Murder in Hell's Kitchen Read online

  “But they knew each other,” Jane said.

  “Yes, they knew each other.”

  “Did she say his death was an accident?”

  “That’s what she was told. But she didn’t stay around very long to find out how it happened.”

  “Did she ever go back to the building again?”

  “You mean to visit? I don’t think so. I don’t think she had any real friends left in the building, just neighbors. She must have gone back once to get her things. When she came home, there was a truck with her furniture.”

  “Can you tell me anything about the accident that killed your sister?”

  “I wasn’t with her when it happened. I only know what they told me. She had left work and was getting her car from the parking lot. That’s where the car hit her.”

  “In the parking lot?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I thought you said it was a traffic accident,” Jane said, looking down at her notes.

  “What I meant to say was that she was hit by a car. I must have picked the wrong word. Margaret was walking toward her car when she was hit. The police said there were no witnesses. By the time people got there, the car that hit her was gone.”

  “Can you give me the name of the detective who investigated the accident?” Jane asked.

  “Yes, I remember his name very well. It was Johnnie Roy Anderson.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Hopkins. I assume they’ve never found the driver of the car.”

  “Not that they’ve told me. It was probably some young fella who ran away when he saw what he’d done. I don’t expect they’ll ever get him. Maybe when he’s old and gray he’ll come forward because of his conscience. I’ve heard of that happening.”

  “It does happen sometimes. I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Hopkins. Thank you for your help.”

  Jane put the phone down and looked around the small office. MacHovec had just put his phone down and both men were looking at her.

  “Dead?” MacHovec said.

  She nodded.

  “Suspicious circumstances?” from Defino.

  “Hit in a parking lot as she was walking toward her car. No witnesses, no suspects.”

  “Wow,” MacHovec said. “Maybe we better take out more life insurance working on this case.”

  “But there’s a connection between the Rawls woman and Soderberg. They went to dinner sometimes.”

  “Interesting,” Defino said. “I wonder how Hutchins died.”

  “Hutchins is dead too?” Jane swiveled to look at him.

  “No, just a bad joke. Sorry. If we find him alive, at least we’ve got a suspect.”

  “A busy one,” MacHovec said. “That makes five suspicious deaths, right?”

  “If you include Mrs. Best. Four if she died of natural causes.” Jane looked at her sketch of the building. “I’ve never had a case like this before.”

  “Got you goin’, huh?” MacHovec said with a wicked grin.

  She felt a flicker of irritation, but he was right. “All I can think of is questions.”

  “And the big question is why,” Defino said. “You got anything, Sean?”

  “Omaha police’ll look into it and get back to me. And the autopsy on Soderberg should be here before noon.”

  “We’ll be gone before noon,” Jane said. “We’re meeting Quill’s ex-wife at twelve-fifteen on Sixth Avenue in the Fifties. Doesn’t matter. She’s not going to give us much time. She sounded very defensive.”

  “Hey, if she paid to have Quill killed, she could’ve paid to have them all killed.”

  “But why?” Defino said.

  Why, indeed, Jane thought. She pushed the notebook away and called her dad.

  7

  THEY ALLOWED PLENTY of time so they wouldn’t be late, taking the D train up to Fiftieth Street, then walking north past Radio City to the office building Laura Thorne worked in. It was a section of Sixth Avenue with one glass-and-steel building after another, buildings that held thousands of people each on weekdays, people who clogged the streets and subways and buses in the morning and early evening.

  They crossed to the west side of the street and found the door to the massive lobby behind which were banks of elevators.

  “We’re early,” Defino said. “Black coat, red scarf?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “That her over there?”

  The woman standing to the side of the information desk was blond and very pretty, wearing what she had promised and black high heels. They walked toward her and she saw them and watched them approach without a hint of recognition.

  “Mrs. Thorne?” Jane said, showing her shield and photo ID.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Det. Jane Bauer and this is Det. Gordon Defino. Where would you like to go to talk?”

  “Not here. Come with me. They’re holding a table at a little place around the corner.”

  They headed toward Seventh Avenue, Laura Thorne leading the way so that she scarcely looked as though she was walking with them. The coffee shop was almost full, but there was a table in the back that was empty, and she walked directly to it and sat so that her back was to the door. Jane and Defino sat opposite.

  After sitting, Laura Thorne stood and took off her coat and silk scarf, folding them carefully on the chair next to hers. She was wearing a good-looking suit of black wool with a white silk blouse showing at the neck and an interesting handmade silver pin on one lapel. Her nails and lips were an exact match. Her wedding ring was a row of diamonds of a good size, and on her other hand was a silver ring in a fluid free-form. Her face was made up with care, the eyes very prominent, only a hint of color in the cheeks. Her scent crossed the table like an invitation, and Jane remembered Bracken’s comment.

  “Mrs. Thorne,” Jane began, “we’re reinvestigating the murder of your former husband. Can you tell me exactly when you married him and the date of your divorce?”

