“You had a problem in your Emergency Room, the night of May sixth, nineteen-eighty-five. There was a lawsuit.”
“It would be right here. Off-database.” She moved to the files at the extreme right of the wall. She spent a moment peering at dates on the drawers, then pulled out the next-to-bottom drawer. “Who sued?”
“That’s what I want to find out.”
“Oh, boy.” She did some thinking. “In that case, here’s what has to be done. These files are arranged by year, alphabetized under the plaintiff’s name. Assuming your suit was filed within a year of the alleged damage, it’ll be in this drawer. Someone has to go through this whole drawer from here back. It can’t be me because I have work to do, and it shouldn’t be you because you’re not on the staff … but seeing as you’re a cop and this is need-to-know—right?”
Cardozo crouched on the floor, and when he realized that the crouch would kill his thighs during the hour or more this search could very likely require, he sat cross-legged and let his lower back do the suffering.
He worked his way through the files slowly. He carefully examined the covering page of each lawsuit, not wanting to miss a single May sixth that might be hiding in the boldfaced legalese. At the end of an hour and a half he found a suit brought by Richard Martinez for recovery in the wrongful death of Isolda Martinez.
Cardozo took the file to Ms. Dailey. “Sorry to bother you again, but could you tell me what the hell this last paragraph means in English?”
Ms. Dailey’s gaze moved quietly over the page. “Isolda Martinez died in Emergency the night of May sixth, nineteen eighty-five. She had no proof of insurance, and the hospital refused to treat her.”
“That much I got.”
“Isolda was covered on Richard Martinez’s insurance, and he claimed the hospital should have known. He also accused the hospital of letting Fanfare Magazine create a noxious condition in Emergency that contributed to Isolda’s death.”
“I got that too.”
“The jury awarded two million dollars to Martinez. The judge set the award aside.”
“Why?”
“Okay. Here’s the hard part. A cash award would have initiated the hospital’s collateral suit against the insurer. And that would have raised the employer’s premiums.”
“But why does that mean Martinez can’t collect his damages?”
She floated him a disheartened look. “Because the employer was a federal agency. The federal government can be sued only if it consents. The government refused to pay increased premiums, and it refused to be sued for them. Therefore the premiums couldn’t be raised. Therefore the hospital couldn’t collect from the insurer. Therefore Martinez couldn’t collect from the hospital. All the contract-law dominos fell backward and Martinez got crushed.”
Cardozo felt a pang for Martinez, a sense of raw helplessness in the face of the majestic riffing and doo-wopping of the law. “Tell me if I’m understanding this. The insurer didn’t tell the hospital this woman was insured, so the hospital didn’t treat her, so she died—and everyone admits to this—and her husband still couldn’t collect a dollar?”
Ms. Dailey’s smile flattened and she continued with a different tone, hesitant, maybe just a little bit apologetic. “It was unfair. But it was legal. The crux of the matter is the insurance contract. I’d talk with the insurer.”
“And who’s the insurer?”
“Blue Cross Blue Shield—they’re down on Forty-first Street. I’m sure they’d be more than prepared to give you an expert run-around.”
CARDOZO STEPPED OFF THE ELEVATOR on the fourteenth floor of the Blue Cross building into a warren of corridors bounded by flat-white, head-high partitions. He explored and finally found the opening marked 1412. He rapped on the wall. “Is Monte Horlick around?”
A young man with red suspenders sat at a modular desk, staring at figures scrolling up the screen of a computer terminal. A two-foot-high paper dandelion stood in a Perrier bottle on the desk beside the terminal. The face drawn in the center of the dandelion was smiling with berserk good cheer.
The young man turned in his chair. “Horlick is right here. What’s up?”
Cardozo showed his shield. “They told me downstairs you could run down the records on a policy.”
“Shoot me the stats.” Horlick pressed buttons on his keyboard and cleared the computer screen. “Policy number?”
Cardozo read the number from his notebook.
