Three-Day Town dk-17

by Margaret Maron

  (“They probably recommended her for promotion just to keep from choking on the sugar,” Hentz said when he realized that Sigrid was gritting her teeth.)

  Pictures on the captain’s wall showed versions of a tall, rawboned woman in varied attire through the years. There she was in her official police uniform at her swearing-in ceremony, and here she was wearing shirts with lettering across the chest and holding enormous bowling and softball trophies, several of which now stood on the shelves in her office. By the time of the latest picture, wherein the police commissioner shook Fortesque’s hand in congratulation while Mac looked on, the captain wore an artfully draped suit meant to disguise the extra pounds she was packing.

  She occasionally spoke wistfully of the softball and bowling teams she had played on and of the camaraderie such activities fostered. So far, she had not insisted that similar teams be formed here, but Sigrid lived in dread.

  Nevertheless, even though she could no longer run baselines or bowl strikes, their new captain seemed determined to encourage off-duty personal relationships among her squad leaders. Sigrid had been forced to attend more than one after-work session at the cop bar near their station so that the captain could offer a toast to someone’s birthday or to celebrate the confirmation, bar mitzvah, or graduation of a colleague’s child. Worse, Sigrid had been horrified to find herself the recipient of a fulsome toast on her own birthday the previous February and had already planned to be on vacation when her next one rolled around.

  “That woman needs a hobby,” she had muttered to an amused Sam Hentz.

  “Or a husband,” he had murmured back.

  “Muffins on me!” Captain Fortesque said, setting two fragrant boxes and a stack of napkins on the conference table in front of one of the squad heads. “Lieutenant Hess became the grandmother of twins Thursday night. A girl and a boy. Amanda and Jackson, right, Lieutenant?”

  “Annabelle and Jack, right,” Lieutenant Hess said, beaming proudly as she pulled the first muffin from the box. “Almost seven pounds each.”

  As the others murmured congratulations, Hess passed the boxes and napkins on down the table.

  “I’ve decided that bran muffins are healthier than our sugary doughnuts,” Fortesque said as the boxes made their way past Sigrid, who took a muffin and set it on the napkin before her. “Most of us could stand to cut back on the calories.” She patted her ample middle. “Not you, of course, Lieutenant Harald. In fact, you really ought to eat two. And start adding cream to your coffee.”

  Sigrid forced herself to smile and broke off a piece of the muffin. This was not the first time the captain had implied that she was too skinny. It would be futile to point out to the woman that one of these “healthy” muffins—rich and buttery and thickly studded with walnuts and raisins—probably packed more calories than two or three doughnuts. Instead, having skipped breakfast this morning, she took a second bite and opened her notes.

  Saturday night’s homicide put her at the top of the agenda, but did not keep her there. No sooner had she finished reporting the bare facts of Phil Lundigren’s death and what lines her squad were pursuing than Fortesque gave her a beneficent smile, said, “I’m sure you and your squad will do your usual superb job, Lieutenant,” then turned to Narcotics with happy anticipation.

  During yesterday’s snowfall, a Nissan sedan with a Florida license plate had crept cautiously up Eighth Avenue. Instead of going with the flow when the green light changed to yellow, the Nissan slammed on its brakes and a cab skidded into its rear end. It was the usual snow-related fender bender with no real damage to either car.

  Except that it sprung the lock on the Nissan trunk.

  A passing patrol car stopped to assess the situation, whereupon the driver of the Nissan and his passenger tried to flee. One thing led to another, as it so often does. After picking the driver up from the icy pavement where he had slipped and fallen, the officers asked for and received permission to look into the trunk even though it was standing wide open and they could see several clear plastic bags full of fresh green vegetable matter, which as they now knew had been harvested the night before over in a Bensonhurst basement and was then on its way to a packager and distribution point in Morningside Heights.

  “Eleven arrests so far and more to come,” Narcotics crowed. “The feds are very happy with us right now.”

