“You’re doing fine.”
“‘To end all sex is there anything else in your perverted—in your perverted—’”
“Is he repeating or are you?”
“I am.”
“Your perverted what?”
“Okay. ‘Worldview. Mine marks little piggies fine. Kisses, Society Sam.’ I’m sending it up by messenger—you’ll have it within the hour.”
“Thanks, Rad.”
Cardozo laid the receiver back in the cradle. It rang again immediately. “Cardozo.”
“Hi, it’s Abner Love over at the sound lab. Bet you’d forgotten me.”
“I haven’t forgotten you, Abner.”
“I’ve been tinkering with that other tape you gave me. There’s a stretch where I’ve been able to pull up some background signals. They’re faint, but the wave form resembles the signals on the boom-box tape. I wish you were here to see the oscilloscopes.”
“How close is the resemblance?”
“Except for frequency they’re a good match. Both onset with a click, both reverb at the high end of the partials, both show very little decay. If it weren’t for those partials, I’d say the sound is electronically produced.”
Cardozo’s ears pricked up at the word sound. Singular, not plural. “We’ve got the same sound on both tapes?”
“The sequences of pitches is a little different, but it’s obviously generated exactly the same way.”
“Any idea what generated the sound?”
“I’d say touch-tone dial tones, except there are too many of them and the partials are wrong.”
“Abner, could I have dupes of those two tapes?”
LEIGH BAKER SAT in the straight-backed metal chair, listening. A series of bright, shrill, dial-tonelike hums floated through the cubicle. And died.
Cardozo snapped the cassette out of the tape player. “And this was what he found on your answering-machine tape.”
He slipped a second cassette into the machine and pressed the Start button. For just over twelve seconds the little speaker resonated with more of the same high-pitched hums.
“It’s familiar,” Leigh Baker said.
“Which one’s familiar? The boom-box tape or yours?”
“They both are. But I can’t quite place the sound.”
“While you’re thinking,” Cardozo said, “how about some really rotten coffee, courtesy of the detective squad?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
“How do you take it?”
“A little fake sugar and some milk.”
“Settle for fake milk?”
“Perfect.”
“Don’t go away.”
While he was out of the cubicle she looked around the little space. It gave her the feeling that the detectives didn’t clean and—what with city budget cutbacks—no one else did either. The only tidy area she could see in all the clutter was the place on the desk where a small stainless-steel framed photograph sat.
She picked it up. It showed a young girl, six years old or so, with long, straight dark hair and beautiful deep brown eyes.
“Drink at your own risk.” Cardozo came back with two coffees. “The police accept no liability.”
Leigh was still holding the girl’s photo in her hand. “Excuse me for being snoopy.” She set it back in its place of honor. “She’s so pretty, I couldn’t help noticing.”
“My little girl,” Cardozo said.
Leigh accepted a styrofoam cup from his hand. She sipped and her mouth had a sensation of thick, bitter heat, like what she imagined summer nights in Mongolia to be. “Not so bad,” she said.
Cardozo dropped back into his seat. “The engineer thinks the sounds on those tapes both have the same source.”
“And what’s the source?”
“He doesn’t know. But if the person threatening you left the sound on your machine and the same sound showed up on the boom-box tape, there’s a good chance that your caller and the man with the boom box are the same person.”
She shook her head firmly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that.”
He raised an eyebrow. “And I’m sorry, but that’s what the tapes say.”
“Then the tapes are wrong.”
A beat of silence passed. “It might interest you to know that the night Dizey Duke died, Jim Delancey never left his building.”
“What does that have to do with anything? Delancey didn’t—” She stopped herself. She realized what she had been about to say: Delancey didn’t push her.
Cardozo’s eyes flicked up. “Delancey didn’t what?”
The air conditioner began whining. Cardozo rose and walked to the window and gave it a karate chop. The whine became a sort of muffled sobbing.
Leigh shifted in her chair, bracing herself, drawing up steadiness from the floor. “Delancey didn’t leave his building? How do you know?”
