Linda Fairstein - Hell Gate

Laura was standing at the door to her cubicle as I crossed the hallway. “You’ve got Mike on line one.”

“Give him to Mercer,” I said. “I’m whipped.”

“Mercer ducked out to pick up sandwiches for you, and Nan’s back at her desk.”

I took the receiver from Laura’s hand. “I’ve had a miserable morning, Mike. I think I’d rather be at the morgue.”

“I haven’t exactly been picnicking, either, Coop. Listen, I’ve got-”

“Battaglia’s all over me. He wants to know why you can’t find Salma.”

“Be careful what you wish for, kid. She’s not missing anymore,” Mike said. “And she’s very dead.”

I sat in Laura’s chair and rubbed my eyes with my free hand. “Where is she?”

“At the bottom of a well, twelve feet down. Headfirst.”

“And the baby?”

“No, no, Coop. No sign of the little girl.”

“Thank God,” I said, beginning to process what he had just told me about Salma. “Hey, Mike? How far out of town did they find her? I mean, where’s the well?”

“Right here. Right close to home.”

“We’ve got wells in Manhattan?”

“It’s the first one I’ve seen. All dried up now, but it’s a well.”

My mind was racing visually up the streets and avenues of the city, lined cheek-to-jowl with brownstones, tenements, high-rise buildings, and housing projects.

“You’ve lost me, Mike. What kind of house had a well?”

“I guess if you owned a mansion, you had a well, Ms. Cooper. This one just happens to be at the mayor’s house,” Mike said. “I’d like to see Battaglia’s face when you tell him the body was found at Gracie Mansion.”

“Nice diversionary tactic you worked for us,” Mike said, as he opened the passenger door of Mercer’s car to help me out. “Keep your head down and walk as fast as you can on the paved path around the side of the house.”

“What tactic? What’s all the action on East End Avenue?”

East End was one of the shortest avenues in Manhattan, a mix of small, elegant town houses, two of the city’s finest private schools for girls, a quiet park, and some fancy apartments. It started at Seventy-ninth Street and ran just twelve blocks north. Mercer had driven as close as he could to the entrance-the rear door, actually-of Gracie Mansion, past the small guardhouse on Eighty-eighth Street that was a fixed post for an NYPD cop. It was just after three in the afternoon.

“Your pal Lem Howell let out the news that Salma went missing from her apartment last night and how worried the congressman is about her. The press hounds have staked out her building, which required Scully to send a few uniformed teams for crowd control.”

“Nobody’s noticed yet that right across the street we’re in the process of recovering her body.”

“You mean-?”

“She’s still in the well.”

There were dark clouds overhead and a raw chill in the air.

“But you’re sure it’s Salma?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

I was trying to keep up with Mike as he walked off the path to the north of the handsome old building on the lawn that sloped away toward a long wrought-iron fence.

“We lowered Katie Cion down to take some photos. That’s one tough broad,” Mike said. “Good thing the department bought out all the Polaroid film on the market when they stopped producing it. I don’t know what CSU will do when they run out of it. The super across the street made the ID from one of those.”

Katie Cion was one of the few women assigned to the Homicide Squad. She had earned the gold shield with some clever and courageous detective work on a gang initiation slaying in the Bronx a year ago. Petite and agile-maybe five three when she drew herself full up to salute Scully at her promotion-she was as fearless as she was smart.

I stepped between a stand of trees and around some neatly trimmed hedges. I was just ten feet from the wide esplanade that formed a sinuous border along the water’s edge, staring at the churning gray river.

“Welcome to Hell Gate,” Mike said.

I had been to the mansion before, for receptions and ceremonies, but had never been out on the lawn to see the dramatic vista.

“Seems like the right name for it today.”

Mike pointed straight out across the river. “It’s been the right name for it for four centuries. That’s what the Dutch called this narrow strait in the sixteen hundreds. Treacherous tides and a watery grave for more ships than we’ll ever know.”

He pulled aside more branches and I could see the setup for the recovery operation. Most of the blue-and-white police vehicles had been left on East End Avenue, where they would be presumed to be part of the security detail. Four green Parks Department vans ringed a small area of the drive, and one NYPD Emergency Services truck was wedged against the fence on top of a flower bed that had been put to sleep for the winter.

Mike led me between the vans, into the circle of police officers and park employees who were gathered around the gaping hole in the ground. The chief medical examiner himself-Chet Kirschner-was overseeing the procedure.

“Hello, Alex,” he said, greeting me with a handshake and an explanation. He was a quiet man, well-respected for his medical brilliance and his dignity with the dead. “We’re about to bring the woman up now. I want to do this without causing any more postmortem artifacts than are inevitable in this kind of situation.”

Kirschner would need to establish a cause of death, complicated by the disposal of the body in such an unusual location and the injuries that might have been sustained in the dumping.

“Who found her?” I asked.

“Three kids from the projects. Taft Houses over on a Hundred and twelfth Street. Lieutenant Peterson has them up in the squad right now,” Mike said. “They weren’t supposed to be playing around here, of course, so when the Parks Department cleanup crew came to get them out, they were already screaming about the lady upside down in the hole.”

“Was the well covered?”

“Apparently it’s been covered for as long as anyone can remember. There’s the lid.”

A four-foot-square plank of plywood pieces stood against the side of one of the vans. Some of the boards were warped and appeared to have rotted on the sides.

“How old are the kids you’re talking about?”

“Fourteen, fifteen.”

“By any chance, are they Mexican? Could they have known Salma through the immigrant community?”

“Not that easy, Coop. African American.”

Three of the powerfully built men from the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit were maneuvering around the opening of the well. They had an empty gurney standing ready, and they were talking to someone who was out of my sight within their truck.

“Anybody think they had something to do with Salma’s death?”

Mike shook his head. “Too early to know what we’ve got. They were probably just hanging out on their way home from the playground.”

Fifteen-acre Carl Schurz Park, directly adjacent to the mansion, was one of the most family-friendly places in the city. A beautifully landscaped oasis, its playground, dog run, and hockey court were a Mecca for children. Although I had grown up in the suburbs and attended a public high school in Harrison, I had visited often with friends who’d gone to elite schools like Brearley and Chapin, right next door to the park.

“What are they saying?”

“The ringleader-Jalil-he says they were just fooling around, trying to go down by the fence to see whether they could climb over it to get on the esplanade. Got curious because the ground was covered with snow, but the board on top of the well wasn’t. They didn’t know it was a well, of course. Just wanted to see what was there.”