Death of a Butterfly (Sigrid Harald)

by Margaret Maron

  Sigrid wondered what that said about Julie Redmond’s character? Everything or nothing?

  The round white breakfast table was molded in one piece of plastic, with a central pedestal for support, and Sigrid drew up a chair and spread out her notes. Although she and Tillie had avoided stepping on it, neither was unduly bothered by the chalked outline on the orange-tiled floor. (I’m getting hard, Sigrid thought sadly.)

  The coffee maker was still plugged in, so Tillie located cups and spoons to pour them each some of the now bitter brew and they discussed what they had so far.

  “The doorman, a Samuel Dorritt, confirmed what Mr. and Mrs. Cavatori told us,” Tillie began. “He says he got a cab for her and the little boy about ten-thirty and another for the ex-husband around eleven.”

  “How secure is this building?”

  “Not very. Dorritt’s supposed to know everyone coming in or out, and it’s pretty tight at night; but during the day, when he’s on duty, the doors are unlocked and sometimes he has to go up to the avenue to hail a cab—something he does for the good tippers like the Cavatoris, so I suppose anyone could walk in then.”

  “Get someone to check out the cab Redmond took. Make sure he didn’t double back.”

  Tillie made a note of it and added, “It fits in with what the Cavatori maids told me.” He showed Sigrid the rough timetable he’d begun:

  10:15—Mrs. Cavatori to Redmond apartment, 3-D

  10:20—Karl Redmond to visit Vico Cavatori, 3-B

  10:29—Mrs. C. and Timmy Redmond leave 3-D

  11:00—Redmond leaves 3-B (Mr. C. sees him enter elevator, Dorritt sees him leave.)

  11:15—Mr. C. leaves 3-B

  11:30–1:00—someone leaves 3rd floor by service stairs

  1:15—Body discovered by Miss Fitzpatrick from 3-C

  “Somewhere you need to add what Miss Fitzpatrick told me,” said Sigrid. “She overheard Julie Redmond speaking to someone angrily in what Miss Fitzpatrick refers to as midmorning. She couldn’t be any more specific than that; but if it’s any help, she eats breakfast at six-thirty.”

  Tillie grinned at the faint shudder in Sigrid’s tone. Her aversion to early morning hours had indicated to him the first chink in the lieutenant’s protective armor.

  “Could that be our unknown who took the stairs?”

  “Possibly. Miss Fitzpatrick only heard the girl’s voice.” Sigrid referred to her own sketchy notes. “‘He’s mine and you can damn well stay away from him’ is what she said she heard.”

  “Talking to another woman? Maybe about that George she made the tape on?”

  “Or to her ex-husband about the boy?” Sigrid suggested. She tapped her pencil on Tillie’s timetable. “Everyone keeps saying around eleven. That could be a six- or eight-minute spread, you know. Quite sufficient time. Can we be sure Redmond came straight down after Mr. Cavatori saw him into the elevator?”

  “I’ll check it,” Tillie said. “And I’ll also see what Records has on the brother, Mickey Novak.”

  They had found an address book by the bedside telephone and Sigrid riffled through its pages. Julie Redmond’s efficiency seemed to have carried over to her personal records, she noted: Names were entered in ink, but addresses and telephone numbers were lightly penciled in a clear and curiously childish handwriting.

  The space under Karl Redmond’s name was slightly rough, as if more than one address had been erased since the book was begun. Sigrid recognized the current address as somewhere in lower Manhattan.

  The rest of the listings included three Georges but nothing to indicate which, if any, was the George of the telephone tap. She slid the book across the shiny white table top to Tillie.

  “When you get back to the office, have someone start running a check on these names. See if you can winnow out the right George. I’ll take Karl Redmond myself.”

  As she divided immediate chores and mapped out the routine, Sigrid became aware of voices out in the vestibule. From her seat in the kitchen, she could see down the narrow hallway through the open service door to where one of Officer Crowell’s colleagues from the precinct stood guard duty. He was speaking to a tall, cadaverous-looking man and seemed annoyed by the older man’s badgering.

  “—you don’t like it, talk to the Lieutenant,” they heard him say.

