Frenzy

by John Lutz

  Quinn pondered that.

  “Learn anything useful about the sisters?” he asked.

  Lido gave his weary shrug again. His inebriated mannerisms had invaded his sober world. “Both dead,” he said.

  “Don’t give me a lotta crap, Jerry. I get enough of that with the menagerie I have to contend with here.”

  “Every one a Sherlock,” Lido said. “Speaking of which—Weaver.”

  Quinn rested his elbows on his desk and leaned toward Lido. “Nancy Weaver?”

  “The same. While I was doing my research, I came across her tech footprints.”

  “Meaning?”

  “She’d recently visited several of the sites I explored.”

  “Doing her own exploring?”

  “Looked that way. No surprise. She belongs to Renz.” Lido raised his eyebrows. “She has to be pretty good on a computer, judging by what I saw.”

  “Weaver has multiple talents.”

  “That’s what I hear, but who really knows?”

  Quinn’s land line desk phone rang. He nodded to Lido, dismissing him, and snatched up the receiver. The phone’s caller ID said the call originated at the Far Castle.

  Quinn identified Q&A and himself, watching Lido drift out the door. On his way to catch up on either his drinking or his sleep. Quinn knew how he would bet.

  “This is Winston Castle,” said the voice on the phone. It was well enunciated and deep. Castle’s BBC voice. “There’s been a development that might be of interest to you.”

  “Try me,” Quinn said. He couldn’t get over the feeling that he was being played by Castle. He reminded himself, not the first time, that the business he was in might create that kind of suspicion. Everyone he met while on a case didn’t necessarily have some sort of angle or ulterior motive. It only seemed that way.

  “That woman called me again, about ten o’clock last night,” Castle said. “Identified herself as Ida Tucker again and said she was a distant relative of my wife.”

  “Is she?”

  “Maria isn’t sure.”

  Quinn bet Jerry Lido could be sure. He wished now that Lido hadn’t left. On the other hand, even Lido might not be able to straighten out this mess. “So why did Ida Tucker call?”

  “She wanted to negotiate some more on that Michelangelo bust, Bellezza.”

  Quinn was beginning to really like this case. “Negotiate what?”

  “Not just the missing art, but the letters she claimed are with it, the ones Henry Tucker wrote on his deathbed, just before he succumbed to wounds he’d suffered at Dunkirk. She wanted me to come to someplace called Green Forest, Ohio, and examine and purchase the letters. I asked her to simply mail me copies, but of course she wouldn’t do that. What’s valuable—in her mind, anyway—is what the letters contain, as well as their authenticity.”

  That made sense to Quinn. So did something else. “Why didn’t you simply tell her no thank you and hang up?”

  “Because I’m curious. And so are you, eh, my friend?”

  Quinn smiled. Castle had him there.

  “We’re both afflicted with that dread disease, curiosity,” Castle said. “The one that killed the cat. And there’s something else. This time when we talked, Ida Tucker seemed especially interested in whether the police had found any letters among the contents of Andria Bell’s luggage, or in the hotel suite where the murders took place.”

  “And what did you tell her?” Quinn asked.

  He could almost see Castle’s devilish dark smile over the phone. “I told her nothing, of course. She was so curious, I thought I’d leave her that way. Knowing you’d understand.”

  “Oh, I do,” Quinn said.

  Quinn caught up with Jerry Lido at the Dropp Inn lounge, a few blocks from the office. It was a bar with a step-down entrance that caused first-timers to stumble. Regular customers amused themselves by silently watching newbies for interesting falls and reactions. Dim and cool inside, the Dropp Inn at this time of day was almost deserted.

  Quinn knew about the tricky threshold, but nevertheless had to take a quick double step to maintain his balance when he entered.

  There was one other drinker besides Lido in the lounge, an absolutely ravished looking gray-haired woman in her sixties. She had an expensive-looking choppy hairdo, and without the wrinkles in her clothes she would have been stylishly and crisply dressed, as if for finance and business. There was a sadness about her bearing that was almost tangible. She made Quinn wonder if the stock market had tanked.

