Murder in Hell's Kitchen (3 page)

The bottom line on Elaine Best was that they got nothing out of her. Noted in the DD5 was the fact that she remained in her nightclothes the entire time the detectives were in the building. She whimpered more than spoke. She was retired from a secretarial job and lived on Social Security and a small income, and this, she assured them, was the end. She would start packing today and get out of this building and this city as soon as she could arrange for movers. She had seen Mr. Quill from time to time but did not know him except to say hello. She knew nothing about him, couldn't remember when he had moved in, and wasn't sure what floor he lived on. Aside from those few grudging statements, she whimpered almost constantly like an ailing animal and repeated over and over that she hadn't killed him. The detectives reassured her that she was not a suspect, but it made no difference in her demeanor. They gave up and went upstairs, presumably to search for a good lead.

The interviews with the tenants about the victim revealed a nondescript man who had lived in apartment 3B for more than a year and less than two years. In the words of his nearest neighbor, Miss Rawls, who was interviewed that evening, he was “a sad man.” He looked sad, he acted sad, he said little to his neighbors. On weekdays he left for work about eight o'clock, dressed in a suit “like a banker or an accountant,” Miss Rawls volunteered. His shoes were always shined. “I notice people's shoes,” she said in her gentle southern speech.

It was Henry Soderberg, interviewed when he came home from work the day of the homicide, who seemed to make the most observant remarks of all the tenants. Quill looked to be in his early thirties (this confirmed by documents on his person). He was about five-ten, dressed for business, wasn't talkative but wasn't hostile either. He went to work regularly, didn't bother anyone, and didn't make any noise. Mr. Soderberg was in a position to know this last personally; he occupied the apartment under Arlen Quill's. “Hardly hear him come home,” Soderberg said. But when he did hear, it was generally between six and eight in the evening. If Quill listened to music or television, if he sang in the shower or talked on the telephone, he did it at low volume. “He was a great neighbor,” Soderberg was quoted as saying. “I didn't know he existed.”

The place where he worked, the Golden City Hotel on Sixth Avenue, hardly knew he existed either. He had a job behind the scenes in the banquet department as an event planner, where he attended to the details of weddings and conferences. He was good at his job, never missed a day in the four years he had worked there, never elicited a negative comment from the people he dealt with, mostly on the telephone. “He had a nice telephone voice,” the detective had dutifully written in the interview with a coworker. But Quill had never been known to have lunch with anyone or socialize after work. He usually ate at his desk, cleaning up carefully after himself. In answer to the question of who might have wanted him dead, there were only shrugs. He got along, apparently, with everybody. On one of the last days of his life, he voiced an uncharacteristic complaint: he thought he heard the scurrying of rodents in the empty apartment upstairs.

“The whole thing sounds like a push-in,” MacHovec said. “Quill comes home late from work, he's at the door, goes for his key, a guy comes up behind him, follows him inside, kills him, and goes.”

“His wallet was in his pocket,” Jane said. “What was the point?”

“The perp heard a sound from the whimpering lady's apartment and got cold feet. He killed him for nothing. Not the first time that's happened.”

“It's possible,” Defino said.

“Which means we gotta look into push-ins in the area, see if we can pin this on a known perp. They get any latents off the door, the door handles, glass? Anything?”

“The prints of the cop that answered the call,” Jane said.

“They never learn,” MacHovec said.

It was true. Cops destroyed more crime scenes than onlookers did, certainly more than the perps themselves.

“So we got anything that points to someone besides a random push-in?” Defino asked.

Jane turned the pages. “He had an ex-wife.”

“That sounds promising.” Defino started to look interested. “Kamikaze divorce?”

“Let's see.”

The separation and divorce decrees were among the papers in Quill's apartment, along with several snapshots of his former wife. For a plain, quiet, apparently uninteresting man, he had had a beautiful wife who obviously enjoyed posing for the camera. There were pictures of her in bathing suits, in street clothes, in elegant dinner dresses, and a small white wedding album, now in the property clerk's warehouse, whose contents were in an envelope in the file.

The men agreed she was a knockout. Laura Quill had been twenty-nine at the time of her ex-husband's death and appeared to have an airtight alibi. She and her new husband, Terry Thorne, were on a cruise at the time of the homicide and didn't return until several days later.

