by Barbara Paul
DiFalco didn’t know. “That’s something we’ll have to find out. I want you to contact Universal Laser as soon as you get your team organized, never mind what time it is. Do you want to split this list, or what?”
“Let’s see what Universal has to say first,” Marian suggested. “What does the FBI have on the others?”
The elder statesman of the four victims had been named Conrad Webb. In sound health at sixty-seven, he’d been with the firm since its founding, always on the business end, and was in fact a principal shareholder. The FBI’s list of Webb’s industrial and governmental contacts read like a Who’s Who of shapers and movers.
“Government contacts,” Foley stressed. “The answer’s in Washington, I tell you.”
Webb’s children were grown and scattered about the country; his sixtyish wife had collapsed when the officers brought her the news, Captain DiFalco said. Mrs. Webb’s housekeeper had chased the police away, telling them to come back later. “Send somebody, or go yourself,” the captain told Marian.
The wife of the bald murder victim had been more stalwart; she’d excused herself when she learned her husband was dead and then returned a little later, red-eyed but relatively composed, to ask for details. The bald man’s name was Sherman J. Bigelow; he was fifty years old and had been the head of Universal Laser’s legal department. Mrs. Bigelow was also a lawyer, in private practice; she and her husband had met while arguing opposing sides of a civil case sixteen years earlier. Bigelow had been with Universal Laser for the last seven. The Bigelows had no children.
The last of the victims was Herbert Vickers, the fat man, forty-three years old but looking older. He was the technology man in the group; according to the FBI, his field was inertial confinement fusion.
“What the hell’s that?” Foley asked blankly. The others couldn’t tell him.
Vickers had been married twice; his first wife had divorced him after two years of marriage. His second marriage was less than a year old. DiFalco said, “The officers who contacted the second Mrs. Vickers say she’s a centerfold blonde, at least twenty years younger than her husband. They also say she seemed more aggravated than heartbroken when she learned he was dead.”
“Something there?” Marian asked.
“Find out,” DiFalco said. “No way this can be a domestic matter, but we gotta investigate just the same.” He looked at his watch. “I’m going home—I’ll check back with you later, and I want to hear some results, got that? Have a nice Sunday.” They were dismissed.
“Yeah, rub it in,” Foley muttered on the way out.
Captain DiFalco had assigned four additional detectives to the case to help with the legwork. There was much to be covered. Follow-up interviews with Mrs. Webb, Mrs. Bigelow, and Mrs. Vickers; a follow-up phone call to Jason O’Neill’s mother in Idaho. Did Jason have a girlfriend? Check finances; Conrad Webb was probably worth a mint, but what of the other three? Who inherited? Try for a make on the black van, as impossible as that seemed; check on stolen vehicles reported for a start. Check with the cab companies; look through every driver’s daily record for Saturday and see if anyone picked up a fare near one of the victims’ home addresses. Bug Dr. Whittaker for the autopsy report. But most especially, find out if any one of the four victims had an enemy so deadly that he’d kill three other people to get to the one he wanted.
Once the other detectives were squared away, it was time for Marian and her partner to approach Universal Laser Technologies. It was almost six A.M. The head of the firm was a man named Edgar Quinn who lived in an apartment on Park Avenue South.
The security guard on duty in the apartment building lobby was reluctant to ring Mr. Quinn’s number even when they showed him their I.D. Only Marian’s repeated insistence that the matter was urgent finally persuaded him to wake up an important tenant at such an early hour. Upstairs, the door was opened by a man with hastily slicked-back hair who demanded to see their identification before he’d let them in. “Mr. Quinn will be with you shortly,” the man said and left them standing in the entranceway.
“He did say ‘Have a seat,’ didn’t he?” Marian asked dryly and stepped into a hallway that opened on to two rooms on either side, with a stairway straight ahead. A two-story apartment.