  Lido was slouched in a cramped wooden booth near the opposite end of the bar. At least he’d had sense enough to stay away from the woman. Though he was glancing in her direction.

  “That’s how you’re going to wind up,” Quinn said, motioning toward the life-worn woman as he slid into the seat across from Lido.

  Lido squinted at the woman and brought her into focus. “Oh, her. I happen to know she’s eighty-seven.”

  “Like we are,” Quinn said.

  “She’s a gin drinker,” Lido said.

  “I’ve seen you drink gin.”

  “I’ve seen you try to keep up.”

  “Not one right after the other in slow-motion suicide.”

  “She was probably beautiful once,” Lido said, still staring at the woman. “I can perceive that in her still.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like Winston Castle.”

  The bartender came out from behind the bar and stood over the booth. These weren’t free, these seats on the sidelines while the world slid past outside.

  Quinn ordered the same kind of beer Lido had—a microbrewery brand he’d never heard of—and a fresh one for Lido. Quinn figured Lido had had time to consume about three or four beers, so he might be at his perceptive best.

  “I need to ask you something more,” Quinn said.

  Lido gave him a mushy grin. “I didn’t think you followed me here to assess the female presence and possibilities.”

  “Not that female,” Quinn said, with a nod toward the woman at the bar. “A woman named Ida Tucker. Do you recall where she fits into the family tree whose roots and various branches you researched?”

  A certain gleam appeared in Lido’s bloodshot eyes. A sharpness that Quinn recognized. In its strange way, alcohol acted as some kind of cerebral lubricant that allowed Lido’s thoughts to follow appropriate tributaries to surprising headwaters.

  In a voice not at all slurred, he said, “Let me tell you about Ida Tucker.”

  “And the rest of her family. The whole mess of a maze of them.”

  Lido smiled. Sipped. “I took it back to Henry Tucker, a British soldier who died in an English hospital after escaping the German advance at Dunkirk.” Lido fixed a bleary eye on Quinn. “We’re talking World War Two here.”

  “I figured,” Quinn said.

  “Henry had a brother, Edward. Edward had a wife, Ida. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Henry, at the time of his death, was having a hot affair with an English nurse named Betsy Douglass. Betsy had a sister, Willa, living in Ohio and married to a Mark Kingdom.”

  “Okay,” Quinn said. “Mark and Willa Kingdom. Should I be writing this down?”

  “I’ll give you a printout later,” Lido said. He continued. “For medical reasons, Willa and Mark couldn’t have children—he’d been injured in the merchant marines—and they adopted two wards of the state: Robert and Winston. That’s where the two families intersect, in the breeding grounds of Ohio. Winston died in childhood.”

  “Wait a minute,” Quinn said. “Winston Kingdom? Winston Castle?”

  “Not yet,” Lido said. “He’s actually Robert Kingdom, Jr. He’s something of an Anglophile.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Still, he’s married to Mariella Lopez, a Mexican immigrant.”

  “Maria? Are you kidding me? I assumed she was Italian.”

  “She is Italian. Her last name was Righetti until she married a Mexican mathematician named Lopez. He died five
years ago.”

  “Don’t tell me his boat blew up.”

  “No, he was struck by lightning. A year later, Mariella migrated to the U.S. and married Winston Castle. Whose name was Kingdom, Jr. then.”

  Quinn took a long pull of his beer. “Isn’t anything the way it appears with this family?”

  “No. And they seem to take some delight—or at least satisfaction—in that. That sort of thing is genetic, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Quinn said. The older he got, the more madness he had seen, and the more he thought people were, at least to some extent, slaves of their DNA. But with this family, blood relationship didn’t seem essential to share the lunacy.

  Lido continued: “After Willa Douglass and Mark Kingdom died in a tornado, Ida Tucker divorced Edward, and married Robert Kingdom, Sr. She continued using her former name, Tucker. They adopted sisters, Andria Bell and Jeanine Bell. Also they adopted a son, Robert Kingdom, Jr., who now, for reasons of his own, calls himself Winston Castle.”

