Take Out

by Margaret Maron

  “Sofia! I came as fast as I could. A fender bender had traffic on the bridge backed up. Are you all right?”

  He bent over the seated Mrs. DelVecchio and kissed the thin cheek she offered him.

  “Now that you are here, yes,” she said. “These are police officers, George.”

  His glasses finished turning from dark to clear as he straightened to face them and behind the lenses, his brown eyes widened. “Lieutenant Harald, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry,” Sigrid said, rising from her chair. “Have we met?”

  “Only informally.” He held out his hand. “George Edwards. It was at that gawdawful opening for one of Hal DiPietro’s artists. Last spring. Right before he was killed. Didn’t you handle that investigation?”

  Sigrid nodded. “You’re an attorney, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Sofia—Mrs. DelVecchio—called me as soon as she heard that Matty was found dead next to another body. Something about the fettuccine Orla took him?”

  “We don’t have a cause of death yet, Mr. Edwards. We’re just here to learn more about him. Do you know any of his friends? Where he lived?”

  “No. I helped him get back into rehab two or three years ago. When he came out, we got him a room over on West Summer Street, but he gave it up when he started using again. Would rather spend the money on drugs than a bed.” Edwards gave them the name of the facility. “They might know something. They were supposed to do follow-ups.”

  Mrs. DelVecchio gave an impatient wave of her hand.

  “If there are no further questions for my clients—”

  “Just one for now,” said Sigrid. “Miss Orlano, you said that others leave food on that bench, too. Who?”

  “Different ones,” the housekeeper replied. “The red door woman most often and sometimes the boy from the diner. Maybe others from the street. I do not keep watch.”

  They stood to go and George Edwards showed them out. At the door, he handed Sigrid his card. “If you need to speak to them again, please call me first.”

  Back outside, Tillie spotted a red door at the opposite end of the street. There was no professional signage on the front of the otherwise nondescript three-story building, but steps led down to the basement and a homemade board wired to the iron handrail announced that jazz played there nightly from 8:30 till 2:00, Wednesday through Saturday. They crossed, rang the brass bell, and were answered by a tall, loose-jointed woman who wore her brown hair in a single side braid across her shoulder.

  She cocked her head in amusement.

  “You’re not plumbers, are you?”

  When they showed her their badges and introduced themselves, the woman frowned. “Somebody complained again?”

  “Complained?” Sigrid asked. “Complained about what?”

  “Oh, people are always complaining about something,” the woman said smoothly, leaning against the door frame. She wore a red shirt and white capris and the toenails of her bare feet were painted a pale green.

  “And you are—?”

  “Janis Jennings. How can I help you?”

  “We’re investigating two deaths at the end of this block, down on Sixth.”

  “Oh, is that why all the police cars and people are down there? I was wondering. Who died?”

  “We don’t have a full identification on both men yet, so maybe you can help us, Miss Jennings,” Sigrid said.

  “Mrs. Jennings,” the woman corrected cheerfully. “Just don’t ask me where Mr. Jennings is. Haven’t seen him in four years. He went down to the diner for coffee one morning and never came back.”

  “Did you file a missing persons report?” Tillie asked.

  Mrs. Jennings hooted with laughter and her braid bobbed up and down against her red shirt. “God, no! Good riddance. He took his clothes and our dog and cleaned out our bank account. I wouldn’t mind having the dog back, though. She was good company.”

  Tillie handed her the pictures of the two dead men. “Do you know either of these men?”

  “Never saw this guy,” she said of the older man. Her face fell at the second picture. “Awww! Poor Matty! Oh, jeez. That’s too bad. Did he finally overdose?”

  “You know him?”

  “Know who he is. He’s been hanging around the neighborhood ever since I got here. Liked to brag about being connected.”

  “Connected?”

  “To the Mafia guy who used to live over there.” She pointed down the block to Number 409, the DelVecchio house. “Said he was a nephew or something. Said he was keeping an eye on the guy’s widow. Protecting her.”

