Forgotten City

by Carrie Smith

  “I’d say she’s been dead since yesterday.” Codella moved to the side of the bed. Lielkaja’s fingernails were clean and unbroken. No blood stained her body or the bed. Her throat was red, just as Brandon had described it, and yellowish, thumb-sized bruises dappled her upper arms.

  “Note the time, Muñoz. And call it in.”

  Muñoz fished in his jacket pocket for the small spiral notebook he always carried. As he recorded the time and got on his phone, Codella lifted her iPhone and photographed the body. Then she turned to survey the room. Fifteen feet away, a clear plastic Juice Generation cup sat on the round blond-wood table where she had interviewed Baiba yesterday. The lid was on the cup, and a straw was sticking through the lid. The inch of liquid still in the cup was dark red.

  Codella walked over to the table. Only then did she notice the single sheet of folded paper resting beneath the cup. She was staring at the two typed lines of text on the paper when Muñoz came behind her. They read the words together. I’m sorry Thomas. I can’t live with what we did.

  “What do you think?” asked Muñoz.

  Codella didn’t move or speak. In her mind, she heard Thomas Merchant’s voice yesterday in his office. I did not kill my wife. She pictured Brandon Johnson shivering in front of the Hudson River today as he told her, What if she liked him so much that she wanted to be the new Mrs. Merchant? What if she used me to kill Lucy?

  Codella could feel Muñoz waiting for her interpretation, but she wasn’t ready to give one. She walked to the bathroom. Nothing looked out of place. She pulled a tissue out of a box and used it to carefully open the bathroom medicine cabinet. The shelves were filled with perfumes, face creams, and a solid rack of nail polish bottles in various shades of red, pink, and purple. The only medications were Claritin and Advil. If she’d drugged herself, where was the drug?

  She walked into the kitchen. It was spotless—not a dirty glass or plate on the counter or in the sink. She looked into the garbage can. It was empty except for a yogurt container. She glanced over at Lielkaja’s desk. Finally she returned to the table. “We’re supposed to believe that Baiba and Merchant killed his wife and then she committed suicide out of guilt. It doesn’t feel right to me.”

  Codella pointed to the laptop and printer on the desk. “Why would you bother to type out a two-line suicide note?” she asked. “I mean, I could see if she were leaving a long letter, but—two lines? Why not just grab a pen?”

  “Maybe she’s used to typing things out? Maybe she’s a little compulsive?” Muñoz didn’t sound convinced.

  “And here’s another thing,” said Codella. “Does she look like someone who just got back from Juice Generation? Are we supposed to believe she got dressed—remember, it’s thirty degrees outside—went to the smoothie store, came back, and put on her sweats and T-shirt to drink up and say farewell to life?”

  “You think someone brought her the smoothie and printed out the note.”

  Codella nodded. “If she mixed her own death potion, Muñoz, then where did she get it? I don’t see any drugs lying around here. Do you? This place is immaculate.”

  “So who are you thinking?”

  “Well, that’s the million dollar question.”

  Sirens were sounding on the street below. “Stay here. Guard the scene,” she told him. “I’ll go down and meet them.”

  Three NYPD squad cars had pulled up, and six uniformed officers from this Upper East Side precinct were standing on the street when she stepped outside. Codella approached the one wearing sergeant’s stripes. She filled him in and then the sergeant started issuing orders. Soon the building was surrounded by yellow tape. One officer with a notepad recorded the license plate numbers of parked cars up and down the street. Two other officers guarded the crime scene perimeter, holding back pedestrians who arrived to do their own little investigations. An officer named García was stationed at the building entrance to sign people in, and another officer was inside the building making sure no one left their apartments.

  A precinct detective Codella didn’t recognize showed up twenty minutes later and flipped her his shield in the stairwell outside Lielkaja’s door. His name was Cooper. He was tall, about forty, with curly towhead hair you’d expect to see in Norway, not Manhattan. “What the fuck are you doing at my crime scene?” he asked.

