The guy in the car held his head angled sideways. Except for the chewing the head didn’t move. Who the hell, Rick asked himself, eats with his head turned sideways?
It came to Rick that the hungry man in the Celica was just possibly a stakeout, and just possibly he was watching the doorway of 457 West Forty-ninth Street.
Rick was careful to keep walking naturally, like your typical no-harm-intended nighttime stroller. He strolled right past his doorway, didn’t even slow, didn’t even glance at it. See, man? No way I live in that building. He turned north on Tenth Avenue, and when he was sure the cop in the Celica couldn’t see him, he broke into a run.
THE GIRL STOOD bathed in the jittering light of the pizza-parlor window.
Rick drifted to the next storefront, an all-night head shop. He stopped, looked across at the girl, gauging her openness. He judged her to be fourteen, trying hard to look nineteen. She had pale, small features and she’d rewritten them in heavy makeup and framed them in ringlets of reddish-blond hair.
She was wearing jeans and a blue-and-gold toreador jacket over bare tits, with the sequined collar turned up. She had obviously been dressed by her pimp.
Rick felt a complex flutter in his stomach. She was attractive to him in a way he couldn’t quite explain to himself. He smiled his broadest smile, inviting hers.
Her glance floated slowly across the sidewalk. The pavement was full of people, every one of them alone. She let her gaze slide over Rick.
He saw that her blue eyes were scared, blinking behind spiders’ legs of fake lashes.
Baby, you think you’re scared now, just wait till you see what Rick’s got for you.
He took three steps toward her and simply stood there, presenting himself, solid, unmoving, a fact of the universe. “Hi,” he said. “I’m a statistic.”
“I can see that.” She had a midwestern accent.
“I wanna fuck you,” he blurted.
“No problem. I live over there.” She nodded at a blinking hotel sign across the street.
He followed her through stalled, honking traffic.
The hotel lobby smelled of ammonia and hot spices. A hand-lettered sign said ABSOLUTELY NO VISITORS. A fat Chinese man at the desk gave her half a glance and handed her a key.
The girl stepped into the elevator and Rick stepped in behind her. She pushed the button for five. Rattling rhythmically, the elevator clunked upward.
Rick brought his face close to the girl’s. He could smell the sweet residue of cinnamon-flavored chewing gum on her breath. He looked into her eyes and she looked straight back into his, not smiling. Slowly he reached over and wrapped a hand around her shoulder. He slid his other hand up between the legs of her jeans.
The elevator stopped. She pulled away. He followed her down a corridor with most of its forty-watt light bulbs blown out.
She put a key into a lock but did not turn it. “What’s in the pouch?”
“Crack, ice, and money.”
She swung the door open. It was a small, bare room, and Rick could see her housekeeping was even worse than his. A bath towel had been stuck across the window with screwdrivers. An ancient Tina Turner poster had been taped to the wall.
Rick laughed. “What the well-dressed wall is wearing, hey?”
The girl sat on the unmade bed, one leg tucked under her. She looked at him. “I wish I was as weird as you. That crack must be pretty good.”
Rick gave the door a push shut. The latch clicked and they were alone. “Know what I want to do?”
“No, surprise me.”
“I want to get high with you and spend the night.” He took out his crack pipe, dropped a rock into the bowl, lit it with his Bic. He took a deep drag and passed the pipe to the girl.
She took a hit and handed the pipe back. “My man doesn’t like me to have sleepovers.”
“So, how many customers do you usually have between now and noon?”
“On a slow night, enough to make three hundred.”
“Bullshit.” He took out his wallet and handed her seven fifties.
She fanned the money out, waving it slowly back and forth in front of her. “I didn’t say yes.”
His lips shaped a coaxing smile. He tapped a finger against his jogging pouch. “Come on. It’s two in the morning and I’m beat and I’m horny and there’s nowhere else I can go.”
“Boo-hoo. What are you, a poor little orphan?”
“Yeah, that’s what I am tonight. An orphan.”
She reached for a jam jar sitting on the windowsill. She unscrewed the top and dropped the money in. “I’m strictly safe sex. My man’s the only man I go down on without protection.” She took a rubber from the jar. “Sit down.”
