“No, I’m still around,” he called, striding down the hall. He wore a white silk scarf around his neck now and had a heavy black overcoat draped over his arm. “Luna and her boyfriend said they would try to construct a guest list for you.”
“She doesn’t have the original?” asked Hentz.
“In case you haven’t realized it yet, Hentz, our Luna is a creature of impulse,” said Buntrock. “She decides to give a party, and two minutes later she’s scrolling through the numbers on her phone to text everyone she thinks might like to come to a beach party in January. Amazing how many of us are amused by her impulsiveness.”
“I didn’t find being accused of theft all that amusing,” I said. “And after making such a fuss about that cat, she went off and left it here.”
“Cat?” asked Detective Urbanska. She looked around as if expecting to see a real one emerge from behind a chair.
I lifted the brightly painted wooden cat from a nearby table. “This one. It was over there with those pillboxes. Luna said it was hers. Accused my husband and me of stealing it last night.”
“Now, now,” said Elliott. “She merely blurted out the first thing that came into her head to explain how it got here. She really doesn’t think you stole it.”
“No?” I was suddenly feeling cranky and tired of all these people and wished they would go away and leave Dwight and me alone. I was sorry that someone had died here. Phil Lundigren had seemed like a nice enough person and he probably didn’t deserve to be killed. All the same, it wasn’t as if he were someone we’d had any kind of a relationship with.
“Anyhow,” Buntrock said, “it’s just a cheap Mexican souvenir. Probably didn’t cost her ten bucks.”
“Let it go, shug,” Dwight said quietly. “Any of those guys who helped themselves to our facilities last night could have set it on that table.”
Sigrid held out her hand and I gave her the cat. No more than two inches tall and approximately four inches long from tail tip to nose, it was carved to look as if it were about to pounce. “It was over here, right?”
She carried it to the table halfway down the living room wall and set it down next to the two pillboxes. By lamplight the rich deep enamel had made them glow like jewels. By daylight, they were merely shiny and pretty.
“I can’t swear to it,” I said, “but I think there were at least five or six more of those little boxes there before the cat appeared.”
“Are they valuable?”
“I have no idea. I guess it depends on their age and who made them.” I lifted one and saw some indecipherable characters engraved on the bottom. “Anybody here read Chinese?”
“Is it important?” Elliott asked her.
Sigrid shrugged. “If they’re valuable and if someone wished to steal two or three, putting an equally colorful object in the middle of them might distract a casual eye from noting the loss.” She restored the figurine to its original position, and even though it really didn’t go with the exquisite little boxes, I realized it could indeed serve as a decoy.
Intrigued, Elliott Buntrock began to lift the boxes and hold them up high so he could study the markings on their bottoms. For some reason, he reminded me of a long-ago springtime on the farm when two of my brothers decided to raise chickens for a 4-H project.
“You ever sex biddies?” I asked.
His lips twitched. “What?”
“Baby chicks. You look at their bottoms to see whether they’re male or female so that you don’t wind up with too many roosters.”
“I grew up on the East Side,” he said dryly. “Not many baby chicks there. But this one’s got a hallmark on its little bottom. Probably gold, if I’m not mistaken. Could be worth a tidy sum.” He carried it over to the French doors to study it in better light.
“I don’t suppose you found a pillbox in the victim’s pocket?” Dwight asked as we moved back to the vestibule.
“Or my other earring?” I asked.
Sigrid shook her head. “Sorry.”
While we had been distracted by the Mexican cat and the pillboxes, Detective Hentz had stepped into the hall to answer his phone, and now he said to Sigrid, “Lowry and Albee are on their way down, Lieutenant.”
“Good.” She turned to Dwight. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, Major, that if anything about last night occurs to either of you—”
“No,” Dwight said. “You don’t. And we do have your number.”
“Oh wait!” I cried. “When I pulled all the bubble wrap out of the box that Mrs. Lattimore sent, we found an envelope.”
