“Thank you, Mr. Kapps,” Sigrid said, and handed him Hentz’s ten. “Enjoy your lunch.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Bohr,” said Mrs. Bayles, “but Mr. Livingston’s at lunch right now. May I take a message?”
“Well, he seemed in such a rush that I shepherded the DNA samples through the testing myself. Tell him there’s no doubt in my mind that we have a perfect match.”
“So Vincent Haas really is Oscar Nauman’s natural son?”
There was a long silence.
“Perhaps you should have Mr. Livingston call me,” said Dr. Bohr, and gave her his personal number.
The first thing Sofia DelVecchio noticed upon leaving Charlotte Randolph’s house were two police cars parked in front of her own house and a small knot of curious onlookers across the street. The second was her granddaughter Laura, who broke into a run toward her as soon as she saw Sofia, her pretty young face twisted in a mixture of fear and anger.
“Nonna! Where were you? Come quick!”
“What’s wrong?” she asked, alarmed.
“The police are tearing the house apart. I tried to make them wait till I could call Dad, but they wouldn’t. He’s on his way but it’ll be another thirty minutes before he can get here.”
“What are they looking for?”
“They won’t say and they’re going to arrest Orla if she doesn’t get out of the way so they can search your room.”
“Cretina!” Sofia murmured, and hurried down the sidewalk.
As she entered her house, a uniformed officer came down the stairs with a firm hold on Miss Orlano’s arm. Her housekeeper was struggling and cursing him in Italian.
“Basta, Orla!” Sofia said sternly.
“Signora!” Orla cried, and burst into tearful Italian.
“In English, Orla.”
“They’re going through your room! Opening drawers, touching your things. How can they do this? Can’t Mr. George make them go away?”
Sofia looked up the stairs and saw Sigrid on the landing. “Lieutenant Harald. What’s happening?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but we do have a search warrant.”
“Then tell me what you’re looking for so we can end this.”
“That bottle of Coumadin you stopped taking last winter.” Sigrid motioned for the officer to let go of Miss Orlano. “It’s the same formulation that killed your godson and the other man.”
Released, the old woman hobbled over to her employer. “It’s not here. I have remembered for sure. I did throw it away, just after Christmas.”
“Then there’s nothing to worry about, is there?” Sigrid said.
Number 409 was a three-story house. Even with her whole team searching, there were so many places in which to conceal a small pill bottle that George Edwards made it in from Riverhead about ten minutes before they found it.
Empty.
“Where was it?” Sigrid asked when Dina Urbanska brought her the little orange plastic bottle.
“In the toe of a shoe in her closet.”
“Whose closet?”
Urbanska nodded toward the housekeeper. “Miss Orlano’s.”
“Orla?” said George Edwards.
The elderly woman shook her head and tears streamed down her wrinkled face, her bushy gray eyebrows drawn together in misery.
“It was still in her medicine cabinet when you came asking for it last week,” she told Sigrid. “I hid it so you would not think she was the one who poisoned Matty’s food.”
“Why would I think that, Miss Orlano?”
“Because of Aria.”
George Edwards’s head swung around sharply. “What?” His acne-scarred face was furrowed with surprise.
His daughter seemed equally bewildered. “Orla? What do you mean? How does Mother have anything to do with this?”
“Orla!” Sofia DelVecchio’s voice cut through the other voices like a whiplash. “Dimmi la verità!”
“La verità?” Orla whimpered. “La verità es Matty. Lui l’ha uccisa. Quando—”
“In English, Orla. Now!”
“Wait a minute, Sofia,” said George Edwards. “Orla, as your attorney, I’m advising you to say nothing more.”
“As you wish,” Sigrid said. “Where’s Mr. Salvador?”
“Sal? Why do you want him?”
“He and Miss Orlano were, by their own statements, the only two to touch the takeout carton from Giuseppone’s. She served herself and Mrs. DelVecchio from it out here in the kitchen and Mr. Salvador was the one who took it to Matty. I’d like to hear what he has to say.”
