“Yeah?” He scooped a final dead leaf from the surface of the koi pond as the two detectives, trailed by the girl, joined him at the garden bench.
Once again he was dressed in green coveralls, and with his shaggy gray head and slightly stooped shoulders, he reminded Hentz more strongly than ever of the dwarf in Wagner’s Ring cycle—a good-natured Alberich, who propped his net against the bench and gave them a friendly smile of recognition.
They explained why they were there and gave him the list but he began shaking his head even before he read it. “Matty was okay, but me and him weren’t tight. He was family. I was just help. We didn’t hang out together and I never heard him mention any friends by name. You, Miss Laura?”
She shook her head, too. “I’m afraid not, Sal. Just Mother. Poor Matty.”
“Did you see him often?” asked Hentz.
“He came to Mother’s wake. That was the last time. I’m afraid he was on drugs and incoherent, so Nonna told him to stay away from the funeral. That he dishonored her memory by showing up like that.”
“And before that?”
She brushed a lock of long blond hair from her face and squinted in the sunlight as she considered the question. “I forget. Maybe fall break? He’d been clean for several months then and Mother was so happy for him. Happy, but always worried that he was going to fall off the tracks again. I think they were about the same age, but he was like a kid brother that never quite grew up.”
“And neither of you ever heard him mention a friend’s name?”
“I think he used to volunteer at that soup kitchen around on Sixth,” said Salvador. “Martha’s Table. They might know.”
Sigrid thanked them, and although Laura Edwards offered to take them back through the house, she said, “No, we’ll go out through the garage.”
Carrying his net, Sal walked ahead to open the door. As they passed the vintage Oldsmobile draped in its tarpaulin, Hentz patted the fender. “I bet it’s still a sweet ride.”
“You better believe it. They just don’t make ’em like this anymore. The clutch is starting to slip a little, but we don’t take it out enough to make it worth getting fixed yet.”
“Did Matty drive it much?”
“Matty?” Sal laughed. “Naw. He learned to drive on an automatic and never got good at shifting gears. He drove Mrs. D to a charity thing once and stalled it out three times. After that, she told me never to give him the keys again.”
CHAPTER
26
So what did you think?” asked Sigrid as she clicked her seat belt and opened her notepad. “Were they telling the truth?”
“Hard to say,” said Hentz, who was driving. “I didn’t notice any obvious tells, did you?”
Sigrid smiled. “Widening eyes, gasps of recognition? If only.” She jotted a few notes on their interview at the DelVecchio house.
“Want to swing by that soup kitchen?” asked Hentz.
“Not much point, is there? Lowry and Albee didn’t learn anything when they tried again yesterday. What are we missing here, Hentz? Who’s not telling us what we need to know? Two men dead. Takeouts that came from two houses. But which one killed them? Charlotte Randolph had a prescription for the right kind of Coumadin but no reason to kill Jack Bloss if she really is going to tell the whole story of her big break in her book. I’m willing to believe Mrs. DelVecchio still has some of her old pills, but where’s her motive for killing her godson?”
“If anyone’s not telling the whole truth, my money would be on her, though,” said Hentz as he braked for a red light. Beyond the light, cabs and buses were trying to make four lanes out of three and horns blared impatiently as pedestrians in the crosswalk threaded around turning cars. “That woman could be the snow queen.”
“But her granddaughter and son-in-law seem fond of her. And don’t forget that she lost her daughter only six months ago. She’s probably still grieving.”
“Yeah, well, everyone says Matty blamed himself for not driving Aria Edwards that day. Maybe she blamed him, too.”
Sigrid was unconvinced. “I’m not saying she couldn’t have done it, and poison is classically a woman’s choice of method. I just don’t think she would have waited six months if that were the case. So why now? What triggered this?”
As they neared the station, she spotted a Sabrett’s yellow-and-blue umbrella on the corner. “Let me out here. I’m getting a hot dog for lunch. You want one?”
“Mustard and onions,” he said.
