Deadly Rich

by Edward Stewart

  “The boom box looks like a bridge fell on it. Hard to be sure, but it appears to be a Sony XX.”

  “Come on, Lou. I found the damned thing. There’s no appearing about it. The trademark says Sony, loud and clear.”

  Lou glanced across the cubicle with just a flash of impatience. “Sorry, I wasn’t being clear. It’s a Sony that appears to be an XX. The model went on sale in the metropolitan area nine months ago. Two hundred and some outlets carry it.”

  Cardozo sighed and looked down at the scratch pad he’d been doodling on. He’d drawn five horizontal, more or less parallel lines. The bottom line lay slightly to the left of the others. “Any prints?” His hand added a sprinkle of dots in the upper left-hand corner of the design.

  “There are partials all over it,” Lou said. “Once we eliminate the prints of the security guards, who knows, maybe our man left a few. But what we did find is a tape. What’s interesting is, he recorded it himself. Did a piss-poor job too. He took some rap music off the air or from another tape. Our sound man thinks he recorded over something else.”

  “Can our sound man tell us what kind of something else was recorded on this tape?”

  “Maybe you should talk to him yourself. He explains it a hell of a lot better than I can.”

  “WHAT WE’VE GOT ON THE TAPE,” Abner Love said, “are rap recordings taken from another tape—so there’s hiss and accumulated signal distortion.” Abner was a middle-aged skinhead with hair that would have been light brown if he’d let it grow out, but with a considerable tonsure, which maybe was why he didn’t.

  “Can you identify the original tapes?” Cardozo said.

  “Now, you’re not going to believe this—but my little kid is a fan of rap music, and he has the original tape.”

  They were sitting in Abner’s work space on East Thirty-second Street, a loft with walls banked from floor to ceiling with high-tech sound equipment. Abner handed Cardozo a commercial tape cassette.

  The front cover showed five white men who looked like younger Abners hunkered down around a floor mike on a bare stage. The album was called Hallelujah Dirt. The artists called themselves the Celestial Honkies and Roscoe.

  Cardozo shook his head. “My kid’s fifteen, she doesn’t bring much of this stuff into the house anymore.” He didn’t bother saying, I’d murder her if she did.

  “For my money they’re no big deal, but Hallelujah Dirt went platinum six days after release.”

  Abner slid another cassette across the worktable. This one was commercial home-recording tape, Sony X-90, with no writing on either label on either side.

  “Now, the boom-box tape,” Abner said, “was recorded on a poor machine with imperfect sound-head contact. So areas on the tape retain magnetic residue from an earlier recording made on a different machine.” Abner looked across the table at Cardozo. “Are you with me so far?”

  “I think so.”

  Abner smiled. “When we play the boom-box tape, we’re hearing a composite signal. But since we have the original of the rap tape, we can subtract that signal from the composite signal—and theoretically that leaves us the pure residue of the previous signal.”

  “The way you say theoretically doesn’t sound too hopeful.”

  “Why don’t I play you a little of what we’ve reconstructed so far?” Abner walked to the wall and flicked a switch, and three oscilloscopes lit up with amber grids laid over black backgrounds. A kind of spacious silence poured from the speakers mounted around the room.

  In a moment dots like comets trailing three-inch tails made flat-line graphs across the grids. He flicked two more switches, and bright lariats of light danced across the screens.

  The sound that poured from the speakers struck Cardozo as garbage made audible—screams, uh-huh’s, baby-baby-baby’s, clicks, bangs, drum machines, voices high, voices low, voices screeching like people getting born, people getting laid, people getting killed, people jiving, jibbering, singing English, Spanish, Korean, fading in and out—till finally a chant rose above the river of sonic chaos:

  Nickel-dimin’ two-bit pipsqueak squirt, Bleedin’ Thursday blood on your Tuesday shirt—Spilled a pint of plasma and you still don’t hurt, ’Cause your head’s in the heart of the hallelujah dirt.

  Abner strolled from wall to wall, manipulating dials and switches, and by a series of almost imperceptible shifts the sound tamped down into a structureless aural foam, and then—in some unexpected corner of that immensity of white noise, hints of another sound began to cluster.