I darted into the dining room and retrieved the envelope we’d left on the table beside the magazine pages. When Elliott realized what was happening, he hastily set the box back on the table and joined us.
To my disappointment, Sigrid merely turned the envelope in her hand, then put it and the magazine article in the pocket of her white parka.
“Come on, Sigrid,” Elliott complained. “Aren’t you going to tell us what she said?”
“It’s not addressed to me,” she said coolly. “Shall we go see how Miss DiSimone’s getting on with her guest list?”
Okay, I had wanted them to clear out and leave Dwight and me alone, but it was frustrating not to know what was in Mrs. Lattimore’s letter.
Elliott slipped on his jacket and gathered up his overcoat. “Thanks again for sheltering me from the storm. If you’re free one night, perhaps you’ll let me treat you to dinner?”
“That would be great,” I said before Dwight could say no.
We exchanged phone numbers, and when everyone was gone, Dwight shook his head in amusement. “You don’t fool me, honey. You’re hoping he’ll find out what Mrs. Lattimore wrote.”
“Aren’t you at all curious, too?”
“Maybe, but I’m more patient. Besides—” He took a business card from his pocket and flourished it. “Detective Hentz gave me his card. He’s playing at that jazz club down in the Village tomorrow night. I thought perhaps we could buy him a drink.”
CHAPTER
11
There is the reach for happiness—the attempt to gain it by and through possessions.
—The New New York, 1909
SIGRID HARALD—SUNDAY (CONTINUED)
Last night, apartment 6-C had seemed as packed with festive beachcombers as a Hamptons jitney on an August weekend. Today, through the open front door, it looked more like Coney Island on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Plastic wineglasses and half-empty drink cups littered the surfaces. Bits of food had been ground into the planks of the floor and the colored toothpicks that had held tasty morsels were scattered everywhere. Several black plastic trash bags were heaped in the middle of the oversized living room. One was stuffed and already tied shut. Luna was still adding to the other three: wine and liquor bottles in one, aluminum cans in another, while a fourth bag almost overflowed with food-smeared plastic plates, napkins, and other party detritus.
With dainty fingers and an expression of distaste on her pretty face, Luna DiSimone lifted a napkin filled with olive pits by the edges and dropped it into that trash bag.
“Miss DiSimone?” Sigrid said as they paused in the doorway.
“Yes?” She brushed a tress of long blonde hair back from her face and her frown turned instantly to sunshine. “Are you the police Elliott said wanted to talk to us?”
“I’m Lieutenant Harald and these are Detectives Hentz and Urbanska,” she said, “and yes, we did want to speak to you. And to Mr. Marclay, too?”
Sigrid cast an inquiring eye in the direction of the stocky man wearing a flat cap and received a sour nod. She had given the guest list sheets a quick scan on the drive over. Nicco Marclay’s name had appeared so often throughout the evening, she was fairly certain he could not have left the party during the relevant time.
“Excuse the mess and come on in,” said Luna DiSimone. “I had a party last night and the caterers stiffed me on the cleanup part.”
“Didn’t I see you here last night?�
�� Marclay asked.
“Yes,” Sigrid said, surprised that he would have noticed her amid so many.
“Charlie Rathmann said something that ticked you off and—hey, wait a minute! Lieutenant Harald? You’re Sigrid Harald, aren’t you? You and Oscar Nauman?”
Sigrid gave a tight nod.
“Well, I’ll be damned! You really are a police detective. I thought that was some gallery hype to make you seem more mysterious. Why the interest in which art people were here last night?”
“That isn’t something I can talk about right now,” she said.
Elliott Buntrock hesitated in the open doorway. From the neutral look Sigrid gave him, he realized that he was not supposed to mention the missing maquette. He entered without speaking and sat down on a green Adirondack chair. If he was going to have to mark names on a list, the chair’s broad flat armrest would act as a desktop.
Sam Hentz explained what they wanted from the two men while Urbanska huddled with Luna DiSimone to go through the contact list on her phone and text the pertinent names over to their computer back at the station.
