The seventh commandment

by Lawrence Sanders

  Now Dora could understand her gushy friendliness. "I really can't give you a definite date, Eleanor, but I'm sure it won't be much longer."

  "I hope not. I want to hit that schmuck where he lives- and that means his bank account."

  "I was sorry to hear about the divorce," Dora said.

  "Don't be sorry, sweetie; be glad, because I certainly am. I should have dumped that moron years ago. He is so dumb. A dumb rat. Of course Helene Pierce isn't his first playmate. He's been cheating on me since the day we were married. And the idiot thought I didn't know!"

  "Why did you put up with it?" Dora asked curiously.

  Eleanor raised her head to look at her. "Everyone cheats, luv. It's hardly a capital crime, is it? If it were, there wouldn't be enough electric chairs in the world. There's nothing so terrible about cheating-I've had a few flings myself-but one should try to be discreet, don't you think? And ending a marriage just for the sake of a roll in the hay is definitely de trop. I mean, it just isn't done. Except by rat finks like Clayton Starrett. Well, I wish him happiness with his Barbie Doll. She'll take him for whatever he has left after I get through with him. Poor Clay will end up washing windshields at stoplights." She cackled with glee.

  "Eleanor, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was Felicia. I met her yesterday, and she seemed-uh, she seemed ill."

  "Ill?" the other woman said with a harsh laugh. "Stoned out of her gourd, you mean. Felicia is a basket case. She really should be under professional care somewhere, but Olivia doesn't know what's going on."

  "What is going on?"

  "Oh, she's doing coke, no doubt about it. I think Turner Pierce turned her on, but if it wasn't him, it would be someone else. Felicia is lost. She's going to get into serious trouble one of these days."

  "Why would Turner Pierce want to supply her with drugs?"

  "What a child you are! Felicia is hardly poverty-stricken, is she, and Turner has expensive tastes. As I well know. One of those flings I mentioned, I had with Turner. But I soon gave him the broom. A very, very grabby young man. Just like his sister."

  "I thought you liked the Pierces. At our first meeting you were very complimentary."

  "That was when I was a member of the family," Eleanor said bitterly. "Now I can tell the truth, and they can all rot in hell!"

  When she left the salon, Dora stood on the sidewalk a few moments, gulping deep breaths. She needed that sense of a world washed clean, everything spotless and shining.

  It wasn't Eleanor's vindictiveness toward Clayton that dismayed her; the scorned wife was entitled to that. Nor were the revelations of Felicia's addiction a shock; Dora had guessed that doomed woman was beyond her help- and probably any other Samaritan's.

  But what really depressed Dora were Eleanor's blithe comments about cheating. Was she right? Did everyone do it? Was adultery no more serious than a mild flirtation at a cocktail party, and no more reason for marital discord than the toothpaste tube squeezed in the wrong place?

  She walked west on 56th Street wondering if she was hopelessly naive, an innocent with no real perception of how the world turned and how people behaved. "What a child you are!" Eleanor had said, and perhaps, Dora acknowledged, she was a child, with all her notions of right and wrong the result of her teaching, and not wisdom distilled from experience.

  She cut over to 54th Street and continued to plod westward, still brooding. Could she be right and everyone else wrong? It hardly seemed likely. John Wenden had said, "Life is too short to be faithful," and perhaps that was a universal truth that had somehow eluded Dora Conti, happily married and now questioning if her world was ridiculously limited.

  She shook off these melancholic musings and looked about her. She stood on the corner of 54th Street and Eighth Avenue. This neighborhood was vastly different from the one she had just left. There was a police station, hemmed in by parked squad cars. Then there was a crowded stretch of tenements, garages, and low-rise commercial buildings.

  She dodged traffic, crossed Eighth, and walked west on 54th, watching the numbers and realizing she still had a block or two to go.

  When she told John about that empty jewelry shop in Roxbury, the detective had said, "Look, this gold-trading caper is yours. I have my hands full with the three homicides; I can't suddenly start chasing gold bars. Why don't you stick with it and see what you can come up with. I'm here and ready to help. Okay?"

