Take Out by Margaret Maron

Author:Margaret Maron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2017-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

An hour later, Hentz and Urbanska finished reporting what they’d learned at Jack Bloss’s apartment.

“We called that nursing home in Suffolk County,” Hentz said. “They wouldn’t tell us much, just that his son had been a patient there for several years. We asked if he was allowed visitors and the nurse said yes, but that he wouldn’t be able to help us. He’s been comatose since the first day he was admitted.”

“There was a picture of a young man on his dresser,” said Urbanska. “Sitting on a motorcycle. That might have been him. It was the only personal picture in the bedroom.”

“Lots of Bloss in his scrapbooks, though,” said Hentz. “With actors and directors and fellow crew members. And this.”

He opened the scrapbook they’d brought back and handed Sigrid the torn pieces of the photograph he’d found, the picture of Bloss and Charlotte Randolph. As Hentz had done earlier, she put them together on a sheet of paper, this time with double-sided tape to hold the pieces in place.

“Which one of them tore it up, do you suppose?” asked Detective Albee, passing the paper on to Jim Lowry. “Or first balled it up?”

Hentz shook his head. “Doesn’t really matter, does it? He’s the one kept all the pieces.”

“She probably did have a fling with him, either before or after she got her big break,” said Sigrid. “But even if it ended in anger, is that a motive for poisoning him now, all these years later? Did you find any indication that they were in touch recently?”

“No, and the man was a real archivist when it came to the shows he worked on,” said Hentz. “Every item in these scrapbooks is labeled and dated and so are the photographs. All except for this one.”

He slid the composite into a plastic sleeve and labeled it as he spoke.

“We brought back his files,” said Urbanska, pointing to five manila folders on the desk behind her. “Those are mostly business records, receipts, and his son’s medical records. He doesn’t seem to have kept much personal correspondence and I didn’t find anything from Randolph.”

“What about a cell phone?” asked Tillie. “We didn’t find one on him.”

“I doubt if he owned one. I did a quick look at his bills. Nothing for a cell phone. Just a landline and no messages on the answering system.”

“Go back through all files and the scrapbooks again,” Sigrid said. “See if anything jumps out.”

Her own eyes were snagged by that first review and she turned the scrapbook page toward Hentz, who had become her de facto opera authority. “What does that headline mean?”

“Mi chiamano Charlotte Randolph? In English, it would be ‘They call me Charlotte Randolph.’ It’s a play on the opera’s most popular song. When the man asks what her name is, the woman says Mi chiamano Mimi—‘They call me Mimi.’ I guess the critic that wrote this meant that she owned the role.”

“Did critics review every performance back then?”

“No,” he said slowly. “No, they didn’t. And this guy was a pretty big deal in his day.

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