Deadly Rich (64 page)

Two minutes later Terri joined him in the kitchen. “Hold the coffee. She fell asleep on the sofa.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.” Terri came and hugged him. “I wish I’d taped you on TV.”

“Come on, give me a break. All I did was walk a famous lady through a hostile crowd so she could have her breakdown in private.”

“I’m not talking about you and the movie star in there. I’m talking about you, period.”

“What about me, period?”

“You looked so happy.”

Cardozo felt his face flush. “Go on. Me, happy?”

A BUZZER SOUNDED
. It seemed to clang through the little apartment like a racing fire truck. Cardozo hurried to the hallway and opened the front door.

“Guess what?” Ellie Siegel took two breathless steps into the apartment. “The
New York Trib
has killed tomorrow’s Braidy column.” She grabbed Cardozo’s hand. “Just balance me for a second—one of us has to go, this shoe or me.”

Cardozo held Ellie’s hand.

Balancing on one high-heeled foot, she lifted a knee and reached with her free hand for her foot. After ten seconds of failing to connect she managed to wrench the shoe off. She shook it. Nothing came out. She thumped it with her fist. With a clunk heavy enough to be a five-dollar gold piece, a black pebble dropped to the floor.

She stooped, with dainty disgust picked up the pebble between thumb and forefinger, and dropped it into her pocket. “I wonder what volcano coughed that up.” She stepped back into the shoe and, testing her walk, advanced cautiously toward the living room.

“Maybe you’d better not go in there,” Cardozo said.

Ellie stopped at the threshold and for one long, craning moment squinted into the dimness. “Aha. Company.”

“She’s sleeping. We can talk in here.” Cardozo led the way down the hall and switched on the kitchen light. “Why did the
Trib
kill the column?”

Ellie dropped her purse on the kitchen table. “You should see what Braidy wrote. You’d have killed it too.”

“You managed to see it?”

“Better than that. I was charming to one of the
Trib’s
computerized press jockeys, and he let me take a printer’s proof.” Ellie snapped open her purse and pulled out something that looked like a neatly folded four-foot square of Third World toilet paper. She unfolded it. The toilet paper had printing on one side. “Shall I read?”

“Please.”

““
Dick Sez
,’
by Benedict Braidy. Two months
—” Ellie cleared her throat. “Excuse me. Summer cold coming on.
Two months after the death of my daughter Nita Kohler, the editor of
Fanfare Magazine,
Kristi Blackwell, commissioned me to
—”

“Daughter?” Cardozo wheeled. “He’s calling Nita Kohler his
daughter
? Again?”

“He’s not calling Greta Garbo his daughter.”

“But that’s a lie.”

“Be charitable, Vince. It’s an understandable exaggeration. But if you want to quibble, quibble with him, not me.” Ellie thrust the press proof into Cardozo’s hand.

He dropped into a chair.

Two months after the death of my daughter Nita Kohler, the editor of
Fanfare Magazine,
Kristi Blackwell, asked me to write an article dealing with the last forty days of Nita’s life. I interviewed friends, family, co-workers, and four weeks later produced a detailed day-by-day account. Ms. Blackwell found the result “too morbid” for
Fanfare
readers and cut it by eighty percent.

“Would I be disturbing the household if I got myself something to drink?” Ellie said.

“Sorry.” Cardozo nodded over his shoulder toward the refrigerator. “Help yourself.”

Five months later, at the disclosure stage in the trial of Nita’s accused murderer, lawyers for James Delancey produced a diary, certified by handwriting experts and criminal investigators to be Nita’s. Neither I nor my wife, actress Leigh Baker, had ever known Nita to keep a diary. Shocking passages of this diary, detailing Nita’s alleged drug use and sex life, were put into evidence.

I did not see the unpublished passages of the diary until Sunday, June 9 of this year. They were, word for word, the passages that Kristi Blackwell cut from my article. Quite clearly the diary had been forged, and Ms. Blackwell used me as an unwitting Deep Throat to dilute blatant fabrications with persuasively “authentic” material.

Ellie returned to the table with a glass of sparkling water. She sat on the chair facing Cardozo. She raised the glass in a silent toast and took a long, thirsty swallow.

