Twist

by John Lutz

  “You can see where he dipped,” Weaver said, pointing. There were half a dozen swipes in the spilled blood on the mattress.

  “He used his writing finger to get blood from her ass,” Nift said, glancing at Pearl. He smiled. “Fecal matter is present on the mirror.”

  “Must have gone back and forth, between bedroom and bathroom,” Quinn said. “Took his time.”

  “Or he coulda loaded up with blood once and gone with it into the bathroom,” Nift said. “ ’Specially the blood from her ass. She was still alive when he put that statuette to her. That had to have been a fountain.”

  “The letters would get lighter as they were written if he dipped his finger only once,” Quinn said. “They don’t.”

  “Very good,” Nift said, as if Quinn had done well noting something he, Nift, had known all along. Sort of a test.

  “Is there a doorman for this building?”

  “No,” Renz said, “but I bet there will be.”

  “So she had the keys to this apartment and knew it was unoccupied,” Quinn said.

  “It was with more keys on a big ring. Lab’s got it. And the lockbox itself.”

  “So who actually owns this place?”

  “Belongs to some guy who’s out of the country,” Renz said. “He won’t be happy to hear about this.”

  “Odds are she came here with the killer willingly. She was the one with the knowledge that it existed—and she had the key.”

  “Odds are she seduced him,” Nift said.

  “You wanna try her for murder?” Pearl snapped.

  Nift shut up and concentrated on bagging his instruments. He closed and latched his black case, then put on the suit coat he’d carefully folded and draped over a chair back.

  “Got an approximate time of death?” Quinn asked him.

  “Between one and five a.m.,” Nift said. “Looks like the torture started before midnight, though.” He smiled in a way that made his face particularly ugly. “This killer must have studied the Spanish Inquisition or something. Our Gigi must have suffered horribly before he let her die.”

  “Nice to know you’re concerned,” Pearl said.

  Nift shrugged. “I’d always heard real estate is a tough business.”

  “When you have more on this,” Quinn said, “give me a call. No matter what time it is.”

  “Will do.” Nift adjusted his cuffs and buttoned his suit coat. “You understand that all of this, at the scene, is preliminary.”

  “Sure. Everything we goddamn do is preliminary.”

  “Okay to release the body?” Renz asked.

  “If the CSU people are finished, no reason not to,” Nift said. “But I should tell you there’s something a little different about this murder. I’ve seen the other victims, the nature of their wounds—especially the torture wounds. There was a special rage behind this. He was mad at her.”

  “You talking about the statue up her ass?” Renz asked.

  “Among other things.”

  “They’d only just met,” Quinn said. But even as he spoke, he realized he was assuming. He’d imagined a brief scenario: woman fired from her job, depressed, goes drinking, meets man who will love and console her, at least for one night.

  Gets a surprise.

  Nift shrugged. “Okay, don’t listen to what I got to say. But just remember, he was extra-special mad at this one.”

  “That makes sense,” Helen said.

  She was wearing baggy sweatpants this morning, and a loose-fitting T-shirt. The clothes made her look not just tall, but larger. A scent of slightly perfumed heat and perspiration wafted from her. It wasn’t unpleasant. More a healthy scent. She might have jogged here, for all Quinn knew. He thought Helen might have lived earlier as some kind of Viking warrior queen.

  “Makes sense how?” he asked.

  “The killer would possess a special rage for this victim. So soon after what almost happened on Liberty Island. That had to be a close call for him, a reminder of what can happen. Of what almost inevitably will happen.”

  Pearl was seated on the front edge of her desk so she could be part of Quinn and Helen’s conversation. “Because he wants it to happen,” she said.

  Helen nodded. “In his own sick way, yes. He wants it more and more, even though he tries to deny it.”

  “It’s what they all want,” Quinn said. “They finally get frustrated with it not happening.”

  “Being so close to her, though,” Helen said. “It must have been quite an experience. It must have triggered a lot of horrible reactions in his mind. Maybe she scared the hell out of him.”

