“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.”
32
“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,
