The Deadhouse (48 page)

It was probably Winston Shreve who had called Paolo Recantati's wife
and pretended to be Professor Grenier. Shreve smart enough to know that
Recantati was thoroughly insecure about the growing scandal at the
college. He could have easily prodded into retrieving an envelope from
Dakota's office especially if such a harmless action could make all the
trouble fade away. And Mrs. Recantati hadn't met any of them, she
wouldn't have known the difference between Shreve's voice and Grenier's.

For the first hour after regaining consciousness I had wanted to
believe Winston Shreve. I wanted to believe that I would be and could
trust him. He hadn't killed Charlotte Voight. But cruder fate could he
have masterminded than to leave her be this desolate place?

And what about Lola Dakota? Why had Lola Dakota Her death, unlike
Charlotte's, was not an accident.

And then I remembered what Claude Lavery had told us. He had tried
to convince us that he had not seen Lola since almost a month before
her death. From Bart, we knew otherwise. But Claude was firm in his
recollection that the last thing Lola had told him was that she knew
where Charlotte Voight was, and that she was going to see the girl.

That statement had raised in Mike and me the false hope that
Charlotte was still alive. Now my brain fought the sedatives that had
slowed its normal processing and focused on the logical sequence of
events.

If Bart had been right, then Lavery and Lola had encountered each
other on their way into the building. Lavery was already facing a jail
sentence from the feds. He didn't need to become a scapegoat in the
murder investigation, the last person to see Lola Dakota alive.

But suppose she trusted him enough to tell him what she had finally
figured out? That she knew where the Voight girl was, and she was going
to see her, to find her. Like me, Lavery had assumed that meant that
Charlotte was alive. Lola knew better. Did she confront Shreve with
that fact, between the time she got to her apartment and the time she
tried to leave, less than one hour later? Did she threaten to go out to
the island to prove her theory? And was it Shreve who prevented her
from doing that?

Now I was squirming again. Feet first, exerting every remaining
ounce of my energy against the restraints. I couldn't tell if they
truly felt looser or whether I just wanted to believe that they did.

I stopped to rest. Wind rushed in the oversize hole that had once
been a window. It found every crevice around me, blowing in the sides
of my parka's hood to sting my ears and whooshing up my sleeves to test
the strength of my thermal underwear.

Homeless people survived this every winter night, I told myself.
Older men and women, infirm and insane, were at this very moment
hunkered down in cardboard boxes and storefront doorways all over the
city streets and sidewalks. You can make it, little voices whispered to
me. People know you're missing and they're looking for you. How many
empty morgue trays were there on either side of Charlotte? What did I
have to do so that I didn't wind up in one of them, waiting for the
spring thaw?

I heard the footsteps packing down the thick snow before I saw the
narrow sliver of light. Winston Shreve was back, carrying with him a
six-foot-long piece of thick rope.

36

Shreve talked to me but I could not take my eyes off the rope. He
crouched in front of me to remove my bindings, and they seemed like
doll's clothes compared with the powerful weapon he had just dropped
onto the fraying, stained mattress pad.

"That's only if things go terribly wrong, Ms. Cooper. Don't let it
scare you."

I see. So far, things are right on schedule. Going really well.
What
had I unleashed when I'd stormed out of Jake's apartment on Sunday
night? I shut my eyes tight and willed myself back on his living room
sofa, thinking about how good it would feel to have him caress me and
make love to me. What could go more terribly wrong than the events of
the past twenty-four hours?

I played with my wrists and ankles, trying to limber the feet
tingled from the deadening effect of pins and needles hours of
restricted circulation.

Shreve had a plastic bag from some twenty-four-hour deli he must
have passed on his way back to the Second Avenue tram. He unwrapped
sandwich halves from their aluminum foil and took the lids off two
large Styrofoam cups of coffee.

"Here, perfectly safe." He took several sips from the container to
show me that it had not been doctored. I drank the lukewarm liquid and
it heated a few of the cold-restricted inches throat as I downed it.
Maybe I didn't care if it was drugged. Sleep might be better than
whatever I was facing in this urban finished the entire container in
three minutes. Something-the caffeine or Shreve's return—had jolted me
to full attention.

