Deadly Rich

by Edward Stewart

  She told him she’d gone to school to be a graphic designer.

  “What kind of graphic design?”

  “Stationery, layouts, album covers. Nothing very important.”

  He had a sense of the small, decent dream of a small, decent person, and he knew it was important to her. “That’s great. Graphics can make all the difference, how a thing looks.”

  He smiled. He was comfortable. She kept smiling and he could see she was getting comfortable too.

  “So how’d you get from designing to computers?” he asked.

  “There’s more money in word-processing—at least there is for me. The federal government started this program to computerize local police files, and I went down to get interviewed, and they said fine. It comes at a good time. My husband’s a teacher in parochial school and they just cut back his hours, so you know, I’m trying to make up the slack.”

  “Sorry to hear your husband got cut back.” So she’s married, he thought. Like me.

  “It’s tough on him,” she said. “But it gives me a chance to get back into the world. I’ve been taking life as it comes for a long time now, and for a long time life’s been dragging me where it wants. Till now I just had one part-time job. Now I have two, so things are looking up.”

  Malloy had the feeling she was telling him things were not that great at home. “So Bonasera’s your married name.”

  She nodded. “It was Moran before.”

  “You have kids?”

  “None yet. What about you?”

  Malloy realized he’d forgotten to take his wedding ring off. “Two kids. They’re grown, so it’s like not having any.”

  She didn’t answer, and he was aware of the slow trickle of time, a silence waiting to be decoded.

  “You must be smart to work one of those machines,” he said.

  “You can be an idiot and work one.”

  “I can tell you’re no idiot.”

  He felt her turning shy.

  “What I’m really thinking of,” she said, “is writing a book.”

  “What about?”

  “Don’t laugh. I want to write a book about cops.”

  “I could help you. I could tell you stuff you don’t see on TV.”

  Before Laurie Bonasera could answer there was a sound like a motorcycle crashing into a suit of armor.

  Malloy couldn’t believe it. At a booth across the room a boom box sat on the table, blasting—a two-speaker state-of-the-art megadecibel doomsday machine with red lights rippling up and down the panels in time to the beat.

  The owner of the boom box had sprawled back on the red vinyl seat, thrust one foot in its jogging shoe up on the table. He was defying the whole shop with the contemptuous sweep of his gaze.

  The other customers went on eating their ice cream as though it weren’t happening. As they lifted their little spoons to their pained little smiles, they seemed to be saying, The man with the boom box isn’t here, the boom box isn’t booming, we’re not getting raped by that racket.

  The proprietor, a tiny, leathery Korean woman with a shock of white hair, was trying to tell the boom-box man to please turn the boom box off.

  Malloy watched the old woman’s rapid, staccato gestures of pleading, and he watched the boom-box man shrug her off.

  “Excuse me a minute, Laurie.” Malloy pushed up from his seat. He crossed the room and stopped in front of Mr. Boom Box’s table. Just stood there, letting his jacket hang open. Letting his revolver show.

  Mr. Boom Box was heavyset and tanned, definitely a Latino, with mucho macho and a cracked-out, fuck-you glaze in his eyes. He was wearing a tight black T-shirt with shoulder pads and a yellow sweatband around his head that matched his yellow sweatpants. It took him a moment to focus on the fact that Malloy was standing there, tapping his fingers on his revolver butt.

  Mr. Boom Box quickly picked up his boom box and started to leave.

  “Hey,” Malloy called. “Didn’t you forget to pay your check?”

  Mr. Boom Box slapped five dollars down at the cashier’s counter and didn’t wait for change.

  When Malloy came back to the table, Laurie Bonasera’s smile was admiring.

  “It’s too bad you have to go through that,” she said.

  “A lot of things are too bad.”

  In a way he was happy. The incident had given him a chance to impress her. When they left the shop, the Korean woman refused to let him pay for the ice cream.

  “You have any more trouble with guys like that,” Malloy said, still playing a little for Laurie’s sake, “you let me know.”

  He gave the old woman his business card.

