Death of a Butterfly (Sigrid Harald)

by Margaret Maron

  She heard Karl’s foot on the stair, then a tinkle as the shop door opened and a customer drew him back. She waited placidly, no longer irritated by that placidity. It was hard to remember how once she’d run and flitted from task to task, full of plans for every facet of their lives, eager to begin new projects. Now she planned nothing beyond the next action and the unstructured rhythm only vaguely worried her.

  She remembered a science fiction story she’d read once in which a man went about buying up his friends’ extra time. Occasionally she wondered if someone had contracted to buy hers. She seemed to procrastinate endlessly these days—nothing accomplished, projects abandoned before they were well begun. Had she sold her time and somehow forgotten about it?

  Hardly, she smiled, with a flash of her old humor. If she’d exchanged her productive time for money, they wouldn’t be worried about meeting all the bills, would they?

  The shop bell tinkled again and Karl returned, an odd expression on his face, half excited, half what? Ashamed? Stunned?

  “Buyers?” asked Bryna.

  “Lookers,” he said, but without the usual bitterness. He took the mug of tea she handed him, looked at it blankly, and then set it back on the table.

  “Julie’s dead,” he said. “That was Luisa Cavatori on the phone. Julie was murdered this morning. Somebody hit her with one of those flatirons we bought up at Haines Falls.”

  “What about Timmy?” Bryna whispered.

  “Timmy?” For a moment he was puzzled by her question, then his face cleared. “No, he’s okay. Luisa had taken him to the circus this morning. Must have happened right after I was there.”

  A small fear made Bryna shiver.

  “It’s weird,” he said, “but while Luisa was talking, all I could think about was that now we can get married. Now. Today. Or whenever we can get a license and a priest, right?”

  Bryna was silent.

  “I guess that sounds pretty callous, doesn’t it?” He studied her face.

  “No,” she said and touched his hand. “Not really. If I were honest, I’d admit I won’t miss having to pay her money we don’t have every month.”

  For the first time in weeks, anticipation stirred her. “We’ll have to find a cot. Didn’t Pete and Gina have one they wanted to get rid of? We can rearrange the couches and everything so he can have part of a window.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “About making a place here for Timmy.”

  “No!”

  “Karl, he’s your son!”

  “He hates me!” Karl said tightly. “He screams every time I try to touch him. How can we have him here now anyhow?”

  “We could manage.”

  But even as she said it, she thought about her lethargy, the drifting of her days.

  Karl saw her hesitation and pounced on it. “No, sweetheart.”

  “Luisa thinks—and I agree—that it’d be better for Timmy not to have to cope with too many changes all at once. She and Vico are good with him. God knows he loves them better than he loves me. They’ll keep him until things get settled down. Maybe after a while, but not now.”

  He cupped her face with his hands. “Not now,” he repeated, and it was almost a plea.

  “Okay,” she said, remembering that, after all, she had no right to push.

  He stood up suddenly. “Lord, I almost forgot!”

  He slapped the pockets of his jeans and located a slip of paper.

  “Luisa gave me the address of Vico’s partner, Mario Fuselli. Vico’s arranged an appointment at five-thirty. What’d I do with those zipper pulls?”

  Bryna watched as he located the samples they’d worked up together.

  She was the craftsman, he the one with ideas to sell them. Funny the way their roles had changed. When they first met, he was the drifting one with no thought beyond the day. Drained by his father’s brutal death and Julie’s emasculating coldness, he had let her rearrange his life, unresisting.

  Now he overflowed with plans and schemes to produce and market not just zipper pulls but a whole line of popular fashion jewelry. And she, who should have caught fire from his blazing excitement, could barely muster interest in the day-to-day running of the shop.

  Karl peered in a mirror and rubbed his chin. “Better shave,” he said, and headed for the small cubicle of a bathroom in the far corner of the flat.

