Entombed (19 page)

"Did she tell you why
she thought it was true?"

He thought for a
minute. "Yeah. One night, a few weeks after Emily had busted out of the
program, the guy came home from a session-"

"You mean an AA
meeting-Alcoholics Anonymous?"

"Like that. I think it
was called SABA-Student Abusers Anonymous. I think he'd been clean and
sober a little longer than Emily. He'd started in the group while he
was still enrolled at NYU. Anyway, that night he spun out of control
and brought home a few bags of coke. They got high together and that's
when he broke down."

"How do you mean?"

"He wigged out.
According to Emily, he was pretty frantic. He told her that he'd been
having flashbacks ever since he'd been sober and dried out. He said
that during that evening's session he'd admitted to a couple of the
guys that he thought he had murdered someone. It was all visions and
dreams, mumbo-jumbo, alcoholic blackouts. But as soon as he-what's the
bullshit word they use now-shared? As soon as he 'shared' his story
with his self-help group, he began to worry that one of the other guys
would give him up. So he went a little berserk, picked up some drugs to
get him through the night, and came home crying to lay it all on
Emily's lap."

"And she came to the
station house?" Mike asked.

"You mean did she come
that same night, when she should have?" Kittredge sneered. "Yeah, about
four months too late. Not that night, not the next day."

"Why not?" I asked,
speaking for the first time.

"Typical broad
bullshit. Emily didn't think it was possible. Such a sensitive soul,
the guy was. Good family roots, poetic genius, brilliant student, kind
to animals. She laid it off to the white powder he shoved up his
nostrils."

"She stayed with him?"

"Yeah. Then things got
more desperate after the shoplifting. Truth is I never knew whether she
was really afraid of him, or he just dumped her and she had nowhere to
go."

"How'd she wind up
with you?" Mike asked.

"She told her
lawyer-Legal Aid, he was-that she had a friend in the police
department. He called and told me that if she had a transient address
like the Y, the DA's office wouldn't dismiss the case. He just asked me
to let her use my crib for a month."

"Did you and she-?"

"None of your fucking
business, Chapman."

"But you actually
investigated the case?" I asked. "I mean, did you talk to other people
in his SABA group?"

Kittredge looked at
Mike while he talked to me. "Hard to do. By the time Emily got to me,
school was out for the summer. The rehab meetings had been
confidential-you know the law, drug treatment stuff is privileged-so
the college didn't have any record of who attended."

"All you had was a
half-assed confession, fueled by cocaine," Mike said.

"With no body, no
crime scene, and not even a suspect I could put my hands on. I kicked
it around for a few months," Kittredge said.

Probably, I thought,
for as long as Emily was putting out for him.

"Then my boss took me
off it. He figured that she was just squealing on a guy who had dumped
her and we couldn't go digging up ground all over Manhattan unless we
had a report of somebody missing."

"You keep a file on
it?" Mike asked.

"There was the usual
paperwork I did in the squad, back before we had computers."

"Take any of your case
folders with you? Something that might have names on-"

"For what? My
memoirs?" Kittredge laughed as he walked to the front door and put his
hand on the knob.

"You mind if we come
back to you when we have more information?" Mike said, realizing the
opportunity for conversation was about to be over.

"Try not to waste my
time. Emily wasn't known for her taste in men. She probably picked up
one too many barflys with a rough edge. She just couldn't keep off the
juice, I guess."

We were back out on
the stoop, headed for the car, when Mike's cell phone rang. He opened
it to say hello, and I could see the condensation of his breath in the
air. It made him look as though he was as fired up inside as I figured
him to be.

"Where? Does Scotty
Taren know?" Mike asked, getting answers that he liked. "Thanks, Hal. I
owe you big-time."

I waited for him to
unlock the car and let me inside. He slammed the door and pursed his
lips. "That was Hal Sherman. Looks like all the pressure of going
public with a patient's history may have been too much for Dr. Ichiko.
He killed himself today. They just found his body up in the Bronx."

19

"Why did Hal call
you?" I asked. "It's Scotty's case now."

