Hell Gate (39 page)
“I’m telling you what I know.”
“Sounds a little bit too much like your own club. Like your father’s tontine, with your two-faced buddies like Donny Baynes.”
“What’s Donny got to do with this?” Leighton rubbed his eyes with both hands. “If he told you about the Tontine Association, he also told you it was disbanded years ago.”
I thought for a moment that Mike had hoisted Ethan Leighton on his own petard, that the slick politician had dangled a piece of misinformation in front of us, not realizing that Baynes had tied himself in knots too. I’d hoped Mike connected tonight’s events to Moses and Ethan Leighton, Donovan Baynes, and perhaps Mayor Statler himself.
“Did Anita tell Luci anything else about this man she was meeting—or about the kind of club it was?”
“Only that she said she felt safe when she went out tonight, because the guy who asked her to do it was an old friend,” Leighton said, pausing before he remembered another fact. “Yes. Yes, there is a name. The club is called Sub Rosa
.
It’s all very discreet like that. That’s what she told Luci.”
.
It’s all very discreet like that. That’s what she told Luci.”
“Sub Rosa,” Mike said. “I get it. Secret, confidential, private.”
“You don’t get it at all. Go for the literal translation, Mike,” I said. I thought of the small tattoo—the property stamp of the snakehead, the trafficker—that was on the bodies of our Jane Doe #1 and on Salma Zunega. That might have been part of Salma’s bond with Anita. “Doesn’t that expression mean ‘under the rose’?”
FORTY-THREE
“ ‘Under the rose’ it is,” Mike said. “The nuns who taught me would have been proud of you. I didn’t think your Latin was that good.”
“Just the basics. I don’t know why it means what it does.”
“It’s a practice from the Middle Ages.” Mike’s parochial school education had served him well. “In medieval days, a rose was hung over council chambers if the proceedings were to be kept secret.
Sub rosa.
You should come to church with me more often. A lot of times you’ll see roses carved into the confessionals, for exactly that reason.”
Sub rosa.
You should come to church with me more often. A lot of times you’ll see roses carved into the confessionals, for exactly that reason.”
“That’s my point,” I said. “Find Anita, find the friend who set her up tonight, and we’ll have the bastard behind all this misery. We’ll learn why these girls are the property of the rose.”
“Where did you locate her?” Mike asked Leighton.
“On Edgecombe Avenue. I really don’t know this area. It was just before two A.M.”
“Edgecombe and what? You want to see her alive, or don’t you care?”
There was an urgency in Mike’s voice now that Leighton caught too.
“Yes, I care. A Hundred and fifty-sixth Street, maybe a Hundred and fifty-seventh. I’m not certain. As I drove along, Anita ran out into the roadway. There was a park on the right. I remember that.”
“High Bridge Park. I hope to God she isn’t in there.”
I’d handled scores of cases that had occurred in the long strip that stretched north from 155th to Dyckman Street, with rugged topography and a treacherous slope that ran down from Edgecombe to the Harlem River Drive below it.
“She was waiting for me, sort of hiding behind a tree until she recognized the car.”
“Was she okay? She wasn’t hurt when you got there?” I asked.
“No, no she wasn’t. Just scared.”
“Did she get in the car with you?”
Leighton hesitated.
“There’s no time for you to even blink right now, man, so don’t start with censoring your answers,” Mike said. “Did she get in the car?”
“That’s what we were fighting about. She refused to get in. She wanted to take Ana with her.”
“Take her and go where?”
“I don’t know. Don’t raise your voice to me, Chapman.”
“Make sense, then. Why didn’t Anita get in your car? Where was she planning to go in that neighborhood with the baby, in the freezing cold?”
“That’s what we were fighting about. She told me her friend was waiting for her. That he’d take care of her.”
“The guy who did the dinner fix-up?”
“I guess. I wouldn’t give her the child, and she wouldn’t come with me.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Because she’s still all mixed up about Salma’s death.”
“While she was standing in the road, arguing with you, was Anita yelling?”
“Yes, yes, she was. Then she saw the patrol car coming. She accused me of calling the cops on her. That’s when she flipped out and started to run.”
“Into the park?”
“No, no. The other way. She ran west, but I don’t know those streets.”
“And she left this child with you?”
“Yes.” Leighton practically whispered the word.
