“Your expert?”
“You really want to hear me grouse about work?” he said.
“Absolutely.”
“I have a friend who’s a clinical psychologist. He thinks the victims are chosen at random—the killer’s psycho-biological clock alarm goes off, the killer goes into his gotta-kill cycle, prowls till he sees a candidate. He stalks that candidate and when the opportunity presents itself, he hits. The only connection between the killer and the victim is that the victim is the first candidate to cross the killer’s path after the cycle starts. In a technical sense the killer and victim are strangers.”
“Why only in a technical sense? It seems to me they are strangers.”
“My friend calls it ‘an unsymmetrical relationship.’ The victim doesn’t know who the killer is—but the killer knows who the victim is.”
He was aware of a change in her, in the quality of her attention.
“You don’t mean the killer personally knows who he’s killing,” she said.
“He doesn’t know in your sense and mine. He knows in the sense that, from his point of view, the victim is wearing a flag or a label. The killer can read that flag. The killer knows the most likely place to find a victim with that label, the most likely time to find one. But when the victim looks at the killer, there’s no flag, no label—no warning—until that last instant when the knife comes out.”
“Do you agree with any of this?”
“Not completely. I don’t think the killings are random.”
She shifted slightly. “That’s interesting. Why not?”
“Look at the original Son of Sam killings. None of those victims knew one another. There wasn’t a single link. They didn’t eat at the same restaurants, they didn’t share employers, they didn’t ride the same busses or live on the same streets. That’s random. But Society Sam’s victims know each other.”
She gave a half nod of assent. “Are the police sure the victims were all killed by one person?”
“It’s the simplest theory.”
“But is the simplest always right? What if those Society Sam letters are fakes?”
“We’re sure the first two are the same killer.”
“But you’re not sure who killed Dizey?”
“Completely different MO. No cuts.”
“If it isn’t the same killer, is there anyone you suspect?”
“A lot of people had access to Dizey that night. A lot of them had been stung at one time or another by that column of hers.”
“You think it was someone she’d blasted in the column?”
“It’s the sort of possibility we have to consider. But don’t forget the ones who never got mentioned—because they might have had a grudge against her too.”
“In other words, you’re considering practically everyone at that memorial.”
“We have to.”
“Tell me, just for example, would you consider me?”
Cardozo found himself enjoying this woman. She had something unpredictable about her. He liked not knowing exactly how she would react, because he didn’t know exactly how he’d respond, and that made him interesting to himself again. “Would I consider you as Society Sam? No, you’re a woman.”
“What about just killing Dizey?”
“I’d consider it.”
“How could you prove it?”
“You have to understand—most homicide investigations are closed one way: a witness talks.”
“What if there’s no witness?”
“There’s always one witness, and that’s the one that usually talks.”
Her hands rested on her lap, locked. “The killer confesses?”
“Or gives himself away.”
“How?”
“Surprisingly dumb ways. A lot of killers can’t resist cozying up to the cops.”
“Why’s that?”
“I have a theory it’s fear. Some part of them is afraid that punishment is inevitable. They want to speed things up a little, end the waiting. A lot of killers actually try to help the cops. For example, if you were the killer, you’d be making a big mistake now—asking me about the investigation.”
“Then let’s change the subject before I get myself sentenced to life. Are you hungry?”
“Cops are always hungry.”
“Let’s eat in. Do you mind?”
“Who, me?”
He followed her into the kitchen. She opened an armoire-sized refrigerator and stood rattling the ice cubes in her empty glass. The freezer compartment exhaled white mist around her face.
“How would you feel about tomato and fennel soup, rack of lamb, vanilla ice cream with lingonberries that were fresh once upon a time?”
“What-berries?”
“They grow in Sweden. They’re supposed to be a delicacy.”
“How are you going to make all that?”
“Waldo’s chef froze some leftovers. I’ll just heat them up.” She pulled three quart-sized plastic bags from the freezer and thunked them down on the counter. They looked like petrified swamp. She slit knife holes in the bags and arranged them on plates and slid them into the microwave. She set dials with a matter-of-factness that made him think she’d mastered basic microwave cookery.
She went and pulled another bag from the freezer. This one looked like a red woolen cap that had frozen in a snow drift. She set it in a mixing bowl.
She arranged two place settings on a butcher-block table in a corner of the kitchen. Two dozen gleaming copper pans hung from a rack directly overhead.
“Could I ask a rude question?” Cardozo pointed a thumb upward. “Does anyone ever cook in those things?”
She smiled. “I don’t pry into the servants’ lives, and they don’t tattle on me to the magazines.”
She went down to the cellar and returned with a bottle of wine. A heavy coat of whitish dust lay on the neck of the bottle, and he could see a 1969 on the label.
“Mouton-Rothschild.” She spoke the French syllables as though they were the name of a never-to-be-forgotten lover. “It was the only wine that ever did all those things to my mouth that connoisseurs say a great wine should.”
