Deadly Rich (22 page)

Bridget Braidy stepped not very far to one side, and Cardozo found himself speaking into half a mike.

“The force and I,” he said, “are very grateful to the mayor and the commissioner for this assistance. It’s an example of what can be done when city agencies pull together, and it’s going to make a real difference.”

“Any leads?” a redheaded woman called out.

“Quite a few. We’re following them up right now.”

“The two killings were committed by the same person?” a blond-bearded man asked.

“Very possibly.”

A young guy in jeans and a Kiss-Me-I’m-Italian T-shirt jammed a mike into Cardozo’s face. “Do you think a task force can compensate for the innocent lives this creep has taken?”

The young man stood there, hating, but Cardozo answered calmly, riding his own unruffled beat. “Compensation is not the issue in this or any investigation.”

Bridget Braidy interposed a hand and smoothly lifted the mike. “This investigation will send an unequivocal signal that the city administration holds all human life precious and that the people of New York City will not be terrorized.”

“What about the eleven people slain in New York City in the last thirty-six hours?” a young man in a New York Mets cap shouted. “Any task force for them?”

Putting together any kind of task force meant pulling cops off your everyday New York atrocities that never reached the papers, concentrating them for one splashy moment on an atrocity that had made it to page one. It meant pulling uniforms out of the high-crime neighborhoods and hoping the city’s killers and robbers and muggers would not declare a two-for-one day.

“It’s a horrible statistic,” Bridget Braidy said, “and we cannot and will not countenance it.”

“Isn’t this response too little too late?” a young woman shouted. She was wearing the trademark T-shirt and red beret of the Guardian Angels.

“No,” Bridget Braidy said.

“In the last ten years,” the young woman shouted, “New York has seen the militarization of the entire city north of Ninety-sixth Street. There’s nothing magic about the number ninety-six. The street isn’t fortified. Sooner or later the killing was bound to trickle south. Isn’t the question for law enforcement whether we’re going to go after the causes of crime, or just throw task forces at the problem to make sure homicide stays north of Ninety-sixth?”

“Young lady,” Bridget Braidy said, “we’ve had plenty of homicides south of Ninety-sixth, and long before Society Sam. To cite just one, my own niece—Nita Kohler—was murdered four years ago on East Seventy-eighth Street. And that tragedy has given me a very personal perspective on these homicides and a personal commitment to seeing that this perpetrator is brought to justice.”

I don’t believe I’m hearing this
, Cardozo thought. He leaned toward Reilly. “How soon are we getting these men? I need to put a round-the-clock tail on a suspect starting today.”

Reilly shook his head. “It’s not going to be that soon.”

“How about stealing me two detectives from the embassy watch?”

“I’ll see what I can do, but don’t mention anything. Keep it sweetness and light in front of these guys, okay?”

“I
S SOMEONE USING AN APPLIANCE
?”

The voice was female. Carl Malloy didn’t recognize it. He glanced around from his desk. A young woman was standing just inside the doorway.

“What kind of appliance?” Goldberg shouted.

“Electrified marital aid?” DeVegh shouted.

Besides Goldberg and DeVegh there were four other detectives in the squad room, all men, and they broke up laughing. The girl just stood there. Malloy remembered having seen her yesterday. He’d assumed she was one more problem that had walked in off the street.

“Something’s pulling the current way down.” She had auburn hair, cut long and wavy.

“Way down!” DeVegh echoed.

Malloy couldn’t see what was funny about that, but the detectives cracked up again. He was trying to type up a summary of last night’s tail. But with all the laughing and racket he couldn’t concentrate. The sound of a TV game show was spilling in from the little storage room where the detectives knocked off to have coffee; voices were shouting in the corridor and FTP radios erupted in bursts of static. Phones were ringing everywhere.

“I’m losing files,” the young woman said. “Who’s running a heavy-amp appliance?” She had a sweet, lost look, but she was standing her ground. Malloy found himself pulling for her.

“Check the little girls’ room,” Goldberg shouted. “Someone must’ve left a vibrator running.”

Malloy could tell she was inwardly withering. One instinct said,
Leave it alone.
Another instinct said,
Go help the poor kid.
He pushed up from the desk, put on a smile as wide as a billboard, and went to her.

