Three-Day Town (15 page)

“Not really,” I admitted. I’m all for culture and I know New York’s museums are world-class, but we have a great natural history museum in Raleigh and a fine planetarium over in Chapel Hill.

Dwight seemed to feel the same. “Why don’t we take the camera and walk over to Central Park? See what city folks do in the snow.”

We piled on a couple of layers of warm clothes and were soon heading out the door, this time making sure that it was really locked. I felt a bit vindicated when Dwight had to pull on it firmly to make the latch fully engage.

The man on the elevator was the same one as from Friday evening. Sidney. He was a mixture of regret for the death of a fellow worker and sympathy for our messed-up vacation. Mostly though, he was avid for details.

“What happened?”

“Looks like he interrupted a robbery,” Dwight said, “and someone smashed him in the head.”

“Robbery? Was anything taken?”

“We think part of Mr. Lacour’s collection of gold and enamel pillboxes,” I said.

“And your earrings,” Dwight reminded me.

“One of them anyhow,” I said. “And a little bronze sculpture.”

“You didn’t happen to notice people going in and out of our place last night, did you?” asked Dwight.

Sidney shook his head. “But then I was busy with people coming and going and the hall seemed to be packed full every time I came up. Someone on the fifth floor was threatening to call the fire marshal on Luna.” His wry smile turned mournful. “Poor Phil, though. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when they told me. I guess you heard that his wife flipped out when they told her and had to be taken to a psycho ward?”

We hadn’t, and he told us about Mrs. Lundigren’s mental problems in more detail than Kate had. Kate had told me that the West Side was very liberal and socially tolerant of human failings, but to tolerate a klepto?

“I probably ought not to be talking about it, but I heard that you’re a police officer yourself?”

Dwight nodded. “So what happened to the regular morning guy?”

“Antoine? Who knows? They say he started work as usual and then just left.”

“So that’s why the elevator never came this morning,” Dwight said. “Even the service elevator wasn’t running. There was someone on duty when I got back. Didn’t seem like a happy camper, though.”

“That would be Vlad,” said Sidney. “One of the board members called him to come in because of the boiler. The front sidewalk needed shoveling, too. We’re all having to take up the slack. The night man’s still asleep downstairs, but he’s getting too old to pull a double shift.”

“He spent the night here?” I asked.

“Yeah. Antoine, too. See, Phil always said if we were gonna get snowed in, we better get snowed in here and not at home, so he and Jani bunked here. Jani took over around eleven last night so I could get home before it got too deep. My place is only a block from the stop, so I knew I could get back before four today.”

“Why would the day man just up and quit?” I asked. “Was it because of Phil?”

Sidney shook his head and tried to smother a yawn. “He and Phil didn’t get along all that good. Not that he wished Phil bad luck or anything, but I don’t think he’s gonna cry at Phil’s funeral. No, it’s probably that he’s finally had it with teenage boys who think it’s funny to hijack the elevator and leave it on another floor. Vlad was still ticked off about it when I got here.” Beneath that impeccable gray mustache, his lips curved in wry humor. “But then with Vlad, everything’s a big drama.”

CHAPTER

13

Carts work at the snow for days and weeks trying to get it away to the docks and so into the river.

—
The New New York
, 1909

S
IGRID
H
ARALD
—S
UNDAY (CONTINUED)

B
y the time Sigrid and Sam Hentz backed out of the hospital room, Denise Lundigren was in full-blown hysterics. Leaving Dr. Penny to calm her, they headed back for the car, and both gave involuntary sighs of relief as they got in and slammed the doors. It was one of those rare moments of solidarity and Hentz didn’t push it.

Instead, he put the car in gear and said, “Think there’s any chance she followed him upstairs and killed him?”

“The spouse is always a possibility.” Sigrid leaned forward to adjust the heat controls with chilled fingers. “Remember what she said when we told her Lundigren was dead?”

Hentz nodded. “She asked if he was really dead and not just hurt.”

“Which could suggest that she had hit him herself without realizing the force of her blow.”

“And the door was secured with two chains,” Hentz said thoughtfully. He eased down on the brakes so that a man pulling two laughing, well-bundled children on a sled could cross against the light. “Like she didn’t expect him back.”

