Take Out

by Margaret Maron

  “He was here?”

  She nodded.

  “How did you know him?”

  “It was years ago.” The soprano’s voice softened and deepened with nostalgia. “He worked backstage on the lighting crew at the Met for a while, then moved on to Broadway. Lovely man. Very handsome.” She looked down at the picture. “Of course, he had a full head of brown hair back then and a smile that could melt your heart.”

  “Did he melt your heart?” Hentz asked.

  She dimpled. “You’ll have to read my book, Detective. In fact, that’s how we reconnected. I’m not sure how he found my number, but he phoned on Tuesday morning. He’d heard that I was writing my bio and he asked my assistant if he could bring over the program from that night. It had the insert that explained how I was to go on in Marta Constanza’s place. Of course I said yes as soon as Marian told me. That pile on the end.” She gestured to papers on the other side of Hentz. “I think that’s where Marian put it. Such a surprise to see it after all these years. Inserts usually get thrown away quicker than the programs themselves.”

  Hentz found the insert and handed it to Sigrid. “What time was that?”

  “Marian told him six o’clock and he was here on the dot.”

  “Did you give him food?” Sigrid asked.

  “Food?”

  “You said you didn’t send any food down to that bench on Tuesday, but on Wednesday morning, there was a takeout box for lasagna that we can’t account for. Do you know anything about that?”

  Randolph looked embarrassed. “You’re going to think I’m an awful snob, Lieutenant. I had made reservations at the Red Chameleon, but when he turned up here in those clothes? Looking like a tramp? It was clear that he had come down in the world, so I insisted that he take some money in return for bringing me that program. I let him think that the insert made it rare and collectible. We had a few martinis and talked about old times for maybe another hour, then I’m afraid I lied some more and said friends were picking me up for a dinner engagement. He said he’d skipped lunch and had thought I might give him dinner. The children had brought me lasagna the night before and it was still in the refrigerator untouched. I said I hoped he wouldn’t be insulted and he assured me he wasn’t. Then he took it and left, a bit unsteady on his feet, I’m afraid. He was the one who had mixed the drinks and I wasn’t too steady on my own feet after two or three of them. I wonder if that’s why he stopped at that bench?”

  “The children?”

  “My sister’s granddaughter and my third husband’s son. Or was Ray the fourth?” Her rueful laugh was so contagious that even Sigrid smiled. “No, I’m positive he was third. Cameron was fourth.”

  “Their names, please?”

  “Grace Landers and Ferguson…” She frowned. “Do you know, I can’t remember Ferguson’s first name. I’ve always just called him Ferguson. When you get to be my age, you start losing nouns. Names especially. Would you hand me my address book, please? It’s that fat red one.”

  Moments later, she looked up in triumph. “Abner! Abner Ferguson. Such an ugly name, Abner. No wonder I keep forgetting it.”

  She read out their contact information for Hentz to jot down, then said, “No one’s told me how Jack died. Was he shot? Stabbed?”

  “No, he was poisoned,” Sigrid told her.

  “Poisoned! How?”

  “He shared your lasagna with the other man and both died.”

  “There was poison in my lasagna? How did it get there?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to ascertain,” said Hentz.

  She looked up at them, her blue eyes wide with puzzlement. “So if I had eaten it—?”

  “Who else had access to it?”

  “The restaurant, of course,” she said slowly. “My niece and stepson. Marian, perhaps, but not Selma. She wasn’t here Tuesday night. But it’s absurd to think that Ferguson or Grace would— No! I can’t believe it.”

  “We’ll be contacting them, but in the meantime, we’ll need your fingerprints, too. For elimination purposes.”

  Charlotte Randolph sat in silent thought as Hentz took her prints. When he was finished and she had wiped her fingers clean, she said, “The other man who died? Who was he? Where did his food come from?”

  “The DelVecchio house,” Sigrid said. “Do you know Mrs. DelVecchio?”

  “We’ve been neighbors for more than forty years, so of course I’ve met her. Her daughter, too.”

  “What about her husband?”