Her partner didn’t answer; he was too busy gawking. The apartment was spacious and luxurious, of the sort Foley probably thought existed only in the movies. Eleven years in the Ninth Precinct could do that to a man.
They were still standing when a man wearing a gray velvet robe joined them. He was surprisingly young, not yet forty, with an oddly triangular face that he emphasized by brushing his dark blond hair upward from the temples. “I’m Edgar Quinn,” he said, and waited.
Marian identified herself and her partner. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Mr. Quinn, but we have bad news.” And she told him.
Quinn’s mouth opened and his eyes narrowed. “All four of them are dead? Conrad’s dead?”
“Yes—I’m sorry. They all died quickly, no pain.”
Quinn felt behind him for the stairway banister and shakily lowered himself to one of the steps. He sat there stunned-looking. “How? How did they die?”
“They were all four shot. Death was instantaneous.” She didn’t know that was true, but why make it worse for him?
Quinn buried his face in his hands. Foley cleared his throat and said, “Uh, can we get you something? Call somebody?”
The other man gestured no and after a few moments pulled himself together. He stood up slowly and said, “How am I ever going to tell my wife? She loved Conrad as much as I did.”
“You were close to Mr. Webb?” Marian asked.
“He was like a second father. Sergeant Larch, Detective Foley—let’s go in here and sit down. I have questions, and I’m sure you must too.”
Tons of them. Marian noticed he’d gotten both their names right after only one hearing, something most people failed to do when faced with the unexpected appearance of the police. Once the three of them were seated, Quinn wanted to know details. Marian explained what they’d found in East River Park.
He took it hard. “That’s insane! Shot through the eye and then handcuffed? Or were they handcuffed first?”
“We don’t know yet,” Foley told him.
“But why? Why would anyone want them dead?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out, Mr. Quinn.”
After a while Quinn couldn’t think of any more questions and fell silent. Marian asked him how long he’d known Conrad Webb. “All my life,” he answered.
Universal Laser Technologies had been founded by the present owner’s father. One of the first things the elder Quinn, a physicist, had done was bring in a man he could trust who had a head for business. That was Conrad Webb, who’d stuck with Universal during early hard times and ended up owning a piece of the firm. He’d been CEO for nearly twenty years, before advancing age had prompted him to opt for a less strenuous position in the company. Webb was as much identified with Universal Laser as Quinn’s father had been, the younger Quinn told them.
But Webb had eased out of the actual management of the company several years ago. His real value, Quinn said, was in the contacts he’d built up during his life, both in industry and in government. “We called him The Network King,” Quinn said with a wry smile.
“Had he been in Washington recently?” Marian asked.
“They all four had—they were our liaison with the Defense Department. They got back last Wednesday.”
“You mean like a committee?” Foley asked. “Those four represented you regularly?”
“Yes, that was their job with the company. Conrad was in charge. Sherman Bigelow was along as legal counsel, and Herb Vickers was the technical adviser.”
“What about Jason O’Neill?”
“Jason was a sort of trainee.” Quinn sighed. “Conrad was getting on in years—he couldn’t last forever. When he retired, Sherman Bigelow would have taken over as head of liaison. But we
needed someone to replace Conrad’s charm, I guess you could call it. Jason O’Neill was one of those loose, relaxed people that everybody likes. I’ve seen him walk into a room full of government dignitaries he’d never met and make himself right at home. He’d go up to someone, anyone, and introduce himself—and five minutes later they’d be laughing and talking like old buddies who hadn’t seen each other in years. Conrad could do that too, in a more subtle way. But Jason had the gift of making people like him. We hired him for his personality.”
Marian consulted her notebook. “Herb Vickers’s specialty was inertial confinement fusion, right? What project was he working on? Why were they in Washington?”
“Sorry, I can’t tell you that—it’s classified information. The military has innumerable uses for the technology of ultrahigh-power laser and particle beams, and the Defense Department has clamped a lid on most of the research going on. Including ours.”
“But it was a military matter that took all four men to Washington?”
