Deadly Rich

by Edward Stewart

  Tori Sandberg’s eyelids flicked down, paler than the color of her face. “She was drinking a lot of champagne, and who knows what pills she was on. She started arguing with the waiter about the vegetable dip. So the poor waiter got her a fresh pot and that ended that argument, so she started another. She claimed she saw someone in the kitchen who shouldn’t have been there.”

  “And who was that?”

  A moment went by. Cardozo was suddenly aware of a silence threaded through with shadow.

  “A murderer,” Leigh Baker said.

  “She was screaming it,” Tori Sandberg said. “What is that murderer doing in your kitchen? How dare you hire a murderer!”

  “Did she have any murderer in particular in mind?”

  “His name is Jim Delancey.” In Leigh Baker’s lap two thumbs with their clear-polished nails began probing each other. “He killed my daughter four years ago.”

  “And did Oona Aldrich actually see him?”

  Tori Sandberg shrugged as though it should have been obvious. “She had to have been imagining it. Jim Delancey was sentenced to—what was it, Leigh—twenty-five years?”

  “I could see into the kitchen from the table,” Leigh Baker said. “He wasn’t there.”

  “Oona had an instinct,” Tori Sandberg said. “She zeroed in on people’s dreads. I’m not saying she did it with premeditation or even consciously. But if she’d wanted to destroy our little reunion, she couldn’t have picked a quicker or more effective way.”

  Cardozo flipped to a fresh page. “And you said Mrs. Aldrich made another scene outside the store?”

  “The man with the boom box was there,” Tori Sandberg said. “She insulted him.”

  “How did Mrs. Aldrich do that?”

  “She said they shouldn’t allow music like that in front of the store. She said next thing they’d be allowing it inside. He heard her and he followed us inside.”

  Cardozo glanced up from his notebook. “This man followed you?”

  “I didn’t see him,” Leigh Baker said.

  “Well, one moment we were outside and he was outside,” Tori Sandberg said, “and the next moment we were on the second floor in the boutique and there he was.”

  “The same man,” Cardozo said.

  “Unless there were two Hispanic men with the same boom box and the same scowl wearing the same gray jogging clothes and red sweatband and red jogging pouch and white Adidas sneakers.”

  “I didn’t think he was scowling,” Leigh Baker said. “If anything, he looked easygoing.”

  “Killing Oona over a stupid ninety-cent battery is hardly easygoing,” Tori Sandberg said.

  “She wasn’t killed over the battery,” Leigh Baker said. “She was killed for the brooch.”

  “Excuse me,” Cardozo said. “What brooch?”

  “Oona was wearing a brooch exactly like this.” Leigh Baker tapped a finger against a small platinum hummingbird pinned to her lapel.

  Cardozo noticed that Tori Sandberg was wearing an identical piece of jewelry.

  “We were all wearing one,” Leigh Baker said, “and Oona’s is gone.”

  “Was she wearing it when she went into the changing room?”

  Leigh Baker nodded. A moment went by and then Tori Sandberg nodded.

  “And when did you realize it was missing?”

  “It was missing when I found her,” Leigh Baker said.

  Cardozo made a note. “How much is a brooch like that worth?”

  “It cost about six thousand,” Tori Sandberg said.

  “Fifteen years ago,” Leigh Baker said.

  Figure forty thousand today, Cardozo calculated. “At the time Mrs. Aldrich entered the store how visible was her brooch?”

  “Extremely visible,” Leigh Baker said. “It was pinned to her jacket.”

  “It was pinned to her blouse,” Tori Sandberg said. “The jacket covered it.”

  Cardozo reflected that if Baker was right, Aldrich’s brooch had motivated the killing. But if Sandberg were right, Aldrich’s behavior had caused the murder.

  Leigh Baker’s hands were in rapid motion, unpinning her brooch, practically ripping it from her blouse. She held it out to Cardozo. Her hand was shaking. “You’re welcome to keep mine for reference.”

  Cardozo turned the brooch over in his hand. It was a beautiful little thing. The sugaring of emerald and ruby chips threw off glints of colored light.

