Deadly Rich (23 page)

“He put these up last week.”

“Beautiful,” Cardozo lied. “Who were his models?”

“He got them from an agency.”

“Was he friendly with any of them?”

“He was friendly with everyone.” The housekeeper sniffed back a sniffle. Her hand went out to touch a black marble-topped table. She seemed to draw steadiness from it. “Too friendly for this city. He drew the sharks. He had terrible experiences every time he stepped outside that front door.”

“Muggings?”

“Muggings were the least of it.”

“Why didn’t he use a limo?”

“Mr. Gardner wasn’t one to throw his money around. And he liked to walk. Besides, the party last night was practically next door. Three blocks across, three blocks up.”

“Could you tell me who was giving the party?”

THEY WERE SITTING IN HER STUDY,
amid bookshelves loaded with up-ended one-of-a-kind china plates.

Annie MacAdam gave Cardozo the hard data: when Avalon Gardner had arrived, who he had spoken to, where he had sat for dinner, what she’d heard him saying, what she’d heard people saying about him. She remembered he’d been wearing a new cologne. “Fortunoff is trying to get a new brand started. They’ve mailed half ounces to everybody on the
Vanity Fair
party list. I do think it’s tacky to wear free samples at a dinner.”

“Did Avalon have any enemies, any disagreements with anyone?”

“Of course he did.”

“Did he have any last night?”

“He had words with Dick and Leigh—” Annie MacAdam looked at Cardozo. With her hair dyed jet-black and coiled wiglike on the side of her head, jauntily speared with a tortoiseshell pin, she resembled a Fifties musical-comedy actress working the talk-show comeback trail. “Dick Braidy and Leigh Baker. The BeeBees, we used to call them in the days when they were married.”

“Avalon had words with the BeeBees—about what?”

“I don’t know how the subject came up.” Under high-arched eyebrows her eyes were energized, sparkling. This was a moment she was enjoying. “But their daughter was killed—I mean
her
daughter. Her name was Nita Kohler, you may have heard about it. Her boyfriend threw her off a sixth-story terrace. Jim Delancey.”

Cardozo nodded.

“He’s been paroled. Avalon was saying bygones are bygones and Delancey deserves a second chance. Leigh and Dick were upset with his attitude and they let him know it.”

“How did they do that?”

“Leigh said she hoped Avalon would die, and the sooner the better.”

A phone rang.

“Excuse me.” Annie MacAdam rose from the sofa and crossed to her desk. She lifted the receiver. “Yes?” She reangled herself so that she faced away from Cardozo. “The whole world has heard.” Her head turned and her eyes came around toward Cardozo. “No, I can’t … No, of course I haven’t … Of course I won’t … All
right.
I promise.”

She seemed rattled when she hung up the phone. She took the long way back, circling an antique globe of the earth, and sat again on the sofa. “I don’t know about your business, Lieutenant, but my business brings out the absolute worst in people. They say the real estate market’s soft, but you’d never know it in this part of town. Such conniving and competition every time I list a major duplex. And, of course, Avalon’s town house is going to be on the market now. People will be murdering for that. Have you seen it?”

“Just this morning.”

“That property is
prime
.”

“You were telling me about Avalon’s disagreement with Leigh Baker and Dick Braidy.”

She settled back against the cushion and sighed. “I tend to sympathize with Leigh and Dick.”

“Why’s that?”

“A second chance is one thing and we all deserve it. Acceptance in society is another, but it has to be earned. Jim Delancey is working as a salad chef at Archibald’s, and he hasn’t earned it.”

“Salad chef at Archibald’s is acceptance in society?”

“It’s certainly visiblity, and that’s nine tenths of the battle. Put a good-looking, notorious young man in that place—a man who’s had as much press as Jim Delancey—and there’s no telling who he’ll meet—a designer, an heiress, an actress, I’m talking about people of
top
significance. There are hundreds of deserving young men who’d give their eyeteeth for a chance like that. Why waste it on a sleazy killer? Poor Avalon.” She shook her head. A Lucite earring clanked. “He was always getting himself into disagreements.”

“Did he ever have a disagreement with you?”

“Oh, Avalon and I had a classic feud going.”

“What was that about?”

