“That’s a good neighborhood,” I said.
“It’s not like the old days,” she said. “Sandhogs make a pretty decent wage. My younger brothers do okay for themselves. Duke had the same damn curses my father did, though. Horses and hooch, my mama used to say. A little less of both and we’d have been on easy street.”
“So these guys weren’t in the tunnel when their father died, were they?” Mike asked.
“No, no. They were all in grade school at the time.”
“They couldn’t have witnessed anything then?”
“Tall tales. That’s what they’re going by.”
Mike flipped the page. “You know any other men who were down there at the time Hassett died, with your father and Duke?”
She thought about it for thirty seconds. “Nobody who’s a friend.”
“Trish,” Mike said, “I’m not looking for Duke’s friends or his enemies. I’m looking for an eyewitness who might tell me the truth.”
She put her elbows on the table and covered her eyes with her hands. “My mother knew every one of the crew. Too bad those memories are all locked up inside her head now.”
“Think, Trish,” Mike urged. “You’ve heard this story so many times.”
She remembered the names of two of the older men who had died of the same black-lung disease that had killed her father, and two more who’d retired out of state. She recalled some common surnames-Powers, Ryan, O’Callahan-that Mike would have to find by checking through union records going back more than a decade. Reluctantly, she decided to give us someone who might have been an eyewitness.
“Phin-Phinneas Baylor. If he’s still alive, maybe he’ll talk to you. Phin was crippled that day in the crash. Never got back to work so far as I know. He never blamed Duke-everyone said it was my brother who saved Phin’s life.” Trish’s attitude was growing in defiance. “Used to live over in Throgs Neck with his daughter. I knew her from school. She and Bex and me-we were all good friends in junior high.”
“You remember what address?” Mike asked.
“Right next door to St. Frances de Chantal. Hollywood Avenue, just to the left of the church. I don’t know the number, but the house is right there,” Trish said. “Too bad Bex is dead. She’d have kept the boys’ heads on straight. She knew better than to blame Duke.”
Trish slid out of the booth and stood next to Mike. “I’ve got to be going now.”
“Bex?” I asked. “Your best friend? What did she have to do with this?”
“She was a Hassett, too. Rebecca Hassett, the boys’ older sister. Bex was my age-we were like sisters from the time we were four or five.”
“What did she know about the accident?” Mike asked.
Trish hesitated. “You think she would have stayed so close to me if she thought anyone in my family had killed her father?”
Mike’s impatience was beginning to show. “Look, Trish. That’s just-just…I don’t want to say it’s of no value, but-”
“It’s the truth, Mr. Chapman. You just want it all made easy for you, don’t you?”
Trish started to walk past the bar. Mike and I followed. “Can I give you a ride?”
“I told you I can’t be seen with you,” she said to him.
“When did Bex die?” I asked. I couldn’t remember a modern urban culture like this world of tunnel diggers-and their families-in which lives seemed so constantly at risk.
“We were sixteen,” she said, wrapping the black coat around her. “It was about five or six months after her father got killed. She sort of spun out of control when that happened. Had to be like a second mother to the three boys and she was too young to deal with that. Bex liked her freedom.”
“What became of her?”
“My mother used to say she was a wild child. I’d get a beating if I skipped school and got caught. Bex just stopped caring, and there was nobody to rein her in. Hung out on the street, spent more time at my house than she did at her home. Then she got in with a crowd-older kids mostly-who used to stay out late at night in the park.”
“Which park?” Mike asked.
“Pelham Bay. The golf course was where they found her. Bunch of hoodlums used to practically live there, smoking and drinking, making trouble all night. She got in over her head with them. That day we sneaked downtown to Brendan’s wedding together? It was the last time I saw Bex Hassett alive.”
Trish was making her way to the door of the bar while Mike paid the tab.
“What happened to her? How’d she die?” I asked.
