Daddy's Gone a Hunting (37 page)

“What’s up is that I’m on my way in to talk to you. I can represent to you that Harry Simon might have useful information regarding Tracey Sloane’s disappearance, and it’s not what you’re thinking. He
didn’t do it but he could end up being a valuable witness. When I was with him yesterday, he told me that he can describe the type of vehicle that she willingly got into the night she disappeared. But he won’t talk unless he has assurance that it will help him in a plea agreement on the Lower East Side case. He’s no fool. He knows the kind of proof that you have with that tape.”

“The thought of giving that creep one day less in prison makes me sick,” Stevens replied. “And, anyhow, I don’t have that kind of authority. That would have to come from the DA himself or one of his top assistants.”

“Well, talk to one of them now. But I’m telling you that what Simon told me was before that press conference, so it’s legit. And if anyone doubts about the timing of his information, I will withdraw as his attorney and become a witness. He may be a useless piece of garbage but in this case I can swear, as an officer of the court, that he talked to me yesterday. And particularly after watching that press conference, I think that what he said is going to help you. I’ll be there in a little while.”

Noah Green put his cell phone in his pocket and looked at his wife. “Wish me luck,” he said.

An hour later, Noah was seated in the impressive private office of Ted Carlyle, the district attorney of Manhattan. Detective Matt Stevens, his expression inscrutable, was next to Carlyle. After expressing his own repulsion at giving Harry Simon anything, DA Carlyle agreed to offer Simon twenty years without parole on the Lower East Side murder of Betsy Trainer if the information about Tracey Sloane proved to be of substantial value.

“If it doesn’t completely pan out, we’re back to life without parole,” Carlyle stated emphatically. “I’ll bury him.”

Green responded, “He will certainly understand that.”

“All right,” Carlyle replied. “Now what are the details that he claims he has?”

“He followed Tracey Sloane from the restaurant the night she disappeared. He saw her get into a furniture van a couple of blocks away.”

Noah could not help savoring the look of astonishment on the faces of the two men. “The van was stopped at a light. Somebody inside it called out to her. The door opened and she willingly got into the van. From where he was a short distance behind her, Simon couldn’t see the driver, but he could see that it was a black furniture van with gold lettering on the side panel that had the word ‘antique’ on it.”

Noah’s voice became firm. “As I said before, I want you to check the time I was with Simon yesterday afternoon. I left him just before five o’clock. It was a few minutes later that Tracey Sloane’s remains were discovered in a sinkhole in the parking lot of the esteemed Connelly Fine Antique Reproductions complex.”

“Why didn’t he tell this to Nick Greco when he was first questioned right after Sloane went missing?” Carlyle demanded.

“I asked him exactly the same question,” Noah replied. “He said that he was afraid about something in his background and that he would end up making himself a suspect.”

“He’s right about that,” Carlyle snapped.

82

S
ammy was one of the many street people who was questioned by the police as to whether he knew the homeless man who called himself Clyde. At first he had said that he had never heard of him. He didn’t want to get in trouble. But when one of his friends tipped him off that it had been on television that maybe Clyde had killed a couple of girls, Sammy was seized with a sense of civic duty.

Tony Bovaro was a young cop in the Chelsea district who would wake him up in the morning if he was squatting outside a building or near a townhouse and say, “Okay, Sammy, you know you’re not supposed to be here. Get moving before I have to take you in.”

This time, it was Sammy who went looking for the officer. On Thursday afternoon, he caught up with Officer Bovaro, who was seated, with his partner, in a squad car. “I got something to tell you, Officer,” he said, trying to conceal the fact that he had a pretty good buzz on.

“Hi, Sammy. Haven’t seen you in a couple of days,” Bovaro said. “What’s up?”

“What’s up is that you should take a look at the black-and-blue mark on my chin.”

The twenty-four-year-old police officer got out of the squad car and examined Sammy’s grime-covered, splotched, and unshaven face. But then he did notice the ugly black and purple swelling on
Sammy’s jaw. His interest deepened. “That’s pretty nasty, Sammy. How did it happen?”

Sammy could see that the cop was listening to him with respect. “That guy, Clyde, the one they think murdered that college student, he damn near killed me last week. I tried to set up near him and he didn’t want me there. And then when I said I wouldn’t leave . . .”

Sammy did not mention that he had deliberately knocked over the bottle of wine Clyde had been enjoying. “Anyhow, Clyde punched me so hard I almost had to go to the hospital but I didn’t. That guy was mean. He was crazy. Just so you know, I hear that he admitted punching that girl. But I bet he killed her. I don’t know about the one thirty or so years ago. But if he was around here and she got in his way, I bet he killed her, too.”

“Okay, Sammy, take it easy,” Officer Bovaro said, even as his partner grabbed the radio to call in that they had new information about Clyde Hotchkiss.

