Death of a Butterfly (Sigrid Harald) Read online

  DEATH OF A BUTTERFLY

  Margaret Maron

  Copyright © 2011 by Margaret Maron.

  Original publication in 1984. All rights reserved.

  All characters in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  For John—son and friend.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE EBOOK EDITION

  As I have said in the introduction to the eBook edition of One Coffee With, each of my books is written in what is (and was then) the current “now.” In the late 70s, books (and police reports) were written on typewriters. In One Coffee With, Lt. Harald and her squad typed all their reports. Telephones were tethered to the handset with a curly cord and numbers were manually dialed. No one had a cell phone. By the time Fugitive Colors, the eighth and final book of the series, was written, typewriters were a thing of the past, and Sigrid wrote up her reports on a computer. If she owned a mobile, I was not aware of it.

  When Death of a Butterfly, my second Sigrid Harald novel, was written in 1984, smoking was more widespread and allowed not only in parks but in most buildings and all restaurants. There were no digital cameras, mobile phones were still uncommon, and women were more sensitive to instances of male chauvinism. Without ultrasound, few expectant parents knew the sex of their baby before it was born and older people still lifted an eyebrow at out-of-wedlock babies.

  You have downloaded this book to a device that was still science fiction in 1984. Now, novels printed on paper are beginning to be referred to as “the physical book” as opposed to the electronic one.

  For me, fourteen years passed between the first book and the last. For Sigrid, it was only one short tumultuous year.

  Try not to let technology and societal norms get between you and the page. Suspend your disbelief. Enjoy!

  • Margaret Maron, February 2011

  CHAPTER 1

  The peephole on the door of the service entrance to apartment 3-A was of the old-fashioned variety and offered a narrow perspective. Very little of the front door to apartment 3-D could be seen, just its outer frame. Easing the door open a hairline crack improved the watcher’s hearing but further limited the field of vision.

  The watcher, young and very determined, froze as the door to 3-D clicked open and a small boy emerged, clinging to the hand of a comfortably plump, grandmotherly woman.

  “Tell Mommy goodbye, caro.”

  “Bye-bye, Mommy, bye-bye!” the child prattled happily. “I be a good boy now! Bye-bye!”

  The woman smiled at him indulgently. She was a well-tended sixty and her softly coiffed hair was jet black with just a light threading of gray. She wore frivolous black patent shoes that matched her purse and a stylish suit of floral silk that flattered her ample proportions and that also, thought the watching girl, had probably cost a full week’s salary.

  “—trouble?” the woman was asking. “When was Timmy any trouble to us? You take your time, Julie.”

  She closed the door and the child pulled her through the peephole’s field of vision to the elevator.

  “Want Mama Luisa to lift you up, caro mio?”

  “I punch the button myself!” he gleefully agreed.

  When they had departed, the landing was quiet for another half hour. Then a door out of view must have opened, for male voices were heard, but too indistinctly to catch the import until the elevator door swooshed open and an earnest voice said, “Thanks, Vico. It means a hell of a lot.”

  Through the thick walls by the elevator shaft, the girl could hear the cage come and go to other floors, but it was another ten minutes before the elevator again rose to a new summons from this landing and someone from 3-B descended on it.

  She idly wondered who. Of the four apartments which opened onto this landing, only the traffic to and from 3-D, Julie Redmond’s apartment, was important; yet any activity broke the monotony.

  And how monotonous it was! Probably futile, too. Julie seemed to lead such a virtuous life these days that her suspicions were starting to seem absurd. If it weren’t for that odd note she’d found under George’s desk and his missing Saturday mornings . . .

  Painters were working somewhere in the building and something about the odors which drifted through the cracked door stimulated the appetite. Only eleven-fifteen. Much too early for lunch.

