Daddy's Gone a Hunting (33 page)

F
rom the moment he was arrested by the detectives in the kitchen of Tommy’s Bistro on Tuesday evening, Harry Simon had been defiant. After he had been read his Miranda rights, they took him to police headquarters. He had agreed to talk to them, insisting he had done nothing wrong. But there was no way he could ever refute the evidence on the security cameras. Harry Simon was, unmistakably, the man who had dragged Betsy Trainer, the young waitress and aspiring actress, through the alleyway and into the courtyard where he had molested and strangled her.

Only a part of the actual crime was on camera, but it was clear from the view of the assailant’s face and the dragon on the back of his jacket that Harry Simon was the man who was leaning over the helpless figure on the ground. The cameras had captured Betsy’s terrified expression as he forced her into the courtyard. Twenty minutes later, they again registered her face, her unseeing eyes now staring straight ahead, as he carried her lifeless body to his car.

Obviously stunned as the detectives ran the tape for him, his only response was, “Yeah, it looks like me. But I don’t remember doing nothing to nobody. If that was me, and I’m not saying it was, I was out of my mind. I’m bipolar. Sometimes I forget to take my medicine.”

“Do you need medicine to recognize your own face on the tape
or that cheap jacket with the dragon on it that you were wearing then and that you were wearing when we picked you up?” one of the detectives shouted sarcastically. “Do you need medicine to understand what you did to that girl?”

Harry did not budge an inch from his insistence that he did not remember anything about the murder, even though he continued to be grilled all Wednesday morning and afternoon.

The detectives had switched their questioning midstream to the disappearance of Tracey Sloane. “You worked with her years ago. Did you ever go out with her?”

“Nah, she never gave me a glance.”

“Did you like her?”

“Everybody liked Tracey. She was fun to be around. She wasn’t like some of the other waitresses, who’d start chewing out the kitchen people if their orders weren’t ready.”

“You’re sure you never went out with her? Someone told us they saw you in a movie together.”

“That’s a lie. Tell ‘someone’ to get new glasses.”

“Maybe you forgot that you made Tracey Sloane disappear, the way you forgot you killed Betsy Trainer last week. Maybe you had a buddy grab Tracey the way you grabbed Betsy and then you met him later after you established your alibi at Bobbie’s Joint. Maybe Tracey was still alive when you met him later.”

“That’s a really good ‘maybe’ story,” Harry Simon replied, obviously enjoying himself. He had always known that someday he would be caught, but there was no death penalty in New York, so he considered himself lucky. He figured that if he’d been arrested in Texas after that barfly disappeared, or in California after the model he met on the beach disappeared, or in Colorado when that hitchhiker he picked up disappeared, he’d probably have ended up on death row.

Even as the detectives pounded their questions at him, he let his
thoughts drift. He’d met all of them when he was on vacation. He never told anyone the truth about where he was going on vacation. He’d tell the guys in the kitchen at Tommy’s that he was going somewhere else, and when he came back, he’d show them pictures of himself on a beach and say he’d been to the Jersey shore or Nantucket or Cape Cod. Not that anyone cared but it was a good way to cover his tracks. Just in case.

The anger and frustration he saw on the faces of the detectives had actually invigorated and amused Harry Simon.

“Like I say, it’s a good ‘maybe’ story,” he repeated. “Even twenty-eight years ago, the blocks between Tommy’s Bistro and Tracey’s apartment were always crowded. How do you think I could drag Tracey off the street without nobody seeing me?”

Harry knew he had said too much.

“So you did follow her?”

“I knew where she lived. I knew which way she had to walk home. So did everybody else. And, remember, I was at Bobbie’s eighteen minutes after the others got there.”

At three o’clock Wednesday afternoon, Harry finally indicated that he had had enough of their garbage and that he wanted to talk to the lawyer who had gotten him out of a speeding ticket last year. “The cop’s radar gun wasn’t working right,” he said, smiling. “The judge threw it out.”

The detectives knew that they had to stop the questioning, but they couldn’t resist the sarcastic comment that there was a big difference between beating a speeding ticket because of a defective radar gun and beating a homicide that was recorded on camera.

When attorney Noah Green arrived an hour and a half later, the detectives led him to the small holding cell where Harry Simon
was waiting. When the detective left the enclosure, Harry Simon said, “Hi. Glad you came. This is the first time I’ve been in big trouble.”

“Very big trouble,” Noah Green corrected. “The police told me that they have you on camera killing the woman on the Lower East Side.”

“I’ve told them that I’ve been off my medicine and don’t remember anything about her,” Harry replied, dismissively. “Maybe you can get me off on insanity.”

Noah Green grimaced. “I’ll do my best but don’t count on it.”

Harry decided to test the waters. “Suppose I can tell them something about Tracey Sloane.”

“Her name has been all over the news since you got arrested. You worked with her and the cops questioned you when she first disappeared. What are you talking about now?”

