarians?”

“Well, you saw the original, Mike. Was it made out
in pencil or in ink?”

“The front side, with her name and the book title,
was done in ink. The notation on the back—see how faint it is here on the copy?
That was written in pencil.”

“The librarians in the reading room don’t allow
ink in there. Most research libraries are like that. You can only use pencil,”
Jill said. Her hand was trembling as she folded the slip in half. “I know
Tina’s handwriting well, Detective. It’s quite distinctive, whether in print or
script. She didn’t write that information on the call slip. And it’s unlikely
any of the librarians did, either. Certainly not in ink.”

Mike took the papers back and compared the two
writing styles. I knew what he was thinking. We’d have to bring in another
expert—someone familiar with the very unscientific field of handwriting
analysis. One clue that seemed promising at two o’clock in the morning now
created a new level of obfuscation.

“The second page—that quote on the back of the
slip—that’s Tina’s writing,” Jill said. “But she didn’t fill out this form. We
have several early editions of the Lewis Carroll work, all of them quite rare.
Maybe another person asked her to make the request to see one of these books.”

Maybe someone who didn’t want to be associated
with the request filled out the call slip, counting on the fact that he—or
she—could persuade Tina to deliver it and retrieve the book. Maybe it was the
person who killed her.

EIGHTEEN

“Where are the books?” Mike asked. “I don’t see
a frigging book in here.”

Mike, Mercer, and I were standing in the middle of
Astor Hall, one of the most magnificent interior spaces in New York. Jill had
gone off to find the chief security officer to ask him to guide us through the
enormous building.

“It’s not a lending library, Mike. It’s a home for
scholars to use, for research,” I said. “Books have to be accessed through a
formal system. They’re not out on open shelves, and they never leave.”

“Unless they’re stolen. So where the hell are
they?”

“Upstairs, in carefully maintained private
collections,” I said. “And under your feet, in the stacks. You’ll see.”

Mercer was walking around the great vaulted space.
“Looks like we’ve time-traveled back to inside a medieval castle.”

The great hall, dressed entirely in white marble,
had a self-supporting vaulted ceiling that covered the space between the two
broad staircases leading up to the second floor. Four giant torchères—also
marble—stood sentry around the large, empty room.

“Did you see her hand shake?” I said, whispering
so that my voice didn’t echo throughout the hall.

“Jill’s?” Mercer asked. “I missed that.”

“When Battaglia and I were talking to her
yesterday and McKinney jumped in, he referred to Tina Barr as a thief and a
forger.”

“And you said Jill didn’t seem to buy in to that.”

“Yes. But someone working in here must think so.”

“What’s your point?” Mike asked, standing under
one of the arches across the room.

I walked toward him so that I didn’t have to
shout. “How can Jill say for sure that the writing on the call slip wasn’t done
by Tina?”

“You mean, if Tina was capable of forgery, maybe
she intentionally wanted it to look like someone else wrote it out?”

“That’s possible. Once she turned in the original
slip, it would become the permanent record that the library would have for the
request. That’s who they’d look to if the book went missing.”

Mercer came up behind me. “It’s also possible Jill
got the shakes ’cause she recognized the penmanship on the slip, Alex. Maybe
it’s given her an idea about who wrote it but she chose not to tell you just
yet.”

We heard her approach on the marble staircase and
stopped talking.

“Why don’t you come this way?” Jill said, pausing
halfway down.

We crossed the room, our footsteps echoing
throughout the hall, and followed Jill as she turned and walked up to the
second floor. At the top, a man about my height with a thick build was standing
cross-armed, dressed in a drab green uniform.

“This is Yuri,” Jill said, introducing him to each
of us. “None of the security supervisors is here yet. He’s one of our
engineers, so just tell us what you’d like to see and we can get started.”