Horlick entered the digits and letters. Lines of type began scrolling up the screen. Horlick gazed at the screen through half-parted lids. “What we have here is a gentleman by the name of Richard no middle name no initial Martinez. It’s a terrific policy: wraparound benefits plus psychiatric plus dentistry. Mr. Martinez’s most recent reimbursement was for dental work performed April eighteenth.”
For Cardozo it happened in a split millisecond—the realization that something had dropped into his lap. “April eighteenth this year? Do you mean this policy is current?”
“Current and kicking.”
“Where did you mail that reimbursement?”
CARDOZO FINALLY FOUND A PAY PHONE in the street that worked. He called Carl Malloy at the precinct.
“Carl, I need you to stake out a mailing address. Box 108-E, Four twelve West Fortieth Street. It’s an outfit called Mailsafe. The box is rented in the name of Richard Martinez.”
“Jesus Christ, is that Rick Martinez?”
“It’s him.”
SIXTY-TWO
“TELL ME ABOUT DICK BRAIDY,” Cardozo said.
“Dick?” Kristi Blackwell gazed thoughtfully across her desk with its computer terminal and its vase of bloodred roses. “He was always charming, often honest, and he was very, very driven.”
“Driven by what?”
Kristi Blackwell was wearing a high-fashion dark business suit, but she radiated an easy, at-home sort of power.
“Dick was leading a life where everyone he ever heard of was a millionaire—except him. In his heart he was a runty little Irish kid from north Boston, and he never got over it.” She turned up her eyes and smiled. “Shall I tell you his most painful memory?”
Cardozo could feel her bursting to tell him. “Please.”
“He rarely discussed this, though I pleaded with him to put it in an article—his most painful memory was having been invited, as a teenager, to a debutante cotillion at the Brookline Country Club. They were serving beef Wellington at the sit-down dinner but it was Friday night, and of course in those days Catholics couldn’t eat meat on Fridays. So the old Irish biddy who was waiting on Dick’s table brought him a plate of scrambled eggs and she whispered in his ear, in brogue if you please, ‘I know you’re a nice Irish boy, so I made these for you myself.’”
Kristi Blackwell delivered the line in a little brogue of her own. Her eyes were on Cardozo and there was a how’m-I-doin’ look in them.
This was an odd way, Cardozo couldn’t help but think, to be talking about a friend who was both dear and dead.
“Well,” Kristi Blackwell said, “one of the Cabot girls was sitting at poor Dick’s table and she just took one look at those sad eggs and she burst out laughing.”
“Laughing because he was Catholic?”
“Laughing because he was ignorant Catholic. What poor Dick didn’t realize was that Cardinal Cushing had given social Catholics permission to cool that no-meat rule. Dick told me he never forgot that girl’s laughter—and he never knew how the serving woman had spotted him.”
“How had she spotted him?”
“The place card—Braidy.”
“He never figured that out?”
“Dick was a puzzling man. For all his shrewdness he had more blind sides than an accordion.”
“Such as?”
“He yearned to be a major player, but he never truly understood what the game was about. He had no sense of what was stylish or awful. For example—the major boo-boo of his career: when he got his first big check from the magazine, he
realized he’d never be taken seriously if he didn’t move out of that seedy little hotel where he’d been living. So he went out and bought a rundown co-op in a dingy little building that didn’t allow Jews. He honestly thought it was more chic if somebody wasn’t allowed in. Of course, in New York, that kind of anti-Semitism is provincial.”
Cardozo got the impression from the way she said it that perhaps there were other kinds of anti-Semitism that weren’t provincial.
“Dick never truly understood the basics. To an extent he could fake it. He watched other people and imitated their behavior, but he overdid it. He filibustered every dinner party he could get into. He thought that made him a good seat. In the last decade of the twentieth century he was still sending to Turnbull and Asser in London for his shirts. He thought that was chic. He sincerely believed that gossip was the prime energizer of the universe. So he told that stupid story about Barbara Walter’s bidet much too often and he infuriated Louis Auchincloss with that canard about Lily and the sugar bowl. In fact, that ridiculous sugar bowl got him blackballed from the Union Club and the Century.”