“I adored Avalon.” Behind her eyes was something disdainful that she didn’t bother hiding. “But he had poor judgment. It was when he and Oona—Oona
Aldrich
—were on the outs. Everyone in New York was trying to stay neutral, and Avalon tried to pull me over to his side.”

“What did he and Mrs. Aldrich disagree over?”

“It was years ago. Ask Dizey Duke. She’d remember. All I recall now is, it got so bad that you couldn’t invite them to the same party. You couldn’t even have them to the same
funeral
.”

“Did you ever invite them to the same party?”

“I haven’t had them in the same room for six years.”

“When was the last time?”

“Do you want to know exactly?”

“If that’s possible.”

“My tax records would certainly show.”

Annie MacAdam rose again. She walked to the one wall of bookcases in the room that held any books at all. She bent down to a shelf of two-inch-thick black leather binders and peered along them till she found the year she wanted. She pulled out a binder, opened it, and flipped till she found the right page.

“The last time Avalon Gardner and Oona Aldrich were in this house together was dinner six years ago, the night of May sixth. Princess Margaret was guest of honor, and I served
mousse de brochet.
”

WHEN CARDOZO TOLD LEIGH BAKER
why he had come, she gaped at him for one wild, blank moment.

She crossed to the windows. A little gold-and-porcelain clock on the mantelpiece tinkled the quarter hour. She turned. “Do you want to hear a funny joke?” She was standing beside a vase that held a gigantic spray of tulips and amaryllis. Her head was framed in sunlight. “Avalon and I had a terrible fight last night. I told him I hoped he died, and the sooner the better. He couldn’t have been more obliging, could he?”

“You had nothing to do with it,” he said.

“That’s very gallant of you.” Her voice was tight with the determination not to be comforted. “But you’re not so naive as that and neither am I. He left the party because I got into an ugly, childish, name-calling brawl with him.”

“That’s not a crime.”

“Let’s be honest. Half the real crimes on earth aren’t crimes, according to law. I drove him out into the street and into the arms of that killer.”

Cardozo knew what she was going through. His news had knocked her off balance and she was grabbing for steadiness at the nearest feelings she could find. What surprised him was that she’d been surprised; she hadn’t seen the morning paper, and if any of her friends had seen it, they hadn’t phoned her.

“There’s no predicting these street-corner encounters,” he said. “Even God couldn’t predict them.”

She came back across the Chinese carpet with its whites and faint rust tones and pale leaf-greens. They stood four feet from each other at a border of silence. They stared just an instant into each other’s eyes.

“Why are we standing?” She sank into a chair. Her finger played with a seam in the upholstery. “First Oona. And now Avalon. They detested each other.” Her tone was flat. There was no heat to it.

“What was their problem?”

“It had to do with photographs. Avalon had taken some pictures of her and, apparently, they weren’t very flattering.”

Nudies
? Cardozo wondered. “Did you see them?”

“No. I didn’t want to. He published them, but I didn’t buy the magazine. She was horribly insecure about her appearance. Wrongly insecure, of course. And as long as we’re dishing the dead, if you’re curious what
my
fight with Avalon was about—”

“I know. You disagreed with him over Delancey’s parole.”

“As though who said what or who thought what mattered! It’s who
does
what that counts. I was screaming at Avalon as though he’d opened the cell door himself.”

“It’s a question of fairness. Delancey gets his second chance, your daughter gets nothing. In that situation I might say a few harsh words myself.”

She looked at him. He was aware of a change in her, as if she was seeing him in a way she hadn’t expected to.

“And I’m sorry,” he said. “A raw deal once is bad enough, but your daughter got a raw deal twice.”

“Thank you. I needed to hear that somebody was on my side.”

Cardozo could tell she had something more to say, but she didn’t say it right away; and while he waited he could hear the muffled, distant sounds of things happening in a well-built, well-run New York town house—cooks cooking, maids vacuuming, delivery men dropping off flowers, a secretary somewhere fielding phone calls and running the printer on a PC.

“I’m getting phone calls,” she said. “My machine’s been getting calls.”

“What kind?”

“Silences. It rings and I answer and no one’s there. I find myself waiting for them! Every time the phone rings, it’s hard not to think—it might be him.”

“Him?” Cardozo said.

“I just assume it’s—him.”

“At the moment we’re watching Jim Delancey.”

“What does that mean, watching him?”

