Take Out Page 7

  B’Nita Parsons gave a quick glance down at the calendar on her computer screen and saw only Elliott Buntrock’s name. “She’s in a meeting right now. Did you have an appointment?”

  “No, but I think she’ll talk to me.”

  A moment later, Hester Kohn looked up as her assistant tapped at her office door and entered without waiting for an answer.

  “Sorry, Hester, Mr. Buntrock, but there’s a man here to see you.”

  “Tell him to come back, B’Nita. We’re busy right now.”

  “I really think you should see him. Both of you. He says he’s Oscar Nauman’s son.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  What?” Buntrock came to his feet so abruptly that his chair tipped over and papers went flying as he scrambled to catch them.

  “He’s who?” asked Hester Kohn. “Like hell he is!”

  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” said B’Nita Parsons, holding up her hands. “Shall I show him in?”

  Hester could only nod mutely as Buntrock retrieved his papers and righted the chair.

  The man who entered appeared to be in his early forties. He was as tall as Oscar Nauman and his hair was going white; otherwise, Hester saw no resemblance to the artist she had known since she was a child playing under her father’s desk in this very office. His shoulders were broader, his neck much thicker, but yes, his eyes were blue and returned their appraising stares with an unsmiling appraisal of his own.

  To break the awkward silence, Buntrock stretched out his hand. “Elliott Buntrock. This is Ms. Kohn, and you are—?”

  The stranger gave an embarrassed shrug. “Actually, I’m not quite sure what to tell you. My passport says Vincent Haas. My birth certificate says Vincent Nauman.”

  His spoke with a slight accent.

  “Sind Sie Deutscher?” asked Buntrock, who was semi-fluent in several languages.

  “Not German, no. Austrian…well, actually, I’m an American. Born in California, but brought up in Austria. Please. May I explain?”

  “By all means,” said Hester Kohn. She gestured for him to take the other chair across from her desk, an asymmetrical slab of sea-green glass. The heady scent of her gardenia perfume elicited an appreciative smile from the stranger.

  “My birth mother was Lila Nagy,” he said, laying a manila envelope on the irregular corner of the desk that jutted out toward him. He looked from Hester to Elliott. “I see that the name is familiar to you, Mr. Buntrock.”

  Elliott, who labored under the delusion that he had a poker face, nodded.

  Hester looked at him inquiringly.

  “Rudy Gottfried said she and Nauman met soon after he came to New York,” Elliott said. “Back when he and Oscar shared a studio downtown.”

  “Then perhaps you knew that when she left him, she went to California?”

  “I really don’t know any of the details. Just that they were lovers and that she tried to cut off his ear and—”

  Hester was startled. “She did what?”

  “And,” said Elliott, “I think she tried to attack the woman he started seeing after they broke up.”

  “Yes, this too is what I have been told. After that incident, she fled to California and gave birth to me there.” He took a document from the envelope and slid it across the green glass surface of the desk. “As you see, Oscar Nauman of New York City is listed as my father.”

  Hester scanned the paper and passed it on to Elliott. “Back then, she could have named anybody. This birth certificate doesn’t make it so.”

  “True,” he agreed. “But why would she lie all those years ago? I only know what she told my mother. My adoptive mother.”

  “Let him finish, Hester,” said Elliott, and she subsided back into her chair.

  “Thank you,” said Vincent Haas. “You know that Lila Nagy is in a prison for the criminally insane?”

  Clearly, Hester did not, but again, Elliott nodded.

  “I was told that even as a child, she would go into uncontrollable rages. In the end, she killed a young woman and this time, they sent her to prison. Her sister—my adoptive mother—flew over for the trial and took me back to Austria with her. I wasn’t even three, so I have no memory of that time. Some of her paintings hung on the walls of our house and they talked about her talent and her beauty, but I was never told that Lila was my mother. Instead, I was brought up as the son of Anja and Klaus Haas.”

  Hester frowned, but did not speak.

