Sara Paretsky - Sisters on the Case

‘‘Very well, Gerald,’’ she replied. ‘‘Give me the syringe.’’

‘‘Come down into the shrubbery first so we can’t be seen from the house.’’

She hesitated. ‘‘It’s full of wasps down there.’’

He laughed and steered her toward the dense screen of bushes. Once hidden, he took the hypodermic out of his pocket. ‘‘Here you are. Be sure to handle it with your handkerchief as I’m doing, so you won’t leave any fingerprints. Now have you got it all straight?’’

‘‘Yes, Gerald,’’ she said. ‘‘I know exactly what to do.’’

‘‘Good. Then you’d better go back to the house and tuck Roger in for the night. I’ll stroll around the grounds awhile longer. We mustn’t be seen going back together.’’ He blew her a kiss and turned to leave.

‘‘Wait, Gerald,’’ said Eleanor sharply. ‘‘Don’t move. There’s a wasp on the back of your neck.’’

‘‘Well, swat it, can’t you?’’

Lady Patterly’s hand flashed up. ‘‘Oh, too late. Sorry, that was clumsy of me. Did it sting you badly?’’

She left him rubbing his neck and walked easily across the terrace. The hypodermic barrel felt pleasantly smooth in her hand. She lingered a moment by the garden well, idly dropping pebbles and listening to them plop into the water far below. If one plop was slightly louder than the rest, there was nobody but herself around to hear it. She went in to her husband.

‘‘How are you feeling tonight, Roger?’’

‘‘Like a man again. Eleanor, you don’t know what you’ve done for me.’’

She slipped a hand over his. ‘‘No more than a wife should, my darling. Would you like to read for a while?’’

‘‘No, just stay with me. I want to look at you.’’

They were sitting together in the gathering twilight when the gamekeeper and his son brought Gerald’s body back to the house.

‘‘How strange,’’ Eleanor observed to the doctor a short time later. ‘‘He mentioned his heart again this evening. It kept him out of the army, he told me. But I’m afraid I didn’t take him all that seriously. He always looked so healthy.’’

‘‘That’s always the way,’’ said the doctor. ‘‘It’s these big, hearty chaps that go in a flash. Now, His Lordship will probably live to be ninety.’’

Lady Patterly smoothed back her husband’s hair with a competent hand. ‘‘Yes,’’ she replied. ‘‘I don’t see any reason why he shouldn’t.’’

They call it the High Line. It’s an elevated meadow that rises some thirty feet above the streets of Chelsea on the far west side of Manhattan. In the spring and summer the High Line is a rich blanket of green, dotted with wildflowers. When Francine Gold goes missing, it is here among the wildflowers on a sunny June afternoon that her body is found.

The High Line used to be a railroad route running from Gansevoort Street in the meatpacking district all the way to 34th Street, and the tracks are still visible cutting through the flora that has grown around them. People climbed the mound and strolled through the meadow, marveling that such a wonderful place existed in the city.

So the city, after much debate about tearing it down, actually listened to the protests, decided to convert the High Line into a public park, and closed it to the public, pending renovation. Now of course, as happens in New York, architects and landscape experts are being consulted without end, and there is no sign that any work will be done on the project in the near future.

This being the case, were it not for Chopper 6, the WNYS weather and traffic helicopter doing a sweep to report on sailboating traffic on the Hudson this summer morning, decomposition would have been more extensive.

‘‘What a sight! Let me tell you, it’s a great day for the tall ships,’’ chopper pilot Phil Vigiani reports. ‘‘Just enough wind to fill those beautiful sails. Boy oh boy, wouldn’t you like to be tacking the mainsheet right now? I would.’’ He smiles at the photo of Jen and the twins propped next to the one of him and Dwayne and Fred in their gear in front of Dwayne’s Apache. Fred, poor bastard, comes all the way through Desert Storm, then, drunk as a skunk, tops a hundred into a concrete barrier outside of South Bend. Phil pushes it from his mind. What’s the fucking point?

‘‘Water looks a little choppy there, Phil,’’ Wanda Spears comments from the studio.

‘‘Maybe a little. But there’s not a cloud in the sky. What a day.’’ He pauses, adjusts his goggles. ‘‘I’m looking down on the High Line now, Wanda. From up here she looks like a wide green carpet. Hey!’’ Engine surges.

‘‘Phil?’’

‘‘Holy sh-’’

Wanda doesn’t like where this is going and cuts him off before they’re all in trouble with the FCC.

Phil calls 911 on his cell. ‘‘Phil Vigiani, Chopper 6. I’m low over the High Line and I see what looks like a body lying in the grass. Not moving.’’

‘‘Hold on, sir.’’

‘‘Listen, babe, don’t put me on hold. I’m in a chopper. Get some medics and cops to the High Line, around 18th or 19th Street. What I’m seeing down there hasn’t moved though I made two low passes over it.’’

Doris Mooney doesn’t like being called babe, but she’s a pro. She’s been taking 911 calls for five years now. Before that she spent twenty-five years teaching fourth grade. Ask her which she likes better, she says right away, being a 911 operator.

‘‘Sir, I’m routing you through to the police and the fire department.’’

‘‘Tell them Phil Vigiani, Chopper 6. They’ll get it.’’

His name and phone number appear on her screen. ‘‘Stay on the line, Mr. Vigiani.’’ Doris hears the excitement in his voice. It’s like a drug, this adrenaline thing. She wonders if that’s really a body up there on the High Line.

Doris knows the High Line because she lives in a tiny one-bedroom apartment on 8th and 25th, part of the Penn South Houses, a middle-income housing development. She and Walter, her nine-year-old calico she realizes she loves more than she did her late husband, for whom the cat was named.

The High Line is very much part of the neighborhood. She’d buy a rotisserie chicken, make biscuits and potato salad, Walter would pick up a bottle of wine, and they’d have a nice picnic up there in the tall grass. It was like being in another world. But that was a long time ago. Walter was gone and she was no spring chicken anymore, though she still had her wits about her and the new copper color she’d washed into her hair looked really nice. If it was a body up there, how had it gotten there? The High Line was closed off till the city got around to renovating it. Heck, it’s New York. Anyone who wants to get somewhere bad enough finds a way.

She hears and sees on her screen that Phil Vigiani is connected to the 10th Precinct on West 20th. In short order, the area’s going to be crawling with cops, firemen, and EMTs. Doris disconnects, freeing the line for another call.

The 10th Precinct is an old-fashioned lime-and-brownstone precinct building on West 20th Street between7th and 8th avenues. You can’t miss it because of the large number of unmarked and radio cars, plus SUVs slant-parked on the sidewalk in front of the House, which pisses off some of the environmentally conscious locals. Not so much the parking all over the sidewalk so you can’t walk, but all those gas-guzzling SUVs with no thought to global warming.

The precinct covers a wide area from Chelsea into Hell’s Kitchen, combining both a large commercial industrial area and varying socioeconomic, multiethnic residential communities, including three housing projects: Fulton Houses, Chelsea-Elliot Houses, and Penn South Houses.