Deadly Rich

by Edward Stewart

  “That’s a fantastic dress,” Leigh said.

  The woman turned. She was a tall, striking, young, pale-skinned black. Her gaze held Leigh’s an extra telltale second. “Why, thank you. Actually this dress was designed by my brother. I’m sneaking it into the movie for a free plug.”

  Leigh’s heart gave a lurch. She realized it wasn’t just the dress that she recognized: it was the woman wearing it. “You were in the Ingrid Hansen Boutique at Marsh and Bonner’s. And you were wearing that same dress.”

  “I’m surprised you remember.” The woman held out a hand. “Tamany Dillworth. It’s nice to meet you, Miss Baker. You’re the only star I know of, besides Vanessa, who mixes with the help. How do you like your coffee?”

  “What? Oh, a little milk, thanks.”

  Tamany Dillworth handed her a cup and then filled one for herself.

  “Have the police spoken to you?” Leigh said.

  The implications of the question seemed to amuse Miss Dillworth. “The police and I have had words from time to time.”

  “Have they talked to you about that day in Marsh and Bonner’s?”

  “No, they haven’t. What about it?”

  “They had that killing.”

  Tamany Dillworth brought a hand to her mouth. “Omigod. That was the day that poor woman got killed?”

  “Do you remember that man with the boom box?”

  “Who could forget him.”

  “The lieutenant in charge has a theory—that maybe you knew him? And came to the boutique with him?”

  Tamany Dillworth’s eyes widened. “No way.”

  For some reason Leigh felt vindicated. “You’d save the lieutenant a lot of wasted effort if you’d just explain things to him.”

  “I’d be glad to. What’s his name?”

  SIXTEEN

  Friday, May 17

  CARDOZO LAID THE IDENTI-KIT of the male Hispanic on the desk top, angled so that Tamany Dillworth could see the face right side up.

  She leaned forward in her chair, frowned, tilted her head left, then right. “That’s the type, but I wouldn’t say it was him. I mean, if I hadn’t seen him, I wouldn’t know that he was who this is supposed to be. Not to criticize your artist.” Miss Dillworth had a perky way of not sitting still. Hands gestured to emphasize a point, bracelets clanked, legs crossed and uncrossed. “His eyes were sleepier. Like he wasn’t interested in going to the effort of holding them open. I had a feeling he might have been on dope. I mean, you have to be a little wacked out to take a boom box into a store like Marsh and Bonner’s. And you could tell he wasn’t there to shop.”

  “When did he leave the boutique?”

  “I don’t remember seeing him leave. But I left in a hurry.”

  “Why was that?”

  “I set off an alarm.” Tamany Dillworth covered her face. “Oh, Lord, I was so gauche! I wanted to see how a jacket would look in the daylight, so I took it to the door—only I took it too far. When that bell went off, I thought for sure they were coming to arrest me.”

  Cardozo laid the photo of Jim Delancey next to the Identi-Kit. “Did you see this man in Marsh and Bonner’s?”

  Tamany Dillworth’s lips shaped a pout. “I can’t say for sure. Maybe I’ve just seen him in the papers or on the news. Is he famous?”

  “He’s had some fame.”

  “Nice-looking guy.”

  “Miss Dillworth, you’re an actress?”

  “That’s how I ran into Miss Baker. I’m doing extra work, but we wrap in two days. I also model, I sing, I act, I have a one-woman cabaret show, I’m a stand-up comic, I do dynamite Italian catering for dinner parties, and I baby-sit. And if you’re ever hiring extras for a lineup, I can look real street.”

  “If you’d care to leave me your phone and address, I might just take you up on that.”

  “My horoscope said this was going to be a lucky day. What can I write on?”

  Cardozo slid a pad and a ballpoint across the desk.

  She printed with bold, decisive strokes. “Two twenty-nine West Eighty-first. The phone’s not working right now, but the address is.”

  FIVE MINUTES LATER Cardozo stepped into the squad room, where Carl Malloy was typing up a report on yesterday’s tail.

  “Hey, Carl, would you have time to confirm an address for me?”

  Malloy glanced at the notepad. “No problem.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Monday, May 20

  “HOW MANY PLACES DO I have left at your May twenty-first dinner?” Dizey Duke asked.