  Lighting another cigarette, the girl stretched, darted down to the bathroom and from there to the kitchen. The apartment’s owners had left the refrigerator on its lowest setting, but she’d turned it up to keep a quart of milk cold. She downed a glass quickly, doused her cigarette in the sink, then returned to her surveillance post, a tall bar stool co-opted from the breakfast counter in the kitchen.

  To think there were people who made careers of this! Policemen and detectives and FBI and all the other professional spies. It looked so exciting on television. And so easy. No sooner did a hero get himself strategically placed than some significant piece of action would occur. Television never showed all the boring hours of waiting. Odd how doing nothing was so much more tiring than actual work. Luckily the stool had armrests and a padded back. That helped some. One could always prop elbow on knee, cup chin on hand and rest the eyes a minute. Tiring to keep squinting through that tiny hole . . .

  The girl awoke with a guilty start and tried to rationalize that any movement beyond the door would have triggered subconscious alarms even in a sleeping brain. Eleven-forty. Less than fifteen minutes missing and there seemed no change in the landing outside. She shook another cigarette from its crumpled pack and found she had no matches.

  Eleven-fifty, eleven fifty-five, and she capitulated to hunger and nicotine. After all, how long could it take to splash cold water on her face, grab a snack, and find matches?

  Eight minutes.

  Refreshed now and well-supplied with matches, she resolved not to leave the stool again. For once, virtue was instantly rewarded by the rising whine of the elevator. It stopped, the doors opened, and a young, dark-haired man crossed into view, heading for Julie Redmond’s door.

  He wore polished black boots, white Levi’s, and a bright green T-shirt under a white denim jacket. There was something vaguely familiar about his raw good looks, but his eyes were cold and hard as he stared around the landing and he scowled as he jabbed the bell again.

  The girl stood silently with her eye pressed to the peephole.

  Her cigarette burned down to the filter, but there was no time to look around for her ashtray, so she dropped it by her foot and stepped on it.

  The dark-haired man rapped sharply on the door, and it must have opened, for he disappeared inside and she heard him say, “Hey, Julie?”

  Several minutes passed. The girl was concentrating so intensely upon the main door that the man almost went unnoticed when he first emerged from 3-D’s service entrance. There was something markedly stealthy in his bearing. Even more suspicious was how, instead of ringing for the elevator, he pushed open the stairwell door, listened a moment, then slipped silently away.

  The watching girl was consumed with curiosity. Was he a thief? Had Julie gotten past, undetected, during one of her absences from the peephole, leaving the front door unlatched?

  Cautiously, she tiptoed across the landing. The door of 3-D stood slightly ajar. A gentle push and she was inside. There was no sound from within the apartment.

  Across the room, a modern white desk had been turned inside out, papers strewn, its drawers agape. So the man had been a thief! Or had he been searching for evidence of his own, too?

  The desk was an obvious place to keep things, but the man had left by the service door. Why?

  Julie had a devious streak in
her and she wouldn’t be the first woman to stash papers and photographs in a cookbook or tape them to the bottom of a vegetable bin.

  The silence held as the girl moved through the apartment to Julie Redmond’s kitchen.

  CHAPTER 2

  Despite a naive insistence that we are all one people, people can be (and usually are) divided into many categories. One of the simplest, one that cuts across all orderly groupings of age, sex, race, creed, or national origin, is a basic division of day people from night people.

  Day people leap from their beds at dawn’s earliest light whether they have to or not and they never stop crowing about glorious sunrises, dewy-fresh morns and how much work they got done before breakfast, as if there were great virtue simply in being up and about when nothing else is stirring but some opportunistic birds and a few sluggish worms.

  Night people prefer their days a bit more broken-in. Sunrises strike them as grossly overrated, and anyhow, they’ll tell you crossly, sunsets are just as lovely and a hell of a lot more civilized. When’s the last time anyone handed you a drink at sunrise?

  Unfortunately, schedules and work days are organized chiefly by dawners, and night people learn to accommodate, much as lefties learn to get along in a right-handed world. One learns gratitude for small blessings and to take one’s compensations where one can. Which is to say that night people, including police officers, will shamelessly sleep till noon no matter how glorious the morning, if that morning happens to fall on an off­duty weekend.