  “My father died about two years ago, my mother this past January. Among her papers was a letter to me and this birth certificate. The letter told me Lila’s history—where she was and the awful thing she had done—and that I was Lila’s son by a famous artist. She said that she wrote to him after my father died and told him about me, but she never heard back from him.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Hester murmured. “Anja Haas! That’s why the name sounds familiar. A registered letter came for Oscar the day he left for California. From an Anja Haas. It had an Austrian return address and it was marked urgent, private, and personal. I remember that I took those words at face value because they were heavily underlined, so I put it in a new envelope the same day and overnighted it to his hotel. When we heard that he’d died, it went right out of my mind, but you were there, Elliott. Did he get it?”

  “If he did, he didn’t mention it to me.”

  “So he never knew,” Vincent Haas said sadly. “When first I read my mother’s letter, I hoped it might mean that I had a brother or sister, but I searched online and it didn’t say he ever married or had children.”

  “No,” Hester said.

  “Maybe if he’d lived,” Elliott murmured.

  Hester lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “You think? Can you see Sigrid in an apron? Or changing diapers?”

  “All the same—”

  Vincent Haas stirred in his chair. “Is there anyone who would know about his brothers or sisters?”

  “Maybe,” said Hester. “I never heard any mention of relatives. In fact, I think he was an only child, but my father’s partner is still alive. If anyone would know, surely it would be Jacob.”

  Haas’s face brightened. “Is he here in the city? Can I see him?”

  “I don’t think so.” She looked at Buntrock. “Maybe Sigrid could arrange it?”

  Buntrock frowned. “Do we really want to bring her into it now?”

  “Who is this Sigrid?” Haas asked.

  Ignoring his question, Hester said, “Tell me, Mr. Haas. What exactly is it that you want? Are you planning to put in a claim against Oscar Nauman’s estate?”

  Haas shrugged. “Why not? Is that so strange? He was my father. I’m his son. Doesn’t that give me certain rights?”

  Hester Kohn turned to her computer screen and clicked several times, and lights blinked on the printer behind her. A moment later, she handed Vincent Haas the printout.

  “That’s the name and address of Oscar Nauman’s attorney.” She stood up and her voice was cold. “He’s the one you should talk to. Not us.”

  “Please!” he protested. “Money is not the important thing.”

  “No?” She touched a button on her desk phone. “Mrs. Parsons will show you out.”

  When they were alone, Hester reached for her phone. “I’d better give Marcus Livingston a heads-up.”

  Buntrock was pacing her office like an agitated shore bird whose catch had just been snatched away by an opportunistic gull. “God knows what this is going to mean for the Arnheim retrospective.”

  “And somebody needs to tell Sigrid,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  9

  When Sigrid got back to her office, she stepped out of the elevator without looking and collided with a uniformed officer, who dropped the sheaf of papers he was carrying. As they both apologized, she stooped to help him pick up the pages and saw that they were photocopied pictures of the older dead man that had been doctored to show him with open eyes. Across the top in bold black letters was “DO YOU KNOW THIS M
AN?”

  “Detective Tildon’s asked me to pass these out along Tenth Avenue,” he explained.

  In the squad room, Sigrid asked Tillie, “Why Tenth Avenue? Did someone recognize him?”

  “Not yet, but if I’m right, we could know who he is by Monday.” He flourished a plastic bag. “Remember this blue rubber band from the guy’s ponytail?”

  Sigrid didn’t, but she was used to the way Tillie noticed details the rest of them often missed and now that she looked at it more closely, she saw that white letters were printed on the band—C.J. Smith Farms—PLU 4080.

  “What does that mean?”

  “This rubber band started life around a bunch of asparagus from a farm in New Jersey,” he said happily. “PLU stands for price look-up, and 4080 is the code number for asparagus. This rubber band looks new, so our victim probably acquired it fairly recently. And you know that Duane Reade receipt that was in his pocket?”

  Sigrid nodded.

