Bad Blood (32 page)

“Blood,” I said, for no reason at all. It was the only word I heard.

“Paper napkins?”

“No. The linen ones are in the armoire. Second shelf, on the right.”

Trebek stepped aside and the final answer was revealed as he read it aloud for the viewers. “‘First British king who required his subjects to call him Majesty.’”

Two contestants put on their best puzzled game-faces while the third one began to scribble an answer.

“You know it, Coop?”

“Why, Mike? You got anything in your wallet? Take a stab at it.”

“See, Mercer? That means she knows something,” Mike said, coming into the room and perching on the arm of the sofa, behind my head. “Must be a cultured king, not a soldier statesman.”

“Same guy who invented the handkerchief and insisted spoons be used at all court events.”

“What a wuss.”

“‘Who was Richard the Second?’” I asked.

I held up my hand for Mike’s forty dollars. He grabbed my fingers and squeezed hard before letting them drop — empty.

“Now that’s a ridiculous clue,” Mike said. “I mean, I could have been a contender if they’d asked it the right way. Like, ‘Son of the Black Prince.’ No offense, Mercer. Not a homey, bro — just the guy who wore a black cuirass at the Battle of Crécy. Or they could have said, ‘British king who lacked the hereditary thirst for battle. First casualty of the Wars of the Roses.’ Then she’d have been stumped. Coop doesn’t know from history — she just relies on Willy Shakespeare.”

“‘The worst is death, and death will have his day.’”

“Yeah, well, he’s had his day many times over,” Mike said. “And usually when I’m catching cases.”

The intercom buzzed and he got up to answer it. “The only thing more miserable than Coop being in a dark mood like this is Coop being in a dark mood like this when she’s not drinking.”

He came back and smiled at Mercer. “Dinner is served. Vickee’s here with the vittles.”

I got up and went to the door with Mercer to greet her. She handed the packages to him and put her arms around me.

“Don’t get her started again, Vickee,” Mike said. “We’ve barely got the tear ducts and tissues under control. None of this estrogen emo-show, okay?”

“Just help Mercer heat up the meal, Mike. Can you handle that?” Vickee said, turning to him and running her hands up and down his sides. “You better go double on my potatoes, Mr. Chapman. You’ve dropped too much weight.”

“What can I get you?” I asked.

“I’d love some white wine. And your doormen asked me to thank you for their dinner. They said it was delicious — some kind of veal? Now where did that come from, girl?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Mike was holding one of Vickee’s shopping bags. “Yeah, I meant to tell you. They wanted me to bring the food up on my way in. The cops said that some guy from a restaurant came by — one of your snooty French bistros, no doubt. Must have been a waiter who was sent to surprise you with food. A care package. Mercer had already told me we were getting a special delivery from Vickee, so I just told the guys to split it up. No note or anything. Your bloody puss was all over the news. Everyone in town knows you had a rough day.”

I bit my lip. It was almost worth laughing at the notion of Luc being taken for a waiter. He had probably tried to get through to me with a four-star meal. “Guess so.”

“When do we eat?” Mike asked Vickee.

“Half an hour.”

“You mind if I call Teddy O’Malley?” he said to me, after depositing the food in the kitchen. “See if he’s got any ideas about who might hide Brendan Quillian.”

“Go right ahead. I think it would be harder to go undercover with sandhogs than to infiltrate the Mob.”

Mercer busied himself in the kitchen with the food and Mike took out his notepad to make a series of calls from the den, where he was watching the local news. Vickee and I curled up on the living room sofa while she listened to me vent about the day while Dr. John sang background about his gris-gris.

At eight thirty, Mercer called us to the table and served the meal.

The breakout of Brendan Quillian seemed as if it had happened in a bad dream. Here, safe in my own home with my loyal friends, it was almost easy to think of murder for hire, domestic abuse, and dynamite blasts as other people’s problems. But then I would have a flashback to the face of Elsie Evers on the courtroom floor, and I knew we’d all be back to business as usual by daybreak.

“Take some more, Alex,” Vickee said, passing the platter of chicken. “Alex likes the breast. Give her that piece of white meat, Mike, will you? It’s her favorite.”

“Speaking of that, Coop. You ever do Lem Howell back in your rookie days?”

I laughed and shook my head.

