Deadly Rich (48 page)

“What were you doing out at this hour, Jonathan?”

“What am I, trying to be helpful and that makes me a suspect?”

“We just need the details. Details help fill in the picture.”

An ambulance sped up Third Avenue, siren screaming.

“I work nights at the Carnation Deli down on Second. I always buy an early-edition
Post
from the newsstand three blocks up. Ask them, they know me.”

“Coming up from Second, which street did you take?”

“Seventy-fourth. I always take Seventy-fourth.”

“Why?”

“It’s the cleanest block. Why walk through shit?”

“Who did you pass tonight coming from work?”

“No one. The sidewalk was dead. Like it is now.”

“How was the traffic?”

“Very light. Maybe one cruising taxi.”

“Were these parked cars all here?”

Jonathan nodded.

“Any parked cars gone now that were here then?”

Jonathan shook his head.

“Did you see anyone who might have been a witness? Anyone in a car, in a window, anyone passing or loitering or just standing or taking a piss against a wall?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the kid saw it.”

“The kid.”

Jonathan pointed a finger straight down. “
This
kid.”

“She isn’t yours?”

Jonathan shook his head, an emphatic
no.
“She was standing right over there.”

He nodded toward the building. There was an ornamental but otherwise useless hollow in the wall, as though a door had been bricked up, and there was an ornamental but otherwise useless step leading up to it.

“Alone?” Cardozo said.

Jonathan nodded.

“Does she talk?”

“Not to me she doesn’t.”

Cardozo crouched down again. He touched the girl’s cheek. “Hi, honey. My name’s Vince. What’s yours?”

She wouldn’t look at him.

Cardozo smoothed a wisp of blond hair away from the child’s eyes. “What kind of candy do you like, honey? You like chocolate? You want a Hershey’s?”

Without looking at him, the little girl nodded.

Cardozo shouted to the officer. “Hey, Sarge, can you get a Hershey bar from the newsstand? Get a dozen. Candy for everyone.” He lifted the child’s chin. “Did you see what happened? Can you tell me what happened to the lady?”

The girl didn’t answer. She put a thumb in her mouth.

“Do you know that lady? Can you tell me who she is?”

The girl began sniffling.

“Is that lady your mommy? Is that your mommy over there? Is that who she is? Mommy?”

The girl nodded. Her eyes glistened and silent tears began rolling down her freckled cheeks. And then the freckles began rolling down her cheeks.

Cardozo touched one of the freckles. It came off on his finger. He studied the fingertip. He took a second look at the little girl’s face and hair and arms and shirt.

Poor kid. She must have seen it all. She was covered in her mom’s blood.

THE WALLS WERE PAINTED
flat landlord-white. There were kick marks on the baseboard, most of them near the bathroom door. Faint partial prints of small hands ran around the walls up to a height of four feet.

The furnishings struck Cardozo as pathetic: a futon mattress on the floor, a twenty-inch Sony Trinitron with remote, a six-foot avocado tree growing out of a copper tub on the floor that Nan Shane had probably nursed to maturity from the leftover pit of a salad avocado.

Greg Monteleone was standing in the kitchen alcove in front of the open refrigerator, searching through half-empty jars of Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise. Nan Shane had amassed over twenty.

“Nan never finished eating anything,” Monteleone said.

“New York career women live on the run,” Cardozo said.

“Want to take a guess what Nan Shane did for a career?” Monteleone was examining a half-empty carton of La Yogurt raspberry yogurt. “She read society Tarots.”

“So? Tarot readers live on the run.” Cardozo studied the bamboo étagère that stood against an empty wall. Several of the open shelves held bric-a-brac, and the others served as a bookcase. He could see no order to Nan Shane’s books—biographies of Marie of Rumania were crammed between thrillers and studies of parapsychology.

Holding up one end of the row of books was an Aleister Crowley Tarot set. The Tarot box opened like a videocassette case. Inside a hollowed-out plastic nest Cardozo found a how-to paperback, with Nan Shane’s own color-coded underlinings, and a deck of cards with illustrations of heavy-metal sorcerers, warrior women, and dragons.

Cardozo dropped the Tarot how-to book into an evidence bag.

