Lethal Legacy (9 page)

I heard the front door of the apartment slam shut
and footsteps—it sounded like a woman in spike heels—coming down the hallway. I
was hoping to see Tina Barr, thinking she might shed some light on this.

“Give me a break, Guido, we just got here. We’re
waiting for the ME now,” Mike said. “The broad was DOA, yeah. Don’t go with it
yet, but it could be Hunt. Minerva Hunt, okay?”

The Chandleresque brunette—tall, lean, and tough
looking—struck a pose in the doorway of the kitchen, dressed also in a
well-tailored and probably expensive black suit. She looked through me as
though I were invisible, tossed back her hair, and smiled at Mike.

“Now what kind of detective work is that?” she
asked him. “Do I look dead to you?”

SEVEN

Minerva Hunt was perched on the corner of Mike
Chapman’s desk in the offices of the Manhattan North Homicide Squad.

Mike seemed to be as interested in her affect as
he was in her appearance. I watched him look her over again as she glanced
around the room. She was casually coiffed and carefully made up to accent her
dark eyes and full lips.

“Doesn’t exactly have the makings of a physical plant
for a think tank, does it?” Hunt said, scanning the room.

The desks that were positioned back to back with
each other had been cheap when they were purchased twenty years earlier.
Computer equipment was usually outdated by the time it was installed. The
drunken arrestee groaning on the bench in the holding pen behind us, who had
beaten his mother-in-law to death just hours ago, was a harsh reminder of the
business at hand.

“Most of the time we get it done,” Mike said. “You
feeling better?”

Two hours earlier, when Minerva Hunt first saw the
corpse on the kitchen floor, she had lost her composure. But the emotional
outburst was short-lived, and a frosty veneer had settled over her like a thin
sheet of ice.

“Karla Vastasi?” Mike asked, making notes on the steno
pad he carried in his jacket pocket.

“Karla with a
K,
Detective. Could I trouble
you to ask the lieutenant for one of his cigarettes, Mr. Wallace? And don’t
tell me about the no smoking rules. I really need it.”

“There’s a chair for you here, Ms. Hunt,” Mike
said.

“I’m perfectly comfortable,” she said, recrossing
her shapely legs, which had caught the attention of the two older detectives
working on the far side of the room.

“How long ago did you hire her?”

“She came to me during the winter. I’d say it’s
been eight or nine months.”

“What did she do for you, exactly?”

“I told you, Mr. Chapman. Karla was my
housekeeper. That’s what we call them now, isn’t it? I mean we don’t say things
like ‘maid.’”

“Did she live with you?”

“No. She slept at my apartment occasionally when I
traveled. Took care of the dog if I was called away.”

“And where is your home?”

“Thanks, Detective,” Hunt said to Mercer. She
stood up and let him light her cigarette for her, holding her perfectly
manicured hands around his. “I’ve got a town house on Seventy-fifth Street.
Between Madison and Park.”

“Where did Karla live?”

“Queens. Somewhere in Queens,” Hunt said, sticking
the edge of a brightly painted red fingernail between her two front teeth while
she thought. “The agency will have an exact address for her. Matter of fact, I
probably have some receipts from the car service I use. Sometimes I sent her
home that way if it was late or she wasn’t feeling well.”

“Family? Do you know anything about Karla’s
relatives?”

“There’s a sister here in the States. Connecticut,
I think. The rest are back home.”

“Where’s home?” Mike asked.

“Which is the country where the women all have
such perfect skin? You know…they all come here to be facialists?” Minerva
asked, looking at me. “Romania, isn’t it? Yes, she’s Romanian. The employment
agency has all that information.”

“How old was she, do you know?”

“She told me she was forty-five.”

I guessed Hunt to be a few years older than that.

“Did she have a husband, a boyfriend, a social
life?”

“The ex is back in the old country. And no, no
social life on my time.”

“She’s a good-looking woman,” Mike said. “Never a
guy hanging around?”

Hunt inhaled and flicked her ashes on the floor.
“She asked to sleep at the house once or twice because the man she was dating
got a bit too possessive, maybe a little rough. But I never went into that with
her, and I think they broke up during the summer.”

“Let me ask you, Ms. Hunt, did anyone ever get the
two of you confused?”

She looked at Mike as though he had just punched
her in the face. “Confused? The girl could barely form a proper sentence in
English. She cleans house, makes the beds, washes the dishes.”

“Physically, Ms. Hunt. Karla was about your
height, had a nice figure, hair about the color of yours—”

“And she was the help, detective. I’m not sure who
would have had trouble getting that clear. My friends? The dry cleaner? The
butcher? I don’t know if you meant that as a compliment to her or an insult to
me.”

“We’ve got to figure out if whoever killed Ms.
Vastasi was looking for her,” Mercer said, “or consider the possibility that
she was mistaken for you. You own that apartment, don’t you?”

“Yes, but I didn’t spend any time there.”

“You went tonight.”

“Obviously. I think that’s the second or third
time I’ve set foot in it. And I sent Karla there this morning.”

“Why?” Mercer asked.

The detectives were playing Hunt off against each
other, Mercer distracting her from Mike’s comment that she found so offensive.

“Because I got word that the tenant had moved out.
It was rather abrupt, and I wanted to know what shape the apartment was in. I
wanted it cleaned out.”

Mike flashed me his best I-told-you-so look, then
shook his head. Tina Barr was gone. I’d been puzzled by her connection to this
tragic event from the moment I saw Karla’s body, and now the urgency of
Battaglia’s directive to find Tina made sense.

