"It's the boyfriend we're interested in," Mike said, although I knew he was now every bit as interested in the disaffected Kittredge as he was in Emily's old beau. "What can you tell me about him?"
"Nothing. Never met the guy."
"Well, how'd you get pulled into the case?"
"I wasn't. Had nothing to do with the larceny she got locked up for. I worked in the Sixth Squad at the time," Kittredge said.
The theft was uptown, we knew from the police report, but Emily had been living in Greenwich Village, in the Sixth Precinct.
"She came to the station house with-well, with a pretty bizarre tale-and I happened to be the schmuck catching cases that day. You know what it's like, don't you, Chapman?"
"What was her story?"
Kittredge crumpled the empty drink container in his fist. "Poor little Emily was high as a kite. The desk sergeant kicked her upstairs. He wanted one of the women detectives to toss her for drugs 'cause she wasn't making much sense when she talked. Nobody was around but me. The kid said she had information about a murder. She knew a guy who had killed someone."
"True?"
"I gave it a shot. I asked her to start with the perp. Tell me about him. She was too frightened to do much of that. It was a boyfriend of hers, a guy she'd met in some kind of rehab program."
"Monty? Was his name Monty?" Mike asked.
"Nope. He may have had a nickname like that, that he called himself, but it's not how Emily knew him," Kittredge said, frowning and shaking his head. "Hey, I haven't thought about this for two decades. I'm supposed to remember the guy's name?"
"Didn't you meet him? Wasn't Emily living with him?"
"She'd moved out by then. Gone off the wagon and moved into the Y to live. She tried to point him out on the street to me one time, but I never got a clear fix on him. Looked like one more Village idiot to me. Doped-up rich kid trying to live like a hippie. Most of 'em outgrow it. I went back to question the guy, but he was gone. I think they had shared a place on Sullivan Street. Couldn't find a trace of him."
"Was he a student, too?"
"I think he was already out of school. Dropped out or kicked out. His family wouldn't pay the bills, I think she told me. Black sheep syndrome," Kittredge said, smiling at Mike. "Been there myself."
"Who'd he kill?"
Kittredge leaned back against the kitchen table. "She didn't know that either. Another junkie was all she said."
"Where'd it happen?"
"Well, if Emily Upshaw had the answer to that, I might have made a case, don't you think? Look, Chapman, here's this sweet kid strung out on dope who kept telling me that her boyfriend had buried someone alive. I didn't know who, I didn't know where, and I didn't even know whether the boyfriend had been one of her delusions. She had those, too, from time to time."
"Did she tell you why she thought it was true?"
He thought for a minute. "Yeah. One night, a few weeks after Emily had busted out of the program, the guy came home from a session-"
"You mean an AA meeting-Alcoholics Anonymous?"
"Like that. I think it was called SABA-Student Abusers Anonymous. I think he'd been clean and sober a little longer than Emily. He'd started in the group while he was still enrolled at NYU. Anyway, that night he spun out of control and brought home a few bags of coke. They got high together and that's when he broke down."
"How do you mean?"
"He wigged out. According to Emily, he was pretty frantic. He told her that he'd been having flashbacks ever since he'd been sober and dried out. He said that during that evening's session he'd admitted to a couple of the guys that he thought he had murdered someone. It was all visions and dreams, mumbo-jumbo, alcoholic blackouts. But as soon as he-what's the bullshit word they use now-shared? As soon as he 'shared' his story with his self-help group, he began to worry that one of the other guys would give him up. So he went a little berserk, picked up some drugs to get him through the night, and came home crying to lay it all on Emily's lap."
"And she came to the station house?" Mike asked.
"You mean did she come that same night, when she should have?" Kittredge sneered. "Yeah, about four months too late. Not that night, not the next day."
"Why not?" I asked, speaking for the first time.
"Typical broad bullshit. Emily didn't think it was possible. Such a sensitive soul, the guy was. Good family roots, poetic genius, brilliant student, kind to animals. She laid it off to the white powder he shoved up his nostrils."
