Take Out

by Margaret Maron

  Eventually Livingston had persuaded her that they could do it together. “Besides,” he’d said, “taxes are going to take most of it anyhow.”

  Not quite true, of course. Not by a long shot, but his calm reassurance persuaded her to make a start. Nauman had agreed to the major retrospective that Elliott Buntrock had proposed, but no papers had been signed, so that had been the first order of business. After that, step by step, she and Livingston had formed a working relationship and she now trusted him completely.

  Today’s meeting was to sign the final papers for the sale of Nauman’s Connecticut house. As chair of the art department at Vanderlyn College, he had rented an impersonal three-room furnished apartment here in the city, but his home and his studio were in Connecticut and that’s where he spent his weekends and summers. Livingston’s secretary had arranged to have the apartment cleaned out and Sigrid had given up the lease to it without regret, but the house was harder. It wasn’t just the memories of their weekends there together, it was his books, his notebooks, his clothes, his unfinished paintings. A thousand items and each item demanded a decision.

  In the end, overwhelmed, she had kept nothing except Nauman’s pipe and the silverpoint pen he’d used to draw her portrait. Instead, she had turned the keys over to the two people best suited for the job—Elliott Buntrock and Hester Kohn, the current owner of the gallery that had represented Nauman for almost thirty years.

  When they first met, Sigrid had been more than a little intimidated by the woman, who exuded so much blatant sexuality.

  “So round, so firm, so fully packed,” Hentz had murmured when they interviewed Hester after the murder of another gallery owner. “Something my grandfather used to say about women who looked like her,” he explained. “‘So round, so firm, so fully packed, so free and easy on the draw,’ whatever that meant.”

  “I’m sure you knew exactly what he meant,” Sigrid said dryly.

  Hentz had grinned. “Probably not cigarettes,” he’d agreed.

  Now, to her surprise, Hester joined them in a cloud of musky perfume. Eyes shining with mischief, she gave Sigrid an air kiss, then leaned over to kiss Marcus Livingston on his cheek and give him a glimpse down the front of her low-cut summery dress. No longer intimidated, Sigrid could smile when Livingston said, “Quit trying to make an old man’s pulse beat faster, Ms. Kohn.”

  “When are you going to call me Hester?” She pouted but took a chair next to Sigrid, smoothed her skirt around her shapely legs, and took a thick manila folder from a soft-sided green leather case that looked more like a purse than a briefcase. “Here’s the inventory and a check for the things we sold minus our commission. You didn’t specify who should get the check, so it’s made out to your firm, Marcus, and you two can fight it out. Also a list of the art works that are consigned to Kohn and Munson Gallery, pending your approval, of course. We don’t want to flood the market before the Arnheim show.”

  “And how’s that coming?” he asked. “Still on schedule to open in September?”

  “That’s what Elliott Buntrock says.” She turned to Sigrid. “I’ve heard that Søren Thorvaldsen plans to come over for it.”

  “Really?” The last she’d heard of Thorvaldsen, a Danish entrepreneur and an avid collector of Nauman’s paintings, he was facing some rather serious charges of money laundering. “He’s not in prison?”

  Hester gave a cynical shrug. “Amazing what a good team of international lawyers can do, present company excepted.”

  Livingston laughed. “I’m no international lawyer, Ms. Kohn.”

  “Next he’ll be telling us that he’s just a country boy from the cotton fields of Columbia Law School,” Hester told Sigrid. “I’d love to stay and chat, but I have a client flying in from LA.” She reached into her briefcase again and drew out a small sketchbook. “I know you said you didn’t want to keep anything, but I thought you might change your mind about this.”

  Sigrid opened it at random and saw her own eyes looking back at her. She had never posed for Nauman, yet here were her hands, her face, the back of her head in page after page of Nauman’s quick, sure pencil strokes.

  “When—?” she whispered. “How—?” She swallowed back the lump of grief in her throat. Turning another page, she saw herself sitting cross-legged on a couch in Nauman’s studio, absorbed in a crossword puzzle in the Sunday Times. Only a few penciled lines, but he had caught her concentration. She remembered glancing up to find him looking past her as if his mind were miles away before this sketchbook claimed his attention again.