  Tillie got up and walked down to the door. “Something wrong, Mr. Dorritt?”

  The man glared at Tillie truculently. “How much longer? Respectable building here.”

  “Where a woman’s just been murdered,” Tillie reminded him mildly. “And only this morning, too. You can’t expect us to be finished so quickly.”

  “Is that the doorman?” Sigrid called. Although he was informally clothed now, his build and the way he carried his head reminded her that she’d seen him in the living room when she’d first arrived. “Ask him to come in, please.”

  Dorritt was a tall, almost gaunt figure. He had rounded shoulders and his head bobbled forward on a long scrawny neck, making him look somewhat like a thin, elderly turtle. His eyes were deep-set and his iron gray hair was closely trimmed and combed flat. He wore uniform pants with a dark red stripe down the side, but instead of a doorman’s jacket, his pants were topped by an open-necked white shirt and an old maroon cardigan which had been clumsily darned at the elbows. On his wrinkled face was a mulish look of suspicion mingled with stubbornness.

  Tillie introduced Sigrid and said, “You told me before, Mr. Dorritt, that you were in the lobby when Karl Redmond came down in the elevator. Then Vico Cavatori came down about ten minutes later. Are you sure it wasn’t the other way around?”

  Dorritt’s head swung around the bright yellow and orange kitchen, bobbled in Sigrid’s direction, then back to Tillie. “Wasn’t there,” he said.

  “But you distinctly told me—” Tillie began indignantly.

  “Wasn’t me.” Malicious humor briefly sparked the old man’s pale blue eyes. “My brother.”

  At Tillie’s unbelieving stare, he shrugged his thin shoulders indifferently. “Twins. Identical. He’s Sammy. I’m Manny.”

  Sigrid gazed at him, bemused, trying to picture the proud delight this tall bony man and his brother must have excited in a mother’s heart over sixty years ago. Samuel and Emanuel.

  Imagination turned somersaults with the vision, was firmly restrained.

  “Do both of you work here?” she asked.

  Manny Dorritt rationed out his words as reluctantly as a miser spending gold, but he nodded and grudgingly volunteered that he and his twin, who was working the day shift this week and to whom Tillie had spoken earlier, not only shared the doorman’s job but also the doorman’s single uniform jacket and gold­braided hat. (“Stingy owners,” said Dorritt, without rancor.) There was no full-time resident janitor. Regular cleaning and repairs of the building were performed by a maintenance service, but the Dorritt brothers had been given the use of a small basement apartment in return for minor janitorial duties involving fuses and thermostats and cut-off valves.

  The brothers worked two shifts: from seven to four in the afternoon and from four to midnight, the off-duty one spelling the other at lunch and supper time. That meant that Manny Dorritt had been in the lobby from around twelve till one P.M. and had missed both the comings and goings of the third-floor tenants as well as Miss Fitzpatrick’s discovery of Julie Redmond’s body.

  “So during the hour you were on duty, no one went up to the third floor?” asked Sigrid.

  Dorritt’s pendulous head swung around to her again. “Busy time. Doors to open. Packages to hold. Didn’t watch to see what floors the cage stopped at.”

  He pursed his thin, liverish lips as if so much garrulity pained him. Sigrid waited, gazing at him with her calm gray eyes. Tillie recognized her tactic and didn’t interrupt.

  Dorritt turned his head from one to the other uneasily. The silence grew, and up from the dim recesses of Manny Dorritt’s memory floated the image of a fourth-grade teacher who had never been fooled as to
which particular Dorritt twin had committed which infraction of the rules. She’d had gray eyes, too. Eyes that bored into you until you couldn’t help coming out with the truth. Dorritt’s rounded shoulders slumped in capitulation.

  “Saw her brother,” he said sullenly. “Just after twelve. Didn’t see me.”

  He’d been a couple of minutes late relieving Sammy for lunch, he explained in monosyllables, so Sammy had already gone downstairs, leaving the doorman’s jacket and hat inside their little cubbyhole just off the lobby. He’d entered the lobby from the street a pace or two behind the dead woman’s brother.

