speak to you. And to Mr. Marclay, too?”
Sigrid cast an inquiring eye in the direction of the stocky man wearing a flat cap and received a sour nod. She had given the guest list sheets a quick scan on the drive over. Nicco Marclay’s name had appeared so often throughout the evening, she was fairly certain he could not have left the party during the relevant time.
“Excuse the mess and come on in,” said Luna DiSimone. “I had a party last night and the caterers stiffed me on the cleanup part.”
“Didn’t I see you here last night?” Marclay asked.
“Yes,” Sigrid said, surprised that he would have noticed her amid so many.
“Charlie Rathmann said something that ticked you off and—hey, wait a minute! Lieutenant Harald? You’re
Sigrid gave a tight nod.
“Well, I’ll be damned! You really are a police detective. I thought that was some gallery hype to make you seem more mysterious. Why the interest in which art people were here last night?”
“That isn’t something I can talk about right now,” she said.
Elliott Buntrock hesitated in the open doorway. From the neutral look Sigrid gave him, he realized that he was not supposed to mention the missing maquette. He entered without speaking and sat down on a green Adirondack chair. If he was going to have to mark names on a list, the chair’s broad flat armrest would act as a desktop.
Sam Hentz explained what they wanted from the two men while Urbanska huddled with Luna DiSimone to go through the contact list on her phone and text the pertinent names over to their computer back at the station.
“You won’t tell anyone where you got their info, will you?” the actress asked. “Some of these numbers have
“We’ll destroy them as soon as the case is closed,” Sigrid promised. “And we may not have to contact all of them.”
Leaving the others to labor over the lists, she and Hentz walked out into the hall to meet Lowry and Albee as they stepped off the elevator.
“Learn anything?” Sam Hentz asked.
“Mrs. Wall gave us Lundigren’s personnel file,” said Lowry. “Mrs. Lundigren was with him and he was passing as male when he was hired nineteen years ago. Before that, he worked as a janitor over on Amsterdam and West Ninety-First. He listed his mother in New Hampshire as next of kin, but she’s dead now.”
“Was she aware that he had any issues with anyone?”
“Other than a nutty wife? No, ma’am. According to Mrs. Wall, everyone loved him.”
Hentz groaned. “And how many times have we heard that?”
Lowry grinned, then reported that the building employed seven men in addition to the usual service providers. Referring to the list Mrs. Wall had provided, he ticked them off on his fingers: “Lundigren was the super, of course, then two porters and four guys that handle the door and elevator twenty-four/seven. It’s like a little UN here— Jamaica, Croatia, Hungary, you name it, they got it.”
Typical New York, thought Sigrid. “Hentz and I will go over to the hospital and talk to Mrs. Lundigren. While those three finish IDing any guests with an art background, you and Albee can start questioning the employees.”
She gestured to the third apartment on this floor. “That door was open to the party last night, so talk to them first. Ask if they expanded DiSimone’s guest list to any art people. I gather that she doesn’t have a firm handle on who she invited, much less who actually came.”
When Sigrid reentered Luna DiSimone’s apartment, she found Urbanska questioning the actress about the dynamics of the building and how well the Lundigrens got along with the owners and the other employees.
“I honestly can’t say. He was darling to me, but I’ve only lived here about two years. It took me forever to convince my mom that this wasn’t the back side of the moon. She really didn’t want me to move so far away from her.”
“Where’s home?” asked Urbanska, who still had moments of homesickness for South Jersey.
“Over in the East Sixties.”
Suppressing a smile, Sigrid saw that Elliott had finished annotating his list and told him that she and Hentz were headed downtown.
“Can we drop you?”
“Sure,” he said, reaching for his overcoat.
When they got outside, the snow had finally stopped falling for the moment. The windshield and back window of the car were covered in white, but it brushed away easily. Traffic was still light and Hentz executed a U-turn that headed them in the right direction. On the way, Sigrid read aloud the names that Elliott had checked off and he elucidated each.
“Mischa Costenbader? He runs the gallery that exhibits Nicco Marclay. I saw him when I first arrived, but he can’t stand Rathmann, so he didn’t come over once Rathmann collared me. Would he take a Streichert maquette if he could get away with it? In a heartbeat. Orton owns a gallery in NoHo that’s two cuts above Costenbader’s. Marclay may be trying to get taken on there. I’ve never heard much negative about him except from artists that he won’t give a show to. Rathmann you met, of course. Wishes he were a bigger name as an art critic, but who doesn’t? I got to the party at nine-thirty and he was already there buzzing around Orton and me till you arrived. Kenneth Burtch? He’s starting to make it as a fashionable portrait painter. He’s done the mayor and one of the Kennedy women and a Rockefeller, too, if I’m not mistaken. You’ve got him on the guest list, but I didn’t see him. I did see Cameron Broughton, though. He’s one of those professional Southerners whose accent gets stronger the longer he’s out of the South. I’m not sure how he makes his living, but he talks knowledgeably about antiques and the decorative arts. He might not know what a Streichert maquette was, but he’d probably recognize that it wasn’t something off eBay.”
