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Deadly Rich

Page 22

by Edward Stewart


  “But you always look wonderful in late afternoon.”

  Sorry lifted a small amount of sorbet de poire to her mouth. “I’ve lost eight pounds and it’s time to look better than wonderful. You, by the way, look smashing. You’re the only woman I know who can bring off that dégagée look.”

  “You mean I should spend more time in front of my mirror?”

  “Quite the opposite. Reckless is you, darling.”

  Leigh supposed Sorry was referring to the crème brûlée she had ordered and already finished.

  “Have you been getting strange phone calls?” Leigh said.

  Sorry offered an uncertain smile. “Now, that’s an interesting question. How strange is strange?”

  “Hang ups, breathing … threats.”

  “None that I recall. Should I have been?”

  “Have you noticed anyone following you?”

  “I think IRS may have a man following me.”

  “Are you sure he’s IRS?”

  “No. I’m not even sure he’s following me.”

  “Where have you seen him?”

  “At Cartier’s four times. He watches what I buy and then he whispers to the salespeople. Doesn’t that sound like IRS to you?”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Heavy. Poor taste in clothes. He has thinning black hair and he combs it over his bald spot.”

  “It doesn’t sound like—” Leigh was going to say Jim Delancey, and then she thought, There’s no sense alarming Sorry. “Like the person I’m thinking of.”

  “In other words someone’s phoning you, and breathing, and hanging up, and threatening you. And following you. And he’s better-looking than my man in Carrier’s.”

  “What about Fenny?” Fenny Gurdon was Sorry’s partner in the interior-design firm of Gurdon-Chappell, and like Sorry, he had testified at the trial for Nita’s character.

  Sorry licked her spoon clean. “You know Fenny doesn’t follow women.”

  “Is he being followed?”

  “Not that he’s mentioned to me. But he’s at the shop this afternoon. He’d love to see you. Why don’t you go ask him?”

  LEIGH SHADED HER EYES and peered through the Madison Avenue window of Gurdon-Chappell Interiors. She saw antiques, but no Gurdon. No customers either. She pushed the buzzer.

  Twenty seconds later the shop door swung open, and she stepped inside. Crystal chandeliers threw elegantly fractured light.

  “Leigh—love!”

  An enormous white-haired man materialized from the depth of the store, rushing toward her down the Biedermeier-cluttered aisle. They met: first their hands, then his lips and her angled cheek.

  “Fennie, there’s something I’ve got to ask you, and I hope it won’t seem strange.”

  She caught the stillness and expectancy in his eyes. He thought she was here to buy something.

  “In this business, love,” he said, “no request is strange. And nine times out of ten, in this shop, the answer’s yes.”

  Keeping her hand in his, he led her to an enormous leather-topped desk at the rear of the gallery. They sat. She picked up an embroidered velvet bell cord and began drawing it through her fingers.

  He waited.

  Her eye roamed a wall of marble mantelpieces, standing suits of armor, carved canopied beds. “Fennie—have you been getting phone calls?”

  “I should hope so!”

  “Odd phone calls. Hang ups. Silences. Breathing.”

  “Good Lord, love, what are we talking—phone sex?”

  “No. I’m serious, Fennie. Something is going on. It’s been going on ever since they paroled the Delancey boy.”

  Fennie Gurdon drew back in his chair. “I’m not exactly understanding the question, love.”

  “Lately have you had any feeling that someone’s watching you?”

  “Watching me?”

  “Following you?”

  “Should I have had?”

  “I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

  “I’m not exactly a household name to the broader public. As far as sex appeal goes, I’m a distinctly minority taste. Why should anyone bother with me?”

  “To learn your movements. To know where you go when and what times you’re apt to be alone.”

  The patchouli-scented face remained cool, practically deadpan. “Sad to say, no such attention has been lavished on me, love. Don’t I wish. But I’m not a celebrity like you.”

  “It’s not a fan, Fennie.”

  Fennie lifted the bell cord from her fingers. “This person seems to be making you terribly unhappy, love. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Just be careful. Please.” Leigh got to her feet.

