Murder in Alphabet City (21 page)

“God bless you,” she said. “You find him, OK?”

“I'll do my best.”

29

“S
O MAYBE THAT'S
it,” Defino said. “She stole the babies. She gave the mothers five hundred dollars and took the rest for herself, and disappeared with the babies.”

“I don't think that's what happened with Jackie Warren. She said she gave the baby up for adoption and she didn't complain about Rinzler.”

“She was on the take, right?” MacHovec said. “Still getting paid welfare for the kid?”

“Right.”

“So that was her quid pro quo. She got her five hundred and decided to make Social Services pay the rest.”

“Wouldn't someone have complained?” Jane said. “You think all those women gave up their babies and not one of them was paid? You'd think there'd be one or two that would report Rinzler to the police.”

“They were scared,” Defino said. “Rinzler told them they'd get in trouble if they talked. Maybe they thought they'd end up in jail.”

“Something's missing. It still doesn't explain why she stopped visiting Stratton. I need to talk to Rinzler's sister again.” As she reached for the phone, it rang. She answered, identifying herself.

“This is Mrs. Tedesco. Are you the one who called me this morning?”

She backtracked quickly. “Yes, ma'am.”

“I called my daughter. She'll talk to you, but she wants an assurance she won't get into trouble.”

“I can give her that assurance. She can call my captain if she wants.”

“OK. That should do it. She's in Philadelphia, well, near Philadelphia. Here's her number.” She dictated and Jane wrote it down.

“What's her name, Mrs. Tedesco?”

“It's Bradley now, Mrs. Vincent Bradley. This is between you and her. You don't talk to her husband. You don't talk to the neighbors.”

“I understand. Can I call her now?”

“She's waiting by her phone.”

Jane went back to the records. This was another client of Rinzler's who had been dropped. She dialed the Pennsylvania number and a young female voice answered immediately.

“Mrs. Bradley?”

“Yes. Tell me who you are.”

Jane went through it all, giving her Graves's number.

“You want to talk to me about that Social Services woman?”

“Yes, I do, ma'am.”

“I can't do it on the phone. Can you come here?”

“Yes. How's tomorrow?”

“I can do it in the morning. How early can you get here?”

“By ten. How's that?”

“Ten is good. Will you drive?”

“Yes. Tell me how to get there.”

They went through it in detail. It would mean renting a car, getting things vouchered. Defino said he wouldn't come. He needed to be available if Toni called. It would be a week tomorrow since the incident with Fletcher.

Jane checked in with Graves, who had just talked to Andrea Bradley. He told her to rent a car and they'd work out the paperwork on Monday.

“Do I carry a weapon?” she asked. She was crossing a state line and that got tricky.

“I'll make a phone call. Take it unless I call and tell you not to. Take your cell phone with you and watch yourself.”

Annie reserved a car and started the paperwork.

“You do a lot of traveling,” Annie said, writing down the details.

“I'm single. They can't leave their wives.”

Annie grinned. It was their mutually shared identity.

Jane went back to her office with a cup of coffee. The day was moving toward its end and she wouldn't be back here till Monday. She Xeroxed a few things she wanted to have at home and perhaps take with her tomorrow. Then she dialed Judy Weissman's number in Chappaqua. Waiting for an answer, she sipped her coffee, which was nearly cold.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Weissman, this is Detective Jane Bauer.”

“Oh yes. Do you have information for me?”

“Not yet. I have some questions about your sister. Everyone who remembers her says she wore beautiful strings of beads.”

“That's true. Beads were her passion. Some of them were valuable, but mostly, she just liked color and texture. It reflected her personality.”

“Where did she get them?”

“Everywhere she went. She had some turquoise I would have killed for. We gave her some crystal beads once that turned colors in the light. But mostly she made them up herself.”

“How did she do that?”

“She was a beader. It's gotten very popular in the last few years but she was doing it ten, twelve years ago. There's a place in the East Fifties she would go to. I don't remember the name of the store but it had one of those cute names like Bead Heaven or Beading Like Mad. It's just slipped my mind. I went there once with her to pick out stones for a necklace she was making me for my birthday.”

“I see. That necklace of your daughter's, did Erica make that one?”

“No, my daughter made it. Erica was teaching her how to do it. She does beautiful work now. She's very artistic.”

Jane wrote down “Bead shop East Fifties” and passed it to MacHovec, who reached for the yellow pages as she continued her conversation. “Mrs. Weissman, you were aware that your sister was involved in something outside her regular job, weren't you?”

The silence told her she had hit it. “I—” Another silence. “You found the box, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Who gave you permission to get into it?”

“A warrant signed by a judge.”

“You got a warrant for that box?”

