Murder in Hell's Kitchen

by Lee Harris

  “You’ve been very cooperative, Mr. Johnson. We want to stay in touch.”

  Johnson took the pad and wrote on it. “These are my numbers. I’ll see what’s on file when I get back to D.C., but it may take a few days. I’ll also have to brief my section chief and get her clearance on some of the files, but if it will help in Henry’s case, I don’t think she’ll object. Now that I see what you’re investigating, I’ll be glad to do anything I can.”

  They thanked him and got a car from the Chinatown Precinct to take him home and drop Jane and Defino at Midtown North. It was time to sweat Derek.

  28

  “IT’S LIKE THIS,” Bracken said. “He decided to run after you talked to him—when was that? Friday?—and he took off. He’s a little vague about where he spent the weekend.”

  “Derek’s vague about what he had for lunch,” Defino said.

  “Anyway, either he got thrown out or it rained on him or whatever story he’s telling when you ask him next time, he crept back and went to sleep in his own bed.”

  “Who found him?” Jane asked.

  “Stabile, of all people,” Bracken said. “Stabile came down to see what was going on, figuring he’d have to clean the super’s apartment out and get another guy, and there was Derek, fast asleep.”

  They followed Bracken to the interview room, where Derek had put his head down on the table and gone to sleep again. Must have been some pretty sleepless days away, Jane thought. Derek lifted his head with a start, stared at them without comprehension, then gradually seemed to figure out where he was and who these people were.

  “Detective,” he said.

  “Hi, Derek,” Jane said in her most cordial voice. “Nice to see you again. We’ve been looking for you.”

  “I got scared. I went away for a while.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re back.” She sat across from him and Defino sat next to her.

  “Lemme know if you need anything,” Bracken said, backing out of the room.

  “We have some questions for you,” Jane said when the door had closed. “It would really be great if you would answer them truthfully.”

  “Yeah, OK.”

  “It’s about the apartment on the fourth floor, the one across from Mr. Hutchins’s apartment. Someone was living there when Mr. Soderberg fell down the stairs, isn’t that right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Who was it, Derek?”

  He made some faces before he answered, wrinkling his nose, pushing out his lips, squeezing his face into a fake smile, rubbing his ear. “It was a lady,” he said finally.

  “A woman was living in that apartment?” Defino said.

  “A real fine lady, yeah, she lived there for a while.”

  “Tell us about it.”

  “She come to me one day, ask me do I have a place in that house. I say yeah, somebody move out and we gonna remodel, you know?”

  “Did Mr. Stabile know?”

  “No, sir. This just between that lady and me. She just want to be there a little while till she get herself together. She got some problems she gotta work on, you know? So I say, they only work on that apartment durin’ the day. You can stay there at night, but gotta be real quiet. Can’t let nobody know you’re there. That was OK with her. She just wanna stay a coupla weeks.”

  “When did she move in, Derek?”

  “I ain’t too good with dates, mister. I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Was it before or after Mr. Quill got killed?”

  “It was before. Oh, yeah, it was before, ’cause I told her after they found poor Mr. Quill dead, she gotta get outta there. There was cops all over the place.”

  “And did she get out?” Jane asked.

  “I don’t know,” Derek said in what seemed to be an honest answer. “I didn’t see her for a long time. If she was still stayin’ there at night, I couldn’t tell ya.”

  “Before Mr. Quill died, did you see her a lot?”

  “No. I never see a lot of her. She ain’t there much during the day ’cause the men are working.”

  “Did she have a key to the apartment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did she come and go, Derek?” Jane attempted a smile to make him feel at ease.

  “She . . . uh . . . I think she come through the roof.”

  Jane restrained herself from clapping Defino across the back. They had been asking the goddamn right questions, only they hadn’t been getting the right answers. “Can you get down to the street from that roof?”

  “Not from that roof exactly, but maybe from the next one.”

  “You can go from one roof to the other?”

  “It ain’t hard.”

  All she had to do was wait for Hutchins to leave for work in the morning and then the coast was clear. She could go up to the roof, connect with another roof, get down to the street, and go about her business. Getting back without being seen by Hutchins would be a little trickier, but apparently she had managed.

  “Do you know where she went during the day?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Did you ever see her during the day?” Defino asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “OK, let’s go back. She moved in before Mr. Quill got murdered. Is that right?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “And you told her to stay away after the murder because the cops were all over the place.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you don’t know if she really moved out.”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Did you see her there after the cops were gone?”

  “Yeah, I see her sometimes. Like in the street maybe.”

  “You ever ask her for the key back?” Defino asked.

  That question seemed to disturb Derek. He scratched his head and looked around. “I don’t remember askin’ for it back.”

  “They change the lock on that door after someone moved in?”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, Detective.”

  “What did this woman look like?”

  Derek shrugged again. “I’m no good on faces. She was a nice lady. She was good to me.”

  “You mean she paid you.”

  “She gave me a little somethin’.”

  “Was she black or white?”