  Lieutenant Sigrid Harald was no exception.

  Groggily, she pushed the cutoff button on her alarm clock three times before it finally penetrated that the persistent ringing was telephonic, not horological.

  She spoke sleepily into the receiver.

  “Still in bed?” demanded the aggressively cheerful voice of a born dawner. “Don’t you know what time it is?”

  Sigrid resisted an impulse to hang up. Instead, she propped a couple of pillows under her shoulders, pushed away her heavy dark hair and shifted the receiver while examining the clock.

  “Are you there?”

  “It’s only a quarter past ten,” she told him resentfully.

  “We’ve been invited to late breakfast, so I’ll pick you up in half an hour sharp, okay?”

  “Listen, Nauman, I keep telling you: I don’t like breakfast. Anyhow, it’s my weekend off. I was going to sleep till noon and then clean my apartment.”

  “But now you’re awake,” Oscar Nauman said, sweet reason itself. “Clean your apartment tomorrow. The sun’s shining, birds are singing and we’re having a picnic.”

  “Central Park’s full of degenerates,” Sigrid objected. “Breakfast is bad enough. Why do I have to put up with flashers, too? I’m off duty, Nauman!”

  “Who said anything about Central Park? If you keep arguing, we’re going to be late and that’s rude. Get dressed. I’ll be circling your block in twenty-five minutes.”

  “Wait!” she cried, awake enough now to remember. “I’m still on call. Give me a phone number where we’ll be.”

  “Will you wear something with color?” he bargained.

  “What color?” she asked warily.

  “That blue-green suit with the blue ruffled shirt.”

  “You know my closet better than I do,” Sigrid grumbled. Nauman interpreted that as a promise, and after Sigrid had relayed the number to headquarters, she swung herself out of bed and darted into the bathroom. It took less than five minutes to shower and do up her thick hair into a neat but severe bun at the nape of her neck—all without the aid of mirrors. In fact, Lieutenant Sigrid Harald seldom consulted mirrors except to make sure everything hung together decently: that her skirts were long enough, that a slip didn’t show, that her shirts were tucked in, that her face wasn’t smudged. At the age of thirteen, she’d decided once and for all that she would forever be too gawky, too tall, and too homely, so mirrors had never become an instrument of vanity.

  She could study her face unselfconsciously, noting the too­long neck, her wide gray eyes and dark, level brows, the thin nose and angularities of her face. She’d never learned to smile at her reflection and continually judged herself by her southern grandmother’s antebellum standards. Grandmother Lattimore had raised three stunning daughters and still couldn’t accept an ugly duckling granddaughter who refused to turn into a conventionally pretty swan.

  Because of Grandmother Lattimore, Sigrid owned two sets of clothes: the serviceable, severely cut, neutral-colored suits she bought for herself, and the brighter, more feminine things her mother Anne chose for her to wear whenever they made duty visits South. Sigrid had never enjoyed clothes, but it was easier to wear Anne’s choices than listen to Grandmother Lattimore complain that “Sigrid simply isn’t trying.”

  Sigrid considered the Carolina side of her closet peacock feathers for a crow and was annoyed that Nauman seized every opportunity to bully her into them.

  Of course, she conceded, as she examined the garments he’d specified, he was an artist and had a highly developed color sense, but it was exasperating that having seen her closet only once—it was only once, wasn’t it? she asked herself, trying to remember how many times he could have been in her bedroom—having seen her closet only once, he should remember so much.

  Oscar Nauman’s artistic reputation was so firmly established that he could have retired to the South of France, painted three or four pictures a year, and lived quite comfortably on the proceeds. But he was too impulsive to hang onto money and he loved teaching too much—Loves managing everyone’s life, more likely, Sigrid thought—to give up his position as chairman of the art department at Vanderlyn College. He had to be nearing sixty, but he retained the vigor and vitality of a much younger man. There were even times when he made Sigrid feel older than he.

