Take Out

by Margaret Maron

  “Poisoned? Jack? Enemies? No! Not Jack. Jack walks on water. Everybody loves him. At least they used to. I don’t really know him anymore. We had tons of friends back then, but all our friends took his side and once the divorce went through and we settled on what to do about Jacky and who was going to be responsible— Oh, God! That means it’s back on me, doesn’t it?”

  “Unless he left a will. Did he have any other relatives? We’ll need someone to make a positive identification.”

  “You mean go down to the morgue like in all those crime shows on TV where they slide a body out of a drawer and lift up a sheet? No. Uh-uh. Not me. Let Fern do it.”

  “Fern?”

  “His sister. They were thick as thieves. She was my friend first, if you can believe it. Introduced me to Jack, then dropped me like a hot potato when we got married. She’ll tell you what you need to know. Just don’t believe everything she says about me.”

  She reached into her purse and pulled out an address book, which she opened and pointed to an address. “Fern Woods. Moved to Suffolk County when she retired so she can visit Jacky every week and make sure he’s being taken care of and not getting bedsores like that first place we had him.”

  Urbanska copied down the contact information and handed it back. Mrs. Bloss dropped the little book back into her yellow purse, zipped it closed, and stood to go. “Is that all?”

  “Just one thing more, Mrs. Bloss. Charlotte Randolph. Did you know her?”

  “Who?”

  “The opera singer.”

  “Oh yeah. The la-dee-dah Met.”

  “Did he talk much about her?”

  “Charlotte Randolph? I think he may have met her, but he’d moved down to Broadway by the time we got together. I never worked there.”

  “You were in show business, too?” asked Urbanska.

  “Not on stage,” Mrs. Bloss said with a feigned show of modesty, “although I did a little summer stock and the director said I had talent. No, I worked as a dresser, Off-Broadway.”

  She named a couple of actresses that neither Tillie nor Dinah Urbanska had ever heard of and was telling them the plots of her favorite show—“Sixteen costume changes including a mermaid tail”—as they eased her out the door.

  The garage door at Number 409 was open and Sigrid and Hentz walked in without knocking.

  Perched on a high swivel stool, Salvador was bent over a rusty push mover that lay upside down on the workbench at the end of the garage. He had taken off one of the wheels so that he could smear some sort of thick gunk on the blades. After every two or three backward rotations, he smeared on more, then tested the edges with his finger.

  “That thing looks like an antique,” Hentz said. “First push mower I’ve seen since I was a kid. My uncle had one.”

  “Better than a gas mower for that little bit of grass out there,” Salvador answered with a cheerful smile. “This thing’s older than me and it’ll still be cutting grass after I’m gone if it gets a little TLC and some of this lapping compound every few years. They used to build things to last.”

  He wiped the blades clean and reached for the wheel assembly. “I guess you’ve got more questions about Matty?”

  “That’s right,” Sigrid said. “More specifically, your meeting with him Tuesday evening.”

  “I told you. The last time I spoke to Matty was at least two weeks ago.”

  “But you were the one who took him the fettuccine, weren’t you?”

  Salvador slid the wheel onto its shaft and began tightening the nuts with a wrench he’d taken from the top pocket of his coveralls. “Orla tell you that?”

  Sigrid nodded. “Someone saw you with a takeout box in your hand talking to Jack Bloss that evening.”

  “That the guy’s name? He didn’t say.”

  “Had you seen him before?”

  “No, just the once.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Nothing much. The weather. I think he’d been drinking or something because he seemed a little unsteady with his fork. He was eating lasagna. Said it wasn’t his favorite, but he’d skipped lunch and was hungry.”

  “Did he say where he’d gotten it?”

  “No. I thought maybe he’d found it there on the bench. There’s a soup kitchen down the block but people will leave food on the bench in case somebody needs a meal when it’s not open, although to be honest, he didn’t look like somebody who’d been sleeping rough. His clothes were too clean. I told him I had fettuccine for a friend. He didn’t know Matty, but he said he’d give it to him if he came, so I handed it over and left. But when I looked back, he was opening the box.”

