Hell Gate (28 page)

“No, thanks, sir,” I answered.

“Don’t be shy. We keep these going all day.” Vin Statler was pointing at a stack of tea sandwiches. “English cucumbers, Mike. Give them a try. Chef Estevez makes the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. Even Mother Teresa thought so. Four thousand a week we make for guests and tours. You know in the summer we grow a lot of things in our own garden—right down past the well. Romaine lettuce, eggplant, Brussels sprouts, chives.”

“I didn’t think you called us here for an Iron Chef throw-down, Mr. Mayor,” Mike said.

“I understand you’re interested in the mansion, Mike.” Statler’s plastic smile changed to a momentary scowl. “I’ve got all the information you might want to know, and you may have something for me.”

“No free rides, sir. I’m aware of that. I was hoping we could look around.” Mike was still determined to find a reason that Salma’s body had wound up on the grounds of this unusual home.

“We’ll show you the place. I expect that will put your mind at ease, convince you the mansion has nothing to do with anything so sordid,” Mayor Statler said. “Roland tells me you’re quite the history buff, Detective. And you, Alex, you’ve been spending time in France I understand. You know Zuber?”

Mike’s brow furrowed at the mention of a name he didn’t know. He hated to be left out of the loop.

“Yes, sir. I’ve seen this room before, but never without a crowd in it,” I said.

“Take a good look. It’s remarkable, isn’t it.”

“I’ll bite,” Mike said. “What’s a Zuber?”

“Jean Zuber ran a company in Alsace, Detective, that was set up in the early nineteenth century. The crème de la crème of French artistry.”

Mike was running his hand over the smooth surface of an antique pier table. “What’d he make?”

“Wallpaper.”

“You could get rich from wallpaper?”

“This is the grandest quality in the world, Mike,” I said. “These panoramic scenes were printed on hand-carved pear-wood blocks.
Les Jardins Français,
isn’t it?

“Yes, Alex. Made in 1830.” The stunning painting of French gardens covered the room, like a colorful montage of trees and flowers and fountains. “That was the height of the craze for French wallpaper of this quality. It was before photography, so people would pay to have these foreign scenes created in their homes.”

“Flocking. My mother was more partial to flocking,” Mike said.

“This would have cost a fortune to re-create today. Beyond our means,” Statler said, ignoring Mike completely. “But the decorators just happened upon it in the attic of a grand Hudson Valley house, unused and in its original wrapping. Did you know Jackie Kennedy found two Zuber panoramas to place in the White House?”

The mayor was finishing his coffee. Mike poured us each a cup and helped himself to the cookies.

“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”

“We got very lucky. We’d never have afforded this one.”

“Ninety percent of police work is getting lucky,” Mike said. “Glad it happens under your roof too.”

“But there was a fortune spent on restoring this house, wasn’t there?” I asked.

“Indeed,” the mayor said to me, then turned to Dan Harkin. “Want to ask someone in the kitchen for hot coffee?”

Statler pushed back from the table and stood up. “Parts of the house were falling down by the time Ed Koch moved in. Almost uninhabitable. By 1983, he’d raised private money—millions—to establish a conservancy for Gracie Mansion, to get down to the foundation and rebuild the entire structure.”

“That must have been quite a process,” I said. Statler clearly wanted to be stroked, to show us he was in charge of the “people’s house,” before he turned it over to us for examination.

“You can’t imagine what they did. Everything from infrared scanning to determine the posts and beams of the original wooden framing, biopsies—really, biopsies—of old paint chips to try to match the original colors.”

“It was renovated again in 2000, wasn’t it?” Mike said.

“It’s very hard to maintain something as old as this building. Despite the earlier work, the deck on the front porch almost collapsed. At the time, there was an anonymous gift to the conservancy here for five million dollars.”

Mike whistled. “That could buy a lot of Zuber.”

“There was a great effort that went into finding some of the original pieces the Gracie family owned, furniture made for the house when the Gracies lived here.”

“Nice job. Bloomberg, huh?”

Statler bristled at the sound of his predecessor’s name. “Anonymous, I said.”

“We all know what that guy did for the city,” Mike said. “Every decent charity and every great cause got an anonymous handful from his deep pocket. The guy is aces.”

