Eye of a Needle

by Lee Perry

  Jordan looked down at the dust-covered floor, made from delicate-looking marble, “Wow…” she murmured, “This must have been beautiful in its day.”

  “Some of the rooms are done in marble, some in herringbone.” He pointed down a long hallway, “Come have a look at the kitchen.”

  She followed him and when they entered, she felt like she stepped into the past.

  “This kitchen was state of the art back in ‘38.” He pointed to the corner, “There's an icebox and next to it an old-fashioned warming drawer. Last time I checked, the oven still worked.”

  Jordan silently noted how ivy vines had infiltrated the shutters outside the dirty glass windows and even ripped one from its hinges, “It’s like stepping into an exhibit at the Smithsonian.”

  “Yep,” he agreed and led her back to the winding staircase, “the water heater in the basement is as long as a limousine, she had it installed but it’s never been used. There’s a chamber for drying draperies down there too.” He continued as he led her up the stairs, “There’s a walk-in safe down in the living room, but I don’t think it’s ever been opened. I don’t even know if her lawyer or anyone else knows the combination anymore.” They looked inside the empty bedrooms and he showed her a linen closet that had a chamber with glass-enclosed shelves. “The dining and living rooms had air conditioning, and the bathrooms all have chromium-plated tubes for drying and warming towels.”

  “Jeez.” she muttered, following him back downstairs.

  “All in all, this place has eleven bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and ten fireplaces. Fifteen and twenty-foot ceilings, a ballroom, wine cellar, trunk room, elevator, although that’s been shut down since ‘66.” He led her through the main floor to the back, “And this…” he flashed a grin, “Was to be her master bedroom…” He pushed open the double oak doors and Jordan followed him inside.

  “Oh, now this is nice.”

  “Yep,” he waved vaguely at the faded but still beautiful parquet floor, “this room is still in pretty good condition.”

  “Some room,” Jordan blinked, “the ceiling is what, thirty feet?”

  “Twenty-six, but that’s because she had them build a loft up here. Come on up.” He pointed to the baluster at the bottom of the staircase, “See?” It was a carved ballerina standing on tiptoe, arms extended overhead, supporting the rail, “Why insist on that kind of detail if you’re never gonna move in?” He shook his head and continued up the stairs, “I always wondered what happened.” Jordan was silent as she followed and he stopped at the head of the stairs, letting her pass him as she walked to the center of the room, “She wanted lots of windows up here… for the light, I guess. Maybe she wanted to paint, although there’s those mirrors and bars dancers use too, so…”

  Why not at least come here for the occasional weekend, Helga? Jordan walked from window to window, The views are gorgeous, you could have had performances in your ballroom, concerts for your friends… fellow dance and art lovers. Silent, she followed Lou back down the stairs and to the double height window and glass door that faced the woods.

  “Let’s go out this way.” He opened the door and she followed him back outside. He made sure the door locked behind them and as they walked down the wide steps, he gestured to the trees, “Hear that?”

  She cocked her head to one side, “Yes?”

  “It’s a waterfall, just twenty feet in or so, there’s a brook in there I fish trout from.” His smile was wistful, “Bobby and I had some real good summers here.” They walked around the mansion, back to the car, only stopping once when Lou pointed, “See that area in there?”

  Jordan stopped and peered over and through a thicket of wildly overgrown hedges at what looked like a small rectangular field, “Yes, what is it?”

  “Tennis court.” He replied and walked on, “I just don’t understand the rich I guess,” he shrugged helplessly, “I could never buy a beautiful place like this and never want to live in it.”

  They got back to the jeep and climbed inside, “How you boys doin’ back there?” He asked, checking the rearview mirror.

  Jordan felt hot doggy breath and turned to grin at them, “Hey, Toby,” she gave the grizzled old head a scratch, “hey, Max.” She petted the smaller dog, grinning when she noticed the underbite.

