Liberty Falling Page 27

  Anna eavesdropped until it became obvious that Patsy wasn’t going to be any fun for an hour or more. With a waggle of her fingers to show there were no hard feelings, she left to amuse herself elsewhere.

  Without a conscious choice being made, Anna’s feet carried her to the tangled garden where Corinne had lain for so long. On the steps, tucked under the living shade of forty years’ unchecked growth, the only movement a stirring of leaves, light muted, sun fragments sparkling through the canopy, there was a sense of isolation, if not solitude.

  Like the other gardens, the Commissioner’s was small, enclosed. One could enter only by descending the steps where Anna sat. Before, this garden had struck her as intimate. Today it was claustrophobic, dangerous: nature caged, a green tiger waiting, angry, resenting its captors.

  Ambient fear, the raw pure kind that fuels panic, began building behind Anna’s sternum. The tips of her fingers went numb and her scalp tingled. Years had passed since she’d suffered an anxiety attack—another legacy of her husband’s death. Breathing deeply and evenly, she rode it out as she’d learned to do, mind and body lifted on a cresting wave of nameless terror. The wave broke in a gush of cold sweat, and panic faded, leaving her weak and very alone.

  To occupy her mind, she listed options: She could go to Liberty, to Patsy’s house. She could return to Manhattan. Both choices brought back the tingle of rising fear and she decided to stay where she was.

  For a minute or two she stared at the fading impressions heavy round things had made in the leaf litter at the bottom of the stairs. Nothing new revealed itself. Undergrowth had been slashed and trampled during the rescue effort, a rude path cleared to where Corinne had lain. Enjoying, in a perverse way, the scratching of twigs against her bare legs, Anna pushed through. External pain distracted her from the claws of the inner demons.

  By the light of day she could see the creeping tendrils of poison ivy and stopped to examine her hands and arms. No blisters. It had been over twenty-four hours. For once she’d gotten out of a physical scrape scot-free. Her lucky star must have been on the rise.

  The ground was clear where they’d put down the backboard and packaged the actress. Anna picked what looked like a spider-free, ivy-free zone and sat down tailor-fashion. Cloying heat settled around her. Silence was just one more memory of Colorado. Sultry air thickened with the hoot of ferries, the growl of motors, the fetid breath of seven million scurrying souls.

  Anna was in a foul and edgy mood.

  She sat. She waited. She relaxed her body. She eased her mind. Oppression did not lift. Dark thoughts bubbled below the surface of forced calm. Leaf by leaf she began sifting through the debris, looking for anything Joshua might have missed. Looking for a clue, a project that would occupy her till Molly was well enough that Anna could go home to Mesa Verde and breathe.

  The garden was rich in artifacts: half a wooden button, pop-tops from the days before aluminum drink cans were changed, a marble—a green cat’s-eye. Anna pocketed that, not for professional reasons but because she liked it. A safety pin, shiny and new.

  On all fours to facilitate her grubbing, Anna didn’t touch it. Unlike the other oddments, the safety pin was recently brought into the garden. Not a smidgen of rust or dirt dulled its surface. Nose near the ground, she studied it. The closing end had a blue plastic cap, the big kind people used to use to fasten babies’ diapers before those Velcro-like tabs and the incredible waste of disposables were invented. Judging by the color, it could have been used to fasten Corinne’s nightgown. Near the pointed tip was a brownish discoloration. Blood, she guessed. The safety pin might have been the implement used to scrape the message into the actress’s arm. Anna retrieved a piece of notepaper from her pack, folded it into an envelope and, using sticks as tweezers, pinched up the pin and dropped it into the paper container. She didn’t know yet what she would do with it. Already she was guilty of disturbing evidence—if it turned out to be evidence. In New York she had no rights as a law enforcement officer. Training covered this situation explicitly: her duty was to report her findings to local authority, turn over anything she had, be available for interviewing should they deem it necessary, then butt out, be a private citizen.

  Anna slipped the envelope into the pocket of her shirt and then buttoned it.

  Boots scraping on concrete intruded into her thoughts. Billy Bonham stood in the door, blocking the exit.

