Death of a Butterfly (Sigrid Harald) Read online

  In the end, Sigrid let them go; and while Tillie went back to straightening Julie Redmond’s ransacked papers, she went down to the kitchen to dial the telephone number Manny Dorritt had provided.

  “Miss Montrose, please,” she said when a feminine voice answered on the first ring.

  “Sorry, she and George are playing tennis. This is her room­mate. Want to leave a message?”

  “It’s rather important that I talk to her,” said Sigrid. “When do you expect her back?”

  “Who knows? They only left about ten minutes ago. I think the court was booked for noon. Hang on a minute, okay?”

  She was back shortly with the location of the Central Park tennis court where her roommate might be found.

  Thoughtfully, Sigrid returned to the living room. Tillie was as intrigued as she to learn that Sue Montrose’s tennis partner was named George.

  “Want me to come with you?” Tillie asked, his hands full of MasterCard statements.

  “No, one of us ought to be here when the lab men arrive next door,” she decided. “Besides, you don’t really want to leave that desk, do you?”

  Things were starting to get interesting, Tillie admitted. “I should have everything sorted in another half hour and then I can really get into putting the pieces together. She seems to have had an awful lot of money.”

  “No job and she was getting what in child support?” mused Sigrid. “Five hundred a month?”

  Across the room, Eliza Fitzpatrick stirred in her chair. “Julie certainly didn’t live on just that! Why just last week she had on a new suit that was advertised at Bloomingdale’s for four hundred and sixty dollars.”

  “Four hundred and sixty dollars!” Sigrid almost never read fashion ads. To augment her Carolina clothes, she followed Anne through designer lofts or to specialty thrift shops where society’s fashionable shed the distinctive clothes they couldn’t be seen in more than once or twice. The most expensive item in Sigrid’s closet was a cashmere coat that she’d paid three hundred dollars for and had felt terribly extravagant about ever since.

  Tillie grinned at her horrified expression and pulled another charge statement from the heap in front of him.

  “Can I help?” Eliza asked shyly. “I don’t have anything to do until Aunt Elizabeth gets home.”

  Tillie glanced at Sigrid, who nodded that it was all right with her. “You do know what privileged information is though, don’t you?” she asked the girl.

  “It means I don’t tell anybody about anything you’ve let me see or hear this morning.” She took the pile of bills Tillie handed her and began arranging them by date and category.

  “You’ve forgotten my father’s a lawyer,” she reminded Sigrid.

  “And you’re a credit to his calling?” Sigrid asked dryly as she gathered up her things to go.

  Eliza caught the tone and gave her a delighted grin. “I certainly do try to be,” she said with mock demureness.

  About twenty minutes later, she handed Tillie a slip of paper.

  “You said to mention anything odd, so what about this?”

  It was a jeweler’s bill dated just over a year ago and acknowledged payment for a key-shaped charm made to order from fourteen-karat gold.

  “What’s odd about it?” asked Tillie.

  “Well, look how expensive it is to get something specially made like that,” said Eliza. “Why didn’t she just get Karl to make it? He and his father still owned their own jewelry store then.”

  “Maybe it was a gift, a surprise for him,” said Tillie, who was very happily married.

  Eliza shook her head. “No, this was hers. She wore it all the time—a gold chain with a little heart-shaped lock and a key. This key. And something else: They didn’t really match. The key had the same sort of filigree on top, but the size was wrong. It was too big for the heart. Not that it really mattered. Most of the time you never saw it because the chain was long and hung down inside her clothes. But why would she spend this much money for something that was off?”

  “She wore it all the time?” asked Tillie. He was beginning to remember something.

  “I think so,” said Eliza. “She told me it was her good-luck necklace.”

  Tillie knew that a jewelry box with several expensive pieces remained in the bedroom, so they had not thought that robbery played a part in the Redmond death. Yet they had found no gold chain with a heart and key in that box and nothing around the dead woman’s neck except that abrasion Cohen had showed them.

