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Smithback's body gone… How could some jackass just walk into the morgue and steal a body? Maybe it wasn't so surprising — Nora had charged right in and nobody stopped her. There was only one night receiver, and people in that position seemed to have a history of sleeping on the job. But Nora had been chased, and ultimately caught, by security. And charging into a morgue was a lot different than leaving with a body.
Unless the body left on its own…
What the hell was he thinking? A dozen theories were swimming in his head. He'd been certain the Ville was involved somehow. But of course he couldn't dismiss that software developer, Kline, who had threatened Smithback so openly. As he'd told Rocker, certain pieces of his African sculpture had been identified by museum specialists as voodoo artifacts with particularly dark significance. Although that brought up the question of why Kline would want to kill Caitlyn Kidd. Had Kidd written about him, too? Or did something about her remind him of the journalist who had once destroyed his budding career? That was worth looking into.
And then, there was that other theory that Pendergast, despite all his dissembling, seemed to take seriously: that Smithback, like Fearing, had been raised from the dead.
"Son of a bitch," he muttered out loud, turning and walking out of the reception hall into the foyer. The cop guarding the front door signed him out, and he stepped into a chill, gray October dawn.
He glanced at his watch. Six forty — five. He was due to meet Pendergast downtown at nine. Leaving his squad car parked on Fifth, he walked down 53rd to Madison, stepped into a coffee shop, eased himself into a chair.
By the time the waitress arrived, he was already asleep.
Chapter 37
At ten after nine in the morning, D'Agosta gave up waiting for Pendergast and made his way from the lobby of City Hall to an anonymous office on a high floor of the building, which took him another ten minutes to find. At last he stood before the closed office door, reading its engraved plastic plaque:
MARTY WARTEK
DEPUTY ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR
NEW YORK CITY HOUSING AUTHORITY
BOROUGH OF MANHATTAN
He gave the door a double rap.
"Come in," came a thin voice.
D'Agosta entered. The office was surprisingly spacious and comfortable, with a sofa and two easy chairs on one side, a desk on the other, and an alcove containing an old bag of a secretary. A single window looked into the forest of towers that constituted Wall Street.
"Lieutenant D'Agosta?" asked the office's occupant, rising from behind his desk and indicating one of the easy chairs. D'Agosta took the sofa instead: it looked more comfortable.
The man came around the desk and settled himself in a chair. D'Agosta took him in quickly: small, slight, ill — fitting brown suit, razor — burned, tufts of thi
D'Agosta started to remove his shield, but Wartek quickly shook his head. "Not necessary. Anyone can see you're a detective."
"That so?" D'Agosta was somehow offended. He realized he was hoping to be offended.
Vi
A silence. "Coffee?" "Thank you. Regular."
"Susy, two regular coffees, please."
D'Agosta tried to organize his thinking. His mind was shot. "Mr. Wartek—"
"Please call me Marty." The guy was making an effort to be friendly, D'Agosta reminded himself. No need to be an asshole in return.
"Marty, I'm here to talk about the Ville. Up in Inwood. You know it?"
A cautious affirmative nod. "I've read the articles."
"I want to know how the hell it is these people can occupy city land and block off a public access road — and get away with it." D'Agosta hadn't meant to be so blunt, but it just came out that way. He was too damn tired to care.
"Well, now." Wartek leaned forward. "You see, Lieutenant, there's a point of law called a 'proscriptive easement' or 'right of adverse possession' " — he indicated the quotation marks with nervous darts of his fingers—"which states that if a piece of land has been occupied and used in an 'open and notorious' ma
D'Agosta stared. What the man had said was just so much noise in his ear. "Sorry. I didn't follow you."
A sigh. "It seems the residents of the Ville have occupied that land since at least the Civil War. It was an abandoned church with numerous outbuildings, I believe, and they simply squatted there. There were a lot of squatters in New York City at the time. Central Park was full of them: little kitchen farms, pigpens, shacks, and so forth."
"They're not in Central Park now."
"True, true — the squatters were evicted from Central Park when it was designated a park. But the northern tip of Manhattan was always something of a no — man's — land. It's rocky and rugged, unsuited to farming or development. Inwood Hill Park wasn't created until the thirties. By that time, the residents of the Ville had acquired a right of adverse possession."
The man's insistent, lecture — hall tone of voice was starting to grate. "Look, I'm no lawyer. All I know is, they don't have title to the land and they've blocked a public way. I'm still waiting to hear how that's possible." D'Agosta folded his arms and sat back.
"Lieutenant, please. I am trying to explain this to you. They've been there for a hundred and fifty years. They have acquired rights."
"Rights to block a city street?"
"Perhaps."
"So you mean, if I decide to barricade Fifth Avenue, it's okay? I have a right to do it?" "You'd be arrested. The city would object. The law of adverse possession would never apply."
"All right then, I break into your apartment while you're away, live there rent free for twenty years, and then it's mine?"
The coffees arrived, milky and lukewarm. D'Agosta drank half his down. Wartek sipped his with poked — out lips.
"In point of fact," he continued, "it would be yours, if your occupation of the apartment were open and notorious and if I never gave you permission to be there. You would eventually acquire a right of adverse possession, because—"
"What the hell — are we Communist Russia, or what?"
"Lieutenant, I didn't write the law but I have to say it's a perfectly reasonable one. It's to protect you if you, say, accidentally build a septic system that encroaches on a neighbor's land and that neighbor doesn't notice or complain for twenty years — do you think you should have to take it away if he notices it then?"
"An entire village in Manhattan is not a septic system."
Wartek's voice had climbed a notch as he became excited, a rashy splotch spreading over his neck. "Septic system or entire village, it's the same principle! If the owner doesn't object or notice, and you are using the property openly, then youdo acquire certain rights. It's as if you abandoned the property, not so different from the marine law of salvage."
"So you're telling me the city never objected to this Ville?"
A silence. "Well, I don't know."
"Yeah, well maybe the city did object. Maybe there are letters on file. I'll bet—"