On the floor beside the étagère was a wicker hamper, the kind a family of four might have taken on a picnic in the country in 1903. Cardozo lifted the lid. The hamper contained children’s toys—dolls, animals, coloring books—most of them torn and battered. There was a color-coded miniature xylophone with soft mallets and a one-octave range.

“You haven’t seen her phone book anywhere, have you?”

“Over there.” Monteleone nodded to where the avocado-green touch-tone phone sat on the floor on a stack of Nynex directories.

Cardozo glanced through Nan Shane’s Manhattan directory to see if she’d written any most-called numbers in the margins or on the most-called page. “What about Shane’s address book?”

“Haven’t seen it. Try the closet—I haven’t been in there yet.”

The clothes closet was the sort of walk-in you couldn’t walk into anymore. Shelves and drawers took up half the space; dresses, skirts, and jackets, all on hangers and stored in their plastic dry-cleaner’s bags, were jammed into the other half. A raincoat hung from a red plastic hook that had been epoxied to the inside of the door.

Cardozo went through the drawers: the top seven were women’s things: beads and belts and imitation jewelry in the uppermost; designer scarves in the next; sweaters and under-clothes in the rest. There was no address book, but under a pile of lace-fringed panties he found Nan Shane’s passport.

He flipped it open. The passport had been issued two years ago. Ms. Shane grinned out at him from a color photo in a blouse cut so low that none of it showed in the picture, and she looked like a topless waitress nearing mandatory retirement.

He flipped to the visas and counted ten pages of entries into and exits from El Salvador. “Hey, Greg—what do you think of a society Tarot reader who takes thirty-one trips to El Salvador in twenty-three months for an average stay of two days each?”

Greg Monteleone’s eyebrows went up. “She either loves the place or she has business down there.”

“Tell me honestly, who have you ever heard of that loved El Salvador?” Cardozo dropped the passport into an evidence bag.

He returned to the closet and searched the four bottom drawers. They held clothes for a four-year-old girl. He searched the pockets of the clothes on hangers; he found eight restaurant matchbooks and bagged them.

He wondered if maybe she had an extension in the bathroom and kept her address book in there. He opened the bathroom door and flicked on the light switch.

Plenty of shelves but no phone.

Rubber Donald Duck decals had been glued to the floor of the tub, and extra shelves had been hung from the walls of the stall for soaps and bath toys. Cardozo sniffed the containers of liquid soap and body moisturizer and stuck his ballpoint pen down through the gook in each, probing to see if she’d hidden anything. She hadn’t.

The sink was clean. No drips under the soap dish and no drips under the toothbrush holder with its two toothbrushes, one adult-sized and one child-sized.

The medicine cabinet seemed standard: three brands of toothpaste, prescription tranquilizers, children’s aspirin, over-the-counter sleeping pills, feminine-hygiene basics, first-aid stuff.

Cardozo lifted the toilet seat. The toilet bowl was clean, the water an inky blue from some kind of thousand-flush bowl cleaner.

The built-in hamper was filled to the halfway point with towels, underwear, children’s clothes.

There was something underneath the pink bathmat, rippling it. Cardozo crouched and turned the mat over and found a dog’s leash coiled on the tiles. One end was fastened with a slip-choke around the sink stand. The other was a padded halter with a label from a shop called Togs-4-Tots.

Without unhooking it, Cardozo walked the halter back into the main room. It allowed a radius of five feet of maneuverability: enough to reach the toy chest, the futon, the TV—but not the window or the phone or the stove. “I take it Ms. Shane was a single mother?”

“No one ever heard of a Mr. Shane.”

“How did she treat her daughter?”

Greg Monteleone shrugged. “No one heard the kid scream.”

“Did anyone ever hear her laugh?”

“Vince, this building has very thick walls.”

Cardozo waved the halter. “Nan Shane’s day care. She used it on the kid.”

“Get out of here.” Monteleone had found an eight-ounce can of GNC protein-supplement powder in the freezer. He popped the plastic lid off. “Oh boy oh boy, what some people won’t do for fast energy.” He held out the can.

Cardozo looked. The can was a quarter full of loosely packed white powder. He licked the tip of his forefinger, touched it to the powder, tasted. He whistled.

“Those trips to El Salvador were definitely tax-deductible,” Greg said.

