Into the Lion's Den

by Linda Fairstein

  I wanted to become the best investigator I could possibly be, and no one was a better example to follow than my mother. And when I grew up, I was determined to track down the people who killed my father.

  6

  My alarm went off at seven a.m. Liza and I dressed for school and went into the kitchen. My mother was on her third cup of coffee, by the looks of the water level in the coffeemaker. She had a stack of newspapers next to her, and I leaned over to give her a kiss. It was her habit to walk Asta early in the morning, and the sweet dog was sitting at her feet, hoping for crumbs.

  “Good morning. How did you girls sleep?”

  “Very well, Ms. Quick,” Liza said.

  “English muffin, Liza?” I asked. I poured us each a glass of orange juice and put the muffins in the toaster. “Mom?”

  “I’ve been up since five. Two days away from my desk and I had a lot to catch up on. I’ve eaten, thanks.”

  “Do you ever wear a uniform, Ms. Quick?”

  I think Liza was taking in my mother’s navy blue pin-striped suit with its pencil skirt, and the spiky high heels that stuck out from under the end of the table. She looked more like she was on her way to work at a fashion magazine than police headquarters.

  “No, dear. I get to wear my civilian clothes. One of my job perks.”

  “Sam’s her biggest perk,” I said, grinning at my mother as I pushed the toaster controls down to make the muffins crisper. “Isn’t he?”

  “Yours and mine both, Dev. Could we have a better friend? His ex-wife took the twins upstate for the summer, to her parents’ home. He’s really feeling down, so I want to include him in things that we do. Try not to bug him, will you?”

  “Promise.”

  “Would you like to know what happened in the world while you were sleeping?”

  Mom liked to start each morning this way. She thought there was nothing that would ever replace black-and-white newsprint. She devoured the big stories and all the little news bits in every paper left on our doorstep. I scanned the Internet instead—so much faster and up to the minute—because we always got quizzed on current events at the Ditch.

  “Give us the good news first, Mom.”

  “There actually isn’t anything terrible on the front pages. There’s a story about Argentina and the next election that might interest you, Liza, and a nice piece about the summer Olympics.”

  “No earthquakes? No tsunamis? No tornadoes?” I asked. Catastrophic events and extreme weather freaked me out. I couldn’t wrap my brain about why those things always happened somewhere else and not here. I spent way too much time worrying about when our day would come.

  “None.”

  But what my mother was really looking for were crime stories—what had happened in the last twenty-four hours that she might have to address. Heads would roll if commanding officers in Brooklyn or Queens had not called in any patterns of serial criminals or especially vulnerable victims. When she got to the office, her first call of the day would be to the mayor of the city, and she had to know more than he did about the safety of his streets.

  “Any homicides last night?” I asked.

  “No, Sherlock. We’ve really brought the murder rate way down, as you know,” Mom said, then turned to Liza. “Years ago, violent crime was a huge issue in this city. There was a day when people like your parents would never have sent their child here for a month.”

  “Yes, ma’am. My father was actually at university here in the late 1980s, when it was a rougher city. He’s told us lots of stories.”

  “I hope you’ll be able to impress him with how far we’ve come by the time we’ve shown you around New York this month,” my mother said, pushing back from the table. “Out the door in five, okay?”

  I carried the dishes to the sink and rinsed them. “Where’s Natasha?”

  Natasha was very wise, and I thought I could consult her about the theft. But I loved that she had a group of good friends at school and could hang out with them in her free time. She had been so shy when she first came to live with us.

  “Sleeping in. She got home late. Grab your books and let’s go.”

  The three of us rode down in the elevator and through the lobby. The building on East Eighty-Third Street was a bit shabby looking, nothing a good coat of paint in the public areas couldn’t improve.

  The PD didn’t make a fuss about the building’s security, since there was a doorman on duty twenty-four hours a day, supported by the uniformed detail outside.

  Sam was leaning against the black SUV that was my mother’s “on the job” car.