He sat down on the bed beside her. She unzipped his fly and began slipping the rubber around his cock.
He touched the side of her throat. “You’re so soft.”
She smiled. “You’re not.”
SIXTY-FIVE
Thursday, June 20
“AS WE ALL KNOW, my brother was not always pious.” Bridget Braidy was leaning just a little too close into the mike. “But he was devout in the way that counted: in his actions.”
She was standing at the lectern of Saint Anne’s Roman Catholic church, dressed in the same navy-blue suit Cardozo had seen her in at the last Police Academy graduation. She wore three strands of pearls, and her white Peter Pan collar had half snagged in the uppermost.
“And one story,” she said, “comes particularly to mind, illustrating that side of him. Now, some of you may know that Dick’s death is not the first time our family has been devastated by murder. Four years ago my beloved niece Nita Kohler was murdered.”
A woman in the pew ahead of Cardozo whispered loudly to the woman next to her, “Nita Kohler was her niece?”
“Her niece by marriage, you might say,” Cardozo heard the second woman say, and he realized she was Kristi Blackwell wearing a red Orphan Annie wig, and then he realized that the wig was her real hair.
The first woman took out her compact, studied her reflection, and touched up her powder. “Are you going to the Jeu de Paume tomorrow?”
“How could I miss Zack’s wedding party?”
“I can’t believe he’s marrying that fat nobody.”
“She must know how to do something Tori Sandberg doesn’t.”
“Or something Tori Sandberg won’t do.”
“Let me tell you what my big brother did,” Bridget Braidy was saying. “Benedict O’Houlihan Braidy was a grand guy—anyone who reads the columns knows that. But he wasn’t just grand. He was warm too, and human, and he could scale himself down. When my niece was murdered, he phoned me and he said, ‘Sis, I know how you’re feeling, because I’m feeling exactly the same. So let’s do something about it. I’ll be by in ten minutes to pick you up …’”
Cardozo was waiting for a murderer—a young male Hispanic murderer of athletic build with short-cropped dark hair. He and the murderer had no formal date to meet, but an astonishing number of killers showed up for their victims’ funerals—so why not the man who had murdered Benedict Braidy?
His nose took in that smell peculiar to houses of worship—the mixture of incense and altar flowers, but with a moneyed accent here, the spice of women wearing expensive perfumes. His eye circled the nave with its high-arched shadows, and the stained-glass windows with their rich hue of Tiffany lamps, and the spectacular carved ivory altarpiece.
He saw no agony of Christ pictured here, only a serene crucifixion and can-do-looking saints with golden spears. The memorial plaques on the wall amounted to a century’s worth of New York movers and shakers. The communion rail shone like a piece of yacht’s brass, and he could imagine the city’s country-club set tinkling delicately against each other as they knelt for noonday wafers.
Dick Braidy’s funeral had drawn a respectable turnout, filling the front twenty pews. Most of the women wore diamonds. Many were bare-shouldered. Most had their hair done in airy, expensive-looking a
rrangements. Their men wore tailored dark suits. There was a lot of looking around in the pews to see who else was there; kisses were blown, hand signals exchanged, fingers waved.
A sound behind him drew Cardoso’s eyes toward the nave.
A young man with dark, cropped hair, heavy-set and tanned, had darted into the church. The right age. The right build. Eyes sunken in, lazy-lidded, dark-looking. Possibly Hispanic.
He was dressed carefully, but the clothes were not expensive: a gray tweed jacket that was the wrong weight for today’s heat wave, and so large on him that it had to be second-hand; gray cotton trousers that looked pressed for the occasion; no boom box.
He hung back a moment at the rear of the nave. Hesitation flickered over him. He came noiselessly down the side aisle. He passed within a foot of where Cardozo was sitting. He was wearing white Adidas jogging shoes. His affable, slightly sad smile sloped down at the corners.
Cardozo smelled something streetwise, almost a put-on.
The young man genuflected, crossed himself with simple Catholic gravity, and stepped into an empty pew.
