had on one of his cheap brown suits with the coat open and flapping. As he moved in his awkward gait, the coattails swung like pendulums, brushing and almost knocking over a pot of dead flowers on a rusty plant stand. He’d been talking to the super of the building next door, who’d discovered the body early this morning while searching for his runaway cat.
Quinn gave the okay to remove the body as long as the techs were finished with it, and then motioned for Fedderman to follow him back through the building and outside to the street. Pearl waited until Nift had finished packing up his instruments and was on his way out before joining them. As if she needed to stand guard over the dead woman to protect her from a necrophiliac. For years there had been whispered rumors about Nift.
Who’ll protect her in the morgue?
As she was leaving, Pearl hesitated, then bent over the distorted corpse and looked at the label in the panties. They weren’t an expensive brand, and were fairly new. She examined them more closely.
“So whadda we got?” Quinn asked Fedderman, when the three of them were standing out on the sidewalk.
Fedderman got out his leather-bound notepad, which he opened to the proper page and stared at as he spoke. “The super, a guy named Willy Fernandez, lives and has an office in the building next door. He’s also been hired to keep an eye on this building while it’s being rehabbed, and he has a key. His cat, Theo, took off and Fernandez had to go look for him. He saw Theo run into the next-door building with the door hanging open, so Fernandez let himself in and went looking for him. When he found Ann Spellman, he forgot all about Theo.”
“I’ll bet he did,” Pearl said. “He the one called it in?”
“Yeah.” Fedderman stuffed the notepad back in his pocket. “He’s watched enough cop shows on TV to know not to touch anything, so he went back to his apartment next door and called the police.”
“Not nine-one-one?” Quinn asked.
“No. He’d seen enough to know it wasn’t an emergency.”
“Where’s Fernandez now?”
“In his apartment in the building next door. I told him we might wanna talk to him again.”
“We do,” Quinn said.
Fedderman stayed around to watch the body being removed, while Quinn and Pearl left to go to the building next door and talk to Fernandez the super.
An ambulance with its siren off but its red and yellow lights flashing was already coming down the block toward them. Ann Spellman’s ride, picking its way through traffic. Fedderman could see the two paramedics behind reflections playing on the windshield.
He didn’t envy them their job.
20
T he foyer of the super’s building was the same as that of the one next door, with a stairway falling away toward the basement, as well as ascending to a landing and a stairwell running up the rear wall. The walls had just been painted a pale green and there was no graffiti. An elevator had been installed in this building, but it had a handwritten O UT OF ORDER sign taped to its door. Quinn didn’t mind, as he went ahead of Pearl down the steps and felt her lightly touching his shoulder as if for balance.
He pushed a button near a brass-lettered SUPER sign on the door, and it opened almost immediately. Fernandez had heard them descending the steps.
“I thought you’d be along soon,” Fernandez said, as Quinn and Pearl flashed their IDs. He had a slight Spanish accent. He raised dark eyebrows. “You are NYPD?”
“Working with them,” Quinn said.
“Closely?”
“Like lovers.”
Fernandez grinned and stepped aside so they could enter. He was a short, handsome man in his forties, with sharp features and only a few gray strands in his jet-black hair combed straight back. He was wearing a green work outfit, but it was easy to imagine him in a tailored European suit playing a sleek gigolo in a play or movie.
Quinn had expected a modest basement apartment, but this one was spacious and well furnished, with a large flat-screen TV on one wall. A green recliner faced the TV directly. There was a small table next to the recliner with a beer bottle sitting on a magazine so it wouldn’t leave a ring. Quinn could see a modern kitchen with white appliances beyond the living room.
“You live here alone?” he asked.
“I was with my wife until six months ago.” Fernandez motioned with his arm toward a stiff-looking leather or vinyl sofa. “You want to sit down?”
Quinn and Pearl both declined.
“You and your wife separated?” Pearl asked. Fernandez hadn’t struck a tragic note, so she assumed the wife hadn’t died. Maybe the couple was divorced.
“She ran away with an electrician.”
Pearl resisted asking him if it had come as a shock. She almost smiled.
Quinn, seeing something was going on with her, took over the conversation. “Did you know Ann Spellman?”
“The vic?”
Obviously Fernandez used his big TV to watch cop shows.
“The vic,” Quinn confirmed.
“I never saw her before but to glance at her,” Fernandez said.
A large gray cat entered the room, took brief notice of the presence of Quinn and Pearl, then ignored them. Quinn watched the cat effortlessly jump up onto a plush chair and curl into a ball, facing the other way.
“That Theo?” Quinn asked.
“The one and only,” Fernandez said. “He slipped out when I was opening the door to go check and see if I had mail in my box. I forgot to look earlier, and I got a Netflix coming. Lie to Me. You ever see that one?”
“Constantly,” Pearl said.
“So I go after Theo, up into the foyer, and damned if the street door wasn’t open a few inches, the way it sticks sometimes, and I saw Theo squeeze through and outside.”
“What time was this?” Quinn asked.
“About midnight.”
“You wanted to watch Lie to Me at midnight?”
Fernandez shrugged. “What else I got to do, with the wife gone? I sure as hell couldn’t get to sleep.”
“Thinking about her and the electrician,” Pearl said.
“You got it.”
“Did you notice anyone coming or going at the building next door?”
“Just Theo. When I went outside to try to get him and bring him back, I saw him go into the other building. Its street door was hanging wide open.”
“That was unusual?” Quinn asked.
“You bet. It might be an unoccupied building, but there’s stuff to steal in there. Raw lumber, copper plumbing, even tools the workmen leave behind. That’s why they hired me, to make sure nobody unauthorized came or went. The place is usually locked tight.”
“But not tonight,” Pearl said.
“No. The lock had been forced. Like somebody wedged a pry bar or something between the door and frame and leaned hard on it.”
“A large knife, maybe?” Quinn asked.
“Yeah, that’d do it. The screws just popped out of the old wood door frame, and the lock wasn’t worth diddly.”
“So Theo was inside,” Pearl said. She and Quinn could be a smooth team when it came to keeping someone
