Twist (29 page)

L
egwork time.

In the heat.

Quinn assigned Sal and Harold to canvass the apartments around the one where Gigi Beardsley had died. They had a police sketch artist’s rendering of antique dealer Jacob Thomas’s photo of Dred Gant, if Gant were clean shaven and with dark hair. Average looking, to be sure, but quite a different person without the blond beard, mustache, and black-framed glasses. No longer somebody who might score you some drugs in a club restroom.

They had also been given copies of the original photo, featuring the hirsute, scruffy Dred Gant. Disco Dred.

Good luck with that
, Quinn thought.

But it had to be done.

A call to Homestead Properties, Gigi’s former employer, quickly provided them with Gigi’s home address, on the West Side near Columbus Circle. The woman Quinn talked with seemed genuinely distressed over Gigi’s death. Quinn was told, predictably enough, that everyone at the agency had liked Gigi. The deceased was an earthbound angel, with a kind word for everyone. It wasn’t for lack of friends that Gigi had been fired, but lack of funds.

Quinn tended to believe that last part was true.

Armed with more of the sketch copies, he decided to drive to Gigi’s address with Pearl and Fedderman. Jody wanted to accompany them, insisting and insisting, until Quinn finally said it was all right, all right, and assigned her to the backseat of the Lincoln with Fedderman.

The old car’s air conditioner was going to have a hard time keeping up with the heat, especially with four people inside.

Feds, even more disheveled than usual, was morose and had been having trouble at home—again. Basically about him being a cop. Busy bickering, leaving no time for much else. Neither he nor his wife, Penny, had been doing the wash or visiting the dry cleaner’s for a while, even though they were in the middle of a heat wave. Served Jody right.

Quinn parked the Lincoln in a loading zone across the street from Gigi’s apartment building. He saw Sal and Harold’s unmarked, also parked illegally, near a fire plug on the opposite side of the street. Who were the bad guys in this city?

The building was an obviously expensive one, four stories of engraved stone and then twenty or so more of brick. The lower windows all had green awnings. There was a fountain outside, a sort of gargoyle perpetually vomiting water. Quinn thought that Gigi’s company must have been doing well before the market had gone sour.

“We should be selling real estate, maybe,” Fedderman said, gazing out the car window at the imposing tower of stone and brick.

“The crime market doesn’t go up and down,” Quinn said.

“And down,” Pearl added.

“I’d rather go to court than to real estate closings,” Jody said. “Borrrring.”

“You sell real estate, you don’t have to lug around a gun,” Fedderman said.

“And nobody tries to kill you,” Quinn said.

“So what are we doing here?” Jody asked.

Almost everyone had a good laugh.

Quinn fumed.

Pearl and Jody traded slight smiles.

Just in the brief time since Quinn had switched off the engine and AC, it had gotten uncomfortably hot in the car.

They all climbed out of the Lincoln and gingerly pulled the material of their sweaty clothing away from where it was stuck to bare flesh. Before they crossed the street, Quinn left his NYPD placard where it was visible on the dashboard.

There
, he thought.
Legal
.

 

 

The lobby of Gigi’s building was mostly oak paneling, potted plants, and fox-hunting prints, with tastefully disguised elevators almost impossible to locate.

“What did the victim actually do where she worked?” Jody asked seriously. Trying to match victim with environment.

“Human resources,” Quinn said. “It paid well until it didn’t pay at all.”

A uniformed doorman who looked like a German field marshal directed them to one of the maintenance staff, a short man with a bulbous nose and incredibly baggy green pants. His pin-on name tag identified him simply as Harry. He accompanied them upstairs and worked the locks on Gigi’s apartment door.

There was no crime scene tape on the door, though Quinn knew the NYPD had been here. Probably they had found nothing of interest. Or worth preserving.

Of course it was, as British TV cops said, early days. If anything had been obtained here it was doubtless still being analyzed.

“Her computer still here?” Jody asked.

“Police lab’s got it,” Quinn said. The victim’s computer was always one of the first things the lab set to work on. “They already pronounced it useless, unless somebody was planning to buy into New York real estate. Gigi hadn’t been online for ten hours before we have her at the bar meeting the man we assume killed her. Her drinking friends and former coworkers could make nothing of that sketch. They did recall a man at a nearby table giving her the eye, but they didn’t get much of a look at him. They described him as average this, average that.”

“He might not have been the killer,” Jody said.

“Did we have to bring her along?” Fedderman asked.

Jody kicked him in the ankle, not hard, but it hurt.

Harry the maintenance guy asked them to lock up when they were finished.