  “Elliott said that Oscar was thinking about line and portraiture, but this is the only example we found,” Hester said. “There’s one near the back.” She reached for the book. “This one of you is quite amazing, isn’t it? Too bad he never finished it.”

  “He finished it,” Sigrid said quietly.

  “Oh? What happened to it? Where—?” And then she took a closer look at Sigrid’s eyes. “Ah,” she said. “How stupid of me. I’m sorry, Sigrid.”

  She handed the pad to Sigrid, who closed it and laid it next to her purse.

  “You okay?” Livingston asked when Hester had gone.

  Sigrid nodded.

  “May I?”

  She handed him the sketchbook and the silence of the office was broken only by the slow turning of the pages.

  When he came to the end, he sighed, then gave it back to her without comment before straightening his shoulders and opening the folder on his desk.

  “Here’s the best offer we’ve had on the house. Quite a bit over the market value, I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid?” For a moment, Sigrid was puzzled, then the meaning of his words came to her. “Because it was his?”

  Livingston nodded. “Nothing we can do about it. All the locals up there know who owned it. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think the buyer plans to exploit the connection. Now, are you absolutely sure this is what you want to do, Sigrid?”

  “I could never live there,” she said firmly. “And the house is too beautiful to just sit empty. Let someone else enjoy it.”

  She signed the papers and felt a sudden lifting of her spirits. The last of the hard decisions had finally been made. Hester and Buntrock would see to the art, which might take years to dispose of, but that was okay. Somehow, the art had less personal meaning for her.

  “Do you know yet what you’ll do with the money?” Livingston asked. “You’ve talked about scholarships or a foundation to award grants. Any decision?”

  “Not yet. Could we leave it open for now?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks, Marcus. You’ve been very patient with all this.”

  He tried to wave away her thanks, but she persevered even though expressing emotions had always been hard for her. Now she looked at him directly, the cool silver of her eyes meeting the warm topaz of his. “I’m glad you were Nauman’s attorney.”

  “So am I, Sigrid,” he said. “So am I.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  Next day, they were no nearer an ID for the second dead man. A doctored picture of him had been released to the news media and had run on the local TV channels. So far, no one had come forward to say, “Yes, that’s my neighbor, my customer, my ex-wife’s uncle.”

  Jim Lowry’s hardware store thought that the unmarked key found in Matty Mutone’s watch pocket was for a car or truck, but without a brand name, there was no easy way to tell the make.

  Another canvass of the neighborhood had added nothing of significance, but the ME was ready to give them a cause of death. “Both died from internal bleeding, Lieutenant. A pretty heavy dose of warfarin. I’ve seen it before so it was an easy call.”

  “Rat poison?” Sigrid asked.

  “Well, yes,” he said. “But in controlled compounds, warfarin is commonly prescribed to prevent blood clots. Coumadin’s the most popular form and I’m guessing that’s what this is. I’ll run a few more tests to be certain. The meth user probably would’ve lived if
he’d been clean and his internal organs hadn’t already been compromised. The older guy may’ve already been taking it. He had a pacemaker and that’s a common drug for heart problems. If so, an overdose added to what he was already on would have pushed him right over the edge. In addition, he’d recently drunk quite a lot of gin. I’m surprised he could walk.”

  “Which box had the warfarin?”

  “We found it in both cartons.”

  “But which had more? The lasagna or the fettuccine?”

  Sigrid could almost hear his shrug over the phone.

  “Too much cross-contamination to say for sure. Sorry, Harald.”

  The men’s fingerprints were on both takeout cartons, which further suggested that the two had shared the food. Although their prints overlay each other, the fettuccine box was marginally cleaner, as if it had been wiped.

  “If someone wiped that carton, that could be where the Coumadin began, right?” asked Elaine Albee. “In the DelVecchio house?”

