Lethal Legacy (37 page)

Still no sign of Travis. Mike handed two of the
catalogs to me. “2002,” I said. “A little late to put a bid in.”

“Homer Collyer, the older brother, went blind. So
the younger one began to save newspapers,” Mike said, sweeping his arm across
the piles of Forbes’s out-of-date dailies.

“Why?”

“In case Homer ever regained his sight, Coop. Then
he’d have all the news that he’d missed to read. They even booby-trapped the
whole place against thieves. So the younger one got stuck in one of his own
traps and buried in the rubble, while Homer starved to death. Rats took care of
the rest of him.”

“I get the point.”

“You get a call to a Collyer, you don’t know what
to expect to find under the debris. Junk? Stolen books? Maybe a body or two?”

Mike’s phone rang. He listened and then repeated
to me what Mercer told him. “Travis just peeped out the back. Made eye contact
with Mercer. Maybe now he’ll move our way.”

“Hey!” Forbes called out from the far end of the
hallway. “You can’t come in here. You can’t just break the lock.”

“I swear I didn’t,” Mike said. “I guess it
just—just fell. What have you got here, Travis? You know how dangerous it is to
keep paper jammed in here like this? A regular fire hazard.”

Travis Forbes was either embarrassed by Mike’s
discovery or simply didn’t like to make eye contact. I guessed him to be in his
late twenties, about my height, with a sad expression lingering within the
intense gaze of his dark, bespectacled eyes.

“I understand,” he said.

“What’s with yesterday’s news?” Mike asked.

“I started saving things for Eddy. Things I didn’t
think he could get in prison. It’s—it’s just a habit.”

“Somewhere along the way, I guess Eddy told you
the federal can is like summer camp, no? The
Times
, the
Journal
—that’s
all those swindlers and crooks read.”

“I told you, it’s a habit. It’s what I do.”

“You into rare books, too?” Mike asked, taking the
catalog from my hand.

“No. No, I’m not. I—I was keeping that for Eddy.”

“This auction took place years before your
brother’s arrest, years before he went to prison,” I said.

“Then he must have given it to me to hold for
him,” Travis said, shrugging. “I’ve got lots of Eddy’s stuff.”

“The feds ever been here?” Mike asked.

“These things were released to me after Eddy got
in trouble. He had to give up his apartment and had nowhere to store them. The
FBI went through everything he owns. They know all about it.”

It was as obvious to Travis Forbes as it was to me
that Mike wanted to get inside and ferret through every piece of paper, looking
for stolen books and maps, or anything else of value. It was also obvious he
didn’t have a leg to stand on, other than the one that was planted inside the
door.

“Who lives here with you?” Mike asked.

There was a wooden board on a slice of the wall
beside the door, with several jackets hanging on pegs.

“Nobody.”

“You collect clothes, too?” There were
windbreakers in different colors and weights on top of one another, and a
workman’s denim jacket with the label of a Maine utility company on the sleeve,
covering the upper part of a white lab coat.

Forbes didn’t answer.

“When was the last time Eddy was in town?”

“He hasn’t been here since before he was sent
away. I haven’t seen him.”

“Pets. You got pets?”

“Tropical fish. I have an aquarium.”

I imagined Forbes sitting alone in his fortress of
useless papers and old books, staring at brightly colored fish in a tank. He
seemed far too aloof and cold to be a companion to any warm-blooded animal.

“What do you do, Travis?”

“I wait tables.”

“Where?”

“Near the Columbia campus, on Broadway. Place
called the Lion’s Pub.”

“How long have you been doing that?” I asked.

“Since I ran out of money to finish graduate
school, a year and a half ago. I’m a neurobiologist. At least, I will be when I
complete the program.”

“What are your hours there?”

“Eight p.m. till we close. Four in the morning.”

“And last night?” I asked.

“Same,” Travis said, while I tried to penetrate
his blank stare. “What does this have to do with my brother?”

My exhaustion had me seeing suspects at every
turn. If Travis Forbes had the same access to the library that his brother once
enjoyed, he could have found his way to Tina on Wednesday evening, in the
conservators’ office, and back again to move the body last night. But if his
alibi held tight, he wouldn’t have been standing on a nearby street corner—with
us in his sights—at the time the body was found and the ghoulish, laughing
caller rang on Tina’s cell.

“Do you know a girl named Tina Barr?” Mike asked,
refocusing the conversation.

“Who?”

“A friend of your brother’s.”

“Eddy’s a lot older than I am. We never really
socialized together.”

“This is someone he worked with,” Mike said. “A
conservator. Restores rare books and old maps.”

“I know what a conservator does, Detective,”
Travis said, growing more churlish by the question. “Ask Eddy. You must have
his number.”

“Why don’t you give it to me, just in case?” The
ex-con was likely to have two phones—one that his probation officer used and
one for his friends and family.

“I’ll have to ask him if he wants me to do that.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Not in here, you won’t,” Travis said, taking his
hands out of his pockets to try to close his front door, dislodging Mike’s
foot.

Mike tried to keep his balance by grabbing at the
jamb with his left hand while his right one settled on Travis Forbes’s wrist.
“Sorry. I get it. We’re out.”

Travis shook loose of Mike’s accidental grasp. At
the same moment, we both saw the cuts on the back of Travis Forbes’s left hand.
Long narrow strips of red-lined flesh protruded from both ends of a bandage
strip.

“What’s with the scratches, pal?” Mike asked.
“Your fish got fangs?”

