She pushed past him into the lobby.
Jasmin Hakim was waiting on one of the sofas. Her long dark hair and pale, ivory-skinned face could have been taken from a Victorian cameo. She looks so much like Nita, Leigh thought.
The girl looked at Leigh as she passed.
“Jimmy,” Leigh heard her say. “I missed you.”
“Me too,” she heard Delancey say.
A knot twisted in Leigh’s stomach. She hurried into the street.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Sunday, June 16
LEIGH KNOCKED ON THE open door. “Am I interrupting?”
Vince Cardozo was sitting in his shirtsleeves, frowning at a photograph. He looked up and turned the photograph over. “Please,” he said, rising, “come in and interrupt.”
He moved a stack of documents from a chair to the floor.
She sat. “I’m sorry I bothered you yesterday.”
“You didn’t bother me. I’m sorry I was grumpy.”
“You weren’t grumpy.”
“I guess that establishes that we both have perfect manners.” He was watching her with an odd sort of half smile, and she couldn’t tell if he was glad to see her or not. “Coffee?” he offered.
“I can only stay a minute.”
“Fake sugar and fake milk, right?”
While he was out of the cubicle she turned over the photograph he had been studying. She recognized Gloria Spahn’s corpse. She winced and laid the photo back on the desk, facedown.
Cardozo came back. He closed the door. She accepted a styrofoam cup. She sipped. “Not bad,” she said. “Better than last time.”
“But you didn’t come here for our famous coffee.” Cardozo dropped back into his seat.
“I saw Jim Delancey yesterday.”
Vince Cardozo’s face seemed to crumple. “Yesterday.”
She nodded. “I was standing closer to him than you and I are now. The expression on his face told me everything.” Her voice began edging up. “Vince, it’s him. He’s the one.”
For a moment Vince Cardozo didn’t speak or react in any way. “Where did this happen?”
“In the elevator in his building.”
“What were you doing there?”
“You said he was home the night Gloria was killed. I was afraid … you weren’t going to watch him anymore.”
“So you decided to help me out and keep an eye on him?”
Even with the door shut noise poured in from the squad room. The consensus in there seemed to be, Why talk when you can yell. Telephones were jangling. Someone was slamming through metal cabinet drawers, and each slam was like thunder.
“Delancey has a breaking-and-entering record.” Leigh sat forward in the metal chair. “He’s broken into dozens of girls’ apartments. He’s stolen valuables and pawned them. You must know that—it all came out in the trial.”
Cardozo’s eyes flicked up. “Excuse me. We seem to be talking different time frames. I’m discussing now, not four years ago.”
“So am I. Sorella Chappell has a studio in Jim Delancey’s building. It connects to the building next door. She wasn’t home Thursday night. He could have broken into her apartment and gone out through the other building.”
Cardozo watched her levelly. He sighed.
“That’s how he did it! Why can’t you believe me? I’m not crazy and I’m not lying to you!”
“But you do hate Jim Delancey.”
She didn’t bother to deny it. “You don’t have to take my word for it—go look at the apartment.”
Cardozo picked up his pen. “What’s the apartment number?”
“Sixteen. Sorella Chappell. You have a man guarding her right now. At least you say you do.”
TWO MINUTES AFTER LEIGH BAKER had gone there was another knock on Cardozo’s door. He turned.
Ellie Siegel stood in the doorway. She had a smile like a twirling lariat. “And how’s Miss Silver Screen?”
“Ellie, I’m sorry. I’m going to have to take back two of the men I gave you.”
“Indian-giver. Why?”
“Looks like Delancey’s in the running again. We may have to put back the round-the-clock tail.”
FIFTY-EIGHT
Monday, June 17
TORI STEPPED OUT OF the cab. The shadow that hovered behind the glass-paneled door leapt forward. The door swung inward.
“Good morning, Chuck.” She zipped past the doorman into the air-conditioned lobby.
“G’morning, Miss Sandberg,” he called out behind her. “Are you back?”
Not breaking stride, she pondered the implications of that particular greeting. Had Zack told the staff, she’d moved out? “That’s right, Chuck. I’m back.”
