Oh, blast her undisciplined mind!
Unaware of causing ambivalent thoughts, Nauman spied a parking space and, with a clashing of gears and brakes, whipped into it before a slower sedan could take precedence.
An entrancing yeasty fragrance hung over a sidewalk crowded with amiable shoppers out to enjoy a leisurely Saturday morning. Nauman unfolded his lean frame and handed her out of the yellow MG.
“This is one of the best French bakeries in the world,” he said, pulling open the door of an immaculate, heavenly smelling shop. “You won’t find better croissants in Paris.”
“Paris? Faugh on Paris!” sniffed the dark and villainous-faced owner of the shop. “Dites-moi, Oscar: Where in Paris do you find food fit to eat in the last ten years?”
“There’re still a few places.”
“Places, Oscar?” The man leered suggestively. “Places or les dames?” He lapsed into rapid French.
Nauman laughed at those ribald references to the long-gone days of postwar Paris and shook his head ruefully. “Rien de plus, Jean! Je me fais trop vieux.”
“You? Ha! You will never be too old, my friend,” the man said with a Gallic gesture which included Sigrid as part of his argument.
Fortunately, Sigrid had already headed for the pastry cases and missed both the gesture and Nauman’s warning frown. The open car had stimulated her appetite and breakfast was beginning to feel less and less like an idiotic idea. Everything looked as wonderful as it smelled and they filled a large bag with different croissants, brioches, and jam tarts.
From the pastry shop it was only a short drive to a quiet, tree lined side street. Nauman parked the car, hooked the bag of pastries out of the rear, and led Sigrid down a shallow flight of steps to the basement door of a narrow brownstone.
“Ciao, Oscar!” cried a boisterous female voice from within, and the door flew open upon a short, vibrant woman of indeterminate middle age, who stood on tiptoes and pulled Nauman down to her level so that she could plant hearty kisses on either cheek. Her harlequin-shaped glasses had turquoise frames heavily crusted in rhinestones, but otherwise she looked like everyone’s childhood image of a little Dutch girl: plump, rosy cheeks, flaxen hair cut straight across in bangs, even a white eyelet blouse and a long peasant skirt of vivid primary colors. Her red wood and leather sandals looked like a space-age version of Dutch clogs.
“Come in! Come in! I hope you bought out Jean’s shop. I’m ravenous!”
Nauman held the open bag to her nose and she breathed in the combined aromas of cinnamon, yeast, and peach jam, then beamed at them, still chattering nonstop.
“This is Dr. Gill,” Nauman began, but the woman seized Sigrid’s hands and said, “Hi! I’m Jill Gill. Feel free to make jokes and bad puns about it. Everyone else does. You must be Sigrid Harald. I wish I could say Oscar’s told me all about you, but this morning was the first I’ve heard. Come along and help bring out the coffee. We’re picnicking in the garden. Unless you’d rather have tea? Or maybe cocoa?”
“Coffee’s fine,” Sigrid murmured, and followed the billowing skirt down a bright hallway which led back to the kitchen and out into a deep walled garden.
Meeting new people socially made Sigrid shy and tongue-tied as a rule, but Jill Gill gave her no time to feel awkward. She was kept so busy bringing out cups and saucers, pots of honey, jam, and butter, a pitcher of milk, and enough breakfast supplies for a dozen people that by the time they were finally settled at the glass-topped patio table at the front of the garden she felt as if she’d known the woman longer.
There was nothing shy about Dr. Gill. Blunt and plain-spoken, she asked astonishingly personal questions with a child’s directness that left Sigrid gasping.
“Stop it, Jilly,” said Nauman, lighting his pipe after three croissants, two jam tarts, and three cups of coffee. “She’s not a specimen under your microscope.”
“Did I sound like I was dissecting?” Dr. Gill looked so genuinely crushed that Sigrid tempered his reproach with a question of her own. “What does he mean by specimen? Are you a scientist?”