  Captain Fortesque was moved to tell how aspects of this incident paralleled her own rise through the ranks. “If those two on the beat had driven on past without stopping, that stuff would soon be out on the streets. Good police work makes good opportunities.”

  And stupid criminals make good police work easy, Sigrid thought as she tried to match the respectful interest she saw on the faces of her colleagues. She wondered if any of them were also thinking, Who’s dumb enough to let a Floridian drive a valuable load of weed in a snowstorm?

  When they were dismissed and Sigrid returned to her own squad room, she was pleased to see progress.

  IAFIS had turned up a second shoplifting charge against Antoine Clarke only two years ago, and Vlad Ruzicka had been charged with an assault in what looked like a fistfight with someone in his neighborhood over a leaf-blowing incident last year. He had been fined and put on unsupervised probation. The others seemed to be as law-abiding as they claimed.

  Detective Tildon was already engrossed with cross-matching the guest lists. “I’ve eliminated eight names that left before nine o’clock and four that didn’t get there till after ten,” he said, a satisfied smile on his round face. “Another bunch claim not to have left 6-C from the time they arrived till after the body was discovered, and they can cite friends to back them up.”

  Although a husband and father first, Tillie loved the details and minutiae of police work, especially if they could be reduced to a list or a simple diagram. As a schoolboy, his orderly soul had found joy in diagramming compound-complex sentences or in working out complicated quadratic equations. Merging the many partial lists that the officers had collected from Luna DiSimone’s guests was a real treat for him.

  Yanitelli had made rough IDs for several of the fingerprints. “I’ve matched prints from the toilet seat with the first guy who said he went in. His and Mrs. Lundigren’s were the only prints in that front bathroom. Nothing but smudges in the master bath. Our Brit, the guy with the blue Mohawk? He left one clear thumbprint on the lower outer corner of the medicine cabinet mirror and a corresponding index print on the inside corner, so he probably had a look-see at the contents. Maybe after prescription drugs?”

  “Or an antacid,” Hentz said pessimistically as he took off his tailored charcoal jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. “He did imply that he was there longer than normal because he wasn’t feeling well. What about the French doors?”

  “Nothing usable from them, but we found Lundigren’s on that wooden cat. They overlapped his wife’s prints.”

  “That tallies with what the wife told us,” Sigrid said. “She admits taking the cat from DiSimone’s apartment and that she let Lundigren believe it came from 6-A. According to her, he went up that night not to check on the noisy party, but to return that cat.” She glanced over at Tillie. “Does anyone mention seeing the super go into 6-A?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “Lieutenant?” Elaine Albee had her hand over the mouthpiece of her desk phone. “Mrs. Wall on two.”

  Sigrid picked up the nearest phone. “Mrs. Wall? Lieutenant Harald here.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Lieutenant. I have emailed you the name of the elevator man that we let go—the one that Antoine Clarke replaced—but I thought perhaps I should speak to you personally.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re aware that Antoine left his post yesterday morning without any notice?”

  “Yes, we were told that.” Sigrid held up her hand for silence and pressed the phone’s speaker button so that the others could hear.

  “The thing is, his girlfriend’s called twice this morning,
” said Mrs. Wall. “She says Antoine never came home yesterday and he’s not answering his mobile. She’s worried that something’s happened to him.”

  “Give me her name and number,” Sigrid said, “and we’ll check into it. In the meantime, we still want to speak to your son Corey.”

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but he’s not due home from school until three.”

  By the time she hung up, the others had begun to connect the dots.

  “Antoine Clarke’s done a runner on us?” asked Yanitelli.

  “He was in the building Saturday evening,” said Lowry.

  “And we know that he has at least two Class A misdemeanors,” Albee chimed in.

  Hentz leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. Stainless steel links gleamed in the French cuffs of his crisp white shirt. “If he’s worked there two years, he’s probably had opportunity to acquire a few passkeys.”

  Tillie walked over to their whiteboard and began constructing one of his detailed timetables. At the top, he wrote, Time of Death—9:50–11 p.m. Saturday night.