  They had met the month before after a homicide in Nauman’s department, yet the end of the case had not been the end of their acquaintance. He kept showing up at odd times, carrying her off to dinner at disreputable taverns, marching her around museums and galleries to remedy her abysmal ignorance of modern art, and appearing on her threshold with a weird assortment of groceries that he turned into gourmet meals in her heretofore soup-and-sandwich kitchen. He was undeterred by her prickly nature, her rudeness, or her insults; and Sigrid had quit trying to analyze why he persisted.

  Or why she hadn’t brought herself to sever the relationship once and for all.

  Hastily, she donned the blue-green suit he had specified. The silky wool challis was cut with a slight flare at the hemline and it swirled around legs which were thin but finely proportioned. Sigrid frowned at her mirrored image, noticing only that her slip straps needed shortening. She was still feeling self-conscious about ruffles at wrist and neck when Nauman’s battered bright yellow sports car pulled up in front of her apartment building.

  “On my first circle, too,” he said as he pushed open the door to let her in. “Punctuality’s a rare virtue.”

  “In a woman, you mean?” she asked. Unfairly, since he was less chauvinistic than most men she’d met.

  “Still cross because I woke you up?” He looked at her critically. “I told you to leave your hair loose.”

  “You did not!” Sigrid’s hands flew up to protect her hair. Only last week Nauman had sent her dignity tumbling by pulling out crucial hairpins and strewing them along the FDR Drive.

  “Well, I meant to. What’s the point of having hair like yours if you keep it pinned flat all the time? I suppose you want me to stop and put the top up?”

  “Not unless this is one of your Indianapolis 500 days.” Sigrid hated fast driving and she didn’t think Manhattan traffic should be treated like an amusement park’s bumper-car pavilion. Nauman seemed unable to grasp just how embarrassing it was for her, a police officer sworn to uphold the law, to be present during the issuance of so many careless-and-reckless citations. How he managed to hang onto a driver’s license anyhow was something she preferred not to question. Knowing
Nauman, his good fairy could be anyone—a DMV file clerk or a municipal judge. His circle of acquaintances seemed to range from penthouse duplexes to dime store basements.

  He was on his best behavior now though, driving at a moderate speed and obeying all the laws. Sigrid began to relax. It really was a glorious morning. Just as New Yorkers started thinking hazy skies and low visibility were the norm, along came days like this, when the view from Riverside Drive was stunning and the Palisades across the river shone like the Promised Land in clear sunlight.

  She lifted her face to the warm sun, her head tipped back against the headrest, and Nauman found it hard to keep his eyes on the road. Her profile made such a lovely line from her determined chin down the long slender neck. And then she smiled at him and he nearly swerved across two lanes of traffic. Her smile was so rare that one forgot its unconsciously sweet gaiety.

  He caught his breath and grinned back. “You need a pet.” Instantly, her smile converted to a scowl and she twisted around to peer behind the seat, almost expecting to find a Great Dane lurking there. Nauman was capable of it.

  “I don’t want a pet. I don’t have time for one. Anyhow, pets aren’t allowed in my building.”

  “These would be and they don’t take much time.”

  “These? Pets in the plural? Fish?” She considered the idea of fish. “Aren’t they hard to raise? I mean with all the chlorine and chemicals in the city water?”

  “Not fish and not—uh-oh, sorry about that!” he apologized, having taken the exit ramp so fast that tires squealed as he braked for the sharp curve.

  Sigrid bit her tongue while he concentrated briefly on driving. The backs of his hands were lightly sprinkled with brown age marks, but the hands were still capable—a craftsman’s hands, strong and square, yet with the promise of lyrical, gentle touch. Always and entirely against her will, they made her remember those lines, “Licence my roving hands . . .” Not that licensing would ever come up. Not that their relationship was anything other than platonic . . .