  “No doubt she did,” Quinn said, imagining.

  “We talking about the Statue of Liberty?” Pearl asked.

  “We are,” Quinn said.

  “His mother,” Helen said.

  60

  Legwork time.

  In the heat.

  Quinn assigned Sal and Harold to canvass the apartments around the one where Gigi Beardsley had died. They had a police sketch artist’s rendering of antique dealer Jacob Thomas’s photo of Dred Gant, if Gant were clean shaven and with dark hair. Average looking, to be sure, but quite a different person without the blond beard, mustache, and black-framed glasses. No longer somebody who might score you some drugs in a club restroom.

  They had also been given copies of the original photo, featuring the hirsute, scruffy Dred Gant. Disco Dred.

  Good luck with that, Quinn thought.

  But it had to be done.

  A call to Homestead Properties, Gigi’s former employer, quickly provided them with Gigi’s home address, on the West Side near Columbus Circle. The woman Quinn talked with seemed genuinely distressed over Gigi’s death. Quinn was told, predictably enough, that everyone at the agency had liked Gigi. The deceased was an earthbound angel, with a kind word for everyone. It wasn’t for lack of friends that Gigi had been fired, but lack of funds.

  Quinn tended to believe that last part was true.

  Armed with more of the sketch copies, he decided to drive to Gigi’s address with Pearl and Fedderman. Jody wanted to accompany them, insisting and insisting, until Quinn finally said it was all right, all right, and assigned her to the backseat of the Lincoln with Fedderman.

  The old car’s air conditioner was going to have a hard time keeping up with the heat, especially with four people inside.

  Feds, even more disheveled than usual, was morose and had been having trouble at home—again. Basically about him being a cop. Busy bickering, leaving no time for much else. Neither he nor his wife, Penny, had been doing the wash or visiting the dry cleaner’s for a while, even though they were in the middle of a heat wave. Served Jody right.

  Quinn parked the Lincoln in a loading zone across the street from Gigi’s apartment building. He saw Sal and Harold’s unmarked, also parked illegally, near a fire plug on the opposite side of the street. Who were the bad guys in this city?

  The building was an obviously expensive one, four stories of engraved stone and then twenty or so more of brick. The lower windows all had green awnings. There was a fountain outside, a sort of gargoyle perpetually vomiting water. Quinn thought that Gigi’s company must have been doing well before the market had gone sour.

  “We should be selling real estate, maybe,” Fedderman said, gazing out the car window at the imposing tower of stone and brick.

  “The crime market doesn’t go up and down,” Quinn said.

  “And down,” Pearl added.

  “I’d rather go to court than to real estate closings,” Jody said. “Borrrring.”

  “You sell real estate, you don’t have to lug around a gun,” Fedderman said.

  “And nobody tries to kill you,” Quinn said.

  “So what are we doing here?” Jody asked.

  Almost everyone had a good laugh.

  Quinn fumed.

  Pearl and Jody traded slight smiles.

  Just in the brief time since Quinn had switched off the engine and AC, it had gotten uncomforta
bly hot in the car.

  They all climbed out of the Lincoln and gingerly pulled the material of their sweaty clothing away from where it was stuck to bare flesh. Before they crossed the street, Quinn left his NYPD placard where it was visible on the dashboard.

  There, he thought. Legal.

  The lobby of Gigi’s building was mostly oak paneling, potted plants, and fox-hunting prints, with tastefully disguised elevators almost impossible to locate.

  “What did the victim actually do where she worked?” Jody asked seriously. Trying to match victim with environment.

  “Human resources,” Quinn said. “It paid well until it didn’t pay at all.”

  A uniformed doorman who looked like a German field marshal directed them to one of the maintenance staff, a short man with a bulbous nose and incredibly baggy green pants. His pin-on name tag identified him simply as Harry. He accompanied them upstairs and worked the locks on Gigi’s apartment door.