  He drove her back to the twin caretaker houses and lifted the dogs from the back of the jeep, “There you go now…” Both dogs trotted off to pee and he pointed to the fenced-in yard between his house and garage, “See ‘em?” He pointed to a large aviary and chicken coop within, “We built another one just like it in the garage for nighttime and bad weather…” They walked to the fence and he called, “Hey, Stan!” A white goose emerged from the dark open doorway and approached the fence, “There he is; I doubt the girls will come out, it’s too cold.”

  “Hello, Stanley,” she grinned at the softly honking bird, “it’s very nice to meet you.” She turned back to Lou, “You know the district attorney’s office suspects a lot of manipulation and outright theft in the Lynch estate now that Helga’s died.” He was silent and she shrugged, “That body that was found here was her day nurse…”

  His eyebrows shot up his forehead, “No kidding?”

  “Yeah, she was murdered and dumped here.”

  “Why?” He asked, “What happened?”

  “Don’t know yet. Helga Lynch owned lots of artwork and some of it’s missing. A lot of people got an awful lot of her money…” She caught his look, “and I want you to know you are not on that list of suspects.” She emitted a harrumphing sound, “If you only knew how much some people got out of her it’d make you dizzy.” She chuckled wryly, “It makes me dizzy every time I have to look at the numbers… Anyway, I think you’re entitled to know the surrogate court is now in charge of the Lynch estate and that means it’ll likely be a while before this property is allowed to be sold. It could take years for all I know…” Her smile touched her eyes, “Are you okay with staying on here as caretaker for a while longer?”

  He caught her drift and grinned, “Yes ma’am, I’m happy to. Bobby’s just getting started, you know? He’s renting right now, and working real hard to get a place so me an’ all these critters can retire and live with him in our dotage.”

  “Sounds like you did a great job raising him, Lou.”

  He shrugged, and a flush of color crept up the weathered neck, “He’s a great kid.”

  New York City, NY

  “So, that was my day,” Jordan tapped closed the files on the screen, “and I can tell you right now if I won a mansion raffle and was given the choice between Bellosantuario and Chateau Donjon I’d pick Donjon, hands down.”

  Mattie sat next to Catherine and saved the notes she made during Jordan’s presentation, “Hell, who wouldn’t?”

  “Jordan,” Catherine waved a hand, “Louis Becker’s annual salary has been nineteen thousand a year since he got that job and Helga only left him two hundred thousand in her will.” She snorted, “Which would be a lot if we were talking about almost anyone else. Shouldn’t we think it odd that she put his son through school but never ever gave him a raise in twenty years or a bunch of crazy gift checks like so many others got?”

  Jordan unplugged her tablet, “I don’t think so, and I think I understand her inattention to Donjon; Helga spent all those summers with her mother at Bellosantuario, that place held memories for her, but she bought this place as a Cold War hideaway and for whatever reason never got around to moving in. She made no memories there so she had no personal or emotional investment in it.”

  “She still paid for Bobby Becker’s schooling.” Mattie said.

  “She did,” Catherine nodded, “but then she paid for a lot of people’s kids to go to private schools and college. I remember seeing those checks in her decades of bank statements.”

  “My turn.” They were in the auditorium and Mattie stood and walked to the podium. “There’s a lot of correspondence in her apartment about having work done at Chateau Donjon to cre
ate that huge master bedroom and art and dance loft.” She plugged her tablet into the podium and waited for it to connect. “But if she wrote about why she never moved in I haven’t found it yet.”

  “Okay.” Jordan sat next to Catherine, “I can’t wait to hear how Mister Tauscher forgot to mention he’s been living in an apartment owned by Helga Lynch for the past twelve years.”

  Mattie snorted, “I’ve been going through boxes of Helga’s correspondence and records in her apartment since I got back, and I found this…” She opened a document file of a letter addressed to the building manager, Harold Richter. “This gave Gary Tauscher permission to live in her ninth floor apartment on an indefinite basis. That’s her signature at the bottom and the letter was prepared by her lawyer.” She turned and leaned on the podium, facing them, “The building manager told me Gary lived in that apartment on my first trip there, and when I confronted him he admitted he’s been living there since his contentious divorce. He said his wife divorced him because he spent all his time catering to Helga Lynch’s every whim…” She gave them a look, “His words, not mine.”