Although most of her team were still out running down the owners of the abandoned cars that had been scrapped, Sigrid and Hentz were not the only two who had opted for a lunch of street food. When they reached the office, Tillie was working on an enormous turkey wrap and Gonzalez had only been back long enough to unwrap a couple of egg rolls.
He dipped one end into a container of plum sauce and reported that he had come up dry on the first owner he tried to find, a Winston James Goldman. The other name on his list belonged to an elderly man who was afraid that he was going to get socked with the parking fees. “He had a bad case of pneumonia in January and was in the hospital for so long that he decided the fee was going to be more than the car was worth. His kids had been after him to quit driving anyhow. He still had his ticket, though, so it wasn’t Matty’s car.”
Tillie had been waiting with barely concealed eagerness for Gonzalez to finish his report so that he could talk. “I think we can now say for sure which car it was, Lieutenant. A full copy of the report on the Aria Edwards hit-and-run came in while you were out.”
“And?”
“Wait’ll you hear!” He wiped his mouth and fingers on a paper napkin. “It happened December sixteenth, at a few minutes past three, and the circumstances are pretty much like what we heard. Mrs. Edwards stepped off the curb at Madison and East Fifty-Third right in front of a car that was driven by a white male. It knocked her down, ran over her, and just kept going. Ran a red light and was gone. Witnesses say it was an older white sedan—either a Toyota or a Honda. No license number, although one witness thought the end number was either an eight or a six.”
He handed Sigrid the report and paged through another file. “Now look at this. The parking ticket for Vic’s garage is time-stamped December sixteenth at three-forty. Only thirty minutes after the incident. And one of those abandoned cars was a white Honda Civic with a license number ending in a three. A three could be mistaken for a six or eight, right?”
Sigrid nodded and looked at the list of the former owners that he had compiled earlier. “This Elton Denver Kapps may have been responsible for Aria Edwards’s death, but what was Matty doing with his parking ticket?”
There were blank looks all around.
“Who’s trying to find Kapps?”
Tillie consulted his list. “That would be Urbanska.”
It had been a busy morning for Detective Dinah Urbanska. The DMV’s last address for Elton Denver Kapps was above a store on the Bowery that sold light fixtures.
The door that led upstairs stood open, so she stepped into the vestibule to read the names on the mailboxes.
No Kapps.
The manager and owner of Lee’s Lighting was a small Chinese American woman with glossy black hair and a bright friendly smile. “Elton Kapps? And he lived here? Ah! You must mean Denny Kapps. He moved out almost eighteen months ago.”
“What can you tell me about him?” Urbanska asked.
The manager shrugged her thin shoulders. “Not much. He rented one of the rooms here for less than two years. Always late with the rent. Didn’t seem to have a regular job. I got tired of dunning him and asked him to leave.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“Little Italy,” she said promptly. “Off Delancey. He gave me the address so I could mail him back his security deposit after I’d had a chance to see if he’d done any damage. He hadn’t, so I did. Let me see if I kept it.”
She disappeared through a door in the back and while she was gone,
Urbanska looked around the store. Dozens of fixtures hung from the ceiling. All shapes and sizes. Everything from crystal chandeliers to hammered brass and black iron. Crowding the tables and counters were lamp bases of carved wood, shiny chrome, frosted glass, and blocky ceramics that were as colorful as a box of kindergarten crayons. A forest of floor lamps were massed in one corner and at the back were shelves stacked with shades of all shapes. Ever since moving into the apartment she shared with two friends, she had wanted a lamp for reading in bed. Her room was small, though, and so was the bedside table, but here was a wall lamp with an adjustable arm that would give the necessary light without taking up any table space.
The manager returned with the address for Denny Kapps and her dark eyes alertly followed Urbanska’s. “I can give you a good price on that wall lamp.”
“How good?”
It was a very good price indeed and as Urbanska pulled out her credit card, the woman said, “You’ll probably want a narrow rectangular shade so you can push the arm up against the wall out of your way when the lamp’s not in use. Let me show you what we have.”
