Take Out

by Margaret Maron

  “Yeah?”

  Sigrid introduced herself and Hentz. “Do you remember when you last saw him?”

  “I dunno. Maybe a week? Ten days? He stopped me a couple of blocks up on Sixth. Wanted me to try and get her to forgive him and let him come back. I told him it was never gonna happen.”

  “Her? Mrs. DelVecchio?”

  The man nodded.

  “Forgive him for what?”

  “For using drugs again,” George Edwards answered when the handyman hesitated. “It’s okay, Sal. They know.”

  “Yeah,” Salvador agreed. “She couldn’t rely on him no more.”

  “Rely on him for what?”

  “He didn’t show up on time when he was supposed to drive them somewhere.”

  “He drove for Mrs. DelVecchio? Not you?”

  “I banged up my arm summer before last.” He pointed to a climbing rose that covered the garage wall in fragrant white blossoms. “Fell off the ladder pruning back the Lady Banks roses. Broke my arm in two places. Matty needed a job, so she hired him to drive her and the girls when they came into town.”

  “The girls?”

  “My wife and daughter,” Edwards explained.

  Salvador flexed his right arm vigorously. “It’s fine now.”

  “How did you get along with him?” Hentz asked.

  The man shrugged. “Okay. We didn’t have much to do with each other. He was good with cars. Liked to wax them, keep them clean. Never put a dent in them, anyhow. And he kept the herb beds weeded when he was around.”

  They showed him the key they’d found in Matty’s pocket.

  “Not one of our cars,” he said.

  “Are you familiar with Coumadin?” Sigrid asked.

  “What’s that? An herb?”

  “No, it’s a blood thinner. Prescribed for heart conditions.”

  “Never heard of it and my heart’s just fine.”

  “Mrs. Orlano said you picked up supper for them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re going to need your fingerprints,” Hentz said, undoing the clasp on the expansion envelope that held the necessary form and ink pad.

  “Huh?” The man drew back defensively. “Why? What do you need mine for?”

  “It’s only for elimination purposes,” Hentz said.

  When the man continued to balk, Edwards said, “Don’t worry, Sal. They don’t care about stuff that happened twenty-five years ago.”

  Hentz led the reluctant Salvador over to the bench beside the central fishpond and Sigrid raised a questioning eyebrow to Edwards, who smiled.

  “He snatched a couple of purses back when he was a bicycle messenger. Couldn’t resist the temptation when women crossed in front of him dangling their handbags by the handle. His criminal career was cut short when a woman’s husband chased after him. He crashed into a Sabrett’s wagon and the husband nearly beat him to a pulp. I don’t know how they met, but right before he was killed, Benny hired him to drive Sofia and Aria, my wife. I guess you know about that?”

  “That he was shot down in front of the house? Yes.”

  “Aria didn’t see it happen, but she was here in the house and ran out to the street when she heard the shots. She was only a teenager. Had nightmares about it for years. Natural, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” said Sigrid. At least Benny Olds’s daughter had clear memories of him. She herself could barely remember her own father.

  According to Mac, Olds had been a loving and protective father, so yes, seeing his body bloody and torn apart by bullets would surely be the stuff of nightmares.

  By now, Sam Hentz was finished with Salvador and the two detectives followed George Edwards back through the garage to the street.

  After Edwards left them to reenter the house through the front door, Sigrid turned to Hentz and said, “So who or what was Alberich that so amused you and Mrs. DelVecchio?”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant. He was the dwarf in Wagner’s Ring cycle who lived in a cave and stole the Rheingold. I’m afraid that Salvador looks a little like the way Alberich is often described, and since he lives in the basement…”

  “Opera again? I should have known.” She glanced at her watch. “Well, you wanted to meet her, so let’s go see if Charlotte Randolph’s remembered anything.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  To Sam Hentz’s disappointment, no one answered the doorbell at Number 403.

  “The Jennings woman said she gave Matty a freebie,” Sigrid said, “so why don’t you go question her again, while I see if my friend knew him or has anything useful to say about the neighborhood.”