Cardozo came back slowly to his desk. He gave her a look that said, I’m going to trust you. “We had men watching both entrances. Delancey never came out.”
The cubicle suddenly seemed darker to Leigh. She couldn’t tell if she was imagining it or if the current had dipped. And she couldn’t tell if Vince Cardozo was saying the police no longer suspected Jim Delancey. She wanted to scream. Every instinct in her body said it was Jim Delancey. He was the one who was phoning her, he was the one who was killing her friends.
Cardozo’s eyes never left her. “Are you going to be home later?”
“I can be. Why?”
“I may have some news about Oona’s brooch.”
A SHADOW FELL ACROSS THE DESK. Cardozo turned and saw Ellie Siegel resting a shoulder against the open door.
“What did the movie star want?”
He shrugged. “I asked her to listen to some tapes.”
“And she dropped everything and came running right over?”
“I didn’t time her, and I didn’t ask how much she had to drop.”
“Are you going Hollywood on us, Vince?”
“If all you came here for is to nag, good-bye. If something is on your mind, please get to the point.”
“As a matter of fact, something is on my mind. It’s not a big deal, but I thought you should know.” Ellie stepped into the cubicle and handed him that morning’s New York Tribune, folded open to page ten.
“What’s this?”
“Benedict Braidy’s society column.”
“I didn’t know he was writing one.”
“He’s replaced ‘Dizey’s Dish.’ Now it’s called ‘Dick Sez.’”
Cardozo scanned. In the space where only last week an air-brushed, blond-banged Dizey had grinned, a black-banged, air-brushed Dick Braidy now solemnly frowned.
My great and good friend, Zack Morrow, publisher and owner of this newspaper, has invited me to take over the society column. Mindful of my dear friend Dizey Duke’s high standards and achievement, I accepted on one condition: that I be allowed full freedom to follow in Dizey’s hard-hitting footsteps.
And so, dear readers and Dizey fans, with your blessing, here goes:
What followed seemed standard Dizey fare: who went where, who wore what.
Ellie picked up the tape player and spent a moment examining it. “Is the tape secret? Is that why the door was shut?”
“Do you want to hear the tapes? Is that why you’re nagging me?”
Ellie set the tape player gently down on the desk. “I didn’t mean to nag, and I hope you don’t feel as grumpy as you sound. I just wondered why you had your door shut.”
“I was playing a tape for Leigh Baker, and I had the door shut because it’s a zoo around here and you can’t hear yourself fart.”
“Do you want to hear yourself fart? Does she want to hear you fart?”
“The tapes happen not to be very loud. Go on. Shut the door and listen to them. Be my guest.”
Ellie frowned primly. She opened a drawer of his filing cabinet and neatened the bits of paper hanging out. “I’m sure it’s none of
my business. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“Please, Ellie, intrude.” He kicked the door shut.
“If you insist.” Ellie sat and listened while Cardozo played her the two tapes. Beneath her shut eyelids her eyes moved as though she were watching butterflies in a dream.
“Very pretty,” she said, when the tape finished. “Like a lonely robot humming to cheer itself up.”
“Recognize it?” Cardozo said.
She shook her head. “It’s familiar, but I can’t place it. It’ll come to me.”
CARDOZO HELD UP HIS SHIELD. “Do you have an ambulance attendant here by the name of delMajor?”
“Ambrose delMajor?” In her jeans and Batman T-shirt, the dispatcher was a thick-bodied woman with a ruddy complexion and curly blond hair clipped short. “Ambrose is bringing in a coronary from Beekman Place. He should be here any minute now.”
The ambulance-dispatching station of Lexington Hospital had the frightening look of a firebombed subway token booth. Reinforced movers’ tape webbed out from bullet holes in the plate-glass window, and plastic garbage bagging had been taped up to cover a missing panel.
The phone rang. The dispatcher answered, listened, and then pleasantly said, “Fuck you too, ma’am,” and hung up.
She smiled at Cardozo.
“There’s Ambrose,” she said.
