“Nope. Did I mention, I’ve got a contract?”
“Now I’d like for you to have a clue.”
After a depressing twenty minutes, during which everyone other than Renz moved wreckage to reveal more wreckage, one of the uniforms came over and told Quinn and Renz that the Gremlin had phoned in to the Minnie Miner show and claimed credit for the destruction of the buildings, as well as for the deaths. The call was, of course, brief and impossible to trace, but the voice tracks appeared to be the same. The Gremlin’s, in both instances.
Quinn said, “Seems like a clue, Harley.”
Renz, flushed and puffed up from the heat and pervasive smell, called for his limo to pick him up.
Now that he’d delivered his message, Renz had little use for Quinn. He didn’t so much as glance in Quinn’s direction as the gleaming black town car with NYPD plates glided away.
Only to reappear on the opposite side of the bomb blast area and fire damage. Maybe Renz had thought of something helpful. A clue.
Quinn watched Renz from half a block’s distance. Renz was out of his car and talking to a woman with a microphone. Another woman was frantically leaping around the limo with a small camera, finding good angles for shots of Renz.
Renz was helping her as much as possible. He removed his suit coat and rolled up his white shirtsleeves. He found a high spot in the debris so the photos would have a flattering upward angle. For some shots, he propped his fists on his hips and raised his chin. A portly Mussolini.
Quinn watched and waited for a while, but he never saw Renz actually touch anything.
That was Renz’s talent.
48
That evening, in his office, Renz was less circumspect in talking to Quinn. He knew there were no hidden video cameras or recorders here. And like a beast in his lair, he was most comfortable in familiar surroundings.
The conversation was so amiable that Renz gave Quinn one of his best cigars and fired up an identical one for himself. He confided to Quinn that the cigars were illegal and from some South or Central American country that Quinn had heard of only in a Woody Allen movie. Now they were partners in crime.
Quinn sat in a comfortable leather armchair, holding the cigar and a glass ashtray. The armchair faced Renz’s desk, behind which sat Renz. If the desk had been any bigger, Quinn thought, he might need to shout to be heard.
“Now that we’re off the record we can talk,” Renz said.
Quinn didn’t remember anything about being on or off the record, but he let it slide.
Renz tilted back his head as if about to administer eye drops. He made a perfect O with his lips and blew an imperfect smoke ring.
“Are we really getting any traction in finding this Gremlin bastard?” he asked. “Something or somebody we can toss to the media wolves?”
Quinn blew a perfect smoke ring. “Tell them we’re making progress.”
“They won’t believe me.”
“They won’t believe you no matter what you say, so why waste the truth on them?”
Renz chewed on his cigar but didn’t take smoke into his mouth. “This Gremlin guy would be easier for us to get a line on if he was a professional. But real experts in those fields always peg him as a talented amateur. New to his work, maybe, but he knew or learned enough about killing that he manages to make the hit and then get away unseen.” Renz produced a white handkerchief as big as a surrender flag and wiped his forehead and neck with it. Watching him made Quinn realize the office had gotten much warmer. It might have been the cigars, or the futility.
“For instance, he knew how to neutralize all those elevator safety brakes in the Blenheim Building,” Renz went on. “All those floors.” He tapped ashes from his cigar into an ashtray on his desk and made a face suggesting he was nauseated. “God! All that bone sticking through flesh. And the fires! The arson guy said it took some knowledge and some jerry-rigging to bring off what this guy has done. Imagine the planning, learning what those buildings are made of, when and how they were constructed—their materials and vulnerabilities. He must have made studies before he made plans.”
“You would think so,” Quinn said.
“He knew where the flammable wooden support beams and joists were,” Renz said. “How the fire would dance its way through the place. Which walls were load-bearing. Everything that’d cause the fire to feed on itself and turn buildings into ovens.”
“Fire seems to fascinate people who like gadgets.”
“Does it follow that people who like gadgets like to kill?”
Quinn thought about that. “People who like gadgets want to know about how the insides of things work. They can only gain that deeper understanding through careful observation and examination. Which is why our gremlin has a compulsion to disassemble things so he can study them. Even women.”
“So he thinks that by abduction and torture he can learn about women?” Renz looked skeptical.
“Only some things,” Quinn said. “Other things he’ll learn in other ways. We have to learn those things, too, if we’re going to find him.”
“It sounds reasonable when you say it,” Renz told Quinn. He snubbed out his cigar.
Quinn took that as a signal from Renz that their tête-à-tête was finished.
Quinn didn’t think so. Still seated, he said, “There is something you might toss to the circling news vultures, Harley. Tell them we’re studying closed-circuit security camera stills and videos of people at the Taggart Building fire. The people in the street, observing the flames. Images from before, during, and after the explosions and fire. We think we might be able to do a facial match with the killer and the artist’s rendering. Mix in a picture of Kray as a youth, and we may come up with some positive identification.”
Renz looked surprised. “Are we doing all that?”
“As soon as you supply the cameras and cassettes.”
“Nobody uses cassettes anymore,” Renz said.
Quinn ignored him and stood up. He knew Renz had the political clout to get whatever he needed to get something done in a rush. The man had his connections. That was how it worked. The favor would also subtract from Renz’s stock of favors owed. Some might sniff weakness, but who knew if there really were such images that hadn’t been destroyed?
Renz stood up and said, “You are really a prick, Quinn.”
As Quinn was leaving, he paused at the door and said, “Nice cigar, Harley. But it’s only that.”
When Quinn arrived at Q&A, he found Jerry Lido there, along with Pearl and Fedderman.
Sal and Harold were still occupied interviewing witnesses to the bombing and burning. Sal had called earlier and talked to Pearl. She’d told him two witnesses had surfaced and reported glimpsing a child of about twelve running and dancing through the flames. Neither witness had gotten a good look at the quick, lithe figure.
Pearl gave Sal and Harold names and addresses and sicced them on the witnesses.
“Could have been a small adult,” said one of the witnesses, a hard-looking but glamorous woman named Philipa.
“Or a large child,” Harold said.
They were in her living room, in a modest but cozy ground-floor apartment that looked out at ankle level at passersby on the sidewalk. It was on the upwind side of the field of wreckage left by the explosions and fire. Half the buildings on the block looked untouched, in contrast to the others.
Harold wondered about Philipa’s ethnicity. She had a certain earthy magnetism that intrigued him. When she caught Harold staring at her breasts, she gave him a look that startled him with its clarity of meaning. She knew what he was thinking she was thinking, but he was wrong.
Exactly.
“I was just curious about your ethnicity,” he said, laying it all out there. “Where you’re from.”
“Philipistan,” she said. “And before you ask, yes, I am named after my country.”
“Like Odessa,” Harold said.