Twist (19 page)

Q
uinn saw that the message on his cell phone was from Harlan Wilcoxen. He sat back and listened:

“That conversation we had the other day?” Wilcoxen’s laconic voice said on the phone. “I gotta admit I didn’t play quite square with you. I kept some things from you, like why I was so interested in the Lady Liberty Killer case? Truth was, I wasn’t so interested in givin’ information
to
you as in gettin’ information
from
you. There was one piece of information I knew you’d come across once you got far enough into the FBI file. The dead woman’s husband? Billy Wilcoxen? He was my son, and it was my grandson who was ripped from his mother’s womb. It was my grandson that became Dred Gant, an’ who killed all them women. I’m hopin’ what additional information I’ve given you will be of some help. An’ that when you find Dred, you’ll remember Mildred Gant.”

That was the end of the message. There was no good-bye, but still it gave Quinn the creeps.

He motioned for Pearl to come over from where she was working at her desk.

“Let’s take a ride,” he said, when she got close.

“One I’m gonna like?”

“Probably not.”

“Let’s go then, before things get even worse.”

 

 

On the drive to the Hayden Hotel in Quinn’s old Lincoln, he filled her in, and then let her listen to Wilcoxen’s message on his cell phone.

“I don’t like any of it,” Pearl said, handing the phone back to Quinn. “From the content to the tone of his voice.”

“He always uses uptalk,” Quinn said.

“Uptalk?”

“Says things that end in question marks when they aren’t questions. Kind of an upward glide. Must be a Missouri thing.”

They stopped for a red light on Broadway. A guy in a ripped T-shirt and khaki shorts rapped his knuckles on the Lincoln’s hood and pointed to let Quinn know the front of the car was inside the crosswalk. Quinn unconsciously edged the big car forward even farther while waiting for the light to change. The look on his face scared Pearl. Scared the guy who’d tapped on the hood, too, judging by the way he picked up his pace. Quinn had a way of figuring out things before he realized he’d done so, before he put on his dead-eyed cop’s face.

“You think we oughta call Renz?” Pearl asked. “Get a radio car over there before Wilcoxen checks out?” But she knew he wouldn’t check out; he’d simply leave. Probably he already had left. Wilcoxen was an old hand and knew the moves.

“Let’s see what we got first, when we get to the hotel.”

“Optimist.”

“I don’t feel like one,” Quinn said.

The light turned green and the Lincoln swooped across the intersection, causing a man wheeling his bike along the crosswalk to stop cold and make an obscene gesture. Pearl smiled. The pedestrians were frisky today.

Quinn leaned on the horn, getting impatient. They were about fifteen minutes away from the hotel. Traffic was getting heavier as they moved downtown. Pearl phoned the Hayden. Wilcoxen was still registered, but he wasn’t in his room.

“Maybe he’s in the bar, waiting for us to show up,” Quinn said, jockeying for position in the traffic.

“Or maybe he doesn’t want to lend any more help to someone trying to get his grandson caught and shot to death or executed.”

“Or maybe he does want to lend a hand in finding his grandson before more women are tortured to death.”

“I’d guess both,” Pearl said.

Quinn said, “There’s the problem.”

 

 

The Hayden was a small hotel on Seventh Avenue, near enough to Times Square to have enjoyed some of the area’s resurgence. The lobby was more cozy than imposing, with walnut paneling, potted palms, and black leather armchairs that were unoccupied. A mildewed scent tainted the air, as if someone had just come up from a damp cellar and left the door open.

There was a bar off the lobby, and Quinn detoured and glanced into it on his way to the front desk. Six people occupied bar stools or chairs. Two of them were women. None of them was Harlan Wilcoxen.

Over near the desk, Pearl was using a house phone to call Wilcoxen’s room again.

She put the receiver back on its hook and shook her head. Still no answer.

Quinn saw no point in wasting time. He talked to a bellhop, who directed him to an attractive Hispanic woman behind the desk.

The woman listened to Quinn, then called the manager on the phone. After a brief conversation, she made a subtle come-hither motion that produced a large, shambling man in a brown suit who looked exactly like what he was—the house detective. He said his name was Bert Salter.

The manager appeared from a doorway behind the desk, then disappeared and emerged from another door on the lobby side of the desk. He was a lean, nervous man and introduced himself as Larry Castleman.

Quinn, Pearl, the manager, and the house detective walked in a tight group to the elevators and rode one to the tenth floor, where Harlan Wilcoxen was registered in room 1057.

Castleman knocked gently on the door, waited, then knocked harder. The house detective, Bert Salter, inhaled so his barrel chest swelled, then sighed loudly. Quinn thought Bert would have enjoyed kicking in the door, but the manager, a man of milder temperament, produced a card key and swished it.

The card worked the first time.

Bert moved to enter first, but Quinn eased in front of him, and the big house detective shuffled to the side.

They moved cautiously at first. Then, satisfied that there was no immediate problem, they walked in and found the room unoccupied.

