Deadly Rich

by Edward Stewart

  “He likes kids,” Malloy said.

  “Holy moly,” Monteleone said, “we got us a molester.”

  “He smiles when he sees kids,” Malloy said. “Why do I feel I’m defending this guy? Once or twice an adult went by with a child, and Delancey lit up. He didn’t stop, he didn’t stare, he didn’t pull out a pocketful of candy. He just looked happy and kept walking. He was home at nine-oh-five. I hung around Beekman Place for two hours, and he didn’t come out again. Vince, you said get a general idea what he’s about and where he goes. Nobody mentioned a twenty-four-hour tail. I was getting a general idea he’d turned in for the night, and I was getting tired so I went home. I figured I’d pick him up again tonight after work and put in a full night staking him out. Unless you have other ideas?”

  “No.” Cardozo shook his head. “Keep going. Get a feel for what Jim Delancey is doing with his time.” He turned now to Ellie Siegel. “Ellie, you’re our resident expert on Judaica. If the killer lit a Jewish Sabbath candle, do you think he was Jewish?”

  “It’s a flaky question,” she said. “But if you want a flaky answer—he wasn’t Orthodox, because it’s the job of the women in the house to light the candles, and the candles are lit on Shabbes eighteen minutes before sundown. Oona was killed on a weekday, not Shabbes, and she was killed in the early afternoon. I really can’t see even a demented link with Jewish ritual here. But possibly the killer is Catholic. They don’t sell votive candles in the supermarket so maybe he used a Jewish candle, which supermarkets in New York do carry.”

  “Ellie’s a sly one,” Greg Monteleone said. “She’s going to blame it on us.”

  “Greg,” Ellie said, “this is not an us-versus-them issue. Or do you still believe matzohs are made of Christian children’s blood?”

  “Which brand?”

  “You’re going to get me angry, Greg.”

  Ellie and Greg seemed to have a TV comedy act going—Greg would come on the fascist pig, and Ellie would play the outraged liberal. Cardozo had nothing against the act, but he didn’t need it on company time.

  “Okay.” Cardozo placed both hands on the edge of the desk and stood. “Clock’s ticking. Back to the hunt, guys.”

  Ellie did not leave with the others. “Vince, something’s been bothering me.”

  “I don’t want to hear about Greg. You two please just try to get along.”

  “You’re not going to hear about Greg. Not from me.” She laid a Xerox of a news clipping on the desk.

  Cardozo’s eyes went down to the heading, “Dizey’s Dish” … He skimmed, taking in solitaire-cut apples en salade and thrilled with her new Dauphine-Pléïade by Zelziac of Cologne, the ritziest bidet in the world, but you knew that.

  He recognized the column that had showed up in the waste-basket in the changing room. Now his eye came to the paragraph Ellie had highlighted in yellow.

  Starting today at 10 A.M., everyone who is anyone and that includes Mrs. Charles Evremonde and Petra (“Slim”) Paley, will be dropping in on the second floor at Marsh and Bonner’s to see the divine little boutique that Ingrid Hansen just opened, specializing in casual, chic summer loafing clothes. If you’re looking for a fair-weather silk scarf, look no farther!

  “This must be the twentieth time I’ve read it,” Cardozo said. “Still seems like a straightforward paid plug to me. What am I missing?”

  “Vince, you lack what I’d call a certain fast-track sensibility.” Ellie smiled. “There are those who do it, and then there are those who read about it because they can’t afford to do it and wouldn’t know how to, even if they struck oil. I find it a real wrong note that this item shows up in that wastebasket.”

  “How so?”

  “Dizey Duke is a nonstop commercial masquerading as an insider society column. She syndicates her scam in eighty-some tabloids nationwide, right after the sex crimes and just before the hernia-truss ads. The people who shop at Marsh and Bonner’s don’t take her advice—they laugh at it.”

  “I thought she was sort of respected.”

  “Come off it, Vince. When Dizey Duke goes north, they stampede south. When Dizey’s in Morocco noshing couscous with Malcolm Forbes, they’re in Marietta Tree’s garden nibbling blinis. If the people Dizey writes about take any advice besides one another’s, it’s Vogue’s and Harper’s.”

