Chapter 28: Evidence Bag - Lucidity

“LOVED THE QUIET INTENSITY,” FREMMER SAID WHEN THEY GOT back out on the street.

“The what?”

“You got that whole Clint Eastwood thing going. I gotta say I didn’t see it coming. I should’ve, but I didn’t.”

Madden took the compliment in stride. “That stuff you said about Zander, was it real?” he asked.

“Did it sound real?”

“You had me going.”

“Well, the truth is …” Fremmer started to say, but something had distracted him.

Madden looked ahead and saw a woman, maybe early thirties, maybe a bit older, in a short black sleeveless dress coming toward them.

The woman said hello to Fremmer, and they stopped.

“Hey you,” she said, then kissed him on the side of the cheek. “Were you on vacation? They had a sub teaching your class this week.”

“I’m off the schedule for now,” he replied.

“What? Why?”

“Talk to the manager. Put in a good word, would you?”

“Are you kidding me? I can’t believe they did that. To you of all people. What happened?”

“Long story.”

“I’ll totally talk to the manager. And my friend Amy will, too. She loves your class.”

“Thank you. And thank Amy,” Fremmer said, and with a slight nod of his head he and Madden started walking together again.

“The key is fully believing what you say as you say it,” he went on as if their conversation had never been interrupted. “The truth is my friend Carlos did hire an investigator who’s trying to determine exactly where Ronald was that morning. Too bad he didn’t carry a cell phone. That would have made it easy to track him. But we’re basically left with any video we can get a hold of. And the cops are out in front on that. They’ve already collected footage from the same locations the investigator’s going to. It’s easy for them to get it. People want to cooperate with the police.”

“They haven’t turned it over yet?”

“The DA’s office is taking its sweet time because it can. But now that the judge has ruled Ronald’s fit to stand trial, they’ll have to turn over what they’ve got pretty quickly.”

“And the meeting with Zander?”

“Didn’t happen yet,” Fremmer said. “Drew Masters tried to make an appointment earlier today but couldn’t get one ’til tomorrow afternoon.”

“So where’d you come up with the stuff about the postcards?”

“From his website. And Yelp. He’s got about fifty reviews, most of them quite positive. Of course, you never know who wrote them.”

This Fremmer guy was strange, but he had a quick mind. Madden was impressed. He still didn’t fully grasp the whole story, had yet to learn all the players and the roles they played. He knew all about Fremmer’s connection to the victim, of course, and Fremmer had explained his conversation with Ronald in the holding cell well enough. What Madden didn’t quite understand was why Fremmer got involved in Ronald’s defense in the first place.

“You saw her reaction to your Zander theory,” Madden said. “There was something there. Did you just come up with that?”

“About Zander trading places with Ronald?”

“Yeah.”

“Look,” Fremmer said, “I can see four possible scenarios. One, Ronald had one of his Looney Tunes moments and pushed her. Two, someone paid Ronald to push her. Three, he actually knew her and pushed her for some unknown reason. And four, someone who looked like Ronald pushed her. If the latter’s the case we’re looking at a premeditated situation and the question becomes, what’s the motive? I can think of a lot of possibilities. The ex-husband is out the picture, he died over five years ago. But I suppose it’s possible she could have rubbed one of these guys she gave handjobs to the wrong way. Pardon the pun.”

“Handjobs?”

“Oh, did I neglect to mention that? She had this thing where she’d surreptitiously jack off guys in Apple stores. Research for her books. She’d cover up the action with a backpack or a coat. She put an ad on Craigslist and found plenty of willing participants. The books were fiction, but they were based on a lot of truth. Remember the book Looking for Mr. Goodbar? Her stories reminded me of that, minus the rough sex.”

A little bell went off in Madden’s head. He remembered hearing something about an accident and an author that wrote books about a woman who gave handjobs to strangers in Apple stores. Did he read about it or did someone tell him? Maybe it was his wife. That would explain why he’d half tuned it out. She was always sending links to articles she’d found about strange crimes. The online version of the Chronicle seemed to feature some bizarro story every day. Clickbait, they called it.

“I do remember that book,” he said. “Roseann Quinn. That was the name of the real murder victim, the one the book was based on. She had polio as a kid, walked with a slight limp. I’ll never forget someone telling me that.”