  “It was from the store on Ninth and Forty-Third. I called C.J. Smith Farms and they said they sell asparagus to a market that’s just around the corner. I figure that if we distribute the guy’s picture within a three-block circle around the drugstore and the market, we might get lucky.”

  “Good thinking,” Sigrid said.

  Albee and Lowry described how they had located the homeless man who had slept on that bench for most of the winter until Matty Mutone claimed it for himself.

  “His name’s Laurence Church,” said Lowry. “And Mutone didn’t chase him away. He left of his own accord for a halfway house over on Staten Island. Doesn’t sound like there was any bad blood between them. In fact, he probably wouldn’t have remembered Mutone at all except that some old lady—probably the Orlano woman—brought Italian food down there the last night before he left for Staten Island and Mutone said that she’d been a friend of his mother.”

  “So it looks like we’ve pretty much covered the block except for your friend Gottfried,” said Elaine Albee.

  “I talked to him today,” Sigrid said, looking over her notes. “He told me that one of the people who occasionally left food there was a Nick Finmore from the diner. Anybody talk to him?”

  Dinah Urbanska raised her hand like a schoolgirl. “That was Sam and me, Lieutenant. We spoke to him on Wednesday. He said he hadn’t seen Mutone in a couple of weeks, though.”

  She nodded at Lt. Hentz, who had just joined them.

  “What about the other one?” Sigrid asked.

  “We showed him the picture. He thought our guy was there Tuesday afternoon, but he couldn’t be positive. Right, Sam?”

  “Right,” said Hentz as he dropped his notepad on his desk and sat down. “He remembered the ponytail. Said if it was the same man, he ordered coffee, nothing else, then took a table by the window and seemed to be waiting for someone.”

  “Who?”

  “He couldn’t say. They got busy then and next time he looked, the guy was gone.”

  “Try the diner again,” said Sigrid. “It seems to be information central for that block. Maybe someone else noticed if he left with anybody. In the meantime, did you learn anything about Mutone from the Jennings woman?”

  Hentz laughed. “Oh yes. That’s quite a business she’s got there.” As Dinah Urbanska managed to set a full mug of coffee on the corner of his desk without spilling it, he thanked her, then continued his report. “Her ladies get eighty dollars an hour for their services or four hundred for all night.”

  There were snickers around the squad room and Sigrid frowned. “Is somebody on the take? Why hasn’t she been shut down?”

  “Because she’s not selling sex, Lieutenant. She’s selling cuddles. It’s a cuddles-for-hire place.”

  “Cuddles?”

  “Oh, I read about that,” Urbanska said. “It’s so sad, isn’t it?”

  “Sad?” asked Elaine Albee.

  Urbanska nodded. “Imagine if you didn’t have anybody in your life who would touch you or hug you. Lonely people. Ugly people.”

  “Elderly men who’ve lost their wives and women who don’t have any relatives. Or the disabled,” said Hentz. “They pay to have someone lie down beside them and just cuddle. Hug them, stroke their arms, smooth their hair. Physical human touch.”

  Lowry looked at them in disbelief. “They pay? Just to get hugged?”

  “What else do they get for their eighty bucks?” asked Detective Gonzalez with a cynical leer.

  “Nothing,” Hentz said flatly. “Both people are fully dressed and the clients have to sign a paper that they will not try to have sex.”

  “And there’s a market for that?” asked Albee.

  “Yep.”

  “You’re right, Dinah,” Albee said. “That is sad.”

  Tillie shook his head. “Was that the ‘freebie’ Janis Jennings gave Mutone?”

  Hentz nodded. “She felt sorry for him. They keep extra clothes on hand and if it’s needed, the clients take a shower first and change into clean pajamas. She gave him a session back in the winter, but it made him so emotional that she passed him over to one of her other residents the next time she felt charitable.”

  “Residents?” asked Sigrid.