“If you remove anything,” he said, moving toward the door, “make sure you let me know. I’m supposed to make a list.”

Quinn assured him that they would, then asked if there was anything already on the list.

“Nope. Nobody but you guys has been here since the cops left.”

He gave them a half salute and then left.

The apartment seemed to go quiet and still after the door to the hall closed. No traffic noise from outside. Nothing but dust motes swirling in silent riot in the sunlight.

“Damn near soundproof,” Fedderman said. “Prewar building with thick walls.”

Quinn wondered when people would stop using the expression “pre-war building.” Which war were they talking about?

“Smells like death in here,” Jody said. “Even though she died somewhere else.”

The others knew what she meant and didn’t comment.

“Pearl and I will go through the apartment,” Quinn said. He then assigned Fedderman to canvass Gigi’s neighbors in the building, even if Sal or Harold had already interviewed them. Jody he gave some copies of the photos from antique dealer Jacob Thomas’s files—the ones of Dred Gant with blond hair, mustache, beard, and glasses. Her job was to cover the nearby neighborhood merchants.

Both of them also took copies of the NYPD sketch, and—in case they wanted to jolt someone’s memory and disturb their sleep—postmortem photos of the victim that had been faxed over to Q&A from the morgue.

Jody was having no luck. By the time she entered Sam’s Spirits, on Eighth Avenue, she was sweating like crazy and her feet hurt.

Sam’s was a liquor store about the size of a closet. Besides booze, there were also racks of impulse items, everything from plastic police whistles to beef jerky.

Jody looked around and didn’t see any plastic Statues of Liberty.

A man Jody assumed to be Sam himself stood behind a wooden counter, intent on counting money. He was small, middle-aged, bald, and wearing red suspenders over a blue short-sleeved shirt with perspiration crescents below the armpits. In his left hand he held a large roll of money while his right thumb effortlessly and rapidly folded back the bills one by one. Jody thought he would have looked just right with sleeve garters and a green visor. As he worked his talented thumb, the bills made a swishing, snapping sound.

He glanced up at Jody. She didn’t seem threatening, so he continued counting money the final few precious seconds, until he was finished.

Makes the world go round
, Jody thought.

He placed the money beneath the counter and smiled at her. “Please feel free to look around,” he said, motioning with his arm as if there were vistas of booze instead of his limited stock.

“I want you to be the looker,” Jody said with a return smile.

“So I’m looking.” He regarded her carefully, and she realized he thought she wanted him to look at her. “I see a cop,” he said.

She laughed and flashed her Quinn-supplied temporary NYPD shield. “There is no prize. You the Sam on the sign?”

“That Sam I am.”

She moved up to the counter and laid the NYPD artist’s hypothetical and questionable sketch on the counter. The guy in the sketch even looked slightly familiar to Jody, but maybe that was because she’d seen the sketch so many times. “Ever seen this man?”

He stared at the sketch. “Can’t say I have. Can’t say I haven’t. Average-lookin’ fella.”

“I know, I know.” Jody reached into her purse and pulled out a copy of the Jacob Thomas photo of Dred Gant in what might have been a false beard and mustache, blond hair, thick black-framed glasses. She laid it on the counter next to the NYPD sketch.

Sam studied both likenesses. “Same fella?”

“You tell me.”

He pointed to the beard and mustache photo. “I think I might have bought a joint from that guy back in nineteen-sixty-nine at college.”

Jody waited.

“That’s all I can tell you,” Sam said.

Jody gave him a spiteful look, but thanked him nonetheless.

“He do something?” Sam asked.

“We’re pretty sure he did.” She gathered up photo and sketch and turned to leave.

“Wait a minute,” Sam said. “Bring back that first one. Something about the second picture kind of triggered something about the first.”

That sounded plausible to Jody.

She returned to the counter and laid the two likenesses side by side again, hoping whatever had triggered Sam’s memory once would do it again. She said nothing. Didn’t even move. Didn’t want to create bias.

Sam studied them.

Finally he raised his gaze and looked at Jody with bloodshot eyes. “He might’ve come in last night, about nine or nine-thirty. Maybe a little later. Had a blond girl with him. She might’ve been a little tipsy. He bought a bottle of Grey Goose vodka.”

Jody felt her pulse quicken. Suddenly she was having fun here. A certain kind of fun.

“They say anything?” she asked.

“Not as I can recall. Just him ordering the vodka from where it’s displayed there behind the counter. They was sort of leaning on each other, obviously
with
each other, if you know what I mean.”

“Lovers?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Or to swear it wasn’t so.”

“How’d he pay?”