  “You’re right,” he told Eliza, carefully setting the bill aside. “Maybe this is odd.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Notwithstanding dirty buses, unsafe subways, and steadily rising fares, New York is officially committed to public transportation. Private automobiles are allowed, of course, but not encouraged. Doubters may examine the state of New York’s streets or take a spin on its expressways.

  During the day, street parking is virtually banned from the East River to the Hudson between Twenty-third and Seventy-second streets; elsewhere, alternate sides of the street offer occasional havens if one can keep up with which days are safe and which are verboten.

  Most of the rules are relaxed on the weekends, and the city becomes more tolerant. With police identification on her car tags, Sigrid did not have to worry about being towed, but she preferred to park legally whenever that was possible. Accordingly, she counted herself lucky when a Volkswagen van pulled away from the curb on Central Park West not too far from the West Ninety-sixth Street entrance to the park.

  The hot noon sun had brought out crowds of Sunday strollers, and joggers in shorts and sweatbands, cyclists with babies strapped into baskets fore and aft. Skateboarders, and roller­skaters zipped by her as she turned into the park. Her long strides overtook a contingent of beer-bellied softball players resplendent in gold and crimson uniforms.

  Sigrid did not run, cycle, nor play team games; but she saw a croquet game in progress upon a grassy flat and was instantly transported back to the wet summer day when she and her cousins had waited out the rain by rummaging in Grandmother Lattimore’s vast attic. They had found a brass-bound croquet set that their grandparents had brought home from their wedding trip to London.

  For the rest of that visit and for several summers thereafter through her teens, they had turned Grandmother Lattimore’s west lawn into a free-form croquet court. It was discovered that the skinny Yankee cousin, somewhat bookish and almost painfully shy, had a killer instinct when it came to croquet, and the cousins fought to be her partner. An elaborate handicap system had to be worked out so that everyone stood a chance of winning their flat-out, no-holds-barred version of the game.

  As Sigrid moved on, her gray eyes, usually so clear and purposeful, were almost dreamy as she remembered the brambled rosebushes that edged Grandmother Lattimore’s west lawn, the many-stemmed crepe myrtle tree in the middle of the course, and an iron deer that required a tricky bank shot off a set of stone steps to get around it.

  The tennis courts were full and, on benches behind the chain link fence, other players waited their turns. There was something joyous and carefree about the thwack of rackets upon balls and balls upon the courts.

  Sigrid found the court attendant, who consulted his list and told her that Sue Montrose was supposed to be playing on the end court. He checked his watch and added, “Her time’s up in eight minutes.”

  Pleased to have a chance to study Montrose and her companion unobserved, Sigrid threaded her way through the onlookers to the far court. She’d subconsciously expected the Dorritt twins’ niece to be middle-aged, tall, and skinny. Instead, she found a very attractive girl in her early twenties, with a nicely rounded body that barely topped five-three.

  Score one more point for the mysteries of genetics, thought Sigrid, and leaned against an iron stanchion to watch the finish of their game.

  The Montrose girl might be small, but she packed a wallop with her racket. Left-handed though, Sigrid saw, and Cohen said that Julie
Redmond’s death blow had probably been dealt by someone right-handed. Besides, Redmond had been rather tall. Even seated she probably would have been a difficult target for Montrose.

  On the other hand, George—the George of Julie Redmond’s tape?—was a hair over six feet, right-handed, and was, Sigrid noted clinically, one of the most physically stunning men she’d ever seen. Knew it, too, she thought, sensing a self-consciousness about the man’s movements when he missed a ball and had to come down to the fence to retrieve it. His eyes raked her automatically as he passed nearby. Sigrid was used to not stopping a man’s eye and this time it didn’t bother her because she had the impression that this man’s eyes never stopped roving. Even now he was grandstanding ever so slightly for a gorgeous redhead posed just behind the fence.

