Forgotten in Death

by J. D. Robb

  3

  The elevator doors opened on fifty to a spacious reception area that continued the dignified theme in tones of navy and cream and dark, glossy wood. Two people manned stations at opposite ends of the tall counter backed by the floor-to-ceiling company logo.

  Eve heard the one on the right chirp cheerfully to a caller on her station ’link, “Good morning! Singer Family Developers! How can I assist you?”

  The woman who waited to greet them didn’t look as if she’d chirp, cheerfully or otherwise.

  She wore her ink-black hair in a kind of skullcap with the ends honed into keen spikes. While her lips curved in polite greeting, her eyes—a tawny gold that made Eve think of various unpleasant reptiles—stayed as keen as those spiked ends.

  Her dress, blue as cobalt, skimmed down to the knees of a tough, athletic body and showed off well-cut arms.

  “Lieutenant Dallas.” She offered a ringless hand and a very firm grip. “Detective. I’m Zelda Diller, administrative assistant to Mr. Singer. He and Mr. Geraldi are meeting in Mr. Singer’s office. I’ll escort you back.”

  “Okay.”

  She started back and through a wide doorway to the left of the counter. Open doors on either side showed outer offices where admins or secretaries or both worked busily at stations with closed inner doors where Eve assumed the execs did what execs did.

  “Due to the unfortunate circumstances”—Zelda flicked a glance at Eve—“I’ve cleared thirty minutes of Mr. Singer’s schedule for you. I assume that will be sufficient.”

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?”

  As expected, the big boss’s offices boasted double doors.

  Dignity continued its reign with a sand-colored carpet, dark wood, chocolate leather visitors’ chairs, and the central desk, where a man in a navy pin-striped suit worked his comp.

  Through the open door on the left, Eve saw a man in shirtsleeves pacing as he held a conversation on his ’link. The firmly closed door on the right had the admin’s name on a brass plaque.

  Zelda moved straight to the double doors behind the central desk.

  She knocked briskly before opening one side.

  “Lieutenant Dallas and Detective Peabody, sir.”

  “Yes, thank you, Zelda. Please, show them right in.”

  Bolton crossed the wide space from desk to door in his sharp gray suit as a second man in work clothes rose from a chair.

  “Lieutenant, Detective. Bolton Singer and our project supervisor Paul Geraldi. A difficult day for all. Zelda, could we get some coffee, please?”

  “I’ll arrange it.”

  She stepped out, closed the door behind her.

  And, Eve would’ve made book, started the thirty-minute timer.

  “Please sit.” He gestured not to the chairs facing his desk, but to the two-seater sofa in that chocolate-brown leather, then waved Geraldi to one of the forest-green chairs facing it. Bolton took the other rather than the power position behind his desk.

  Eve figured an office told you something about the person who worked in it. The vibe, her oldest friend, Mavis, would’ve called it.

  This one struck her as friendly—the comfortable seating, the thriving plant in a cheerful pot at the corner of his window wall. Involved, as she spotted several framed wall photos of Bolton Singer in hard hats at job sites as well as more formal ones of him at ceremonial first shovels or ribbon cuttings.

  Busy, most likely. She couldn’t see his comp screen, and the wall screen pulsed on holding blue, but she’d spotted a legal pad and some handwritten notes on his blotter.

  “Paulie’s been filling me in,” Bolton began, “as best he can. My first questions are do you know what happened, and what can we do to help?”

  “We’re at the very beginning of our investigation. We appreciate your cooperation thus far, and continuing that cooperation aids our investigation.”

  “You can count on it.” He paused when the knock came again. This time Navy Pin-Stripe came in, wheeling a coffee service.

  “Thanks, Terry. I’ll confess I read Nadine Furst’s first book, and have already started her second, so it’s black coffee for Lieutenant Dallas, coffee regular for Detective Peabody.”

  He had a strong face, clean-shaven, that just missed handsome. Direct, pale blue eyes took it over the line into appealing, as did the dark honey hair curling over his ears and collar.

