“No, Cormac. It’s a lucky thing. That gene pool of men who founded Local 46 is worth a lot of money, bought with a great deal of sweat.”
There was another archway and I tapped him on the shoulder to follow me through it. My flashlight revealed a long empty hallway ahead. The structure was finally beginning to resemble the interior of an enormous star. This was the side of one of its points.
“My great-grandfather was the first one in the family, on my father’s side. Then so on down the line to me.”
The deeper into the old fort we went, the cooler and darker it seemed to be. There were holes in the wall that offered a bit of fresh air, as warm as it was, but mostly the dankness of the place dominated my senses.
“Any brothers work with you?”
“I got three older sisters. Only one brother. He’s a priest, Detective. Had to happen to one of us in the family sooner or later.”
I laughed with him. Maybe he was just a nervous kid, I thought. Sullen and nervous. Maybe he’d had a bad encounter or two with the NYPD.
“I know the feeling. Would have been me,” I said, “but the nuns figured I’d sprouted an unfortunate mouth and good right hook way too young.”
At the end of the hallway-the tip of one of the star’s points-the archway was completely boarded up. A large red sign that said CAUTION was affixed to the wooden crossbars.
“Seen enough, Detective?” Cormac asked.
He leaned against the brick wall and lit up a cigarette. He blew out the match and put it in his pocket.
“Probably so,” I said.
I ran my flashlight over the two-by-fours that blocked farther access to the fort’s other starred points. At the bottom of the left corner, opposite Cormac Lonigan, were ashes. Anthill size but undisturbed, as though recently deposited. There were three or four spent matches around them.
“Is this your place, Cormac?” I asked.
“Nah. Like I said, I just come down near the office, the room behind it.”
“By yourself?”
“Usually so.”
He started to walk back in the direction from which we’d come.
I pressed my right hand against the wooden boards directly above the ashes. He heard the boards shift and turned to look at me.
“Don’t lean on that, Detective.”
“Who put this up, Cormac?”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t come back here.”
But somebody else did. Somebody who wasn’t careful enough to pick up his matches or grind the ashes into the stone floor.
I examined the boards with the flashlight. The nails on the left side of the CAUTION sign looked shiny and new. The ones to the right, where Lonigan had been standing, had already begun to rust from the dampness.
I banged on one of the long pieces of wood, about chest-high, with the heel of my hand. It cracked in dead center.
Cormac Lonigan shouted at me to stop.
I pulled at the wood and the end of it snapped out of the board behind, three shiny nails coming with it.
“Why stop?” I asked.
“Because that part of the fort’s been blocked off for years,” he said. “There’s fallen granite inside and the ceiling’s unstable. A man could get hurt in there.”
“I’m a sucker for two things, Cormac. One is exploring old forts,” I said, ripping at the other end of the board, oblivious to the splinters and nails, “and the other is getting hurt.”
I lifted the flashlight from my belt, where I had tucked it when I started to pull at the jerry-rigged wall. I shined it into the space behind the separated boards.
“Give me a hand here, kid,” I said.
I couldn’t see anything in the blackness beyond, but Cormac didn’t wait to hear that. He threw his cigarette to the ground and bolted away from me.
The flashlight dropped from my hand as I turned to give chase.
The kid was faster than I was, but the second’s hesitation when he stooped to pick up his backpack cost him the lead.
He was halfway up the thick stone steps to the pedestal base when I grabbed both ankles and brought him down.
He slid back toward me on his belly. I took a handful of hair at the nape of his neck to lift his head up a couple of inches and turn it to the side, slamming his right cheek against the solid granite slab. I expected the ringing in his ear would last for a month.
THIRTY-NINE
“Cat’s got his tongue,” I said to Mercer, who had rushed to the bottom of the staircase when he heard me shout his name.
There was a three-inch-long scrape on Cormac Lonigan’s cheek, and blood on his upper lip where there had previously been a smirk.
Mercer pulled him to his feet by the collar of his denim jacket.
“Who are you, kid, and what’s behind that wall?” I asked.
“You know as much as I do,” he said.
“Where’s the lady?”
“I don’t know anything about a lady.”
“Where were you Wednesday night?”
He didn’t answer me.
“Wednesday night, Cormac, where were you?”
“Left here on the last ferry. Went drinking with Pete. Ask him.”
“I don’t want to ask him. I’m asking you.”
“I don’t remember.”
“It’s true,” Fitzgerald said. “I live in Queens and we-”
“Shut up,” I said. “Hand me your phones, both of you.”
They each removed their Android phones from their pants pockets. I told Jimmy to take them and start dealing with the information on them-last numbers called, texts sent, contacts listed-as soon as we got upstairs.
“You two want to help yourselves-you want to do anything that would save you from having me throw you out a window of the green lady’s crown-you start talking.”
“I just work with the guy,” Fitzgerald said. “We didn’t do nothing.”
Cormac Lonigan didn’t speak.
We would separate the two of them as soon as we emerged from this black hole and answers might come faster. I just wanted five minutes to look behind the boards.
“Walk him back inside the fort, Mercer. I dropped my flashlight there.”
We made our way through the dark passage, past the office and sitting area. Jimmy and Walter brought up the rear, with Pete Fitzgerald in tow.
“Look, Detective,” Walter said. “This is going too far. I’ve got no business in here. We’ll have to wait till the ranger gets back to enter this part of the property. That’s the rules.”
“If you’ve got no business being here, Walter, then Cormac has even less,” Mercer said. “You got anything to say, anything to explain his actions, be sure and tell us. If not, you’re just along for the exercise.”
We reached the end of the long corridor with the boarded-up wall. I bent down for my flashlight and shined it on the broken barrier.
Mercer braced himself against the left side of the archway-his foot on the brick wall-and pulled on the board below the one I had broken. Three more planks, from waist-high to the floor, came loose, and the dark hole expanded.
“You got the kid, Jimmy?” I asked, before ducking inside.
“He’s going nowhere.”
“You got no right to hold me,” Lonigan said.
“I’ll think of one before it’s time for a cocktail,” I called back at him. “I promise you that.”
I stood up straight and pushed a few pieces of wood aside so that Mercer didn’t cut himself. I shined the light ahead and could see that this side of the star’s interior was badly deteriorated. Large chunks of the cement ceiling had fallen to the floor and been crushed on hitting the uneven stones. The wall was crumbling in places, allowing for some daylight to filter in.
“Watch your step, Mercer. It’s like a minefield in here.”
We went eight or ten steps forward, taking care not to trip over the bricks and granite pieces that made movement difficult.
In another twenty feet, the area looked as though it had been swept clean of debris. I crossed the smooth stone floor and then, a few yards later, right before the corridor seemed to end, the minefield started as abruptly as it had ended. The granite was piled higher than what we had just walked through.