  But Sigrid wasn’t ready to commit so quickly. “It’s a starting point, though.” She took out the business card Mrs. DelVecchio’s attorney had given her. “I’ll give Mr. Edwards a call and you two see if you can find the homeless man that Mutone dispossessed of that bench.”

  When she finally got past his switchboard, George Edwards gave the heavy sigh of a much put-upon man. “Is this really necessary, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m afraid so, Mr. Edwards. Do you know if your client has a heart condition?”

  “Is that what killed Matty? Some sort of heart pills?”

  “That’s what our medical examiner thinks.”

  Silence from his end, then, “She’s eighty-two, Lieutenant, and she has a pacemaker. I don’t know what medications she’s on, though.” He gave another long sigh. “Very well, I’ll clear my schedule and try to meet you at the house by noon.”

  “Bridge or ferry?” Jim Lowry asked Elaine Albee when they had questioned the staff at the soup kitchen again and learned that the man they sought, a man called Lunk, was now living in a halfway house on Staten Island.

  Elaine had looked up the address. The halfway house was only a few blocks from the ferry landing and it was a beautiful spring day, so they wouldn’t really need a car.

  “Ferry,” she said.

  He grinned. “I’ll buy you lunch. Sauerkraut or onions?”

  “Big spender,” she teased, happy that their relationship had eased into something smoother now that they had gotten over that rough patch. He had come on so strongly when they were first partnered that she had instinctively backed off, knowing the dangers of hooking up with a co-worker. She’d had no intention of short-circuiting her career for a quick fling. Besides, he wasn’t her type—too confident, too handsome, too sure that she would fall into his arms and into his bed.

  She had clamped down so hard on his overtures that when Dotty Vargas, a forthright brunette from the Bronx and one of their crime scene officers, started flirting with him last year, he had responded. Elaine had told herself that she wasn’t jealous, that there was nothing to be jealous about. He wasn’t her personal property. But Vargas went through men quicker than a hay fever sufferer goes through Kleenex and Jim had grown up on a Pennsylvania apple farm, which, in her eyes, made him a babe in New York’s woods. She’d kept her mouth shut, though, and to her relief, the flirtation seemed to have died a natural death with no wounded feelings on either side.

  Hot dogs were perfect for lunching on the ferry and they found a place near the stern and out of the wind where they could comfortably watch the buildings of Manhattan recede in the distance. A nearby group of tourists with several children were also munching on hot dogs and the tang of sauerkraut and onions mingled with the smell of salt water. Soon the children were tossing the ends of their buns over the railing and raucous seagulls dived for them, their white wings flashing in the late morning sun as they passed the Statue of Liberty.

  At the halfway house, a grandmotherly white woman pushed back the glass panel that separated her cubicle from the lobby. “May I help you?”

  Her brow furrowed when they showed her their badges and asked to speak to someone named Lunk.

  “Lunk? Lunk?” She leaned forward to call to some men standing by the front door. “Any of you guys know somebody named Lunk?”

  “Yeah,” said one of them. “I think his last name’s Church.”

  A few clicks of her computer and the woman said, “Here he is. Of course. Laurence Church. According to his schedule, he’s probably up on the roof weeding our vegetable garden.”

  They found him gazing out over the bay with a trowel in his hand. A stocky black man with hunched shoulders, he gave them a gap-toothed smile as they approached and gestured with his trowel to the row of planter boxes. Two of the boxes looked like leafy salad bowls; the rest contained ten-inch-high bright green plants.

  “Ain’t this something? Born on a farm in Alabama and here I am raising lettuce and tomatoes again. On a rooftop in New York City.”

  “Mr. Church?” asked Lowry. “Lunk Church?”

  “Laurence Church,” he said. “I’m Laurence now. Laurence with a U. Done left Lunk behind over yonder. Along with the whiskey bottles and sleeping on cardboard.”

  “Actually, that’s what we want to ask you about,” said Albee. “Did you know a Matty Mutone?”

  “Who?”

  Lowry showed him a picture of the dead man that had been doctored to look as if still alive, with open eyes.