  Sure, Dora had told him, that was okay, and she went back to the plan of action she had outlined prior to her Boston trip.

  She had the address of the vault of Starrett Fine Jewelry in Brooklyn, but it didn't seem worthwhile to investigate because she had no idea when a shipment of gold might be delivered. It made more sense to check out Starrett's main supplier of gold bullion, an outfit called Stuttgart Precious Metals, Inc., located on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan. According to the computer printout, Stuttgart was the USA subsidiary of Croesus Refineries, Ltd., headquartered in Luxembourg.

  Dora had expected to find Stuttgart Precious Metals in a blockhouse of a building, a thick-walled bunker surrounded, perhaps, by a heavy fence topped with razor wire, with armed guards in view. Instead she found a one-story concrete block building with no fence, no guards. It was located just west of Tenth Avenue and looked as if it had been built as a garage, with a small office in front and wide, roll-up doors leading to the main building. There was no sign.

  Even more perplexing than the ordinariness of the physical structure was its air of dilapidation. It looked deserted, as if business had dwindled and bankruptcy loomed. A derelict was rooting in the garbage can outside the office door. Looking for gold bars? Dora wondered.

  She had eyeballed the building from across the street. Now she marched resolutely up to the office door and pushed her way in. She found herself in a barren, wood-floored room with stained walls carelessly plastered and no chairs or other amenities for potential customers. There was a scarred wooden counter, and behind it, at an equally decrepit desk, a bespectacled, gray-haired lady sat typing steadily. There were no other papers or documents on her desk.

  She stopped typing when Dora entered, and looked up. "Yes?" she said in a crackly voice.

  "Is this Stuttgart Precious Metals?" Dora asked.

  The woman nodded.

  Dora had prepared a scenario.

  "My husband and I have a small craft shop in Vermont," she said, smiling brightly. "We design and fashion one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces, mostly gold and sterling silver in abstract designs. We've been buying our raw gold and sterling in Boston, but I had to come to New York on business and decided to find out if we could get a better price on metals down here."

  The woman shook her head. "We don't sell retail," she said.

  "Well, it's not actually retail," Dora said. "After all, we are designers and manufacturers. We sell to some of the best department stores and jewelry shops in the country."

  The woman didn't change expression. "How much gold could you use in a month?" she asked. "Ounces? We sell our metals in pounds and kilos. Our gold comes from abroad in bars and ingots. Too much for you, girlie."

  "Oh dear," Dora said, "I'm afraid you're right; we wouldn't know what to do with a pound of pure gold. Listen, one other thing, I walked over from Eighth Avenue, and it occurred to me that someday we might consider opening a small workshop and showroom in Manhattan. Does Stuttgart own any other property in the neighborhood?"

  "We don't own," the woman said, "we lease."

  "Oh dear," Dora said again. "Well, I guess I'll just have to keep looking. Thank you for your time."

  The woman nodded and went back to her typing.

  Dora was lucky; she caught an empty cab that had just come out of an Eleventh Avenue taxi garage. But traffic was murder, and it took an hour to get back to the Bedling-ton. She went immediately to her suite and kicked off her shoes. Then she phoned Mike Trevalyan in Hartford.

  "Gee, it's good to hear from you," he said. "Having a nice vacation?"

&nbs
p; "Come on, Mike, cut the bullshit. I need some help."

  "No kidding?" he said. "And I thought you called to wish me Happy Birthday."

  "I have two words for you," Dora said, "and they're not Happy Birthday. The computers in our property and casualty department use a data base that covers all commercial properties in our territory-right?"

  "Oh-oh," he said. "I know what's coming."

  "There's this business on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan called Stuttgart Precious Metals, a subsidiary of an outfit registered in Luxembourg. Stuttgart leases their premises. I'll give you the address, and I need to know who owns the property and anything else you can find out about Stuttgart: the terms of the lease, how long they've occupied the place, and so forth."

  "What's this got to do with the Starrett insurance claim?"