  Codella would have asked the same thing if she were in his shoes. This was his precinct, after all, and precinct detectives were territorial. As far as he was concerned, she didn’t belong. She pulled out her identification. Whenever she had to do this, it felt like comparing the size of their dicks. “Manhattan North Homicide,” she said in case he couldn’t read. “This body is part of an ongoing investigation, and we’re going to have to work this scene together. It’s going to be a long afternoon and evening, Detective. I don’t want to have to pull rank, but I will.”

  “Hey, I know you,” said Cooper. “You’re the one who solved the Elaine DeFarge murder, aren’t you? You caught that Wainright Blake guy who cut off locks of hair.” His tone turned almost reverential. Codella shrugged. Attention to her achievements always made her uncomfortable, but reverence was infinitely preferable to antagonism. “What’s your investigation?” he asked.

  There was no reason not to share the details with him. This body was going to make the news. In fact, the satellite uplink trucks would probably arrive any minute. Too many dispatch calls guaranteed that the media was on to this. And they would quickly learn that Lielkaja was connected to Park Manor. It wouldn’t take a genius to draw the connection to Lucy Merchant.

  Codella introduced Cooper to Muñoz. “From the looks of it, someone paid her a visit, and we need to know who. We need as much information as we can get from the neighbors. Can I count on you to work with Muñoz on this?”

  Cooper looked at Muñoz. “Yeah. You can count on me.”

  “Good.” She checked the time on her iPhone. In a few hours, she hoped, she would be sitting across from Thomas Merchant in a Manhattan North interview room, and there was something she needed before that happened. “Get as much as you can out of the neighbors. I’ll be back here in half an hour.”

  She went downstairs and climbed in her car. She was staring at the reddish-brown façade of Lielkaja’s building as the crime scene unit van pulled up. She watched the team take their equipment out of the van in a carefully choreographed routine they performed every time they were called to a body. She watched them climb the front steps and sign in with García. Then she started the car engine and checked her messages. Constance Hodges had left two voicemails, but she didn’t want to talk to Hodges right now. She dialed Merchant’s office at Bank of New Amsterdam and waited for Roberta Ruffalo’s crisp voice to answer.

  CHAPTER 52

  “Where are you right now, Pamela?”

  “Centre Street. I just got out of court. What is it?”

  Merchant looked out his window as he spoke. The cloud cover was dramatically low this afternoon. The spire of the Freedom Tower was barely visible, and the water reflecting the clouds in New York Harbor looked gray and murky. The water surrounding St. Bart’s would be emerald green right now, he thought, and he wished he were there with no press to hound him, no police to question him. He’d been there last New Year’s, he remembered, with a brunette named Claudia. She had been more adventurous than Baiba, but not nearly as beautiful or irresistibly vulnerable. “That detective called me two minutes ago. She wants me to meet her at her precinct this evening.”

  “Why?”

  “To update me, she says.”

  “Update you on what?”

  “The autopsy.”

  “She can’t do that over the phone?”

  “Exactly. What if she really wants to interrogate me?”

  “About Lucy’s death?”

  “Julia put ideas into her head.” There was a long silence, and he knew what Pamela was thinking. Why was he nervous unless he had a reason to be? “I’m just not sure I trust her.”

  “You
should never trust a cop who wants to talk to you. You know that,” said Pamela. “Put her off. Tell her you’ll come in tomorrow.”

  “I can’t just put her off, Pamela. It’s my wife we’re talking about. She knows I’ll have to come. The autopsy was this morning. She said she’d call me back in a couple of hours and tell me when to get there. And I want you there with me, as my attorney, just in case.”

  “Aren’t you making a pretty big assumption—that I trust you?”

  “You’ve seen my worst, Pamela. I admit I’m no angel, but—” He waited.

  Pamela sighed into his ear. “All right. But if this goes south for you, you’ll need someone else to represent you. I don’t do murders, and even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t defend the person accused of killing my sister—no matter how pissed I am at her. Got it?”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll call you as soon as I hear from her.”

