Deadly Rich

by Edward Stewart

“No way. The door’s locked and there’s a guard.”

  “What was in the bag?”

  “Damp clothes.”

  “Do you mean a complete change of clothes?”

  “I didn’t take an inventory. None of it was our stuff. There was a sweatshirt.”

  “Damp with what?”

  Harry Danks shrugged. “Sweat, what else.”

  “Could you describe this man physically?”

  “He was in his twenties—your height—dark hair—could have been Spanish. And maybe a weight lifter.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “When I put my hand on him, it wasn’t real—he was so hard.” The guard slapped a hand above his hip. “Everyone’s got a little extra something they’d like to lose right here, but not Mr. Boom Box. I remember wondering, Is this guy bionic or what? But what comes to me is, he’s wearing a weight-lifter’s belt. Sometimes you see delivery men and moving men wearing them. Protects your back when you’re lifting anything heavy. Which got me to thinking about his gloves. They didn’t have fingers. Not gloves with the fingers cut off, but gloves that never had fingers to begin with.”

  “Weight-lifter’s gloves?” Cardozo said.

  The guard nodded. “And under the gloves, he was wearing throw-away surgical gloves. His fingers squeaked.”

  “Tell me, Harry, did you find a weapon on this guy?

  “When I frisked him, he had something under his sock—a kind of splint on his shin, it felt like.”

  “Could this splint have been a holster for a knife?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Didn’t you check?”

  “There wasn’t time.” Danks pointed to a fresh-looking three-inch black-lipped scar in the wall. “He swung the boom box at me. That was meant for my head.”

  The plaster had split down to the concrete underneath. “He must have pretty well wrecked the box.”

  “Piece of solid-state garbage. After I got him down to the street he threw it at me.” Danks’s forefinger tapped a small bandage on his temple.

  “Where’s the boom box now?”

  “Probably the same place where it landed. I can’t imagine anyone would want it after that bashing.”

  Cardozo followed Harry Danks down to street level.

  Danks nodded to the guard on duty and pushed the heavy steel door open. Cardozo had not been aware that the stairwell was especially cool, but by comparison, what whooshed in from the street was a heat front from a furnace.

  Above the pavement and asphalt, light rays rippled and bent like the image on a poorly tuned TV. Pedestrians and traffic moved slowly through the burning glare. Car horns blasted dissonant fanfares.

  Danks stood on the sidewalk, stirring a foot with a sort of brutish daintiness through a foot-deep drift of litter.

  Cardozo scanned a ten-foot radius of sidewalk. He saw newsprint, flyers, junk mail, cigarette butts, gum wrappers, crumpled pizza boxes—the fallout of an average midtown workday—but nothing metal or electronic or remotely solid state. And then, through hurrying feet, his eye caught a wink of chrome from the gutter. He walked to the edge of the sidewalk and stared down.

  A two-foot plastic-and-chrome radio-cassette blasting unit looked as though it had taken the full weight of a crosstown bus. He crouched for a better look, then turned and shot Danks a come-over-here nod. “Was that boom box a Sony?”

  FIVE

  CARDOZO STEPPED FROM THE sunlight of Lexington Avenue into the soft brown-and-red interior of the restaurant that outsiders called Archibald’s and society called home.

  In a place like Archibald’s you waited to be seated. Cardozo waited. Now was the precocktail lull, and the only customers were two overdressed, overmade-up women at a corner table. A man in a Santa Claus-red blazer who looked like a maître d’ dressed for happy hour gave him a glance and a cold shoulder, and went back to handpicking napkin lint from one of the tablecloths.

  Cardozo crossed toward the kitchen.

  The lint picker in the Santa jacket intercepted him. “May I help you?” He spoke with a French accent, and the offer had a broad edge of insincerity.

  Cardozo showed his shield. “Do you have an employee by the name of James Delancey working here?”

  The lint picker’s mouth narrowed in a half smile but the expression on his face didn’t at all match his eyes. “In the kitchen.” He nodded toward the door.

  Cardozo stepped into the kitchen.

  There wasn’t enough ventilation to clear the cooking smells, and the claustrophobic space seemed impossibly ill lit and hot and cluttered. A black man was stirring a cauldron on the twelve-burner stove; a Korean was rolling dough with a champagne bottle; and a Caucasian male stood behind a butcher-block counter, slicing salad vegetables.

  Cardozo watched the bright, narrow blade blur up and down. It worked as fast and as expertly as a precision machine, flipping out a glint with each stroke, flicking paper-thin wafers of cucumber to the side in a neat, staggered pile.

  “James Delancey?” Cardozo said.

  The young white man glanced at Cardozo with a look that was curious and guarded. The click-click of the blade against the butcher block slowed. His curls were full and richly dark and the face beneath them was as tanned and unlined as a surfer’s, and Cardozo wondered if they now had tanning beds along with the cable TV in the penitentiary.

  Cardozo took out his shield case and flipped it open. “Wouldn’t you do better using a Cuisinart on that cucumber?”

  The young man’s eyes flicked without visible interest to the shield. “It takes as long to clean a Cuisinart as it takes me to slice a dozen cucumbers.”

  “Is there somewhere we could talk?” Cardozo said.