  Was that what explained the withdrawn expression on Sue Montrose’s freckled face? She seemed cool and unruffled and she was punishing the man subtly, making him look faintly inept as she peppered the court with well-laced shots that looked easy but were just out of his reach. He was sweating and panting and starting to sulk. When the court attendant called time on them, he slung his towel around his neck and stomped off to the water fountain without looking back.

  Calmly, the girl gathered up their balls, put them back in a tin, slipped on a white cardigan, and picked up the man’s sweater and racket cover. Sigrid met her at the gate.

  “Miss Montrose?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Lieutenant Harald,” she said, flipping open her ID case. “I’m investigating Julie Redmond’s death and would like to ask you a few questions about yesterday morning.”

  The girl’s brown eyes widened and she risked a quick glance at the man who was just straightening from the water fountain. Hastily, she separated his belongings from hers, placed them on a nearby bench and called to him, “I have to leave now, George; I’ll phone you tonight.”

  She turned back to Sigrid and tried to keep her voice matter of fact. “Shall we go, Lieutenant?”

  “Oh, there’s no hurry,” Sigrid said vaguely. She realized that Sue Montrose would prefer to keep the man out of it. He, on the other hand, had stopped dawdling and was returning faster than he’d originally intended.

  George Franklin was too self-centered to be the most perceptive of lovers, but he was sufficiently attuned to Sue’s moods to know she was now uptight about something more than his casual flirtation with that redhead. He saw that she had gone white beneath her freckles and seemed almost afraid of the tall, angular woman who had joined her.

  “Something wrong, Susie?” he asked, moving protectively closer.

  Resigned, Sue said, “Julie Redmond was killed yesterday and this police officer wants to ask me some questions.”

  “Killed? You mean murdered? Julie?”

  Sigrid said, “I believe you knew Mrs. Redmond also, Mr. —?”

  “Franklin,” he said automatically. “George Franklin.” Which explained Mrs. Yew’s groping through a roster of the Founding Fathers, thought Sigrid.

  “What do you want with Sue?” Franklin asked.

  Sigrid decided to force the situation. “Mrs. Redmond was killed in her apartment and we think Miss Montrose may have been there yesterday,” she said deliberately.

  Sigrid watched the stunned look on his face. Because Julie Redmond had been killed or because Sue Montrose had been there?

  George grasped the girl’s arm. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She stared back at him with level brown eyes. “I didn’t know you still kept in touch with her.” She handed him his sweater and he put it on mechanically.

  “Well, I didn’t. Not really.” His own eyes wavered uneasily, then he said firmly, “I haven’t seen Julie since last fall.”

  “She once worked for you, Mr. Franklin?” Sigrid asked.

  “My secretary. She quit when she got married four years ago.”

  “But you knew her socially, too?”

  Sue Montrose had gone even whiter and George Franklin was now visibly uncomfortable. “Not since she was married,” he insisted. “She kept in touch. Phone calls once in a while, and drinks one time after work a few months back, but that’s all!”

  “And you didn’t visit her yesterday morning?”

  “Of course not. I was”—there was a split-second hesitation— “I was at my dentist’s.”

  He answered her questions, but the words were directed at his companion, who seemed intent now on watching the players who had replaced them on the court.

  Sigrid looked from one to the other and said briskly, “Then I won’t detain you any longer, Mr. Franklin.”

  “Now wait a minute! I’m not going to leave Sue alone here for you to bully and—”

  “It’s okay, George,” Sue said.

  “No, it’s not. Why does she think you were there? You don’t even like Julie.”

  “You’re forgetting that my uncles work in her building,” she said. “I was the one who told her about the apartment in the first place, remember?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Look, George, why don’t you go back to my place? Ask Jenny to give you a drink. This shouldn’t take long. Please?”

  He went reluctantly, his handsome face as sulky as a child’s when sent to play while grown-ups talk. Sigrid was happy to take advantage of the girl’s readiness to cooperate and pointed to a vacant bench on a rise above the crowded tennis courts.

