Chapter One

Nobody wanted to go for a bike ride.

Too hot, too much traffic, what if you got a flat tire? I explained to each one I called that there is a bike path that goes all the way up the west side of Manhattan between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River. There are no places where you have to cross a street once you get on the path. It’s paved and there are lots of people skating, running and biking on it all day every day, even when you’d assume most people would be at work. It’s that kind of city. You don’t have to worry about being by yourself and running into thugs.

Still, nobody would go with me. I really had my mind set on exploring that afternoon with a buddy. My trusty roommate, Carl, was, not unusually, out of town, up in Montreal. Finally, I tried Gabriele Cortese, whom I had met as part of a murder investigation that I was partly involved in solving with my friend Mike di Saronno, a detective in the Midtown West Police Precinct. Gabriele was originally a suspect, but he had nothing to do with the crime. He was totally innocent.

Gabriele lives all the way in Brooklyn Heights, and I had no real hope he would be willing to schlep into town and then ride all the way up to Fort Washington Park, which was what I wanted to do. I had never seen the little red lighthouse that sits under the George Washington Bridge. Very few people have seen it, comparatively speaking, because you have to wander out under the bridge to see it. There are no vantage points in Manhattan where it is visible. One of those hidden treasures of New York—and there are a lot of those.

“Ciao, Ugo,” he said when he picked the phone up, clearly with a caller ID.

I told him what my idea was, and he said yes right away, without even thinking about it. Woo hoo! He said he was going to take the subway to Times Square, which is where I lived, because his bike folds up so he can carry it on the train. So there was no chance he would fink out after riding all the way from Brooklyn Heights. Perfect.

He’s from the Isle of Capri and speaks English with a slight Italian lilt most of the time, but with pronounced “foreigner” grammar when the mood comes upon him, so to speak. He’s startlingly handsome, and I have learned to be amused by the looks on faces and the craned necks when he walks into a room. He had also been a sex worker at one point.

Yes, the truth is that like most people, I find him handsome. We actually met because, although we were not exactly neighbors, I thought we were neighbors because, well, the area where I lived, which is the theater district in New York, is thick with sex workers. Even someone who looked like a movie star, as Gabriele does, would have fewer takers where he lives in Brooklyn Heights than where he used to hang out around Times Square, which is choked with hotels, bars and horny travelers. These days he is the respectable host of a white-tablecloth restaurant near Gramercy Park that he and his cousin, Dante, own together. Dante is the chef; Gabriele is the matinee idol. The food is to die for.

No, we aren’t involved, and I don’t see how that could ever change. When I first met him, I thought he was trying to kill me. Fortunately, I was mistaken. Maybe that’s why we are close friends; we’d been to the mat together, so to speak. There’s just too much clutter in our lives to toss it all aside and try to change everything in one swell foop. It’s worth pointing out that I’m twenty years older than he is, which makes him young and me middle-aged. Okay, later middle-aged. Ok, senior. Besides, I have kids, even though I seldom see them because they live on the other side of the country, in La-La-Land. You know that old New Yorker cover that shows a New Yorker’s view looking west? Well, way at the far side, before Japan. Nuff said.

I am very fortunate because I started a consulting company about twenty years ago and was able to work there and increase the value of it, and then to sell it to a bigger company in the same business for an ongoing percentage of the profits. I have some duties there, but mostly I am on my own, with enough income to pay my bills and a decent-sized—not princely—net worth.

And just to be clear, if I were going to throw everything over for someone, it would be Ruth. Luckily for me, she’s happily married—so we are happily “friended” rather than anything else. She suspects that I’m gay even though she knows I would do her in a heartbeat. (Women like knowing that, especially when they think the stud is gay.) Forget that, not in a heartbeat. I don’t want her husband, Murray, coming after me with a cleaver—ugh! Ruth and I have known each other for decades, when she was working for a hedge fund manager who made a run for the mayoralty of New York (and lost). Before she married Murray, we used to go to the theater together, or dinner sometimes, but we never so much as kissed romantically. It’s still more or less the same—I am her regular “date” because Murray does not like opera, concerts, musicals or Shakespeare—and apparently, he can snore pretty loud even in a sitting-up position. I like Murray; we’re friends.

