Deadly Rich (7 page)

Among the press clippings he found an interview with Delancey’s lawyers. They claimed that Nita Kohler was famed among her fast-living, rich young crowd for her promiscuity, her drug-taking, her irrational violence, her addiction to kinky sex. For months she had pursued Delancey, begging him to engage with her in sodomy and intercourse. Finally, with cocaine, she had bought him.

This was not her first brush with disaster. She courted thrills. She courted death.

The file was long closed, ancient history, but still there was a movement in Cardozo’s heart, a strangulation that he felt each time he ran up against one of these victim-is-guilty defenses. He knew the alibis. Society’s fault. Parents’ fault. The drug culture’s fault. Above all, the girl’s fault.

Cardozo began reading the transcript of Delancey’s first interrogation. After six pages he felt his lips pull together into a thin, frustrated line. He leaned forward in his swivel chair and stared at the two arraignment photos of James Delancey the Third.

He finally chose the full-face shot with its narrow nose and full-lipped scowl and bright points of light in the eyes. The face was smooth and soft, almost without real contours, and it hadn’t changed in four years.

A moment later Cardozo crossed the squad room and stepped into the little room where an Albanian stand-up comic was telling dialect jokes on the TV screen. Detective Goldberg was sitting in a chair with a coffee cup, not watching.

“Do you mind?” Cardozo slid a cassette into the VCR.

Goldberg shrugged a burly shoulder.

Cardozo started the tape. Someone had played it and not rewound it all the way, so the picture came up in the middle of Detective Carl Malloy reading the suspect his rights.

“You’re entitled to a lawyer,” Malloy was saying. “You have the right to remain silent.”

Christ, Malloy had lost hair and put on weight since this was taken. Malloy looked
young
in this tape.

“Anything you say can and will be used against you. Do you wish to have a lawyer?”

The camera caught what the transcript hadn’t, that instant where James Delancey’s last remnant of bravado wordlessly slipped away. He shook his head.

It occurred to Cardozo that Delancey must have been working out with weights in prison—he was almost slim in this picture.

“Jim Delancey indicates no,” Malloy said.

There was the sound of a door closing, and Ellie Siegel came onto the screen.

Ellie should give Malloy tips on not aging, Cardozo thought.

She came toward the table with a cup of coffee. Her expression was agreeable. She put the coffee down in front of the suspect. “Do you want to make a statement?” she asked gently. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Jim Delancey lowered his head and raised his eyes under his thick dark hair to look up apologetically, like a child. He brought himself up nervously erect in the metal chair. “It wasn’t my fault. She attacked me.”

Siegel’s eyes and lips collaborated in a pleasantly skeptical half smile. “That hundred-and-two-pound girl attacked a hunk like you?”

What balls, Cardozo thought—she was flirting with the punk, and what’s more, he was going for it. For ten seconds Delancey was looking at the floor, shy, and then he was looking at the detectives, half smiling, and then he leaned forward to lift his coffee cup and take a gulp from it. The light from the lamp got in his eyes and he put a hand up to shield them. It could have been some freak result of camera placement, but the hand looked huge.

“I’m not clear on this, Jim.” Siegel sat looking across the table at him. “Nita Kohler attacked you tonight, on the terrace of her mother’s town house?”

“She attacked me tonight and every night since we met.”

“Why would anyone attack a guy like you? Especially a woman?”

“She wanted sex with me.”

“She wanted sex with you,” Siegel repeated with a kind of nonpressuring nonemphasis. “And how did you feel about that?”

“She didn’t turn me on.”

“Then why were you seeing her? Wasn’t she your girlfriend?”

“She thought she was.”

“If she wasn’t your girlfriend, what was your relationship?”

“She was my caseworker at Renaissance House.”

“That’s the drug rehab up on East Ninetieth?”

Delancey nodded.

“Jim Delancey indicates yes,” Malloy said.

Cardozo sensed in the image of the boy a brooding wonderment, as though somewhere along some line of coke he had lost track of how the reality outside his head was built, of what cause led to what effect.

“Are you an addict?” Siegel asked.

“I’m a recovering addict.”

“Did you do drugs tonight?”

He nodded. “I did a little coke.”

“Jim Delancey indicates yes,” Malloy said.