“I think he’s in the kitchen,” said Laura Edwards.
“I’ll get him,” said Detective Hentz, and went down the hallway.
Sigrid followed. “We’ll question him out there.”
“I’ll come, too,” said Edwards.
“Are you representing him as well?”
“And anybody else in this house who needs me, Lieutenant.”
Sofia DelVecchio, Laura Edwards, and a distraught Orla were told to wait in the living room under Dinah Urbanska’s watchful eyes.
The handyman sat at the kitchen table and looked up apprehensively as Sigrid and her team entered and closed the door to the hallway. He had been weeding the flowerbeds when Orla warned him that the police were there. His shaggy pepper-and-salt hair was damp from the heat and sweat dampened the back of his dark green coveralls as well. His grass-stained hands left dirty marks on the glass of ice water on the table before him.
“What’s going on, Mr. George?”
“They have more questions, Sal, but if it’s something you shouldn’t answer, I’ll tell you.”
Sigrid took the chair across from him and Hentz sat down next to her with his notepad and tape recorder.
“Mr. Salvador, we were told that when you were in the diner last week, someone came in looking for Matty and you said you knew him. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” he admitted cautiously. “Why?”
“Did you two talk?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“What about?”
“He said he’d let Matty use his car back before Christmas and did I know where it was?”
“And did you?”
“No. Last time I saw Matty, he was pushing a grocery cart. No car. Then when the guy told me what kind of car it was, I said Matty wouldn’t keep it. He never really got the hang of a stick shift. Stalled it out every time. As for where the car was, I told him Matty’d been back on drugs for the last six months and probably couldn’t remember that far back.”
“And then?”
Sal shrugged. “Then nothing. The guy said he’d try to catch up with Matty at the soup kitchen and left.” He pulled a paper napkin from the holder on the table and wiped the mud from his glass.
“Did you repeat that conversation to anybody else?”
Sal shook his head and finished drinking his ice water.
“You’re sure?”
“Come to think of it, I might’ve told Orla. It was funny that Matty would borrow a car he’d have a lot of trouble driving.”
“And when did you tell her this?”
“Last Tuesday. Around lunchtime. I remember because she said she’d run into Matty that morning. When he saw her, he started crying again. Still blaming himself for Miss Aria.” He gave the lawyer a sympathetic look. “Sorry, Mr. George, but you know how he was always going on about how he should’ve been driving her that day.”
“Yes, Sal.” Edwards had loosened his tie and now ran a handkerchief across his homely pockmarked face. His voice was sad. “I know.”
“And what did she say when you told her about the car?” Sigrid asked.
Sal shrugged. “Nothing. She was unloading the dishwasher and all of a sudden a plate slipped out of her hand and smashed all over the floor, so after that, we were cleaning up glass. First time I ever saw her break anything.”
“That evening, you were the one who went to Giuseppone’s for takeouts, right?”
He nodded. “Just like every Tuesday. Chicken or veal for me and a double order of some sort of pasta for Mrs. D and Orla, so that there’d be enough to send down for Matty, too. I had the chicken parmigiana last Tuesday and they had fettuccine.”
“Did you eat your supper here in the kitchen?”
“No, I took it downstairs to watch television. I didn’t come back up till Orla called me. She was supposed to take the carton down to Matty, but her arthritis was bothering her so much she asked me to do it and I did. But like I told you people, Matty wasn’t there yet. Just the other guy. Eating lasagna. So I left the box with him.”
“And?”
“And what? That was it. I came back here.”
“Did you look back before you turned the corner?”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. I saw him opening our box.”
“Even though you’d made it clear that the food was for Matty?”
“I didn’t think it really mattered. A lot of times, Matty never even came.”
“Thank you, Mr. Salvador. One of my officers will transcribe this conversation and we’ll need you to stop by and sign it tomorrow.”
Sal looked up at the lawyer. “Okay for me to do that, Mr. George?”
