Death of a Butterfly (Sigrid Harald)
Page 12
“But yesterday?” asked Sigrid, sensing the girl’s reluctance to focus on that period.
Sue Montrose dropped her cigarette on the path, crushed it with her sneakered foot, and immediately lit another. Sigrid waited patiently.
“Yesterday morning,” she said at last. “I was there for over an hour before a single thing happened. At ten-fifteen, the woman from 3-B rang Julie’s bell. Julie answered it and let the woman in. About five minutes later, somebody came up on the elevator, a man, and I heard the maid in 3-B let him in there. Five or ten minutes after that, the Italian lady came out with the little boy. They told Julie goodbye and then they took the elevator down.
“Nobody else visited Julie until just after twelve, when some man I’ve never seen before came up on the elevator and rang her bell. She didn’t come to the door, but it must have been unlocked because he walked right in. He was there about ten minutes and then, instead of coming out the front door and taking the elevator down, he sneaked out the service door and down the stairs.”
A ragged flock of pigeons waddled past their bench herded by an unsteady toddler in red corduroy overalls. Her parents followed with the empty stroller and indulgent smiles.
“What happened next?” Sigrid asked.
“I thought maybe Julie had gone out. I wasn’t at the door every single minute, you see. She could have left without my knowing. I thought maybe the guy had been a thief, so I went over. The door wasn’t shut tight—I just touched it and it opened. Inside, there were papers all over the floor around her desk.”
The girl dropped her cigarette, stuffed her hands into her sweater pockets, and very carefully placed her feet together with the toes extended as far as possible, sinking down into the bench until her body was a straight line that touched the bench only at neck and hips. Her voice became expressionless as she continued.
“I called her name in case she was there. I was going to pretend I had just dropped in while visiting my uncles. But there was no answer; and when I got to the kitchen, there she was. Lying on the floor. I thought maybe that guy had knocked her out, but then I touched her and her arms were cold and I knew she was dead.”
Sigrid looked at the rough notes she’d taken and frowned.
“She was cool to the touch?”
Sue Montrose nodded.
“I don’t mean to belabor the point, Miss Montrose, but you entered immediately after the man left? A man who was only there ten minutes at the most?”
Again the girl nodded.
“And you’re quite sure her flesh was already cool?”
“She was cold,” Montrose repeated, and swallowed hard.
“You say you were away from the door at times. Can you be more specific?”
“I was there from nine till about eleven-fifteen, when I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk. I guess that took about two minutes. Then I’m afraid I dozed off for a few minutes around eleven-thirty.” Her smile was rueful. “Stakeouts are pretty boring, aren’t they?”
Sigrid nodded. “They can be. Did you sleep long?”
“No more than eight or ten minutes at the most. I honestly don’t think anybody could have gotten past without me seeing them. I really needed a cigarette to keep me awake, but I’d left my matches in the kitchen and I thought as long as I was going, I might as well get a sandwich and go to the bathroom, too. That took exactly eight minutes, because I timed myself: from eleven fifty-five till twelve-oh-three. The man came almost immediately after I got back.”
Sigrid flipped back to earlier notes and found Vico Cavatori’s account of Karl Redmond’s visit. “Are you sure no one else crossed the vestibule that morning?”
“Not to Julie’s apartment. And not to 3-C where the old lady lives alone either. But like I said, some man came to 3-B. I couldn’t see that part of the landing, but I heard him saying goodbye when he left around eleven.”
“You’re positive the man who left at eleven didn’t go across and enter the Redmond apartment?”
“Sure. He got on the elevator and left. I never saw him and I had my eye on the peephole all the time. Someone else came out of 3-B about fifteen minutes later and that’s when I went for milk.”
Vico Cavatori, thought Sigrid. “Could he have visited Mrs. Redmond?”
“No, I waited until I heard the elevator going down before I left the door.”
“Did you ever meet Julie Redmond’s brother, Mickey Novak?”
Sue Montrose shook her head; but when Sigrid asked her to describe the man she’d seen enter the Redmond apartment, the details tallied with the description of Novak.
Sigrid went back over each point, but the young secretary would add nothing further—those were the times and those were the people. No one else.
Yet Sigrid could not help feeling that Miss Montrose was holding something back. She kept her pen poised for the address of the electronics firm where she worked for Franklin. “I’ll have your statement typed up and someone will be around tomorrow for you to sign it, if that’s convenient?”
“Okay.” Sue nodded. She gathered up her racket and tennis balls, suddenly anxious to be gone. When the lieutenant offered to drop her off at her apartment, she shook her head. “It’s only a ten-minute walk.”
She hurried away, cutting across a grassy field, knowing the policewoman’s cool gray eyes were watching her speculatively, but she couldn’t help it. She needed time alone. Time to decide what to tell George. She thought about those gaps in her vigil yesterday morning and wished she hadn’t told Lieutenant Harald about them.
The ten-minute walk stretched to twenty. She moved unseeingly through Sunday strollers, pausing mechanically at the corners for red lights, moving on with the crowds when the lights turned green.
As she unlocked the door of her apartment, George sprang up from the couch where he’d been watching the Mets on television with halfhearted interest.