“Entomologist. Want to see?” She took another croissant, smeared it thickly with butter and jam, and, still munching, led them along a brick walk to the rear of the garden. The entire back wall was given over to a large, fine-meshed wire cage. Within, ground and sides were lined with planters that held a jungle of vines, herbs, and outright weeds.
Sigrid caught her breath. What from the front of the garden had seemed like colorful flowers undulating in a light breeze was in reality dozens of butterflies of every color and size.
On the whole, Sigrid ignored nature. She did not gush over flowers, burble about small animals, or devote much emotion to new moons, first snowflakes, or the like; but so many butterflies in one mass were stunning.
“Where on earth did you get them?”
Pleased by Sigrid’s reaction, Jill Gill beamed behind those atrocious rhinestone-studded frames. “From all over,” she said, daintily licking the last dollop of jam from her fingers. “Some of them I raised myself, but most were sent to me from all across the country. I write science books for children and one of them—the one about butterflies—hit the bestseller list a few years back. Kids are still sending me specimens from all fifty states.”
Sigrid tried to picture butterflies in envelopes, but Dr. Gill disabused her. “They send the chrysalises and cocoons and kids are usually pretty careful about packing them properly. I put them all back here so that when they start emerging in the spring, I can catch any unusual specimens. Then every Saturday afternoon, I let the week’s hatch go.
Suiting action to words, she folded back the hinged cage top.
Hesitantly, then with growing confidence, the butterflies fluttered upward—three or four at first, then a small cloud lifted in the warm spring air and floated freely into the garden and across the walls. There were several that stayed behind, clinging to the wire, and Dr. Gill showed Sigrid how to slip her hand down until a particularly beautiful insect released its grip and clasped her fingers.
It was a lovely pale green, edged in soft pink with black and gold eyespots on each wing and fully six inches long from top to the long tapering tails of the hind wings.
Too absorbed in the creature to notice how Nauman was looking at the picture they made, Sigrid held her hand high to give it a chance to fly, but it stubbornly clung to her fingertips.
“It’s a luna moth,” explained Dr. Gill, who had noticed Nauman’s face. “A night-flyer.”
“What’s the difference between a moth and a butterfly?”
“Well, the most obvious difference is in antennae and body shape. A butterfly’s slenderer and its antennae usually end in little blackjacks at the tips; but a moth’s chunkier, more hairy, and the antennae are often feathery. There’re other differences, too, of course, but Oscar gets bored when I become technical.”
Nauman shrugged, and Jill Gill’s sharp blue eyes crinkled merrily through her absurd glasses. “Come alone someday, my dear, and I’ll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about lepidoptera but were afraid to ask.”
“Perhaps I will,” Sigrid said gravely, knowing that when an expert talks about her field, she is never dull.
She was almost sorry when Dr. Gill took the luna from her and transferred it to a tree branch.
“Which kind are you going to give her?” asked Nauman, and Sigrid realized these were the pets he’d threatened her with.
“Can butterflies live in an apartment?”
“Not butterflies—caterpillars.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Sigrid said doubtfully, thinking of slimy worms.
They ignored her, discussing the merits of each species. “The monarch makes the prettiest chrysalis,” Dr. Gill said at last. “Like a green-enameled, gold-tipped jewel box, but it has to be fed milkweed. Do you know what milkweed looks like?” she asked Sigrid. “Almost every abandoned lot all over the city has some growing wild.”
Sigrid vigorously di
savowed knowing any weed by name, but her benefactress was undeterred.
“We’ll make it a black swallowtail then. It eats parsley, celery, or fresh dill and you can buy those at any fruit stand along Ninth Avenue.”
Everything seemed to go together effortlessly. “No trouble at all,” she said over Sigrid’s demurrals. “I’m always fixing them for the kids in the neighborhood. They’d rather have a dog, of course, or a cat; but caterpillars are better than nothing if you want something living to care for.”
