Bad blood

21

“Soft kill. That’s the most oxymoronic phrase in forensic medicine,” Mike said, brushing his dark hair off his forehead. “Nothing soft about strangulation. Right up there among the most painful ways to die, fighting for enough air to breathe while someone squeezes the life out of you for four or five minutes.”

They were murders without weapons, murders without the guns or knives or tire irons that made other homicides “harder.” The designation was as baffling to Mike and me as it had been to Trish Quillian when she’d learned the fate of her best friend.

“Am I crazy to be thinking about a possible connection to Amanda Quillian’s death?” I asked. “Is it just coincidence that both she and Bex Hassett were strangled?”

“What connection do you mean-the Quillians? You always want it both ways, Coop. I thought your expert was primed to tell the court that ligature and manual strangulation are among the most common methods of homicidal deaths with female victims. Especially if they’ve been sexually assaulted.”

“That’s why I can’t go too far with that statistic in front of the jury. There wasn’t even an attempt at a rape in Amanda’s case.”

“Well, according to Trish, the cops thought it was the motive with Bex. If it makes you happy, we’ll pull the file on her investigation. Meanwhile, you game to try to find Phinneas this afternoon?”

“You think it’s worth the chase?”

“Trish’s half-right,” Mike said, talking as he dialed his cell. “Somebody had it in for Duke. I think she’s grabbing at straws, but we got a nice June afternoon to kill. See what the Hassett-Quillian grudge is about.”

I opened the car door as Mike spoke into the phone. “Who’s this?…Hey, Spiro-it’s Chapman. Need a favor. Go back twelve years, give or take a few months. Find me a file on a sixteen-year-old girl, Rebecca Hassett. Called herself Bex. Asphyxial in Pelham Bay Park. Yeah, I know. I’ll owe you a great big juicy sirloin at Patroon with a steep bottle of red.”

Mike got in and started the engine as the detective on the other end of the phone responded to him.

“What do you think I want, Spiro? Everything on paper, as fast as you can put your mitts on it. Yesterday if you can do it. Case folder with the DD5s,” he said, referring to the detective-division documents that would have every detail about the old investigation. “Autopsy report, photographs, any record of an arrest or suspects. Call me back when you’ve got it.”

The ride to the outermost peninsula of land in the East Bronx, an old community in the shadow of the large modern bridge that crossed Long Island Sound, took another twenty minutes. Mike used the time to show off his mastery of the history of the city, which I never tired of hearing. “Throgs Neck. You know how it got its name?”

“I have no idea.”

“John Throckmorton. Settled a farm there-hundreds of acres-while the Dutch had control of New York in the 1640s. We’re looking for Phin Baylor’s place next to a church on Hollywood, right? That’s got an interesting namesake, too.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Let’s just say the final Jeopardy! category for the afternoon is Doo-Wop,” Mike said. “An audio daily double. The answer is ‘Girl group with 1958 hit-“Maybe.”’”

He began to croon to me. “‘May-ay-be…’”

I had danced to that a few times at college parties when the deejays were spinning oldies. Maybe, if I hold your hand…maybe, if I kissed your lips, I thought to myself. I knew the lyrics as well as Mike did, but if he wanted me to sing to him, I wasn’t going there. And I just didn’t know who had recorded the song.

“The Shirelles?”

“Not even close.”

“The Sequins?”

“I gave you the whole damn clue, Coop. Who are the Chantels?”

“From this church? St. Frances de Chantal?”

“Yup. Just changed the spelling by a letter. They practiced by singing in the choir and doing Gregorian chants. Performed in the parish at a school dance when they were teenagers, got noticed by a big promoter, and were one of the first girl groups to hit it big with doo-wop.”

We turned off Harding Avenue at the corner of Hollywood. The bright stained-glass windows of St. Frances gleamed in the late-afternoon sun. Two young women-about Trish Quillian’s age-were sitting on the stoop of a narrow brick house adjacent to the church. They stopped chatting and stared at the car as we came to a stop at the curb.

“Let me do this,” I said to Mike.

I walked up the path and introduced myself to the pair, asking if this was where Phinneas Baylor lived.

“Yes, and I’m his daughter, Janet,” the fairer one said, standing to come toward me. “Something wrong?”

“No, we’d just like to talk to your father.”

“Depends on what it’s about. I don’t need you bothering him.”

