“Christ. Is the boy safe?”
“The boy’s in school, but I can’t question him without his mother’s permission.”
“You say that as though it had something to do with me.”
“It does. The mother’s name is Kyra Talbot and she’s serving on a jury. Any chance you can locate her?”
“Kyra Talbot is serving on my jury and they’re sequestered. If you want to talk to her, you’ll have to ask Judge Bernheim, and I can tell you right now she’ll turn you down flat.”
“Maybe not. I think Britta was carrying Mickey Williams’s photo to see if any of the kids recognized him.”
“And did they?”
“I won’t know till I speak to Toby Talbot.”
“Vince, you’re giving me mirrors and smoke.”
“You say that a lot lately.”
“Because you’ve been doing it a lot lately.”
“Come on. We both saw Mickey’s record before the feds shredded it. His M.O. is hanging around schoolyards. And Britta saw the record too. She was also the first uniform on the scene of the Briar killings—so she had a fair idea of your star witness’s capabilities.”
“There’s no way Mickey could have done anything. He’s been in the federal witness relocation program for almost two years.”
“Unfortunately, federal protection isn’t the same thing as federal restraint. Look at the situation. It’s crazy. Two years ago, Mickey was a suspect in two murders and the court released him in Dotson Elihu’s recognizance. Now charges against Mickey have been dropped, Corey Lyle’s accused, and Elihu’s representing Corey. And his old client is chief witness against his new client. Doesn’t that strike you as a little too cozy?”
“Elihu has always represented the Coreyites. While Mickey Williams was friendly to them, he represented Mickey. When Mickey became hostile, Elihu dropped him. There’s no irregularity.”
“Then if it isn’t giving away a government secret, can you tell me if Mickey was in New York City this past week?”
“What if he was? You want to yank one of my jurors out of sequestration and possibly screw up a sixty-million-dollar trial, but you don’t know who this man in the schoolyard is. You’re just pulling Mickey’s name out of a hat. From what you’re telling me, you don’t even have a witness who got a good look at him.”
“Not yet. But I might if the judge excused Talbot from the jury and used an alternate instead.”
“Why would she do that? You haven’t established compelling need. Judge Bernheim’s aiming at a Supreme Court nomination. She’s got to keep this trial on track. She’s not going to waste an alternate that she may need down the road to avoid a mistrial. Look how many alternates the O.J. trial used up. She’d have to be crazy. Or in love with you.”
“You yourself once said, Mickey’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous, maybe, but not an idiot. He wouldn’t cruise for chicken while he’s testifying for the federal government.”
“Wouldn’t he? His record didn’t suggest he had a handle on his compulsions.”
“Vince, I’ve got a hell of a lot to do tonight. Could we save the rest of this talk till you have something a little more solid?”
“That’s a date.”
She had already hung up.
Cardozo lowered the receiver into the cradle. He leaned back in his swivel chair, thinking: She’s scared. Why?
Tess diAngeli searched her desktop. She found the number of Mickey Williams’s guard, lifted the telephone, and punched it in. She sat tapping nervous fingers.
A man answered. “Security.”
“Rick? It’s Tess diAngeli.” Though the door was shut, she lowered her voice. “I need some information. Do you happen to recall where Mickey was this past Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon?”
“He was with his girlfriend.”
“You’re absolutely sure?”
“If you mean, was I in the bedroom with them, no, I wasn’t. I dropped him off at her place around two P.M., picked him up around five.”
“What did you do in between? Observe the premises?”
“Hell, no. I went to a movie. It’s not as though anyone’s gunning for the guy. Or are they?”
Then Mickey had a window of opportunity, Tess realized. Damn. If he’s starting to stalk kids again, this could be a disaster. “Rick—don’t ever leave Mickey unobserved. And I want you to start keeping a log on his movements.”
NINETEEN
Saturday, September 21
Fourth day of trial
8:55 A.M.
“THERE’S NOT A CHANCE,” ELLIE Siegel said, “that anything was going on between Roger Bailey and his partner.”
“How can you be so sure?” Cardozo slathered cream cheese on a pumpernickel bagel. They were having breakfast in a rear booth in the Lexington Coffee Shop.
“Vince, that gunk is going to kill your arteries.”
He gave her a look and dolloped marmalade on top of the cream cheese. “I asked you a question.”
“How can I be sure? Edie’s gay. She’s out and she heads the gay officers’ alliance at her precinct.” Ellie pulled the bag of chamomile tea out of her cup, wrung it dry, and deposited it neatly in the saucer. “I agree with you, Vince—generally speaking, where there’s smoke, something’s burning. But if I could venture an opinion, there isn’t even smoke here. Furthermore, Britta and Edie were good friends.”
“How good is good?”
“Britta sounded Edie out, how did she think Roger would react to the idea of a divorce. Edie said go for it.”
“Doesn’t that seem peculiar to you, the wife bending the ear of the husband’s partner?”
“Not when they’re all cops.”
“Any chance anything was going on between Edie and Britta?”
Beneath waved dark hair, Ellie’s brown eyes were impatient. “Give me a break.”
“Do me a favor. Check Edie’s movements Wednesday night after her shift.”