Statler clearly didn’t like Mike’s admiration of the popular politician who had preceded him in the post.

“When did Gracie Mansion become the official mayoral residence?” I asked.

“The country’s first official mayoral residence, Alex,” Statler said. “At the insistence of Robert Moses, who was the very powerful parks commissioner, Fiorello LaGuardia reluctantly gave up his own comfortable apartment and moved in here, to the farm, as he liked to call it. Nineteen forty-two was the year.”

Mike was getting antsy. “How come so many of you guys don’t want to live here?”

“Each mayor, each family, has its own reaction to the house. You know we had a district attorney who became mayor, Alex, do you?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Nineteen forty-six, Bill O’Dwyer,” Statler said. “He’d been the Brooklyn DA.”

“Prosecuted the Murder, Inc., guys,” Mike said. The media had given the thriving organized crime group known as Brownsville Boys, who’d been responsible for scores of murders from the 1920s to the 1940s, their more vibrant name.

“Yes, he did. But his wife hated it here. She thought the proximity to the river made it a lonely place—foghorns, the noise of the buoy bells keeping her awake,” Statler said. “Ed Koch used it more than he ever thought he would, though he still escaped downtown most weekends to his own apartment after too much pomp and ceremony.”

“Then Rudy ditched the place when he walked out on his bride,” Mike said.

The moment that Giuliani held a press conference to announce he was leaving his wife—before telling her himself—had deservedly been one of his lowest points of popularity in the months before September 11, 2001.

“And Mayor Bloomberg?” I asked.

“When he was elected in 2002, he made the decision to live in his own home, all the time,” Vin Statler said. “Bloomberg has a magnificent town house. He preferred to use Gracie Mansion for daytime functions and to house the most eminent overnight guests. Quite frankly, I made the same choice. The mansion is a public place, and I’m a rather private man.”

“How public is it?” Mike asked.

“Walk with me, please,” the mayor said. “Once the Wagner Wing opened, they had to construct this little hallway to connect the two pieces of the house. See? Brilliant, isn’t it? We call it ‘the hyphen.’ ”

That’s exactly what it was—a narrow, hyphen-shaped passageway between the original parts of the Gracie home and the rooms that had been added hundreds of years later for much larger, public events.

Statler was walking us through, showing us everything from the enormous ballroom, painted the same mediagenic color as the Blue Room in City Hall, to the dainty parlor, to a smaller dining room, and another reception area with huge glass-fronted bookcases and tall shelves that housed a collection of Chinese export porcelain. In each, the dark mahogany furniture gleamed against the deep true colors that had been reclaimed and restored.

As we moved along, Statler described the range of events held weekly in the mansion. “It’s not like this glorious place sits empty, Mike. There are seminars of all kinds held here, retreats and meetings of different city agencies. I’m divorced so there isn’t a first lady, but Mrs. Dinkins used to read to schoolchildren right in this ballroom every Tuesday afternoon,” he said, steering us back to the rear entrance of the house. “What haven’t you seen?”

“What haven’t you shown us?” Mike said.

The mayor was exasperated. “What the hell is it with you? Do you understand who you’re talking to?”

“Yes, sir. Despite my vote, you’re the mayor of my favorite city,” Mike said. “I’m trying to make an intelligent connection between the young lady who’s dead and why she was found in your very own backyard. Is that so hard to understand?”

“If your implication is that I had anything to do with this woman, you might want to start measuring yourself for a new uniform. I’ll wave if I see you along a parade route, while you’re doing crowd control,” Statler said, thrusting his hands in his pockets and stomping on the floor. “You want to see the basement? You think I have skeletons in the closet?”

“Last closet I saw this week was a veritable gold mine,” Mike said. “Sure, I’ll take the basement. I was here on a detail ages ago. It was built as a bomb shelter in the 1950s when this wing was added.”

“That’s right, Detective. And now it’s a police command center if there are problems in the city or on the river. Dan”—the mayor gestured to his bodyguard—“take Chapman down if he wants to see it.”

Statler turned and started charging back to the dining room. “Where’s Roland?”

“Upstairs,” Dan said, leading Mike to the staircase.