  It was a beautiful June morning, and he was sipping a cup of coffee, having relieved the midnight detail by his arrival.

  “Can I ride with Sam, Mom?”

  “We’re walking, sweetheart. I’ll be cooped up in my office all day.”

  I looped my arm in hers after she handed Sam two tote bags full of papers and police reports. She hooked her other arm with Liza, and the three of us headed off toward East End Avenue, where the Ditchley School had established itself ninety years ago on some of Manhattan’s prime real estate overlooking the East River.

  “What do you two say to Shakespeare in the Park on Saturday evening?” my mother asked.

  “What a cool idea!” Liza said. “Central Park? I’d love to go there. It’s supposed to be so beautiful.”

  “I was thinking of maybe a Yankees game, Mom. Show Liza the all-American sport. Hot dogs and peanuts and the stadium.”

  “I think they’re playing in town next weekend. I’ll check.”

  One thing about being police commissioner, my mother sometimes got outrageously good tickets for sporting events, probably because the parks commissioner lost one of the friendly bets they were always wagering. We were at the stadium on opening day in April, sitting directly behind the dugout, and I scored autographs from half the team.

  “Don’t you like Shakespeare, Dev?” Liza asked.

  She kept looking over her shoulder, watching Sam crawl along in the SUV about ten feet behind us. I was so used to having a shadow at our backs everywhere we went that I hadn’t noticed him at all.

  “We haven’t had much of him yet in class. The one I like best so far is Macbeth.”

  “Of course you would,” my mother said. “A dark tragedy featuring a trio of witches. Throw in some murder and madness. Dev is obsessed with murder, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  I wasn’t going to stick anything in my mother’s face, but I had good reason to be obsessed with murder. She’d dealt with my dad’s death by devoting herself to advocacy for victims of all types of crimes. She’d worked out some of her anguish that way, I’m sure. It was all much more raw for me, the great big hole in my life driving so much of my emotional reaction to things.

  “Romeo and Juliet. That’s Saturday’s play.”

  “It’s my favorite, Ms. Quick,” Liza said. “I’ve read it twice and seen the ballet.”

  “Sappy,” I murmured. “Star-crossed lovers and all that. Dripping with sap.”

  My mother pinched my forearm. “Would you still think so if I tell you that Bradley Cooper is playing Romeo and Jennifer Lawrence is Juliet?”

  “What?” I said, breaking free to run ahead so I could turn to face my mother.

  “And if you’re not too upset about my choice of a play, I can ask the producer if it might be possible to go backstage and meet the cast after the performance.”

  “That is the coolest thing ever, Mom,” I said, jumping toward her and throwing my arms around her neck.

  “You are so fickle, Devlin Quick,” she said. “I’m only asking about getting backstage because Liza is here. Otherwise I wouldn’t want to spoil you constantly. And also, I’ll allow it if you stop nosing into business where you don’t belong.”

  “Well, the swordplay is really fun to watch and the balcony scene is a hoot,” I said, changing the subject.

  “I think you’ll like the entire plan, Liza,” my mother said. “We’ll go
as a small group with some of our friends—we do it every year—and we’ll picnic on the grass in the park before the show. In fact, we can take you on a tour of Central Park beforehand, so you can see the zoo and Literary Walk and Bethesda Terrace. The show is done in an open-air theater, and it’s quite a wonderful summer tradition in New York.”

  “Thank you so much, Ms. Quick. It sounds really exciting.”

  I ran to the SUV and grabbed onto Sam’s arm, which was on the window frame. “Will you come to Shakespeare with us on Saturday night?”

  “Are you my date, Devlin?”

  “If Bradley Cooper won’t have me.”

  “Yes. Your mother invited me already.”

  I ran back to her side. “Who else?”

  “Natasha’s coming, too, with one of her friends. And Booker, if he stays in town.”

  “Booker!” I exclaimed. Why hadn’t I thought to involve Booker Dibble in our investigation?

  “Who is he?” Liza asked.