  Rudy Gottfried seemed surprised to find Sigrid at his door, but immediately invited her in and led her through a series of dark, low-ceiling basement rooms to his studio, a bright and spacious solarium at the back that was cluttered with easels, a rack of canvases, and paint-spattered chairs and small tables. He wore a denim chef’s apron with a bib that covered his short-sleeved shirt, but there was a smear of red paint on his chin.

  This was the first time she’d been here since shortly after Nauman’s death, and the sharp smell of fresh turpentine and earthy pigments hit her senses like a palpable blow, with wave after wave of a grief so acute that she had to reach out to a sturdy wooden easel to steady herself. Nauman’s clothes, his hair, his very skin, had been so permeated with these strong, clean, almost medicinal smells that she moved blindly to the far end of the studio where she could keep her back to Gottfried and pretend to be interested in the view while she regained control.

  The glass curved out into a neglected backyard that was only a few inches below the windowsill. Weeds rimmed a cracked square of concrete that held a couple of plastic chairs and a rusty metal picnic table. They were shaded by a single pathetic tree not yet in full leaf. Some sort of wild vine had died on the ugly concrete wall at the rear and left behind a tracery of dried leaves and stems. No flowers, no fountain, and certainly no water lilies floating serenely on a pristine fishpond. With her hands flat on the dusty window ledge, she leaned forward to look for yellow roses atop the wall that enclosed Mrs. DelVecchio’s lush garden, but from this position, three feet below ground level, her view was blocked by a thick privet hedge and a tall wooden fence beyond that. If Charlotte Randolph had a garden, it was hidden behind by a tall concrete wall on the other side of Gottfried’s yard.

  He joined her at the windows, which were badly in need of washing. “Good thing I was never interested in painting landscapes. I tend to forget how dreary this view is. I sometimes sit out there to read the morning paper and have my coffee. Maybe I ought to get a couple of flower pots or something.”

  “I just came from Mrs. DelVecchio’s garden,” Sigrid said now that her emotions were back in check. “Were you ever in it?”

  He nodded. “Now that’s a garden Monet would have been right at home in. She hosted a meeting of the block association there a couple of years ago. Wanted us to sign a petition to close down a place,” Gottfried said.

  “The one with a red door?”

  “You know about that?”

  “Mrs. Jennings said that Mrs. DelVecchio had complained about her, but that’s no concern of mine. I’m here about the two men who died around the corner on Sixth. Did you hear about it?”

  “Wednesday morning? Yeah. Some of your people came by. Cute little blonde.”

  “Did you know either of them?”

  “Just the one they called Matty. Not that I really knew him. He used to drive for the don’s widow and he gave me a lift uptown once when he was on his way to pick her up last fall. Friendly guy. Told me his whole life story in the time it took to drive up to Forty-Fourth. How his mother was the don’s cousin and how the daughter was like a sister.”

  “Any talk about him in the neighborhood?”

  “Not really. At the diner I’d heard that they were related and that the widow fired him when he started using drugs again. He didn’t mention drugs to me, but then why would he?”

  “Did yo
u know he was still hanging around that bench on Sixth and that she sent food down for him every week?”

  “Yeah, I heard that at the diner, too.” Gottfried shook his head in amusement. “I just realized that if I didn’t eat there once a week, I’d never know a thing about what goes on around here. But the widow’s not the only one. Other people leave food there, too. Janis Jennings, Charlotte Randolph, Nick Finmore.”

  “Who’s Nick Finmore?”

  “Kid that waits tables at the diner. He takes stale bread down to the bench and feeds the pigeons there. Used to feed them in front of the diner, but it pissed off the owner. People didn’t like walking through the droppings.”

  “You ever leave food there?”

  Gottfried grinned and patted his rotund belly. “Does this look like I ever had leftovers?”

  “What about the second man?”

  Gottfried shook his head. “Your blonde showed me his picture, but I never saw him before. Was it poison?”

  “The ME thinks so. Warfarin.”