Jim Lowry and Elaine Albee each returned empty-handed shortly before one o’clock.
“The Mercedes’ owner of record died last year,” said Lowry, “and his widow gave the car to her grandson. He told her someone had stolen it, but she didn’t seem surprised to hear it had been involved in a drug deal. She says she never heard of Matty Mutone and she has no idea where her grandson is.”
Albee had a similar report. “The Pinto’s owner got married several months ago and took her husband’s name, which is why her new address didn’t show up in DMV’s records. She said the car was a total lemon and she just wanted to be rid of it. Leaving it at a garage seemed as good a way as any. That was around Hanukkah, she said, which would be about a week before the date on the ticket, so there wouldn’t be a connection with Mutone.”
Detective Urbanska joined them a few minutes later carrying a large white plastic bag in one hand and a fruit salad in the other. Several strands of golden brown hair had come loose from their clips. Before she could reach her desk, the corner of her bag sent the open container of Gonzalez’s plum sauce into his lap.
“Dammit, Urbanska!” he said, trying to wipe the sticky mess off his khaki slacks before heading to the lavatory.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” she wailed.
Hentz deflected the bag from his coffee cup as she passed and the others watched as she stowed it in the kneehole of her own desk without doing further damage.
“Any luck?” Hentz asked.
“The owner of the white Honda wasn’t at home,” she said, “but I did get the name of his parole officer.”
“Parole officer?” asked Sigrid.
“Yes, ma’am. The super at his building said he got out about two weeks ago.”
She flipped open her notepad and passed it to Tillie. “Maybe you can contact him?”
Gonzalez returned with a large wet spot on the upper leg of his pants.
While they finished eating lunch and batted the known facts of the case back and forth, Tillie was listening on the phone and making notes as he ate. When he hung up, he was shaking his head in wonder. “Elton Denver Kapps was sentenced to eighteen months for aggravated assault. He was paroled, but then violated his parole and was picked up last December—December seventeenth, the day after the hit-and-run, to be exact—and sent back to prison. He got out about ten days ago and is currently doing community service as a condition of his early release. Guess where?”
“Oh, my God!” Elaine Albee exclaimed. “Martha’s Table?”
“That Denny we talked to yesterday was Elton Denver Kapps?” asked Jim Lowry.
“Go bring him in,” said Sigrid, tossing the remains of her hot dog into the nearest wastebasket.
CHAPTER
27
Denny Kapps sat at the table in the interview room and stared at the two-way mirror as if he could see the officers on the other side. Even though Urbanska knew he couldn’t, it was still a bit unnerving to the young detective when he looked straight at her and grinned.
“How long’s this cat-and-mouse game gonna go on till somebody tells me why I’m here?” he asked.
His eyes were a clear bright blue and a cowlick at the upper right edge of his hairline gave his thin face an appealing boyishness even though his rap sheet put his age at twenty-six. “And don’t be fooled by his wide-eyed look of innocence,” his parole officer had warned them. “He’ll trade on his good looks if you let him.”
Small chance of that working with Lt. Harald, thought Hentz as they entered the interview room and took seats across the table from Kapps.
She came straight to the point with him. “You’re the owner of a white 1980 Honda Civic?”
“Yeah. Hey! You found it?”
“Found it?”
“I reported it a week ago.”
“When did you last see it?” Hentz asked.
“Well, to be honest, not since back in December. See, what happened is that I lent it to a guy I met at Martha’s Table, one of those guys you people found dead on that bench on Sixth. Matty Somebody. He needed a car in a hurry, but before he could give me the key back, I got picked up and sent back to prison. When I got out last week, I went looking for him. They hadn’t seen him for a while at the soup kitchen, and then next thing I heard, he was dead, so I figured somebody stole my car.”
“Yeah? Why would you lend your car to somebody you barely knew?”
“Because I was behind on my rent and he paid me forty dollars.”