  Annie MacAdam had to clutch the phone between her ear and shoulder while she leafed through her notebook and found the list of seventy-eight guests and the ten-table seating plan.

  “You’ve filled your places,” Annie said.

  “Unless you’re saving a place for Oona Aldrich’s ghost, you’ve got room for one more.”

  Annie lit a cigarette and slipped into the yes role with automatic resignation. “Whatever you want, Dizey dear.”

  “I want you to invite Avalon Gardner.”

  Annie MacAdam had a hollow feeling inside. It required the strategic sense of a Soviet chess champion to put a New York dinner party together, and when Dizey Duke chose to involve herself, it was like playing with live grenades instead of chessmen.

  “That could be complicated,” Annie said. “Leigh and Waldo are coming, and Leigh’s feuding with Avalon.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know. That little princess needs to be taught a lesson.”

  Annie watched her cigarette smoke drift away, drawn into the currents hovering around the mocha velvet shade of the lamp on the Steinway grand. “I’m not going to put Leigh and Avalon at the same table.”

  “Did I ask for Apocalypse? O.K. Corral will do just fine.”

  Annie had learned to put up with Dizey’s little defects—her demands, her double-dealing, her vendettas, her drunkenness. For Dizey was more than an ally, she was an essential weapon in Annie MacAdam’s battle for New York social visibility.

  Twelve years ago Annie had entered the game with no money, no name, no looks, no connections, no education beyond Kansas City high school. She had had two assets only: determination and a real estate broker’s license.

  At that time Dizey Duke’s building was going co-op under an eviction plan. The conversion was sponsored by a syndicate of Kuwaiti real estate speculators and Panamanian drug barons. The plan gave Dizey and the other tenants two equally painful choices: move from their homes or cough up the quarter-million insider purchase price.

  Enter Annie MacAdam.

  As one of the brokers, for the deal Annie had in her safe the sales contracts. It was clear that the syndicate—with the then state governor’s then wife serving as director—had illegally voted tenants’ shares in getting its plan passed. There was no way the state attorney general was going to question, let alone halt, any deal fronted by the governor’s wife. But if the details of the conversion leaked to the papers, they could have impacted, well, negatively, on the governor’s reelection prospects.

  With one phone call to the governor of New York and another to Ms. Duke, Annie arranged for Dizey to keep her home at the rent-stabilized rate; and through the offices of Dizey Duke’s column, Annie MacAdam became an overnight star and twelve-year survivor in the world of New York society dinners.

  Every bargain has its downside. In this case there were three: Dizey had the right to fill ten percent of Annie’s dinner seats with guests of her own choosing; Dizey had the right to veto any guest of Annie’s choosing; and—the truly draconian clause—Annie could never, but never ever, invite any other columnist to any of her dinners.

  The deal was worth the downside. On any given night during the season there were upward of a dozen A-list dinners in Manhattan. There were only four society columns—no more than a hundred twenty column-inches to cover the entire who-was-there and who-wore-what. Competition for those inches was murderous, and ambitious hostesses were willing to pay ten thousand to get m
entioned, twenty to get a photo run of themselves in designer décolletage.

  Thanks to Dizey’s constant touting of Annie MacAdam, New York’s premier party giver, Annie was perceived as one of the luminaries and arbiters of the New York social scene.

  “All I want,” Dizey said, “is to see Leigh Baker’s face when she realizes she has to spend an evening in the same room with Avalon Gardner.”

  “I’ll have to tell her that he’s coming,” Annie warned. “I’m not going to let her be surprised.”

  “Tell her.” The gloat in Dizey’s voice was unmistakable. “What do you bet she gets so rattled she falls off the wagon?”

  Annie had noted for some time that Dizey, who rarely picked up a phone in one hand without a loaded shot glass in the other, had a voyeuristic interest in the drinking problems of famous women.

  “A wise hostess never bets on her guests’ sobriety,” Annie said quietly.

  “SOMETHING HAS BEEN on my conscience, Leigh darling.” Annie MacAdam’s voice came over the telephone line high and flat, with a sort of florid falsity.

