Take Out

by Margaret Maron

  “Did you hear?” he asked. “The new board of trustees at the Breul House fired their incompetent director.”

  The Breul House was an idiosyncratic historical house where a longtime friend had almost persuaded Nauman to stage his retrospective. A murder had cancelled that venue, to Buntrock’s relief, and Sigrid had to smile, remembering that the director was both incompetent and not completely ethical. Something about deaccessioning art works at his former post. She had forgotten the details, but Nauman had introduced her to Buntrock in the course of the investigation and a friendship had developed based on a mutual fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan.

  “Have they hired a replacement?” she asked, threading her way between some overflowing garbage pails at the curb and a vegetable stand that encroached on the sidewalk.

  “As a matter of fact, she interned with me when she was finishing up her doctorate.” He paused in front of the cut flowers at the end of the stand. “Dorothy Reddish. Doctor Dorothy Reddish. I wrote a glowing recommendation.” He lifted two bunches of flower from their tubs. “Tulips or daisies?”

  “You don’t need to buy me flowers.”

  “Need and want are two different things, Sigrid. Which?”

  “Tulips, then.”

  He paid the grocer, who wrapped the stems in tissue paper and handed her the bright yellow blossoms with a broad smile.

  They parted at the Houston Street subway, where he would take the Seventh Avenue train uptown to his apartment on West End Avenue, while she kept walking west to her own place near the river with no more thought of divas or dons.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Near the lower end of Sixth Avenue, on a corner where the windowless side of one building pulls back eight feet farther from the other, an opportunistic sycamore tree shelters a long metal park bench anchored in cement. The space isn’t big enough to be called a park—no grass, no flowers, but it’s a shady place to sit in the summer and with cardboard scraps to cover its slats in winter, the bench makes a warmer bed than the icy sidewalk, sheltered as it is on two sides by brick walls. Despite the city’s periodic efforts to rid the homeless from its streets, the bench does seem to invite them. The nearest bus stop is a block away and the storefronts on the other side of the street are not for browsing but strictly utilitarian—an electrician, a shoe repair, a locksmith, and a dry cleaners. Locals seldom use the bench and they don’t complain about the street people who do.

  Live and let live.

  Except when they don’t.

  That mild June morning, a patrol car on the beat stopped at the corner. When the officer got out to prod the sleeping derelict onto his feet, he discovered that the man was dead with no obvious sign of violence. This was not a first for the young officer, nor even a second. Living on the streets too often meant dying on the streets. Too much rotgut whiskey, too many drugs, or an untreated medical condition, who knew?

  Not his problem.

  Ordinarily, he would have called it in, waited for the wagon to come take the body off his hands, made a note of it in his daily report, and that would have been that.

  What made this death different was finding a second body under a dingy comforter at the far end of the bench.

  “I thought it was the first guy’s belongings,” the officer told Lt. Sigrid Harald when the homicide team arrived. He pointed to the takeout cartons strewn under the bench where ants and yellow jackets were busy with the food scraps. A crumpled bag bore the logo of a nearby Italian restaurant. “It’s like he had supper and then slumped down against the armrest and went to sleep, but then when I saw the other one and he was bleeding, too…”

  Sigrid watched the ME swab identical thin trickles of blood that had oozed from the mouths of the dead men. Both were white and both wore jeans and knit shirts. The first man was at least seventy. His white hair was worn in an abbreviated ponytail secured by a blue rubber band. His short white Santa Claus beard looked hand-trimmed. His green, long-sleeved cotton T-shirt was marginally newer than the faded gray shirt of his companion in death, and he wore thick leather sandals without socks while the other man had on ragged sneakers.

  The younger man’s graying hair was close-cropped and he appeared to be in his early fifties, but he had the sunken cheeks and ashy skin of an addict, so he could have been much younger.

  His immediate examination finished, Dr. Cohen stood and indicated that the detectives could begin searching the bodies.

  “Overdose?” Sigrid asked him.