  “Not so fast,” Pamela said. “What do I need to know before I get in there?”

  “How can I answer that,” he said, “when I don’t know what she’s going to ask?”

  “Don’t be evasive with me, Thomas. You know what I mean.”

  “Look,” he said, swiveling his chair away from the window, “your job is to protect my interests, Pamela. Not probe for information you don’t need. Just keep your phone nearby.” He hung up.

  CHAPTER 53

  Codella sped to the 171st and filled in Haggerty.

  “So what are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I need you to print out some photos for me.”

  “Sure.” He sat at his desk.

  Codella selected two photos from her iPhone collection and forwarded them to Haggerty’s email. He downloaded the images to his desktop and sent them to the printer across the room. She stared at the enlarged photos. They were a bit grainy, but all the pertinent details were still dramatically visible.

  “Thanks.” She stuffed them into a manila folder. “I’ve got to go now.” She touched his two-day-old beard and kissed his cheek.

  On the way back to Lielkaja’s, she made her obligatory call to McGowan. “There’s another body,” she said. “A woman named Baiba Lielkaja. The Nostalgia care coordinator from Park Manor. There was a suicide note at the scene, but it’s bullshit. She was murdered.”

  His silence told her he was reserving judgment.

  “CSU is there, and we’ve got a canvass going. I’m bringing Thomas Merchant up to the station tonight. I’ll brief him on the autopsy results and see what I get out of him.”

  The sun had set, streetlamps were on, and reporters were clustered outside the crime scene tape when Codella returned to Lielkaja’s building. A wind-blown brunette holding a microphone came at her as she emerged from her car, but Codella held up a hand and said “No comment” in a voice that stopped her cold.

  She signed in with García and found Cooper and Muñoz on the second floor. “Tell me you’ve got something,” she said.

  “Yeah. We’re catching residents as they come home from work. There’s only twelve units in the building and we’ve accounted for eight so far.” Cooper seemed eager to be the spokesman. He read off his pad. “A widow lives alone in 2B—Mrs. Pagonis—and she saw a silver-haired man in an overcoat leave the building just after four PM yesterday. She was coming in as he was going out.”

  Codella looked from Cooper to Muñoz. “Merchant has gray hair.”

  “I know, and it’s him,” Muñoz pronounced with certainty. “It’s got to be him. After Cooper spoke to her, I went back up and asked her for more details. She described a tall, thin, distinguished-looking man. He was wearing an elegant black overcoat, she said, and when the outside door closed behind him, she watched him walk down the steps and duck into a black SUV.”

  Merchant had his personal driver, Felipe, pick her up, Codella remembered Brandon saying. “I was with Lielkaja at three thirty,” she said. “Merchant must have come right after me. Was he carrying anything as he left?”

  “You mean like a Tiffany bag?” Muñoz shook his head. “Not that she saw.”

  Codella shrugged. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” said Cooper. “A couple in 4A was returning home around eight PM and a young man, early twenties, came in through the front door right behind them. Didn’t use a key. Wasn’t a resident. Said he was going to a friend’s.”

  “Description?”

  “Green parka. Gray sweatshirt. Blond streaks in the hair.”

  “Shit!” Codella said.

  “What?” asked Muñoz.

  “That description matches Brandon Johnson. I saw him early this afternoon. He was wearing the gray sweatshirt. He’s got the blond streaks. But he told me he’d been here in the middle of the day, not at night.” She reached in her pocket for dry-mouth gum and stuffed a piece in her mouth. Dr. Abrams had told her she might want to invest in the company that made this gum or else try acupuncture, which seemed to help some people get rid of this lingering and annoying chemo side effect. When she’d left Brandon Johnson this morning, she reflected now, she had trusted his veracity. But how could this data not rekindle her suspicions? “Did you find Lielkaja’s phone in there?”

  “On the floor under the bed,” said Cooper. “Lots of calls unanswered. I had them checked out as soon as the CSU guys lifted prints.”

  “And?”

  He read off his notes. “Three calls from Park Manor—two this morning, one around noon.”

