Take Out Read online

  “Go back through all files and the scrapbooks again,” Sigrid said. “See if anything jumps out.”

  Her own eyes were snagged by that first review and she turned the scrapbook page toward Hentz, who had become her de facto opera authority. “What does that headline mean?”

  “Mi chiamano Charlotte Randolph? In English, it would be ‘They call me Charlotte Randolph.’ It’s a play on the opera’s most popular song. When the man asks what her name is, the woman says Mi chiamano Mimi—‘They call me Mimi.’ I guess the critic that wrote this meant that she owned the role.”

  “Did critics review every performance back then?”

  “No,” he said slowly. “No, they didn’t. And this guy was a pretty big deal in his day. He would have reviewed the opening night performance, not subsequent ones.”

  Remembering that bookseller from North Carolina, Sigrid said, “So all the planets really did line up for Charlotte Randolph that night, didn’t they?”

  He nodded. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  Elaine Albee’s blue eyes widened. “You think Jack Bloss could have caused the star’s accident so his girlfriend could go on?”

  Hentz frowned. “He might’ve caused the accident, but how could a no-name stage hand get a critic like Franklin McCall back to the Met?”

  They batted around unlikely scenarios till Hentz said, “This is starting to sound like All About Eve.”

  Sigrid smiled at the reference. “With Charlotte Randolph in the Anne Baxter role?”

  Young Urbanska was looking blank.

  “I’ll lend you the video,” Hentz said.

  Glancing at the wall clock above their whiteboard, Sigrid decided to call it a day. “Albee, you and Lowry question Randolph’s niece and stepson tomorrow. They had access to the lasagna and it wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to hurry up an inheritance. Tillie, see if you can locate Bloss’s ex-wife.” Turning back to Hentz, she said, “We ought to talk to Randolph again and Mrs. DelVecchio as well. See if she blames Mutone for her daughter’s hit-and-run and why.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  Sigrid sat bolt upright in her bed Tuesday morning. Between all the complications of the case and the possibility that Nauman had fathered a son who had a moral claim on his estate if not a legal one, she had forgotten all about what the waiter in the diner had told her. As soon as the sun had been up long enough to suppose Hentz was up as well, she called him, apologized if she had awakened him, and asked if he could locate the locksmith whose shop was across the street from that bench where two men had died.

  “You’re up early,” Roman Tramegra said, surprised to enter the kitchen and find Sigrid reading the paper. His green paisley dressing gown was open to reveal purple pajamas and he quickly tightened the belt to close the front as he padded over to the coffee maker.

  She was not a morning person and normally slept as late as possible. Today, she was already dressed for work in dark slacks, fitted red jacket, and a white knit tee, with a colorful silk scarf loosely looped around her neck.

  So different from when they first met, he thought approvingly.

  Until Oscar Nauman erupted into her life, she had worn her long dark hair pulled back into a no-nonsense bun at the nape of her slender neck and most of her clothes were either black or beige and strictly utilitarian. Because of him, she had cut her hair, learned to use makeup, made time for weekly manicures, and purged her closet of everything beige. She would never be as beautiful as her mother or her Southern cousins, but neither would those wide gray eyes and quiet air of self-containment let her be ignored.

  “Our eggs hatched yesterday morning,” he announced.

  “Really? Does one of them have red feathers?”

  “No, they’re all just little dark fuzz balls.”

  “That sparrow’s in for quite a surprise, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, they’ll look enough like her that she probably won’t notice once it starts fledging. By the time it gets red feathers, it’ll be able to fend for itself.”

  He was smiling until he took a second look at her eyes and saw the dark circles beneath them.

  “A rough night, my dear?”

  “A lot on my mind.”

  She had spent yet another restless night thinking about this Vincent Haas and what it might have meant to Nauman to learn he’d fathered a son with Lila Nagy. If he had read the letter from Austria that Hester had forwarded to him, had he been pleased or angry? Would he have accepted a middle-aged son or refused to know him?