  Cardozo focused his ear on that little smidgin of sound.

  Abner’s finger nudged one last switch.

  Now Cardozo heard it: a bright, high beep lasting maybe half a second.

  Abner stopped the tape. “Recognize it?”

  Was this a quiz show? Name that tune in one note? “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”? The “Hallelujah Chorus”?

  Cardozo shook his head. “Sorry.”

  Abner smiled like the kind of guy who enjoyed having the answer that no one else did. “It’s the signal an answering machine makes when a call comes in. It’s a high frequency, and on a cheap machine it scars the magnetic coating. You can’t record over a scar, which is why we can recover the signal. So at least we know what we’re looking for.”

  Maybe Abner knew, but Cardozo didn’t. “And what’s that?”

  “The in-coming messages buried under ‘Hallelujah Dirt.’”

  “Think you can actually pull up the messages?”

  “It’ll take time, but something’s got to be there. At least a fragment. Possibly a range of fragments. Once we have those we put the computer to work and enhance. Same principle as your outer-space photos enhancement, except that program translates sound to light and ours translates sound to better sound. Theoretically.”

  NINE

  Friday, May 10

  “VERY ROUGHLY,” ELLIE SIEGEL said, “from what I could worm out of the lawyers, if the stock market and real estate don’t crash too badly in the near future, Oona Aldrich’s estate is worth around seven million.”

  Greg Monteleone whistled.

  “Who inherits?” Cardozo said.

  He had gathered his task force in the spare room that the detective squad used as an extra office and storage space. The chairs they were sitting in were parochial-school surplus, wood-slatted collapsibles that had tortured generations of students; but Ellie held herself easily erect in her pale pink blouse, as though she were comfortable with her body, comfortable with the chair, comfortable even with the humidity. Though an air conditioner was clattering in the window, the air had a disturbingly unreal density.

  “Oona’s only immediate relative,” Ellie said, “is her son by the first marriage. He gets half. A quarter goes to the Metropolitan Opera. There are cash bequests to servants, friends, local charities.”

  “What’s the largest cash bequest?”

  “The butler, the cook, and the maid get two hundred fifty thousand each. There are bequests of twenty thousand each to three friends.”

  “Doesn’t sound as though Oona had many good friends,” Sam Richards said.

  “But she had great servants.” With a satisfied grin Greg Monteleone pushed his hands through his curly dark hair and sat back and eyed the others. He was wearing designer chinos, Top-Siders, and an eye-curdling deep heliotrope shirt.

  “What about property?” Cardozo said.

  “No property bequests,” Ellie said.

  In the crammed, narrow room sounds seemed to hammer at the light. From the street came a gray, constant roar of cars, trucks, buses, and above them the looping wail of a siren. The precinct added its own little orchestra: through the pea-soup green walls you could hear phones jangling for attention, voices shouting, doors closing, footsteps clacking up and down the stairs, the high-pitched sigh of waterpipes.

  “Where’s the son?” Cardozo said.

  “He’s in England,” Ellie said. “He’s studying Classics at Oxford. I phoned him at six A.M. this
morning. He and his mother were estranged. He says he’s renouncing any inheritance and don’t expect him at the funeral.”

  “Nut case,” Monteleone said. “Who’s going to pay the college bills?”

  Ellie gave him a long, unloving glance. “The boy happens to have a father.”

  “So do I,” said Greg, “and he never gave me a cent.”

  “But Greg,” Ellie said, “you’ve always been special.”

  “Ellie, you’d better check that the son was in England Wednesday,” Cardozo said. “Check the servants’ whereabouts Wednesday. And check the previous wills—see if anyone was dropped.”

  “She had two ex-husbands,” Ellie said, “but they’re richer than she was.”

  “Check the exes’ whereabouts Wednesday. Did you find her address book?”

  “It wasn’t hiding—she’d left it right by the bedroom phone. I think it was her favorite bedtime reading. The bottleneck is, Aldrich never threw out a return address. She entered her Con Ed account manager into her personal phone book. Half the names aren’t even alphabetical.”