  “Protecting her from what?” asked Tillie.

  Mrs. Jennings shrugged. “Who knows? I thought it was all in his head till somebody at the diner told me that some Mafia guy was gunned down right in front of his house there. I felt sorry for Matty. Gave him a couple of freebies.”

  “Freebies?” asked Sigrid.

  “You know. A free meal, a couple of dollars.”

  “Did you ever take food to him?”

  “If I saw him down at that bench when I came up from the subway.” She grinned. “He told me his aunt didn’t like him hanging around, so if he was there when I was passing, I’d give him my doggie bag if I had one. A few bucks now and then.”

  “I take it you don’t care for Mrs. DelVecchio?” said Sigrid.

  “I don’t care for hypocrites. That house wasn’t bought with clean money, was it? Drugs, too, probably. Yet she could turn up her nose at poor Matty and complain about—”

  “About you?” Sigrid asked when the woman changed her mind about whatever it was that she started to say.

  “Me and anybody else on the block that annoyed her. If we left our trash barrels out at the curb too long. If we were having a party or the jazz club got too loud on a Saturday night.”

  “You didn’t happen to see him last night, did you?”

  The woman shook her head.

  A plumber’s van pulled up to the curb. The man behind the wheel rolled down his window and called, “Jennings?”

  “You got it, honey,” she said happily. “Sorry, Lieutenant, but there’s a leak in my washer line.”

  On their way back to the park bench, while Tillie stopped to ask questions at the diner, Sigrid crossed over to Gottfried’s apartment but the artist did not respond to the doorbell.

  By now, the bodies had been removed and the beat officer who had called it in was rolling up the yellow tape. The foam food cartons had been bagged and tagged and there was nothing left except Matty Mutone’s grocery cart.

  “Might as well bring that in, too,” Sigrid said. “And get the other guy’s clothes from the ME, Albee. Maybe you missed something the first time.”

  Before heading back to her office, she left orders for the officers who would come back to canvass the neighborhood a second time to see if they could learn who had brought lasagna to that park bench.

  CHAPTER

  3

  While waiting for the medical examiner to determine if they were dealing with two accidental deaths or a double homicide, Sigrid had a clerk pull Matty Mutone’s record. It showed several misdemeanors and that he had twice done time for minor drug-related felonies.

  With no other pressing cases, Tillie did a search for data on Mrs. DelVecchio and her housekeeper.

  “Nothing on Miss Orlano,” he reported, “and any mention of Mrs. DelVecchio has to do with her husband’s activities. Matty may have bragged about being connected, but his only link to the mob seems to be through her, and everything I found indicates that DelVecchio kept his home life totally separate from his business.”

  When Albee and Lowry returned to the office after lunch, they had little to show from their latest canvass of the neighborhood. As was common in the SoHo area so close to the river, the street was a mixture of scruffy commercial and pricey residential. Except for the diner and that house with the red door at the end, the buildings on the south side of the street were all warehouses. No windows and nobody there on a regular basi
s.

  “We checked by Giuseppone’s again,” said Albee, who brushed back a lock of her long blond hair as she laid her notes out on her desk. “One of the waiters remembered that they’d had an extra takeout order for lasagna. The customers ordered it at the table after they’d finished eating and they paid cash, so it didn’t show up in the receipts. She said that she’d seen the couple before but she didn’t know their names.”

  “The woman’s white. The man’s black. Both good-looking, both mid-to-late thirties. She’s pretty sure she would recognize them again,” said Jim Lowry, popping the top on a can of soda. He took a long, thirsty swallow, then set the can on his desk so that he could flip through his notes. “The guy that runs the cleaners across the street from that bench says he saw Mutone talking to Miss Orlano a time or two. He’s open later than the other shops along that block, so he’s seen people from the neighborhood drop off food there. A black guy showed up on that bench last fall and was sleeping there pretty regularly till late February or early March, when Mutone claimed the bench for himself and ran the guy off. Nobody has a name for him and he hasn’t been seen around there since, but he’s why people first began bringing food there.”