“I was beginning to think I was going to have to post bail for you!” He smiled, moving confidently to take her in his arms.
His glass was nearly empty and not for the first time, Sue guessed. She saw the bottle sitting on the coffee table and remembered that Jenny had a date this afternoon. She’d probably told George to help himself and George had.
Drowning his sorrows over Julie’s death or giving himself Dutch courage? Suddenly angry, she wrenched free of his hold. To hell with tact, she thought.
“Where were you yesterday, George? And don’t say dentist. You aren’t due for a checkup till July and you had a notice from Dr. Jordils last month that his office would be closed the first three weeks of May.””
George Franklin stared at her blankly.
CHAPTER 15
After finishing with Sue Montrose, Sigrid strolled back to a hotdog stand. The mustard was spicy, the sauerkraut nicely flecked with caraway seeds, and Sigrid munched contentedly while watching the end of the croquet game she’d passed earlier.
Her peripatetic lunch over, she had dialed the Redmond apartment and, getting no answer, played a hunch and stopped by headquarters, where she found Tillie letting his fingers do some of the footwork.
He described to her the custom-made key Eliza Fitzpatrick said Julie Redmond had constantly worn and told her how that had made him take a closer look at Redmond’s bank statements. Sure enough, there had been periodical deductions for rental fees on a safety-deposit box. He had already set in train the necessary paperwork to allow them to open the box the next day. “And I thought you might want somebody posted there first thing tomorrow in case anybody shows up with the key?”
“It will probably be her brother,” Sigrid said. “Has he been located yet?”
“Nope. I put someone on it last night, but Novak moved out of his boardinghouse around three yesterday. No forwarding address, naturally, so we’ve got an APB out on him. Did the Dorritt niece give you anything?”
“Yes, indeed,” Sigrid described George Franklin, then reconstructed Sue Montrose’s Saturday morning vigil for Tillie, who dr
ew up another of those timetables so dear to his heart:
8:45–Sue Montrose to 3-A
10:15–Mrs. Cavatori to 3-D
10:20–Karl Redmond to 3-B
10:29–Mrs. C. and Timmy leave 3-D
11:00–Redmond leaves 3-B
11:15–Mr. C. leaves 3-B
11:15-11:17–Sue M. away from door for milk
1l:20-11:40–Sue M. asleep
11:30-1:00–Gilchrist to lunch. Wet paint walked through
11:55-12:03–Sue M. away from door for lunch
12:02–Manny Dorritt sees Mickey Novak enter building
12:04–Novak to 3-D
2:15–Novak leaves via stairs
12:16–Sue M. to 3-D, finds Julie R. dead
1:15–Miss Fitzpatrick discovers body
“If Montrose and Julie Redmond were involved with the same man, maybe she was the one Miss Fitzpatrick heard Redmond yell at,” Tillie suggested. “Montrose says she was getting milk at eleven-fifteen, but what if she went over to Redmond’s apartment instead? That could be Miss Fitzpatrick’s midmorning.”
“I don’t know, Tillie. I could see her going there and arguing, but then to return and continue her watch from 3-A? It doesn’t seem logical.”
Tillie looked dubious, knowing that murderers were not always logical.
“Besides, Cohen said the blow was delivered by a righthanded person. Sue Montrose plays tennis and lights cigarettes with her left hand.”
“Speaking of Cohen,” Tillie remembered, “his report came through a few minutes ago.”
He moved the papers on his desk and handed the autopsy findings to Sigrid.
It was a straightforward report with no surprises. Cohen had listed the time of death as occurring between nine-thirty and twelve-fifteen, evidently forgetting that they’d told him Redmond had been seen alive at ten-thirty by Mrs. Cavatori and Timmy.
“Which Sue Montrose confirms,” said Sigrid. “She heard Timmy say goodbye to his mother just as he told us.”
“And she’s sure Redmond was already cool to the touch when she went in right behind Novak?” asked Tillie. His brow furrowed as he tried to fit it all together.
Sigrid nodded. “That would narrow down the time of death to between ten-thirty and no later than eleven forty-five.”
“And Montrose was away from the door at least twice during that very period.”
“So she says.”
Tillie looked up from his timetable. “You think she’s shielding somebody? One of her uncles?”
“Or George Franklin. He claimed he had a dental appointment yesterday morning. Sounded like a spur of the moment invention to me, and I don’t think Montrose believed it either. She sent him away before she’d talk to me.”
Sigrid turned her pen thoughtfully through slender fingers. “Try to have her statement typed up for signing by tomorrow, Tillie, and we’ll take it around to Landau and Maas ourselves. We’ll also take a copy of that telephone tape;, see if it can loosen Franklin’s tongue.”
“Too bad the time doesn’t fit for Mickey Novak,” said Tillie. “I checked his priors: criminal mischief, second-degree assault, burglary-two; criminal possession of a weapon—he seemed to be building up to the big one.”
He tapped the notations carrying Karl Redmond’s name and said, “Maybe we’ll get the ex-husband though. I’ve got Jim Lowry chasing down the cabbie who’s supposed to have picked him up at eleven-oh-five. Maybe we’ll find he only took Redmond around the block.”
