Death of a Butterfly (Sigrid Harald)

by Margaret Maron

  “So your father won’t be Mrs. Redmond’s chief mourner?”

  “But that doesn’t mean he would hurt her,” Eliza protested.

  Insulated by the egocentrism of youth, Eliza Fitzpatrick had been relatively unmoved by Julie Redmond’s murder. There had been no meeting of minds in the two or three times she’d sat for the woman, no touching of sympathetic chords. Eliza was scornful of women who used their bodies instead of their minds and she’d lumped Julie into that category as casually and as completely as had her father.

  Gilbert Fitzpatrick’s exasperation with Julie’s harassment had seemed funny to her. Eliza knew that her father was stuffy and humorless; on the whole, though, she loved and admired him and she planned to follow his footsteps into law school with the significant exception of specializing in criminal law rather than civil or corporate.

  Julie’s death had seemed like a terrific opportunity to gather firsthand information about a murder investigation. That the officer in charge happened to be a competent, no-nonsense woman only added to its interest. Last night had been half scary but exciting; yet watching the lieutenant coolly analyze what she’d just said about her father brought Eliza to the abrupt realization that this was not some abstract game of hypothetical probabilities. Julie had been killed yesterday morning, and this woman’s job was to bring somebody—anybody?—to trial for it.

  “Anyhow,” she said quickly, “Dad has a standing squash game with a friend every Saturday morning.”

  His grin under control, Detective Tildon returned with three cups of coffee and a more professional air. He tactfully elicited the name of Gilbert Fitzpatrick’s squash partner without alarming the girl.

  “Miss Fitzpatrick seems to have had a busy night, too,” said Tillie, handing Sigrid a written précis of Hodson’s carefully edited version of last night’s events. Hodson’s relief had passed it along to Tillie this morning along with Dorritt’s key ring.

  Sigrid sipped her coffee and skimmed through the account.

  She glanced at Eliza Fitzpatrick, who looked somewhat embarrassed by Tillie’s words.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Eliza explained, “so I got up to make some hot chocolate to relax me and I just thought I’d see if Officer Hodson wanted some, too—and please don’t say anything about it to Aunt Elizabeth or in front of my father or mother!”

  They assured the girl of their discretion and, after hearing her account of the doorman’s early morning activity, sat back, puzzled.

  “Hodson says one of the Dorritts offered to relieve him several times during the evening,” mused Tillie. “Once to go out for a sandwich, again to use the john in the basement, and finally just to go up to the roof and stretch his legs. Very considerate.”

  “Certainly doesn’t sound like the Dorritts we’ve come to know and love,” Sigrid agreed. “But why 3-A? Did Hodson check out the whole apartment?”

  Tillie shrugged, and Eliza, who’d listened enthralled, said, “No, he didn’t. Just made Mr. Dorritt leave everything as it was and come away. And something else, Lieutenant—the Bitzers have been away for a couple of weeks, but I smelled cigarette smoke in the service hall, and Mr. Dorritt says he doesn’t smoke.”

  “That was very observant of you,” said Sigrid, pleased. Her gray eyes flicked over to Tillie, then back again to the girl. “Would you mind being present while we question the Dorritt brothers?”

  “I’d love—I mean,” said Eliza, struggling for dignity, “I’ll be glad to help any way I can.”

  Tillie’s lips were twitching again as he departed in search of the Bobbsey twins.

  CHAPTER 12

  The morning after too much cocaine is not like the morning after too much alcohol. One’s head does not throb with the slightest movement, one can think of last night’s dinner without lurching for the bathroom, and one does not necessarily resort to the hair of the dog in order to stabilize the shakes. Nevertheless, the lambent spring sunlight which streamed through faded curtains did nothing to warm Mickey Novak’s spirits.

  To the uninitiated, his drippy nose, streaming red eyes, and stuffy head might seem like symptoms of hay fever or a common spring cold, but Novak was bleakly aware of the difference. Ordinarily he was not a heavy user, but last night he’d wanted to blot out everything. Today, he had awakened jittery and anxious in a strange room and it had taken him several minutes to get his bearings.