“They were just replaying that shot of him walking you out of the courtroom today, you wrapped in his jacket and him looking at you like he wanted the rest of your dress to just slice off in two.”

I pushed my plate away. “I’m full. And if I wasn’t, you once again have the flawless ability to take my appetite away.”

Mike reached for a third helping of potatoes and tore off a fistful of bread. “You were good buddies, right? Don’t you credit him for half of your courtroom success?”

“I had a lot of help from a lot of guys. And from the handful of women who broke me in. And I didn’t
do
them all, thanks.”

I stood up to clear my place, but Vickee pointed at me and told me to sit.

She came out of the kitchen with a pecan pie and a carton of vanilla ice cream. “Nobody says no to this dish. My mama’s recipe and it’s the very best.”

“Your money on Lem Howell and Coop, Detective Wallace?”

“I spent a lot of time in Ms. Cooper’s office in those early years,” Mercer said, gnawing on a chicken wing. “I may have to go to the grave with some of the messages that steamed off that telephone when I sat out those long days at her desk while she was upstairs on trial, but Mr. Howell was not among those in hot pursuit.”

I wagged a finger at him. “Don’t give me up, Mercer. We’ll see how good Mike’s detecting skills are. I don’t have a lot of secrets from you guys, but the ones I do, I’m keeping close to the vest for the time being.”

The phone rang and I walked to the den to answer it.

“Alexandra? It’s Paul Battaglia. How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay. I’ll be fine.”

“What were your plans for tomorrow?”

“Well, Judge Gertz wanted to give the jury a couple of days away from the courthouse. He’ll probably bring them back on Friday to declare a mistrial. I’d like to go to Elsie’s wake, certainly.”

“That starts tomorrow night. You’ll come with me.”

I would have preferred to avoid the political statement and show up without the district attorney, but he might leave me no choice.

“So, for the morning—”

“Exactly. Here’s what I’d like. Jefferson just called me,” Battaglia said, referring to the Bronx district attorney. “You know where Mike Chapman is?”

“Yes, yes, I do.”

“Get in touch with him and coordinate. Jefferson just got an expedited ruling from the administrative judge up there. He’s ordered the immediate exhumation of the body of that teenager — what’s her name?”

“Hassett. Rebecca Hassett.” When I said her name, Mike and Mercer both looked up. The candles on the dining table seemed to flicker with the breeze that wafted through the open windows behind them.

“Tomorrow morning. You and Chapman have to meet the Bronx homicide prosecutor at the grave site. Woodlawn Cemetery. Can you do that?”

“Of course, boss. Sure we can.”

“Who knows. May be good for nothing, may give us a clue or two. But the media’s all over this case now. Your job is to be there so this doesn’t get away from us and wind up on Jefferson’s plate in Bronx County,” Battaglia said.

“I understand.” The district attorney was turning the screws and I could feel the pressure throbbing in my head.

“He’ll try to pull it out from under you if you don’t sit on it. Make sure Chapman gets that body to the morgue. You’ve brought Quillian this far, Alex. Let’s not let him slip away from my jurisdiction completely. I want that bastard brought in.”

“Teddy O’Malley thinks his subterranean empire is a necropolis,” Mike said. “But
this
is what I call a city of death.”

We had parked in front of the tall wrought-iron gates of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, four hundred acres of elegantly landscaped grounds that had been a burial place for New Yorkers since the time of the Civil War. Evan Silbey, the funeral coordinator who would escort us to Rebecca Hassett’s grave site, met us there.

Silbey settled into the backseat of the car. “The word
cemetery
means ‘place of sleep,’ Mr. Chapman. It’s more calming than the word
death.
”

“The big sleep, buddy. No disrespect to Raymond Chandler.”

“My point is that cemeteries are a very recent concept, historically speaking,” Silbey said. “The necropolis style was mainly driven by architecture — funerary monuments just stacked upon each other with no sense of nature. The ancients buried their dead along the roadsides leading out of the cities. Via Appia, if you will.”

Mike walked around to the driver’s side and got into the car.

“In medieval times, it became the custom to bury people in churchyards, right inside the cities,” Silbey went on. He was slightly built and quite pale, with horn-rimmed glasses and the flattest monotone of a voice. “But most urban areas eventually ran out of room. By 1800, many city dwellers wanted more rural retreats that would offer places for meditation and contemplation while visiting the departed, so people could use these grounds as public parks, too.”

