Linda Fairstein - Lethal Legacy

Mike just nodded at me and mouthed the words You’re doing fine.

“She didn’t steal nothing. I drove her there myself. The lady had a present for her. All very civilized.”

“I think Mike’s blowing this totally out of proportion,” I said. “I disagree with him completely. I thought you might want to give her a heads-up, and maybe I can set up a meeting with her tomorrow.”

He wasn’t ready to trust me.

“Is Minerva with you now?”

“Cute, Ms. Cooper. Real cute. Then you tell the homicide dick whatever I tell you, so I’m just the schmuck who’s out of a job.”

He disconnected me the second he finished the sentence.

“Sonny? You got a location for me?” Mike asked. “Thanks, buddy. I owe you big-time.”

He dropped the phone on the seat and started the engine, making the turn from Forty-second Street onto Fifth Avenue.

“You did good, Blondie. It seems that Carmine took the odd couple downtown-Second Avenue, between Second and Third streets. Nearest cell tower is in front of Provenzano’s, a funeral home.”

“A little late for a condolence call, isn’t it?” Mercer said.

Traffic moved well on the straight run south to the point at which Broadway intersected Fifth Avenue, then Mike wound his way farther east.

As we crossed Third Street, I could see the limousine parked on the west side of Second Avenue.

Mike pulled over to the curb, several cars behind Carmine, and turned off the engine and headlights. “What do you think, Mercer? Him sitting in the limo all these hours, don’t you think all that weight would have flattened one of his tires by now?”

“I could do that,” our young charge said.

“You stay with me, Shalik.”

“C’mon, Coop,” Mike said. “Let’s all have a look around.”

As we got out, Mike walked ahead and peered into the window of Carmine’s car. Then he kneeled down. I tried to keep Shalik occupied while Mike scored one of the tires with his Swiss Army knife.

“I don’t think he should eat such heavy meals at night,” Mike said, coming back to get us. “He’s sleeping like a baby. Least they can’t make such a quick getaway if Minerva and Travis aren’t happy to see us.”

Mercer was on the sidewalk, checking out the block on either side of the avenue. “There’s a pizza joint, a Thai restaurant, and a neighborhood pub. We can look in each of those.”

He kept one arm on Shalik’s shoulder, and I walked on the other side of the kid, closer to the buildings. We watched as Mike tried the front door of the funeral home, but it was locked and all the lights were out.

We passed an alleyway fronted by a wrought-iron gate, and kept going. The night was clear and getting cooler. Mike went into each of the open restaurants and bars on both sides of the street but didn’t spot Hunt or Forbes in any of them.

“Go another block north,” Mercer said. Mike did, while I tried to find out from Shalik whether he had gotten inside Travis Forbes’s apartment before getting caught.

By the time Mike doubled back, the kid had described how the cops had arrived and nabbed him just after he’d jimmied the back door and wriggled in.

“No trace of them,” Mike said. “Time to interrupt Carmine’s dream cycle and have a chat. Worst he can do is call and alert them that we’re here to break up the party.”

We turned around and started walking back toward the limousine.

The light from the street lamp bounced off the gold paint on the narrow archway above the wrought-iron fence that closed off the alley to my left.

I read the words on the large sign, first to myself and then aloud: NEW YORK MARBLE CEMETERY. INCORPORATED IN. 1831

Below them was a smaller tablet, also engraved. I held on to one of the bars of the fence as I read again: A PLACE OF INTERMENT FOR GENTLEMEN.

“Gents like Jasper Hunt Jr. and his cronies,” Mike said. “Get the kid in the car, Coop. I’m going in.”

“Stay here, Alex,” Mercer said. “I don’t know how Mike thinks he’s going to get past this gate.”

Shalik Samson grabbed two of the vertical iron bars with his hands and tried to shake them. “You put me on your shoulders,” he said to Mercer, “I could be over that easy.”

“Getting you out might be the problem. Let go of those.”

Traffic was light on this part of the avenue, and there were no pedestrians to bother us.

“You think somebody inside?” Shalik asked, craning his neck to look up at Mercer. “It look like a little park in there.”

Mike was studying the lock, which was a single keyhole. There was no sophisticated equipment in place to protect the entrance, which seemed well groomed and tended.

“Pretty clever. If you’re going to break in to someplace right on the street,” he said, “dress Travis Forbes up like a cop to give you cover.”

Shalik was back against the bars, standing on the sharply pointed pieces that jutted up from the base of the heavy gate.

“Cut it out, Shalik. You’ll hurt yourself,” Mike said. “Coop, I told you to put him in the car.”

“Yo, look! It ain’t even locked no more.”

The teenager had reached his slim arm between the bars and retrieved a metal rod that must have temporarily held the bars in place. Someone had indeed broken in to the old cemetery, and in all likelihood was still somewhere inside.

Shalik pushed on the right side of the gate, and it creaked open against his weight. Before I could stop him, he ran ahead down the alleyway, which was bordered on both sides by brick walls.

Mercer gave chase and overtook him twenty feet away, where the passage opened onto a large grassy area, almost the length of a football field but half as wide. He put his hand up to his lips and told the boy to be quiet.

I closed the gate behind me and caught up with Mike, who had stopped to read a plaque on the wall.

“What does it say?” I asked as he turned away and headed toward Mercer.

“The oldest nonsectarian cemetery in the city. A hundred and fifty solid marble vaults,” he said, breaking into a trot. “All of them were built underground as a health precaution against nineteenth-century contagious disease.”

We were suddenly in a gardened oasis in the middle of the East Village that I had never known existed.

The tall walls around the open green space seemed to be made completely of stone, many parts obscured by the bushes and trees that had grown up around the borders.

Mercer was deputizing Shalik, trying to extract a promise from him to stay close and obey directions.

Mike jogged along the perimeter of the north wall, stopping at smooth marble tablets to note names of the occupants of the subterranean vaults. I was just a few steps behind him.

“Charles Van Zandt. Uriah Scribner. James Tallmadge,” Mike said, stopping to run his hand over the names, one above the other, as he read them from the engravings.

Ten feet farther along, another tablet, with numbers I assumed corresponded to the graves below. Some listed three or four vaults, though only one or two individuals’ names had been added to the list of the dead.

There were Auchinclosses and Randolphs, Phelpses and Quackenbushes, grand names that together created a history of New York City. I paused at the marker for the infant son of Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who had landscaped Central Park.

Mike crossed to the south wall and continued his search. Before he had moved very far along, he signaled me to join him.

“Here they are, kid. Jasper Hunt. Jasper Hunt Jr.,” he said, showing me the names of father and son, and their wives, the first dates for the family patriarch etched in the wall more than a century ago. “Four Hunts, six burial vaults.”