Judge Bernheim had decided, in the interest of moving the trial along as quickly as possible, to hear testimony Saturday. At nine thirty-five Tess diAngeli called her eighth witness, the doorman at the Park Avenue building where the Briars had lived.
“After Corey Lyle began visiting the apartment of John and Amalia Briar,” diAngeli asked, “what security measures were in effect to protect former Secretary Briar and his wife?”
“The same as for the other tenants. If a visitor or a delivery arrived, I rang on the intercom. Visitors went up the front elevators, deliveries went up the rear.”
“In the two years before his death, did you ever see John Briar bring strange women into his apartment?”
“The only woman I ever saw him with was his wife.”
“Around this time, did unescorted women begin visiting the Briar apartment?”
“Unescorted? No.”
“Did you ever see any woman besides Mrs. Briar or the maid let herself into the apartment with her own key?”
“No.”
“And what security measures were in effect the night the former secretary and his wife were murdered?”
“Besides the lock on the front door, there was no security, because there was no doorman on duty, not on Labor Day weekend. The staff went on strike midnight Friday.”
“Who was on duty Friday evening before midnight?”
“I was.”
“Would you describe the traffic to and from the Briars’ apartment before midnight?”
The witness took a moment to consider. “The Briars’ servant left around eight. Corey Lyle went up around ten. Around eleven Mickey Williams arrived. The Briars hadn’t said anything about expecting him. I called up on the intercom. A man said to send Mr. Williams up.”
“Was it John Briar who answered the intercom?”
“If it was Mr. Briar, his voice sounded a whole lot healthier than it had lately.”
“Objection. Conclusion.”
“Sustained.”
“Were you familiar enough wi
th Corey Lyle’s voice to recognize it over an intercom?”
“Objection—leading the witness.”
“Sustained.”
“If it wasn’t former Treasury Secretary Briar who answered the intercom, who else—from your knowledge of the comings and goings in that apartment—could it have been?”
“Him.” The witness nodded toward the defense table. “Corey Lyle.”
“Mr. LaMontagna,” diAngeli said, “before you went on strike at midnight, did you see Corey Lyle leave the apartment?”
“No, ma’am, I didn’t.”
“Did you see Mickey Williams leave the apartment?”
“No, ma’am.”
Cardozo shaded his eyes and peered into the window of the shop that called itself Antiquity Americana. Between shimmering reflections of Madison Avenue traffic he could make out a jumble of furniture and duck decoys and quilts, and a blond hairdo that appeared to be chatting with a red hairdo.
He pressed the button beside the door. There was a buzz and the door swung open.
Both hairdos turned, but it was the blonde that spoke. “Could I help you, sir?” An affable smile flashed beneath cold gray eyes.
He inhaled an almost intoxicating mix of varnish and potpourri. “I’d like to speak to someone who was in this shop last Wednesday afternoon.”
The smile died. “This is with reference to …?”
He opened his wallet to the gold shield. “Something that happened in the street around four o’clock.” This was the twelfth shop on the block where he’d asked, and so far he’d had no luck.
The redhead spoke. “Carla might be able to help. Walk on through to the back room.”
Cardozo stepped through a steel doorway. A young woman was crouched on the floor blow-torching the finish from an enormous tiger maple armchair.
“Excuse me,” he said.
The air was suffocating and heavy, the blowtorch as loud as a jet plane.
He moved closer. He saw that the chair had an oversize circular back that flipped down and rested on the arms so that it became a table. “Excuse me,” he shouted.
The head turned, eyes visored behind a dark plastic shield.
Cardozo held out his I.D.
The young woman turned off the flame and set the blowtorch down on the floor.
“Nice chair,” he said.
“Early twentieth-century. Mormon.”
He looked into peanut-shaped eyes and smiled his broadest smile, inviting hers. “If you’re Carla, they said you might be able to help me.”
“I’m Carla and I’ll be glad to try.”
“You were in the shop last Wednesday afternoon around four?”
She nodded.
He held out an envelope. “Could you look at these pictures and tell me if you happened to see this woman? She was in the street and you might have noticed her through the window.”
She snapped off her gloves and sprang to her feet. She went to a tiny sink in the corner and lathered her hands with a bar of industrial-looking red soap. She rinsed and dried and tossed the paper towel into an empty carton.
“Let’s have a look.” She took the envelope and drew the glossies out and looked at them one by one: Britta in lacy white at her wedding, beaming. Britta in cutoff jeans at the precinct barbecue last June, grinning, gesturing with a chicken leg. Britta at her Police Academy graduation five years ago, in full uniform, a good ten pounds lighter, trying her damnedest to look serious.
“She’s a cop?”
“She was.”
She caught the past tense and turned her gaze and looked at him. “I saw her. She was in uniform. She came out from the schoolyard and started talking to a guy in a blue ’ninety-four Pontiac—double-parked. Jersey license. Weird-looking guy.”
Cardozo opened his wallet and took out Britta’s magazine photo of Mickey Williams. He’d covered the caption with masking tape. “Was this the man?”