  “Luisa said Fuselli’s old-fashioned. That means suit and tie. Just like the old days. ‘The customers can wear anything they want,’ Pop used to tell me, ‘but they don’t trust a jeweler who dresses like a soda jerk.’”

  Bryna heard the pain underneath his light words and helped him find a clean shirt. The unsolved murder still haunted him.

  Karl and his father had been so close. How could he have allowed such an abyss to open between himself and his own son?

  He looked like a stranger when he emerged from the screens around their bedroom in polished shoes and precisely knotted tie. Good tailoring never lost its shape and the suit still fitted well despite his weight loss. He had half a dozen of those suits left over from the more prosperous days before she knew him.

  They had met by chance. Bryna had heard that a jewelry store was unloading the remnants of its stock at rock-bottom prices and she had gone with a silversmith friend, hoping for bargains.

  She’d been touched by the sandy-haired man with hurt in his eyes, who showed them what was left and seemed indifferent to the value of his stock.

  “But that’s too cheap!” she’d exclaimed after Karl told her the price of an odd lot of aquamarines.

  He had shrugged when she said he was cheating himself; so after checking out his other prices, Bryna had talked him into letting her handle the sale for a percentage of the extra profits.

  Two weeks later, Julie had begun divorce proceedings and Karl moved into the loft with Bryna.

  She had been scraping by comfortably enough alone; with Karl there, money was much tighter. Gentle, undemanding lovemaking had helped him recover his initiative and he soon pulled his weight in the shop; but meeting Julie’s monthly demands strained them to the limit.

  At first, Karl had paid whatever she asked; then, as life took hold of him again in the months following his father’s death, he’d become resentful of Julie’s whiplash scorn, of the way she made him feel that the sum the judge had set for child support was his tribute to her, not his son.

  Even harder to endure was the way she’d turned Timmy against him. He’d virtually quit seeing the child, so unhappy and strained were their occasional outings.

  It would be different now, Bryna thought. Julie was dead and already some of the tension seemed to be gone from Karl’s eyes.

  He touched her hair, breaking her reverie. “Will you be okay, sweetheart?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, smiling, and followed him downstairs. At the bottom of the stairway, another twinge of pain rippled through her, but Karl was already through the front door and she wouldn’t have called him back for that anyhow.

  He walked briskly, eager for the chance this meeting with Vico’s partner could make; and perhaps it was that confident tilt of his head that took her over to her workbench.

  Despite those back pains, she suddenly felt lighter than she had in weeks. As if her lost energy were returning. She felt like tackling something physical and vigorous, scrubbing floors or washing windows perhaps.

  Instead, she picked up a necklace she’d abandoned last month and immediately saw the solution to the design flaw which had caused her to cast it aside.

  She sorted out her tools and was instantly absorbed.

  CHAPTER 6

  As Sigrid and Tillie crossed the landing, they saw two attendants wheeling the loaded stretcher from the service entrance of 3-D.

  “Oh, there you are, Harald,” said Cohen, an assistant Medical Examiner, who’d just authorized removal of the body. “Wait a minute, you guys.”

  The attendants paused stoically, and Cohen motioned to Sigrid as he
lifted the sheet and drew it back.

  “It’ll be in my report, but I thought you’d like to know about this now.” He pulled aside the collar of Julie Redmond’s apricot robe and pushed back a handful of dark hair as if it were nothing more than a window dummy’s polystyrene wig. “See the abrasion on the neck? Looks like a necklace or something was yanked off; probably a thin chain the way the skin’s torn.”

  “Before or after she was killed?”

  “Oh, definitely after. Wasn’t any bleeding there.” He flipped the sheet back over the dead girl’s face and waved the stretcher on into the elevator.

  “What about the actual blows that killed her?” asked Sigrid.

  “Looks like only one; and offhand, I’d say a right-handed person of average strength. Nothing fancy. She was probably sitting there at the breakfast table with her back turned and whoever it was just grabbed the nearest object—in this case, one of those flatirons on the windowsill—and let her have it.”