“I don’t know either of those stories.”
“And you don’t want to. The point is, Dick did himself huge damage with that hara-kiri mouth of his. If Louis doesn’t like you, Brooke is not going to have you in the house—and that’s exactly what happened. And then on top of having no judgment about gossip, he told all sorts of needless lies—no one ever knew why.”
“Could you give me an example?”
“Silly things. Who-cares kinds of things. He said Harrison Ford had painted his house before he became a star.”
“Not true?”
“Not true. Harrison Ford painted his sister’s house. Dick tried to imply that he and Leigh had never divorced, and when that didn’t fly he tried to imply they had secretly remarried.”
“Why did he want to imply that?”
“He was star struck. And he didn’t want to be called gay.”
“Was he?”
“Gay? How could anyone tell? He was so scared after Leigh divorced him that he never had sex with anyone.”
She was trying to seem easy and hard-boiled about this, but it was giving her trouble. Cardozo sensed something unresolved in this woman’s feelings about her dead author.
“But,” she said, “with all his denial and all his limitations, he was one hell of a writer. Nothing escaped him. He could spot the gonnabee alumni of Betty Ford at a glance, and he knew who’d changed what place card at whose dinner—because to Dick Braidy everything in New York society happened during prime time and he was thrilled, just thrilled, to be a part of it. He adored the old rich and famous and he was fascinated by the nouveaux rich and famous. He believed they walked, talked, dreamed, and excuse me, farted Technicolor. And he communicated his excitement to his readers.”
Cardozo understood what Kristi Blackwell was telling him: Guys like Dick Braidy were about power worship. Over at the precinct they would have called it ass-kissing.
He understood too that guys like Kristi Blackwell—for all their airs of being above mere money-grubbing—were about keeping their own breadbaskets full, which in this case meant turning Dick Braidy’s worship of the wealthy into a commercial cult and peddling it to all the other Dick Braidy think-alikes in the world.
What he didn’t understand was how deep her dislike for the man really ran. Was this just mean-spirited kidding, or was it something more?
“It’s a sad fact,” Kristi Blackwell said, “that today most Americans are outside the economy looking in. Dick grasped that, because he was an outsider himself. He may have gone to Bobo Vanderbilt’s in twelve-hundred-dollar patent-leather pumps, but he was still that hungry little mick from the ghetto, scared that he was going to be the only kid at the table eating scrambled eggs.”
Her eyes were on Cardozo now. One eyebrow lifted, sly and more than a little manipulative. It was a distinctly italicized moment. That eyebrow was saying, We understand, these things—you and I. “Society sensed that outsider thing about him and—frankly society laughed. But readers sensed it about him too and they loved it, because it made Dick Braidy exactly the same as them. Our readers are going to miss him. The magazine is truly going to miss him. And God knows, so am I.”
“If he was that great for the magazine,” Cardozo said, “why did you make so many cuts in his articles?”
“I never cut Dick’s articles. Not without his consent.”
“He says you did.”
“He says?” This time both of Kristi Blackwell’s eyebrows lifted. The upper sockets of her eyes had been painted deep blue, like a ballet dancer’s. She leaned forward on her elbows. Two dozen bracelets clanked. “I doubt that at this moment Dick Braidy is saying anything on that or any other subject.”
Cardozo handed her the proof of the unpublished column.
Kristi Blackwell brought her eyeglasses down out of her curls and balanced them on the tip of her nose. As she read the column her lips narrowed into a thin pink gash.
“Dick Braidy was a child.” She snapped the proof onto the desk. “Like a child he had great pride in his work—often justified—and very little understanding of how the real world works. It never occurred to him that there were valid reasons for toning down his articles—oh, no, only a conspiracy could explain why a single comma was moved.”
“Would you happen to remember any of these valid reasons?”
