So the city, after much debate about tearing it down, actually listened to the protests, decided to convert the High Line into a public park, and closed it to the public, pending renovation. Now of course, as happens in New York, architects and landscape experts are being consulted without end, and there is no sign that any work will be done on the project in the near future.
This being the case, were it not for Chopper 6, the WNYS weather and traffic helicopter doing a sweep to report on sailboating traffic on the Hudson this summer morning, decomposition would have been more extensive.
‘‘What a sight! Let me tell you, it’s a great day for the tall ships,’’ chopper pilot Phil Vigiani reports. ‘‘Just enough wind to fill those beautiful sails. Boy oh boy, wouldn’t you like to be tacking the mainsheet right now? I would.’’ He smiles at the photo of Jen and the twins propped next to the one of him and Dwayne and Fred in their gear in front of Dwayne’s Apache. Fred, poor bastard, comes all the way through Desert Storm, then, drunk as a skunk, tops a hundred into a concrete barrier outside of South Bend. Phil pushes it from his mind. What’s the fucking point?
‘‘Water looks a little choppy there, Phil,’’ Wanda Spears comments from the studio.
‘‘Maybe a little. But there’s not a cloud in the sky. What a day.’’ He pauses, adjusts his goggles. ‘‘I’m looking down on the High Line now, Wanda. From up here she looks like a wide green carpet. Hey!’’ Engine surges.
‘‘Phil?’’
‘‘Holy sh-’’
Wanda doesn’t like where this is going and cuts him off before they’re all in trouble with the FCC.
Phil calls 911 on his cell. ‘‘Phil Vigiani, Chopper 6. I’m low over the High Line and I see what looks like a body lying in the grass. Not moving.’’
‘‘Hold on, sir.’’
‘‘Listen, babe, don’t put me on hold. I’m in a chopper. Get some medics and cops to the High Line, around 18th or 19th Street. What I’m seeing down there hasn’t moved though I made two low passes over it.’’
Doris Mooney doesn’t like being called babe, but she’s a pro. She’s been taking 911 calls for five years now. Before that she spent twenty-five years teaching fourth grade. Ask her which she likes better, she says right away, being a 911 operator.
‘‘Sir, I’m routing you through to the police and the fire department.’’
‘‘Tell them Phil Vigiani, Chopper 6. They’ll get it.’’
His name and phone number appear on her screen. ‘‘Stay on the line, Mr. Vigiani.’’ Doris hears the excitement in his voice. It’s like a drug, this adrenaline thing. She wonders if that’s really a body up there on the High Line.
Doris knows the High Line because she lives in a tiny one-bedroom apartment on 8th and 25th, part of the Penn South Houses, a middle-income housing development. She and Walter, her nine-year-old calico she realizes she loves more than she did her late husband, for whom the cat was named.
The High Line is very much part of the neighborhood. She’d buy a rotisserie chicken, make biscuits and potato salad, Walter would pick up a bottle of wine, and they’d have a nice picnic up there in the tall grass. It was like being in another world. But that was a long time ago. Walter was gone and she was no spring chicken anymore, though she still had her wits about her and the new copper color she’d washed into her hair looked really nice. If it was a body up there, how had it gotten there? The High Line was closed off till the city got around to renovating it. Heck, it’s New York. Anyone who wants to get somewhere bad enough finds a way.
She hears and sees on her screen that Phil Vigiani is connected to the 10th Precinct on West 20th. In short order, the area’s going to be crawling with cops, firemen, and EMTs. Doris disconnects, freeing the line for another call.
The 10th Precinct is an old-fashioned lime-and-brownstone precinct building on West 20th Street between7th and 8th avenues. You can’t miss it because of the large number of unmarked and radio cars, plus SUVs slant-parked on the sidewalk in front of the House, which pisses off some of the environmentally conscious locals. Not so much the parking all over the sidewalk so you can’t walk, but all those gas-guzzling SUVs with no thought to global warming.
The precinct covers a wide area from Chelsea into Hell’s Kitchen, combining both a large commercial industrial area and varying socioeconomic, multiethnic residential communities, including three housing projects: Fulton Houses, Chelsea-Elliot Houses, and Penn South Houses.
The precinct house’s claim to fame is that it was featured in the 1948 film The Naked City.
Officers Mirabel Castro, a twenty-eight-year-old redheaded Latina with a nice nose job, a booming voice, and a deceptively relaxed manner, and Anthony Warbren, thirty-four, former Little League pitching champ, who got as far as a Yankee farm team and is still recognized with a lot of Yo, Tonys around Fort Greene in Brooklyn, have just come off cooling a couple of hot tempers in a parking dispute in front of Loehmann’s.
They are already on 18th and 7th, three long blocks from the area where the body was sighted.
‘‘So whadja say then?’’ Tony said, making tracks. He intends being First Officer on the scene.
‘‘Said, Felipe, you gotta respect my career.’’ Mirabel’s sweating like a fool in this heat, taking three steps for his every one to keep up. Felipe’s her live-in boyfriend. He has a good job with Home Depot in the Bronx and’s been bugging her about kids. ‘‘Tell the truth, Tony, you see me wiping asses?’’
Tony laughs. ‘‘You already dealing with crap on the Job.’’ He’s crossing 9th Avenue, leaving her behind. What’s she got to bitch about? All these women on the Job get special attention and it burns a lot of guys. But he has no complaints. He’s gay and out and no one at the 10th says boo to him about it. He and Larry, a dental surgeon, have been together for nine years. They’re in the process of adopting a multiracial kid.
They get beat to the scene by the fire department. An EMT fire department bus, lights swirling, is pulled up next to the red fire emergency vehicle in a parking lot below the thirty-foot rise. Metal stairs lead up from the lot to the High Line. Two EMTs are taking the stairs fast. An FDNY fire marshal is on the top of the rise, waving the medics up. He sees Tony first and draws his hand across his throat, like he’s slicing.
‘‘See that?’’ Tony says. ‘‘I’m calling it in.’’ He talks into his cell. ‘‘Yeah, looks like something. FDNY beat us to it. Better get someone from Crime Scene over before they fuck it up.’’
‘‘Hey, up there,’’ Mirabel yells. ‘‘Don’t mess up our crime scene.’’ Her voice is so loud they all turn.
On his cell, Tony says, ‘‘Gotcha, Sarge. Everyone stays till the detectives get here, and no one else goes up there.’’ He clicks off. ‘‘You heard?’’
‘‘Yeah.’’ Mirabel folds her arms across her chest.
Pigeon crap coats everything, including the staircase, which is fenced off at entry by a gate with a padlock. It wouldn’t be easy to get to the top of the rise without climbing over the fence, unless someone has a key to the padlock of the gate. The padlock hangs loose now, either broken by the perp or by the FDNY.
The EMTs come back down the stairs, hauling their kits. First, black woman, her curves almost, but not quite, hidden under the regulation uniform. Simone Norwood, Corporal, National Guard, served two tours in Iraq as a medic and could be called back any day now, which doesn’t make her happy, her being a single mother with two kids under ten and her own mother whining all the time about taking care of kids again at her age. Simone’s wire-rimmed glasses have slid down her nose on beads of sweat. She pushes them up and gives her gear to the probie Ryan Moore to load into the bus.