“Some-some animal tried to rape her, I guess. We came back from Manhattan and I remember we had a big argument on the train, her asking me all about how come my family wouldn’t go to the church, and how could Brendan do that to us-give us all up for some rich, fancy girl. Wanted me to run away with her ’cause her mother tried to get crazy strict with her after her father died,” Trish said. “Wasn’t any use by then. I don’t think she ever went home that night. Her brothers came to get me the next morning-we went everywhere looking for her.”
“She didn’t even go back to school that week?”
“Bex didn’t care about school,” Trish said, frowning, chewing her lip furiously again. “The very night she was killed she called the house.”
“What did she want?”
She met my eyes with hers. “I don’t know. My mother wouldn’t let her talk to me. Told Bex that I was already asleep and she’d give me the message. But Mama never told me about it until after the police found her body. I always thought I could have helped her, you know, the way kids do? Blamed myself for it. Thought that if she was looking for a place to stay or something, she wouldn’t have been murdered that night. I could have done something to save her if she hadn’t gotten so agitated, so-”
“That’s a heavy burden to live with, Trish,” I said. “Whatever happened to her wasn’t your fault.”
“She must have been very scared that night to call me. The last day we were together she did nothing but argue with me-was so spittin’ mad at me about my family and the wedding she didn’t call me or come over the whole week.”
“You were with her brothers when they found her?” I asked.
“No, ma’am. We went looking, I told you. It was cops who actually found her body, way out in the middle of the golf course. Those bastards choked her to death and left her body right there in the park. Over what? It had to be rape, ’cause there’s not much else she would have bothered to fight about. Strangulation-you wanted to know? That’s how Bex died. I still remember when the detectives came to the house to ask about her-when we had seen her last and such. They called it a soft kill, the way she died. Sounds like anything but that to me.”
21
“Soft kill. That’s the most oxymoronic phrase in forensic medicine,” Mike said, brushing his dark hair off his forehead. “Nothing soft about strangulation. Right up there among the most painful ways to die, fighting for enough air to breathe while someone squeezes the life out of you for four or five minutes.”
They were murders without weapons, murders without the guns or knives or tire irons that made other homicides “harder.” The designation was as baffling to Mike and me as it had been to Trish Quillian when she’d learned the fate of her best friend.
“Am I crazy to be thinking about a possible connection to Amanda Quillian’s death?” I asked. “Is it just coincidence that both she and Bex Hassett were strangled?”
“What connection do you mean-the Quillians? You always want it both ways, Coop. I thought your expert was primed to tell the court that ligature and manual strangulation are among the most common methods of homicidal deaths with female victims. Especially if they’ve been sexually assaulted.”
“That’s why I can’t go too far with that statistic in front of the jury. There wasn’t even an attempt at a rape in Amanda’s case.”
“Well, according to Trish, the cops thought it was the motive with Bex. If it makes you happy, we’ll pull the file on her investig
ation. Meanwhile, you game to try to find Phinneas this afternoon?”
“You think it’s worth the chase?”
“Trish’s half-right,” Mike said, talking as he dialed his cell. “Somebody had it in for Duke. I think she’s grabbing at straws, but we got a nice June afternoon to kill. See what the Hassett-Quillian grudge is about.”
I opened the car door as Mike spoke into the phone. “Who’s this?…Hey, Spiro-it’s Chapman. Need a favor. Go back twelve years, give or take a few months. Find me a file on a sixteen-year-old girl, Rebecca Hassett. Called herself Bex. Asphyxial in Pelham Bay Park. Yeah, I know. I’ll owe you a great big juicy sirloin at Patroon with a steep bottle of red.”
Mike got in and started the engine as the detective on the other end of the phone responded to him.
“What do you think I want, Spiro? Everything on paper, as fast as you can put your mitts on it. Yesterday if you can do it. Case folder with the DD5s,” he said, referring to the detective-division documents that would have every detail about the old investigation. “Autopsy report, photographs, any record of an arrest or suspects. Call me back when you’ve got it.”
