The gray brightened. As she rounded a corner into the lobby a wall of daylight blinded her.
“Sign out, please,” the guard said.
She took the pen from him and scribbled an initial in the register.
“Is your friend coming down?”
“My friend?” She saw her policeman waiting beside the lobby door. “He’s right over there.”
“Not him. The guy that went up looking for you.”
“I don’t understand.” She called across to the officer. “Weren’t you upstairs with me?”
He sauntered across the lobby. The name came to her. Dan. Dan with the blue eyes and the round, unlined face that looked all of eighteen years old.
“Beg pardon, ma’am?”
“Miss Baker said she was expecting someone.” The guard’s tone was defensive. “She said send him right up.”
“You sent someone up?” the officer said.
“We were in the elevator just a minute ago,” Leigh said. “I thought he was you.”
Dan shook his head. “Wasn’t me.”
Her heart gave another sharp contraction. “Let’s get out of here.”
LEIGH SAT ON THE EDGE OF THE BED, staring at the phone, trying to work up nerve. I’m not imagining things.
She lifted the receiver and dialed.
An unfriendly voice answered. “Vince Cardozo.”
“I hope I’m not bothering you. It’s Leigh Baker.”
The voice immediately shed its gruffness. “Of course you’re not.”
He likes me. Even though I’m a nuisance. The thought pleased her. “I’m going to Europe tomorrow—I’ll be back Sunday.”
“Okay, I’ll call off the guard. Have a good trip.”
“You’ll be getting a package from me by messenger.”
“Thanks. I’ll look forward to it.”
“Don’t. I’m afraid it’s not very enjoyable. It’s a diary. The diary Delancey’s lawyer tried to pass off as Nita’s.”
He didn’t answer. The quality of silence flowing across the line seemed to change. She wondered if they’d been disconnected.
“Hello?” she said.
“I’m here.”
“Are your men still watching Delancey?”
“Why do you ask?” A little of that gruffness was creeping back.
I irritate him. I talk too much about Delancey. “Someone followed me today.”
“That someone was a cop, I hope.”
“There was someone else. Besides him.”
“What time?”
“Around four.”
“Delancey works noon to eight today.”
“Are you sure he was at work?”
“I’ll check. Would you mind telling me why you’re sending the diary?”
“Look at the entry for January eleventh. I’ll leave a bookmark. You’ll recognize five words. I wonder if you’ll think what I think.”
“And what’s that?”
“The person who wrote the diary wrote Society Sam’s third note.”
LAURIE BONASERA TOYED with objects on the counter—the sugar dispenser, the saltshaker—moving them around as if they helped her find the words she wanted to say. “This is getting complicated.”
Carl Malloy touched her hand. “Hey, I’ve got enough pressure right now.”
“I know you do.” The fluorescent lighting gave her eyes a sunken-in, dark look. “But it’s pressure on me too. When we’re together, it always feels like an emergency. Being with each other shouldn’t feel like that. It should be calm. Like it is for other people.”
“Like what other people?” All he could do was smile, try to make her see there was a light side to everything. “Who’s calm in this city?”
“Somebody must be.”
“Do you think it’s any fun for me, wanting to hold you and having to sit here and pretend I’m interested in this doughnut?”
“Is your doughnut as stale as mine?”
“Worse.”
She smiled. It was only a sort-of smile. But at least her face wasn’t a mystery. “They always advertise on TV that they make their own. I wouldn’t be so anxious to take credit.”
He couldn’t think of anything to say about the doughnuts. He could feel that he and Laurie were two heartbeats away from another silence.
“Well,” he said, “we’re not here about a doughnut, are we?”
Her gaze flicked up. He knew she was checking to see if anyone else in the doughnut shop was noticing them.
The counter attendant was sponging off a stretch of green formica counter. He was a slender, underfed-looking man in a stained white jacket that was much too loose on him, and he moved with a sort of reggae bounce.
