Deadly Rich (28 page)

Down the block a man in a raincoat was watching her. He was wearing a little cap that shaded his eyes and she couldn’t see his face, but she wondered if it wasn’t the man she’d seen in the bookstore.

She crossed Madison and continued north.

At Seventy-fourth she pretended to look in a window of porcelain figurines, and she half turned around. The man in the raincoat was there again, still a half block behind her.

THE ANSWERING MACHINE
showed that three more calls had come in. Leigh sat down on the edge of the bed and pressed the Replay button. The first message was a neat hang up. The second was a messy hang up.

The third was a silence.

She sat forward. She focused all her power of hearing on the soft white noise hissing from the machine. She began to sense something, a presence, the held breath of another person listening, not speaking.

The even hum of a dial tone cut in.

She stopped the machine. She dialed Waldo’s direct line at work. Waldo’s male secretary answered.

“Horst—it’s Leigh. Could I speak with Waldo for just a moment?”

“Oh, Miss Baker. I’m afraid Mr. Carnegie is in a meeting. Can he call you back?”

“I’ll hold.”

“I’m afraid he’ll be quite some time.”

SEVENTEEN MINUTES LATER
Leigh was stepping out of a cab on Fifth Avenue in front of the Carnegie Building. She plunged into the lobby and took the express elevator to the penthouse. She walked rapidly down the Impressionist-lined corridor, pursued by the snapping echo of her green lizard pumps.

“Here I am,” she said cheerfully, “complicating your job.”

Waldo’s pale-haired, pale-eyed secretary was sitting at his desk outside the inner office, and she could read nothing in his smooth, tanned face, not even a hint of surprise in the exquisite civility of his smile.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll take
all
the blame.”

“Miss Baker, I really wouldn’t—”

“Honestly. I’m an old pro at it.” She blew him a kiss and pushed through the door.

Waldo and three Japanese in extraordinarily beautiful Italian business suits were seated in easy chairs around the coffee table. They were drinking Bloody Marys.

Waldo’s glance swung toward the door and his disbelief had an almost luminous surface. He bolted up and came toward her. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

“I’m going to pieces. I keep getting hang ups and silences on my answering machine.”

“You come busting in here because of hang ups on your machine?”

“I need you to reassure me and tell me you’re not going on that business trip Thursday.”

There was cold blue refusal in his eyes, and it emphasized a boundary between where they were standing and the rest of the room, with its cycloramic three-wall view of the sprawling, howling city. “Those shoes don’t go with that dress,” he said.

She exercised savage restraint. “Well, excuse
me.
”

Waldo continued to stare at her but with something sad creeping into his eyes now. “My office is not the ideal place for this kind of unannounced apparition.”

“You know what a baby I am. Please, just hug me and give me a kiss and tell me you’ll cancel your trip or take me with you—and then I’ll go home like a good little girl.”

He was looking her straight in the eye, the way people do when they’re holding something back. “These are very important men. They haven’t recognized you yet. If I kiss you, they’ll know it’s you and they’ll know how you dress when there isn’t a photographer around.”

She felt an angry blush spreading from her face to her neck and shoulders. “You’re not that petty. You couldn’t be.”

“Darling,
they’re
that petty. Please?”

BACK AT THE HOUSE
she sat on the edge of her bed. She felt rejected, crushed. The scary thing was, she knew there was no reason for the feeling. It was like a rising tide of black water, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

She phoned Luddie and got his answering machine. “Luddie,” she pleaded, “pick up, goddammit. I’ve got to talk to you.”

But he didn’t pick up.

“Luddie, I need you. I’m falling apart and I know I’m being stupid and that’s what scares me. Tell me something wise. Tell my machine something wise.”

She hung up and the empty floor stretched around her in perfect, quiet dustlessness. A thought came to her that she couldn’t quite explain. She wondered if anyone had bothered to disconnect Oona’s machine.

She reached again for the receiver. She dialed Oona’s number. The machine answered. No one had changed the message. She sat listening to Oona’s voice. “Hello, thank you for calling. You have reached—”

She felt startled and sad at the same time. This dumb, stilted recitation, read straight from the manufacturer’s booklet, was all that remained of her friend, of all the years they had shared.