  “I’ll return it as soon as we photograph it,” he said.

  “There’s absolutely no hurry,” Leigh Baker said.

  It was as though she’d said, I never want to see it again.

  “Did either of you see the man with the boom box go into the changing rooms,” Cardozo said, “or come out?”

  Leigh Baker shook her head immediately.

  It took Tori Sandberg a moment longer. It was clear that something had convinced her of the man’s guilt, and Cardozo was curious what that something was.

  “When did this man leave the boutique?”

  Neither answered.

  “Did either of you see him leave?”

  “I saw his friend leave,” Tori Sandberg said. “The black woman.”

  “I can’t believe they were friends,” Leigh Baker said.

  “But neither of you saw the man go,” Cardozo said.

  Neither spoke.

  “Could you identify this man if you saw him again?”

  “I think so,” Leigh Baker said.

  “I certainly could,” Tori Sandberg said.

  “And would you be able to describe him to a sketch artist?”

  LAB REPORTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS and other people’s descriptions never quite did it for Cardozo.

  He was one of those cops who needed to study the crime scene with his own five senses. He needed to know how it smelled, how it felt to be there. He needed to know what the killer had seen, what the victim had seen, how it felt to move through the space they’d moved through.

  So he stood in the doorway now, looking in at the changing room.

  The walls and mirror and rug looked as though a defective can of raspberry soda had popped its top and exploded its full twelve ounces. The spatter could have been the work of a revved-up graffiti artist wielding a pastry gun of diluted red pigment, but the sweet, sickening smell of iron told Cardozo that this was human blood.

  It was obvious that behavior in this city had crossed a new frontier.

  Lou Stein from the lab was kneeling on the rug, examining the pile under a magnifying glass.

  “What have you found?” Cardozo said.

  Lou Stein looked up. “Hey, Vince,” he said. Now that his blond hair had receded to a horseshoe fringe around the back of his head, his gold-rimmed glasses seemed to fill the upper half of his face. The trifocal lines in the lenses made his blue eyes appear to hop as they moved. “There was some stuff in the waste basket.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “You’re the critic. Judge for yourself.”

  Cardozo picked up one of the evidence bags from the bench. It held two sheets of pink tissue paper, badly rumpled. Another bag held three inch-long pins with tiny spherical pink heads. The pinks in the two bags matched.

  A third bag held a crumpled newspaper clipping that had been uncrumpled and laid flat. On one side a portion of an ad trumpeted a store-wide stereo equipment clearance sale. On the other side a perky blond pixie grinned out from an inch-square photo, airbrushed ageless and almost featureless in bangs. Cardozo recognized Dizey Duke, the syndicated gossip columnist of the New York Tribune. In bold print to her left the words “Dizey’s Dish” topped today’s breathless recounting of the doings of New York’s glitterati.

  A fourth bag held a three-inch length of burned white candle.

  Cardozo frowned. “This was in the wastebasket?”

  Lou Stein looked around and nodded.

  “And this?” Cardozo held up the fifth bag. It contained a single Duracell type A radio battery with a gold-and-black jacket.

&
nbsp; “That was on the floor, under the bench.”

  Cardozo hunkered down and ducked his head below the built-in bench. His eye ran along the crack where the baseboard met the plaster wall, then traveled the half-inch gap between the baseboard and the dark beige carpeting that hadn’t quite managed to reach wall-to-wall.

  He stood and stepped back into the corridor. He looked to his left, past the changing rooms and toward the emergency exit; and then to his right, where the corridor ended in an arched, curtained doorway.

  He moved toward the curtain.

  It was lined and hung three inches above the floor. The hooks were movable, and the rod holding them slanted upward. Cardozo opened the curtain and stepped through. Weights sewn into the bottom hem caused the hooks to slide back down the rod, and the curtain closed itself.

  “Clever design, isn’t it?” Ingrid Hansen was waiting for him on the other side, blond and nervous and skinny. Behind her the boutique was a softly lit space of glittering showcases and arrogantly posed free-standing mannequins and comfortable chairs.