  This particular room might not be familiar, but its tired wallpaper, bare floors, and cheap, minimal furnishings made it the counterpart of a thousand others throughout the city. It could have been the same boardinghouse he’d so hastily moved out of yesterday afternoon.

  The room was not particularly dirty; it was, in fact, cleaner than many he’d lived in. All the same, there was a grayness here that would never come bright again and a musty, dusty smell of Lysol and homelessness.

  He and Julie had begun in rooms like this. That foster home where the social workers had stuck the two Novak kids had been an apartment of dingy gray rooms.

  But Julie had gotten out. And once in a while, when she was between guys and he was between reform schools or prison, she’d let him move in for a few weeks.

  With almost physical longing, he thought of Julie’s apartment—nothing faded or secondhand. Everything new and clean. Every object chosen to set off Julie’s soft black hair and her clear skin: sheer white curtains, bright cushions on that orangey-pink couch, cut-glass bowls of yellow flowers. All gone now . . . gone for good.

  At twenty-four, Mickey Novak had wasted little time on sentimentality or introspection, but as he paced the linoleum he was filled with a wrenching sense of loss.

  Julie could be a real bitch, he thought—a cold-hearted, lying, double-dealing bitch—but he’d never wanted her dead. Not really. Okay, maybe he’d belted her once or twice. God knows she’d deserved it. She played rough herself and if anybody else had pulled that, he’d have killed them long ago. After what Julie’d been through as a kid, though, maybe she needed all the softness and smooth things money could buy. Besides, she’d only done to him what he might have done to her if he’d thought of it first.

  He tried to calm himself, knowing that this nervous agitation came as much from snorting coke last night as from what happened yesterday. He hadn’t been this shook-up yesterday. He’d stayed calm, found the key, and got away clean.

  Not too clean, he remembered irritably, and looked at his black boots. Flecks of green paint still clung to the instep despite the swabbing he’d given them with lighter fluid last night. He’d have to throw them away. They’d tie him to Julie’s apartment house if the police caught up with him.

  Looking for another pair, he unsnapped the catches of a large brown leather suitcase. $189.95 it’d cost. Genuine pigskin, and he hadn’t stolen it, either. He’d paid cash over the counter for it in a regular store with part of the thirty thousand Julie’d given him. Inside was everything he owned at the moment; the things he’d brought with him when he decided he’d better clear out of the last place before the cops got onto him from his parole officer—a few changes of clothes, some toilet articles, a radio/cassette player with a dozen or so tapes, some other odds and ends, and a bundle of birthday cards.

  Funny those cards. No matter where he was, Julie’d always mailed him one. Or got him one and hung onto it till she knew where he was.

  He fumbled for a handkerchief, blew his nose, and damned the coke. It was the coke that made his eyes stream like this. He’d never cried over anybody or anything—no, not even that first time they’d hauled him off to juvenile hall and that Spanish kid took his jacket and threatened to kick his teeth out if he told. Not even then. But low moans escaped through his clenched teeth now as he turned the cards over and over in agitated hands.

  They were all gag cards, but he’d come to count on them through the years. They’d never kissed or hugged. The only time she’d ever touched him was to slap his face a couple of times.

  But she sent the cards.

  And
once—the year he was nineteen—he’d been sleeping on her couch all week and when he came in that night, she had a cake from the bakery down the street and there were nineteen blue candles on it and she’d even got him a present, a silver chain with a little silver horseshoe that he’d worn until some girl lifted it. It was the first glimpse he’d ever had of what regular families must be like, but they fought the next day and she threw him out and the week after that he was picked up and took a six-month fall for second-degree burglary.

  But how could she be dead? He hadn’t wanted that. She was his sister. His only relative. They hadn’t had the same old man and their mother had abandoned them before he could remember her, but Julie’d always been there, somewhere where he could call her up even if she was calling him a bum and a jailbird ten minutes later.