  IT WAS CLEAR that the housekeeper was not going to sit: she regarded Cardozo as Gardner’s guest, not hers. Besides, the only place to sit was a virtually floor-level gray quilted sofa. If the design wasn’t Japanese, the idea had to be. Cardozo was afraid that once he got down that low, he would need help to get up again. So he stood, holding the cup of coffee she had given him.

  “You were his housekeeper?” he said.

  The slender, dark-haired woman nodded. She wore an old-fashioned housemaid’s striped uniform. “For eight years now.” She wiped at her eyes with the edge of her apron. “Mr. Gardner was a fine man and a fine employer.”

  Cardozo heard Irish in the voice and he saw grief in the face. He saw shock. And he saw an enormous effort at self-control.

  “Do you live in the house?”

  She nodded. “Mr. Gardner gave me the basement apartment. He had it completely renovated. He put in cable TV. There wasn’t a kinder man in this city than Avalon Gardner.”

  “What can you tell me about his personal life?”

  She smiled with enormous sadness. “Mr. Gardner’s life was exactly like this room. He believed in keeping things simple.”

  The room took up an entire floor of the town house, and it seemed the kind of relentless understatement that photographed well in Sunday magazine supplements. There was a single piece of classical furniture, a Chippendale secretary, obviously placed there because it was a knockout statement in isolation.

  “Did he have friends?” Cardozo said. “Family?”

  “Well, like it or not, we all have family, don’t we? There’s a niece and a nephew. But Mr. Gardner had no time for their gadding around. Mr. Gardner worked.” With a firm nod the housekeeper indicated the walls around them.

  The walls were dove-colored, tightly stretched silk. Hanging over the silk were huge black-and-white Avalon Gardner photos. Where the subject of the photo was recognizable as part of a human body, it tended to be a blowup of a shoulder blade or a butt. Sex impossible to distinguish. Photos that at first glance seemed to be spotted scarves billowing in the blast of an electric fan on second glance turned out to be monstrously enlarged orchids.

  “He put these up last week.”

  “Beautiful,” Cardozo lied. “Who were his models?”

  “He got them from an agency.”

  “Was he friendly with any of them?”

  “He was friendly with everyone.” The housekeeper sniffed back a sniffle. Her hand went out to touch a black marble-topped table. She seemed to draw steadiness from it. “Too friendly for this city. He drew the sharks. He had terrible experiences every time he stepped outside that front door.”

  “Muggings?”

  “Muggings were the least of it.”

  “Why didn’t he use a limo?”

  “Mr. Gardner wasn’t one to throw his money around. And he liked to walk. Besides, the party last night was practically next door. Three blocks across, three blocks up.”

  “Could you tell me who was giving the party?”

  THEY WERE SITTING IN HER STUDY, amid bookshelves loaded with up-ended one-of-a-kind china plates.

  Annie MacAdam gave Cardozo the hard data: when Avalon Gardner had arrived, who he had spoken to, where he had sat for dinner, what she’d heard him saying, what she’d heard people saying about him. She remembered he’d been wearing a new co
logne. “Fortunoff is trying to get a new brand started. They’ve mailed half ounces to everybody on the Vanity Fair party list. I do think it’s tacky to wear free samples at a dinner.”

  “Did Avalon have any enemies, any disagreements with anyone?”

  “Of course he did.”

  “Did he have any last night?”

  “He had words with Dick and Leigh—” Annie MacAdam looked at Cardozo. With her hair dyed jet-black and coiled wiglike on the side of her head, jauntily speared with a tortoiseshell pin, she resembled a Fifties musical-comedy actress working the talk-show comeback trail. “Dick Braidy and Leigh Baker. The BeeBees, we used to call them in the days when they were married.”

  “Avalon had words with the BeeBees—about what?”

  “I don’t know how the subject came up.” Under high-arched eyebrows her eyes were energized, sparkling. This was a moment she was enjoying. “But their daughter was killed—I mean her daughter. Her name was Nita Kohler, you may have heard about it. Her boyfriend threw her off a sixth-story terrace. Jim Delancey.”