“She lived a couple of blocks from here on 72nd Street on the other side of Broadway. The bar was across the street from her apartment. I forget what it was called then. I knew it as the All State Cafe. Used to go there all the time. It’s something else now.”

The memory of Quinn took Madden back. When was it that he’d heard about her? Was it college? No, it was after that.

“Anyway, you did great back there,” Fremmer said. “I think we got under her skin. I bet she called Braden the second we left.”

Madden would have liked to do the leave-the-cell-phone-recording routine with Isabelle, but she seemed pretty tuned into the possibility that one of them might be trying to record her—probably because she also used her phone as a weapon.

“Why didn’t we go see him first?” he asked.

“Mainly because I didn’t want to show up too late at her apartment. But I think it works better this way. If she called him after we left, he may not be so surprised we’ve come to see him, too. If he isn’t so surprised, he may be more likely to let us in.”

Madden didn’t necessarily agree with Fremmer’s logic, but he knew that on this case, for now anyway, he was along for the ride.

They walked two long blocks along 73rd Street to Amsterdam Avenue, then turned right and headed north. In the middle of the block, Fremmer stepped off the sidewalk into the street.

“It’s a perfect evening for a stroll,” he said, raising his right arm. “But Braden’s place is twenty-five blocks uptown. We’ll take a cab.”

Madden studied the Maps app on his phone so he had some idea of the city’s layout. And he’d read enough books and articles about the city to have a semblance of familiarity with some of its streets and neighborhoods. He knew he was on the Upper West Side near Central Park, but his overall ignorance about the place put him way out of his comfort zone. Too many impressions he had of the city were formed from movies he’d watched as a young man, when it was far grittier. Of course, he’d seen plenty of more recent shots of the city. It seemed like every other movie and TV show was made in New York, with the city playing a major role, so he knew it had changed drastically. Yet some of those early impressions were indelibly etched into his memory, clashing with the tamer version of the city he now experienced. It was a little like expecting to go on a safari in Africa and ending up at the San Diego Zoo instead.

More than anything he was struck by the number of people out on the streets. And how everyone seemed so collegial. It was almost ten on a Tuesday night and there were people everywhere, sitting outside at restaurants, strolling along the sidewalks, even grocery shopping. Palo Alto and San Francisco were bustling on Friday and Saturday nights, but they tended to empty out fairly quickly on weeknights, particularly earlier in the week. Back in his younger days he sometimes felt a little uneasy walking around the city late at night without his gun.

He felt much safer here.

And the other thing that stood out was the number of people out walking their dogs. That surprised him. All the dogs. This had to be prime dog walking time.

“They film Taxi Driver around here?” Madden asked as they got into a cab.

“Not here so much. The campaign office was down on Columbus Circle. But they shot Three Days of the Condor a couple blocks over on Broadway. The alleyway where Redford gets shot? That’s now a really expensive garage behind the Ansonia on 73rd and Broadway. And then he runs up Broadway past the Beacon. You remember that?”

“Vaguely,” Madden said. “I remember the movie but not the scene.”

“Well, you can watch it on your phone when you get back to your hotel. You tired?”

“I’m OK. It’s only seven for me.”

“Good. So, this is the plan.”

“There’s a plan this time? I didn’t know you did plans.”

“I do a plan when the plan calls for a plan.”

“Well, let’s hear it then.”

“We get Braden to drink something and then we take whatever he drank from.”

Fremmer pulled a couple of large Ziploc bags from his backpack. They were folded down into a smaller rectangle.

“One for you,” Fremmer said as he handed one to Madden, “and one for me.”

“That’s the plan?”

“Yeah, you check him out, then we get a DNA sample. A fingerprint or two wouldn’t be bad either.”

“What about the fifty thousand?”

“We’ll deal with that as we go along. But I somehow doubt we’re going to leave there with that, not without someone putting a gun to his head. But a cup we can do. He likes herbal tea.”

“What if he isn’t there? Or doesn’t want to let us in.”

“I don’t know. That’s not part of the plan.”

“Well, do you have a contingency plan?”

“I do,” Fremmer said. “But you don’t want to hear it.”