Deadly Rich (42 page)

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 Baker 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.”

“Is the note genuine?”

“It looks as genuine as the others.”

She was silent again, and he could see something was bothering her.

“‘
Sex to end all sex
,’” she recited, “‘
is there anything else in your perverted worldview
?’”

“You’ve memorized it.”

“Does that phrase sound familiar?”

He shrugged. “It’s a familiar idea. Politicians tout war to end all war, restaurants advertise pasta to end all pasta.”

“It reminds me of something else. Something in my own life.”

Cardozo smiled. “Sounds interesting.”

But Leigh Baker wasn’t smiling. “It’s something unhappy. But I must have repressed it. I can’t recall what.”

Wednesday, June 5

“E
XCUSE ME,” A FEMALE
voice said irritably.

Sam Richards was standing first in line in the Records Room of the Family Court Building on Lafayette Street. He turned.

A gray-suited, thick-torso’d little white woman had pushed into the line directly behind him. She was breathing heavily, as though she’d just run ten blocks.

“You have to wait your turn,” the girl behind the counter said. She was a pale-skinned black girl, and her eyes were bored. Her ongoing midmorning snack was spread across the countertop: a barely begun bottle of Yoo-Hoo chocolate-flavored drink, a styrofoam cup of black coffee, half a cheese-and-cherry Danish cradled in a nest of waxed paper.

“This is an emergency.” The column of the woman’s neck swelled. “I have a court order.
Department of Child Welfare versus Delancey
stays sealed.” She snapped open her purse and yanked out an overstuffed business envelope from the Supreme Court of the State of New York, which she threw down on the countertop.

The girl caught the Yoo-Hoo bottle before it could tip over. She pushed the envelope away. “I don’t accept court papers.”

“Sure, and you don’t do windows either. This is the Department of Records, isn’t it?”

The girl’s dark eyes shot the woman a long, loathing glare. “Go to the Director of Services. Third floor.”

“You don’t have to sign it—just read it!” The woman ripped the envelope open and pulled out the order and waved it. “They did teach you to read, didn’t they?”

“Why don’t you teach me, bitch?”

“Excuse me, ladies.” Sam Richards took out his shield case. “Could I help negotiate a trace here?”

The woman wore mildly myopic prescription lenses. Eyes the color of slate peered at the shield. “And who are you?”

“Detective Sam Richards, NYPD. How may I help you, ma’am?”

A cry broke from the woman’s throat. She took a swing with the court order and batted the shield from his hand.

Sam Richards didn’t move or say anything or even show he was reacting, but his mind closed in on the fact that he was dealing with a crazy. “Hold it right there, ma’am, please.” Keeping his eyes fixed on hers, he crouched to retrieve his shield from the floor.

Her foot shot out and connected with his shoulder.

He almost lost his balance. His hand caught the edge of the counter. He pulled himself to standing. “I advise you never to kick an officer, ma’am. We’re armed. Could I see some identification?”

An angry scarlet covered her face and neck. Sweat beaded her eyebrows. She slapped a driver’s license down onto the counter and then a social-security card.

Sam Richards studied the license. She looked even meaner in the photograph, with little red dots glowing in the center of her eyeglasses. “You’re Xenia Delancey?”

“I am. And I’m sorry I hit you. But this young woman’s attitude enrages me.”

“Would you mind showing me your court order?”

She thrust it into his hand.

He scanned the three pages of legalese. The order had been issued by Judge Anna Lubitsch of the State Supreme Court, and it restrained the Department of Records of Family Court from unsealing any documents relating to case FC-1982-124-TR-32-Z-1467,
Department of Child Welfare versus Delancey.

“Looks like you’re just in time.” Sam Richards handed the order to the girl behind the counter.

She looked not at it but at him. There was a change in her expression. Nothing moved in her face, but something shifted behind her eyes.

The request form that Sam Richards had filled in still lay on the countertop. He ripped the form in two and pocketed the pieces. He took his briefcase from the counter and gave a little nod. “Good day, ladies.”

He walked quickly across the room and out to the stairway. He took the steps up to the lobby two at a leap. By the time he’d reached the street, he was sprinting.

Twelve minutes later, after executing an illegal U-turn and busting three traffic lights and double-parking in front of the precinct, Sam Richards burst into Cardozo’s cubicle.