moved back to New York from Connecticut last year and didn’t even know Lisa was in town until we ran into each other about a month ago and exchanged phone numbers.”
“The other woman you had lunch with, Janet Hofer, did you know her the same way?”
“Yes, I did. In college. Janet and I kept in touch enough to exchange Christmas cards, photographs, that sort of thing. Then she called and told me she was coming in to the city for a jewelry convention and I suggested we have lunch with Lisa and talk about the old days.”
Quinn and Pearl glanced at each other. Jewelry. Like Leon and Lisa. “What kind of jewelry?” Pearl asked.
“Nothing expensive. Janet sells it part-time, sets up a booth at shows, holds jewelry parties, that kind of thing.”
“Paste?”
Abby looked at him, not understanding at first. “Oh! Yes, I suppose. Nothing with real stones in it, or real gold or silver, unless it’s plated. She and Lisa joked about that at lunch, how they had the high and low ends of the market covered. Not that Janet didn’t carry some very attractive items. I bought some from her.” She held up an arm on which dangled several gold hoops. “These bracelets.”
“Nice,” Pearl said. Pearl, who thought of bracelets as handcuffs.
“Did Lisa tell you anything that suggested she or her husband might be in any kind of danger?” Quinn asked. It was probably only a coincidence that both women dealt in different sorts of jewelry. And it wasn’t as if Janet Hofer had been murdered. Now, if any of the other victims had sold jewelry…
“No,” Abby said. “Lisa talked as if everything in her life was going well. She showed us pictures of her husband, her apartment-showed Janet, anyway, since I’d seen them when we’d run into each other last month. She seemed…oh, I would say, well, normal.” Twist, twist went the finger. Must hurt, Pearl thought.
“You never met Leon?” Quinn asked.
“Never. Just saw his photo. Nice-looking man, but older than Lisa. Not that that isn’t okay…with me. Especially since he seems-seemed-to be something of a romantic.”
“How so?” Quinn asked.
“Lisa said he’d been leaving her presents, but not letting on they were from him. Playing games with her, in fact. Sex, love, were all about games, she said.” Abby was looking away from Quinn and directly at Pearl. Woman to woman.
Pearl nodded. Lisa was right about that. She hadn’t known how right.
“What kinds of gifts?” Quinn asked, not letting on that he felt like grabbing Abby and shaking the information out of her.
“Oh, candy. A blouse she’d admired once when they were shopping together for something else. Caviar real recently. Lisa was wild about caviar. Myself, I just see it as fish eggs.”
Quinn didn’t recall seeing caviar or an empty caviar container in Lisa and Leon’s kitchen.
“Flowers-”
“What?” Pearl asked sharply.
Abby stared at her. “Flowers. Lisa said Leon had given her flowers. Not officially from him, of course. Like he was a secret admirer. Playing his romantic games.”
“What kind of flowers?”
“Roses, I think she said.”
“Yellow ones?” Quinn asked almost lazily, not wanting to lead her.
“They might have been yellow.”
Abby absently twisted her finger harder, then must have hurt herself, the way she looked down and stopped and folded her hands in her lap.
“Yellow. Uh-huh. In fact, I’m pretty sure she said they were yellow.”
Back down in the unmarked, Pearl started the engine and switched on the air conditioner while Quinn used the cell phone.
“I’m busy this morning,” Harley Renz said when Quinn had identified himself. “Everybody’s on my ass from the mayor to the guy who can’t get close enough to kiss the mayor’s ass. Say you got something for me, Quinn.”
“Stomach contents,” Quinn said.
“Jesus, I just ate. Talk plain.”
“Did the ME list the postmortem contents of Lisa Ide’s stomach?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Caviar?”
“Among other things. How’d you know?”
“I’m a detective. It’s my job to find out things. You told me that yourself.”
“About the caviar?”
“About finding out things.”
“Dammit, Quinn!”
Quinn waited.
“All right, all right, maybe I rag you too hard. It’s in me, and you sure as hell deserve it. What does this caviar mean, other than the late Lisa had a hoity-toity dinner before she died?”
“It means she really did love caviar and that she and Leon were definitely done by our guy. He left caviar in their apartment recently, somehow knew Lisa was crazy about it and made it one of his gifts to her. He also gave her yellow roses. This makes three out of four Night Prowler murders where yellow roses were or had been somewhere around.”
“Maybe the husband, Leon, really left her the gifts. He musta known she liked caviar, and he mighta given her the roses.”
“Not the husband.”
“Why not?”
“He and Lisa are dead.”
“Yeah. That might be convincing to a jury.”
Quinn related what else they’d learned from Abby Koop.
“So now we got our solid link,” Renz said, warming to the information and obviously pleased. “Think we should feed the information to the media? It’d take some pressure off me.”
“And put more on the Night Prowler,” Quinn said. He made a mental note to call Everson and give him a heads-up on the information Renz was going to give out. “Make sure the media know about the other anonymous gifts, too. I want this asshole to think we’re pounding at his heels.”
“Like you were last night?”
“How’d you find out about that?”
“I got a connection at the hospital who saw your name on the patient list and did some checking. But don’t worry about it, Quinn, my source won’t say anything if he doesn’t wanna go to prison for drug theft. And I’m not gonna pull you off this case. By the way, we recovered the bullets.”
“What bullets?”
“The ones that were fired at you last night on First Avenue. Thirty-two caliber. I sent somebody around to recover them and had ballistics run a quick, confidential test. In case we might wanna make a match in the future when he tries for you again, or maybe shoots somebody else.”
“But he’s still using a knife on his victims.”
“He won’t try to use one on you. He doesn’t wanna get close enough. And he almost got you last night. You mighta died from a heart attack, even though he missed you. You hear the shots?”
“No, but that’s not surprising. He fired from across the street-maybe even out a window-and there was a lot of traffic noise.”
“So he mighta used a silencer.”
“I suppose.” The silencer again. “But like I said, it was noisy on the street, and I took right after him. The people on the other side of the street might have heard a shot. I didn’t take time to ask.”
“I still say he’s using his silencer. Speaking of which, the only silencer of that model unaccounted for in our neck of the woods was bought three years ago by a Wilhelm Whitmire, eighty-nine years old, who lives on West Eighty-seventh. He said he decided last year he was too old and shaky to have guns around, so he sold all his.