The name rang a distant, five-hundred-dollar-a-bottle bell in his mind. He remembered reading about it in The New York Times.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m not that much of a wine drinker.”
“You are tonight.” She got the cork out with three twists of something that looked like obstetrics forceps for midgets. “To hell with letting it breathe. It can breathe in the glass.” She poured two glasses.
“Are you drinking?” he said.
“One glass looks lonely. I like two on the table, don’t you? When you finish yours, we’ll switch.”
When the bell on the microwave went off, she got up and took out their thawed dinners and brought the soup bowls and plates back to the table.
During dinner she turned giddy, talkative, as though she were the one who was drinking the wine. She told him about having a French mademoiselle and an English nanny when she was a child and going to the Brearley school over on East End Avenue when she was twelve, and sitting next to Rockefellers and Vanderbilts in class.
“That’s where I met Oona and Tori. We were instant chums for life. When we were seventeen we all made our debut together at the Infirmary Ball at the Plaza. Lester Lanin conducted the orchestra, and do you know who I danced my first dance with? Truman Capote.”
“Why not your father?”
“Dad had died.”
“What about your mother?”
“Mom didn’t.”
The silence told him that Leigh Baker’s mother was not her favorite person.
“By the time Tori and Oona and I were twenty-one, we were all engaged. And by twenty-two Oona and I were married.”
“How many times have you been married?”
“Four. But Charley was the one I loved. Charley Kohler.”
“The producer? Tell me about him.”
She drew in a breath a
nd sat with her hands flat on the table, thinking. “I’ve always thought happiness is not even knowing you’re happy till you look back and you say, Wow, that was it. After he died I looked back at those years and I realized that was it.”
“What did you like most about him?”
There was something in her eyes that was deeper than loss. They were deep-set eyes and of such a dark green that they appeared almost brown around the pupils. “I loved his laughter. I loved the way he laughed. I loved the times he chose to laugh. I loved the reasons he laughed.”
“No one since?”
“Not like him. It would be what researchers call a statistical fluke.”
“Flukes happen.”
“All the time. But I’ve had mine. Mustn’t be greedy.”
He was feeling a glow throughout his body, a flush over every inch of his skin, and he felt free to ask her questions he might not have if he hadn’t had that second glass of Mouton-Rothschild.
“What about Dick Braidy? I have trouble seeing you married to him.”
“He was Charley’s personal assistant and after Charley died he was there when I needed him, and most of the time he was sweet. It counts for something, when a person’s sweet to you.”
“Doesn’t sound like many people have been sweet to you.”
“Maybe I have exaggerated expectations.”
“What about you and Waldo?”
Her fork stopped halfway to her mouth and went back to her plate. “It’s not the same at all. We’re not married.”
“I know, but …” He shrugged. “You live here.”
“He’s lonely.” She said it as though it was the reason they were together.
“And are you lonely?”
“I thought I was.”
“Why don’t you marry him?”
“We’re not in love. He wants a friend, he wants a hostess, he wants some glitz—I’m it.”
“And what do you want?”
“I’m not sure.”
He sat there in the stillness of that moment. What am I doing? he wondered. Hoping for a twenty-ton truck to run my life over?
She got up from the table. She went to the counter where she’d left the ice cream to thaw.
Cardozo watched the way she walked. It was fluid, easy, with no wasted movement.
She squeezed the ice-cream bag and made a pouting face. “It’s going to be another hour before it’s soft.”
It occurred to Cardozo that she could have thawed it in two minutes in the microwave. Obviously she was in no hurry. That suited him.
“Let’s watch a movie,” he said. “Let’s watch one of yours.”
“You’re either a sadist or a masochist. Which one?”
“How about the last one you made for TV? I missed that one.”
“I hate my TV movies.” Her eyes came around to his, thoughtfully. “Which of my movies did your wife like best?”
“The one she loved was where you were the plain Jane married to the actor with the drinking problem.”
“Cassandra—that was fifteen years ago.”
“So we’ve all added a little mileage.”
“Did you like it too?”
“Well, at the time …”
“You didn’t.”
“I thought it was good, but …” He sighed. “I’ve worked with people like the husband you had in that movie. I still do. For me it was like two hours overtime.”
“Without pay?”
He smiled.
“I was a mess in that movie. Glasses and floppy sweaters.”
“My wife loved it that you weren’t glamorous. She thought you were that woman.”
“A lot of people did. Funny, I was a roaring drunk. And my costar, who was playing a drunk, wasn’t. In fact, he was the one who persuaded me to go to AA. The first time.”
“Could we see it?” Cardozo said. “I think I’ll like it better this time.”
They went to the library on the second floor. He sat on the sofa. She loaded the tape into the VCR. She turned off all the lights except for one dim little lamp above the TV, and she came to the sofa and kicked off her shoes and sat beside him.
“Lights, camera, oops!” She aimed the remote and pushed a button, and there was a fanfare and the studio logo came up on the TV screen.
