Deadly Rich (49 page)

Yip pursed his lips till they resembled a guppy’s. “No, not last night.”

Spilled a pint of plasma and you still don’t hurt,

’Cause your head’s in the heart of the hallelujah dirt

“Have you ever seen them?”

“This one, no.” Yip Guardella pushed the Identi-Kit back toward Cardozo. “This one …” His fingers drummed a nervous rhythm on Jim Delancey’s head. “He was in the papers a lot, four years ago.”

“He’s been in the papers a lot lately too. You recognize him?”

“Jim Delancey. He killed that movie actress’s daughter, right?”

“Right.”

Hallelujah dirt that’ll do ya

That’ll do ya dirt hallelujah dirt.

“Wasn’t there a kid with Nan?” Cardozo said.

Yip’s face whitened. “A kid?”

“Her four-year-old daughter?”

“You kidding?” Yip Guardella’s reaction was mostly in the eyebrows. “If we let kids that young in here, we’d lose our license. They have to at least look within striking distance of twenty-one.”

“Was anyone besides you here when Nan Shane left this morning?”

Yip Guardella folded heavy arms across his chest. “The crowd had pretty well thinned out—in fact, now that I think of it, they’d all gone home. She was the last customer.”

The door to Third Avenue swung open and a thin, red-haired young man wearing designer janitor’s overalls sauntered in. “Hi, Yip.” He gave a wave and crossed to the men’s room.

Yip waved back.

“Who’s that?” Cardozo said.

“That’s J.J.” A fine line of sweat was trickling down from Yip’s hairline across his forehead. “He waits tables.”

CARDOZO SWUNG THE MEN’S ROOM DOOR OPEN
and stepped into heavily camphorated air. “Hey, J.J. I need to talk to you.”

The young man stood bent over a cold-water-only sink, rinsing his hands. He looked over his shoulder at Cardozo’s shield.

“When did you see Nan Shane last?”

J.J. straightened. He turned. He left the water running. “Around two, two-thirty this morning.” He dried his hands on a filthy-looking continuous roll of cotton towel. “What’s happened?”

“Bad news. Nan was killed on her way home.”

J.J.’s jaw dropped. He stared at Cardozo from under a cliff of curly red hair that badly needed a trim.

“I take it you two were friends?” Cardozo said.

J.J. stood there pushing out shock. “Not good friends, but I liked her.”

“I’m sorry.” Cardozo handed J.J. the Identi-Kit. “Did you happen to see this man last night?”

“No.”

“Ever see him?”

“No.”

Cardozo handed J.J. the photo of Delancey. “Him?”

“Not last night.”

“Ever see him?”

“Sure.”

“Know him?”

“Not personally—and I wouldn’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“He’s noisy. Makes too much of a fuss.”

“Know who he is?”

“Not by name. He’s a friend of Yip’s.”

“You’ve seen him with Yip?”

“Sure.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, the last time was … about four weeks ago.”

“Happen to remember the day?”

“It was a Wednesday. Lunch hour.”

“
VINCE CARDOZO?
”

Cardozo stopped to see who on the crowded Third Avenue sidewalk had called to him.

A woman was prying her way through the jostling crowd, and the jeweled forearm she was using as a crowbar remained outstretched, offering a handshake. “Nancy Guardella, U.S. Senate.”

It took Cardozo an instant to recognize her, chiefly because her jaw was far stronger than in her photos. She had gray hair that had been dyed somebody’s idea of blue, and her makeup looked as though it was designed to show up on TV and to hell with how it looked in real life.

“You were in the bar talking to my son Yip, am I right? I’m sure he talked your ear off—but could you give me a minute so I can put in my two bits?”

Now this is interesting
, Cardozo was thinking. “Senator Guardella, how do you know my name?”

“How do I know your name? You’re running the Society Sam task force—you’re a media presence.”

“Were you, by any chance, waiting for me just now?”

“I sure was.” Facing him in heels that exactly matched her pink-and-beige suit, she stood an extremely heavy five eight, and something in the way she held her weight at the ready suggested a particularly grumpy chow chow. “Let me give you a lift. Which way are you going?”

“Seventy-first and Park.”

