“Jeez!” said Lowry. “Talk about a screwed-up couple.”
Lundigren’s medical files showed no hospital stays, only annual physicals. On all the forms, the sex box was checked
“Here’re their wills,” said Hentz. “Looks like they were pretty careful about the wording. No mention of husband or wife. He leaves everything to Anna Denise Katsiantonis Lundigren, and hers leaves everything to Phillip James Lundigren, both of this address.”
“Hey, Detectives!” someone called from back near the elevator.
“Yeah?” Lowry called back.
“You guys order pizza?”
“Yeah,” said Lowry. “Be right there.”
“I ordered an extra-large,” Lowry told them. “Figured maybe you hadn’t eaten lunch either.”
The promise of pizza was welcome news.
“You didn’t happen to order coffee, too?” Sigrid asked.
He grinned. “Sure did.”
Before he could reach for his wallet, she pulled out hers. “Let me get this, Lowry.”
His refusal was only pro forma. He took the bills she handed him and headed down the long passageway to the outer basement door. Minutes later, the appetizing fragrance of oregano and mozzarella reached them. They dragged chairs over to a rickety card table and were soon pulling apart the slices.
“Postal Pizza?” Sigrid asked. The red-white-and-blue box was printed to look like priority mail.
“Neither snow nor rain stays the swift completion of their deliveries,” Albee said with a laugh. “We got the number from the porter down there. This place delivers twenty-four/seven. The night man says he orders from them all the time, and when you get a look at his figure, you’ll know he’s telling the truth.”
“What’s he doing in so early today?” Hentz asked as he tried to keep sauce from dripping onto the folders he had brought from the files.
“He never left,” said Lowry, handing him a napkin. “The snow was so deep this morning when his shift ended, he just sacked out here. Same as Antoine Clarke. Both of them heard the weather report last night and were here by nine before it got too deep. There’s a set of bunk beds down there.”
“And a fridge, a TV, and a microwave,” said Albee, “plus a shower. All the comforts of home.”
Hentz listened as he leafed through the papers in the folder he had brought to the table. All were stamped by the management company that had hired the men. “Copies of the personnel files,” he said. “I guess he was their on-site eyes and ears.”
A copy of Lundigren’s own original job application was there, too, and they saw a younger version of the victim. In the grainy black-and-white photograph, his eyes appeared open and candid beneath those very bushy eyebrows.
Jim Lowry shook his head. “Even knowing he’s a woman, he doesn’t look like a woman. He must have taken hormones in the early years.”
Sigrid took the personnel file. The forms for later hires had color copies of their photographs and she lingered on that of Antoine Clarke. He had honey brown skin, brown eyes, and a clipped Afro. A trendy half-inch-wide beard outlined his square chin from ear to ear with a small pointed goatee in front. According to his application form, he was five foot seven, weighed 135, and was twenty-seven years old. Born in Jamaica, he became a naturalized citizen at age eleven when his parents were granted citizenship. An address in Queens had been crossed out and a new one up on West 146th Street penciled in. To the question of previous arrests, he had copped to a shoplifting charge eight years ago and a D&D two years after that.
None of the other employees listed arrests. Either they were less forthcoming or had each led spotless lives.
“Have someone run these names for us,” Sigrid said. “See if they’re as clean as they claim.”
She declined when offered one of the extra pizza slices. “So all three elevator men were here in the building last night? Too bad we didn’t get a chance to sit down with this Antoine Clarke before he quit. What about the porters? Any of them here overnight or during the party?”
“No, ma’am,” said Lowry. “They worked their usual eight to five on Saturday. Sidney got here about twenty minutes before we did.”
“Who else have you interviewed?” Sigrid asked as she retrieved a wayward olive that had rolled off her slice of pizza.
“Vlad Ruzicka, the porter working today, and Sidney, who normally has the four-to-midnight shift. Jani Horvath—he’s the night man—just got back from the deli, so we were giving them a chance to finish eating first.” He licked a dab of sauce from his fingers.
“Learn anything useful from either of them?”
“Not really. Lundigren ran a tight ship, but he doesn’t seem to have been a micromanager. He let them know what was expected, then left them to it. Wasn’t looking over their shoulders all the time, and they respected that. Didn’t socialize much, though. They said he spent a lot of time back here reading. Most of the books on the shelves over there are biography or current history. The others never knew if he was here or not unless they saw him or heard him or came and looked, and I get the impression that it kept them on their toes. They knew that management and the board would support Lundigren if he thought there was cause to fire one of them.”
“They tell you if Lundigren was having trouble with Antoine?”
“I think Vlad might know something, but Sidney said we’d have to ask Antoine, so Vlad clammed up, too.”
“Anything interesting on that computer?” Hentz asked Albee, who had made a quick scroll through Lundigren’s
