Murder in Hell's Kitchen Page 15

  “You bet. You just call me when you’re ready to go and I’ll lead you right to it.”

  “He’s on the run,” Jane said.

  “Or the shooter got to him. It’ll hold till later.”

  “Suits me just fine.”

  He came into the room and made some phone calls while she gathered her things together. Having expected to stay only a couple of days at the outside, she didn’t have much, and it repacked easily. His son arrived about ten minutes after he was called, a handsome young man named Luke who was tall but didn’t look much like his father. It was something she always noticed, who people took after. He had a small overnight-sized bag with him that Mike intended to use as a decoy. Its much-used look resembled her old suitcase at home, just what a New York cop would carry if she hadn’t gotten to Bloomingdale’s before dashing out to the airport.

  When she was packed and Mike had arranged payment for the room, he took the small suitcase downstairs to his car. Then Jane and Luke took the service elevator down and went out the back way. He was driving his own car, and they drove off the hotel grounds using the back exit, the one trucks used when they made deliveries.

  Jane didn’t look around till they were well away from the hotel. The sun was rising now, light in the eastern sky, cars along the road, most of them heading into Omaha.

  “You know what?” she said. “I’ve got my second wind. Can you take me to where they found Cory Blanding’s car? I’d like to see it before I go to sleep.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. I won’t collapse on you.”

  He smiled and turned at the next intersection. It took about twenty minutes to reach the car, and a crime scene unit was already on the scene, the area taped to keep away the curious. Four floodlights, with black battery packs, provided the detectives with enough light to read by as they examined the car and its contents.

  Jane introduced herself to the detectives and asked if they had found anything.

  The one named Joe Meyner said, “There’s a lot of junk in the backseat, fast-food garbage mostly, but nothing in front. The door to the driver’s side was open when we got here, and the motor was off.”

  “Keys?”

  “None.”

  “Mind if I have a look around?”

  “Sure thing. Hope you find something.”

  So did she. She bent to go under the tape, then walked back and forth, moving farther away from the car with each turn. Luke Fromm joined her.

  “What’re you looking for?”

  “Anything he might have thrown away.”

  He pulled out his flashlight, although it was fairly light by now, and pointed it toward the ground. The grass was several inches high and weedy and would need to be combed to dislodge its secrets. The area was similar to the brush behind the gas station, where she had searched for John Grant and Jerry Hutchins a couple of hours ago. She didn’t think Hutchins was around, but just in case he was hiding from an attacker, she called him a couple of times; there was no response except for the rustling of the wind in the leaves.

  “Something over there?” Luke said.

  In the beam of the light there was a glitter, glass or metal. They walked over carefully and Jane crouched. “Keys,” she said, feeling a rush of excitement.

  Luke pulled a plastic sandwich bag out of a pocket and lifted the keys with it. “Looks like he tossed them to keep someone else from driving his car away.”

  “Could be. Mark the spot where the keys were lying and give them to the crime scene guys, and then maybe I’ll be ready to find a place to sleep.”

  Nothing was new at the car. The trunk was open, revealing more junk but nothing that looked promising as evidence. She gave Meyner the keys and saw his eyes light up. She was sure he would have checked out the grounds himself later, but she was glad to have found them.

  “Toyota,” Meyner said, looking at them. “Very nice.” The smile he gave her was genuine.

  “OK,” she said to Luke. “Now I think I can sleep.”

  She didn’t, of course, for some time. By the time they got to the Fromms’ house, a small house with a beautiful front lawn and a big yard out back, it was after eight, which meant it was nine in New York and time to call in. She reached Defino on the first try and he returned her call, conferencing in McElroy. She detailed the night’s events as far as she could remember them. They hadn’t read her fax yet, but while they spoke it was delivered to Defino by Annie.

  McElroy must have been taking notes, because he asked her to repeat a lot of things. Finally, after almost twenty minutes on the phone, he summarized: “You’re telling us that someone knew you went to Omaha, that he followed you when you picked up Hutchins, that he went after Hutchins at the gas station where he worked and managed to shoot a cop and get away with Hutchins?”

