Twist

by John Lutz

  There was a lot of tan leather and shiny chrome about. The apartment gave the impression that all the furnishings had been bought recently at the same time and place. They seemed to suggest that the occupant wasn’t there very often, but spent most of the time in his office or on business jaunts.

  Aikins was having trouble looking either of the detectives in the eye. Hiding something. Sal saw that as a hopeful sign. The more people were hiding, the better.

  “I guess this is about Gigi,” Aikins said. He shook his head from side to side, staring at the cream-colored carpet. “Damned shame, what happened.”

  “It’s funny,” Harold said, “how the apartment she was murdered in is just down the street from yours.”

  Sal thought Harold was pushing a little too hard here; then he realized what was going on and determined to play good cop.

  “Six blocks,” he said. “Not so funny, really.”

  “It isn’t funny at all,” Aikins said. “Nothing about what happened is in the least bit funny.” He looked at Harold now, shot him daggers. “And six blocks isn’t all that close. Not in Manhattan.”

  “Six short blocks,” Harold said.

  Sal thought of leavening that, but decided not to jump in here. It was kind of fun seeing the mild-mannered Harold playing bad cop.

  Harold pretended to consult something in his note pad. “You’re the director of human resources at Homestead Properties?”

  “Managing director.”

  “Just what the hell does that mean?” Harold asked.

  Sal almost smiled. Harold turning it on.

  “Means I’m in charge of personnel.”

  “And it was your decision to fire Gigi Beardsley?”

  “No. That was a board decision.”

  “You’re on the board?”

  “Yes.”

  Harold shrugged.

  Sal said nothing.

  Aikins said, “All right.”

  They both looked at him.

  “All right what?” Sal rasped.

  “I saw them last night, before Gigi was killed.” Sal wished Harold would either say something or shut his mouth. Literally. His bad-cop role had been so well played that Aikins had rolled open like a sardine can. Both detectives were surprised. It was better not to look that way.

  Sal figured he’d better take charge here, though he couldn’t fault the progress Harold had made.

  “You’d better elaborate,” he said to Aikins.

  “I felt terrible about firing Gigi. She really was an angel. Everybody at Homestead liked her.” He stared at the carpet and shook his head again. “This damned business has no heart.”

  “You mean real estate?” Sal asked.

  “Sure. What else would I mean?”

  “It was out of your hands,” Harold said.

  Now he was sympathizing with Aikins, who looked at him in surprise.

  Sal looked at him, too. Toughen up, Harold.

  “Did you and Gigi have something romantic going?” Sal asked, putting this Q and A back on the beam.

  “I wish!” Aikins said. Which was not a smart thing to say. Only he wouldn’t have admitted it if he were guilty of Gigi’s murder, so maybe not a dumb thing to say.

  “I knew she spent some time in the neighborhood,” Aikins continued. “There was a lounge not far away where she and some of the other Homestead employees spent their time and money.”

  “Including you?”

  “No. Not a good place for a managing director to be.”

  “Too friendly with the help?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” Harold said.

  Sal gave him a cautioning look. He was the old Harold again, not the hard-bitten detective out of TV and movie drama.

  “I did get lucky enough to catch sight of her,” Aikins said. “She was walking on Eighth Avenue, and I sort of figured where she might be going. She still had a master key to the universal lockbox—I forgot to ask her for it, and she forgot to volunteer it. And I knew the Padmont Building unit wasn’t far away.”

  “She might have been going anywhere,” Sal said.

  “Well, I didn’t think so. I wanted to satisfy my curiosity. That’s why I followed them.”

  Sal and Harold exchanged a dead-eyed glance that Aikins wasn’t supposed to notice.

  “Them?” Harold asked.

  “Didn’t I say? She was with someone. A man I’d never seen before. That’s why I was curious. And, I admit, a little jealous. I had a kind of mild crush on Gigi, but I wasn’t the only one.”

  “Was she the sort that slept around?” Harold asked.