“Did Nita Kohler take drugs tonight?” Siegel asked.

“She took a hit,” Delancey said.

“Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened tonight,” Siegel suggested. “Start from the beginning. Where did you two meet?”

“We met at Achilles Foot,” Delancey said. “Like always.”

“That’s a bar?”

He nodded.

“Jim Delancey indicates yes,” Malloy said.

“She wanted to talk about where our relationship was going. She was very hurt and said we should go to her place and talk, because no one was home. So we went there, and she said how much she loved me and how could I hurt her by seeing other girls. I told her this was bullshit. Her hand came out
zap
, like that, and she scratched my face. See?”

Cardozo pressed the Pause button and froze the frame. Scabs dotted the right side of Delancey’s face from his eye down to his mouth. You could connect the dots and see what had been a superficial abrasion.

Cardozo restarted the tape and when Delancey’s voice came up again, he was aware of how gratingly whiny it sounded.

“I said that’s it, fuck you and adios, and before I knew it she was attacking me again.”

“And you defended yourself?” The way Siegel put it was halfway between question and statement. There was absolutely no tone of judgment. If anything, Siegel’s voice and manner suggested it would have been the most natural thing in the world for this poor guy to defend himself against a crazed, drugged-up virago.

“I put my arms up to protect my face.”

“Did you push her away?”

“I didn’t touch the bitch.”

Cardozo pressed the Off button. The picture on the screen froze for one split instant and then fractured into black-and-white static.

ELLIE SIEGEL WAS STILL AT HER DESK
, typing up the day’s notes.

“Tell me about the Kohler-Delancey case,” Cardozo said.

Ellie sighed. “My second homicide. All cases should be that easy.”

“There’s not the slightest doubt in your mind he killed her.”

“More to the point, there wasn’t the slightest doubt in the jury’s mind. Seven hours to convict.”

“The medical report mentions a straight-line bruise on the palm of Nita’s left hand.”

Ellie fixed softly piercing eyes on him. “You’ve been excavating some pretty old paper.”

“Nita was right-handed.”

Ellie nodded. “I know, I know, and she would have fended off a blow with her right hand and not her left. But Delancey had a knife strapped to his shin, and the hilt matched the mark in her palm.”

“But it was a bruise, not a cut.”

“Hilts don’t cut, Vince. They’re made not to cut.” Her tone was flat and mild, and while it acknowledged his possible dimness it criticized nothing. “Believe me, a lot of people went over that bruise, and one thing it does not point to is one iota of innocence on the part of Jim Delancey.”

“What did you think of him personally?”

“Personally he was a big, stupid, handsome, stoned schmuck. He was momma’s prince, ego with no limits. Nita Kohler was obnoxious to King Me and so he pulled her life off her like wings off a fly. He knew what he was doing and, believe me, he liked doing it.”

“You’re speaking as a woman or a feminist or a detective?”

“I’m speaking as a human being who happens, at this point in her life, to be all of the above.” Ellie switched off her electric typewriter and covered it.

“There’s a lot of drugs on that first tape,” Cardozo said.

“Tell me about it.”

“And they were never mentioned in the trial. How come he didn’t plead cocaine intoxication as a defense?”

“Beats me, because he was a heavy hitter. He was feeding his nose two-, three-hundred dollars’ worth a day. Why do you think he had all that breaking and entering on his rap sheet? The week before he killed Kohler he was fencing a thousand dollars a day.”

“What kind of stuff did he fence?”

“Jewelry, coins, watches, anything valuable and small he could pinch from his girlfriends’ apartments.”

“As I recall he had quite a few society girls interested in him.”

“And it wasn’t because he was interested back. It was just their bad luck that they could access the kind of cash he needed.”

“He didn’t like girls?”

“
Like
is not the word. He had a momma’s-boy resentment of females. They owed him a living and they owed him sex and they weren’t doing their job.”

“Think he’s twisted enough to kill Oona Aldrich?”

“If he got a chance after the grief she caused him today, absolutely.”

“On his third week of parole?”

“What’s parole got to do with it? It’s the principle of the thing. Oona was a woman, and she bugged him. With timing and luck he could have followed her in a cab. The emergency stairway would have gotten him into the changing room and out again.”