“Cash, I think. A fifty-dollar bill.”

“Could you recognize that individual bill if you saw it?” She recalled cashiers who always marked big bills when they accepted them, so the customer couldn’t claim he or she had given them a bill of even larger denomination and demand more change.

“C’mon!” Sam said, looking incredulous. “Booze ain’t cheap. I get fifties all day long.” He shrugged his bony shoulders. “You gotta realize that, till you came in here, those two were just some of yesterday’s customers, is all. I didn’t think there’d be any
reason
to identify them, or their money.”

“Which way’d they turn when they went out the door?”

“That I couldn’t tell you.”

Jody considered the place where Gigi’s friends and former coworkers had had drinks, where they’d left her despondent and vulnerable. It was a short walk from there to here, which was about halfway to a subway line Gigi and the killer could have taken to a stop very near the furnished but unoccupied apartment where she’d died.

Though she’d been fired, Gigi had still had her key to the agency’s lockboxes. She and the man who’d picked her up—or vice versa—would have gone to an apartment like that to have sex.

She reached in her purse and got out another photograph Quinn had given her. Gigi Beardsley’s morgue photo.

She laid the photo on the counter, in front of Sam. “Seen her before?”

Sam stared. “Jesus H. Christ!”

“Not
Him
,” Jody said. She pointed to the morgue shot. “Her.”

“That’s the girl,” Sam said. “The one who was in here with the guy that bought the vodka. I could and would swear to it.” He shook his head sadly. “She’s dead, ain’t she?”

“Completely,” Jody said.

N
obody liked a surprise visit by the cops.

Bobby Aikins, medium height and weight, aveage-looking guy, well on the way to losing all his hair on top, was no exception. Aikins lived six blocks from where Gigi Beardsley had been killed, which was far afield from Sal and Harold’s assignment to canvass the neighboring buildings.

What had prompted the visit was the fact that Aikins was managing director of human resources at Homestead Properties, which had sacked Gigi on the day of her death. Probably it had been Aikins himself who’d given her the bad news.

Aikins moved back to let Sal and Harold enter his apartment. It was a nice one on the tenth floor, with a view down Broadway. He motioned for the two detectives to sit on the sofa. Sal sat. Harold remained standing. Aikins settled down in a buttery tan leather armchair that matched the sofa.

There was a lot of tan leather and shiny chrome about. The apartment gave the impression that all the furnishings had been bought recently at the same time and place. They seemed to suggest that the occupant wasn’t there very often, but spent most of the time in his office or on business jaunts.

Aikins was having trouble looking either of the detectives in the eye. Hiding something. Sal saw that as a hopeful sign. The more people were hiding, the better.

“I guess this is about Gigi,” Aikins said. He shook his head from side to side, staring at the cream-colored carpet. “Damned shame, what happened.”

“It’s funny,” Harold said, “how the apartment she was murdered in is just down the street from yours.”

Sal thought Harold was pushing a little too hard here; then he realized what was going on and determined to play good cop.

“Six blocks,” he said. “Not so funny, really.”

“It isn’t funny at all,” Aikins said. “Nothing about what happened is in the least bit funny.” He looked at Harold now, shot him daggers. “And six blocks isn’t all that close. Not in Manhattan.”

“Six short blocks,” Harold said.

Sal thought of leavening that, but decided not to jump in here. It was kind of fun seeing the mild-mannered Harold playing bad cop.

Harold pretended to consult something in his note pad. “You’re the director of human resources at Homestead Properties?”

“Managing director.”

“Just what the hell does that mean?” Harold asked.

Sal almost smiled. Harold turning it on.

“Means I’m in charge of personnel.”

“And it was your decision to fire Gigi Beardsley?”

“No. That was a board decision.”

“You’re on the board?”

“Yes.”

Harold shrugged.

Sal said nothing.

Aikins said, “All right.”

They both looked at him.

“All right what?” Sal rasped.

“I saw them last night, before Gigi was killed.” Sal wished Harold would either say something or shut his mouth. Literally. His bad-cop role had been so well played that Aikins had rolled open like a sardine can. Both detectives were surprised. It was better not to look that way.

Sal figured he’d better take charge here, though he couldn’t fault the progress Harold had made.

“You’d better elaborate,” he said to Aikins.

“I felt terrible about firing Gigi. She really was an angel. Everybody at Homestead liked her.” He stared at the carpet and shook his head again. “This damned business has no heart.”

“You mean real estate?” Sal asked.

“Sure. What else would I mean?”

“It was out of your hands,” Harold said.

Now he was sympathizing with Aikins, who looked at him in surprise.

