Daddy's Gone a Hunting (29 page)

“Mrs. Hotchkiss, we can’t give you details but we’re eternally
grateful that you were there to urge your husband to answer our questions,” Frank Ramsey said.

“I never knew Clyde to tell a lie or even shade the truth,” Peggy said firmly. “He told you that he punched the girl and she got out of the van and then he heard her scream, ‘Help me, help me.’ What happened to that girl?”

“I can tell you that she never made it home that night,” Frank Ramsey said.

“Did you believe Clyde?” Peggy demanded.

Frank wanted to say “yes” to comfort her, but looking into the now-blazing eyes of the widow of Clyde Hotchkiss, he said, “What he told us opens a whole new avenue as we try to solve the death of this young woman. It may turn out to be incredibly valuable information and we thank you for persuading him to share it.”

Twenty minutes later Frank and Nathan were having lunch in a sandwich shop near the hospital. When they were seated and had ordered, Frank asked the first question. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Clyde couldn’t bring himself to tell his wife and son that he was a killer,” Nathan suggested.

“He admitted punching her and that accounts for the black-and-blue mark on Jamie’s chin.” Like Nathan, Frank was thinking aloud.

“He was probably pretty drunk when he hit her. She got out of the van. I remember reading that she was a good athlete. I think she was on the track team in high school. That means she was both young and fast. Once she was out of the van, I bet he couldn’t have caught up with her,” Nathan pointed out.

It was the kind of investigative analysis that was second nature to both of them.

“Or maybe the punch knocked her unconscious and he had all
the time in the world to tie her up, strangle her, put her in the cart, and dump her in the river.”

“Assuming, of course, that he happened to have twine with him in the van. That would have come in handy,” Klein said, sardonically.

“If she was already dead, he could have left her there and come back with the twine,” Ramsey shot back.

The sandwiches arrived. Unlike the ones that, unbeknownst to them, Jessie Carlson and Hannah Connelly were enjoying ten blocks away, these looked as though they might have been made yesterday. Nathan shared that possibility with Frank Ramsey.

“Or maybe the day before yesterday,” Frank said as he signaled for the waiter to ask the chef to try again.

When the new sandwiches arrived, they ate in silence, each busy with his own thoughts. The silence was broken when Ramsey said, “The more I think, the more improbable it is that someone happened to be outside that van at what was probably sometime between midnight and six in the morning. And if there was someone else there, why would he attack Jamie Gordon? Doesn’t make sense. I think Clyde Hotchkiss couldn’t admit in front of his wife and son that he killed a college girl because she annoyed him. I just doubt that, when he meets or has met his Maker, he can talk his way out of that one.”

“Do we tell the boss and Cruse that we think it’s time to let the Gordon family know that we believe we have found Jamie’s killer?”

“We’ll tell him what we have, but I’m going to recommend that for now they say absolutely nothing about the notebook or Clyde Hotchkiss. My gut tells me that we haven’t got all the facts yet. But one thing I do know is that the next thing we have to do is find out where Gus Schmidt got that money to buy his daughter’s home. We both know he never won a lottery, and soon we should have confirmation of it. That’s when we really begin to
lean on Lottie Schmidt. She may be seventy-five years old and not weigh more than ninety pounds but don’t let that fool you. She’s a tough old bird and I’d bet the ranch that she knows exactly how and where Gus got that money. Our job is to get her to talk.”

66

T
he fact that a kitchen worker named Harry Simon at Tommy’s Bistro had been arrested for the murder of another young actress had jolted Nick Greco to the core of his being. He spent all Wednesday afternoon examining and reexamining every inch of the file containing the investigation into the disappearance of Tracey Sloane.

Over and over he read the statement of Harry Simon, taken nearly twenty-eight years ago, and tried to find anything that he might have overlooked. He remembered Harry very well. He was then in his early twenties, thin but wiry build, average height, a sallow complexion, and small eyes. His subservient, eager-to-please manner as he had answered the questions had been off-putting but he had certainly given the impression of being so very, very shocked about Tracey’s disappearance.

Disgusted, Greco reread Simon’s statement. “We got off at eleven. Some of the waiters and waitresses and busboys were going to Bobbie’s Joint for some drinks. Tracey said that she had an early-morning audition and was going home. I started to walk to my apartment, too.”

His apartment was in the opposite direction from the way Tracey would have gone, Nick Greco noted.

“Then I thought, What am I going home for? I was pretty broke but I thought, well, so I’ll nurse a couple of beers. We all pay our
own checks. So I just went back and joined up with them,” Harry had said.

Every one of the other employees had vouched for the fact that Harry arrived there just about eleven thirty. They had all agreed they were all at Bobbie’s by about ten after eleven. Not more than twenty minutes later, Harry was with them.

It was a pretty strong alibi, Nick Greco remembered. Unless Harry and maybe an accomplice had dragged Tracey off the street and into a hallway or some kind of vehicle.

