Linda Fairstein - Entombed

"Did I do that?" he said, apparently surprised to hear it.

"Perhaps it was your secretary. Zeldin set it up for us, after we left the Botanical Gardens. I noticed your name on the plaque in the cottage."

"No coincidence there at all, Ms. Cooper. My name is on a lot of Bronx institutions. Zeldin himself can tell you that. I've donated a new magnolia garden in my mother's memory, which will open in the spring. And the two of us traipsed all over the conservatory just before the holidays. He's shameless about looking for naming opportunities, and some of us are vain enough to oblige him."

"Traipsed? What did you do with Zeldin?" The man couldn't traipse, from what I'd seen of him.

"Have you been to the conservatory since it reopened? It's spectacular. He walked me through the whole thing after hours one night."

"I didn't think he could walk," I said. "I've only seen him in a wheelchair."

Zeldin's immobility had kept him out of my main focus as a suspect.

"He only resorts to his iron buggy when his gout kicks in. That makes it too painful for him to get about very much, with the muscle deterioration condition he suffers from. But most of the time he can walk just as well as he can talk."

The meeting had broken up by noon. I called Mercer at his home in Queens and suggested we meet at Zeldin's office at the Botanical Gardens up in the Bronx at two o'clock, for another go at him.

When I dialed Mike's cell phone it dumped me into voice mail. Sympathy and concern hadn't worked to get him to respond to me, so I tried another route. "Look what you've reduced me to, Detective Chapman. Now I'm getting information from you through Ellen Gunsher. I'm insane with jealousy. You knew it would have that effect, didn't you?

"Well, she's playing so nicely with me in the sandbox that I'm going to take her along this afternoon. See how she does in the gardens. Scotty will drive us up to the Bronx and Mercer will meet us there. I'm not trying to tempt you to come back to work, but I thought maybe you and Ellen were beginning to bond and you'd want to show her all your old Fordham haunts." I paused, thinking my tone had been too flip. "Take care. I'm not very good at getting the bad guys without you."

Scotty Taren's bulky outline blocked my doorway. "Zeldin's there. I gave him some crap about wanting to discuss Mr. Guidi's connections and contributions. We gotta enter through the back gate on Mosholu 'cause the front entrance is closed today."

"I thought they only shut down on Monday."

"Usually. But they're setting up a giant tent behind the conservatory this week. Most of the staff is off 'cause they'll be doin' overtime for the benefit. Friday night's their big fund-raiser- Winter Wonderland, he called it. He's gonna leave our names with security. I'll give Mercer a shout and let him know."

Shortly before 2P.M. the three of us-Ellen, Scotty, and I- drove through the tall wrought-iron fencing off Kazimiroff Boulevard and stopped at the gatehouse. The guard pulled back the plastic window to tell us that Zeldin was expecting us in the Haupt Conservatory, the stunning crystal palace that was the jewel of the gardens' exhibition space.

There was no sign of Mercer as we parked in the designated space-the only car in the deserted row-and climbed the walkway against the fierce February wind. The pathways were empty but for the golf carts that employees used to get around the miles of roads and sidewalks inside the gardens. There was no one to inquire of at the ticket desk inside the front door of the enormous building-one full acre under seventeen thousand panes of glass. It was very still inside, and eerily quiet.

We must have been there almost ten minutes before a custodial worker trudged from a hallway into the circular lobby area, where we waited under the Palm Dome. It was a thicket of New World palms that reached over ninety feet up into the building's cupola, circling a reflecting pool that mirrored their elegant limbs as they stretched toward the sunlight.

"Excuse me-have you seen Mr. Zeldin?"

The man didn't speak but pointed behind him, in the direction of a sign that announced the entrance to a tropical lowland rain forest.

Scotty started walking and Ellen and I fell in behind him. "Outside, I'm freezing my ass off," he said. "In here, it's like hangin' out at my mother-in-law's trailer park in Lauderdale. I think I'm gettin' a hot flash."

He unbuttoned his overcoat and loosened the tie around his neck.

The newly refurbished cement path wound through thousands of densely planted trees and shrubs. I would have thought we had entered the heart of a Brazilian jungle had the ground beneath us not been paved. Large leaves and fronds hung over our heads, brushing against my hair as I ducked to avoid them. The only sound was the whisper of the misting device that sprayed water from behind the trees.

Scotty was impatient. "Zeldin? Anybody home?"

His voice echoed and I heard a shuffling noise in a small thatched hut that bordered the path ahead of us. "What's that?" I asked.

Ellen read from the large illustrated signage that showed a photograph of a dark-skinned woman crushing leaves between her hands. "It's a healer's house."

"I'll give the bastard something to heal. This place is too hot for me," Scotty said, wiping the sweat that was rolling down his forehead with the back of his hand. "They got monkeys in here, too?"

There was noise above us, now, and we each looked up to find its source. A mesh metal staircase, painted dark green to camouflage it against the foliage, wound up more than fifty steps around a huge empty tree trunk, leading to a skywalk that trailed along the length of the rain forest. A worker in khaki overalls got up from his knees and leaned over the railing, picking brown tips off the ends of thick growth.

"Yo, pal. You seen Zeldin?" Scotty asked.

The man cocked his head and squinted. "No comprende, señor. No lo sé."

"I'm telling you, I feel like we're in frigging Santo Domingo. You think that guy's an exhibit or he's really working here?"

A sharp right turn led us out of the rain forest and into a room that looked like it was built for a Victorian estate. The humidity level lowered immediately, while hanging vines hovered over a long rectangular pool, full of aquatic ferns and plants that surrounded a statue of naked goddesses spouting jets of water over tiered fountains.

Scotty bent over and dipped his handkerchief in the murky green liquid, mopping his brow before I could urge him not to put the slimy stuff against his skin.

The room ended at a ramp that curved down between a wall of lichen-covered boulders. At the foot of it, we seemed to have left the natural habitat for the intrusion of a twenty-first-century convenience-a dark, narrow tunnel several hundred feet long, connecting the arms of the conservatory to each other via an underground passage that was made out of an ugly form of corrugated siding. I wondered if it was just my own recent brush with a dank enclosed space that made this space seem uncomfortably creepy, or whether my companions were bothered as well.

When we emerged at the far end, we not only found Zeldin, but had transported ourselves into the middle of a simulated African desert as arid as the rain forest had been damp.

Scotty had to pause to catch his breath after mastering the uphill section of the ramp. Ellen and I approached Zeldin, who was seated in his wheelchair but turned his head at the sound of our footsteps.

"I hope you didn't have any difficulty finding me."

Ellen and I answered politely before Scotty could complain, and I introduced them to each other.

"The detective told me you've got more questions for me," Zeldin said with his distinctive drawl. "Why not fire away?"