“The mother of one of the boys who was killed there became a one-woman campaign to clean it up. Learned everything there was to know about its history. She told me she used to sit in the same desolate room where her kid was offed, just staring out at the park, thinking about how many people had come to the end of their lives in that forsaken place.”
“Back when it was built,” I said, “cancer was incurable. Treatment was just palliative.”
“Patients went to that hospital to die, eased by morphine and champagne, Sunday carriage rides in the park,” Mike said. “Story was that the hospital whiskey bill was higher than the one for medical supplies. Even Marie Curie came to visit.”
“She did?” I asked as we crossed the broad street, dodging taxis and buses, to get to Mike’s car.
“The Curies discovered radium in 1898, and doctors here pioneered the first techniques to burn cancers away with it. The largest repository of radium in the country was kept in a steel vault right in that building.”
“I don’t know that I could live in a place like that,” I said. “Too many ghosts.”
“Life goes on,” Mike said. “The Octagon-the old lunatic asylum on Roosevelt Island-has been turned into a housing development, and the building where more than a hundred people died in the Triangle Waist Company fire in 1911 is a biology lab at NYU now. Like a phoenix from the ashes.”
I had just cleared the passenger seat of half a dozen empty soda cans, a tie, a book on the Crimean War, and a gross of Tic-Tac boxes when I heard Mike’s beeper go off.
He looked at the display and slammed the car door. “It’s Peterson.”
My cell was in my hand. I speed-dialed Mike’s boss and handed him the phone.
“Hey, Loo, what’s up?” Mike listened to the answer. “Got it. Yeah, she just bought me lunch at the medical examiner’s outdoor cafe. We’re on it.”
“Detour?” I asked.
“Quick stop on Ninety-third Street,” Mike said.
“Tina’s apartment? Why?”
“Because Billy Schultz played hookey from his office today. He’s working from home.”
“So?”
Mike was driving up First Avenue, weaving between cars to catch the lights while he talked. “Precinct guys spent the morning canvassing the buildings that face the garden behind the apartment. Got a rear-window thing going on. Remember Billy told us he hadn’t seen much of Tina since the summer? Well, the little old lady who takes the fresh air on her fire escape saw Billy out back with Tina over the weekend. Saturday, right around dusk.”
“Doing what?”
“Digging.”
“You mean gardening?”
“I would have said it if that’s what I meant. She says digging. With a great big shovel and mounds of dirt. No pansies, no tulips, no vegetables.”
“Why didn’t he tell us?” We were cruising past the United Nations, and Mike put on his whelper to cut a course through the slow-moving traffic. “Did you see any disturbance in the garden?”
“Actually, Coop, I was distracted by the broad on the floor with the bad headache. I thought there was a messy patch in the yard, and I just figured it was where the perp pulled the armillary out of the ground to whack her. Anyway, Crime Scene will have photos,” Mike said. “Peterson’s got a uniform outside his apartment, rope-a- doping him into answering questions about all the other tenants till we get there. And I buried the lead.”
“What’s that?” I held the dashboard as Mike slammed on the brakes to avoid an Asian deliveryman, then accelerated again.
“That gas mask the cops picked up a few doors away from the building the night Barr was attacked?” Mike asked.
“Don’t look at me. Look at the road,” I said. “What about it?”
“Preliminary on the DNA inside the mask. There’s a mixture, of course,” Mike said. “I’d expect that with something like a mask-especially if it isn’t brand new. And one of the profiles matches Billy Schultz.”
“Are you serious? I never thought of him that way for a minute. He was wearing the damn thing?”
“Skin cells, sweat. I don’t know what else they got.”
Once we passed the turn-off for the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, we made the left onto Ninety-third Street in less than three minutes.
I could see an officer talking to Schultz on the sidewalk as we pulled up in front of the building. He looked over when he heard the car door shut and started up the steps as Mike approached.
“Yo, Billy,” Mike said. “I need a couple of minutes of your time.”
Schultz was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up, and he frowned as he checked his watch before telling Mike that he had to get back upstairs for a conference call. “I can’t talk to you now.”
“A guy could get a complex. Only person who’s ever happy to see me is my mother,” Mike said. “It’s just a little thing.”
“Really, I’ve got to make a call.”
“This Minerva Hunt thing’s got me puzzled.” Mike was doing his best Columbo imitation, a look of complete befuddlement on his face. He seemed too dense to be able to figure out much of anything. “When you phoned 911, you told the operator you thought the dead woman was Minerva Hunt, right?”
Schultz looked annoyed. “That’s what I said.”
“That you’d seen her in the building on other occasions.”
“Exactly.”
“You were standing with me when the
“In the garden, yes.”
“Did you see her?”
“I did.”
“I’m just trying to get straight which of the two women you’d seen around the building before that night. That’s all I want to know.”
“The way you came speeding up the street, I thought it was something more urgent,” Schultz said, seemingly relieved that was the reason for our visit. “I-uh-I was mistaken when I called for help. The outfit, the general physique, the bag with her initials. I couldn’t really see her face-it was such a mess-I just jumped to that conclusion. As soon as I saw that other woman talking to you, I knew I’d been wrong.”
“Very helpful, Billy. I didn’t mean to hold you up,” Mike said with a wave of his hand. “What are you growing this time of year? Pumpkins?”
“Excuse me?”
“In your garden. My lieutenant asked me to find out what’s in bloom.”
“It’s all put to bed, Detective. Come back next spring and see what we’ve got,” Schultz said, heading up the stairs.
“The big dig, Billy. Last Saturday. What was that about?”
Schultz continued on his way.
“People saw you with Tina out in the yard. You want to tell me what you were doing together?”
Schultz stopped but didn’t answer.
“Don’t be going back out there for a while, Billy. Cops are on their way to seal it up now, till we have a chance to check it out. It’s off-limits.”
The man turned to look at us, clearly displeased. “Tina asked to borrow my shovel, okay? I didn’t ask her why. I didn’t need to know. I took it down to her and talked for a minute or so. That’s her little plot. I don’t care what she does with it.”
“But you told us you hadn’t talked to her-” I said.
“Maybe I just forgot. It was such an insignificant exchange, I simply forgot.”
Mike took a step closer and put his hand on the railing of the staircase. “Easy to understand, Billy. A lot easier to understand than the fact that you left your droppings in that freaking mask you ran around in the other night.”
“What are you talking about? That’s not my mask,” Schultz said, angered. He raised his voice and his face
