The Red Queen Dies

by Frankie Y. Bailey

  The young man in the photo looked a lot like Clarence Redfield might have nine years ago.

  McCabe sat there staring at the photo. If Clarence Redfield had been Melanie Jacobs’s boyfriend and Melanie’s little sister had attended a summer science camp and been bullied by a girl named Bethany and then nine years later, Bethany and Sharon Clark, who had been caught up in the drama, were murdered …

  Clarence Redfield was here in Albany, threading about the murders and, to all appearances, unaware that he had once had at least indirect contact with the victims.

  Both Johnnie Mae and her mother were dead, and Melanie was nowhere to be found. So where was Melanie? Had she assumed another identity, become someone else? Did Clarence Redfield know where to find her?

  If FIU or the State Police lab could confirm it was Redfield in the photo, they would have a wedge. An entry point for another interview, to which Redfield would undoubtedly bring his lawyer.

  All right, what about the Ted Thornton connection? They knew that Redfield had worked for a company that had subcontracted for Thornton. Redfield probably had been working late the night before his wife fell from the ladder. Had Ted Thornton been in Albany that week?

  Easy enough to find out. Bruce Ashby should know. McCabe decided to call him rather than send him a tag. Almost 6:30, but he might still be on the job.

  “Bruce Ashby.”

  She left her ORB on VOICE ONLY.

  “Mr. Ashby, Hannah McCabe here. I wonder if you could help me with something. I’d rather not get into the details right now, but we’re looking into the background of someone who might have tried to contact Mr. Thornton a couple of years ago.”

  “A couple of years ago?” Ashby said. “Who was this person?’

  “Uh … I’m not sure what name he might have used. But I’m wondering if Mr. Thornton was in Albany during July 2017. Particularly from July tenth to twelfth.”

  “Hold a moment,” Ashby said. Then: “Ted was here the week before and until the afternoon of July eleventh. He was waiting for a bid from a subcontractor, but he left to go down to the Tony Awards.”

  McCabe felt her heart jump. “The Tony Awards?”

  “Vivian was nominated for her second Tony.”

  McCabe flashed back to the photograph in Vivian Jessup’s condo. The photo of Jessup and Thornton at an event after the Tony Awards.

  “The subcontractor who was making the bid … did they know that Mr. Thornton was waiting?”

  “Of course they knew. The bid was due the next day, but I had asked them to try to get it in by the afternoon of July eleventh, because Ted wanted to see it before he left Albany.”

  “Did they make it?”

  “No. They had all kinds of excuses, but it didn’t come in until the next morning.”

  “I suppose their staff must have been putting in overtime.”

  “Not our problem. They knew three months before that the bid was due.”

  “Could I ask … did they get the contract?”

  “They got it. Ted said they had made the deadline. And there was no one else who could do the job as well.”

  “But they might have thought that they were going to be penalized for not getting the bid in before Mr. Thornton left for the Tony Awards.”

  “They might have thought that,” Ashby said. “I realize Ted promised to provide full cooperation, Detective McCabe, but I don’t see what our business dealings with a subcontractor—”

  “I hope I can explain soon, Mr. Ashby. Thank you for being so forthcoming.”

  McCabe said good-bye before he could ask any more questions.

  Sometimes, if you just kept asking questions, you could get people to provide information before they thought about whether you should have it. She had caught Bruce Ashby when he’d sounded as if he were distracted by something else.

  And that reminded her that they needed to ask Research for follow-up on the initial background checks on Bruce Ashby and Lisa Nichols.

  McCabe sent her request to Research. Then she began to search the Web for the photo that she had seen in Vivian Jessup’s apartment of Jessup and Thornton. Photos archived on the official node. Photos of the award winners and nominees on other nodes, as well. Best-dressed. Worst-dressed. Who was escorting whom.

  Not only was the photo of Jessup and Thornton on several nodes but there was a brief interview with Jessup about her win, with a smiling Ted Thornton, her “dear friend,” at her side.