She steered him toward the curb. A white stretch limo with diplomat’s plates was idling in the space reserved for express busses. Cardozo half expected a liveried chauffeur to dash around the gleaming hood and open the passenger door, but Senator Guardella opened it herself. She motioned Cardozo to hop in and slid in behind him.

The backseat came equipped with TV and a bar heavily stocked with up-market labels. The cooled air was saturated in musk potpourri.

“Leo,” Mrs. Guardella said to the back of the driver’s head, “Seventy-first and Park and take your time.” She turned. “Okay, Vince. Cards on the table. You may not know that I’m chairman of the oversight committee of the DEA. Not that it’s a secret.”

Cardozo nodded. The DEA—Drug Enforcement Agency—was one of the fastest-growing federal agencies; a lot of taxpayer dollars were flowing their way, and it made sense that they’d need an oversight committee.

“The reason I’m here is, I saw the Shane thing on TV. I knew Yip would be questioned. Now, there’s something you have to know, and this
is
secret.” Nancy Guardella pressed a button on a remote control. A tinted glass partition rose between the seats. She sat back and smiled at Cardozo. The limo eased into traffic. “Achilles Foot is ours,” she said.

Cardozo turned. “
Ours
?”

“It’s a front. A sting operation.”

Cardozo sat letting his mind comb through the implications.

“Unfortunately,” Nancy Guardella said, “the agency is fighting other agencies for a slice of a shrinking budgetary pie. Agencies are not above sabotaging one another. You may remember a big to-do five years ago—my son Yip was accused of dealing coke at Princeton?”

“I do remember.”

“Okay; Yip is a normal guy with normal curiosity. Yes, he experimented with drugs, like ninety percent of his Princeton classmates. But because his name was Guardella, the New Jersey cops set him up and busted him.”

Cardozo remembered the incident, though not with quite the entrapment spin Nancy Guardella was putting on it.

“A lot of people would like to embarrass the agency and embarrass me. They’d like to see our bust-and-conviction rate brought down. Not to sound my own trumpet, Vince, but we make the other agencies look worse than sick. They look terminal.”

“Are you telling me your son’s an agent?”

“He’s not listed on any roster, if that’s what you’re asking. But sure—he works for us.”

“And Nan Shane?”

“One of our best. She’ll be missed. I understand you have to investigate her death the same as any other homicide, but you also have a right to know the background. And to know it on the bat, without any futzing about clearance.”

“I appreciate your help,” Cardozo said.

Nancy Guardella handed him a business card from her purse. There were five extensions listed. “Call me if I can help with anything.”

The driver pulled over to the curb. When the limo stopped, Nancy Guardella looked out the window. “Say, this is the building where Annie MacAdam lives. You know Annie?”

Cardozo set one foot outside the limo. “I’ve met her.”

“If you see her, tell her hello for me. And let’s do this again soon.”

THEY WERE SITTING ON FACING SOFAS
in Annie MacAdam’s living room. Awnings on the terrace had been pulled to shade the French windows, and a cool, trembling green-washed light filtered indoors.

“Her name was Nan Shane,” Cardozo said. “Your name is in her address book.”

“Christ. Poor Nan.” There were thought lines around Annie MacAdam’s eyes. She was wearing a Coca-Cola-logo white satin blouse with silver sequin embroidery and over it a big-shouldered, gold-brocade jacket. She adjusted a sleeve.

“Any chance Nan Shane was here at your Princess Margaret dinner?”

“You have my word that Nan Shane was never a dinner guest in this house.”

“Let’s just double-check and look at the guest list for that night.”

They went to the library. Annie MacAdam handed Cardozo the loose-leaf binder for April, May, June of 1985.

Cardozo found the ten-table seating plan for May sixth and the list of seventy-nine guests. The name
Shane
did not appear on either.

“We really weren’t at all the same world,” Annie MacAdam said. “In fact, I’m just a little bit ashamed of my relationship with her. At the time we met I needed information. We struck a deal.” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the ceiling. “I know this sounds venal as hell—but Nan Shane gave me insider intelligence when her building was going co-op. She did Tarot readings for a living, and in exchange, I let her bring her cards to my parties—after dinner, with coffee. People turned to her when their buildings went co-op. They wanted readings to tell them whether or not to buy. In time she came to know a great deal about a great many buildings.”

“It sounds as though you and Nan Shane became fairly useful to each other.”

