When she was close enough to be heard, she said, “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I let the time get away from me.”
The cane was evidently more for effect than necessity, because Randolph walked without using it except to help herself up the steep steps. Hentz stood aside as she unlocked her door and led the way into her sleekly modern home. She stashed her cane in a tall white umbrella stand and flicked a switch to light the crystal starbursts that hung at varying levels from the ceiling above the large open space.
“What about your attorney?” Sigrid asked.
“He wasn’t able to get away today, but he told me I was probably being overly dramatic—that it was quite reasonable for you to ask for a sample of my pills.”
She walked past the cluttered glass-topped dining table to the white chairs and couch near the large rear windows. “Looks as if we’re going to get some rain.”
Outside, the wind stirred the trees and the flowering bushes for which Sigrid, having little interest in nature, had no name.
“I’m going to have a glass of Riesling. May I pour some for you?”
“No, thank you,” Sigrid said.
Randolph disappeared behind the mirrored screens that hid her butler’s pantry and emerged a moment later with a crystal goblet of pale golden wine.
“My assistant looked you up, Lieutenant. You and Oscar Nauman. I have one of his pictures.”
“Oh?”
“Upstairs,” she added as Sigrid looked around. “Would you like to see it?”
“Perhaps another time. Right now, we’d like to hear more about your conversation with Jack Bloss last Tuesday.”
“What more can I tell you, Lieutenant? It was purely innocuous. He gave me the program insert from that second night, we talked about old times, had a few drinks and he left. I’m sure that being poisoned was the furthest thing from his mind.”
“Yet you gave him five hundred dollars. Why?”
She took a sip of wine, then set the goblet on the glass-and-chrome coffee table. “I’m sure that by now you know that he had a son who’s been in a coma for years?”
Sigrid nodded.
“The nursing facility was raising its rates and he was strapped for money. Jack may have belonged to a good union with excellent benefits, but the boy’s mother took half his pension in their divorce settlement and she balked at paying more for his care. She wanted Jack to either take him off life support or move him somewhere cheaper. I asked him what he was going to do.” She reached for her wineglass as thunder rumbled outside. “He couldn’t bear to do either. He said that if I’d ever had a child, I’d understand. That I would want the best I could afford and that I’d want that child to live forever.” She shrugged. “I felt sorry for him.”
“So you gave him money.”
“So I gave him money.”
“Was it a one-time thing or the first installment for his silence?”
“His silence?”
“For not telling how Marta Constanza happened to fall that night.”
Charlotte Randolph took another sip of wine and held the glass up to the light. Her hands were wrinkled and spotted with age, but her fingers were graceful as she wiped away a lipstick smudge.
When she did not speak, Sigrid said, “We spoke to his sister.”
“Sister? Ah, yes. That’s right. Jack did have a sister. Was she there that night?”
“No, but he was. He told her he was up on a catwalk and saw the whole thing. A man no one had seen before bumped Marta and kept going. He thought the accident might have been arranged by your new boyfriend. So I ask you again, Miss Randolph. Was Jack Bloss blackmailing you because of the way Benny Olds made you a star?”
“My voice made me a star,” she said sharply. “My voice. Marta’s accident just speeded it up a little.” She drained the last of her wine and leaned back on the white couch with the goblet held loosely by the stem. “As for what Jack thought he saw, it would have been his word against mine. He had no proof. No photographs. No name for a man no one could describe.”
“But it would raise a lot of questions. Undercut that memoir you’re writing.”
Randolph laughed and rose with a graceful, fluid swirl of her gray-and-white skirt. “I can’t believe you’re that naïve, Lieutenant. After all the things that were written about you and Oscar Nauman when he died? ‘World-renowned artist leaves everything to a city cop’? Had you rushed a book into print, I’m sure it would have been a bestseller. The public loves salacious gossip. Not that yours would have been that salacious,” she added with amusement as Sigrid willed herself not to let either Hentz or Randolph see how uncomfortable that taunt made her.