Cardozo leaned down toward the little Japanese mike fastened like a tie clip to his necktie. “Can you hear me, Ellie?”
Her voice came out of the tiny transistor plugged into his left ear. “I’m hearing you.”
She was seated across the church, eight aisles back, and he could see her pale key-lime suit motionless through all the shifting, glittering socialites and celebrities.
“You see the guy alone in the front pew, my section?”
“I see him.”
“… I panicked,” Commissioner Braidy’s amplified voice was saying, p’s exploding in the vaulted space like cherry bombs. “Because when my brother said, Let’s do something, he usually meant dancing the hustle with Jackie O or hunting down New York’s best pizza with Greta Garbo. I said, ‘Dick, I’m not dressed, I’m not in any condition to do anything.’ And my big brother said, ‘That’s when you’ve got to be good to yourself. You’ll hear me honk three times—just come as you are.’”
“He’s got to come down my aisle,” Cardozo said, “or the center, or yours.”
“Okay,” Ellie’s voice answered in his ear. “I’ll cover this aisle.”
“Greg,” Cardozo said, “do you see him?”
“I see him,” Monteleone’s voice said.
“Cover the center aisle, okay?”
“The horn honked three times,” Commissioner Braidy was saying. “I threw on a windbreaker and went downstairs—and there was the biggest, whitest, stretchiest limo you ever did see, with a uniformed chauffeur, and inside was my big brother, in blue jeans and a parka, with his arms spread and tears running down his big Irish mug—and I just fell into those arms, and we had the cry of our lives. And then Dick said to the driver, ‘Driver, take us to the nearest David’s Cookies.’”
Bridget Braidy looked out over the congregation.
“Now that is style. That is class. And I’ll tell you one thing: When my big brother and I left that David’s cookie shop three hours later, there was not a single macadamia chocolate chip remaining on the premises.”
Commissioner Braidy paused. She mugged cookie munching. There was laughter. A few hands applauded. The sound of the traffic on Park Avenue seemed remote, not just in space but in time, like remembered thunder.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” Bridget Braidy said. “This city has seen too much crime. This city has seen too many of its decent citizens terrorized and murdered. As God and this gathering are my witnesses, I make this vow to my murdered brother: Your death and Nita Kohler’s, and the deaths of the thousands of New Yorkers sacrificed this and every year to the tide of random violence—your deaths shall not have been in vain. If I have to turn in my commissioner’s badge and run for mayor myself, I will fight, to the last fiber and breath of my body, the evil that has stolen you from us. So help me God.”
She blew a kiss over the heads of the congregation.
“Good-bye, Dick. Earth was better for your being here, and heaven’s better now that you’re there where you belong. We love you. We miss you. God bless you—put in a good word for us with You Know Who. And how about saving us just a drop of—what do you call that stuff they drink up there?—Roederer Cristal!”
Twenty minutes later the priest blessed the departed and blessed the congregation. The pallbearers wheeled the coffin back down the aisle. Two doors slammed like cannon shots and the organ broke into a roof-ripping postlude—Cole Porter’s “From This Moment On.”
The congregation rose and spilled into the aisles. Expensive pumps clicked on marble floors like tap-dancing castanets. Voices broke into an almost deafening chatter. The center aisle jammed with little kiss-kiss groups.
The young man stayed seated in the front pew. He looked around at the congregation. It seemed to Cardozo that there was a curl of disdain to his smile, as though he had a secret inside him that he was not allowing to slip out.
When the young man rose, Cardozo rose.
“If ever you needed proof that Dick Braidy was a somebody,” Cardozo heard Kristi Blackwell say, “look at the turnout.”
“The Nixons are here,” her companion said. “And Madonna. And Jackie. Is Jackie going to Jeu de Paume?”
The young man walked forward to the front pew. He crossed in front of the communion rail. He started up the middle aisle and immediately met a traffic jam of glitterati.
For the next three minutes Cardozo thought he’d lost the young man, and then Ellie’s voice hissed in his left ear, “By the baptismal font.”
“Where the hell’s the baptismal font?” Cardozo growled into his tie clip.