“Yes, Sal.” He exhaled deeply, almost as if he hadn’t breathed for the last five minutes. “I suppose you’ll want to question Orla now, Lieutenant?”
Sigrid nodded. “And I suppose you’ll advise her not to answer?”
But they were too late.
“I tried to tell her not to speak,” Urbanska said, “but she wasn’t under arrest and I couldn’t Mirandize her and once she started talking, she wouldn’t stop.”
All three of the women seemed traumatized. Mrs. DelVecchio was white-faced, Miss Orlano looked shattered, and Laura Edward burst into tears as she rushed to her father’s arms.
“Matty was the one who ran over Mother!” she sobbed. “And Orla poisoned him for it.”
“She should have told me,” said Mrs. DelVecchio, “and I would have done it myself. I don’t care what it takes, George. You cannot let Orla go to prison.”
“We’ll start with bail and go from there,” he said as Lowry stepped forward with handcuffs. “Are those really necessary?”
Lowry looked at Sigrid. “Lieutenant?”
“No handcuffs,” she said. “Just read her her rights.”
CHAPTER
29
So your killer’s a seventy-five year-old arthritic woman?” Captain McKinnon asked when Sigrid briefed him that afternoon.
“Her attorney’s already posted bail and will probably be filing continuances or appeals until we all die of old age, but that’s the DA’s problem, not ours.”
“Are you sorry it wasn’t Benny Olds’s widow?”
“Not really. Sofia DelVecchio may be living on the last of his dirty money, but she wasn’t the one who ran his organization and it can’t have been easy for her. Giving his glamorous mistress a house only a few doors from them? How humiliating is that?”
“She was pretty glamorous herself,” Mac reminded her. “Although a beautiful blond, full-fledged opera star must’ve been pretty stiff competition.”
Sigrid nodded. “Their daughter was her hole card. Everyone says Benny was crazy about her from the moment she was born. They all were, especially Miss Orlano. She was the nursemaid, the one who got up to give the baby a bottle every night because she wouldn’t nurse…”
Her voice trailed off and her eyes held a faraway look.
“What?” said Mac.
She came back with a start. “Sir?”
“You seemed to be remembering something.”
Sigrid shook her head and smiled. “Just thinking about the baby birds my housemate found in our bushes. Did Mother tell you about them?”
“And how one of the eggs was from a different bird?” He chuckled. “Like bringing home an extra baby from the hospital. You’d think the parents could tell.”
“Not if there’s enough similarity,” Sigrid said, remembering how Sofia DelVecchio’s hair had started off light brown, yet became spun gold before it turned white.
Strictly speaking, it was none of the department’s business, but on her way home, Sigrid yielded to curiosity and detoured to Number 403 Vanderbock. Charlotte Randolph herself answered the doorbell.
“I should have called,” Sigrid apologized, “but I thought you might like to know that we’ve arrested someone for poisoning the pasta that killed your friend.”
“I saw the police cars in front of the DelVecchio house,” said Randolph, gesturing for Sigrid to enter. “Was it Sofia?”
“No. Her housekeeper. A Miss Orlano.”
Sigrid followed her across the wide airy space and took a seat on one of the white couches.
“So Jack wasn’t the intended victim?”
“No. It was the other one, Mrs. DelVecchio’s godson.”
“I want to hear all the details, Lieutenant, but first I want a glass of wine. I don’t suppose there’s any point in offering you a glass?”
“I’m off duty now.”
Charlotte Randolph disappeared behind the mirrored screen. There was a clink of glassware and the woman returned with two wine goblets and a bottle of Riesling.
“Did you know Miss Orlano?” Sigrid asked.
“Orla? I knew who she was, of course. Benny hired her when his daughter was born and I saw her pushing the baby carriage occasionally. She knew about Benny and me and she still gives me the evil eye if we pass on the sidewalk. Very loyal to Sofia. I didn’t let it bother me then and I don’t now, but I shan’t miss her. So what was the other man to her? Why poison his food?”