  He wore a thick, ridged, white-gold wedding ring, a slick and sleek black-banded wrist unit, and a single stud in his left ear.

  Beside him, Paul Geraldi looked tanned and burly with his barrel chest in a black T-shirt, his scarred work boots, his small, scruffy beard and gray-streaked brown hair clipped militarily short.

  Bolton waited until Terry slipped back out of the room.

  “Is there anything you can tell us about the woman who died? If there’s anything we can do for her family?”

  “Our information to this point is she lived on the streets.”

  He nodded, looked down at his coffee. “There’ll be expenses regarding her burial or cremation. If there’s no family, I would take care of that.”

  “She was known to the cops at the Tenth Precinct, and if we can’t locate next of kin, they’ll make arrangements for her.”

  “You know who she is?” Geraldi spoke up, then glanced over. “Sorry, Bolt.”

  “No, don’t be.”

  “I didn’t really get a look at her. I’d just gotten on the site when the kid found her. I figured we weren’t supposed to touch anything before the cops got there.”

  “You were right. We’ve identified the victim as Alva Quirk.”

  “Don’t know the name.” Geraldi looked back at his boss again. “Don’t know it.”

  “Peabody.”

  Peabody brought up the ID image—one a few years out of date—turned her PPC so both men could see it.

  Bolton started to shake his head, but Geraldi leaned closer.

  “Ah, shit. Sorry. Damn it. I knew her. I mean to say I didn’t know her so much as I saw her a few times, talked to her a couple times.”

  “Where?”

  “On the site. She came up a couple times—some do even though we’ve got the old steps blocked off. They get around it. And we have crew coming up and going down, so it ain’t hard. Nothing up on that side of the fence right now, so it’s not a big problem, but I move ’em along when I can. She was … she gave me a flower.”

  “A flower,” Bolton repeated.

  “Folded paper flower. Like that origami stuff. Out of part of one of those damn flyers they try handing out on the street nobody wants. She said I was lucky to work in a place with such a nice view, and how it was good we were building places for people to live. She kept coming back, and I had to keep telling her it was private property. She’d just smile and give me a flower or a bird or whatnot.”

  He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Got so I liked seeing her now and then. She’d camp some days down on the sidewalk by the steps. She wasn’t hurting anybody. She told me how she was sorry she had to report one of my crew to the police.”

  “Why?” Bolton demanded immediately. “Did someone harass her?”

  “Nah. She’d been up at the fence, saw one of the crew tossing stuff in the dumpster there. He missed with something, left it on the ground. She said littering was against the rules, showed me how she’d written it all out in her book.”

  “She showed you her book?”

  Geraldi nodded at Eve. “Yeah, she had this book—sort of like those diaries little kids like to write in. A paper one. She showed me where she’d written it down. What the guy looked like, what he was wearing, the time of day, the litter. She said how we had to keep our city clean, and I said it wouldn’t happen again.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, man, this was back … last month. Three, four weeks easy. It gave me the idea to ask her how about she write down people who came up the steps who didn’t work for us. Figured it would keep her from coming up. I gues
s it didn’t.”

  “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  Geraldi scrubbed a hand over his beard. “Gotta be a couple, three days ago. I worked out a kind of deal with her, see? I’d stop by down below after work every Friday, and she could give me her report, you know? I’d give her a few bucks for the weekend. I made a kind of game out of it, because I didn’t want her coming up all the time, maybe taking a spill, or getting through the gate and picking through one of the dumpsters. We got broken glass, nails, sharp shit—stuff goes in there. We’re doing a lot of demo. I didn’t want her getting hurt. She wasn’t hurting anybody.

  “Goddamn it, Bolt, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not on you, Paulie.” Bolton reached over, gripped Geraldi’s arm briefly. “It’s not on you, and I’m sorry, too.”

  “Who has off-hours access to that dumpster area, and the secured area, the building, all of it?”