  “Or Hutchins ran for it. No telling where he is now.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Right.”

  “We got a problem.”

  “Looks like it. We have to find out who Henry Soderberg was, who he worked for, and whether Derek, the super, knows things he hasn’t told us. But you know, I never told Charlie Bracken where I was going, so maybe we can cross him off our list.”

  “Guess we got our work cut out for us,” MacHovec said into the speakerphone.

  “Have a good time, guys. I’m going to sleep. I’ll get back to you later.”

  “Have a good one,” McElroy said. “And don’t leave that phone till we talk.”

  The living room looked as though it had been designed for smaller people than the Fromm men. But it was comfortable and cheerful, with floral patterns on the sofa and curtains. Family pictures were scattered around, some of them from Mike Fromm’s boyhood, when he was a tall, gangly kid. His wedding picture was there, his bride a foot shorter than he, smiling and very pretty.

  “Mom died two years ago,” Luke said.

  “I’m sorry. I lost my mother, too.” She realized she had been standing in front of the picture and staring. “I think I need sleep.”

  “This way. The guest room’s upstairs.”

  The guest room had obviously belonged to Luke’s sister. A handmade quilt covered a double bed that half a dozen stuffed animals sat on. Luke dropped off her suitcase and closed the door behind him, saying he would see her later. She gathered up the animals in one big armful and dropped them on a chair. Then she pulled the quilt down, stripped, and got into bed.

  She slept soundly for three hours, then got up. The clock radio on the night table said it was almost noon, and she felt so refreshed that she found the bathroom, where a stack of clean towels lay on the toilet cover, presumably for her. When she got out of the shower, she was a new person.

  In her life she had rarely spent a night in a house. Having grown up a New Yorker, she was used to apartment living. She had a friend or two in grade school and high school who lived in a single-family or two-family house in the Bronx, but it still struck her as a different way of living, four walls that looked out onto the outside world. Here there would be no complaints about heavy-footed people running amok, about loud stereos and TVs. Angry wives would not shriek back at angrier husbands only a few feet from the limits of your room. Living in a house gave a new meaning to privacy.

  Her hair dried, she stepped out of the bathroom and stopped to listen to the sounds from downstairs.

  “Jane? You up?” It was Mike’s voice.

  “Yes. Hello.”

  “I just got home. Come down when you’re ready. I’ll have some breakfast for you.”

  She was downstairs in ten minutes, the smell of fresh coffee leading her to the kitchen. “Good morning. You’re a very hospitable family.”

  “I’m finally off duty. It’s been a long shift. I stopped at the hospital and got to say a few words to John.”

  “He’s OK?”

  “He’s fine. He asked about you.”

  “What about what happened last night?”

  “He’s feeling a little dopey f
rom the anesthetic, so it wasn’t a very long conversation, but the gist of it is, there was a third man there. John arrived at the gas station sometime after the guy who was looking for Jerry Hutchins. By the time John realized what was going on, the guy had shot him and gotten his gun. Hutchins got away in his car while the shooter was looking for John.”

  “How did the shooter get there in the first place?” Jane asked as he filled her coffee mug.

  “Didn’t ask. We can go back later, but I want you to keep a low profile. Somebody knew you were here. Let’s keep you hidden as long as we can. How about some scrambled eggs? I put a little Texas hot sauce in them.”

  She smiled. “Sounds good.”

  “I’ll join you. This is either my breakfast or my supper, I’m not sure which. But I’m hungry. Let’s see if we have some bacon.”

  He cooked like a master, the smells filling the kitchen and dinette. She could see the kitchen had been updated not too long ago, and she could imagine the pleasure of the woman who had used it.

  “We fixed the kitchen up for my wife,” he said as he sat down finally to eat. “My son and I did most of it not long before she took sick. She didn’t get much time to enjoy it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She was too young to die, but you don’t have much say in things like that.”

