Linda Fairstein - Hell Gate

“Don’t get yourself in a swivet. We got work to do.”

“I’m telling you, something’s got the boss in a horrible mood. Something bigger than today’s news. He tried to control me like a puppet. Didn’t do anything when we walked out of City Hall but berate me for holding out on him. The world is upside down when Paul Battaglia is nipping at my tail and Rowdy Kitts is trying to save face for me.”

“Tell me you took the subway. Good for you to mingle with the people every now and then.”

“That’s not my favorite station,” I said. I hardly needed to remind Mike about our trip together around the loop that snakes under City Hall, an incident neither of us would ever forget. “Beside that, I was totally sandbagged. Lem was waiting for me in front of the office.”

“You ride up here in his pimp-buggy?”

“The first ten blocks. It’s worse than that. Ethan Leighton was in the car.”

“Talk about burying the lead. What was that about?”

I told Mike exactly what happened. “It was creepier than I can possibly describe. So if Battaglia’s already set off at me, imagine when I tell him I actually got in the car.”

“You take that little factoid to the grave with you. I know. We’ll tell Mercer. Sit on that piece of information for now, okay?”

“Maybe Kelli’s right. Maybe Lem’s trying to use me for something I’d rather not be in the middle of. Where’s Dr. Pomeroy?”

“Scrubbing down. Give him ten.”

“And Mercer?”

“I thought he’d beat you here. He must be close. You mind turning on the telly?”

Pomeroy kept a small set on a high shelf in a corner of the room that he used to monitor stories of fatalities that would involve his staff.

I reached up and pressed the power button. The TV was set to the local all-news station. The reporter was describing the still-unfolding scene on the beach in Queens, the hood of a parka pulled over his head, muffling his voice.

Mike searched the desktop, then opened drawers till he found the remote clicker. “Almost time. Get your twenty bucks ready.”

For as long as I had known him, Mike had a habit of tuning in to the last five minutes of Jeopardy! to bet on the final question. Although the son of a decorated police officer with a legendary reputation in the department, Mike had set out on a different track, majoring in history at Fordham College. When his father dropped dead of a heart attack just two days after retiring from the job, Mike decided to honor that legacy by following in his footsteps.

“Any autopsy results yet?”

“Waiting on Pomeroy. He wanted to get two done today-one of the supposed drowning victims, and the girl with the mysterious injuries. Compare and contrast the findings.” Mike switched channels and muted the commercial. “What did the mayor have to say?”

“Nothing to me. Keenly interested in Ethan’s situation.”

Mike saw Alex Trebek on the screen above my head and clicked on the sound. “That’s right,” Trebek said, “the category of tonight’s question is THE COLOR PURPLE. THE COLOR PURPLE, folks.”

“I spoke too fast. Literary stuff.”

“Double or nothing.” I had majored in English literature at Wellesley before deciding that my interest was a career in public service, and went on to study at the University of Virginia School of Law.

“That’s taking candy from a baby, Coop,” Mike said, offering me the small brown bag of chocolates. “Wipe the grin off your face. All I’ve got is my M and M’s and twenty-four bucks. It’s almost payday.”

“Spent too much on the holidays?” I bit my tongue to prevent myself from making a crack about New Year’s Eve.

“Back to purple. Spielberg movie,” Mike said. “Eleven Oscar nominations.”

“Walker novel. Pulitzer Prize.” I could take him on a handful of topics like literature, but Mike knew more about military history than anyone I’d ever met. Mercer’s father had serviced planes for Delta and he’d grown up with maps of the world’s airline routes papering his bedroom walls, so he took the kitty whenever the subject was related to geography.

One of the attendants came to the doorway. “Dr. Pomeroy would like to see you downstairs.”

Mike put one foot on the floor. “Be right there.”

At the morgue or in fashionable mansions, at crack dens or social clubs, very little interfered with Mike’s evening ritual of watching the final question, even if it delayed for a few minutes the crews bagging bodies and recovering evidence.

“Here’s your answer, gentlemen,” Trebek said, as the board pulled back to reveal the phrase. “The answer is ‘City from which this purple hue, worn for centuries by royalty, derives its name.’ ”

Trebek repeated the answer while his three bespectacled contestants studied the words before starting to write on their video tablets.

“I can see it in your face, Coop. Not on your reading list, as you’d expected, right?”

I was walking to the door. “Let’s go.”

“Wait a minute. You doubled me down, didn’t you? Check it out.”

Trebek approached the first young man, who hadn’t been able to come up with a good guess. “What is-?”

“Sorry. Oooh, and you wagered seven thousand five hundred on that one. Very sorry.”

“And you, sir? You’ve written ‘What is Maroon?’ ”

“Like where in the world would that city be?” Mike said, balling a piece of paper and throwing it at the screen. “Maroon, Italy? The guy’s a jerk. Won the last three nights on sheer luck.”

He had drowned out Trebek, who moved on to the third player. “You’re shaking your head already, Scott. And your question is, ‘What is Indigo?’ Wrong again.”

Mike had both feet on the floor. “What is Tyre? I’m telling you, get me on that show and I’ll make enough money to quit this job tomorrow.”

“What is Tyre? That’s what we were looking for,” Trebek said. “The color Tyrian purple. That’s the name we wanted. Also called imperial purple, first produced by the ancient Phoenicians in the city of Tyre, and royal figures everywhere used it almost exclusively to flaunt their stature.”

“And you know that because…?” I asked, as we headed down the quiet corridor to go to the basement where the grim work of the medical examiners was performed.

“Alexander the Great crushed the Tyrians. Three thirty-two B.C. Tyre was one of the great early seaports of the world. The people dissed Alex-wouldn’t let him enter the city when his troops arrived-so he practically wiped them out. All the great ancient emperors wore Tyrian purple robes, Coop. Very expensive stuff. And you know what it was made from? Mucus. A mucus secretion from the gland of a predatory sea snail in the Mediterranean.”

Mike opened the door to the basement and I could smell a strong antiseptic odor, as though someone had just cleaned up the autopsy rooms and overwhelmed the familiar chemical smells with even harsher fluids.

“Don’t turn up your nose at me. Too much reading about female empowerment with those weepy women’s novels and not enough cold, hard facts.”

“I wasn’t sniffing at you, Mike. It was the idea of the colorful dye coming from mucus.”

He took a package of mints out of his pocket and offered them to me. Every detective had different ways of dealing with the strong scent of death, and Mike had something ready for almost every occasion.

Gurneys lined the wall of the long, narrow staging area, which led from the bay in which the bodies were received from morgue vans and hearses into the autopsy theaters.

The first room, where Pomeroy usually worked, was empty. Someone had just mopped the tiled floor and wiped down the stainless steel table, ready to receive the next unfortunate voyager.