Sigrid looked through the timetable again, her gray eyes calculative. “At an absolute minimum, Tillie, how long would it take someone to cross that vestibule, enter Redmond’s apartment and get out again? A minute? Two minutes?”
“If he just walked in, bopped her on the head, and came straight out again?”
She nodded.
“Probably no more than ninety seconds flat. Of course, that’s if she just sat there and let it happen. Wouldn’t she be on her guard if someone walked straight in like that?”
“Not if it were someone she’d never had reason to fear.”
“Like George Franklin?”
“Perhaps,” said Sigrid, not ready to voice the unlikely notion that had occurred to her. “Franklin did know about the tap. He might even have installed it. As an executive at Landau and Maas Electronics, he must have some practical knowledge in the field. I wonder how long that thing was in place?”
“And why?” mused Tillie. “If it was for blackmail, no payments show up in her bank records. At least not in the last twelve to fourteen months.”
“Does that mean you found something earlier?”
Even with the heat off, the office was warm. Wishing she could open her window, Sigrid rolled up the sleeves of her white shirt before giving her attention to the extract of Julie Redmond’s bank records which Tillie had prepared.
“The Redmonds were married almost four years ago,” said Tillie. “At that time, they opened a joint checking account as well as a joint savings account. But she had another savings account in her name alone in a different bank and she seems to have deposited all her paychecks in it in addition to other occasional small amounts—probably money left over from household expenses that he gave her.”
“What’s yours is ours; what’s mine is mine alone?” asked Sigrid.
“Seems that way.”
“A rather mean-spirited approach to marriage,” she observed.
“Those deposits stop when she quit her job to have the little boy. Less than three years ago. But almost immediately, something new picks up.”
He pointed to a list of deposits for the fifteenth of each month. They began the month before Timmy’s birth and continued until fourteen months ago. Twenty-one monthly deposits of three hundred dollars each.
“Not an allowance from her husband?” asked Sigrid.
“Nope. Everything about the joint accounts remain the same,” said Tillie. “Karl Redmond seems to have gradually drawn larger salaries from his father’s jewelry store—about what you’d expect—but that stopped when the old man was killed. And of course, she filed for divorce the month after that, so—”
His words broke off and he frowned, struck by a sudden coincidence. “I wonder—”
He picked up one of the steno notebooks that contained his raw notes and started flipping through it. Sigrid waited patiently. She knew from experience that whatever he was looking for would eventually be found. Tillie thrived on details and she had benefited from his methodical nature too often to call him on it.
At last he thumped a lined page with pleasure. “Here it is and I was right! Old Mr. Redmond was killed on the thirteenth of that month and there were no more three-hundred-dollar deposits after that. My God! She was blackmailing her own fatherin-law!”
Sigrid was less willing to jump to such an extraordinary conclusion. “If he’s the source of the money, isn’t it reasonable to assume it was more in the nature of a gift, freely given, because she’d borne him a grandson?”
Deflated, Tillie looked back at his dates. He found an arguing point. “But they start the month before Timmy was born. Besides, his present for the kid carne three days after the birth. He started a college fund for Timmy with five thousand dollars as the first deposit.”
“Nevertheless,” Sigrid said firmly.
“Okay.” For the moment, Tillie let the point pass because there was something else.
“Right after Karl Redmond moved out, she deposited seventy-five thousand in that account. And don’t ask if it had something to do with a divorce settlement,” he warned, “because she’d already cleaned him out good—drew everything from their joint accounts and transferred it over to her private account the day before she kicked him out of the apartment.”
It was not a very nice picture that they were getting of Julie Redmond, Sigrid reflected. She knew that many marriages did end with similar money-grabbing tactics. If a union turns bitter, it may be hard to remember fairness and decency.
On
the other hand, she thought, a separate savings account from the very beginning doesn’t exactly argue for mutual trust and mutual sharing. In this day and age it was probably naive to censure a woman who leaves the wedding altar after pledging to merge her life with her husband’s and then heads for the nearest bank, where she coolly arranges to keep her money separate. Nevertheless . . .
Sigrid sighed and turned back to Tillie, who was explaining that the first seventy-five thousand dollars had not remained alone long. Another fifty thousand dollars had appeared six months later.
Except for an unexplained draft of thirty thousand dollars soon after the account was opened, Julie Redmond seemed to have withdrawn only a modest two or three thousand of it at a time, which she transferred to her checking account along with the monthly five hundred her ex-husband Karl contributed for child support. This had been used for day-to-day expenses. Her only extravagance seemed to be occasional splurges for clothing or a piece of furniture. Otherwise, she was not a spendthrift.
According to the last bank statement, her savings account had totaled well over a hundred thousand dollars when she was killed. With annual interest, it would have lasted several years at the rate she was spending.
“But where did it all come from?” Sigrid asked Tillie.
He threw up his hands. “I can’t figure it. Sometimes she made little notes to herself on the back of her deposit slips, but not with those two.”
“Any notes with those three-hundred-dollar deposits?”
“I haven’t sorted out all the slips yet; but with our luck, she won’t have left us anything.” Tillie sounded momentarily discouraged.