  “No. Just the opposite. That’s one reason why I was curious.”

  “What did this man she was with look like?”

  Aikins closed his eyes, thinking. Then opened them. “There was nothing unusual about him. I guess that was unusual. He was just . . . average.”

  “You knew the approximate height of Gigi Beardsley, Mr. Aikins. Using that as a yardstick, was the man short or tall?”

  “Tall’s relevant. And I don’t know what kind of heels Gigi was wearing, or if she had on high heels. I’m tall at six feet one. He seemed slightly shorter than me.”

  Aikins had looked to Sal to be about five-eleven.

  “What else?” he rasped.

  “He had on light slacks, a dark blazer.”

  “Hair?”

  “Yeah. A full head of it, like mine. Dark like mine, too. I think. Really, it’s hard to say. I didn’t dream I might have to describe him, or I’d have paid closer attention.” Aikins looked from Harold to Sal. “Do you think he’s the one who killed Gigi? The Lady Liberty Killer?”

  “Yes,” Harold said.

  “My God! I could have done something. Stopped him.”

  “You couldn’t know,” Sal said. “And if you had known, you couldn’t have stopped him without killing him.”

  “Then I—”

  “What?” Sal asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Were the two of them walking okay?” Harold asked.

  “You mean, were they drunk?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Maybe a little. But then, I figured they were coming from the lounge, so I mighta just seen them as being slightly unsteady.”

  “Were they walking in the direction of the listed apartment where Gigi was murdered?”

  “Yeah. Or toward a subway stop that’d get them there.”

  “What about her own apartment?”

  “Not in that direction. Maybe she didn’t want him to know where she lived.”

  “Why would that be?” Harold asked.

  “You know. Guys can give a woman—could give her—all kinds of trouble. She maybe . . .”

  “What?”

  “Just needed temporary comforting.”

  “Because of what you did to her.”

  “Easy, Harold,” Sal said. “Take it easy.”

  Sal took out the images of Dred Gant, deciding to spare Aikins the morgue shot of Gigi. He didn’t like looking at that one, himself.

  He held the copies out for Aikins to see. “This the man you saw?”

  Aikins stared, then looked up at Sal. “I can’t say. They don’t even look like the same man until you study them. And even then . . .”

  Sal put the copies away.

  “Do you recall what time you saw Gigi and her companion?”

  “Nine-fifty.”

  “How can you be so definite?”

  “I always know the time. Automatically check it regularly.”

  “From being in Human Resources, I guess,” Harold said.

  “Maybe.” Aikins was staring at the carpet again, glum, spent.

  Sal and Harold thanked him for his time, and told him he’d be asked later to make a statement.

  “So you can see if I contradict myself,” Aikins said, head bowed. “Trip myself up.”

  “Everybody contradicts themselves every day,” Sal said.

  Though
not when they’re talking about murder.

  “That’s sure comforting,” Aikins said, still not looking up.

  Sal and Harold took their leave.

  When they were descending in the elevator, Sal said, “I forgot you could play such a hard-ass.”

  “Just like on TV, movies, the stage,” Harold said.

  “Really. You ever been on the stage?”

  “A few times in lineups. Does that count?”

  “No,” Sal said.

  62

  Jody was on the way back to where Quinn and Pearl were, at Gigi Beardsley’s apartment. She was eager to tell Quinn she’d been able to place the killer with the victim near the approximate time of the murder. All Quinn had to do was phone the medical examiner and ascertain whether Gigi had Grey Goose vodka in her stomach at the time of her death. That shouldn’t be so difficult.

  Then Jody felt a stab of nausea, remembering actually seeing Gigi’s stomach.

  She forced that vivid picture from her mind, or at least to a compartmentalized place where it might lie unnoticed, and assured herself that the police lab could work miracles. Surely they could find traces of vodka, and should be able to identify the brand. Well, the brand, maybe.

  The temperature had gained another few degrees, and Jody realized she was walking fast, perspiring.