Sal looked at him, too.
Toughen up, Harold.

“Did you and Gigi have something romantic going?” Sal asked, putting this Q and A back on the beam.

“I wish!” Aikins said. Which was not a smart thing to say. Only he wouldn’t have admitted it if he were guilty of Gigi’s murder, so maybe not a dumb thing to say.

“I knew she spent some time in the neighborhood,” Aikins continued. “There was a lounge not far away where she and some of the other Homestead employees spent their time and money.”

“Including you?”

“No. Not a good place for a managing director to be.”

“Too friendly with the help?”

“You could say that.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Harold said.

Sal gave him a cautioning look. He was the old Harold again, not the hard-bitten detective out of TV and movie drama.

“I did get lucky enough to catch sight of her,” Aikins said. “She was walking on Eighth Avenue, and I sort of figured where she might be going. She still had a master key to the universal lockbox—I forgot to ask her for it, and she forgot to volunteer it. And I knew the Padmont Building unit wasn’t far away.”

“She might have been going anywhere,” Sal said.

“Well, I didn’t think so. I wanted to satisfy my curiosity. That’s why I followed them.”

Sal and Harold exchanged a dead-eyed glance that Aikins wasn’t supposed to notice.

“Them?” Harold asked.

“Didn’t I say? She was with someone. A man I’d never seen before. That’s why I was curious. And, I admit, a little jealous. I had a kind of mild crush on Gigi, but I wasn’t the only one.”

“Was she the sort that slept around?” Harold asked.

“No. Just the opposite. That’s one reason why I was curious.”

“What did this man she was with look like?”

Aikins closed his eyes, thinking. Then opened them. “There was nothing unusual about him. I guess
that
was unusual. He was just . . . average.”

“You knew the approximate height of Gigi Beardsley, Mr. Aikins. Using that as a yardstick, was the man short or tall?”

“Tall’s relevant. And I don’t know what kind of heels Gigi was wearing, or if she had on high heels. I’m tall at six feet one. He seemed slightly shorter than me.”

Aikins had looked to Sal to be about five-eleven.

“What else?” he rasped.

“He had on light slacks, a dark blazer.”

“Hair?”

“Yeah. A full head of it, like mine. Dark like mine, too. I think. Really, it’s hard to say. I didn’t dream I might have to describe him, or I’d have paid closer attention.” Aikins looked from Harold to Sal. “Do you think he’s the one who killed Gigi? The Lady Liberty Killer?”

“Yes,” Harold said.

“My God! I could have done
something
. Stopped him.”

“You couldn’t know,” Sal said. “And if you had known, you couldn’t have stopped him without killing him.”

“Then I—”

“What?” Sal asked.

“Nothing.”

“Were the two of them walking okay?” Harold asked.

“You mean, were they drunk?”

“Well, yes.”

“Maybe a little. But then, I figured they were coming from the lounge, so I mighta just seen them as being slightly unsteady.”

“Were they walking in the direction of the listed apartment where Gigi was murdered?”

“Yeah. Or toward a subway stop that’d get them there.”

“What about her own apartment?”

“Not in that direction. Maybe she didn’t want him to know where she lived.”

“Why would that be?” Harold asked.

“You know. Guys can give a woman—could give her—all kinds of trouble. She maybe . . .”

“What?”

“Just needed temporary comforting.”

“Because of what you did to her.”

“Easy, Harold,” Sal said. “Take it easy.”

Sal took out the images of Dred Gant, deciding to spare Aikins the morgue shot of Gigi. He didn’t like looking at that one, himself.

He held the copies out for Aikins to see. “This the man you saw?”

Aikins stared, then looked up at Sal. “I can’t say. They don’t even look like the same man until you study them. And even then . . .”

Sal put the copies away.

“Do you recall what time you saw Gigi and her companion?”

“Nine-fifty.”

“How can you be so definite?”

“I always know the time. Automatically check it regularly.”

“From being in Human Resources, I guess,” Harold said.

“Maybe.” Aikins was staring at the carpet again, glum, spent.

Sal and Harold thanked him for his time, and told him he’d be asked later to make a statement.

“So you can see if I contradict myself,” Aikins said, head bowed. “Trip myself up.”

“Everybody contradicts themselves every day,” Sal said.

“That’s sure comforting,” Aikins said, still not looking up.

Sal and Harold took their leave.

When they were descending in the elevator, Sal said, “I forgot you could play such a hard-ass.”

“Just like on TV, movies, the stage,” Harold said.

“Really. You ever been on the stage?”

“A few times in lineups. Does that count?”

“No,” Sal said.