Deadly Rich

by Edward Stewart

  “She’ll be right with you,” Mac said. “She’s on the phone.”

  At the far end of the corridor a tall, stocky woman in Wrangler jeans paced back and forth with a receiver pressed to her ear.

  “That story is over one-hundred percent lies,” Cardozo heard her saying. “They papered the house at his funeral.” She took a long drag on a cigarette. “No way. Not one more free plug for Mercedes.”

  She made a hurry-it-up hand signal to Mac. He ripped a sheet of paper from a clattering printer before it had finished clattering. She grabbed the sheet from him. Her eyes scanned.

  “Oh, yeah?” She was speaking again into the receiver. “Tough. Only the dead love everyone.” She broke the connection and passed a hand over her brow. “Oy. Where’s my Advil?” She began dialing another number.

  “Dizey,” Mac said, “visitor. Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo.”

  Dizey looked around. She dropped the receiver onto its cradle. “How do, Lieutenant. Got your message. Be right with you.” She snapped the page of computer printout at Mac. “This column is cluttered. Too many nobodys.”

  Mac grimaced. “If you’d tell me once in a while what your lead item is going to be …”

  “If!” Dizey returned the grimace. “If your grandpa had wings he’d be a glider on wheels! What the hell am I dealing with, the Exxon oil-spill response team? For Christ’s sake, there’s a catering war on Park Avenue! So is Splendiferous Eats doing the library benefit, or aren’t they?” She crumpled the page into a ball and threw it at Mac. “You want coffee, Lieutenant? Mac, get us two coffees.” Dizey headed for an arched doorway. She tossed Cardozo an over-the-shoulder nod. “We can talk in here.”

  In here was a small living room with three cats exercising squatters’ rights on an ancient sectional sofa. One wall seemed to have been painted Rust-Oleum. The window commanded a view of rooftops and black and crippled antennas and beyond them a pollution-brindled sky.

  Dizey dropped into an easy chair. Cardozo sat facing her on the end of the sofa where the cats weren’t.

  “Are we giving the killings a brand name now?” Dizey stuck a fresh cigarette in her mouth. From the embroidered breast pocket of her cowgirl shirt she pulled a green Bic lighter. “Society Sam, is it?”

  “That’s up to the papers.”

  Dizey flicked flame from the Bic and held it to the tip of her cigarette. Her eyes studied him. “Well, I’m part of the papers, and I don’t like giving them a brand name. It makes them seem too … established. Like, here’s reality—there’s nothing anyone can do about it, so love it or leave it.”

  “That’s not a bad description of life,” Cardozo said.

  “You mean life in the Big Apple. This has been my adopted home for more years than I’d care to own up to, but I never saw kids strip the running shoes and Walkman off a raped woman. And now it’s commonplace. And Society Sam. Why? Sex and economics have been around for a long time, and they never caused this sort of problem before.”

  “It could be that the city’s growing a meaner type of criminal these days.”

  “I’d hate to think you’re right, but I think you’re right.”

  “We’ve been looking into links between the two victims,” Cardozo said.

  Dizey nodded. “There were plenty of those.”

  “Evidently there was some kind of problem between Oona Aldrich and Avalon Gardner—they fought at one of Annie MacAdam’s dinners and never spoke to each other again?”

  “Oh, yes, indeedy.”

  “Could you fill me in a little on that?”

  “Tell me when to stop.” Dizey exhaled twin jets of blue smoke. “It was six years ago, so this is off the top of my memory. Oona got a fish bone caught in her throat. It looked like she might choke. Avalon was at the same table, so he took her to the hospital. While she was being treated he photographed her. The photos got published in Fanfare Magazine. They weren’t what you’d call flattering angles. Oona never forgave him.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Cross my heart, Lieutenant, that is the ganzeh megillah. As I’ve found out in my business, and as I’m sure you’ve found out in yours, people can be stubborn and they can be dumb.”

  “They can be dumb some of the time,” Cardozo said.

  “Beg to differ. Nowadays people are dumb all of the time. Look at the way they react to Jim Delancey. He kills a lovely girl, they give him twenty-five years. Dumb.”

  “Too much time?”