  “We told the patrol in that area to try to come up with a name,” said Albee. “And we asked the Jennings woman at the other end of the street if she’d ever talked to him. She says not.”

  Tillie looked up from his computer screen, a smile on his round, cherubic face. “I forgot to tell you, Lieutenant—Janis Jennings owns her building and it’s registered as a single-room occupancy.”

  Sigrid frowned. “An SRO? It seemed a little upscale for that.”

  Tillie was looking so pleased with himself that the penny dropped right away.

  “Are you saying that her red door isn’t just a decorative whim?”

  Tillie nodded. “Nothing’s been proved and nobody’s been charged. But complaints have been made. Mostly by Mrs. DelVecchio. It appears to be very discreet. The ground floor’s a common area—shared kitchen and laundry room, dining facilities and lounge. Unlike most SROs, though, each bedroom seems to have a private bath and the rooms are individually rented.”

  “So the freebie that Matty got?”

  Albee rolled her eyes and Lowry grinned. “I doubt if it was a takeout carton of leftovers.”

  “What about the second man?” Sigrid asked. “Any hits on his prints yet?”

  Tillie shook his head.

  “The dry cleaner didn’t notice him and the other shops close at five.”

  “We spoke to someone from every house on the street,” said Lowry, “and no one recognized his picture. At least no one said they did.”

  “Oh, and a Rudy Gottfried sends his regards,” said Albee. “He lives across from the diner and says he knows you.”

  Albee tried to mask the open curiosity that everyone in the squad room felt about their boss’s personal life. They knew that Oscar Nauman and the lieutenant had been lovers, as unlikely as that seemed, because the newspapers had covered his death and aspects of his life and his art in minute detail.

  Before the pause grew awkward, they were joined by Detective Sam Hentz. He had accompanied the bodies to the morgue and a faint chemical smell clung to his brown linen sports jacket and to the two large bags that held the dead men’s clothes and personal effects.

  Tillie immediately reached for one of the bags and began going through the pockets again.

  Of all the detectives in Sigrid’s command, Hentz had been most resentful of her appointment and they were still somewhat wary of each other.

  “Cohen give you the results?” she asked.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant.” He handed the bag with Matty Mutone’s things to Albee. “He said he’d try to have something for us by midmorning.”

  Sigrid turned back to Lowry and Albee and said, “Did you question Charlotte Randolph?”

  “Who?”

  “A door or two up from Gottfried.”

  Sam Hentz paused in turning out the pockets of a pair of pants from the unidentified dead man and looked up with interest. “The Charlotte Randolph? She lives there?”

  “Who’s Charlotte Randolph?” asked Dinah Urbanska, the most junior member of the team. Built like a golden palomino, she was forever dropping coffee mugs, tangling her jacket on doorknobs and armrests, and bumping into people and doors. For some quixotic reason, the normally impatient and urbane Hentz had taken the awkward young woman under his wing to mentor and turn her into a proper detective.

  “Before you were out of the egg,” Hentz told her. “She was one of the greatest sopranos of her time.”

  “Which was when?” asked Lowry.

  “When I was still a kid myself,” Hentz admitted. “The Met used to build whole new productions around her. I saw her in Rosenkavalier and I’ve never forgotten it. She was golden.”

  Elaine Albee was impressed. “You went to the Metropolitan Opera when you were a kid?”

  Hentz shrugged. “I have an aunt who loves it. So, did you question Randolph?”

  “I questioned an old woman at Number 403,” Albee said. “But now that you mention it, she carried herself like she’d been somebody and she did have a nice voice.”

  “She still is somebody,” said Tillie, who had abandoned his inspection of the clothes to search online for Charlotte Randolph’s name. “She just signed a big contract to write her autobiography. The publishers’re calling it a ‘tell-all blockbuster.’ Sounds like she’s had quite a colorful personal life—a couple of famous singers, a wealthy philanthropist, a New York senator and a Connecticut governor.”