  Not blocking, Anna corrected herself to stop the sudden rush of a panic that hadn’t been banished but merely held at bay. Just standing. Not blocking. Standing.

  “Hey, Billy.” She was pleased no quaver of fear tainted the words.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Not a very welcoming statement. “I’m crawling around,” she said, and sat back down as if laying claim to her right to exist in the world.

  “What did you put in your pocket?” This aggressive, confrontational Billy was not the same man who’d shared his tales of ghoulies and ghosties with her on the stern of the Liberty IV.

  “You’re sure grouchy,” she countered. “The heat getting to you?” Dodging his probe, she realized she wasn’t going to be a good little ranger. She was going to keep the safety pin and pursue it in her own way. Billy she didn’t trust to deliver it. She didn’t think the Park Police would treat it with the seriousness she felt it deserved.

  “I guess,” he replied, sounding more like his old self, and he sat on the top step. Anna was relieved at this relaxing of attitude. Still, she was uncomfortable having a brawny, well-armed boy squatting between her and freedom. The crack to Corinne’s skull had been vicious, delivered with the strength of rage. Maybe Billy had done it by mischance, mistaking her for a “haint.” Maybe he had nothing to do with the woman’s assault. And maybe he had an agenda Anna didn’t want to be a part of.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, hoping if he talked long enough she’d get a feel for his state of mind.

  Bonham blew a gust of air out through loose lips. Staring between his knees, he plucked a living shoot off an azalea and began methodically stripping the leaves. “It’s that thing with that actress. Everybody thinks I heard her calling for help and was too scared to come look. That’s a flat-out lie.” Without looking at Anna he said overloud: “I didn’t hear anything. Not a doggoned thing.”

  Up till then she was half inclined to believe him, but the remark smacked too much of a working denial: denying it to others, and most important, denying it to himself. Anna fervently hoped he’d leave the Park Service. Especially if Corinne died. The knowledge that he’d abandoned an injured woman to die because he was scared of the dark would unbalance him. Either he would push so hard to prove himself that he’d be a danger to everybody he worked with, or he would retreat into bitterness and self-justification. Either way, he was washed up as a good law enforcement officer.

  “What happened that night?” Regardless of the wisdom of unsettling a questionable cop blocking the one exit, she couldn’t resist pushing.

  “Nothing! I told them that,” he snapped. Anna nodded noncommittally and took up her own twig, stripped it and began tracing patterns on a small slate of earth cleared when the backboard was dragged across it. Billy had not turned and left when he first found her in the garden. Deep down he really wanted to talk or there was something he wanted to find out by getting her to talk. Anna would win any battle of silences. At twenty-two, it was a grievous burden to sit without doing, without speaking. At forty-four, it was a practice and a pleasure.

  “I was on my usual rounds,” Billy said after a short time.

  “Aha.” Anna made an interested noise to grease the wheels.

  “I go two or three times a night. You know—walk the perimeter. We don’t have to go into the buildings on Islands Two and Three,” he said defensively.

  That was true. They were too decrepit to be safe by night. “Safety regs,” Anna said helpfully.

  “Yeah. These places are death traps.”

  An overstatement,
but Anna let it pass.

  “There was nothing out of the ordinary that night. Nothing. If I’d heard something, you think I wouldn’t check it out? That’s crazy. I’d check it out.”

  “What’s ordinary?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” Billy was suddenly suspicious, his baby-blue eyes narrowing.

  “You said ‘nothing out of the ordinary.’ What’s ordinary for a night patrol of the island?”

  “Nothing.” He used the word again. “I mean nothing much happens. That’s why I wanted day shift—not enough action.” He laughed with a false bravado and Anna pitied him. Maybe over time the lies would come easier.

  “You get boats wanting to land at night. Kids on adventures mostly. This is my first summer, but I guess it happens a lot. I’ve scared a couple off a time or two. You know, come by and seen them just offshore like they’d been here. Once or twice somebody’s walked or ridden bikes over the bridge from Jersey there behind the registry building. I’ve chased a few of them off. That’s about it. It’s pretty boring. I mean it’s real boring. I would have welcomed something to break the monotony.” Again he laughed, same tone. Billy Bonham hadn’t been bored nights on Ellis, he’d been scared.