“Yes, we did.” She was aware that Defino was listening. “We've gone over everything in the box. Most of it looks pretty innocuous, the tax returns, the address book. How did you know to separate that from the other things she stored?”

“She left me a note.” The voice had changed. Judy Weissman was crying. “I never told anyone, not even my husband. Bee-Bee wrapped that notebook in plastic and then rubberbanded a note to it. It said something like, ‘Judy, if anything happens to me, burn this.' I found it after she died. That's why I thought maybe she really did commit suicide. I don't know what the notebook meant. It was written in a kind of code and I didn't really examine it. I just took that and a few other things and stored them in a small locker in the same place.”

“Under her name.”

“Yes. I called them the other day because the bill is due soon and I wanted to check on the amount. They told me the police had taken the contents of the box. Was she— Do you know what she was doing?”

“Not at the moment. Mrs. Weissman, did your sister ever adopt a baby?”

“Erica? No. What would make you think she did?”

“I'm just exploring possibilities. She never had a baby in her possession that you know of?”

“Absolutely not. She worked five days a week. She couldn't have managed a child. But she loved children. She loved my children. I know she wanted her own someday.”

“Thank you for your time. I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the box, but we needed to see what was in it.” As she hung up, MacHovec pushed a slip of paper with an address onto her desk. String Me Along on East Fifty-third Street. “Thanks, Sean.” She put the slip in her bag, checked her watch, and gathered her papers in a folder, including a copy of the time line. “I'm outta here,” she said, grabbing her coat. “See you Monday. Annie?” She dashed toward Annie's corner office. “Where do I pick up my car?”

The bead store was a new experience. Every wall was covered with strings of beads arranged by color and medium. All the glass beads were gathered in one area, the stones in another. Rainbow followed rainbow. Women of various ages pored over the strands, picking one, then another, then returning one to its hook to hang with ten other identical strands. Some beads were of irregular shape, some round or faceted, all the same on one string. In a glass-topped counter, large individual beads lay in open boxes, potential pendants. Jane could appreciate the draw of this hobby. The colors alone were magnetic.

“Can I help you?”

She had the plastic bag in her hand. “Do you recognize these?”

The woman held the bag up to the light. “We don't carry these anymore, but we did a few years ago. I can show you what we have now. They're similar but they're made by a different company.”

“How long have you worked here?”

“Fifteen years.”

“Do you recall a woman named Erica Rinzler as a customer?” Jane showed her the sketch.

“I do. She bought a lot from us. I haven't seen her in years.”

“What would you do with these beads?”

“In the bag? You could put them between larger beads to show off the big ones. They're a little like the old baby bracelets, but they don't use them anymore. We have letter beads here if you wanted to make one of those. You expecting?”

“Not a baby,” Jane said, leaving the woman looking puzzled. “Thanks for your help.”

At home she called her father, organized her papers for tomorrow, ate dinner, and sat down to read a current biography. She could thank Flora for teaching her to read. Before she met Flora, she read little besides the
Daily News
and the dozens of sheets of institutional crap that flooded her in-box daily. In one of their early meetings, Flora had laid out part of a life plan for Jane to follow.

“You're a smart girl, Jane,” she had said. “Now it's time you became a smart woman.”

She had been right. Jane was in her mid-twenties when they had that conversation. The turmoil of her youth was behind her and Hack had not yet become part of her life. It was the job and guys, although by then she had become discriminating. She wanted them single and even if the sex was good, she dropped them if they were boring or did nothing but drink.

College had opened not just her eyes but her whole consciousness. Music actually predated the sixties and art had been around since the cavemen. The
Daily News
wasn't the only paper in town and books were more than romances about silly girls who wanted to get laid and married in one order or another. A course in literature had almost been her undoing, but she had made the effort and found that among the books she could not finish were many she put away to read again one day, knowing she would find something new the second time.

She had become the smart woman Flora wanted her to be, achieving the gold shield and the B.A. And Hack. She hadn't gone after him. It hadn't occurred to her that that was an option. He had come for her. She had often wondered why. He was everything she could want in a man except that he was married. But what had drawn him to her? She wasn't cute and flirtatious. She hadn't even guessed he was interested until he spelled it out for her one day at the Academy when they ran into each other ten years ago, a year after they met in a class at John Jay College and she had thought he was a Madison Avenue businessman.

He had educated himself the way she had and he had gone on to law school, preparing himself for a high-powered job with the department that was now within reach. He was tough and political but he listened to her and took her seriously, disagreed with her sometimes and nodded appreciatively when she said something that captured him. He treated her like an equal. That had been Flora's message, just not for that kind of relationship.