“But you’re forgetting one thing: What would he tell his boss?”

“That he was stepping outside to smoke a cigarette.”

Cardozo ran it through his mind. “I don’t know. There’s such a thing as going out to smoke a cigarette, and then there’s such a thing as going out to smoke a pack.”

“All I know is, Delancey had the head to kill her. Whether he had the opportunity …” Ellie flicked off her desk light. “Makes me tired to think about it. That’s it for me. Good night.”

Cardozo was suddenly aware that there was one thing he wanted to do very much, and that was go to bed. He walked with Ellie to the stairs.

“Funny,” he said. “Delancey’s mother working in the boutique where Oona was killed.”

“What’s funny? The woman ran up a quarter million in legal fees defending her golden boy. And God knows how much it cost to spring him from prison. She’s got to work somewhere.” Ellie shrugged. “Sometimes you just have to accept that there’s such a thing as coincidence.”

“But don’t you sometimes have to accept that there isn’t?”

“Every day.”

They came to the stairway.

“Do you think Delancey could change?” Cardozo said. “Get off drugs? Hold down a job? Grow up maybe?”

Ellie tossed him a pitying glance. “People don’t change, Vince. They just learn better camouflage.”

“Is that your story, Ellie?”

“And yours obviously. But more to the point it’s his.”

Cardozo returned to his cubicle. He got out his notebook and listed reasons why Jim Delancey had to be involved. He turned the page and listed reasons why Delancey couldn’t be involved.

Finally he closed the notebook and lifted the telephone and punched in a number. He leaned sideways and gave the cubicle door a push, shutting out the man-made and machine-made racket that spilled in from the squad room.

A man’s voice answered on the fifth ring. “Hello?” The low-pitched, patrician drawl tortured a simple
o
into an Ivy League diphthong. “Walter, it’s Vince Cardozo.”

There was an instant’s lag before recognition kicked in. “Yes, Vince.” Walter Vanderflood’s tone was not happy—nothing that linked his world to Vince Cardozo’s could ever be grounds for happiness—but it was respectful. “Is something the matter?”

“Not too much in my life and not too much in yours, I hope.”

“No, I’m doing all right.”

There had been a time when Walter Vanderflood had not been doing all right, when his nephew had been found murdered in a Sixtieth Street hotel, and Vince Cardozo, doing no more than his job, had helped. Walter Vanderflood had said, “If you ever need help …” Walter Vanderflood served on the Putnam County parole board, and three times Cardozo had taken him up on that offer.

“Jim Delancey was paroled two weeks ago.”

“The young man who killed the Kohler girl?”

“The same. Somebody used a lot of influence.”

“I’m not sure I can help you there. Parole proceedings are closed—there aren’t even records.”

“But if by any chance you happen to talk to anyone who served on that parole board … if you happen to talk socially, I mean.”

“Of course. If by any chance I do, I’ll let you know.”

I
T WAS AFTER ELEVEN
by the time Cardozo found a parking place on Broome Street. As he walked the block to his home the neighborhood felt quiet. Some kids were playing basketball over on the ball court, and somewhere a restaurant had its door open and Rosemary Clooney was singing “Baciami, Bambino” on the jukebox.

He let himself into the six-story apartment building on the corner of Sullivan and checked the mailbox to see what bills had come today. None, which meant his daughter Terri had already picked them up.

He climbed to the third floor. He’d lived in the same rent-stabilized apartment since before SoHo had become trendy, and he was still living there now that the wave of trendiness was subsiding. He let himself into the rear apartment.

The living room was dark except for a glow spilling through the windows. There was no blinking red light on the Panasonic Easa-Phone answering machine, but he crossed to the sofa and pushed the Messages button anyway, just to be sure. The machine whirred into Replay.

“Terri,” a male voice said, “are you there? It’s Josh.”

A light went on. Cardozo turned.

Terri was standing there, straight and slender against the wall, her long, dark hair spilling over her bathrobe. She looked at him with sleepy, dark fifteen-year-old eyes.

“I already picked up that call,” she said. “Why are you running through old messages?”

He pushed the button to stop the machine. “Just wanted to be sure I didn’t miss anything by accident. Who’s Josh?”