  Easy enough for Clarence Redfield to have seen.

  He’d worked late, while Ted Thornton went down to the City for a gala event, to be there to cheer on his friend Vivian Jessup.

  But if Clarence Redfield was the killer, why now? Had Vivian Jessup’s arrival in Albany been too much for him? Brought back all of his anger and maybe guilt about the deaths of his wife and baby?

  And what about Bethany Clark and Sharon Giovanni? Even if Clarence Redfield had felt some anger toward them because of what had happened with his girlfriend’s sister, would he kill them nine years later? Kill them for something that had happened when the two girls were little more than children?

  If he’d held a grudge, wanted revenge on behalf of his girlfriend, Melanie, and her sister, why had he waited?

  He had been back in Albany since … Of course, when he first returned, his mother had been ill, and then she had died. And then for a brief period, he must have been happy. He had been married; his wife was pregnant.

  And then wife and unborn child were dead. In that scenario, Vivian Jessup made some kind of sense. A target for his rage. But why go back nine years to the incident with Bethany and Sharon?

  “You too, huh?”

  McCabe looked up, to see Pettigrew holding out a cup of coffee. “Thanks,” she said. “Me, too, what?”

  “Stuck.”

  “Yeah, I am,” McCabe said. “I can almost see it, but something’s missing. You still working on the ex–baseball player case?”

  “Among others. The lou says it goes into the file unless we catch a break.” Pettigrew sat down in the chair beside her desk, his own coffee cup in hand. “All we know is an unidentified young woman came to visit Swede Jorgensen a couple of days before thugs jumped him and beat him senseless. He’s dead. We can’t find the girl or the thugs.”

  “But you think the girl’s visit had something to do with what happened to Jorgensen.”

  “Probably,” Pettigrew said. “Since he didn’t seem to have much of a life otherwise. Okay, trivia time. Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was a baseball fan? And Abner Doubleday, who is often mistakenly credited with creating baseball, was a Union general and friend of Lincoln.”

  McCabe smiled. “And with that, it looks like we’ve found the six degrees of separation between our cases.”

  “So we have. Your turn. Anything interesting but not particularly useful come to mind about my case?”

  McCabe took a sip of her coffee. “You know baseball isn’t my game. But when I heard your player’s nickname, it did remind me of something.”

  “What?”

  “Ever see an old movie from the forties? Burt Lancaster plays a washed-up prizefighter called ‘the Swede.’”

  “The Swede?” Pettigrew said, sitting up straight.

  “When the movie opens, he’s killed by two professional hit men who come looking for him.”

  Pettigrew set his coffee cup down on her desk. “What’s the title of this movie?”

  “The Killers. I watched it with my dad years ago.”

  “In the movie, why did they come after him?”

  McCabe shook her head. “I don’t remember the details. Something about a holdup he had been involved in. And I think he was involved with Ava Gardner, the wife of the gangster who sent the hit men. And the insurance investigator was playing your character.”

  “My character?”

  “The guy who was trying to figure out why Burt Lancaster—the Swede—hadn’t tried to run when the killers came looking for him. Why he just let h
imself be killed.”

  “But my Swede wasn’t killed. He just wasn’t talking about why two thugs beat him up. Then he got an aneurysm and died.”

  “And if he’d been involved in a holdup, that would have turned up by now.”

  Pettigrew shifted in his chair, then stood up. “Still, I think, just for the heck of it, I’ll go find that movie. Might give me some ideas.”

  “Or not,” McCabe said.

  “Or not. I got another one for you. Did you know there’s a baseball player who was known as ‘the Wizard of Oz’?”

  “There is?”

  “Ozzie Smith. Used to do somersaults on the field. My dad and I went to Cooperstown when Smith was inducted into the Hall of Fame. But unlikely he has anything to do with your case.”

  “Probably no more than Burt Lancaster has to do with yours,” McCabe said. “But it’s an interesting tidbit.”

