“Would that affect her sense of balance?”
“Absolutely. This woman would have been at risk getting out of a chair, let alone sitting in a box at the opera.”
“I know it’s an odd question to ask about a senior citizen, but did she have sex before she died?”
“Not that odd, Vince. But in Dizey’s case there was no semen , in the vagina or mouth or anus.”
“Pubic hairs?”
“Only her own, where God put them.” Dan Hippolito folded his arms across the front of his smock. It had a faint arc of laundered bloodstain below the neck. “All I’m giving you is preliminary conclusions, if you’ll excuse the oxymoron, based on a cursory visual examination and initial bloodwork. We haven’t cut yet. We haven’t analyzed tissue. But she doesn’t fit with your other two victims. No stab wounds. Throat untouched. The only breaks in her skin are where bones fractured through. When we go inside we’ll find out a lot more about her drug habits—and her nutrition, which was piss-poor. This woman must have lived on booze and animal fats and desserts, but we’re not going to find parallel lines and dots carved on her internal organs.”
A kind of stillness seemed to fall from the air ducts in the ceiling.
Cardozo heaved himself to his feet. “It’s weird. Because in other respects she fits. She’s the kind of victim Society Sam likes.”
“From what I can gather,” Dan Hippolito said, “Society Sam has pretty broad tastes.”
“DIZEYS ONLY FAMILY,” Ellie Siegel said, “is her mother Etiennette, who lives in a nursing home in Billings, Montana.”
Cardozo sat drumming his fingers against his desktop.
“There’s an ex-husband in Manila but no children or siblings.” Ellie turned a page in her notepad. “Dizey named three beneficiaries: her mother, her assistant Mac, and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.”
The cubicle was just large enough for Ellie to take three steps before she had to turn around. She took the third step and turned.
“The mother is one hundred seven years old, and she spent yesterday on the back porch of the nursing home. Mac was at the memorial party when Dizey died, but he was indoors and she was on the terrace. The Gay Men’s Health Crisis, so far as I know, isn’t killing people who name it as a beneficiary.”
Cardozo still didn’t speak. He pushed his lips together into a thoughtful, lopsided pout.
“Vince, you do not have the look of a happy man. Tell me what’s bothering you.”
“Dizey Duke wasn’t Society Sam’s M.O. And serial killers practically never change their method.”
Ellie raised her shoulders in a what-can-you-do-about-it shrug. “To me that’s statistics—and statistics are compiled from events, not vice versa. Just because Society Sam stabbed two doesn’t mean he can’t push the third off a roof.”
“I’m not happy with it.”
“No one’s telling you this is cause for celebration, but why make it more of a mystery than it is? Look who he’s killing, not how. Aldrich and Gardner were glitz-ditzes. Dizey Duke was the official media motor-mouth of the social bunny-hop.” Ellie angled her head to see the files open on Cardozo’s desktop.
“What do you see?” he said.
Ellie frowned at the glossies. “I see two hands. Two left hands. An old left hand and a young left hand. I can’t see the nails, since these are shots of the palm, but I’d say the hands are female.”
She picked up the glossies.
“I see a bruise in the palm of each hand. The bruise runs approximately two inches along the crease of each palm. I’d guess that a similar object made the two bruises. Maybe the same object. The object has a straight, sharp edge but not necessarily a cutting edge.” Ellie laid the glossies back down. “Am I close?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
Ellie tapped her finger on the newer glossy. “This is obviously Dizey’s hand. Whose hand is the other?”
“Nita Kohler’s.”
Ellie picked up the Kohler glossy again. “On the one hand, excuse the pun, the bruise isn’t your classic Society Sam marking.” She stood there knitting her eyebrows together. “On the other hand, we do know who made the bruise on Nita Kohler’s palm.”
“GUESS WHAT.” LOU Stein allowed a suspenseful little silence to come across the phone line. “There was a wad of tissue in the left cup of Dizey’s bra.”
Cardozo’s desk lamp dimmed and began buzzing. He slammed his fist down onto the desktop. The light blinked out and then came nervously back to normal wattage. “What was she doing, padding?”
“Doubt it. Bras have been coming prepadded for quite a few decades. Not that she needed the extra. But a lot of women use their bra as a sort of purse-away-from-the-purse. Anything can go there—money, cigarettes, drugs, phone numbers. These were used tissues.”
“Used for what?”
“Come on, Vince, what do you use tissue for?”
“I know what I use them for, I want to know what she used them for.”
“Blowing her nose.”
“So you got snot off the tissue.”
“Trace snot. She had blood in her sinuses. But also—and this is what’s going to interest you—the tissue had been saturated in corn, barley, artificial caramel color, sodium, sodium saccharine, and caffeine.”
“What does that add up to?”
“It adds up to a diet cola drink laced with second-rate Scotch.”
“Why second-rate?”
“The Scots would never mix corn and barley malt.”
“So it was a cheap knock-off Scotch.”
“Let’s just say domestic. Who knows how the liquor cartels price these products.”
“So the party caterers were charging for Johnnie Walker and serving refunneled Laird Robbie. What did she do, dribble?”
“I said saturated, Vince. She must have sopped the drink up.”