  Laura Thorne looked stunned. If she had prepared herself for this meeting, it was not to answer this question. She looked at Jane for a long moment with a wide-eyed stare, and then she smiled. It was a beautiful, practiced smile, but she said nothing.

  “Could you answer the question?” Jane asked.

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m quite serious. When did you marry Mr. Quill and when were you divorced?”

  “I can’t really remember. Uh, we were married in June 1993, I think. The divorce was . . . I don’t know the date.”

  “Can you tell us a year?”

  “It was about a year before he was murdered. We were separated for some time before that. I stayed in the old apartment and Arlen moved out. He moved into the place where . . . where he died.”

  “When did you meet your present husband?”

  “While I was still married to Arlen. It’s why we broke up. I fell in love with Terry and that was it. My marriage was over.”

  “When did you marry Mr. Thorne?”

  “May seventeenth, 1996.” She smiled nervously. At last she had remembered one date.

  “Where were you when Mr. Quill was murdered?”

  “I’ve given all this information to the police. Terry and I were on a cruise in the Caribbean. I didn’t know Arlen was dead until we got back.” She motioned a waitress to come to the table, and she ordered a salad and tea. Jane and Defino declined. “I hope you’ll excuse me but I must have lunch before I get back to work.”

  “What was your relationship with your former husband after you married Mr. Thorne?” Jane asked.

  “We were never on bad terms. I didn’t ask for alimony, so we had no quarrels over money. I kept a small bank account in my name, and we agreed that it was mine. Arlen kept everything else.”

  “Did he enjoy his job?”

  “That’s a hard question to answer. Arlen wasn’t a person who came home and said how much he enjoyed things. I don’t think he really liked his job, but I don’t think it ever occurred to him to look for something he might like
better.”

  “Was that a source of trouble between you?”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite that way. Arlen was a man who plodded along. He did his job well. No one ever complained about him or the way he worked. He put in his hours, picked up his paycheck, and came home at night. Sometimes we went out to a movie, sometimes we had dinner out, sometimes we watched television. A few times a week we made love. I don’t think Arlen ever thought about where he was going. He cared for me a great deal. Unfortunately, I was bored.”

  “Did you think about where you were going?”

  “All the time.” She said it as though it were her defining statement. Her salad arrived and she began to eat it in small, careful mouthfuls, patting her mouth from time to time with the napkin. The tea steeped in a small metal pot. After a minute or two, she poured it and sipped it without adding sugar or lemon.

  “You were saying that you thought about where you were going,” Jane said.

  “I did. It was very important to me. If you had seen me when I married Arlen, you wouldn’t recognize me. I didn’t know anything, and that’s how I looked. I learned a lot during my marriage to him. One of those things was that I had to change my appearance. I worked at it. I started doing exercises, I changed the kind of clothes I wore, I had my hair cut a different way.” She stretched out her hands as though to appreciate her manicure. Every nail was perfect.

  “Arlen loved me very much. It was a terrible blow to him when I said I was leaving. But he was a dead-end man with a dead-end job. He would have stayed in that job forever. Terry has an important position, and he keeps moving up. I’ve taken a few giant steps myself.”

  It didn’t surprise Jane. Everything about this woman was careful and studied.

  “The only pictures of you in Mr. Quill’s apartment look the way you look now,” Defino said. “Didn’t he keep any of the old ones for sentimental reasons?”

  She allowed her lips to smile very slightly. “I burned them. I wouldn’t have them around. Arlen was very angry when he found out.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill Mr. Quill?” Jane asked.

  “Not at all.” She pressed the napkin against her mouth again. “I thought this was supposed to be a mugging or a push-in or whatever they call it.”

  “We don’t know,” Defino said. “Nothing was taken from Mr. Quill. He had his wallet when he was found, and there was money in it. We were hoping you might have thought of someone who had a grudge, a reason, an argument with him.”

  Laura Thorne shook her head. “Who would have cared? I don’t think Arlen made enough of a difference in anyone’s life that they would want him dead.”

  They left her to finish her salad and tea, to pat her mouth dry and pay her bill. They walked west until they found a small restaurant with lasagna on the menu in the window. Defino wanted pasta and Jane didn’t care. A very harried waitress pointed them toward a tiny table that was being cleared and they sat.

  “What a climber,” Defino said. “Talk about moving up the social ladder. That woman used Quill as a stepping-stone.”

  “The coat was cashmere. I touched it as we were walking. I feel sorry for Quill. But there’s no motive. If there was money hidden somewhere, she would have killed him before the divorce.”

  “She’d have no claim after she remarried.”

  “Funny that she didn’t remember when she married him. I thought women remembered things like that.” There were dates in Jane’s life that she would never forget, none of them a wedding.

  “My wife gets mad at me when I forget the year. And it was a lot longer ago than this broad was married.”

  “She has no reason to remember,” Jane said. “She’d rather forget. She was an ugly duckling, and she doesn’t want to be reminded of those times.”