“We’re actually with-”

“I know it’s not a courtesy call. Your automobile kind of gives the both of you away in this neighborhood,” Janet said, trying to back me down the path, putting distance between our conversation and her friend. I could hear the door slam behind me and figured Mike didn’t like the dynamic he was watching.

“Mike Chapman here. NYPD,” he said, both hands in his pants pockets. “Nothing to get perturbed about. You’re…?”

“Janet. Janet Baylor.” She looked back and forth between Mike’s face and mine and made her choice. “This a problem for my dad?” she asked him.

Mike took her arm and steered her toward the car, smiling at her to reassure her. “Ancient history, Janet. We need a lesson. Hear your pop has some stories about the old days that might be a help in something we’re doing.”

She cocked her head. “Quillians it’ll be, won’t it? They’re all over the news. You won’t be mixing him into that stuff, will you? He don’t know the first thing about it.”

“Fair enough. We’re just trying to get a handle on some of the background.”

“That’s all? Honest?”

Mike held up his hand and smiled again. “Blood oath.”

“Phin took a walk down to the water, at the end of Pennyfield Avenue,” Janet said. “Fort Schuyler. Sits up on the ramparts there every day he can, May to October, until sunset. Silver hair-and I think he’s got on a black T-shirt and baggy pants. Got a bad gimp. You’ll know him by the cane.”

“Do you mind my asking whether you know Patricia Quillian?” I said.

Janet looked up. “Went all through school with Trish. Haven’t seen her since we got out.”

“Any reason why?”

She shrugged. “Just went separate ways, that’s all. We had another friend-Bex-and-”

Mike wanted to show her we knew about Bex. “Rebecca Hassett, right?”

Janet paused. “Yeah, yeah. Guess you’ve got a good start on your history lesson already, Detective. Well, her murder shook up our whole crowd. Just never knew what happened. Me, I used to keep all the newspaper clippings about the case.”

“You still have them?” I asked.

“Nah.”

“Why did you save them?”

She pushed the hair off her forehead. “Bex’s murder made her the most famous person we knew. Had her name in the paper every day for a couple of weeks. Seemed like the cops were coming around talking to us all the time at first. Seemed like the most important thing in all our lives. Then they just stopped coming. Stopped caring about Bex. Most people did. They always figured it was the druggies in the park.”

“And you?” Mike asked. “What did you think?”

She shrugged again. “Same as everybody else. She should have stayed with our crowd. Bex, I mean. Started running with hoodlums. People who weren’t like us. Lots of people thought she was asking for it.”

I closed my eyes, stung by words I had heard far too often about victims of violence.

“How well did you know Brendan Quillian?” Mike asked.

Janet Baylor frowned. “Not at all. Too much a pretty boy for me. Never really saw him around here anyway.”

“And Duke?”

She didn’t answer.

“Did you know Duke?”

“Had firm orders from my mother to keep away from him. We all did. Now that was a nasty boy, Duke Quillian.”

Mike was standing as close to Janet Baylor as he could get. “Tell me what you mean. Tell me why you say that.”

She hesitated again and licked her lips. Then she shook her head from side to side.

“Janet?” Mike said, trying to get her attention again.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m remembering wrong.”

“He’s dead now. He can’t hurt anybody.”

“Terrible things, he did. At least that’s what I used to hear.”

“What? Like shooting squirrels and skinning cats?”

Janet laughed and pointed a finger in Mike’s face. “You’ve been watching too many of them serial-killer shows, Detective. Not that stuff.”

“What then?”

She took a deep breath. “It’s only stories I heard, mind you. Nothing I witnessed.”

“Tell them to me,” Mike said.

“Duke had a fight with a kid once,” Janet said, pointing down the street. “A boy who lived over there, but the family moved right afterward. Duke tied his one arm to the fence in the backyard to keep him still. Had a pair of pliers-big, rusty old things he carried around in his pocket to break locks open and such. Pulled all the fingernails out of the kid’s other hand to teach him a lesson.”

My stomach heaved, but I tried not to show any reaction, hoping that Janet would keep talking.

“And one of the girls who made a fool of him in front of his friends? He doused her hair in some kind of oil and set fire to it.”

“I can’t believe he was never locked up for these things,” Mike said.

“Please, Detective. Nobody dared call the cops. We’ve got our own way of settling things. Duke Quillian didn’t need to practice on squirrels and cats, Mr. Chapman. It was people he liked to torture.”