Her forefinger, riding through space two feet ahead of her, connected with the elevator button. The door opened. Inside the mahogany-paneled cabin the air smelled sweet, for fresh anemones had been placed in the decorative wall brackets. She pressed the button for eighteen.
As the elevator rose she gave herself a last-minute look-over in the little mirror. She saw dark circles under her eyes and a smile that did not disguise a thing. Not the best face for greeting your sexist-capitalist lunk of a lover and telling him, Surprise, darling, I’ve thought it over and I’m back.
She opened her compact and did a quick cover-up.
The elevator door opened. She stepped into the little foyer outside the apartment.
She was gripped by an upsurge of affection for the Regency table and the Jasper Johns signed litho hanging above it, for the peach-upholstered banquette that matched the stripes in the hand-blocked wallpaper.
She took the door key out of her purse.
Until eleven forty-eight that morning everything in her life was solid and brick-simple. But something funny happened on the way to eleven forty-nine.
The lock gave a click of refusal. The key wouldn’t turn clockwise. It wouldn’t turn counterclockwise.
She couldn’t believe that her fingers and wrist had forgotten how to turn this key in this lock. Something here felt like the essence of totally off.
She examined the other four keys on her chain. She tried each of them in turn. None of them would so much as slide into the lock.
It came to her that she could die of old age trying to get one of these keys to do what obviously none of them were going to. Zack had changed the lock. She had to smile. What a petulant little boy!
She leaned an ear against the door. A phone was ringing inside the apartment. She heard the fast slaps of the Guatemalan maid’s sandals, one side of a muffled conversation.
She pushed the doorbell. She fixed an agreeable, relaxed expression securely in place.
The door opened and the maid, with one fist raised to her mouth, was staring at Tori in white-knuckled disbelief.
“I’m not a ghost, Josefina.” Tori entered the apartment. She let its familiarity flow around her. “Did Mr. Morrow change the lock?”
Josefina nodded.
“Wait till I talk to that idiot. Where is he?”
Josefina just stood there, twisting a dust rag in both hands. “They went to TriBeCa.”
“They, Josefina? Who’s they?”
The maid burst into tears. She pointed to the copy of that morning’s Trib that lay on the hall table. “Society page,” she said, sobbing.
Tori opened the paper. A photo leapt up at her. She felt as though a revolver had been fired inside her brain. The picture showed a grinning Zack with both arms around a grinning Gabrielle MacAdam.
Beneath the picture, Dick Braidy’s gossip column burbled:
The ultraprivate ceremony takes place this morning at ten sharp at Robert De Niro’s ultra-in and ultra-now TriBeCa Grill. It is all very hush-hush and very spur-of-the-moment, but the buzz is Hizzoner the Mayor and the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs will serve as witnesses. The newlyweds will host a little reception Friday for 200 close friends at the Jeu de Paume at Le Cercle.
But all is not unalloyed me
rriment in Gotham’s fair city. For, as Gilbert and Sullivan so presciently remarked a century ago …
WHEN CARDOZO OPENED the door, the air in his cubicle was the temperature of a car that had been parked all day in the sun with the windows up.
He punched a button on the air conditioner, and the compressor labored to life, pulling down the wattage in the desk lamp, kicking out a cycle of gasps and clanks.
He sat at his desk and looked through his phone messages. Three were from relatives of homicide victims whose cases were still, technically, on-going, and these would be calls for hand-holding and reassurance.
The fourth was a Chinese restaurant flyer with an order-out number; on the back, in Monteleone’s handwriting, were the words:
11:20 A.M. Cassandra called, says Hi.
Cardozo frowned. He didn’t know any Cassandra. The message had obviously come to the wrong extension. He crumpled it and tossed it into the wastebasket.
He let his eye roam across the paper that had piled up on his desk: white and pink and yellow color-coded flash reports, interim orders, multiple orders.
He reached for the freshest-looking mound. Most of it was interdepartmental b.s.—clearance needed on an order to print flyers, notice of triplicate missing on a form, mayor’s office for films wanting a lieutenant to vet a script.