"She stayed with him?"
"Yeah. Then things got more desperate after the shoplifting. Truth is I never knew whether she was really afraid of him, or he just dumped her and she had nowhere to go."
"How'd she wind up with you?" Mike asked.
"She told her lawyer-Legal Aid, he was-that she had a friend in the police department. He called and told me that if she had a transient address like the Y, the DA's office wouldn't dismiss the case. He just asked me to let her use my crib for a month."
"Did you and she-?"
"None of your fucking business, Chapman."
"But you actually investigated the case?" I asked. "I mean, did you talk to other people in his SABA group?"
Kittredge looked at Mike while he talked to me. "Hard to do. By the time Emily got to me, school was out for the summer. The rehab meetings had been confidential-you know the law, drug treatment stuff is privileged-so the college didn't have any record of who attended."
"All you had was a half-assed confession, fueled by cocaine," Mike said.
"With no body, no crime scene, and not even a suspect I could put my hands on. I kicked it around for a few months," Kittredge said.
Probably, I thought, for as long as Emily was putting out for him.
"Then my boss took me off it. He figured that she was just squealing on a guy who had dumped her and we couldn't go digging up ground all over Manhattan unless we had a report of somebody missing."
"You keep a file on it?" Mike asked.
"There was the usual paperwork I did in the squad, back before we had computers."
"Take any of your case folders with you? Something that might have names on-"
"For what? My memoirs?" Kittredge laughed as he walked to the front door and put his hand on the knob.
"You mind if we come back to you when we have more information?" Mike said, realizing the opportunity for conversation was about to be over.
"Try not to waste my time. Emily wasn't known for her taste in men. She probably picked up one too many barflys with a rough edge. She just couldn't keep off the juice, I guess."
We were back out on the stoop, headed for the car, when Mike's cell phone rang. He opened it to say hello, and I could see the condensation of his breath in the air. It made him look as though he was as fired up inside as I figured him to be.
"Where? Does Scotty Taren know?" Mike asked, getting answers that he liked. "Thanks, Hal. I owe you big-time."
I waited for him to unlock the car and let me inside. He slammed the door and pursed his lips. "That was Hal Sherman. Looks like all the pressure of going public with a patient's history may have been too much for Dr. Ichiko. He killed himself today. They just found his body up in the Bronx."
19
"Why did Hal call you?" I asked. "It's Scotty's case now."
"'Cause Scotty's a stand-up guy. When Hal reached out to him, Scotty said to play dumb and give me the first heads-up. After all, I was in the basement after the skeleton was discovered and Hal took the photos. So it would make sense for him to have to call me in order to find out that Taren's got the case now. And why should I know McKinney forbade him to talk to you about it?"
"Don't think you're leaving me behind on this one."
"McKinney'll go nuts if you show up at the scene, Coop."
"That fact alone is enough to make me want to go twice as badly. You're always telling me how much I'd love the Bronx. So far I've limited most of my experience to Yankee Stadium. Now's your chance to show me
the borough's charms."
Mike had gone to college at Fordham and loved the rich history of the borough, once the seventeenth-century farmland of Swedish-born Jonas Bronck, the first European settler to live on the mainland northeast of Manhattan.
"Yeah, but a death scene wasn't my vision of an introduction."
"I guess Crime Factor will have to go with a rerun for tonight's show. Dr. Ichiko won't be revealing the identity of our skeleton on this episode. C'mon, let's see what happened to this greedy shrink. Where to?"
Mike shifted into gear and pulled out into the traffic. "The gorge."
"What?"
"The Bronx River Gorge."
"Never heard of it," I said, as he took advantage of the early evening lull in traffic to race across town to the Triborough Bridge, and up the Major Deegan Expressway to wind through what to me was the unfamiliar territory of the Bronx.
"You've never been to the Botanical Gardens?"
"Not since I was a kid." I had grown up in the suburbs north of the city and remembered visits to the gardens with my mother, who took me there for the brilliant spring displays of roses and the seasonal show of dozens of orchid varieties that she so loved.