  “Do say it’s a complicated case,” Roman pleaded as he poured himself a second cup of coffee and topped off her cup. “I need another plot twist for my new book. It’s sagging in the middle and I always feel it’s cheating to throw in another killing just to hoist things up.”

  She set aside the paper. Although she wasn’t ready to tell anyone about Vincent Haas, Roman was looking so eager that she gave him a thumbnail sketch of the two murders under investigation.

  He had written scenarios for a neighborhood dance company and was a walking encyclopedia of gossipy stage lore, so he was entranced to hear that Sigrid’s case involved the famous Charlotte Randolph. “Maybe she put a tripwire over the stairs leading up to the star’s dressing room and the stage hand saw her. Then when he heard she was writing her memoirs, maybe he tried to blackmail her. That’s such a legendary story that she certainly wouldn’t want the world to know that her lucky break wasn’t an accident.”

  “So she sent him off with poisoned lasagna in a box from her own refrigerator?”

  “Why not? Opera is full of blood and gore, tenors and bassos stabbing each other, sopranos throwing themselves off parapets. And poison is the classic choice for women, isn’t it?” He added two cubes of sugar to his coffee and stirred it thoughtfully. “It probably wouldn’t occur to her that he’d sit down the first place he could and start eating. That’s something I’m sure she would never do. If he’d made it out of that neighborhood, you might never have connected the two of them.”

  “Possibly,” she admitted as her phone rang. It was Hentz, returning her earlier call. He had located the locksmith and was on his way to meet the man there.

  As she carried her cup over to the sink, Roman’s face suddenly brightened. “I know! Instead of another murder, maybe I can put one of the characters into a coma until it’s time to reveal the killer’s name.”

  Sigrid smiled. “That should work.”

  Hentz was waiting for her outside the locksmith’s shop when she arrived twenty minutes later. While they waited for the owner to arrive, Hentz said, “Did I tell you I have a copy of Franklin McCall’s biography?”

  “Who?”

  “The critic that reviewed Charlotte Randolph’s performance. Franklin McCall. I looked her up in the index.”

  “And?

  “And he patted himself on the back for being the first to notice her.”

  “Did he say how he happened to be there that particular night for a repeat?”

  “Actually, he did. He called it a fortuitous accident. A friend of his had an extra ticket that night and he thought McCall hadn’t been fair to the tenor in the first review, so he asked him to come along and give the guy another chance. Ironically, the tenor was completely ignored in his second review and— Ah, you must be our locksmith,” he said to the man who hurried up to them on foot.

  “Sorry,” the man said. “I had a lady with a baby locked out of her apartment on Prince Street. She left a spare key for her deadbolt with a neighbor, but the neighbor’s out of town.”

  He unlocked his own door and held it open for them to enter the dingy shop that was cluttered with tools, racks of key blanks, and several locks in various stages of disassembly. “Excuse the mess, but I don’t get a lot of walk-ins. Most of my work’s off-premise. Like today. I gotta go change the locks on a bunch of mailboxes a few blocks up from here, so this won’t take long, will it?”

  They assured him it wouldn’t.

&
nbsp; “You want to hear about those guys I saw last Tuesday evening, right?”

  “Right,” said Hentz.

  “There’s really not a lot I can tell you. I’d already closed up for the day and was on my way to go get something to eat when a man called, wanting me to come change the locks so his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend couldn’t get in and strip the place. I came back here to pick up a new deadbolt and I saw these two men across the street at the bench. One guy was sitting there eating out of a takeout box and the other one was standing on the side talking to him.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Around seven-thirty, maybe eight.”

  “Can you describe them?”

  “Well, the guy on the bench looked like an old hippie—a beard and white hair in a ponytail. I never saw the face of the other one. Dark hair, maybe going gray? And a lot of it.” He rubbed the bald spot on the top of his head with a rueful smile. “You don’t really notice hair till you start to lose it.”

  “Tall, short? Fat, skinny?”

