Three-Day Town

Chapter


20


In the early seventies, with only horse-cars on the side avenues, it required an hour or more to go from down town to Forty-Second Street; and during snow storms there were often several days of suspended animation, except for foot-passengers.



—The New New York, 1909



SIGRID HARALD—MONDAY EVENING

“He appears to have been stunned with a blow on the head and then strangled with his own necktie,” Cohen said. The assistant ME stripped off his latex gloves and indicated to the others that he was finished with his examination of Antoine Clarke’s body for now. “I’ve bagged his hands, but there are no lacerations on his neck and no obvious sign of someone else’s skin under his nails.”

“Time of death?” Sigrid asked, watching as they tried to fit the young elevator man’s contorted body into a body bag before strapping it onto the gurney.

“Won’t know till I open him up. At least twenty-four hours, though.”

“He’s been missing since yesterday morning around nine o’clock.”

“That fits. Rigor appears to be relaxing in the legs, but there’s still a lot of stiffness in his torso, so he may well have died then. If someone can tell us they saw him eat a doughnut or a ham sandwich around that time, it would help us pinpoint it further.”

Sigrid turned to Lowry and Albee. “First thing tomorrow morning, talk to the night elevator operator. Horvath,” she told them. “See if he has anything else to say about when Clarke relieved him yesterday morning. And ask him what he knows about Corey Wall.”

“You looking to tag the Wall boy with this, Lieutenant?” Elaine Albee asked.

“He was blackmailing Clarke and he disappeared at the exact same time. In the middle of a snowstorm. If he’s not involved, why did he run?”

Which was exactly what Sigrid had asked Mrs. Wall when she and Hentz spoke to her a half hour earlier. They had put it more tactfully, of course, and the woman, still shocked by another violent death in the building, had not immediately realized that Corey might be involved. Her worry was that her son’s disappearance meant he was in danger, too.

“I’ve called both of our daughters. One’s at MIT, the other’s at Stanford. Neither of them have heard from him.”

The delayed discovery of the body meant that half of Manhattan could have passed through the basement since yesterday morning, and with the victim so neatly bagged for them, there was little for the crime scene unit to process.

Before letting the porters go, they had taken Vlad Ruzicka’s dramatized statement as well as that of the other porter, one Hector Laureano, fifty-eight, employed there for eleven years.

Both seemed to be reeling from Antoine’s death and both claimed not to have seen Antoine since quitting time on Friday. “He got off at four and we stay till five,” Laureano said. He had not noticed the Wall boy with Antoine, and no, he really didn’t know much about the day man at all. “He hasn’t been here very long.”

“What about Corey Wall?”

“He was just another kid,” said Laureano. “Back when he was little, one of his sisters would bring him down to get their bikes and take him riding in the park. Haven’t seen much of him since he got old enough to take trains and buses by himself.”

Vlad Ruzicka, on the other hand, seemed to regret his lack of more exciting things to tell them. Watching his dramatic arm gestures as he acted out the little he did know, Sigrid was privately amused to remember that Hentz had called him Vlad the Regaler. Clearly the man wished he could hand them a head or two on a pike.

“I knew we had five of them wheely bins, but only four were here. I even checked all twelve landings. So I started looking back there in the storage area and there it was! Hiding behind a kayak and some skis.”

His broad flat face expressed first the puzzlement he’d felt and then the surprise of his discovery.

“Swear to God I was starting to think it was Antoine killed Phil, that maybe he thought Phil was out to get him fired for something. Antoine needed this job even though he always acted like it wasn’t good enough for him. Like he ought to’ve been a headwaiter in some fancy restaurant or something.”

For a moment, the big bulky man became a mincing maître d’ with his nose in the air and his eyes at half-mast as he looked down his nose at them.

When asked again about the last time he saw Clarke, he described how he had helped one of the residents get two heavy suitcases down to the street and into a cab on Friday. “As God is my witness, each bag weighed as least fifty pounds. ‘What?’ I asked her. ‘You going for two months?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Two weeks.’ And it wasn’t even for a wedding.”

After he had slammed the trunk lid on the cab and started down the sidewalk to the service entrance, he saw Antoine pull some bills from his wallet and give them to the Wall boy. “There was still plenty of daylight left, so I saw at least two bills, but I couldn’t tell if they were fives or fifties.”

“Did Corey give him anything in return?”

“Not that I saw.” He pantomimed putting money in his pants pocket and giving it a satisfied pat. “Then he walked on up toward West End Avenue. Antoine passed me on the way to his train and I said I hoped he had a good weekend. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said and that was that. Who could know?” Ruzicka’s face turned so mournful they almost expected to see tears. “Last words I ever heard him say.”

It was now 7:15 and Sigrid was ready to call it a day. Urbanska had left an hour ago to take the red flip-flop with Judge Knott’s earring to the lab and to issue a be on the lookout for Corey Wall as a “person of interest.” Lowry volunteered to check the car back into the motor pool for Hentz, and Albee went with him.

