The Deadhouse (18 page)

"I saw her do that bit in her classroom once. I thought that West
was locked up in Manhattan, in the Tombs."

"One night there. Then a ten-day sentence to the workhouse on the
island. Mae had it pretty cushy, for a prisoner. The warden agreed that
the inmate underwear was too rough for her delicate skin and let her
wear her own silk teddies and white stockings. He even took her out for
horse rides in the evening.

"Lola knew all their stories. Boss Tweed, Dutch Schultz, lots of
corrupt New Yorkers wound up there."

"Damn, I'd love to hear some of those tales," Mike said.

"Talk to Professor Lockhart in the history department. Or even to
Paolo Recantati. The historians were tracking that kind of thing. I've
got my own tales of woe from the asylum."

"What kind of guy is Recantati?" I asked.

"He was new to King's this semester. Quiet, very aloof. He was a
history scholar, too, so Lola tried to engage him in our cabal, get his
support for continued funding. Our goal was not only to complete the
dig, but to try to get the money needed to restore these unique
buildings. She brought Recantati in on a few of our meetings to hear
what we were up to. I've talked with him about it several times, and he
seemed quite interested."

"Were you and Lola the only two women running the show?"

Nan paused for a moment. "Yes, we were."

"Any sense of Lola's personal life? Was she involved with any of
these other professors?"

"I'd probably be the last one to know. The students always seemed to
be more interested in that kind of information than I was."

I showed Nan a photograph of Charlotte Voight, a copy of the one on
Lola's board, which Sylvia Foote had given to me earlier in the day.
"Did you know this girl, one of Lola's students? Ever see her on the
island?"

Nan studied the picture and handed it back. "No help to you there. I
supervised the Barnard and Columbia kids. If she went to King's
College, then any one of the group we've talked about would have been
working with her."

"It's puzzling why Dakota would have cared about the kid enough to
hang her picture in the office. Along with Franklin Roosevelt—"

"The Roosevelt piece I can answer," Nan interjected. "FDR was one of
Lola's heroes, for whom Blackwells was renamed in 1973."

"Charles Dickens?"

"No idea."

"Nellie Bly?"

"She's one of
my
inmates. Your office helped, Alex."

"We did?"

"Assistant District Attorney Henry D. Macdona, 1887. Nellie Bly was
a young reporter, working for
The World,
Joseph Pulitzer's
scandal-loving newspaper. Some editor had a brainstorm to expose the
hideous condition of the patients in Blackwells insane asylum, and
Nellie Bly volunteered for the job. Undercover, you'd call it. She
actually went to the district attorney for advice, and for the promise
that they would begin a grand jury investigation if she found abuses.

"So Bly checked into a women's boardinghouse, claiming to be a Cuban
immigrant called Nellie Moreno. Within days of her arrival, feigning
insanity and babbling in an incomprehensible tongue, she was escorted
to the police station and then to court. First stop was Bellevue, where
doctors ruled out the delirium of belladonna, the deadly nightshade
poisoning of so many nineteenth-century mysteries, and actually
declared her to be insane. On to Blackwells."

"Committed to the asylum?"

"Spent ten days there, documenting everything from the filthy ferry
that brought her over, to the vicious prison attendants from the
penitentiary who choked and beat their patients, to the baths that
consisted of buckets of ice water being thrown on her head, to the
descriptions of the perfectly sane women who were just sent away
because they couldn't be understood. 'Inside the Madhouse' made a
pretty compelling story in the
World,
and then your office
exposed the whole operation."

"Did that close the asylum down as a result?"

"Certainly helped make it happen. All the mental patients were moved
away from the island at the turn of the last century. My building
became the first incarnation of Metropolitan Hospital."

"The one that's now on the Upper East Side?"

"Exactly right."

Mike had checked off Bly's name from his list in the steno pad.
"About Lola, would you know why someone would call her a treasure
seeker or gold digger?"

"That's what we all are on this project, of course." Nan smiled.
"Each of us is looking for a different kind of mother lode. For me, the
treasure is as simple as a stone ax or a porcelain teacup, coal boxes
or ox yokes. One of my interns actually found a handful of pearls last
fall."