  Cardozo nodded.

  “He’s been paroled. Avalon was saying bygones are bygones and Delancey deserves a second chance. Leigh and Dick were upset with his attitude and they let him know it.”

  “How did they do that?”

  “Leigh said she hoped Avalon would die, and the sooner the better.”

  A phone rang.

  “Excuse me.” Annie MacAdam rose from the sofa and crossed to her desk. She lifted the receiver. “Yes?” She reangled herself so that she faced away from Cardozo. “The whole world has heard.” Her head turned and her eyes came around toward Cardozo. “No, I can’t … No, of course I haven’t … Of course I won’t … All right. I promise.”

  She seemed rattled when she hung up the phone. She took the long way back, circling an antique globe of the earth, and sat again on the sofa. “I don’t know about your business, Lieutenant, but my business brings out the absolute worst in people. They say the real estate market’s soft, but you’d never know it in this part of town. Such conniving and competition every time I list a major duplex. And, of course, Avalon’s town house is going to be on the market now. People will be murdering for that. Have you seen it?”

  “Just this morning.”

  “That property is prime.”

  “You were telling me about Avalon’s disagreement with Leigh Baker and Dick Braidy.”

  She settled back against the cushion and sighed. “I tend to sympathize with Leigh and Dick.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “A second chance is one thing and we all deserve it. Acceptance in society is another, but it has to be earned. Jim Delancey is working as a salad chef at Archibald’s, and he hasn’t earned it.”

  “Salad chef at Archibald’s is acceptance in society?”

  “It’s certainly visiblity, and that’s nine tenths of the battle. Put a good-looking, notorious young man in that place—a man who’s had as much press as Jim Delancey—and there’s no telling who he’ll meet—a designer, an heiress, an actress, I’m talking about people of top significance. There are hundreds of deserving young men who’d give their eyeteeth for a chance like that. Why waste it on a sleazy killer? Poor Avalon.” She shook her head. A Lucite earring clanked. “He was always getting himself into disagreements.”

  “Did he ever have a disagreement with you?”

  “Oh, Avalon and I had a classic feud going.”

  “What was that about?”

  “I adored Avalon.” Behind her eyes was something disdainful that she didn’t bother hiding. “But he had poor judgment. It was when he and Oona—Oona Aldrich—were on the outs. Everyone in New York was trying to stay neutral, and Avalon tried to pull me over to his side.”

  “What did he and Mrs. Aldrich disagree over?”

  “It was years ago. Ask Dizey Duke. She’d remember. All I recall now is, it got so bad that you couldn’t invite them to the same party. You couldn’t even have them to the same funeral.”

  “Did you ever invite them to the same party?”

  “I haven’t had them in the same room for six years.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “Do you want to know exactly?”

  “If that’s possible.”

  “My tax records would certainly show.”

  Annie MacAdam rose again. She walked to the one wall of bookcases in the room that held any books at all. She bent down to a shelf of two-inch-thick black leather binders and peered along them till she found the year she wanted. She pulled out a binder, opened it, and flipped till she found the right page.

  “The last time Avalon Gardner and Oona Aldrich were in this house together was dinner six years ago, the night of May sixth. Princess Margaret was guest of honor, and I served mousse de brochet.”

  WHEN CARDOZO TOLD LEIGH BAKER why he had come, she gaped at him for one wild, blank moment.

  She crossed to the windows. A little gold-and-porcelain clock on the mantelpiece tinkled the quarter hour. She turned. “Do you want to hear a funny joke?” She was standing beside a vase that held a gigantic spray of tulips and amaryllis. Her head was framed in sunlight. “Avalon and I had a terrible fight last night. I told him I hoped he died, and the sooner the better. He couldn’t have been more obliging, could he?”

  “You had nothing to do with it,” he said.

  “That’s very gallant of you.” Her voice was tight with the determination not to be comforted. “But you’re not so naive as that and neither am I. He left the party because I got into an ugly, childish, name-calling brawl with him.”

