The Red Queen Dies

by Frankie Y. Bailey

  “And I’ll be around, too,” Chase’s friend David said, putting his arm around her again.

  “Good,” she said, giving him a watery smile.

  Before they could forget they were still on-screen, McCabe said, “Ms. Chase, there is one more thing. The Next Man tote bag that you were carrying that morning when you picked up the video at the library. Where did you get it?”

  “I’d talked Kevin into going down to the City to see the play a few weeks earlier.”

  “And Vivian Jessup was in the play on the day that you saw it?”

  “Yes. She was one of the leads.”

  “I don’t suppose you happened to get a chance to speak to her.”

  Chase shook her head. “I wanted to wait at the stage door, but we’d gone to the matinee and Kevin was starving. He wanted to get some dinner before we caught the train back to Albany. So I bought the tote bag and we left.”

  “So you never met Vivian Jessup?”

  “I wish. I loved her. She was so great.”

  McCabe said, “I don’t suppose Bethany, Sharon, or Johnnie Mae ever mentioned the play or Vivian Jessup.”

  “No … except Bethany asked about my tote bag. About what The Next Man meant. And I told her it was a play.”

  “Did you mention Vivian Jessup?”

  “I don’t … I think I mentioned the play was a musical and Vivian Jessup was playing a secretary in love with her boss. And Bethany said something like ‘Who’s Vivian Jessup?’”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  “That Vivian Jessup had played Alice in a musical when she was a kid and that now she was known as ‘the Red Queen’ and was a Broadway star.”

  “Did any of the three say anything when you told them that?” McCabe asked.

  Chase smiled. “They looked completely unimpressed. Bethany even made a show of yawning.”

  “Thank you,” McCabe said. “We’ll let you—Wait, one more thing. Did the movie The Wizard of Oz or the ‘yellow brick road’ here in Albany ever come up?”

  “No,” Chase said. “I know we didn’t talk about that movie, and I didn’t even know there was a yellow brick road in Albany. There is?”

  “Check the Web. You’ll see the node,” McCabe said. “We will let you go now, but we’ll be back in touch if there’s anything else.”

  “Okay,” Chase said. “I think I’m going to go find myself a drink.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Baxter said once McCabe had disconnected. “How about debriefing the case over a couple of beers?”

  “Thanks, but I’m about cased out right now. I’m going to send all the names that Chase gave us to Research and then head home.”

  23

  McCabe stopped at the barricade across the Western Avenue entrance to Washington Park. A uniform she recognized was standing there. She waved to him.

  He walked over to her car. “Hey, McCabe, how you doing?”

  “Hi, Joe. Why’s this entrance blocked?”

  “They’re filming a scene for another movie. Got Hollywood here every few months now, huh?”

  “Yeah, we do. What’s this one about?”

  “Don’t know. But the scene’s supposed to be a family birthday celebration in the park. Kid runs and falls and knocks out a tooth. Mommy and Daddy get into a big argument about who should have been watching him. Mommy slaps Daddy for one of his comments. He punches her. Relatives of Mommy chase Daddy and beat him senseless. That’s why they got the emergency vehicles.” He grinned. “I hear it’s supposed to be a comedy.”

  McCabe shook her head. “Sounds like it. Take it easy, Joe.”

  She waved and backed up, making a U-turn. Whenever she did that, she flashed to one of Pop’s Andy Griffith reruns, with Gomer Pyle yelling, “Citizen’s arrest!” when Deputy Barney Fife made a U-turn after giving Gomer a ticket.

  Mayberry RFD. Safe, dull, and no daddy punching out mommy on a movie set in the park. No real-life droogie boys killing an old woman. No serial killer with who knew what motive on the prowl.

  Of course, she would probably have died of boredom as a cop in Mayberry. Taking in the wash from the clothesline for a citizen wasn’t quite her idea of “protecting and serving.” She liked solving crimes.

  But the downside was that every crime had its victim. And if you were a cop, you didn’t just play Sherlock Holmes. You had to deal with victims who had been hurt by offenders who were sometimes victims themselves.

  Take Gary Motley. Gary Motley, the armed burglar she had shot after he’d shot her brother. He’d had his own story. A single, hardworking mother who’d loved him and done the best she could. And his favorite teacher, who had sexually abused a smart, handsome little boy and left him angry and bitter. A life that had gone from bad to worse because nothing he had tried to do right had worked out as it should have.

  And then he had broken into a house with a gun and shot someone and been shot and killed himself. By a nine-year-old girl. About the age he was the first time he’d been abused by his teacher.

  Justice, McCabe thought, is a difficult commodity to come by. About as elusive as a star in another solar system.

  * * *

  McCabe heard the groan before she saw her father. He was stretched out on the sofa with an ice pack on his head.

  “Pop? Are you okay?”

  “Not so loud,” Angus said. “Speak softly or not at all.”

  “Pop, you don’t have a hangover. Tell me that you don’t—”

  “I won’t tell you anything. Just be quiet.”

