was out to get him fired for something. Antoine needed this job even though he always acted like it wasn’t good enough for him. Like he ought to’ve been a headwaiter in some fancy restaurant or something.”
For a moment, the big bulky man became a mincing maître d’ with his nose in the air and his eyes at half-mast as he looked down his nose at them.
When asked again about the last time he saw Clarke, he described how he had helped one of the residents get two heavy suitcases down to the street and into a cab on Friday. “As God is my witness, each bag weighed as least fifty pounds. ‘What?’ I asked her. ‘You going for two months?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Two weeks.’ And it wasn’t even for a wedding.”
After he had slammed the trunk lid on the cab and started down the sidewalk to the service entrance, he saw Antoine pull some bills from his wallet and give them to the Wall boy. “There was still plenty of daylight left, so I saw at least two bills, but I couldn’t tell if they were fives or fifties.”
“Did Corey give him anything in return?”
“Not that I saw.” He pantomimed putting money in his pants pocket and giving it a satisfied pat. “Then he walked on up toward West End Avenue. Antoine passed me on the way to his train and I said I hoped he had a good weekend. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said and that was that. Who could know?” Ruzicka’s face turned so mournful they almost expected to see tears. “Last words I ever heard him say.”
It was now 7:15 and Sigrid was ready to call it a day. Urbanska had left an hour ago to take the red flip-flop with Judge Knott’s earring to the lab and to issue a be on the lookout for Corey Wall as a “person of interest.” Lowry volunteered to check the car back into the motor pool for Hentz, and Albee went with him.
“Didn’t you tell Buntrock you were playing tonight at some jazz club down in the Village?” Sigrid asked Hentz.
He gave her a wary nod.
“I’m headed home that way. If you want a lift, it’ll give us a chance to discuss this case.”
When he hesitated, she shrugged. “Or not. I have to go back upstairs. I must have left a glove in the lobby.”
He followed her up the service steps. As she retrieved her glove from the couch, the front elevator doors opened for the Bryants, who seemed to be dressed for an evening out. Gone was the judge’s disheveled look of this afternoon. Her sandy blonde hair fell smoothly around her face and she had given it a spritz of gold shine. A smoky blue eye shadow enhanced her clear blue eyes, and her lipstick was the same bright red as the cowl-necked sweater she had worn Saturday night. A dressier pair of gold earrings gleamed in the soft lights of the lobby.
There was a time when Sigrid would not have noticed what another woman was wearing or else would have been intimidated if the woman was as confidently attractive as this judge appeared to be. Although Grandmother Lattimore seemed to love her as much as her other granddaughters, she had bluntly voiced her doubts that such an ugly duckling could ever evolve into the swan every other Lattimore woman became, as if beauty were a birthright. Even when they were not classically beautiful, they carried themselves as if they were, and a willing world agreed.
“You’re already too tall and your neck is too long, but you have nice eyes and they do say you’re going to be real intelligent,” her grandmother had said with a sigh when Sigrid was twelve or thirteen and nothing but skinny arms and legs.
It took Oscar Nauman to make her apply that intelligence to her looks, to realize that making the most of one’s physical assets was not some arcane mathematical problem. For years, she had worn her fine dark hair pulled straight back into a utilitarian bun. Then, on an impulse, she had gotten it cut short so that it feathered across her forehead and softened her brow. After that, she read a couple of books, looked at some online tutorials, and experimented with light makeup that could and would enhance her high cheekbones and wide gray eyes. She learned that lip paint would last all day, and that some colors flattered her clear pale skin while others would