SEVEN
Minerva Hunt was perched on the corner of Mike Chapman’s desk in the offices of the Manhattan North Homicide Squad.
Mike seemed to be as interested in her affect as he was in her appearance. I watched him look her over again as she glanced around the room. She was casually coiffed and carefully made up to accent her dark eyes and full lips.
“Doesn’t exactly have the makings of a physical plant for a think tank, does it?” Hunt said, scanning the room.
The desks that were positioned back to back with each other had been cheap when they were purchased twenty years earlier. Computer equipment was usually outdated by the time it was installed. The drunken arrestee groaning on the bench in the holding pen behind us, who had beaten his mother-in-law to death just hours ago, was a harsh reminder of the business at hand.
“Most of the time we get it done,” Mike said. “You feeling better?”
Two hours earlier, when Minerva Hunt first saw the corpse on the kitchen floor, she had lost her composure. But the emotional outburst was short-lived, and a frosty veneer had settled over her like a thin sheet of ice.
“Karla Vastasi?” Mike asked, making notes on the steno pad he carried in his jacket pocket.
“Karla with a
“There’s a chair for you here, Ms. Hunt,” Mike said.
“I’m perfectly comfortable,” she said, recrossing her shapely legs, which had caught the attention of the two older detectives working on the far side of the room.
“How long ago did you hire her?”
“She came to me during the winter. I’d say it’s been eight or nine months.”
“What did she do for you, exactly?”
“I told you, Mr. Chapman. Karla was my housekeeper. That’s what we call them now, isn’t it? I mean we don’t say things like ‘maid.’”
“Did she live with you?”
“No. She slept at my apartment occasionally when I traveled. Took care of the dog if I was called away.”
“And where is your home?”
“Thanks, Detective,” Hunt said to Mercer. She stood up and let him light her cigarette for her, holding her perfectly manicured hands around his. “I’ve got a town house on Seventy-fifth Street. Between Madison and Park.”
“Where did Karla live?”
“ Queens. Somewhere in Queens,” Hunt said, sticking the edge of a brightly painted red fingernail between her two front teeth while she thought. “The agency will have an exact address for her. Matter of fact, I probably have some receipts from the car service I use. Sometimes I sent her home that way if it was late or she wasn’t feeling well.”
“Family? Do you know anything about Karla’s relatives?”
“There’s a sister here in the States. Connecticut, I think. The rest are back home.”
“Where’s home?” Mike asked.
“Which is the country where the women all have such perfect skin? You know…they all come here to be facialists?” Minerva asked, looking at me. “ Romania, isn’t it? Yes, she’s Romanian. The employment agency has all that information.”
“How old was she, do you know?”
“She told me she was forty-five.”
I guessed Hunt to be a few years older than that.
“Did she have a husband, a boyfriend, a social life?”
“The ex is back in the old country. And no, no social life on my time.”
“She’s a good-looking woman,” Mike said. “Never a guy hanging around?”
Hunt inhaled and flicked her ashes on the floor. “She asked to sleep at the house once or twice because the man she was dating got a bit too possessive, maybe a little rough. But I never went into that with her, and I think they broke up during the summer.”
“Let me ask you, Ms. Hunt, did anyone ever get the two of you confused?”
She looked at Mike as though he had just punched her in the face. “Confused? The girl could barely form a proper sentence in English. She cleans house, makes the beds, washes the dishes.”
“Physically, Ms. Hunt. Karla was about your height, had a nice figure, hair about the color of yours-”
“And she was the help, detective. I’m not sure who would have had trouble getting that clear. My friends? The dry cleaner? The butcher? I don’t know if you meant that as a compliment to her or an insult to me.”
“We’ve got to figure out if whoever killed Ms. Vastasi was looking for her,” Mercer said, “or consider the possibility that she was mistaken for you. You own that apartment, don’t you?”
“Yes, but I didn’t spend any time there.”
“You went tonight.”
“Obviously. I think that’s the second or third time I’ve set foot in it. And I sent Karla there this morning.”
“Why?” Mercer asked.
The detectives were playing Hunt off against each other, Mercer distracting her from Mike’s comment that she found so offensive.
“Because I got word that the tenant had moved out. It was rather abrupt, and I wanted to know what shape the apartment was in. I wanted it cleaned out.”
Mike flashed me his best I-told-you-so look, then shook his head. Tina Barr was gone. I’d been puzzled by her connection to this tragic event from the moment I saw Karla’s body, and now the urgency of Battaglia’s directive to find Tina made sense.
“You lived there at one time, didn’t you?” Mercer asked. Billy Schultz had told us Hunt’s name used to be on the buzzer.
“Never.”
“Someone using your name, before Tina Barr moved in?”
“Ridiculous. What reason would anyone have to do that?”
No point pushing her on that tonight. There would be neighbors and witnesses to confirm or deny what Schultz said.
“Ms. Hunt, Karla seemed a bit overdressed to be cleaning an apartment,” I said.
She gave me a glance. “Remind me, young lady. Who are you?”
“Alex Cooper. From the district attorney’s office.”
“Well, then, you’re working overtime. I’m so glad I voted for Paul Battaglia, darling. Four times already, or has it been five? ‘Don’t play politics with people’s lives’-that’s a good mantra for a prosecutor.”
I was tempted to ask her whether she had spoken to Battaglia early this morning, but I knew better than to give her that advantage. I would call him as soon as we took a break.
“The clothes Karla was wearing-”
“They’re mine, Ms. Cooper. Old clothes, of course. It’s either the staff or the thrift shop. I hate to say I wouldn’t have been caught-well, dead-in that outfit again this fall.”
From Park to Fifth avenues, it was often hard to tell the matrons from the nannies, au pairs, and housekeepers strolling the sidewalks. The latter often sported last year’s fashions, handed down at the end of the season. They carried home leftover food and goody-bag giveaways in the instantly recognizable shopping bags tossed out by their employers: the robin’s-egg blue of Tiffany, the bright orange of Hermes, the pale lavender of Bergdorf Goodman, and the shiny black and white of Chanel.
“The tote with your initials on it?”
Hunt stood and crushed the cigarette with the ball of her black patent pump.
“I hate those logo bags, Ms. Cooper. One sees oneself coming and going. It was a gift, and I passed it on to Karla.”