The baby had stopped crying and seemed to be drinking her bottle, so Mercer came back to join us. “Where are the clubs around here, say, west of a Hundred and fifty-sixth?” Mike asked.
“Amsterdam Avenue, mostly,” Mercer said. “A few on St. Nick.”
“What’s she wearing, Leighton? What does she look like?”
“Medium height. Long dark hair.”
“Skin color?”
“White. Brown eyes. She had on black slacks and a jacket—it looked like fake fur, almost iridescent. A short fur jacket.”
“I hope to God it glows in the dark. Give me your car keys.”
“What?”
“The Jag. Let me have the keys,” Mike said, holding out his hand. “Every mope in this part of town can make a department Crown Vic. At least I’ll look like we’re hustling for drugs in your father’s wheels.”
Ethan Leighton reluctantly handed over the keys.
“You want to ride with me, Coop?” Mike asked, walking away from the morose congressman to discuss our plans. “Mercer, why don’t you take your car, and we can tag-team to see who’s walking the streets. Back us up.”
“You start going into clubs in this neck of the woods, we’d better ask for a detail to hang out in case there’s trouble,” Mercer said.
“I got a different idea. Let’s take a gander at Jumel Terrace.”
Mercer’s scowl disappeared. He slapped Mike on the back and reached for his jacket. “Just a ways up from a Hundred and fifty-sixth, and a block in from Edgecombe. I like it.”
“What’s Jumel Terrace?” I asked. “What’s there?”
“The oldest Federal house still standing in Manhattan. The Morris-Jumel House. It’s a mansion, Coop. It’s a fine-looking old mansion, with a well.”
FORTY-FOUR
Mercer was in the beat-up Toyota he used to drive to work. Mike was adjusting the seat and the steering wheel in the steel gray Jaguar that he had commandeered from Ethan Leighton.
We left Leighton in the station house. He would not have need of the car for hours. By the time the children’s service agency workers finished talking to him, he’d be wishing that Mike were conducting the interrogation.
We pulled out of the parking space on West 169th Street. There was a Yankees baseball cap on the dashboard. “Put it on, kid. That ponytail I ragged you about the other day? Do it again. I need you to look like a nineteen-year-old aching for coke, in case we run into any locals.”
I took a rubber band from my jeans pocket and followed Mike’s orders. “What took you so long to remember the mansion?”
“ ’ Cause that’s not how I think of the place. It’s got a military significance to me, not a social one.”
“Why? What is it?”
We were moving at a snail’s pace down Amsterdam, each of us looking into doorways and alleys, on fire escapes and in parked cars. The cold spell and the early morning hour had most people off the streets. In the rearview mirror, I could see that Mercer was giving us plenty of lead time.
“The house was built by a British colonel in the 1760s—Roger Morris. About one hundred acres, on this hilltop, just east of here. An amazing setting, when you think about it.”
“Like Gracie.”
“No, no. Even more spectacular. You just see east and south from Gracie Mansion. This gave you all that, plus the Jersey Palisades and up the Hudson River. So in the fall of 1776, George Washington seized the place and made his headquarters here. That’s when he forced the British retreat at the battle of Harlem Heights.”
“You’ve been here before? Is it restored?”
“The general’s digs? Sure, I have.”
“Slow down. See that woman walking?” I asked.
Mike braked gently as someone came out of the shadows between two brownstones.
“Nope. Sorry. Ratty fur jacket,” I said. “But it’s a man. Who’s Jumel, then?”
“Your kind of guy, Coop. Stephen Jumel was French. A wine merchant. One of the wealthiest men in New York when he moved here. He married an American woman named Eliza,” Mike said, snapping his fingers. “And you know what? Rumor had it she’d been a prostitute before she married him.”
“Must have sounded like the right place for a tryst to Anita.”
“The more I think about it, the more it has to be connected to the boys who ran the old tontine. When Jumel died, Eliza actually married Aaron Burr. Didn’t last long, but she married him just the same.”
“Aaron Burr? Who killed Hamilton in a duel.”
“But before that was co-counsel in the murder of the woman in the well.”
“Gracie Mansion, Hamilton Grange, and this place,” I said. “The only three Federal houses that still exist in Manhattan. What’s the hook between them and our case?”
Mike made a left turn onto West 160th Street, and then a second quick left. “Jumel Terrace, Madam Prosecutor.”
The street was only two short blocks, and as Mike glided to a stop at the curb, I looked up the hill at the most unusual sight.
