Take Out

by Margaret Maron

  “Bourbon and Coke, please.”

  “Anything to eat?”

  She shook her head.

  “And for you, sir?”

  Haas inquired about the brews on tap, then ordered an ale. “And a cheeseburger, medium rare. I am in love with American cheeseburgers,” he confessed to Sigrid with what was probably meant to be a winning smile. “Must be in my DNA.”

  Which produced an awkward silence.

  After a moment, Haas exhaled a stream of smoke and met it head on.

  “You do not think he is my father, do you?”

  “As you say,” Sigrid murmured, “DNA.”

  “I gave a sample this morning. I want this clearly determined as much as you and Mr. Livingston.”

  Sigrid was surprised. “But what will they compare it with? Nauman had no close relatives.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they just want my DNA in case a sample of his should turn up.”

  Their drinks arrived along with a dish of peanuts and sesame sticks. “And your cheeseburger will be right out,” said the waiter.

  “What was he like?” Haas asked.

  A flood of images and memories tumbled through Sigrid’s head, none of which she particularly wanted to share. But if this man was Nauman’s son, it would be selfish not to.

  “He liked to drive fast,” she said. “He had a yellow MG and he only put the top up if it was raining.”

  Haas stubbed out his cigarette and took some peanuts but before they reached his mouth, his hand stopped in midair. “Yellow MG? Back home I drive a yellow Fiat Spider.”

  At her blank look, he said, “That’s a convertible, too.”

  He clearly found a confirming significance to this coincidence and Sigrid felt herself sympathizing with his desire to connect with Nauman, to find a link to the man he now considered his father.

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes. With two daughters.” Without being asked, he opened his wallet and showed her the pictures. “Anna and Maria-Louise.”

  She tried to see even the faintest resemblance to Nauman and failed. “They take after their mother?”

  “Luckily for them, yes.”

  “What about your mother?” she asked as his cheeseburger and fries arrived. “Lila Nagy. Will you try to see her soon?”

  “I went there first,” he said, which made Sigrid think better of him. “My mother—” He hesitated and gave a helpless gesture. “For as long as I can remember, Anja and Klaus Haas were my mother and father. It is hard to think of Lila as my mother.”

  “I can appreciate that,” Sigrid said.

  “My mother did not say how often she wrote and I feared that Lila might be anxious because the letters had stopped.” He took a bite of his cheeseburger with a sad smile. “I need not have worried.”

  “Did she know you?”

  “No. I was not allowed to speak to her except through glass. That first day I held up pictures of my mother—her sister. And a picture of me when I was three. There was no spark. Nobody there. I spoke to the officials and to her doctor. I told them how far I had come and why. The doctor was very nice. He said to come back the next day and he would withhold her drugs until then. He said that she could become violent without them, but he would do this for me.”

  He drained his glass of ale and lifted it to signal their waiter for a refill.

  “Did it make a difference?”

  “Yes. She was fairly cogent at first—spoke German to me and seemed sad when I told her that Anja had died, but I don’t think she fully understood who I was even though I showed her the pictures again. Then I made a mistake. I said Oscar Nauman’s name and that got a string of curses. She began beating on the glass between us. She must have thought I was him. The guards had to come and take her back to her ward.” He sighed. “I do not think I will go back.”

  The waiter set a fresh glass of ale on the table and took away the empty one.

  Sigrid still had half her bourbon and she sipped it as Haas took an envelope from the inner pocket of his jacket.

  “This is a picture of Lila shortly before she came to New York.” He laid the photo on the table, then placed another beside it. “And this is what she looks like now.”

  “They let you take her picture?”

  He nodded.

  Sigrid picked them both up and held them side by side. The first was recognizable from the photos Rudy Gottfried had shown her. Long dark hair. Slender figure. Flashing eyes.

  Except for the manic eyes, the second bore no resemblance at all. Short hair completely white. Puffy face. No trace of her former beauty.

  Sigrid slid the pictures back to him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It must be very painful for you.”