The ride to the outermost peninsula of land in the East Bronx, an old community in the shadow of the large modern bridge that crossed Long Island Sound, took another twenty minutes. Mike used the time to show off his mastery of the history of the city, which I never tired of hearing. “Throgs Neck. You know how it got its name?”
“I have no idea.”
“John Throckmorton. Settled a farm there-hundreds of acres-while the Dutch had control of New York in the 1640s. We’re looking for Phin Baylor’s place next to a church on Hollywood, right? That’s got an interesting namesake, too.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Let’s just say the final Jeopardy! category for the afternoon is Doo-Wop,” Mike said. “An audio daily double. The answer is ‘Girl group with 1958 hit-“Maybe.”’”
He began to croon to me. “‘May-ay-be…’”
I had danced to that a few times at college parties when the deejays were spinning oldies. Maybe, if I hold your hand…maybe, if I kissed your lips, I thought to myself. I knew the lyrics as well as Mike did, but if he wanted me to sing to him, I wasn’t going there. And I just didn’t know who had recorded the song.
“The Shirelles?”
“Not even close.”
“The Sequins?”
“I gave you the whole damn clue, Coop. Who are the Chantels?”
“From this church? St. Frances de Chantal?”
“Yup. Just changed the spelling by a letter. They practiced by singing in the choir and doing Gregorian chants. Performed in the parish at a school dance when they were teenagers, got noticed by a big promoter, and were one of the first girl groups to hit it big with doo-wop.”
We turned off Harding Avenue at the corner of Hollywood. The bright stained-glass windows of St. Frances gleamed in the late-afternoon sun. Two young women-about Trish Quillian’s age-were sitting on the stoop of a narrow brick house adjacent to the church. They stopped chatting and stared at the car as we came to a stop at the curb.
“Let me do this,” I said to Mike.
I walked up the path and introduced myself to the pair, asking if this was where Phinneas Baylor lived.
“Yes, and I’m his daughter, Janet,” the fairer one said, standing to come toward me. “Something wrong?”
“No, we’d just like to talk to your father.”
“Depends on what it’s about. I don’t need you bothering him.”
“We’re actually with-”
“I know it’s not a courtesy call. Your automobile kind of gives the both of you away in this neighborhood,” Janet said, trying to back me down the path, putting distance between our conversation and her friend. I could hear the door slam behind me and figured Mike didn’t like the dynamic he was watching.
“Mike Chapman here. NYPD,” he said, both hands in his pants pockets. “Nothing to get perturbed about. You’re…?”
“Janet. Janet Baylor.” She looked back and forth between Mike’s face and mine and made her choice. “This a problem for my dad?” she asked him.
Mike took her arm and steered her toward the car, smiling at her to reassure her. “Ancient history, Janet. We need a lesson. Hear your pop has some stories about the old days that might be a help in something we’re doing.”
She cocked her head. “Quillians it’ll be, won’t it? They’re all over the news. You won’t be mixing him into that stuff, will you? He don’t know the first thing about it.”
“Fair enough. We’re just trying to get a handle on some of the background.”
“That’s all? Honest?”
Mike held up his hand and smiled again. “Blood oath.”
“Phin took a walk down to the water, at the end of Pennyfield Avenue,” Janet said. “Fort Schuyler. Sits up on the ramparts there every day he can, May to October, until sunset. Silver hair-and I think he’s got on a black T-shirt and baggy pants. Got a bad gimp. You’ll know him by the cane.”
“Do you mind my asking whether you know Patricia Quillian?” I said.
Janet looked up. “Went all through school with Trish. Haven’t seen her since we got out.”
“Any reason why?”
She shrugged. “Just went separate ways, that’s all. We had another friend-Bex-and-”
Mike wanted to show her we knew about Bex. “Rebecca Hassett, right?”