  “Mickey Novak?” asked Tillie.

  Dorritt nodded. He described the small, dark-haired young man whom he’d known by sight as wearing white denim jeans and jacket and a green shirt. Without his own distinctive hat and elaborate doorman’s jacket, he hadn’t been recognized by Novak.

  “None of ’em do. They see you on the street like this, they pass you up,” the doorman said bitterly. The old grievance made him almost loquacious. “Think they’re being so gawdamighty friendly when you’re holding the door or getting ’em a cab. Not to you. To the frigging uniform.”

  By persistent questioning, they learned that Mickey Novak had passed through the lobby and into the elevator at a minute or two past twelve, but the noon hour was the busiest time of day and if Dorritt had seen Julie Redmond’s brother depart, he wasn’t admitting it.

  Sigrid rather suspected there was something else Dorritt wasn’t telling, but she thanked him for his cooperation and indicated that they had no more questions for the moment. “We should be finished for the day shortly ourselves,” she told him.

  Dorritt started to leave, then turned back. “Taking him with you?” he asked, his head bobbing toward the patrolman at the end of the service hall.

  Tillie explained that an officer would be on watch there until they were completely finished with the Redmond apartment, which might take another day or two. Dorritt started to argue, thought better of it, and reluctantly departed.

  A disappointed Officer Frederick Crowell appeared to report that no taped conversations had been masquerading as rock tapes. He, too, was thanked and sent back to his precinct station.

  Tillie looked longingly at the ransacked desk. His methodical soul was drawn by muddled papers in need of sorting and cataloguing, but Sigrid dissuaded him. “They’ll wait till tomorrow,” she said. “First things first.”

  He nodded, called the local precinct to confirm a routine round-the-clock watch outside apartment 3-D and collected the dead girl’s address book to take back to headquarters.

  “Unless you want me to come with you to see Redmond?” he asked.

  “Not necessary,” she said.

  Out in the vestibule, she hesitated before Miss Fitzpatrick’s door, then decided to tackle young Eliza at a later time.

  The lone police officer stood alertly as they locked the two doors and prepared to leave, but he was an old hand at long stretches of guard duty and had already secured a fairly comfortable arm chair which he’d positioned just inside the small recess formed by the corner of the enclosed stairwell near 3-D’s service door.

  The elevator stopped with a soft chime and as soon as the door closed upon his superiors, he loosened his collar and settled back for an easy, if boring, evening.

  CHAPTER 7

  It was still daylight when Sigrid parked her car near Father Fagan Square and walked up MacDougal Street through a diversity of people and wares crowding the sidewalks. Bursts of Chinese, Spanish, and Italian were heard as frequently as English along these SoHo streets.

  Among its dingier neighbors, Number 2 Princess Alley reminded Sigrid of Dickens’s Mrs. Cratchit, brave in ribbons. The front of the old two-story brick building glistened in shiny green enamel; the windows were bedizened with spangles and glitter, and above them, the name Brummagems had been lettered in a flowing gold script which owed more to verve than expertise.

  As Sigrid entered the shop, a delicate tinkle made her glance up. The doorbell was a white stained-glass lily with petals gracefully turned back from dainty pistils tipped by a cluster of minute brass bells, each no bigger than the end of a hatpin. They tinkled again when she closed the door and from the rear of the shop, Sigrid heard a voice call, “With you in a minute.”

  She gazed around with mildly curious eyes. Jewelry did not interest her much. The few pieces she owned were modest keepsakes: an old ruby ring from Grandmother Lattimore that had been in the family for five generations, an oval pin of seed pearls, a handful of silver bracelets her mother had once sent from a bazaar in Marrakesh, a child’s gold locket that had been bought for another Sigrid over a hundred years ago in Copenhagen.

  The trendy things in this shop were light years away in feeling. In the center of the store, a hexagonal column had been covered with line drawings of angular exotic faces. Large organdy ears jutted from the faces and each lobe was pierced by earrings fashioned from colored glass, polished rocks, sea shells, chunks of wood, feathers, and a dozen different materials. Wooden hands protruded regally from one wall and every wooden finger and wrist were similarly adorned.