  “No ghostly stuff?” Anna prodded. “Music, odd sightings, strange sounds?”

  “No. I never said any of that. Oh, maybe I made a joke about it and now everybody makes it into this big deal.” Sullen, boyish; he’d dropped ten years before her eyes. His voice was petulant, his body posture changed. He looked and sounded like an unpleasant twelve-year-old.

  “You weren’t joking when you told me about it that morning on the boat,” Anna said.

  He took another twig and began pulling the leaves off.

  “Corinne was behind all that,” Anna said. “She was gas-lighting you. Trying to scare you, make you think the place was haunted. Or you were nuts.”

  Billy didn’t reply. Anna let the words lie. Half a minute ticked by, pushed along by the movement of the shadows.

  “Yeah. Well. Maybe it was Corinne and maybe it wasn’t,” he muttered at last. That’s easy to say. Everybody wants to believe it. Big joke on Bonham. Ha ha. Very funny. Like I wouldn’t know if some half-baked actress was screwing with my mind.”

  Anna was now sure of two things: Billy had heard Corinne’s cries and would never admit it, not even to himself; and he was not Corinne’s attacker. Billy wasn’t ashamed of something he’d done, but of something he’d left undone, a hollower and more cowardly crime.

  “Good talking to you,” she said, and levered herself up out of the dirt. “I’ve got to be going.”

  Billy didn’t say good-bye, just leaned to one side to let her pass.

  Vile as the prospect was, Anna was headed back to the Upper West Side. She had a couple more assignments for Frederick Stanton.

  She smiled to herself. If you want to marry into the Pigeon family, there are dues and responsibilities.

  22

  “ANNA, IT’S NOT that simple. I’m an FBI agent, not the President of the United States. I can’t just walk in with an unidentified safety pin and demand a fingerprint and DNA test run on it, no case number, no explanation, no nothin’. Besides, I doubt there’s enough matter on your pin to get a reading. Science is still science, it’s not yet magic.”

  “Do you still have the engagement ring?” Anna asked.

  Frederick’s face flashed three emotions in such rapidity that it looked as if he were morphing from Jekyll to Hyde. “Is that a threat?” he asked quietly.

  Anna thought about it. “No,” she admitted. Molly’s happiness was not something she would bargain with. “But it could have been.”

  “In that case, I’ll see what I can do.” Frederick accepted the envelope and tucked it in his purse, a brown canvas shoulder bag he carried despite the ribbing from his peers.

  “I’m in a hurry,” Anna said.

  “So, what else is new?”

  “It’s different this time. I feel ...” She stopped to discern what it was she felt. “Rushed. Clock ticking. Time of the essence. That sort of thing. I can’t tell you why.”

  “Ranger’s intuition?”

  “Maybe.”

  It was late. Visiting hours at Columbia-Presbyterian were over and even Frederick, with whatever special status he’d managed with the nurses, had been tossed out. In Molly’s big and beautiful apartment, with its spacious rooms and tasteful decor, Anna and Frederick were hunched over a cramped breakfast table squeezed into one end of what Anna had heard referred to in the South as a “one-butt kitchen.” In the 1920s designers of New York apartments must have counted on the residents sending out for Chinese a lot.

  Anna was tired the way only a day of being bombarded by people could make her; tired of bone and spirit, not of body. Thoughts troubled her and the anxiety she’d felt in Corinne’s garden threatened to return. Sleep was a ways away. In spite of the day with its crush of sweaty city bodies, she did not want to be alone.

  “What with one emergency and another, we’ve not really had a chance to talk,” she said, to prolong the evening.

  “What about? Us? There is no us.”

  Frederick was churlish. Anna had scared him. She took the hit with good grace. “Sorry I made that crack about the engagement ring,” she said. “I was out of line.”

  “Way out of line,” he said, but he softened and, in that moment, looked terribly old. Keeping a face of hope and good cheer for Molly was costing him.

  “Are you sleeping?” Anna asked on impulse.