So, there we were, starting out from my place at 48th Street and 8th Avenue at about one o’clock, heading for the GW Bridge on bicycles. It was Sunday and it was September, and it was still drippy summer humid, so we took bottled water in the saddlebags. Dehydration is not part of my plan for myself. It being hot, the population on the bike trail was not as heavy as it would be in better weather. On weekends in hot weather, by the way, the great and the good are not in town—they’re still out east (in the Hamptons), or down the shore (the beachfront towns in New Jersey), or maybe at some lake upstate if they can’t afford either of the first two places. Still, there were rollerbladers, runners, sweaty walkers, and helmeted bikers like Gabriele and me. We dismounted at the Boat Basin at 79th Street and polished off a full bottle of Poland Spring water each then refilled the bottles from a water fountain next to the restaurant there. Then we were back at it, pedaling and staring at the people on parade.

Gabriele wanted to stop at Riverbank State Park, which is a place that could only happen in New York. It’s a real park, like thirty acres of real park, built on top of, literally on top of, a sewage treatment plant. No, it doesn’t smell bad. The bridge was looming in front of us, but I still couldn’t see the little red lighthouse. There is actually a kids’ book called The Little Red Lighthouse. I saw one in a used bookstore one time and actually that is what caused me to look it up in Wikipedia and decide it was being added to my bucket list. There is actually a Little Red Lighthouse swim every year, but the thought of submerging myself in the Hudson River with God knows what kind of vermin or ancient industrial toxins is far too grim to consider.

I kept thinking we would see the lighthouse, but it is really obscured by the trees, and as you get closer, it is hidden on the river side of the huge aluminum-colored erector-set pylons that hold the bridge up. Originally, the bridge was to have looked more like the Brooklyn Bridge, with the metal skeleton covered by stone or cement. They never got around to doing the all-clad chiseled stone exterior during the Depression because it was too expensive. But the distinctive girders filled with x-shaped struts have been admired over the decades by artists and architects almost universally. One famous French architect said it was the most beautiful bridge in the world, and that was while he was designing the General Assembly building at the United Nations. Finally, there was a branch of the bike path to the left and the little red lighthouse was there in front of us, where the main path continued on north.

We walked up the cast-iron staircase inside the lighthouse to the lantern, which has been restored as a lighthouse, even though its light is ridiculously overwhelmed by the millions of lights on the bridge that towers over it. Needless to say, the lighthouse predated the bridge by more than forty years, so there was a navigational purpose to it when it was built. We admired it then walked over toward the base of the bridge to see how the structure was raised, that is the busiest vehicle bridge in the world.

Italians are very much into beautiful things, and Gabriele is no exception. He was very taken by the bridge itself, from the completely unaccustomed angle and viewpoint we had. The gigantism of the bridge is more evident from beneath it than it is driving across it. Like the Great Pyramid at Giza, the simplicity of its shape makes it look smaller than it is in real life. The bridge is basically what has been called an inverted arch where the suspension cables are the defining aspect of its appearance. He was busily taking photo after photo on his smartphone, looking across the river toward the stunning vista of the Palisades on the New Jersey side of the river.

I walked over to the pylons to look up and started taking some cellphone photos myself. I have to admit that my distance vision, even with my glasses on, is not 20-20, especially when the lighting is not great, but as I looked up, I saw what I thought must have been a big bird’s nest in a corner up about 60 or 70 feet. The sun was in front of me as I looked up, and it obscured the nest, which I thought must be the abode of bald eagles, because there are certainly bald eagles all over and their whole diet is fish. If you drive along the Hudson River on a cold winter day, you can see the bald eagles sitting on ice floes waiting for a foolish fish to be visible—and then they dive straight into the water and come up with a meal. I was determined to get a picture.

Then it moved. Or swayed. I thought maybe I was getting dizzy, and looked down, put my hand out to a tree to steady myself. When I looked back up, the nest was quite different looking from what I had thought before. The sunlight was very dazzling, almost blinding me so I couldn’t make out anything for sure. I walked back over to the water’s edge and grabbed Gabriele’s arm.

“Come over here,” I said. “There’s something I can’t really see very well, and I want to know what it is.”

I pointed up inside the pylon and said, “I thought there was an eagle’s nest up there, but now I don’t think that’s what it is. Can you see what I’m pointing at?”

He nodded and took out a pair of dark sunglasses from his backpack and put them on. “There are two large black birds. No, maybe three.”

“Black? Are you sure? They must be crows. That’s disappointing, I was hoping they were eagles.”