“So she hired a killer,” Defino said.

“Why?” Jane asked. “Quill didn't leave much. She didn't ask for alimony. It looks like she got divorced and remarried in the same week. He's the one who should've killed her, except it looks like he still loved her. Look at this. Here's a napkin from their wedding, ‘Laura and Arlen' in silver on pink. He saved all this stuff. She broke his heart when she left him.”

“Good morning!”

The greeting took all of them by surprise. In the doorway was the whip himself, his gorgeous face smiling.

“I'm Frank Graves. Glad to meet you.”

They went through the introductions, but it was clear that Graves knew every name before he popped in. “We're having lunch together today, courtesy of the task force special petty-cash fund. We want to get to know you, have you get to know the other teams. Anything you need?”

“A hot lead,” MacHovec said, and Graves laughed.

“You'll find it. I've got all kinds of faith in you guys. See you at noon. They're setting up tables in the briefing area.”

“Free lunch,” MacHovec said. “Could be worse.”

Defino got off his desk and moved around a little, working his hands in and out of fists to get the circulation going. “There's no such thing as a free lunch. Remember where you heard it first.”

3

JANE'S FATHER WAS home and in good spirits when she called just before noon. Madeleine, his longtime friend and neighbor, had picked him up at eleven as promised, and he had already been home for fifteen minutes when the phone rang. Madeleine was making lunch for him, and he was feeling really good.

She hung up in better spirits herself. The catered lunch was being set up buffet style on a long table, and the briefing area was filled with small tables and chairs. The whip was already seated at one table and the second whip at the table that MacHovec and Defino had taken. She didn't want to eat with either MacHovec or McElroy, and as she looked around, holding her tray, she accepted an invitation from another table.

They introduced themselves, and the one who had invited her, Jim McCaffrey, said, “Welcome to the OSS.”

“I'm missing something.”

“Old Stiffs Squad.”

“Got it.” She smiled and looked down at her plate, a nice assortment of hot foods, salads, and a warm biscuit. Dessert and coffee would come later. “What's your case?” she asked them.

“Coupla girls got whacked alongside the Bruckner Expressway.”

“I remember that one. We've got the guy in the West Fifties, looks like a push-in.”

“I wonder how many of these'll get cleared with results,” the man called Rob said.

“None of them today, that's for sure,” McCaffrey said.

They talked through lunch, Jane feeling that these three men were all preferable to MacHovec, but that was the luck of the draw. They all cared about the victims. There had been a lot of news when those bodies were found about a year ago. Boyfriends had been questioned, girlfriends, families, teachers, employers. It looked as though someone had picked them up to give them a ride and decided to rape and murder them.

She began to wonder how the cases had been distributed, whether this team had rated a better case than her own. She wasn't even sure, in her own mind, what a better case was. Did it mean the case was more likely to be cleared or that the victims were more sympathetic?

Both Graves and McElroy approached Jane's table, although there was no empty fourth seat. Graves pulled up an extra chair and left it there for McElroy. It was all hype and cheerleading. We're counting on you, anything you need is at your disposal, you've been carefully selected, fresh start, new angles. “The PC is very interested and backing us all the way.” It had the hidden suggestion of promotion to first-grade detective for results. They had heard it all before.

Back in the office, MacHovec had a foil box full of food to take home. Jane turned her face so he wouldn't see her breaking into a laugh. Cheapskate of the month.

“Look,” she said, “let's divide this file up and each read a third and pass it along. We've got the basics now. It's more efficient that way and we can stop and talk about anything at any point.”

“Sounds good,” Defino said.

Jane divvied it up, keeping the bottom or earliest third for herself, handing the middle third to Defino, and the most recently collected material to MacHovec. For the next couple of hours it was pretty quiet except for pages turning and MacHovec yawning.

Around three-thirty Defino got restless. “We better start planning our strategy,” he said. “Who goes where, you know?”

“One of us should hang out here,” MacHovec said, and Jane sighed with relief.

“We should see Bracken and Wright first,” she said. “Then the ex-wife and the people in the building.”

“I'll call and see if Bracken is still on the job. He'll probably know where Wright is.” Defino picked up the phone and started making calls.

Jane found the phone number for Quill's ex-wife and dialed. After several rings an answering machine picked up. At least Mrs. Thorne was still available. She hung up and waited for Defino to get off his phone.