  “Sorry to hear it. Question her friends in the New York area. And her doctor. If she had a shrink, question the shrink. If she had a personal trainer, an astrologist—anyone providing any kind of personalized service—talk to them too.”

  Ellie was taking it all down in her notebook. She wrote in a shorthand of her own invention that she’d once tried to explain to Cardozo, but he’d never understood how she could tell one of those squiggles from another.

  “Do I get permission to sleep anytime this week?”

  “I’ve asked Reilly to give us more detectives. Discuss it with them.”

  Ellie winked. “You’re funny today, Vince.”

  Cardozo sat frowning at the blackboard that had been set up on an easel at the front of the room. The words Oona Aldrich Homicide had been blockprinted across the top, followed by the identifying numbers that would be used on all departmental forms referring to the case.

  Beneath this Cardozo had written the forensic number assigned to the case, and below, on the left, he had listed the physical evidence so far discovered: a partial candle, a newspaper clipping, a shattered boom box, particles of dirt, a Sony answering-machine tape, seven Duracell batteries, an eighth battery listed separately because it had been found separately, the victim’s clothing, and the personal effects she had carried in her purse. Beside each item he had written the property number of the voucher attached.

  On the right of the board he had written the word witnesses, followed by the names Baker, Sandberg, Hansen, Delancey, Danks, and a question mark. There was still plenty of space in the witness column.

  In the center of the board he had drawn a rough layout of the changing room and a stick figure representing the position of Aldrich’s body.

  Only two things on the entire board suggested there had been a rational motive for the crime: the missing brooch and, assuming they were a cartel trademark, the knife cuts on the body. Photos of Leigh Baker’s brooch had gone out to all precincts and all jewelers in the city. On the chance that the killer might not be too bright, photos had gone to pawnshops as well. So far no one in Narcotics had recognized the cuts.

  “Let me just throw out an idea,” Cardozo said. “Dan Hippolito thinks the markings on Oona’s stomach could mean it was a drug hit.”

  “Did she do coke?” Sam Richards said.

  Ellie nodded. “Her butler says she dabbled.”

  “No way Oona was a drug hit,” Greg Monteleone said. “The drug cartel doesn’t go after its customers. It disciplines the middle men and the street retailers.”

  Cardozo glanced questioningly toward Ellie. “Any chance Oona was dealing?”

  “Come on,” Greg Monteleone groaned. “The woman was a wacko. She wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes in the cartel.”

  Ellie sighed. “I haven’t seen any evidence she was anything more than an occasional user.”

  Cardozo turned to Sam Richards. “Sam, how are we coming?”

  Sam Richards pulled a notebook from the pocket of his blue blazer. “Jogging pouches aren’t manufactured in the city.”

  “Nothing’s manufactured in the city,” Greg Monteleone said, “except crack and illegitimate babies.”

  Sam Richards prided himself on dressing like a gentleman, jacket and tie always, never a scuff on his shoes; and he’d mastered a cool lack of excitability to go with the dress. He gazed now at Greg Monteleone with no more involvement than the anchor on a TV news show. “Do we want to take a comedy break, or do we want to hear my report?”

  “Greg will get his turn,” Cardozo said.

  Sam Richards continued. “Red jogging pouches with black flamingo stitching are made by Pedro Cardin of Taiwan, they’re ripped off by Petro Cardin of Manila, they’re imported into the metropolitan area by Jolly Boy Imports of East New York, and they’re bootlegged by Nordic Novelty of Bushwick.”

  Richards had the sort of smooth African skin that seems to sweat nothing but after-shave lotion. His eyes were brown and large, and a relaxed cynicism flickered in them. As he flipped through his pages he allowed a weary smile to peep through. Every detective in the room knew that most homicide investigations were hopeless until a witness came forward or the killer gave himself up.

  “Jolly Boy supplies four jobbers who wholesale to four hundred thirteen outlets. Nordic Novelty doesn’t keep records.”

  “Under the circumstances,” Cardozo said, “let’s back-burner the pouches. How are we coming with sporting-goods outlets?”

  “In the metropolitan area,” Sam Richards said, “there are sixty-seven outlets selling those weight-lifter belts and gloves. I spoke to eighteen yesterday. Nobody recognizes the Identi-Kits or the photo.”