  “You kidding? He should roast in hell for life. Then they give him a parole. Dumber. Then they give him a job in a high-status restaurant. Dumber than dumb. It’s saying, What you did doesn’t matter, Jimbo, we’re going to eat out of your bloody hands anyway. And then … these pickets. They’re well-intentioned, but it’s obscene. All they’re doing is giving him publicity—and he doesn’t deserve it. The guy’s a killer, not a cause célèbre!”

  Cardozo sat nodding in silent agreement.

  “Can you believe,” Dizey said, “columnists are publishing his salad recipes? Archibald’s can’t handle the demand for reservations. The whole damned business is vile. It’s a freak show and in this jaded town freak shows sell out.”

  “How do you suppose Delancey got the job at Archibald’s?”

  All of Dizey’s energy suddenly went into blunt, clear-polished fingertips that slowly stroked the beveled glass edge of the coffee table. “I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of that—but I’m working on it.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you could let me know what you find out.”

  “You’ll find out when my readers find out, Lieutenant. I don’t play favorites.”

  “Not even with the law?”

  “Not even with the law.”

  “Too bad. We’d make good allies.”

  At that moment Mac arrived carrying a clinking plastic tray with two cups of coffee and a sugar bowl full of pink Sweet’n Low envelopes and a half-pint carton of cream. He slid the tray down onto the coffee table between them. “Cream, Lieutenant?”

  “The lieutenant can handle it,” Dizey said.

  Mac gave her a look. “Excuse me.”

  Dizey waved her hand. “Scram.”

  Mac scrammed.

  Dizey helped herself to heavy cream and Sweet’n Low. “Tell me, Lieutenant, how do you think you could help me?”

  “That would be up to you. But I know how you could help me.”

  Dizey pushed the coffee tray toward him. “I’m listening.”

  “The morning before Oona Aldrich was killed your column carried an item on the Hansen Boutique. Yesterday, the morning before Avalon Gardner was killed, you carried an item on Annie MacAdam’s dinner.”

  “Are you saying there’s a connection?”

  “We think the killer could be getting tips from you.”

  “Tips?”

  “As to who’s going to be where.”

  A phone jangled in the other room. “For you,” Mac hollered. “Ms. A.”

  Dizey picked up the phone on the coffee table.

  “Yeah?” She listened a moment with drooping eyes. “Jorge Luna and Tony and Chelsea LoGrande?” Her voice had become snide and just a little nasty. “Your guest lists are getting ridiculous.” She hung up. Her eyes came back to Cardozo. “You can’t hold me responsible, Lieutenant. I certainly didn’t mention that Oona Aldrich was expected at the boutique at one-thirty P.M. In fact, I didn’t even know it.”

  “But you implied there would be a certain type of clientele at the boutique, and the killer has drawn two victims from that social level.”

  “So Oona and Avalon were killed by the same man.”

  “It looks like it. We’ll know for sure tonight.”

  “Let me ask you this: Is it your eyewitness knowledge that Society Sam is choosing his hits on the basis of my column?”

  “It’s a strong possibility, and I have to ask you to stop previewing social events in your column.”

  Beneath its heavy powdering the red of Dizey Duke
’s face darkened. “Until you have this crazy under lock and key, I’m supposed to limit my column to past events?”

  “It might save lives.”

  “You mean it could save the life of every other columnist in town. I don’t suppose you’ve asked Suzy or Liz or Billy Norwich to edit coming events out of their columns?”

  “If necessary we’ll certainly appeal to them.”

  Dizey jabbed her cigarette out in her saucer. A ribbon of smoke rose twisting from the mangled stub. “Okay, I get the picture, Lieutenant. It’s always easier to write prescriptions than to pay for them, right? You’re looking at a gal who happens to believe the Constitution meant it when it promised freedom of the press. I’m not going to censor my column for the police or for anyone.”

  “No insult intended. Just asking.” Cardozo smiled and took a long sip of his coffee. “Great flavor.”

  “Latin roast. Mac buys it down at the corner bodega. They grind it special.” Dizey Duke turned her wrist and frowned at her Minnie Mouse watch. “Well, Lieutenant, this gal’s got to get cracking. Anything else I can refuse to help you with?”