“He's on the job and he'll see us at ten tomorrow. We can check in here first and then go uptown.”

“Suits me.” Good, she thought. Things are starting to move.

When they broke up at five, she took the rest of her portion of the file with her, something to read tonight. Outside everyone and his brother was going home. She walked over to the City Hall subway station and got on the Lexington Avenue uptown. At Grand Central she shuttled over to the West Side and caught the number one train on the Broadway line going north. When it reached Fifty-ninth Street, she heard a barely intelligible announcement that the train would go no farther. Half the crowd grumbled while the other half, numbed by the daily misery of trying to get to and from work in a hostile subterranean world, moved silently out of the train.

Jane went up to the next level. The crowds were stifling. From this point she could walk home in less than half an hour and leave the underground menace behind. It seemed better than waiting for another train. She climbed the stairs to the street and got her bearings. A stroll up Broadway would do it. As she waited for the light, it occurred to her that she was only a few blocks away from the building where Arlen Quill had been murdered. She was in no hurry to get home, and she had eaten enough for lunch that she could get through the evening on leftovers. Why not take a look?

She turned abruptly and walked west. At Ninth Avenue she turned south and walked to Fifty-sixth, then turned west again toward Tenth. The block was a row of colorless old buildings with a shared lack of individuality, probably looking shabbier inside than outside.

Fifty-sixth Street was near the northern end of the section of the west side of Manhattan now called Clinton, named after the park of the same name a little farther south. The park was home to a statue of DeWitt Clinton, a long ago mayor of the city and governor of the state. The name of the area, which covered most of the west Forties and Fifties over to the Hudson River, was relatively new, having for nearly a century sported the more picturesque name of Hell's Kitchen, an area so full of murderous gangs around the turn of the last century that police officers were sent on patrol only in groups of three.

Several fables explaining the origin of the old name existed. The one that appealed most to Jane claimed that during a blistering heat wave one summer in the late nineteenth century, one cop allegedly said to another that this place was as hot as hell. It was hotter than that, his partner asserted. It was as hot as hell's kitchen. The name stuck until late twentieth-century gentrification brought upscale residents into the west Forties and Fifties. These people, with more money and finer sensitivities than their predecessors, preferred to live with a more gentrified name and Clinton was officially adopted.

When she got to Quill's house she stopped. One of the tenants interviewed had referred to it as the haunted house. Fire escapes lined the front of the building. The windows were large and for the most part uncurtained. The only signs of life were the plastic bags of garbage on the curb.

Three steps led up to the front door. She mounted them and opened the door. On the right were mailboxes and doorbells. She had been in a thousand entries just like this in the last twenty years. The stairs were straight ahead and there, on the left, the door to Mrs. Elaine Best's apartment. She pressed the buzzer next to the door.

An elderly man opened it, a cat at his heel.

“I'm Det. Jane Bauer.” She pulled out her shield and photo ID case. “I'm looking for Mrs. Best.”

“Don't know any Mrs. Best.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Almost four years.”

“I guess she moved.”

“If you're looking for the woman who used to live here, I heard she died.”

“Sorry to have bothered you.”

“No bother.” He gave a little smile as though her brief visit had been a welcome interruption from the television set that sounded from another room. He closed the door and she retreated to the mailbox area. She had a list of the tenants at the time Quill was murdered. There were seven apartments on the four floors of the building, but only six of them had been occupied at the time: Mrs. Best on one, Mr. Soderberg and a middle-aged man, Hollis Worthman, on two, Quill and Margaret Rawls on three, and a younger man, Jerry Hutchins, in 4A. Four B, the apartment directly over Quill, had been empty.

When she took out the list and compared it to the names on the mailboxes, she realized that all the names were different. She walked out to the street and checked the number above the door. This was the number of the building where Arlen Quill had been murdered four and a half years ago, yet not one person who had been there at the time of the homicide still lived there. This was certainly a rent-controlled building. Rent-controlled tenants in New York had been known to tolerate conditions almost as bad as Third World prisons or battlefield accommodations—no heat, no electricity, no water, vermin and filth, attacks by the landlord's goons—all to hang on to a cheap apartment. What had made these five leave?

