Murder in Hell's Kitchen Read online

  “Nervous.”

  “Holding back?”

  “Maybe.”

  Defino looked at his watch. “Want to talk to the super?”

  “Absolutely.”

  They took the train to Fifty-ninth and walked the same route Jane had walked last evening.

  “Still Hell’s Kitchen up here,” Defino said.

  “Just what I was thinking.”

  The building the super lived in was closer to Ninth than Quill’s building and looked identical to it. They found Derek, a pudgy black man with a scraggly beard and work clothes, in his ground-floor apartment.

  “You the cops?” he said when he saw them.

  “Mr. Stabile call you?” Defino asked.

  “Yeah. Said you might come by. This about that murder a coupla years ago?”

  “Mr. Quill. You remember that?”

  “Man, I can’t never forget it.”

  “I can believe it,” Jane said. “Must have been awful.”

  “Yeah, it was. You wanna come in?”

  “Sure.”

  The inside was a mess, a big room that had never seen a vacuum cleaner, never had anything thrown away or replaced.

  “You can sit here, miss,” Derek said, removing a pile of nondescript items from a wooden chair and putting them on the floor. He offered Defino a chair from the kitchen and then he sat on a sofa with just enough uncluttered space for one man’s bottom.

  Jane introduced herself and started the questioning. “We heard there was a tragic accident in that building a few months after Mr. Quill was murdered.”

  “That other man, Mr. Soderberg, yeah. He fell down the stairs. That poor lady on three, she found him when she came home from work.”

  “Did the police talk to you after that?”

  Derek looked scared. “The police? What they want to talk to me for?”

  “Just to find out what happened.”

  “What happened? That was a accident. He fell down the stairs.”

  “Seems a little funny to me,” Defino said, screwing his face into a look of skepticism or even disbelief. “He lived on two, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how come he fell down the stairs and landed on two? What would he have been doing one flight up from where he lived?”

  “He was changin’ a lightbulb is what he was doin’.”

  “Changing a lightbulb?”

  “Yeah. He was always complainin’ ’bout those missin’ lightbulbs. Someone was comin’ in offa the street and stealin’ them. He kep’ sayin’ it was dangerous, you didn’t have enough light.”

  “How’d he reach the ceiling?”

  “He had a little chair or somethin’. I don’t remember exactly what.”

  “Isn’t that your job, Derek? Changing lightbulbs?”

  “It’s my job, sure, but I gotta see that lightbulb’s missin’. I can’t be everyplace at once.” He sounded very imposed upon, as though he were being asked to do more than his contract required.

  “Where were you when it happened, Derek?” Jane asked.

  “Me? I was here. I was watchin’ TV.”

  “Who was the lady who found him?”

  “That Miss Rawls. Nice lady. She about as scared as anyone I ever see. She called a ambulance. I heard it come and I went down to see what happened. They took him away.”

  “What happened to Miss Rawls?”

  “She picked up and moved out. Left the same night.”

  “You know where she went?” Defino asked.

  “Yeah, she went to live with a friend. She give me the address.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “Nah. I threw it away. She come back a coupla days later, moved her stuff out. I never saw her again.”

  “I heard you moved out, too,” Defino said.

  “I was scared. Too many people die in that house. I went to stay with a friend but he threw me out after a few weeks. Mr. Stabile, he took me back. I been here ever since.”

  “Did you know Mr. Soderberg?” Jane asked.

  “I knew ’em all. They all nice people. They nice to me at Christmas.”

  “How did Mr. Soderberg get along with the other people in the house?”

  Derek shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you that. I never heard no shoutin’ or nothin’.”

  “Do you remember Mrs. Best?”

  “The lady on one? I remember her.”

  “Did she die in the house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who found her body?”

  Derek took a deep breath. “Somebody called. They didn’t see her for a while so Mr. Stabile asked me to open the door.”

  “That must have been pretty awful,” Jane said.

  “I never wanna do that again, I can tell you.”

  “It’s been rough on you, Derek.”

  “It sure has.”

  “How are the people who live in that building now? You get along with them?”

  He smiled, showing a couple of missing teeth. “I get along with everybody. Just ask Mr. Stabile.”

  5

  THEY WENT DOWN the block to the building where Quill had lived and died. All seven apartments were occupied now, and they turned down Derek’s offer to go inside the apartments of their choice. They had no warrants, and there wasn’t much they could learn almost five years after the victim’s death. The file contained sketches of Quill’s apartment, but it was clear he had not been attacked there, nor had he died there.

  As they walked up to the fourth floor, Derek prattled away about who had lived where, what a nice person he was, who lived there now.

  “How do you get to the roof?” Defino asked.

  “Up there.” Derek pointed. The stairway became little more than a ladder from the top floor to the roof.

  “You keep that door locked or open?”

  “Locked most of the time.”

  “Was it locked or open when Mr. Quill died?”

  “Prob’ly locked, but I don’t remember no more. You can ask that policeman was here after the murder. He tell you.”

  “What about when Mr. Soderberg died? Was it locked or open that day?”