  “Worse if I thought I had inherited her madness. My mother had me examined by psychiatrists when I was a child and again when I was sixteen. She told me it was because she was afraid there might be some strain in the family blood and that I might become like my aunt. They assured her I was quite normal. Boringly normal, in fact. Which is probably why mathematics fascinated me.”

  “You’re a statistician, right?”

  “A versicherungsmathematiker, actually.” He smiled. “I’m an actuary for a large insurance corporation. No artistic talent from either parent.”

  Which brings us back to Nauman, Sigrid thought.

  “Will you be staying here long?”

  “Until it can be proven one way or another if I am Oscar Nauman’s son.”

  “And if you are?”

  “That will depend on you, Lieutenant.” He pushed the remains of his cheeseburger aside and lit another cigarette. “Some men acknowledge their bastards, others do not. I think you probably knew him better than anyone. You will know what he would do, yes?”

  When she did not answer, he said, “And I think you will do whatever that is.”

  Sigrid drank the last of her bourbon and signaled to the waiter.

  “No, no,” said Haas. “Please. You must let me take care of the bill.”

  She thanked him and as she stood to go, she said, “My lawyer knows where you’re staying?”

  He nodded.

  “Then I won’t say goodbye.”

  CHAPTER

  24

  As she let herself into the house, Sigrid heard her housemate say, “Hold on a moment. Let me find a pencil.”

  She went down the short entrance hall to their kitchen and found Roman rummaging for a pencil in a drawer beneath the wall phone.

  “Ah! You’re back. It’s a Dr. Reddish.”

  The name was vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t think in what context.

  Roman handed her the phone and went back to stirring something on the stove, something that smelled deliciously of browned garlic and a whiff of rosemary.

  “Dr. Reddish? This is Sigrid Harald.”

  “Oh, good!” a youthful voice exclaimed. “Ms. Harald—I mean, Lieutenant Harald, I’m the new director at the Breul House. I hope you don’t mind that I got your number from Dr. Buntrock? Did he happen to mention me?”

  “Actually, he did. I believe he said you were once a student of his.”

  “I’m calling about Roger Shambley’s murder. They tell me here that you handled the investigation.”

  “Yes? How can I help you?”

  “I know it’s a long shot, but my assistant is under the impression that Dr. Shambley might have found something significant in the house just before he was killed. Did you hear that, too?”

  “It was mentioned, but I have no idea what it was.” She hesitated. “Unless…”

  “Unless?”

  “I don’t know if it was significant or not, but there was a docent there. A Mrs. Beardy?”

  “Mrs. Beardsley?”

  “That’s right. She seemed to know every item in the house. An embroidered pink satin item was found in Shambley’s briefcase. It looked rather like an envelope. Mrs. Beardsley said it was Mrs. Breul’s glove case, but when she took us to where it wa
s usually kept, it turned out be a duplicate. She was quite surprised that there were two. We didn’t take it, so it’s probably still there in the house.”

  “It was empty?”

  “I’m afraid so. But it did look as if it had held something long enough to leave an impression. It could have been a small book or a jeweler’s box for a bracelet, who knows? It didn’t come from Sophie Breul’s room, though. I remember that it had a musty smell. Maybe from the attic where Shambley was working? You could ask Mrs. Beardsley.”

  Of course I can, thought Dorothy Reddish after she had thanked Lt. Harald and hung up. Even though it was after six o’clock, Mrs. Beardsley was probably still here in the house somewhere. She rather suspected that the woman thought of this place as her own personal life-size dollhouse.

  Several years ago, someone had donated jointed manikins from a going-out-of business clothing store and Mrs. Beardsley treated them as stand-ins for the Breul family and their servants, circa 1890. A female figure stood with her hand on the bannister of the curved staircase, as if coming down to join the male figure who waited below. Erich and Sophie Breul. Mrs. Beardsley changed their clothing every month. Here in June, Sophie wore a flowery dress of cotton batiste. Erich was jaunty in a lightweight linen suit and a straw boater with a red-and-white-striped hatband, as if he were about to walk out the front door for a stroll up the avenue.