  Pettigrew nodded. “Life is full of interesting tidbits.”

  He waved a hand as he headed back toward his own desk.

  “You forgot your coffee, Sean.”

  “Toss if for me. I’ve had enough caffeine for one day.”

  McCabe tilted sideways in her chair and tossed the cup into her disposal bin. “Hey, Pettigrew, did you know that some writer had a theory that Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper?”

  Pettigrew looked up from his ORB and gave her a bemused look. “Really? Never heard that one. You think Carroll ought to be on your suspect list?”

  “Problem with that is, he’d have to be capable of time travel. That particular Ripper theory’s kind of far-fetched anyway. Find your movie?”

  “The synopsis and a clip.”

  “Feel like going for a beer when you’re done?” McCabe said.

  “Sure. Sometimes the answers are floating right there in the suds.”

  “Are they? Why didn’t anyone ever tell me about that?”

  31

  Wednesday, October 30, 2019

  McCabe woke up with a half-formed thought. It was gone before she could catch it. She searched for it as she was standing in the shower. Vivian Jessup’s purse. Something about what the old woman had said about finding Jessup’s flower purse. Or maybe about who had thrown it away.

  She sat down across from her father at the kitchen table. He was wearing the biomonitor that sent his readings to his doctor once a week. He was eating oatmeal with a look of displeasure on his face. “I hate this stuff,” he said.

  “What do you think of when someone says ‘a he/she’?” McCabe said.

  “What do you mean, what do I think?” Angus said. “It’s a crude way of referring to someone who is transgender.”

  “What if someone said she could tell someone was a he/she by the walk?”

  “How was the person walking? Swishing like a girl? Stomping along like a lumberjack?”

  “Our witness didn’t say,” McCabe said. “She drifted off into aliens from outer space. Thanks, Pop.”

  “You’re welcome. Now, tell me what we were talking about.”

  “I think that the person who the witness saw might have been wearing a disguise.”

  * * *

  Baxter was at his desk when McCabe got there. He pointed to a box of muffins. “Sorry I had to duck out before you got back yesterday.”

  “Something you had to do?”

  “My own hot date. Her meeting was canceled. She called—”

  “And you went? Nothing much was happening anyway.” McCabe took a blueberry muffin from the box and sat down at her desk.

  If I keep on eating my way through this case, McCabe thought, I’ll need to run five miles a day for the next month.

  She opened the master file instead.

  “Nothing new,” Baxter said. “Forensics is still sifting through the garbage from the old lady’s house and nearby trash cans, but so far nothing that looks like it might have come from Jessup’s purse.”

  “I’ve been thinking some more about our odds and ends. Like the flowers at the first two crime scenes. But no flower near Jessup’s body. So last night, I watched Mrs. Miniver again.”

  “The movie you and Greer St. John were talking about?”

  “She said that her mother had named her after Greer Garson, who played Mrs. Miniver in the movie.”

  “Yeah. And she said something about a scene in the movie when Mrs. Miniver was reading Alice in Wonderland to her children.”

  “They’re in the family’s bomb shelter. The children fall asleep, and Mrs. Miniver and her husband talk about their own childhood memories of the book. And then the bombing gets closer, and the children wake up and begin to cry,” McCabe said. “But the reason I watched the movie again is because I remembered the rose. The village stationmaster names a rose after Mrs. Miniver. Vivian Jessup had a purse in the shape of a rose.”

  Baxter said. “So you’re saying that it might mean something, that instead of leaving Jessup a flower, the killer took away her rose purse?”

  “Not that knowing that is particularly helpful.”

  Baxter leaned back in his chair. “Here’s something else that may not be particularly helpful. This morning I stopped by Pluto’s Planet, where our girl Bethany worked, to sample the breakfast buffet. While I was there, I showed Redfield’s photo around.”

  “Anyone remember him?”

  “A couple of Bethany’s colleagues thought they had seen him in the place now and then. But, on the other hand, they thought he might have looked familiar because they’d seen him on the news, giving Jacoby a hard time. The manager’s going to run Bethany’s receipts to see if she was ever Redfield’s server when he ate there.”