“Fine. Follow me, Alex. We’ll show you the private quarters. When you’ve satisfied your curiosity in the basement, Mike, come right along.”

I was trying to elevate the spirit of the conversation with Mayor Statler. “This house has such wonderful bones.”

“Indeed. A great classic center-hall layout, wonderful symmetry, and it’s completely flooded with light.”

“I can see that, even on a gray day.”

When we reached the foyer, I could hear the staircase creaking. Rowdy Kitts was descending from the rooms above. He greeted both of us and removed the burgundy rope that normally blocked access as the mayor and I approached.

“All in order, Roland?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did we have any guests this week?” The mayor was climbing ahead of me.

“Not since before Christmas, Your Honor. It’s been very quiet.”

“Let’s show Alex what we’ve got up here,” the mayor said to Kitts. “Living history, young lady.”

He led me to the northwest corner of the house, an enormous room with sweeping views of rivers and bridges. “The mayor’s bedroom. I suppose this intrigues you.”

There was a wood-framed canopy bed that anchored the space, a pair of inlaid chests under the windows, a large bathroom with modern fixtures to provide the most up-to-date comforts.

“It does, actually. It’s quite beautiful.”

“Remind me, Roland. Whose portrait is that?”

Rowdy Kitts rubbed the scar under his left eye, as though that would help him think of the answer.

The mayor was growing more impatient. “The artist is Thomas Sully. The woman is—well, some nice Quaker girl with rich folks is who she was.”

I stepped in the sun-filled room to look around and paused at the painting.

“Nelson Mandela slept here, can you imagine? All the Gracies and their fancy Federalist friends, and still we’re adding historical importance to this home,” Statler said. “It’s great that we can let the city use this for special occasions.”

I was thinking of the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House, and the bundles of cash that swirled around the players in this investigation. “Since you’re not here at night, do you rent it out to contributors?”

“Nonsense. The fact that neither Bloomberg nor I lived here makes it easy to simply offer it to dignitaries and important guests.”

Statler never set foot in the room. He watched me explore it and then guided me across the wide hallway. I stopped to admire a graceful sofa, upholstered in a bright red fabric. “Someone found that at City Hall, just crying out to be here.”

Mike was coming up the stairs.

“Satisfied, Detective?” the mayor asked. “We call this the mayor’s study. A little office that guests can use. That’s its primary purpose, isn’t it, Roland?”

“What are you, Rowdy?” Mike asked. “The concierge?”

“I’m whatever the mayor tells me to be.”

Dan Harkin, who had come up behind Mike, nodded in agreement.

“Then we have the State Sitting Room,” Statler said, leading us down the hallway. “It used to be the family room, when some of the mayors lived here with their children. We’ve changed all that.”

Mike was opening closets and pulling on desk and dresser drawers.

“You looking for some official stationery?” Rowdy joked. “Or Gideon’s Bible?”

“Your staff has lists of people who’ve stayed here, do they?” Mike ignored him.

“Pretty impressive DNA the mansion’s guests have, Detective,” the mayor said. “How far back would you like to go? Washington Irving spent the better part of a summer here one year. And of course if you’re keen on history, then you would have enjoyed sitting at that grand dinner table when Mr. Gracie was entertaining some of the regulars. History—that’s your territory, Mike, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“You know the name Gouverneur Morris?” Statler asked.

“Widely credited for writing the Preamble to the Constitution,” Mike said. “He’s the ‘We the people’ guy.”

“I should have learned my lesson Thursday not to trifle with you,” he said, taking us down the stairs and back to the foyer. “Morris, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton. They were all part of Archibald Gracie’s circle of friends.”

I reached the bottom step and could tell from the mayor’s body language—a slight grimace, his feet planted firmly in place, and his arms crossed on his chest—that he was ready for us to be out of his hair.

“So Hamilton Grange,” I said, “was that designed with this mansion in mind?”

“Exactly, Alex. Hamilton was quite close to Archibald Gracie. He admired this house tremendously. He even hired the same architect to design his. You should visit the Grange sometime. There aren’t many of these original Federal masterpieces still standing in Manhattan. How many would you say, Roland?”