“That’s right. More than that, I can’t tell you.”
Marian and her partner exchanged a look. Top Secret stuff—that meant the FBI would be horning in.
Edgar Quinn had no idea what the four murder victims had been doing on Saturday. He wouldn’t even speculate as to why they’d ended up dead in East River Park. He knew of no murderous personal enemies any of them might have; in fact, he insisted that it was Conrad Webb’s and Jason O’Neill’s stock-in-trade not to have any enemies at all.
Marian was openly incredulous. “Conrad Webb was in business for over forty years and never made an enemy? Come on, Mr. Quinn.”
Quinn shrugged. “Maybe in his youth, before he developed his polish? But I doubt even that. He instinctively knew how to make people feel comfortable. And he wasn’t a double-dealer or a back-stabber—he didn’t have to be. Conrad just didn’t make enemies.”
“Well, what about the other two—Herb Vickers and Sherman Bigelow?”
Possible, Quinn admitted. Sherman Bigelow had been in private practice before joining the company; he was bound to have made some enemies there—some grudge-holder whose case Bigelow had defeated in court, perhaps? Sherman was a by-the-book person, Quinn said, rather literal-minded, but with a phenomenal memory; he never forgot anything. And he was scrupulously honest. Quinn trusted his judgment implicitly.
Never forgot anything, Marian wrote in her notebook.
As to Herb Vickers, Quinn went on, he didn’t really want to be in the liaison group; he’d much rather spend his time in the laboratory. But Herb knew how to explain technological matters so that laymen could understand, and that made him invaluable in Washington. “He would have made a great teacher,” Quinn added. “But he could never have lived on a teacher’s salary.” Herb was careless; he was careless with money, careless with his clothing, careless with people. He could get so preoccupied with his work that he’d forget everything else. He’d once spent four straight days in the lab without remembering to call his wife and tell her he wouldn’t be home.
“That his first wife?” Foley asked.
Quinn nodded. “Candy seems much more tolerant of Herb’s eccentric ways.”
Marian had to smile. “Candy?”
Quinn smiled back. “She’s well named.”
Marian tried to find out if there were any sort of internal problem at Universal Laser that one of the four victims might have been involved in, but the company’s owner insisted there was none. The business was notably free of office politics, Quinn told them; that was because they chose their personnel very carefully, all the way from Head of Research down to the mail room boy. There were no power plays going on, or incidents of jealous rivals trying to undercut each other.
“We just don’t work that way, Sergeant,” Quinn said. “Anything like that starts to surface, the parties involved are dismissed immediately. That’s been our policy since the day my father started the company. We just don’t have time for nonsense like that. Only one thing is important at Universal Laser, and that’s getting the job done.”
Marian sat back and listened as Foley took Edgar Quinn over the same ground again, looking for contradictions, omissions, hesitations. There were none. Finally Quinn himself put an end to it, saying there were things he needed to do now that he’d lost four of his men. Marian agreed immediately; in her judgment he’d just reached his irritation threshold. She thanked him for his help and gestured to her partner that it was time to leave.
Down on the street, Foley asked: “You don’t believe that lily-white picture he painted, do you?”
“Not for one minute,” Marian replied. “I can’t tell if he’s hiding something, or if he’s just instinctively presenting his company in the best light possible.”
“Shit,” Foley said in disgust. “Couldn’t you tell? Well, I know a snow job when I hear one. The guy was lying in his teeth.”
Marian sighed dispiritedly. That probably meant Edgar Quinn had been telling the truth.
6
Marian breakfasted on coffee and danish at her desk and read a newspaper the desk sergeant had brought in. The headline screamed: HANDCUFFED CORPSES IN RITUAL SLAYING. She’d sent Foley home to get some shut-eye; now she was the only one in the Precinct Detective Unit room. Staying up all night got a little harder every year, but at least the shadows under her eyes made the shiner Juanita Alvarez had given her a little less noticeable. Marian was going to have to grab some sleep soon, but there was paperwork to take care of first. With an effort Marian shifted mental gears back to Mrs. Alvarez and the Downtown Queens.