“Didn’t you tell Buntrock you were playing tonight at some jazz club down in the Village?” Sigrid asked Hentz.

He gave her a wary nod.

“I’m headed home that way. If you want a lift, it’ll give us a chance to discuss this case.”

When he hesitated, she shrugged. “Or not. I have to go back upstairs. I must have left a glove in the lobby.”

He followed her up the service steps. As she retrieved her glove from the couch, the front elevator doors opened for the Bryants, who seemed to be dressed for an evening out. Gone was the judge’s disheveled look of this afternoon. Her sandy blonde hair fell smoothly around her face and she had given it a spritz of gold shine. A smoky blue eye shadow enhanced her clear blue eyes, and her lipstick was the same bright red as the cowl-necked sweater she had worn Saturday night. A dressier pair of gold earrings gleamed in the soft lights of the lobby.

There was a time when Sigrid would not have noticed what another woman was wearing or else would have been intimidated if the woman was as confidently attractive as this judge appeared to be. Although Grandmother Lattimore seemed to love her as much as her other granddaughters, she had bluntly voiced her doubts that such an ugly duckling could ever evolve into the swan every other Lattimore woman became, as if beauty were a birthright. Even when they were not classically beautiful, they carried themselves as if they were, and a willing world agreed.

“You’re already too tall and your neck is too long, but you have nice eyes and they do say you’re going to be real intelligent,” her grandmother had said with a sigh when Sigrid was twelve or thirteen and nothing but skinny arms and legs.

It took Oscar Nauman to make her apply that intelligence to her looks, to realize that making the most of one’s physical assets was not some arcane mathematical problem. For years, she had worn her fine dark hair pulled straight back into a utilitarian bun. Then, on an impulse, she had gotten it cut short so that it feathered across her forehead and softened her brow. After that, she read a couple of books, looked at some online tutorials, and experimented with light makeup that could and would enhance her high cheekbones and wide gray eyes. She learned that lip paint would last all day, and that some colors flattered her clear pale skin while others would make her look washed out. It was only an exercise in logic after all, she told herself, much like the puzzle rings she collected and put together when working through the intricacies of a homicide case.

Once she figured it out, she tossed half her wardrobe, invested in good makeup brushes, and gradually accepted that she could hold her own in that competition. She would never be as conventionally curvaceous and pretty as Elaine Albee or Lady Francesca Leeds, Nauman’s former lover, or even this Deborah Knott, but knowing that he had found her as intriguing as any Dürer model was enough to give her a modicum of confidence.

“Lieutenant Harald! Sigrid,” the judge said now, greeting her with a sympathetic smile. “Dwight told me about Antoine. How awful! After what Mrs. Lundigren told me this afternoon, I was sure he was the one who killed her husband. And now he’s been killed himself?”

“Mrs. Lundigren? She talked to you?” Hentz asked, bemused. He had no doubt that this woman could slather Southern charm around, but was charm enough to overcome Denise Lundigren’s social anxiety disorder?

“Weird, isn’t it? Everyone says she’s shy with strangers, but her doctor must have given her one hell of a happy pill, because she wasn’t a bit shy with me.”

She saw her husband check his watch and she tucked her arm in his as he edged toward the door. “Sorry to rush off, Sigrid, but we’re meeting your friend Elliott Buntrock for dinner down in the Village and we’re going to be late if we don’t keep moving.”

“Elliott?” Sigrid asked, following them out to the sidewalk.

“The Village?” Hentz asked. He gestured to a late-model sedan parked at the snowy curb nearby. In the dim light, they saw an official NYPD sticker on the back fender. A card read NYPD OFFICIAL BUSINESS on the flipped-down sun visor, not that anyone needed to worry about tickets and tow trucks when so many illegally parked vehicles were still plowed under. “Lieutenant Harald’s going our way,” he said smoothly, “and she’s offered me a lift.”

Before Sigrid quite knew what was happening, they were waiting for her to unlock the car. Minutes later, she was headed down Eleventh Avenue with the other three chattering as if they had known each other for years.

Encouraged to tell them of her visit to Denise Lundigren, Deborah repeated what the woman had said about Antoine, how more things had disappeared from various apartments than what she had stolen, and how Phil Lundigren had found the elevator man in parts of the building where he had no business being after his shift was over. “She said he used to take cigarette breaks and then lied about it.”

“That’s probably how Corey Wall was able to hijack the elevator so many times,” Hentz told Sigrid.

“Do people in the building know that Mrs. Lundigren is a klepto?” Deborah asked. “Don’t they care?”

“For the most part, it sounds fairly benign,” Sigrid said. “And something they were willing to put up with because Lundigren was such a sterling super. That’s how that Mexican cat wound up in your apartment, though. Lundigren knew she’d cleaned there Friday morning. What he forgot was that she’d also cleaned for Luna DiSimone on Saturday morning.”

Deborah, who was seated in front beside Sigrid, turned to look at Hentz, who sat behind Sigrid. “The other things that were stolen—is there any way Antoine could have gotten into those apartments?”