  There was no crime scene tape on the door, though Quinn knew the NYPD had been here. Probably they had found nothing of interest. Or worth preserving.

  Of course it was, as British TV cops said, early days. If anything had been obtained here it was doubtless still being analyzed.

  “Her computer still here?” Jody asked.

  “Police lab’s got it,” Quinn said. The victim’s computer was always one of the first things the lab set to work on. “They already pronounced it useless, unless somebody was planning to buy into New York real estate. Gigi hadn’t been online for ten hours before we have her at the bar meeting the man we assume killed her. Her drinking friends and former coworkers could make nothing of that sketch. They did recall a man at a nearby table giving her the eye, but they didn’t get much of a look at him. They described him as average this, average that.”

  “He might not have been the killer,” Jody said.

  “Did we have to bring her along?” Fedderman asked.

  Jody kicked him in the ankle, not hard, but it hurt.

  Harry the maintenance guy asked them to lock up when they were finished.

  “If you remove anything,” he said, moving toward the door, “make sure you let me know. I’m supposed to make a list.”

  Quinn assured him that they would, then asked if there was anything already on the list.

  “Nope. Nobody but you guys has been here since the cops left.”

  He gave them a half salute and then left.

  The apartment seemed to go quiet and still after the door to the hall closed. No traffic noise from outside. Nothing but dust motes swirling in silent riot in the sunlight.

  “Damn near soundproof,” Fedderman said. “Prewar building with thick walls.”

  Quinn wondered when people would stop using the expression “pre-war building.” Which war were they talking about?

  “Smells like death in here,” Jody said. “Even though she died somewhere else.”

  The others knew what she meant and didn’t comment.

  “Pearl and I will go through the apartment,” Quinn said. He then assigned Fedderman to canvass Gigi’s neighbors in the building, even if Sal or Harold had already interviewed them. Jody he gave some copies of the photos from antique dealer Jacob Thomas’s files—the ones of Dred Gant with blond hair, mustache, beard, and glasses. Her job was to cover the nearby neighborhood merchants.

  Both of them also took copies of the NYPD sketch, and—in case they wanted to jolt someone’s memory and disturb their sleep—postmortem photos of the victim that had been faxed over to Q&A from the morgue.

  Jody was having no luck. By the time she entered Sam’s Spirits, on Eighth Avenue, she was sweating like crazy and her feet hurt.

  Sam’s was a liquor store about the size of a closet. Besides booze, there were also racks of impulse items, everything from plastic police whistles to beef jerky.

  Jody looked around and didn’t see any plastic Statues of Liberty.

  A man Jody assumed to be Sam himself stood behind a wooden counter, intent on counting money. He was small, middle-aged, bald, and wearing red suspenders over a blue short-sleeved shirt with perspiration crescents below the armpits. In his left hand he held a large roll of money while his right thumb effortlessly and rapidly folded back the bills one by one. Jody thought he would have looked just right with sleeve garters and a green visor. As he worked his talented thumb, the bills made a swishing, snapping sound.

  He glanced up at Jody. She didn’t seem threatening, so he continued counting money the final few precious seconds, until he was finished.

  Makes the world go round, Jody thought.

  He placed the money beneath the counter and smiled at her. “Please feel free to look around,” he said, motioning with his arm as if there were vistas of booze instead of his limited stock.

  “I want you to be the looker,” Jody said with a return smile.

  “So I’m looking.” He regarded her carefully, and she realized he thought she wanted him to look at her. “I see a cop,” he said.

  She laughed and flashed her Quinn-supplied temporary NYPD shield. “There is no prize. You the Sam on the sign?”

  “That Sam I am.”

  She moved up to the counter and laid the NYPD artist’s hypothetical and questionable sketch on the counter. The guy in the sketch even looked slightly familiar to Jody, but maybe that was because she’d seen the sketch so many times. “Ever seen this man?”

  He stared at the sketch. “Can’t say I have. Can’t say I haven’t. Average-lookin’ fella.”