“Unless he habitually came and went through the service door,” Sigrid said, trying not to let herself be diverted by that sled and the bittersweet memory it evoked of sliding down a snowy Connecticut hillside into a tangle of blackberry vines with Nauman, another sharp reminder of all that she had lost when he died. “Their living room looks more like a furniture showroom than a place used by someone in coveralls.”

“Between the crystal knickknacks and flowers and ruffles, the whole apartment felt girly to me. Wonder if he ever wore a dress and sipped tea?”

“Would you?” she asked dryly.

“Point taken,” he said. “She did make it sound as if he really was a man trapped in a woman’s body. Must have been hell on him growing up.”

Up ahead of them, a sanitation truck fitted with a snowplow on the front trundled along, throwing up a three-foot high windrow that completely blocked a car illegally parked in front of a delicatessen. They saw the car’s owner come hurrying out, gesticulating wildly.

Too late.

He shook his fist at the driver, who passed on, oblivious.

“Hope that poor bastard has a shovel in his trunk,” Hentz said.

Although both of them were too young to remember the blizzard of 1969, when the city came to a virtual halt for three days, no succeeding mayor of New York ever forgot the political fallout, and surely this mayor was too savvy to let the streets stay closed for long. New Yorkers might enjoy a Sunday snow, but come Monday morning there would be a price to pay at the next election if too many streets remained blocked for more than two or three days. Private snow removal companies were already out at the major corners, and traffic had to swerve around a yellow backhoe that was loading snow into a big dump truck.

“Do you suppose the board knew about Mrs. Lundigren’s klepto tendencies?” Hentz asked as he waited for the light.

Sigrid looked up from her notes. “I was wondering that myself. Lowry and Albee reported that this Mrs. Wall made a point of saying how honest Lundigren was. I think we should go back and ask her about the wife. From what I’ve read, kleptomaniacs steal for the thrill of stealing, not for any material gain. Most times, they’ll just throw the object away. If Lundigren always took back whatever she stole, then maybe the board was willing to treat it as a quirk, something they could put up with in order to keep a valuable employee.”

“Are you going to tell her about Lundigren?”

“Only if it’s pertinent.”

“Wonder where they got married? Were same-sex marriages allowed anywhere?”

“He was probably already passing by then, but it’s an interesting legal point,” she said. “The state recognizes common-law marriages between heterosexuals, but what’s the standing for same-sex couples? Did he leave much of an estate? Is there a will?”

“I don’t know about a will, but the Wall woman told Lowry that she’ll benefit from a quarter-million insurance policy. That could be two hundred and fifty thousand reasons to kill.”

“Maybe, but why do it in 6-A?”

Hentz flicked her a sardonic look. “Don’t you mean ‘why now’?”

There was a time when Sigrid would have frozen him with an icy narrowing of her gray eyes, but now she acknowledged his jab with a wry quirk of her lips. Sooner or later in any puzzling case, her team of detectives had learned to expect that pointed question, especially if they could show opportunity and motive for more than one of the victim’s circle of friends, family, or fellow workers. “Why now?” she would ask. “Why not last week? Why not next Wednesday? What’s different? What pushed the killer’s buttons
now
?”

Her phone vibrated and it was Detective Albee checking in. She reported that the occupant of 6-B was a friend of DiSimone’s. “They met on
Sesame Street
and she’s the one who told DiSimone about the building when that apartment came up for sale two years ago. She wasn’t able to add any names to the list, and when we showed her our master list, she didn’t know who had art connections except for this Cameron Broughton. He styled her bedroom and helped her pick out some prints to frame.”

“What about the other building employees?”

“The eight-to-four elevator man—Antoine Clarke—seems to have quit, but we’ve talked to the evening man who’s covering for him and to one of the porters. The night man’s around, but we haven’t found him yet. Urbanska’s gone back to the office to start collating the lists.”

After bringing Albee up to speed on what they’d learned from Denise Lundigren, Sigrid said, “When you’re talking to the staff, ask about any friction between Lundigren and Clarke. And tell Mrs. Wall that Hentz and I want to speak to her. We should be there in ten minutes.”

