Murder in Hell's Kitchen (8 page)

“Check,” MacHovec said.

“We've got the autopsy on Soderberg and it's inconclusive.”

“Right.”

“What about this guy Worthman? The one who moved back to Harlem and got mugged?”

“I'll go over to One PP tomorrow and get the file,” MacHovec said, referring to police headquarters at One Police Plaza.

“The woman who was a hit-and-run in Tulsa.”

MacHovec yawned. “I talked to the detective, Johnnie Roy Anderson, while you guys were out. He'll get the file and call me back. He remembers the case. It's still carried as a vehicular homicide, officially, but maybe it was just a hit-and-run. He said it almost looked like a homicide except who would want a nice woman like Miss Rawls dead?”

“Or a nice man like Hollis Worthman,” Jane said. “Or a nice man like Henry Soderberg. Anything on Bracken's partner?”

“Otis, yeah. I called him. His wife said he'd love to meet with you. She said he's doing fine.”

“OK,” Defino said, sounding a little more upbeat. “When do we go?”

“I'll get you a time.” MacHovec keyed a number and had a brief conversation. “I made it ten o'clock tomorrow,” he said. “Give you some time to get out to Queens. Otis is black, by the way.”

“If he can talk to us,” Jane said, “I don't care if he's purple.”

The call from Flora Hamburg the other night had troubled her. Flora wanted to know that Jane's decision to retire had not been made either quickly or lightly. When you've spent half a lifetime on the job, if you haven't grown to hate it, you probably love it. Jane loved it.

Working the streets in Harlem, then Chinatown, and later in Manhattan South Narco, she had built a reputation for herself, made the kinds of arrests that drew notice, received a few commendations, and eventually, on her assignment to the Manhattan South Burglary Squad, was awarded her gold shield. Now Detective Bauer, she put together everything she had learned on the street: the junkies, the fences, the informants, the hows and the whys of how crime worked. She knew which secondhand shops would buy jewelry cheap, no questions asked, which antique dealers would close their eyes and hand over cash, which stamp and coin shops would buy old gold and silver to be made into scrap and resold to jewelers. She used everything she knew for a couple of spectacular arrests that netted her no promotion but got her a mention in the
Daily News
.

And it was close to the Academy, and she did run into Hack, and something got started and neither one of them ever looked back.

When the noise died down on Centre Street, she signed out.

8

SHE WENT TO the new apartment before going home. The floors, now sanded and polished, were so beautiful she didn't want to step on them. The new buildings she had looked at had floors of square parquet. Some people kept them natural; others stained them a darker brown. But these floors had character. They were patterned with a thin, dark border that ran around the whole room a foot or so from the wall, and the sanding and polishing made the design almost a work of art. It would be a shame to cover them with anything larger than a small rug.

She went through the apartment one more time, finding that her small requests had been attended to. The window that stuck now opened and closed effortlessly. The few imperfections in the paint were cleaned up. A note on the mantel assured her that the fireplace was in good working order.

After her checkup, she went down to the super's apartment and told him she would be moving in on Saturday. That was fine with him. She buttoned up her coat and went out into the cold evening.

She had always loved lower Manhattan. From Fourteenth Street down to the Bowery it was the part of the city that was most appealing. The streets here ran amok; the famous grid of uptown Manhattan didn't exist below the single-digit streets. On the east, the island bulged into Alphabet City; on the west it narrowed, eliminating some streets and squeezing others into strange patterns. Parallel streets inexplicably crossed; others came to an unexpected end. The monotony of numbered streets no longer existed. The havoc that began below Fourteenth Street increased around Washington Square Park. If a map was superfluous uptown, it was a necessity downtown, where nothing was predictable. Jane knew the streets because she had worked them; she even loved them, some of them, anyway. Now she would live there. For as long as the Centre Street job lasted, she would be able to walk to work if the weather allowed. Chinatown was also accessible, as were Washington Square and all of Greenwich Village. She enjoyed walking, especially in that part of New York. When the new job started, she would be back to the subway, this time paying her way, but it didn't matter. She would earn more, and she would allow herself luxuries and pleasures that she denied herself now.

When she went down into the subway for the ride uptown, she pulled out her shield as automatically as she always did and rode for free.

There were no messages waiting tonight, not from Hack and not from anybody else. Not that she expected him to call back. It had been a moment of opportunity, a moment, perhaps, of weakness, being alone in his office, something reminding him of her, and before he knew it he had the phone in his hand and he was keying the number. She knew this about him, that he hadn't forgotten. She knew it because she felt the same. She was glad that she shared an office now, that there would be no momentary lapses, no chance to pick up the phone and have an intimate conversation with anyone. Look at poor Defino, his day ruined after talking to his wife.