  Derek raised his shoulders. “I couldn’t tell you. Prob’ly locked.”

  “Who else has the key to the roof?”

  “Mr. Stabile.”

  “Any chance Mr. Soderberg was out on the roof the day he had the accident?”

  “I don’t guess so. Nobody goes out there ’cept me.”

  The interior of the building had a new coat of paint, and the stair treads looked as though they had been repaired or replaced recently. Maybe Stabile had put some money into the building in order to attract renters.

  They went downstairs, stopping on two, where Soderberg’s body had been found.

  “Is that where Mr. Worthman lived?” Jane asked.

  “Yeah, that was his place.”

  “You have any idea where he went when he moved out?”

  “I think maybe back to his family in Harlem.”

  “Is Mr. Worthman black?”

  Derek nodded his head.

  “How long did he live here?”

  “Long time. Maybe twenty years. More’n I been here.”

  They went downstairs and out to the street. Derek left them, walking slowly back to his building.

  “I wonder if Bracken ran a check on Derek to see if he has a record,” Jane said. “Let’s check the case file and, if not, call down to NCIC.”

  “Sounds good. Want me to sign you out?” Defino asked. “Seems like a shame for you to go all the way downtown just to turn around and go back up.”

  “Thanks. I don’t mind. Give me a chance to think.”

  MacHovec had spent a busy afternoon. The medical examiner would send over a copy of the report on Soderberg’s autopsy tomorrow. “Lotta broken bones,” MacHovec said, looking at his notes. “Head injury probably did him in.”

  “Any chance he was pushed?”

  “There’s always a chance. Also a cha
nce it was a suicide. But the ME’s office labeled it accidental. Looked like he was up on a stool to reach a lightbulb.”

  “You get anything on Worthman?” Jane asked.

  “Not yet. You?”

  “He’s black. The super thinks he went back to his family in Harlem. Maybe we should try the phone book.”

  MacHovec grinned. “I’m good at that.”

  They sat down and began comparing notes. MacHovec had the name of the friend Miss Rawls had moved in with, but he hadn’t been able to reach her by phone. He also had a forwarding address for the man from the West, Jerry Hutchins, and had come up with a local phone number from Cole’s Directory, but again, there was no answer.

  “I’ll try them from home tonight,” Jane said, taking the slips of paper and copying the information. “They’ll be home from work.”

  MacHovec had also checked up on the landlord’s record. It was amazingly clean. He had been cited for a minor violation in another of his buildings two years ago, but aside from that, he seemed to manage well-run buildings. Either he had a cozy relationship with inspectors or his buildings were up to building code. There were no records of anyone who lived in Quill’s building at the time of his death ever taking a complaint downtown.

  Defino was just starting to type up his DD14s, the forms for recording additional information, when the second whip knocked on the doorjamb and came inside.

  “Just touching base,” he said. “Anything I can do for you?”

  “We’re doing OK,” Defino said.

  “You’re on the Quill case, right? I looked that one over. Everything’s a dead end there. They questioned every mugger in Manhattan about that homicide. Got nowhere.”

  “We turned something up,” MacHovec said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Another suspicious death in that building.”

  “OK!” McElroy said with feeling. He sat on the nearest desk. “Let me in on the secret.”

  MacHovec gave it to him, and McElroy almost beamed. He had something to take back to his boss.

  “Hey, it sounds like you’re really onto something. Any chance this was a homicide?”

  “A chance,” MacHovec said. “The ME came down on accidental death.”

  They talked about it for a couple of minutes and then McElroy left.

  “Just enough to let the whip know we’re on the job,” MacHovec said. “I’m on my way. See you guys tomorrow.”

  “Were you holding your breath?” Defino asked when he was gone.

  Jane laughed. “I was. I was afraid he’d give McElroy everything and then we’d find out tomorrow it was all worthless. But what he said was OK. He was right. It was just enough.”

  “Go home,” Defino said. “I’ll be using the typewriter for the next half hour.”

  Before she left she called the mover. They had a cancellation for Saturday morning. Could she be ready by then? She said yes and took a deep breath. It was really going to happen.

  The steam was puffing up in little spurts as she entered the apartment. The sight of the packed cartons startled her; they seemed so out of place. She wondered if leaving this apartment for the last time would affect her. This was only the second real home in her life, and after she left her first home, she watched her mother get sick and die there. She had pleaded with her father to leave then, to find a small, clean new apartment in a safe neighborhood, but he would have none of it.

  She had never felt that kind of fierce affection for a place, but she knew he felt it, and as long as he was able, he would stay there, and she would see to it that he could.

  The answering machine was blinking and beeping, and she pressed the play button as she took her coat off. It was a man’s voice: “Jane.” A brief silence. “I’ve been missing you. I just wanted to hear your voice.” That was it. The mechanical voice told her the call had come in less than five minutes ago. She dropped her coat on a chair and pressed the replay button.

  “Jane . . . I’ve been missing you. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  So I heard your voice and you heard mine on the recording. There was never anything simple about the man. Had he called early so as to miss her or had he called as late as he could, just as he was leaving for home, hoping to catch her as she walked in the door? How many hours or days had he thought about calling before picking up the phone?