“He was Mrs. DelVecchio’s godson,” Sigrid said, and gave her an encapsulated account of how Matty Mutone had been responsible for Aria Edwards’s death last December.
“Poor man,” Randolph said. “And poor Orla. Benny used to say she idolized Aria.”
They sipped their wine in silent contemplation until Sigrid said, “Will you write about this in your book?”
“I don’t think so. It’s not a part of my story.”
“Really? Wasn’t Aria your baby?”
Randolph had set her empty glass on the table and was reaching for the bottle, so even though Sigrid had clearly startled her, nothing was spilled or broken. “Why on earth would you think that?”
“Benny Olds named his daughter Aria. You said this house was a quid pro quo and that he gave it to you around the time she was born. Miss Orlano told me that when she came to Number 409, all the servants had quit or been fired and no new ones were hired until after the baby was born. She also said that the baby refused to nurse and had to be bottle-fed. It made me wonder if the servants had been let go earlier so that they couldn’t talk and that the reason the baby didn’t nurse was because Sofia wasn’t her mother.”
“Is this something you’ll put in your report?”
Sigrid shook her head. “No.”
“I have your word on that?”
“You have my word.”
Charlotte Randolph topped off both their glasses and leaned back onto the white cushions with a deep sigh. “We never told. Even Orla doesn’t know.”
She paused and took a swallow of the pale golden wine.
“When I realized that I was pregnant, I wanted to get an abortion but Benny and Sofia had tried to have a baby for years, with no success. Benny said he’d make all the arrangements and give me this house if I’d carry it to term and then let them have the baby. I certainly didn’t want a child. Not then and not now. I told my agent that I had polyps on my vocal cords and that the top specialist was in Rome. My sister and I stayed over there till I was near term. Then we flew home to this house. Sofia pretended to be having a difficult pregnancy and had stayed in her room the last two months. If she had to come down, she wore a small round pillow under her maternity smock. No one saw her except when she was wrapped up in a comforter. Benny even fired all the servants in case they suspected somethin
g. When the time came, my sister called Benny and he and Sofia took me to the hospital. They checked me in under Sofia’s name and she kept out of sight until it was time to bring the baby home. Sofia was a good mother and she loved the child.”
“You never regretted your decision?”
“Not for one single moment.”
“You don’t want to tell Laura Edwards that you’re her grandmother?”
“Good God, no!”
CHAPTER
30
With an arrest made and mellowed by the wine she’d drunk, Sigrid was looking forward to a quiet evening with that new book of poetry she’d picked up at BookExpo on Saturday.
Upon unlocking her front door, though, she walked into a noisy, smoke-filled hall. Roman Tramegra stood on a stepstool to silence the smoke alarm on the ceiling.
“What happened?” she asked, leaving the door open to help the smoke dissipate.
“I always do this,” her housemate fumed. “I mean to leave the kitchen just for a minute and the next thing I know…I’m so sorry, my dear. It was going to be Cornish game hens en croute with asparagus puree tonight. Now, I’m afraid it’ll have to be takeout. Would you like Italian, Mexican, or Chinese?”
Before she could answer, the phone rang and it was Marcus Livingston, who invited her to join him for dinner. “Vincent Haas is flying back to Austria day after tomorrow and I thought a bon voyage party might not be amiss. At Madigan’s. Let him taste the best steak in the city before he leaves.”
“Does this mean he’s not Nauman’s son?”
“It does.”
For a moment, Sigrid couldn’t decide if she was pleased or sorry. “You said party. Who else is coming?”
“Just Elliott Buntrock and Rudy Gottfried.”
“May I bring a friend with me? Elliott knows him.”
“By all means.”
On the walk over to the restaurant, which was just a few blocks south of them on the river, Sigrid told Roman about Vincent Haas and his claim to be Nauman’s son.
“My dear Sigrid. No wonder you’ve seemed so distracted. How very distressing for you this must have been,” Roman said. “Will tonight be a wake?”
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