This was not the only time—merely the most egregious—that Ms. Blackwell, after having lashed me on to exhaustively detailed work, removed and sequestered chunks of my material.

From “Gotham’s Grandest Dame,” she cut Mrs. Astor’s bitterly fought divorce, reducing a hard-hitting expose into yet another oafish fan letter.

From “The Prince They Now Call Sir,” she cut human-rights abuses, animal sacrifice, slavery, and drug-running, reducing meaningful journalism to an inane puff piece for Cayman Islands tourism.

From “Socialites in Emergency,” she cut the wrongful-death lawsuit resulting from conditions in Lexington Hospital’s Emergency Room.

A clear pattern of abuse emerges. Ms. Blackwell has consistently commissioned, and then withheld from publication, material threatening America’s vested interests. Is she really the public-spirited crusader she presents herself as? Or is she, like the late J. Edgar Hoover, abusing her position in order to amass private files—and with them to wield private power over the mighty of the land? It is a question whose time has come.

Cardozo tipped his chair back against the kitchen wall. “It’s a question whose time has come, and it’s sitting on the shelf right behind you.”

Ellie twisted around in the chair and frowned at the row of bottles and books. “Garlic salt. Garlic pepper. What are you talking about? Macrobiotic cooking for two. Who cooks macrobiotic?”

“Not those,” Cardozo said. “Nita Kohler’s diary.”

“This?” Ellie picked up the leather-bound volume.

“Turn to the entry for January eleventh.” Ellie sat reading. After a moment she looked at Cardozo.

“Turn the page,” he said.

She turned the page. After a moment she beckoned for the press proof. He slid it to her across the table. She spent another silent moment rereading. She looked up.

“I’ve read Braidy’s first draft,” Cardozo said. “He’s telling the truth. Three quarters of that diary is lifted from him. But not those nine words.”

With a moment’s perplexity Ellie’s eyelids sank over her eyes. “The nine words are fake. They showed up in the diary four years ago, and they showed up in Sam’s third note a week ago. Okay, it’s a small world but not that small, right? So the third note is fake. And if the third note’s a fake, why not all the notes?”

“You said it, Ellie, not me.”

She sat slowly shaking her head. “But why would anyone copy this diary to fake a Society Sam note?”

“It may not have happened that way. The diary and the note could both have been copied from a third source.”

“What third source? Why bother? Why not make it up from scratch?”

“Tell me the truth, Ellie. Have you ever met a killer as bright as you?”

“Plenty. But this guy isn’t one of them.”

Their gazes met.

“Before I forget.” Ellie reached again into her purse and pulled out her notepad. “Sam’s moving up. Zip code one-oh-seven-oh-three is Douglas Avenue, Yonkers. The best neighborhood he’s yet mailed a note from. The postmaster says it was mailed no later than eleven fifty-five
A.M.
yesterday, which was a Sunday. And mailed no earlier than eleven fifty-five
A.M.
last Friday—which happens to have been a Friday. Vince—I made a joke.”

“I’ll laugh in a minute.”

Ellie slipped the notepad back into the purse. “Doesn’t it seem odd—killing a guy in a place where you work and everybody knows you?”

“There could be a reason. Sam alias Rick Martinez may not be planning to return to work.”

“Then you think Sam alias Rick is the kind of guy who plans.”

“Possibly.” Cardozo rose from the chair and went to the refrigerator. “And it could be he’s reached the end of his list.”

“What leads you to that optimistic conclusion?”

“He’s let us know who he is.” Cardozo bent down to see if there was any lemonade left.

“Has he? Then how come we haven’t found him?”

“Miracles take time. Thirty-eight men are out looking for him right now.” Cardozo found the lemonade hiding behind the milk. “On the other hand …” He brought the pitcher and two glasses back to the table. “Wilkes thinks Sam could be building up to an explosion.”

“What kind of explosion?”

“A mass killing.”

Tuesday, June 18

T
HE PHONE RANG.

With shaving cream still covering half his face, Cardozo ran to lift the receiver before the third ring could rouse the answering machine. “Vince Cardozo,” he said quietly.

“Where is she?” The rasping, cigarette-ravaged voice had to belong to Tom Reilly, and the clinking sound suggested he’d put ice and maybe something else in his morning orange juice.

“She’s on the sofa.”

“Send her home.”

