“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.