Free Hell Gate by Linda Fairstein

bag of chocolates. “Wipe the grin off your face. All I’ve got is my M and M’s and twenty-four bucks. It’s almost payday.”
    “Spent too much on the holidays?” I bit my tongue to prevent myself from making a crack about New Year’s Eve.
    “Back to purple. Spielberg movie,” Mike said. “Eleven Oscar nominations.”
    “Walker novel. Pulitzer Prize.” I could take him on a handful of topics like literature, but Mike knew more about military history than anyone I’d ever met. Mercer’s father had serviced planes for Delta and he’d grown up with maps of the world’s airline routes papering his bedroom walls, so he took the kitty whenever the subject was related to geography.
    One of the attendants came to the doorway. “Dr. Pomeroy would like to see you downstairs.”
    Mike put one foot on the floor. “Be right there.”
    At the morgue or in fashionable mansions, at crack dens or social clubs, very little interfered with Mike’s evening ritual of watching the final question, even if it delayed for a few minutes the crews bagging bodies and recovering evidence.
    “Here’s your answer, gentlemen,” Trebek said, as the board pulled back to reveal the phrase. “The answer is ‘City from which this purple hue, worn for centuries by royalty, derives its name.’ ”
    Trebek repeated the answer while his three bespectacled contestants studied the words before starting to write on their video tablets.
    “I can see it in your face, Coop. Not on your reading list, as you’d expected, right?”
    I was walking to the door. “Let’s go.”
    “Wait a minute. You doubled me down, didn’t you? Check it out.”
    Trebek approached the first young man, who hadn’t been able to come up with a good guess. “What is—?”
    “Sorry. Oooh, and you wagered seven thousand five hundred on that one. Very sorry.”
    “And you, sir? You’ve written ‘What is Maroon?’ ”
    “Like where in the world would that city be?” Mike said, balling a piece of paper and throwing it at the screen. “Maroon, Italy? The guy’s a jerk. Won the last three nights on sheer luck.”
    He had drowned out Trebek, who moved on to the third player. “You’re shaking your head already, Scott. And your question is, ‘What is Indigo?’ Wrong again.”
    Mike had both feet on the floor. “What is Tyre? I’m telling you, get me on that show and I’ll make enough money to quit this job tomorrow.”
    “What is Tyre? That’s what we were looking for,” Trebek said. “The color Tyrian purple. That’s the name we wanted. Also called imperial purple, first produced by the ancient Phoenicians in the city of Tyre, and royal figures everywhere used it almost exclusively to flaunt their stature.”
    “And you know that because . . . ?” I asked, as we headed down the quiet corridor to go to the basement where the grim work of the medical examiners was performed.
    “Alexander the Great crushed the Tyrians. Three thirty-two B.C. Tyre was one of the great early seaports of the world. The people dissed Alex—wouldn’t let him enter the city when his troops arrived—so he practically wiped them out. All the great ancient emperors wore Tyrian purple robes, Coop. Very expensive stuff. And you know what it was made from? Mucus. A mucus secretion from the gland of a predatory sea snail in the Mediterranean.”
    Mike opened the door to the basement and I could smell a strong antiseptic odor, as though someone had just cleaned up the autopsy rooms and overwhelmed the familiar chemical smells with even harsher fluids.
    “Don’t turn up your nose at me. Too much reading about female empowerment with those weepy women’s novels and not enough cold, hard facts.”
    “I wasn’t sniffing at you, Mike. It was the idea of the colorful dye coming from mucus.”
    He took a package of mints out of his pocket and offered them to me. Every detective had different ways of dealing with the strong scent of death, and Mike had something ready for almost