  “So you’re telling me this clipping didn’t belong to any of the customers who changed in that room.”

  “Not on your life.”

  “Then whose was it?”

  “The killer’s.”

  THEY WERE DISCUSSING DICK BRAIDY and her troublesome, contradictory feelings toward her ex-husband.

  “I don’t know why I got so angry at him,” Leigh said.

  Luddie handed her a cup of coffee. “Because he’s earned your anger.”

  She shook her head. “No. He was really very sweet and concerned. He even tried to persuade me to exercise with his trainer.”

  “I take it he’s still going to that jet-set gym?”

  She nodded. “It must take terrific discipline. He’s absolutely determined to get himself into shape.”

  “You mean he’s absolutely determined to butter up the celebrities who go there.”

  She took a chair by the window of Luddie’s living room and sat gazing out at the city. Beyond the glass, spires threw off sparkling points of light. “You have a truly low opinion of Dick.”

  Luddie gazed at her across the tips of his steepled fingers. “Does that surprise you?”

  “Yes. And it hurts me. If you don’t respect the people I respect, then you don’t really respect me, and what’s the point our even talking?”

  “Leigh, this innocence of yours is wearing awfully thin. I know you don’t even like this idiot. How come you don’t know it?”

  For a moment she felt lost. “Luddie, I resent that. I love him—I do—”

  “And do you always divorce the people you love?”

  “To save our friendship, yes. He’s probably the best friend I ever had.”

  “He’s a best friend like all the ten thousand other best friends in your life. Which is to say, you don’t even know the guy.”

  She fixed disquieted eyes on Luddie. She realized he was attacking her, and she couldn’t understand why. “That’s a very distorted view of me and my life.”

  “Name me one good trait Dick Braidy possesses.”

  “He’s generous. He’s funny. He’s a good listener. He’s a great escort. Every woman in town swears by him.”

  “You mean he’s a tattle-tale with the most indiscreet tongue in Manhattan.”

  “In all Dick Braidy’s life, he has never spoken against a friend.”

  “You actually believe what you just said.” Luddie’s hand hesitated and it was a telling hesitation. “May I read to you from today’s ‘Dizey’s Dish’?” He bent down to pick up that morning’s Trib from the floor. He folded it open to a middle page.

  A prominent actress-socialite, who has had no trouble convincing millions in her twenty-some starring screen roles, can’t get New York State’s star-chamber of a parole board or the city’s disaster of police department to take her seriously. The beauty with the moss-green gaze has evidence that a certain convicted killer was prematurely paroled and at least one Manhattan figure has paid the price—with her life.

  Leigh’s first reaction wasn’t shock, it was pure denial: she’d heard wrong. “You’re kidding. You’re making that up.”

  Luddie sat calm as a television anchorperson reporting live from the scene of someone else’s catastrophe. He shook his head.

  Shock slowly crystallized into understanding. “Shit. You’re not kidding. She really printed that.”

  “And unless it was you that gave that story to Dizey, it couldn’t have been anyone but your beloved ex.”

  “Look, he didn’t mean it. She wormed it out of him.”

  “I don’t buy it. Dick Braidy isn’t a victim of some gossip columnist’s cunning—he’s a broker on th
e same exchange. He purveys rumor and hot poop to buttress his own social power, and the victim, my friend, is you.” Luddie laid the newspaper down and stared at her. “And I mean that literally. A real killer has really killed, and Dick Braidy is telling the world that you’re ready to finger the guy.”

  “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  “What can you do, except your best? Don’t drink, don’t skip meetings, don’t walk down dark alleys alone, and don’t talk anymore to your ex.”

  LEIGH’S HEAD ACHED. She felt tired and she didn’t want sunlight. She closed the curtain and switched on the bedside lamp.

  The soft yellow light cast a circle of warmth that touched the edge of the quilted spread and the Tiffany traveling clock and the telephone, her own private telephone perched on its own private answering machine.

  I do have real friends, she thought. I do.

  Something clicked like the snap of a tiny mousetrap. The green light on her answering machine registered an incoming call. Before she could lift the receiver, her own recorded voice cut in. “Hello, thank you for calling.”

  “Oh, do shut up,” she told the voice.