  McCabe opened her mouth and closed it again. She had learned as a child, watching her mother nag, that it was pointless to keep talking when her father wasn’t prepared to listen. She would wait until he was back on his feet from what had obviously been a high old time in the City with his buddy. And then she would remind him about what his doctor had said about drinking after his bypass surgery. She would remind him, and he would do whatever he wanted to do anyway.

  “I’m going to make myself some dinner,” McCabe said. “I don’t suppose you want any.”

  “No, I don’t. And stay in the kitchen, so I don’t have to smell it.”

  To distract herself from being aggravated, McCabe decided to make something more satisfying than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  She touched the countertop, pulling up the virtual drawer that contained her recipes. She wanted the one for pasta fagioli that she had gotten from Mrs. Castelleno, their next door neighbor.

  Another minute to run a check of the required ingredients against what she had in the pantry and refrigerator.

  All right. She was good to go.

  Ten minutes prep time, forty minutes to cook the old-fashioned way. And soup on the table, with a crisp salad and garlic bread.

  While she was eating, McCabe used the kitchen table as a wall for her ORB. She figured she might as well finish going through Bethany’s node journal again.

  If Bethany had been smart when she was thirteen, she was determined to downplay her intelligence as a twentysomething. She raved about the new job she’d gotten a few months earlier, still a server in a restaurant, but a more fun place to work. New job or not, her life seemed to be work, shopping, clubbing, and more of the same. Men were mentioned frequently, but none of them by proper names. And there was nothing that seemed to hint at a dangerous, potentially homicidal encounter.

  But any man who had been interested in Bethany Clark would have had no trouble keeping track of her comings and goings. She had believed in keeping her public informed.

  Another one of Pop’s topics for rants. That the concept of privacy had vanished.

  No expectation of privacy in public places with surveillance cameras everywhere. And no sense of what should be private among young people who believed everything should be shared, from holograms of the clothes they were trying on in a store to an instant critique of the sexual performance of the person they had just bedded.

  “All right, Bethany,” McCabe said, “do we have
a real wacko serial killer? Or someone you pissed off long ago when you were a kid, who finally got revenge?”

  “Stop talking to yourself,” Angus said from the doorway, “and make me a cup of coffee, would you?”

  “Busy, Pop. Make your own.”

  He grunted and started across the floor. “Showing your disapproval, are you?”

  “Yes,” McCabe said, “I am.”

  He made his coffee and came over and sat down in his chair at the table.

  “Anything new on your case?”

  “A lot more of the pieces, but no answers.”

  “Want to talk it through?”

  “I’ve been doing that all day with Baxter. Right now, I just want to sit here and stare at Bethany Clark’s journal and hope something will spring out at me.”

  “If she had known somebody was out to get her, she sounds like the kind of girl who would have made sure other people knew it.”

  “Unless the reason someone was out to get her was something she didn’t want other people to know about.”

  “What have you got on her? And what happened with Ted Thornton? You were real curious about him the last time we talked.”

  “Pop, I can’t—”

  “Don’t give me that ‘I can’t talk about it.’ You were willing to talk when you wanted to pick my brain.”

  McCabe met his scowl. “I could use some more information. So let’s horse-trade. I’ll trade you an update for the answer to another question.”

  “Deal.”

  “You’re still sworn to secrecy.”

  “Understood.”

  McCabe waved her hand, closing the display of Bethany’s journal. This is what we know so far,” she said.

  When she was done, Angus looked as if his hangover was much improved. In fact, he was leaning forward, listening intensely.

  He needs, McCabe thought, something to do with his time. Write the book or get out of the house and take up a hobby. Do something that occupies his mind.

  “This is a doozy,” he said. “We got a little bully who ends up being killed nine years later.”

  “But we don’t know that was the reason she was killed. And Sharon was killed, too. She seems to have been an innocent bystander. And then there’s Vivian Jessup.”

  Angus nodded and scrubbed at his day’s beard with the back of his hand. “It all requires some thought.”

  “Exactly what Baxter and I have been doing,” McCabe said. “So has the task force. With the aid of forensics and an FBI profiler. And we still haven’t figured it out.”

  “Then you haven’t been thinking about it right. Haven’t been turning it on its head and looking at it upside down.”

  “I’ve been standing on my head and looking at it every way from Sunday. We all have.”

  “So, what do you want to ask me, Ms. Detective?”

  “About what was going on in Albany back in 2010. What was happening in the city?”

  “You were here.”

  “I know I was here. And I was on the job by then. But I wasn’t really paying attention to things like Ted Thornton’s move into the city. What else was going on that I might not have noticed?”

  “If you’d been reading my newspaper, you’d know.”

  McCabe tilted her head at him. “You mean to tell me everything that you knew about what was going on actually ended up in the paper? Okay, I’ll just pull up the archives and read it for myself.”

  Angus scowled at her. “Let me get my notes and see what I said about that year.”

  “Thanks, Pop.”

  24

  New York City

  In his penthouse apartment in Manhattan, Bruce Ashby was stretched out on his sofa, staring up at the ceiling. The skylight gave him a view of the night sky. The stars were out, sparkling after the thunderstorm that had passed through.

  He thought of rousing Rufus, his sleeping bulldog, to go out for a walk. But he was too comfortable to move.

