The complicated tests for toxicological finds in the blood and tissue were impossible to be rushed. It often took weeks, depending on the substance tested for, to get an answer to whether drugs were present and in what amounts.
“Did Chirico have anything to add?” I asked. Not that there were any good thoughts to have about this case.
“Not yet. Wound himself up in this one tighter than a tick on a dog’s ear. He doesn’t like anybody screwing with the Mother Church. The guy won’t budge from his desk. What’d you get?”
Mercer repeated what Rabbi Levy had told us about Naomi Gersh. All of it fit with her brother’s description of her as a pariah, and of her profound loneliness as she struggled to find a way to live her life. He also noted the rabbi’s apparent interest in helping Naomi relieve some of that gloom by suggesting a date.
“Then there’s this Bellevue piece,” Mercer said. “If you ask me, Naomi’s quirks were growing on the rabbi. She might have pushed back because she thought he was coming on to her. She told him she had a friend she had to see who’d been sick. Said he’d been at Bellevue.”
“A veritable whackjob? Now we’re talking,” Mike said.
“I thought I’d ride down there and rattle some cages. We have a pretty specific window. Naomi told the rabbi about this guy last week, and if he’s a Bellevue psych patient, I can start to look at discharges in the days before the murder—”
“And escapes. Eyeball the escapes too.”
“You’re going to need a subpoena. I’ll cut you a few when I get down to the office.”
“Ask one of your posse to do it for him right now,” Mike said. The stunning team of lawyers who worked Special Victims — Nan Toth, Catherine Dashfer, Marisa Bourges — would drop most of what they were doing to back up Mike and Mercer on any case. “I’m going to take you for a ride, Coop.”
“Where?”
“The Bronx. I got a hunch.”
“About Naomi?”
“No. About a church.”
“I wouldn’t dream of crossing you on that subject. Mercer, when you get to Bellevue, you should think about the emergency room too.”
New York had some of the finest private medical centers in the world, including the New York University facility adjacent to Bellevue. But cops knew the best trauma treatment was in the ERs at hospitals one would never choose for open-heart surgery: Harlem, Metropolitan, and Bellevue.
“Already doing that. Maybe Naomi didn’t like the rabbi calling her friend crazy ’cause she didn’t think he was crazy. Could have been at Bellevue for an injury. Treated and released.”
“Maybe he was giving his machete a practice run,” Mike said. “Hurt himself in the process. Or drugs.”
There were scores of people a day in and out of the Bellevue ER. Hundreds more who were in outpatient programs or coming in to receive meds. If you wanted to do one-stop shopping for the mentally ill in Manhattan, this hospital was the place to start.
“I’ll go straight to administration. Will you call Laura and ask her to fax up the subpoenas?”
“Right now.”
“Coop’s office at six tonight?” Mercer asked.
“Deal.”
Once again we went in separate directions, Mercer downtown and Mike and I heading due east to take the Triborough Bridge to the Bronx.
“You’re not telling me where?”
“No secret. It’s a long shot, not a secret. I’m taking you to my alma mater. The old church there — St. John’s — may have a clue or two.”
“Another St. John’s?” I asked. “Obviously not the Divine this time?”
“Nope. Just a little parish church built in the Bronx way before that one got under way.”
Mike had majored in history at Fordham University, one of the premier Jesuit institutions in the country. While the school had expanded its campuses into Manhattan, the original Rose Hill site was where Mike had studied.
“Time for confession?” I said, dialing Nan’s number to implore her help.
“Just like there’s a reason for Naomi to be dumped at Mount Neboh, this woman’s at St. Pat’s to make a point. If the perp has done that much homework, maybe I’ll get lucky.”
Mike was weaving between cars and trucks while I brought Nan up to speed on the events. She would put a team of our most trusted colleagues together and run interference with McKinney until I could return to the office.
The Gothic Revival church, St. John’s, was built in the 1840s as the house of worship for the parish of surrounding farms in what was then the bucolic village called Fordham. Today, with an overbuilt urban population on every side of the campus, the buttresses, gargoyles, and great bell tower of the church seemed a pleasant anachronism.
Mike and I had worked a case that took us to this neighborhood often just a few years earlier. As he turned onto the Fordham grounds from Southern Boulevard, I looked across at the serene Botanical Gardens that held such deadly memories for me.
“Tintinnabulation,” Mike said. “Your man Poe.”
“What?”
We were driving toward the chapel as he pointed to the tower. “Most scholars think these old bells were Poe’s inspiration for that poem.”
The cottage to which Poe moved with his young, terminally ill bride was a short distance away, and he walked this area almost every day that he lived nearby. “Hope you’ve got more to show for the ride than that.”
“Boy, does this bring back memories,” Mike said, getting out of the car and heading toward the plain wooden doors of the chapel.
I followed Mike inside. As we walked down the nave of the simple Gothic church, natural light streamed onto the white marble altar through the blue, yellow, and green stained-glass windows that lined the walls. Below them were a series of panels depicting the Stations of the Cross, scenes from the trial of Jesus by Pontius Pilate to his burial in the tomb.
Mike’s right hand was busy combing through his hair. He looked around, as though taking everything in anew, but didn’t speak.
“What is it, Mike?”
“Who was the last king of the French? That’s a subject dear to your heart,” he said, beginning to pace, staring up at the windows as he walked through the crossing.
“Look, it’s a little early for Jeopardy! Why did you bring me here?”
“Last king of the French.”
“Louis-Philippe. The July Monarchy, as it was called.”
Mike was motioning with his cupped fingers to give him more. “When?”
“Eighteen thirty to eighteen forty-eight.”
“I’ll take you the rest of the way, Coop. See these six windows? Three on each side? The most brilliant-colored ones?”
I looked back and forth. Of the sixteen windows that lined the nave, six were larger and far more exquisite than the others.
“So, Louis-Philippe had the idea to make a grand gift to the Catholics in America. He had these six stained-glass windows, said to be the most beautiful in the world, designed for St. Patrick’s Cathedral — the old one—”
“The one where the body was found today.”
“Exactly. They were created in Sèvres, France, and shipped to New York as the king’s — what do you call it?”
“Beau geste.”
“Yeah. But these windows didn’t fit at Old St. Pat’s. Imagine that? A king’s ransom worth of stained glass, but the wrong dimensions for the fancy new cathedral in Manhattan,” Mike said. “So the bishop shipped them up here to the little farming village of Fordham, so they could be the centerpiece of this new seminary that was still under construction and could be modified to hold them.”
I studied these glorious works with a deep appreciation of their magnificence — the depiction of handsome biblical figures, which were indeed so much richer in color and style than the other windows in the chapel, and than their replacements at Old St. Pat’s.