“Southeast corner of church.”
Cardozo peered over an ocean of bobbing coiffed heads, of couture dresses and dark suits. He saw the carved marble font, and he saw Siegel and Monteleone and the young man in the tweed jacket standing between them. They hadn’t exactly put him under restraint, but his shocked and disbelieving face said he didn’t feel exactly free to go either.
“Stay right there,” Cardozo told the mike. “Stay visible.”
He had to squeeze around a woman in slinky gray who was saying to a man in a blue blazer, “I don’t know if Jeu de Paume’s going to be worth it. Are you bothering to go?”
Three feet away Leigh Baker stood talking with her friend Tori Sandberg. They were the only women in the church who were wearing black. Cardozo reached out and touched Leigh’s shoulder. She looked over at him. He saw surprise in her face, and something else, quickly controlled and covered over.
“Ladies, I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. “But can you see the baptismal font? The young man in a gray tweed jacket?”
Leigh Baker turned toward the font. “The oversized gray herringbone tweed jacket with elbow patches?”
“Is that the male Hispanic you saw in the boutique at Marsh and Bonner’s?”
For an instant she seemed utterly baffled, and then she shook her head. “That’s Juanito. He was Dick’s gardener. He took care of the terrace plants. He wasn’t the man in Marsh and Bonner’s.”
“Absolutely not,” Tori Sandberg said.
“Sorry to bother you.” Cardozo spoke to the mike. “Wrong man. Let him go.”
“ONE NEW LETTER SOURCE in note five,” Lou Stein was saying. “U.S. News and World Report.”
“Which issue?”
Lou’s sigh traveled across the line. “April second, what else.”
“I wish I could figure out why he loves magazines that went on sale April second.”
“You got it wrong, Vince. They’re dated April second. They went on sale March twenty-sixth. April second was the day the April ninth issues came out.”
Cardozo frowned. He flipped his calendar to the week of March twenty-sixth. The only event of interest listed by the publisher was the new moon, a black circle in the blank space for Monday. He tapped his ballpoint against the calendar’s spiral binding. Something nagged at him. It was like
hearing a name that almost rang a bell but not quite. “Why does March twenty-sixth seem more interesting to me than April second?”
“It’s farther from April Fool’s. And it’s something new to think about.”
“Thanks, Lou.”
The instant Cardozo laid the receiver down the phone rang. What was it about his telephone? he wondered. For years it had been content to ring with a low-key obnoxious buzz. But today there was a distinctly new ugliness in the ring—an ear-flaying overtone that he could swear he’d never detected before.
He caught the phone before it could inflict a second jangle on his nerves. “Cardozo.”
“Lieutenant, it’s Rad Rheinhardt at the Trib. We’ve got another letter from Society Sam. I’m sending it up by messenger.”
DRIZZLE WAS DROPPING from a sullen, leaden sky. The wet pavement shimmered, and the drizzle turned everything to distance. Cardozo and Malloy were sitting in the Honda, illegally parked south of the West Seventy-second Street entrance to Central Park. They were watching the bench on the pedestrian path just inside the park wall.
A solitary figure sat on the bench: a woman, wearing a big-shouldered green jacket, her long blond hair done up in a fat blond bun. She was holding a pink Mylar umbrella. One silver high-heeled boot tapped restlessly against the paved path.
Rick Martinez was seven minutes late for his two o’clock date.
Malloy stared through the spattered windshield up the avenue, at art-deco condos layered like birthday cakes. He raised a paper cup of deli coffee to his mouth. He had dark crescents under his eyes like a linebacker’s glare smudges. “Where the hell is this fucker? Can’t he even keep an appointment?”
It was ninety seconds later that Cardozo saw a young man in a red T-shirt step out of the Seventy-second Street subway exit, across the avenue. He stood a moment in the drizzle, waiting for the traffic light. He crossed the avenue and turned south. He passed within ten feet of the Honda, close enough for Cardozo to recognize the face in the Bodies-PLUS photo.
“It’s Martinez.” Malloy crunched the empty coffee cup and stuffed it halfway into the ashtray.
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