Murder in Central Park Read online

  Michael Jahn’s New York City Mysteries: Murder in Central Park

  by Michael Jahn

  Copyright 2000 by Michael Jahn

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  Rockabye Captain, in the Treetops

  The clouds skittered like wary spectators past a full moon that glistened in the water and gave knife edges to the shadows of the weeping willows, ferns, and skunk cabbage that lined the isolated and largely abandoned pond not far from Central Park Lake. There was no wind on that midnight late in April when the bright lights of Central Park West, the nearest boulevard, were less than a memory and the sounds of the occasional ambulance rushing a survivor to an emergency room were as weak and faraway as the heartbeat of the victim.

  When Captain Bill Donovan, chief of special investigations for the City of New York, pushed open the passenger's side door of the forest-green Range Rover he stepped into a world few native New Yorkers and no visitors knew. His old white hightops broke through the wild blueberry underbrush and crushed the dried twigs that lay atop an inch or two of rotting leaves, left from the previous autumn, that formed the bed of this old forest that surrounded a small pond that existed, wild and largely unknown, amidst the Empire City.

  The trees were old-growth maples and oaks, with a solitary elm pushing the limits of its lifespan not far from the little-used dirt path that wound into the woods and finally became overgrown and impassable a hundred yards before the muddy bank of what the sole history book to remember it called Fiddler's Pond. That same book, published in a solitary edition in 1937 and currently falling apart in the archives of the New-York Historical Society, never mentioned the path. No one recalled who cleared it or when, and all that kept the path from being reclaimed by the forest was the sometimes passage of a scientist's vehicle.

  Gently opening the driver's side door and quietly closing it, Lauriat stage whispered across the top of the Range Rover, saying "Don't slam the door. You'll wake up the crows."

  Donovan whispered back, "okay," and did as he was told, pulling his well-traveled, old canvas L.L. Bean tote bag from the vehicle and inching with it to the front of the vehicle, squeezing between the fender and the brush, which scratched the back of his head and his old suede jacket.

  Lauriat did likewise. Then he pulled a small flashlight from his hunter's vest, from one of the loops that in another usage was given to shotgun shells, and shone it on the ground. Someone long ago had tried to pretty up the path by strewing it with broken oyster shells. They crunched vaguely beneath Donovan's feet, but not loudly enough, he was glad to note, to wake up the crows.

  Lauriat said, "The road ends here. We have to walk a hundred yards through the brush. But the workmen who put up the scaffolding cut a path. Follow me."

  Donovan did that, following not so much his friend and neighbor in the Federalist brick apartment building on Riverside Drive, but the sandwich-plate-sized patch of light just ahead of his logger's boots.

  Lauriat had exaggerated the success of the workmen in cutting a path. The track had been cut in winter and was subsequently overgrown, and new leaves licked Donovan's cheeks and supple, just-grown branches brushed his shoulders. Still, soon the patch of light shone on the floor of a dining-room sized clearing nestled at the feet of three mature oaks. Behind a gated and locked, green chain-link fence, was steel construction scaffolding—also painted green in an attempt at camouflage.

  "I forgot to ask if you're afraid of heights," the scientist said, grasping a shoulder-high rung of a metal ladder that went straight up, rising from the blueberry brush to parallel the scaffolding and the immense tree trunk and finally disappearing into the canopy of newly grown leaves. Lauriat aimed his beam up the ladder, as if it could reach to the treetops. Only the moon, serendipitously out from behind a cloud, allowed Donovan to detect that something was up there, the Crow’s Nest, Lauriat called it. All Donovan could see was a mass of some sort hidden in the leaves. Nearly impossible to make out at night if you weren't looking for it; difficult during the day, Donovan imagined. But he wondered how much the crows were fooled.

  "I actually am afraid of heights," he admitted. "But I'll be okay if I don't look down. Are you sure that your high-tech tree house is safe?"

  "Absolutely safe. This is construction-grade scaffolding, city certified."