  “And what’s that?” Leigh sipped her coffee. The liquid slipped down her throat with a comfortable warmth. The maid had brought breakfast in bed—coffee, dry whole-wheat toast, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. To compensate for all the delicacies that were not there, a speckled blue orchid floated in a fingerbowl.

  “When I sent out the dinner invitations,” Annie was saying, “I had no idea that they were going to parole that unspeakable Delancey boy or that Avalon Gardner was going to defend him in Dizey’s column.”

  There was no transition. Suddenly Leigh had crossed over the zone of gray sleepiness into full-color wakefulness. “How does Jim Delancey’s parole affect dinner?”

  “It affects my dinner, because I invited Avalon Gardner.”

  Leigh felt as if she had been kicked in the lungs. “Just tell me one thing. Have you invited Jim Delancey?”

  “Gracious, what kind of hostess do you think I am?”

  “You’re up to the minute, Annie, and I have no idea what the latest chic is.” Leigh hated the feeling of being one heartbeat away from a raving argument. “For all I know, it’s a great social coup nowadays to have a convicted murderer at the table.”

  “I wouldn’t consider inviting that boy. But if under the circumstances you don’t care to face Avalon—”

  Leigh could hear sirens coming from the back of her brain. “Face him? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Be that as it may,” Annie MacAdam said, “whoever has to face whomever, I’m calling to tell you that I will absolutely understand if you’d rather not see Avalon—and I wouldn’t dream of holding you to your acceptance.”

  “Why are you dumping all this on me? Why can’t you ask him to cancel?”

  “Leigh darling, I have—and he won’t. I’m sorry. You have every right to be upset, of course.”

  Through the quiet cool of the bedroom, traffic along Fifth Avenue sent up a faint muffled vibration.

  “I’m not upset. Not in the least. And Waldo and I have no intention of changing our plans. We’re coming, of course.”

  “HERE—TASTE.” Annie’s daughter, Gabrielle, held out a wooden spoon dripping … something.

  Annie hung up the kitchen extension phone. She turned and looked at her daughter, at the chubby pink face framed in mouse-brown ringlets; she looked at the spoon. She backed off a step. “Are you serious? It looks like a special effect in a horror movie.”

  “It’s your party, it’s your dessert.” Gabrielle’s face suddenly had that petulant little-girl pout it took on when she thought she was keeping her hurt feelings to herself. “I’m only trying to help.”

  Annie worked up her courage and tasted. The flavor was good. Far better than the caterers were capable of—and a lucky thing, since Annie had knocked their price down twenty percent and told them she’d handle her own dessert. “It’s delicious. But I’m not going to put a mess like that on my guests’ dessert plates. You’ve got to spruce it up.”

  Gabrielle was silent.

  How the hell, Annie asked herself, did I ever inherit a divorced, overweight live-in daughter at this stage of my life?

  “At least get it to stick together. I’ll tell you what—we’ll use pastry shells.”

  “You’re not going to put my mousse in pastry shells.” Gabrielle thumped the Pyrex mixing bowl down onto the counter.

  There was a tiny spasm in Annie’s heart. This is my daughter, she thought. My own daughter, my only child. And she’s hurting. “I’m sorry if I seem tactless, but you have to grasp that there’s an all-or-nothing factor attached to New York entertaining. It’s an arena where you win big or lose big; and the bigger you win—and believe me, I’ve won very, very big—the bigger you have to keep winning.”

  Gabrielle was staring at her mother, and there was suddenly something hard and unreachable in her eyes. “You truly don’t give a damn about anything going on in the world—except giving parties and going to parties and meeting people you think are extraordinary.”

  “And they are extraordinary,” Annie said. “Because do you know what most people are in this life? They’re extras! And do you know what you’re going to turn into if you don’t get a grip on yourself?”

  “I’ve no idea. Tell me.”

  “If only you’d try—” Annie dropped into a kitchen chair. Suddenly she was exhausted. “You have a look that’s all-American, perky, healthy. You could be spunky. You could be flirty. Add a little dignity and a little mystery and style, and people would find you very worthwhile.”

  “Why should I care how people I don’t even know find me?”

  “Because you could make something of yourself—besides a whale.”