The storm that had been building broke as sheets of rain pounded against the floor-to-ceiling windows. Randolph stepped behind the mirrors to refill her glass, then lingered at the windows to watch the rain for a moment before returning to her seat.
“So the five hundred dollars wasn’t an attempt to buy his silence?” asked Hentz when Sigrid didn’t respond to Randolph’s words.
The soprano smiled at him and placed her goblet back on the low table before her. “Actually, it was, Detective Hentz. And to be quite honest, I think Jack did hope to blackmail me, but he was too decent to make a blatant demand.”
“I don’t understand,” Hentz said.
“Not blackmail,” Sigrid said. “But it really was a first installment, wasn’t it? To buy his temporary silence?”
Randolph lightly clapped her hands. “Brava, Lieutenant!”
Hentz continued to look puzzled, so Randolph enlightened him. “My book will be published next April and I want it to deliver a bombshell on the day it’s published, not dribble out like little firecrackers sputtering on the sidewalks for months in advance. Even my editor doesn’t know the true story of how I came to sing Mimi that night. At the very last minute, I’ll add one chapter and one extra picture, then boom!”
As if to underscore her words, a brilliant flash of lightning lit up the room, followed by an almost instant crack of thunder. Rain fell even heavier and wind whipped through Randolph’s garden to plaster leaves against the glass.
“You’d destroy your own legend?” asked Hentz.
“Not destroy. To enhance it. Spice it up. Think of it: unknown singer and well-known gangster? The media will love it. Yes, if it had come out back then, I might have been harmed, lost some bookings, even been fired or blacklisted. And Marta Constanza certainly wouldn’t have become my friend. But now? I think they’ll find it romantic.”
“What about Mrs. DelVecchio?” Sigrid asked. “Will she find it so amusingly romantic?”
“Sofia and I made a bargain years ago.”
“When her husband gave you this house?”
Charlotte Randolph arched a beautifully shaped eyebrow. “You did do your research, didn’t you?” She lifted her glass and stared into the pale golden wine. “If you wanted to be crude, you could say that this house was payment for services rendered. In return, I promised to be discreet and to keep my affair with Benny a complete secret. Living in this house so close to his helped us do that. Except in the very beginning, before anyone noticed that I wasn’t his usual chorus girl, we were never seen in public together.” She smiled as if remembering. “He would dress in patched overalls and a workman’s cap while I wore an ugly cotton dress and bobby sox. We’d spend an afternoon at Coney Island, riding the roller coaster and eating hot dogs, then we’d come back here to drink champagne while I sang for him. Or we’d slip away for a weekend to some city where no one knew us.”
“And Mrs. DelVecchio accepted this?”
“She had what she wanted,” Randolph said coolly. “His name, his child, the respect of their community. I took nothing she valued and I did not publicly embarrass her. It was strictly quid pro quo.”
“Did you know that Benny Olds was going to have that other singer tripped and sent to the hospital?” asked Hentz.
“Of course not!”
“Then why did he trick Fr
anklin McCall into coming to that particular performance? The one night that you would be covering instead of Petra Savos?”
The crystal goblet slid from Randolph’s fingers and splashed wine across her skirt, then bounced without breaking on the white carpet beneath her feet. White-faced, she stared at Hentz. “How on earth do you know about Petra Savos?”
“Who is Petra Savos?” asked Sigrid.
“The soprano who was supposed to be covering Marta Constanza. For some reason, she couldn’t be reached that evening. Did Benny make it worth her while not to answer her phone?”
“Oh, please,” said Randolph, who had recovered her poise and was now mopping her skirt with some paper cocktail napkins from a silver box on the coffee table. She retrieved her glass and put the wet napkins into it. “You credit him with planning something that complicated?”
“Benny Olds ran a large and complicated operation,” said Hentz. “Until he was gunned down by the Gambinos, he was usually two or three moves ahead of the others. He probably would have made one hell of a chess player. Did he play?”