A black leather suitcase rested on a foldable luggage stand. A wrinkled blue shirt was draped over the desk chair. Either the maid hadn’t been there yet or Wilcoxen had gone back to bed for a while. The spread and covers were mussed and turned back, and the rough outline of a human head was indented in the pillow.

“Nothing,” the manager said, sounding relieved.

“Both card keys are on the dresser,” Bert the house detective said.

Quinn stood still. He’d smelled something. So did the others. All except the manager.

It was subtle, but easy to identify. Blood. And a lot of it.

 

 

Harlan Wilcoxen was in the bathtub, which was three-quarters full of an approximate mixture of half blood and half water. His eyes were closed, but he didn’t look peaceful. He looked pale and in troubled deep sleep. One of his hands was turned palm up, floating on the surface of the devil’s mix in the tub, and the broad cut in his wrist was visible.

“Opened up his wrists,” Bert said. “Whatever kinda blade he used is underwater, where it isn’t visible.” He talked like a man who’d seen this kind of death before.

On the closed toilet lid was a Bible that looked as if it had never been read. It was probably from the hotel nightstand drawer. It was weighting down a fat file folder that looked as if it contained copies or originals of everything that was in the file Wilcoxen had given to Quinn earlier.

“Don’t anybody touch anything,” Bert said. He was an ex-cop, and this was his beat, after all.

The manager looked at him as if he must have lost a gear somewhere, giving orders. “We’ve got a suicide here,” he said.

Bert looked at Quinn, waiting.

“We can’t be sure yet what we’ve got,” Quinn said.

They all moved toward the door to the hall, while Quinn used his cell phone to get in touch with Renz.

 

 

The killer, scanning the
Times
and
Post
at breakfast the next morning, saw an item about a former law enforcement officer from Missouri committing suicide in a Manhattan hotel yesterday.

There were few details. Suicide wasn’t all that uncommon. The item would be of only passing interest to anyone other than the man’s family members, who, if they existed, weren’t mentioned.

Q
uinn sat at the dining room table in the brownstone with the two files on Dred Gant’s kidnapping from his mother’s womb.

It seemed to him that three important things were made clear in the file that Wilcoxen had left in his hotel room.

The first was that Dred Gant had somehow learned that Mildred Gant wasn’t his biological mother; but he still had no idea as to the identity of his real mother, or his father or grandfather.

The second was that a week before she’d stolen the auctioneer’s money and injured the highway patrolman thirteen years ago, Mildred had bought a state lottery ticket. It had turned out to be a winner.

She hadn’t been the big winner, but big enough, especially considering her finances. Her winnings were a quarter of a million dollars. It was estimated that after taxes, this would amount to approximately one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. Some of it she used to make bail. Most of it she hid somewhere.

Dred had been a teenager at the time. He might have learned about the lottery winnings, or he might not have. It would have been like Mildred to make sure he didn’t learn of it, so he couldn’t somehow get his hands on it.

In the file was a yellowed newspaper clipping announcing Mildred’s good luck, along with that of some other winners. She’d bought her ticket at a combination gas station and convenience store off of Interstate 70 just outside of St. Louis, where she’d gone for an estate auction. The jackpot winner, an attractive unemployed schoolteacher who had lost her job after posing seductively with a nozzle for a firefighters’ calendar, had received three million dollars, and almost all of the newspaper ink. There was no photograph of Mildred, or any of the other lesser winners.

The third important thing?

Wilcoxen had been of the opinion that Mildred Gant not only had acted as a pimp for Dred, but had also molested him herself.

Quinn sat back in his chair, mulling all of this over.

Good God! How might that have affected a young boy, being sexually abused by his mother? Or the woman he assumed was his mother?

A mother like Mildred Gant?

And how must he have felt when, protected from him by prison walls, she took her own life?

He had mauled her with a whip-like saw blade, but she had denied him his final ecstasy and release. His closure.

Two questions: What had happened to Mildred’s money? And should any or all of this information be released to the media?

Quinn thought the FBI might be sitting on much of the information, though he couldn’t be sure. The Bureau played whatever cards it held close to the vest. It was unlikely that they’d seen Wilcoxen’s expanded file, but they might have pieced together the information from other sources. Despite the jokes and feigned disdain about the “Feebs” that was present in a lot of metropolitan police departments, the Bureau was good at its job.

Quinn considered lighting one of his Cubans, to help him think this over. If he opened one of the tall dining room windows looking out on West Seventy-fifth Street, and sat near it so the smoke would escape outside, would Pearl still know?

Probably.

Quinn sat cigarless, staring at the clutter of the files’ contents, wondering what Renz knew. Renz was tight with the feds, in his Machiavellian way.

His cell phone chirped and he dug it out of a pocket. He saw that it was Sal calling. The Sal and Harold team was keeping a loose watch on Carlie.

 

 

Quinn switched on the phone. “Whaddya got, Sal?”

“Carlie and Jody are in a place called Twiggy’s on Varick, kind of a pick-up health-drink bar.” Sal’s voice was made even raspier by the tiny cell phone.

“A pick-me-up health—like a juice bar?” Quinn was trying to understand that.