  “You didn’t see Matty at all?”

  “Nope.”

  He finished with the wheel and set the lawnmower right side up on the floor. The handle came almost up to the short man’s chest.

  “Why did you lie about it when we first asked you?”

  “Orla and me, we cover for each other.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Look, Lieutenant, this is a good place to work. The pay’s good and the work’s not hard. Mrs. D, she doesn’t ask for a lot, but what she does ask for, she expects to get. Between you and me, I don’t think she would’ve cared if Orla’d said ‘Let Sal take it,’ but for some reason, Orla’s scared to do that. Besides, you don’t want to cross the old lady. She gets something bad about you in her head and that’s it. You’re out. No second chances.”

  “Like what she did with Matty?”

  “Exactly like that.”

  “Because of her daughter’s death?”

  Sal shrugged but Sigrid persisted.

  “We’ve heard that Matty thought Mrs. DelVecchio blamed him for that, and that he blamed himself even more. What actually happened, Mr. Salvador? How did Aria Edwards die?”

  He sighed and swiveled the stool around to face them.

  “When I first came, Miss Aria was still a teenager. Long blond hair, beautiful face. She could have been a movie star or a model. And such a sweet voice. When she laughed—” He shook his head ruefully. “You wanted to play the fool just to make her laugh.”

  He turned back to the workbench and began tidying it up as he spoke. The tools were slotted back in their spaces, then he capped the sharpening compound and put it on a shelf over the counter.

  “Matty’s mother was still alive then and they were over here a lot. He and Miss Aria were like brother and sister. I always thought he wanted to be more than that to her, but she wasn’t interested. They both went off to college, but then she met Mr. George and that was the end of school for her. For Matty, too. He mooned around like a sick puppy. Couldn’t keep a job. And when she married Mr. George and moved out to Long Island, he went off the deep end. Started using drugs. His mother died and he was in and out of jail.”

  It was the usual story that Sigrid and Hentz had heard dozens of times.

  “Miss Aria kept thinking she could make him turn his life around. Finally she and Mr. George got him into a rehab place that seemed to work. When I broke my arm last summer, he was clean and started working here part-time. Two weeks before Christmas, Miss Aria came into town to spend a few days with Mrs. D and Orla and to do some Christmas shopping. Matty dropped her off that morning as soon as the stores opened and he was supposed to pick her up after lunch, only something went wrong with the catalytic converter and he had to get it towed, so he couldn’t go meet her. It was crappy weather—a little rain, a little snow. She had her arms full of packages and maybe she slipped, who knows? Orla said there were witnesses that said she stepped off the curb just as a white car pulled up and knocked her down and then ran over her. Crushed her skull, then drove away.”

  “Anyone get the license?” asked Hentz, who had walked over to look at the gardening supplies at the far end of the work counter.

  “No. They couldn’t agree if it was a Toyota or a Honda or even if it was a man or woman driving. Just that it was dirty and pretty dinged up.”

  �
�Must have been rough on the family,” said Sigrid.

  “Yeah. Mrs. D took it bad, but Orla was even worse. She was here when Miss Aria was born. Loved her like she was her own daughter. And Matty was out of his head. Blamed himself for not being there to pick her up as he’d promised. He went back to using so heavy that he’d probably have been dead in another month or two anyhow.”

  “Did Mrs. DelVecchio blame him, too?”

  “Not really. You’d think she would, but she didn’t. She knew how much he loved Miss Aria. If she blamed him for anything, it was for going back to drugs when he knew how bad it would have hurt Miss Aria to see him throwing his life away. That’s why she quit having anything to do with him except for seeing that he got at least one good meal a week.”

  “Lieutenant?” Hentz said. He pointed to an orange-and-yellow box on one of the shelves. It pictured a rat on the front and printed above the rat were the words Warfarin Rat Bait.

  “You have a problem with rats here, Mr. Salvador?”