  “I know, I know.” Jody reached into her purse and pulled out a copy of the Jacob Thomas photo of Dred Gant in what might have been a false beard and mustache, blond hair, thick black-framed glasses. She laid it on the counter next to the NYPD sketch.

  Sam studied both likenesses. “Same fella?”

  “You tell me.”

  He pointed to the beard and mustache photo. “I think I might have bought a joint from that guy back in nineteen-sixty-nine at college.”

  Jody waited.

  “That’s all I can tell you,” Sam said.

  Jody gave him a spiteful look, but thanked him nonetheless.

  “He do something?” Sam asked.

  “We’re pretty sure he did.” She gathered up photo and sketch and turned to leave.

  “Wait a minute,” Sam said. “Bring back that first one. Something about the second picture kind of triggered something about the first.”

  That sounded plausible to Jody.

  She returned to the counter and laid the two likenesses side by side again, hoping whatever had triggered Sam’s memory once would do it again. She said nothing. Didn’t even move. Didn’t want to create bias.

  Sam studied them.

  Finally he raised his gaze and looked at Jody with bloodshot eyes. “He might’ve come in last night, about nine or nine-thirty. Maybe a little later. Had a blond girl with him. She might’ve been a little tipsy. He bought a bottle of Grey Goose vodka.”

  Jody felt her pulse quicken. Suddenly she was having fun here. A certain kind of fun.

  “They say anything?” she asked.

  “Not as I can recall. Just him ordering the vodka from where it’s displayed there behind the counter. They was sort of leaning on each other, obviously with each other, if you know what I mean.”

  “Lovers?”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Or to swear it wasn’t so.”

  “How’d he pay?”

  “Cash, I think. A fifty-dollar bill.”

  “Could you recognize that individual bill if you saw it?” She recalled cashiers who always marked big bills when they accepted them, so the customer couldn’t claim he or she had given them a bill of even larger denomination and demand more change.

  “C’mon!” Sam said, looking incredulous. “Booze ain’t cheap. I get fifties all day long.” He shrugged his bony shoulders. “You gotta realize that, till you came in here, those two were just some of yesterday’s customers, is all. I didn’t think the
re’d be any reason to identify them, or their money.”

  “Which way’d they turn when they went out the door?”

  “That I couldn’t tell you.”

  Jody considered the place where Gigi’s friends and former coworkers had had drinks, where they’d left her despondent and vulnerable. It was a short walk from there to here, which was about halfway to a subway line Gigi and the killer could have taken to a stop very near the furnished but unoccupied apartment where she’d died.

  Though she’d been fired, Gigi had still had her key to the agency’s lockboxes. She and the man who’d picked her up—or vice versa—would have gone to an apartment like that to have sex.

  She reached in her purse and got out another photograph Quinn had given her. Gigi Beardsley’s morgue photo.

  She laid the photo on the counter, in front of Sam. “Seen her before?”

  Sam stared. “Jesus H. Christ!”

  “Not Him,” Jody said. She pointed to the morgue shot. “Her.”

  “That’s the girl,” Sam said. “The one who was in here with the guy that bought the vodka. I could and would swear to it.” He shook his head sadly. “She’s dead, ain’t she?”

  “Completely,” Jody said.

  61

  Nobody liked a surprise visit by the cops.

  Bobby Aikins, medium height and weight, aveage-looking guy, well on the way to losing all his hair on top, was no exception. Aikins lived six blocks from where Gigi Beardsley had been killed, which was far afield from Sal and Harold’s assignment to canvass the neighboring buildings.

  What had prompted the visit was the fact that Aikins was managing director of human resources at Homestead Properties, which had sacked Gigi on the day of her death. Probably it had been Aikins himself who’d given her the bad news.

  Aikins moved back to let Sal and Harold enter his apartment. It was a nice one on the tenth floor, with a view down Broadway. He motioned for the two detectives to sit on the sofa. Sal sat. Harold remained standing. Aikins settled down in a buttery tan leather armchair that matched the sofa.