After dinner, she began throwing things away: papers, letters, magazines, half-used packages of food she hadn't even known she owned. She felt a little like Old Mother Hubbard when she was finished; the cupboard was bare. She would eat one more dinner here, two more breakfasts. There was enough left to do that. When she was finished with dinner, she wrote checks for the few bills that lay on the kitchen counter, remembering that she would have to find a closer branch of the bank next week, that she would need new checks printed. There was no end to details.

And then there was nothing left in the kitchen except the little envelope of crinkly paper. She thought about whether this was the time to open it, whether she should take care of old business in the old apartment and start everything fresh in the new one. But this was not something she could take care of as easily as she could write a check and get rid of a debt. She put the envelope in her handbag and turned on the TV to catch the news, see the guys in the squad get their minute of fame.

Otis Wright lived in a private house in Richmond Hill, a brisk ten-minute walk from the J train station on Jamaica Avenue and One Hundred Twenty-first Street. Years ago the population had been white, Irish, Jewish, Italian, and German. Today it was mostly black, both American and Caribbean, as well as Indian. It was one of those old neighborhoods of low buildings with store-fronts at street level, a nail store, a drugstore, little restaurants, a grocery. She remembered an old partner once calling such buildings “taxpayers.” In the old days, the family business was downstairs and the family's life went on upstairs.

She spotted Defino half a block ahead of her as she walked south on Lefferts Boulevard but wasn't able to catch up to him till he stopped and looked around on the next corner.

“Morning,” he said as they met.

“You know where we're going?”

“Yeah. Left at the next corner onto Ninety-fifth Avenue and A Hundred Twenty-first Street. Want to stop for coffee?”

“Not now. They'll probably give us some.”

They started walking. “You have kids?”

“No.”

“Don't.”

Jane laughed. “They giving you trouble?”

“She's giving me trouble,” he said, emphasizing the
she
.

“How old is she?”

“Sixteen.” He shook his head. “I don't think I was ever sixteen the way she is.”

“I was.”

“And you turned out OK.”

“I gave my folks a hard time. They didn't deserve it.”

“Nice of you to own up. I don't think my kid ever will.”

“She will, Gordon. She just won't tell you.”

He smiled a little at that. They came to the corner and turned left. Here it was completely residential, one small house after another, small, well-cared-for lawns that were autumn drab, here and there a leafless tree in front of a living room window. They walked another block and found the house. They were just on time.

Mrs. Wright was an attractive black woman wearing a black pantsuit with a white blouse. She looked as though she was expecting company. “I have to ask you to be careful where you step,” she said after they had introduced themselves and she had taken their coats. “We have tubes all over the place for Otis's oxygen.” She led the way into the living room, where a clear plastic line on the floor ended at a chair near the front window. “He has emphysema, you know.”

“Charlie Bracken said he wasn't well,” Jane said.

“Oh, you've talked to Charlie.” She smiled at the name. “Otis, these folks have talked to Charlie Bracken.” She made the introductions.

Otis Wright started to get up, but Defino told him to stay where he was. They all shook hands, and Mrs. Wright said she'd bring in the coffee.

“I'm OK,” Otis Wright said. “Just need a little oxygen once in a while if I move around too quick.”

“We just want to talk,” Jane said, sitting on the sofa near his chair.

“This is about the Quill murder, right?”

“That's it. We're on the new squad they've set up to look into open homicides. Gordon and I got Quill.”

Wright sat in his chair and looked down for a moment. He was a tall man who had apparently lost a lot of weight. His sweater looked big on him; his face was gaunt. His hair, like his wife's, was beginning to gray. “There wasn't much to grab onto in that case,” he said finally, looking up at them. “The body was lying in the front hall of that building over on Fifty-sixth Street. He'd been dead all night when one of the tenants came down and found him. Had a knife in his gut, if I recollect properly.”

“He did,” Defino said.

“Nothin' was taken, right? Wallet was there, watch was there. If it was one of the tenants did it, we never found a motive and nobody heard anything. I interviewed everyone in the building myself. The two women, they were so scared I thought they'd move out that night. But they didn't.” The talk had been too much for him. He reached for the plastic tube and fitted a small breathing piece into his nostrils, sat back for a moment and just breathed. Then he said, “I'm fine. Don't worry about me.”

“There were three men in the building, too,” Defino said. “You remember them?”

“Yeah.”

“Any of them give you a bad feeling? Anything sneaky?”

“Yeah, maybe. But there was nothing there. The guy on the top floor, Hudson or something.”

