She lifted her glass of cappuccino and sipped. “How do you know about this?”
“Some of his dissatisfied customers complained to the Better Business Bureau. There’s also a possibility that he sells housebreakers the plans of the apartments he decorates. The attorney general is looking into it.”
“I never heard that.”
The remark sounded unguarded and sincere, and Cardozo took it to mean that she’d heard all the rest.
“Some of my co-workers believe he sold the Vanderbilts’ security plans for the country estate—but Mrs. V. protected him from the heat.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Word is, he deals dope to a few close friends who don’t want to have to take deliveries personally.”
“That poor old dowager is on dope?” Leigh Baker played with her cappuccino glass, turning it slowly on its paper doily.
“Here’s my suggestion,” Cardozo said. “I phoned and his shop will be open tomorrow between two and six. You go there and tell him you want a brooch like the one Dizey bought from him. If he produces the brooch, which he will unless he’s already sold it, we have him.”
She was silent. It was as though she were staring into motionless water.
“I’ll be at Fenny’s tomorrow,” she said. “Two o’clock.”
“Good. Then so will I.”
THAT EVENING LEIGH LOOKED UP from her copy of French Vogue and saw that Waldo had laid his copy of Forbes down on the sofa beside him. He was staring into his highball. He seemed preoccupied, and she asked him if anything was bothering him.
“Just thinking,” he said.
She’d heard on television that the Dow Jones had closed down almost two hundred points, and she wondered if that had anything to do with his mood. She crossed the room and sat beside him. She took his glass and set it on the table and took his hands in hers.
“Don’t worry about business,” she said. “What goes up comes down, what goes down comes back up.”
“I’m not worried about business. To tell the truth, I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t worry about me either. I go up, I come down. I go down, I come back up.”
“I promised I wouldn’t leave you alone, and now I have to.”
Her hands withdrew. “When?”
“I’ve got to go to Tokyo this Thursday. One of our companies is in trouble. I won’t be able to get back till Sunday.”
“And you can’t take me with you?”
He shook his head. “But I’ve arranged for you to be taken care of.”
She got to her feet. “Not that guard again—I won’t have Mr. Arnold Bone following me around.”
“Nothing like that. You’re going to Paris for four days with Kristi and Wystan Blackwell.”
She had a feeling Waldo had bribed the Blackwells to look after her, and a trip to Paris had been Kristi’s price. “That’s awfully sweet of you.” And then she sighed. “I just wish you could come with me instead of them.”
“So do I. Maybe next time.”
FORTY-ONE
Tuesday, June 4
“THE ZIP CODE,” ELLIE Siegel said, “is one-one-eight-oh-three—Stauber Drive, Hicksville.” Today she was wearing a dark blue dress with a low neck—not very low, just low enough for the heat. “Why anyone would drive thirty miles out on Long Island just to mail this note, don’t ask me.”
“He had an errand,” Malloy said.
Sam Richards shook his head. “No one who can possibly help it has an errand in Hicksville.”
Greg Monteleone yawned loudly. “He’s doing it to confuse us. But we’re not confused, guys, are we?”
Ellie snapped open her purse and took out her notepad. “The postmark is A.M., June first—last Saturday. Ordinarily there are two Saturday pickups from Stauber. But the regular driver was sick, and the replacement didn’t make the first pickup till three P.M. Which means the letter must have been mailed Friday before three.”
Siegel rose from her chair and crossed to the window and stood staring out. The view was of one of those midtown alleys where sunlight didn’t fall: developers had been allowed to blot out the sky, and the only thing remotely bright on the brick wall across the way was the pigeon droppings.
“I don’t often agree with Greg, but I’m coming around to his point of view. Sam’s not just trying to confuse us, he’s trying to wear me out. There’s no other reason for these letters to be mailed from such crazy places.”
“You’re working too hard,” Cardozo said.
“Tell me.”