  Fennie rose at the same time. “I’ll try, love, but you know your old Fennie—some things are easier said than done.”

  LEIGH BAKER STARED at the marsala-marinated strawberries heaped in a parfait cup, doused and dripping with zabaione. She felt an almost obscene craving for sweets; she recognized it as a transposed longing for alcohol, brought on by stress. No, she made up her mind. I’m not going to.

  She tore her eyes from the color photograph and closed the book of Italian desserts and replaced it on the shelf.

  Most of the other customers in the shop were women. But one man standing at the biography section with his back toward her was wearing a raincoat. Odd to be wearing a raincoat, she thought. It’s a sunny day.

  She swung the shop door open and stepped out on Madison.

  Steam pipes under the street had exploded. A Con Ed crew was working to repair the thirty-foot crater. Boys on roller skates glided through the jammed traffic, handing out restaurant flyers to stalled drivers. An ambulance was trying to get through and its siren was wailing at top decibel.

  Garbage cans waiting on the curb for collection had narrowed the sidewalk to a single lane. A homeless man had picked that exact spot to spread out a bed of newspapers and fall asleep.

  Leigh walked around him. He was unshaved and he’d fouled his trousers and he had open sores on his arm. She felt disgust and then she felt ashamed of her disgust and guilty that she had a home, even if it wasn’t her own. She took a ten-dollar bill from her purse and bent down to slip it into his shirt pocket.

  She felt like a sentimental fool. She glanced around her to see if anyone had noticed her impulsive little gesture.

  Down the block a man in a raincoat was watching her. He was wearing a little cap that shaded his eyes and she couldn’t see his face, but she wondered if it wasn’t the man she’d seen in the bookstore.

  She crossed Madison and continued north.

  At Seventy-fourth she pretended to look in a window of porcelain figurines, and she half turned around. The man in the raincoat was there again, still a half block behind her.

  THE ANSWERING MACHINE showed that three more calls had come in. Leigh sat down on the edge of the bed and pressed the Replay button. The first message was a neat hang up. The second was a messy hang up.

  The third was a silence.

  She sat forward. She focused all her power of hearing on the soft white noise hissing from the machine. She began to sense something, a presence, the held breath of another person listening, not speaking.

  The even hum of a dial tone cut in.

  She stopped the machine. She dialed Waldo’s direct line at work. Waldo’s male secretary answered.

  “Horst—it’s Leigh. Could I speak with Waldo for just a moment?”

  “Oh, Miss Baker. I’m afraid Mr. Carnegie is in a meeting. Can he call you back?”

  “I’ll hold.”

  “I’m afraid he’ll be quite some time.”

  SEVENTEEN MINUTES LATER Leigh was stepping out of a cab on Fifth Avenue in front of the Carnegie Building. She plunged into the lobby and took the express elevator to the penthouse. She walked rapidly down the Impressionist-lined corridor, pursued by the snapping echo of her green lizard pumps.

  “Here I am,” she said cheerfully, “complicating your job.”

>   Waldo’s pale-haired, pale-eyed secretary was sitting at his desk outside the inner office, and she could read nothing in his smooth, tanned face, not even a hint of surprise in the exquisite civility of his smile.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll take all the blame.”

  “Miss Baker, I really wouldn’t—”

  “Honestly. I’m an old pro at it.” She blew him a kiss and pushed through the door.

  Waldo and three Japanese in extraordinarily beautiful Italian business suits were seated in easy chairs around the coffee table. They were drinking Bloody Marys.

  Waldo’s glance swung toward the door and his disbelief had an almost luminous surface. He bolted up and came toward her. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

  “I’m going to pieces. I keep getting hang ups and silences on my answering machine.”

  “You come busting in here because of hang ups on your machine?”

  “I need you to reassure me and tell me you’re not going on that business trip Thursday.”

  There was cold blue refusal in his eyes, and it emphasized a boundary between where they were standing and the rest of the room, with its cycloramic three-wall view of the sprawling, howling city. “Those shoes don’t go with that dress,” he said.