  The beep finally came. She snatched up the receiver. “Hello, it’s me, not the machine.”

  No one answered. From somewhere beneath her, traffic along Fifth Avenue sent a muffled vibration through the quiet cool.

  “Hello, I’m on the line, who is this?”

  A hang up, she thought. But the machine would have beeped if they’d hung up. A wrong number. Someone who doesn’t recognize my voice. Someone who doesn’t speak English.

  She held the receiver closer. Just beyond the blanket of faint sound she sensed a disturbance, an unevenness in the flow of silence.

  “Hello,” she said. “Who is this? Look, if you’ve got the wrong number, hang up. If you don’t speak English, just say so.”

  There was no hang up, no words in a foreign tongue. Just that same false silence.

  “What are you waiting for? What do you want? Who is this?”

  She jiggled the cradle. The connection broke. She sat for a moment listening to the hum of a dial tone, then laid the receiver again in its cradle.

  Curious now, she pushed the Replay button on the answering machine.

  A beep came out of the tiny speaker, and then a silence like the flow of water from a small tap, and then her own voice, like a radio signal imperfectly recovered from the past.

  And then that silence.

  She boosted the volume as high as it would go. The silence seemed to exhale and then inhale, exhale and inhale.

  I’m imagining it, she told herself. It’s just an old tape that needed replacing long ago, and there are ghosts of old phone calls buried on it.

  She leaned forward and pressed the Erase button.

  TEN

  Saturday, May 11

  CARDOZO’S EYE RAN ALONG THE WALL where a dozen different-sized and different-shaped knives dangled from a row of iron hooks. They all had a similar pale hardwood handle.

  “I see your knives are a set,” he said.

  The Korean nodded. “Good knives. French.”

  Cardozo had chosen Saturday to visit Archibald’s kitchen, because it was one of Jim Delancey’s two days off.

  It was also, obviously, brunch day. Every order the waiters shouted through the Dutch door was eggs this or eggs that. The black cook was frying up an acre of Canadian bacon on the griddle. A teenage girl stood stirring a wooden spoon through a two-gallon double-boiler of hollandaise. She had skin so clean that Cardozo couldn’t believe she’d been in the city longer than an hour.

  “May I?” He unhooked the strangest-looking of the knives. It had a narrow blade twisted into a spiral, with serrations on both edges. “What does this one do?”

  The Korean smiled. “Apples.”

  Cardozo tried to visualize the blade in action. Whatever this knife does, he wondered, why would you want to do it to an apple? He replaced the knife and touched another. “This one?”

  “Trout.”

  “Just trout?”

  The Korean nodded. He reached up and ran his hand along the row. “Salmon. Chicken. Potato. Carrot. Cabbage.”

  “Thanks.” Cardozo didn’t need the entire tour. “I get the idea.” He unhooked the cabbage knife and angled it to the overhead light. The manufacturer’s trademark had been etched into the side of the thin tempered-steel blade. “Jobert—you said that’s a French name?”

  “Fine knives.”

  Cardozo counted the blades on the wall. “Fourteen in a set?”

  The Korean nodded toward the sink. “Twenty.”

  All Cardozo saw was a tub of water with dish edges and pot tops poking through a Sargasso of algae’d-looking scum. “Where did you buy them?”

  The Korean shook his head. “Expensive. Not for home.”

  “Thanks for warning me, but where did you buy them?”

  The Korean smiled. “Marsh and Bonner Epicure Shop. I write it down?”

  “That’s okay. I know the store.”

  CARDOZO HAILED A CAB on Lexington. He timed the ride from Archibald’s to Marsh and Bonner’s. Eight minutes and forty seconds.

  In the Epicure Shop a dark-eyed woman asked if she could help him.

  “I’m interested in Jobert knives.”

  “The restaurant knives? They’re very popular. And very useful in the home kitchen.”

  She went into a back room and returned carrying a three-foot case of pale hardwood that must have weighed forty pounds. She laid it carefully on the counter.

  “There are twenty in a set, right?” Cardozo said.

  “No, sir, there are twenty-one.” She opened the case. Twenty-one knives nested in twenty-one individually shaped hollows.