  “I would,” Bolton began. “Paulie, of course, our head architect and engineer, head electrician, lead plumber.” He stopped himself, held up a hand. “I’ll give you a list of names and job titles.”

  “That would be helpful. We’ll need to speak to all of them.”

  “I’ll have Zelda set that up. Wouldn’t it be more likely it was someone who got through the stairs on that side of the fence? Just some … opportunist?”

  “More likely doesn’t apply at the moment. Can you tell us where you were last night, Mr. Geraldi, between midnight and two A.M.?”

  Geraldi blew out a breath. “Takes me back,” he murmured. “I had a couple little brushes back in my misspent youth.” He tried a half smile. “Nothing like this. I can tell you I was home, from five-thirty or so—grabbed a beer—a couple—with some of the crew before I went home. Two beers because my in-laws are visiting from Scottsdale.”

  He rolled his eyes toward Bolton, who let out a sudden laugh. “You’ll get through it, Paulie. Stay strong.”

  “Been married going on thirty years,” he told Eve and Peabody, “raised up three good kids. Got two sweet-faced grandkids so far. I make a good living, got a good, responsible job and respect on it. But I’m never going to be good enough for their girl. They don’t say it right out loud so much anymore. But they think it, and always will.”

  He huffed out another breath. “Anyway, I was home, had dinner with my wife, the in-laws, my youngest boy, who came by with his new girlfriend. Medical student, pretty thing, speaks French like a native. And believe me, she’ll never be good enough for their grandbaby. Anyway,” he said again. “I was home from five-thirty, hit the sack about ten because my day starts early.”

  “Okay. Mr. Singer?”

  “My wife and I had dinner with friends, and I’d say we got home about the time Paulie hit the sack. My day doesn’t start so early. I checked on some work—habit—we watched the first part of Knight at Night, then settled in. Or my wife did. Our youngest is home from college. When he—or any of them—are away, I sleep like a rock. But when they’re home, I can’t drop off all the way until I hear them come in. Which he did at twelve-forty-eight—because I looked at the clock.”

  “Thank you. If you could ask your admin to generate those lists?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “My partner can go with you while it’s set up. If we could have a space to conduct interviews with anyone in the building at this time, that would also help.”

  “Absolutely.” He rose. “This shouldn’t take long, and I’ll have you set up in the small conference room on this floor. Detective?”

  When Peabody went out with him, Eve turned back to Geraldi. “You’ve worked for the Singers for a long time.”

  “Longer than I’ve been married. Longer than Bolton, come to that. Turned me around as I was heading in the wrong direction. Nothing big, but not doing anything with my life. I got a job with Singer, and it helped turn me around.”

  “You’d have worked for them when some of the buildings you’re taking down first went up.”

  “Yeah, just a laborer back then. I had a lot to learn. Learned pretty quick I like demo. I thought it was so I could just bust things up, but I learned more. How to take something down, when, when to save and salvage. What’s safe, what’s not. What you can repurpose or donate. You don’t just tear something down and throw it away.”

  His eyebrows drew hard together as he stared down at his hands. “That’s what someone did to her. They just threw her away.

  “It’s not right. It’s not right.”

  “No, it’s not. Have you had any trouble on the job site? Pilfering, sabotage? Anything?”

  “Nothing like that. We had some trouble when we started with sidewalk sleepers and squatters trying to get back in those buildings—the old ones. That’s why we added security fences around the buildings in addition. They weren’t safe, Lieutenant. I swear to you, they weren’t safe, and if we weren’t taking them down, they’d sure as hell start falling on somebody’s head in another five, six years.”

  He leaned forward again. “They weren’t built to last, see? It’s not on the Singers, it’s the system. Or what was. You’re too young to know, but people were desperate for a place to live back then. So many buildings down or bombed out, torn up. It was get something up fast, get people off the streets. Or get people coming back into the city again. Get things going again.”

  “I know. A lot of the projects in Hudson Yards—just like elsewhere—ended up with that sort of construction. The Singer Family sold off a larger chunk of it.”

