by Nevada Barr
At the top of the pedestal, where the elevator waited to take them down, she and Charlie stopped for a moment to look at Manhattan from the balcony.
“Uh-oh. Door’s unlocked. Hatch must have forgot,” Charlie said after a brief fumble with keys. His tone was neutral, but Anna suspected this careless attention to the lady’s security would not go uncorrected. He held the door and she slipped by. At Hatch’s favorite spot, she leaned her elbows on the parapet, the granite still cold from the night, and took in the view.
Charlie DeLeo came up beside her. After a moment, he hooked his gnarled fingers over the far side of the stone wall, weight on his forearms, and peered straight down. He crossed himself and made a small ugly sound in his throat. “If this is a joke it’s not funny.”
She pulled herself over the ledge to look down the side of the pedestal where he was looking.
“Not funny,” she agreed.
Turning, they left the sunshine for the elevator. Charlie hurried, but neither ran. Halfway down, the floors flicking by at a glacial pace, DeLeo said: “You got medical training?”
“Emergency medical technician is all,” Anna replied.
“You go check. I’ll get whoever’s on to start the calls. Somebody’ll be back with you fast as anything. You won’t be left too long,” he promised.
Anna nodded. Charlie couldn’t know she didn’t much mind being left alone with the dead—at least not in the light of day when she was sure they were really and truly dead. There was little doubt on that score.
The elevator stopped at the level that opened onto the gracious Star of David-shaped rooftop of old Fort Wood, the base of the pedestal. Anna got off. Charlie punched a button and rode on down. Free now to run, she did. Not because she thought response time was a factor—the platinum fifteen minutes, even the golden hour EMTs referred to were long gone—but because she needed to burn off the wild feeling bad news and disaster bred within her.
The sprint was short. She knew better than to barrel headlong into an accident scene regardless of how straightforward it appeared.
Hatch lay ten or fifteen feet from the base of the pedestal. His right arm was folded beneath the thickness of his chest, the left outflung, twisted, palm up, elbow bent backward as if he’d tried to break his fall with his hands. His legs were splayed in a neat V, one toe turned out, the other in. What had been his face was toward Anna.
There’s a graphic depiction of taking it on the chin, she thought, grim humor serving not to amuse but merely to allay horror till a more opportune time. Watching where she stepped lest she damage any trace that might prove of importance later, she moved to kneel beside him.
No pulse. No breath. No surprise.
The skin of his neck was cold and his joints stiff with rigor. Maybe it was beginning to pass off the jaw, but there was no way to tell. The bottom half of his face was smashed to bone fragments and pulped flesh. His hair and clothes were damp, not from rain but from dew. At a guess, he’d been dead eight to twelve hours. The deduction didn’t make Anna feel particularly bright. His ten-hour shift had ended less than thirty minutes earlier. It didn’t take a forensic pathologist to figure out he was probably alive when he reported in for work.
Voices and the sound of feet pounding preceded Anna’s being swallowed up in a cloud of green and gray. Radios crackled, orders were issued. She removed herself from the epicenter of the quake.
Above her, nearly lost in the glare of a sun already high, was the shallow crenel in the balustrade where Hatch had smoked his nightly tribute to Lady Liberty’s sister in Paris. Sixty feet. The pedestal tapered, became narrower near the top. The girl—Hatch’s jumper—had bounced off on the way down. Anna searched the stone blocks to see if there was any indication Hatch had done the same. If he’d hit, she couldn’t see where.
Photographs were taken. More people than she had imagined were on the island found reason to come up and were duly shooed away by the Park Policeman. The Superintendent was called. Trey Claypool was on his way over from his office on Ellis. A helicopter had been dispatched from NYPD. The mess would be gone before the first tourists arrived at ten o’clock.
A second jump in a week. The park would be heavy into damage control. Like anything else, suicide was prone to fads and trends. The last thing any park wanted was to become a destination for people seeking their own final solution.
Second jump: Anna realized, from the scraps of conversation she was overhearing and the natural bent of her own thoughts, that everyone was assuming Hatch had jumped. There’d be a search for a note, but notes weren’t as key as people liked to think. Lots of suicides didn’t think their life of enough value to bother explaining why they’d chosen to cut it short.
