Read Online Likely to Die by Linda Fairstein - Free Book Online

1956 and endowed by the heirs of Peter Minuit, director general of New Netherlands and the man who stole Manhattan from the Indians for twenty-four bucks.” Chapman started drawing arrows from the main building to the sketch of the modern tower that housed the medical school.
     “A masterpiece of modern architecture, Chief, and not only is it connected to Mid-Manhattan by a number of hallways and elevators on every floor but also, unbeknownst to me before today, by the series of underground tunnels built in the days when your cronies thought that bomb shelters would save us all in a nuclear disaster. The medical school is a child of the fifties—it was supposed to be a central headquarters in case of an atomic bomb blast in the city—and there’s underpasses and mole holes that could probably stretch to China if you laid ‘em end to end.”
     “What’s in them?” Peterson queried Mike.
     “Wrong, Loo.Who’s in them, not what. You see those skels out in the pens in the squad room? Those tunnels and rattraps are lived in by hundreds of homeless people. We walked through there this morning—you got sad old men just curled up along the wall asleep, you got junkies with crack vials littered all over the place, you got a girls’ dorm with bag ladies who are dressed like they used to be Rockettes sitting around talking to themselves. In one stretch of roadway, I saw three guys I locked up in ‘94 during a drug sweep and I think the old fat man wearing a silver lamé jumpsuit who was urinating in a corner when we walked by might actually have been Elvis—I’m not sure.”
     “Chapman,” the Chief asked, “any sign they get up into the hospital buildings?”
     “Every sign. Half of them are dressed in doctor’s scrubs or lab coats—obviously stolen from the floors. They’ve got trays with remains of patient’s meals and empty bottles of prescription pills. They use bedpans for pillows and rubber gloves for warmth. I wasn’t kidding, you open your eyes at night, in that private room your insurance company is dishing out a thousand dollars for, and you gotta see most of these creatures roaming around the hallways. It would either cure you or kill you, no question about it.”
     Mike flipped the chart to the next sheet, bringing his marker from the top corner to the middle of the page.
     “And don’t forget the third piece of this puzzle, guys. We haven’t yet mentioned the friendly folks at Stuyvesant Psychiatric Center, located just to the south of Mid-Manhattan and, of course, you guessed it—linked to both other buildings on every level above ground and below.”
     Wallace whispered to me again, trying to suppress a smile. “He’s about to do Nicholson now—he’s going into theCuckoo’s Nest mode. McGraw’ll go bat-shit.”
     Mike was off and running with his next imitation, leading us on his morning tour through all nine hundred and forty-six beds in the psych hospital. He described the patients and their varying degrees of confinement, from the locked wards that held the prisoners declared incompetent while awaiting trial, through the straitjacketed screamers, to the quiet malingerers and psychotic lifers who, by virtue of their familiarity and long-term residence, had more freedom to walk around most of the day.
     Peterson tried to make him be serious again. “Don’t tell me these patients aren’t supervised?”
     “The most severely ill certainly are, but there are some regulars who seem to have the run of the place.”
     “Meaning in and out of the building, into the rest of the Center?”
     “Nothing to stop them, Loo. Just put on their slippers and shuffle off down the hall.”
     “Past the square badges?”
     “Loo, I’m telling you, if one of them walked up to the security guards I talked to today and said, ‘Hi, my name is Jeffrey Dahmer and I’m hungry,’ these morons would give him a pass and direct him to the adolescent clinic.”
     McGraw was incredulous.