Annie MacAdam seemed to blush beneath her powder. “I didn’t have the heart to turn her away. She was having a hard time these last two years.”

“In what way?”

“She kept wearing the same four gowns—a rose Givenchy knockoff, a kelly-green Scaasi, a Mary MacFadden cocktail thing—black silk, a little too basic—and a divine blue de la Renta that looked genuine, though even in a thrift shop it would have cost six thousand. I don’t think Ms. Shane had a head for money.”

“Do you know for a fact she was having money problems?”

“I really know nothing about her. As I said, we were very different worlds.”

“Could she have been here at your party six years ago—reading Tarots?”

“It’s very possible.”

“Some of the guests might remember,” Cardozo said. “I’m sure some of the men would remember very clearly.”

“O
H, NO!” SHOCK HUNG
in the air three feet in front of Dick Braidy’s face. “That poor woman. That poor,
poor
woman.”

“How well did you know her?” Cardozo said.

“I didn’t know her at all well. I saw her more as a type than as an individual. To me, Nan Shane was a New York tragedy long before she was murdered.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It was the old story: She wanted a great deal, she could afford very little. This town does that to so many young men and women. And so many not-so-young.”

In the living room windows behind Dick Braidy, curtains moved softly in the air-conditioned breeze.

On the end table beside the sofa, a scented blue candle burned in a small silver dish. Incandescent particles whirled upward through the tiny halo of light.

“You’d see her at parties. Always wearing that same de la Renta cocktail number. Poor thing, she was caught between two worlds. Too useful to invite as a guest—and too useless to hire as a servant. She generally appeared as designated fortuneteller, just around the time the after-dinner liqueurs came out. She’d smile and spread her cards and predict sweet generalities—and ask for a twenty-five-dollar tip.”

“That’s how she made her living?”

“There was a rumor that she had a sideline. I hate to speak ill of the dead. But you heard it so much, you had to wonder. Why were people
always
whispering that Nan Shane was a dope courier?”

“Maybe because she was.”

“I have no idea. Personally, I never required her services—for anything.”

“The night of May sixth, nineteen eighty-five—the night you described in ‘Socialites in Emergency’—do you recall if Nan Shane joined your table at dinner?”

A moment went by and then Dick Braidy nodded.

“I seem to recall she did. Sorella Chappell was feeling insecure about some job or other for the British royal family, and Nan swore it would come through. Nan’s forecasts tended to be the kiss of death, so needless to say, it did
not
.”

“And afterward—did she go to the hospital with you?”

“Nan
Shane
? Leave before she’d worked every room in the apartment? No
way.
”

“
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING AT,
” Dan Hippolito said, “is a physical impossibility.”

He dealt the glossies out one by one on his desktop, turned so Cardozo could see them headup. They lay there like a gruesome, oversized hand of solitaire: Oona, Avalon, and Nan.

“Missing tissue,” Dan said, “is very, very rare in stab wounds. With bullets, with bombs, with speeding cars, yes—it’s in the nature of high-velocity impacts that flesh gets severed from the victim and scatters. Even with a rotary saw you see a little scatter, a little loss. But with a knife?”

Cardozo’s eyes slowly scanned the photos, comparing. In the preautopsy shots, the victims had been stripped and washed. No dried blood obscured the killer’s artwork. Each abdomen showed deep-lipped horizontal slashes and rat-a-tat punctures. In places the killer’s blade had opened the intestine.

In the postautopsy shots, the wounds puckered like the drawn purse strings of a miser’s moneybag.

“I reviewed over two hundred lethal stabbings in the last quarter,” Dan said. “Not one single instance of tissue missing. So I had to wonder. Why this particular tissue? It didn’t seem to be especially meaningful tissue. We’re talking microscopic bits of abdominal skin and fat and muscle. Who would want them? No one. Why would he take them? No reason. So why are they missing?”

Viewed chronologically, from Oona to Nan, the photos showed a progression. Cardozo could clearly see the killer’s hand becoming surer, the horizontal slashes becoming more nearly parallel, more nearly aligned and equal. The photos could have been sketches of a corporate logo struggling to find that final, instantly recognizable image.

“I gave this a lot of thought,” Dan said. “It took me till yesterday to find the answer. In fact, you might say the answer found me.”