Three-Day Town

CHAPTER

14

The number of restaurants, cafés, lunch counters—places where food is cooked and served—is something amazing to strangers. Some of the side streets are lined and dotted with eating establishments.

—

The New New York

, 1909

SIGRID HARALD—SUNDAY (CONTINUED)

As they left the Wall apartment, Sigrid’s phone vibrated in her pocket and she glanced at the screen. Elaine Albee.

Once they were out in the hall with the door closed, she answered the phone and heard Albee say, “Lieutenant? We’re down here in the basement. Does Hentz still have Lundigren’s keys? I think we’ve found where he kept his papers.”

A few minutes later, she and Hentz stepped off the elevator into a basement that smelled of musty cement overlaid with a faint aroma of motor oil and a stronger one of hot pastrami. Off to the left lay the boiler room, and beyond that, a hall that terminated at a steel door to an areaway outside. A high window in the door had bars embedded in the glass for security. The hall was lined with garbage bins that had wheels and tight-fitting lids so that no odors escaped. Although gray and utilitarian and crowded with the equipment needed to keep a building like this running, the basement felt clean and there was a sense of orderliness and purpose.

Straight ahead was a short hall that seemed to open into a locker room where the men could change from their street clothes into the brown wool uniforms provided by the board. Many articles of indoor and outdoor clothing hung from hooks along the wall. Through the arched opening, they saw two large men who sat with their backs to the door while they ate sandwiches at a Formica-topped table. Judging by the sounds from deeper in the room, they were also watching some sort of loud sports program on television. The announcer spoke excitedly in a language that was neither English, Spanish, nor French, the only languages Sigrid could confidently identify.

She glanced at her watch. Almost three. No wonder their fragrant sandwiches were making her hungry.

Battered chairs and occasional tables stood around, castoffs abandoned from above and rescued by the staff. A miscellany of pictures hung on the walls—everything from kitsch framed in ornate gold leaf to a cover of a National Geographic magazine signed by a well-known photographer and framed in bamboo.

“Down here,” Lowry called from somewhere off to the right.

They followed his voice through the dimly lit passage to a double bank of ceiling-high wire cages that measured about four feet wide by six feet deep. Each bore the number of an apartment and served as a storage locker for off-season clothes, luggage, or anything else an owner could not find room for upstairs. Most were neatly arranged; others looked as if the doors had been opened and stuff thrown in with a snow shovel.

Lowry pointed to a unit at the far end where Albee waited. “This one’s assigned to the Lundigren apartment,” she told them.

Somebody—Lundigren?—had built shelves to the ceiling to accommodate several cardboard boxes and two rows of books, but had left an alcove large enough to hold a rump-sprung swivel chair, a two-drawer file cabinet with wheels, and a small steel desk that was missing one of its original legs. A fairly new-looking laptop sat on the desk.

Hentz handed the super’s set of keys to Albee, and after four tries she found one that turned in the lock. They rolled the files out into the passageway, and after they found its key, Hentz and Sigrid each took a drawer while Albee tackled the laptop and Lowry went through the desk.

Sigrid hit paydirt immediately. “His birth certificate,” she said and handed it to Hentz.

There it was: Phyllis Jane Lundigren, female, born fifty-three years ago in Littleton, New Hampshire. In the same folder was a marriage certificate dated twenty-four years earlier for Phillip James Lundigren, age twenty-nine, and Anna Denise Katsiantonis, age twenty-seven.

“Cute,” said Lowry. “Don’t change the body, just change the name.”

Another folder was devoted to Mrs. Lundigren. It held her birth certificate and her medical records, including a stay in a New York psychiatric facility for treatment following a pseudocyesis when Denise was thirty.

Puzzled, Hentz said, “What’s pseudocyesis?”

“Hysterical pregnancy,” Sigrid told him. “Where a woman thinks she’s pregnant and develops all the symptoms, including morning sickness and actual birth pains.”

“Jeez!” said Lowry. “Talk about a screwed-up couple.”

Lundigren’s medical files showed no hospital stays, only annual physicals. On all the forms, the sex box was checked M, which would indicate a live-and-let-live doctor.

“Here’re their wills,” said Hentz. “Looks like they were pretty careful about the wording. No mention of husband or wife. He leaves everything to Anna Denise Katsiantonis Lundigren, and hers leaves everything to Phillip James Lundigren, both of this address.”