“I mean, like, maybe I began to follow her that night to see if maybe she’d have a drink with me but then I saw her get in a vehicle.”

“They said on the news that you have always denied having any idea what happened to her. Now you’re saying you saw her get in a vehicle. You’d better be careful or you’ll end up convicting yourself on that one, too. On the other hand, if you weren’t involved and really do have some important information that helps them to solve Sloane’s disappearance, I would say that maybe we can cut some kind of deal that wouldn’t keep you in prison for the rest of your life.”

“Let me think it over.”

“You can’t just tell them she got in a car. They won’t believe you and even if they did, it doesn’t help them.”

“I didn’t say a car. I can describe it. I can get specific.”

“Harry, have you got something to tell me or not? I’m your lawyer. This is confidential. It doesn’t go any farther than me unless we decide that it should.”

“Okay. This is what happened. I was following her the night she disappeared. Like I said, I thought if I ended up on her doorstep, well, maybe she’d invite me in. Probably not but I . . .” Harry hesitated. “I couldn’t help myself. I was about half a block behind her. But then there was a red traffic light at the corner. Somebody who was stopped at the light called out to her. A minute later, the passenger door opens and she hops in like she couldn’t wait to get in.”

“She must have known the person,” Green commented, as he studied Harry’s sly expression. Somehow he had the gut feeling that Harry was telling the truth. “Why didn’t you tell that to the police when Tracey disappeared?” he asked.

“Because I had followed her and that didn’t look good. Because I had gotten together with the others at Bobbie’s and I had a good alibi. So I let it go. I didn’t want them looking too deep into my background. I had a few minor problems when I was in high school. I was scared they’d pin her disappearing act on me if I opened my mouth.”

Noah Green thoroughly disliked his client and was ready to go home. “I doubt very much if telling the detectives that you saw Tracey Sloane get in a car that night will do you much good in your current situation. In fact, I agree they’ll probably end up pinning her disappearance on you.”

“I didn’t say I saw her get into just any car. I just told you I can describe it. It was a midsize black furniture van with gold lettering that had the word ‘antique’ on the side. Now, if we give them that, can you get a plea deal for me?”

“Are you absolutely sure you want to reveal this?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t make any promises to you that it will help at all. Let me think about how I approach the detectives with this information. I’ll
see you tomorrow morning at your arraignment. Remember, don’t talk to anybody, and I mean anybody, about anything.”

A weary Noah Green left his client at five minutes past five on Wednesday evening. It was precisely at that moment that, in Long Island City, Jose Fernandez walked across the parking lot of the Connelly complex and looked down into the sinkhole and saw Tracey Sloane’s remains.

74

W
hen Frank Ramsey and Nathan Klein drove into the Connelly property Wednesday evening, they learned that the detectives who had finished questioning Harry Simon were on their way to the site. I’d be rushing to get here, too, if I had been working a cold case that’s been around for over twenty-eight years, Frank thought.

Now officially a crime scene, the parking lot was already swarming with activity.

The cleanup crew had been ordered to stay, and Jose Fernandez, the young worker who had found the skeletal remains, was being questioned in a police mobile unit. His story was straightforward and backed up by his boss. “Last night, it was pretty dark when we set up the poles around the sinkhole. We couldn’t see into it and anyhow it had been a long day. This morning, Sal, the boss, decided that we’d worry about the sinkhole later because our job was to get rid of as much debris as possible.”

At that point, Jose decided to throw in a brief history of his interest in archeological finds. You never know if one of the detectives has a sister who is a principal in a school and could use a substitute teacher, he thought. He cited his master’s degree, then said, “So, I was curious to take a look. Sal told me to make it quick because he was driving me back to the garage. I jogged across the parking lot to the sinkhole and looked down and . . .”

Then he shrugged. The vivid memory of the curled-up skeleton with the long auburn hair sticking to the skull would haunt him for a long time to come.

Jose and everyone else in the cleanup crew were soon cleared as potential suspects. Their IDs were checked, their names, addresses, and phone numbers taken, and they were permitted to leave.

Frank and Nathan knew that they would not be part of the investigation that would follow the finding of the remains of Tracey Sloane. While, of course, there would be an autopsy, they had zero doubt that it was her. The investigation would be purely within the jurisdiction of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where the case had remained cold for all these years. But they stayed until their own boss, Marshal Tim Fleming, arrived and conferred with them and the DA’s detectives.

At a grim conference in the police mobile unit, they all agreed that it was now appropriate to publicly release the fact that Jamie Gordon’s notebook had also been found in the wrecked van, and that the deceased vagrant Clyde Hotchkiss had admitted punching her, but not killing her.

The same thought was on all of their minds. Hotchkiss had been living on the streets for forty years. Was it possible that he had been hanging around the complex twenty-eight years ago, and, if so, could he be responsible for killing both Jamie and Tracey?