“Or she had a nasty habit. Or both.” Greg slid out the shelf beneath the freezer compartment. “Vince. This what you’re looking for?”

A small leather booklet lay between the frozen peas and the loose ice cubes. The cover was initialed N.S., and it had deep fray marks along the edges.

Greg Monteleone popped the booklet loose and handed it to Cardozo. The pages were interlarded with chits of paper that poked out like two dozen place markers.

“What do you bet she was dealing too?” Greg said.

Cardozo shook his head. “If she lived like this place looks, she must have been the worst-paid dealer in the city.”

“The doorman says she hung out at a Third Avenue bar.”

“Dealing?”

“He didn’t exactly say dealing. But he didn’t exactly say not dealing. She did Tarot readings for the customers.”

“What’s the name of this bar?”

C
ARDOZO WALKED OVER TO
the end of the bar where the lone woman customer wasn’t and pulled out a stool. While he waited for the bartender he looked around at the almost empty table area and saw three customers sitting alone with their morning drinks at separate tables.

A mirrored wall gave the impression of doubling the space and the population. In the reflection the gold saloon-style lettering in the window that spelled
Achilles Foot
came out unreversed.

The bartender rang up a sale. The mirrored cash register tinkled and zinged and threw a splash of light across his dazzling electric-blue silk shirt. As he came toward Cardozo a gold chain twinkled in the chest hairs of his open collar. His smile telegraphed a synthetic good mood. “Hi, what’ll it be?”

“How about a diet cola?”

The bartender was a thick-featured, fat guy in his late twenties. “Coming up.”

He brought the drink, and Cardozo laid his shield on the bar.

“Who was tending bar when you closed this morning?”

“Me.” The bartender held out a hand. “Yip Guardella. Good to meet you.”

“I’d like to ask you some questions about Nan Shane.”

Yip Guardella shook his head, sending a wave through his expensively layer-cut dark hair. “This city is going to hell.”

“How long did Shane spend here yesterday?”

“On my shift? Oh, she showed up around midnight and stayed till around two, two-thirty this morning.”

“Why so long?”

“She was doing good business.”

“And what kind of business was that?”

“She did Tarot readings for the customers. She was sort of a tradition here—going back six or seven years.”

“How well did you know her?”

“Me?”

The corners of Yip Guardella’s mouth began to sneak up into a grin, slowly disclosing well-tended white teeth. He had a dimple smack in the center of his chin, and Cardozo had a hunch that that dimple made him feel he was the sexiest devil this side of Chippendale’s.

“I knew her to say hello to, shoot the breeze, you know, nothing deep, nothing special.”

“Did she ever talk to you about her personal life?”

“Not to me.”

Cardozo let his eyebrows say it:
What do you mean, a slick stud like you
?

Yip Guardella got the message and shot back a crinkled grin. “We made it once or twice, you know, but it wasn’t a talk relationship.”

Cardozo nodded. “Did she ever mention other boyfriends, business associates, social acquaintances?”

“Not to me.”

“Would you know of anyone who might have had a reason to hurt her?”

“Absolutely no way. Nan was the sweetest bar nun.”

It took Cardozo a moment to realize that Yip had said that Nan was the sweetest, bar none.

The woman customer stretched her Where-is-Josef-Stalin-now-that-we-need-him T-shirt tight across heavy, braless breasts. “I’m out of quarters, Yip—could you beam me a cut?”

Guardella zinged the cash register open and scrounged in the change drawer. He found what looked like the remote control of a TV set and aimed it at the jukebox. “You’re on, Mandy.”

“You’re a
vraie poupée.”
The woman pushed back her shoulders and crossed to the jukebox and jabbed three buttons. A spinning compact disc threw off fractured rainbows and a synthesized machine-drum-backed rap number began pounding from the speaker:

N
ickel-dimin’ two-bit pipsqueak squirt,

Bleedin Thursday blood on your Tuesday shirt—

Cardozo glanced toward the jukebox. “Is that song popular?”

“Number three this week,” Yip Guardella said.

Cardozo suppressed a shudder. He laid a photograph and an Identi-Kit drawing side by side on the bar top. “Did you happen to see either of these guys last night?”

“At the bar?” Yip Guardella studied the photo. He studied the drawing.

A change came over him. Cardozo could see his eyes stop and skip back and stop again.