He passed the foil to me but I refused the sandwich. My hunger had
been intense for hours, yet now I was gripped again by and unable to
look at solid food.

"What do you know about my grandfather's miniature of the island,
Ms. Cooper?"

I didn't speak.

"You'll feel better if you put something in your something in your
stomach. You're going to fight me, aren't you?" He helped himself to
some turkey while I watched in silence. "Trying to drag this out until
daylight?"

I knew that Mike and Mercer would never have let Shreve walk out of
the station house without putting a tail on him, especially once he
came up with the phony line about the
Jeopardy!
question. If
I could stall for a bit, I was certain that the homicide squad would
find me.

"What did Detective Chapman say?"

"I'm sorry. I should have started with that. Mr. Chapman was nowhere
to be seen tonight."

My right hand flew to my face to cover my mouth and I gnawed on the
damp glove leather to mask my emotion. It wasn’t possible that Mike
hadn't been there to intercept the one clue I thought might lead him to
me.

"Something about following a lead on another part of the
investigation in New Jersey. A different fellow took all the
information. An African-American gentleman, Mr. Wallace. He's getting
married tomorrow, on New Year's Day. Everyone was quite cheerful there,
actually. Bottles of whiskey out, toasting him and his bride. A bit
distracted from the business of finding you, I would say.

"Wallace seemed to know about this television game, too. Said that
sounded just like you. Always watching the final question."

Dammit. He was right. The information would have been reassuring to
Mercer. The idea that I would have watched the quiz show in the
hospital waiting room would have made perfect sense to him, and he had
not been with Mike and me when the question about Elizabeth Blackwell
had been aired last week. It would not set off any alarms in his mind.
Would he even think to tell Mike about it when they next spoke?

"I believe Mr. Wallace understood my concern about your walking out
of the emergency room at nine o'clock or so to find a taxicab by
yourself. He said that neighborhood is plagued with drug dealers and
youth gangs. I hope they double their efforts there to look for you.
Seems they found an elderly woman in an alley just a few hours ago,
beaten to a pulp by some young hoodlums, just to rob her of seven
dollars and a crucifix on a gold chain. Brought her to the same
emergency room where you and I waited for Sylvia."

Shreve paused. "And then another detective reminded Mr. Wallace that
some woman had been harassing you as well. Some lady with a gun." He
shook his head in mock dismay, and I thought how easily the detectives
could be off on a red herring now, combing the East Seventies for my
unhappy stalker.

I sank deeper into my frosted terror. What if Mike wasn't worried
about me at all? What if he and Valerie were home together, enjoying
each other's company like a normal couple? Maybe he'd gotten fed up
with my repeated rituals of independence, believing that I'd walked out
of Sylvia Foote's hospital scene just as I'd run away from Jake's
conversation with an informant and run again from Mike's scene of
domestic intimacy. Maybe I deserved to be marooned in an abandoned ruin
with a killer.

"The miniature model that my grandfather had built, Ms. Cooper. You
seem to be as interested in it as I am. Shall we talk?'

Shreve had let me live so far because he thought I either knew
something about the model's whereabouts or the key to its treasures.
Now he was determined to get the answers.

"You've tried to convince me that you're not a killer, Professor
That Charlotte Voight was responsible for her own death." Hi looked at
me but didn't speak. "But Lola Dakota is dead, too. And if you're going
to tell me that was also an accident, then we've go nothing to discuss."

"It wasn't a murder, Ms. Cooper. Nothing was premeditated, didn't go
there to kill her."

Most lawyers didn't know the distinction between premeditation and
intention, so why should Winston Shreve? He didn't have to plot the
murder of his friend Lola before he went to se her that day, he simply
had to form the intent to kill her in the moments before he executed
the plan. Maybe it was a genetic thing, inherited from his grandfather.