It was Sigrid who answered. “According to one of the porters, the locks on most of the service doors have never been changed.”

“So who better than the man on the elevator to know when an apartment would be empty?” Deborah said excitedly.

Sigrid slowed to veer around a truck that had suddenly and with no warning decided to stop and double park in their lane. Till then she had caught several green lights in a row. The small delay meant that she had to speed up to get back into the flow, but a red light caught her in the next block. “Maybe Corey didn’t hijack the elevator as often as Antoine Clarke claimed,” she mused as she waited for the light to change.

Hentz saw where her thoughts were going. “Clarke could’ve slipped out of the elevator, onto the service landing, and been in and out of an apartment in minutes, then if anyone saw him, he could say that he was looking for the elevator.”

Sigrid finished the thought for him. “Corey probably saw him, realized what was happening, and started blackmailing him.”

“Corey was blackmailing Antoine?” Deborah asked. “Why?”

From the backseat, Dwight Bryant said, “Is the kid into drugs?”

Sigrid’s eyes met his in the rearview mirror. Normally she would not have discussed a case with an outsider, but this murder had been committed in their apartment, he had helped take names Saturday night before reinforcements came, and he was, after all, an officer of the court, as was, of course, his wife. “Not drugs, Major. Poker. He’s a gambler, a compulsive one from the sound of it. He’s stolen so much from his family so that they’ve put locks on their bedroom doors and his parents have blocked his online access to poker sites, but his friend says he’s still playing live games someplace in the area at least once a week.”

“Ah,” said Deborah, who nodded in understanding. “Therefore the need to blackmail Antoine instead of turning him in. After talking to Mrs. Lundigren, I thought maybe Antoine had killed her husband because Lundigren walked in on him while he was loading his pockets in our apartment. Could that still be the case?”

“Unless it was Corey Wall that Lundigren walked in on and the kid panicked,” Sigrid said. “Clarke was in the building, if not in the apartment itself. It’s possible that he was in the back hall and saw Corey slip out of the apartment through the service door.”

“This could be a blackmailing standoff that left Clarke dead,” Hentz said thoughtfully. “Corey was certainly at the party, so he could have seen that your door wasn’t locked and decided to see what he could pick up to feed his gambling habit.”

“That latch is getting worse, too,” Deborah said. “Dwight, maybe you could take a look at it tomorrow? See if something could be tightened? I had to pull it to twice before I was sure it was locked.”

An ambulance with siren wailing and lights flashing roared through the intersection at West 23rd and Sigrid had to brake sharply to avoid clipping its back bumper. A minute or two later, she turned onto West 14th. One of her rear tires hit a patch of ice at the curb and the car almost fishtailed into a delivery van in the next lane.

“Whoa!” Deborah said as Sigrid quickly corrected. “Good reflexes.”

White-knuckled, Sigrid slowed as she tried to decide which of these branching streets would lead her to the West Village restaurant Buntrock had selected.

“He said for us to get off the train at Christopher and walk north on Seventh Avenue,” Bryant said as they all began peering through the windows.

“Must be near the club,” Hentz said.

“There it is!” Deborah cried, pointing to a sign two doors off Seventh.

Sigrid signaled to turn. Miraculously, a car pulled out directly across the street from the restaurant and she slid her own car into the spot.

Helped along by rock salt and the day’s weak sunshine, the street itself appeared almost completely ice-free, but dirty gray snow was still piled along the curb and had frozen back into ice so that Dwight’s boots crunched on it when he got out to hold the door for Deborah.

As they were thanking Sigrid for the ride, Elliott Buntrock rounded the corner on foot and a big smile lit up his bony face.

“Perfect timing,” he called, his open overcoat and scarf flapping in the wind like the wings of a giant heron. “I was afraid I was going to be late. Sigrid? Aren’t you staying?”

She lowered her window. “Hello, Elliott. No, I’m just their gypsy cab.”

“But why not? You have to eat. Unless you have other plans?” He gave a crafty smile. “Or is Roman cooking something special tonight?”

“Oh, God, you’re right. He did mention medallions of calf’s liver poached in wine. When I left this morning, he was trying to decide whether merlot or chardonnay would go better with the capers and the green beans.”

Deborah, who did not like calf’s liver or green beans, made a face. “You’re joking, right? Who’s Roman?”

“My housemate, and no, I’m not joking. He’s an inventive cook, but some of his inventions are bombs.”

“At least he cooks,” Buntrock said with a half smile, which Sigrid returned.

“Elliott’s seen my collection of take-out menus,” she said, turning to the others. “You sure you don’t mind if I join you?” It had suddenly occurred to her that there would be more than one source of some specific information at the table.

The Bryants assured her that she was quite welcome. Hentz, however, looked a bit apprehensive.

“And we can all go on to Smalls later and hear Sam play,” Elliott said.

Sigrid was amused to see the look of discomfort deepen on Hentz’s face. Not quite enough revenge for his laughter when Captain Fortesque had led the singing of “Happy Birthday, dear Sigrid” last February, but it was a start.