  The ME shrugged. “The younger guy’s got the physical signs of a crystal meth user, but the other one? He’s got a pacemaker. No sign of meth and no tracks on his arms. Time of death for both of them was probably sometime between midnight and six a.m.”

  “Food poisoning?” she asked.

  “Botulism or ptomaine?” He cast a doubtful eye over the two bodies. “Won’t know till I open them up. No vomit, though, and it does look as if they had a good final meal, if that Giuseppone bag means anything. I’m not ready to call it a homicide, but it sure as hell would be a real coincidence if their deaths were natural. Not with that blood. I’ll take samples, but you know how long it takes to run a tox screen if it’s not something common.”

  To be on the safe side, Sigrid sent several officers to canvass shops and houses in the immediate area, then walked over to Detective Elaine Albee, an attractive blonde in her early thirties, just as Albee pulled a roll of fifties and twenties from the older man’s pocket.

  “Four hundred eighty,” Albee said as she finished counting, and slid the money into an evidence bag.

  “No ID?”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant. Just a Duane Reade receipt from two days ago—the one on Ninth and Forty-Third—for a bottle of aspirins. Three subway tokens, a five, two ones, and some change in that other pocket. Nothing else except these two keys.”

  The keys could have been for an apartment door, but there were no identifying names or numbers.

  “The small bills were separate from the large ones?” asked Detective Tildon, glancing over at Albee’s findings. He had turned out the pockets of the younger man. No ID, but he’d found a flyer for a soup kitchen two blocks down, a small nondescript switchblade with a bone handle, a twenty-dollar bill, and a handful of change. “Four hundred and eighty in that guy’s pocket and a twenty here? You suppose that bankroll started out at an even five hundred?”

  A few years older than Albee and Lowry, Tillie was Sigrid’s most trusted team member even though he occasionally tried her patience with his excessively detailed reports. Nothing was too small to escape his attention.

  “You’re suggesting our first man shared his wealth?” she asked dubiously. “Why?”

  Tillie had no answer to that. In the meantime, Albee’s partner, Detective Jim Lowry, had finished with the grocery cart parked behind the bench. It held an umbrella, a half-used roll of paper towels, a box of crackers, and some articles of clothing, but nothing to identify the owner.

  “Probably belonged to the methhead,” Lowry said, “since he’s the one with the blanket.”

  When their crime scene photographer had taken several instant pictures of the men’s faces, Tillie said, “Want us to go talk to the staff at the soup kitchen? See if they knew one of these guys?”

  Sigrid nodded and Tillie signaled to Ruben Gonzalez, one of the newer detectives, as a uniformed officer rounded the corner and approached them. Holding on to his arm for support was an elderly white-haired woman who barely topped his elbow and who seemed to move with difficulty. A small group of curious pedestrians had collected behind the yellow tape that marked off the bench. When asked, none volunteered knowledge of the dead men.

  “I’m ashamed to say I never look at street people very closely,” said one woman.

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” said her friend. “What can one person do? It’s the city’s problem and City Hall keeps shifting the blame for why we don’t have more homeless shelters.”

  “Lieutenant?” the offic
er called. “This lady may know one of them.”

  Sigrid motioned them forward.

  “This is Miss Orlano,” he said. “She lives just down the block. A guy in the diner says he’s seen her come this way with takeout pretty regularly and her employer said she came last night.”

  Until then, Sigrid had not paid attention to their precise location. Now she looked more closely at the direction from which Miss Orlano had come and recognized the diner where she and Elliott Buntrock had eaten supper with Rudy Gottfried last week. And unless she was mistaken, this was the same woman who had entered the house across the street, the house where Rudy said the Mafia widow lived.

  Seen up close, the old woman had a small wrinkled face overshadowed by thick eyebrows of coarse wiry gray hair that almost met over the bridge of her nose. She ignored Sigrid’s outstretched hand and shuffled straight over to the bodies still on the bench. Albee pulled back the paper sheets that covered them.

  She stood gazing at the first one for so long that Albee gently touched her arm. “Did you know him?”

