by John Lutz
He managed to remain upright, dug the tip of the cane into the floor, and swiveled the chair around to where he could reach the phone, answer it, and identify himself.
“It’s good to hear your voice,” said Winston Castle.
Quinn sat forward, the cane and all chair legs on the floor. “How have you been, Winston?”
“Fine, of course.”
“And Maria?”
“Also fine.”
“Now that we’re all fine,” Quinn said, “let’s get to why you called.”
“You sound angry with me, Detective Quinn.”
“I’m not,” Quinn said, surprising himself by realizing that was true. “I’m just befuddled.”
“I’m calling from Mexico,” Castle said, though the caller ID on Quinn’s phone said the call originated in some place called High Wind, Texas.
Quinn decided to let it go. Nothing else was genuine about Winston Castle, so why should this be? “I heard the restaurant’s closed.”
“Temporarily,” Castle said. “I sold the business, though I continue to own the building. I’ll simply be renting out restaurant space.”
“How does Maria feel about that?”
“She’s the reason we’re doing it. It’s for her well-being.”
“Part of the reason, anyway,” Maria said. On an extension phone in High Wind. “Winston and I have chosen the life we want to live, and right now the restaurant doesn’t fit into it.”
“Apparently,” Quinn said, “neither do English accents.”
“You noticed that, old thing?” Castle said.
“Difficult not to.”
“It seems to me,” Castle said, “that there was a reason for the substitution of Bellezza busts in the restaurant garden. This whole thing was planned.”
“What whole thing?”
“Everything from the fake Bellezza to D.O.A.’s escape.”
Quinn was surprised, then wondered why he should be. “D.O.A. is dead,” he said. “I saw him die.”
“Somebody in a bulletproof vest was shot and killed.”
“Yes. A man named Dwayne Oren Aiken. I chased him for years.”
“Can’t you admit, Detective Quinn, that there is the slightest possibility that this Dwayne Oren Aiken survived. I mean, wouldn’t he want to be officially dead?”
“Why?”
“So you’d stop hunting him. And he could sell Bellezza to a dedicated but dishonest collector.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I think it’s possible. That’s why I’m in Mexico.”
“You’re in Texas.”
“Very near the border.”
Quinn agreed with Castle that there really were such art connoisseurs, who would be content simply to own but never show such a wonder. Quinn also knew there were people whose joy was in searching for the unattainable. Classics had been written about them. Movies had been made. At least Castle, whom Quinn had come to like, was a seeker and not a hoarder. Apparently Maria was the same. That kind of dogged optimism and persistence seemed to Quinn to be a healthier, happier existence than most people led. So let Castle, and his entire crazy family, the quasi or real descendants of the Kingdoms and Douglasses and Tuckers, roam the world and seek. It wasn’t a bad thing to nurture and chase a dream. For some, it was the only thing.
“I understand now how the case became so complicated,” Quinn said. “The precious object it revolved around never existed.”
“That’s a possibility,” Castle said. “But you must understand our quest for the art treasure gives our family its raison d’être. Its reason for being. And the family needs me to keep it out of trouble. This is the only family I have, Quinn. And for some of us, our search is the only meaningful thing in our lives.”
“I do understand,” Quinn said, thinking Michelangelo would be pleased by such a constructive fancy.
“I knew that you would.”
“Good luck to you and to your family,” Quinn said.
But there was no answer. Winston and Maria Castle were gone.
In the wind again.
Quinn told no one other than Pearl about the conversation. They agreed that Q&A would never be for sale.
The new owner of the Far Castle continued to operate the restaurant under the terms of the lease. Nothing appeared to have changed.
On stormy days, one gargoyle on the building’s concrete cornice, shielded from immediate view by the restaurant’s canopy, emitted no water but seemed to glory in the rain. It was a bust of a woman with her eyes closed and a slight smile on her face, basking in the downpour. Knowing there would be another sunrise. She was a thing of beauty.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With special thanks to Marilyn Davis.