An hour later, Sammy was in the local police station recounting his story with gusto. As he was speaking he embellished it, claiming that the street guys were all afraid of Clyde Hotchkiss. “We called him Lonesome Clyde,” Sammy said, his sly grin revealing several missing teeth. Then, for the benefit of the investigators who had not yet seen a close-up of his jaw, he thrust it forward. “Clyde had a terrible temper. He was a killer. I could be dead right now the way he hit me.”

When Sammy left the police station, he was followed by a reporter who had noticed him going in and who was curious as to why he was there. “It was my duty to come forward,” Sammy said earnestly. Then, with further embellishment about how he had barely escaped with his life, he retold his story.

83

N
ick Greco reflected on the nearly twenty years that he had spent working on the Sloane case before he had retired. His determination to solve it had been well known throughout the office and so had the fact that he had taken a copy of the entire file with him when he had left.

Now, with the discovery of her skeletal remains, Detective Matt Stevens, who had taken over Greco’s position, was keeping him informed of whatever developments would occur. Stevens had told him earlier that neither Harry Simon nor Jack Worth had in any way changed their stories. Both absolutely denied having anything to do with Tracey’s death.

“Nick, we know Simon didn’t have time to abduct her,” Stevens had said. “And Worth claimed he went home to bed that night after working at Connelly’s. Hotchkiss admitted he punched Jamie Gordon, and we think he killed her. And for all we know, he was hanging around Long Island City twenty-eight years ago. He could have been panhandling in Manhattan the night Tracey Sloane disappeared. By then he’d been missing for over ten years and his wife had given up trying to find him. We’ll probably never know if Hotchkiss killed Sloane.”

Nick Greco did not believe that the vagrant who admitted punching Jamie Gordon had anything to do with Tracey Sloane’s disappearance.
His gut feeling was that it had been a person who had somehow been in Tracey’s circle of trusted friends. From everything they had learned about her, he did not believe that she had a secret romance going on or that she would have allowed herself to be lured by a complete stranger.

All day Thursday, Nick had once more been going through the list of Tracey’s friends, coworkers, and the diners who always requested her table. There were more than one hundred of them on the list he had compiled all those years ago. He had been Googling them, one by one, to see if any of them had ever been in trouble in the past twenty-eight years.

A few of them were already dead. Others had retired and moved to Florida or Arizona. Not one of the people he could trace had led anything other than an ordinary life.

He had watched the press conference at noon and asked himself if a man on his deathbed would concoct a lie that, in a way, was almost as bad as admitting that he had killed Jamie Gordon. Nick didn’t think so. If Hotchkiss was going to lie, why would he have admitted knowing Jamie Gordon at all? He could have said that he found her notebook in the street in Manhattan and picked it up.

That would have been a believable story—or at least one that would have been almost impossible to disprove. And it would have exonerated him, at least in the eyes of his wife and son. So why admit punching her and then not trying to help her when she screamed?

Greco concluded that Clyde Hotchkiss had made a truthful deathbed statement.

At three o’clock, Matt Stevens called him with another update. “Nick, I could lose my job telling you this,” he began.

“I know you could. But you know you won’t because it’s just between us. What have you got?”

“Harry Simon’s lawyer is working out a deal. Simon claims
through his lawyer that he was following Tracey Sloane that night, but that someone called out to her and she willingly got into a van.”

“A van?”

“Yes. Simon said it was a midsize black furniture van with gold lettering on the side, and he could read part of the wording. He swears ‘antique’ was one of the words. Jack Worth, the plant manager at the time of the explosion, was already working back then at Connelly Fine Antique Reproductions as an assistant bookkeeper. We’ll see if he’s willing to come back and answer some more questions. We’ll really lay into him this time. Let’s hope he hasn’t lawyered up.”

“All right, thanks, Matt. Keep me posted.”

After they had finished speaking, Nick Greco sat for a long minute at his desk as his mind made the connection between Connelly Fine Antique Reproductions and the names on his list of people who had been questioned in Tracey Sloane’s death.

Then, almost with a jolt, he remembered one of those names. Connor Connelly. Connor had dined at Tommy’s Bistro a number of times, Greco recalled. We had been told by some of her coworkers that Connelly had always requested Tracey’s table. And he was one of the men in the picture Tracey had on top of her dresser in her bedroom. But his name had been removed from the list of people to question when we learned that he had died in a boating accident weeks before Tracey disappeared. That was what I was trying to remember, Nick thought. I saw his name on the copy of my original list when I looked at it again yesterday.

This time when he opened his computer, Nick began a search for everything he could learn about Connor Connelly and his entire family.

84

O
n Thursday morning, Douglas Connelly did not wait for the phone call he knew he would get. Instead he called the person “with the angry voice” himself.

“You will get your money, though I am still not convinced that I am guilty of what you accuse me of,” Connelly said, trying to sound calm, his hand clenching involuntarily. “Sure, your client can have a bunch of goons work me over, but that won’t bring you one cent. You’ve made plenty in the past on the, shall we say, ‘tips’ I’ve given you, so you can afford to wait a few weeks and you’ll be paid in full. Paid without a pain-and-suffering bonus, I might add.”