Hatch was a man alone: no wife, no kids. Friends maybe, family—Anna didn’t know. What she did know was that he’d felt responsible for the death of a fourteen-year-old girl, that he’d become obsessed with it, that an interpreter—probably Patsy’s roommate, Mandy—had exacerbated his feelings of guilt and responsibility not twenty-four hours before. Even on short acquaintance, Anna knew James Hatchett to be sensitive, sentimental, ritualistic and romantic. The sort who might jump into a balmy summer night if he felt a need to atone. Maybe it went deeper. Maybe there was a genuine need to atone. Maybe he had murdered the child and could no longer live with what he had done.
The monument’s EMTs, helped by Charlie and the handsome black Park Policeman, were stuffing the last of James Hatchett into a body bag. Rigor locking joints, the corpse was uncooperative. One of the men ended up putting a knee on Hatch’s chest, the way Anna did when her suitcase was jammed too full to close properly.
Eventually a compromise was struck. Right arm, torso and legs were bagged. Head and outthrust left arm were draped with a blanket. The package was ludicrous. It bothered Anna that a man of such innate dignity must be carted off in scarecrow attitude.
Two men lifted the unwieldy bundle onto a gurney and rolled it away. Presumably to wherever the helicopter was slated to land. That done, the Park Policeman and the Assistant Superintendent asked Anna and Charlie all the questions they could think of. There weren’t many. Hatch was dead. They saw him. Nothing enlightening about that. Anna told them of the letter she’d had from Hatch and promised to deliver it to Trey Claypool’s office.
Talking of the letter hurt. It hadn’t been on her mind till the questioning started. Now she was plagued with the meaningless swarm of “ifs” that suicides leave behind to torment the living. If she’d met Hatch last night like he’d asked. If she’d tried a little harder to ID the dead child. If she’d bothered to call him at the law enforcement office from the phone at MIO. This barrage of guilt, and its attendant grandiosity, surprised her. As a park ranger, she’d been in emergency medicine for a dozen years or more. There’d been plenty of people who didn’t make it, who died because she hadn’t been there, hadn’t gotten to them quickly enough. That was part of the charm of the backcountry, the wilderness: there wasn’t anybody there. Like most people who lasted any length of time in the rescue professions, she’d worn out the “if” factor pretty quickly. You were where you were. You went where you went. You did what you could. Mostly, people were better off after you showed up than before. Most people lived. As long as you didn’t actually screw up and push a wheelchair off a cliff or administer cardiac shock to a perfectly sound specimen, you were home free. “If” and “should” were self-indulgent.
Suicide was different. It denied everybody a chance. Suicide was a violent act against the living. Anger at Hatch would have helped, but as she watched them take him across the plaza, she couldn’t dredge up any. But he deserved it. If he left relatives behind, he’d get it too. Suicides tore families apart the way even murder couldn’t. Suicide was somebody’s fault and blaming the dead was intrinsically unsatisfying.
Charlie DeLeo left and Anna wondered if he was going to have a word with the Almighty about the care and feeding of one James Hatchett. It crossed her mind to ask if she coul
d tag along, but being alone was better than being with God, even one as benevolent and believable as Charlie’s.
Out into the harbor, left of the sun, a Circle Line ferry pushed around Liberty from Ellis. Behind Anna, doing a do-si-do with the departing corpse of the dead policeman, two National Park Service interpreters were approaching the statue. Within minutes it would be open for business. In a quarter of an hour the first of the twenty or thirty thousand feet that daily trod the monument would be shuffling up the stairs, scuffing over brick and granite. Sweaty hands would rub the parapet where Hatch had last seen life. What, if anything, spiritual or corporeal, Hatch might have left behind when he shucked off the mortal coil would be obliterated.