Hack was the best sex Jane had ever had, even now when he was fifty. Thinking about him, her groin ached. Would the ache go away if they lived together? If she told him she wanted him forever, he would leave his wife the next day. She did want him forever, just not always in the same apartment with her, in the same routine. She needed time alone, time between visits, time to make the visits sweeter.

He had told her up front that he was married, something the others hadn't bothered to say. The love was long gone, he said, but he loved his daughters and didn't want to lose them.

The enduring mystery was what he had seen in her to make him initiate the affair and then to keep him interested after a decade. It was the freckles, he told her, the freckles now long gone, visible only in the memory of a loving father and the imagination of a lover.

30

F
RIDAY MORNING SHE
was up before sunrise. Taking her notes and driving instructions with her, she hailed a taxi and picked up the rental car. Annie had ordered a good-sized vehicle. It was good to have Annie on her side, although she had done nothing except be courteous to achieve it. MacHovec had screwed himself early on and Annie was not the forgiving type. Defino was somewhere in between, probably more positive now that his daughter had suffered. Annie knew how to pick and choose.

Jane found her way to the Lincoln Tunnel. Beside her on the passenger seat was a map the rental company had given her, marked to show her route. The drive would take a good two hours but the radio and her thoughts would keep her company. She remembered the way to the New Jersey Turnpike and she headed south, a stack of bills handy to pay the tolls.

The question of whether Rinzler had “stolen” Maria's baby, as Maria's mother believed, still rankled. Rinzler wanted a child. What better way to acquire one than wait for the perfect baby, pay five hundred dollars for it, and take it for her own. Except that there was no baby in Rinzler's life. Now that Judy Weissman had acknowledged that she knew her sister was involved in something dark, Jane believed Weissman would come clean. She had seemed startled at the thought that Erica had adopted a baby. Surely if a baby ended up in Chappaqua, Jane would know by now. The Weissmans' younger child was much more than eight years old, so that possibility was not viable.

The trip took more than two hours and Jane got lost once, near the end, but arrived close enough to ten that she didn't have to apologize. The woman who opened the door of the attractive house on a tree-shaded street was near Maria Brusca's age, but lived a life so different from Maria's that no comparison could be made aside from race. Andrea Bradley was slim and well dressed in a black pantsuit, diamond stud earrings, and two rings on her left hand, one of them a large diamond solitaire.

“Your ID?” she said before letting Jane in.

Jane displayed it and the woman inspected it carefully, comparing photo to face, then opened the door. A small boy came running to see who the company was. Shy, he grabbed his mother's leg and looked up at Jane, who smiled back.

“Go and tell Mrs. Ruskin you're ready to go out,” Andrea Bradley said and the little boy dashed away. “They're leaving. Coffee?”

“I wouldn't mind some. It's been a long drive.”

“I'm sure it was. Come in the kitchen.”

She served coffee only. Jane would have to seek out lunch before she started back.

“Tell me what you want to know and I'll do my best to fill you in. It's been a while but my memory of that time is pretty good. I don't talk about it, even to my mother, but it's the kind of thing you don't forget.”

Jane began by explaining that it was Rinzler they were interested in. “We want to know your relationship with her and what happened between you.”

“You probably know I got pregnant. I was in high school. I was scared silly, and I wanted an abortion. A friend took me to a clinic and when I got there, I chickened out. After that, I told my parents. They were shocked, to put it mildly. I went to Catholic school and their daughter didn't get into that kind of trouble. Eventually, my mother and I went to Social Services and a caseworker was assigned to me.”

“Do you remember who that was?”

“Mm. A woman with a Spanish name. Cordero or Cortaro. Something like that.”

“When did Rinzler come on the scene?”

“Maybe a month later, I can't be sure. She showed up instead of the regular caseworker. She asked me if I wanted to keep the baby and I said I didn't. It was already too late for a safe abortion. Miss Rinzler said she could help me.”

“What did she suggest?”

“She said she could arrange an adoption very quietly. I would get five thousand dollars, five hundred before I gave birth and the rest right after. I could even approve the parents from what she told me about them, but I would never know who they were.”

“And you agreed?”

“We all agreed, my parents too. It seemed like a good way to go. Miss Rinzler said we couldn't talk about it because it was marginally legal but she said she'd done it several times and it had worked very well. The people adopting babies were all screened and had good homes. She found a couple with dark hair and eyes, people in their thirties, I think. He had a good job and she hadn't been able to get pregnant although they'd tried for years. It sounded right. Maybe there was more, but I can't remember at this point.”

“And then what?”

“She gave me the five hundred in crisp bills. I'd never seen a hundred before. My mother put it away. Two weeks later I went into labor.” Her face had changed as she spoke, her lips tightening, her brow furrowing. She was leading up to the bad part.