  “Not anymore. The city did some work on the sewers back in March and I saw a rat in the cabinet under my sink. Orla said she’d seen droppings in the kitchen, too, so I put out some of that stuff. No more droppings and no more rats.”

  “You do know that warfarin was what poisoned Matty and the other man, don’t you?”

  “Huh? No! I thought it was heart pills.”

  “Heart pills that are made with warfarin,” said Hentz.

  “Now, wait a minute! You think that I poisoned Matty?”

  “No,” said Sigrid, “but it would be helpful if you can tell us if any of the baits are missing.”

  He took the box and looked inside. “I forget how many I used, but this seems right.”

  “Mind if we take one?” Hentz asked, pulling a plastic bag from his pocket.

  Sal looked uneasy but offered no objection.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Charlotte Randolph pushed back from the glass-topped table strewn with the letters and photographs and press clippings that documented her public life. “I’m sorry, Marian. I just can’t seem to concentrate today.”

  “That’s okay,” her assistant said cheerfully. “We’re ahead of schedule. If you like, I could finish putting those interviews in chronological order.”

  “No, take the rest of the day off. Go check out that shoe sale. You’ve earned it. I’ll try to get my thoughts in order.”

  “You’ve been sitting so long lately, you could probably use a good massage. Want me to call your therapist? See if she can come over?”

  “No. Maybe I’ll call her after lunch. You go.”

  But when Marian Schmidt had gathered up her things and gone off with a shoe ad from the morning paper, Charlotte continued to sit at the table, lost in memory.

  The police interview had unsettled her more than she wanted to admit. When he was here on Tuesday, Jack swore he hadn’t told anyone but she found herself remembering that old warning: “Two people can keep a secret if one of them be dead.”

  Well, Jack was dead, but how many other secrets were hidden in the papers spread out before her?

  And how many of those secrets would she take to her own grave?

  She squared her small shoulders decisively. Maybe it was time to find out.

  Founded in 1897, Vanderlyn College occupied a leafy green space overlooking the East River that was two blocks wide by eight blocks long. Unlike other institutions of higher learning where real estate was less valuable, none of these stone building were dormitories or faculty residences, although there was a central grassy commons where students crisscrossed to classes on patterned brick walks or perched on the broad rim of the fountain to eat lunch in the shade of several large oaks.

  Two years earlier, Detectives Albee and Lowry had taken part in a murder investigation in Vanderlyn’s art department but their activities had been confined to Van Hoeen Hall and they had never become fully oriented but a student pointed them toward Stuyvesant Hall, which was where they had arranged to meet Grace Landers and Abner Ferguson.

  Inside the building, they squeezed onto a crowded elevator that let them off in front of glass double doors marked FACULTY ONLY. The doors opened onto a wide covered terrace that looked out over the river and was furnished with wrought-iron tables and chairs. On this warm June day, most of the chairs were occupied.

  Lt. Harald had described to them the couple that she’d seen entering the Randolph home, so they spotted almost immediately what had to be Charlotte Randolph’s niece and stepson at a table next to the railing. Both had their backs to the glare coming off the water. The woman appeared to be in her late thirties and from the gray hairs at the man’s temples, he was probably early forties. They made an attractive couple and their smiles were friendly without a hint of uneasiness at being asked to meet with the police.

  “Hope you don’t mind if we go ahead with lunch,” said Grace Landers, opening clear plastic clamshells that held green salads. She wore her light brown hair parted in the middle and tucked back behind her ears but a breeze off the river kept loosening different strands. “I hold office hours from one to three.”

  “And I’m teaching a graduate seminar then myself,” said her husband, a slender black man with a pencil mustache who used a penknife to open their packets of dressing.

  As they ate, they explained that he specialized in eighteenth-century American literature while she was the deputy chair of the math department.

  “I’m afraid I can’t say anything intelligent about either subject,” Lowry confessed.

  Dr. Abner Ferguson smiled. “Neither can a lot of our students. I hope this isn’t about one of them?”