Cardozo tried to visualize it: Dizey Duke is schmoozing at a jet-set memorial party; she spills a drink; she reaches into her bra and pulls out a used Kleenex with sinus blood on it and sops up.
No. Maybe at home, but not in front of these people.
“I don’t think she sopped up a drink. It got spilled on her.”
“This had to be a hell of a spill.”
“So she had a hell of a spill. It must have been just before she went over the wall, because no one at the party has mentioned seeing her with Scotch and Coke running down her front.”
“You’ll have it in writing tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Lou.”
Cardozo dialed Dizey Duke’s work number. A man answered. “Duke office, MacLean speaking.”
Cardozo could hear that he was hurting and depressed. “Mac, it’s Vince Cardozo at the Twenty-second Precinct. Do you happen to remember what kind of liquor Ms. Duke was drinking at the memorial reception?”
A silence came over the phone like an empty ripple in space. “When Ms. Duke drank, which was infrequently, she preferred dry white wine, usually in a spritzer. When she drank hard liquor, which was very rarely, she stuck to vodka.”
“Did she ever drink Scotch?”
“She’d sooner have drunk battery acid. She detested Scotch.”
A LITTLE AFTER THREE P.M. Cardozo was standing in the courtyard of the old Frick mansion on Fifth Avenue, talking with a young man by the name of Jan Bachman.
Jan had tended bar at the Aldrich memorial, and the caterers had said he’d be here working a benefit dinner. He had light hair, a turned-up nose, and cloudy blue eyes. When Cardozo asked if he could by any chance recall what Dizey Duke had been drinking, he burst out laughing.
“I sure can and it’s not by chance. Vodka and soda, easy on the soda.”
“Nothing but that?”
Jan nodded. He was wearing dungarees and one small cross-shaped earring, and he was carrying his waiter’s tux in a suit bag. “Dizey never changed. I’ve been pouring booze for that lady for five years and, believe me, I knew her likes. Dizey was strictly Stoli. With a twist of lime. No
t lemon, lime. She was very particular about that inch of lime peel.”
“Did she really like it, or did she just drink it to give an impression?”
Cardozo and Jan Bachman formed a little island of stillness in the river of activity flowing around them. Men were setting up dining tables around the pool and arranging pink tablecloths and rose centerpieces and chintz napkins in tulip glasses. Three moving men were trying to lift a harp onto a six-inch platform.
It seemed to Cardozo it was a different century in here than it was out in the streets.
“Dizey was Billings, Montana,” Jan said. “Her idea of a fun drink was probably barbecue sauce and tequila. But to get anywhere in New York you go with the flow, and Stoli and soda is definitely the flow. And insisting on a lime peel shows you have real taste—and know how to kick waiter ass.”
“You never knew Dizey to lapse after a few and order something else—say, diet cola and Scotch?”
“God, no.”
“Doesn’t anyone drink diet cola and Scotch?”
“Not in public, not at the affairs I bartend.”
“Do you remember serving diet cola and Scotch to anyone at the memorial party?”
Jan shook his head. “Frankly, no—and that sort of thing I’d recall, because columnists would pay good money to know.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
“DIZEY WAS WEARING OONA’S BROOCH,” Leigh said.
“You mean, a brooch like Oona Aldrich’s?” Vince Cardozo said.
They were sitting in Waldo Carnegie’s library. She’d chosen the library and not the living room for this meeting, because it was a smaller space. Less could get lost in it.
“No,” she said. “Van Cleef only made three of them, and the brooch Dizey had on was exactly the same as Tori’s and mine. It had to be Oona’s.”
“Then, the day Dizey Duke died she was wearing the same brooch that Oona Aldrich wore the day she died?”
“I’m absolutely sure of it.”
“Did you ask Dizey where she’d gotten it?”
“I accused her of stealing it …” She let her voice trail off, showing him that she lacked assurance, that this was difficult for her. “Dizey denied it. I called her a liar.” Leigh glanced up slowly. “In fact, I’m ashamed to say, we had a fight.”
She was throwing Cardozo a cue: This would have been a natural point for him to mention what the police had unearthed about Dizey’s last moments, how they had reconstructed that final chronology. If anyone else had told him about a fight, now was the logical time for him to react.
But he didn’t.
“Frankly,” Leigh said, “I’m surprised nobody heard us.”
“Where did you have this fight?”
“On the terrace.” At the last moment instinct had kicked in and told Leigh not to wear black; so she faced Cardozo for the second time today with her hair freshly combed, dressed to dazzle in lilac, in carefully understated maquillage.
“Was anyone else on the terrace?”
“No—just Dizey and me.”
“Who was on the terrace first?”
“I suppose I was.”
“So you were alone before Dizey joined you?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Why were you alone on the terrace?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I wanted to be.”
“Why did Dizey join you?”
“I don’t think she knew I was there when she came out.”
“And were you there when she fell?”
He said this so simply, so directly, that she realized he was actually a very sly man.
“When I left the terrace, she was still standing there.”
“Standing there doing what?”
Leigh did not answer immediately. She lowered her eyelids just a little, as though they were an inner screen on which she had to review her memories. “Dizey had turned her back to me. She was standing there looking out over the city.”