  At the moment the room was cordoned off from the rest of the store. Two uniformed cops stood guard at the entrance, fending off a horde of rubbernecking afternoon shoppers. The area bustled with crime-scene technicians measuring, dusting, photographing, searching for dust or fibers or filaments or prints that might prove relevant.

  Ms. Hansen seemed to be expecting Cardozo to pronounce some sort of verdict on the curtain.

  “Very clever,” he said. “Self-closing. Tell me, Ms. Hansen, is the emergency exit kept locked on the stair side?”

  “No. That would be against fire regulations.”

  “Then anyone could have used the stairs and gotten in there while Mrs. Aldrich was changing?”

  She sighed. He could feel her wanting to push this entire day away, to bury this day, to exile it on a rocket.

  “I saw no one.”

  They’d already been over it, three times. Her records showed twenty-two customers between the time the boutique opened and the time Mrs. Aldrich arrived. Nine of them had used the changing rooms, but she had seen no one go into or come out of the rooms while Mrs. Aldrich was changing.

  “But if you’d like to ask my assistant—” Ms. Hansen raised her right hand, forefinger extended. The gray-haired woman sitting at the desk on the other side of the boutique immediately looked up. “Xenia, could we speak with you a moment?”

  Xenia came across the boutique, short and full-bodied with apple-red cheeks and wire-rimmed spectacles. Cardozo asked if she had seen anyone go into the changing rooms or come out while Mrs. Aldrich was changing. Xenia’s eyes were clear and pained, and her answer was instant and uncomplicated. “No.”

  “There was a man here with a portable radio. Could you describe him?”

  “I can try. He was your height, your build—”

  “He was younger,” Ms. Hansen said. “Early twenties, I’d say. So naturally he was in better physical condition.”

  Thank you, Ms. Hansen, Cardozo thought, I needed that. In fact, he felt in damned good shape for a desk-bound cop who was never going to see forty-five again. At six feet one, thanks to diet and the occasional workout at the police gym, he still weighed the 170 he’d weighed in the army. So far nothing sagged, nothing slumped. His vision was still twenty-twenty, and he needed glasses only for prolonged reading.

  “Brown eyes like the lieutenant’s,” Xenia said, “and the same sort of dark, curly hair, but cut short—and of course, no gray at the temples.”

  “Of course. And did he have a mustache like mine?”

  “He was clean-shaven.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “He was wearing a red sweatband around his forehead and gray sweat clothes.”

  “Not a jogging suit?”

  “You could certainly jog in them, but they were sweat clothes and they were gray.”

  “He had new white Adidas jogging shoes,” Ms. Hansen said.

  “And he was wearing a jogging pouch around his waist,” Xenia said. “It was a red jogging pouch with three red plastic zippers running at a slant on the left side.”

  “Red,” Cardozo said. It occurred to him that he’d seen plenty of black jogging pouches but never a red one.

  “It matched the sweatband,” Xenia said. “And there was a word stitched on the pouch in black-threaded script. Flamenco or flamingo.”

  “You’d make a good witness.”

  “I try to pay attention to what’s going on around me.”

  “What can you tell me about the woman who was with this man?”

  “There was no woman with him.”

  “Wasn’t there a black woman in the shop?”

  “Yes, I waited on her and she set off the alarm.”

  “How did she manage to do that?”

  “She was helping Miss Sandberg choose a bolero, and she stood too close to the electric eye at the door. It happens all the time.”

  “Where was Mrs. Aldrich when the alarm went off?”

  “In the changing room.”

  “And could you describe this black woman?”

  “She had an angular nose, very sharp features—huge eyes—longish hair—the hair seemed natural. She was wearing a pale coffee lace dress with a skin-colored slip beneath.”

  “Skin-colored,” Cardozo said.

  “The color of her skin.” Xenia’s eyes considered Ms. Hansen. “She was a little taller than Ms. Hansen. She had a lean body. Excellent physical shape. I’d say she could have been a dancer, and I’d say she was striking.”

  “Yes,” Ms. Hansen agreed. “I’d say so too.”