  “Didn’t Ms. Randolph tell you?”

  Both professors gave them blank looks. “Charlotte? Tell us what?”

  “Let’s back up a bit,” said Albee. “Ms. Randolph told us that you often bring her supper.”

  “Yes?” Dr. Ferguson seemed puzzled by her question.

  “Did you bring her food this past week?”

  They nodded. “Lasagna,” said Ferguson. “She loves pasta, but very seldom orders it for herself.”

  “Trying to preserve her girlish figure,” said Landers with an indulgent smile as she speared a cherry tomato. “Almost eighty, but still in the game. We stop in to check on her every week or so and we usually take her something. I guess you know she’s my grandmother’s sister and that Gus is the son of her third husband.”

  “Or her fourth husband,” he said, pushing aside a ring of red onion. “Charlotte claims she can’t remember which.”

  Landers gave a rueful shake of her head. “We’ve never understood why she would bother with a ceremony since none of her marriages ever lasted more than eighteen months.”

  “The lasagna you brought her was from Giuseppone, right?”

  The laughter faded from their faces at the seriousness of Lowry’s tone.

  “What’s this about, Detective?”

  “Two men were found dead on a bench on Sixth Avenue at the end of her street.”

  “Oh no!” said Grace Landers. “Please don’t say it was gang-related. That’s always been such a safe street.”

  “No, this looks personal. Their food was poisoned.”

  “Poisoned? I don’t understand.”

  “Two takeout boxes were given to those men Tuesday evening. Warfarin was found in both boxes.”

  Landers, who had been frowning, immediately looked relieved. “Oh well, that lets us out. We took Charlotte’s lasagna to her on Monday.”

  “Did you see her eat any of it?”

  “Well, no. She put it in that little refrigerator in the butler’s pantry to have later.”

  “She never ate it,” said Albee. “One of those two men visited her Tuesday evening and she sent your lasagna home with him.”

  “Really? Who was he?”

  “A man named Jack Bloss, who used to be a stage hand at the Met. He brought her a program from the night she went on for the star. He to
ld her he’d missed lunch, so she gave him your lasagna. He stopped to eat it on that bench and next morning he was dead.”

  Landers seemed both shocked and bewildered. “I don’t understand. How did that happen? How could someone get into Charlotte’s house and—?”

  Her husband reached for her hand. “They think we did it, babe.”

  “Don’t be silly, Gus. Why would we poison a man we never heard of?” But then she saw the looks the detectives exchanged. “That’s crazy!”

  “Your aunt’s a wealthy woman,” said Lowry. “If she dies, who inherits?”

  “Juilliard,” Landers answered promptly. “I may get her jewelry, but everything else has been earmarked for their scholarship programs.”

  “You think we’d try to kill her for money?” Ferguson sounded incredulous.

  “Do you know who Gus is?” asked Landers, who suddenly seemed more relaxed. She nested their empty salad boxes and her husband took them over to a nearby garbage pail. “His great-grandfather was Raymond Howard. Howard Metalworks. Pipes and cables. Remind me how much your grandfather got when he sold the company, hon?”

  Dr. Ferguson shrugged. “I forget. Enough to give my six cousins and me tidy nest eggs, all reinvested in blue-chip stocks. Last time I checked my portfolio, Detectives, it was a little over twenty million, so no, we wouldn’t kill Charlotte for her money.”

  They were stunned. “But you’re teachers,” said Lowry.

  “And pretty damn good ones, too, if I do say so.”

  “Not all trust fund babies lead hedonistic lives,” his wife murmured.

  Ferguson grinned. “In the late seventeen hundreds, John Adams wrote his wife a letter. In it, he said he had to study politics and war so that their sons might have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy so that their grandsons could study painting and literature.” He leaned back in his chair and gestured to the halls of learning that surrounded them. “I’m John and Abigail’s black grandson, Detective Lowry.”

  “Did they know Matty Mutone?” Sigrid asked when Lowry and Albee finished reporting.