  “Any guess as to when yet? We have one person so far who saw her alive around ten-thirty.”

  “Yeah? Well, that’ll help narrow it down. I was going to say nine-thirty at the earliest, ‘cause she was lying in the sunshine and that’d slow down the cooling,” said Cohen, who cultivated a laconic manner. “’Course, that tile floor . . . they found her at one-fifty, y’know, and by the time we got here . . .”

  He did a few mental calculations. “Okay. Say any time between ten-thirty and twelve-thirty at the absolute latest unless I tell you different in my report.”

  With a friendly salute, Cohen followed the stretcher into the elevator.

  Sigrid and Tillie re-entered the Redmond apartment and were immediately waylaid by one of the local precinct men. Young Officer Crowell was enthusiastic, ambitious and, at the moment, positively pink-cheeked with his good fortune.

  “I was checking in with my sergeant,” he explained, “when I noticed the wires.”

  The telephone in question was a white extension in Julie Redmond’s bedroom. As Officer Crowell had discovered, it did indeed carry a simple tap which was connected to a tape recorder in the top drawer of the bedside stand.

  “Very nice, Officer—?”

  “Crowell, ma’am. Freddy—I mean, Frederick Crowell.”

  “Detective Tildon,” said Sigrid, dryly formal, “please make a note that this device was the discovery of Officer Frederick Crowell.”

  Tillie grinned and Crowell grew even pinker.

  The photographer was summoned from the next room and after appropriate pictures had been taken of the apparatus, Sigrid pressed the recorder’s rewind button. When it cut off, she pressed Play. There was a sound of a telephone bell, a man answered, then the dead girl spoke from the drawer.

  “Hullo, George, darling!” Her voice was light and breathless with a studied effect of sensuality.

  “Oh, Christ!” said the man, his voice dropping in resignation.

  “Is that any way to say hello, darling?”

  “What do you want, Julie?”

  “You, George. Just you.”

  The man made a rude sound and the girl’s laughter rippled through the room.

  “Damn it, Julie! We went through all this four years ago. It’s too late now, doll. You made your choice.”

  “But it was the wrong one, darling. You’re not going to hold it against me forever, are you? Admit it, we all make mistakes, don’t we?”

  Silence.

  “I said, don’t we, George?” A sardonic taunt crept into her voice now, as of a cat toying with a mouse she hadn’t quite decided to eat.

  “Why do you keep bringing it up?” the man asked angrily. “What’s the point of—?” There was a reflective pause, then a low, incredulous, “Damn! Are you taping this?”

  “Now why would I do a silly thing like that?” she began. She was too late. The man had hung up.

  Laughter rippled again and there was the sound of the drawer being opened as she’d stopped the tape. Nothing else was on the cassette.

  “He knew about the tap,” exclaimed Officer Crowell. Sigrid nodded. “So it would seem.”

  “Blackmail?” wondered Tillie.

  “Instead of the lover Mrs. Cavatori thought she had? Possibly. That could explain how she lived so well without working.”

  Sigrid checked the other drawers in the nightstand. “No tapes here, but others could be stashed around the apartment. Keep your eyes open.”

  They began a cursory search. Officer Crowell was assigned Julie Redmond’s collection of rock music and told to make sure a Devo label hadn’t been stuck over a homemade tape as camouflage.

  As they moved into the living room, they noticed a man in white coveralls speaking to the remaining technicians who were waiting for Sigrid to dismiss them.

  The photographer signaled to her. “Mr. Gilchrist here has some info, Lieutenant.”

  A vigorous fifty, Gilchrist had medium brown skin, a pencil­thin moustache, and the ability to add two plus two without a calculator. He made the shift from male police officer to the officer’s female superior without flicking an eyelash.

  “It’s like this, Lieutenant,” he said, a light lilt of the Caribbean in his voice. “I got the contract to paint this building, yes? Hallways, main lobby, and stairwells.”