  “I don’t know if I can be much help,” said Sue Montrose as they sat down. “It’s true that I visited my uncles yesterday morning, but I didn’t know Julie all that well and—” Her voice died away as she met Sigrid’s cool gray eyes, and her freckled face turned bright pink.

  “We know that you were watching from the Bitzer apartment for several hours,” Sigrid said kindly.

  “How?” she whispered.

  “Your uncles were caught trying to clear away your traces.”

  Sue Montrose sighed. “They’re grumpy old dears. They must have hated getting caught. I guess I wasn’t thinking too clearly. Just grabbed my bag and ran.”

  “Why were you there in the first place?”

  She took a deep breath and gave a shaky little laugh. “Jealousy pure and simple, Lieutenant. You heard George. She was his secretary before me and I thought he was seeing her again.”

  “You’re Mr. Franklin’s secretary, too?” Surprise made Sigrid tactless.

  The girl colored again. “George is a creature of habit,” she said and there was a trace of bitterness in her voice.

  Sigrid headed for safer ground. “Exactly what happened yesterday?”

  Sue Montrose fumbled in her pocket and brought out an opened pack of cigarettes of the same brand that had been found in the Bitzer apartment. She lit one with a butane lighter and inhaled deeply before answering.

  “I met Julie about four and a half years ago. We worked in the same building and used to run into each other in the cafeteria down the street. She wasn’t somebody you could get close to, but we’d take coffee breaks together or go shopping on our lunch hour once in a while. When she was getting married, she said something about how much trouble they were having finding a good place to live. I knew of a vacancy in my uncles’ building, so I told her about it. In return, she asked me if I wanted her job at Landau and Maas Electronics when she left to have the baby. It paid fifty a week more than I was getting downstairs and was a smaller company, easier to work for, so I said yes and she recommended me.

  “She and George had been seeing each other before she met Karl Redmond, but I didn’t think it’d been anything serious. Then last year, she started dropping in, flirting with George, inviting him for drinks after work. He pretended he didn’t want to go, but he went.

  “It was none of my business,” she said carefully. “He and I had only seen each other once or twice outside the office. I didn’t have any strings on him. They seemed to be picking up where they left off. Julie divorced Karl and then, all of a sudden, nothing.”

  “
Nothing?”

  “She stopped coming, he stopped going.”

  “So you and he—?” Sigrid probed delicately.

  Sue Montrose studied the drifting smoke of her cigarette. “So he and I,” she agreed. “Until this past month. I thought they were starting again. She was phoning him. I found a note on the floor under his desk. He said they weren’t, but he’s never available on Saturday morning and—and—”

  “And you wanted to find out if he was seeing Mrs. Redmond instead of his dentist?” asked Sigrid.

  Sue Montrose nodded but was pricked by silent fear, wondering if the lieutenant’s remark was casual or if she’d noticed George’s hesitation.

  “And was he?” asked the lieutenant.

  “No, of course not!”

  Although the sun overhead was so warm that Sigrid wished she had picked a bench in the shade, Sue Montrose shivered inside her white cardigan. Of course, she was wearing a short tennis dress and her freckled legs were bare, but Sigrid suspected the shiver came more from her questions than from physical cold.

  “How long were you in apartment 3-A?” she asked, taking a small leather notebook from her shoulder bag.

  “I got there around a quarter to nine. 1 told my uncles that I thought Julie was selling industrial secrets. They knew she’d worked for Landau and Maas before me and they believed it. They didn’t like her anyhow. She was a fault-finder and demanding; a poor tipper, too, so they went along with it when I asked to use the empty apartment. And you might as well know it: I was there last Saturday, also. A bust, though. Nobody came all morning except the people in 3-B, who took Timmy somewhere.

  “Julie went shopping. I followed her through Ohrbach’s and Altman’s and when she went into a hairdresser’s after lunch, I came home.”