  The police had returned his ebony walking stick, but that was for winter. For June, Mrs. Beardsley had brought out his bamboo cane.

  Upstairs in the playroom, Erich Breul Jr. would be dressed in a white sailor suit, a little boy who never grew up, a child so adored that his mother had saved all his clothes.

  Reddish had to keep reminding herself that Erich Junior did, in fact, grow up. Upon finishing college in 1912, he left for a wanderjahr in Europe, where he was struck and killed by a team of runaway horses in a narrow Paris street. He was not quite twenty-two.

  She had read the heartbroken entries in Sophie’s diaries and ached for Erich Senior’s grief.

  But what was Shambley doing with Sophie’s glove case?

  She stepped out into the great hall and found Mrs. Beardsley staring at the male manikin. The older woman gave a guilty laugh, as if embarrassed to have been caught unaware.

  “I know it’s silly of me, but I’ve been trying to decide if Mr. Breul should have a buttonhole?”

  “A what?”

  “A boutonniere. That’s what they would have called it back then. Or would it make him look too much like a dandy, which I’m quite sure he was not?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Reddish said. “Maybe it was something his wife liked.”

  “Now that’s an idea!” Mrs. Beardsley exclaimed. “I shall move Sophie closer to the railing and let her be handing him a daisy or a rosebud and he can be reaching up for it. Isn’t it lucky that these manikins are so nicely jointed? Gives us so many staging possibilities.”

  The royal us, thought Reddish. As if any of the other docents would dare move these two figures.

  “I wonder if you can help me,” she said. “Lieutenant Harald tells me that a glove case was found in Dr. Shambley’s briefcase after he was killed. Where would I find it?”

  “In the attic,” the woman replied promptly, and immediately started up the stairs. “We were all so surprised to learn that there were two glove cases and we surmised that Mr. Breul must have used it to keep some private reminder of his wife after her death, so rather than leave it with Sophie’s other things, I put it back in the attic.”

  Reddish dutifully followed her up the several flights to the attic, where she herself had begun going through the records of Erich Breul’s shipping company.

  “We gave Dr. Shambley the use of Erich Junior’s desk that was stored up here when we redid the playroom. You, of course, are using the desk Erich Senior used.”

  She made it sound as if she hoped Reddish appreciated the privilege.

  Slightly panting as they entered the fourth-floor attic, she opened a lower drawer of this smaller oak desk and brought out a flat cardboard gift box. Inside, now carefully wrapped in tissue paper, was the embroidered pink satin glove case that Lt. Harald had described. It was faded and discolored on the edges.

  “I wanted to have it cleaned and restored,” said Mrs. Beardsley, “but then I thought that perhaps it was best to leave it as it was in case we ever found whatever it was that it used to hold.”

  With her fingers, Reddish traced the outlines of the impression. Something about two inches thick that measured approximately nine by four inches. “And you have no idea what that might be?”

  “Not at all.” True regret lay in Mrs. Beardsley’s voice. “But it was so chaotic back then, with police all over the house from attic to basement and making wicked accusations.”

  Reddish looked around. Here near the stairs, space had been cleared for the desk, a swivel chair, and a floor lamp. Two file cabinets stood nearby. Stretching far back under the rafters were bulky shapes draped in dust cloths, pieces of furniture unwanted and no longer needed downstairs.

  “Has all that furniture been catalogued and evaluated?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid so, Dr. Reddish. Like you, our former director hoped to find something that could be sold without diminishing the holdings of the house. Unfortunately…”

  “And this is where Dr. Shambley worked while updating his history of the house?”

  “He was everywhere,” said Mrs. Beardsley with remembered annoyance. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but he was such an unpleasant little man. He’d wave his hand for you to get out of his way and then push right past you if you didn’t move fast enough to suit him. Nobody here mourned him, I can tell you. But yes, this is where he worked. We have no idea where he found that second glove case. It certainly wasn’t in the desk. Maybe in the file cabinets?”

