The only message waiting for me was from Joe Durkin. He'd left his home phone number. I went upstairs and tried Thurman first and hung up when the machine answered. I called Joe and his wife answered and called him to the phone, and when he came on the line I said, "He didn't show in Maspeth but Stettner did. Both Stettners. They were looking for him the same as I was, so I guess I wasn't the only person who got stood up tonight. Nobody on the TV crew had a clue where he went to. I think he flew the coop."
"He tried. His wings fell off."
"Huh?"
"There's a restaurant downstairs. I forget the name, it means radish in Italian."
"Radicchio's not radish. It's a kind of lettuce."
"Well, whatever it is. Six-thirty or so, you must of just got on your way to Maspeth, guy goes out back with a load of kitchen garbage. Way in the back behind two of the cans there's a body. Guess who."
"Oh, no."
"I'm afraid so. No question about the ID. He went out a fifth-floor window so he's not as pretty as he used to be, but there's enough of his face left so you know right away who you're looking at. Are you sure it doesn't mean radish? It was Antonelli told me. You'd think he'd know, wouldn't you?"
Chapter 18
The papers loved it. Richard Thurman had fallen to his death just a matter of yards from where his wife had been brutally raped and murdered less than three months previously. One potential Pulitzer Prize winner theorized that his last sight in this life might have been a glimpse of the Gottschalk apartment as he sailed past its window on the way down. That seemed unlikely, since you generally draw the blinds when you leave town for six months and a day, but I didn't have strong enough feelings on the subject to write a letter to the editor.
Nobody was questioning the suicide, although opinion seemed to be divided on the motive. Either he was despondent over the loss of his wife and unborn child or he was guilt-ridden over having caused their deaths. An editorial page columnist in the News saw the case as epitomizing the failure of the greed of the eighties. "You used to hear a lot of talk about Having It All," he wrote. "Well, three months ago Richard Thurman had it all- money in the bank, a great apartment, a beautiful wife, a glamorous job in the booming cable TV industry, and a baby on the way. In no time at all it turned to ashes, and the job and the money weren't enough to fill the void in Richard Thurman's heart. You may think he was a villain, that he engineered the unholy scenario enacted in November at that house on West Fifty-second Street. Or you may see him as a victim. Either way, he turned out to be a man who had had it all- and who had nothing left to cling to when he lost it."
"YOUR instincts were on target," Durkin told me. "You were afraid something happened to him and you wanted to get into the apartment. Same time, you didn't really think he was in there. Well, he wasn't. The ME's guess on time of death is seven to nine A.M., which would figure, because from ten in the morning you had kitchen staff in the joint downstairs and they probably would have heard the impact when he landed. Why nobody noticed the body during lunch hour is hard to figure, except that it was way over at one end of the courtyard and their service door was at the other end, and nobody got close enough to notice anything. You got your arms full of leftover eggplant, I guess you just want to dump it and get back inside, especially on a cold day."
It was Friday morning now and we were in Thurman's apartment. The lab crew had been all through the place the previous evening, while I was chasing shadows in Maspeth. I walked around the place, moving from room to room, not knowing what I was looking for. Maybe not looking for anything at all.
"Nice place," Joe said. "Modern furniture, looks stylish but a person could live with it. Everything overstuffed, built for comfort. You usually hear them say that about a woman, don't you? 'Built for comfort, not for speed.' Where does speed come into it, do you happen to know?"
"I think they once said it about horses."
"Yeah? Makes sense. Assuming you get a more comfortable ride on a fat horse. I'll have to ask one of the guys in TPF. When I was a kid, first wanted to be a cop, that's what I wanted to do, you know. I'd see the cops on horseback and that's what I wanted to be. Of course I got over it by the time I got to the Academy. Still, you know, it's not a bad life."
"If you like horses."
"Well, sure. If you didn't like 'em in the first place-"
"Thurman didn't kill himself," I said.
"Hard to be sure of that. Guy spills his guts, comes home, wakes up early, realizes what he's done. Sees he's got no way out, which he didn't, because you were gonna bag him for doing his wife. Maybe his conscience starts working for real. Maybe he just happens to realize he's looking at some real time upstate, and he knows what it's gonna be like in the joint, a pretty boy like him. Out the window and your troubles are over."
"He wasn't the type. And he wasn't afraid of the law, he was afraid of Stettner."
"Only his prints on the window, Matt."
"Stettner wore gloves when he did Amanda. He could put them on again to throw Richard out the window. Thurman lived here, his prints would already be there. Or Stettner gets him to open the window. 'Richard, it's roasting in here, could we have a little air?' "
"He left a note."
"Typewritten, you said."
"Yeah, I know, but some bona fide suicides type their notes. It was pretty much your generic suicide note. 'God forgive me, I can't take it anymore.' Didn't say he did it, didn't say he didn't."
"That's because Stettner wouldn't have known how much we already knew."
"Or because Thurman wasn't taking any chances. Suppose he falls four stories and lives? He's in the hospital with twenty bones broken, last thing he wants is to face murder charges on the basis of his fucking suicide note." He put out a cigarette in a souvenir ashtray. "It so happens I agree with you," he said. "I think the odds are he had help going out the window. That's one reason I had the lab boys do a real thorough job last night and it's why we're looking for a witness who saw anybody going in or out of here yesterday morning. It'd be nice to turn one up, and it'd be nice if you could put Stettner at the scene, but I can tell you now it ain't gonna happen. And even if it did there's no case against him. So he was here, so what? Thurman was alive when he left. He was despondent, he seemed upset, but who ever thought the poor man would take his own life? Horseshit on the half shell, but let's see you go and prove it."
I didn't say anything.
"Besides," he said, "is it so bad this way? We know Thurman killed his wife and we know he didn't get away with it. True, he had help, and maybe it was Stettner-"
"Of course it was Stettner."
"What of course? All we got for that is Thurman's word, which he said to you in a private unrecorded conversation a few hours before he fell to his death. Maybe he was jerking you around, did you stop to think of that?"
"I know he was jerking me around, Joe. He was trying to make himself look as good as possible and trying to make Stettner look like a combination of Svengali and Jack the Ripper. So what?"
"So maybe it wasn't Stettner. Maybe Thurman had some other accomplices, maybe he had some business reason to do a number on Stettner. Look, I'm not saying that's what happened. I know it's farfetched. The whole fucking case is farfetched. What I'm saying is that Thurman set up his wife's killing and he's dead now, and if every murder case I ever had worked out this well I wouldn't sit around eating my heart out, you know what I mean? If Stettner did it and he skates, well, I live with worse than that every day of my life. If he was as bad as Thurman made him out to be he would have got his dick in the wringer somewhere along the line, and it never once happened. Man's never been arrested, hasn't got a sheet on him anywhere. Far as I can tell he never even got a speeding ticket."