“You lived there at one time, didn’t you?” Mercer
asked. Billy Schultz had told us Hunt’s name used to be on the buzzer.

“Never.”

“Someone using your name, before Tina Barr moved in?”

“Ridiculous. What reason would anyone have to do
that?”

No point pushing her on that tonight. There would
be neighbors and witnesses to confirm or deny what Schultz said.

“Ms. Hunt, Karla seemed a bit overdressed to be
cleaning an apartment,” I said.

She gave me a glance. “Remind me, young lady. Who
are you?”

“Alex Cooper. From the district attorney’s
office.”

“Well, then, you’re working overtime. I’m so glad
I voted for Paul Battaglia, darling. Four times already, or has it been five?
‘Don’t play politics with people’s lives’—that’s a good mantra for a
prosecutor.”

I was tempted to ask her whether she had spoken to
Battaglia early this morning, but I knew better than to give her that
advantage. I would call him as soon as we took a break.

“The clothes Karla was wearing—”

“They’re mine, Ms. Cooper. Old clothes, of course.
It’s either the staff or the thrift shop. I hate to say I wouldn’t have been
caught—well, dead—in that outfit again this fall.”

From Park to Fifth avenues, it was often hard to
tell the matrons from the nannies, au pairs, and housekeepers strolling the
sidewalks. The latter often sported last year’s fashions, handed down at the
end of the season. They carried home leftover food and goody-bag giveaways in
the instantly recognizable shopping bags tossed out by their employers: the
robin’s-egg blue of Tiffany, the bright orange of Hermès, the pale lavender of
Bergdorf Goodman, and the shiny black and white of Chanel.

“The tote with your initials on it?”

Hunt stood and crushed the cigarette with the ball
of her black patent pump.

“I hate those logo bags, Ms. Cooper. One sees
oneself coming and going. It was a gift, and I passed it on to Karla.”

“It’s a bit odd that she went to clean an
apartment without taking some work clothes to change into,” I said.

“How do you know she didn’t?” Hunt snapped at me.
“Maybe she put them down on her way in, somewhere else in the apartment. Maybe
the thief took them.”

“The police didn’t find any clothes.”

“We’ll give the pad another look,” Mike said. He
wanted to be the good cop again. He would like the challenge that this arrogant
woman presented, perhaps as much as he liked her looks. “The ME was wrapping up
when we left to come back here. Taking Karla’s body to the morgue. We’ll go
over the place more carefully in the morning.”

“Listen, Detective Chapman,” Hunt said, softening
as she talked. “I’ll try to get a number for her sister. If there’s any issue
about funeral expenses, I’ll take the bill.”

“Thanks for that. We’ll be doing a lot of work
with you on this investigation, so you might as well get to know us. First
thing is, call me Mike.”

“Okay, Mike. You do the same.”

“Fair enough. Just tell me what you like. Min?
Minnie?”

“Minnie’s a mouse, Detective. I’m Minerva.”

“Minerva, the warrior goddess.”

“Now that, Mike, is only a myth.” Hunt crossed her
arms, and one side of her mouth lifted into a smile. She was practically nose
to nose with him. “Just a myth.”

There was nothing about military history—from
Roman mythology to real-life conflict—that Chapman didn’t know.

“The warrior part?” he asked, and Hunt laughed.

“We’ve got to talk about getting you some
coverage,” Mercer said. “The lieutenant has someone standing by to take you
home. And if you don’t mind, we’d like to give you a guard for tomorrow.”

The commissioner wouldn’t allow the same mistake
the department had made, refusing my request to provide protection for Tina
Barr.

“I’ve got my own security. Thanks for the offer,
but I don’t need yours.”

“Security?” Mike asked.

“The gentleman who dropped me off at the apartment
tonight and followed us here. Didn’t you make the tail, Detective? You’ve
surprised me again.”

Mike chewed on the inside of his cheek.

“What’s that about?” Mercer asked. “Why have you
got protection?”

“I’m a Hunt. And if you were thinking tomato sauce
and ketchup, you’d be wrong.”

“I was thinking oil, actually,” Mike said.
“Something thicker than tomato sauce.”

“Even better than that, Detective. Real estate.
New York city real estate. My great-grandfather was a partner of John Jacob
Astor’s. Jasper Hunt was his name. We still own more of Manhattan than it’s
polite to talk about. Be careful where you walk, Detective. I wouldn’t want you
stepping on me.”

“Well, what makes you Hunts so unpopular you need
security 24/7?”

She looked at her watch as she answered. “We’re
not unpopular in most circles, Mike. But my father made a point of teaching me
early on to protect my assets. All of them.”

Mercer shook his head at me. He didn’t like the
direction Mike was going any more than I did.

Minerva Hunt’s name was familiar to me from
society columns and media coverage of philanthropic events. It made no sense
that she, an heiress to a great family fortune, was micromanaging a basement
apartment in Carnegie Hill.

“Going back a bit, Ms. Hunt. Perhaps I didn’t understand
what you meant, but you own the apartment in which Tina Barr was living?” I
asked.

“Not that dank little apartment,” she said,
tsk-tsking at me without missing a beat. “We own the building, Ms. Cooper. The
whole row of brownstones on that street.”

Then why didn’t Billy Schultz recognize her name
when he saw it on the buzzer, as he claimed he had before Tina Barr moved in?