Charlotte Randolph slowly shook her head. “Not chess, Detective. Bridge. And he never lost count of the cards.”
She stood and fluffed the thin material of her skirt to help it dry. “If there are no more questions?” she said, clearly ready to show them out.
Sigrid remained seated. “You make a good case for not wanting Jack Bloss dead,” she conceded, “but he is dead. From an overdose of warfarin, so we still want to see your bottle of Coumadin.”
“Oh, really, Lieutenant!”
Hentz stood. “We have a takeout box with traces of Coumadin that held lasagna from your refrigerator with your fingerprints on it, Ms. Randolph. We also have money from the dead man’s pocket with your fingerprints as well. That’s enough grounds for a search warrant, which would allow us to take your house apart piece by piece.”
“Would you like to call your attorney?” Sigrid asked. “See if he can come after all?”
With a gesture of irritated capitulation, Charlotte Randolph stomped over to the glass-and-chrome staircase and started up. “They’re in my bathroom.”
Sigrid shot an amused glance at Hentz and murmured, “I thought the only usable fingerprints on the lasagna box were from our victims.”
He grinned.
It was several minutes before Randolph descended the staircase, her lipstick refreshed and her chin high. “And before you ask, neither my niece nor my stepson went upstairs when they were here Monday. They dropped off the lasagna and left almost immediately.”
She handed Hentz the little orange prescription bottle and he read the label aloud: “Warfarin sodium, two milligrams.” The bottle had held ninety pills and would require authorization from her doctor for a refill. At the moment, it seemed to hold about ten or twelve small lavender pills.
“I suppose you feel the need to count them,” she said. “I take one a day on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, then two on the other four days. You can do the math.”
“Actually,” said Hentz, “it would be simpler just to see how many are missing from your new refill.”
She started to protest, but Hentz showed Sigrid the date on the label. “Her druggist will have already asked for permission to refill it and I doubt if she lets herself run completely out.”
“May we see your new bottle, Miss Randolph?” Sigrid asked.
With a sigh, Charlotte Randolph yielded to Hentz’s logic. This time she was back much quicker than before.
“It’s those wretched childproof caps,” she told them. “I have a touch of arthritis in my thumbs and always have trouble getting them off. Last week, I spilled six or seven pills down the sink, so when you asked to see them, I topped off that first bottle so you wouldn’t think I was the one who poisoned Jack.”
“Eighty-one,” said Hentz as he finished counting and poured the pills back into the bottle. “Nine missing. Eighteen milligrams.”
Sigrid said, “Did you know Matty Mutone?”
“The other man that died? No. How would I?”
“He was Mrs. DelVecchio’s godson. You live so close to her. Haven’t you stayed in touch?”
“We were never ‘in touch,’ Lieutenant, except through Benny. We don’t spit on each other if we pass in the street, but we could never be friends.”
Hentz capped the pill bottle and left it on the table. “Did you send condolences when their daughter died last December?”
“Aria? I didn’t know her. Not really. I met her a few times when she came backstage with him to get his program signed but I didn’t try to charm her. So far as she knew, I was just someone her father liked to see perform at the Met or at a concert hall. She was a pretty little thing, but I’ve never been very good with children and we had no reason to meet after he died.”
“So you wouldn’t know about relationships in the DelVecchio household?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Does she know that you’re going to write about your affair with her husband?”
Randolph nodded. “But I don’t see that this has any bearing on Jack’s death, Lieutenant, so now, if you don’t mind, I really am rather tired.”
They all looked to the window wall, where rain pounded against the glass.
“I’ll lend you an umbrella,” she said.
CHAPTER
21
The rain continued throughout Tuesday night as a line of thunderheads swept across the city. Roman Tramegra fretted about the baby birds in their garden until Sigrid reminded him that birds had been surviving storms since they were pterodactyls.