  “Couldn’t do it all, not efficiently, not timely, and you know, you’ve only got so many resources, right? As I recall, the old man—that’s Bolt’s father—had partners, and when Bolt was coming up in the business, he wanted to focus in more. His old man had already sold most of the second site, I think, by then anyhow. That’s awhile back.”

  “Did you work on both construction sites back then? Right after the Urbans?”

  “They bounced me around plenty.” Nostalgia put a wistful smile on his face. “Like I said, I was green labor. Young, strong back, so I’m hauling trash, mixing cement, carting materials. Crap stuff, like I said. I didn’t know better then.”

  He looked up as Bolton came back in.

  “The detective’s getting things set up with Zelda. It won’t be long.”

  “I appreciate that. If I could have a few more minutes of your time, Mr. Singer. We’re done here, Mr. Geraldi.”

  “Go home, Paulie. We’ll shift over to the Houston site tomorrow, get a jump on it. I’ll meet you there at seven-thirty. How’s that?”

  “Can do.” He rose. “I’d sure like you to let me know when you find the person who did that to her. Alva, you said. It’s a nice name, and it suits her. I’d like to know when you get them.”

  “All right.”

  Bolton sat down again as Geraldi left. “He’s taking it hard. It’s that personal connection. It makes it even harder. He’s a good man.”

  “He’s worked for you a long time.”

  “He’s a fixture. Loyal, reliable. He takes pride in his work. Whatever his in-laws think, his wife couldn’t have done better. Now, what more can I do to help?”

  “Your company developed a second project in Hudson Yards at the same time as the one you’re currently rebuilding.”

  “Yes, Hudson South-West, I think they called it at the time. Then the Urban Wars put a stop to that. I don’t know a great deal, as I wasn’t interested in the business, and then was away at college. I do know the buildings went up fast and cheap once the dust cleared.”

  “Your father sold off a portion of Hudson South-West.”

  “Yes, years ago. He wanted to build the tower. The Singer Tower. He wanted that signature, you could say, before he retired. He’d hoped to develop the entire project, but he had some health scares. When I took over, I decided there were other areas that took priority. And I wanted that project, where my father had built his signature, to be worthy. It takes time and resources, so I sold the rest of S
outh-West.”

  “What was Hudson South-West is also being developed now.”

  Bolton smiled. “I’m aware, Lieutenant. And certain that it will also be worthy. Roarke builds to last, and with the integrity of the city in mind. It’s exactly why I approached him about buying the property.”

  “My partner and I answered a call to that site this morning.”

  “I’m sorry?” He looked blank for a moment. “But you’re … You’re Homicide. Dear God, not another murder.”

  “This one, if it proves to be murder, happened a long time ago. The crew found human remains in what had been part of a wine cellar—walled off, perhaps deliberately, to conceal those remains.”

  “Jesus.” His fingers shot through his hair. “How long ago? Do you know who he was?”

  “We have to determine that, and will. That, too, will take time. If we date it to when the building itself was being constructed, it would be roughly thirty-seven years.”

  “Thirty-seven years.” More nostalgia, Eve noted, and wistful with it. “I was in college—or just out—and living in Savannah. I didn’t want any part of the business back then.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to be a rock star.” He offered that half smile now. “The troubadour for my generation, like Dylan, like Springsteen.” Now he laughed. “More or less. I wanted to write music, to perform. I wanted everything that wasn’t my father at that point in my life.”

  “You left New York to study for it.”

  “Yeah. I guess you checked. It was about as far away from urban development as it gets. But I know—and I was young and critical—that buildings there, as in other areas, went up hard and fast and cheap. I know some who worked on them weren’t … there weren’t many Paul Geraldis, if you understand me. One of the agreements my father and I made when I said I’d come into the business was the return to our tradition of quality builds. I was very full of myself, even though I’d failed miserably as a performer.”

  When he shook his head, Eve caught more than self-deprecation in his eyes. She caught just a hint of sadness.