A graffiti-smeared ambulance pulled out of the avenue’s gridlocked traffic, wheels slipping on leaked oil, and skidded onto the indoor ramp. The rear doors burst open.
An attendant leapt down onto the ramp. Another began shoving a stretcher out.
The woman strapped to it looked dead.
“Which one’s Ambrose?” Cardozo asked.
The dispatcher pointed to the second attendant.
When Cardozo stepped out of the air-conditioned booth, the heat pressed down like the lid on a simmering pan. The ramp was noisy in an insanely bad-tempered way.
“Ambrose delMajor?” Cardozo called out.
The attendant spun around and froze.
Behind him, two young-looking M.D.s were wheeling the stretcher into the Emergency Room.
Cardozo strode forward, shield extended in his left hand. “Lieutenant Vince Cardozo, Twenty-second Precinct. Could I have a word with you?”
Ambrose had a flat blue stare, expressionless as the lens of a minicam. He stood a little under six feet. He was wearing sneakers and blue jeans, and beneath his white hospital jacket one corner of the collar of his blue cotton workshirt was sticking up like a broken thumb.
“What’s this about?” Ambrose spoke with a slight southern accent and a pronounced case of the sniffles.
“May eighth you were on the ambulance crew that brought Oona Aldrich to this hospital—the lady who was attacked in Marsh and Bonner’s.”
“Look, I bring thirty people a day to this hospital.”
“And four days ago you brought Dizey Duke. That was the lady who went off the town-house terrace over on Sixty-seventh.”
Cardozo sensed hesitation in Ambrose, a missed beat.
“I have no way of recalling.”
“You don’t need to recall anything, Ambrose, because I just got through checking the records. You were on both those crews. In fact, you were the only person who was on both those crews.”
“Ambrose!” the dispatcher yelled.
Ambrose went over to the booth.
Cardozo could see him through the window, arguing with the dispatcher. He stalked back, sullen-faced. “Can’t talk with you now. I got another call.”
“I’ll ride with you.” Cardozo hopped up into the ambulance and offered Ambrose a hand up. A moment later the second attendant began to climb in.
“Why don’t you ask your friend to ride in front?” Cardozo said.
“Fritz,” Ambrose said, “ride in front.”
Ambrose pulled the doors shut.
Cardozo settled himself in one of the technicians’ seats.
From up front there came two shocks of the cab doors slamming. The motor ground to life. On the other side of the roof the siren cut on in midscreech.
Ambrose slipped out of his white jacket and hung it over a wall hook. He took the other seat and stuck a cigarette in his mouth and spent the next thirty seconds coaxing flame out of a green plastic Bic.
The ambulance executed a sharp left.
The door of the syringe depository swung open with a bright, startling clang. Ambrose reached a fist over and bopped the door shut. He sat there dragging on his cigarette. “I’m listening.”
“I could book you on suspicion,” Cardozo said. “You couldn’t work for the city, Ambrose. They’d have to suspend you. Without pay. Think about it.”
“Suspicion of what?”
“Suspicion of smoking on the job.”
Ambrose’s eyes flicked around guardedly.
Cardozo smiled. “Only joking. But that is oxygen in that cylinder, isn’t it?”
Ambrose stretched out a foot. The tip of his blue sneaker touched the cylinder. “That’s why the big letters spell oxygen.”
“You guys sure like to live on the edge,” Cardozo said.
Ambrose didn’t answer. His jacket was hanging by Cardozo’s left ear, and Cardozo reached a hand up into the pocket and pulled out a lady’s wallet.
“Tell me, Ambrose. Do you really think blue alligator is helping the ecology?”
Ambrose stared with one instant’s open astonishment. “You have no right to touch that.”
“Just checking that you have a valid social-security number.”
“My social-security card’s not in there.”
Ambrose reached for the wallet, but Cardozo leaned away. He leafed through the credit cards.
“Neither is your American Express, your Visa, your AT&T, or your Ritz limo charge—unless your name is. Mitzi Lloyd Eberstadt. You don’t look like a Mitzi to me, Ambrose. But that woman you guys just dropped off, now she looked like a Mitzi.” Cardozo riffled through the bill compartment. He whistled. “Two hundred thirty, cash.”