“She says she doesn’t have a home.”

“Send her anyway.”

From the hallway Cardozo could see into the darkened living room, where a dark-haired woman in stocking feet lay on the sofa, curled around a pillow that she was hugging like a doll. That she should be there at all struck him as an illogical extension of a daydream he had barely known he was dreaming.

“I can’t. She’s asleep.”

“She’s a public personality. A police lieutenant heading up a highly visible investigation cannot have this kind of public personality sleeping on his sofa.”

“Where does it say that in the statutes?”

“I’m talking image. Word has traveled fast. Some very important people are having coronaries over this.”

Which, Cardozo understood, was Tom Reilly’s way of saying that he was being nagged by the borough commander, who was being nudged by the chief of detectives, who’d been queried by the chief of police, who’d had a call from the mayor, who’d gotten a threat from Waldo Carnegie that he was going to move his publishing empire to New Jersey.

“Tell these important people they’re welcome to try to wake her up, but I doubt they’ll have any more luck than I did.”

“Waldo Carnegie is not taking this personally. He is not angry. He does not believe the rumors. He is willing to send a limousine.”

“Waldo Carnegie has already sent a limousine.” Shifting the window curtain an inch to the side, Cardozo looked down into the street. The long, black BMW limousine was still double-parked in front of the building. “It’s been here since ten last night.”

“What are you trying to do? What do you expect people to
think
you’re trying to do?”

“Right now I’m trying to make my breakfast, and the toast’s burning. Can we talk this over later?”

Terri came into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. She sniffed and went to the oven. “Toast’s burning.” She speared two chunks of smoking carbon with a carving fork and carried them to the garbage pail.

Right away the room felt a lot nicer, just because her face was in it.

“I’m sorry,” Cardozo said. “I was on the phone.”

She opened the refrigerator. Containers clattered. “Would you consider eating a decent breakfast?”

“Depends on the decent breakfast.”

He watched her break eggs into a mixing bowl. She added a little milk, paprika, salt, and pepper. She tipped the mixture into a hot frying pan, and the pan hissed.

“Know what I hate?” he said. “I hate it when, first thing in the morning, you tolerate me.”

She smiled. “Get over it.” She brought two plates of scrambled eggs to the table. “Dad,” she groaned. “I borrowed this issue. What have you done to it?” She was holding
People
magazine open to a page that he’d been doodling on.

“Sorry.”

She sat and frowned at his drawing and she looked like a little girl trying to play a grandmother in a school drama-society production. “You’re drawing this all the time. You’re drawing it on napkins and newspapers and envelopes.”

“Am I?”

“Why are you so hung up on the flag all of a sudden?” He sat motionless, hearing the words; and then he turned his head and looked at her eyes—brown, luminous, veiled with dark lashes. “What did you just say?”

“I said why does the flag interest you so much?”

“The American flag, right?” A wave of certainty shot through him. “Stripes and little stars over in the upper left-hand corner?” He sprang up and grabbed the telephone and dialed Marty Wilkes’s home number. “Marty, it’s Vince. We have to talk. Right away. Sam’s logo is an American flag.”

“I’ll meet you in my office in fifteen minutes.” Maybe Cardozo was just imagining it, but when he hung up his daughter seemed to be looking at him as though he were a seriously bad comedian. “I hate to ask you to be late for school,” he said. “But I’d rather Leigh didn’t wake up … you know …”

“You don’t want her to wake up alone. In a strange place.” He nodded. “Do you think you could hang around till she leaves?”

“Sure.” Terri smiled. “I’ll be glad to.”

“
YOU ASKED ME
if I’d ever run across a serial killer who carved flags on his victim’s bodies.” Marty Wilkes leaned back in his chair. The facades of Greenwich Village town houses glowed in the window behind him. “I ran a quick computer search. Does it matter if it’s not a national flag?”

“Hell, no,” Cardozo said. “A flag is a flag.”

“If you don’t mind the flag of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico—the so-called
bonita bandera
—then La Rue Newton is your boy. Between June 1942 and September 1944 he murdered eight residents of the South Jersey shore and carved the
bonita bandera
on their bodies with a poultry knife.”

He swiveled to face his computer terminal. His fingers drifted over the keyboard, touching keys, making no more sound than a rain of talcum powder.