  “She was very pretty,” Jane said. “I looked at some of your pictures in the living room.”

  “That she was. And about half as big as I am.” He swallowed a lot of coffee. “You talk to your people in New York?”

  “First thing this morning. They’ll be looking for the connection. I hope it isn’t anyone on the job.”

  “First place you gotta look.”

  “One of the original detectives on the case is on sick leave now. Emphysema. The other one’s still on the job. I don’t like to think it could be either one of them.” She sketched out the case, starting with the Quill homicide.

  “I’d be looking at that super of yours,” he said. “Sounds like he’s on someone’s payroll.”

  “There’s another possibility. Last night is just coming back to me. The empty apartment on the top floor . . . Hutchins lived on the top floor. He said someone was living in the apartment. Unofficially.”

  “Someone who could have killed Quill by mistake and the second man when he got around to it.”

  “Right.”

  “Still goes back to the super, don’t you think? Didn’t he have to know someone was living in an empty apartment? Didn’t he show the apartment to people?”

  “During the day or early evening. This guy could’ve come in at night from the roof. Maybe the super knew; maybe he didn’t.”

  “Sounds like a frustrating case.”

  “A good one.”

  “Well, it got you out to Omaha.”

  “You ever hear of a town called Jewell, Kansas?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. Very small place a few hours’ drive from here. You know someone out there?”

  “I may.”

  “You planning to go?”

  “I don’t think so. I want to finish up here and get back to New York. I keep hoping you’ll get a call that they’ve found John Grant’s car.”

  “With Hutchins in the trunk?” He looked at her soberly.

  She sat with her hands around the warm mug, thinking. “I don’t know about Hutchins. I still think he could be on the other side.”

  “Even with what John said?”

  “We’ll find out. I think we’re going to crack this case this time around.” We better, she thought as she drank the coffee.

  17

  THE CRIME SCENE detectives turned up nothing of interest in the little blue Toyota. There was no blood, no signs of a struggle, no written message stuck between the seats. It appeared that Jerry Hutchins had abandoned the car, tossed the keys, including his house key and some others, into the grass, and taken off on foot. No weapon was found anywhere in the car, and the glove compartment was closed when the car was found. So he probably hadn’t been searching for anything in the last seconds he was in the car.

  But was he followed and overtaken, or did he just decide he had more flexibility on foot? Nothing at the scene was definitive. Whatever happened, it had been sudden and quick. Tossing the keys meant that anyone following him could not get into Cory’s apartment. But whether he made a successful getaway or had been picked up by his pursuer was a toss-up.

  Jane gathered all the information she could, then called New York. This time Captain Graves joined McElroy on his speakerphone, and Defino and MacHovec shared theirs. She gave them everything she had and then let Defino and MacHovec report.

  Sean had spent the morning trying to trace the company Henry Soderberg had allegedly worked for, QX Electronics. The company didn’t exist anymore, but it had occupied quarters in a building in downtown Manhattan four years ago. Defino had chased over there this morning and talked to the owner, who barely remembered the company. His files showed they had rented a very small office on the third floor for about eighteen months, but signed a lease and paid for a full two years. He couldn’t remember how many men worked in the office, but he was sure there were only men. At least, he had never seen a woman there.

  The telephone company’s records showed phone service for QX for eighteen months, all their bills paid on time. But when QX terminated service, which was a few months after the death of Soderberg, they did not leave a forwarding number. A check of Dun & Bradstreet and TRW showed no record of QX’s existence. This alone was not telling. They might have been a start-up company, a couple of guys with a brilliant idea, a Microsoft wanna-be that just never made the grade, and with Soderberg gone, half their resources may have been gone too. So they came out of nowhere and went back to the same place, MacHovec volunteered rather poetically.

  Where Soderberg came from was still unknown. Stabile, the owner of the apartment building on West Fifty-sixth Street, had no record of any references or former addresses for him. He had a job and he had plunked down a month’s rent and a month’s security, and that had been enough for Stabile. So at the moment, Soderberg’s origins were as cloudy as those of the company he worked for.

