Seven forty Park Avenue was an eighteen-story limestone-sheathed cooperative apartment building at the corner of East Seventy-first Street in uptown Manhattan. It was designed by Rosario Candela, the renowned New York architect, and completed in 1930. Over the years its apartments, thirty-one, thirty-three or thirty-five of them, depending on who you asked, had been occupied by a continuous cavalcade of the wealthy, the powerful, the famous and the infamous.
For seventy-five years it had been New York’s richest apartment building and one of the three or four most prestigious addresses in the world. Rockefellers had lived there, as had Vanderbilts, Chryslers, Schermerhorns, Bronfmans and Steinbergs. Jackie Kennedy grew up there, and Doris Duke sometimes entertained there.
The Explorers Club was a block or so away, the Frick even closer, and as the real estate brokers liked to say, it was close to some of the best churches and schools in New York, including Hunter College and Temple Emanu-El. Dolce & Gabbana as well as Versace and Giorgio Armani were just around the corner, and Sette Mezzo delivered if the right person asked.
Other than the Dakota, it was the only apartment building in New York to have its biography written. Officially there had never been a murder at 740 Park Avenue, although there had been several discreetly sanitized suicides and a number of robberies, almost inevitably inside jobs committed by disgruntled staff.
Henry Todd Lincoln, direct descendant of President Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, self-described as the next mayor of New York, lived in 17C, one of the building’s lavish two-story penthouses. By 740 Park standards, the apartment was quite modest, comprising only four thousand square feet, with nine rooms, not including two maid’s rooms, a pantry, the kitchen and two large terraces. The apartment had astounding views west to Central Park and across the Hudson to New Jersey, north up Park Avenue and south to take in all of midtown.
After passing through the efficient hands and pointed questions of a doorman, a concierge and a plainclothes security officer in the lobby meant to make you think of a presidential Secret Service agent, Carrie, Max and Diddy were allowed into one of the building’s ornate key-operated elevators and sent up to the seventeenth-floor penthouse.
The elevator arrived, the doors slithered open and they stepped out into a small vestibule done in marble checkerboard squares that in turn led to more marble and an enormous gallery stretching for thirty or forty feet, lit by chandeliers. The walls were hung with enormous mirrors in gilded frames, and the floor was covered with a pair of gigantic Persian carpets in rich deep pinks and greens depicting the classic tree-of-life pattern.
Standing directly in front of them was a very large man with a buzz cut and a face that looked as though it had been made of lightly tanned boot leather. He was wearing a dark suit and gigantic, highly polished black shoes, and he had a flesh-colored curly wire behind his right ear.
Max smiled. “I know you,” he said. “Seibert, right? Brooklyn South, the Six-Six. Used to work Vice with Conklin.”
The tanned boot leather didn’t even twitch. “Follow me,” the man said. He turned on one enormous heel and headed down the hall. He turned right into what was probably called the Library since there were a number of high, arch-topped bookcases recessed into the walls between the windows.
There were oil paintings in niches, each one with its own little light. Landscapes of places that never existed, portraits of horses that had never raced and dogs that had never hunted. The furniture looked mostly French and uncomfortable. The lamps on the side tables were original Tiffany, and a huge chandelier hung from the ceiling. A muted blaze burned in the marble-manteled hearth of the fireplace at the end of the room. The whole thing was straight out of the pages of Architectural Digest. There wasn’t a thing in the apartment that divulged anything about the man who owned it.
There were two people in the room: Ryan Trusell, Henry Todd Lincoln’s campaign manager, and Lincoln himself. Both were dressed in dark, chalk-striped suits and identical Harvard striped rep ties in dark red. Lincoln, tall, square shouldered and with his trademark thatch of JFK look-alike dark blond hair, stood with his arm on the mantel of the fireplace with a drink in his hand. Trusell was sitting on one of the plush couches with his knees drawn together writing something with a Montblanc fountain pen in a leather-covered portfolio.
“The three musketeers,” said Trusell sourly as they stepped into the room. Lincoln gave an almost imperceptible nod and the heavyset bodyguard shimmered away.
“Detective Slattery and Miss Norton, I presume. The young gentleman in the horn-rims I am not so sure of.”
“His name is Kling,” said Max. “And he’s a cop, just like I am. And it’s Dr. Norton.”
“My mistake, Doctor,” said Lincoln, turning to Carrie. “No offense intended.”
“None taken.”
“Let’s get down to it,” said Trusell. “We understand you’ve destroyed some expensive LinCorp property.”
“You understand correctly,” said Max. “Illegal wiretap equipment, among other things.”
“There’s nothing illegal about tapping your own telephones,” said Lincoln calmly.
“Surveillance cameras as well?”
“Security,” said Lincoln. “As were the programs installed on the computers. All perfectly legal and aboveboard, I assure you. My three years at Harvard Law weren’t entirely wasted.”
“Nor mine,” piped up Trusell.
“Frat buddies, huh? That’s nice,” said Slattery.
“Alpha Psi Upsilon, as a matter of fact,” said Lincoln. “Since 1850.”
“Before the Civil War, then,” murmured Carrie.
“We’re not going to get into this again, are we?” Trusell asked.