“You won’t tell anyone where you got their info, will you?” the actress asked. “Some of these numbers have never been public.”
“We’ll destroy them as soon as the case is closed,” Sigrid promised. “And we may not have to contact all of them.”
Leaving the others to labor over the lists, she and Hentz walked out into the hall to meet Lowry and Albee as they stepped off the elevator.
“Learn anything?” Sam Hentz asked.
“Mrs. Wall gave us Lundigren’s personnel file,” said Lowry. “Mrs. Lundigren was with him and he was passing as male when he was hired nineteen years ago. Before that, he worked as a janitor over on Amsterdam and West Ninety-First. He listed his mother in New Hampshire as next of kin, but she’s dead now.”
“Was she aware that he had any issues with anyone?”
“Other than a nutty wife? No, ma’am. According to Mrs. Wall, everyone loved him.”
Hentz groaned. “And how many times have we heard that?”
Lowry grinned, then reported that the building employed seven men in addition to the usual service providers. Referring to the list Mrs. Wall had provided, he ticked them off on his fingers: “Lundigren was the super, of course, then two porters and four guys that handle the door and elevator twenty-four/seven. It’s like a little UN here—Jamaica, Croatia, Hungary, you name it, they got it.”
Typical New York, thought Sigrid. “Hentz and I will go over to the hospital and talk to Mrs. Lundigren. While those three finish IDing any guests with an art background, you and Albee can start questioning the employees.”
She gestured to the third apartment on this floor. “That door was open to the party last night, so talk to them first. Ask if they expanded DiSimone’s guest list to any art people. I gather that she doesn’t have a firm handle on who she invited, much less who actually came.”
When Sigrid reentered Luna DiSimone’s apartment, she found Urbanska questioning the actress about the dynamics of the building and how well the Lundigrens got along with the owners and the other employees.
“I honestly can’t say. He was darling to me, but I’ve only lived here about two years. It took me forever to convince my mom that this wasn’t the back side of the moon. She really didn’t want me to move so far away from her.”
“Where’s home?” asked Urbanska, who still had moments of homesickness for South Jersey.
“Over in the East Sixties.”
Suppressing a smile, Sigrid saw that Elliott had finished annotating his list and told him that she and Hentz were headed downtown.
“Can we drop you?”
“Sure,” he said, reaching for his overcoat.
When they got outside, the snow had finally stopped falling for the moment. The windshield and back window of the car were covered in white, but it brushed away easily. Traffic was still light and Hentz executed a U-turn that headed them in the right direction. On the way, Sigrid read aloud the names that Elliott had checked off and he elucidated each.
“Mischa Costenbader? He runs the gallery that exhibits Nicco Marclay. I saw him when I first arrived, but he can’t stand Rathmann, so he didn’t come over once Rathmann collared me. Would he take a Streichert maquette if he could get away with it? In a heartbeat. Orton owns a gallery in NoHo that’s two cuts above Costenbader’s. Marclay may be trying to get taken on there. I’ve never heard much negative about him except from artists that he won’t give a show to. Rathmann you met, of course. Wishes he were a bigger name as an art critic, but who doesn’t? I got to the party at nine-thirty and he was already there buzzing around Orton and me till you arrived. Kenneth Burtch? He’s starting to make it as a fashionable portrait painter. He’s done the mayor and one of the Kennedy women and a Rockefeller, too, if I’m not mistaken. You’ve got him on the guest list, but I didn’t see him. I did see Cameron Broughton, though. He’s one of those professional Southerners whose accent gets stronger the longer he’s out of the South. I’m not sure how he makes his living, but he talks knowledgeably about antiques and the decorative arts. He might not know what a Streichert maquette was, but he’d probably recognize that it wasn’t something off eBay.”
“And would he stick it in his pocket if no one was watching?” Sigrid asked.
Buntrock cocked his head and looked out the window to orient himself by the passing street signs. “Sorry. I don’t know him well enough to say. You can let me off at the next corner, Hentz.”