  Those calls, Codella guessed, would have been from Hodges, wondering why her Nostalgia care coordinator hadn’t shown up to work. “And the others?”

  “Two from the guy you just named—Brandon Johnson.”

  “When did he call?”

  Cooper checked his notes. “Just after six PM last night and again at seven.”

  “Find out where he was when he made those calls.”

  Cooper jotted a note. “And there were three calls from a cell phone that belongs to Thomas Merchant.”

  “Ahh. You saved me the best for last.”

  Cooper smiled.

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “Verizon doesn’t lie, and his name’s right in her directory.”

  “What time did he call her?”

  “Ten PM last night and nine AM this morning.”

  Codella turned to Muñoz. “Those were after she was dead.”

  “Which suggests he didn’t know she was dead.”

  “Unless he’s the one who killed her and he placed the calls to throw us off.” She looked back to Cooper. “Find out where he was when he made those calls.”

  She climbed one flight up to Lielkaja’s apartment with Muñoz and Cooper behind her. The body had been removed. As she watched from the door, a crime scene investigator wearing a white Tyvek jumpsuit leaned over the pullout couch and picked up a hair or fiber with tweezers.

  The lead investigator—it wasn’t Banks or anyone else she knew—came to speak with her. His combed-back hair accentuated his severe widow’s peak. His placid expression and foreshortened neck made him look tortoise-like. “What can you tell me?” she asked.

  “There was no forced entry.”

  She nodded. She knew that already.

  “And no struggle.”

  “What about prints? How many sets did you lift off the laptop?”

  “There were no prints on the keys,” he said.

  “How about on the suicide note?”

  “Nothing.”

  She pointed to the Juice Generation cup. “Whatever’s in that cup killed her, and I need to know what it is.”

  Muñoz had come up behind her. “Can you get your hands on a Raman analyzer?” he asked the CSU detective.

  “Sure. I can do that.”

  “Can you do it as quickly as possible?” Muñoz asked politely. Then he turned to Codella. “Raman Spectroscopy,” he explained. “You just point and scan. I wish I’d had one of those when I was a narc.”

  “You’re no narc anymore.” Codella squeezed his arm grate
fully. “I need you to find me Brandon Johnson. Bring him to Manhattan North. He’s got some explaining to do.”

  CHAPTER 54

  Merchant stared out the plate glass windows in the lobby of the BNA building. All he saw were network news vans, prop cameras, and reporters gripping mics. Where was the Escalade? The vans were usurping the curb in front of the revolving doors. The reporters reminded him of a lynch mob; they all wanted a piece of him. Even if Felipe could get in front of the doors, Merchant couldn’t get to the car without running that gauntlet. He turned to Chester, the senior security officer he’d known for almost a decade. “Take me the back way.”

  “Yes, sir.” Chester nodded.

  Merchant called Felipe as Chester led him through labyrinthine passageways to an unmarked set of doors at the back of the building where trucks made deliveries. A few minutes later, the Escalade pulled up. Chester checked the alleyway, gave the all clear, and Merchant ducked out into the darkness. Just before Chester closed his car door, Merchant pressed a Ulysses S. Grant in his palm. “Thanks, buddy.”

  Twenty minutes later, he walked into Manhattan North and approached the desk sergeant. “Detective Codella is expecting me.”

  “Take a seat,” said the sergeant in a gruff, unimpressed tone that Merchant wasn’t used to hearing from people. The bench was hard, and he didn’t like to be kept waiting.

  Ten minutes later, Codella appeared. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  They entered a small, windowless room, and Merchant said, “My attorney will be here shortly.”

  “Your attorney?”

  “Safety precautions, Detective.”

  “Whatever makes you feel comfortable, Mr. Merchant.” She gestured to a chair. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Black.”

  She left and returned a few minutes later with a white mug for him and a water bottle for her. She sat across from him and folded her hands. “I appreciate your coming up here. I thought it would be best to tell you about your wife’s autopsy results in person.”