She stuck a small medicine bottle to the bottom of a widemouthed gallon glass jar with a dab of Plasticene, added water to the little bottle, then picked several stems of parsley growing in a nearby box. Before standing the parsley in the water bottle, she handed Sigrid a magnifying glass, and there on the leaves Sigrid saw three or four tiny black caterpillars with a yellowishwhite saddle mark. They were less than a quarter-inch long and were, if anything, hairy rather than slimy.
“The hair falls off soon and they’ll get green with black and yellow stripes as they molt,” said the pixyish entomologist, tying a piece of cheesecloth over the mouth of the jar. “Just keep sticking in fresh parsley every few days. When they’re as big as your index finger and start crawling off the parsley, add some long bare twigs so they’ll have a rigid place to pupate.”
Sigrid said it sounded complicated; Nauman told her not to be such a nay-sayer. “It’s a perfectly simple, logical process which even a two-year-old could understand.”
“Don’t you want some, too?” Jill Gill generously asked Oscar.
“Can’t,” said Nauman. “I’m off to Amsterdam tonight.”
“That’s right, your exhibition,” the woman nodded.
Sigrid suddenly felt as if she’d stepped down on a step which wasn’t really there. “Amsterdam?”
“Amsterdam. Didn’t I mention it before?”
“No,” she said coldly.
“Thought I did. They’ve gotten together a collection of my stuff and I have to go over and talk about it. Back in a few weeks. Miss me?”
“Certainly not!”
Dr. Gill’s round blond head had been following their exchange, switching back and forth as if at a tennis match, when the distant trill of the telephone called her to the house. She went reluctantly, her red shoes flashing beneath the long bright skirt. “If you’re going to fight, wait till I get back,” she called over her shoulder.
“Are we fighting?” Nauman asked, eying Sigrid.
“Don’t be absurd. It just surprised me, that’s all.”
Nauman looked vaguely disappointed. “I’ll miss you,” he said lightly.
“Miss having someone to bully, you mean.” Sigrid’s tone was dry.
At the far end of the garden, Jill Gill appeared in the doorway waving the telephone receiver. “It’s for ‘Lieutenant Harald,’” she called. “Sounds official.”
“Oh hell!” said Nauman.
CHAPTER 3
Detective Tildon waited for her in an open doorway on the third floor of the Rensselaer Apartment Building.
Tildon, inevitably called Tillie the Toiler by his colleagues, was a cherubic-faced officer who found it very difficult to make comparisons, draw parallels, formulate theories, or see beyond the obvious; but he was a valuable investigator because he felt his shortcomings keenly and tried to compensate by following the book and taking scrupulous note of every detail uncovered in an investigation. His reports were officialdom’s despair, but almost always, somewhere in that mountain of verbiage, the vital clue or damning piece of evidence would have been noted and documented.
Sigrid, aware of her own shortcomings, thought they made an efficient team. She had a clear and usually logical mind which, although she wouldn’t admit it, was aided by bursts of sheer intuition; but she lacked Tillie’s cheerful bumbling manner, which could so readily disarm witnesses and induce them to say more than they’d often intended.
“Sorry to call you in on such a pretty day, Lieutenant,” Tillie apologized as she stepped from the elevator, “but things got busy and your name was at the top of the roster.”
“It’s all right,” Sigrid said. Along the way, she’d stopped to change into one of her formless working suits, and all traces of Saturday holidaying were erased. “What do you have so far?”
Tillie consulted his ubiquitous notebook. “Julie Redmond, Caucasian female, early twenties, severe blow to the head. Body discovered around one-fifteen. Divorced and apparently there’s a kid—a little boy. No sign of him at the moment.
“I was just about to question the doorman,” he concluded, and indicated a gloomy-faced uniformed man who stood by the living-room windows.
Sigrid nodded for him to carry on and made her way through the apartment to a yellow and orange kitchen where the corpse was being examined and photographed in situ.
The room seemed crowded as Sigrid entered and stared down at the body. It was too soon to know what Julie Redmond had been like in life, but in death she was still quite lovely. Her features were composed and drained of emotion as she lay on the polished kitchen tiles like a crumpled butterfly carelessly pinned for display. An apricot robe half hid long, shapely legs. There wasn’t even much blood apparent, for she lay face up and the crushing blow had been struck from behind. One had to look closely through those soft dark curls to see the shattered skull and drying blood.