  “Benito DelVecchio? Oh yes, I met him several times. He could be quite charming. And of course, he loved opera. Almost a cliché, isn’t it? An Italian gangster with season tickets to the Met? He used to come down and ask me to sign his programs.” That dimple flashed again in her cheek as she confided, “I don’t think his wife approved.”

  “Do you take any medication for your heart, Miss Randolph?”

  “How did you know? Or do you just assume every old woman has a heart condition?”

  “It’s not uncommon,” Hentz said in a tone that implied that she would never be old in his eyes. “Coumadin?”

  She gave a graceful shrug. “I’ve taken it for almost ten years. For my a-fib. Is that what killed him? But how?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out. Would you show us your bottle?”

  “My bottle?” Her blue eyes widened. “Are you accusing my niece or my stepson of trying to poison me?”

  “It’s just standard procedure,” said Hentz, but Charlotte Randolph shook her head and she seemed distressed and apologetic as she rose from her chair.

  “I’m so sorry, Lieutenant Harald, but I must ask you both to leave. I really don’t think I should talk to you anymore without my attorney here.”

  When they were gone, Charlotte went up to her bedroom on the next floor where she unlocked the top drawer of a tall chest and pushed aside several bundles of love letters, each tied with a different colored ribbon. Red for the senator, blue for the governor, green for the millionaire who had wanted to marry her and take her to Wisconsin, black for the tenor who would have left his very rich wife for her. Briefly she wondered if men still sent love letters on paper through the post office or was it all now as ephemeral as electronic bytes that disappeared with the click of a button? She had touched on her husbands and most of the men in her book, tastefully and discreetly with just enough details to spice up their chapters in her life. Only one lover had been kept shrouded in secrecy.

  But now that Jack was dead?

  Underneath the bundled letters was a flat metal box, its tiny key kept hidden behind the mirror of her dressing table. She unlocked the box, lifted the lid, and chose a letter at random.

  Like all the others in this box, it began “Cara mia…”

  As long as they were in the neighborhood, Sigrid and Hentz tried the diner again. This time, the waiter who had seen Jack Bloss last Tuesday afternoon was there, but he had nothing new to add, although it did match Charlotte Randolph’s account of when Bloss had arrived at her house.

  “Like I said, he came in around five-fifteen, five-thirty, ordered a cup of coffee and sat at that table by the window for at least a half hour. Next time I looked over, he was gone. Left his money on the table. Me and the counterman were the only ones working the front and he didn’t see the guy leave neither.”

  As they headed back to the station, Sigrid said, “If Tillie’s turned up an address for Bloss, maybe those keys will work, so get a search warrant and check it out.”

  Up on Madison Avenue, the intercom on Marcus Livingston’s desk buzzed and Mrs. Bayles’s disembodied voice said, “Dr. Bohr’s on line one.”

  Her employer laid aside the dull brief he’d been reading and picked up the receiver. “Dr. Bohr? Marcus Livingston here. Any success?”

  “You got lucky, Mr. Livingston. I’ve located some tissue at a lab in Rochester. Another three days and it would have been incinerated. They’re expressing it to my lab and I should have it tomorrow morning, so if
you’ll send along the person you’re trying to match, I’ll take a swab and get right on it.”

  “How long before we know the results?”

  “No more than seventy-two hours. In fact, if they’re nowhere near a match, it’ll be even quicker. In any event, I’ll put a rush on it.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. I’m very grateful.”

  A dry chuckle came across the line. “Let’s hope you feel the same when you get my bill.”

  They agreed on a time and the address and Livingston gave the information to Mrs. Bayles, who immediately called Vincent Haas at his East Side hotel.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Sam Hentz and Dinah Urbanska arrived at the address Tillie had given them to find that Jack Bloss’s apartment was on the fourth floor.

  No elevator.

  One of the two keys they’d taken from the victim’s pocket opened the street door and as he followed Urbanska up the stairs, Hentz wondered how an old man with a pacemaker had made it up and down so many steps every day. The rookie detective was barely breathing hard but pride alone kept Hentz from huffing and puffing as he joined her on the final landing.