  THE PARTY WAS IN FULL SWING. The room glinted with the movement of evening dresses and precious stones and tuxedos, but Gabrielle felt she was alone, lost in a deep forest of black trees.

  She squeezed through the crowd, looking for a wall. She found a space beside the Chippendale secretary that her mother had borrowed from Gurdon-Chappell.

  “I need something amusing,” she heard Gloria Spahn say, “something versatile.”

  Her mother and Gloria Spahn were standing on the other side of the secretary, chatting with Zack Morrow, the real estate conglomerateur and owner of the New York Tribune. He was good-looking, he was unmarried, and he was on the cover of New York magazine this week.

  “But you should wear some of Fenny’s designs!” Annie said. She unclipped a cameo brooch from her dress and handed it to Gloria.

  “Fenny designed this?” Gloria said, turning it over in her hand. “But you know, this isn’t at all bad.”

  Gabrielle stood there, waiting to be included. Waiting for her mother to take her hand and draw her into the circle and say to Zack Morrow, Do you know my daughter? She’s unmarried too.

  “Fenny!” Annie sang out.

  Fennimore Gurdon, an overweight man with waved white hair and a humorous red face, joined the group.

  “Hello, all.” He gave a casual wave of his champagne glass. He was wearing antique mother-of-pearl studs in his boiled shirt and one was beginning to pop out.

  “I was just telling Gloria about your brooches,” Annie said.

  Gabrielle stepped forward. A waiter’s arm intervened, cutting her off from the group.

  Gloria Spahn set her empty champagne glass on the waiter’s tray and took a fresh one. “How long have you been designing such great jewelry?” she asked Fenny.

  Suddenly Gabrielle felt bad about herself. She felt a sense of waste, of ugliness, of overweight. The black Gloria Spahn that her mother had lent her felt tight at the hips and bunched-up under the arms.

  Don’t panic, she told herself. Concentrate. Focus on each breath. Turn the mind inward. This moment will pass. It will pass.

  “Are you okay?” Annie whispered to her, looking annoyed.

  “Excuse me,” Gabrielle said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”<
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  Annie watched her daughter bumble off through the crowd.

  “I wish you hadn’t let Gabrielle wear my dress,” Gloria said. “It wasn’t cut for her.”

  “Relax,” Annie said. “You have plenty of beautiful dresses here tonight, no one’s going to notice Gabrielle.”

  Fenny Gurdon had overheard them, “Tori’s dress is stunning. That’s one of yours, isn’t it, Gloria?”

  Annie followed the direction of Fenny’s gaze across the room to where Tori Sandberg, tall and slim in one of Gloria’s pale apricot sheaths, was moving through the crowd.

  “You must be very proud of Tori tonight, Zack,”’ Annie said. Zack and Tori had been living together for almost seven years.

  Zack looked startled. “Why? I mean, why tonight?”

  “Because she looks beautiful.”

  “Anyone looks beautiful,” Fenny Gurdon said, “in one of Gloria’s designs. Christ, I’d look beautiful in one.”

  Annie’s eye took in the bustle and energy and haute couture eddying through the room. Her ear tuned in on all the chitchatting, the laughing, the music of life in the only lane that counted.

  “Excuse me,” Annie said.

  The Duke and Duchess of Argyll had just come through the front door.

  “Hi, your Graces!” she called out.

  LEIGH TRIED HER BEST to listen. The young man was telling her about the Astor who couldn’t wear pearls because her sweat was acidic and corroded them horribly. But the voices in Annie MacAdam’s living room were all shouting in a sort of multichannel stereo, as though to make themselves heard above a roaring wind, and the volume controls in Leigh’s head were set very wrong. The background was drowning out the melody.

  “They have to be fed to a goose,” the young man was saying.

  Leigh tried to muster a shuddered outbreath of caring. An interested smile. “A goose?”

  Behind her she could hear a man saying, “He’s such a rotten driver he hit a Rockefeller while he was on antidepressants.”

  She didn’t even have to turn to know it was Dick Braidy. After three years of marriage Dick’s voice had left a scar on her brain that four years of divorce had not healed. She could come into a room full of people and her ear would tell her immediately if he was there.