  “Well, at least you’ve been doing something more constructive than watching old movies.”

  Baxter raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me that you’re getting discouraged, partner.”

  McCabe popped the last bite of her muffin into her mouth. “Me? Never. As long as our killer eludes, I—sorry, we—will pursue.”

  “‘Eludes’?” Baxter’s grin widened. “If only Ted Thornton could hear you now.”

  “He’d undoubtedly recognize a riff on Robert Browning.” McCabe’s hand hovered over her mug. “Pluto’s Planet, Mike. Remember when they were trying to get the building permit to have a vertical garden attached to the restaurant?”

  “Vaguely,” Baxter said. “I wasn’t that interested.”

  “Me, either. Other than the idea of the farm being right there beside the restaurant. But I do remember that the old couple who owned the mom-and-pop store next door didn’t want to sell. They did eventually, and there was something about it on the news. Something about the investment company that was bankrolling the restaurant owner.”

  “And are you thinking it might be one of Ted Thornton’s companies?”

  McCabe said, “That kind of project took money. It’s the kind of thing that Ted Thornton would have wanted to be involved in, isn’t it?”

  “So let’s see what Research can tell us about the money behind Pluto’s Planet.”

  “Although,” McCabe said, “you would think Thornton would have told us if he had a financial investment in that restaurant, wouldn’t you? Given that our first victim worked there.”

  “Never know what might slip a man’s mind,” Baxter said as he sent the query to Research. “Okay, they’re on it.”

  “In the meantime,” McCabe said, “let’s have a look at what Pluto’s Planet has on the Web.… Great. A hologram.” She waved her hand and the image of the restaurant and the adjoining building spun out.

  The restaurant was on two levels, a bar and casual dining on the ground floor, a formal restaurant on the second level with a balcony. A walkway linked the restaurant to the self-contained building next door, a three-story food-production plant with water-hydrated crops and the fish farm.

  “According to this,” Baxter said, reading the notation, “only the workers are allowed inside the vertical farm because of the risk of contamination of the crops. The walkway is only for e
mergency evacuation via the restaurant.”

  “If you read the labels, it looks like they’re raising everything from artichokes to tomatoes in the farm,” McCabe said.

  “They must be raising enough to have a surplus. This morning, they were setting up for a farmers’ market in the restaurant parking lot.”

  “I’ve bought stuff there on occasion,” McCabe said. “This is an impressive operation.”

  McCabe closed the Pluto’s Planet node and went back over to her desk to pick up her coffee mug. “I thought of something else last night when I was doing my movie watching. Mrs. Miniver has an encounter with a wounded German soldier. That reminded me that we haven’t spent a lot of time on the neo-Nazi angle. Whitman brought it up during the first task force meeting, but we more or less let it drop after that.”

  “Because we discovered the science camp link between Bethany and Sharon and that Ted Thornton, Vivian Jessup’s good friend, had financed the science camp. The only link to Nazis is the phenol as a murder weapon.”

  “I know. But we may as well run it through just to be sure we’ve covered our bases.”

  “Okay, we have nothing better to do while we’re waiting to hear from Research.”

  “I have some sources that I found.” McCabe sent the nodes to the wall. “Here’s the article that I read about the use of phenol. These two say more or less the same thing.”

  “What’s that one with the photographs?”

  “It’s a collection of photographs and interviews with survivors of Nazi prison camps,” McCabe said. “I looked through it, but … I can’t believe this. It was right there staring me in the face.”

  “What was?” Baxter stood up and came to stand beside her.

  “Look at the first name in the second column,” McCabe said.

  “Aaron Jessup,” McCabe said. “Playwright and—”

  “That’s Vivian Jessup’s grandfather. I saw his name in her bio.”

  “‘Sent to prison camp with his parents, sister, and older brother,’” Baxter said, reading the entry.