All I knew is that I didn't want to be another notation in his
agenda of women who had met their demise accidentally. "In fact, it was
Claude Lavery who caused her death."

"I don't believe that." As soon as I snapped those words at Shreve,
I didn't know why I had said them. I was overwhelmed with
confusion—from the sedatives, the situation, and the snow

"I spoke to Lola often while she was out in New Jersey at her
sister's house." He was standing again, swinging his arms as though to
keep warm. "Both of us had been certain that the old laboratory—"

"Strecker?"

"Yes, that the Strecker building was the deadhouse. It's an old
Scottish word meaning a morgue, or a place where dead bodies are kept."

How fitting that it has kept in character after all these years, I
thought, not daring to imagine the condition of Charlotte Voight's
remains.

"While Lola was hiding out at her sister's house she was also
researching the island, using a lot of primary source material that
student volunteers had come up with while assigned to the Black-wells
project. Things they had found in the municipal archives, records from
the Department of Health and Hospitals. Papers no one had touched for
the better part of a century. Documents that explained exactly what the
deadhouse was."

"And it wasn't the laboratory?" Could there have been a more ghastly
place than Strecker?

"Its purpose was plain. It was just a theater for autopsies and a
lab to examine the specimens. But there wasn't enough room to keep the
bodies from all the plague-ridden institutions on Black-wells Island.

"Deadhouses were the wooden shacks they built all along the
waterfront. Places to store and stack the corpses until they could be
taken back home for burial."

The first sight from the Manhattan side of the water that patients
bound for the island would see. The reason that some of them jumped
into the deadly current to chance escape rather than a sure sentence of
death by contagion. Deadhouses.

"Weren't they destroyed?"

"Moved, actually. Torn down and hauled to the other coast of
Blackwells, to face the factories and mills on the Queens side of the
river. No patients were shipped in from that direction, so the
buildings were simply reerected out of sight of the arriving
population. To give the patients hope, Ms. Cooper, to give them
something to believe in."

Exactly what I needed at the moment. Something to make me believe
that I could get off the island alive, too.

"But what did the deadhouses have to do with your grandfather?"

"It took Lola to figure that out. There was Freeland Jennings, a
realist if one ever existed, stuck in a penitentiary with those
lower-class criminals, most of them immigrants, f their primitive
superstitions. All of the papers make reference to the fact that none
of the laborers would go anywhere near wooden deadhouses."

"Those hospitals had all been closed years before your j father was
sentenced to prison."

"Yes, but the buildings still stood there, much as you set today.
The Smallpox Hospital, Strecker, the Octagon Tower even the row of grim
little shacks that had housed the dead land wrote about the
circumstances in the letters he sent sister—the same one who was taking
care of my father. First, months of observations of the other inmates
and their manners and odd habits. Then his fascination with the way
these seemingly fearless street thugs would avoid, like a ritual,
haunted remnants of all the places that had sheltered the terminally
ill.

"It didn't take him long to figure out a safe place to hide the
diamonds, the jewels he considered his lifeline."

"Under the deadhouses." I thought of the map Bart I had mailed to me
shortly before he died, and how it diagram every inch of the island,
signed by Freeland Jennings.

"Luigi Bennino was the prisoner who created my grandfather’s model
of the island. And it was Luigi he hired to dig the places for his
gems. No one would think to go where a disease and pestilence might
still lurk. Even today, lots students and faculty won't go near this
building, fearful they'll unearth some encapsulated germs that still
bear their lethal poison."

"Bennino was an uneducated peasant, too. Why wasn't he just as
superstitious about contamination?"

"Don't forget his crime, Ms. Cooper. He was a grave robber. Young
Luigi had clearly overcome his concern about contact with the dearly
departed long before he reached Blackwells Island. He was the perfect
henchman for my grandfather's needs.

"It's just that Freeland had learned never to put all his trust in
another human being. And although it's kind of veiled in his
correspondence, it would appear that he paid a second prisoner to
double-cross Bennino and move the diamonds. Still in the dead-houses,
but in entirely different locations in the ground."