  "Nothing," Dora said breezily. "I'm just having fun."

  After he calmed down, she gave him the address of Stuttgart, and he promised to get back to her as soon as he had something.

  "Miss me?" he asked her.

  "I sure do," she said warmly. "What's your name again?"

  She hung up on his profanity and then, a few minutes later, phoned Mario, and they talked for almost a half-hour. Dora got caught up on local gossip and told Mario how much she missed him and their little house.

  "It's the home cooking you miss," he said.

  "That, too," she agreed.

  "When are you coming back?"

  "Soon," she promised. "Have you been behaving yourself?"

  "As usual," he said, which wasn't exactly what she wanted to hear.

  But the talk with her husband cheered her, and she went to bed resolved to forget all about people with sloppy morals; nothing could equal the joy of a happy, faithful marriage.

  But sleep did not come easily; her equanimity didn't last, and she found herself questioning again. So she got out of bed to kneel and pray. It was something she hadn't done for a long while, and she thought it was about time.

  Chapter 37

  Felicia Starrett was not a stupid woman, but introspection dogged her like a low-grade infection. She was aware- continually aware-that her life lacked some essential ingredient that might make it meaningful, or at least endurable. Her mother never ceased to remind her that a loving mate and a happy marriage would solve all her problems. That advice, Felicia thought wryly, was akin to telling a penniless, starving bum that he really should eat good, nourishing meals.

  But it was true, she admitted, that her relations with men had soured her life. She was still in her teens, with the arrogance of youth, when she began to offer money or valuable gifts to men. This pattern continued after she was graduated from Barnard and, in an effort to find the cause of this curious behavior, she read many books of popularized psychology. But none offered clues as to the reason she continually met (or sought?) men who accepted her largesse casually as if it were their due.

  At various periods of self-analysis she had ascribed different motives for her compulsive generosity. First she thought it was a power ploy: She wanted to dominate men. In fact, she wanted to own them, reduce them to the role of paid servitors. Finally she concluded that she gave money because she was unable to give love. She was fearful of commitment, recognized the deficiency, and lavished gifts as a substitute.

  But recognizing the cause did nothing to ameliorate her unhappiness. And so she surrendered to addictions: caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, a variety of drugs, and eventually cocaine, in an endless search for the magic potion that would provide the joy life had denied her.

  She thought her search had finally succeeded when Turner Pierce provided ice, the smokable methampheta-mine. Here was a bliss that turned her into a beautiful creature floating through a world of wonders. The high was like nothing she had ever experienced before.

  But there was a heavy price to pay. The crash was horrendous: nausea, incontinence, dreadful hallucinations, fears without name, and frequently violence she could not control. But Turner-the darling!-was always there to minister to her and, when the worst had passed, to provide more of those lovely crystals in a glass pipe, and then she soared again.

  She was vaguely aware of vomiting, weight loss, respiratory pain, thundering heartbeat, and heightened body temperature. But she became so intent on achieving that splendid euphoria that she would have paid any price, even life itself, if she might slip away while owning the world.

  But death held no lure, for there, always, was Turner who had promised to marry her, an act of love that made her happiness more intense. So joyful was she that she was even able to acknowledge the beauty and beneficence of Helene-a woman she had formerly mistrusted-who came once to help Turner bathe her and wash her hair. And also clean up the apartment, which Felicia, during a vicious crash, had almost destroyed, slashing furniture with a carving knife, breaking mirrors, and smashing all those cute china figurines belonging to the landlord.

  So she alternated between ecstasy and despair, hardly conscious of time's passage but, in her few semilucid moments, realizing with something like awe that she would soon be a married woman and finally, at last, her life would be meaningful.

  Chapter 38

  Dora drove around the block twice, and then around two blocks twice. Finally, three blocks away, she found a parking space she hoped she might be able to occupy, but it took ten minutes of sweaty maneuvering to wedge the Escort against the curb. She locked up and walked back to Gregor Pinchik's building in SoHo. She didn't even want to think about the eventual problem of wiggling the Ford out of that cramped space.