“Never mind these nitwits,” he said. “They’re just horsing around.”

She squeezed out a smile for him. “I already looked in the women’s room. There’s no appliance in there.”

“Would you like me to check the men’s room?”

Her eyes signaled gratitude.

Malloy walked into the corridor and down to the men’s room. The cleaning crew used cakes of industrial-strength camphor to tamp down the stink of the urinals, and the smell of it lay heavily on the damp, unmoving air. One of the lights had blown, leaving the two toilet stalls in dimness.

Greg Monteleone was standing in front of one of the sinks, practicing his charisma in front of a mirror. In one hand he held a hair dryer and in the other a comb. He seemed to be teasing his hair into a wave while the hot breeze of the dryer strafed his receding hairline.

“You’re fucking up the power,” Malloy said. “Your dryer’s pulling on the current, and the kid on the computer is losing her files.”

Monteleone clicked off the dryer. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

“You could warn her before you turn on the dryer. You could give her enough time to save her files.”

“Next time I’ll give her sixty seconds’ warning. Anything to save your sex life, Carl.”

“Fuck you.”

Back in the corridor Malloy stopped by the computer. “One of the detectives was using a hair dryer. He’ll give you warning next time.”

“Thanks,” the young woman said. “I appreciate it.”

She smiled, and Malloy could feel her looking at him, and he found himself thinking regretfully that there were more tiny lines around his eyes than when he’d been a young man, a lot more gray in his hair, and a little less hair.

“Hey, if you ever feel like taking a break,” he said, “there’s a really great place on the corner. They make their own ice cream.”

“I didn’t take a lunch hour.” She looked at her watch. “I am sort of hungry.”

SHE TOLD MALLOY
her name was Laurie Bonasera.

They were sitting in a booth off at the side of the ice-cream shop, eating double scoops of peach ice cream with sprinkles.

“It’s an Italian name,” she said. “It should be spelled Bu-o-na-sera, with a
u
, but we leave the
u
out to make it more American.”

Malloy was looking at her. For the first time that day all the tension had drained out of him, and his body felt relaxed. “Red hair’s not usual for an Italian girl.”

“That’s because my father’s Irish. He married an Italian.”

“Marrying an Italian didn’t used to be all that usual for Irish guys.”

“My dad’s father took a while to accept it. But when I was born with red hair, it helped bring him around.”

Laurie Bonasera went on like that, telling Malloy little things about herself. Malloy nodded, liking her smile: it softened the space around her. It had a glow.

She told him she’d gone to school to be a graphic designer.

“What kind of graphic design?”

“Stationery, layouts, album covers. Nothing very important.”

He had a sense of the small, decent dream of a small, decent person, and he knew it was important to her. “That’s great. Graphics can make all the difference, how a thing looks.”

He smiled. He was comfortable. She kept smiling and he could see she was getting comfortable too.

“So how’d you get from designing to computers?” he asked.

“There’s more money in word-processing—at least there is for me. The federal government started this program to computerize local police files, and I went down to get interviewed, and they said fine. It comes at a good time. My husband’s a teacher in parochial school and they just cut back his hours, so you know, I’m trying to make up the slack.”

“Sorry to hear your husband got cut back.”
So she’s married
, he thought.
Like me.

“It’s tough on him,” she said. “But it gives me a chance to get back into the world. I’ve been taking life as it comes for a long time now, and for a long time life’s been dragging me where it wants. Till now I just had one part-time job. Now I have two, so things are looking up.”

Malloy had the feeling she was telling him things were not that great at home. “So Bonasera’s your married name.”

She nodded. “It was Moran before.”

“You have kids?”

“None yet. What about you?”

Malloy realized he’d forgotten to take his wedding ring off. “Two kids. They’re grown, so it’s like not having any.”

She didn’t answer, and he was aware of the slow trickle of time, a silence waiting to be decoded.

“You must be smart to work one of those machines,” he said.

“You can be an idiot and work one.”

“I can tell you’re no idiot.”

He felt her turning shy.

“What I’m really thinking of,” she said, “is writing a book.”

“What about?”

“Don’t laugh. I want to write a book about cops.”