“I can’t tell what they’re doing, but they’re flapping their wings like they are trying to hold onto something,” he said.

Just as he said that, the birds let go of what they were holding onto and flew up to a girder. What they were sitting on was a black lump that was actually swaying like a streetlight in a high wind.

Then without warning it started to fall, and as it fell we could both see that it was not a nest, but something with a black piece of cloth waving as it fell. As it fell, we both knew what it was. It was a body, a human body, and it had been hanging from a rope. It hit the ground with a squishy thud. Gabriele stared at it; I ran over to the lighthouse and interrupted a uniformed woman who obviously worked there.

“I’m sorry, miss, officer,” I said. “There’s an emergency over here.” I ran ahead of her to where Gabriele was standing and as I ran up to him, he turned and vomited all over the ground. When the body hit the ground, the birds returned and started to eat again. It was also immediately obvious why the body had fallen—the head had become detached from the body and had landed a few feet away. There was a ferocious smell.

I thought the woman was going to faint, but she didn’t. She called in an alarm to someone, and there were sirens almost immediately.

Gabriele, who has the darker skin of a Mediterranean, was as pale as a sheet. I walked him down the slight incline toward the lighthouse and sat him on a bench. I pushed his legs up so that the knees were bent in front of him.

“Put your head between your knees,” I said in as authoritative a voice as I could summon while feeling fairly sure I was going to be sick myself. We had moved away from the sight and smell of the cadaver and the birds, and there were firemen in full regalia, and paramedics running by us toward the pylon. I sank down on the bench next to Gabriele and put my arm around his shoulder. I was still wearing my backpack and I reached inside and pulled out a fresh bottle of water, opened it, and handed it to him.

“Just a little. Don’t drink much. It’ll make you sick.”

He sat up, sweaty but with his color returning. His hand shook as he lifted the bottle to his mouth.

“The Bridge is the most common location for suicide anywhere in the whole region,” I said. “Although most people jump off into the river. Hanging yourself seems like a much worse way to die than just smacking into the water.”

He looked at me quizzically. “Nobody would kill himself like that,” he said.

There was a used-car lot melee of yellow crime scene tape being strung from every vertical to every other vertical, and two plain-clothes detectives arrived within minutes. One stopped and said, “You found the body?”

We nodded.

“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

I did not feel faint, but I had the inevitable reaction after a tidal wave of adrenalin had rushed through my body: too weak to stand up, or to hold my head erect on my neck. I looked down at my legs, at the black-and-yellow bike pants and the cross-trainer shoes I chose to wear instead of bike shoes. I could feel myself shaking, especially my head and my jaw.

The detective came back. “OK if I ask you some questions?”

We told him the whole thing. How I thought it was eagles but couldn’t see over the glare from the sunlight. The birds scattering, the fall. “I guess you saw how it all landed,” I said. “Did he kill himself?”

“No way to tell. The M.E. will have to rule on that. Can you tell me how you happened to be here today?”

I told him that we came to see the lighthouse, rode our bikes. Gabriele said nothing, just stared at the ground between his feet. The detective asked to see identification. He took photos of the two driver’s licenses with his cellphone, thanked us and handed each of us his card. Then he turned to walk off toward the pylon.

“Excuse me, detective?”

He turned back to me.

“I don’t think we’re going to be up to riding our bikes 140 blocks back to Times Square. Any chance you could give us a lift? We have two bikes with us.”

“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

I pulled out my smartphone and called Ruth.

“Hey, sweetie,” she said.

“Hey yourself. I’m up at the GW Bridge, under it, actually. Gabriele and I found a dead body, or it found us. The cops are here. We need to be picked up, because we rode our bikes up here and we’re both just wrecked, never make it back on the bikes. And I don’t have an Uber account. Can you come and get us? We have two bikes, so it has to be a car with plenty of room in back, or a pickup or something like that.”

“What do you mean, a body?”

“Can I tell you later? A body. A dead man, dead for a while, being eaten by birds. The cops are working on it. We just have to get out of here. Both of us are ready to blow our stomachs. Gabriele already did.”

“Murray has an Escalade. I’ll bring that. Where are you?”

“Fort Washington Park, near the little red lighthouse if you know where that is.”

“I’ll figure it out. Or GPS will figure it out. Be there as soon as I can get the car out of the garage and drive up there. I’m a sight, not gonna get pretty before I leave. A body! Cripes. You are a magnet for mayhem, Hugo Miller.”