Ellie Siegel knocked on the door. “Have you read Benedict Braidy’s column?”
“Not today. Am I missing something?”
“Very definitely.” She handed him that morning’s Trib, folded open to “Dick Sez.”
“Enjoy.”
“Thanks, Ellie.” Cardozo leaned back in his swivel chair and read the paragraphs that Ellie had circled in red:
But all is not unalloyed merriment in Gotham’s fair city. For, as Gilbert and Sullivan so presciently remarked a century ago, things are seldom what they seem. Case in point:
Kristi Blackwell, editor of Fanfare Magazine, has long presented herself as a crusader. But in fact she is a hired gun, peddling slick disinformation. Query: in whose employ is our fair lady of the terrible swift red pencil?
To cite only the most flagrant abuses, Blackwell has published:
(1) an article falsely attributing the paternity of Jean Seberg’s still-born child to a leader of the Black Panthers. The article, printed as a favor to the FBI, triggered Miss Seberg’s suicide.
(2) an article alleging that socialite-suicide Anne Woodward was already married at the time of her marriage to William Woodward. The charge was false, as Truman Capote, who had first launched it, confessed on his deathbed. Kristi Blackwell detested the Woodwards for blackballing her from the co-op at 820 Fifth Avenue.
(3) an article maintaining the existence of a second syringe in the 1987 Thoroughbred-doping scandal that cost Rex Imperator his Triple Crown.
(4) an article detailing Princess Caroline of Monaco’s alleged inhumane treatment of palace animals; a leak from the office of an ambitious Monegasque prosecutor (and financial partner of Ms. Blackwell), the article was intended to bolster his political career and was never substantiated.
(5) For reasons known only to her baroque brain, Blackwell heavily cut my article “Socialites in Emergency,” suppressing all mention of a lawsuit against Lexington Hospital.
(6) Most painful of all to me personally, Blackwell published an article that served as the basis for forged evidence in the trial of my daughter’s murderer. I will discuss this case in detail in tomorrow’s column.
A chain reaction of thoughts went off in Cardozo’s head: So Nita Kohler has been promoted to daughter—or has Dick Braidy promoted himself to father? I wonder what Leigh Baker would have to say about that?
The thought of Leigh Baker reminded him of the movie they had watched on the VCR. She’d played a character named Cassandra.
Which, he realized, was the name on the phone message.
He retrieved the restaurant flyer from the wastebasket. He was carefully flattening it out when the phone rang. “Cardozo.”
“Hi, Vince, Rad Rheinhardt. Surprise, surprise.”
“Read it to me.”
“‘Sam’s one itch is your big breeches.’”
Cardozo wrote quickly. “Go on.”
“‘Rags to riches take three stitches fit for bitches.’ And he signs himself ‘Kisses, Society Sam.’ He misspells breeches—b-r-i-t-c-h-e-s. It’s hard to tell if Sam’s being ignorant or clever. He spells to with a w and for with a u—like numbers. I guess that could be clever. It gives you one, two, three, four. I’m sending it up.”
“Thanks, Rad.” Cardozo hung up and stared a moment at his scribbling, then x’ed out to and for and wrote in two and four. He pondered ‘rags two riches’ and ‘fit four bitches’ and then he decided he’d rather ponder Leigh Baker’s little message on the back of the Chinese-restaurant flyer.
Cassandra called, says Hi.
He smiled for ten seconds or so, feeling an odd delight, feeling odd that there was anything left on earth he could still feel odd delight about.
Then he neatly ripped away the parts of the menu that were not message. He folded the rest and slipped it into his wallet.
“TELL ME EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT,” Zack Morrow said.
“Tell Dick Braidy to retract today’s column,” Kristi Blackwell said. “Kill any follow-up column that accuses me of journalistic wrongdoing. He can go after my wardrobe or my love life with a machete, for all I care—but I won’t have my work slandered.”
Zack shook his head. “That’s prior restraint, and we don’t do it in this country. This isn’t Great Britain.”
They were sitting at table four at Le Cercle, Kristi’s regular table. Noise filled the room like a hissing vapor—dozens of voices all trying to be heard at once, silverware clacking against china.