“Hutchins.”

“Right. Jerry Hutchins. He didn't fit. Didn't come from New York. Didn't seem right for that place. Doesn't make him a killer.”

“What way wasn't he right?”

“He was young,” Otis Wright said without hesitation. “The others were . . . well, sad older people.”

“Quill wasn't old.”

“No, you're right, he wasn't. He was in his early thirties. But he was sad too. Had a gorgeous wife that had left him. You get a look at her? Upscale, wow.”

“Yesterday.”

Mrs. Wright came in with a tray and set it down on the coffee table in front of the sofa. It was close enough to Otis that he could lean over and reach his cup. The coffee was in a handsome silver-plated thermos to keep it hot. As she poured, Jane could see the steam rise.

“I brought you some nice cakes, too,” Mrs. Wright said. “We have a new Caribbean bakery on Liberty Avenue. The old one closed a couple of years ago, but now things are getting better.”

“They look great,” Jane said.

Mrs. Wright moved away and took a chair apart from them.

Defino got back on track. “From what she told us, she used her husband as a stepping-stone to a better life, hung on to him till she found something better.”

“I can believe it.”

“But she had no reason to kill him, or have him killed.”

“None we could find,” Otis said. “She's got a husband who makes more money than Quill, treats her real good, buys her nice things. Why should she get rid of the poor slob she ditched?”

“So what do you think, Otis? You think it was one of the folks in the building, one of those sad people that lived there all those years, or someone at work, or someone who just followed him home, killed him, heard a noise, and ran off scared before he took anything?”

“I gotta tell you, I don't think it was someone in the building. If it was someone where he worked . . . it was a hotel, right?”

“Right.”

“We couldn't find anything. He was Mr. Invisible at work. No one knew if he was there or not. They all said he was nice, but they didn't know a damn thing about him. The trouble with someone following him home—” He stopped for a minute and caught his breath.

“They didn't take anything,” Jane said.

“Nothing we could find missing.”

“Well, Jane and I stumbled onto something,” Defino said.

“Yeah?”

“Something crazy. Tell him, Jane.”

“I went into the building the other day on my way home. Every name on the mailboxes was different.”

“They all moved out? Every one of them?”

“The woman on one? Mrs. Best? She died in her apartment about six months after Quill was murdered. A stroke or something. Then Soderberg, the guy who found Quill's body, he fell down the stairs and broke his neck.”

“He's dead too?”

“Right. The southern woman, Miss Rawls?”

“Oh, yeah, nice woman, sweet as sugar.”

“She found Soderberg, got so upset she moved out that night to stay with a friend, and went back to Oklahoma a few months later. Got hit by a car in a parking lot, hit-and-run, no ID on the driver.”

Wright's alert eyes glistened with interest. He looked at her with disbelief. “Go on.”

“Officially, vehicular homicide. The detective said it almost looked like homicide, but who would kill a nice lady like Margaret Rawls?”

“I'm listening.”

“Hollis Worthman—”

“The black guy.”

“Right. Moved out after Soderberg died and went back to Harlem. I talked to his mother. He was mugged in the street and killed.”

“This is crazy,” Otis said. “You're gonna tell me they're all dead. That's all of them, isn't it? Except Hutchins.”

“It looks like Hutchins went back to Omaha, Nebraska,” Defino said, articulating the city and state carefully, as though there were something unusual about it. “But we haven't found him yet. He's not listed in the phone book. We've got a detective calling high schools and checking the DMV.”

“This is crazy. I've never heard anything like this. You hear this, Betty?”

“I'm listening to every word and I can't believe it either.”

“Damn peculiar. All of this must've happened after Charlie and me stopped working actively on the case, six months after.”

“Charlie knew Mrs. Best had died,” Jane said.

“Yeah, OK, I remember that too. Skinny old gal wore a black wig to make her look younger. Yeah. It comes back to me now. There was nothing suspicious about her death.”

“You take them one at a time,” Defino said, “there isn't much suspicious about any of them. Soderberg was changing a lightbulb and fell off a stool and went down a flight of stairs. You get mugged on a city street at night, you don't go looking for any motive besides money.”

“But a nice southern lady getting run down in a parking lot,” Otis said. “Makes you wonder. And Hutchins disappears. I don't like it one bit.”

For a minute they all sipped coffee and ate squares of cake. Jane looked around the room. Half-concealed behind an end table was a small green oxygen tank, probably for taking along when he went outside. It was in a clear carrier case and didn't seem to be connected to anything. His life and limits were defined by the length of the plastic hoses. He could no more go down to the corner for a paper than he could scale a fence or chase a perp.