  The computer maven had the top floor of an ancient commercial building that had recently been renovated. There were new white tiles on the lobby floor, and on the walls were Art Deco lighting fixtures with nymphs cavorting on frosted glass. The original freight elevator-big enough to accommodate a Steinway-had been spruced up with crackled mirrors and framed prints of Man Ray photographs.

  Pinchik's loft was illuminated by two giant skylights that revealed a sky as dull as a sidewalk. But there was track lighting to fill the corners, and Brahms played softly from an Aiwa stereo component system that had more knobs, switches, gauges, and controls than a space shuttle.

  "How about this, lady?" Gregor cried, waving an arm at his equipment.

  He gave Dora what he called the "fifty-cent tour," warning her not to trip on the wires and cables snaking across the floor. He displayed, and occasionally demonstrated, a bewildering hodgepodge of computers, monitors, printers, modems, tapes and disks, telephones, fax and answering machines, digital pagers, hand-held electronic calculators, and much, much more.

  "I'm a gadget freak," the bearded man admitted cheerfully. "If it's electronic, I gotta have it. A lot of this stuff is junk, but even junk can be fun. Now you sit down over here, and I'll get you caught up on the adventures of our pigeon."

  Dora sat in a comfortable swivel chair, and Pinchik perched on a little steel stool that rolled about on casters. He settled in front of a monitor and punched a few buttons with his stubby fingers.

  "I put the whole file on one tape," he said. "You know what I collected in Dallas and Denver. Now we'll get to the new things."

  Typed lines began to reel off across the screen, and Pinchik leaned closer to read.

  "All right," he said, "here's the scoop I got from my hacker pals in KC. Our hero showed up in Kansas City after leaving Denver. Now he's Turner Pierce. Same initials, but who the hell knows if it's his real name."

  "Still got the mustache?" Dora asked.

  "Still got it. And he's still on the con. The reason the KC hackers knew so much about him was that he set up what was apparently a legitimate business. Office, secretary, letterheads, advertisements-the whole schmear. He called himself a computer consultant and designer of complete systems for any size business, large or small. He was one of the first in that field in KC, and he made out like gangbust-ers. First of all, he knew his stuff, and he never tried to sell a client more hardware than he needed. Of course
Pierce was probably getting a kickback on the equipment he did recommend, but that was small potatoes. He lined up some hefty clients: a bank and its branches, a local college, an insurance company, a chain of retail shoe stores, and a lot of factories, distributors, supermarkets, an entire shopping mall, and so forth."

  "So he went legitimate?"

  "That's what everyone thought. At first. Then there was a string of computer swindles. The bank took heavy losses in cash, and the shoe stores and distributors lost merchandise delivered and logged in as paid for, though payment was never actually made. And the insurance company found itself paying off claims on policies it had never written."

  "Don't tell me, Greg," Dora said. "I can guess."

  "You got it," Pinchik said, nodding. "All those victims had computer systems installed by Turner Pierce Associates, Inc. What he was doing was leaving what we call a 'trapdoor' in every system he designed. In its simplest form this would be an access code, maybe just a single word or a six-digit number, that would enable a bandit to get into the system from outside, rummage around in all the records, and clip the business the way he wanted for as much as he wanted."

  "And that's what Turner was doing?"

  The computer expert shook his shaggy head. "Nope," he said, "he was too smart for that. He followed the same pattern we saw him use in Dallas and Denver. He never did the dirty deed himself, but he sold those trapdoors to guys greedier and dumber than he was. When all those crimes came to light, some of the actual crooks were nabbed and convicted, but Pierce folded his tent and quietly slipped away."

  "Greg, some of those guys who were convicted must have tried to plea bargain by giving the prosecutor Turner Pierce's name."

  "Sure, they fingered him as the guy who sold them access to the computer systems. But what evidence did the prosecutor have to come down on Pierce? No evidence. Just the accusation of an indicted criminal. There was no case against Pierce that would hold up in court, so he was advised to get out of town."