Halfway down the counter two old guys in New York Mets caps were arguing. At the end of the counter a bag lady had put a Saks bag on the stool beside her and was searching through it.
“I’m not good at lying,” she said. “My husband isn’t going to keep buying my dumb excuses for being out.”
“What kind of excuses do you give him?”
“Visiting a friend in the hospital.”
“That’s not dumb.”
“He could check the hospital.”
“Is he that kind of guy? Would he check up on you?”
“He isn’t yet. Carl, I don’t want to get good at lying.”
“What did you tell him for tonight?”
“I didn’t. I said I’d be home.”
“Home when?”
She glanced over at the clock on the wall. Just a glance. The glance said nothing, said everything. “Regular time.”
Carl Malloy didn’t know why his mouth was going dry with panic. He didn’t know why he felt he was going to lose her, that every moment longer he could hold her was a moment snatched from annihilation. It wasn’t rational, but it was what he felt.
“I know I’ve asked a lot of you,” he said. “I know you’ve got a lot on your mind—but just do this one thing for me, please. Come with me now. Let’s go to the hotel.”
She turned her gaze on him. “I hate that hotel—I feel like a hooker.”
“Just this one last time. Then I’ll get a real place.”
“What kind of real place?”
“I’ll borrow a place.”
There was a gloomy, thoughtful overtone about her. “I have to get home.”
He could feel bridges burning. “Then why did you come at all?”
“To see you.”
He was losing the battle to keep his nerves tucked in. He felt as though he were having a headache throughout his whole body. “This isn’t seeing each other!”
She kissed him lightly and slid off the stool. “Good night, Carl.”
FORTY-THREE
Thursday, June 6
LEIGH WATCHED THE CITY slide past the amber-tinted windows. She felt edgy, remote, in no mood for Europe.
Just beyond the LeFrak City turnoff of the Expressway, the limo hit a slowdown. A zebra-striped sawhorse blocked one of the lanes. A highway-patrol car was pulled to the divider and a highway cop stood by the sawhorse, signaling drivers to merge lanes.
“Trouble.” Leigh’s new private guard pushed the button that automatically rolled down the window. He leaned out and called, “Say, Officer! Officer! What’s happening?”
The cop, a heavyset man with gray hair, stared in the direction of the shout. He stood for a moment with one hand on his hip holster, eyes only half visible behind their sunglasses, and then he sauntered over. “Tow truck collided with a U-Haul.”
“How long’s the delay?”
The cop made a helpless Italian gesture with both hands. “I hope you’ve got a good book or a TV in that backseat.”
“Officer, I have Leigh Baker in this backseat with me. The actress. We’re trying to make a plane. Any chance we could use the grass divider to get past this mess?”
The cop frowned and glanced over his shoulder at the single-lane grass divider. He gave a what-the-hell shrug. “Why not.” He leaned
down to the window. “Hey, Miss Baker, enjoy your trip.”
AT THE CONCORDE BOARDING GATE the new man handed Leigh her ticket and passport. “Enjoy your trip, Miss Baker.”
“Aren’t you coming with me?”
“I wish I could.” His smile took just a millisecond too long to develop. “Your guard is waiting for you on the plane. It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”
At the end of a blue plastic accordion-walled boarding ramp, a stewardess took Leigh’s boarding pass. “How are you today, Miss Baker? You’re in row six, window seat to your right.”
Leigh peered into the cabin and counted rows. She recognized Kristi Blackwell in six, even though Kristi was wearing an enormous picture hat that hid one eye. In the seat beside her, Wystan Blackwell was gulping champagne as though a bartender had announced last call.
Leigh fixed her best fake smile in place and waved.
Kristi didn’t see her; she was busy sniffing the perfume sample that came with the airline’s overnight kit. Wystan was signaling the stewardess for another champagne.
The seat directly across the aisle from them was empty. The seat beside it was occupied by a man. He had bent sideways and was shading his eyes to peer through the window. When he took his hand down, Leigh saw that he had startling pale eyebrows. He leaned back in his seat, and she recognized Arnie Bone.