  Church shook his head. “Ain’t nobody I know.”

  “You sure? We heard you used to bed down on a bench near that soup kitchen on the lower end of Sixth Avenue till he kicked you off.”

  “He kicked me off?”

  “That’s what we were told.”

  Church turned back to the picture and studied it more closely. “Oh yeah, I sorta remember him now. Skinny little white dude. Started hanging around there ’bout the time I heard they had a place for me here. No way he kicked me off. I was ready to split. Got me a real bed here. And they found me some part-time yard work around the neighborhood. Couldn’t wait to get off the farm when I was a kid. Now I wish I could get back on one.”

  “You and Matty talk much?”

  Reluctantly, Church brought his attention back to the picture. “Naw. He was strung out on something. I might’ve let booze mess me up, but I never did no drugs. I got asthma, so I can’t smoke and I’ve always hated needles. How come you asking about him anyhow?”

  “He’s dead. Looks like someone gave him some poisoned food.”

  “No shit?”

  “He ever say who he might’ve pissed off?”

  “Naw. Like I said, I only saw him—what? Two times? Three?”

  “People bring food while you were sleeping there?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “When Matty was there?”

  “Oh yeah. Some old woman brought us Italian right before I left. He said she knew his mother.”

  “She give you food, too?”

  Church shrugged. “He passed out before he could eat it all, and I didn’t eat all day, so I finished it off. Guess I was lucky, huh?”

  “Lucky?”

  “That it didn’t have poison in it that night.”

  In midmorning, Sigrid gathered up several folders and went down the hall to brief her boss. One file held Matty Mutone’s record, another the new one they’d begun upon his death. Yet another was a bulky brown expansion envelope held together by the thick cord that had long ago replaced the original elastic string. These were the files on Benito DelVecchio, which she had not yet read. The papers inside were dog-eared and beginning to yellow. Several were chipped along the edges.

  Last year, things had still been awkward between them, but most of that had dissipated since she first learned of Captain McKinnon’s history with her parents. Until then, she had wondered if he resented her assignment to his command. She hadn’t known that he and her father had been roommates and partners when they bo
th made detective, nor that McKinnon and her mother had been lovers. Now she knew that her father had been as handsome and charismatic as a tall blond Viking and had probably cheated on her mother from the beginning, but when Leif Harald caught a bullet from a low-level mobster, a guilt-stricken Anne had blamed McKinnon and cut him out of her life.

  Somehow Sigrid’s grief and near breakdown after Nauman’s death had brought Anne and McKinnon back together again. Night before last, her mother had let slip that she and McKinnon planned to marry when he retired at the end of the year.

  “Don’t tell him I told you,” Anne said.

  As if.

  She and McKinnon had kept each other at arm’s length after he and Anne began seeing each other. No way would either of them want it gossiped about in the department or have to endure snickers about Mac becoming her stepfather.

  Built like an overgrown teddy bear, Captain McKinnon still ran things on a “trust ’em or bust ’em” basis and could appear sleepy-eyed and easygoing until faced with incompetence. That’s when those sleepy brown eyes would sharpen and underlings became abruptly aware that the muscles on his large frame had not softened.

  Now he listened intently as Sigrid briefed him on the two men found dead at the end of the street where Benito DelVecchio, a Mafia don, had been killed. “You okay with this?”

  “Okay?” she asked.

  From her puzzled look, he realized that she had not made the connection.

  “Benito DelVecchio,” he said. “Aka Benny Olds?”

  “What?”

  “Vecchio means old in Italian.”

  Several years ago, once she had joined the force and had access to its records, Sigrid had read the official reports of Leif Harald’s death in the line of duty, but she had concentrated on her father’s shooter, not on the shooter’s connections to the mob. There had been mention that he was part of the Benny Olds organization and she had let herself be distracted by the nickname and how he passed out Oldsmobiles like Christmas bonuses. Even though McKinnon might have mentioned the don’s real name when he told her how Leif had been shot, it had not registered deeply enough for her to recognize it again.