The rest of the desktop was a maze of spiral notepads, computer disks, phone messages dated three and four months earlier, which detectives would scour in the days to come, and small framed photographs. I recognized a young Lola in her cap and gown, at what must have been her graduation from Barnard, and then a Dakota family shot of more current vintage, taken in front of her sister Lily's home in Summit.
There was a black knit cardigan sweater over the back of the desk chair. 'Any idea what she was wearing today?' I asked.
Mike called to George, but he hadn't seen the body either, so Mike added that question to the list he had started in the memo pad he kept inside his blazer. 'They'll have it inventoried at the ME's office in the morning. Then I've got to check with the sister to see if the clothes she had on when she died are the same ones she left Jersey with.'
I used my forefinger to pull at the pocket on the chest of the sweater. 'Hey, Mike, want to take out this piece of paper?'
I didn't want to be responsible for touching anything that might raise an issue of chain of custody. For all intents and purposes, I wasn't there tonight. He slid his gloved fingers in and came up with a folded page from a telephone pad printed with the words king's college at the top, and beneath that, the single handwritten notation, in bold print:
THE DEADHOUSE
Below the words was a list of four numbers: 14 46 63 85.
Mike read the words aloud. 'Mean anything to you? A person? A place?'
I shook my head.
'Probably what the other tenants will start calling this building,' George said.
'Is that her writing?'
I had seen enough of her correspondence to recognize it at once. 'Yes. Any date on it?'
'Nah. I'll voucher the note and the clothing. When we go to Jersey, remember to ask the sister if she can tell us whether Lola had this sweater there with her yesterday.'
I opened the closet door and we poked around the contents. An ordinary mix of skirts and slacks, dresses and blouses, sizes consistent with Lola's large chest and slim hips.
'What do you know about a boyfriend?' George called out to me from the second bedroom.
'News to me.' I closed the closet and went into the smaller room.
There was a couch and a chair, and George was standing in front of a chest of drawers, having pulled open each of the three levels. He was dangling a pair of Jockey shorts on the end of his pen. 'Get me some bags from the kitchen. Let's see if we can find out who Mr. Size 40, Briefs-Not-Boxers, might be.'
Mike noticed the end of a striped sheet sticking out below the edge of the couch. He threw the cushions onto the floor and rolled out the metal frame of the sleep sofa. He stripped the sheets off the narrow mattress and folded the top and bottom ones separately. 'Let's see if the lab comes up with any love juice.' He wrapped each one in an ordinary brown paper bag, to avoid contamination from one surface to another, and because sealing damp materials in plastic could cause them to deteriorate.
George chuckled. 'So much for the mayor's theory that she threw herself in the elevator shaft 'cause she was so despondent about having Ivan arrested. Peterson told me the first thing I had to look for in here was a suicide note. Damn, seems like she squeezed in one last fling before it was lights out.'
'Let's just leave this all here and send a team in for the morning with an Evidence Recovery Unit. Someone needs to go through this stuff,' Chapman said, waving his hand at the several pieces of men's clothing hanging in this room's closet. 'Got to check the labels, look for ID. It'll take hours. We'll just seal off the apartment now and have them put a uniformed post outside the door for the night.'
'Any mail here?' I was taking one more look around as I put on my coat.
'No. The brother-in-law said all her mail was being forwarded to her office at school, then she went through it there. We'll have to pick it up tomorrow.'
'Fat chance. I've had dealings with the legal departments, both at Columbia and at King's. I can only tell you that if Sylvia Foote gets to Lola's office first, everything will be so sanitized that you'll think it had been swept by a CIA operative. Never a trace of Professor Dakota.'
Foote was the general counsel of King's College, having served in the same post at Columbia for more than a quarter of a century. She would opt for protecting the institution every chance she had.
'You know her personally?'
'Yeah. And she's like fingernails on a chalkboard. 'Don't disturb the students' is her mantra, but what she really means is that the university's golden rule is not to scare the parents. Nobody paying those tuition rates wants his kids to go to a school where there might be a hint of scandal. We'd better try to get in there as fast as we can.'
Chapman called the two-six and asked the desk sergeant for an extra body to sit on the door of 15A. Then we said good night to George and retraced our steps downstairs and out the rear door of the building, around to Riverside Drive, where the car was parked.
As we let the engine warm up, I reached for the radio and moved the dial to 1010 WINS, the all-news station, to see when this arctic front would pass through the city. I caught the tail end of the traffic cycle, warning about icy patches on the bridges leading in and out of town, and shivered again at the top of the early morning news.
'This just in: the body of a Yale University senior, missing from her New Haven dormitory since the day after Thanksgiving, was found shortly after midnight, floating in the Hudson River, near the promenade off Battery Park City. The content of the letters left behind by Gina Norton have not been released to the press, but police sources say that there are no signs of foul play.'
'So much for my mother's theory that the school yard was a safer place to be than the streets-one more corpse tonight, we'll have a hat trick. And how handy for Hizzoner. No foul play declared before she's even been dried off, thawed out, and taken apart by the medical examiner,' said Chapman, flipping off the radio, turning on the headlights, and easing out of the parking space to take me home.
4
I heard
Three pages back in the Metro section was a photo of Lola, standing at a lectern in full academic dress, mortarboard atop her head. The caption read 'University Professor Dies in Bizarre Accident,' above a subheading printed in smaller type describing her as a 'Witness for the Prosecution.' The reporter had managed to incorporate every stereotypical expression of reaction into his brief story. The administration was shocked and saddened by news of the beloved professor's death, students were puzzled by the ironic twists of fate in Dakota's final days, and her husband's family was outraged at charges that he was alleged to have been involved in the thwarted plot to kill her.
The phone rang and Chapman gave me the morning weather report. 'You're gonna need a dogsled to get downtown this morning. The streets are coated with ice and the windchill brings it down to about five degrees. I'm on my way home to catch a few hours' sleep.'
'Anything develop during the rest of the tour?'
'Nope. Made the usual notifications, took care of all the paperwork, got the preliminary reports down on the chief of detectives' desk so he's in the know first thing he walks in. Subway's the only way to go today, kid, much as you hate it. The driving is treacherous. See you around lunchtime.'
I finished dressing and reluctantly headed for the Sixty-eighth Street Lexington Avenue station, anxious to beat the rush hour crowds. Once settled into my seat, I scoped out the other passengers and sat back to read the rest of the newspaper. It was early enough so that most of my companions appeared to be people going to their jobs and offices. A bit later and too many of the riders who stayed on board south of Forty-second Street would also be on their way to the courthouse, to make appearances for their criminal cases. On those occasional days that I got