  She exercised savage restraint. “Well, excuse me.”

  Waldo continued to stare at her but with something sad creeping into his eyes now. “My office is not the ideal place for this kind of unannounced apparition.”

  “You know what a baby I am. Please, just hug me and give me a kiss and tell me you’ll cancel your trip or take me with you—and then I’ll go home like a good little girl.”

  He was looking her straight in the eye, the way people do when they’re holding something back. “These are very important men. They haven’t recognized you yet. If I kiss you, they’ll know it’s you and they’ll know how you dress when there isn’t a photographer around.”

  She felt an angry blush spreading from her face to her neck and shoulders. “You’re not that petty. You couldn’t be.”

  “Darling, they’re that petty. Please?”

  BACK AT THE HOUSE she sat on the edge of her bed. She felt rejected, crushed. The scary thing was, she knew there was no reason for the feeling. It was like a rising tide of black water, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  She phoned Luddie and got his answering machine. “Luddie,” she pleaded, “pick up, goddammit. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  But he didn’t pick up.

  “Luddie, I need you. I’m falling apart and I know I’m being stupid and that’s what scares me. Tell me something wise. Tell my machine something wise.”

  She hung up and the empty floor stretched around her in perfect, quiet dustlessness. A thought came to her that she couldn’t quite explain. She wondered if anyone had bothered to disconnect Oona’s machine.

  She reached again for the receiver. She dialed Oona’s number. The machine answered. No one had changed the message. She sat listening to Oona’s voice. “Hello, thank you for calling. You have reached—”

  She felt startled and sad at the same time. This dumb, stilted recitation, read straight from the manufacturer’s booklet, was all that remained of her friend, of all the years they had shared.

  After the beep Leigh tried to think of a message.

  “Hi, it’s me. I just wanted to hear your voice. I just wanted to say I’m sorry we fought. I guess I’m beginning to understand what you were going through. I miss you terribly. I can’t believe you’re not there. Here. Somewhere. Oh, shit.”

  She broke the connection.

  There was a tightness below her throat, a stinging in her eyes. She laid the receiver carefully back into the cradle.

  She gazed around the bedroom—a mistress’s bedroom clotted with decorator chic and spill-over doodads from houses that Waldo’s designer had done for other celebrities.

  She sat a moment in numbed dullness and then a message crackled along her nerve endings, too faint to be measured and yet too insistent to be ignored.

  She walked into the hallway like an old woman, with small, tired steps.

  One of the servants was using the elevator again, so she walked down the stairway, through latticed slashes of light and shadow.

  In the living room a light like a silver tarnish fell on the eighteenth-century French secretary that Waldo’s designer had converted into a bar.

  The light seemed to signal a shimmering zone of safety just beyond the touch of reality.

  She remembered Luddie’s saying to her, long ago when he’d first become her AA sponsor, that part of self-acceptance was allowing yourself decisions, wrong decisions, mistakes even.

  She opened the paneled doors of the secretary and found the silver ice bucket and the Johnnie Walker right away. She dropped two cubes into a highball glass, two long splashes of Scotch. She had to search to find the diet Pepsi. She filled the glass to the brim.

  As her hands went through the old movements that she’d forgotten were there in the memory of her muscles and nerves, the old peacefulness came back that she’d forgotten was there too.

  She rotated the glass and studied the little whirlpool she had created. Then she lifted the glass, and her lips touched the door to another world.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Thursday, May 23

  A LIGHT ON CARDOZO’S PHONE winked, and he punched the button and grabbed up the receiver. “Cardozo.”

  “Lieutenant, it’s Rad Rheinhardt, down at the Trib. We just got another in the mail.”

  TWELVE MINUTES LATER Cardozo walked into Clancy’s Bar and Grill and stopped by the door, giving his eyes a minute to adjust to the dimness.

  The same two old-timers were sitting at the bar, but they seemed to be getting chummier. Today there were only five empty stools between them instead of eight.

  The bartender stood serenely eating from a plastic salad-bar container of take-out balanced on the cash register, and he nodded at Cardozo as though, with this second appearance, he’d become a valued regular.

