Hell Gate

by Linda A. Fairstein

  The bare feet of the dead woman came into view before the top of Katie’s head, as she twisted herself to stay centered.

  “Got it!” the sergeant shouted. “Hang on, Katie. Great job.”

  Chet Kirschner stepped forward to put his gloved hands on the legs of Salma Zunega. “Gently, men.”

  The crumpled and broken body of the woman came into full view. Her mouth was wide-open and it appeared her skull had split practically in half. Stones and small rocks were embedded in her face and on her shoulders, and when her head swung around in my direction, I could see a hole in the front of her neck that was caked with dried blood.

  She was clad only in a teddy—a pale yellow piece of lingerie that was encrusted with snow. Her upper back and places on her legs and arms were imprinted with even lines that formed rectangles on her skin, as though she had been pressed against the bars of a cage.

  I didn’t move. I was fixated on the face of the young mother who had died so violently. Why had she denied her earlier calls to 911, and then failed to make the last one in time to save her life? And after the odd back-and-forth about those calls, would anyone have responded if she had managed to press Send?

  The ESU men followed Kirschner’s directions, while Mike and Mercer held on to Katie Cion until the body was removed from her grasp and lowered onto the gurney.

  “It looks like she was tortured,” I said softly. It would be Kirschner’s job to sort out which of the injuries had been fatal. “Why is her skin so pink?”

  “It’s the lividity, Alex,” Kirschner said.

  I knew that the blood settled into the skin’s capillaries as they dilated after circulation ceased—usually causing a purple discoloration in the dependent parts of the body.

  “It’s often this light pink,” he went on, “when a body has been recovered in icy conditions.”

  “Let’s get her out of here before the vultures across the street smell blood,” Mike said. “Can we transport her in the EMS vehicle so we don’t have to bring a marked morgue bus in here?”

  “That’s fine,” Kirschner said.

  Two of the ESU guys raised the gurney up from the ground and I heard it lock into place. Katie Cion had already gotten into the rear of the truck to put on her jacket and boots. The men draped a sheet over the twisted form of Salma Zunega.

  The four ESU men surrounded the gurney and started to wheel it down the slight incline. The ground was uneven, and as they moved ahead Salma’s body shifted on its temporary bed and her leg dropped over the side of the gurney.

  “Hold it a minute,” I said, from a step or two behind the group. “Could you just stop while I take a quick look? I think I saw something on her leg.”

  The sergeant who was trying to bring this difficult operation to a successful close rolled his eyes at Mike as I moved in next to the body.

  Chet Kirschner was there before me. With his latex glove, he moved the left leg of the mangled corpse a bit farther apart from the right and brushed some dirt away from the exposed skin. On the upper left thigh was a familiar marking.

  “It’s a rose, Alex. There’s a tattoo here of a small rose.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “Salma Zunega must have been trafficked into this country,” I said.

  Visions of what that meant for her, what her first years in New York must have been like, flashed through my head. Like the Ukrainians who had just survived their journey, I knew only too well what that life was like, I had met scores of women like Salma throughout my career. And far too many of them had shared her ultimate fate.

  “It would have been years ago, no doubt. Property of the same scumbag snakehead who was running the Golden Voyage,” Mercer said. “Property of the rose.”

  We were standing on the front steps of Gracie Mansion, facing the river from a higher vantage point than the slope on which the well sat.

  “Good to know the American dream still works, Coop. Somebody in the family spends his life savings to smuggle his kid over the border, and she winds up being the best-looking one so she makes a living on her back instead of picking grapes.”

  “Can we at least wait inside, Mike? It’s freezing.”

  The mayor had directed us to stay at the scene until he could get here. He didn’t want any news released until he had a clear understanding of how this discovery had unfolded.

  The door had been opened for us by the housekeeper, a short dark-skinned woman with a generous smile who had worked there, she said, since the earliest days of the Koch administration.

  I followed her inside, through the large reception space with its distinctive black-and-white diamond-shaped flooring. “I think you’ll be most comfortable here in the library,” she said, depositing us in the handsome room with floor-to-ceiling windows, denticulated cornices, and furniture that looked original to the building.

  “I don’t believe in coincidence,” Mike said. “Not on this scale.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “So go back to the night before last. You’ve got a shipload of immigrants desperate to get ashore, who panic when they can see the land, smell it, practically touch it, but nobody shows up to take them ashore.”

  “Except what looks like a government boat coming to intercept them,” Mercer said.

  “And right up the street from the mayor’s house, a congressman goes nuts about something. Was it a baby who wasn’t really sick by the time she got to the hospital?”

  “And if it wasn’t Leighton’s baby, why would he care so much?” I asked.

  “We know for sure he was drunk and flying downtown on the highway,” Mercer said, “which is when he got into an accident.”

  “One girl with a rose tattoo, probably Ukrainian, washes up in Queens. Her Mexican comadre starts playing phone tag with emergency operators, then someone shows up to visit her last night and sticks a corkscrew in her throat before he takes her out for a stroll,” Mike said, fingering one of the old cannonballs that sat on the mantel over the fireplace. “And deposits her here, in a well at Gracie Mansion.”