She typed up a second report; the first had been submitted before she’d learned from young Juanita the reason behind her mother’s murder. In the process of typing Marian found she was able to look upon the whole affair a little more dispassionately than before; nothing like a new murder to cure the blues brought on by the old. God.
When she’d finished her report, she opened a desk drawer and took out a notebook. Being careful to use a red-ink ballpoint pen, she copied everything from the notebook she carried in her handbag to the one she kept in the desk. The notebook she carried with her was filled with names, dates, interview notes, crime scene descriptions, all the details every crime generated. Those entries were written in blue ink, pencil, black ink; in abbreviations, in Marian’s own special shorthand she’d developed over the years, in key words that would mean something to her but little to anyone else.
Marian printed the information neatly in block letters, making sure the new entries were complete and that everything was spelled correctly. She’d once had a defense counsel ask to see her notebook while she was testifying in court. Without actually accusing her, he’d managed to imply that because the entries were written in more than one color ink, she’d gone back after making the arrest and simply fabricated whatever details she’d needed to make her case. Her testimony was consequently discredited; the jury had bought the trick and the perp had walked. Marian had been furious and humiliated, and she swore it would never happen to her again.
She was just getting ready to go home when a phone call came in from an assistant DA she knew slightly; he told her the DA was taking the position that Juanita Alvarez’s “unilateral” act of self-defense was unjustified, since she had other resources available to her. The assistant DA didn’t sound too enthusiastic about the case; he asked who was the attorney representing the child in Juvenile Court. Marian shuffled through the papers on her desk and came up with the name of the kid lawyer the Public Defender’s Office had assigned to Juanita.
As Marian was hanging up, one of the other detectives Captain DiFalco had transferred to the East River Park murders walked in. Tired-looking half the time and the only other woman detective in the Ninth Precinct, Gloria Sanchez was the offspring of a black mother and a Puerto Rican father, oscillating between ethnic identities as the mood hit her; today she was in her Hispanic mode. “Got something, Gloria?” Marian asked, shifting gears again, away from Juanita Alvarez.
Sanchez plopped down on the nearest chair. “Been talkin’ to Candy Gee-Don’t-I-Taste-Good Vickers. She dint have nothin’ to do with her husband’s death.”
Marian remembered that Candy was supposed to have appeared more aggravated than heartbroken by the news of Herb Vickers’s death. “You mean it’s finally sunk in on her? She’s grieving now?”
“Naw, she’s still pissed. Mrs. Herbert Vickers is ver’ pretty, ver’ young, and ver’ lazy. She jus’ wan’s to be taken care of. She thought she was set when Fat Boy married her, but now she’s gonna have to go huntin’ again.”
“But he must have left her money—a sizable amount, I’d guess.”
“It’s not jus’ the money.” Sanchez made an effort and sat up straight. “She wan’s a man arrangin’ stuff for her, makin’ decisions, like that. The only thin’ she cares about is her looks—which are great, I gotta give her that. But that mirrorkissin’ baby couldn’t put herself out enough to commit a murder, much less four. And she couldn’ handle it physically neither.”
“She could have driven the van.”
“No driver’s license. My partner checked. Believe me, Marian, Candy Vickers is not behind the murders. She’d jus’ wrinkle up her pretty nose and go Ooooh! You know what I mean.”
Marian knew. “What could she tell you about her husband?”
Not a whole lot, it turned out. Around noon on Saturday, Herb Vickers had told his wife he had some business to take care of; so she had assumed that meant he’d be in the offices of Universal Laser. But when she tried to call him there later in the day, she got the watchman, who said the place was empty. No, she wasn’t worried when he hadn’t showed up by dinnertime; Herb was rather careless about keeping track of time. She was a teensy bit put out with him, though; he knew she wanted to go out that night.