  “You think she’s a dead end.”

  “Too soon to say. I hope to God they find Hutchins alive.”

  “They won’t,” Defino said. “It’s that kind of a case.”

  It was two-thirty when they got back to Centre Street. MacHovec was on the phone, and Defino had a message to call his wife. Jane took the opportunity to call her dad. He was feeling fine, had gone out for a walk, and was having dinner with Madeleine tonight. His voice was strong and he sounded good.

  “I hear there’s no progress on the City Hall Park Murder,” he said when he’d answered all her questions.

  “I haven’t even had time to think about that,” Jane said. “It’s a week and a half. If they haven’t cracked it by now, it may be a long time.”

  “You could have done it, Janey.”

  “Let’s see if I can crack the one I’m working on now. It’s a case that really grabs you, Dad. I think it’s got more to it than the other one.”

  “The other one had visibility.” He was always sure that if she did something that was noticed, she’d end up running the detective division. It was hard to disabuse him of his fantasies, and Captain Graves had a leg up on the job.

  “At least here the press isn’t looking over our shoulders all the time.”

  “You tell me about it when I see you.”

  She promised she would. MacHovec was off the phone, and Defino was arguing with his wife about something. When he saw Jane hang up, he wound up his call.

  “Got the autopsy on Soderberg,” MacHovec said. “No surprises. His injuries were consistent with falling down the stairs. Could he have been pushed? Yeah. Could he have fallen off the stool? Yeah. The ME flipped a coin on it and made it an accident.”

  “Don’t they usually steal lightbulbs from the downstairs socket?” Jane said. “Seems like a long walk up just for a bulb.”

  “Maybe Hutchins snatched it,” Defino said.

  “And take away light he needed to get upstairs?”

  “He needed a lightbulb,” Defino said. “He took one.”

  “Anything on Hutchins?” she asked MacHovec.

  “He doesn’t have a Nebraska driver’s license, but they’ll check Iowa. No rap sheet. This guy’s gonna call around the high schools, see if Hutchins went to any of them. It’ll take some time, but he offered to do it. You ever notice how polite these guys are in the Midwest? They seem to get a kick out of helping the big-city detectives.”

  They started to talk about it when a cheer went up in one of the nearby offices. It sounded as if someone had hit the lottery. They went out to the briefing area just about the same time everyone else in the squad did. A couple of doors down, three detectives were going crazy, shouting and yodeling their excitement. Lots of highfives and handshakes.

  The black woman walked over to Jane and said, “They cracked their case.”

  “How . . . ?” She couldn’t believe it. “How’d they do it?”

  “Two of them walked in to question a friend of the victims and he got scared and confessed.”

  “What case was it?”

  “The girls dumped at the side of the Bruckner Expressway.”

  It was the group Jane had had lunch with yesterday. She started toward the gathering crowd, but Captain Graves, smiling like a proud poppa, was on his way.

  “Guess we won’t get the gold medal,” MacHovec said behind her.

  “We should have such luck.”

  But she knew it wouldn’t happen to them. The murder of Arlen Quill was not a pickup and rape. There was more to it than that. Much more.

  Not a hell of a lot of work was done for the rest of the afternoon. Before the day was over, every TV station had set up cameras and lights in the briefing area, and Graves, every silver hair in place, had given a statement, smoothly worded and delivered, and then introduced the three detectives who were the new stars of the task force.

  MacHovec suggested with disgust that the whole thing had been a setup to promote the squad and help Graves on the road to the chief of D’s office. In spite of his undisguised hostility, Jane couldn’t entirely discount what he said. As the man in charge, Graves looked damn good.

  The new heroes of the
squad were gracious in victory. Jane got a hug from one of them and an offer of champagne from another. At this rate, the celebration might last through the weekend. And then what? MacHovec said irritably that all three would be promoted and out of Centre Street in a week, maybe even get a chance to pick their new commands. Jane wasn’t sure what he was so upset about. He had the job of his dreams right now. He never had to leave the chair behind his desk except to go for coffee and the men’s room, which appeared to be the life he had always wanted.

  “You think MacHovec’s right?” Defino said next to her.

  “That it’s a setup? Graves would be out on his ear if it ever came to light.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” He sounded defeated, and she wondered whether she was the only one who hadn’t secretly dreamed of being the first to solve their case.

  Omaha called back later in the afternoon. They had found the high school Hutchins had graduated from, but he had dropped from sight after that. A call to the home he had lived in during high school found someone else using the number for the past seven years. The detective was checking other Hutchinses in the phone book and would get back to MacHovec tomorrow.

  The noise in the briefing area was so loud they could hardly talk, and Defino, who had been in a foul mood since his phone call home, wanted to leave, but there wasn’t a chance of that. He’d have to walk right by Graves to get to the stairs or elevator.

  “All right,” he said, “let’s see where we’re at. Omaha is working on Jerry Hutchins.”

  “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?”