  She hung up her coat and listened to the message a third time. “Jane . . . I’ve been missing you. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  “Miss you too, Hack,” she said to the machine. The voice still did it to her, hit her where it hurt most. She had done the right thing, breaking it off, but righteousness was a cold bedfellow. She let thoughts of him enter her mind as she changed her clothes and went to the kitchen to scrape up some dinner. The relationship had been long and warm and rewarding. Even the end was not bitter. Maybe the breakup was the greater reason for her deciding to take the new job. In a high-rise office building there was no chance of crossing paths. The insurance business was another world, one he would not enter.

  And soon there would be another apartment. Would he call this number in a few weeks or months and hear a robotic voice telling him the number had been changed? Would he think she had married or moved in with a new boyfriend? Would he dial the new number to find out?

  Nothing was simple. If this apartment—the wood and plaster and thick coats of paint—had not left a permanent mark on her, maybe his presence in it had. Maybe that was what she would miss in the end, knowing that Hack had walked these floors, lain in her bed, cooked for her in the kitchen, that they had been here together, that he would never set foot in the new place.

  It took her long enough to decide to make it end. Several months ago his daughter began to ask pointed questions about where he spent his evenings. Discretion went only so far; she had suspicions, which meant his wife did. Something had to change, and Jane made the decision. They would stop seeing each other, and he would stay with his family. Afterward she had to keep herself from calling, as he had only minutes ago, just to hear his voice, to hear him say something comforting, something to carry her through a tough time. His number was still number two on her speed dial. No one had come along to fill the slot, not that she was looking. She was forty when men her age were looking for girls half of hers.

  Enough, she thought, taking out the one dish, the one knife, the one fork. It was good that she would be moving in a few days. Maybe in a couple of weeks she would call and leave her new number, just so that he could have it.

  Come on, Jane, she instructed herself. It’s dinnertime. Get on with it.

  It was while she was in Chinatown that she had decided to go to college. Decided wasn’t exactly a fair way to put it; Flora Hamburg ordered her to get a degree.

  “Go to school, girl,” she said. “There’s no future for you if you don’t.”

  Jane didn’t want to. It would be years of hard work, and she wasn’t convinced that it would pay off, although she knew now that it was the way to go. She registered at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a division of CUNY that catered to cops and firemen by offering the same courses twice a day, morning or afternoon, and then again in the evening to fit in with changing tours of duty. One week she sat in on the morning class; the next week, when she was working days, she attended the evening class. Luckily the college wasn’t far from the apartment, which made it easy.

  About halfway through college, when she had left Chinatown for OCCB, the Organized Crime Control Bureau/Narcotics Unit down on Ericsson Place, she sat down next to an older student in one of her forensics classes. She hadn’t seen him before—maybe he came days when she came nights—and they talked during a break and after class for a few minutes. He seemed interested in her career but said nothing about his own, just told her his name was Hack. She figured him for an executive in the security business.

  It was more than a year before she ran into him again. It happened on St. Patrick’s Day, when an Irish cop she had dated a couple
of times invited her to the annual Emerald Society bash for a traditional green beer after the parade. The place was wall-to-wall cops, most of them, like her date, smashed. She looked up and saw the man from last year’s class standing in front of her, wearing the uniform of a lieutenant with a couple of medals on his chest.

  “Jane Bauer,” he said.

  “Lieutenant.” She was nearly speechless.

  “Nice to see you again. How’s the degree coming?”

  “Very well, sir.”

  “No ‘sir,’ OK? I told you the name was Hack. You were in Manhattan South last year, OCCB. I always liked that place. I used to take my daughter to see the horses in the stable downstairs.”

  She was amazed at his memory. “They’re still there.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Still in Manhattan South. I’m on the burglary squad now.”

  “Behind the Academy. Maybe we’ll run into each other. I spend a lot of time down there. Enjoy the party. It was good seeing you again.”

  She felt dazzled. She watched him walk away, grasp someone’s hand, pat someone else on the back. She felt a sexual draw that had happened only once or twice before. But he had said “daughter,” and that meant wife, and she didn’t want to get into that kind of situation. Flora would kill her, and Flora was right.

  That was more than ten years ago, and Flora hadn’t killed her because Flora didn’t know.

  Looking through her few pieces of mail reminded Jane that she would have to let the post office know of her change of address. And the credit-card people and the stores where she had charge accounts. The details of moving went far beyond hiring a van with a few strong men.

  At the bottom of the pile of mail was the little letter on crinkly paper. Once again she left it unopened. This was not the time. She had dinner to eat and calls to make to try to locate the missing tenants in Quill’s building.

  “This is Catherine Phelps. Who is this, please?” The voice was not that of a native New Yorker. It had probably started life in the South, although Jane guessed its owner had lived here for some time.

  “This is Det. Jane Bauer of the New York Police Department.”

  “My goodness! That is a surprise. Has something happened?”

  “No, ma’am. We’re just trying to locate someone you know, Miss Margaret Rawls.”