Three-Day Town - By Margaret Maron Page 0,36

ever met the dead guy was when he and his creepy wife were up here yesterday morning.”

“Creepy wife?”

“Don’t be mean, Nicco,” Luna said. She sat down at the far end of the long swing, slipped off her shoes, leaned back against the pillows, and put her stockinged feet in the artist’s lap.

“I’m not being mean. I’m being honest.” He began to massage her feet absentmindedly. “But you’ve got to admit that it’s creepy when somebody won’t look at you and you have to tell her husband what you want her to do before she’ll do it.”

“She has a psychological hang-up,” Luna told Buntrock. “I forget what it’s called but it’s like being pathologically shy. Anyhow, the last time the caterers came, they said they had to start with a clean kitchen and mine was a total mess, but my regular guy doesn’t work on weekends, so when I asked Antoine if he knew anybody, he told me that Phil’s wife helps out sometimes, so I called Phil and they came up. He asked me what I wanted done and I told him, and then he took her out to the kitchen and asked us not to go in till he came back for her, that it made her nervous.”

“Creepy,” Marclay muttered. “But that’s the only time I saw the man, so I don’t have anything to tell the police.”

“I think they want us to go through Luna’s guest list and mark everybody who knows anything about art.”

“Art?” asked Marclay. “Why?”

“Ours not to reason why,” Buntrock said lightly. He finished untangling his scarf and dropped the lei back in the bowl. When he put the flip-flops back in, something clinked against the glass and he saw that a shiny button or something had embedded itself in the spongy sole.

“Guest list?” said Luna. “I don’t have a guest list. I just went through the contact names on my phone and sent invitations to the people I like.”

“Which is how that asshole Rathmann got invited,” Nicco Marclay said truculently. Charles Rathmann occasionally reviewed for one of the throwaway weekly papers and he had not been kind to Marclay’s last show.

“So how do you know police people like that Lieutenant Vaughn and that professor from John Jay?”

“The pilot I made for StarCrest Productions.”

Marclay tweaked her big toe. “The one where you were supposed to play a Coney Island police officer?”

Luna nodded. “They were consultants on the shooting and we got to be friends.”

Of course they had, thought Buntrock. Luna was as friendly as a six-month-old puppy and just as confident as any puppy that everyone wanted to be her friend, too. Buntrock had to admit that such artlessness was appealing.

Marclay gave the ball of her left foot a final rub, then began on her right. “Too bad it didn’t get past the pilot. You could’ve made some serious bread.”

Buntrock lifted a cynical eyebrow. Trust Marclay to keep his eye on the economic ball. He himself had met Luna through the owner of Marclay’s gallery back when she was with another artist. Marclay had soon cut the other guy out. Out of the gallery and out of Luna’s life. Luna DiSimone might not be an A-list actor—hell, she was probably barely B-list—but she was a connection to that world, and it never hurt to have a sprinkling of showbiz glamour at your openings.

“You add any names to the guest list?” he asked.

Marclay shook his head. “It was her thing, not mine.”

“But you did ask if I’d invited Elliott and Mischa and Orton,” Luna said. She gave a contented sigh as Marclay kneaded the ball of her foot with his knuckles. “Ummmm, that feels so good.”

CHAPTER

10

Many of [the drawing rooms] resemble nothing so much as antique shops…. Louis Seize cabinets back up against the walls and hold Chinese porcelains, silver, glass, miniatures.

—The New New York, 1909

The doorbell rang and I called, “It’s open, Elliott. Come on in.”

“Sorry,” Lieutenant Harald said, “it’s not Elliott.”

Dressed in a white parka with the hood pushed back, she entered through the unlatched door, followed by Detective Hentz, whom we had met the night before, and a Detective Dinah Urbanska, a sturdy young woman in a navy blue jacket with golden brown hair and light brown eyes.

Lieutenant Harald seemed a little surprised to realize Elliott Buntrock wasn’t with us. “He left?” she asked.

“No, I’m still around,” he called, striding down the hall. He wore a white silk scarf around his neck now and had a heavy black overcoat draped over his arm.