  She stopped, causing several people to pause and stare at her. Telling herself to take her time, she moved into the shadow of an awning over the window of a small bookshop. It struck her that you didn’t see very many small independent bookstores these days. The future pecking away.

  Best to use part of the tech onslaught to phone Quinn, make sure he and her mother were still at the victim’s apartment. Jody fished her iPhone from her purse and was surprised when it buzzed and vibrated in her hand.

  She automatically swished her thumb and answered it before she’d fully read the call’s origin—Golden Sunset Assisted Living, a New Jersey number.

  “Jody?” called her grandmother’s voice from the phone. “Are you there, dear?”

  Well, no problem here. Her grandmother would surely understand that she was working.

  “Hi, Gramma. I can’t talk now. I’m—”

  “About to hear—and this I don’t often say—the opportunity of your lifetime. For this, Jody, dear, you find time.”

  Huh? “I’m helping to apprehend a serial killer, Gramma.”

  “Killer schmiller. What? Will he disappear like a magician’s bunny?”

  “Maybe just like that, Gramma. This is really important!”

  “I don’t have to tell you who you sound like now, dear. This opportunity—”

  “Will keep. It will keep, Gramma. Really!”

  “Will it, dear? The impetuousness of youth—and I mean this not as an insult—is sometimes unable to pause and open the golden door to the future. Even, I am sad to say, they ignore opportunity’s knock. Often it isn’t a loud knock, and yet—”

  “What is this opportunity, Gramma? Do you want me to buy gold?”

  Jody realized she was talking too loud, drawing attention. She moved farther back into the shadows of the doorway, near a tall, leaning display of books about impending climate change. Global warming. It’s here! It’s here! Jody almost said aloud, feeling beads of sweat trickling down the inside of her right arm.

  “Not gold—and I assure you I would have no reservations about buying gold at this time, when impending disaster looms, and we mustn’t think about that, because what’s the use, disasters being what they are? Not gold, dear. Something even more valuable than gold or any of the other precious metals. In so far as any metal is precious when compared to the value of flesh and bone.”

  Good God! Jody realized she was squeezing the phone. She had observed her mother talking on the phone to her grandmother, seen the signs of stress. At the time, she hadn’t understood, and had even been critical of her mother.

  Was it time to inform her grandmother that she was “breaking up”?

  Jody didn’t like the imagery of the remark. Besides, Gramma was never really convinced of this convenient cellular interference, and Jody had been openly disdainful of her mother for blatantly lying to her mother. There was no doubt that the old woman wasn’t actually deceived.

  Right was right. Wasn’t that what Quinn preached? Sort of?

  Jody drew a deep breath.

  “What is this better-than-golden opportunity?” she asked her grandmother.

  “It turns out—though to say this in such a trivial manner and without trumpets is to disregard what is, perhaps, meaningful fate—that Doctor Milton Kahn has a daughter.”

  “I’m not looking for new friends right now,” Jody said.

  “Oh, I’m thinking of more than mere friendship, dear.”

  A startling thought crossed Jody’s mind. “Are you matchmaking?”

  “It’s an honorable tradition, dear.”

  Jody was puzzled. “I’m straight, Gramma.”

  “A daughter who has a friend, dear. Which is, in this instance, a man, and is another word for find. A recently divorced friend who is a respected chiropractor. His name is Austin Morton.”

  “Isn’t that a British car, Gramma?” She really did feel like breaking the connection but fought the impulse.

  “Not in this instance. He is from the Bronx. If you were—and I say this with a grandmother’s instinctive knowledge of how personalities might mesh—simply—and simply is an understatement as to the momentous importance of the matter—to look at Doctor Austin Morton’s photograph on Facebook, and read about his considerable, not to say admirable, accomplishments, you would—”

  “You’re breaking up, Gramma.”

  And just a fraction of the guilt that her mother felt settled on Jody.