“When was this?”
“December sixteenth. I know because I got picked up on the seventeenth.”
“So why didn’t you tell us this when we questioned you at the soup kitchen?”
“I just got out of prison and you come asking about a guy who’s just been murdered? I didn’t want to get mixed up in it, okay?”
Hentz exchanged a skeptical look with Sigrid, who said, “On December the sixteenth, your car was involved in a hit-and-run on Madison Avenue. You want to tell us about that?”
“Huh?”
“You ran over a woman and then fled the scene.”
“What? No, that wasn’t me! I told you. I lent my car to Matty.”
As Denny Kapps sat there, vigorously shaking his head in denial, Sigrid realized that they had it all wrong. If Denny had stashed his car in that garage, why would Matty have the parking ticket? And why would he have the car key?
“You’re sure you didn’t see Matty after you got out of prison?”
“Positive. No one knew where he was. They said he was living on the street, that he was into meth pretty heavy, but I couldn’t seem to catch up with him. If it really was my car that hit somebody, he was the one driving. Not me. Honest.”
Sigrid stood up abruptly. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Kapps. That will be all. You’re free to go.”
“Wait a minute! That’s it? You hauled me in just for this? Where’s my car? You guys impound it?”
“Sorry,” Hentz said, and explained what had happened to the Honda.
“They scrapped it? Why? It ran like a top. I kept it tuned myself. Who the hell told that guy he could scrap it? I’ll sue the bastard.”
“I don’t understand,” said Dinah Urbanska. “Why would Matty kill his cousin? Everybody says he was crazy about her. And why borrow a car to do it?”
“Do we know for certain that the DelVecchio car really did break down that day?” asked Tillie. “Or was it so he could drive a different car that might not get connected to him?”
With his penchant for details, he had added the pertinent December dates to the timeline on their whiteboard.
“We’ve been told Aria Edwards came into the city to spend a few days with Mrs. DelVecchio and do some Christmas shopping,” Sigrid said. “Did she spend any time with Matty?”
“Maybe something happened between them,” said Elaine Albee. She frowned at the timeline. “He supposedly w
ent off the rails and started using speed the day after the accident because he was so torn up over her death. What if he actually started the day before and they fought so that he ran her down in some drug-induced rage?”
Sigrid listened as they batted theories back and forth, but none of them felt right to her. “Let’s not overthink this,” she said. “Maybe Aria Edwards’s death really was an accident. Matty was supposed to pick her up that afternoon but the car was out of commission. So he borrows Kapps’s car. That model—a 1980 Honda Civic. Would that be a manual drive or an automatic?”
“Probably a manual,” Tillie said promptly.
“Well, damn!” said Hentz, who saw where she was going. “Sal told us he wasn’t allowed to drive that Oldsmobile because he couldn’t shift gears without stalling out every time.”
Like the others, Elaine Albee was suddenly picturing the scene in her head. “He could have called her. Told her what car he’d be driving. It was snowing, though. The streets would’ve been slippery.”
“So when she saw him, she stepped off the curb,” said Lowry, “and instead of clutching and braking, he hit the gas instead and ran over her. Then panicked and ran.”
“No wonder he started using meth again,” Urbanska said softly.
Sigrid nodded. “Everyone says he blamed himself for Aria’s death. What if he was telling the truth? But that was six months ago. So who killed Matty? And why now?”
It was the one question she wound up asking herself in every homicide that wasn’t a slam dunk open-and-shut. Why now? Why not yesterday? Why not last week or tomorrow?
Murder in the heat of the moment seldom gave them problems. It was the dish served cold that sent them running down blind alleys.
There must have been a catalyst that provoked this murder.
Of course, she thought, looking at the timeline on their whiteboard. “Gonzalez, see if you can catch Kapps and bring him back. And, Tillie, get us a search warrant for the DelVecchio house. Let’s find out if Mrs. DelVecchio’s old Coumadin pills really did get thrown out last December.”
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