Janet paused. “Yeah, yeah. Guess you’ve got a good start on your history lesson already, Detective. Well, her murder shook up our whole crowd. Just never knew what happened. Me, I used to keep all the newspaper clippings about the case.”
“You still have them?” I asked.
“Nah.”
“Why did you save them?”
She pushed the hair off her forehead. “Bex’s murder made her the most famous person we knew. Had her name in the paper every day for a couple of weeks. Seemed like the cops were coming around talking to us all the time at first. Seemed like the most important thing in all our lives. Then they just stopped coming. Stopped caring about Bex. Most people did. They always figured it was the druggies in the park.”
“And you?” Mike asked. “What did you think?”
She shrugged again. “Same as everybody else. She should have stayed with our crowd. Bex, I mean. Started running with hoodlums. People who weren’t like us. Lots of people thought she was asking for it.”
I closed my eyes, stung by words I had heard far too often about victims of violence.
“How well did you know Brendan Quillian?” Mike asked.
Janet Baylor frowned. “Not at all. Too much a pretty boy for me. Never really saw him around here anyway.”
“And Duke?”
She didn’t answer.
“Did you know Duke?”
“Had firm orders from my mother to keep away from him. We all did. Now that was a nasty boy, Duke Quillian.”
Mike was standing as close to Janet Baylor as he could get. “Tell me what you mean. Tell me why you say that.”
She hesitated again and licked her lips. Then she shook her head from side to side.
“Janet?” Mike said, trying to get her attention again.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m remembering wrong.”
“He’s dead now. He can’t hurt anybody.”
“Terrible things, he did. At least that’s what I used to hear.”
“What? Like shooting squirrels and skinning cats?”
Janet laughed and pointed a finger in Mike’s face. “You’ve been watching too many of them serial-killer shows, Detective. Not that stuff.”
“What then?”
She took a deep breath. “It’s only stories I heard, mind you. Nothing I witnessed.”
“Tell them to me,” Mike said.
“Duke had a fight with a kid once,” Janet said, pointing down the street. “A boy who lived over there, but the family moved right afterward. Duke tied his one arm to
the fence in the backyard to keep him still. Had a pair of pliers-big, rusty old things he carried around in his pocket to break locks open and such. Pulled all the fingernails out of the kid’s other hand to teach him a lesson.”
My stomach heaved, but I tried not to show any reaction, hoping that Janet would keep talking.
“And one of the girls who made a fool of him in front of his friends? He doused her hair in some kind of oil and set fire to it.”
“I can’t believe he was never locked up for these things,” Mike said.
“Please, Detective. Nobody dared call the cops. We’ve got our own way of settling things. Duke Quillian didn’t need to practice on squirrels and cats, Mr. Chapman. It was people he liked to torture.”
22
Mike followed Schurz Avenue down to Pennyfield, an eclectic mix of row houses and white stucco buildings that resembled the sides of small cruise ships, with railings that fronted on the unusual waterfront setting. The smell of the salt sea air was a refreshing change from the odors of the liquor and beer in the dark bar.
“You seem to know this area well,” I said.
“Fort Schuyler. Built in 1833, named after General Philip Schuyler. You probably don’t know anything about our seacoast fortifications,” he said.
“Guilty as charged.”
Mike always shifted into high gear when he could display his knowledge of military history.
“After the French revolution,” he said, “the Founding Fathers were afraid we’d be drawn into the European wars that broke out all over. They started to build military forts for defense along the coastline, calling them the First System. They started the Second System in 1807, when Great Britain became a threat, too.”
“Not much help, I guess, if you count the War of 1812.”
“Brilliant deduction, Coop. You can tell they hadn’t been very successful with the first two stages. So this one-and Totten, across the sound in Queens-were built as part of the Third System, later on.” He got out of the car and slammed the door, pointing as he surveyed the vista. “The idea was to be able to use cannon fire from these two fortifications to stop any enemy ships that tried to enter the Sound in order to approach New York City.”
Bad blood Page 17