  “Yikes,” Catherine muttered, “I hope he was quoting his wife.”

  “He said his ex found it emasculating for him to be dressing mannequins in ballet costumes and then taking pictures of them he’d then take to show Helga in her hospital room. He was clearly embarrassed when he said that she found it perverted. I asked him if he felt there was some sort of… inappropriate process going on in Helga’s mind… I mean, Jesus, she was elderly, living in seclusion, maybe she was taking little side trips down Dementia Lane? But he was adamant that while Helga was eccentric, in her heart of hearts she was an artist and just liked collecting this stuff.” She shrugged, “The costumes are handmade and for all I know could be considered valuable works of art.”

  Jordan raised a hand, “I’ve been reading the doctor’s daily notes they kept in her hospital chart; there are notations of her being slightly confused or cranky from time to time but overall, right up till the end the medical consensus was that she was clear-minded and sharp.”

  “But they had a stake in her money too, didn’t they?” Catherine turned to her, “And keeping a private gallery of dressed up mannequins… just saying it out loud sounds odd.”

  “It qualifies as eccentric, for sure.” Jordan agreed, “And even though the hospital hit her up for a hundred and fifty million, she didn’t leave anything to Dominican...” her voice faded abruptly.

  “What?” Catherine asked.

  “I thought she was lucid when we spoke to her, but between that day and her death…” Jordan shrugged one-sidedly, “She could have gone completely loony-toons in that hospital room and everyone who worked with her would have plenty of motivation to deny it rather than risk losing out on getting one more dollar out of her.” She ticked off the names on her fingers, “Hannah Babcock, her doctor, the hospital…”

  “Gary Tauscher?”

  “If he’s been selling off pieces of her art collection…?” She looked at Mattie, brows raised.

  “Every time I discover something missing from her collection I post an alert for it,” she gestured impotently, “and so far, nothing.” She turned and clicked open a document on the screen with the remote, “This is a list I’m compiling of the art that’s unaccounted for. Aside from the Monet and Picasso, they’re paintings and sculptures by lesser known artists, and the one thing they have in common is that they’re all small in size, if they were stolen then I’m assuming because they’re easier to remove from the apartment.”

  Jordan tapped up a picture on her phone, “Louis Becker showed me this article he’s kept in his wallet for years…” She showed it to Mattie.

  “Ah, yes, she did sell this Renoir for twenty-six million.” She nodded, “It was a legit sale, evidently it was a painting she didn’t find terribly attractive so she was happy to part with it.” She shrugged, “Shrewd investment though. Apart from her galleries there’re four rooms used for storage just packed with art pieces she was unable to display because she just had too much.”

  Catherine’s jaw dropped, “Yikes…”

  “According to Gary, when she lived there she would rotate the pieces by lesser known artists when she had a recital or music event planned.”

  Jordan snorted, “Really? And how far back was that, the thirties?”

  “And forties, yeah,” Mattie nodded, “pretty much.”

  Catherine was busy making notes on her tablet, “You said the data he has on the twelfth floor apartment hard drives are not matching up with the hard copy correspondence you’ve been sorting though?”

  “Yes, I have a stack of invoices and letters about art she purchased that’s missing from the apartment, and when I search Gary’s workstation I can’t find any documentation about those pieces at all and I still haven’t touched his hard drives on the ninth floor.” She clicked open a picture file on the wall screen, “So… Gary Tauscher.” Using the laser pointer on the remote, she pointed to a picture of a bedroom filled with Louis XVI styled furniture, “When I first got there I took pictures of all the rooms. This is a picture of Helga’s bedroom in her twelfth floor apartment.” She turned to them, “I take it Gary didn’t give you a tour of the place when you were there?” They shook their heads and she smiled, “Well, then I took this picture,” she clicked open another file, “this is the master bedroom in Helga’s apartment on the ninth floor.” She positioned the images side-by-side and Jordan pointed at the screen,

  “Uh, Mattie, that’s the same picture…”

  “No, it isn’t, see?” Catherine pointed at the picture file’s index numbers. “She had the bedrooms made as exact replicas of each other?”