  “Where, for some reason, the mayor most definitely did not want Scully to post his men this morning,” I said.

  “We need to get back to the squad and chart this all out,” Mike said. “It’s part of one big pie, and we just got to figure out who the baker is. What’s holding Hizzoner up?”

  Mercer was staring out the window, then abruptly walked out of the library without saying a word.

  “Maybe we can get the housekeeper to show us around before Statler gets here,” I said. “You think it would help your noncoincidental theory to see any other parts of the house?”

  “Better to do it without telling her. Where did Mercer go?”

  The elegant building with its custard yellow frame and green trim was one of the only Federal Period wooden houses still standing in Manhattan.

  Several years ago when I was dating a reporter who worked at NBC, we were frequently included in cocktail parties and dinners hosted by the former administration. I knew a few things about America’s first official mayoral residence and its careful restoration a decade ago, but I couldn’t figure how it would play as a site in this widening investigation.

  “Give him a minute. He must have seen something going on outside,” I said.

  The housekeeper appeared in the doorway. “Excuse me, miss. We’re expecting fifty people for tea at four o’clock. Will that be fine?”

  “No, no, no,” Mike said. “Tea?”

  “Yes, sir. We have tea tours several times a week.”

  “Well, there’ll be no tea today. You call out to the guardhouse and tell them no one comes in this afternoon until Mayor Statler gets here.”

  She appeared to be thinking about talking back to Mike, but changed her mind and withdrew.

  “Want to look upstairs?” Mike asked me. “That’s the private quarters. The master suite and guest bedrooms.”

  I stepped to the doorway and saw the velvet rope that blocked the staircase off from public access. �
��I’d rather not be snooping around without Statler’s permission.”

  “Coop, it’s ‘the people’s house.’ That’s what the mayor always says.”

  “Wait.”

  Mercer came back inside, rubbing his hands together for warmth. “I’m not sure I agree with you, Mike. I mean about this whole mess being connected to Gracie Mansion. Look out the window.”

  We both followed Mercer there.

  “See the well? And the fence right behind it? I’ll bet whoever did this was on his way to the river with the body. You dump the girl in there, just over the fence, let the currents of Hell Gate do their job, and nobody sees her again till it’s spring and she floats to the surface.”

  “Maybe so,” Mike said. “Maybe the river was the final destination. That makes sense. But what, you think the killer just got lucky and found a well? Nope, it’s not that coincidental. Too convenient.”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re looking to jam up the mayor,” I said.

  “Course not. I just think we need to spend a little more time getting him to answer questions, before you have to wind up inviting him to the grand jury to do that.”

  “Battaglia would probably pay admission to see him testify.”

  Mike was pacing impatiently, rolling the heavy cannon shot in his hands like Captain Queeg nervously playing with steel balls while his crew planned their mutiny. “The city gives you a house like this to live in, with all its history, and most of these guys would rather crib somewhere else. Can’t figure it. I’ll give him another fifteen minutes and we’re out of here. We got work to do.”

  “You’ve never been assigned to the mansion, have you?” I asked. Every detail of the house was a perfect reflection of the Federal Period. The antique convex mirror facing the windows was topped with a gilded eagle. Each sofa and chair had been upholstered in fabric copied from old designs and paintings. A block away from Salma Zunega’s modern high-rise was this graceful step back in time that looked like it belonged on a movie set.

  “Dignitaries and protocol, Coop? Not exactly my bailiwick. But when I was in the Academy and the British prime minister stayed here for a week, they needed extra men for the detail.”

  “Let me guess. Mr. Gracie was a warrior, right? That’s how come you know so much.”

  “Nope. It really started long before Gracie,” Mike said, replacing the cannonball on the mantel and leading me back to the window. “You’re standing on one of the most historic sites in the entire city, which has owned the mansion and this point of land since 1896. Back in the 1640s, when New Amsterdam was a little village on the southern tip of Manhattan, this was a farm owned by a Dutchman and called Horn’s Hook. An English family took it over a century later, since it was one of the choicest properties in the city.”

  “Why so?”

  “Can’t you see for yourself?” Mike said, pulling back the curtain. “Think like a general once in a while, not like a lit major.”

  “I’ll try,” I said, shrugging while Mercer tugged at a strand of my hair.

  “First you’ve got this high promontory of land, looking out on the turbulent body of water. From the roof of this building, you can actually see all the other boroughs in the city. It was rich soil for farming and there were oysters and fish of all kinds teeming right down on the shore. Sort of like your place on the Vineyard, kid.”

  “I get that.”

  “The family that owned the land was named Walton, and they picked the wrong side during the Revolution.”

  “Loyalists?” Mercer asked.

  “Exactly. When Washington sent his men to New York in 1776 to prepare the defense against the British, American troops seized this home and built two forts—one here at Horn’s Hook and one across the way at Hallett’s Point in Queens—to block the passage by boat through Hell Gate.”

  “So the front lawn right out here was a major battleground in the Revolutionary War?” Mercer asked.