"Pearls?"

"In those days, men were able to discipline insubordinate wives by
committing them to the asylum for a spell."

Chapman winked at me, nodding his head in approval.

"Some of the well-to-do women sewed jewels in the hems of their
skirts when they were sent to Blackwells, hoping to buy favors from
their keepers. Or perhaps their escape. I've got one volunteer on the
project, Efrem Zavislan, who dreams of stumbling across Captain Kidd's
buried gold. No one's ever found the million-dollar lode the pirate was
bringing back from Madagascar to New York, before his capture. Talk to
Efrem, he spent lots of time with Lola. She sure wasn't interested in
my kind of booty.

"My view of it is that if all those prisoners were digging for
years, and they didn't come up with any treasure, then there's none
here to be found."

"What were the prisoners digging?"

"Every inch of the place. The island's bedrock is gneiss. Ford-ham
gneiss. And there's lots of granite, too. From the time the
penitentiary opened in 1835, until it was shut down a hundred years
later, the healthier prisoners were forced to do hard labor. All of the
stone for these many buildings on the island was quarried from its own
land. No rock had to be brought in.

"The granite was used to build a seawall around the entire
circumference. And the gneiss is what they mined to create the
exteriors of the notorious Blackwells institutions. If there were
treasure to be found, some miscreant would have dug it up long before
now." "This gives us a great head start, Nan. We're hoping to meet with
some of the faculty members tomorrow. At least we'll have an idea about
what has had all of you so absorbed."

Nan walked us down to the front door, retrieved my coat and gloves,
and waved us off into the cold night air.

We made the short drive down Second Avenue and Mike stuck his
laminated police department parking permit on top of his dashboard as
he left the car illegally positioned in front of a bus stop near the
corner of Sixty-fourth Street. "C'mon, Coop. There's not a brownie in
town who'd brave this weather to stick a ticket on my wreck."

We weaved our way across the late-hour Christmas shopping traffic
that was blocking the intersection and pressed through the crowd around
the bar at Primola, hoping that Giuliano had not given away my
eight-thirty reservation.

"Buona sera,
Signorina Cooper. Your table will be ready in
a minute. Have a drink on me, please. Fenton," he called over to the
bartender, "a Dewar's on the rocks and a Ketel One,
subito."

People were five-deep waiting to be seated at my favorite
restaurant. Most had drinks in one hand and shopping bags in the other,
adding to the volume of the pack. It was too noisy to talk murder in
their midst, so we relaxed with our cocktails till the maitre d',
Adolfo, led us to a corner table in the front of the room.

I didn't hear the chirping sound of my cell phone ringing until I
had lowered myself into the chair and hung my bag over the armrest.

"Alex, can you hear me? It's Bob Thaler." The chief serologist
usually started his day in the lab at 6 A.M. That he was still working
at 9 P.M. meant that he had pulled out all the stops to do the testing
on the Lola Dakota case. "Am I catching you at a bad time?"

"Never. Any results?" The DNA testing that had routinely taken six
months to yield information when I first submitted samples to the FBI
ten years ago now came back to us from the medical examiner's office in
less than seventy-two hours.

"Dr. Braun and I worked on your evidence all through the weekend.
I've got some preliminary answers you might want to get going with. All
I'll need from you are some suspect controls, when you come up with
them."

"That's Chapman's end of the deal. He's working on it."

"Dakota's vaginal swab was negative for the presence of semen. But
we did find some seminal fluid on the sheets the cops sent in for
testing. From a sofa bed, is what the voucher says. I worked that up
and got a profile from it for you.

"The wad of gum Chapman pulled from the wastebasket in the
deceased's office? Dr. Braun handled that piece. He also got a DNA
sample from it. Just thought you'd like to know as soon as we confirmed
them that it's a match. Whoever was sleeping in Dakota's bed is the
same guy who paid a visit to her office. Does that help you?"

14

"Anybody out there blowing bubbles?" I asked, greeting Mike at the
office of the Manhattan North Homicide Squad at eight-thirty Tuesday
morning. I had walked up the stairs and in the rear door, near the
Special Victims Unit, to avoid any members of the King's College
faculty who had responded to Sylvia Foote's directive to appear to
answer questions.