“Facing the wall?”
“Yes, looking out over the wall.”
“Why did you leave the terrace?”
Keep it simple, she told herself. “Because we’d fought. I wanted to get away from her.”
“How did you end your conversation with Dizey?”
“End it?” By the time she decided that the natural reaction to the question would be a rueful half smile, the rueful half smile no longer felt natural. “I don’t think I exactly ended it. I suppose I said good-bye.”
“Good-bye?”
She had two jobs to do at once: she had to monitor her own performance, and she had to interpret his. It really required two minds and all she had was one, and it was a not very together mind at this moment.
“Maybe not literally good-bye … Probably I said, I’m going inside; and she said, I’m staying out here; and I said, I’ll see you later.”
“And you didn’t see her later.”
“No.”
“Were you the last person to see Dizey on that terrace?”
“I have no idea.” In the little parallel universe where I’m sitting, she thought, I’m completely innocent of wrong-doing. The only reason we’re even having this chat is because you requested it, and I want to help you.
It occurred to her that she needed a motivation for that.
I want to help you because I like you.
She let her eyes meet his.
See? My eyes say I like you.
But what were his eyes saying?
“When I came back into the house,” she said, “I mixed and mingled and I honestly wasn’t keeping track of who was going onto the terrace and who was coming back.”
“How did Dizey seem to you during that last meeting?”
His eyes studied her, and she could feel him wondering things. What was he picking up on? Did he realize that underneath all her glib glamour, the celebrity was a vibrating wreck?
The first step was to deflect that last-meeting jab.
“I didn’t know it was a last meeting, so I wasn’t paying as much attention as I might have had I known. How did she seem? She seemed very much herself—bubbly, gossipy.”
“Did it strike you as odd that she was bubbly?”
“We’d come from a memorial, and people are usually a little down after a memorial. So everybody drinks and then that kind of hysteria takes over and it seems giddy and fun, and I suppose that’s how Dizey felt.”
“Was she drinking?”
“Oh, yes—Dizey loved her drinking and drinks were on the house.”
“Tell me, was Dizey drunk?”
“In my opinion she was very drunk.”
“Do you recall what she was drinking?”
Recall, to be convincing, could not be instant. Leigh half closed her eyes as though reseeing the scene. “I think she was drinking vodka. It seems to me she only drank Stoli neat or Stoli and soda.”
“Why only Stoli?”
“Maybe the Stoli people paid her.”
“You say that as though you don’t approve.”
His eyes lingered on her face, and she could feel her face reddening. She decided the best next step would be to let a little human frailty show.
“I’m jealous of people who can drink without messing up their lives the way I did.”
He had soft eyes, sad eyes, and she felt him tuning in on her in ways that had nothing to do with words.
“How long did you say you and Dizey were together on the terrace?”
She knew she hadn’t said. “It could have been sixty seconds, it could have been five minutes. I’m rotten at estimating time. I was more or less sleepwalking through the memorial and the reception. And my mind was on other things.”
“Could I ask what other things?”
“That house … used to be my house. My daughter … was pushed from that terrace.”
She couldn’t escape a nagging sense that she was saying too much, trapping herself, that he was encouraging her to get lost in her own explanations.
“I was drunk the night my d
aughter died. I was drunk and drugged. I was drunk and drugged a great deal in those days. And I’ve often thought that if I’d been sober, at least sober at that instant, she might still be alive.”
“You didn’t push her,” he said quietly.
Leigh looked at him. She had a sense that he had decided to take her side. “Sometimes I feel I did.”
“No one’s going to punish you for feelings,” he said. “Sometimes feelings aren’t even facts.”
“You’re worse than my sponsor,” she said.
“What’s so bad about your sponsor?”
“I can’t lie to him.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“It’s a little something extra to remember—like brushing your teeth and putting on clean underwear and keeping your nails clean.”
“And you can’t lie to me?”
“I don’t think it would do me any good.”
He was watching her with an agreeably skeptical half smile. “By the way, were you drinking during your talk with Dizey?”
She noted that the fight had become a talk, and the question of her drinking was slipped in almost as a footnote.
“I may have had a drink in my hand.”
“Do you remember what you were drinking?” The question gave the drink rock-solid reality.
“Is this a memory quiz?”
“Yes.”
That threw her. Of all possible replies, she had never expected yes. “Well, I actually don’t remember what I was drinking.” She was careful to fall in with his assumption naturally, innocently. She said What I was drinking, not whether. “So it must have been my usual.”
“And what’s your usual?”
“I drink diet Pepsi and—”
And she caught herself.
“And what?”
“And I don’t drink alcohol.”
AFTER CARDOZO LEFT Leigh stood in the living room, letting her mind curl around a thought. I didn’t play that scene at all well.
She found herself in front of the liquor cabinet. The edge of a Chardin landscape and the blooms on a pear tree in the garden were bright splashes of color in the mirror.
Out of the corner of her eye she could see her reflection mixing a drink.
She recognized it was an old solution: When you don’t know what to think or believe or feel, don’t think, don’t believe, don’t feel.
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