  To one side he wrote, Employees in the Building, and in alphabetical order listed Antoine Clarke, Jani Horvath, Sidney Jackson, and Denise Lundigren as being there at the relevant time.

  “Jackson worked the elevator until eleven,” Sigrid said, “and everyone says people streamed in and out all evening.”

  Hentz went back to his notes. “Horvath said he slept till he relieved Jackson a little before eleven, which is when Jackson said he went home. You think Jackson would have had enough time to sneak back up and kill Lundigren before you and Judge Knott entered the apartment?”

  “Maybe,” Sigrid said slowly, “but Denise Lundigren says her husband called right before he left her to see if the Bryants were there. Tillie, contact the ones who admitted being in the apartment and ask if they heard the telephone ring around ten o’clock. It wouldn’t take him an hour to return the cat and no one seems to have seen him after he left his own apartment. Did a canvass of the building turn up anything?”

  “There are forty-five apartments,” Elaine Albee said, reading from a list compiled on Saturday night. “The uniforms say they knocked on every door. No responses from twenty-one, and eight of those twenty-one still didn’t answer the door when we tried them yesterday. At least half of those were out of town, according to their neighbors. The Rices in 7-A will be in with their lawyer today. The owner in 3-C told one of the officers that Lundigren fixed a leaky faucet in her kitchen around five-thirty. No one else admits to seeing or speaking to him after that.”

  “The wife says they watched television that evening and they had words about her taking things from various apartments,” Sigrid said. “So he leaves with the cat about ten.”

  Tillie added that to the neat timetable he was compiling.

  “Let’s say he lets himself in through the back door and surprises Antoine in the act of stealing those little gold-and-enamel boxes and the judge’s earrings. Antoine hands the earrings back, then picks up that chunky bronze piece and smashes Lundigren on the head. Lundigren goes down, Antoine tries to stash the body on the balcony but doesn’t quite get the door shut.”

  “Did he take that bronze with him or did someone else?” Lowry wondered aloud.

  “Both are possibilities.”

  “Horvath told us that Antoine was awake at nine-thirty but just going to bed at eleven when he got up to relieve Jackson early,” Hentz said, keeping his eye on the main ball. “So Clarke was around and awake all evening. And Vlad the Regaler did tell us that there was some animosity between Antoine and Lundigren, if that’s not another of his embellishments.”

  “Either way, we definitely need to find Antoine Clarke,” Sigrid said. “This doesn’t look like a premeditated murder to me, so maybe we’ll get a quick confession.”

  Dinah Urbanska tossed her empty coffee cup toward the nearest wastebasket. It missed and splashed its last few drops on Tillie’s shoe. Flushing, Urbanska apologized and said, “Um, Lieutenant? I was wondering. Nothing much has been said about it, but do you think Lundigren’s death had anything to do with the fact that she—I mean, that he’s a woman?”

  “What?” Tillie stared at her in surprise and Sigrid realized that he had not been with them when the ME relayed that information.

  “Sorry, Tillie. When Cohen had the super’s body on the table yesterday, he discovered that Lundigren had all the physical attributes of a female,” she said, and told him of Mrs. Lundigren’s insistence that it was a heterosexual marriage. “And to answer your question, Urbanska, if anyone at his apartment building suspected otherwise, we haven’t heard a whisper. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no reason to make things more uncomfortable for Mrs. Lundigren unless it becomes an obvious factor in this death.”

  She referred again to her notes. “Speaking of Mrs. Lundigren?”

  “I spoke to Dr. Penny,” Hentz said. “He’s going to send her home today with something to help her cope with her anxiety.”

  Jim Lowry looked up from his computer screen. “Here’s the information Mrs. Wall sent us about the elevator man that Lundigren recommended for firing. Want me to follow up on it?”

  Sigrid shook her head. “Let it ride for now. I’d prefer that you run the names of those guests with a known art background. See if any of them have priors. And, Tillie, let’s have a list of all the guests who can’t be alibied. We’ll finish up here, then go back after lunch and see if we can speak to the occupants of those eight apartments that weren’t home yesterday.”