“The wallet fell out when we were moving her.”
“So you’re just holding on to it till you can return it to her?” Cardozo tossed the wallet to him.
Ambrose had fast reflexes. He caught it one-handed.
“Now, Ambrose, enlighten me about something. You were driving Oona Aldrich to the hospital when she lost a little platinum hummingbird brooch with ruby eyes. Three weeks later you were driving Dizey Duke to the hospital when she lost a little platinum hummingbird brooch.”
“I wasn’t driving. I never drive. I’m a trained paramedic. I stay with the patient.”
“Then you were back here with these women when they lost their brooches. Maybe you saw what happened to those hummingbirds?”
Cardozo figured that, financially speaking, Ambrose had to be in a negative-asset position. He probably owed three thousand dollars to every bank that had ever been dumb enough to issue him a credit card, plus interest, plus collection charges, plus past judgments due. If he got suspended from his ambulance job, the most he could look forward to in unemployment benefits would be $175 a week. After rent that would amount to barely ten dollars a day to sustain his drinking, his drugging, and lesser needs—such as eating.
“Okay, okay. I did fence two small items. They were both cheap little hummingbird brooches. It was the only time I ever did anything like that in my life.” Ambrose spoke quietly, with no physical show of emotion except for the way his sneaker ground out his cigarette on the ambulance floor. “But I didn’t steal them. I saw them lying on the floor, and I have financial expenses. My mom is in Intensive Care, she’s not covered by insurance—”
“Who’d you fence them to, Ambrose?”
In a toss-up between Ambrose’s neck and anybody else’s, Cardozo had a fair hunch whose neck Ambrose would choose.
“This fellow I know,” Ambrose said. “He’s a society decorator.”
CARDOZO PHONED LEIGH BAKER. “Let’s meet,” he said, “and
talk about Oona Aldrich’s brooch.”
“HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW Fennimore Gurdon?” Cardozo said.
“Fenny?” Leigh Baker stretched the nickname out like a piece of taffy. “I don’t really know him, but I adore him.”
They were sitting in a place on Madison that called itself the Fifth Avenue Tea Room. It had been Leigh Baker’s suggestion.
A civilized white noise filled the room like a thin vapor—dozens of voices all modulated to the same register, silverware clacking against china, the sweetly chaotic gamelan music of leisured life. Most of the other customers were women—and they looked to Cardozo like the immaculately-maned sort who got together monthly and discussed Proust. Their clothes contrasted brightly with the honeydew-melon color of the walls and columns. Matching wooden shutters ran from floor to ceiling, shuttering windows that weren’t there.
“Tell me about him,” Cardozo said.
Leigh Baker took a moment collecting her thoughts. She was wearing a green blouse that brought out the color of her eyes. Little truant blips of light flashed from tiny, almost invisible diamonds in her ears. “He has terrific staying power. He’s been popular with the last three generations of tastemakers. He has a home on the Vanderbilt property in Rhinebeck. If you like his style, the home’s beautiful. If you don’t, it’s an overdecorated Victorian department store. He’s considerate and charming and he’s a great escort.”
A waitress placed an iced cappuccino in front of Leigh Baker and a coffee in front of Cardozo. On the small table between them she set a plate of tiny, crustless sandwiches that looked as though they had been made by elves for elves.
“Your turn,” Leigh Baker said. “Tell me what you know about Fenny.”
“Oona Aldrich’s brooch was fenced to him—twice.”
Leigh Baker caught her breath and a hand went halfway to her mouth. “But how could he?” A shadow pulsed rapidly just beneath the white hollow of her throat. “Why would he?”
“The theory around the Fraud Bureau is, he has an expensive crack habit. He owes major back taxes to the city. So he’s had to take up a few sidelines.”
“Besides fencing?”
“Besides fencing. He helps people move into society. For twenty thousand a month he promises to get you into four major dinners. That’s above what he charges for decorating your home.”
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