“It means you don’t have to worry. And as for those calls, why don’t you let the machine answer? Don’t pick up till you know who’s on the line.”

T
HOUGH DIZEY DUKE CHRONICLED
New York’s beautiful people for eighteen million nationally syndicated readers, Cardozo was surprised to find that she lived on the Lower West Side, far from the glittering towers and the long, long limousines of midtown Manhattan.

A nonstop jam of trucks heading for the Holland Tunnel moved past her building’s front door with horn blasts and loud clankings of gearshifts. It was a noisy street at this hour, and Cardozo had a feeling it was a truck route, just as noisy round the clock.

The doorman wore a uniform from the waist down, a
Quiero-Buenos-Aires
T-shirt above that. He examined Cardozo’s shield, buzzed Ms. Duke’s apartment, and told Cardozo to take the elevator to 12-C.

The door on the twelfth floor was opened by a short man, no more than five feet six, with no hair and extremely thick hornrimmed glasses.

“I’m Boyd MacLean,” he said. His speech was fast, clipped, nasal. “Call me Mac and come on in.”

Cardozo stepped into a hallway that seemed to have been temporarily converted into an office a long, long time ago. Two scarred and dented steel desks had been pushed against one wall, and the facing wall was lined with sagging bookshelves and steel cabinets. Snowdrifts of paper overflowed every surface. A fax machine on the floor was spooling out print, and another on top of a filing cabinet was making electronic distress noises.

“She’ll be right with you,” Mac said. “She’s on the phone.”

At the far end of the corridor a tall, stocky woman in Wrangler jeans paced back and forth with a receiver pressed to her ear.

“That story is over one-hundred percent lies,” Cardozo heard her saying. “They papered the house at his funeral.” She took a long drag on a cigarette. “No way. Not one more free plug for Mercedes.”

She made a hurry-it-up hand signal to Mac. He ripped a sheet of paper from a clattering printer before it had finished clattering. She grabbed the sheet from him. Her eyes scanned.

“Oh, yeah?” She was speaking again into the receiver. “Tough. Only the dead love everyone.” She broke the connection and passed a hand over her brow. “
Oy.
Where’s my Advil?” She began dialing another number.

“Dizey,” Mac said, “visitor. Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo.”

Dizey looked around. She dropped the receiver onto its cradle. “How do, Lieutenant. Got your message. Be right with you.” She snapped the page of computer printout at Mac. “This column is cluttered. Too many nobodys.”

Mac grimaced. “If you’d tell me once in a while what your lead item is going to be …”

“If!” Dizey returned the grimace. “If your grandpa had wings he’d be a glider on wheels! What the hell am I dealing with, the Exxon oil-spill response team? For Christ’s sake, there’s a catering war on Park Avenue! So is Splendiferous Eats doing the library benefit, or aren’t they?” She crumpled the page into a ball and threw it at Mac. “You want coffee, Lieutenant? Mac, get us two coffees.” Dizey headed for an arched doorway. She tossed Cardozo an over-the-shoulder nod. “We can talk in here.”

In here
was a small living room with three cats exercising squatters’ rights on an ancient sectional sofa. One wall seemed to have been painted Rust-Oleum. The window commanded a view of rooftops and black and crippled antennas and beyond them a pollution-brindled sky.

Dizey dropped into an easy chair. Cardozo sat facing her on the end of the sofa where the cats weren’t.

“Are we giving the killings a brand name now?” Dizey stuck a fresh cigarette in her mouth. From the embroidered breast pocket of her cowgirl shirt she pulled a green Bic lighter. “Society Sam, is it?”

“That’s up to the papers.”

Dizey flicked flame from the Bic and held it to the tip of her cigarette. Her eyes studied him. “Well, I’m part of the papers, and I don’t like giving them a brand name. It makes them seem too … established. Like, here’s reality—there’s nothing anyone can do about it, so love it or leave it.”

“That’s not a bad description of life,” Cardozo said.

“You mean life in the Big Apple. This has been my adopted home for more years than I’d care to own up to, but I never saw kids strip the running shoes and Walkman off a raped woman. And now it’s commonplace. And Society Sam. Why? Sex and economics have been around for a long time, and they never caused this sort of problem before.”

“It could be that the city’s growing a meaner type of criminal these days.”