  “Not tall. In fact, he was real short. Couldn’t have been much over five feet. And sort of thin. He had on like a uniform. Coveralls, anyhow. Dark green or black. I couldn’t say. The only reason I even noticed them was because they both had takeout boxes and I was pretty hungry. They said at the diner two guys died. Those two?”

  “Your old hippie was one of them,” said Hentz. “The other was someone different. Did you see anyone join them or what the short guy did?”

  “Sorry.” As he talked, the locksmith had been opening and closing long three-by-five-inch drawers beneath the counter at the rear of the shop. “I really need to label these things,” he said, slamming one shut in frustration. Irritation turned to smiles as he looked into another drawer. “Ah, here they are!”

  He fished out a handful of small locks in individual plastic bags and put them in his tool bag. “If we’re done here—?”

  Sigrid thanked him for his help and handed him her card. “If you see that short man again or if you think of anything else you forgot to mention, please call me.”

  Back out on the sidewalk, Hentz said, “You thinking the same thing I am?”

  “Mrs. DelVecchio’s Alberich?”

  “Yeah.”

  At Number 409, they walked down three steps to the basement door beneath the stoop and rang the bell. When Hentz’s second ring received no answer, they went up to the main door and this time, the door opened a crack and the housekeeper’s wrinkled face peered up at him.

  “Yes?”

  He held out his badge. “Detective Hentz, ma’am.”

  Before he could say more, her thick gray eyebrows drew together tightly. “Signora DelVecchio is still asleep. You cannot see her now.”

  “It’s Mr. Salvador we want to question, Miss Orlano,” Sigrid said. “He doesn’t answer his bell. Is he here?”

  The thick oak door opened wider and her voice dropped to a whisper. “Come through, but be quiet. She likes to sleep till ten.”

  That was something Sigrid could appreciate, but she said nothing.

  Miss Orlano led them down the long dark hall, past the staircase to a bright and surprisingly modern kitchen. Sigrid rather expected to see appliances from the forties or fifties. Instead, everything was up to date.

  When the housekeeper had closed the swinging door to the hallway, she spoke in a normal voice. “He’s out in the garden.”

  “Actually, Miss Orlano, we have a question for you, too,” said Sigrid. “Why did you lie about seeing Matty last Tuesday?”

  Miss Orlano glared at them, her eyebrows beetling furiously. “Lie? Who says I lied?”

  “It wasn’t you who took him the fettuccine, was it? It was Mr. Salvador. We have a witness who saw him there at the bench.”

  Her belligerent wrinkled face crumpled so abruptly, it was like watching air escape from a child’s balloon. “Please, Lieutenant. Don’t tell the signora.”

  “Why not?” Sigrid asked. “Why would she care which one of you took it?”

  “Look at me, Lieutenant! Look at me!”

  She held her hands out to them. They were gnarled and arthritic.

  “I am old and everything hurts. To walk, to vacuum, to make the beds. But if I am no use, if I cannot do what she asks, what happens to me? I have no family. What will I do? Where will I go?”

  “Surely Mrs. DelVecchio wouldn’t turn you out onto the street,” said Sigrid. “Haven’t you been with her for years?”

  The old woman nodded tearfully and her accent had become more pronounced. “Forty-two, almost forty-three years. Since the first day they brought Aria home from the hospital. The cook had quit. The housemaid went back to Chicago. I was supposed to be the baby’s nursemaid but there was only me and she wouldn’t take the breast, only the bottle, so I was up and down those stairs all night. I was young and strong though, and so was my signora. Together we did everything the first week until Signor Benito hired more help. Someone to clean, someone to cook. I was not trained as a cook, but every week, I made cannelloni for Signor Benito. And sometimes my fegati della Romano! He said it tasted like his own mother used to make.”

  “Fegati?” Sigrid asked.

  “Chicken livers sautéed in butter with fresh basil and served on buttered toast.”

  It sounded like something Roman would like but Sigrid resisted the temptation to ask for the recipe.