  “Fellas, we are making a fundamentally asshole assumption here.” Greg Monteleone never used a word like wrong in front of Ellie when a word like asshole would do. “Why is this guy going to buy an item he could walk into any gym and rip off?”

  “I was getting to gyms,” Sam Richards said. “High rents have put most commercial outfits out of business. There are only about thirty left in the five boroughs. But if we’re talking high school gyms and private school gyms, add a hundred twenty.”

  “Mr. Boom Box does not go to private school,” Greg Monteleone stated flatly. “And I frankly doubt he goes to any school.”

  “Because he looks Hispanic you don’t think he has an education?” Ellie challenged.

  Greg Monteleone sprawled one arm over the back of his folding wooden chair. He studied Siegel with elaborate, almost theatrical disdain. “Because he acts like a jerk I know he doesn’t have an education, and so do you.”

  “Not that I don’t trust Greg’s intuition,” Cardozo said, “but let’s still check schools.”

  Sam Richards sighed. “I’m only one pair of feet, Vince.”

  “Reilly said he can steal us two men.”

  “Big spender,” Greg Monteleone said.

  “What about me?” Ellie said.

  “You get the next two.” Cardozo turned in his swivel chair. “Okay, Greg. You’ve got the mike.”

  Monteleone stretched his arms overhead and yawned. “I knocked on a lot of doors in the Marsh and Bonner’s area yesterday.” He consulted his notepad. “Nothing useful. Two maybes on the female Identi-Kit, one on the male, nothing on Delancey. Vince, are we working to rule on this? Do you want a five on every interview?”

  Regulations required a written report on every witness or potential witness interviewed. Because the number of the report form ended in a five, cops called the reports fives, and they hated them.

  “I think fives are a piss-poor idea when we’ve got these few hands,” Greg said. “Witnesses remember forty-eight hours, tops, and then their imaginations begin playing tricks. Anytime we spend now typing up notes and filling out forms is time we could be tracking down a lead before it fizzles. I spoke to forty-four people yesterday, and if I was doing a five for every interview, I wouldn
’t have got through ten.”

  “Okay,” Cardozo said. “But don’t anyone get eight weeks backlogged on your fives. Maybe one day a week tidy up the paper work.”

  “You mean Sunday,” Greg Monteleone said. “Our day off.”

  “There’s no day off,” Cardozo said. “We’re working overtime.” Cardozo turned to Carl Malloy. “Carl, what are we finding out about Jim Delancey?”

  “Enough to fill a postage stamp.” Malloy took out his notepad. “At eleven fifty-five yesterday morning, Delancey showed up for work, on foot and alone. At two forty-five he took a five-minute cigarette break, alone, outside the kitchen door. At three o’clock, figuring we’re more interested in what he does after work then during, I took a four-hour break.”

  Today everything about Carl Malloy was just a little rumpled—the trousers of his brown suit, his shirt, his half-loosened tie. His hair was still dark on top, but it was going gray at the temples and it needed a combing. He didn’t exactly look bad, but he missed neatness by just enough that it was a little embarrassing to look at him. You had the feeling he was basically a nice, careful guy, but maybe he’d argued with his boss or his wife and he’d momentarily mislaid his self-respect. People would instinctively look away from a guy like that, and it was the right look if you were running a tail on a suspect.

  “I was back at Archibald’s at seven. At eight-twenty Delancey left, alone, and went home, on foot, to Twenty-nine Beekman Place.”

  “This guy’s a salad chef,” Greg Monteleone said, “and he lives on Beekman Place?”

  “With his mother.”

  “What the hell do rents run over there?”

  “You don’t rent on Beekman Place,” Malloy said. “You own.”

  “So what does this mother-son team own, a town house?”

  “Two bedrooms on the ninth floor at number twenty-nine.”

  “Who paid?”

  Malloy turned to beam Monteleone an acidic smile. “At the moment, Greg, I don’t have that information, but if you like, I can phone Mrs. Delancey and ask.”

  “Did he talk to anyone on the way home?” Cardozo said. “Did he seem interested in any of the other people on the street?”