After the beep Leigh tried to think of a message.

“Hi, it’s me. I just wanted to hear your voice. I just wanted to say I’m sorry we fought. I guess I’m beginning to understand what you were going through. I miss you terribly. I can’t believe you’re not there. Here. Somewhere. Oh, shit.”

She broke the connection.

There was a tightness below her throat, a stinging in her eyes. She laid the receiver carefully back into the cradle.

She gazed around the bedroom—a mistress’s bedroom clotted with decorator chic and spill-over doodads from houses that Waldo’s designer had done for other celebrities.

She sat a moment in numbed dullness and then a message crackled along her nerve endings, too faint to be measured and yet too insistent to be ignored.

She walked into the hallway like an old woman, with small, tired steps.

One of the servants was using the elevator again, so she walked down the stairway, through latticed slashes of light and shadow.

In the living room a light like a silver tarnish fell on the eighteenth-century French secretary that Waldo’s designer had converted into a bar.

The light seemed to signal a shimmering zone of safety just beyond the touch of reality.

She remembered Luddie’s saying to her, long ago when he’d first become her AA sponsor, that part of self-acceptance was allowing yourself decisions, wrong decisions, mistakes even.

She opened the paneled doors of the secretary and found the silver ice bucket and the Johnnie Walker right away. She dropped two cubes into a highball glass, two long splashes of Scotch. She had to search to find the diet Pepsi. She filled the glass to the brim.

As her hands went through the old movements that she’d forgotten were there in the memory of her muscles and nerves, the old peacefulness came back that she’d forgotten was there too.

She rotated the glass and studied the little whirlpool she had created. Then she lifted the glass, and her lips touched the door to another world.

Thursday, May 23

A
LIGHT ON CARDOZO’S PHONE
winked, and he punched the button and grabbed up the receiver. “Cardozo.”

“Lieutenant, it’s Rad Rheinhardt, down at the
Trib.
We just got another in the mail.”

TWELVE MINUTES LATER
Cardozo walked into Clancy’s Bar and Grill and stopped by the door, giving his eyes a minute to adjust to the dimness.

The same two old-timers were sitting at the bar, but they seemed to be getting chummier. Today there were only five empty stools between them instead of eight.

The bartender stood serenely eating from a plastic salad-bar container of take-out balanced on the cash register, and he nodded at Cardozo as though, with this second appearance, he’d become a valued regular.

Rad Rheinhardt had taken a table by the window, and the sun cut him and his rumpled pale green shirt into ribbons of light and dark. He was examining his fingernails.

Cardozo glanced at the half-empty glass on the table. “Tequila Sunrise?”

Rheinhardt picked up the glass. “Tequila, hold the Sunrise.” He took a long, comfortable swallow.

Cardozo pulled out a chair and sat. “Isn’t it a little early in the morning for heavy metal?”

Rheinhardt spat a shaving of ice into the ashtray. “You seem to be searching for reasons to love me.”

Cardozo had a sense of confronting the irreducible biology of Rad Rheinhardt. “Give me the letter and my search is over.”

Rheinhardt reached down into a briefcase that he’d parked between his Top-Siders. “Coming at you live.” He laid the letter on the table, wrapped in a plastic freezer bag.

Cardozo frowned. Inside the sheath, the cut-out words had been taped to a sheet of yellow foolscap.

NO REST FOR THE WICK

SO OUT OUT BRIEF CANDLES

A WALKERS SHADOWS

WHAT THIS SAGE DEMANDS.

KISSES, SOCIETY SAM

What hooked Cardozo’s gaze on the very first scan were the words
wick
and
candles.
Nothing about
Shabbes
candles had been published, so either Sam was a lucky guesser or with this letter he established his authenticity. “There’s stuff in this letter that we’ve held back. Details of the M.O. No one knows but us and Sam. If you publish them, we risk copycats.”

“Vince, when are you going to realize you and I are on the same side?”

Rheinhardt’s pupils were as tiny and hard as peppercorns, and Cardozo was not reassured by the thought that Rad was doing coke or speed to balance out the booze.

“Just tell me what you want us to hold back.”

