“They were landscape architects. They won a major competition to design the Park. And it’s not Vaux,” I said, pronouncing the name as Mike had, rhyming with “so.” “It’s Calvert Vaux-sort of rhymes with ‘hawks.’”
Mike slammed his hand on the table, sloshing my wine over the rim of the glass. “What is it about you that you can’t stop yourself from telling me I’m wrong? Telling me I’m wrong with more regularity than I bet you have when you go to the bathroom?”
“What did I do? The commissioner will correct you on Monday if I didn’t do it now. You might as well go in on top. Let him know how smart you are.”
“This morning it was about the lake that you had to tell me was a pond. Now I call Monaco a country and you say it’s a principality. The architect’s not Vaux like ‘so,’ he’s Vaux like ‘hawks.’ I haven’t seen you in more than a month, and I was actually beginning to look forward to hanging out with you on this one. Not anymore, I’m not. You wanna know why you’re spending a weekend alone?”
“She’s not alone, Mike,” Vickee said, getting to her feet and fanning herself with her napkin as though the heat was too much to take. She smiled and patted me on the head. “Alex will have me. I’ll show her what my cougar talent can do to spice up her life. Is the restroom down those stairs in the back?”
I nodded.
“You’re alone because you are so damned critical and picky and self-righteous.”
“I’m nothing like that, am I, Mercer? I-I just corrected the pronunciation thing. I didn’t mean anything by it.” I started to reach for my drink, but my hand was shaking so visibly that I rested it in my lap.
“You are so doomed to be alone in your ivory tower, blondie. Waiting for King Louis the twenty-something of France to return and rescue you.”
“Back off, Mike,” Mercer said, catching the dig at my relationship with a Frenchman-Luc Rouget-that had recently splintered and left me with a heavy heart. Luc and I were trying to figure out whether to pick up the pieces, and how to do that with an ocean between us. “That’s over the line.”
“No, it’s not. When Coop’s unhappy, she thinks we all need to be unhappy with her.”
“I’m not unhappy.”
“Get honest with yourself. You’re miserable. And have you figured out why Pat McKinney and the district attorney were so agreeable about giving you this case? Isn’t it strange that your weasel-faced supervisor didn’t try to pull it out from underneath you today, like he always does?”
Mike sucked in more vodka before he answered his own question. “They want you to fail, Alex Cooper. This case, this woefully sad murder that is going to play out in the media all over the world, has all the earmarks of a dog. I expect it’ll be barking at me from now till the day my pension vests, like the rest of those ice-cold cases from the Park. McKinney wants you to fall on your face so he can grind his shoe into the back of your neck. They’re all looking for you to fail for a change, and just maybe, they found the case that will accomplish that for them.”
FIVE
I picked at my salad while I waited for Vickee to come back to the table. I was determined not to go downstairs to splash some cold water on my face, for fear I would lose my composure if I were alone.
Mercer tried to lighten things up by making small talk, but that didn’t engage either Mike or me. “Remember that Preppy Murder case?” he said. “Robert Chambers, the scumbag who killed a friend of his behind the Metropolitan museum in ’86? That’s the only murder in the Park I can think of except for the Brazilian jogger in ’95. And the two kids who stabbed the homeless guy to death in ’97. The squad had both of them in custody within hours, just like they did with Chambers. I don’t know why you’re so pessimistic.”
“Robert Chambers’s friend was Jennifer Levin. Eighteen years old. Nice girl. Trusted the bastard and walked into the Park to her death, hand in hand with him. But she had ID in her jacket pocket, a loving family that threw themselves into helping the cops, and twenty kids who saw them together an hour before she was killed,” Mike said. “Not happening here. It’s not like that at all. If this girl’s been dead two or three days already-or more likely, as Johnny Mayes said, at least a month-how come nobody’s even reported her missing?”
Mike’s father, Brian Chapman, was a much-decorated detective who had worked many of the city’s most high-profile cases before his son came on the job. Chambers had been one of his perps.
“Mike, I’m sorry for being so rude. I really am.”
“Forget it, Coop. My mother says ‘rude’ is my middle name. It’s the part about being miserable that I hate to see. Get over it.”
Foolish advice coming from Mike. He had been engaged a couple of years back to a great girl named Valerie Jacobson, who had survived breast cancer only to be killed in a freak skiing accident. Mike had internalized his grief so completely that he’d never been able to fully open himself to a relationship ever since.
“Want me to check on Vickee?” I asked Mercer, looking for an excuse to break away.
“No, she’s just making a call to Logan, I’m sure.”
Mike took three plastic bags from a case he was carrying and put them on the table. “Just so I’m not holding back anything, I’ll be dropping these things at the lab. Back burner, of course. We picked up a lot of crap today: used condoms and a lead pipe that could have crushed someone’s skull; a few kid-sized baseball bats that might have done the same; bits and pieces of tiny sailboats that had been smashed on the Lake-every kid in walking distance of the Park has one of those-and all the dirty laundry, underwear in every size and color you can imagine. The ME’s going to give us a small conference room. We’ll get a wall-sized map of the Park and put pins where everything was found. A field guide to the detritus of Manhattan’s park people.”
“What’s in the bags?” Mercer asked.
“Some of the few things that didn’t seem like pure trash. Stuff that a few of the guys found off the pathway, at the northernmost tip of the Lake, between the shoreline and the bridle path. Could be where the body went into the water. You never know.” Mike pushed the three bags across the table, toward Mercer and me. “I’m dropping it all off for prints and swabbing.”
I was so cowed by Mike’s outburst that I was afraid to ask questions and have him pound at me again. Mercer picked up the first bag to examine and then handed it to me.
“Look, Alex. It’s a miniature castle. Could be something a kid dropped out of a stroller or backpack. Nice find.”
“You know what I think it is, guys? I think it’s Belvedere Castle.” My voice was tentative, but I was certain about the distinctive shape of the structure.
“That’s the one just above the 79th Street Transverse?” Mercer said.
“Exactly.” It was one of the most distinctive lookouts in the Park, perched high above Turtle Pond and designed in the style of a medieval castle. It had always been a favorite destination for my older brothers when we visited the city as children, and I knew its outline well. For decades it was home to the National Weather Service, and is still the place where meteorological instruments record the amount of snow and rainfall in the Park’s center for every weather report around the country.
“Pretty rich kid to have a model this perfect,” Mike said.
I removed my cell phone from my tote and snapped a photograph of the figurine. “Maybe the Conservancy shop sells this kind of thing, but it is pretty ornate, and it looks like it has some age to it.”
Mercer held up the second bag, and Mike spoke before we all jumped in. “The Obelisk, right? Cleopatra’s Needle.”
“Look at the detail in those carvings,” I said. It was a safer thing to point out than the fact that the Obelisk-twin of the fifteenth-century-BC monument that stands on the Thames embankment in London-had nothing to do with the Egyptian queen, who was born centuries after their creation, except that she had moved the striking pair to Alexandria to commemorate Caesar’s death.