“Hey, Detectives!” someone called from back near the elevator.

“Yeah?” Lowry called back.

“You guys order pizza?”

“Yeah,” said Lowry. “Be right there.”

“I ordered an extra-large,” Lowry told them. “Figured maybe you hadn’t eaten lunch either.”

The promise of pizza was welcome news.

“You didn’t happen to order coffee, too?” Sigrid asked.

He grinned. “Sure did.”

Before he could reach for his wallet, she pulled out hers. “Let me get this, Lowry.”

His refusal was only pro forma. He took the bills she handed him and headed down the long passageway to the outer basement door. Minutes later, the appetizing fragrance of oregano and mozzarella reached them. They dragged chairs over to a rickety card table and were soon pulling apart the slices.

“Postal Pizza?” Sigrid asked. The red-white-and-blue box was printed to look like priority mail.

“Neither snow nor rain stays the swift completion of their deliveries,” Albee said with a laugh. “We got the number from the porter down there. This place delivers twenty-four/seven. The night man says he orders from them all the time, and when you get a look at his figure, you’ll know he’s telling the truth.”

“What’s he doing in so early today?” Hentz asked as he tried to keep sauce from dripping onto the folders he had brought from the files.

“He never left,” said Lowry, handing him a napkin. “The snow was so deep this morning when his shift ended, he just sacked out here. Same as Antoine Clarke. Both of them heard the weather report last night and were here by nine before it got too deep. There’s a set of bunk beds down there.”

“And a fridge, a TV, and a microwave,” said Albee, “plus a shower. All the comforts of home.”

Hentz listened as he leafed through the papers in the folder he had brought to the table. All were stamped by the management company that had hired the men. “Copies of the personnel files,” he said. “I guess he was their on-site eyes and ears.”

A copy of Lundigren’s own original job application was there, too, and they saw a younger version of the victim. In the grainy black-and-white photograph, his eyes appeared open and candid beneath those very bushy eyebrows.

Jim Lowry shook his head. “Even knowing he’s a woman, he doesn’t look like a woman. He must have taken hormones in the early years.”

Sigrid took the personnel file. The forms for later hires had color copies of their photographs and she lingered on that of Antoine Clarke. He had honey brown skin, brown eyes, and a clipped Afro. A trendy half-inch-wide beard outlined his square chin from ear to ear with a small pointed goatee in front. According to his application form, he was five foot seven, weighed 135, and was twenty-seven years old. Born in Jamaica, he became a naturalized citizen at age eleven when his parents were granted citizenship. An address in Queens had been crossed out and a new one up on West 146th Street penciled in. To the question of previous arrests, he had copped to a shoplifting charge eight years ago and a D&D two years after that.

None of the other employees listed arrests. Either they were less forthcoming or had each led spotless lives.

“Have someone run these names for us,” Sigrid said. “See if they’re as clean as they claim.”

She declined when offered one of the extra pizza slices. “So all three elevator men were here in the building last night? Too bad we didn’t get a chance to sit down with this Antoine Clarke before he quit. What about the porters? Any of them here overnight or during the party?”

“No, ma’am,” said Lowry. “They worked their usual eight to five on Saturday. Sidney got here about twenty minutes before we did.”

“Who else have you interviewed?” Sigrid asked as she retrieved a wayward olive that had rolled off her slice of pizza.

“Vlad Ruzicka, the porter working today, and Sidney, who normally has the four-to-midnight shift. Jani Horvath—he’s the night man—just got back from the deli, so we were giving them a chance to finish eating first.” He licked a dab of sauce from his fingers.

“Learn anything useful from either of them?”

“Not really. Lundigren ran a tight ship, but he doesn’t seem to have been a micromanager. He let them know what was expected, then left them to it. Wasn’t looking over their shoulders all the time, and they respected that. Didn’t socialize much, though. They said he spent a lot of time back here reading. Most of the books on the shelves over there are biography or current history. The others never knew if he was here or not unless they saw him or heard him or came and looked, and I get the impression that it kept them on their toes. They knew that management and the board would support Lundigren if he thought there was cause to fire one of them.”

“They tell you if Lundigren was having trouble with Antoine?”