  Quinn gave Nift the info—they knew the victim’s last hours, the approximate time of her death. And her killer had actually been seen, though identifying him for certain in a courtroom still seemed a long shot.

  Most of the Q&A personnel—or human resources—were in the squad-room-like office on West Seventy-ninth. The desks were in two rows, facing each other. There was nothing in between. The place even smelled like a precinct squad room—that unique combination of desperation and perspiration, of misplaced old church pews. There was remorse here without atonement.

  Quinn thought the arrangement might keep the heat down, allowing more circulation from the underpowered window-unit air conditioners, than if there were a lot of cubicles. His office was the only actual cubical, and it wasn’t permanent. In fact, it usually had only two or three sides in place. It seemed that the hotter the weather, and whatever case they were on, the fewer cubicle walls were up. There was only one of the portable fiberboard panels in use now, propped behind Quinn’s desk. Everybody could see anyone, disagree with anyone, and interrupt anyone. This communal arrangement sometimes bred irritation and conflict. And solutions.

  Helen, who didn’t have a desk, was pacing sockless in her new Nikes. She was wearing a light beige linen suit with a skirt short enough—on her—so the play of muscle in her calves and lower thighs was plainly visible. Quinn supposed that was what everyone was looking at while they listened intently to what she was saying.

  “He’s nearing the zenith of his career,” she said of the killer. “He must sense that. We have his name, we have pictures, we have eye witnesses who saw him with at least one of the victims. His relationship with the media isn’t working out as well as he planned. He’s being painted as a monster. And we almost had him on Liberty Island. He’s still probably breathing hard after that one. They say murder destroys a little bit of the killer each time he or she kills, and they’re right. Gant’s rationale is being whittled away. His murders aren’t supplying the long-lasting relief they used to. His memories of them are tainted now by the fear we instilled in him by breathing down his neck. The latest murder was by far more the work of a mad butcher than a clever and meticulous serial killer.”

  “Mad butchers we can h
andle,” Sal rasped. “I know one in Brooklyn who’s still pissed off over losing this thumb he had that wouldn’t behave.”

  No one said anything, choosing not to hear any more about the Brooklyn butcher and his misbehaving thumb.

  “Scales of justice,” Harold said, after a while.

  “Something else,” Helen said.

  “About the butcher?” Harold asked.

  She ignored him. It was hard to know when Harold was joking.

  Helen went to a slim leather portfolio she sometimes carried instead of a purse. She drew out two photographs that looked as if they’d been printed on ordinary computer paper.

  They were headshots of the same woman, one head-on, one in profile.

  “Mug shots from when Mildred Gant was arrested,” she explained. “Before she had her hair cut.”

  The photos were passed around.

  “Not an attractive woman,” Fedderman said.

  “True,” Helen said. “But did you notice the facial bone structure, especially around the eyes, the strong cheekbones and chin? Isn’t it familiar?”

  They had all seen it.

  “But there’s a world of difference in attractiveness,” Fedderman said.

  “That’s not what the killer’s thinking about,” Helen said. She propped her fists on her hips. “Anybody here think this woman doesn’t—or didn’t—resemble Carlie?”

  “She resembles Carlie slightly,” Jody said.

  “Considerably,” Sal said.

  “Whatever,” Helen said. “We can use that resemblance.”

  Quinn wondered if Renz had prompted Helen about what tack she should take. He doubted it. Renz was her boss only up to a point. Helen was, in many ways, her own woman.

  “The killer’s still not making mistakes,” Quinn said to her.

  “But he doesn’t know that. He’ll start questioning himself now. He can’t be sure of what he’s left behind.”

  “So maybe he’ll take a break,” Pearl said. “Let things calm down for a while.”

  Helen, who had begun pacing again, shook her head no. Her long, rounded calves flexed, flexed, flexed with every step. “No, no. He’s the one who set the tempo for this game, and wanted to play as fast and hard as possible. He needs to take another victim as soon as he can. He needs reassurance as well as relief from his compulsion.”