Leigh executed an about-face before he could see her.
Passengers clustered and unclustered in the aisle. She worked her way around them.
“Miss Baker, is everything all right?” the stewardess asked.
“Where’s the washroom?”
“Straight ahead.”
Leigh went straight ahead, but instead of turning right for the washroom she turned left and got off the plane.
LEIGH TOSSED HER PURSE on the bed. Before leaving, the servants had turned the air conditioner off. In the four hours since she’d been away the bedroom had become stuffy, and she crossed to the window and pressed Low/cool. A breeze built up and gradually rippled the curtain.
In the garden below children were having a birthday party with favors and paper hats and ice cream and cake. That’s how I’d like to spend my weekend, she thought. Being six years old.
She splashed water on her face and kicked off her shoes. Just as she was lying down she noticed that a phone call had come in. For an instant she had the sensation of being an inanimate object at the mercy of a malevolent box of plastic and wire.
She pressed Replay.
The message was a four-minute silence.
As she listened the silence seemed to listen back.
The machine clicked to a stop. All the emptiness of the deserted town house suddenly pressed in on her. She felt a cold buzzing like Novocain jabbed into the dead center of an ache.
I’ve made a dumb mistake, she realized.
She searched in the drawer of the bedside table for the card with Vince Cardozo’s work number.
He answered on the fourth ring. “Cardozo.”
“Hi, it’s Leigh. Leigh Baker. Sorry to bother you.”
“Go ahead. Bother me. Aren’t you in Paris?”
“No—I’m here. And I got another one of those calls.”
“Then I should come over and look at the trace.”
“I wish you would.”
“It may be late.”
“That’s okay.”
CARDOZO BROKE THE CONNECTION and phoned Esther Epstein, the elderly widow who lived next door in his apartment house. “Would you mind looking in tonight to make sure that Terri’s okay? I may be home late.”
“How late?”
He had to smile. Mrs. Epstein was coming on like the voice of his conscience.
“Because,” she said, “I have a favor to ask you. My air conditioner broke, and the man says it won’t be fixed till Monday. Would you die of a heart attack if you walked in and found an old lady sleeping on the couch?”
“Esther, you’re a lady, but you’re not an old lady, and if I found you on my couch … you kidding? I’d die of joy. Sleep over, please.”
CARDOZO UNLOCKED THE DOOR and stepped into Waldo Carnegie’s wine cellar.
The shaded overhead light threw a pale, even glow over the walls of wine bottles. Through a mesh grille in the ceiling he could hear the faint gray pulsation of the temperature-stabilizing system.
He lifted the Harlequin drawing off its hook and swung the little door open. A digital four pulsed in the display window of Tommy Thomas’s sound-activated cassette recorder.
It seemed odd to him that there had been only four calls. He thought of Leigh Baker as a popular person, one who’d have celebrities on her private line all hours of the day and night.
He pushed the Rewind button and then Play. There was a moment’s transistorized silence, then three buzzes, a click.
In the trace window area code 212 flashed.
An answering machine came on, speaking with Leigh Baker’s voice. “Hello, you have reached …” She gave just the number, no name, no promise to call back, no assurance of anything.
A 929 appeared next to the area code. Cardozo recognized a lower Manhattan exchange.
Beep. Obviously a hang up. Too fast for the tracing mechanism to capture the rest of the caller’s number. The trace window went blank.
Another span of silence. Another three buzzes. A click. In the window, area code 212 flashed a second time.
The answering machine cut in. Beside the area code flashed 555.
There was a beep and then a man’s voice, with a kind of upper-class East Coast arrogance encoded in its nasality. “Leigh, are you there? It’s Waldo. Are you there, honey?”
The trace window said Waldo was calling from 555-1923.
I don’t need to listen to this, Cardozo thought. Before he could press the Fast Forward button, her voice came on the line.