For the record, Lieutenant Sigrid Harald was deliberately not looking closely. This was the part she liked least about her job. It was not the sight of blood or gore that bothered her so much, but the grosser obscenity of murder itself. Of a life cut short before its time.
Yet she was aware of sidelong glances from the case-hardened professionals in the room, lab men and precinct officers, who even at this late date still mistrusted women officers. She knew the contempt they’d feel if she showed any vestige of the nausea rising within her, so she forced herself to seem detached— “Cold bitch,” thought a sergeant from the local precinct—and looked again.
The girl had been alive only a few short hours ago. She had sat at this table in her bright kitchen, as she drank coffee from a flowered cup and made plans for this day. Was she someone who had noticed butterflies? That wouldn’t matter anymore. Death had made such details irrelevant.
“We haven’t printed that yet, Lieutenant!” one of the lab men warned sharply.
“Sorry,” Sigrid murmured.
Absentmindedly, she’d almost picked up the weapon, a heavy black flatiron. It was one of a pair which had been used as bookends for the short row of cookbooks now sliding in disarray on the wide windowsill. Sigrid doubted that the rough diamond-patterned handle would yield usable prints but didn’t press the point.
“If you wouldn’t mind stepping back a little, Lieutenant?” suggested a photographer, his tone bordering on insubordination.
Sigrid turned and chilled him with such a frigid glance that he remembered that the privileges and power of rank extended to female officers, too, and abruptly decided to shoot another camera angle first.
Having examined the body long enough to make her point, Sigrid moved past the lab crew and back down the short hall which led to the rest of apartment 3-D.
As in most of these older apartments in the East Seventies, the living room was high-ceilinged and spacious. It overlooked a narrow strip of trees and flowering bushes and a wider service alley that separated this building from its rear neighbors and allowed the room more light. The dead woman had favored modern furniture, and the sofas and chairs upholstered in apricot velvet must have made a dramatic background for her dark beauty.
The one jarring note was a stark white plastic desk whose open drawers had been thoroughly ransacked. Receipted bills and canceled checks had fallen in drifts upon the floor and a crystal bowl of yellow roses seemed to have been removed from the top of the desk to make room for someone’s hasty examination of a box of snapshots.
A hall to the left led to two bedrooms and a bath. The second bedroom had
scaled-down furniture, a toy box, and a closet with little boy’s clothes. The room was supernally neat except for a pair of fuzzy slippers shaped like small rabbits under the edge of the bed and short blue pants carelessly tossed on the counterpane.
Sigrid opened one of the cabinet doors. She had little experience with children, but there seemed something odd about this room. She tried to visualize the rooms of her cousin’s children and remembered random heaps of books, stuffed animals and—since Hilda believed in rampant self-expressiveness—every wall bright with crayoned drawings.
Not a single pencil mark marred the pale blue walls of this child’s room. No bits and pieces from games or toys littered the deeper blue carpet, though there were games and toys enough behind the closed cabinet doors, all neatly arranged.
“She really had that kid well trained,” Tillie observed from behind her. He had children of his own and Sigrid thought she heard a trace of envy in his tone.
“Any sign of him yet?” she asked.
“The doorman says the lady in 3-B, a Mrs. Cavatori, took him out this morning. The maids over there confirm it. They were going to the circus. The people in 3-A are in Mexico, but that Miss Fitzpatrick’s calmed down enough to talk if you’re ready.”
“Fitzpatrick?”
“She’s the one who found the body,” reminded Tillie.
Sigrid stepped out into the carpeted vestibule. The building had been well taken care of through the years and wore its age gracefully. She noticed a strong smell of fresh paint. It was not a large building: only four apartments to each floor clustered around a central vestibule. On the left were double doors leading to an enclosed stairwell; on the right, an elevator shaft.
Death of a Butterfly (Sigrid Harald) Page 2