"That's where we're headed. The gorge is inside the grounds of the Botanical Gardens. The Fordham campus is right across the street."
"I know the hothouses and the-"
"No flowerpots, Coop. This is part of the Bronx River. You know that's the only freshwater river in New York City?"
"What about the Hudson, or the East River?"
"They're tidal estuaries, Coop. You got to pay more attention to your surroundings."
For much of the ride, Mike gave me the early history of the area. After its discovery by Henry Hudson and its control by the Dutch West India Company as New Netherland, there were frequent and violent clashes with the local Indian tribes.
"You would have had your little prosecutorial hands full here, even in the 1640s."
"Doing what?"
"Ever hear of Anne Hutchinson?"
"Yes. She was exiled from Massachusetts by the Puritans. Brought a whole little colony somewhere down here because of religious intolerance."
"This is it. Chief Wampage was a bit peeved about the slaughter of some of his people, so he made his way to Hutchinson's house and whacked her right in the forehead with his tomahawk. Scalped her and her kids."
By the time we reached Bronx River Park, I had a thumbnail sketch of the county's major military skirmishes, from the revolutionary fortifications at the King's Bridge to the Battle of Pell's Point.
At the entrance to the park, long after closing time, a uniformed officer opened the gate when Mike flashed his badge. He directed us south and told us that the Crime Scene Unit and some grounds-keepers were waiting for us there, half a mile inside.
My childhood memories of sun-filled gardens with vividly colored flowers bore no resemblance to the vast, darkened park that we had entered. There were occasional streetlamps along the route, but the roadway was surrounded on both sides by a tall, dense growth of trees. The wind caused tall shadows to dance in front of our headlights, and the sprawling grounds seemed an eerily sinister place.
Some snakelike curves in the road and half a mile later, Hal Sherman waved us down and came over to open my car door.
"I doubt you were ever a Boy Scout, Chapman," he called out over my head, "but you might wanna rub a couple of sticks together and start a little fire if you're thinking of keeping me out here any longer. I can't stand much more of this cold."
"That the doctor?" Mike asked, pointing at an ambulance parked at the curb.
"Not a pretty picture."
Mike held his arm straight at me, palm out. He walked to the open end, said something to the two EMTs, and they unzipped the black body bag. He leaned in with a flashlight and studied the head and chest of the dead man.
"Looks like he went ten rounds with Mike Tyson," he said, returning to us. "Who's calling this a suicide?"
Hal shrugged his shoulders. "It sure as hell wasn't a mugging. You got enough dark alleys between his house in Riverdale and his office in the Village for someone to do him in. You think a member of the Polar Bear Club brought him up here for a dip in ice water to off him? His wife says he was up all night tearing his hair out because of the bad press over his decision to go on that crappy show and give up a patient's name. Finally was about to get his time in the limelight, but was ready to kill himself once he realized the professional consequences of doing something so stupid."
"Who found him?"
"We're waiting on a translator," Hal said. "That's the head groundskeeper-the tall guy in the khakis. The two others who pulled the body out of the river are the short ones with him. They're Vietnamese."
I followed Mike over to the trio, who were shielding themselves from the wind against a stand of pine trees.
"You in charge?"
"Phelps. I'm Sinclair Phelps," the groundskeeper said. "These men work for me."
I could see Phelps's profile silhouetted against the light gray rocks lining the riverbed behind me. He was, at about five-eleven, a little shorter than Mike. His hair was long and thick, but flecked with enough silver to suggest that he was in his mid-fifties. His aquiline nose gave him a stern mien, and the years of outdoor labor had lined his face as if it were the hide of a gator.
"You know anything?" Mike asked, after introducing us.
"Only what Trun has told me," Phelps said, pointing to the slighter of the two men, who were shivering as badly as I was.
"You speak Vietnamese?"
"No, no," Phelps said, smiling. "They can manage a few words of English and some fairly effective body language. I can tell you as much as they've told me. Late this afternoon-Miss Cooper, you seem to be uncomfortable. Would you like to move inside?"