  “Rat poison?” He gave a sour laugh. “Well, they did die outside, didn’t they? Isn’t that how rat poison’s supposed to work?”

  Moving over to a table littered with books and papers, he opened a drawer and handed her several old black-and-white photographs. “I found these the other night. Think Buntrock might be interested to see what Oscar was painting back then? You can’t really see the details, but I’m pretty sure that’s the first picture Kohn and Munson ever sold for him.”

  And there was Nauman, young and intense, standing in front of an easel with a pipe clenched in his teeth, a paintbrush in his hand, his face half turned away as if totally oblivious to the camera. He wore a thick wool jacket and gloves that had the fingers cut off.

  “That was our place over in Chelsea. The boiler kept breaking and the radiators never gave any heat.”

  “Is that you?” She recognized Nauman, but the man standing beside him had his back to the camera. He was almost as slim, but a little shorter, with a bushy head of hair, a thicker neck, and broader shoulders.

  “Yeah, that’s me. Before I started to pack on the pounds.”

  “Who’s that?” Sigrid asked when she came to a picture of Nauman, Gottfried, and a woman who had wrapped herself in a blanket from head to toe and sat atop a table with her knees drawn up as if she were freezing.

  “Lila Nagy. You know about her?”

  “The name’s familiar. She and Nauman were together when he first came to New York, weren’t they?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sigrid passed to the next picture, taken on what must have been a warmer day, because the blanket was gone and Nauman had his arm around her slender waist. Sigrid could not help but notice that the woman did not lean into his embrace. Nor was she smiling. Long, dark hair and bold eyes stared directly into the camera.

  “She was quite beautiful, wasn’t she?”

  “Sexy as hell, but too intense and crazy as a loon,” said Gottfried. “He ever tell you how she did a van Gogh on him? Tried to cut off his ear?”

  “What? No! Why?”

  “She was an artist, too, but not half as good as she wanted to be. She was jealous of Oscar. Thought it came too easy for him, that he needed to suffer for his art.”

  Their time together had been so short, Sigrid thought. Too short for sharing all their stories. She had seen the scar behind his ear, of course, had even run her fingers along that thin white line but hadn’t asked about it because he had turned his head to her and once their lips met, she forgot about that nearly invisible scar.

  “Was she trying to kill him?”

  “Not really. Just wanted to drive home a point. I mean it, the woman was crazy. Still is, I suppose.”

  “She’s alive?”

  “So far as I know. When I heard how Oscar went off a curve up in the hills from LA, I asked Buntrock if that’s why he was there.”

  Sigrid stared at him in bewilderment. “I don’t understand.”

  “Oscar wasn’t the only person she attacked. After they broke up, she stalked him and tried to stab the woman he was seeing after her. They put out a warrant on her, but she left the state before she could be arrested. Next thing we heard, she’d moved to an art colony out near Sacramento where she stabbed a teenage girl to death. I don’t know that Oscar kept up with her, but the last I heard, she was serving life in a prison out there for the criminally insane.”

  “And that prison is out in the hills from LA?”

  Gottfried nodded. “Oscar visited her once when he was there—maybe twenty, twenty-five years ago? They’d cut her hair and she’d gained a lot of weight. He almost didn’t recognize her and she didn’t know him at all. Sad. Still, I wondered if maybe that’s where he went that day.”

  Sigrid looked down at the pictures in her hand.

  Lila Nagy.

  Dark flowing hair.

  Eyes that challenged the camera.

  She had known there were other women before her. Beautiful women according to the snippets of gossip she’d heard. She had never been jealous, but looking at this picture, knowing that this woman might have been the last person Nauman spoke to before his death? Yes, she had to admit that she was jealous.

  CHAPTER

  7

  The woman who opened the red door at the end of the block did not look like what Sam Hentz’s aunt Lizzie would call a woman of the evening. She was almost as tall as he with iron-gray hair pinned back from her face by blue plastic barrettes. No perfumed hair or makeup and no sexy clothes. Instead, she wore white sneakers, khaki shorts, and a denim apron that covered the message on her T-shirt. The cloth in her hand smelled strongly of furniture polish.