  A uniformed officer appeared in the doorway. “Lieutenant? There’s a Mr. and Mrs. Rice here with their attorney. I put ’em in interview room A.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. Hentz?”

  The Rice attorney was urbane in a charcoal pinstripe suit. He introduced his clients, assured Sigrid and Hentz that they were more than happy to cooperate in this terrible tragedy, then took a seat beside them.

  In appearance, husband and wife were almost polar opposites. She was small and dark and impeccably dressed in a designer suit and thigh-high leather boots. He was big and blond and could have stepped out of a Lands’ End catalog—turtleneck beige sweater, brown corduroy pants, and hiking shoes.

  In temperament, however, they were mirror images—indignant to be here, irate at having to answer questions, indifferent to the death of a super they felt had thwarted their rights, and clearly irritated that this session necessitated their attorney, whose hourly fee would probably mean one less designer suit for Mrs. Rice.

  “I believe your interest in my clients relates to the death of the building’s superintendent?” asked the attorney.

  “That’s correct,” Sigrid said. “It seems that there was personal animosity toward him.”

  Both Rices started to argue and justify, but the attorney raised a restraining hand.

  “Whether or not what you say is true, am I correct in thinking you wish to know if they have an alibi for the pertinent time of the man’s death?”

  Mrs. Rice sneered and Mr. Rice huffed at the word “alibi.”

  “Correct,” Sigrid said. “Can they prove where they were between nine-thirty and, say, eleven?”

  “Certainly.” He drew a sheet of paper from his briefcase. “Here are the names and addresses of four people who dined with my clients from eight till ten-forty over on the East Side, as well as the doorman who let them in and out and who knows them by sight. I have included a photocopy of the receipt from their taxi. You will see that it is time-stamped eleven-oh-eight.”

  “Excellent,” Sigrid said. She passed the paper on to Hentz. “Thank you for coming.”

  “That’s it?” asked Mr. Rice. “That’s all you wanted to ask?”

  Mrs. Rice was similarly stunned. “We dragged our attorney here with us and this is all? Well, why didn’t those detectives tell us that? We could have saved a lot of time and money.”

  “I believe they tried,” Sigrid said coldly. “You refused to listen and tol
d them you had nothing to say.”

  “But we thought it had to do with our lawsuit.”

  “No.”

  “Damn!” said Mr. Rice, his beefy blond face turning an unhealthy red as he glared at their attorney.

  Mrs. Rice picked up her expensive leather purse and stood to go. “Living on the Upper West Side is like living among Bolsheviks. The sooner we move back to the East Side, the better.”

  When alone in her office, Sigrid dialed her grandmother’s number. Once more the soft-voiced woman answered. Sigrid identified herself and the woman immediately said, “I’m so sorry, Miss Harald. You just keep missing her. She asked me to apologize for not calling you back and to say she’s visiting a sick friend. I did tell her you had concerns about the package she sent your mother. She forgot that Mrs. McKinnon was away and she wants you to open it and do with it whatever you think is best.”

  “When do you expect her back, Ms…. I’m sorry, but I don’t know your name. Have we met?”

  “I’m Chloe Adams, Miss Harald. I met you when—” She broke off, then continued smoothly, “when you visited Miss Jane back when you were in high school and I was helping out here. That was years ago and I’m sure you won’t remember. Now, I’ll be sure and tell her you called.”

  “Wait!” Sigrid said sharply, but she was too late. Chloe Adams, whoever she was, had hung up.

  Chloe Adams. Chloe Adams? The name almost connected with a long-ago memory that she could not pin down. Troubled, she looked in her address book and dialed another 919 number.

  After five rings, Kate Bryant’s cheerful voice said, “You have almost reached the Bryants. Please leave a message.”

  Frustrated, Sigrid hung up.

  After a lifetime of dealing with her mother’s Southern speech patterns, she had learned that what a polite Southerner says is not always what a polite Southerner means. She mentally replayed her brief conversations with Ms. Adams until she finally pinpointed what it was about the woman’s words that had her puzzled.