“Have to stop taking things so personally.” Cardozo gave his swivel chair a push and made a quarter revolution. “Sam, how’s the progress at Family Court?”
“I’m developing great respect for New York’s Hispanic Catholic community.” Today Sam was wearing a brass-buttoned navy-blue blazer, a regimental silk tie, and perfectly pressed gray trousers. “What impresses me is the number of boys who haven’t been molested by older male relatives. So far we’ve found twenty-two hundred of them. The bad news is, we haven’t found a single one who fits Wilkes’s profile.”
“Wilkes is a shrink,” Greg Monteleone said. “Shrinks are hired guns, they’ll say whatever you pay them to.”
“I’m not saying his theory is wrong,” Sam Richards said. “But I kept thinking about Jim Delancey telling the judge he was defending that boy against an abusive father.”
Greg Monteleone snapped a blue suspender. “Delancey’s saving his ass.”
“I believe he’s sincere,” Sam Richards said.
“Why?”
“He risked his parole.”
“No way.” Monteleone shook his head. “The people who had the clout to get him out have the clout to keep him out.”
“I feel he was taking a chance, and I feel he took it because he identified with that kid. I asked myself, What if we’re looking in the wrong population? What if the kid we want is Jim Delancey? What if Delancey was abused and sodomized by an older male relative, what if that relative was his father, what if the case landed in Family Court?”
“A lot of what-ifs,” Cardozo said.
“And here’s the biggest what-if of all. What if it happened within the last eight years, and Family Court has it in the computerized records?”
“And?” Cardozo said.
“The mother’s name is Xenia? The father’s name is James Delancey the Second?”
“Sounds right to me.”
“Eight years ago, the Child Welfare Department brought a complaint against Delancey senior.”
“What was the charge?” Cardozo said.
Sam Richards turned two empty hands palm up. “The record is sealed. I’d need a court order to get into it.”
“I’ll get you one.” Cardozo picked up his pen. “What’s the number of that case?”
CARDOZO SHUT THE CUBICLE DOOR and lifted the phone and dialed. A woman’s voice answered brightly. “Judge’s chambers.”
“Hi, Lil, it’s Vince. Is himself in?”
The voice collapsed. “He hasn’t been well. His prostate. Last week he had to go into University Hospital for a sonogram. The tumors were soft—nonmalignant.”
“So he’s in the clear?”
“I wish. Remember Bessie—his collie?”
“Sure, I remember Bessie. She liked to drink his martinis.”
“She died.”
Not of cirrhosis, I hope. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“So this weekend he went upstate to see the breeder. While he was parked—in Brewster, New York, this happened—his car got broken into.”
“This story has a happy ending?”
“They got his reading glasses.”
“The story has an ending?”
“He just came in. Act like I didn’t tell you anything. Hold on a second.”
Lil put him on hold, and he stared down at his desktop at the latest memo from the Puzzle Palace: a directive on blue paper ordering the precincts to crack down on parking violators. At
tached to it was a yellow memo stating that the Twenty-second Precinct was expected to produce one point two million in tow charges by the end of the fiscal year.
Has law enforcement come to this? Cardozo wondered. A last-ditch expedient to balance the city books?
New York was crumbling, services were crippled, races were polarized, homeless flooded the streets, crack killed—and New York’s finest were hunting down traffic violators.
Judge Tom Levin’s voice came on the line, solid and cheerful. “I was going to call you, Vince. How about a few hands this weekend?”
Cardozo and Tom Levin had been playing poker with each other for over twenty years. “Not this weekend, Tom. I’m on a task force.”
“Too bad. What can I do for you?”
“First of all, I’m sorry about Bessie.”
“Thanks. But I got a great puppy—Abigail. You have to come down and meet her.”
“I’d like to. Tom, I need an order unsealing a Family Court record.”
“No problem. Where’s my pen? Okay, what’s the case number?”
SITTING IN LUDDIE’S LIVING ROOM, Leigh felt the nervousness of a cornered animal. “Why is this maniac taking blame for something he didn’t do?”