  On the opposite wall, serried ranks of Styrofoam wig stands had been sprayed a matte black to dramatize necklaces of shiny wood and chunky beads. A similarly painted window dresser’s dummy stood by the high rear counter, immodestly clad only in belts fashioned of plastic and chrome blocks. The mannequin’s head was inclined toward the silent blond girl behind the counter who bent over a workbench cluttered with bits and pieces of all the things displayed in the shop.

  The girl looked up and smiled. “Only a minute more,” she promised.

  She held up a square of Lucite so polished that its beveled edges looked like cut glass. It was about an inch square and embedded within its crystal clarity was an intricate design in burnished brass wire that began as a link in a chain outside the plastic and, after completing a labyrinthine pattern, exited on the opposite side into another link.

  “It’s my new design for a necklace,” said the girl. “How are you going to like it?”

  “Very much,” Sigrid said and was faintly surprised to realize that she truly did.

  “Of course, it really ought to be gold,” sighed the girl. “Brass just won’t hold that shine. But electroplate’s not much better.”

  She was pure Flemish, thought Sigrid, who favored late Gothic drawings. The girl had a plain, ethereal beauty like one of those Holbein silverpoints—a thin face with high clear forehead and hair so fair as to be almost white. Not exactly pretty, but so self-contained that she radiated serenity.

  She wore a loosely draped peasant-style dress of unbleached muslin that made the analogy to Flemish angels not too unlikely. Then she stood up and walked around the counter and Sigrid caught her breath.

  No, not angel but madonna. The girl was in the very last stages of pregnancy.

  “Did you have anything special in mind?”

  “Is Karl Redmond here?” Sigrid asked.

  The girl shook her head. “No. May I help you instead?”

  “I’m Lieutenant Harald, Police Department,” Sigrid explained, holding out her shield and watching the girl’s face closely.

  There was no apprehension, only professional interest as she reached for Sigrid’s gleaming shield. “May I?” she asked and held it up to the light to scrutinize the engraving.

  “That’s really not very clean work,” she said disapprovingly as she handed it back. “The lettering could be much sharper. I suppose you’re here because of Julie?”

  “You know that she’s been killed, Mrs.—?”

  “Bryna Leighton, but it’s Miss, not Mrs.,” the girl corrected.

  “Luisa Cavatori called Karl late this afternoon to tell him. And then Karl left to discuss a business deal with Mr. Cavatori’s partner.”

  “About the zipper pulls?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I was there when Mr. Cavatori showed one to his wife and s
aid that Mr. Redmond had tried to interest him in them.”

  The girl’s vague air sharpened into interest. “What did he say? Did he like them? Did she?”

  Before Sigrid could answer, the girl seemed to stiffen for an instant. She looked at the clock behind her, frowned, then turned back to her work bench to jot the time on a notepad.

  “The pains are coming pretty regularly,” she said. “Do you think I ought to call the midwife yet?”

  In the next moment, the question became rhetorical as a severe contraction doubled her over.

  “My car’s not far,” Sigrid said hastily. “I can have you at a hospital in no time. I have a siren,” she added inanely.

  “Hospital?” said Bryna Leighton. “Oh no. We’re having the baby here.”

  Sigrid looked around wildly. Nowhere did she see a suitable birthing area. She took a deep breath. She would stay completely calm, she told herself. She would remember the compulsory first-aid course she’d had as a rookie. Among other things, it had included obstetrics instructions.

  Hadn’t it?

  She tried to remember and found her mind going blank.

  “I think,” said Bryna, “that I’d better go upstairs. Would you call Mrs. Li for me? She’s my midwife. The number’s there by the phone:’

  She paused at the doorway to the stairs. “Tell her the contractions are coming every five minutes now.”

  Sigrid dived for the telephone, dialed, and was answered in a spate of Chinese. “Mrs. Li,” she enunciated carefully. “Please let me speak to Mrs. Li.”

  There was a confused murmur at the other end of the wire, then an adolescent male voice said, “Mom’s not here, but we expect her any minute. Want me to have her call you?”