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.
“You can if Scott Trent works here.”
“He does.”
Quinn showed his ID. It didn’t seem to impress the man.
“You the boss?” Quinn asked.
The man nodded.
“I need to talk with Trent, is all. Won’t take more than a few minutes.”
“His minutes belong to the company during working hours.”
Quinn moved closer to the man. “I’m working under the auspices of the NYPD, and I didn’t come here looking for a pissing contest, but I can win one.”
Something in his voice made the Amalgamated boss look closer at Quinn and then blink. He shrugged. “Okay. Makes me no difference. He’s out sitting in that truck cab, checking over his manifest. At least, he damned well better be.”
“I noticed him when I came in,” Quinn said. “Tell me about him.”
“Ain’t got the time.”
“Are you sure you can’t find the time?” Quinn asked, in a way that prompted the boss to think about it.
“Aw, screw it,” the boss said. “There’s not much to tell. Trent’s been working here about a year as an over- the-road trucker. He ain’t got much seniority so he takes the long runs, delivering on Thursdays or Fridays, and has weekends to himself before turnaround. That’s so the company doesn’t have to pay him overtime on weekends. So he has weekends off here in the city, where he lives. Listen, the man’s an ordained minister of some sort. The cops have already been here talking to him. He wouldn’t attack anybody. He’d pray for them instead.”
“Amen,” Quinn said, He nodded to the boss and moved toward the gray steel door.
“Don’t take up too much of his time.”
“Not to worry,” Quinn said. “I know it’s money.”
He walked the length of the trailer that was hooked up to the blue Peterbilt truck, then around to the driver’s side of the cab. He rapped on the metal door with his knuckles. A man about forty, wearing gray work pants and a black T-shirt like the boss’s, only with AMALGAMATED lettered in white on the chest, opened the door and looked down at him.
Quinn flashed his ID as he had with the boss. Trent gave it only a glance.
“Let’s have a talk,” Quinn said. “I cleared it with your boss.”
“I don’t have much time. Gotta be in Georgia tomorrow with this carpet pad.”
“Everybody here is in a rush,” Quinn said.
Trent set aside the clipboard he’d been holding, tucked a pencil in the T-shirt’s saggy pocket, and swung down from the cab.
Quinn saw that he was wearing brown Doc Martens boots. He was slim and muscular, slightly shorter than Quinn.
“This about Jane Nixon?” he asked.
Quinn said that it was.
“I already talked to a police detective,” Trent said. “They accepted my alibi.” He dug into his hip pocket for his wallet and handed Quinn a ticket stub for God Is My Sales Manager. The address on the stub was in Lower Manhattan.
“This is what?” Quinn asked.
“A motivational talk. I was there listening to it the night Jane was attacked,” he said, as if that settled the matter and now he could get back to work.
“Truck drivers do much selling?”