“I think Vlad might know something, but Sidney said we’d have to ask Antoine, so Vlad clammed up, too.”

“Anything interesting on that computer?” Hentz asked Albee, who had made a quick scroll through Lundigren’s files.

“Nothing yet. I get the impression that he wasn’t all that comfortable with computers. Nothing’s password protected. There are some records for the building, and there are emails going back two or three years, but none of them look personal. Mostly it was business-related or tenants asking him to come change a lightbulb or do something about a leaky faucet.”

She wiped her lips and took a sip of coffee. “Mrs. Wall mentioned that their antiquated security system’s been on the fritz for the last few weeks, which is why we have no videotapes of who came and went last night. He seems to have been researching new systems and had narrowed it down to two companies. The rest of his Internet history is mostly reading the New York Times and anything about Lindsay Lohan.”

While they ate, Hentz brought the other two up to speed on their own interview with Mrs. Wall. “That watch she ‘misplaced’ had to be worth at least fifteen thousand,” he said.

“Easily,” Sigrid agreed, looking up from a color copy of Jani Horvath’s photograph. “Run her son’s name through the system, Albee. Corey Wall. See if he’s the reason his mother keeps a lock on her bedroom door.”

Elaine Albee wiped cheese from her fingertips and made a note of the name. “Corey Wall? He the kid that hijacked the elevator this morning?”

“Sidney thinks so,” said Hentz, adding his crumpled napkin to the debris on the table. “And he seems to have crashed the party last night. Sounds like a kid with a healthy sense of entitlement. If he steals from his own parents, maybe he stuck his nose inside 6-A, too.”

Sigrid took a final swallow of what had been surprisingly good coffee and pointed to the phone number on Antoine Clarke’s file. “Invite Clarke to come speak to us tomorrow. And while you’re at it, run a check on him, too. In the meantime, Lowry, you and Albee can go talk to the people in 7-A.”

She repeated what Mrs. Wall had told them about the Rices and their anger that Lundigren had reported them for various violations of the co-op rules. “They tried to bribe him not to and then threatened to sue him for slander when he did. The board has begun the eviction process and the Rices probably blame Lundigren for their troubles.”

Lowry nodded. “The Bryants did say that Lundigren was in their apartment looking for water damage from 7-A, right?”

Albee saw where he was going with that. “You think he could have brought one of the Rices in through the service door to prove negligence and it got out of hand?”

“Except that there wasn’t any new damage,” Sigrid reminded them. “Not last night, anyhow. But ask them.”

They put their dirty napkins and coffee cups on top of the uneaten pizza crusts and Jim Lowry carried the box to a wheeled bin lined with a large plastic bag. On his way back past the locker room, he stepped inside where two bulky men sat watching television. The porter, Vlad Ruzicka, wore the building’s brown coveralls, but the other man was in his own street clothes, thick black corduroy pants and a green wool sweater.

The television was so loud that Lowry had to shout. “Horvath? Jani Horvath?”

The man nodded, stood up heavily, and joined Lowry out in the passageway. “Lieutenant Harald wants to talk to you about last night,” Lowry said.

“Wait a minute,” said Horvath. His thick white hair covered his ears and he fiddled with the hearing aid in his left ear. There was a high-pitched squeal that faded as he adjusted the volume. “My pal there keeps the TV so loud, I have to turn this thing down or it’ll blast my ear off.”

His walrus mustache was as thick and white as his hair. It flared across his top lip and drooped longer on each side of his mouth. Could use a trim, thought Lowry. “I think you’ve got mustard in your mustache.”

Horvath pulled a grease-stained rag from his pocket and vigorously rubbed it across his upper lip till all the mustard was gone. “Now what’d you say before?”

“Down there,” Lowry said, pointing to the other end of the basement as Elaine Albee rang for the service elevator. “Lieutenant Harald.”

“Going my way, sailor?” Albee said from the doorway of the service elevator. She batted her eyes flirtatiously and Lowry laughed as he joined her. There was a time when he had tried to get past the banter, wanting a personal relationship; but she had dialed it back, refusing to get involved with someone on the job. These days they were each seeing someone else and their partnership was strictly professional. Except that sometimes Elaine would look over at his farmboy face when they were winding up the paperwork on an intense case or relaxing with colleagues at the cop bar down from the station and she would find herself wondering if it had been such a wise decision.