  “All women and all currently single. They seem to range in age from late twenties to late seventies. It really is an SRO,” said Hentz. “With a waiting list. They pay her a monthly rent and they get a single room and bath, kitchen privileges, and the use of the common rooms on the first floor. She doesn’t handle their bookings, but she will take phone messages if they don’t want to give out their private numbers. Besides, some of them have regular jobs.”

  “Did you speak to the other woman who did Mutone?” asked Sigrid. She knew she sounded condescending, but damned if she was going to say cuddled.

  “She left for the weekend,” he said, “but she’s due back on Monday.”

  “Monday it is, then,” said Sigrid, who was ready to call it a day.

  Sigrid was neither a jogger nor a yoga enthusiast and exercise machines bored her. Nevertheless, instead of heading straight home, she yielded to the siren call of the gym she had joined several years ago because of its Olympic-size pool. She had discovered the value of swimming back in boarding school and now it was both workout and yoga, a way to blank her mind and give herself up to the sensual pleasures of the water.

  In the locker room, she changed into a one-piece white suit, then sluiced off in the shower. As soon as she entered the large tiled space with its clean, uncluttered surfaces and strong smell of chlorine, she felt herself relaxing. As usual on any afternoon, this close to quitting time for so many of Manhattan’s office workers, the marked lanes were all occupied and she waited till a space opened up in a lane that had only one swimmer. He seemed to be setting a comfortable pace, so she slid into the water several lengths behind him, stroking steadily, arm over arm.

  Just when she felt she could go no longer, her lungs seemed to open deeper. It was as if she had slipped into overdrive and an out-of-body euphoria took over. Now she could let surface thoughts skim across her mind, could let herself think about Nauman’s sketchbook and all those quick studies he’d made of her while she was unaware. She could consider loneliness and how people would pay to have someone hold them, which led inexorably to memories of Nauman and how it had felt to lie in his arms and feel the steady rise and fall of his chest as he slept. He slept so quietly that more than once she had reached out in the darkness to reassure herself that he still breathed. Given their age difference, logic had warned her that she would probably outlive him by several years. At the time, though, she had pushed logic aside, and when the inevitable came so much sooner than anyone would have predicted, logic was cold comfort.

  “You were not his first,” Buntrock had told her after Nauman’s death. “But he said you were his last.”

  She had turned away, not wanting him to see her raw emotions. “Don’t,” she’d said, but Buntrock had persisted. “He did not want to be your last, Sigrid.”

>   Unthinkable then, but here in the water, she could finally consider the possibility of another love, as unlikely as it still seemed.

  She wondered if Buntrock would know if Lila Nagy was the reason Nauman had driven out into the hills above LA and if so, why he hadn’t mentioned it.

  After another twenty minutes, a third swimmer entered her lane, so she cut short her cool-down period and was soon on her way home to the house she shared with Roman Tramegra on Hawker Street, a block or so east of the Hudson.

  It belonged to his godmother’s sister and when a series of circumstances forced Sigrid to find a new apartment, Roman had convinced her to give sharing this house a try. It had worked out much better than she’d hoped.

  In the beginning, she had fallen into the stereotypical trap and assumed that an unmarried man in his early fifties was gay. But he had never brought anyone home and she eventually decided that, while he loved gossip and societal intrigue, he was one of those rare free spirits with absolutely no interest in sex.

  Although he had never said, she gathered that Roman possessed a modest trust fund, which he augmented by writing and selling short articles for a wide variety of small magazines. He had been enchanted to learn that Sigrid was a homicide detective, and had immediately set about writing a mystery novel. To her surprise, the book actually found an editor and he was currently working on a sequel. The thrill of being published, together with the tax write-offs for research and travel, more than compensated for the publisher’s small advances.

  Roman could be exasperating with his adventurous approach to cooking, his magpie curiosity, his speculations as to who was doing what with whom, and his endless questions about police procedure. For the most part, though, he respected the boundaries she set and they had settled into a comfortable relationship. He was enough older that it was rather like living with an eccentric uncle, an uncle whose eccentricities occasionally caused her to look at her cases from a different angle.