Death of a Butterfly (Sigrid Harald) Read online

  One of her rare smiles softened the command, and Elaine Albee left the office revising an opinion formed when she first joined the department four months earlier.

  Maybe the lieutenant wasn’t a cast-iron robot after all.

  CHAPTER 17

  As no will had been found among Julie Redmond’s papers, it was assumed that her son Timmy would be declared sole heir. Accordingly, Vico Cavatori’s attorney had spoken to Karl Redmond’s, and between them someone from a third firm had been commissioned to look after the child’s interests, a Mr. Hagstrom.

  He arrived at the bank promptly at two and introduced himself to Sigrid and Tillie. He had met Mr. Pinchelli from the Internal Revenue Service before.

  Mrs. Schatel forbore to complain about the morning’s disturbance and graciously showed them into the vault area. She was pleased to see that Julie Redmond’s key had been recovered. Without it, they would have had to open the box by force and such destruction went against the bank officer’s orderly soul.

  It was a silent ceremony: Mrs. Schatel inserted the bank’s key, Mr. Hagstrom turned the filigreed copy Julie Redmond had worn around her neck when she was killed; then they adjourned with the box to a small private cubicle where Mrs. Schatel left them without showing any sign of unprofessional curiosity.

  Mr. Hagstrom lifted the metal lid and found an unsealed manila envelope. “Well, well, well,” he said softly, spilling its contents on the bare table.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Pinchelli and helped him count the stacks of bills. They were mostly hundreds with several packs of fifties and totaled an astonishing eighty thousand dollars.

  After the envelope came a small wash-leather pouch, and somehow Sigrid found herself unsurprised by the sight of those glittering, flashing stones. Most were small faceted diamonds, but there were several sapphires and the fiery green blaze of emeralds.

  “These will have to be appraised,” said Mr. Pinchelli disapprovingly, and Mr. Hagstrom nodded in agreement.

  “Add the hundred and twenty-five thousand she deposited in her savings account this past year to that eighty thousand you just found, subtract the total from half a million, and you’ll probably be close,” Sigrid told them.

  “Is half a million a guess, Lieutenant, or specific knowledge?” asked the IRS man courteously.

  “Her father-in-law was killed last spring while carrying a quantity of unset stones which were not recovered. Their estimated worth was set at half a million.”

  “Before you claim these as stolen property,” said Mr. Hagstrom, “I must remind you that it is very difficult to prove the provenance of unset stones.”

  “Does it matter?” asked Sigrid. “I think Timmy and his father were the elder Mr. Redmond’s only near kin, so it all amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

  “Only if the boy remains with his father,” said Mr. Hagstrom cryptically.

  Sigrid shrugged. Other authorities could haggle about ownership of the gems; now that she had seen them, their disposition didn’t really concern her. What did hold her interest was the remaining item in the steel box—a ninety-minute cassette tape.

  “It might record financial information,” objected Mr. Pinchelli.

  “I shall want a signed receipt for that tape and a notarized transcript as soon as possible,” chimed in Mr. Hagstrom.

  “Of course,” Sigrid said noncommittally.

  Each of the three made an identifying mark on the cassette’s plastic casing, and Tillie provided an envelope in which to carry it back to headquarters.

  “What about the necklace?” asked Mr. Hagstrom as he watched her return it to her shoulder bag.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to hang on to that for now,” said Sigrid. “It’s part of our investigation.”

  They exchanged receipts all around; then Tillie and Sigrid departed, leaving Mr. Hagstrom and Mr. Pinchelli doing an Alphonse/Gaston over whose gemologist should appraise the jewels they’d found.

  The tape began with the buzz of a telephone bell heard through the receiver. A man’s voice answered. “Yeah?”

  “Mickey? Julie. Want to go with me next week to buy that new carpet I was telling you about?”

  “Huh?”

  “You remember, Mickey—the cream-colored carpet I wanted for the living room?”