  “Did the Hispanic and the black woman talk to each other?”

  Xenia answered without hesitation. “They did not.”

  “Which of them left first?”

  “The woman.”

  “And when did she leave?”

  “While Mrs. Aldrich was changing,” Ms. Hansen said.

  “How soon after her did the man leave?”

  “I don’t remember seeing him go. Do you remember seeing him go, Xenia?”

  “I didn’t see him go.”

  “I’m curious about something,” Cardozo said. “Don’t the security guards discourage radio playing in the store?”

  “They certainly wouldn’t discourage Mrs. Trump from playing one,” Ms. Hansen said. “Or Mrs. Astor.”

  “But apparently this man wasn’t Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Astor.”

  Ms. Hansen sighed. “Even when we see customers steal, we still have to treat them very carefully.”

  An erect, slender woman approached, and Cardozo exchanged hello nods with Detective Sergeant Ellie Siegel from his precinct. She had intelligent, pale eyes that sometimes seemed hazel, but today, with the loose violet blouse she was wearing, they seemed green. They also seemed to be signaling Cardozo to step aside with her.

  “I spoke to security,” Ellie Siegel told him quietly. “They haven’t had that many boom-box incidents. It’s a gray area.” Her dark brown hair was long enough to fall straight to her shoulders, but today she’d scooped it up behind in a sort of seashell whorl, exposing the clear, pale skin of her temples. “What they do have a lot of is shoplifting.”

  “Anything today?”

  “A mother-daughter team—they boosted three thousand dollars’ worth of leather goods and perfume.”

  Siegel and Cardozo crossed the boutique to where a haughty female mannequin in a beige dress had been sexily posed on the arm of a chair.

  “Did they hit the boutique?” Cardozo asked.

  “Security nabbed them before they got this far. They’re in the manager’s office now, if you want to talk to them. The only other incident was a man loitering in the stairwell with intent to urinate.”

  “When?”

  “A little before two o’clock.”

  “That’s the right time frame. Where is he?”

  “The store doesn’t prosecute trespass. So they threw him out.” Ellie let a beat pass. “He was
wearing a sweatsuit and he had a boom box.”

  “I want to talk to the guard who threw him out.”

  Cardozo went back to the changing rooms. He spent a moment examining the emergency exit.

  The door had a bar handle running its full width and a red sign: FIRE EXIT. EMERGENCY ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND WHEN OPENED.

  Cardozo gave a sharp push down on the bar. The steel door swung inward. First interesting discovery: No alarm sounded.

  He stepped through the doorway onto a poorly lit service stairway painted battleship gray. Looking around the landing, he made a second interesting discovery: Empty cardboard cartons and shipping material were stacked on the floor, constituting a fire hazard and a clear violation of the city safety code.

  He sniffed. The air in the stairwell smelled like a cat’s way of saying This land is mine.

  The door opened behind him. Ellie Siegel was standing there with one of the security guards.

  “Vince,” she said, “this is Harry Danks.”

  Cardozo looked at him: a young man with a stomach that more than filled his gray security officer’s uniform, he had a heavy square-jawed face, blond hair that badly needed barbering, bloodshot blue eyes.

  Danks held out a thick-wristed hand with blunt, rough-skinned fingers. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Tell me about your prowler,” Cardozo said. “Where’d you find him?”

  Danks shrugged, giving Cardozo a look that was hopeful and shy at the same time. Cardozo recognized that look—Your life is happening, and mine’s not. The look made Cardozo a celebrity and the guard an autograph hunter.

  “Exactly where you’re standing,” Danks said.

  “How was he dressed?”

  “Gym clothes—gray sweatshirt, gray sweatpants. Red sweatband around his head. Red jogging pouch. White sneakers.”

  “What was he doing back here?”

  “They usually come in to relieve themselves. Sometimes they’ve lifted something, want to get out fast without going through a detector. They don’t realize there’s a detector at the street door.”

  “Any idea how he got into the stairwell?”

  “Could have been from any of the floors.”

  “How about from the street?”