  Those few weeks before her marriage to Redmond went bust had been some of the happiest he’d ever had. They’d been close then, like a real brother and sister. Planning together what it’d be like after Redmond was out of the way.

  He’d thought she’d be giving Redmond that whiny brat, but she’d hung onto him.

  “What do you want the kid for?” he’d asked her.

  “He’s why the judge gave me the apartment,” she’d laughed.

  “And don’t forget all that lovely child-support money coming in every month.”

  “But you don’t need it,” he’d argued. “You’ve got more money now than you’ll ever spend.” And that was before he’d known she was going to keep it all. He should have known from the way her eyes had narrowed so coldly.

  “There’s never too much money, Mickey. I’m never going back to furnished rooms again as long as I live.”

  And then she’d cheated him out of his part and laughed in his face. Now it would all be his again, but oh damn! Julie was dead and all the money in the world couldn’t buy someone to send him birthday cards.

  “Come on, George! You’re not even trying!”

  George Franklin made an amiable mea culpa gesture and loped after the missed tennis ball.

  It was the third time in a row that he’d failed to get his racket on it, much less send it back across the net to her. Exasperated, Sue Montrose watched him scoop up a couple of their balls that had rolled to the fence. He moved gracefully and his body certainly looked athletic enough in white knit shirt and white tennis shorts. He had dark curly hair, lightly muscled arms and legs, and sported a deep tan. How could someone so handsome look like a pro and yet play like a—a poodle?

  She silently apologized to all the slandered poodles of the world. At least they’ll fetch the ball back when you throw it, she thought, which is more than you can say for George.

  “Okay, Billie Jean, here it comes!” he warned, and served a fairly crisp smash to her right. In this case, since Sue was left­handed, the serve was to her backhand.

  Actually, thought George, she did look a little like a young Billie Jean King. She was small and sturdily built and reddish­brown hair covered her head in short curls. Not at all like the leggy beauties with flowing hair he usually chose.

  He’d never seen Billie Jean King up close, so he didn’t know if she was freckled all over like Susie; , but they both tucked their tongues in the corner of their mouths when competing and both had similar smiles.

  Except that Sue hadn’t done much smiling today. Hell, she knew he wasn’t a jock. Why was she getting so uptight about the way he was playing today?

  He stepped into his swing, kept his racket level for a change, and sent the ball deep into her right court. By focusing strictly on tennis, he could keep her scampering around the court happily enough. She really didn’t mind his erratic returns—even if they were out of bounds—as long as they fell somewhere within her reach.

  Usually there was a look of serious and utter absorption on her face as she concentrated on form and placement; it was that look that had first attracted him in the early days of their relationship. He’d not been used to women blocking him out so totally. Getting past that straight-lipped reserve had been a challenge.

  Since grade school and puberty, he’d noticed that girls were electrically aware of him. Julie, too. Even when she was using him, she couldn’t blank out the natural attraction between them.

  God! What a body she had. Even after a kid and four years of marriage. It was a body still worth taking chances for, but did she really think he was stupid enough to let himself get caught by a tap he’d installed himself?

  “George!”

  Startled, he flailed wildly at the white ball that was zinging straight for his head and managed to duck before he was brained.

  “Sorry, doll,” he called. “I lost it in the sun.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Muttering antiphonal complaints, the Dorritt twins had resentfully accepted Lieutenant Harald’s invitation to tour the Bitzer apartment, and they might have denied being caught there if Eliza Fitzpatrick hadn’t brightly showed Sigrid the empty bottle of milk on the kitchen sink. The Dorritts looked lugubriously at the bottle, at each other, and back to Sigrid again.

  “Is emptying a tenant’s milk part of your janitorial duties?” she asked pleasantly.

  Again each head had waggled and dipped silently.

