“I told you I can’t be seen with you,” she said to him.
“When did Bex die?” I asked. I couldn’t remember a modern urban culture like this world of tunnel diggers-and their families-in which lives seemed so constantly at risk.
“We were sixteen,” she said, wrapping the black coat around her. “It was about five or six months after her father got killed. She sort of spun out of control when that happened. Had to be like a second mother to the three boys and she was too young to deal with that. Bex liked her freedom.”
“What became of her?”
“My mother used to say she was a wild child. I’d get a beating if I skipped school and got caught. Bex just stopped caring, and there was nobody to rein her in. Hung out on the street, spent more time at my house than she did at her home. Then she got in with a crowd-older kids mostly-who used to stay out late at night in the park.”
“Which park?” Mike asked.
“Pelham Bay. The golf course was where they found her. Bunch of hoodlums used to practically live there, smoking and drinking, making trouble all night. She got in over her head with them. That day we sneaked downtown to Brendan’s wedding together? It was the last time I saw Bex Hassett alive.”
Trish was making her way to the door of the bar while Mike paid the tab.
“What happened to her? How’d she die?” I asked.
“Some-some animal tried to rape her, I guess. We came back from Manhattan and I remember we had a big argument on the train, her asking me all about how come my family wouldn’t go to the church, and how could Brendan do that to us-give us all up for some rich, fancy girl. Wanted me to run away with her ’cause her mother tried to get crazy strict with her after her father died,” Trish said. “Wasn’t any use by then. I don’t think she ever went home that night. Her brothers came to get me the next morning-we went everywhere looking for her.”
“She didn’t even go back to school that week?”
“Bex didn’t care about school,” Trish said, frowning, chewing her lip furiously again. “The very night she was killed she called the house.”
“What did she want?”
She met my eyes with hers. “I don’t know. My mother wouldn’t let her talk to me. Told Bex that I was already asleep and she’d give me the message. But Mama never told me about it until after the police found her body. I always thought I could have helped her, you know, the way kids do? Blamed myself for it. Thought that if she was looking for a place to stay or something, she wouldn’t have been murdered that night. I could have done something to save her if she hadn’t gotten so agitated, so-”
“That’s a heavy burden to live with, Trish,” I said. “Whatever happened to her wasn’t your fault.”
“She must have been very scared that night to call me. The last day we were together she did nothing but argue with me-was so spittin’ mad at me about my family and the wedding she didn’t call me or come over the whole week.”
“You were with her brothers when they found her?” I asked.
“No, ma’am. We went looking, I told you. It was cops who actually found her body, way out in the middle of the golf course. Those bastards choked her to death and left her body right there in the park. Over what? It had to be rape, ’cause there’s not much else she would have bothered to fight about. Strangulation-you wanted to know? That’s how Bex died. I still remember when the detectives came to the house to ask about her-when we had seen her last and such. They called it a soft kill, the way she died. Sounds like anything but that to me.”
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
