She gave an impatient shake of her head, shifted the cat onto the couch, and leaned forward to undo the cellophane on the gardenia plant. As the florist had promised, it was covered in fat pale green buds. Two creamy white blossoms had already opened. Mrs. Lundigren took a deep sniff and smiled. “How did Kate know I love gardenias?”
Back upstairs, I switched on the lamps in the living room, poured myself a glass of Riesling, and curled up on the brown leather couch with my laptop to read up on kleptomania. Five o’clock came and went and it was nearly six before Dwight finally let himself in.
“How did the seminar go?” I asked.
“Fine. Did you know that there are cameras and police swarming all over the lobby and the basement door? The day man that they thought quit yesterday morning?”
“Antoine?” I said. “What about him?”
“They just found his body in one of the garbage bins.”
CHAPTER
20
—
, 1909
SIGRID HARALD— MONDAY EVENING
“He appears to have been stunned with a blow on the head and then strangled with his own necktie,” Cohen said. The assistant ME stripped off his latex gloves and indicated to the others that he was finished with his examination of Antoine Clarke’s body for now. “I’ve bagged his hands, but there are no lacerations on his neck and no obvious sign of someone else’s skin under his nails.”
“Time of death?” Sigrid asked, watching as they tried to fit the young elevator man’s contorted body into a body bag before strapping it onto the gurney.
“Won’t know till I open him up. At least twenty-four hours, though.”
“He’s been missing since yesterday morning around nine o’clock.”
“That fits. Rigor appears to be relaxing in the legs, but there’s still a lot of stiffness in his torso, so he may well have died then. If someone can tell us they saw him eat a doughnut or a ham sandwich around that time, it would help us pinpoint it further.”
Sigrid turned to Lowry and Albee. “First thing tomorrow morning, talk to the night elevator operator. Horvath,” she told them. “See if he has anything else to say about when Clarke relieved him yesterday morning. And ask him what he knows about Corey Wall.”
“You looking to tag the Wall boy with this, Lieutenant?” Elaine Albee asked.
“He was blackmailing Clarke and he disappeared at the exact same time. In the middle of a snowstorm. If he’s not involved, why did he run?”
Which was exactly what Sigrid had asked Mrs. Wall when she and Hentz spoke to her a half hour earlier. They had put it more tactfully, of course, and the woman, still shocked by another violent death in the building, had not immediately realized that Corey might be involved. Her worry was that her son’s disappearance meant he was in danger, too.
“I’ve called both of our daughters. One’s at MIT, the other’s at Stanford. Neither of them have heard from him.”
The delayed discovery of the body meant that half of Manhattan could have passed through the basement since yesterday morning, and with the victim so neatly bagged for them, there was little for the crime scene unit to process.
Before letting the porters go, they had taken Vlad Ruzicka’s dramatized statement as well as that of the other porter, one Hector Laureano, fifty-eight, employed there for eleven years.
Both seemed to be reeling from Antoine’s death and both claimed not to have seen Antoine since quitting time on Friday. “He got off at four and we stay till five,” Laureano said. He had not noticed the Wall boy with Antoine, and no, he really didn’t know much about the day man at all. “He hasn’t been here very long.”
“What about Corey Wall?”
“He was just another kid,” said Laureano. “Back when he was little, one of his sisters would bring him down to get their bikes and take him riding in the park. Haven’t seen much of him since he got old enough to take trains and buses by himself.”
Vlad Ruzicka, on the other hand, seemed to regret his lack of more exciting things to tell them. Watching his dramatic arm gestures as he acted out the little he did know, Sigrid was privately amused to remember that Hentz had called him Vlad the Regaler. Clearly the man wished he could hand them a head or two on a pike.
“I knew we had five of them wheely bins, but only four were here. I even checked all twelve landings. So I started looking back there in the storage area and there it was! Hiding behind a kayak and some skis.”
His broad flat face expressed first the puzzlement he’d felt and then the surprise of his discovery.
“Swear to God I was starting to think it was Antoine killed Phil, that maybe he thought Phil was out to get him fired for something. Antoine needed this job even though he always acted like it wasn’t good enough for him. Like he ought to’ve been a headwaiter in some fancy restaurant or something.”
For a moment, the big bulky man became a mincing maitre d’ with his nose in the air and his eyes at half-mast as he looked down his nose at them.
When asked again about the last time he saw Clarke, he described how he had helped one of the residents get