  “Yeah. The king’s army attacked from Long Island, and from all these little islands in the river, bombing the life out of our rebels. The Walton house, tucked inside the fort right here, was set on fire by a shell and burned to the ground. Cannonballs just like this one brought the place down. This point remained occupied by the British until 1783.”

  I never tired of learning of the city’s past through Mike’s boundless enthusiasm for history.

  “Gracie didn’t come along until later?” I said.

  “Archibald Gracie. Born in Scotland, but sailed to New York right after the British evacuated to start a commercial enterprise. He recognized the importance of the tobacco industry, so he moved to Virginia for a few years to make contacts there, until he married and returned here. Took a big house in the heart of the city—lower Broadway—where he both lived and conducted all his business.”

  “What was the business?” Mercer asked.

  “Importing European goods in exchange for tobacco. The man got rich, Mercer. Very, very rich. Began buying his own ships. Came time for him to own a country house. Just like Coop.”

  Mike and I had come to our strong friendship from such different backgrounds that he was always poking fun at my privileged roots. My father, Benjamin Cooper, was a cardiologist whose invention of a half-inch piece of plastic tubing when I was twelve years old had changed the way heart surgery was performed all over the world. The Cooper-Hoffman valve had afforded me a great education and a financial cushion—even in the difficult days of our recent recession—that made public service a far easier lifestyle for me than for most of my colleagues.

  “I thought you’d forgotten about the Vineyard. You haven’t been there in way too long.”

  “My French isn’t good enough, I guess.”

  “We still speak English in Chilmark,” I said, pinching his cheek. “Bring a date. You weren’t alone on New Year’s Eve, were you?”

  “Seems so far back I can hardly remember,” Mike said. “Now, in 1799, at the same time City Hall was going up—right where Manhattan ended—Archibald Gracie started to build his country estate.”

  “Man, it’s hard to imagine East Eighty-eighth Street as the country,” Mercer said.

  “But it was. In fact, there was so much cholera in the city that wealthy New Yorkers built this colony of summer places up along the river, trying to escape to clean fresh air. It’s more than five miles north of the original city walls, and the easiest way to get here at that time was by boat. It was a world apart from Manhattan.”

  “So throughout the last three centuries,” I said, thinking of all the modern construction that recycled precious space on an island that had experienced such radical development since it was colonized, “there have only been two houses built on this site. That’s really remarkable for New York.”

  “C’mon, let me show you the second floor. It’s like a museum.”

  “Statler will be here any minute,” I said.

  “Suit yourself. You must have been the kind of kid who never got caught with your hand in the cookie jar. Take a chance every now and then, why don’t you?” Mike started out of the library across the reception area to the staircase. He moved the stanchion holding the velvet rope and headed up the steps with Mercer.

  I could hear a commotion coming from the hallway that led to the rear of the house, and then Vin Statler’s voice. “Where are they? In the library or out by the well?”

  He charged toward me from the dining room at the head of a group of three men. One was Rowdy Kitts and the other was a second detective I recognized who was also assigned to bodyguard him. “Never mind. Here they—”

  Statler raised an arm and shouted when he saw Mike and Mercer on their way upstairs to the private quarters. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Mayor, they’re the good guys, remember?” Rowdy said, shaking Mike’s hand as he came back down the steps and replacing the stanchion.

  Statler charged past me into the library and introduced me to his other bodyguard.

/>   “Sit down, Alex. Gentlemen? Have a seat in here. What is it you’re trying to make of these events exactly?”

  Mercer joined me on the burgundy velvet sofa but Mike wouldn’t sit. He knew the mayor was trying to stake out a superior position and refused to let him have it. It was imposing enough that he was flanked by two NYPD detectives.

  “I’d like to figure out why somebody thought your house was the appropriate dumping place for the congressman’s dead girlfriend.”

  “The poor young woman lived across the street, Chapman. I certainly didn’t know that until yesterday’s briefing.”

  “See, sir, I just don’t believe in coincidence.”

  “You don’t have to. This mansion happens to be in the middle of a beautiful park. It’s an attractive nuisance. There are teenagers and hooligans running around the park late at night all year. The house sits dark and empty most evenings anyway.”

  “Not always empty, sir. Tea and crumpets, I understand.”

  The mayor was fuming. “There are tourists several days a week. There are occasional dinners and celebrations. In the summer there’s always a tent out on the lawn so we can entertain. But the grounds, including the park, cover a great deal of acreage.”

  “And there’s a police guard at the gatehouse twenty-four/seven,” Mike said.

  “Well, I guess he was working twenty-three/seven last night, wouldn’t you say? We’ve had muggings in the park before. We’ve had women assaulted there over the years. Wouldn’t be the first cop to fall asleep on the job, would he?”

  “Afraid not, Your Honor. So you’re thinking this just happened to be the closest well in town?”

  Statler took a step toward Mike. “Or perhaps, Chapman, someone decided to try to embarrass me. Has that thought occurred to you?”

  “It had, actually. Maybe you’d like to sit down with us and talk about it. Give us some ideas about who you think would have a reason to do that.”

  “It’s your job to come up with ideas, Detective. And with suspects. It’s my job to run this city.”