  Dorothy Reddish sighed as she opened one of the drawers. Although each folder was neatly labeled in some long-dead secretary’s Spenserian script, the files that she had examined all had to do with the early founding of the Breul fortune, which began with three leaky river barges and the opening of the Erie Canal back in the 1820s. A second fortune came from running blockades during the Civil War. From there, the Breuls had moved into banking and investments, and the bulk of those records had probably gone with the company when it was sold after Erich Senior’s death. The documents here seemed to be from that simpler beginning and may have been kept for sentimental reasons. They tracked the transport of manufactured products like tools and yard goods going west, and raw materials like lumber and barrels of apples coming east.

  It wasn’t quite her field, thought Reddish, but it might be possible to put together an exhibit showing the contributions made to American industry and westward expansion by the Breuls.

  Assuming she could keep the house open that long.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Tillie had spent most of Wednesday afternoon crosschecking with the DMV to identify the last known owners of the abandoned cars that Vic’s Garage had sold for scrap. He posted a list on the whiteboard the next morning, hoping to spark new lines of inquiry.

  “Let’s try their last addresses,” Sigrid said. “Split up the list and see if you can find any neighbors to interview. There has to be a link back to Matty Mutone. Detective Hentz and I will see if any of these names ring a bell at the DelVecchio house.”

  Once again, Miss Orlano answered the door of Number 409 and once again, it was with a scowl. But she grudgingly showed them into the front parlor, where Sofia DelVecchio sat with a young and very attractive blonde who introduced herself as Laura Edwards and who became protective when Sigrid explained that they were there with a couple of simple questions.

  “I think my dad wanted to be here if you needed to question my grandmother again.”

  “Yes,” Sigrid said, speaking to Mrs. DelVecchio, “and if you would rather call him and ask him to meet you at my office, we can certainly do that. Our questions are
the same for Miss Orlano and Mr. Salvador, so they will have to come as well.”

  Mrs. DelVecchio gave an annoyed sigh. “Ask your questions.”

  Sam Hentz handed her the list that Tillie had drawn up. “Do you recognize any of these names?”

  Mrs. DelVecchio’s reading glasses hung from her neck by a slender gold chain and as she put them on, her granddaughter leaned forward to read the list over her shoulder.

  “Who are these people and why am I supposed to know them?”

  “We think one of them knew your godson. He had a car key and a parking ticket for a car that might have belonged to one of these names. It would simplify things if you recognized which name that might be.”

  The older woman shook her head and handed the list to her housekeeper, who had joined them. “Orla?”

  Those bushy eyebrows seemed to bristle and came together in an annoyed V as she squinted at the list. “No, I don’t know any of these.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The young woman laughed and jumped to her feet. “Stop faking it, Orla! You know you can’t read fine print without your glasses. Where are they? In the kitchen?”

  She was back a moment later with a pair of bifocals.

  Rolling her eyes, Miss Orlano lifted the paper and made an exaggerated show of reading the names aloud. She paused at one. “Toby Quaranto. I knew a Tobia Quaranto once, but he’s been gone ten years, rest his soul. Besides, he lived in Brooklyn and this one says Queens.”

  Sigrid took the list back and said, “Where will we find Mr. Salvador?”

  “I saw him through the kitchen window,” Laura Edwards volunteered. “He’s cleaning the koi pond. Shall I call him?”

  “If you’ll tell him we’re here, we can meet him downstairs.”

  Mrs. DelVecchio gave an autocratic wave of her thin hand. “Orla? Show Lieutenant Harald through to the garden.”

  “You sit, Orla,” said Laura Edwards, jumping to her feet again. “I’ll do it, Nonna.”

  Sigrid and Hentz followed her down the wood-paneled hallway to the kitchen and from there, out to the deck, where she called, “Sal? These people want to ask you something about Matty.”