Eight minutes later, Sigrid and Hentz were on their way up to the twelfth floor.

“So what’s with Antoine?” Hentz asked him once the brass accordion cage was closed and the first-floor door slid shut.

“Ahh, him!” Sidney gave an annoyed twitch of his narrow shoulders. “You’d think he was never a kid himself.”

“Kid?” asked Sigrid.

“Probably Corey Wall, although the Petersen kid in 11-B’s done it a time or two as well.”

“You mean someone took this elevator up when Antoine wasn’t looking? And that’s why he quit?”

“Who knows? Usually it’s the night man who loses it, but Corey did get me once when I was delivering a package to 1-B and I stepped inside to set it down in the kitchen. Two minutes flat and it was gone. Used to happen to poor Jani at least once a month. He’s pushing sixty-five and when he gets comfortable in one of the lobby chairs, he’s out. The buzzer’s loud enough to wake the dead, so that’s no problem. If someone comes in at two in the morning and Jani’s asleep in the lobby, adults will just wake him up. The boys, though? They don’t do it as much as they used to, but they’re kids and they think it’s funny to hop in and take it up themselves, and then they just leave it on whichever floor and we have to go run it down.”

“And Antoine takes it personally?”

“First time it happened to him, last summer, he bitched about it for three days. Not to Corey’s parents or any of the owners, of course. Or to Phil either, for that matter. It’s like Phil kept telling us: this is a good job. Good pay, good benefits, and anybody can learn it in an hour. I’ll cover for Antoine today, but if he’s not back here tomorrow at eight, they’ll have a new guy in a brown uniform before noon. Just between you and me, though, I don’t know that the kids take it as much as he claims. I think Antoine sneaks out for a cigarette and doesn’t always hear the buzzer. Easy to say he’s hunting for the elevator when he’s the one that stopped it.”

“I’m surprised they don’t install a self-service elevator,” said Hentz, who lived in an East Side high-rise.

“Never gonna happen,” Sidney said, running his hand across the shiny brass fittings, almost like an affectionate owner petting a favorite dog. “People love this thing. It’s been here since the place was built and it’ll probably still be here when they take it down.”

Mrs. Wall invited them into her living room and Hentz looked around appreciatively as they loosened their coats and stuffed their gloves into pockets.

“Roycroft?” he asked, touching the hammered copper tray on the coffee table.

Mrs. Wall seemed surprised and Hentz said, “My aunt’s big on the Arts and Crafts movement. She has a Craftsman house on a lake upstate.”

Sigrid kept her face carefully immobile. She was the only one in the department who had connected Lizzie Stopplemeyer, the aunt listed as Hentz’s next of kin in his personnel file, with the Mrs. Irving Stopplemeyer, whose late husband’s face was as familiar to strudel lovers as Colonel Sanders’s was to chicken lovers. She waited until the amenities were done before describing Denise Lundigren’s present mental state.

Mrs. Wall seemed to grow uncomfortable when they asked about thefts in the building. “Phil Lundigren was the most honest person I ever met. As I told those other detectives who were here earlier, if he found a penny in the hallway, he would go door to door looking for the owner. Denise’s kleptomania distressed him no end, but he always brought anything back as soon as he realized she had taken it. She doesn’t leave the building very often and never alone, so it was easy for him to keep track of anything new in the apartment. It’s so sad and it’s not even that she
wants
the things she takes. I can’t tell you how often Phil or one of the porters finds a missing item on the service steps. Phil said that taking things gives her an adrenaline rush. It’s not the object, it’s the act of stealing itself.” She opened the drawer of a nearby end table and showed them four or five little glass animals. “I’ve started putting these out on Thursdays when Denise cleans for me. So far, it’s working.”

She sighed and her straight silver hair gleamed against the rich brown of the wall behind her. The silver bracelets on her slender arm tinkled as she pushed back her artfully ragged bangs. “So, so sad,” she repeated.

“She said something about a watch and a necklace,” Sigrid said.

“Denise didn’t take my watch,” Mrs. Wall said quickly. “I misplaced it and Denise had cleaned here the day before, so I did ask Phil to look for it. As he pointed out, though, she’s never taken jewelry and I did find it later.”