  “Ah! Anybody else in the family using an alias?”

  Lido shrugged.

  “Why was this family so eager to adopt?”

  “Money accompanied children who were wards of the state. That’s one reason. Another might simply be that they were big-hearted people.”

  “Those kinds of people do exist,” Quinn admitted.

  “It’s not just you and me,” Lido said.

  “Or maybe they do things simply because they are mad.”

  “But with purpose,” Lido said.

  “Robert Kingdom, Sr. and Ida Tucker,” Quinn said. “Despite the Senior, wasn’t she robbing the cradle?”

  “Ida was considerably older. But judging by photos I saw on the net, she was a hot potootie. Maybe still is.”

  Lido took a swallow of beer, licked his lips, and continued:

  “Willa must have hunted down Edward Tucker after the war. The two families intersected and merged into the bunch we have now. Many of them were adoptees, or the sons or daughters of adoptees. Orphaned or farmed out. Dependent on each other. Maybe more so than in other families. The more I learned about them, that’s what came out. The entire zoo struck me as . . . needy. And I don’t mean just for material things.” Lido lifted his shoulders and dropped them as if they were suddenly burdened by great weight. “I dunno, Quinn. I guess plenty of people are needy. I’m no expert on family life, but it seems to me there are lots of families like this one, the way marriages and parenthood have gone all to hell.”

  He looked as if he expected Quinn to agree or disagree.

  Quinn had no feel for the subject. He did consider that his ex-wife and daughter lived in California, and he lived with Pearl and the young woman he considered to be like his own daughter, who was by blood Pearl’s daughter.

  Was any or all of this bad? Or inevitable? Who knew? The Tuckers and the Kingdoms and their offspring, natural or adopted, did constitute a support system. Perhaps one that filled a greater need than if they’d been blood relatives and belonged to something whether they liked it or not.

  Quinn said, “So Ida is making arrangements to claim the bodies of her daughters.”

  “Looks that way,” Lido said. He drank some beer and then wiped his foamy upper lip with the back of a knuckle. “Will she be coming to New York?”

  “I don’t know.” Quinn finished his beer and placed the bottle precisely in the center of its round coaster. He had to admit he was curious about this “hot potootie.” “Talking about her dead daughters isn’t something I look forward to.” He had discussed the grisly deaths of relatives too often in his life.

  “Don’t worry,” Lido said. “That’s why you have me.”

  “To worry?”

  “To do things like this,” Lido said, and unfolded a sheet of paper and laid it in front of Quinn. “I worked up a sort of family tree.”

  Quinn examined the neatly handwritten document

  Henry Tucker/Betsy Douglass

  Edward Tucker (brother)/Ida Tucker (Divorced)

  Willa Douglass & Mark Kingdom

  Adopted: Robert (Sr.) Kingdom &

  Winston Kingdom (died as infant.)

  Ida Tucker/Robert Kingdom (Sr.)

  Adopted: Robert Kingdom, Jr. (AKA Winston Castle; takes Winston’s name as family name.)

  Andria Bell

  Jeanine Carson

  Winston Castle/Maria Castle

  “What are they,” Quinn asked, “a family of traveling gypsies?”

  “Maybe something like that,” Lido said, “but they don’t do that much traveling.”

  “They aren’t really that much family. A lot of them aren’t even blood relatives.”

  “Maybe they’re even closer than blood relatives,” Lido said.

  “How could that be?”

  “Need.”

  Quinn thought back. “Maybe.”

  “They tend to lie a lot. Play roles.” Lido grinned. “You want I should find out more about this family?”

  “It would take a load off my mind,” Quinn said.

  Wondering why Winston Castle had pretended Ida Tucker, his adoptive mother, was a stranger.

  Also wondering how much of Lido’s information was accurate. In various families, for various reasons, subterfuge was deeply ingrained. Sometimes it was for reasons long forgotten, and left behind like a curse.