  Gonna have to hit the gym harder, he told himself as he turned the victim’s second key in the lock of apartment 4-C.

  A kitchenette lay directly in front of the door with a living room to the left and a bedroom and bath to the right. The only windows were two in the living room that looked out onto the hodgepodge of narrow storefronts that cluttered Tenth Avenue. Hanging between the windows was a birdcage. The apartment was furnished in what Hentz thought of as “old single male”—utilitarian and comfortable enough, but with little to soften the edges.

  “Oh no!” said Urbanska, who had gone straight to the birdcage. “It’s dead, Sam.”

  She gazed mournfully at the body of a blue parakeet that lay motionless on the floor of the cage. “The seed cup’s empty and the water bottle’s dry. Poor little thing! They can’t go without food and water for more than two or three days and if Bloss didn’t fill them up before he left here Tuesday…”

  “Too bad,” said Hentz, but his eyes were busily taking inventory of the apartment.

  The kitchenette was essentially a single counter with a cooktop, sink, and microwave and it held a bare minimum of equipment—two saucepans and a skillet, a toaster, some mismatched china, and a few pieces of tableware. The refrigerator was empty except for seltzer, a bottle of vodka with perhaps two shots left, a head of lettuce, a plastic container of deli olives, salad dressing, and a desiccated lime with one slice missing. In the cupboard were a can of tomato soup, two cans of sardines, a box of egg noodles, a jar of instant coffee, and some packets of saltines.

  “No wonder he stopped to eat that takeout Charlotte Randolph gave him,” said Hentz, looking over Urbanska’s shoulder at the bare shelves.

  A dirty coffee mug sat in the sink, but everything else was clean and tidy.

  “He drank his coffee black and I don’t see any sugar,” Urbanska said. “He could have really been hungry.”

  In the bedroom, a sofa bed with a double mattress appeared to be permanently open and a small TV sat atop the dresser. A Fresnel light aimed at the ceiling served as a bedside lamp and when Urbanska walked over to turn it on, her foot tangled in an extension cord and almost pulled the television off the dresser. Only Hentz’s quick reflexes saved it from crashing to the floor.

  “Oh, jeepers!” she cried. “I’m sorry, Sam.”

  Accustomed to her clumsiness, he just smiled and switched on the light, which bounced off the white ceiling and lit up the windowless room.

  “Start with the dresser,” Hentz said, and while she began on the dead man’s socks and underwear, he stepped into the bathroom.

  The medicine cabinet held the usual assortment of over-the-counter grooming aids and pain remedies and an orange plastic bottle of prescription pills.

  “Coumadin,” he said, dropping it into an evidence bag.

  A pair of scissors lay in the sink along with some stray gray hairs.

  “Looks as if he might have trimmed his beard before he left,” said Urbanska.

  “Probably wanted to look nice for his old girlfriend,” Hentz said.

  “Charlotte Randolph?”

  “Yeah. She all but told the lieutenant and me that she and Bloss might’ve had a roll or two in the hay back when they were younger.”

  “They had an affair, yet she didn’t recognize his picture?”

  “Not the first one Albee showed her. His eyes were closed in that one and she said the beard threw her off. Also that it’d been years since they last met.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  Hentz shrugged. “What lips my lips have kissed and where and why…”

  “Huh?”

  “Just saying that Randolph might have had so many lovers in her day that she couldn’t keep them all straight.”

  They went through the pockets of all the clothes in the closet, finding nothing but a few coins, then moved on to the living room, where again, everything was tidy with nothing apparently out of place. Instead of a couch, there were two lounge chairs with a step table between them that held several library books—a biography of Arthur Miller and two Stephen King novels among them. Salt and pepper shakers and a placemat on the coffee table in front of the chairs suggested that this was probably where Bloss ate his meals.