The soft-spoken young man covered his bad hand
with the good one. “Leave me alone.”

“You ought to have that looked at,” Mike said.
“Could get yourself a nasty infection. I got a doc who’ll check it out for
you.”

Mike wanted to see the injury, just as I did. He
wanted to compare the size and shape of the wound to the marks on Tina Barr’s
neck. Maybe she had tried to defend herself with one of the sharp tools from
her own desk.

“I’ve already been treated,” he said, putting both
hands back in his pants pocket.

“By whom?”

Footsteps charging down the staircase overhead
signaled the reappearance of Shalik, on his way from Ms. Jenkins’s apartment to
run her errands.

“How’d you get those cuts?” Mike asked. “You drop
a steak knife on the job? I’m trying to help you out here.”

Now only Mike’s fingers on the door jamb prevented
it from closing. “Who cut you?”

Shalik stopped to listen to the conversation,
squatting on one of the steps, his nose between railings of the banister. But
Travis Forbes didn’t speak.

Shalik let out a low hissing sound, and Forbes’s
head snapped up to look at him.

“Quiet, kid,” Mike said. “I’m asking you once
more, Travis, before I tell Ms. Cooper here to get me a subpoena to photograph
your hand. Who cut you?”

“Hisself.”

Shalik repeated the word he had said the first
time, when I had misheard him.

“Look in his pocket, man. He do it at night
sometimes in the summer, sitting on the stoop. He crazy, Detective.”

“A subpoena for what?” Travis Forbes said,
withdrawing his right hand from his pocket again. He spread it open and in it
was a razor blade. “Talk to my shrink. I didn’t think my problem was illegal.”

Travis Forbes unbuttoned the cuff of his shirt and
started to roll up his sleeve. Scars lined his inner arm, and marks that looked
like they’d been left by lighted cigarette butts dotted the skin on the outer
side.

Mike’s hand dropped to his side.

“Take care of yourself, Travis,” he said, backing
away. “Here’s my card if I can do anything to help.”

THIRTY-ONE

“I gotta tell you, Mercer, I took one look at
the guy’s messed-up paw and I was ready to throw the cuffs on and collar him,”
Mike said, turning off Central Park West for the ride through the park to my
apartment. “We gotta slow this down before I make a mistake.”

“I never saw Mike turn on a dime so fast,” I said
from the back seat, patting him on the shoulder. “He went from executioner to
social worker in a heartbeat.”

“Yeah, well, what makes you such an expert on
self-mutilation, kid? I don’t think I’ve ever had one of these.”

“Alex and I have seen more than our share of it
because the highest incidence is among teenage girls.”

“Does it mean that Travis Forbes is suicidal?”
Mike asked.

“Not necessarily,” Mercer said. “It’s a form of
intentional self-harm without actually having the wish to die.”

“So why do they do it? I mean, not the
psychobabble, but what do you know about it?”

“The docs tell me that self-mutilation is some
sort of outlet for strong negative emotions,” I said. “Usually anger or shame.
Anger at someone else that’s then directed against the self.”

“So maybe he’s embarrassed about Eddy,” Mike said.
“Mad at him for ruining the family name, being such a jerk to get caught. Is it
always done by cutting?”

“Knives and razors,” Mercer said. “They’re the
most popular. Biting or bruising yourself, pulling out hair, putting out
cigarettes on your skin.”

“That fourteen-year-old we had last year,” I said
to Mercer. “Remember? The one whose mother blamed her when the baby brother
died?”

“Yeah. The shrink said she was dissociating. That
her mind just split off that memory, which was too painful to keep in her
conscious awareness. Whenever she hurt herself, she felt alive again.”

“Well, I should have given Shalik a bigger reward.
He saved me from making a fool of myself with Forbes.”

“And it doesn’t seem that Travis has his brother’s
book interests. I mean, you wouldn’t keep rare books in a junk heap like that,”
Mercer said.

“We’ve still got to get to Eddy. His name just
comes up in this too many times to ignore,” Mike said. “I’m dropping you at
home, Coop?”

“Please.”

“I’ll hang with you for the autopsy,” Mercer said
to Mike.

It was almost four when I got out of the car and
walked into my lobby. I stopped for the mail and went upstairs, as anxious to
know whether Luc was waiting for me there as I was to step into the shower and
clear my head of the day’s confusion.

I unlocked the door and went inside. “Luc?”

He didn’t answer, and I was almost relieved to
have a brief respite to myself.

There was a bouquet of white lilies on the table
in the foyer, and a piece of notepaper next to the vase.

Darling—Must be you had a very busy day. I
missed hearing your voice, even to tell me you had no time to talk. Joan
reserved for the four of us at 7:30 at Patroon.
Très Americain,
which suits me fine. Dreaming of a great steak, a serious
Burgundy, and a night with you. Am off to some appointments and will see you
there.
À toute a l’heure, ma princesse.

I didn’t want to leave the comfortable cocoon of
my home. I wanted to give Luc all my attention before he left for the West
Coast in the morning.

His professional world—completely luxe and
extravagant—was so diametrically opposed to the trauma that surrounded my
colleagues and me that sometimes it was hard for me to imagine how we
communicated at times like this. An overdone salmon, not enough mustard in the
vinaigrette, or a table that couldn’t turn over on time seemed to me, an
outsider, to be the kind of urgencies restaurateurs confronted. I knew there
was more to Luc’s business than that, but on days like this one, it all seemed
so frivolous.