“What maniac?” Luddie said.
“Sam, Society Sam, whatever his name is.” Leigh handed Luddie her copy of the morning’s Trib, folded open to the text of Sam’s third letter.
Luddie read aloud. “Simple Simon meet the die man …”
“Please, Luddie. Read it to yourself.”
Luddie’s eyes touched her with the weightlessness of light. “Maybe in Sam’s mind it’s not blame he’s taking. Maybe it’s fame. Maybe he’s addicted to headlines.”
“Or maybe he’s shielding me.”
“And why the hell would you need shielding?”
“Because, as I just got through telling you,” she said quietly, “I was drunk and killed a woman.”
“You were drunk and you did not kill a woman.”
“It’s exactly the same as Jim Delancey and Nita—the same house, the same terrace, the same time of day, the same situation, the same result. The only difference is, Delancey went to jail for it.”
“There’s a second difference. Delancey pushed your daughter—and you didn’t push Dizey.”
Leigh was silent.
“That drunken bitch of a professional gossip fucked up her body chemistry,” Luddie said. “She lost her balance and she fell. Blame her, blame God, blame John Barleycorn, but don’t blame yourself.”
“If I hadn’t been drunk, it wouldn’t have happened.”
“Baloney. If she hadn’t been drunk, it wouldn’t have happened. Face it, Leigh—guilt may give you a great wallow, but much as the old bag deserved what she got, you were not the instrument God chose to deliver it. And even if you had been, how would Society Sam know? He’d have to have been there and seen the whole fight.”
“I don’t think it’s so impossible that he was there. I don’t think it’s so impossible at all.”
“Come on! What are you trying to persuade yourself of?”
“Vince Cardozo knows something happened on the terrace. He knows it wasn’t an accident.”
“How the hell did you get to be such an expert at reading minds? Know what I think? I think this cop is doing his job, and you resent him because he isn’t giving you an obvious handle to control him. You’d love to give him a hard-on.”
“Even for you, Luddie, that’s a pretty crude analysis of my motives.”
“Am I right?”
“Okay!” she shouted. What stopped her, what cut her short was the absolute calm of Luddie’s gaze. “You’re ten-percent right. He doesn’t seem to want the same things from me that other men do.”
“Why should he want anything from you?”
“Most men do.”
“Most men that you bother with do. Look, I understand. You’re used to surviving by manipulation, and you’re wondering if you can manipulate this police lieutenant. Because deep down he’s like every other man who ever saw one of your films—he’s a fan. And the courtship dance has already started.”
“Is he? Has it?”
“Don’t pull that B-movie naive act on me.”
“It is not an act, and I have never made a B movie.”
“What the hell do you call your life?”
“Why are you trying to make me feel second-rate?”
“The only person who thinks you’re second-rate is you.”
“Look, I’m fresh back from a slip. I’m entitled to a little self-doubt!”
“What you’re not entitled to is this poor schmo of a cop. Seducing men is spiritual and behavioral booze for you.”
“You make me want to puke, you are so full of AA clichés and crap.”
“Oh, yeah? Name me once, just once, when you’ve been up against a situation requiring even the tiniest iota of personal growth, that you’ve haven’t run to the nearest hard dick! Which you somehow always manage to captivate!”
Through the double glazing of Luddie’s windows she could hear the faint sound of traffic that never seemed to get farther or nearer. She could see trucks and cars down on Second Avenue, spitting out smoke. Men and women whose faces she couldn’t see waited on corners for red to change to green. In the distance the Empire State Building reflected back a hypodermic of sunlight.
“You seem to think I’m pretty hot stuff.”
“I think you’re a poor little celebrity with a compulsion to reduce every man you meet to a dick because dicks don’t think, and you believe if a man could think, he wouldn’t bother with a piece of shit like you in the first place.”
She turned and faced him. “You do put it gracefully, Dr. Freud.”