A need to beat the crowd, look again from Hatch’s balcony, overwhelmed Anna and she returned to the elevator at a trot and pushed the button for the top of the pedestal. The urgency that drove her up the pedestal turned into helplessness as she stepped out onto the balcony. What in hell she’d hoped to find, to see, she wasn’t sure. The granite block where Hatch had sat and smoked each night, if it had any secrets, did not choose to give them up. Perhaps if she were Sherlock Holmes, a microfiber of blue fabric from the seat of the Park Policeman’s pants would have manifested. She wasn’t and it didn’t. Not that it would have proved anything. Judging from the place Hatch landed, there was little question this was where he’d jumped off. No scuff marks or scratch marks were left to indicate he’d made any attempt to save himself. Not that there would be. Fingernails had little effect on granite.
Because she could not yet bring herself to give up, she made a minute search of the floor beneath the crenel he’d launched from. Crawling on hands and knees, she was aware of the cold and the age of the stones; they smelled faintly of night, old earth and Pine-Sol. A bobby pin and the guts of a ballpoint pen crushed into the crack between wall and floor were all that turned up. Both looked as if they’d been exposed to the elements for a while. Simply because she needed to keep doing though there was no more to be done, she searched the entirety of the balcony, all four sides. A handful of tourist detritus showed up: gum, a 1959 penny, a cardboard stick with the residue of red-colored candy on one end.
Unable to think of anything else to fill her time and her mind, she wandered back to Hatch’s perch, hooked her hands over and stared down. What would it feel like to fall that far? What would one think in that last moment as the weight shifted from wall to empty space? Would it be done on a sudden rush of courage or despair? There was a time, after Zach was killed, when she’d thought a lot about death. Alcohol and weeping shrouded the memories. Mostly what she recalled was fatigue. Was that what Hatch felt? That he was too tired to do anything but give in to gravity and oblivion?
Sixty feet below, the mark of his blood on the stone was barely visible. Skin was a remarkably tough organ. Often, all within could be smashed to jelly, and if a sharp bone end didn’t pierce it, the carnage was contained. Hatch had bled some from the mouth. A brown-black mark the size of a handprint was all that was left.
Not quite all. Anna pulled herself over the high wall, squashing her breasts against the granite, till her head poked over the edge. Three or four yards from where he had hit was a small round object. It had been in shadow, unnoticed, but the sun had moved and now struck a bright splinter of gold from its side.
A swell of sound brought Anna’s head up. They were coming: the first of the shuffling feet, the grubby hands, voices mixed, robbing language of meaning.
Anna slammed back through the door to the inside of the pedestal. The hum of machinery let her know the first elevator of sightseers was on the way up. Unable to bear the wait for a ride to the bottom, she ran for the stairs that snaked down, steps hugging the pedestal walls.
Out on the star-shaped plaza, a stain of tourists was beginning to spread. She darted past a maintenance man armed with mop and bucket, sent no doubt to cleanse the last of James Hatchett from the face of the world. No one had yet gone near the corner where Hatch died. Anna caught her breath and, shading her eyes from the glare off the water, got her bearings. The maintenance worker began mopping. She drew a mental line from where he worked to four yards out. The sun no longer reflected from the metal, but the small round container Hatch had carried in his pocket was still where she’d spotted it from the balcony.
She sat on her heels and stared without touching. One side was scratched and slightly dented, but otherwise it had survived the fall in good condition. When Hatch was airborne, or perhaps just as he struck the ground, it must have been dislodged from his pocket and rolled the twelve or so feet to where it presently rested on its side, like a coin toss that ended on edge and remained there.
Fingerprints were probably not an issue; still, Anna couldn’t bring herself to pick it up without protection. Having neither gloves nor handkerchief, she pulled off her socks and, one hand looking like Shari Lewis’s Lamb Chop eating a rice cake, lifted the container and gently loosened the lid.
Inside was nothing but clean white sand.
Didn’t the condemned, even the self-condemned, have a right to a last smoke? It wasn’t like Hatch had to worry about the Gauloises shortening his life. Maybe he jumped earlier—before his accustomed smoke break. A man of strong habits, he probably would not have moved up his nicotine ritual even for the Grim Reaper.