As the door of the elevator closed and she pressed the button for the seventh floor, she was swept with such a sudden urge to turn and kiss him that it took all her willpower to keep her voice steady and her hands in her pockets, to look as if she actually gave a flying flip about how they should play the Rices when all she wanted to do was stop the elevator, stop time, and say to hell with being sensible.

When Jani Horvath reached the card table, Sigrid had his file open and invited him to sit. He parked his wide bottom on one of the metal folding chairs across from her while Hentz leaned against the wall.

They had met the night before, so without ceremony Sigrid verified his name and address, then said, “I see that you’ve been working here fourteen years?”

He smoothed the ends of his mustache and nodded. “Fifteen this June. I worked as the day man, but when they fired the night guy and hired Antoine to take his place, I asked to switch. Not as much walking back and forth to let people in, no packages to haul in and out of the elevator. Not as many tips either, of course. My wife’s gone, so the night shift’s fine. The new kid said it was okay by him. He likes the tips. Likes the nightlife, too, see? So it works out for everybody.”

“Last night you said you hadn’t seen Lundigren come up to the sixth floor.”

“No. He would’ve used the back elevator, though.”

“So when did you last see him?”

“I got here about eight. Stopped off to pick up a beer and a cheeseburger for my supper. I like to have something to eat about four in the morning. Phil came in while I was putting them in the fridge and he loaned me a Sharpie so I could write the date on it, ’cause Denise checks by every few days and tosses anything that’s been in there a week. Keeps the fridge nice. Is she gonna be okay?”

“Her doctor hoped she could come home today,” Sigrid said. “You like her?”

“Sure. She’s okay once she gets used to you, and she always keeps the place good. Clean sheets on the bunks, washes the dishes if we forget. She was real kind when my wife left me last year. Sewed a button on my jacket for me.” He stretched out his meaty hands. “I don’t do too good with needles, see? Got a little arthritis in my fingers.”

“Was there anything different about Lundigren when you saw him last night?” Sigrid asked.

“Different?”

“Did he seem upset about anything?”

“Nope. He told us to keep an eye on the people in 7-A. The board’s gonna evict them and he was afraid they might do something to hurt the building before they get out. They’re not really our kind of owners. I don’t know why the board let them buy in. The rest of the shareholders act like regular people. The Rices act like we’re dirt. We’re not worth saying good morning to unless they want us to do something for them. Anyhow, I told Phil okay and he said he’d see me this morning. I went on in back to sack out and I guess he went to his apartment upstairs. Wish I’d had a chance to really tell him goodbye. He was a good man to work with.”

“About the new man. Antoine Clarke?”

“Yeah?”

“We’ve heard that he and Phil Lundigren didn’t get along too well.”

Horvath propped his elbow on the table and began twisting one droopy end of his mustache between his thumb and index finger. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Sure you would,” said Hentz. “You’re here the longest after Lundigren. You had to’ve heard if they didn’t hit it off.”

More twisting of his mustache until that end was nothing but a tight string, at which point he sighed and capitulated. “I don’t know what really set them off, but it started with the kids, especially the Wall boy.”

“Corey Wall?”

“Yeah. See, Antoine wanted to haul him up short the first time Corey stole the elevator on him. Wanted Phil to take it to the board. But Phil’s been here since before Corey was born. Used to let him stand on the polisher and hold on to the handle when he was little. Taught him how to ride his first bicycle right up there in the lobby. He really loved that kid. But Corey was fifteen when Antoine came and he didn’t like it when Antoine tried to make him quit horsing around in the lobby. Antoine’s not that much more than a kid himself, you know? Phil says they’re jealous of each other. Antoine’s already a man, see, but Corey’s gonna go off to college, have a good job, make a lot of money, and Antoine’s gonna be running an elevator the rest of his life.”

“Did you see Antoine last night?”

Horvath shook his head. “Not to talk to. I had to take a leak around nine-thirty and he was watching TV. Said the snow was starting to come down heavy. Next time I woke up, it was around eleven and he was climbing into the top bunk, so I told Sidney to go on home early. Right after that’s when all hell broke loose and you people wouldn’t let me take anybody down for a while. Antoine was still sleeping when I came down to eat my cheeseburger, see, so he didn’t know about Phil till I told him this morning when he took over for me and I came back here and sacked out again.”