  “That’s where you close your eyes and don’t think for a while?” He smiled wearily. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

  “There’s drugs. Molly—or David—could write you a prescription.”

  “You know me. I like to suffer.”

  They sat for a while, at peace with each other, sipping tea. Anna had purposely made hers weak. There were no foodstuffs in her sister’s kitchen that weren’t loaded with sugar, caffeine, cholesterol or fat. That, coupled with whiskey and cigarettes, constituted a true health professional’s menu.

  “Molly doesn’t take care of herself,” Anna said. “She takes care of everybody else.”

  “You.” Frederick had not yet totally forgiven her.

  “Among others.”

  Rani climbed Frederick’s bare leg and he squealed.

  “You scream like a girl,” Anna commented.

  “They’re the best screamers.”

  Rani jumped from his lap to the table, settled her furry tummy on the Formica between their teacups and began to purr.

  “We probably shouldn’t let the cat on the table in Molly’s house,” Anna said.

  “Probably not.” Neither of them made a move to disturb the kitten.

  “You say you don’t sleep nights?” Anna asked again.

  “Nope. But it’s good of you to ask.”

  “What I was thinking was, if you can’t sleep anyway you might as well check out the fingerprint—should we be so lucky as to get a good one—tonight.”

  Frederick looked at her, his face impassive. “You know, Anna, you have a heart as big as Texas.”

  “I’ve always suspected that about myself. Finish your tea and let’s go.”

  EMMETT WAS IN his precinct house on the East Side—not the posh yuppie Upper East but way up, Harlem. DNA tests were costly, time consuming, and required forms to be filled out, forms asking questions Anna didn’t have answers for, such as who authorized the lab work. From the frown that met them, it looked as if Frederick was pushing his luck asking for it. Adroitly, he passed the blame to Anna where it belonged.

  They moved on to fingerprints. Emmett relaxed. The print was easy. Every flunky cop and ranger was taught to lift prints. Most weren’t any good at it. Like any precision skill, lifting fingerprints off different surfaces was easily screwed up. Fingerprint evidence was notoriously fragile. Once bungled, the print was forever lost. Emmett was not a flunky cop. In his career he’d lifted hundreds of prints, but he impr
essed Anna by refusing to do it himself, insisting they give the task to a man who specialized in collecting trace evidence.

  Detective Mallow was working that night. There was a case pending, but as Emmett led them up worn and dingy stairs smelling of antique cigarette smoke, he told them Mallow was almost always at the precinct house. Detective Mallow had no life but police work. He wasn’t hiding from alcohol or failed marriages—things that plagued a lot of police officers—he was simply a man with one overweening interest.

  They found him behind piles of folders at his desk in the corner of a room housing four desks, all neater than Mallow’s. Clamped over his left eye was a jeweler’s lens. A gooseneck lamp spotlighted the area between the file folders.

  “Don’t breathe,” he said out of the side of his mouth when he heard them approaching. They stopped at a safe distance while he meticulously covered what looked like dandelion fluff. Pushing the lens up on his forehead, he leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in a neat steeple. He was slight and old, wrinkled of skin and clothes, with eyes that bespoke a formidable intelligence. “Now, what can I do for you, Emmett?”

  Emmett told him what Anna wanted and they waited while the detective digested the information. “Mmhmm,” he said finally. “Checking out a theory before going public with it. Never a bad idea.” He stood and Anna handed him the envelope. He held it aloft, pinched between two fingers more bone than flesh. “However,” he said in his deliberate way, “this could put you in a quandary. Should it turn out to be nothing, all you’ve wasted is time. If it turns out to be something, you are then in the uncomfortable position of having to admit you went through unauthorized channels or having to withhold evidence. I, on the other hand, am merely an innocent soul, handed an item to process yet knowing nothing of its origins.” His eyes twinkled. “There will be, in either case, no flies on me.”

  They followed him to a windowless room at the back of the fourth floor of the building. Unlike Mallow’s desk and most of the precinct house, this room was spotlessly clean, well organized and well lighted. Since Mallow unlocked the room before entering, Anna got the impression it was his special domain.