  “There’s one thing. How did the photos of Oona Aldrich happen to get published in a national magazine?”

  “Maybe you should ask Kristi Blackwell.” Dizey saw the Who her? look on Cardozo’s face and added, “She edits Fanfare and she’s a lot nicer than me.”

  “WHY DID YOU PUBLISH the photos?” Cardozo said.

  Kristi Blackwell gave him a slow, attentive frown. “Because they were part of the story, and the story was offbeat. It had a kick. A kind of pungency.”

  “But it wasn’t news, was it?”

  “News is what the news says is news. Fanfare’s beat is society. And, frankly, not much happens in society unless it’s made to happen.”

  In some ways she had the face of a show-window mannequin—a face of no recognizable age, eerily unflawed, her skin the even white of expensive stationery. Against that skin, the red of her doll-like, tightly ringleted hair and the green of her eyes had the startling force of candied-fruit bits in a pot of zuppa inglese.

  “There’ve been maybe three real social events in the last decade.” She held up three fingers, and one of them wore a waterbug-sized emerald. “Brooke Astor gave a party in the public library, and a midget financier started a brawl. Malcolm Forbes couldn’t get himself listed in the Social Register because a homophobe gay was blocking him, so he bought the company and listed himself. The von Bulow prosecution boomeranged, questions were asked about planted evidence and a deal had to be cut with the state to keep a half-dozen perjurors out of jail.”

  She spoke with an unmistakable London accent, but Cardozo’s ear couldn’t tell whether it was the second-best or third-best kind. It had the faint ring of supporting player in a British TV comedy.

  “If Fanfare had published the truth about any of those stories, we would have been going up against deep pockets who could have sued us out of existence. So what can we do? We deal chitchat from the power zones—Mary-Lou’s dresses and Annette’s divorces and Patty’s gazpacho.”

  She was wearing an uncomplicated lavender silk dress, and Cardozo had the impression her diet-skinny bones carried it at least as well as any of the female bodies that appeared in the ads in her magazine. The lavender matched the irises in the jade vase on her desk, and it matched the walls of her office, and he suspected the matches were not accidents.

  “Gossip is our mandate. At the same time it’s our problem. Nothing dates faster. Added to which, we’re coming out once a month with a three-week press lag. So how are we going to keep ourselves on the cutting edge? Either we have to have an exclusive, or we have to generate the gossip.”

  “And which was the case with the Oona Aldrich article?”

  “Both. ‘Socialites in Emergency’ was an exclusive, and we generated it. If we hadn’t been in that emergency room, not only would it not have been a story—it wouldn’t even have happened. What I wanted to show was, whenever you drop high-profile names into a low-profile environment, the whole situation automatically goes major.”

  “How did you happen to have a writer and a photographer there?”

  “Purest, luckiest accident. Dick Braidy and Avalon Gardner were at the same dinner as Oona; she got a bone in her throat; they helped get her to the hospital.”

  “Because they saw story potential?”

  “¿Quien sabe? Lieutenant, there are fringe benefits to every good deed. Even the Good Samaritan was playing the odds. Between you and me, nothing was wrong with Oona’s windpipe that a good swift Heimlich wouldn’t have cleared up in three seconds. But nobody at Annie’s dinners knows anything as useful as the Heimlich, and thus are great articles born.”

  “I gather Aldrich and Gardner quarreled over the story.”

  “Oona gave us a release. Later she saw what the story did for Avalon. She got angry and, in my opinion, she got jealous.”

  “Jealous about what?”

  “In today’s society the scarce resource is media space. Oona was launching her own name-brand tofutti. Fanfare was going to run a story to help her out. Along came ‘Socialites in Emergency,’ and there was no question—it was a far stronger story. When Oona saw our July issue, and her tofutti wasn’t in it—that was when the vendetta began.”

  “By any chance could I see the story?” Cardozo said.

  “Absolutely.” Kristi Blackwell picked up the receiver of her desk phone and jabbed three buttons. “Lance, would you get me the back issue with Dick Braidy’s ‘Socialites in Emergency’ piece? I think it’s July eighty-something—it has Liz and Malcolm on motorcycles on the cover.”

  Cardozo’s eye had wandered to a painting of a vase of flowers that Kristi Blackwell, or her decorator, had hung on the wall.