  Cardozo brought out his wallet. “Do you take MasterCard?”

  ELEVEN

  Sunday, May 12

  “NEW YORK CITY—ACCEPT no imitations.” Greg Monteleone dropped a copy of the Sunday Tribune on Cardozo’s desk. A two-inch-thickness of tabloid, stuffed with ad supplements and color comics and coupons, thudded onto a stack of unread departmental memos.

  Cardozo put down his coffee cup. Staring up at him from the center of page one was a photo of Oona Aldrich. It must have been her deb photo—she looked seventeen and her ears and neck were holding up at least three hundred thousand in diamonds.

  Running across the top of the tabloid, two-inch bold caps screamed:

  SAM’S BACK!

  Beneath the photo was the headline:

  WHY HE KILLED HER:

  TRIB RECEIVES SOCIETY KILLER’S SHOCKING LETTER

  Inside, a smaller photograph showed what looked like a sheet of foolscap with cut-out letters pasted to it forming the words:

  HI HI SOCIETY

  JUST TO INTRODUCE MY ACT

  I’M SOCIETY SAM KILLER OF SOCIETY SCUM

  I STORM YOUR CHARGE CARD HEAVEN

  SAM SAM THANK YOU MA’AM

  KILL THE GIRLS AND MAKE THEM CRUMBS KISSES, SOCIETY SAM

  The story began:

  Taplinger prize-winning New York Tribune columnist Rad Rheinhardt today received an anonymous letter claiming to have been mailed by the murderer of Manhattan socialite and philanthropist Oona Mellon Aldrich.

  As he read, Cardozo’s mind was querying and footnoting. He didn’t know what the hell a Taplinger prize was, but he recognized the name Rad Rheinhardt—the Trib’s premier right-wing gadfly columnist.

  In an eerie coincidence, the killer calls himself Society Sam, a name reminiscent of 1979’s Son of Sam, whose serial killings reached a total of 12.

  In the gloating letter Society Sam states that New York Society is scum, and the time has come to clean it up.

  “He definitely has an agenda,” says Rheinhardt.

  “The New York Trib seems to be staking out new frontiers in fantasy shock.” Cardozo opened the tabloid, dug through a thicket of Waldbaum and Pathmark ads, and found the editorial page. He squinted at the phone num
ber printed at the bottom of the masthead, then punched the digits into his phone.

  A harried-sounding woman answered and Cardozo asked if she had any idea where he might reach Mr. Rheinhardt on a lovely Sunday like today. There was another buzz and a male voice growled, “Yeah?”

  Cardozo was amazed how much arrogance could come across a phone wire in one little syllable. This was the voice of a temple flunky fed up with beating back all the faithful who wanted thirty seconds with God. And he was talking through what sounded like a mouthful of cream cheese.

  “This is Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo of the Twenty-second Precinct. I’m trying to locate Rad Rheinhardt.”

  “Hey, don’t you godless bloodhounds respect anyone’s Sabbath?”

  Cardozo flashed that he was talking to the great man himself. “Do Rad a favor: Tell him to get a lawyer, fast. I’m coming down right now with a warrant for his public strangulation.”

  There was a pause. “Lieutenant, why don’t you bring your warrant to Clancy’s Bar and Grill. It’s on Front Street, two blocks north of the Trib building.”

  “RAD RHEINHARDT?” Cardozo took a seat at the table where the disheveled gentleman in the mustard-stained necktie was nursing a mug of beer. “Great headline.”

  “Thanks.” Eyes the color of slate peered out from behind Rad Rheinhardt’s mildly myopic prescription lenses. “But I don’t write the headlines.”

  “So tell me, why is a Taplinger prize-winning columnist working on a beautiful Sunday like today?”

  Rheinhardt lifted his mug. “Who’s working? I’m a married man and where I live it happens to be a shitty Sunday.”

  Cardozo turned around and signaled the bartender to bring him a draft.

  The only other people in the place were two shadowy old guys bent over the bar with eight empty stools between them. Even a lobbyist for the American Distillers Association would have had trouble calling Clancy’s Bar and Grill anything but what it was—a cheap dive, strictly for round-the-clock drinkers and staff from the Tribune next door who wished they could be round-the-clock drinkers.