“You got it,” Hentz said as he stopped for a red light.
Buntrock fastened the top button of his coat and began winding his scarf around his neck in preparation for facing the bitter winds that whipped through the unplowed cross streets. “When’s your next gig at Smalls?”
“Tomorrow night, as a matter of fact.” He pulled in as close to the curb as possible. “Here okay?”
“Fine. Thanks for the lift. See you at the Arnheim reception next week, Sigrid?”
“I haven’t decided,” she said.
“I’ll call you,” he told her, opening the door. Two strides of his long legs and he was over the snowbank and onto the sidewalk. Without looking back, he gave a high wave of his hand as he walked away.
Hentz forgot to flick his turn signal when he pulled back into traffic, and an annoyed limo driver gave him a horn blast and the finger as he swerved around their car.
At the hospital, they inquired at the desk for directions to Denise Lundigren’s room. Once on the proper floor, Sigrid asked for her doctor and was told that he expected them. “He’ll be finished with rounds in about ten minutes,” a nurse said, “but I’ll let him know you’re here.”
By now it was well after twelve, so Sigrid excused herself and walked down to the end of a quiet hall to call her grandmother.
The same soft voice as before answered the phone. “I’m so sorry, Miss Harald. Mrs. Lattimore said for me to apologize when you called. She said to tell you that she was invited to Sunday dinner with another friend out in the country and that she’ll try to call you tomorrow, unless you want to leave a message…?”
“If you would, tell her it’s about the package she sent my mother and—Oh, never mind. I’ll talk to her tomorrow,” Sigrid said and hung up feeling unsatisfied and slightly uneasy.
For better or worse, that maquette was involved in Phil Lundigren’s murder, so niceties be damned. She pulled Mrs. Lattimore’s letter from her purse and worked her fingernails up under the flap until it pulled loose.
My dear Anne,
I’ve spent these past few months sorting through the house, ridding myself of decades of mindless stuff. I’ve labeled the items I’ve heard one of you girls admire or that I think you or one of your own children might like. As for this disgusting object, I had completely forgotten that it was locked in an old suitcase up in the attic until my Smithsonian magazine arrived before Christmas. How I acquired it is not important. What is important is that it be
returned to the sculptor’s family—perhaps to the granddaughter who gave the interview?—and that the return be managed discreetly without my name coming into it. Surely you or Sigrid must know someone in the art world who can be trusted to do this? The first time I saw it, I realized that it was a piece of racist vulgarity. Nevertheless it is probably a valuable piece of racist vulgarity and not mine to destroy or keep.
Mother
Puzzling as it might be not to learn how her grandmother wound up with something she found disgusting at first sight, Sigrid knew it would be pointless to ask if she had decided not to tell. Maybe when Anne came home? Her mother and grandmother spoke the same language, a language that could charm confessional secrets from a priest, and one that Sigrid had never mastered. Yes, let her mother deal with it, she decided.
Down by the nurses’ station, a short fat white-haired man had approached Hentz, who immediately signaled to her.
When she joined them, he held out his pudgy hand. It was like shaking hands with marshmallows. “Dr. Penny, Lieutenant. I believe you wanted to speak to me about Mrs. Lundigren?”
“Is there someplace we can talk privately?” Sigrid asked.
He led them to a small room down the hall that held a couch and two armchairs. Although Sigrid and Hentz remained standing, he took the farther chair and said, “I’m sure you realize that Mrs. Lundigren is not one of my regular patients, so I don’t have her whole history. Even if I did, I could not discuss the particulars of her case.”
“We understand that, Doctor. We only want your professional opinion. Is she stable enough to answer questions?”
“As long as you don’t get too close physically or try to force her to make eye contact.” He glanced at his watch. “I think I’ve established a bit of trust, and if you can make it brief, I’ll stay in the room if you like.”
He rose, but Sigrid lifted a hand to keep him from leaving. “Something you need to know, Doctor. Mrs. Lundigren’s husband was murdered last night.”
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