  “Oh yeah, that silk thing that costs an arm and a leg. Where you gonna get the money for it?”

  “Maybe I’ll have the money next week,” she said archly. “Karl’s father is supposed to make a large sale tomorrow and Karl thinks he might get an extra bonus.”

  “This is it, Julie?” Novak’s voice squeaked with excitement.

  Julie’s voice, on the other hand, lacked his spontaneity. It was almost as if she were reading a script.

  “He’s taking a consignment of jewels over to the Hilton for some rich Arab to look at. Can you believe it? He’ll just grab a taxi near the shop sometime after lunch with half a million dollars’ worth of diamonds in his pocket like they were marbles. No guards, no nothing. Crazy, isn’t it? I hope no one tries to rob him.”

  “Maybe I’ll go along and be his bodyguard,” laughed Novak. “Tomorrow after lunch, huh?”

  There were clicking sounds on the tape and several inches unwound with nothing on it except static. Tillie leaned over to touch the fast forward button when an abrupt click signaled a new conversation.

  “—oon and I did it!” crowed Novak’s jubilant voice.

  “Who is this?” asked Julie Redmond sharply.

  “What do you mean who’s this? It’s me. Mickey. Your brother. And I’ve got ’em!”

  “Got what, Mickey?”

  If he hadn’t been so excited, the artificial innocence in her voice might have alerted him.

  “The diamonds, Julie! What the hell do you think I meant? Diamonds and emeralds and some sapphires, too! God, they’re pretty!”

  “How?”

  “I was waiting at a coffee shop down from his place from eleven-thirty on. About two o’clock, out he comes. No cabs in sight. I knew he’d go on down to the avenue, so I hurried on ahead, stepped in that alley near the corner, and when he came by, I grabbed him. He put up a fight, but I bopped him good.”

  “Oh, my God, Mickey! What have you done? Did you hurt him?”

  “Who cares? Now we can buy a dozen fancy rugs!”

  Another click and this time, the silence was final. Tillie re-wound the tape.

  “Do you want to hear it again?” he asked. Sigrid shook her head.

  “She really set him up good, didn’t she?” said Tillie. “She must have talked him into letting her put the jewels in her deposit box for safety and then played him a copy of the tape.”

  “Nicely staged to sound as if she were just passing on careless gossip about her husband’s business and that she was astounded that he’d acted on it so violently,” said Sigrid.

  “Do you suppose he got a penny out of it?”

  “Wasn’t there an unexplained thirty-thousand-dollar withdrawal soon after she opened her new savings account? Maybe that went to him.”

  “I’ll have transcripts made,” said Tillie, ejecting the tape from the player. “Want me to send a copy over to Timmy’s lawyer?”

  “Not just yet. We might—”

  The telephone on her desk interrupted discreetly. “Lieutenant Harald . . . Who? . . . Oh yes, Hodson.” She listened quietly. “Quite right, Hodson. Thank you.”

  “Trouble at the Redmond apartment again?” asked Tillie.

  Sigrid frowned. “Not the kind you mean. Hodson said Vico Cavatori was just carried out on a stretcher. Another heart attack.”

  “Dead?”

  “No, but it doesn’t sound good.”

  Once again that errant possibility niggled at Sigrid’s mind.

  She dismissed it and turned her thoughts to the upcoming interview with George Franklin.

  “Call around and see if anyone’s heard from Sue Montrose yet,” she told Tillie.

  CHAPTER 18

>   The ambulance’s interior was larger than it looked from outside, thought Vico Cavatori, or was that only because he was lying down?

  He was very tired, yet part of his mind was oddly alert. The dark face that kept bending over his—a white jacket, red and blue striped tie—was he Spanish, Indian, or Pakistani? So many nationalities in this great city which had taken him, too, so long ago. The dark-eyed young man smiled at him encouragingly each time he bent down, but he couldn’t smile back.

  There was a cold, rubbery smell to the oxygen they were giving him. He had blacked out only a moment it seemed, and suddenly here he was, hurtling through Manhattan streets, the siren more muffled than he would have thought.