A two-hundred-year-old oak tree in Central Park was shattered by lightning and heavy winds sent unsecured potted plants and small signs scudding across sidewalks all over town. At Rockefeller Center, the bright summer annuals in the Channel Gardens had been beaten down, their stems broken, their fragile blossoms bruised and mangled, while the blue hydrangeas massed at one end were so waterlogged that their heavy heads touched the pavement.
At headquarters that Wednesday morning, wet shoes and dripping umbrellas had made walking across the tiled floors as slippery as dancing on ice. Jim Lowry managed to catch himself on a door frame to keep from sprawling when his feet skidded out from under him, but Dinah Urbanska went down before reaching the safety of her desk. Unwilling to watch her try to navigate the distance to the coffee urn in their break room, Sam Hentz told her to stay put and filled her mug himself. Tillie, accustomed to his children’s spilled milk and juice, spread newspapers and paper towels on the floor.
Sigrid emerged—carefully—from her office with her own empty mug and Hentz said, “I heard back from Cohen about the rat bait we got from the DelVecchio garage.”
“That was quick.”
“Well, he says it’s pretty basic chemistry. That particular brand of warfarin contains both a dye and a bittering agent that’s supposed to keep children from eating it. According to Cohen, the EPA wants to make it the industry standard, but so far, that hasn’t happened.”
Across the room, Detective Gonzalez’s head came up. “My sister’s two-year-old found one of those rat baits at the babysitter’s. She thought it was candy. They pumped her stomach and kept her hooked up to a heart monitor till they were sure she was going to be all right.”
“Is she okay now?” asked Urbanska.
“So far as we know. She finished first grade last week and seems just fine.”
“Anyhow,” said Hentz, “Cohen says there was no dye and no bittering agent in the stuff that killed those two, so it didn’t come out of that package.”
“Did you give him the pill we got from Charlotte Randolph?”
“Yeah, but that’s going to take longer and he may not be able to give us a definite answer. He’ll have to send it out to a central lab. He did eliminate Mrs. DelVecchio’s current prescription, though.”
“That reminds me,” Sigrid said. “Did we get a comparison sample of her old pills?”
“No. Miss Orla
no said they were probably thrown out, remember?”
“All the same, just in case those pills weren’t thrown out, call George Edwards and ask him to have Mrs. DelVecchio’s doctor fax us a copy of the Coumadin prescription that was written for the first pills. Make sure it’s precisely what was prescribed and not a generic or another brand. We really need to know the source of that blood thinner.”
Before returning to her office, she topped off her coffee and paused at Tillie’s desk. “Did you learn anything more about the driver of the car that killed Aria Edwards?”
Tillie shook his head. “The last follow-up report had a witness stating for sure that it was a white male, but no real description.”
An open box sat on the floor beside his chair.
“Are those Matty’s things?” Sigrid asked.
Tillie nodded. “Too bad we can’t match that key he had to a car. I ran his name through DMV. No car registered in his name. His driver’s license is still valid, though, and he didn’t have any violations other than a couple of parking tickets, which he’d paid.”
Turning to Lowry and Albee, Sigrid said, “Let’s backtrack on him some more. Go back and question everyone at that soup kitchen who might have interacted with Mutone and while you’re at it, try that rehab facility he was last in.”
She glanced down again at the box that held the small items they’d found on Matty Mutone’s body or in his grocery cart. Lying on top was that picture from the Overhold woman who’d cuddled him, a picture of Matty and Aria Edwards. Once again, she felt a wash of sadness for his wasted life. The picture currently posted on their whiteboard was of a methhead with sunken cheeks and dissipated eyes.
Impulsively, she picked up this picture of Matty as a young man, laughing with his cousin, their whole lives before them. Intending to put this picture next to the other, she pulled it from the plastic sleeve and was surprised to see that instead of one picture, there were actually two similar poses that were stuck together. When she pulled them apart, something fell to the floor next to Tillie’s shoe.
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