Now and then during the movie he had the feeling she was watching him, and he turned several times to check, but she was sitting forward with her chin resting on one fist, watching the screen. And then she seemed to know he was going to turn, and her eyes met his with a look that hovered between amused and uneasy, as though she hoped they were sharing something, but she wasn’t a hundred percent sure.
The light and shadow moving across the screen threw an easy shimmer out into the room, and Cardozo felt his body floating away from him. She slid over on the sofa, closing the space between them, and her bare arm lay so near to his skin where he had rolled up his shirtsleeve that he could feel warmth coming off her.
When her head dropped toward his shoulder, it was the most automatic, natural thing in the world to let his arm go around her. The part of his brain that cared about survival was telling him, Get up, get out of here, and the rest of him had no desire to go anywhere.
It was the rest of him that won.
He pulled her deeper into the warm place she had made on his shoulder. He turned her head and began to kiss her, easily at first, nibbling her lips softly, then biting gently, then moving deeper.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said.
AFTERWARD, CARDOZO SAT UP and dropped his feet over the edge of the bed. He was having trouble recognizing himself.
“Jesus,” he said. “I don’t believe I did that.”
She raised her eyes toward him. He sensed a kind of gentle acceptance in them.
“We both did it,” she said, “and it was damned nice.”
“I guess I’m not used to damned nice.”
“You should get used to it. You deserve a little.”
“How do you know what I deserve?”
“Everybody deserves a little.”
He stood and began gathering up his underwear.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ll take my things and sleep down the hall.”
“Oh, come on, we’ve done the deed. At least you could stay and cuddle. Cuddling’s the nicest part.”
He looked at her and something in the way she was looking back at him made him realize that she and Waldo had not been lovers in a long time. “Why, you’re just a big, sentimental broad.”
“You better believe it.”
A CLICKING SOUND reached down into Cardozo’s dream. For a transitional moment he was still floating through a turquoise Caribbean sea. And then he was not.
He opened one eye. A soft flutter of shadows filled the unfamiliar bedroom.
He raised his head. The window curtains were stirring in the air-conditioning. Just beyond the rise-and-fall of Leigh Baker’s sleeping body, the fluorescent hands on the bedside clock pointed to three-twenty. Beneath them the answering machine was flashing a green light.
The machine beeped. “Miss Baker.” It was a man’s voice. “This is your security service.”
“Oh, shut up,” she moaned.
“You seem to have been separated from your guard. Could you give us a call as soon as you get this message? We’re at area code 212 …”
Her hand went to the machine and killed the sound.
“What did you do?” Cardozo said. “Run away from your guard?”
“It’s a long story. I can’t stand him.” Her arm came back to bed and went around him. “Let’s go back to sleep.”
FORTY-FOUR
Friday, June 7
ZACK CAME BACK TO REALITY with a sense of exhilaration and release.
The curtains were drawn and the bedroom was half light, half dark. The bathroom door was open a generous crack and the light had been left on, and it threw a soft spill into the space beyond the canopied bed.
; Beside him Gloria Spahn was lying on her side, breathing deeply and peacefully.
He allowed his body time to take back its boundaries, then gently pulled away. He rose by swinging his legs out off the bed and putting both feet on the floor. He felt weightless. Colors seemed sharper and sounds brighter. He sensed that the world wanted to sparkle and sing if only he’d let it.
Making love is great, he thought. I’ve been making love since I was fourteen and it’s still great. There’s something about making love that catches me up no matter what kind of mood I’m in—it gets me out of myself, out of whatever paper bag I’ve sealed myself into.
“Boo!” she cried.
He jumped.
She bounded up and into the bathroom and began running the bath water and filling the tub with scents and soaps and oils and salts.
“You know what the greatest feeling in the world is?” She was kneeling on the rim of the sunken tub, her hand testing the temperature of the water beneath the foam. “A hot tub after hot sex. Nothing beats it.” She motioned him. “Come on—I’ll scrub your back.”
In the tub he said, “We could be great together.”
Gloria Spahn kissed her fingers and pressed them over Zack’s lips. “Don’t spoil it.”
He felt sudden uncertainty, and its presence was like a cold shadow. He could read no hint of her thoughts in the blank, self-satisfied beauty of her face.
The drug high was still carrying him, and his sense of her was sketchy, unfinished, as though nothing he could imagine would ever quite enclose her or confine her.
“Look,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Let’s keep the keys,” he said. “Let’s let this be our place.”
“Let me think about it,” she said.
FOR THE SAKE OF APPEARANCE Zack left the apartment first. Coming down alone in the mirrored self-service elevator, he checked his reflection, patting a dark lock of still-damp hair into place.
The elevator deposited him smoothly on the ground floor. The doorman held the front door. “Beautiful day, sir,” he said.
“You’re telling me.” Whistling, Zack stepped onto the sidewalk.
AT TEN MINUTES BEFORE MIDNIGHT Detective John Ferrara sat behind the wheel of his Toyota. He had parked on East Fifty-second Street, but he was keeping his eye on the entrance to the residential high-rise at Twenty-three Beekman Place.
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