  The pain in his chest had subsided, but it was still there, waiting.

  Through half-closed eyes he saw Luisa crouched beside him, frantic with fear. She clutched the crystal rosary that had hung above Paolo’s picture. Why that one? Why not the amethyst beads Pope John had blessed for them and which she had carried ever since that sunlit day in Rome?

  Sunlight and the crowds cheering and car horns blowing for the blessed new Bishop of Rome. Giovanni Ventitre.

  Santa Maria, how was it possible that more than twenty years had slipped away since then?

  How old would Paolo be now?

  Luisa’s fingers told the decades, slipping along the beveled crystal beads like time across their lives, but her lips only said his name over and over. He wanted to lift his hand and pat hers comfortingly; he could not move it.

  So very tired.

  Sleep, the longest sleep of all would not be unwelcome. Only that it would grieve Luisa so.

  Again, the old sadness swept over him, the years of knowing he was an end, not a continuance—not through him would his family’s blood flow into the future.

  Luisa should have had a dozen children to comfort her when he died, to distract her with grandchildren, to prove that his life went on.

  At least she would not be completely alone now. There was the child. Timmy. Karl would not object. Already, he had half given his consent for them to keep the boy. Not of their blood maybe, but surely of their hearts.

  Making a new life for Timmy would help Luisa into a life without him. And how good for the boy. Luisa had tried to keep from him the way Julie abused Timmy, but he had known.

  He had known.

  The ambulance swerved and came to an abrupt halt. The rear doors were flung open.

  “Here we go,” said the white-coated attendant.

  CHAPTER 19

  Shortly after three-thirty that afternoon, Detective Tildon rapped on Sigrid’s half-open door and stuck his head in.

  “Got a minute before Franklin gets here, Lieutenant?” Sigrid looked up from her work and motioned him to a chair by her desk.

  “I’ve been putting everything we’ve got in chronological order,” he explained, handing her a sheet of paper, “and I was thinking about those three-hundred-dollar deposits Julie Redmond made for twenty-one months.”

  “Yes?”

  “They started right after she quit her job to have the little boy and they end fourteen months ago.”

  “Just before old Mr. Redmond was killed,” she nodded. “So?”

  “So George Franklin told us the tap was installed to get divorce dirt on her husband, but now we know it was really to set up Mickey Novak so he’d kill her father-in-law and she’d wind up with all the jewels.”

  “Are you suggesting Franklin was in on that?” Sigrid asked dubiously.

  “Not necessarily. She wouldn’t have shared that with any more people than she’d have to, would she?”

  “Well, then?”

  “Well, what if it wasn’t just because she was such a good friend that he put the tap on for her?”

  Sigrid leaned back in her chair, elbows on the arm rests, her fingertips tented before her. It was her favorite listening position.

  “Explain.”

  Tillie hesitated. Brilliant bursts of intuitive logic were seldom his, but this had seemed like an inevitable progression.

  “You’re always saying that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one,” he said. “I just don’t think it’s a coincidence that those deposits stopped when they did. I think Julie Redmond was blackmailing George Franklin and she let him off the hook when he put the tap on her phone.”

  Sigrid considered his chronology. “Good point, Tillie. Certainly makes more sense that way.”

  Pleased, Tillie straightened his papers and glanced at his watch. “Franklin’s late,” he noted. “I’ll be at my desk when you want me.”

  Sigrid picked up the report she’d been reading when a thought occurred to her. “You had Jim Lowry checking for Karl Redmond’s cab. Did he have a chance to find it before Novak took him out of action this morning?”

  Tillie looked stricken. “I forgot all about asking him. I’ll go call now.”

  He returned in a few minutes and reported, “The nurse at the hospital says he’s under sedation and won’t be lucid before six, so I called Albee. Lowry hadn’t mentioned it to her, but she said she’d follow up on it. I told her to go ahead.”