“I could help you. I could tell you stuff you don’t see on TV.”

Before Laurie Bonasera could answer there was a sound like a motorcycle crashing into a suit of armor.

Malloy couldn’t believe it. At a booth across the room a boom box sat on the table, blasting—a two-speaker state-of-the-art megadecibel doomsday machine with red lights rippling up and down the panels in time to the beat.

The owner of the boom box had sprawled back on the red vinyl seat, thrust one foot in its jogging shoe up on the table. He was defying the whole shop with the contemptuous sweep of his gaze.

The other customers went on eating their ice cream as though it weren’t happening. As they lifted their little spoons to their pained little smiles, they seemed to be saying,
The man with the boom box isn’t here, the boom box isn’t booming, we’re not getting raped by that racket.

The proprietor, a tiny, leathery Korean woman with a shock of white hair, was trying to tell the boom-box man to please turn the boom box off.

Malloy watched the old woman’s rapid, staccato gestures of pleading, and he watched the boom-box man shrug her off.

“Excuse me a minute, Laurie.” Malloy pushed up from his seat. He crossed the room and stopped in front of Mr. Boom Box’s table. Just stood there, letting his jacket hang open. Letting his revolver show.

Mr. Boom Box was heavyset and tanned, definitely a Latino, with
mucho
macho and a cracked-out, fuck-you glaze in his eyes. He was wearing a tight black T-shirt with shoulder pads and a yellow sweatband around his head that matched his yellow sweatpants. It took him a moment to focus on the fact that Malloy was standing there, tapping his fingers on his revolver butt.

Mr. Boom Box quickly picked up his boom box and started to leave.

“Hey,” Malloy called. “Didn’t you forget to pay your check?”

Mr. Boom Box slapped five dollars down at the cashier’s counter and didn’t wait for change.

When Malloy came back to the table, Laurie Bonasera’s smile was admiring.

“It’s too bad you have to go through that,” she said.

“A lot of things are too bad.”

In a way he was happy. The incident had given him a chance to impress her. When they left the shop, the Korean woman refused to let him pay for the ice cream.

“You have any more trouble with guys like that,” Malloy said, still playing a little for Laurie’s sake, “you let me know.”

He gave the old woman his business card.

IT WAS CLEAR
that the housekeeper was not going to sit: she regarded Cardozo as Gardner’s guest, not hers. Besides, the only place to sit was a virtually floor-level gray quilted sofa. If the design wasn’t Japanese, the idea had to be. Cardozo was afraid that once he got down that low, he would need help to get up again. So he stood, holding the cup of coffee she had given him.

“You were his housekeeper?” he said.

The slender, dark-haired woman nodded. She wore an old-fashioned housemaid’s striped uniform. “For eight years now.” She wiped at her eyes with the edge of her apron. “Mr. Gardner was a fine man and a fine employer.”

Cardozo heard Irish in the voice and he saw grief in the face. He saw shock. And he saw an enormous effort at self-control.

“Do you live in the house?”

She nodded. “Mr. Gardner gave me the basement apartment. He had it completely renovated. He put in cable TV. There wasn’t a kinder man in this city than Avalon Gardner.”

“What can you tell me about his personal life?”

She smiled with enormous sadness. “Mr. Gardner’s life was exactly like this room. He believed in keeping things simple.”

The room took up an entire floor of the town house, and it seemed the kind of relentless understatement that photographed well in Sunday magazine supplements. There was a single piece of classical furniture, a Chippendale secretary, obviously placed there because it was a knockout statement in isolation.

“Did he have friends?” Cardozo said. “Family?”

“Well, like it or not, we all have family, don’t we? There’s a niece and a nephew. But Mr. Gardner had no time for their gadding around. Mr. Gardner worked.” With a firm nod the housekeeper indicated the walls around them.

The walls were dove-colored, tightly stretched silk. Hanging over the silk were huge black-and-white Avalon Gardner photos. Where the subject of the photo was recognizable as part of a human body, it tended to be a blowup of a shoulder blade or a butt. Sex impossible to distinguish. Photos that at first glance seemed to be spotted scarves billowing in the blast of an electric fan on second glance turned out to be monstrously enlarged orchids.