  “That one I see many times,” she said with a distinct Italian accent. She gave the older man a cursory glance. “Him? Never.”

  “But you brought the other man food?” Sigrid asked.

  Those bushy eyebrows drew together over a frown and she spoke with obvious reluctance. “Not just him. Most places give too much food for two old women and when there are leftovers, we give to the hungry. If no one is here, I leave it on the bench. Someone always takes it.”

  Both of the open foam cartons on the ground under the benches bore smears of alfredo sauce, white cheese, and scraps of pasta, but the one under the meth addict seemed to have less of the red sauce than the box lying closer to the other body. Miss Orlano pointed to the first box. “That was ours. Fettuccine alfredo. Not the lasagna.”

  “Did you eat any of the fettuccine?”

  The woman nodded. “And my signora, too.”

  “You brought it in that Giuseppone bag?”

  “Yes.”

  “What time did you come?”

  “About eight-thirty. Before dark.”

  “But you knew this one?” Sigrid asked, pointing to the speed addict.

  “Not to know,” the woman said. “Just to see. Just to know he was sometimes here.”

  “So when did you last see him?”

  From farther up the block, a fire engine pulled out into the street with lights flashing and siren blasting, so Sigrid had to repeat the question.

  Miss Orlano beetled her thick gray eyebrows, then shrugged. “Last week. We had Chinese that day and my signora sent me with the egg rolls we did not eat. Matty—”

  She broke off in sudden consternation.

  “Who’s Matty?” the lieutenant asked.

  “One of the bums that’s sometimes here.”

  Sigrid fixed her with skeptical gray eyes. “You sure it’s not one of these men?”

  Miss Orlano dropped her own eyes.

  “You might as well tell us the truth, Miss Orlano. I have a feeling we’ll find out anyhow as soon as we run his fingerprints.”

  The older woman sighed and gestured to the younger man. “He’s Matty. Matty Mutone.”

  “And how do you know him?”

  “His mother was a good friend to my signora. He turned into a bum. Broke her heart before she died.”

  In a mixture of sadness and scorn, she told them how her employer, a Mrs. Benito DelVecchio, had tried to help the young man break free of drugs, but after his last failure, she washed her hands of him and forbade him to come to her house again. “She does not talk to him and she does not give him money, but every week, for his mother’s sake, she pretends she’s very hungry and then there is too much food to throw away, so I bring it to this bench. Every Tuesday. Usually, he’s here, sometimes not.”

  “But not last night?”

  “No.”

  With lips clamped tight, she turned to go and would have fallen had Sigrid not reached out to steady her. She signaled to the young uniformed officer who had escorted the old woman here.

  “Officer—” She looked at the man’s name tag. “Officer James, please see that Miss Orlano gets home safely.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, offering his arm.

  “I can walk,” she snapped. “I’m no cripple yet.”

  “I’m sure you can manage on your own,” he said cheerfully. “But this sidewalk’s uneven and if you fall, they’ll have my scalp, so please, ma’am?”

  Still grumbling, she took his arm and they moved slowly back down the block.

  Giuseppone di Napoli was a popular neighborhood restaurant and when questioned by Detectives Albee and Lowry, the manager rolled his eyes. “Lasagna? Do you know how many of our customers order that? And half of ’em take some home with them.” But he thumbed through the receipts from the night before. “Twelve lasagnas served on-site, and four takeouts, two of those on credit cards. Five servings of fettuccine. No takeouts. And nobody got sick either,” he added defensively.

  Within the hour, Sigrid’s team had names and addresses for the two who had used credit cards. One was a woman, who lived two blocks over on Prince Street. The other lived half a block up on Sixth. For once they got lucky. Both customers were home and both still had their takeout boxes. The woman’s was in her garbage pail, the elderly man’s was in his refrigerator. “One order of Giuseppone’s lasagna lasts me three meals,” he told them.

  They came up empty on the neighborhood canvass, but Sigrid gave orders for officers to come back after five to try finding people who were not at home now.