  Delancey laid his knife down on the butcher block. He wiped his hands on his apron. He was an extremely well-built boy, lean and broad-shouldered. He looked to be six feet or six one. If he weighed under 180 pounds it wasn’t by much. As he stepped around the counter Cardozo saw he was wearing designer jeans and Bally loafers without socks.

  Cardozo followed him out the side door onto Seventy-fourth Street. Delancey offered a cigarette and Cardozo declined. “Have you been working here long?” Cardozo said.

  “Two weeks.”

  “First job since you were paroled?”

  “That’s right.”

  The late spring heat held a foretaste of summer. Afternoon sun was playing shimmering riffs on upper-story windows.

  “What hours do you work?”

  “Mondays I work eleven A.M. to six P.M. Sundays and Wednesday through Friday I work noon to eight P.M.”

  Jim Delancey lit his cigarette. “I’m off Saturdays and Tuesdays.”

  “Then you were here during lunch hour today.”

  Delancey nodded.

  “Are you familiar with Leigh Baker, the actress?”

  Delancey sighed. “I saw a lot of her during my trial.”

  “Did you see Miss Baker here today with two companions?”

  “I noticed her.”

  “And did you show yourself?”

  “Look, I work in back, I don’t get paid to go out in the front room and dance.”

  “Did you let her see you?”

  Delancey stood there staring into the street at BMWs double-parked beside Porsches. “After I noticed she was here, I moved to the other end of the counter.”

  “Why?”

  For the briefest tick of an instant Jim Delancey’s eyebrows puckered and lifted. You’re playing with me, man, his eyes said. “So she wouldn’t see me when the kitchen door swung open again.”

  “But one of her companions did see you. And she made a scene in the restaurant.”

  Jim Delancey let his breath out in a sigh. “Look, I’m not a psychic. I don’t know what’s going through other people’s heads, and I don’t know why they decide to make scenes.

  “Were you acquainted with Oona Aldrich?”

  Delancey stared with tight lips, blank gaze. “I never met Oona Aldrich in
my life.”

  “Do you recognize the name?”

  “After today I do.”

  “Are you aware that after she left the restaurant today Oona Aldrich was attacked and killed?”

  Cardozo waited for some reaction in the boy’s face. Shock. Faked shock. Something. What he saw instead was a carefully maintained neutrality, flat and cool.

  “I’m aware she was killed.” He could have been saying, I’m aware the sky is blue.

  “And how did you become aware of it?”

  “My mother phoned me.”

  “And how did your mother know?”

  “She works at the Ingrid Hansen Boutique at Marsh and Bonner’s.”

  “What’s your mother’s name?”

  “Xenia Delancey.”

  It struck Cardozo as a bizarre little coincidence. “Did you leave the premises anytime between one-thirty and two-thirty?”

  “Maybe I came out here to smoke a cigarette.”

  “Maybe you came out here to smoke a cigarette, or you came out and smoked a cigarette?”

  Jim Delancey drew in a deep breath that almost burst his blue button-down, open-necked shirt. “I came out here and had a smoke.”

  “When? For how long?”

  “I don’t keep a diary of this stuff. I took a five-minute break. Do you call that leaving the premises?”

  “I call it leaving the premises if no one saw you.”

  Delancey tossed a nod toward the kitchen door. “They saw me.”

  Cardozo questioned the Korean and the black man. They said Delancey had been in and out of the kitchen all afternoon, but they agreed he’d never been gone for longer than a cigarette break.

  The maître d’ backed up their story.

  Cardozo questioned the waiter. He said it had been a bitch of a lunch hour, much too hectic to allow him to notice who was in the kitchen when.

  “Anyone else who might be able to tell me anything?”

  “You could ask Larry—the other waiter.”

  “Where’s Larry?”

  “He went on vacation two hours ago, lucky bum—but he’ll be back working the early shift next Tuesday.”

  “Okay. Thanks for your time.” Cardozo shut his notebook and slid it back into his pocket. As he turned to go he caught Jim Delancey watching him expressionlessly from across the kitchen.

  “I’M COUNTING ON YOU, VINCE.” Captain Tom Reilly’s gray eyes stared hopefully out of his heavy, pale face. It was late for Reilly to be at the precinct: by seven in the evening he was usually home in Queens, or out on the golf course. “There’s going to be a lot of shit from this mess in Marsh and Bonner’s. Stay on top of it.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  They sat facing each other across a glass-topped wood desk twice the size of Cardozo’s, in an air-conditioned office four times the size of his cubicle.

  “Organize yourself a four-man task force,” Reilly said. “Let me know in a day who you want.”

  “I can tell you now.”

  Reilly’s white eyebrows shot up, surprised, as if Cardozo had to be psychic to have already been thinking of a task force.

  But it was a fact of New York political life that certain corpses swung infinitely more weight than others. The crucial factors were race and real estate. A rich white woman murdered in a Fifth Avenue store automatically got more attention from police and media than twenty poor black women murdered in grocery stores in Harlem.

  “Okay, who do you want?”

  “Siegel and I caught the case. We’ll stay on it. And I want Monteleone, Richards, and Malloy.”

  Reilly lifted a pen and made a notation. “You got them.”

  Cardozo sat drinking a cup of coffee that had turned cold, hoping the caffeine would persuade him he was able to think. Stripes of fluorescence slanted down from the desk lamp. Light caught his fingers as they tapped a bolero on the yellowed documents of the Nita Kohler-James Delancey file.

  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.