"Take us through it once out here, will you?" Mike said, rolling his eyes while Hal Sherman passed me a pair of rubber gloves to put on, this time just for warmth. Phelps had a crew-neck sweater over his uniform and seemed as impervious to the damp wind as Mike did in his navy blazer, collar turned up. The rest of us were miserable.
"Do you know the river?"
I shook my head while both Hal and Mike nodded.
"It's twenty-five miles long, seven in the city and the rest going up through Westchester."
"It seems bizarre to me for someone to think of killing himself in a river in the wintertime. I'd expect it to be frozen over," I said, looking at the icy surfaces that gleamed from the rocks in the riverbed and the snow-laden branches overhanging it.
"In the shallow places further north, that's quite true. There are some spots where it's only a few inches deep," Phelps said. "But that's not the case here, because of the falls."
"Waterfalls?" I asked.
"Yes, ma'am. This is a gorge you're looking at. Y'see, there's an ancient fault that was created by the glaciers that moved through here," he said, turning on the beam of his torch lamp and bending to knock some pine branches out of the way so we could follow him a distance into the woods.
I could hear the sound of water, like a rushing torrent, as we neared the basin at the foot of the falls.
It looked as though we were standing in the Adirondacks, not in the middle of New York City. The frigid water cascaded down an enormous drop from the heavily timbered chasm above us and got caught up in the spinning whirlpools below, which whipped it into a frenzy before whooshing it off downriver.
"Quite spectacular, isn't it? On the more mundane side, once a week," Phelps said, "our maintenance men gather trash from the river. Used to be, Detective, that you could find shopping carts, spare parts of automobiles, mattresses, all sorts of flotsam and jetsam in here. We've tried to change that. Today, Trun and Hang were responsible for cleaning up this area."
The two workers were behind us, dressed in heavy rubber suits-like fisherman-with hip waders and watch caps. Phelps motioned them to stand beside him.
"The man you found," he said to them
, "where was he?"
"Between rocks," the one called Trun said. "There."
He pointed about fifteen feet out into the water, where two enormous rock formations guarded an eddy of frothy water.
"How'd they get him out?" Mike asked.
"They used a grappling hook," Phelps said.
Hal whispered in my ear, "I don't care who does the autopsy. Going over the falls and landing on these rocks would have pummeled the daylights out of anybody. Then these two guys stick a pitchfork in him? Ichiko's a bloody mess and I don't know how the best medical examiner on earth is gonna figure this one out."
Chapman turned back to the area where we had parked our cars. "Ask them why they moved him before they called the police," he said to Phelps.
"They didn't actually. I can answer that. They raised me on the intercom and I raced over," he said, pointing at a golf cart he obviously used to get around the grounds. "That couldn't have taken more than three or four minutes. I called nine-one-one at the same time I ordered them to pull the man out."
"Why'd you do that? I mean, tell them to move the body before we got here?"
Phelps seemed taken aback by the question. "Well, Detective, just suppose he was alive. Unconscious or, or… Well, it seemed to be taking an awful chance to leave him there if he was still breathing. I'm sorry if I did the wrong thing."
His two workers hung their heads, seeming to understand that Phelps was being blamed for something they did.
"Hey, Hal, you look above for any signs of where the guy went in?"
"Yep. There's a car parked on top, near the head of the falls. It's Ichiko's."
"Tracks? Any tracks in the snow?"
"Yeah. It looks like Roseland up there. Like people were dancing all over the place. Not to mention the wildlife. You go up there, Mr. Phelps?" Hal asked him.
"No, sir. Trun? Hang?" The groundskeeper questioned his men, pointing up at the heights of the gorge.
Both men nodded in the affirmative. "I go there look for help," Hang said.
Mike turned to Hal. "Charlie Chan he's not. What's in the car?"
"Dr. Ichiko's wallet. ID, cash, credit cards. None of that touched. We dusted for latents, just in case."
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