  A waist-high bookcase covered most of the wall beneath the windows. The last two or three issues of Variety were neatly piled next to a wicker basket that held parakeet supplies. The wider shelves below were filled with scrapbooks, stacked one upon another, two or three deep and each labeled with the name of a play. Some of the titles were familiar, but for every hit, there were six or eight run-of-the-mill shows that didn’t break even and had faded into obscurity.

  Probably the record of his life, thought Hentz.

  A gap near the bottom must have held the scrapbook that now lay atop a desk at the end of the bookcase. This one was labeled “Metropolitan Opera.”

  While Urbanska started on the desk drawers, Hentz took the scrapbook to a clear spot under the windows. Affixed to the open page was a program for La Bohème from almost fifty years ago. According to the cast list, Mimi was sung by Marta Constanza and she had signed the program, as had the tenor and some other cast members. On the opposite page was a review clipped from one of the New York papers. The headline was “Mi chiamano Charlotte Randolph” and it praised the unexpected brilliance of a beautiful young newcomer who stepped in at the last minute when Miss Constanza took a fall backstage and cut a gash in her face that required several stitches and an overnight stay at St. Luke’s Hospital.

  Charlotte Randolph said that Jack Bloss had worked on that production as part of the lighting crew but his name did not appear in any of the technical credits.

  Hentz turned past several pages of autographed Met programs till he came to a clipping from Variety, dated a few months later. It noted that Charlotte Randolph would be singing Berta in The Barber of Seville. Not the lead soprano, but still quite a step up from the chorus.

  Stuck deep in the groove where two pages met were torn pieces of a black-and-white snapshot. They had been crumpled at one point, then smoothed out again. Hentz fit the pieces together. The young woman had blond hair and dimples. The man with his arms around her was smooth-shaven.

  Charlotte Randolph and a beardless Jack Bloss.

  He put the pieces back as he’d found them.

  “You finding anything useful?” he asked Urbanska.

  “Looks like he was divorced twenty years ago and the wife got half his pension in the settlement, but what was keeping his cupboard bare is that these bank statements show monthly automatic payments to a nursing home out in Suffolk County.”

  An hour later, Hentz and Urbanska finished reporting what they’d learned at Jack Bloss’s apartment.

  “We called that nursing home in Suffolk County,” Hentz said. “They wouldn’t tell us much, just th
at his son had been a patient there for several years. We asked if he was allowed visitors and the nurse said yes, but that he wouldn’t be able to help us. He’s been comatose since the first day he was admitted.”

  “There was a picture of a young man on his dresser,” said Urbanska. “Sitting on a motorcycle. That might have been him. It was the only personal picture in the bedroom.”

  “Lots of Bloss in his scrapbooks, though,” said Hentz. “With actors and directors and fellow crew members. And this.”

  He opened the scrapbook they’d brought back and handed Sigrid the torn pieces of the photograph he’d found, the picture of Bloss and Charlotte Randolph. As Hentz had done earlier, she put them together on a sheet of paper, this time with double-sided tape to hold the pieces in place.

  “Which one of them tore it up, do you suppose?” asked Detective Albee, passing the paper on to Jim Lowry. “Or first balled it up?”

  Hentz shook his head. “Doesn’t really matter, does it? He’s the one kept all the pieces.”

  “She probably did have a fling with him, either before or after she got her big break,” said Sigrid. “But even if it ended in anger, is that a motive for poisoning him now, all these years later? Did you find any indication that they were in touch recently?”

  “No, and the man was a real archivist when it came to the shows he worked on,” said Hentz. “Every item in these scrapbooks is labeled and dated and so are the photographs. All except for this one.”

  He slid the composite into a plastic sleeve and labeled it as he spoke.

  “We brought back his files,” said Urbanska, pointing to five manila folders on the desk behind her. “Those are mostly business records, receipts, and his son’s medical records. He doesn’t seem to have kept much personal correspondence and I didn’t find anything from Randolph.”

  “What about a cell phone?” asked Tillie. “We didn’t find one on him.”

  “I doubt if he owned one. I did a quick look at his bills. Nothing for a cell phone. Just a landline and no messages on the answering system.”