  Rad Rheinhardt had taken a table by the window, and the sun cut him and his rumpled pale green shirt into ribbons of light and dark. He was examining his fingernails.

  Cardozo glanced at the half-empty glass on the table. “Tequila Sunrise?”

  Rheinhardt picked up the glass. “Tequila, hold the Sunrise.” He took a long, comfortable swallow.

  Cardozo pulled out a chair and sat. “Isn’t it a little early in the morning for heavy metal?”

  Rheinhardt spat a shaving of ice into the ashtray. “You seem to be searching for reasons to love me.”

  Cardozo had a sense of confronting the irreducible biology of Rad Rheinhardt. “Give me the letter and my search is over.”

  Rheinhardt reached down into a briefcase that he’d parked between his Top-Siders. “Coming at you live.” He laid the letter on the table, wrapped in a plastic freezer bag.

  Cardozo frowned. Inside the sheath, the cut-out words had been taped to a sheet of yellow foolscap.

  NO REST FOR THE WICK

  SO OUT OUT BRIEF CANDLES

  A WALKERS SHADOWS

  WHAT THIS SAGE DEMANDS.

  KISSES, SOCIETY SAM

  What hooked Cardozo’s gaze on the very first scan were the words wick and candles. Nothing about Shabbes candles had been published, so either Sam was a lucky guesser or with this letter he established his authenticity. “There’s stuff in this letter that we’ve held back. Details of the M.O. No one knows but us and Sam. If you publish them, we risk copycats.”

  “Vince, when are you going to realize you and I are on the same side?”

  Rheinhardt’s pupils were as tiny and hard as peppercorns, and Cardozo was not reassured by the thought that Rad was doing coke or speed to balance out the booze.

  “Just tell me what you want us to hold back.”

  “Wick,” Cardozo said. “Candle. A walkers shadows had better go too, just to be safe.”

&nb
sp; “Doesn’t leave much to work with,” Rheinhardt said. “Oh, well, maybe he’ll send another.”

  CARDOZO WATCHED ELLIE SIEGEL as she studied the letter. She was standing beside the window in his cubicle, and she had angled the document between its two protective glassine sheets so that it caught the daylight. “Sam wants to show us he knows his way around the classics, or at least around Bartlett’s Quotations. This letter is really kind of pathetic.”

  Cardozo slid the envelope toward her. “Tell you anything?”

  Ellie picked the envelope up in its glassine cover. “Looks to me pretty much like the envelope the first letter came in. Except for the postmark. This one’s zip-coded one-one-two-oh-one.”

  “And what does that mean to you?”

  “It means Brooklyn, probably the Heights. It means he’s mailing these from different postal zones to give us a hard time. And worst of all it means you want me to go down there and check out mail routes and pickup times.”

  “Only because you’re the best.”

  Ellie Siegel’s charms had their uses. Ellie knew it, Cardozo knew it. Nobody on the force looked quite like her, nobody walked or carried on a conversation quite like her. Men wanted to take her to bed, women wanted to take her shopping. The bottom line was she motivated people to cooperate with her in a way that a lot of other cops couldn’t.

  “Thanks, Ellie. I appreciate it.”

  He watched her turn and leave his cubicle and walk back across the squad room. Her stride started at the waist, purposefully. Her appearance telegraphed an unmissable message: In this city full of filth and giving up, I, Detective Ellie Siegel, maintain my self-respect: I have fought for it, it is mine, I have a right to flaunt it, and you’d better acknowledge it, because I’ll kill to keep it.

  CONSIDERING THAT she said she was calling from One Police Plaza, the woman’s voice on Malloy’s phone was oddly soft and modulated. In Malloy’s experience voices from down there had a harder edge.

  She wanted to know if he could come down immediately to meet with Captain Lawrence Zawac of IAD.

  Paging God, Malloy thought. If anyone from Internal Affairs wanted to talk to him, it was because he was in trouble or because they were going to ask him to help get someone else in trouble. “How soon is immediately?”

 

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