She went back in. There was no Hutchins, no Soderberg, no Worthman, no Rawls, no Best. No law of averages could account for a clean sweep of this building in less than five years. Twenty percent of the general population of the United States might move every year, but rent-controlled tenants in Manhattan did not.

Jane left the building and turned north on Tenth Avenue. Something was wrong or crazy, and whichever it was, it had to be investigated. She walked briskly, feeling very good after a merely routine day. There was something here, something the detective working the case had not noticed. In his annual review, he had not called back any of the tenants, not that he was required to, and he would be totally unaware that they were all gone from the building.

Throughout the mile-and-a-quarter walk home, her mind buzzed with possibilities. In her apartment she changed into pants and a sweatshirt and started packing, as though the walk had provided the momentum to keep moving. The new apartment was hers. As soon as she was packed and had a mover, she could get out of this place and start making fires every night. Sooner was better than later.

She didn't stop until all but a handful of dishes were packed, till the few pictures on the wall were in cartons, till the pots and pans were taken care of. It hadn't been all that difficult, and she had been free to think, free to direct the rush of energy generated by her discovery to meaningful physical work.

Where had they all gone? And more to the point, why had they left?

At nine o'clock she called it quits, put some ice in a glass, and poured Stoli over it. She was hungry but not in the mood to cook. She boiled some water, measured out spaghetti, and reheated the meat sauce that was left in the fridge from the weekend.

The colander had disappeared. It was not on its shelf or in the sink. She searched fruitlessly before realizing it was packed. She started to laugh. Some days it was hard to win. Luckily it was near the top of a carton, and she pulled it out in time to catch the spaghetti. She was starving. The catered lunch on Centre Street seemed like yesterday. She poured the sauce over the spaghetti, which was on the one dinner plate she hadn't packed, and carried it to the table that had been old when she moved in to this place. But she would move it anyway, scratched and burned as it was. There were too many expenses involved in getting settled; a new kitchen table could wait, as dinner could not. She inhaled the mass of food in front of her and dug in.

The phone rang just as she was finishing. She grabbed it, still sitting at the table.

“Jane? It's Flora.”

“Flora. How are you? I haven't heard from you in ages.”

Flora Hamburg had made it on the job when women didn't. If ever someone marched to her own drummer, it was Flora. About sixty now, she had become a cop when pretty women on the job were snapped up to assist men moving to higher places, and plain women went almost nowhere.
Plain
would have been a compliment to Flora. Matronly, tough, rarely without a cigarette dangling from her lips, she had succeeded because she was smart and for no other reason. Her clothes looked like leftovers from the Salvation Army, and if she owned a handbag, no one ever saw it. An unfashionable shopping bag held whatever she chose to carry to work. Her weapon, which she was rumored to have drawn to good effect on several occasions, flapped on her hip. Jane had met her at the Policewoman's Endowment Association when Flora was still a lieutenant and Jane was still in blues. For over fifteen years, Flora had kept an eye on Jane.

“More to the point, how're you? I've been hearing things. Is it true you're retiring?”

“It's true. I've got a few months left.”

“Where're you going?” the gravelly voice asked, blowing smoke.

“I've got a job with an insurance company.”

“Yeah, yeah. Lots of money and an office with a window.”

Jane smiled. “Right.”

“Your initiative or theirs?”

“They came to the union looking for a few good men. I accepted the invitation.”

“Why didn't you come and talk to me?”

“It seemed the right time. I didn't think you'd approve.”

“Well, you're right about that. You should think about this, Jane. You're only forty. The hard work is all behind you. How's your dad?”

“He's OK. Got some heart problems, but he's pretty good.”

“You're giving me heart problems. I hate to see you go. If you wanna talk, you know where to find me. Not next week. I'm going to Atlantic City to make some money.”

“Thanks, Flora.” She hung up feeling the old conflict. But although Flora knew a lot, she didn't know everything. The decision to leave had not been all about pensions and more money.

“Run that by me again.” Defino's thin face was one big frown.

“The five tenants living in Quill's house at the time of the homicide are all gone. I walked by the building yesterday when my subway train stopped for good at Fifty-ninth. The woman on the first floor, Mrs. Elaine Best, she's been gone or dead for almost four years. I didn't talk to anyone else. We have to talk to the super or the owner before we do anything else.”