  “Who claimed the body?” Jane asked almost in the same breath as did a male voice in New York.

  “That is the question,” Sean said. “Nobody, it seems, for some time. Couldn’t find any record in his apartment of his having a family, so they left the body in the morgue after the autopsy. Eventually, maybe a couple of days later, somebody at QX Electronics came in in lieu of next of kin and had him sent to a New York funeral home, but don’t ask me what they did with him after that. I haven’t tracked it down yet.”

  “Sounds like he’s the key to this whole thing,” Captain Graves said. “We’ll have to get on it. Jane?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I think we can leave the search for Hutchins to the Omaha police.”

  “I agree.”

  “It sounds like he doesn’t have the answers we need. You up to coming back?”

  “I’ll call the airline as soon as I get off the phone. I just want to get to the hospital and talk to John Grant before I go.”

  “Get what you can from him. He can probably identify the shooter, even if it was dark. When they get a drawing, they can fax it to us, see if anyone here can ID him. Meanwhile, we’ll be looking into QX Electronics and Henry Soderberg.”

  That ended her part in the conversation.

  “Sounds like you’re heading home,” Mike said when she hung up.

  “There’s nothing else I can do here, at least not now. If you find Hutchins, I’d sure like a crack at him.”

  “We’ll hold the room upstairs for you.” He smiled.

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  “And maybe we’ll get you to that small town in Kansas to see your friend.”

  John Grant was awake and alert when they got to the hospital. He held out his good hand and shook Jane’s. “I have to thank you
for what you did. I could’ve bled to death.”

  “Thank your wife. If she hadn’t called . . . Where is she?”

  “Home taking a shower and a nap. She’s beat. You must be too.”

  “I slept this morning. Can you talk about last night now, John?”

  “Sure. Let me go back a bit. I left you maybe eleven-thirty, right?”

  “About that.”

  “I drove from the hotel to the gas station. I’d guess I got there about midnight, but I can’t swear to it. I left the car off to the side so I wouldn’t be in the way if someone came in for gas. The blue Toyota was there, on the other side of the station, the right side. I could see it in the light from these tall lights they have out there. There was a car getting gas when I pulled in, man and woman in it, man doing the pumping. She got out and used the ladies’ room, and he went inside and paid Hutchins. I waited till they were finished. When they pulled out of the station, I got out of the car and went to the building and stuck my head inside.”

  “Did you see any other cars parked there?” Jane asked.

  He thought about it. “I don’t remember seeing any, but I could be wrong.”

  “Go on.”

  “Hutchins was there, sitting on a high stool near the cash register. He was reading a magazine. When I came in, he looked over at me and said, ‘Hi,’ kind of friendly. I said I just wanted to check in and make sure everything was all right, and he said he was fine, he’d taken Cory home and she was OK, he’d called her. I said if there was any trouble to call nine-one-one, and he said not to worry. That was about all there was. I said good night and went outside to my car. I started the motor and I was just about to pull out when something caught my eye. I could see movement inside the building, where Hutchins was. Someone was inside with him, and I was sure I hadn’t seen anyone go in and the place had been empty when I was in there. I got out of the car and started over there when Hutchins flew out the door like a bat out of hell. I called to him but he never stopped. He shouted something like, ‘He’s after me,’ and then a second man came out. I went for my gun and yelled, ‘Police, don’t move,’ and the second man turned toward me and fired. I didn’t see the gun until it came up.” He reached his left hand over to his right shoulder to indicate where he had been hit. “I hadn’t gotten my gun out and the shot pushed me backward against my car. I slid down on the ground and tried to get out of the light. I heard a car start and the shooter went for the blue car and I dragged myself around the side of the building. I didn’t have much use of my right arm, and I was starting to feel kind of woozy. I just kept trying to put distance between myself and the building. Next thing I knew, there was another gunshot and I got hit in the thigh. I must have passed out for a while, because when I woke up my gun was gone. He must have thought he’d killed me.”