Don’t miss John Lutz’s next exciting thriller featuring
Frank Quinn
JIGSAW
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Keep reading to join Frank Quinn and Pearl Kasner
as they are hired to solve a jewelry heist that
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SWITCH
by John Lutz
Prologue
May 9, 10:40 a.m.
“There’s a finger in her,” Nift said, watching Pearl Kasner’s face for a reaction.
She didn’t show much of one.
Quinn and Pearl watched Medical Examiner Dr. Julius Nift, crouched low near the woman’s body, move his shoulders and arms, probe with what looked like long, thin tweezers, then stare and shake his head. Before him, lying between the corpse’s widely spread legs, was a small, bloody object.
“What do you mean,” Pearl asked, “a finger?”
Nift held up his rubber-gloved left hand, fingers spread. “One of these.” He made a fist except for his extended forefinger. “This one, to be exact. Or one like it.” He grinned. “It was lodged in her vaginal tract. Wanna take a look?”
Pearl did. So did Quinn.
Quinn said, “Man’s finger?”
“Almost certainly. Right size for a man’s. Nail’s trimmed close. No polish. Lots of stuff under it. Maybe rich with DNA.”
“Fingerprint?”
“Should be discernible. Once we get it cleaned up.”
Quinn nodded, standing with his fists propped on his hips, and glanced around Alexis Hoffermuth’s luxurious penthouse apartment, amazed anew by the vastness of the room they were in and the obvious wealth that showed in every facet of the place.
He had met Alexis Hoffermuth here just two days earlier, when she was alive.
Her body had been discovered scarcely an hour ago after she didn’t show up for an eight o’clock appointment (so unlike her), and failed to answer either her cell or land line phone.
The doorman had admitted the woman she was scheduled to meet in regard to a political fund-raiser, and there Alexis Hoffermuth was, in her altered state.
Pearl and Quinn looked at each other, each knowing what the other was thinking: money and murder were such close friends.
“Strange calling card,” said Nift, who liked to play detective, “a forefinger in her twat.” He glanced at Pearl to see if he’d gotten a rise out of her. “Whaddya make of it, Pearl?”
“If he’s a serial killer, he’s limited to nine more victims.”
“Unless—” Nift began.
“Shut up,” Pearl said, and he did.
“She was over fifty,” Quinn said, nodding toward the victim. “You’d never know it, even like this.”
The dead woman stared wide-eyed back at him, flecks of blood visible in the white around her pupils, the way eyes were after someone’s been strangled. In this instance, strangulation appeared to have been caused by the Burberry scarf around her neck. Yet the expression of pain and bewilderment frozen on her face wasn’t quite like that of a strangulation victim.
“There are a lot of imitation scarves like that floating around New York,” Nift said. “You think that one’s real?”
“It’s real,” Pearl said.
“The boobs aren’t,” Nift said.
“You would notice that.”
“Expensive job, though. But then, it would be.”
“No need to wonder about cause of death,” Quinn said, changing the subject before Nift and Pearl clashed. They often played this game. Nift seemed to regard making Pearl lose her temper a challenge. Not that she was his only target.
“Don’t be too sure,” Nift said. “Cause of death can be tricky.” Squatted down as he was, he craned his neck and glanced around, as if seeing the upper half of his surroundings clearly for the first time. “Place is big enough to be a museum. Looks kinda like one, the way it’s furnished.”
“What about time of death?” Pearl asked. She didn’t want to talk about décor.
“The victim sometime between midnight and three o’clock this morning. The finger sometime before then.”
“How do you know that?” Quinn asked.
“That the finger died before she did?” Nift grinned. “Putrefaction, discoloration, suggest several days, depending on ambient temperature. Also, I gave it the sniff test.” He grinned wickedly at Pearl. “Wanna smell?”
“That finger’s not the worst smelling thing in this room,” Pearl said angrily.