“You OK?” Jane said.

Andrea Bradley nodded. The house was quiet. A few minutes earlier a door had slammed and a car had backed out of the driveway. They were alone now, the investigator and the woman who might have the answers to the important questions.

Andrea got up from the table and poured more coffee. She had made a potful. When she came back, she sipped some and looked across the table at Jane. “It was a boy, really beautiful. I thought when I saw him that I should keep him. My parents and I talked about it—they were really supportive—and I knew they were right. Having a baby to care for at seventeen would have been the end for me. The day I left the hospital, I carried him out. He was seven-nine, really a healthy baby with dark fuzzy hair and big eyes. Miss Rinzler was waiting outside for us. She took the baby, looked at him, and promised to come by in a day or two with the money.

“My father was annoyed. He said he thought we'd get it right away when we gave up the baby, but she said the parents would pay when they accepted him. So we went home.”

“And then what?”

“She called and said there was a small hitch, that the parents hadn't been able to get the plane they wanted and they would be a day late. We should be patient.”

“Do you remember the dates of these events?”

“He was born October twentieth.”

“Go on.”

“Well, there isn't much else to say except she made up a story and never paid us.”

“What was the story?”

“She said the baby died.” Her voice shook as she said it.

“Did she tell you how?”

“She said it was SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome. She said the nurse who was caring for the baby found him dead in his crib. She was very sorry but she couldn't pay me because the parents never took possession of the baby. I just went off the deep end.”

“What did you do?”

“I hit her. My father had to pull me off her. I wanted to kill her. How could that happen to my week-old baby, my beautiful little boy?” Tears filled her eyes. “I just punched her and punched her till Daddy separated us.”

“Did she hit you back?”

“No. She just tried to protect her face from me.”

“Did she tell you what happened to the body?”

“No. I asked her. I said I wanted to bury him properly, but she said it had been taken care of. She didn't bury him,” Andrea said with raw anger. “She tossed his body in the garbage. If there was a body, she would have given it to us.”

The phone rang and she jumped, startled out of her anger. She left the table and answered. It was obviously her husband. They talked a few minutes before she came back.

“What did you do after that?” Jane asked.

“We talked about it endlessly. My father wanted to go to the police but my mother and I wouldn't let him. There could have been all sorts of trouble. I wasn't sure what my responsibility was. I had given away my baby and I had no documentation or anything. I was afraid I'd go to jail. I was really scared.”

“Did you ever hear from Miss Rinzler again?”

“Never. That was it. I got my high school equivalency that summer and started college. I met my husband a couple of years later but I never told him. My parents and I agreed we would never talk about it. As far as we know, there's no record of it. It's like it never happened. Then my mother called me and said you were looking for me.”

“Your name came up because we were looking through Miss Rinzler's files. We're interested only in her activities.”

“Were there more like me?”

“There may have been,” Jane said. “That's what we're investigating.”

“So what happened to her?”

“She left the department.”

“I'm glad to hear it. I hope she isn't messing up somewhere else.”

“I don't think she is.”

“More coffee?” It was clear she wanted to be rid of Jane.

“No thanks. I appreciate your cooperation.”

The interview hadn't taken all that long. It was still too early for lunch, so Jane found her way back to the road and started home. Even with a lunch stop, she returned the car before three and then took a cab to Centre Street.

“You're back already?” MacHovec said as she walked into the office. “You must've been doing eighty.”

“Sixty-five. Here's the story.” She hung up her coat. “Rinzler told her the baby died and she reneged on the forty-five hundred dollars the way she did with Maria Brusca.”

“She was doing the deal herself,” Defino said. “Picking up a lot of change tax free.”

“She told this woman the baby died. She told Maria Brusca the parents backed out and then she disappeared. Jackie Warren said she gave up her baby for adoption but didn't tell Social Services and she's been collecting checks for eight years. Either she lied to us or she may have been one of the last people Rinzler paid the whole five thousand.”

“You think the Tedesco baby died?” Defino asked.

“I don't know what to think. Rinzler made up such a bad story for Maria Brusca, she must have realized she had to do better next time. Maria's baby was born October nineteenth. Andrea Tedesco's was born the twentieth.”

“That's some business, a baby a day. Five grand every day of the week.”

“Could have been a coincidence. Most of the dates in the spiral notebook didn't cluster like that. Maybe she just got lucky in October.”

“Or unlucky.”

“Right.” She looked at her watch. “I'm leaving. I'm going up to Rodman's Neck tomorrow morning.”

“I'm going next Saturday,” Defino said.

MacHovec was silent. His life outside this office remained strictly his own business.