Very unlikely in that short a time.

We asked the others if there was anything about Harry that suggested he was excited or nervous when he got to Bobbie’s, Greco thought, as he pored through the reports containing the statements of the other people who had been at that bar. They had all said he had seemed to be in good spirits.

But now we know that he’s an alleged killer who may have managed to stay under the radar for almost thirty years. The homicide squad will be going back through their unsolved cases, particularly involving young women, to see who else might have been Harry’s victim.

The young actress he had killed two weeks ago had been on her way home from her waitress job in the Lower East Side at midnight when he had accosted her on the deserted sidewalk. He had dragged her into the rear courtyard of a boarded-up apartment building, where he had molested and killed her. Then he had carried her body to his truck, which was parked around the corner on a dark dead-end street. Harry didn’t allow for the adjacent building’s security camera that had captured him committing the crime.

Frustrated and angry at himself, convinced that he must have missed something about Simon when Tracey went missing, Nick Greco decided to call Mark Sloane to ask him to have dinner. He
knew that Mark had to be on a roller coaster of emotions. Harry Simon had worked with Tracey. Harry Simon was an alleged murderer. Had he been the one who had abducted and killed Tracey, and then somehow managed to show up twenty minutes later to have a beer with his friends?

From the tone of Mark’s voice, Nick Greco knew that the younger man welcomed the chance to talk to him again. Mark said he had a late-afternoon office conference and seven o’clock would be the best time for him.

They met at Marea, an upscale restaurant on Central Park South. When extending the invitation, Nick had decided that the last thing Mark Sloane needed was to have dinner in a restaurant that would remind him of Tommy’s Bistro.

Both men were prompt and were seated at the corner table that Nick had requested. It was obvious to Nick that the arrest of the kitchen worker had hit Mark Sloane hard. He seemed tense and even defensive, as though he expected to hear more bad news and had to prepare for it.

They both ordered red wine, looked at the menu immediately, and ordered their dinner. Then Mark opened the conversation. “I wasn’t much good at the office today,” he admitted. “I kept thinking that the guy they arrested had to be responsible for Tracey’s disappearance, too.”

“If he was, he almost certainly had an accomplice,” Greco said flatly. “And yet every instinct I have tells me that this guy is a loner.” Compassionately, he looked across the table at the troubled face of the brother of Tracey Sloane. He could guess what he was thinking. The arrest of Harry Simon had been breaking news in the media. This morning the fact that Simon worked in the same bistro where Tracey Sloane was working before she vanished nearly twenty-eight years ago had been blazed across the headlines. The Sloane case
would again be hashed and rehashed even though Simon’s alibi seemed to be so strong.

After they placed their orders, Mark suddenly asked, “Didn’t this restaurant used to be San Domenico?”

“Yes, it was.” Nick Greco had the continuing feeling that Mark was afraid of what Nick might tell him tonight.

“I thought the address sounded familiar. I was in New York about eight years ago. There was a law firm interested in me. The offer I received wasn’t good enough. I came here to dinner one night. It was very good then and from the fact that every table is taken, I guess it’s still very good.”

“It is,” Greco replied.

The waiter brought their wine. “The salads will be arriving shortly,” he promised.

“Have you told your mother about the arrest yet?” Greco asked.

Mark took a sip from his glass. “Yes, I did. I knew that I couldn’t wait to get any more information. I was afraid that the news about Simon’s arrest and his connection to Tracey would be on television in Illinois. When she disappeared in New York, it was major news there. I didn’t want my mother to find out about it from anyone else. She needed to hear it from me.”

He took another sip and added, grimly, “My mother remembered that when she met and spoke to the people at Tommy’s to thank them for doing everything they could to help the police find Tracey, that guy was slobbering all over my mother and telling her how much everybody all loved my sister.”

“The word I hear from my guys is that the homicide squad questioned Simon up and down and sideways for hours last night. He admitted killing the girl in the Lower East Side but swears he had nothing to do with Tracey disappearing.”

Greco felt the vibration of his cell phone in the pocket of his suit jacket. The call was coming in from the detective who had taken
over the Tracey Sloane file. His hand cupping the phone, he leaned his elbow on the table, hoping to conceal the fact that he was answering it in the no-cell-phone restaurant. “Greco,” he said.

“Nick, it’s Matt Stevens.”

“What’s up? Anything more with the Simon guy?”

“No, not yet, but it looks as though the remains of Tracey Sloane have been found.”

It was obvious to Nick that Mark had overheard, because his face went deadly pale.

“Where?” Greco asked.

“You’re not going to believe this, but she was in a sinkhole of the parking lot of the Connelly furniture complex, where they had the explosion last week.”

67

L
ittle fragments of thoughts were floating through Kate’s mind. Gus. She had called him.

And she knew right away that she had upset him. Why?