  “Only my best friend in the world.”

  “I thought that was Katie?”

  “Booker’s my best guy friend. His mother was my mother’s college roommate, so I’ve known him since I was born. We’ve spent every Thanksgiving and Christmas together, and a lot of our vacations.”

  “See, Dev? Another sibling for you,” Liza said. “You have to stop whining about being an only.”

  “He certainly is like that. But he has two older brothers—real ones—and now that he’s almost thirteen he’d rather spend time with them. And with girls he doesn’t have to treat like they’re his sisters.”

  “You’ll meet him Saturday night,” my mother said.

  Maybe before that, I thought. Katie Cion had texted me late last night that her parents wouldn’t let her come back into the city from Montauk simply because I thought I was on the trail of a thief. Booker was a different story. He liked capers as much as I did.

  “This is as far as I go, sweetheart,” my mother said when we reached the corner of East End Avenue. She gave us each a kiss and reminded me to forget about my extracurricular activities and ace the summer courses.

  By the time Liza and I reached the front steps of the school, the SUV was out of sight. We walked inside, did the obligatory curtsy in front of the enormous portrait of the late Wilhelmina Ditchley, and said the words of her motto, WE LEARN, WE LEAD, which had been implanted in the brains of her girls for more generations than I could count.

  Liza and I had three classes to get through before we continued our research—and snooping—at the NYPL. We were both in the World Culture class which had spawned the assignment at the library, and together again in the second hour for European history, which was all about the French Revolution this week.

  We split up for the third class, which was my favorite. The school librarian, Doris Shorey, had been at the Ditch for almost fifty years. She’d been my one steady teacher since first grade and had instilled in me a love for reading, for everything about books.

  Some of my earliest memories are of my mother sitting beside me in bed, reading to me from colorful board books and then the singsong poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson. Every night, before I had to face the dark and try to sleep, I had three stories read to me. But then she got a much more high-powered position at work, and there were a string of nannies before Natasha came along. Not all of them were enthusiastic about reading, and Natasha’s English made it a struggle for the first two years she was with us.

  Miss Shorey opened my mind to the wonders of storytelling. The Ditchley library looked like a room in an English castle, out of Hogwarts, with fine wood trim and huge windows that were flooded with light most of the day. In the corner closest to the river was a wing chair covered in dark green leather. Every Friday, one of the girls was chosen to spend the class hour reading in that chair. It’s in that small oasis—the green chair in the sunny corner of the room—that I met Huck Finn and Pippi Longstocking, the Artful Dodger and Hercule Poirot. That great librarian put each of those books in my hungry hands.

  And on those days when the school got a call that the police commissioner was working late and Natasha was stuck in class, I was allowed to go to Miss Shorey’s room, to her cozy green chair, and make friends with all the wonderful characters who live in books, while I waited for someone to greet me at home.

  Miss Shorey taught a summer school class in literature, and she was as happy to have me enrolled as I was to be there. Only eight students took the course, which gave us all a lot of one-on-one time with Miss Shorey. This week’s assignment was an introduction to Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice, which was a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be based on my experience with those other British girls.

  The first two classes dragged for me, but I hated for this hour to end.

  “Thank you, Miss Shorey,” I said as I packed up to leave. “I’m really liking Pride and Prejudice.”

  “I thought you’d enjoy it, Dev,” the petite woman with short snow-white hair said to me. “Such a smart writer, and so witty. There’s going to be an exhibit of Austen’s personal correspondence in town this fall. I think I’ll make it a class trip so you can all see the letters in her own handwriting.”

  “At the New York Public Library? We’re doing a project there for our World Culture class right now. It’s where I’m going after lunch. I’m writing a paper about Charles Dickens’s stuffed cat’s paw.”

  “Ah, poor Bob!”

  “Then you know about it?”

  “I could live in that library if they’d allow it, Dev. So many treasures there. If you want to get ahead of the class,” Miss Shorey said with a smile, “the assignment for our last week is going to be the novel Frankenstein.”