  He swiveled his screen around so that they could see the woman’s picture, evidently a publicity photo taken from one of her concert performances. She wore a low-cut period gown with a diamond necklace and earrings. Her blond hair was carefully styled and there was a definite come-hither twinkle in her blue eyes.

  “Wow!” said Dinah Urbanska.

  “The hair’s white now and shorter, but that’s her, all right,” said Albee. “She said that she sent food down to that bench once in a while, but not Tuesday night. And she didn’t recognize either of our guys from the pictures.”

  “On the other hand,” Sigrid said, “according to Rudy Gottfried she has a niece and a stepson who bring her food fairly often. I saw them the other night. The niece is white and the stepson’s black.”

  “That couple from Giuseppone’s?” Albee asked Lowry.

  “We’ll wait for Cohen’s report,” Sigrid said. “If it is poison, we’ll ask if they brought her a takeout of lasagna last night.”

  Across the room, Tillie was giving Matty Mutone’s extra pair of pants a closer examination. They were of good quality and had probably started out as the bottom half of an expensive suit. Except for lint and two pennies, the pockets were empty and Tillie was ready to move on until he noticed the small watch pocket almost obscured by the left front pocket. He stuck his finger in and touched metal.

  “Lieutenant?” he said. “It’s another key. Looks like a car key.”

  The key went around the room, but no one could say what make of car it was for. “Looks like a standard blank duplicate,” said Lowry. “There’s a hardware store at my subway stop. I’ll check it out.”

  With nothing more to do till Cohen gave them his findings, Sigrid was pleased to realize she could keep an appointment she’d made earlier in the week. As she passed Sam Hentz’s desk on her way out, she couldn’t resist saying, “Your opera-loving aunt. That wouldn’t be your aunt Lizzie, would it?”

  When she took over the department, Sigrid had read through all the personnel files. Because of Hentz’s early antagonism, she had taken a second look at his. She seldom paid much attention to clothes in those days, but then Lowry made an envious comment about a well-cut jacket Hentz was wearing, so when she spotted him driving an expensive sports car, she had gone back for a third look, hoping to learn how one of her team could legitimately afford it.

  Listed as his next
of kin was an aunt, “Lizzie Stopplemeyer.” A few clicks on the computer confirmed that Elizabeth Stopplemeyer was the widow of Irving Stopplemeyer, whose face was almost as familiar as that of a certain Kentucky colonel. Stopplemeyer pastries could be found on the shelves of every grocery store east of the Mississippi from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. When Sigrid asked, Hentz admitted that he was his childless aunt’s favorite nephew. Hence the sports car, the beautifully tailored suits, and the silk ties. Relieved not to have a dirty cop on her team, she had not shared Hentz’s secret with the others.

  Now Hentz gave a wry smile. “What can I say? She thought I might have musical talents.”

  According to Elliott Buntrock, Hentz’s aunt Lizzie was right. He had heard Hentz play at a Village jazz club and had learned that he was a better than average jazz pianist who had put himself through college playing in cocktail bars. Sigrid had a feeling that this was something else Hentz never planned to share.

  Well, she could understand that.

  “It would be a kick to meet Charlotte Randolph in person, though,” said Hentz. “She was the classic showbiz story where the understudy goes on as a complete unknown and comes off a star.”

  Marcus Livingston’s warm brown face lit up in a wide smile and he chuckled when his secretary showed Sigrid in. “I was beginning to think you were blowing me off again,” he teased.

  Oscar Nauman’s attorney had his law office on Madison Avenue and Sigrid was only a few minutes late, but his words recalled the many times she had failed to show up after Nauman’s death. Unexpected circumstances had necessitated a new will and Nauman had planned to give it serious thought while out in California. As a stopgap, though, he had signed a simple “everything to Sigrid” will. When Livingston explained that she was now a very wealthy young woman, she had been so unnerved that she couldn’t deal with all the complicated decisions that suddenly faced her. Instead, she’d pulled the covers over her head and started sleeping eighteen hours a day.