Sigrid and Hentz exchanged glances. This definitely put Antoine Clarke in the building and awake when Lundigren was killed.

“Thanks, Mr. Horvath,” she said. “We’ll probably be talking to you again before this is over. Would you tell Mr. Ruzicka we’d like to speak to him?”

“Okay.” He stood to return to the locker room. “I got nobody to go home to, so if you need me, I’ll be bunking here again this evening. They’re saying we could have more snow.”

As he walked away, Albee and Lowry returned.

Hentz glanced at his watch. “That was quick.”

“The Rices lawyered up,” Lowry said. “Said that given all the animosity in this building, they weren’t speaking to us without one present and theirs won’t be back till late tonight. They’ll come down to the station tomorrow morning.”

Vlad Ruzicka was a big expansive man. Fifty-two now, according to the job application he’d filed seven years ago. His face was broad and flat with merry blue eyes and an infectious laugh.

When Sigrid introduced herself, he bounded over and shook her hand enthusiastically. “Lieutenant!” he exclaimed. “All day I’m hearing about the beautiful lady cop with eyes that can see into a man’s soul, and now here you are!”

“Have a seat, Mr. Ruzicka,” she said, reclaiming her hand.

“Call me Vlad. Everybody here calls me Vlad.”

He described at great length how shocked he’d been when Mrs. Wall called him this morning, how unbelievable it was, how hard it was going to be without Phil around to guide them, and what about poor Denise? The longer he talked, the sadder his face became, until his blue eyes filled to overflowing.

She interrupted to ask when he last saw Lundigren, and in a quavering voice he said, “Friday, near quitting time. He comes down to see the sign-up sheet for the coat racks. He says Luna DiSimone’s having a party on Saturday, so he puts her name on the sheet and tells me to have a good weekend and he’ll see me Monday. And now he’s gone.”

“Tell us about Antoine and Lundigren,” Sigrid said before his eyes could fill up again.

The tears vanished as quickly as they had come and with exaggerated caution he pretended to look first over one shoulder and then the other. “Sidney. He’s not here, is he? Not listening? And you won’t tell him what I say?”

“Your secrets are safe with us,” Hentz said dryly.

“It’s not a secret. Everybody knows that those two are like a cat and a dog with their tails tied together. Phil, he wants us to do everything by the rule book. Me? I don’t care. Sidney don’t care. You know the rules, you follow them, everybody’s happy, true? But Antoine, he doesn’t want to follow the rules if the owners don’t. Or the owners’ kids.”

“Boys like Corey Wall?”

Vlad clapped his big callused hands together in delight. “You got it! Corey Wall. He’s a little bastard right now, but his people are good people and he’ll be good people, too, when he finishes growing up. But Antoine gets mad every time Corey or his friend talk back to him or steal the elevator. Last time it happens, Antoine wants to ring the bell on 12-B and hit Corey with a glove.”

Bemused, Sigrid said, “With a glove?”

“Like those old movies where one guy hits another guy in the face with a glove.” He pantomimed the act with a backward flip of his hand. “Then next thing you see, it’s swords or pistols and somebody dies.”

“He wanted to challenge Corey to a duel?”

“No, no. Not really. I mean that’s how Antoine feels. Like Corey’s insulting him, and he wants to insult back. But Phil says he can’t and keep his job, so today it’s like take this job and shove it. He just quit. But Mrs. Wall swears it couldn’t be Corey who took the elevator. Not today. She says the only time he left the place today was to go sledding in the park. Besides, we don’t even know what floor the elevator was on. When I got here this morning, it’s right there in the lobby.”

Vlad Ruzicka could tell them nothing new about the Rices, although he would have happily walked them through the board meeting where it was decided to begin the eviction process. “Well, no, I wasn’t there, but Phil tells us about it. The Rices say they’re going to sue him and the board and the whole co-op.”

They thanked him for his help, but he was reluctant to take the hint that they were finished with him for the time being.

“I just hope you find whoever it is that sneaked in and did that to Phil.”

Hentz frowned. “Sneaked in?”

“Yeah. See, everybody thinks this place is like a bank vault. No way, Jose. I’m here six years but the locks on the service doors have never been changed. And people aren’t always careful with their keys, are they?”