“
Wick
,” Cardozo said. “
Candle. A walkers shadows
had better go too, just to be safe.”

“Doesn’t leave much to work with,” Rheinhardt said. “Oh, well, maybe he’ll send another.”

CARDOZO WATCHED ELLIE SIEGEL
as she studied the letter. She was standing beside the window in his cubicle, and she had angled the document between its two protective glassine sheets so that it caught the daylight. “Sam wants to show us he knows his way around the classics, or at least around Bartlett’s
Quotations.
This letter is really kind of pathetic.”

Cardozo slid the envelope toward her. “Tell you anything?”

Ellie picked the envelope up in its glassine cover. “Looks to me pretty much like the envelope the first letter came in. Except for the postmark. This one’s zip-coded one-one-two-oh-one.”

“And what does that mean to you?”

“It means Brooklyn, probably the Heights. It means he’s mailing these from different postal zones to give us a hard time. And worst of all it means you want me to go down there and check out mail routes and pickup times.”

“Only because you’re the best.”

Ellie Siegel’s charms had their uses. Ellie knew it, Cardozo knew it. Nobody on the force looked quite like her, nobody walked or carried on a conversation quite like her. Men wanted to take her to bed, women wanted to take her shopping. The bottom line was she motivated people to cooperate with her in a way that a lot of other cops couldn’t.

“Thanks, Ellie. I appreciate it.”

He watched her turn and leave his cubicle and walk back across the squad room. Her stride started at the waist, purposefully. Her appearance telegraphed an unmissable message:
In this city full of filth and giving up, I, Detective Ellie Siegel, maintain my self-respect: I have fought for it, it is mine, I have a right to flaunt it, and you’d better acknowledge it, because I’ll kill to keep it.

CONSIDERING THAT
she said she was calling from One Police Plaza, the woman’s voice on Malloy’s phone was oddly soft and modulated. In Malloy’s experience voices from down there had a harder edge.

She wanted to know if he could come down immediately to meet with Captain Lawrence Zawac of IAD.

Paging God
, Malloy thought. If anyone from Internal Affairs wanted to talk to him, it was because he was in trouble or because they were going to ask him to help get someone else in trouble. “How soon is immediately?”

“Noon sharp,” the pleasant voice said.

For a moment he sat unmoving in his chair, staring across the squad room. All kinds of terrifying thoughts came pouring into his head. “Could you tell me what this is in reference to?”

“Captain Zawac will be glad to discuss that with you personally.”

Malloy told himself that it was just to discuss some routine fuck-up. Nothing serious. He looked at his watch: eleven thirty-five. Jim Delancey had been at work a little over a half hour, and he wouldn’t be coming off his shift till evening.

“Sure,” he said. “Tell the captain I’ll be there.”

“
DETECTIVE MALLOY,
is this yours?” With a soft snap Captain Zawac laid a small object down on his desk.

Malloy had to get up from his chair and approach the desk to see that it was a business card. He had to pick it up to see that it was one of his own. “I’d be surprised to find out it was someone else’s.”

Zawac’s remote and uncaring eyes fixed Malloy’s. “I’m not interested in what would surprise you.”

Zawac was a stocky man in his late forties, with a high, smooth forehead and a pencil mustache that didn’t quite succeed in covering the scar that bisected his upper lip. His face was square, with broad cheekbones and a determined tilt to the jaw.

“It says Carl Malloy.” Malloy shrugged and smiled. “I don’t think it’s going to be much help to a guy named John Smith.”

Zawac did not smile. “Are you implying that a person named John Smith is using your card?”

“I’m sorry. Bad joke.” Malloy laid the card back on the desk.

“Then this is your card?”

Malloy nodded. “That’s what I said.”

“That’s exactly what you did
not
say,” the third person in the room said. These were Assistant Deputy Commissioner Bridget Braidy’s first words since Malloy had been introduced to her, and it bothered him that she was involved in this. He sensed something happening that he could not quite penetrate, and until he could get a grasp on it, he intended to say as little as possible.

It was Captain Zawac who finally spoke. “Did you give this card to Dorothea Ng yesterday at four forty-five
P.M.
?”