Three-Day Town (24 page)

“I’m on the end, so there’re only three. The bottom locker is a freshman girl. I don’t know her name. On the left, the top one is Jamie Benton, and the bottom one’s Mark McLamb. They’re both juniors.”

“Jamie Benton? Jenny and Max Benton’s son?”

Murmured consultation between brother and sister.

“Emma says yes. Why?”

“No reason.” I wasn’t sure how general the knowledge was that the Bentons were divorcing and that they were locked in a custody battle over the boy. “He and the other boy, Mark? Are they good friends?”

“I guess. They horse around at their lockers, but there’s no way they could get into mine.”

“Two minutes ago you were saying there was no way anyone could post on your Facebook page. If you left your page unprotected you could’ve left your locker unlocked.”

“No way,” he said stubbornly.

“Do those boys have the same lunch period as you?”

More off-phone chatter, then Lee said, “A.K. says they have second lunch with his group.”

If A.K. was standing right there, it’s a safe bet all his teenage cousins were, too. Between them, they could cover a lot of ground.

“Get the others to see what those two were doing during lunch. And ask that freshman girl if she saw anybody fooling around with your locker today.”

“Thanks, Aunt Deborah. I will. Everybody says tell you hey.”

I heard a chorus of heys in the background. Before I could make any further suggestions, he broke the connection. He’s a gentle boy, but maybe his sister and his cousins would teach him something about the art of intimidation.

Had Phil Lundigren’s death happened back in Colleton County, I would now be taking his widow a plate of homemade sausage biscuits, a casserole, or a cake I had baked myself. Food is the universal offering for a house of mourning when all the relatives pour in and need to be fed. Doing something tangible for the bereaved allows friends and neighbors to feel a little less helpless in the face of death. Hell, I’ve even carried a casserole to a presumably grieving widow, only to later learn that she was the one who had planned her husband’s murder.

I had no idea if Mrs. Lundigren had an alibi for Saturday night, nor even whether the marriage was a happy one. Hoping I wasn’t repeating that past mistake, I rummaged in the refrigerator for a wedge of Brie that Dwight had brought home from the market yesterday. An unopened sleeve of crackers and a bunch of grapes would have to sub for a casserole. I arranged the cheese and crackers on one of the pretty paper plates I found in the cupboard, placed the grapes in the middle, and covered everything with plastic wrap. When the gardenia plant arrived, I freshened up and rang for the elevator. The man on duty was still Sidney, who was starting to feel like an old friend by now.

He gave a smile of approval when I told him the flowers were from Kate. “That sounds like her. When my father died last year, she sent a beautiful wreath even though she hasn’t lived here for going on five or six years.”

I asked him which was the Lundigren apartment and if he knew whether or not Mrs. Lundigren was at home. “We heard she had to be hospitalized when they told her about her husband.”

“Yeah. One of the porters said she came home around lunchtime today. Told me she was quite chatty in fact.”

“Chatty? Kate said she had an anxiety disorder that made it hard for her to talk to people.”

“Not today. Vlad says Denise talked to him more today than the whole time he’s worked here. The friend that brought her home from the hospital told Vlad that the doctor gave Denise some pills that were better than three martinis.”

When I got off the elevator, Sigrid and her team of detectives were conferring with a teenage boy in a far corner of the lobby. She had her back to me and the others didn’t seem to recognize me behind all the cellophane and ribbons. Sidney told me that the Lundigren apartment was around the corner, so I decided to mind my own business and stay on task. I did not want to risk being asked about Chloe Adams again.

“Mrs. Lundigren?” I said to the large heavyset woman who opened the door when I rang.

“No, I’m her friend Alice Rosen. Do come in. Denise is in the den.”

I tried to say I didn’t know the woman and was here only as an emissary of my sister-in-law, but it was useless. The woman was already disappearing down a hallway like a white rabbit, so I followed her through a small living room that looked like an illustration from
Better Homes and Gardens
into a room that was not quite as pretty but had a more lived-in air.

Denise Lundigren was nestled at the end of a couch upholstered in a flowery print. She had her feet tucked up under her and ruffled pink, red, and green pillows cushioned her back. She was small and pretty with dark hair and dark vivid eyes. I judged her to be in her early fifties. A large white cat sat purring on her lap and she gave me a tentative smile when I entered.