  “White.”

  “Was she tall or short?”

  “Kind of, you know, in between.”

  Jane nudged Defino and he sat silent. “Was she my age, Derek?”

  “Yeah, maybe. She wasn’t no kid.”

  Thanks, Jane thought. “Was she a thin woman? A heavy woman?”

  “Thin,” he said right away.

  “How did she dress?”

  He looked confused.

  “Did she wear pants or skirts? Did she wear jeans?”

  “Pants, like those running pants, you know?”

  “Did she have a name, Derek?”

  “She told me I could call her Chickie.”

  “Chickie.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Jane sat back. Defino said, “When is the last time you saw her or talked to her, Derek?”

  “Long time ago. I couldn’t tell you when. It’s a long time.”

  “It’s been a long day,” Jane said. It was her turn to let out a long sigh.

  “You gotta believe it. You want to wrap this up?”

  “I think so. Where are you going now, Derek?”

  “Back to my place.”

  “On Fifty-sixth Street?”

  “That’s the only place I got.”

  “You going to stay there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thanks for talking to us.” Whatever it was worth. “If you ever see this woman again, I want you to let us know.”

  He promised fervently and they let him go. Bracken came in and they sat around for a while, talking about the surprise. Who could have believed it was a woman?

  “You think she hung around those six months waiting to get Soderberg?” Br
acken asked.

  “She could’ve been watching the building to see if you and Otis Wright were there. Maybe she had another place across the street or down the block that she spent the rest of her time. I gotta believe this was a contract job that she flubbed the first time around,” Defino said.

  “You know who hired her?”

  “Not yet, but we’re moving in.”

  “Let’s move out,” Jane said. “It’s been a long day.”

  Defino was very agreeable.

  She sent Defino home and logged him out when she got to Centre Street. MacHovec, who had already gone home, left notes that he had reached Ray Kellner and he had nothing new to offer, but he confirmed a lot of what Carl Johnson had said. Another note said that a Chinese female worked in one of the offices Jane had visited for her travel approval, the office in Hack’s domain. She tucked that one in her bag.

  McElroy was on his way out when Jane came by, so she knocked on Captain Graves’s open door. “Hey, Cap, we talked to Carl Johnson and Derek,” she said.

  “Come on in.”

  She sat down and started with the Johnson interview.

  “So we have someone possibly observing Soderberg’s meet.”

  “Man or woman, Soderberg wasn’t sure. Now Derek tells us the person squatting in the empty apartment was a woman.” She dropped her notebook with the link chart faceup on his desk. On the bottom of the page she had written, Park bench?

  “A woman.”

  “About my age, if you can believe Derek, thin, white.” She brought him up-to-date.

  Graves looked down at the chart and nodded. “So no one may have seen her if she never went up and down the stairs. If you passed a woman in the street, you wouldn’t think twice. Maybe she rigged a rope upstairs to swing down and give Soderberg a hard push. You think this Derek could work with a sketch artist?”

  “Captain, I don’t think he’s reliable at all. Maybe what he told us about this woman was true, but you put him with an artist, you’re as likely to get Marilyn Monroe as a contract killer.”

  “So we have a woman who was there four, four and a half years ago. She could be anywhere, any country, as far as that goes. Can’t say it looks promising.”

  “I’ll tell MacHovec to check around for known female contract killers. Maybe he’ll come up with something. Can’t be a very long list. We can also look for help from the Feds on this one. Caffrey was one of their guys. Maybe they’ll open up the special files for us.”

  “Let’s hope so.” He looked troubled. To become a deputy inspector and trade his bars for a gold leaf, he needed results, and searching for faceless killers wasn’t the way to go. “Let’s keep at it. Something will turn up.” He gave her the upbeat smile and she assured him they had no thoughts of slacking off.

  “You missed a call,” Annie said as they crossed paths outside the whip’s office.

  “Who from?”

  “Don’t know. A man.”

  Back at her office, Jane cleaned up her desk and went home.

  She walked home from Centre Street, feeling the need to stretch her legs. It didn’t occur to her until she was halfway there that if she was being tailed, he was getting some unexpected exercise himself, or was it herself? She didn’t care; she just wanted to think. Plenty of people knew which cases had been selected for the squad, but she couldn’t get away from the fact that someone knew she was making the trip to Omaha. And a group under Hack’s supervision knew firsthand. She had known the minute she heard MacHovec mention his name that her love for him had not receded, not diminished, not been replaced by anyone else, better or worse. He had always been her model of the honest cop who had made it close to the top without cheating, without pulling strings, without begging for favors or accepting them when they were offered. He was guilty, if that was the right word, of engaging in a long-term extramarital affair. He would have left his wife and married her if Jane had let him. But she had too many issues in her own life—and he was one of the few people who knew just about everything—that prevented her from agreeing to his wish to divorce. A part of her sympathized with Hack’s wife. Another part wanted his children to grow up with two parents.