  "And no inspectors were paid off?"

  "Not be me," Lauriat replied.

  "Well, that's reassuring," Donovan replied, thinking of the possible other culprits within the construction crew.

  Lauriat began up the ladder, holding the small flashlight, Tarzan-like, in his teeth.

  "What do the crows think of this?" Donovan called after him.

  "You'll hear them rustling around, but overall they're used to me," the scientist replied, his boots now above Donovan's head and receding into the dark, tiny chips of soil flaking off the soles and falling down the ladder.

  Donovan took a breath and followed, knowing that if he made the climb fast enough--and didn't look down--the height wouldn't bother him. He carried the Bean bag in one hand, hoisting it up, rung after rung, as he went.

  The sound of Lauriat's boots was reassuring as the two men climbed through the lower branches and into a dark realm thick with slumbering creatures. The full moon was gone; Donovan assumed because of the trees, but maybe it ducked back behind a cloud. Halfway up the ladder, he felt disconnected ... from earth and from sky ... nowhere. He could see nothing in any direction, and he tried them all, even down. All light was extinguished. He could see none, not the moon, nor the street lamps of Central Park West, nor the famous lights of Broadway (admittedly dimmed that night by a power outage that affected ten nearby blocks), or any of the lights of the Manhattan skyline, though he knew it rose famously around him on all sides, and even Lauriat's flashlight beam was lost in the black of the midnight canopy.

  "You're still with me?" Lauriat called down.

  Donovan responded with a grunt.

  "Almost there."

  Donovan heard Lauriat's boots stop climbing, then step onto a metal platform of some sort. Next came the sound of keys being plucked from a pocket and put into a lock. Then a door swung open, noisily compressing a mass of leaves invisible to the captain.

  "The crows ..." Lauriat began to say something, but his words were obscured by loud squawking ... not from a lot of birds, perhaps half a dozen ... but nearby and loud. The cries didn't sound frightened, either, Donovan thought; but Lauriat was the crow expert. More like irritated. Woken up. But just the closeness of those angry black beaks, each one big and sharp enough to pluck out a man's eye in the dark, startled Donovan.

  "Pipe down," Lauriat said, his voice part commanding, part reassuring. "It's just me. And a friend."

  The birds piped down, of a sorts. The cries of irritation gave way to a few parting caws of complaint, following by a rustling of wings. They were settling back down, Donovan sensed. He was reminded of how Marcy umphed and rolled from one side to the other after being awakened by a passing siren.

  "They listen to you," Donovan said.

  "I know it seems that way. But they really just know the sound of my voice and the time I get here every night. And that I've never been a threat to them. These crows are like that. If they know you, no problem. But if you’re a stranger, they raise the roof. You’r
e with me, so you’re okay."

  Lauriat stepped inside the hut and a light clicked on. It was from a small bulb, maybe 40 watts, set in a ceiling fixture. But it sent a rectangle of light out into the canopy. Leaves were everywhere, Donovan could see then. Previously engulfed by black, Donovan found himself engulfed by green. Oak leaves came to within a foot of his face. But he could spot no birds. Not one. Even though he knew they were there.

  “Where’d they go?” he asked.

  “Where’d who go?”

  Lauriat was inside the shack, switching things on.

  “The boids,” Donovan responded, affecting the accent frequently heard tripping from the lips of his associate at the NYPD, Sgt. Brian Moskowitz of the Canarsie section of Brooklyn.

  “The boids are there, even though you can’t see them. Be careful. Don’t stick your hands in those leaves. Crows can be nasty … protective of their nests and young.”

  Donovan heard those words just as he was about to push away a branch that was rubbing against his neck. He let it stay there.

  “Come on up,” Lauriat said.

  The scientist knelt and reached down a hand to take Donovan’s bag, which he handed over. Then the captain took a final, wary look at the deceptively peaceful green around him before climbing up the final rungs of the ladder and letting Lauriat give him a hands up into the hut.