Kristi Blackwell shrugged. “Sometimes he was puncturing somebody’s aura, and the somebody owned a store that advertised. Or he violated a taboo. Nobody discusses Mrs. Astor’s first marriage. Nobody. Sometimes his eye was a little too sharp. I mean, we all agree that Gayfryd’s party for Saul’s fiftieth was tawdry, it was a stewardess’s idea of chic, but that’s no reason to come out and say it. You have to leave the reader something to believe in.”
“Why did you cut ‘Socialites in Emergency’?”
“I honestly don’t remember what cuts I made or why. We are a monthly, and if I do say so, a very thick one.”
“I realize that.” Cardozo had brought Dick Braidy’s first-draft pages in an NYPD manila envelope. He reached across the desk and handed them to her. “I’ve marked your cuts in red.”
“Is that what all these pretty lines are.” It took her a little under a minute to scan Dick Braidy’s twelve pages. She tapped the sheets neatly together and pushed her glasses back up into her hair. She gazed across the desk. “What’s your point, Lieutenant?”
“All of Society Sam’s victims, except one, play starring roles in that article.”
Kristi Blackwell’s chin rose. “You find that a meaningful coincidence?”
“Possibly. But in Dick Braidy’s draft the socialites are inside the Emergency Room. Dizey is chatting up the nurses and Gloria is flirting with the doctors and Avalon is posing Oona for photographs—and Dick Braidy is busily getting it all down on paper. But your cuts move them back into the Admitting Room.”
“You think that was the purpose of my cuts?”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Why would I or anyone care whether they’re in this room or that room?”
“Somebody cared enough to sue.”
“Who?”
“Richard a.k.a. Rick Martinez. His wife Isolda died in Emergency. Braidy mentions the suit. You’ve cut every reference to it.”
“It wasn’t germane.”
“Then you remember it.”
“Not at all.”
“Fanfare Magazine was named in the suit.”
“I’ve never heard of the lawsuit or him or her.”
“How do you answer Dick Braidy’s charges about the Nita Kohler diary?”
“Lieutenant, it was my understanding that you wished to discuss the Society Sam killings. And within reasonable limits I’m willing to help. But isn’t Nita Kohler a little far afield?”
“Possibly not. How do you answer the allegations?”
“Why should I answer them? Why should I even draw atte
ntion to them? They’re paranoid and he’s dead.”
“What did you do with the material you cut from ‘Pavane’?”
“Do?” Kristi Blackwell bent sideways and swung a wastebasket up from beneath the desk. For an instant Cardozo thought she intended to hurl it at him. Instead she thumped it down onto the desktop. “Whatever was cut from that article went right there, Lieutenant. Where it belonged.”
“And where did it go from there? How did it wind up where it didn’t belong?”
“It didn’t wind up anywhere, Lieutenant. Dick Braidy’s chronology is way off. He didn’t even write the article till after Delancey’s lawyer discovered that diary. If anyone plagiarized, it was Dick lifting from the diary and not vice versa.”
Cardozo raised a doubting eyebrow.
“He was a highly unoriginal writer,” Kristi Blackwell said. “He lifted half his stuff from Marietta Tree’s butler and he never credited anyone.” She consulted the thin gold lozenge of her wristwatch.
“Ms. Blackwell, are you aware that in the United States we have a penalty for falsifying evidence?”
Kristi Blackwell pushed the proof sheet toward Cardozo’s side of the desk. “And for libel too, which is all this ridiculous column of his is. I intend to have a talk with my lawyer.”
“Make that a long talk. And make it within the next forty-eight hours.”
“And what happens after forty-eight hours?”
“You tell me who you gave that material to—or I tell the District Attorney we have a problem.”
“WE RECOVERED SEMEN and pubic hairs from Braidy’s mouth,” Lou Stein said.
“What’s the blood type?” Cardozo said.
“Type O—same as the others.”
“Do the hairs match?”
“Same donor.”
“Any surprises?” Cardozo said.
“One. At least it’s a surprise to me. Sam’s still dousing his pubes in kerosene.”
“Maybe his lice reinfested.”
“Then why aren’t there nits on these latest hairs?”
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