  She looked at the badge Hentz held up and rolled her eyes. “Oh, Christ! Don’t you people have anything better to do?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “What part of ‘not a whorehouse’ do you not understand?”

  “Something wrong, Frances?” asked a woman’s voice from the head of the stairs above.

  “Just another fucking policeman here to hassle you.”

  From the room beyond, a gentle voice said, “Language, Frances.”

  Peering over her shoulder, Hentz saw an elderly woman of Asian descent, who sat in a high-backed chair as she knitted something in fuzzy pink wool.

  “I’ll handle this, Frances,” said the first woman as she reached the foot of the stairs and came forward. “Besides, I think the dryer’s ready to be unloaded.”

  The one called Frances ceded her place at the door. “Did Cookie’s pajama bottoms turn up?”

  “I don’t think so. Check the hampers and start another load.” She turned to Hentz. “May I help you, Officer?”

  He held out his ID again. “Detective Hentz, ma’am. And I’m not interested in what goes on here. I’ve come about the two deaths down at the other end of this block on Tuesday night. Are you Ms. Jennings?”

  “Janis Jennings, yes. Do come in, Detective.”

  As she stood aside to let him enter, a man of late middle age hesitated at the bottom of the steps. “Mrs. Li? I’m Eustace Boyle.”

  “One minute, Detective.” She turned and called to the elderly woman, “Mrs. Li? A Mr. Boyle for you.”

  The woman stowed her knitting in a basket beside the chair and reached for her cane. “Right on time.” She beamed. “My room’s on the second floor, but luckily we have an elevator.”

  Boyle and Mrs. Li both had to be in their seventies and both walked with pronounced limps as they passed down the hall and around the corner. A moment later Hentz heard an elevator door open. He was bemused. What was this? A cathouse for the geriatric set?

  He followed Ms. Jennings into a living room that was more like a hotel lounge. Somehow she didn’t really fit his picture of a brothel keeper either, despite a good figure and a long single braid of thick brown hair.

  “As I told your Lieutenant Harald, I knew Matty only casually and I never saw the other man.”

  “I was hoping
to talk to the woman who serviced him. Maybe he said something to her about who would want him out of the way. Or why.”

  “That would be Peg Overhold, but she’s out of town right now. Her mother’s sick and she’s gone up to help out for a few days. She’s due back the first of next week.”

  “Was she the only one who gave him a freebie?”

  “No, as your lieutenant must have told you, I did, too. I felt sorry for him, so I gave him food, as well, and the occasional five dollars.”

  “Did you talk?”

  She gave him a puzzled look. “Of course we talked. You can’t spend time with someone without talking. What do you think?”

  Actually, Hentz didn’t know what he thought. Hookers must have to put up with a lot of scumbags and it was not his place to judge, but Janis Jennings seemed so fresh and clean that it was hard to imagine her with someone like Matty Mutone. Those discolored teeth? That sour skin? His street-soiled clothes?

  “Was he in trouble? Fearful of anyone?”

  She shook her head and her braid swayed with the motion. “Not fearful, just very, very sad. Someone he loved had died and he couldn’t talk about her without crying. That’s why I asked Peg to take him if she had the time. She’s such a natural empath.”

  “When did she last see him?”

  “I really couldn’t say. I don’t keep up with the bookings.”

  Again Hentz was puzzled. He’d never worked Vice, but it was his understanding that brothel owners took a percentage of a working girl’s take.

  “But then how do you know how much they owe you?”

  “How much they owe me?” For a moment, Jennings’s face mirrored Hentz’s puzzlement, then she started laughing.

  On the second floor of a building in Midtown, the assistant seated at the desk just inside Kohn and Munson Gallery smiled apologetically at the tall white man in jeans and a navy sports jacket who had just pulled open the glass door. “I’m sorry, sir, but we’ll be closing in a few minutes.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I’m not here to look at the exhibit. I’d like to see Ms. Kohn.”