“Hi, darling. Where are you?”
He realized he’d been hearing that voice since he’d been a boy. It was as familiar to him as his own mother’s or his daughter’s or his dead wife’s. Maybe, in a way, more familiar. It pervaded entire areas of his memory, and so unobtrusively that he hadn’t been aware, till this moment, how much it was part of his recall. A hundred masks in his mind spoke with it: the rich girl, the spoiled college-sorority girl, the small-town sweetheart, the hooker, the wartime nurse, the nun …
“I’m still at work,” Waldo’s voice said. “Look, I’d like to get in a little squash at the Racquet Club. Do you mind if I’m late?”
“Not at all—I haven’t got anything planned.”
Funny, Cardozo thought. I’d have thought that’s when she’d mind most. He fast-forwarded.
The next call was Tori Sandberg phoning from a midtown exchange. Lunch plans.
He fast-forwarded to the final call.
Three buzzes, a click. The call was coming from area code 212.
The answering machine picked up.
Now the exchange appeared: 617.
The answering machine beeped.
Then came the silence. It had a hollow, pulsating quality, like the sound you get when you hold a seashell up to your ear. Now and then electronic blips sounded faintly, as though the phone company’s sensors had detected an empty circuit and were trying to reroute traffic through it.
The silence was coming from 617-4336.
Cardozo copied the number on his notepad.
“WHEN DO YOUR SERVANTS get back?” Cardozo said.
They were in the living room. Leigh Baker was sitting at one end of a sofa, and Cardozo sat in the chair facing her. She pulled a needlepoint cushion in front of her and wrapped her arms around it, like a little girl rocking a doll. “I expected to be in Europe. I gave them till Sunday night.”
He fixed her with a disbelieving stare. “You’re going to spend three days and nights alone?”
“I’m not alone. You’re here.”
“I’m here now, but—”
“But what?”
He shrugged. “Now’s now.�
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“Luckily.” She tossed the pillow onto the sofa beside her. “How are you coming with your killer?” she asked.
He shrugged. “All you can do is do everything you can do.”
A soft flow of lacquered light spilled across Oriental rugs and carved mahogany tables. Ornately framed French Impressionists glowed from pale walls, and alabaster busts of fellows who could have been Roman emperors stood guard at either end of the mantel of the hooded marble fireplace.
“It was luck that broke Son of Sam,” he said. “A parking ticket. They had a three-hundred-man task force, but without that parking ticket three hundred pairs of hands would have been as useful as three hundred pairs of tweezers.”
Her head with its beautifully messy hair rested back on satin cushions. “But Son of Sam was crazy. Isn’t it always harder when you’re looking for a madman?”
“Society Sam’s probably crazy too. At least that’s what the psychological profile says.”
“Do you believe it?”
He rippled the water in his glass studiously. “Not as much as the psychologists do, but some of it rings true. For example, I buy very much that it’s a class thing.”
“Class?” she said.
Without gawking too openly, Cardozo glanced around him, at Chinese vases of fresh-cut chrysanthemums, crystal bookends enclosing single silk-bound volumes, gold table clocks and porcelain figurines and marble goose eggs upended on intricate ebony stands. They were objects that spoke of wealth in the most straightforward voice imaginable. There was nothing coded about them.
“Look at the locations Society Sam chooses,” he said. “Marsh and Bonner’s, Park Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street, an Upper East Side town house—he’s hitting in the Golden Ghetto. It’s an envy thing, a rage thing. And the victims: they’re wearing jewelry, fine clothes—emblems of money. And they’re fashionable … they have long hair … they’re tall—”
“Avalon wasn’t tall.”
“For a woman he was tall.”
“The killer mistook Avalon for a woman?”
“We’re guessing.”
“So if I pin my hair up and wear a cotton coat and low heels and slouch and stay away from expensive shops and this area—”
“Then you’ll be a lot safer. Unless … you see, here’s where my expert and I disagree.”
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