I set the gardenia plant and the cheese plate on the coffee table and introduced myself. “I’m Kate Honeycutt’s sister-in-law,” I said, using the name that would be more familiar to this woman, the name Kate still used for her professional work.

Denise Lundigren brightened. “Kate! She was here last spring. She brought me a crystal cat.” A smile played on her lips as she stroked the white Persian. “Did you know Jake?”

I shook my head.

“They were so much in love. Just like Phil and me. And Jake was murdered, too, wasn’t he?”

Tears ran down her cheeks and her friend nudged the box of tissues on the coffee table closer to the woman.

“Does her new husband love her?”

“Very much.”

“She’s so lucky. I’ll never find anyone else like my Phil,” she sobbed.

“Now, Denise, honey,” said Mrs. Rosen. She moved onto the couch and cradled Mrs. Lundigren’s head on her ample bosom.

“Look at me!” she wailed. “You know how I am, Alice. Nobody else is ever going to love me like he did.”

I was alarmed, but the other woman just made soothing noises and kept patting her back. Eventually Mrs. Lundigren quit crying, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose.

“Everyone says your husband was a good man,” I said gently. “But everybody has enemies.”

She sat upright with one hand on Mrs. Rosen’s arm, the other on the cat. “Not Phil.”

“He never had words with any of the staff?”

“Well, he did think Antoine might not be working out. Sometimes he stays after his shift is over and Phil’s found him in places he’s not supposed to be.”

“What sort of places?”

She shrugged. “Upstairs in the halls or on the service landings. Sometimes down where people store their bikes and stuff.”

“What about the residents?”

“Everybody liked him. Everybody except the people in 7-A. They said they were going to sue Phil, but he wasn’t worried.”

“Sue?” asked Mrs. Rosen. “Why would someone sue Phil?”

“Because he told the board all the things they’ve done. They said they were going to sue him for slander. Or was it libel?” She looked at me. “When Kate emailed Phil to say you were coming, she said you were a judge, so you must know which it is.”

“Probably slander,” I said. “Libel is usually written lies and slander is spoken lies.”

“Phil never lied,” she said flatly. “He couldn’t.”

“Did the police tell you how he died?”

She nodded. “Were you the one who found him?”

“Yes,” I said and described Saturday night. The party. The unlatched door. Finding her husband on the balcony.

When I finished, Mrs. Lundigren said, “They told me someone could’ve followed him in or else someone was already there stealing some of Jordy’s things and he saw them. Now maybe he’ll believe me.” Fresh tears trickled from her dark eyes. “Or he would if he was still alive. He thought it was me every time, even though I knew it wasn’t.”

She stared down at her cat and stroked him with gentle crooning noises.

Sidney had told me about her kleptomania. Embarrassed, I looked at her friend, who mouthed a word I couldn’t understand.

“Go ahead and say it out loud, Alice,” Mrs. Lundigren said angrily. She turned to me. “I’m a crazy person. Kleptomania. You know what that means.”

I nodded.

“They say it’s a sickness.
I
say I’m crazy. I don’t even want the stuff. Phil knows—
knew—
I didn’t. But I can’t help myself. I try, but… do
you
think I’m crazy?”

“No,” I said, as gently as I could.

“Phil says it really doesn’t matter. We are what we are. But I’ll tell you this. I’m not the only one who takes things.”

“There’s a real thief in the building?”

“Well, it’s not all me! I didn’t take anybody’s jewelry, I don’t care what they say.”

She gave an impatient shake of her head, shifted the cat onto the couch, and leaned forward to undo the cellophane on the gardenia plant. As the florist had promised, it was covered in fat pale green buds. Two creamy white blossoms had already opened. Mrs. Lundigren took a deep sniff and smiled. “How did Kate know I love gardenias?”

Back upstairs, I switched on the lamps in the living room, poured myself a glass of Riesling, and curled up on the brown leather couch with my laptop to read up on kleptomania. Five o’clock came and went and it was nearly six before Dwight finally let himself in.

“How did the seminar go?” I asked.

“Fine. Did you know that there are cameras and police swarming all over the lobby and the basement door? The day man that they thought quit yesterday morning?”

“Antoine?” I said. “What about him?”

“They just found his body in one of the garbage bins.”

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

S
IGRID
H
ARALD
—M
ONDAY EVENING

“H
e 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.