“Sometimes grace is required. You have a twofold disease: In your case, it’s not enough to put down the pills and the booze—you have to pull up your panties. Would you do your poor battered old sponsor a favor, please, Leigh? Just promise me you’ll keep them up for ninety days?”
She didn’t answer.
“Did you hear me, Leigh? I’m strongly advising you not to see him again.”
“I can’t not see him. We have a date in two hours.”
“What kind of date?”
“Don’t worry, it’s only business. We’re picking up Oona’s brooch.”
“HELP YOU?” The red-faced, six-foot butterball of a man seemed to be one of the proprietors of Gurdon-Chappell Interiors. He wore a stoplight-red blazer with gold buttons and a huge paisley show hankie that matched his necktie. He was wearing more money in that hankie pocket than Cardozo was wearing on his whole body.
“Thanks,” Cardozo said. “I’m just browsing.”
Behind gold-rimmed granny glasses the eyes were cold little stars set in calculating slits. “Take your time.”
Cardozo examined the fifteen-thousand-dollar price sticker clinging to the underside of a life-sized carved alabaster hand.
“That hand was carved by Bernini.”
“Really,” Cardozo said.
A buzzer sounded. The front door of the shop swung open, and a woman stepped briskly inside. She was wearing a suit of a pale pink like the flesh of a watermelon and a large, matching sloped hat that hid one of her eyes.
The outfit made it clear that she had a better-than-decent figure and a far better-than-decent income. What it did not make at all clear was that she was Leigh Baker. You’d have to know her, and be expecting her, to recognize her under the shadow of that hat and behind those sunglasses.
Gurdon advanced toward her. She offered her left profile to his lips. He took her hand and led her to the rear of the gallery. They sat at an enormous carved desk.
His mouth was in motion. His hands made broad, emphasizing gestures. It looked to Cardozo like a lot of hard sell.
Leigh Baker listened with a fixed expression.
Gurdon unlocked the middle drawer of the desk and took out a small, bauble-sized red felt jeweler’s box.
Leigh B
aker leaned forward in her seat to look.
Gurdon’s hand lifted the brooch from the box. He’d attached it to a chain, and he held it dangling.
A kind of champagne-colored light blinked out from the platinum bird’s tiny wings.
Leigh Baker sat quietly, looking over at him, not at it. She listened for a while and then she shook her head in a firm negative.
Gurdon leaned back and threw up his hands in a surrendering gesture.
Leigh took a checkbook out of her purse. Gurdon handed her a gold pen.
She handed him a check.
He handed her the brooch.
She rose from the chair with that same fixed look that was not quite a smile. She put her sunglasses back on.
Without so much as a glance in Cardozo’s direction, she turned and left the store.
“YOU DO THAT AWFULLY WELL,” Cardozo said. “Pretending to bargain.”
He and Leigh Baker were sitting at a table along the dove-colored wall of what was basically a Madison Avenue upscale barroom. Green explosions of potted palms walled off their area of comfortable leather benches and small tile-top tables.
“I wasn’t pretending,” Leigh Baker said. “Fenny was asking way too much. Twelve thousand. I gave him eight.”
Cardozo had the feeling the money wasn’t real to her. “We’ll see that you get it back,” he said.
“I don’t want it back.”
He sensed in her a complicated sort of not-caring, and it made him curious. “Why not?”
“I don’t want Fenny prosecuted.”
Cardozo felt oddly let down that she could say that. “But he broke the law.”
“And he came forward and testified for Nita at the trial. Whatever he’s become, he was a friend when I needed a friend.”
Their drinks came, two diet Pepsis in highball glasses with swizzle sticks. The waitress gave a little puff of indrawn breath, and Cardozo could tell she’d recognized Leigh.
They sipped their drinks. For a moment Cardozo’s silence flowed into Leigh Baker’s.
Suddenly she looked up at him. “Did Society Sam kill Dizey?”
“That’s what his note claims.”
Deadly Rich Page 33