“The body we found at the Minetta site was that of a man in Civil War uniform. He’d been murdered,” said Carrie. “There have been a number of recent murders that bear a remarkable resemblance to that of the murdered man at the Minetta site. Not only that, the present-day murders seem to have some direct relation to you, or at least your organization, by the fact that each of the modern victims was known to have ingested a gold-foil-wrapped coin—a replica of an 1863 double eagle—which your campaign manager had made for one of your fund-raisers.”
“We’ve already been through all of this.”
Max spoke up. “Not quite all. Tell them what you found out today, Officer Kling.”
Diddy brought out his notebook and consulted it. “William Henry Nichols, James Costello, Abe Franklin…Those names mean anything to either of you?” Diddy asked.
Lincoln shook his head. “Not to me. Ryan?”
“Never heard of them.”
“How about August Stewart, Peter Heuston, Jeremiah Robinson, William Jones or Joseph Reed?”
“Never heard of them either,” said Lincoln.
“What’s this all about?” Trusell asked, irritated.
Diddy continued. “Joseph Reed was seven years old. He was beaten to death with cobblestones torn up from the street. William Jones, who’d been on his way home after buying a loaf of bread, was trussed up hands and feet, hung from a lamppost and literally roasted to death by a bonfire under him.”
“This is all senseless,” said Trusell. “What does this have to do with anything?”
“Joseph Reed, the little boy, and William Jones were murdered during the New York Draft Riots of 1863, along with all the others that were mentioned, and more. All of them were black.”
“Your point being?” Lincoln asked.
“The point being that the murders committed in the last few months with your chocolate coins in their bodies were all black too. Not only that, the bodies were discovered in exactly the same places as the killings in 1863—exactly,” said Slattery. “On July fourteenth, 1863, James Costello, a shoemaker, was murdered in his home at 97 West Thirty-third Street. On March fourteenth of this year a black man named Ben Eliot, a waiter at Stout’s Raw Bar, was found dead in the alley behind 97 West Thirty-third Street.”
“A coincidence,” scoffed Trusell. He slammed the portfolio on his lap closed and capped the fountain pen.
“Of the twelve recorded murders filed by the New York Metropolitan Police during the Draft Riots, nine so far have been perfectly duplicated since you threw your party with the replica gold coins,” said Slattery. “Now you seem extremely interested in a hundred-and-fifty-year-old murder on one of your properties. I’d like to know why.”
“Don’t say anything,” said Trusell urgently. “As your attorney I would advise you—”
“Shut up, Ryan,” said Lincoln. He put his empty glass down on the mantel. “I’d be happy to answer the detective’s question. Two words. Politics and money.”
“Explain,” said Max.
“Certainly,” said Lincoln. “First, money. I agreed to the archaeological survey—paid for it—because I had to. It’s the law and as you well know I’m a firm upholder of the law in this city. The fact that the site in question was a fetid, polluted slum a hundred and fifty years ago and could have no real historical significance to anyone but a few academics like Dr. Norton is irrelevant; the law is the law. At some point, however, the line must be drawn.
“This is, fortunately, not an old cemetery like the Negro Burying Ground. The fact that one man was killed there is not a factor when it comes to progress. My interest in Dr. Norton’s…work is simply a matter of time.
“The longer I keep my people waiting to build that condominium, the more money it’s going to cost me.” He paused. “Then there is politics, specifically James Washington Stone, my so-called opponent in the mayoralty race. A man like Stone could easily take the situation at the Minetta site and turn it to his favor in exactly the same way as the same sort of people did in reference to the Negro Burying Ground.”
“African Burial Ground,” corrected Diddy mildly.
“The same sort of people?” Carrie asked.
“People with their own anarchistic agendas,” answered Lincoln. “People who wish to interfere with the progress of this great city for their own shortsighted, short-term, and self-serving and self-aggrandizing reasons.”
“I always thought it was to commemorate the deaths of a number of black men burned at the stake by the British for being traitors to the king of England,” commented Diddy quietly. “I would have thought that would have made them American heroes.”
“The same could be said of the potter’s field in Washington Square Park,” snapped Lincoln angrily. “I don’t see anyone preserving that as a memorial.”
“Maybe that’s because nobody’s trying to put up a building on it.” Carrie smiled.
“Nevertheless,” said Lincoln, “if Stone got hold of the information about your so-called bog body, or worse still, this information about the murders you’re talking about, he could have a field day. That is the source of my interest in your activities.”
“So under motive we put that down as self-serving, then?” said Max.
Lincoln eyed the detective coldly. “You must be close to retirement age, am I right, Detective?”
“I’ve done my twenty-five.” Max smiled. “I could quit anytime now.”
“With or without your pension?” Lincoln said.
“Is that a threat?”
“Take it any way you like,” said Lincoln. “The chief is a good friend of mine.”
“He’s no friend of mine,” responded Slattery. “I know too many secrets that could bury him and his career better than a mob whack job in New Jersey.” Max turned to Carrie and Diddy. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this.” He turned away from Lincoln and Trusell without another glance. A moment later the three were back in the elevator and on their way back down to the street.
“Did you believe anything he said?” Carrie asked.
“I think he’s scared out of his wits,” said Max. “And I want to know why.”