"It wasn't bubble gum. It was Wrigley's spearmint. Just keep that in
mind if you see any of those jaws masticating." He motioned me to sit
at the table that was back-to-back with his own.

"Won't Iggy need it when she gets in?"

"Nope. Gone to Miami for Christmas."

Ignacia Bliss was one of the only women in the squad. They had tried
to team her with Mike when she first arrived from the Career Criminal
Apprehension Unit, but her humorless nature and plodding investigative
technique were not suited to his style. The banner he had hung over her
desk more than a year ago was still tacked to the windowsill:
ignorance is bliss.

"Who's here to chat with us?"

"Only got three. The rest of them seem to have scattered to the
north and south poles." Mike's jacket was hanging from the back of his
chair. He swung around and put his feet on the top of my desk, reading
from his pad. "Skip Lockhart, the project's history professor, is out
of town till the end of the week. Grenier's the biologist who's had the
semester off. He's due back in the middle of January. May have to hunt
those two down.

"Here with us for bagels and brew are Mr. Recantati, Professor
Shreve, and Foote herself."

"Let's begin with Shreve. Nan puts him back at the beginning of all
this. Why don't we see how helpful he is?"

Mike walked past the lieutenant's empty office and returned with a
man I guessed to be in his late forties and dressed, like Mike, in
jeans and a crewneck sweater, carrying a cardboard container of coffee
that had been set out in the waiting area for our guests from King's
College. Before we could be introduced, he reached for my hand. "Good
morning. I'm Winston Shreve. You must be Ms. Cooper."

I pointed to one of the chairs usually occupied by the hapless or
homeless who were being interviewed by Mike on a murder case. The
stuffing was hanging out of the seat pad and two of the four rollers on
the chair legs were missing, so it scraped unevenly along the floor as
Shreve moved it forward to rest his folded elbows on the desk.

About all I knew was that he was an anthropologist. "Would you mind
telling us a bit about yourself, Professor? We're trying to get a
picture of the group of people who worked most closely with Lola
Dakota."

"Anything you'd like to hear." He started with his credentials,
which had been cited to us the previous evening by Nan Rothschild. His
accent sounded vaguely foreign. Shreve's responses to my questions were
quite direct. "No, I was born on Long Island. Oyster Bay. But you've
got a good ear. My family took me abroad when I was an adolescent. I
did what you would call high school in England, before coming back here
for university. Harvard."

His eyes moved back and forth between us. "You seem to know some of
this already. Shall I go on?"

"Till we stop you," Chapman said with a grin. "From London to Paris
to King's College? Sounds like a downhill run to me."

"I'm young enough to take chances, Detective. There's something
quite exciting about an experimental school, about the opportunity to
build an entire department and all the programming from scratch.
They've already attracted quite a bit of intellectual talent, wouldn't
you agree?"

"Can't say I'd recognize it. I'm the beauty of this operation.
Coop's the brains. If she tells me you guys are smart, I'll accept it.
Talk to me about Lola."

"You knew her?" Shreve asked, surprised by the familiarity of
Chapman's first-name reference.

"Coop's actually the one who worked with her. I'm in charge of the
homicide investigation. How well did you know her?"

"Well enough to recruit her for King's. And to consider her a good
friend. Lance and Lily, they're her—" "Yeah, we know."

"They asked me to say a few words at the service yesterday. I guess
I was as close to her as anyone at the college." "Have you known her
long?"

"I'd say almost ten years. I'm forty-six now, a few years older than
Lola was. Met her the first time at the Aspen Institute. We were each
delivering a paper at one of those summer panels. Seemed we had a lot
of the same interests, professionally."

"How about personally?" Chapman jumped ahead, trying to speed the
process of getting some body fluid to Bob Thaler's office. It wasn't
subtle.

"Were we ever intimate, Detective? Yes, but it's been quite a while.
The summer we first met, Lola and Ivan were separated. She had walked
out on him the first time he lifted a hand to her."