Murder in Central Park by Michael Jahn

Author:Michael Jahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: new york, central park, mysteries and detectives, mike jahn, michael jahn, bill donovan
Publisher: Michael Jahn

One time a sanitation worker really did find an alligator

His second night in the park was a colder one. Preceded by a day’s worth of threatening clouds, a mass of cold air had swept down from the Great Lakes, driving nighttime temperatures down to April levels. As midnight approached, the mercury was headed for the forties. A cold breeze blew from the northeast, softly rustling the newly minted leaves on the trees that ringed the pool.

In light of the change in the weather, Donovan exchanged the photographer’s vest he wore under his coat the night before for his old, floppy black sweater, the one with the turtleneck that had become stretched out in the course of years of putting on and taking off and which now hung loosely in front. He also abandoned the massed grocery bags as carriers for beer. This time he filled his sturdy L.L. Bean tote bag with beer—now that he needed bribes for both Milton and passersby. And he brought other stuff: sandwiches for Milton and himself and his laptop computer (disguised in a brown paper bag) in case he felt like working.

As things turned out, that’s exactly how he felt. So he found himself a spot to sit—on a patch of moss at the foot of an ivy-pondered boulder with a view of the waterfall just off Central Park West up on the northwest edge of the park. He chose a spot where no one could come up behind him. Neither could anyone see the light from the monitor, so long as he kept the instrument angled away from the stone footpath that circled the pond, coming within ten feet of his hiding spot. Assorted berry bushes and an ill-tended blackberry bramble kept all but the nosiest prying eyes from spotting him. Before too long the crickets that had been silent since his arrival resumed making a ruckus.

Donovan pulled the bag off the laptop and switched it on. He turned down the light on the screen, after finding that it reflected too brightly off the rock at his back. Then he settled in for an hour’s worth of reading email, answering queries, checking status reports, and, finally, browsing about the Web. In the course of the latter, Donovan read the history of Central Park, read a review of a biography of Calvert Vaus, the designer of Bethesda Fountain and Belvedere Castle, among other park structures, digested an opinion about how the activity of American and European scientists fit into the politics of the Amazon rain forest, and plunked down his credit-card number to buy three months’ worth of time on Natasha Cohen’s Web site.

Donovan was not surprised … and a little relieved … to find that no pornography, nor even severely titillating pictures, lurked at the end of his browsing. Instead he found several poems, including two of her father’s oldies as well as a new composition, fully pastoral by Cohen’s old standards, something about a turtle climbing out of the water and onto a forked log as being symbolic of struggle and difficult moral choices.

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