Silbey handed Mike a map of Woodlawn.

“You got miles of interior roadway here, haven’t you?” Mike asked, unfolding and studying the vast property plan.

“Indeed. And more than three hundred thousand residents. It’s quite a large sanctuary in the middle of the city, although this was all farmland when the design was plotted. You know Mount Auburn?”

“In Massachusetts?” I asked. “Cambridge?”

“Yes. That was the first rural cemetery planned in America. The idea was that the arboretum around the graves — the air being cleaned by circulating through the trees — would be a much healthier burial setting. Greenwood, in Brooklyn, was the next park set up on this model. It actually became one of the first tourist attractions in New York.”

“Where to?” Mike asked.

Silbey leaned forward and pointed to our location on the map, at the northeast corner of the vast memorial park. “We’re right here, at the corner of East 233rd Street. The cemetery runs the entire way down to Gun Hill Road.”

“George Washington territory.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Seventeen seventy-six. Washington was retreating from the city to Westchester, to make a stand at what became the battle of White Plains. He constructed a redoubt to delay the British troops that were coming after him. That’s why it’s called Gun Hill — the redoubt commanded the Bronx River valley and the Boston Road.”

“I’m impressed, Mr. Chapman,” Silbey said. “We’re bounded on the west by Jerome Avenue. You know that one, too?”

“Nope.”

“A capitalist, not a general. Leonard Jerome. Had a grandson named Winston Churchill.” Silbey leaned his small head over the seat back, looking between Mike and me. “You know, Miss Cooper, that even long after we opened these gates here at Woodlawn, women weren’t allowed to accompany their loved ones to their graves at most other places like it.”

“I can’t imagine that.”

“Greenwood Cemetery was built before the Brooklyn Bridge was. Between the street congestion in Manhattan and the instability of the little ferries to Brooklyn, it was considered too indelicate for ladies to make the trip. Our resting ground was much more accessible, so women were always welcome. Primrose, Detective Chapman. That’s where we’re going.”

Silbey tried to stretch his fingers to point at a section of the map.

“Primrose? Like the tree?”

“Yes, that’s it. Stay to the center — we’ll take that main drive.”

Mike started off slowly. Ahead and to the right was the sloping hillside that led west from our starting point. From the street off to our left, the usual city sounds of car traffic and honking horns were almost drowned out as a Metro North train rattled by on the adjacent tracks.

A minute later, we had lost the noise as we climbed the gentle rise within the cemetery and were surrounded by the sylvan atmosphere of the plantings and sculptures.

“We want Walnut or Magnolia?” Mike asked at the first fork in the road.

“Follow Walnut. You see, Miss Cooper, the landscape architects used trees not only to be decorative, but for their symbolic meaning as well. Almost all of our plots are named for a variety of tree,” Silbey said. “Oaks, you may know, are the symbol of steadfast fidelity. In First Kings of the Bible, Elijah tells us he wants to lie down and die under a juniper. Watch that arrow, Detective Chapman. Don’t take Clover.”

We were driving deeper and deeper into the cemetery, the narrow roadways bordered by blossoming plants and shrubs, stone bridges arching over ponds, giant family mausoleums in the style of Doric temples standing on hilltops — the most expensive real estate with the best views in this peaceful enclave.

“You know your Greek mythology?” Silbey went on. “Apollo transformed the dead body of his dearest friend into a cypress tree. They’re often used to stand guard at gravesides. It’s all part of that nineteenth-century Romantic style of philosophy and design.”

“Romantic? In a cemetery?” Mike said. “That’s looking for love in all the wrong places.”

“Turn right here.”

We hadn’t passed more than ten people on our way. Some individual mourners were walking on pathways, and several gardeners had been tending to stone markers and the flower beds around them. Thick gray clouds moved quickly overhead, casting shadows on the tall monuments. An eerie calm seemed to settle in over this pastoral setting the farther away from the city streets we traveled.

Mike had slowed the car. He was staring at one of the larger granite monuments, a Tuscan canopy supported by a dozen columns, covering a swag-draped sarcophagus, surrounded by a stand of tall pine trees. “How rich do you have to be to get a place here? Some of these things look palatial.”