  There was no sign of intrusion in any other part of the living quarters of the large, luxuriously furnished apartment. The Bitzers seemed to be archaeology buffs, for there were glass cases of neolithic pottery and projectile points; and bits of marble statuary from all over the world were displayed in every room, most of them too fragmentary and flawed to be true museum pieces.

  As Eliza had noticed earlier in the small hours of the morning, there was definitely a strong smell of stale cigarette smoke in the back hall. A tall bar stool and an overturned ashtray at the end of the hall next to the service door had told their own story.

  The Dorritt twins now sat side by side on the apricot velvet couch in apartment 3-D, stubbornly uncooperative.

  Sigrid was beginning to sort them out. Manny, the one she’d talked to yesterday, had a small strip of adhesive tape on the loose folds of wrinkled skin under his chin and it seemed to be his turn to wear the official doorman’s jacket this morning.

  Except for a dark navy version of his brother’s maroon cardigan and the fact that his deep-set pale blue eyes were slightly more bloodshot, Sammy Dorritt was a mirror image. Those red-rimmed eyes indicated loss of sleep and made him a good choice for Hodson’s peripatetic visitor.

  Not for one minute had there been the slightest doubt in either Sigrid or Tillie’s mind that Hodson had been sound asleep when whichever Dorritt it was had come up the last time. If not for Eliza Fitzpatrick, he’d have come and gone with them none the wiser. As a reward, Eliza received unofficial permission to stay. It might be a little unorthodox and certainly it hadn’t been spelled out in so many words, but Eliza had been given to understand that as long as she stayed out from underfoot, neither Detective Tildon nor Lieutenant Harald would be inclined to chase her away.

  With a little luck, Eliza thought happily, Aunt Elizabeth might stop off for a cup of tea with some of her church friends before coming home. In the meantime, she curled up in one of the gold-and-white wingback chairs across the room and waited for Lieutenant Harald to learn who the Bitzers’ first intruder had been.

  Patiently, Sigrid pointed out that there was no sign that the door to 3-A had been forced. To whom, she asked again, had they given a passkey?

  “Bitzers have extra keys,” said Sammy.

  “Sublet the place last year,” added Manny.

  It would help if their heads moved in unison, Tillie decided.

  You could follow them easier. Instead, the iron gray heads on each long neck bobbed and ducked independently. When the brothers silently communed with each other, they seemed to be nodding constant agreement in uneven syncopation.

  Sigrid ignored the dipping heads and said, “You’ve heard me send for a technical unit. It will only take a few hours to run your friend’s fingerp
rints through the computer; so you might as well save us all a little time and tell us his name now.”

  “He could be an important witness,” Tillie coaxed. “Maybe even tell us who killed Mrs. Redmond.”

  The Dorritts were mute.

  “If you cooperate, we may not have to inform the Bitzers how you gave somebody free run of their apartment. On the other hand,” he warned, “obstruction of justice is a serious charge. Especially since there’s no need of it. Like the lieutenant said—as soon as we run a fingerprint check, we’ll know anyhow.”

  Manny Dorritt looked indifferent to the threat, which argued against any previous criminal activity on the part of whoever had sat on that stool long enough to fill an ashtray with cigarette butts; but there seemed to be a slight uneasiness on Sammy’s gaunt face.

  “Bonded last year,” he reminded his twin. “Security clearance.”

  “Fingerprints?” asked Manny.

  Sammy Dorritt’s head dipped and salaamed in confirmation.

  Manny Dorritt hunched his thin shoulders and bit the bullet.

  “She didn’t see nothing.”

  Tillie was surprised. “She?”

  “Her full name and address, please,” Sigrid said calmly, not wishing to scare them back into silence.

  Grudgingly, the Dorritts parted with an Upper West Side address and a name: Sue Montrose.

  “Niece,” they said, and that was as far as they could or would go in explaining why they’d given her a key. If they knew why Sue Montrose had wanted to spend her Saturday morning watching the third-floor vestibule, they weren’t admitting it.