Nift ignored her. He’d gotten a rise out of Pearl again. He was temporarily ahead on points in the game he insisted they play.
Like Quinn, Pearl was a former NYPD homicide detective. Now they were part of Quinn and Associates Investigations—Q&A, as it was commonly called. The agency was formed when Quinn decided to extend his avocation beyond hunting down serial killers, which was his area of expertise. Q&A was more of a traditional detective agency now, and its employees were part owners and had a stake in its success.
Because of Quinn’s legendary and well-earned reputation for tracking and apprehending serial killers, the agency sometimes still did work for hire for the city. That work wasn’t exclusively serial killer cases; now it included almost any kind of criminal case that was high profile, sensitive, or for any other reason important to the city, or to the political well-being of its police commissioner. These contracts were mainly because the police commissioner, Harley Renz, and Quinn went back a long way.
Not that they liked each other. Quinn lived by his code, and Renz was without a code and enthusiastically corrupt. Still, the two men got along. Frequently they could help each other obtain what they wanted, however different those wants might be.
The techs from the crime scene unit were still going over the vast apartment with their lights and chemicals, cameras and print powder.
“Maybe they’ll find something,” Nift said, motioning with his arm to take in the activity around him.
“I know what they won’t find,” Quinn said.
Nift straightened up beside his black bag and looked at him. “You know something about what went on here?”
“Maybe,” Quinn said.
Part One
May 6, 2:47 p.m.
It all started not-so-innocently enough.
Ida Beene from Forest, Ohio, who called herself Ida French, knew exactly what she was doing when she slid into the backseat of the parked limo in her preoccupied manner, pretending it was a mistake and she’d thought it was a different limo, one that was waiting for her.
Craig Clairmont, Ida’s current love interest, watched her from a nearby doorway. He could make out her pale features inside the limo’s tinted rear window. Watched her mouth work as over and over she said how sorry she was, how she’d made a terrible mistake by entering the wrong car. Her active, shapely form was never still as she jabbered and waved her arms, pretending to be a bit zany but at the same time apologetic. All the while, he knew she was substituting the gray leather Gucci purse on the seat with her almost identical knock-off Gucci bag she’d bought on Canal Street for thirty dollars.
An embarrassing mistake, that was all. She kept repeating that as she reversed her trim, shapely derriere out of the limo, yakking, yakking all the time, overplaying it, keeping Alexis Hoffermuth distracted and confused. Her words drifted to Craig: “Oh, my God! So sorry, sorry. I’m such a goofball. Never did this before. . . should have been paying attention . . . please, please forgive me. Never, never . . . Such an embarrassing mistake.” All the time gripping the gray leather Gucci purse by its strap.
Only it wasn’t her Gucci purse. It was Alexis Hoffermuth’s. And inside Alexis Hoffermuth’s purse was the little item Hoffermuth had bragged in the society columns that she wanted dearly and was going to purchase at auction. The item for which she’d kept her public word and outbid everyone, including a pesky telephone bidder who kept running up the bid.
Ida slammed the limo door behind her with a solid thunk! and strode quickly away, showing lots of ass wiggle, clutching the purse tight to her side. The limo driver, a burly man in a dark uniform with gold buttons, got out and stood on the other side of the car, looking after her. Obviously wondering.
Craig tensed his body, knowing he might have to act. This could go either way. Nonviolent would be best, but Craig and Ida could play it rough if they had to.
Fortune was precariously balanced here.
It teetered, leaned, and fell Craig and Ida’s way.
The chauffeur made no move to follow Ida, and lowered himself back into the gleaming black limo, behind the steering wheel.
The limo dropped a few inches over its rear wheels and glided out into Manhattan traffic, like a shark released into the sea.
But the sharks were behind it, on land.