  “While he was alive and Aria was little, I only cooked special things he liked, but after he died and Aria was married, it was just the signora and me.”

  “You take care of this whole big house and cook, too?” asked Sigrid.

  “We have a cleaning service every week and Sal helps.”

  “Like taking food down to that bench in your place?”

  “Please! You won’t tell her, will you?”

  “Not if we don’t have to.”

  “Lieutenant?”

  Hentz pointed toward the window and Sigrid saw the handyman open the garage door and go inside.

  Grimacing with pain as she stood, Miss Orlano opened the back door onto the deck.

  “When you finish, leave through the garage so she doesn’t see you.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  Thin to the point of anorexia, Mary Bloss had platinum hair permed into short fluffy curls. From a few feet away, her expert makeup made her look no more than fifty rather than the seventy-one the DMV had in its records. Up close, she still could have passed for sixty. She wore a snug knit top patterned in pale yellow stripes and she was a talker. The officer who showed her up to Homicide seemed grateful to hand her over to Tillie and she switched from uniform to plainclothes without missing a beat.

  “—because even if they are two for the price of one, if you only need one, what are you going to do with two giant-size tubes of toothpaste? And don’t get me started on the way they size things. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tillie said, opening the door to the interview room where Dinah Urbanska joined them.

  “I mean it’s not like we have medicine cabinets the size of steamer trunks, is it?”

  “Mrs. Bloss?” Tillie had to say it twice and the second time rather loudly before she paused.

  “You needn’t shout, Sergeant. I may be getting old, but my hearing’s fine, I assure you. My mother was hard of hearing by the time she was my age, but everything’s still clear as a bell for me. Now my dad—”

  “Mrs. Bloss, please!”

  She frowned but subsided, taking one of the chairs at the table and plopping her bright yellow plastic handbag on the floor beside her.

  “You were married to Jack Bloss, right?”

  “That’s right. Is that what this is about? Is he trying to pressure me into—? Well, you can tell him that I won’t. I can’t. And that’s final!”

  “Can’t what, ma’am?” asked Urbanska.

  “Can’t live on less than I’m getting now. I’m sorry but it’s his fault our son’s a vegetable. I told him not to h
elp Jacky buy that motorcycle, but oh no! What did I know? I told them both it was too dangerous. And what happened? Six days after he got it, he spun out on the FDR and has been in a coma ever since.”

  “When did you last speak to your husband, Mrs. Bloss?”

  “He’s not my husband. We’ve been divorced for years.”

  “And you haven’t spoken to him since then?”

  “Of course I have. Back in April. Tax time. The hospital’s going to increase the cost of Jacky’s care again and he wanted me to help pay part of it, but like I told him, what are they going to do? Throw Jacky out on the street? Besides, he doesn’t need to be in that fancy nursing home. I’m sure there are cheaper places that do just as good a job and yes, it might mean moving him upstate, but there’s no reason Jack has to visit so often. It’s not like Jacky knows either one of us. Last time I was there, it was what? Three years? Four? And he hadn’t changed a bit. He just lies there, getting thinner. Tubes going in and coming out. Nobody home. I’ve begged Jack to pull the plug, let him go, but he won’t. He just won’t. I know it sounds cold for a mother to say this, but I’ve accepted it. My son died the day his head hit that guardrail. It is what it is, though, and like my friend Sadie says, I had to move on or stay stuck in grief, so I told him not to come begging me to take less of his pension. The judge gave it to me fair and square and I earned it. Twelve years I put up with him and his philandering. There wasn’t a single show he ever worked on that he didn’t screw at least one of—”

  Urbanska reached across the table and took Mrs. Bloss’s hands in hers. “I’m afraid we have some bad news, ma’am.”

  “Bad news? About Jacky?”

  “Not your son, ma’am. It’s your husband. Your ex-husband. He died last Wednesday morning.”

  “Died? What happened? His heart?”

  “We think he was poisoned, Mrs. Bloss, and we were hoping you could tell us if he had any enemies, anyone he’d had trouble with?”