  Despite the easygoing lilt, Gilchrist was a thorough professional. He had told his crew to save the stairs for last, he explained, because they’d had to cart extension ladders up and down and he hadn’t wanted to risk scarring the walls. Retouching cost time and money.

  The stairwell’s walls, ceilings, and rails had been finished yesterday; nothing was left except the treads and risers themselves and even those had been painted almost down to the third floor the evening before when his crew had knocked off for the weekend.

  “But my old woman’s gone visiting our grandbabies over in Jersey, so I decided to come on back this morning and finish up here myself. Got another job starting Monday morning and this little bit’s not worth tying up a man all day, and that’s what it’d be if I let one of them lazy bums stay here without me cracking the whip on him, yes?”

  Gilchrist described how he’d painted the concrete steps using an oil-based marine enamel. (“Costs more, but wears four times longer.”) Each floor contained two flights and a landing in between. Working efficiently, the painter had finished the flight down to the third floor, its landing and almost down to the first floor landing before breaking for lunch at eleven-thirty.

  Lunch had stretched to an extra beer and one o’clock. “What the hell?” grinned Mr. Gilchrist, his teeth flashing as he repositioned his white canvas painter’s cap. “I’m my own boss, yes?

  “But when I finally got back to the paintbrushes, bless Jesus if somebody hadn’t walked right down through my whole morning’s work!”

  In all the time he and his crew had moved up and down the stairwell, they had never once met any tenants there.

  “Me, I got careless,” Gilchrist admitted. “Didn’t seem like there was any need to stick up signs all over the place. My own fault, yes?”

  He had backtracked up to the landing between the third and second floors where the morning’s paint was still so wet that it didn’t take many brush strokes to undo the damage, figuring he d come back the next day after the higher steps had dried completely so he could paint over the footprints. The longer he worked, though, the more he’d worried.

  “I got to thinking what if the guy was wearing expensive treads or threads. He could set me back plenty in a small claims court, yes?”

  At last, he’d gone down to speak to the doorman and that was when he first learned of the murder. (“No, don’t think I ever saw the lady and they say she was one you remembered, yes?”) He’d hung around awhile, listened to the talk and speculations and when the tentative estimates about the time of the murder began, he’d started wondering where those hasty footprints originated.

  “And?” asked Sigrid.

  “That’s right, Lieutenant,” Gilch
rist said. “Right out that door, just as plain as applesauce.”

  “Looks like a man’s size seven boot, Lieutenant,” said the lab technician, who’d hoped to end his shift on time this afternoon. From the size of the shoe print and length of stride, they would be able to theorize about the man’s height. Paint samples were taken in case the shoes in question turned up, and exhaustive photographs were also taken; but there was nothing distinctive about the footprints, nothing so useful as trademarks or ridged rubber soles, though Tillie made a quick sketch of the shape of the boot heel.

  “Just in case,” he told Sigrid sheepishly.

  Mr. Gilchrist was thanked and asked to leave the stairwell untouched for the time being. Sigrid released the rest of the lab men and she and Tillie returned to apartment 3-D where Officer Crowell’s ears were still being blasted by authentic rock tapes.

  “Doesn’t seem to be anything here but music, ma’am,” he reported regretfully as they re-entered the living room.

  He was told that all detecting was not as exciting or as simple as picking up a telephone and discovering a wiretap. He was told to keep listening and Sigrid and Tillie walked down to the kitchen looking for some quiet in which to compare notes.

  Even though the sun had long since moved to the other side of the building, the kitchen still seemed sunlit. The cabinets were painted buttercup yellow and the countertops were white Formica, but there was no clutter on the counters. No mushroom-shaped salt and pepper shakers or clever napkin holders, no canisters or cookie jar, no appliances visible at all except the coffee maker, which had been in active use.

  Had it not been for the splashy yellow and orange floral wall covering, the room could have doubled as a testing laboratory. Flowers and bright colors yet, like the whole apartment, stripped down to bare efficiency.