  “You totally rock!”

  “Devlin Quick. You know better—”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Shorey.” In her delightfully old-fashioned way, she had banned the word ‘awesome’ and its related offspring from her classes. “That’s a great idea. You’re making the summer so much fun for us, as well as interesting.”

  “Imagine, Dev, that a novel written two hundred years ago, by a woman, is still borrowed in every art form from literature to film to stage plays,” Miss Shorey said.

  “That’s so cool. She didn’t have to do it in summer school, did she?” I said with a laugh.

  “Better than that, there was a contest between Percy Shelley and Lord Byron—two of our greatest poets—and Mary Shelley, who later married Percy Shelley, was in the contest with them.”

  “What kind of contest?”

  “To see which one could write the best horror story.”

  “And it was Mary who won?”

  “That’s right. A bit of my purpose is to make the summer session enjoyable, but also to light some fires in your literary brains,” Miss Shorey said. “Jane Austen was twenty when she wrote her first novel, Dev. Mary Shelley was only eighteen years old when she created the Frankenstein monster. Heavens, you’ll all be eighteen by the time you leave Ditchley, and I intend to have some completed manuscripts from a few of you by graduation.”

  I laughed. “I’d better get busy.”

  “When the curators let you see Bob’s paw this afternoon, ask them for a look at a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair. That’s also in the library collection. Better still, Dev. Take a picture of her hair, too. Print it out and hold it in your locker here until we get to discuss her. Then you’ll have something to show the others.”

  “Thanks for the tip, Miss Shorey. See you tomorrow.”

  I was completely energized by her idea. Not the part about Mary Shelley’s long-dead hair, which seemed as bizarre to keep around as a cat’s stuffed paw, but the tip that reminded me that my locker—which was assigned to me for the entire school year—had something in it from last semester that could prove useful to Liza and me in working our case.

  7

  Liza was waiting for me by Miss Ditchley’s portrait.

  “Sorry to be late, but my teacher just reminded m
e of something I’ve got in my locker. You can wait for me here or—”

  “I’m coming with you, Dev.”

  I took the stairs two at a time, another unladylike action that Miss Ditchley would have frowned upon. My locker was two-thirds of the way down the hall, and I raced ahead of Liza to get to it. I punched in the four numbers that opened the digital lock.

  There was a set of dirty gym clothes that I had forgotten to take home when classes ended, but they would last another day without being washed. I had notebooks for each subject—English, math, French, biology, and American history—and then there were folders stacked on the top shelf with a miscellaneous assortment of stuff.

  “What are you looking for?” Liza asked. “I can go through part of the pile if you tell me what you need.”

  I grabbed a couple of inches of folders and gave the other half of them to Liza. “We had this project in the spring to bring to our history class two pieces of paper that were, well, I think ‘unique’ was the word the teacher used. Something no one else might have at home. Each of them,” I said, sitting down on the floor to spread out the files, “was supposed to lead us to discuss some aspect of history related to the paper.”

  “So what’s my search?” Liza asked, sitting beside me.

  “I brought a piece of carbon paper, and—”

  “Carbon paper? What’s that?”

  “My mother’s suggestion, really. She told me what it was, and I thought it would be an interesting look at how the invention of computers have changed the world. It didn’t spark quite the conversation as Katie’s special paper—a handwritten letter to her grandfather from President Kennedy, which was the best thing in the whole class—but none of the kids had ever seen carbon paper.”

  I was flipping through the folders too quickly, so I slowed myself down. “A long time ago, Liza, before there were computers and printers, everything was either written by hand or on a typewriter.”

  “Sure.”

  “In order to make duplicates of the pages, there was this thing called carbon paper. The top side was shiny and usually had printing on it with the name of the company who made it. The one I brought was sort of a red-and-silver metallic design. The bottom side was coated with dry ink—a purplish blue—so you could make copies by putting it between the page you were writing or typing on, and a blank paper beneath it.”