Craig walked down to where Ida was waiting outside an electronics store. She was near a show window, pretending to gaze at the various gizmos: thumb-sized cameras, video game players from China, and cell phones that incorporated every imaginable capability. She looked like an actress who could play a ditsy blonde on TV, maybe missing a card from the deck, barely smart enough to lose at tennis. Craig knew that look was deceptive. Ida was wicked smart. And right now she was thinking hard, waiting for Craig.
He stood next to her, leaned over, and kissed her cheek. “You make the switch okay?”
“This is a genuine Gucci,” she said, clutching the purse tighter.
“I’m only interested in what’s inside.”
“So let’s go home. I know you don’t want to look at it here on the sidewalk.”
“It deserves more careful treatment than that,” Craig agreed.
Ida smiled. “Fifty cents on the dollar treatment.”
That had been the deal—fifty percent of the bracelet’s bid price. It didn’t seem like such a good deal, but it was safe and came to almost a quarter of a million dollars.
Craig took Ida French’s arm. They made a striking couple, the slim blond woman and the tall, classically handsome man with steady blue eyes and wavy black hair. They both dressed well and expensively. They could afford it. Especially now.
Home, in the small den off the apartment’s living room, they rooted through Alexis Hoffermuth’s purse. There was, somehow surprisingly, the usual women’s items: makeup essentials; a comb; wadded tissue with lipstick stain on it; a wallet that, disappointingly, held nothing but credit cards; a cell phone (which Craig would get rid of soon, along with the purse, in case it was one of those phones that could be electronically traced if it got lost); a Sotheby’s auction catalog; and, of course, the Cardell diamond-and-ruby bracelet, that for a brief time had been the Hoffermuth bracelet.
Craig smiled. Now it was the Craig and Ida bracelet.
They dumped the rest of the purse’s contents out onto a tabletop. Not even a dollar in cash. The rich lived large and traveled light.
Craig opened a drawer and drew out a paste bracelet that was a duplicate of the real Cardell bracelet they had stolen. He dropped it in the Hoffermuth bitch’s purse then scooped all the other contents in on top of it. Before closing the drawer, Craig got out another paste duplicate of the bracelet and laid it on the table away from the genuine
one. The fake bracelet in the purse was for fooling Alexis Hoffermuth for at least a little while. That was the second duplicate Cardell bracelet. A third one, the one Craig placed on the table, was for fooling someone else.
They held hands as they went into the living room. Craig poured them each a flute of champagne.
They toasted each other.
“You’d better get rid of the purse with that cell phone soon,” Ida said, placing her glass on a paper napkin.
Craig agreed, but he wasn’t worried. It would be a little while before Alexis Hoffermuth noticed the leather of her purse wasn’t its usual softness, and the brassware was a bit bright and tacky looking. And the clasp didn’t quite hold.
Then, with a plunging heart, she would realize that it wasn’t her purse.
But it was exactly like her purse.
She would open the purse and see that it contained only wadded white tissue.
And it would dawn on her like a nuclear sunrise—the Cardell bracelet, for which she’d just paid $490,000 at Sotheby’s Auction—was gone.
Spirited away by a thief!
Or had it been?
She would try to recall the features of the woman who looked and acted like a flustered young Lucille Ball. Alexis would realize the woman had switched purses and left her with nothing but wadded tissue.
But there’d be something else in the purse . . . Alexis Hoffermuth’s fingers would jab and dance through the tissue, then close on a familiar object and draw it out.
The bracelet!
Relief would course through her. But not without some reservations.
Craig Clairmont smiled. Alexis Hoffermuth wouldn’t understand. The bracelet somehow had been removed from her purse and then found its way into the substitute bag. Had the thief made some sort of mistake? She certainly was the type to do so.
Alexis might wonder that again, when her real purse was recovered with the bracelet still in it. A bracelet like it, anyway. It might be a long time, and a lot of wishful and confused thinking, before it occurred to her that the recovered bracelet was yet another not-so-cheap imitation. That the thieves were simply playing for time.