  “Good. You did put an APB out on Novak, didn’t you?” He nodded.

  “And I suppose there’s no word on Sue Montrose yet?”

  “Nope. Her roommate wants to file a missing persons on her, but I told her it was too soon. What do you think?”

  “Hold off another day,” she decided. “It’s not even twenty­four hours yet. Maybe Franklin will remember something pertinent.”

  Both of them automatically checked the time. Ten to four. George Franklin was now twenty minutes late.

  By four-fifteen, they agreed that George Franklin did not intend to keep his appointment. Tillie got on the telephone and extracted as much information as the receptionist at Landau and Maas Electronics could supply: Mr. Franklin had left word that he was going home. She obligingly confirmed Franklin’s current home address and telephone number.

  On the off chance that she might know, he asked if Franklin owned a car.

  “Oh sure!” said the receptionist. “A white Volvo sedan.”

  He thanked her and tried the telephone number she’d provided. After twenty rings, it was apparent that no one would answer at Franklin’s apartment.

  A quick check with the Department of Motor Vehicles gave them a license plate number, and Tillie put it on the teletype with orders to locate and report only. Apprehending could come later.

  “Nothing to do now but wait,” Tillie told Sigrid on his way home. “You staying?”

  “Not too long,” Sigrid answered, eying the diminished pile of reports before her.

  As Tillie left, he glanced back at the dark head bent over her work. Beyond the fact that she was unmarried and seemed to live alone, he knew almost nothing about the lieutenant’s off­duty hours. All his life, Tillie had been surrounded by a cheerful, noisy family and he occasionally found himself wondering what it would be like to go home to silence every day.

  It was very seldom that he had their row house in Brooklyn to himself, but on the few occasions that he’d come home to find Marian gone and all the kids out, he’d felt uneasy and restless until they were back again. He wondered if the lieutenant ever felt silence closing in on her.

  Sigrid worked for another forty-five minutes until she came across a message slip that had somehow got mixed in with the papers on her desk. It was logged two-ten and said, “Call Jill Gill.” A telephone number was included.

  She dialed, waited, and had decided to hang up on the tenth ring; but a breathless voice answered on the eighth.

  “I’ve really got to see about having an extension put in the garden,” it said. “That’s where I was. Just be glad I wasn’t in the tub. Who’s this?”

  Bemused, Sigrid identified herself.

  “Terrific!” cried the entomologist. “Look, I’m giving a slide talk on lepidoptera at seven-thirty tonight. Want to come? It’s just a basic look at life cycles because it�
��s mostly for kids. Prettyman Day School down in the Village.”

  “Could I bring a friend?” Sigrid asked, thinking that Roman Tramegra ought to hear her talk if he was really going to write about the things.

  “Of course! Bring as many as you like. Bring a dozen. They never fill the hall. Parents like to see visiting experts listed on the school schedule, but they don’t like toddling out themselves. We’ll probably just have the science-fair types.”

  She rang off, promising to keep an eye out for Sigrid.

  Sigrid felt a bit guilty as she hung up. Jill Gill had given her those caterpillars so enthusiastically, and here she’d foisted them off on Roman.

  She dialed her mother’s number, since he was still staying there. When Anne Harald found him so down-and-out in Italy and sent him home with a key to her empty apartment, she’d expected him to pull himself together and reorder his life.

  Tramegra, on the other hand, had decided that an unoccupied apartment was an invitation to thieves. He had declared himself caretaker-in-residence until such time as either Anne returned or an irresistibly cheap apartment presented itself to his notice. So far, two months had gone by and he was still firmly entrenched.

  “Hello-please-say?” said a thin, unfamiliar voice.

  “Roman?” she asked, wondering if she’d reached a wrong number.

  There was a flurry of confused sounds, then his deep bass voice filled her ear. “Roman Tramegra here.”

  Sigrid relayed Dr. Gill’s invitation, and he fell upon it with what seemed to her excessive gratitude.