  “After she and her mother moved in the twelfth floor, her mother bought the two apartments on the ninth and had them combined into one just like they did on the twelfth. Helga was becoming a young woman, and back then she was of course expected to marry and the plan was for her and her husband to live on the top floor apartment and her mom would live in the apartment three floors down.” She pointed at the picture on the left, “When her mother decorated her bedroom with this Louis XVI furniture, Helga decided she wanted the same thing but her mother’s pieces were antiques so Helga had furniture makers build exact replicas.”

  Jordan’s eyes flicked between the pictures, “The rooms are mirror images of each other.”

  “They are,” Mattie nodded, “if someone led you blindfolded into one of these bedrooms you’d have no idea what floor you were on.” She sighed, “I’m sharing this mostly because it creeps me out a little.”

  “Yeah,” Jordan’s brow furrowed as she looked from one picture to the other, “that’s a good word for it.”

  “Anyway, Gary has been living all this time in a very nice guest room on the ninth floor overlooking the park, and he maintains his own office, of sorts, in the drawing room where he has a very nice TV.” She clicked up another photo, “He has a nice desk with a workstation, a laptop and a nice rack of servers behind. And I believe him when he says he needed them for maintaining the massive catalogues of Helga’s purchases and collections and digital correspondence generated on her behalf for art purchases and research on her dioramas and dance costumes. He says he had it networked into the workstation on the twelfth floor and…”

  “And this is where I come in…”

  “Yes, Catherine,” she parked her hands on her hips, “for all his diligence maintaining such a careful record of all this stuff, how is it the hardcopy original receipts and logs of transfers don’t match the digital record? He’s been so meticulous, so there should be no discrepancies and yet they’re piling up and he has no explanation for them. When you copy the hard drives on the twelfth floor could you do the same on the ninth floor too?”

  “Sure,” Catherine nodded, “No problem.”

  “I got the warrant this morning,” Jordan tapped open the mail program on her tablet, “I’ll have it expanded to include the ninth floor; it’l
l be quicker to add an addendum.”

  Mattie sighed, “You know, on the one hand, he does appear to be the ever loyal assistant, but that could mean nothing when you’ve been living for free in a luxury apartment for more than a decade and your elderly employer left you a mere three hundred thousand in her will.”

  “Ouch…” Jordan winced, “that’s nothing compared to what Hannah Babcock would have gotten.” She looked from Mattie to Catherine and arched a single brow high on her forehead, “Ohh…”

  “A motive for murder?” Mattie asked.

  “Why not? Why would Hannah’s kids kill her when she’s waiting to get the millions Helga left her in her will? They would have waited ‘til after she cashed in, but maybe Gary, who knew Hannah, was so jealous he killed her.” Jordan dug out her phone, “I’m gonna text Stewart that I need a warrant to search and process both apartments for a murder scene…” She added, muttering, “And we’ll need access to the building’s entire library of security video.” Her eyes flicked up to Mattie, “Maybe watching both apartments get the shakedown will put a little pressure on Gary.” When she finished she sighed, “Okay, so we could really further our investigation if we knew the answers to the following,” She ticked them off on her fingers, “One, who is stealing Helga’s art? If it’s Gary, is he working alone? Two.” She flicked up another finger, “Who stole the three hundred and twenty thousand from that unused account?”

  “That the lawyer closed.” Catherine clarified.

  “Yes.”

  Mattie asked, “And where’s the sex offender accountant in all this?”

  “His parole officer says he’s been vacationing in Hawaii.” She fumbled with her devices, writing herself a note on her tablet, “He must be back now; I need to talk to him.” When she finished she looked at them, “And amid all this chaos we still need to figure out who killed Hannah Babcock.”