  As she reached her front door, her thoughts had segued to the child she had borne and given up. Maybe it was true that everything in a person’s life was interconnected, but the flowchart that was her life was too complicated to follow anymore. Lisa Angelino. She liked everything she knew about her: her name, her looks, her letter, and even the crinkly paper on which it had been written. The notion that she had a child had grown on her these past two weeks, even when she wasn’t thinking about it. She had known all her adult life, and especially since she became involved with Hack, that she would never have children of her own. Her parents had expressed sadness that she had not married. But Lisa’s letter had changed everything. Some of the essence of Jane Bauer had been passed on to a lovely young woman, and Jane was enchanted with the idea.

  Still, that didn’t mean she wanted to establish a relationship with this girl, certainly not a close one that would involve flying back and forth, Christmas celebrations, vacations together. The truth was, she didn’t know what she wanted, and part of the problem was Paul Thurston.

  Lisa had written that she wanted to know who her parents were. Not her mother—her natural parents. Jane thought she knew where to find Paul. The question was whether she wanted to. She had given birth to a child whom he believed she had aborted. He had gone on to marry and have a family of his own. Was it fair to saddle him with this knowledge? She felt that it wasn’t. But what if the twenty years had changed his outlook? He understood better than Jane the value of parenthood. Should he not be given the opportunity—the choice—to decide whether to declare himself Lisa’s father?

  Upstairs in her warm apartment, Jane checked the messages on her machine. “Jane, it’s Mike Fromm. You’ve been out of the office most of the day, so I thought I’d get you at home. John’s doing well. I can’t say the same for Hutchins, but he’s still alive and drifts in and out of consciousness. He’s tried to talk but we can’t make much of what he’s said. Give me a call at home when you have a chance.”

  Maybe in an hour, she thought. She felt cheered that Hutchins was still alive. Maybe there was a chance he would survive, that he would even recover most of his faculties and have a life.

  There were no other messages. She sat in her favorite chair in the living room and brooded. Mike Fromm was an attractive man, and she had felt the familiar draw of sex from the moment they started talking. It surprised her a little now that the same draw still existed when she thought of Hack. Having lived a monogamous life, having been satisfied with whoever was her current partner, being pulled in two directions was a novel experience.

  It was Hack she wanted, and she knew that. If Hack was somehow involved in this business, in these homicides, it would destroy her. It surprised her how much she wanted to talk to him, to hear his voice, perhaps to meet with him and justify it as business.

  She got up from the chair, went into the bedroom, and put a pair of jeans on. Then she made dinner, took care of the dishes, and dialed Mike’s number at home.

  “Hey, good to hear from you. You’re not spending much time in your office these days,” he said.

  “There’s a lot of fieldwork on this one. Tell me about Hutchins.”

  “There isn’t much to tell. He’s out of it most of the time, but he wakes up every so often. Cory’s with him as much as she can. She’s the one who heard him say it. Something about Chinese.”

  “Chinese? As in someone from China?”

  “You got it. It was her impression he was telling her about the guy who kidnapped him.”

  “Mike, this really fits with what we’ve learned.”

  “The Chinese are involved in this?” He sounded incredulous.

  “Some Chinese people may be. We don’t have any names at this point. Did he say anything else? A plate number would be nice.”

  Mike laughed. “
We thought we were lucky to get two syllables out of him, even if they didn’t mean much. I don’t know what he remembers, and I don’t know if he’ll remember any more as time goes on. He’s still critical. He may go to sleep one day and not wake up.”

  They talked about other things after that, courtship talk, Jane thought, banter that would lead nowhere if they remained a thousand miles apart. He was considering coming east for a vacation. He had been to New York only once before, and that was with his wife before they had any children. It was when the Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world and Central Park was safe to walk through.

  “I would want to see you,” he said, “if I made the trip.”

  “I’ll be here. I’ll show you around. We can go up to the observation deck on the Empire State Building and walk across Central Park. It’s fine during the day, and I carry a gun.”

  “Hey, that sounds like fun—Central Park, I mean.”

  “You OK with heights?”

  “Don’t know. I’ve never been higher than about twenty stories. No, wait a minute. We went to the top of the Empire State Building that time we came. That place still standing?”

  Jane laughed again. “Yes, Mike, it’s still standing. I’ll take you there, too.”

  “No, I don’t think so. That was then; this is now. I like to leave old memories the way they were.”

  She thought about that after she hung up. She could see Paul Thurston in a bathing suit and shirt, his legs long and hard, the hair gold against his tanned skin. Whatever he looked like now, it would be different, as she was different. Did she want to superimpose a new memory over the old one?

  Shit. She went over to the fireplace and laid a fire, hoping she was doing it as well as the last time. What she wanted was Hack. Between moving and changing squads, flying to Omaha and taking the train to Washington, she had convinced herself that she was over him. She knew now that she wasn’t. She was over Paul; she was sure of that. Twenty years was a hell of a long time. She had had better and she had had worse since then, but she was over him. She didn’t want to talk to him, though, either in person or over the phone.