  “Albee, you and Lowry stop by the restaurant later and see if any of last night’s waiters can remember who took lasagna or fettuccine home with them.”

  Martha’s Table was the name of the nearby soup kitchen. Its motto was “Works, not words,” a sly poke at those sisters in the Gospel of Luke. Two volunteers immediately recognized the instant picture of Matty Mutone that Gonzalez showed them; the other victim’s picture drew only shrugs and headshakes.

  “But yeah, poor Matty was one of our regulars. Friendly kid,” said the woman who was probably no more than forty.

  “Kid?”

  The woman laughed as she dumped a gallon can of string beans into a serving tray on the steam table. Although the place wouldn’t open for at least another hour, a savory odor of beef stew wafted through the large room and people were already lining up on the sidewalk outside.

  “He was like a puppy—eager to please.”

  “You didn’t know him from the old days,” said the other volunteer, a small black man with a shiny bald head who was stacking loaves of two-day-old bread at the end of the counter. “When I first came here a few years ago, he’d show up every once in a while. He was heavy into meth—twitchy eyes, quick to mouth off about how he was ‘connected.’ Like anybody believed that. But then he went into rehab, cleaned up his act, got a job, even volunteered here once in a while.”

  “Yeah?” said the woman. “I didn’t know that.”

  “He crashed and burned a few months ago,” said the man as he finished stacking the loaves with the precision of a bricklayer. “Right before Christmas. He went back to using again. Yo-yoed back and forth between wanting to punch somebody out and crying for how things had gone so wrong.”

  “Matty? C’mon. He never punched anybody out,” the woman objected. “He was a puppy dog.”

  “One that’d been kicked too many times,” said the man. He sighed. “Yeah, he was one beat-down little puppy.”

  “Who were his friends here?” asked Gonzalez.

  “Friends?” They shrugged. “He was pretty much a loner.”

  On the likely chance that this was indeed a homicide, Sigrid signaled to Tillie and they walked down the side street, past Rudy Gottfried’s basement apartment, to Number 409, a well-maintained private home. It was period Federal style on the outside, but when Miss Orlano answered the door and showed them into the living room, Sigrid wa
s instantly reminded of her grandmother Lattimore’s early twentieth-century home down in North Carolina. Polished mahogany chests and tables held tasteful keepsakes. The chairs were upholstered in harmonizing colors and Oriental rugs lay on the hardwood floors.

  All bought with mob money, thought Sigrid.

  Like Sigrid’s grandmother, Mrs. DelVecchio’s wrinkled face held traces of youthful beauty. A tall woman with fair skin and the clear blue eyes of northern Italy, she did not rise when they entered and was clearly accustomed to deference. Seated in a high-backed wing chair like a contessa on a throne, she did not smile in welcome. No sooner had Miss Orlano announced them than she waved aside Sigrid’s ID and fixed her with a cold and arrogant eye.

  Before Sigrid could express sympathy, the woman gestured for them to be seated.

  “Orla has already told me. Where will they take the boy’s body and when will it be released?”

  “Are you Mr. Mutone’s next of kin?”

  There was a further tightening of those thin lips. “I will be responsible for his burial.”

  “We’ll still need his next of kin.”

  “There is no other next of kin. Only me. His godmother.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  Mrs. DelVecchio frowned and glanced at the woman who seemed as much her companion as her housekeeper. “In February. He came here talking crazy, begging me for money. I told him no more. Not a penny.”

  “What about you yourself, Miss Orlano?”

  “Yesterday, I went to the bakery up on Houston Street and he was sitting on a bench there, so I gave him a muffin when I came out.”

  “And last night?”

  “I told you. I left fettuccine on the bench.”

  “Where did he live?”

  “On the street. That grocery cart. Everything he owned was in it.”

  “It was his choice,” said Mrs. DelVecchio. “He—”

  She paused at the sound of a key turning in the outer door and they watched as a heavyset middle-aged man let himself into the foyer. He was just under six feet tall, his broad flat face was pitted with old acne scars. Without removing his sunglasses, he let the door slam behind him and lumbered into the room.