This was just the sort of thing the killer sought. It would have been silly, at this point, to set the wife free. Besides, a plan was growing in his mind like a disease.
After a few days Wifey was trembling so that she had to be spoon-fed so she wouldn’t make such a mess. Hubby the money man led her to a wall, made her lean against it, and beat her with a beaded leather strap. By now she automatically obeyed his instructions and made no sound while she was being whipped. A gag was no longer necessary.
When the husband’s arm was almost too tired to lift, the killer walked over, took the whip from his hand, and laid the whip hard along the back of the wife’s thighs.
Wifey was sobbing now, her head bowed in submission.
“Take her to the basement and hose her off,” the killer said.
Hubby looked confused. “Hose her . . . ?”
The killer grinned. “With water. If you want to beat her with the hose, maybe we can arrange that later.”
He could barely stop smiling. These two were perfect.
When the killer went down to the basement, he saw that things were in order. Wifey’s arms were tied over her head and she was hanging from a rafter with her toes barely touching the concrete. Quite a stretch. She tried to shift position now and then to relieve the pain when her stretched muscles cramped. Sheer agony. A hard rubber ball was jammed between her upper and lower teeth so her jaws were strained wide open. Her hair was soaked, pulled back, and fastened with a rubber band. She knew the rubber band was so they could see her face. Her expressions. That was great for photographs that could be sold and resold on the Internet. Her husband and their houseguest had taught her that.
The faint, rhythmic thrashing sound began, more vibration than noise. The killer was ready for it, knew that it would stop, knew how to stop it.
He stood with his hands pressed to his ears, his eyes clenched shut. Waiting.
Finally the thrashing noise reached a crescendo then subsided, and he was calm. The air that he breathed was like nectar.
The killer tested the strength of the ropes, felt the warm wetness of her body, then unnecessarily told Hubby the fund manager to stay where he was and went upstairs.
Ten minutes later the killer came back down the basement’s wooden stairs with something obviously heavy beneath a blanket.
“What’s that?” the husband asked. He hadn’t so much as budged.
The killer smiled. “My equipment. Car battery. Cables. Alligator clips.”
Terror paralyzed the wife. She emitted a lot of gagging and gurgling, and then lost consciousness.
The killer knew that unconsciousness was where they often went to escape. A country of painlessness and peace.
He had brought smelling salts.
35
Four people had been killed, seven injured, in the fall of the construction crane at the Taggart Building. Two of the dead were off-Broadway chorus line dancers, Betty Lincoln and Macy Adams. Their names and faces were known only to avid playgoers.
Not enough time had passed that Quinn and his detectives were done talking to the few witnesses who’d actually seen the crane come down, observed the panic, heard the screams. Then almost instantly the impact of the crane, followed by the landslide rumble and crashing of concrete, marble, and brick.
Quinn and Fedderman were doing the last of the interviews of witnesses, which didn’t make for a long list. Usually they weren’t technically witnesses, as it was the bomb-like crash of the crane that first drew their attention. It also scrambled their senses so that much of what they saw and said was wrong, forgotten, or irrelevant.
Now Quinn and Fedderman were in a modest apartment on the East Side, interviewing a giant of a man the others in SBL Properties called Little Louie. He had a bandage on the bridge of his nose and an arm in a sling. Quinn knew they were injuries from the crane accident. Next to Little Louie, on a faded but comfortable-looking sofa, sat Louie’s wife, Madge.
Louie Farrato looked like what he was, a solid type who worked with his hands, simple but not stupid. He would have made a great Indiana Jones in the movies. Madge was a sloe-eyed beauty of the sort who would abide no nonsense.
Quinn glanced at the preliminary notes made within hours of the crane incident.
“Would you like some iced tea or lemonade?” Madge Farrato asked.
Quinn declined. Fedderman gave it some thought and settled for iced tea.
They both waited patiently, along with Little Louie, until Madge returned with a tray on which were four glasses of what looked like iced tea. “Just in case,” she said with a smile that made her look like Sophia Loren. (Had Loren and Harrison Ford, who owned the Indiana Jones role, ever been in the same movie? Fedderman wondered.) “There’s real sugar and some artificial on the tray.” She set the tea on a glass-topped coffee table, and they all settled in as if they were going to watch a movie on television instead of talk about murder.
Quinn, who had changed his mind, sprinkled the contents of a pink artificial sweetener package in his tea and twirled the ice cubes with his forefinger. “We don’t mean to irritate anyone by asking them to repeat what they’ve already probably said over and over. It’s just that sometimes, after a traumatic event, people don’t remember things until some time has passed.”
Madge said, “Tell him, Louie.”
Louie squirmed a bit, ill at ease. He had on buffed leather boots, a many-pocketed tan shirt, and faded Levi’s, and sure enough looked as if he should be on an archeological dig.
He said, “Not long before the crane fell—say, about twenty minutes—I was working a jackhammer and I looked up and saw this guy in a yellow hard hat, carrying a clipboard and taking notes or something. I got a good look at him when I let up on the jackhammer and he became more than a blur. Still, he was some distance away. I got curious and walked over there.”
“So you saw him close up,” Quinn said, as if just to keep the conversational ball rolling. They might have a genuine close-up eyewitness here.
“Yeah,” Louie said. “There wasn’t anything really memorable about him. He was short. Built about average. Little, nimble type, but strong. Like a good flyweight boxer. Even had a cauliflower ear. That’s what I remembered later, when I saw that drawing or something of him on TV.”
“What did you say to him?”
“Asked him if I could help him. He kind of tugged his hard hat down like he didn’t want it to blow off his head.”
“What did he say?”
“Kept kind of doing his job, making notes, checking off stuff, like he was on a schedule. Said, ‘Safety.’ Like it was the one word that should explain it all. So I figured he was an inspector from one of the city agencies. We get ’em all the time, checking for workplace danger, long-term issues, lead-based paint, asbestos . . . that kinda thing.”
“Did you talk about safety?” Fedderman asked.
“Naw. We didn’t gab. We both had things to do.”
“Then?”
“Then he left.”
“Say good-bye?”
“Nope. I guess neither of us thought we had that kinda relationship.”
“Did you see him get into a vehicle?”
“Nope, he just walked outta sight. I didn’t think much of it at the time.”
“When did you think of it?”
“A few hours ago. I was watching news on TV, and up pops this picture of somebody that looked familiar. Then, during the commercial, I remembered. The safety guy! Then I read about him on the crawl at the bottom of the screen. I still couldn’t believe it, that I was just a few feet away from this guy, talked to him. So I read some more about him. The Gremlin. That just about scared the pastrami outta me.”
Louie clamped his lips together, looking as if he was in conflict. Quinn waited for him to say more, not asking him, not wanting to be the first to speak. Fedderman maintained the same silence. Sometimes people who are the first to speak say the damnedest things.