little later. “I suppose we could link him to that flip-flop, but any good attorney would argue that your earring could have been dropped anywhere on this floor. And if he polished off his own fingerprints, then he polished off Jackson’s. We might still find a trace of Lundigren’s blood. Jackson admits that he panicked and grabbed up something heavy when Lundigren caught him rifling the apartment here. A man of impulse, our Sidney Jackson.”
“Is he still blaming everybody else?” Dwight asked, as he opened a bottle of wine and filled our three glasses.
“Oh, yes. According to him, none of this would have happened if people had been where they were supposed to be. If Lundigren had come or gone five minutes earlier, if Corey hadn’t come down to the basement at the precise moment he was disposing of Clarke’s body, if Deborah hadn’t come out just before the garbage trucks got here…”
We were seated around the coffee table in the living room. I suppose it was callous to ignore the reason a bath mat would be lying at an odd angle on the hardwood floor by the French doors, but truth to tell, I had almost quit noticing it. After a certain amount of time, an eyesore becomes something the eye passes over without really registering. I had finally changed out of my nightclothes and was seated at one end of the comfortable leather couch, ready to explore the plate of cheese and crackers Dwight had set out. I put a dab of Brie on a pita chip and popped it into my mouth, suddenly ravenous after missing breakfast and lunch. “So Denise wasn’t the building’s only thief?”
Sigrid was seated in a squishy leather club chair across the table from me and waved away the plate when I offered it, but accepted a glass of wine from Dwight.
“Jackson kept tabs on the whole building—who was home, who was out. Conditions for any one apartment had to be perfect.” She sat her wineglass on the coffee table to tick them off on her thin fingers. “Denise Lundigren had to have cleaned there the same day that outside workmen were there, and the residents had to be out for the evening. Plus, the service doors had to have one of the old locks on it. He’d helped carry in enough packages over the years to know which apartments had valuable little objects sitting around like those gold pillboxes.”
“What about Antoine?”
“Jackson says Clarke figured it out right away and was willing to tell him what went on during his eight-to-four shift for a cut of the profits. Only he was greedy and wanted to hit every apartment that met Jackson’s conditions, and Jackson didn’t want to do it more than three or four times a year, so Clarke was starting to freelance for himself.” Sigrid lifted her glass and took a swallow of wine. “Clarke drew the line at murder, though. He relieved Jackson during the party, but he’d gone to sleep before he heard that Lundigren had been killed. As soon as he heard the next morning, he called Jackson and accused him. Jackson knew it was either blackmail or exposure, and he couldn’t afford either. He figured correctly that Horvath would go to bed before he got here and the porters don’t work Sundays, so he thought he’d have plenty of time to dispose of Clarke before the man was missed, only here came the Wall boy down to get his sled and go have some fun in the snow.”
Sigrid lapsed into contemplation of the wineglass she held cradled in her hands and I figured she’d had a rough session with the boy’s parents. That’s always the hardest part for Dwight. I glanced at his face and he looked as if he was remembering some bad times of his own.
To break the mood, I said, “I know he hid that wheeled bin with Antoine’s body, but what did he do with the Wall boy? Don’t tell me he stashed him in one of those bunk beds, too?”
Sigrid shook her head. “Not with Horvath snoring away in one of them. No, he used the boiler room.”
“Under the tarps?” Dwight asked.
She nodded.
“So the cavity was already there when he needed a bolthole.”
“Right. He was no longer thinking clearly—”
“Hitting me and taping me up like a mummy was thinking clearly?” I asked indignantly.
Sigrid and Dwight both smiled.
“No, I guess not. I don’t think he knew what he was going to do with you.