two heavy suitcases down to the street and into a cab on Friday. “As God is my witness, each bag weighed as least fifty pounds. ‘What?’ I asked her. ‘You going for two months?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Two weeks.’ And it wasn’t even for a wedding.”
After he had slammed the trunk lid on the cab and started down the sidewalk to the service entrance, he saw Antoine pull some bills from his wallet and give them to the Wall boy. “There was still plenty of daylight left, so I saw at least two bills, but I couldn’t tell if they were fives or fifties.”
“Did Corey give him anything in return?”
“Not that I saw.” He pantomimed putting money in his pants pocket and giving it a satisfied pat. “Then he walked on up toward West End Avenue. Antoine passed me on the way to his train and I said I hoped he had a good weekend. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said and that was that. Who could know?” Ruzicka’s face turned so mournful they almost expected to see tears. “Last words I ever heard him say.”
It was now 7:15 and Sigrid was ready to call it a day. Urbanska had left an hour ago to take the red flip-flop with Judge Knott’s earring to the lab and to issue a be on the lookout for Corey Wall as a “person of interest.” Lowry volunteered to check the car back into the motor pool for Hentz, and Albee went with him.
“Didn’t you tell Buntrock you were playing tonight at some jazz club down in the Village?” Sigrid asked Hentz.
He gave her a wary nod.
“I’m headed home that way. If you want a lift, it’ll give us a chance to discuss this case.”
When he hesitated, she shrugged. “Or not. I have to go back upstairs. I must have left a glove in the lobby.”
He followed her up the service steps. As she retrieved her glove from the couch, the front elevator doors opened for the Bryants, who seemed to be dressed for an evening out. Gone was the judge’s disheveled look of this afternoon. Her sandy blonde hair fell smoothly around her face and she had given it a spritz of gold shine. A smoky blue eye shadow enhanced her clear blue eyes, and her lipstick was the same bright red as the cowl-necked sweater she had worn Saturday night. A dressier pair of gold earrings gleamed in the soft lights of the lobby.
There was a time when Sigrid would not have noticed what another woman was wearing or else would have been intimidated if the woman was as confidently attractive as this judge appeared to be. Although Grandmother Lattimore seemed to love her as much as her other granddaughters, she had bluntly voiced her doubts that such an ugly duckling could ever evolve into the swan every other Lattimore woman became, as if beauty were a birthright. Even when they were not classically beautiful, they carried themselves as if they were, and a willing world agreed.
“You’re already too tall and your neck is too long, but you have nice eyes and they do say you’re going to be real intelligent,” her grandmother had said with a sigh when Sigrid was twelve or thirteen and nothing but skinny arms and legs.
It took Oscar Nauman to make her apply that intelligence to her looks, to realize that making the most of one’s physical assets was not some arcane mathematical problem. For years, she had worn her fine dark hair pulled straight back into a utilitarian bun. Then, on an impulse, she had gotten it cut short so that it feathered across her forehead and softened her brow. After that, she read a couple of books, looked at some online tutorials, and experimented with light makeup that could and would enhance her high cheekbones and wide gray eyes. She learned that lip paint would last all day, and that some colors flattered her clear pale skin while others would make her look washed out. It was only an exercise in logic after all, she told herself, much like the puzzle rings she collected and put together when working through the intricacies of a homicide case.
Once she figured it out, she tossed half her wardrobe, invested in good makeup brushes, and gradually accepted that she could hold her own in that competition. She would never be as conventionally curvaceous and pretty as Elaine Albee or Lady Francesca Leeds, Nauman’s former lover, or even this Deborah Knott, but knowing that he had found her as intriguing as any Durer model was enough to give her a modicum of confidence.
“Lieutenant Harald! Sigrid,” the judge said now, greeting her with a sympathetic smile. “Dwight told me about Antoine. How awful! After what Mrs. Lundigren told me this afternoon, I was sure he was the one who killed her husband. And now he’s been killed himself?”
“Mrs. Lundigren? She talked to you?” Hentz asked, bemused. He had no doubt that this woman could slather Southern charm around, but was charm enough to overcome Denise Lundigren’s social anxiety disorder?
“Weird, isn’t it? Everyone says she’s shy with strangers, but her doctor must have given her one hell of a happy pill, because she wasn’t a bit shy with me.”
She saw her husband check his watch and she tucked her arm in his as he edged toward the door. “Sorry to rush off, Sigrid, but we’re meeting your friend Elliott Buntrock for dinner down in the Village and we’re going to be late if we don’t keep moving.”
“Elliott?” Sigrid asked, following them out to the sidewalk.
“The Village?” Hentz asked. He gestured to a late-model sedan parked at the snowy curb nearby. In the dim light, they saw an official NYPD sticker on the back fender. A card read NYPD OFFICIAL BUSINESS on the flipped- down sun visor, not that anyone needed to worry about tickets and tow trucks when so many illegally parked vehicles were still plowed under. “Lieutenant Harald’s going our way,” he said smoothly, “and she’s offered me a lift.”
Before Sigrid quite knew what was happening, they were waiting for her to unlock the car. Minutes later, she was headed down Eleventh Avenue with the other three chattering as if they had known each other for years.
Encouraged to tell them of her visit to Denise Lundigren, Deborah repeated what the woman had said about Antoine, how more things had disappeared from various apartments than what she had stolen, and how Phil Lundigren had found the elevator man in parts of the building where he had no business being after his shift was over. “She said he used to take cigarette breaks and then lied about it.”
“That’s probably how Corey Wall was able to hijack the elevator so many times,” Hentz told Sigrid.
“Do people in the building know that Mrs. Lundigren is a klepto?” Deborah asked. “Don’t they care?”
“For the most part, it sounds fairly benign,” Sigrid said. “And something they were willing to put up with because Lundigren was such a sterling super. That’s how that Mexican cat wound up in your apartment, though. Lundigren knew she’d cleaned there Friday morning. What he forgot was that she’d also cleaned for Luna DiSimone on Saturday morning.”