In the heart of this struggling neighborhood, full of tenements and bodegas, brownstones and crumbling old churches, stood a Palladian mansion. Its elegant white lines contrasted against the starless black sky. It was framed by a monumental portico supported by four enormous white columns.
“Nice place for a gentleman to take a girl to dinner, huh?” Mike asked.
“It looks like a movie set.”
Mercer parked across the street and came over to the car.
“You bring a flashlight?”
Mercer patted his back pocket.
“Why don’t you call the sarge and see if they’ve got a spare key for the joint? Ask him to send a patrol car over.”
“Why would they have a key?”
“The house is open part of the week as a museum. Military buffs like me and house-and-garden babes like you come to visit. The precinct has security responsibility the rest of the time.” Mike said as he got out of the car. “Let me have your flashlight, okay? You wait with her.”
“Where are you going to do?” I asked.
“I wasn’t kidding. I’m going to check the well.”
“There are lights on in the house, Mike. In the center hall, on both floors.”
“My peepers are working fine, Coop. I can see that. I imagine they’re kept on all night,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Follow him, Mercer. It’s awfully dark out there.”
“I’m with you, Alex. He’ll be fine.”
Mike focused the light on the approach to the old mansion. He climbed the staircase to the front door, and tried unsuccessfully to open it. He retraced his steps and went off the pavement, disappearing between two sturdy evergreen bushes that were to the left side of the house.
It was quiet on the narrow street around us, and I could no longer track the beam of Mike’s light.
“You see him?” I asked Mercer, getting out of the car.
“Not yet, Alex. Just give him a minute.”
Then came a sudden noise that echoed off the hilltop, like the sound of a door slamming.
“There, Mercer. Look there!” I said, pointing off the right rear of the mansion. A tall, slim figure, silhouetted against the sky, was running down the slope, away from the house, as fast as his legs would carry him.
FORTY-FIVE
“Get in the car and lock the doors,” Mercer said.
We could both see Mike jogging back to us.
“I got Coop,” he said. “You want me to try to run that guy down?”
“Nobody needs to ‘get’ me. Do what you’ve got to do.” I was in the front seat of the Jaguar, shaking ever so slightly. It was not the most vigorous protest I’d been known to make.
“What about the well?”
“There’s a solid cap on it. Doesn’t look like it’s been touched in years. Take off, Mr. Wallace.”
Mercer got into the Toyota and sped off out of sight, turning right at the end of Jumel Terrace in the direction of High Bridge Park.
Just as he made the turn, the RMP pulled in behind us and two uniformed officers got out.
“Sorry to pull you here, guys,” Mike said.
“That’s okay,” one answered. “You got a problem?”
“I’m not sure. We’d like to go in and have a look.”
“The lieutenant said to tell you that your man left the precinct.”
“Whaddaya mean?” Mike asked. “Not the congressman?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn it. Nobody watching him?”
“Curb your annoyance,” I said. “As long as he didn’t take the baby, we had nothing to hold him on.”
“The baby’s safe, ma’am. She’s doing fine.”
Mike slammed the flashlight against his fist. “So Ethan Leighton is roaming the streets like a loose cannon, and we’ve got his old man’s car.”
“C’mon, Mike. He wasn’t any help. He’ll catch hell on the other end when he gets home.”
The second cop leaned against the window to say hello. “Hey, Counselor. Remember me? I had that domestic with the baseball bat last spring.”
“Yeah. Sure, I do.”
“You know this place is haunted,” he said, opening the door for me.
“Actually, I had no idea it existed.”
“The ghost of Eliza Jumel,” he said, laughing at me. “That was one unhappy hooker. The folks say she stands up on the balcony and bays at the moon. At least it keeps all the neighborhood kids away. Regular ghostbusters, they are.”
“When you guys aren’t doing comedy, you have time to help me with this?” Mike asked.
Other books
Impostor by Jill Hathaway
The Wrath Of the Forgotten by Michael Ignacio
The Objects of Her Affection by Sonya Cobb
Songs of Blue and Gold by Deborah Lawrenson
The Rest Falls Away by Colleen Gleason
Concrete Island by J. G. Ballard
Deaths of Jocasta by J. M. Redmann
How I Met My Countess by Elizabeth Boyle
Mine by Mary Calmes
Dharma Feast Cookbook by Theresa Rodgers