Murder in Hell's Kitchen by Lee Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

she called an ambulance.”
    â€œAny other accidents after that one?”
    â€œNone, none at all.” The phone on his desk rang and he looked at it with distaste till it was answered elsewhere. “That’s a safe building, everything up to code.”
    â€œWas there a lawsuit over the Soderberg incident?”
    â€œNo, there wasn’t. It was simply an accident.”
    â€œI see,” Jane said. She flipped a page in her notebook. “Was Mr. Quill’s apartment occupied at the time Mr. Soderberg had his accident?”
    â€œIt wasn’t. His estate held on to it for a while.”
    â€œHis estate?”
    â€œI think there’s a mother somewhere. It took her some time to clean it out. She kept it for several months.”
    â€œWas anybody home when the accident happened?”
    â€œI don’t know. Mrs. Best had died. She was the very lovely lady who lived on the first floor. Mr. Worthman lived on two, across from Mr. Soderberg, but he went to work every day. He may not have come home yet. Miss Rawls was living on three when she found him. Mr. Hutchins was on four. I think he had irregular hours, but I couldn’t tell you any more than that. I wasn’t in the building very often.”
    â€œWhere can we find the super?” Defino asked.
    Stabile wrote something on a piece of notepaper and pushed it across the desk. “Derek lives down the block from that building in another one that I own. You can find him there.”
    Jane closed her notebook and Defino picked up on it. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Stabile. We may be contacting you again.”
    â€œAnytime,” the landlord said, smiling again. “Always at your service.”
    They walked back across Eighty-sixth Street to Broadway. The subway stop was at the corner, the number one Broadway line that ran in a straight line all the way from South Ferry at the foot of Manhattan to Two Hundred Forty-second Street near Van Cortlandt Park at the lower end of the Bronx. Jane had lived and occasionally nearly died on that line for more years than she could count.
    â€œYou live up here, don’t you?”
    â€œTwo blocks from here. I’ll have to get used to a whole new bunch of takeouts when I move.”
    â€œWhere’re you going?”
    â€œThe Village.”
    â€œThat’ll be a change.”
    â€œI’m looking forward to it.”
    â€œHow’d he strike you?”
    â€œNervous.”
    â€œHolding back?”
    â€œMaybe.”
    Defino looked at his watch. “Want to talk to the super?”
    â€œAbsolutely.”
    They took the train to Fifty-ninth and walked the same route Jane had walked last evening.
    â€œStill Hell’s Kitchen up here,” Defino said.
    â€œJust what I was thinking.”
    The building the super lived in was closer to Ninth than Quill’s building and looked identical to it. They found Derek, a pudgy black man with a scraggly beard and work clothes, in his ground-floor apartment.
    â€œYou the cops?” he said when he saw them.
    â€œMr. Stabile call you?” Defino asked.
    â€œYeah. Said you might come by. This about that murder a coupla years ago?”
    â€œMr. Quill. You remember that?”
    â€œMan, I can’t never forget it.”
    â€œI can believe it,” Jane said. “Must have been awful.”
    â€œYeah, it was. You wanna come in?”
    â€œSure.”
    The inside was a mess, a big room that had never seen a vacuum cleaner, never had anything thrown away or replaced.
    â€œYou can sit here, miss,” Derek said, removing a pile of nondescript items from a wooden chair and putting them on the floor. He offered Defino a chair from the kitchen and then he sat on a sofa with just enough uncluttered space for one man’s bottom.
    Jane introduced herself and started the questioning. “We heard there was a tragic accident in that building a few months after Mr. Quill was