“Must be, and he’s also convinced I could read Battaglia because I knew him so well,” I said. “Surely I can sort out why he was coming to talk to me with such urgency.”
“In that case, you need to be thinking how to solve this 24/7, just like the man told you to do,” Mike said.
“What if Battaglia’s first calls to me were about Lily?” I asked. “Maybe when she responded to his invitation to come to the office, she told him I was there with her at the Met and told her to say no?”
“Would she have done that?”
“Who knows?” I said. “It would have made the old guy really mad if she did.”
“What now?”
“Weren’t we going back to the Bronx this afternoon? For that tour at the zoo?”
“The zoological park,” Mike said. “You still think there’s some link there to Battaglia’s death?”
“We’ve got nothing but our guts to go on,” I said. “And I had such a good time yesterday. So humor me, will you?”
“Every now and then you get a good hunch, kid. Mercer’s at the squad, having a quiet day,” Mike said, handing me his phone. “He’ll shoot across the bridge and meet us there if you give him a call.”
I reached Mercer as we got in the car and headed to the FDR to drive uptown and cross over into the Bronx. I called Deirdre Wright and asked if she could set us up with a guide in half an hour. The more exotic, the more endangered, the more valuable the animal—those were the ones we wanted to see.
“How’s your head?” Mike asked, keeping his eyes on the road.
“By the time I was finished this morning, I felt like it was going to split in half.”
“You made me a promise, Coop, just days before the murder,” he said. “You told me you were ready to start going to talk to Dr. Ricky.”
“I know I did.” I slinked down in the car seat and rested my head against the window. “I saw her twice, but I didn’t feel any better at the end of the session.”
When I was kidnapped, the chief of detectives made Mike sit down with a shrink—a brilliant psychiatrist whose job it was to get inside his brain to help the commissioner and the hostage negotiation squad try to assess how I might react to the stresses of my abduction. Mike kicked and screamed at the idea of it, but came away with boundless respect for Ricky Friedman and urged me to see her to try to deal with the flashbacks from my kidnapping.
“Twice?” Mike said. “You didn’t even give her the chance to get through your thick skull. She’s not about making you feel better. It’s not like an appointment at a day spa.”
“Dr. Ricky was pushing me too hard,” I said. “Too fast.”
“Do you want me to call her and see if she’ll squeeze you in?” he asked.
“I was almost ready to do that again myself,” I said.
This was a punishing position for me to be in: a witness to the assassination of a professional mentor and good friend of a dozen years, as well as a survivor of an abduction that had taken five days—and countless sleepless nights—out of my life. I was finding ways to cope with the latter—none of them good for me—but the former still registered as shattering.
“I feel a ‘but’ coming on,” Mike said.
“A big ‘but,’” I said. “James doesn’t want me getting what he calls brain-teased by a shrink. He doesn’t want my recollections—such as they are—to be tinkered with by analysis and psychobabble. He figures I’ll eventually be the centerpiece of a trial, and he wants my mind in pristine condition.”
“Then he should have put your head in a bubble when you were twelve years old,” Mike said. “You’ve seen as much bad shit as anyone I know.”
“He’s counting on that,” I said. “He wants to control me, and I get that. He’s giving me enough rope to either lead him and the task force in the right direction, or better still, to hang myself in the process.”
“I don’t give a damn what he wants,” Mike said. “I’m talking about what you need.”
I reached over and took Mike’s right hand off the steering wheel. “I’ve got that.”
“All the more reason you need a good shrink, kid,” he said, withdrawing his hand from mine.
Mercer was waiting for us in the parking lot when we reached the Bronx Zoo. He walked to the car and opened my door. “Good afternoon to you both. Who showed up today, James Prescott or his Skeeter alter ego?”
“Both were in the house,” I said, stepping out. “I am so grateful to Vickee—to the commissioner—for sending over the photographs, and to Mike for taking me to view all the tapes this morning. What’s happening at the SVU?”
“Low numbers, Alex. Crime stats continue to stay down,” he said. “One date rape after an office party at an ad firm, but the vic went right to Catherine. Skipped the 911 call completely. I’m cool to hang with you two unless she calls me in.”
“Good.”
“The whole team at One PP thinks Prescott’s got something in his mind that he’s not willing to let them in on,” Mercer said. “Some far-ranging international target that Battaglia must have tried to cross him up on.”
“Dancing in the dark,” Mike said. “DA gets assassinated and his archrival can’t bring himself to get in the sandbox and play nice with everyone else.”
“Vickee did have this, though,” Mercer said, reaching into his jacket pocket and coming out with a Xerox copy of an old newspaper clipping. “Seems this William Hornaday fellow—the taxidermist who was the zoo’s first director?”
“Yes,” I said, as we walked toward Astor Court on our way to the Development Office, “the guy Deirdre talked about yesterday.”
“He put Vickee’s great-grandmother out of business,” Mercer said, handing me the paper.
The 1916 New York Tribune didn’t have quite the headline writers that the Post can brag about, but it wasn’t bad for an old-time news desk: HARLEM HATTERY CLOSED BY HORNADAY.
I looked at it and laughed.
“Old granny Eaton had one of the first black-owned businesses in Harlem,” Mercer said. “We didn’t know her, of course, but we’ve heard plenty of stories about Leola’s Plumes.”
There was a picture of the handsome woman in front of her plume shop, wearing a grand hat with several long feathers pointing back from the brim over her shoulder.
Mike was trying to read along with me, but I was moving too fast. “What’d he do to her?”
“The style of the day, according to my wife,” Mercer said, “involved feathers on the fanciest hats. The bigger the better. Peacock, ostrich, birds of paradise. But this Hornaday dude wrote a clause into the Tariff Act of 1913 that forbade the importation of wild-bird plumage for millinery purposes. Border guards actually seized shipments of feathers, if you can believe it—especially from Australia and the South Seas islands, where these tropical birds flourished.”
“Poor Leola,” I said.
“Then the Audubon Society piled on,” Mercer said. “They argued that American boys would be shooting domestic birds to fill the gap. Ducks, geese, pheasants. You get the picture.”
“What happened to Leola?” I asked.
“She moved on to beaded gowns. Nobody to bust her bubble with beads.”