“I think your client is in deep trouble, Mr. Henshaw.”
Gray eyebrows rose curiously. “How so?”
“It seems she’s been involved in a love affair with a serial killer, who planned on using her as an alibi if he were to find himself in a tight spot.”
“This serial killer, if there was one, is dead?”
Quinn nodded.
“Then why should my client’s name be dragged through dirt? I can assure you she knew nothing of her hypothetical lover’s… extra-extramarital escapades. Her husband happens-”
“I know who he is. Circuit Judge Aaron Flack. Are you also his attorney?”
“I’m the family attorney,” Henshaw said, sipping his drink. He stopped smiling. His pale blue eyes bore into Quinn. “Is your motive for doing this political?”
“Not in the slightest,” Quinn said. “My motive is simple. I want to know the truth.”
Henshaw settled back farther in the booth, smiling and shaking his head. “Such an elusive thing.”
“In your business.”
“Oh, we usually manage to pin down one version of it or another.”
“I’m going for my version.”
“You would wreck a marriage and ruin a fine man and an honest judge in the process?”
“It would depend,” Quinn said.
“You talk like a man with a price.”
“I’m not.”
“So you’re an idealist.”
“Hell, I don’t know.”
“But you see yourself as a just and good man.”
“I try. And I do understand the delicacy of the situation.”
“Might I appeal to your reason?”
“Oh, probably not.”
“Is it useless to quote a number?”
“Useless.”
Henshaw finished his drink and placed the glass on the table. “Then there’s nothing I can do here.” He extracted some bills from a beige leather wallet and laid them on the table, enough to pay for the drinks and a more-than-liberal tip. His jovial smile was back. He extended his hand to Quinn. “It’s been a distinct pleasure, sir.”
“I’ll look out for your clients, Mr. Henshaw.”
“I will tell them, Detective Quinn, that they should be reassured.”
“Within reason,” Quinn said.
“Everything within reason,” Henshaw said. “Everything.”
Quinn recalled the victims he’d seen, the artful carving in human flesh, the torture wounds, the hope no longer hope, the futures no longer futures.
Not everything.
89
Quinn decided his wisest course of action would be to continue his investigation quietly, so there would be a minimum of interference.
Badgering Julie Flack would provoke plenty of interference. Morris Henshaw would see to that, especially if Renz or the media learned what Quinn was doing. Besides, Henshaw had left little doubt that he’d take the case to the wire to establish that his client was unaware of her purpose in Link Evans’s activities. It wouldn’t matter anyway, if Quinn was right and there was more to the Skinner murders than had been uncovered so far.
The next step, Quinn decided, should be what he or one of his detectives would have done if the debacle at the Evans house in Missouri hadn’t occurred. If the investigation hadn’t ended in gunfire. He decided to question the man who’d wrongly gone to prison for the Jane Nixon rape. Who had motive to try to kill her.
His name was Scott Trent, and he’d been living in New York since his release from prison a year ago. He was employed by something called Amalgamated Cartage, and had an apartment on the Lower East Side.
“He’s at work,” Trent’s neighbor said, when Quinn was knocking on the door to Trent’s walk-up apartment. It was on the second floor of an old brick building that was bare on one side where the adjoining structure had been torn down. There was a faded advertisement for Rheingold Beer on the exposed and discolored old bricks.
Quinn turned to see a woman at least in her eighties leaning out from the partly opened door of the adjoining apartment. She was wearing a gray robe dusted with crumbs, had long gray hair in a style better suited to the head of a twenty-year-old, and a face as wrinkled as dollar bills that had been in circulation too long.
“I’m Cranston,” she said, peering through narrowed eyes at Quinn. “ Mrs. Cranston.”
“At work where?” Quinn asked.
“Could be drivin’. Could be preachin’.”
Quinn flashed his identification in its leather folder, letting her think NYPD. Her eyesight obviously wasn’t much good anyway.
“That a wallet?”
“Sort of.”
“You offerin’ me some kinda bribe?”
“Showing you my identification.”
“I don’t care a fig about your education.”
“Who I am.”
“I don’t give a flyin’ fig who or what you are,” Mrs. Cranston said.
“Be that as it may,” Quinn said. He looked for a hearing aid in either of Mrs. Cranston’s ears. Didn’t see one.
“No say or nay about it. I don’t much like Trent, and I don’t much like his friends. Wish to hell he’d quit rehearsin’ his sermons late at night, loud as if he had an audience of thousands. If I could afford it, I’d buy me a hearin’ aid just so’s I could turn it off and use it as a plug, so as not to hear all that rantin’ and ravin’ about goodness, and not takin’ into account an old woman’s sleep.”
“Hypocrisy,” Quinn said.
“Hippopotamus?”
“Where does he preach? Other than his apartment?”
“Street corners. Says he found religion in prison. Like somebody accidentally dropped it and he could use it. Found new ways to steal from good folks, too, I bet. All prison is anyways is a college for criminals.”
“Which street corners?”
“Who the hell cares?”
Quinn tried Trent’s apartment door and found it locked. Better not let himself in, with Mrs. Cranston keeping a constant if clouded eye on things.
“Do you think he’s working today?” he asked.
“Worming?”
“Working. At work. Working.”
“Who gives a fig?”
Quinn thanked Mrs. Cranston for her time and left the building. He was relieved to see that his car hadn’t been stolen or vandalized. He thought he saw Mrs. Cranston peeking out from behind a curtain as he set out for Amalgamated Cartage.
It was just off Eleventh Avenue, not far from the docks. A billboard-size, weathered sign proclaimed that the flat, almost windowless brick and cinder-block building it rested upon was Amalgamated Cartage. The blacktop lot was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire, but a wide gate was open. There was a line of overhead doors along a truck dock running the length of the building, broken only by a flight of wooden stairs leading to a graypainted steel door that allowed access by foot.
Half a dozen truck trailers were backed into loading doors. Trucks were hooked up to two of them. The overhead doors where the trailers had truck cabs attached were raised, and Quinn could see in past the sides of the trailers. There was activity inside the building, men walking, orange forklifts moving back and forth, clanking over the steel bridges that allowed access to and from the trailers. The trailers dipped and rose as the lifts ran in and out, depositing or removing pallets of freight. A driver sat in one of the truck cabs, a dusty blue Peterbilt, engaged in some kind of paperwork attached to a clipboard. He seemed to be paying no attention to Quinn.
Quinn climbed the sturdy wooden stairs and found the door unlocked. He opened it and stepped through into a vast warehouse whose steel shelving seemed to contain mostly long rolls of something covered with brown paper.
The men involved in loading rolls into two of the trailers glanced over at Quinn but didn’t show much interest.
A hefty redheaded man in too-tight jeans and a black muscle shirt emerged from what looked like an unpainted plywood office and swaggered toward Quinn. He had a fullsleeve tattoo on his beefy right arm. In his right hand was a clipboard.
“Help you?” he asked, without a smile.