“Literally, I guess yes. It’s part of a pilot project. The mayor wants there eventually to be at least one every ten blocks or so. Keep New Yorkers healthy. They seem to be popping up all over the place. You haven’t noticed?”

“No.”

“Anyway, the two girls have been here a while, sipping drinks that look like they’re mostly fruit juice.”

“A health-drink bar? Really?” This city, this mayor, had the capacity to keep surprising Quinn.

“Health-drink
pick-up
. That’s the word on it with folks who wanna—you know, hook up romantically and physically.”

“Jesus! Sex and asparagus.”

“Well, I thought you oughta know. Carlie and Jody don’t seem to be here looking for romantic possibilities. They’re minding their own business. They chased away a couple of nerdy-looking guys, ten, fifteen minutes ago, who had drinks with what looked like sprigs of vine dangling from them. Seems to me the girls are just relaxing with a couple of sprout drinks. On their second round, is all.”

“I don’t like it,” Quinn said.

“It’s just another one of the mayor’s pilot programs. Like the fire hydrant taxi stop thing. Probably nothing’ll come of it. You know what I mean.”

“I was thinking about Jody and Carlie.”

“Yeah. Thing is, the place isn’t an opium den. And the girls act like old friends gabbing at each other. That’s all that’s going on here, Quinn.” Sal waited a beat. “ ’Course, I can do something about it, if that’s what you want.”

“I don’t know that you could do much, Sal. They’re both adults. They’d probably both be pissed off if you interfered with them.”

“That’s what I figured you’d say. How about I don’t do anything overt, but I keep an eye on the situation? I’ll turn it over to Harold when he shows?”

“Do that, Sal. And let me know if either one of them . . . hooks up.”

“Sure. I’ll call you right off.”

Quinn broke the connection.
Girls! Women!
He had to remind himself that Jody and Carlie weren’t a couple of kids. He saw them that way sometimes, but he knew he was wrong. One was a retail designer, the other an attorney. He was lucky they listened to him at all. Or to Pearl.

Sometimes all of life seemed to be a goddamned conundrum.

He told himself that Jody and Carlie would be okay with Sal and Harold looking after them. Then he sat at the table, staring at the Dred Gant files’ contents, trying to determine what information he might put to use. It could help if he located an auctioneer who’d dealt with either Mildred or Dred, or both. He remembered a name in the file, and started shuffling papers looking for it. An auctioneer in Missouri. Vernon something . . .

Vernon Casey.

That was it. He soon found the folded flyer, printed in the nineties, advertising the auctioning off of a farm house and barn’s contents in Missouri. Vernon Casey had been the auctioneer. There was a black and white photograph of him, a man with cherubic features, grinning with his mouth open wide as if emitting a loud volume. He was wielding a gavel like a judge about to adjourn court. He didn’t look like a young man. Quinn hoped he was still alive, and that he knew something about Mildred or Dred.

He checked on Facebook and Twitter and found nothing on Casey. That would have been too easy.

When he phoned the Missouri State Police he had better luck. Casey was still alive, and still auctioneering. He lived and worked in and around Columbia, Missouri, a city of about a hundred thousand in central Missouri. Quinn thought that was where the state university was located.

He got Casey’s home and work phone numbers. Then he glanced at the kitchen wall clock. Missouri was an hour behind New York. It was still early enough to try to get in touch with Vernon Casey.

He used his cell to call Casey’s home number.

 

 

Harold had relieved a weary Sal. Now he sat almost out of sight at the far end of the bar in Twiggy’s Health Drinks and watched Jody and Carlie. They amazed Harold. These two barely knew each other, yet they found endless things to talk about. Even from where he sat he could see that they were interrupting each other, so eager were they to trade information and viewpoints.

They seemed to be having a good time, and Harold could be sure they weren’t the slightest bit tipsy. Judging by their drinks, they were mostly in danger of imbibing too much vitamin D.

At least Harold wouldn’t have to call Quinn and report that his sort-of daughter and his niece were inebriated. They wouldn’t be driving anyway. They’d met here after taking the subway to the stop three blocks away, and then walked. Harold presumed they’d go home the same way in reverse.

It occurred to Harold that the subway must have saved a lot of lives. Imagine thousands of DUIs behind private car steering wheels, jousting with all those taxis. Pure chaos. Maybe the mayor had something, with his fruit-and-veggie juice bar project. Harold sipped the strawberry-avocado-almond drink he’d been nursing, thinking about the ratio of people who’d avoided fatal car crashes to the people who’d fallen or were pushed beneath the wheels of subway trains.

While he was considering this and trying with his tongue to force a morsel of almond from between his teeth, he noticed in the corner of his vision a figure approaching Jody and Carlie’s table. An average kind of guy, not bad looking but not a matinee idol. Conservative haircut. Dressed well enough—gray slacks, white shirt with no tie, and the top button unfastened, blue blazer. Average size. Nice smile. He was casually holding a half-full glass of something green in his right hand. The thing about him was, there was nothing off-putting about him. He was too average to be threatening.

Harold stopped thinking about subways and car crashes.