  The downside of working for Ted was that on any given night, he could never be sure whether he would be at home in his own apartment or in Albany because Ted had decided he needed him there.

  Ted’s damn cat despised Rufus. The dog spent those nights when Ashby was in Albany with the woman who lived one floor down and was willing to walk Rufus with her own fox terrier, Fifi. “Boyfriend and girlfriend” she called the two dogs when she was being coy.

  Ashby closed his eyes and considered his problem. Not Rufus and Fifi and her feather-brained mistress.

  Lisa. Beautiful Lisa, who was, at least for the moment, Ted’s fiancée.

  Ted had always tended toward attractions. But Lisa was turning out to be more difficult to get rid of than the others.

  Ted thought he was in love with her and was willing to overlook the discrepancies that Bruce had uncovered and dutifully reported to him.

  Suddenly the great romantic, Ted said Lisa would tell him about her past when she was ready.

  And she might. If she were around that long.

  Ashby intended to make sure she wasn’t around that long.

  He smiled to himself, stretched his arms over his head, and went back to his contemplation of the view through his skylight.

  If only he could send Lisa straight to the moon.

  25

  Angus looked up from his ORB and said, “I don’t have to remind you that 2010 was the year that Faulkner retired as police chief and the mayor and the Common Council hired that hotshot from Connecticut to replace him.”

  McCabe grimaced. “No, you don’t have to remind me of that. Community relations in Arbor Hill and the South End were already shaky when Faulkner left. And in less than a year, our hotshot new chief had even managed to alienate the middle-class folks in neighborhoods like Pine Hills and the campus district.”

  “And it still took another year to get rid of him.”

  “By then, the cops were ready to join the marches on City Hall. It wasn’t any safer for us than for anyone else.” She shook her head. “But he sure did look good on paper. And he sounded good at first.”

  “Fascists can be as charming as hell when they want to be,” her father said. “Make all kinds of sense unless you’re listening close.”

  McCabe smiled. “You said that in your editorials when you were demanding he be fired.”

  Angus scowled at her. “Didn’t mean to make life hard for you with those editorials, daughter. Guess I never told you that.”

  “It was all right. By then, he had other things to worry about. Going after me wouldn’t have helped his cause.”

  Angus nodded. “I knew you could handle yourself.” He turned his attention back to his ORB. “Aside from the ruckus the police chief caused that year, let’s see what else we’ve got.”

  “Not just crime, Pop. Anything that looks interesting.”

  “Understood.”

  “What was the mayor doing in 2010?”

  “Living out in the suburbs. I don’t have it here, but she and her husband didn’t move into Albany until around late 2011 or early ’12, when they bought that house and started renovating it. Then she decided to run for the Common Council.”

  McCabe said, “She rose up through city government pretty fast, didn’t she?”

  “Had the right connections. Having a husband who’s a banker don’t hurt.”

  “A banker. I hadn’t thought about that. I wonder how that plays out with Ted Thornton.”

  “Money men always play together.” Angus eyed her. “The mayor and her husband on your list of suspects now?”

  “No, of course not. Or at least I don’t think so. But Ted Thornton keeps turning up all over this. And he and the mayor do seem to be cozy.”

  “Maybe that’s something for her husband to worry about, not you.”

  McCabe smiled. “She and Thornton did go on that canoe ride together. You think?”

  “Never know.”

  “The mayor’s an attractive woman. But I don’t think she can compete with Ted Thornton’s fiancée.�
��

  “That fiancée,” Angus said. “Thornton better watch himself with her.”

  “Why do you say that, Pop?”

  “Because if this were a forties movie, she’d be dangerous.”

  Because of Pop and his noir movies, that was exactly where McCabe’s mind had gone when she met Lisa Nichols. “Yes, she does have that look, doesn’t she?”

  Angus’s attention was back on his notes. McCabe took a sip of her mango juice and waited. She was hoping he would produce magic from his notes the way he used to pluck a quarter from behind her ear when she wanted a gum ball.

  “Have you ever thought of taking up your magic again?” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Like when I was a kid. You used to go to the hospital and entertain the kids in the children’s ward.”

  “Kids don’t believe in magic anymore. They got three-D and holograms. They know how everything works.”

  “Maybe. But you ought to think about it.”

  “You trying to get me out of the house? Give me some way to occupy my time?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll find something better than magic tricks. When I’m good and ready.”

  “As long as you’re thinking about it. And giving some thought to writing your book.”

  “I thought you wanted to talk about Albany in 2010.”

  “I do.”

  “Then be quiet and listen.”

  “What do you have?”

  “I have an entry in my notes about careless doctors and risking our lives. Turns out it was related to a story we did featuring one of your players.”

  “Who?”

  “Clarence Redfield. He’d filed a lawsuit the year before, alleging the doctor who treated his father had engaged in malpractice. After he filed his suit, several other patients or their families came forward.”

  “Did they have a case?”

  “Hell of a case. The doctor was incompetent. His insurance company settled and the doctor turned in his license before it was taken away.”

  “What happened to Clarence Redfield’s father?”