  “It’s a Pissarro,” she said.

  He assumed Pissarro must be good or at least okay if she had one hanging in her office, but his face must have said something else.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “Not one of the leaders of the pack—but what can you do? Prices for good art are still outrageous, and my publisher wasn’t about to let me hang a Cezanne there.”

  She was talking to him as a sort of equal, as though he too had several hundred thousand of someone else’s dollars to throw away on a pretty painting. She couldn’t be dumb enough to think a cop had legal access to that kind of money. It was strategy, a way of flattering him by appointing him an honorary Person Like Us.

  Her young male assistant brought in the back issue. She studied the cover. “Yes, this is the one.” She handed Cardozo the back issue.

  Looking at the cover, with Liz Taylor and Malcolm Forbes and their bikes, he felt a rush of remember-back-when. He opened the magazine to the Benedict Braidy article: “Socialites in Emergency,” a two-page spread of tilted color photographs and uncentered raggedy-edged type.

  “Which photo did Oona Aldrich object to?” Cardozo said.

  “All of them.”

  Cardozo studied the photos.

  Oona’s face, he thought, looked fine: a little artificially madeup, like an actress’s in a Fifties film—with eyebrows where no one had eyebrows and eyeshadow where only a ballerina had eyeshadow—but pretty and striking in a jaded way. What didn’t look fine against a background of hospital beds and hurrying nurses and shoot-out victims was the dress she was wearing, an extravagant construction of stiffened red silk with a high, ruffled collar that rose twelve inches in back. She looked like an Infanta hunting for an escaped dwarf.

  He turned the page. A photo showed Dizey Duke wearing a long-skirted chartreuse toreador suit. “I see Dizey went too.”

  “Dizey wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

  Cardozo pointed to the photo of a dark, severely underweight woman who seemed to have attached diamonds to her wet suit. “Who’s this woman?”

  “That’s Gloria Spahn, the dress designer. She’s changed her look since then—thank God.”

  “May I keep this copy?”
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  “It’s yours, Lieutenant. Compliments of the house. And if you’d like a complimentary subscription—” Kristi Blackwell smiled and tapped a finger on her phone receiver. “I’m not like the rest of you successful Yanks. I’m still in the book.”

  A SMALL MEXICAN-LOOKING WOMAN in a white smock let Cardozo into Benedict Braidy’s apartment. She indicated with hand gestures that he was to take the hallway to the right. Eight strides carried him into a chintz-choked living room.

  Sunlight touched the dust jackets of books filling the wall of built-in shelves. There were three entire shelves devoted to foreign-language editions of Benedict Braidy’s books, and another stuffed with enormous leather-bound albums.

  Through a glass-paneled door Cardozo could see into a small office. A tall, overweight gray-blond man in a flapping bathrobe stood bent over a personal computer keyboard.

  “Just a sec, Lieutenant,” he called. “Let me close this contraption down.”

  Cardozo watched Braidy jab a key and stand back, biting his lip. The faint pulsation of light on the computer screen shrank to a spot of amber and then exploded into a fading spray of little blips.

  “Shit!” Benedict Braidy stomped into the living room. “Pardon my Swahili, but I have a terrible time with that PC. It’s eating my files day and night.”

  Under the robe he was wearing a strawberry taffy-colored button-down shirt. The top two buttons were open over a gray-haired chest. He had on tan slacks and Top-Siders, no socks. Cardozo had the impression that no socks was a fashion statement.

  “Dick Braidy—great to meet you.” Braidy held out a hand. “What’ll you have? A drink drink? Diet Pepsi? Reheated coffee?”

  “Diet Pepsi will be fine, thanks.”

  “Juanita!” Benedict Braidy shouted. “Dos diet Pepsis, por favor, inmediata!” Benedict Braidy plopped into an armchair. “Sit, Lieutenant, please. You can’t expect me to share poop with a guy who’s towering over me.”

  Cardozo took a seat on the sofa.

  “Now, tell me,” Braidy said. “What’s all this sudden revival of interest in ‘Socialites in Emergency’?”

  “That night appears to be the last time that Oona Aldrich and Avalon Gardner were on speaking terms.”