"'Cause Scotty's a
stand-up guy. When Hal reached out to him, Scotty said to play dumb and
give me the first heads-up. After all, I was in the basement after the
skeleton was discovered and Hal took the photos. So it would make sense
for him to have to call me in order to find out that Taren's got the
case now. And why should I know McKinney forbade him to talk to you
about it?"

"Don't think you're
leaving me behind on this one."

"McKinney'll go nuts
if you show up at the scene, Coop."

"That fact alone is
enough to make me want to go twice as badly. You're always telling me
how much I'd love the Bronx. So far I've limited most of my experience
to Yankee Stadium. Now's your chance to show me the borough's charms."

Mike had gone to
college at Fordham and loved the rich history of the borough, once the
seventeenth-century farmland of Swedish-born Jonas Bronck, the first
European settler to live on the mainland northeast of Manhattan.

"Yeah, but a death
scene wasn't my vision of an introduction."

"I guess
Crime Factor
will have to go with
a rerun for tonight's show. Dr. Ichiko won't be revealing the identity
of our skeleton on this episode. C'mon, let's see what happened to this
greedy shrink. Where to?"

Mike shifted into gear
and pulled out into the traffic. "The gorge."

"What?"

"The Bronx River
Gorge."

"Never heard of it," I
said, as he took advantage of the early evening lull in traffic to race
across town to the Triborough Bridge, and up the Major Deegan
Expressway to wind through what to me was the unfamiliar territory of
the Bronx.

"You've never been to
the Botanical Gardens?"

"Not since I was a
kid." I had grown up in the suburbs north of the city and remembered
visits to the gardens with my mother, who took me there for the
brilliant spring displays of roses and the seasonal show of dozens of
orchid varieties that she so loved.

"That's where we're
headed. The gorge is inside the grounds of the Botanical Gardens. The
Fordham campus is right across the street."

"I know the hothouses
and the-"

"No flowerpots, Coop.
This is part of the Bronx River. You know that's the only freshwater
river in New York City?"

"What about the
Hudson, or the East River?"

"They're tidal
estuaries, Coop. You got to pay more attention to your surroundings."

For much of the ride,
Mike gave me the early history of the area. After its discovery by
Henry Hudson and its control by the Dutch West India Company as New
Netherland, there were frequent and violent clashes with the local
Indian tribes.

"You would have had
your little prosecutorial hands full here, even in the 1640s."

"Doing what?"

"Ever hear of Anne
Hutchinson?"

"Yes. She was exiled
from Massachusetts by the Puritans. Brought a whole little colony
somewhere down here because of religious intolerance."

"This is it. Chief
Wampage was a bit peeved about the slaughter of some of his people, so
he made his way to Hutchinson's house and whacked her right in the
forehead with his tomahawk. Scalped her and her kids."

By the time we reached
Bronx River Park, I had a thumbnail sketch of the county's major
military skirmishes, from the revolutionary fortifications at the
King's Bridge to the Battle of Pell's Point.

At the entrance to the
park, long after closing time, a uniformed officer opened the gate when
Mike flashed his badge. He directed us south and told us that the Crime
Scene Unit and some grounds-keepers were waiting for us there, half a
mile inside.

My childhood memories
of sun-filled gardens with vividly colored flowers bore no resemblance
to the vast, darkened park that we had entered. There were occasional
streetlamps along the route, but the roadway was surrounded on both
sides by a tall, dense growth of trees. The wind caused tall shadows to
dance in front of our headlights, and the sprawling grounds seemed an
eerily sinister place.

Some snakelike curves
in the road and half a mile later, Hal Sherman waved us down and came
over to open my car door.

"I doubt you were ever
a Boy Scout, Chapman," he called out over my head, "but you might wanna
rub a couple of sticks together and start a little fire if you're
thinking of keeping me out here any longer. I can't stand much more of
this cold."

"That the doctor?"
Mike asked, pointing at an ambulance parked at the curb.

"Not a pretty picture."

