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Chapter 10 • Chapter 11 • Chapter 12 • Chapter 13 • Chapter 14
Chapter 10
IT IS BARELY ELEVEN in the morning when I leave Baby D’s apartment. The day is cold and crisp, and to the happy person...Christmas is in the air. The sadness that I’ve come to know so well begins to descend. As the doctors say, “Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, ten being the most painful.” I would call it a six or seven.
I walk down Park Avenue and turn left on 59th Street. I am at a store I enjoy enormously, Argosy, the home of rare maps and prints, antiquarian books. Perhaps a $30,000 volume of hand- colored Audubon birds will lift my spirits. Perhaps a letter addressed to John Adams and signed by Benjamin Franklin will cheer me up. I touch the soft leather on the binding of a first-edition Madame Bovary. I study a fifteenth-century map of my native land—a survey of France so misshapen and inaccurate, it might as well be a picture of a dead fish. But I buy nothing.
The same happens to me in Pesca, a swimsuit shop, where Dalia once bought a pale-yellow bikini for five hundred dollars, where I could buy an old-fashioned pair of trunks with a bronze buckle in front for $550 and look just like mon grand-père on the beach in Deauville. I move on to other shops.
But nothing is for me. Not the art deco silver ashtrays, not the leather iPad cases that cost more than the iPads that they hold.
No. Not for me. But also not for me are the street corner Santa Clauses, the exquisite twinkling white lights in the windows of the townhouses, the impromptu Christmas tree lots on Third Avenue.
In the season of buying I have, for once, bought nothing.
Chapter 11
I REALLY DO intend to return to Midtown East and meet with K. Burke. Really. But then other instincts take over. I decide to return to 535 Park Avenue. I must make a dent in this case. I must redeem myself.
I walk back toward Baby D’s building. This morning I interviewed the super, a handsome middle-aged guy named Ed Petrillo. Like most Park Avenue supers Petrillo wears a suit, has an office, and thinks he’s running a business like General Motors or Microsoft. He says he was at his weekend house (the super has a weekend house!) for Thanksgiving.
I also spoke with the first-shift doorman, Jing-Ho. He was not aware of anything unusual. He suggested that I talk to George, the doorman who came on after him. I let other detectives speak to George, but now I need to stick my own fingers into this pie.
I arrive at the building and exchange a few words with the police guard at the corner of Park and 61st. “Nothing suspicious, nothing extraordinary.” He’s seen a bunch of limos outside the Regency Hotel across the street. He’s seen a celebrity—either Taylor Swift or Carrie Underwood. He’s not sure. (Hell, even I would know the difference.)
George the Doorman has the full name of George Brooks. The dark-blue uniform with gold braid fits him well. He wears black leather gloves.
“In winter we wear leather gloves. Other times of the year it’s strictly white gloves. White gloves are what separates the ‘good’ buildings from the ‘cheesy’ buildings.”
He is a polite guy, maybe thirty-five.
“Listen, Detective, not to be uncooperative or anything, but two other detectives have already asked me a bunch of questions—all I can do is tell you what I told them. I really don’t know much. I mean, Mrs. Dunlop didn’t have many guests. Just the usual deliveries through the service entrance—groceries, flowers, Amazon, liquor.”
“Just tell me anything unusual about the day she died,” I say. “Even if you think it’s not important, just tell me.”
“Nothing. Really nothing. She had come back Thursday night from the country. Her regular driver dropped her off.” He pauses for a moment. “I didn’t like the driver, but who the hell cares about what I think.”
“I care quite a bit about what you think. Why didn’t you like him?”
“He wasn’t here long, but he thought he was better than the building staff. Because he drove a rich lady around in a car. A big black Caddy, an Escalade. Who gives a shit? Here’s a good example: drivers are not supposed to wait in the lobby. That’s the rule. They either stay in the car or go downstairs to the locker room. The driver was always standing outside smoking or sitting on the bench right here by the intercom phone. So I tell Mr. Petrillo about it...”
“The super,” I say.
“The super, yeah. So Mr. P. tells him he can’t do it anymore, and Simon says that that’s bullshit. He says he’s going to tell Mrs. Dunlop. Mr. Petrillo says go right ahead. Well, I guess Mrs. Dunlop agrees with the rules of the building. So the next thing you know—bam!—Mrs. Dunlop is getting a new driver.”
I’ve read all this previously, in the interviews taken down by the other detectives, but I do notice a small trace of triumph in George Brooks’s face when he arrives at the climax of his story.
I also know that the driver, whose full name is the very impressive moniker “Preston Parker Simon,” did not say he was fired. According to his manager, he’d quit. K. Burke had checked Simon out with Domestic Bliss, an employment agency that places maids, laundresses, chauffeurs, and the occasional butler. Simon hadn’t answered her calls, but a manager at Domestic Bliss, Miss Devida Pickering, told Burke that Simon was honest and dependable. But, she said, Mrs. Dunlop only used him part-time, and Simon wanted to be a full-time chauffeur. So that was that. But as that is never really that, we would need to track him down. He was the last person to see Baby D alive. I thank George. He offers me his hand to shake. I, of course, shake it.
I tell him thank you.
He says, “It’s been great talking with you, absolutely great.”
Chapter 12
A MINUTE LATER, I am in the basement of the building. My interviewee is fifty-four years old and is wearing khaki pants with a matching shirt. The shirt has the words “535 Park” emblazoned in red thread on the pocket.
The man’s name is Angel Corrido, and Angel stands in the doorway of the service elevator. As we talk he removes clear plastic bags of very classy recycling. Along with the newspapers and Q-tips boxes are empty bottles of excellent Bordeaux and Johnnie Walker Black Label, empty take-out containers from Café Boulud.
I’ve already been briefed on his initial interviews on the scene, so my first question is the old standby: “Could you tell me anything I might not know about Mrs. Dunlop?”
He shrugs, then speaks. “No, nothing. Mrs. Dunlop never sees Angel Corrido.”
“Never?”
“Eh, maybe sometimes.” He removes a bundled stack of magazines.
“When I see her...Mrs. Dunlop...she is nice. She says, ‘Hello, Angel. How are the wife and the children?’”
Angel laughs and says, “I have stopped telling her that I don’t have a wife and I don’t have children. She don’t remember. She is nice, but a man who runs the back elevator blends in with the other men who run back elevators and shovel snow and take out garbage.”
Angel does not sound angry at this. He actually seems to think it’s amusing.
“Were you working here on Thanksgiving?” I ask.
“No, I come to work early the next morning. No back elevator on Thanksgiving.”
He takes the last bag of recycling from the elevator. Then he throws a glance at the stairs leading down from the lobby above.
“But Angel can tell you something you do not know. But it is not about Mrs. Dunlop. It is about someone else.”
“Yeah?”
He says nothing.
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