On a hunch, Anna went back to the base of the pedestal and, eyes focused on the ground, began a tight zigzag-pattern search. Knowing that what she sought, if it existed at all, could be destroyed by one tourist in flip-flops, she moved as quickly as she dared. Three feet out from the wall, she found it: a worm made of silver-gray ash, the granite beneath discolored from the heat.
Hatch had sat facing Manhattan; he had started to smoke that ritual Gauloise. He had not finished it.
Anna didn’t believe for a second that a man who carried a tin of Waldorf-Astoria sand in his shirt pocket had flipped the butt over the wall. It had fallen from his fingers when his fanny left the balustrade.
Surely such a fastidious man would not intentionally go to meet his maker with a lit cigarette in hand.
13
TOURISTS SWARMED. ANNA marked the ash and the place she’d found the tin of sand the only way she had at hand. With the leather punch on her Swiss Army knife, she scratched the stone of the plaza. Defacing a National Monument. At the moment, the number of the Code of Federal Regulations she was breaking slipped her mind, but it was a classic.
That done, she ran a serpentine pattern through the throng, down the mall and to the headquarters building across from Liberty’s gift shop and restaurant. Not a soul was in attendance. There was no dispatcher for the monument. Doors were locked.
The chopping cadence of rotor blades took her to the wide lawn area behind Patsy’s cottage. As she arrived the helicopter was lifting off. Claypool was gone with the corpse. Standing in the prop wash was the Park Policeman, Andrew—Anna forced herself to recall his name. Thinking of him only as “that handsome black guy” was as tacky as the boys remembering only “the blonde with the great ass.” “Andrew,” she said, to reassure herself she wasn’t a sexist pig.
He turned; sunlight caught the sweat on his high cheek-bones. He smiled—good strong teeth, straight and square, the best of Burt Lancaster and the Masai.
Maybe she was a sexist pig.
“I’ve got something to show you,” she told him. “Nothing probably. But your headache, not mine.”
“If food can be worked in, you’re on.” He fell into step beside her. At headquarters, he took possession of the tin of sand, bagged it and wrote the appropriate information before sealing the evidence bag. Whether or not he actually viewed this relic as evidence, Anna couldn’t tell, but he treated both her and Hatch’s memory with respect. She appreciated that.
Andrew then got the park’s 35mm camera from its cupboard and the two of them returned to the top of Fort Wood where Hatch had fallen. Wind or feet had taken the ash. Even the scratch marks were hard to find, searching as th
ey had to through the aimless wandering herd. Anna found where Hatch’s idiosyncratic ashtray had lain and where what she claimed was the ash of his cigarette was located. Andrew photographed the places indicated and entered time, date and other pertinent data into his log to be filed along with the photographs. They spoke little during this exercise, and as Andrew went through the motions, Anna couldn’t help but feel it was just that: an exercise. So Hatch jumped before he smoked? So this once he threw caution to the winds and flipped his cigarette butt instead of smothering it neatly in his pocket tin? Could be it wasn’t even his cigarette. Anna didn’t know French Gauloises’ ashes from those of a Camel. She didn’t even know if there was a test for it, and since she hadn’t collected the ash when she had the chance, the point was moot. A maintenance man, one of the janitorial staff, anybody who smoked nonfilter cigarettes, might have dropped the burning fag end and walked on. By some freak it could have remained intact overnight.
Anna didn’t believe it. But since her flight back to Colorado wasn’t booked yet and her convalescent nursing duties had been usurped by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, she’d nose around, see who, if anybody, smoked nonfilters. It wasn’t that common. She’d only known two: her sister Molly with her Camel straights and John Lefleur, a crew boss she’d fought fire with in Northern California. Pall Malls were his drug of choice.
Over hot dogs and Cokes bought at a vendor’s wagon on the esplanade, Anna told Andrew her idea that Hatch had been pushed or had fallen accidentally, and how the ash and tin figured into the theory. He listened in silence, his jaw muscles rippling with each bite. When she’d finished he waited a minute before speaking. Either he was a man who gave all information due consideration, or somewhere along the line he’d learned to look as if he did. He’d be a natural at interviewing witnesses.