Mike held his arm
straight at me, palm out. He walked to the open end, said something to
the two EMTs, and they unzipped the black body bag. He leaned in with a
flashlight and studied the head and chest of the dead man.

"Looks like he went
ten rounds with Mike Tyson," he said, returning to us. "Who's calling
this a suicide?"

Hal shrugged his
shoulders. "It sure as hell wasn't a mugging. You got enough dark
alleys between his house in Riverdale and his office in the Village for
someone to do him in. You think a member of the Polar Bear Club brought
him up here for a dip in ice water to off him? His wife says he was up
all night tearing his hair out because of the bad press over his
decision to go on that crappy show and give up a patient's name.
Finally was about to get his time in the limelight, but was ready to
kill himself once he realized the professional consequences of doing
something so stupid."

"Who found him?"

"We're waiting on a
translator," Hal said. "That's the head groundskeeper-the tall guy in
the khakis. The two others who pulled the body out of the river are the
short ones with him. They're Vietnamese."

I followed Mike over
to the trio, who were shielding themselves from the wind against a
stand of pine trees.

"You in charge?"

"Phelps. I'm Sinclair
Phelps," the groundskeeper said. "These men work for me."

I could see Phelps's
profile silhouetted against the light gray rocks lining the riverbed
behind me. He was, at about five-eleven, a little shorter than Mike.
His hair was long and thick, but flecked with enough silver to suggest
that he was in his mid-fifties. His aquiline nose gave him a stern
mien, and the years of outdoor labor had lined his face as if it were
the hide of a gator.

"You know anything?"
Mike asked, after introducing us.

"Only what Trun has
told me," Phelps said, pointing to the slighter of the two men, who
were shivering as badly as I was.

"You speak Vietnamese?"

"No, no," Phelps said,
smiling. "They can manage a few words of English and some fairly
effective body language. I can tell you as much as they've told me.
Late this afternoon-Miss Cooper, you seem to be uncomfortable. Would
you like to move inside?"

"Take us through it
once out here, will you?" Mike said, rolling his eyes while Hal Sherman
passed me a pair of rubber gloves to put on, this time just for warmth.
Phelps had a crew-neck sweater over his uniform and seemed as
impervious to the damp wind as Mike did in his navy blazer, collar
turned up. The rest of us were miserable.

"Do you know the
river?"

I shook my head while
both Hal and Mike nodded.

"It's twenty-five
miles long, seven in the city and the rest going up through
Westchester."

"It seems bizarre to
me for someone to think of killing himself in a river in the
wintertime. I'd expect it to be frozen over," I said, looking at the
icy surfaces that gleamed from the rocks in the riverbed and the
snow-laden branches overhanging it.

"In the shallow places
further north, that's quite true. There are some spots where it's only
a few inches deep," Phelps said. "But that's not the case here, because
of the falls."

"Waterfalls?" I asked.

"Yes, ma'am. This is a
gorge you're looking at. Y'see, there's an ancient fault that was
created by the glaciers that moved through here," he said, turning on
the beam of his torch lamp and bending to knock some pine branches out
of the way so we could follow him a distance into the woods.

I could hear the sound
of water, like a rushing torrent, as we neared the basin at the foot of
the falls.

It looked as though we
were standing in the Adirondacks, not in the middle of New York City.
The frigid water cascaded down an enormous drop from the heavily
timbered chasm above us and got caught up in the spinning whirlpools
below, which whipped it into a frenzy before whooshing it off downriver.

"Quite spectacular,
isn't it? On the more mundane side, once a week," Phelps said, "our
maintenance men gather trash from the river. Used to be, Detective,
that you could find shopping carts, spare parts of automobiles,
mattresses, all sorts of flotsam and jetsam in here. We've tried to
change that. Today, Trun and Hang were responsible for cleaning up this
area."

The two workers were
behind us, dressed in heavy rubber suits-like fisherman-with hip waders
and watch caps. Phelps motioned them to stand beside him.

"The man you found,"
he said to them, "where was he?"

"Between rocks," the
one called Trun said. "There."