  “That’s not a crime.”

  “Let’s be honest. Half the real crimes on earth aren’t crimes, according to law. I drove him out into the street and into the arms of that killer.”

  Cardozo knew what she was going through. His news had knocked her off balance and she was grabbing for steadiness at the nearest feelings she could find. What surprised him was that she’d been surprised; she hadn’t seen the morning paper, and if any of her friends had seen it, they hadn’t phoned her.

  “There’s no predicting these street-corner encounters,” he said. “Even God couldn’t predict them.”

  She came back across the Chinese carpet with its whites and faint rust tones and pale leaf-greens. They stood four feet from each other at a border of silence. They stared just an instant into each other’s eyes.

  “Why are we standing?” She sank into a chair. Her finger played with a seam in the upholstery. “First Oona. And now Avalon. They detested each other.” Her tone was flat. There was no heat to it.

  “What was their problem?”

  “It had to do with photographs. Avalon had taken some pictures of her and, apparently, they weren’t very flattering.”

  Nudies? Cardozo wondered. “Did you see them?”

  “No. I didn’t want to. He published them, but I didn’t buy the magazine. She was horribly insecure about her appearance. Wrongly insecure, of course. And as long as we’re dishing the dead, if you’re curious what my fight with Avalon was about—”

  “I know. You disagreed with him over Delancey’s parole.”

  “As though who said what or who thought what mattered! It’s who does what that counts. I was screaming at Avalon as though he’d opened the cell door himself.”

  “It’s a question of fairness. Delancey gets his second chance, your daughter gets nothing. In that situation I might say a few harsh words myself.”

  She looked at him. He was aware of a change in her, as if she was seeing him in a way she hadn’t expected to.

  “And I’m sorry,” he said. “A raw deal once is bad enough, but your daughter got a raw deal twice.”

  “Thank you. I needed to hear that somebody was on my side.”

  Cardozo could tell she had something more to say, but she didn’t say it right away; and while he waited he could hear the muffled, distant sounds of things happening in a well-built, well-run New York town house—cooks
cooking, maids vacuuming, delivery men dropping off flowers, a secretary somewhere fielding phone calls and running the printer on a PC.

  “I’m getting phone calls,” she said. “My machine’s been getting calls.”

  “What kind?”

  “Silences. It rings and I answer and no one’s there. I find myself waiting for them! Every time the phone rings, it’s hard not to think—it might be him.”

  “Him?” Cardozo said.

  “I just assume it’s—him.”

  “At the moment we’re watching Jim Delancey.”

  “What does that mean, watching him?”

  “It means you don’t have to worry. And as for those calls, why don’t you let the machine answer? Don’t pick up till you know who’s on the line.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  THOUGH DIZEY DUKE CHRONICLED New York’s beautiful people for eighteen million nationally syndicated readers, Cardozo was surprised to find that she lived on the Lower West Side, far from the glittering towers and the long, long limousines of midtown Manhattan.

  A nonstop jam of trucks heading for the Holland Tunnel moved past her building’s front door with horn blasts and loud clankings of gearshifts. It was a noisy street at this hour, and Cardozo had a feeling it was a truck route, just as noisy round the clock.

  The doorman wore a uniform from the waist down, a Quiero-Buenos-Aires T-shirt above that. He examined Cardozo’s shield, buzzed Ms. Duke’s apartment, and told Cardozo to take the elevator to 12-C.

  The door on the twelfth floor was opened by a short man, no more than five feet six, with no hair and extremely thick hornrimmed glasses.

  “I’m Boyd MacLean,” he said. His speech was fast, clipped, nasal. “Call me Mac and come on in.”

  Cardozo stepped into a hallway that seemed to have been temporarily converted into an office a long, long time ago. Two scarred and dented steel desks had been pushed against one wall, and the facing wall was lined with sagging bookshelves and steel cabinets. Snowdrifts of paper overflowed every surface. A fax machine on the floor was spooling out print, and another on top of a filing cabinet was making electronic distress noises.