“Hold it, hold it.” The third person at the table raised two hands, gesturing for calm. His name was Langford Jennings, Lang for short, and he had blond Establishment good looks and an educated drawl that—to many people’s way of thinking—more than qualified him to be a lawyer. Kristi Blackwell suspected that Lang Jennings was the kind of man who put on a three-piece business suit to take the garbage out.
“Are we determined to go the legal route?” At that moment Lang had the smiling, secret look of a man listening to the waves of his own private lake lap against his own private shore. “Why not settle this here, at this table?”
“I want a retraction,” Kristi said.
“Unless a court finds against Braidy,” Zack said, “I can’t compel him to retract. My contract with him is the same as Dizey’s, and it’s specific on that point.”
“Then you retract,” Kristi said.
“Me? I didn’t write it.”
“You published it. And what about the next column? He says I forged evidence.”
“He doesn’t say that,” Zack said. “Read what he wrote. He says maybe he’s going to say it.”
Lang took another forkful of Linzer torte. “Kristi, you’re a public figure. So the issue becomes not malice, which for all I know Dick Braidy is full of, but falsehood.”
The mouthful of espresso that Kristi had been about to swallow went down in a gulp instead.
“Tell me, Kristi,” Zack said. “Would Dick Braidy be lying if he came right out and said you forged evidence? Do you think a jury would find for him or for you?”
Kristi sat twisting her wedding ring. She felt something end there, with her silence.
“I suggest a compromise,” Lang said, “a gentleman’s agreement. Kristi will forgo the retraction, and Zack will print no further statements, impugning her journalistic ethics.”
“It’s going to get me in trouble with Dick.” Zack shrugged. “But I’ll do my best.” He extended a hand across the table.
Kristi didn’t move.
“Come on, Kristi. Zack just got married. He left his bride to meet with you. The least you can do is shake his hand. As a wedding present.”
After a moment Kristi reached ac
ross the table and took Zack’s hand.
“Caught in the act, I see.” Dick Braidy stood in the aisle, holding his head abnormally high under a doughnut-shaped helmet of gray-blond hair. “Do I spy a nonaggression pact between my two publishers?”
“Hello, Dick,” Zack said. “Have a good lunch?”
“Excellent, thank you. And congratulations.” Dick Braidy leaned forward and planted a kiss embarrassingly near Zack’s mouth. “I’ve known Gaby forever and I just love, love, love her, and I wish you both all the happiness in the world.”
The speech struck Kristi as perfunctory and more than a little insincere. It struck her too that Dick Braidy’s appearance had radically changed. He’d had his hair rinsed a sort of yellowy blond, like a see-through varnish. But the change went deeper. There was sadness in him now, and—especially when he looked at her—a sort of disgust.
“I don’t believe we’ve met.” Lang rose from his chair. “I’m Langford Jennings, Ms. Blackwell’s attorney.”
“Dick Braidy. It’s a pleasure.” Dick Braidy took the hand that Lang offered him. “I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a good deal of each other.” He slid a glance toward Kristi.
“Won’t you join us?” Lang said.
Dick Braidy thrust a wrist out of his sleeve and frowned at his watch. “Sorry—I’ve got a date with my trainer.”
“LET’S TRY A LIGHT SET to warm up.” Bruce McGee, the owner and top trainer of Bodies-PLUS, placed a barbell in Dick Braidy’s hands.
Dick Braidy couldn’t concentrate. The barbell crashed immediately to the floor. He felt like a fool. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong.”
But he knew, all right. What was wrong was Zack Morrow not inviting him to the wedding. What was wrong was Zack Morrow lunching and schmoozing with that back-stabbing bitch Kristi Blackwell in full view of three dozen of the fastest and most important mouths in Manhattan. “I just can’t seem to grip it.”
His trainer was watching him curiously. “That’s okay. Your hands are slippery. We’ll find you some weight-lifting gloves.”
Dick Braidy followed Bruce to the wall rack where the gloves were supposed to be kept.
Deadly Rich Page 48
