by John Lutz
“Where is your daughter, Miss Beene?” Pearl asked.
Ida French seemed not at all fazed. Pearl had to hand it to her.
“Eloise is with my sister in Queens.” She gave a wistful smile. “I didn’t think you set up this appointment for just a chat.”
“You planned the theft of the bracelet from the limousine,” Quinn said to Craig, “executed when Alexis Hoffermuth was being driven home from the auction. Ida is the one who actually stole the bracelet, using a confusing exchange of identical purses and a paste copy of the real Cardell bracelet. You and your brother Jack planned to turn the bracelet over to a fence in exchange for cash, only you were greedy. You were going to slip the fence a second worthless replica of the bracelet. Double crossing somebody like that got Jack killed, after his killers amputated his finger.”
“It didn’t happen exactly like that,” Craig said.
“The details will be tended to later in court,” Quinn told him. “Ida, here, judging by the expression on her face, didn’t know you and Jack were going to take the money from the sale of the second replica and disappear with that and the real bracelet. Boomerang upset that plan when he ran away after Eloise had mistaken the bracelet for a cat collar and put it on him.”
Quinn exchanged a look with Jody. Divide and conquer.
“Everything was going to be split three ways!” Craig said.
Ida French appeared dubious.
“The fence spotted the makeshift cat collar at the pickup point, as Boomerang was running away. It looked exactly like the bracelet he’d just bought. That was when Jack ran afoul of the lawless. The fence also came to wonder what we wondered—was Alexis Hoffermuth working an insurance scam from the beginning?”
“Maybe we can work a deal as to who that fence was,” Craig said. “Who killed my brother. Along with whatever else you need to know.”
Ida French stared at him in disgust. She knew he’d give her up in a minute. Even a New York one.
Pearl’s phone played its four musical notes from the old Dragnet TV show theme.
She checked to see who was calling.
“That Grandma?” Jody asked.
Pearl nodded, furious at her mother. She could pick the damnedest times to call.
“Can I talk to her?” Jody asked.
“You don’t have—”
“I want to,” Jody said. “You never know when it might be important.”
Pearl tossed her the cell phone. Jody caught it and went out into the hall.
“You can do your plea bargaining with the prosecutor,” Quinn said to Craig. “As can you, Miss Beene.”
“My daughter—” Ida said in a choked voice. But not before Quinn had seen the calculation in her eyes. Eloise was a bargaining chip.
“The people we want—and are going to get—are the ones who killed Jack Clairmont and Alexis Hoffermuth.”
“I can tell you who they are!” Craig said.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Ida said. She’d apparently thought this out. “We didn’t kill anyone. Didn’t have the real bracelet for very long. There might not even be enough evidence to convict us. Especially if I keep quiet and don’t testify against you. They can’t make a wife testify, you know.”
“You two are really married?” Pearl asked.
Ida grinned. “In Las Vegas, two years ago. We did it so we could file jointly and not pay so much tax on some gambling money we won.” She glared at her husband. “Alexis Hoffermuth can’t identify that woman who got into her limo; she’s dead. And we don’t know where the hell that cat got that bracelet. Or who killed Jack or cut off his finger.” She laughed, staring directly at Quinn. “They don’t even have enough evidence to arrest us.”
Quinn wasn’t sure if what she said was true, but he didn’t have time to give it the test of reasonableness.
Boomerang strutted into the room, and when Quinn and Pearl were looking at him, Craig and Ida broke for the door to the hall. Boomerang got in the spirit and dashed with them. Caught up with them in two large bounds. Quinn and Pearl followed.
The door to the hall burst open. Jody was there, still talking on Pearl’s cell phone with Pearl’s mother. She extended her foot daintily and tripped Craig Clairmont. Ida tripped over Craig. Quinn tripped over Ida. Pearl managed to leap over them all but fell and skidded to a halt near the stairs. She caught a glimpse of Boomerang streaking down the hall toward God and cat knew where.
She quickly struggled to her feet, and staggered over to help Quinn handcuff Craig and Ida before they could gather their senses.
Jody took several steps backward, the phone still pressed to the side of her head.
“So now you can go back to sitting with the same people for dinner?” She was asking her grandmother.
She grinned at the obviously affirmative answer on the other end of the connection.
If a person was persistent enough, things had a way of working out.
“The insurance company has agreed to let the heirs cancel their claim and place the bracelet in a vault,” Quinn said to Ida Beene and Craig Clairmont in an interrogation room at the precinct house. “We won’t make any media statement about that.”
Craig and Ida silently nodded in unison. They both looked small and pale.
“It’s possible that we haven’t enough to charge you, or to get a conviction, but the people who cut off your brother’s finger and killed him in an attempt to make him talk, probably the same ones who tortured and killed Alexis Hoffermuth, are still out there. There isn’t enough evidence against them, either, to trigger an arrest.”
“Damned legal system!” Craig said.
“You want some advice?”
Craig shrugged. “Why not?”
“You and Ida should make arrangements for the kid, maybe with Ida’s sister or Social Services, and then move far away.”
“Arrangements?”
“I’m thinking long term,” Quinn said. “You wouldn’t want Eloise to talk about what she might have overheard. You need to cut ties completely to guarantee her safety.”
He didn’t say Eloise would be better off with a family that didn’t deal in jewel theft.
“My sister’s place in Queen’s is no good,” Ida said. “I have an aunt back in Ohio.”
“That’d work,” Quinn told her. “And there’s one more condition. Eloise takes Boomerang with her to Ohio.”
“Done,” Craig said. “But the damned cat will probably find its way back.”
Later, in the brownstone, Jody questioned whether the deal Quinn had made was entirely legal.
“Maybe the outcome isn’t exactly legal,” Quinn said. “But it’s just. And it gives the kid a chance.”
Jody looked to her mother.
But Pearl was as impossible to read as Quinn.
Jody shook her head and grinned. “You two!”
“Three,” Pearl said.
Epilogue
May 16, 11:37 p.m.
Jody wasn’t along on this one. Fedderman and two uniforms had the front door of Willard Ord’s house in the Village covered. The back door was being watched by two more uniforms and a plainclothes detective from the nearby precinct house. In the front and back of the building were also Emergency Service Unit sharpshooters, the NYPD equivalent of a SWAT team. In dangerous situations, the safest strategy was to overwhelm the suspects.
Pearl and Quinn stood to the side, and Quinn reached over and rang the doorbell.
Within a few moments, floorboards creaked softly inside the old brick building in the Village. A yellow porch light to discourage bugs flickered on, and the door opened.
Willard Ord stood in the doorway. He was wearing what looked like a white bathrobe and glossy black wing-tip shoes with black socks.
“You’re police,” he said with a smile. “You don’t need any identification other than your eyes.”
Quinn could see beyond Willard a table covered with cards and poker chips. There were three chairs at the table, and three beer cans on it.
“Yes. In fact, I’d just gone to bed when I heard the doorbell.”
There were shouts from around the back of the house, and several gunshots. Most of the shots, and the last of them, sounded as if they came from ESU sniper rifles. ESU snipers always hit what they aimed at, and they shot to kill.
Quinn and Pearl both had their handguns aimed at Willard, who shrugged.
“I’m alone now,” he said.
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2014 John Lutz
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-2830-6
First electronic edition: October 2014
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3548-9
ISBN-10: 0-7860-3548-X