  “Welcome to the Crow’s Nest,” Lauriat said as Donovan got to his feet and saw what looked like a small studio apartment. It was perfectly rectangular, with an unfinished wooden floor and fake-wood paneling, the thin metal kind, broken on all four sides by medium sized windows. The room was furnished, in a sense. One entire wall was taken up by an equipment bench that was loaded with technical gewgaws—two laptop computers, audio and video recording decks, several cameras of varying types, a small TV, a radio, and an ominous looking black box that may have been a power supply. Another all held an armchair battered enough to have been scavenged during the Tuesday night sweeps, the weekly West Side ritual wherein the young and lesser fortunate competed for those bearable bits of furniture put out on collection night by the older and quite successful. Donovan still owned several pieces—a freestanding brass ashtray, a wrought iron umbrella stand, and a marble-topped end table—found on Tuesday nights in front of the wealthy apartment buildings along Central Park West and the main cross-town boulevards. The armchair’s brocade was warn through in half a dozen spots and bore cat scratches along both sides. Next to it, an orange crate, set on one end, served as a table. In addition to those pieces, a water cooler sat next to a small refrigerator. Against another wall was a folding Army cot and a small white bookcase of the cheap, build-it-yourself Swedish type sold by Ikea.

  The wall was decorated, of a sorts, with photographs of crows—dozens of crows—each labeled with a number and some with names. Donovan noticed that, in naming his birds, Lauriat favored the classics—Heckel, Jeckyl, Edgar, Allen, Poe and an especially old and grizzly bird that had a look of pure evil in its one eye—the other had been put out; Donovan made a mental note to ask why. That ghastly black apparition was named Nevermore; his photo was central to all the others, a kind of hub, which showed that he mattered.

  “This guy looks like the straw boss,” Donovan said, pointing at Nevermore.

  Lauriat snickered. “He’s a tough one, all right, smart as a fox and mean, too. Lost his left eye in a fight with a peregrine falcon that came too close to the rookery.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Donovan said, “Crows will fight with hawks?”

  “You bet. I watched as five crows chased a peregrine falcon down 47th street and finally cornered him behind a store marquee sign and damn near ripped him apart, diving and pecking at him, until he was rescued by the Humane Society.”

  “What happened to the falcon?” Donovan asked.

  “They took him up to Duchess County and let him go out on a hilltop. I tell you, Bill, New York is a rough town.”

  “The crows here carry semi-automatics,” Donovan said as he put his Bean bag down by one end of the cot. Then he sat on the cot, patted its olive-drab surface, and said, “I get the cot, by reason of age, rank, and the fact that, within the memory of my spinal column, I spend the last six weeks of Marcy’s pregnancy sleeping in a chair in her hospital room.”

  “I figured the cot for you,” Lauriat said. “Working in the Rain Forest I got used to a sleeping bag on the ground. Here, I put my bag on top of an inflatable mattress.”

  Donovan looked around, and Lauriat directed his attention to a pile of clothes, blankets and other apparent debris that the captain now could see included an inflatable mattress.

  As the scientist deployed the latter and then fussed with one of the cameras, Donovan sat on the cot and unpacked. He changed from his jeans and sneakers into sweat pants and socks, and hung his old and tattered black sweater on a nail. He pulled on a huge and loose polo shirt, one comfortably worn and good for sleeping, and, finally, commandeered a patch of benchtop for the cell phone and laptop that connected him to his family at home and his computer at the office.

  He heard the sound of bottles being opened. Lauriat came over bearing two bottles of beer—a Harp for himself and a nonalcoholic Kaliber for Donovan. The latter was the treat that the captain allowed himself after giving up drinking and changing his life around 10 years earlier.

  “It seems vaguely masochistic to drink beer in a tree house,” Donovan said, nodding in the direction of what looked to him like a low-capacity portable potty.

  “You’d think that,” Lauriat responded. “But this is an isolated area and the downstairs neighbors—tree roots—like to be sprinkled with nitrogen.”