  28

  The killer watched from deep shadow as Nancy Weaver emerged to ground level from her subway stop near her apartment. She looked right and left like a good girl and crossed the street. This part of the Village consisted mostly of walkup apartments slightly larger than shoeboxes. And Weaver’s block featured old-fashioned streetlights that, scenic and period New York as they were, cast very little light.

  They suited the killer’s purpose.

  He crossed the street farther down the block and was directly behind Weaver again. Keeping close to buildings and taking advantage of shadows, he observed her moving from pool of light to pool of light. One psychologically safer island, then another.

  Not that she was afraid. Uneasy, maybe. Which wasn’t the same thing. The killer had to grin as he watched Weaver making her way home. Unaware. Unafraid. She exuded confidence. Who did she think she was? Badass cop with a gun in her handbag.

  There was a warm fog tonight in the Village, and few people were out walking in it. Those who were would probably have a difficult time identifying other walkers. Vehicle traffic had slacked off, too. Now and then a truck rumbled along the narrow streets. Or a cab, its tires hissing on the damp pavement, not slowing down for pedestrians. It seemed that all the cabs were occupied. A mist and a spritzle of rain could do that in New York. It was as if the cabs had pop-up passengers that were activated by a mere drop of rain.

  Weaver was easy enough to follow without being seen. Her buxom narrow-waisted figure was simple to identify in the dim light, and the few men who passed her walking in the opposite direction usually reacted by glancing back at her.

  The killer understood how she’d gotten her spotty reputation. A woman like that would always be thought about first in sexual terms. He wondered if she’d decided, since she was going to have such a reputation anyway, that she might as well do the deeds and enjoy life with the proceeds. Let the heads shake and the tongues wag. The killer could understand why a woman would think that way. He fancied he knew a lot about women.

  This one, Weaver, for sure. She had quite a reputation in the NYPD and was easy enough to research. Once he’d seen her with Quinn, and coming and going at the offices of Q&A, he had plenty of information to build on.

  He was glad she was in the game.

  He walked on through light and shadow, his soft-soled shoes making only the slightest scrunching noises on the hard damp concrete. He thought it was time to prod Quinn again. Not by going after Pearl. Or Quinn’s adopted (if she was) daughter Jody, or his daughter Lauri, in California (off the game board).

  Nancy Weaver.

  Yes, Weaver was the best choice,
a woman who for years had been a part of Quinn’s life.

  They were closer to each other than they knew.

  The killer understood that there was nothing of a personal or sexual nature between them, but their friendship, being a lasting one, would be the loss of something held dear. Weaver might be an informer for the idiot commissioner, Renz, but she was also protective of Quinn, and he of her.

  How would Quinn feel if his faithful friend arrived contained in several boxes shipped to him on consecutive days?

  How the killer wanted him to feel, that’s how. And such shipments could certainly be arranged. They would, in fact, be great fun.

  The killer had familiarized himself with Weaver’s building. It was one of a row of narrow brick structures whose architecture suggested they were built in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Its big, heavy street door opened to a small foyer. There was no elevator. Another heavy, paneled door led to a narrow stairwell. That door required a key.

  The killer’s plan was to close the distance between him and Weaver as soon as she’d entered the foyer, but before the street door had closed behind her. He would press all the way inside quickly, perhaps as she was keying the stairwell door, and have a gun digging into the side of her neck before she realized what was happening. He would slide the gun lower, raking her back with it so that it was at waist level. That way he could shield it from view with his body, in case they encountered anyone coming down the stairs. The gun would stay there tight to her body while they slowly climbed the stairs, and Weaver unlocked her door and they entered her apartment.

  With the door closed behind them, he would strike her head hard with the heavy butt of the gun, enough to daze her if not knock her completely unconscious. It was a tactic he’d practiced long and diligently, and he knew exactly where and how hard to hit. Weaver would be down and dazed before she knew what happened.

  Then the fun would begin.

  It was all choreographed in the killer’s mind, every move, every reaction, every counter move. Like a simple dance that, if the dominant partner led quickly and forcefully, would always end the same way, with a woman stunned and helpless before the killer.