She frowned. “I wouldn’t want to say for sure. It could have been, but he’d shaved his head. And when he leaned into the sun, something gold glinted in his left ear. Looked to me like it could have been an earring.”
Cardozo jotted a note. “Did you happen to hear any conversation between Sergeant Bailey and this man?”
“No, the shop door was closed, but I had the impression she was questioning him and he was showing her his wallet.”
“Did he seem to be angry or hostile?”
“I couldn’t see it all, I was waiting on a customer. But one minute she was on the street looking like she was about to write him a ticket. And the next moment she kind of—this sounds weird, but she kind of fell into the car with him.”
Cardozo frowned. “Fell into the car?”
“It looked that way. And then I couldn’t see her at all, and he was at the wheel, and the car drove away.”
The way Cardozo reconstructed events, the man pulled Britta into the car; to Carla, watching from the antique shop, it looked as though Britta fell in. Now, if Mademoiselle de Gramont had seen the same man as Carla—and Cardozo was assuming she had—there was a possibility that she too might have caught a glint of gold earring in the left ear.
Cardozo lifted his receiver and tapped in the number of the École Française. A machine with a French accent told him the École would not be open until Monday. If he wished to speak with Josette de Gramont, he could reach her at home.
He dialed the home number. Another machine with the same accent told him he could reach Mademoiselle at the École.
He dropped the receiver into the cradle, exasperated. The voices of two detectives floated into his cubicle from the squad room. They were arguing about the Los Angeles Rams.
He glanced at his watch. Five after eleven. Two hours since he’d last tried Kyra Talbot. He wanted to talk to her au pair. He tried again. A busy signal came back at him, bell-like and tireless. He dialed zero and asked to verify the number.
There were three ear-popping clicks and a furiously amplified busy signal. “I’m sorry, sir. That line is out of order.”
“What’s the problem?”
“It could be a malfunction with the customer’s equipment. Or a work crew could have cut a cable. It should be taken care of within twelve hours.”
“Cash or charge?” the man at the counter asked.
“Cash.” Kyra Talbot set her parcels down and opened her purse and handed him a ten.
Something brushed her forearm. She turned. Across the aisle a man with a shaved head, his back toward her, was studying a rack of joke greeting cards.
“Five ninety-eight and two is six, and four makes ten. Would you like a bag for those other parcels?”
“Thanks—you’re an angel.” She tucked the Advil into her purse and consulted her notebook. Most of the items on the list headed MUST DO BEFORE 7 P.M. SATURDAY been checked off: Toby’s passport / my passport / foreign currency / trav checks / toilet paper / vitamins / echinacea. But there was no check beside electric current adapter.
Damn, she thought. She’d been running around town for two days and she was dead-tired. They must sell adapters over there. I’m going to take a chance.
The counterman handed her an I Love NY plastic bag stuffed with her last-minute purchases. She swung the door of the drugstore open and stepped out onto the sidewalk. She stood a moment, troubled, wondering why putting the parcels in one bag made them feel lighter than they had separately.
She was about to recount when the traffic light changed and a pedestrian surge carried her across Lexington Avenue. She turned downtown and turned again on East 81st. Halfway down the deserted block, something made her stop. A kind of dim echo. She couldn’t tell if she’d heard it or if she was just remembering it. She’d been aware of it several times this morning.
She glanced behind her. There was nothing moving on the block, not a pedestrian, not a wisp of traffic.
She walked toward her sister Anne’s building, just a little faster now.
It came again—the sound of her own steps, b
ut not quite. There was a split-second delay. As if someone were trying to walk in her footprints.
I’m imagining this, she told herself. It’s been a frantic two days and my mind’s overloaded.
“G’morning, Mrs. Bingham. Beautiful day.”
She smiled at the doorman and hurried into the lobby.
The man with the shaved head stopped at the entrance to 118 East 81st Street.
“Help you?” the doorman challenged.
“I’m from the druggist’s. Mrs. Bingham forgot one of her packages.”
“I’ll see she gets it.”
“She has to sign for it.”
The doorman nodded toward the elevators. “Eleven-E. She just went up.”
TWENTY
12:40 P.M.
THE INTERCOM BUZZED LIKE a fly caught in an electric zapper. Kyra pressed the button.
“Mrs. Bingham, a man from the drugstore is bringing up a package you forgot.”
The doorbell dingdonged. She flipped the dead bolt. A shadowy male figure stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the flickering hall fluorescents. She squinted to make out his face.
He held out a small brown paper-wrapped package.
“Thank you.” She reached for it, but he pulled it away. Almost teasingly.
“You have to sign for it. But I lost my pen.” His voice had a mischievous resonance.
“I’m sure I can find a pen. Just a minute.” She went and foraged through papers on the worktable.
“And I’m out of receipts,” he said. “You’ll have to write one.”
Sighing, she found a pen and a sheet of Anne’s stationery. “What do you want me to write?”
She turned. He was no longer at the door, but standing two feet from her. Light fell slantwise across the shaved skull, the brown eyes glowing with peek-a-boo, I-see-you malevolence.
She took a shocked, lurching step backward. “Get out of here, or I’ll scream. I’m not kidding.”
He unfurled a slow, lopsided grin.
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