  He walked over to where a rag was draped over an accommodation that the captain hadn’t noticed—a funnel stuck into a length of black rubber hose that disappeared through a hole in the wall.

  “I used to know a guy who had one of those in his tool shed,” Donovan said. “All the guys thought he was pretty neat. Had it together, you know? Then one night he went around giving away his tools …”

  “Uh oh.”

  “… then sat down and ate a shotgun shell.”

  Lauriat shrugged. “In my case, it indicates only practicality. And I don’t get that many women guests.”

  “This isn’t exactly the ideal ‘come up and see me sometime’ situation,” Donovan said.

  “In fact, I don’t get guests at all. You’re the first.”

  “I needed to get out of the house and into the fresh air,” Donovan said. “We had the pregnancy from hell. Marcy had every complication on the left side of the menu. Then came five months of crying and diaper changing.”

  “Too much parenthood isn’t always a good thing,” Lauriat said.

  Donovan didn’t agree, but left the subject alone. “And I came up here because I’m interested in your research.”

  Lauriat smiled. “I find it heard to believe that a New York City police detective, even one of your eminence, would find much of interest in canopy research.”

  “Why not? You study life in the treetops. I study life on the fire escapes. Explain to me the difference.”

  Lauriat nodded. “Not much, when you put it that way.”

  “So why crows?” Donovan asked.

  “You mean, why do I study crows?”

  “Because they’re smart?”

  “I study them because they study back,” Lauriat said, bobbing his head up and down. “They’re the smartest birds. I watch them. They watch me. They want to know why I’m here. I mean, they seem to be convinced that I’m harmless … no threat to them, anyway … and they’re curious. Crows are among the few bird species that use tools. Did you know that?”

  Donovan knew. “Twigs, you mean.”

  “There’s a tropical species, corvus moneduloides, which lives in the South Pacific, in New Caledonia,” Lauriat said. “The researcher who reported on them calls them the most intelligent nonhuman animal species. His crows make three types of tools … sta
ndardized, too, which is amazing for a bird … including hooks. They use them to pry insects out of holes.”

  “Your crows don’t do that?”

  “Not that I’ve seen … yet. I can tell you this, though. My guys can get a garbage can open faster than any animal except a raccoon.”

  “Possibly including some winos,” Donovan said.

  “They also play.”

  “Play as in games?”

  “Yeah. They play tug-of-war, for example. Two crows will play with a stick that way. And they do things that are just weird.”

  “Such as?” Donovan asked.

  “Well, now you cut to the reason why I’m here, stuck in a tree six or seven nights a week for the better part of a year.” Lauriat sat down on the mattress and, cross legged, began to pull off his boots. “I haven’t observed toolmaking behavior among my crows, but I think they’re doing it. And here’s why. A crow … Nevermore is a good example … will fly up carrying a stick, leave it atop a pole or wedged in the fork of a tree, fly off, then come back for it an hour or a day later to get it.”

  “Why, do you think?”

  “When a New Caledonia crow makes a tool, he often will leave it in a secure spot and come back for it when he needs it,” Lauriat said.

  “And you think that’s what Nevermore is doing,” Donovan said.

  “Yeah, I think the old cutthroat has made himself a fine tool …”

  “Maybe a crowbar,” Donovan said.

  “For digging worms out of the ground,” Lauriat said with a smile. “Or for picking a pocket, or plucking the marrow from the bones of a dead animal. Who the hell knows what these very clever birds will do.”

  “And he’s sticking it places for safekeeping.”

  “Not that he needs to. No one would steal from Nevermore. I’ll point him out to you tomorrow.”

  Lauriat stripped down to his shorts and a tee shirt, then relaxed to regale the captain with an hour’s worth of bird stories, not wilderness adventures so much as tales of grants fought for and research topics accepted or rejected. At one in the morning Donovan was beginning to nod off; noticing such, Lauriat pulled his pants and boots back on and opened the door. So doing roused the captain from his twilight sleep.