Deadly Rich

by Edward Stewart

  No gloves.

  “Tell you what,” Bruce said. “I’ll set up the next set. Why don’t you look in the changing rooms and see if someone left a pair of gloves.”

  DICK BRAIDY OBSERVED HIMSELF in the changing-room mirror. He drew himself up to full standing height, squared his shoulders, sucked in his gut.

  He defied his reflection: “This is me, the only me I have. I am going to make something of this mess! I have proved I am capable of achievement, and I will achieve this too.”

  A space opened somewhere behind him. A warm, damp breeze drifted across from the shower next door. He turned.

  He had company.

  The towel boy had entered his cubicle without knocking. The boy was leaning sideways against the wall, the wide chest of his Bodies-PLUS T-shirt split by a vertical stripe of sweat.

  A finger of embarrassment tapped Dick Braidy’s heart. He had forgotten to lock the door, and the boy must have seen him talking to his reflection.

  The boy’s eyes were staring, bold as a fox’s, and his mouth seemed to be holding back a smile.

  “Excuse me,” Dick Braidy said, “but I’m not through with this room. I’ll only be a minute.”

  The boy eased the door shut with his foot. The latch gave a click as it caught. He slid the bolt shut.

  Dick Braidy drew in a shallow breath, quickly. He searched the boy’s eyes for some statement of purpose, but all he could see was a flat, affectless gaze.

  Dick Braidy moved to the left. The boy blocked him. He tried a move to the right and was blocked again.

  “What is it you want?”

  The boy gave him a quiet smile—a dangerous smile.

  “You’re not angry because of the other night, are you? Look, I honestly didn’t recognize you. I’m used to seeing you here, and when I saw you out of context—”

  The boy made a quick movement.

  Dick Braidy’s gaze flicked to the boy’s hand. It was holding a straight ten-inch blade.

  Dick Braidy’s hands, now in a panic, patted his pockets, but he’d left his wallet outside in his locker. He held out his empty palms. “My money is outside.” He pointed to the door. “Dinero out there. I have charge cards. American Express. Diners Club. Bueno. Muy bueno. I’ll give you anyth—”

  The boy lunged. The blade hissed through the air.

  Dick Braidy couldn’t believe this was really happening. His body and mind slipped into dream mode. The moment enveloped him in a paralyzing gelatin.

  The force of the first slash spun Dick Braidy around. An arm caught his throat from behind. His breath choked off.

  The blade opened the side of his throat, flicked out a flap of flesh. Metal drove stinging through his windpipe, digging through flesh and cartilage and artery and tendon. A bright gop of red flipped out of him onto the mirror.

  “Holy Mother of God!”

  Dick Braidy stumbled, collapsed to his knees, blinked through geysering blood and gristle. The razor scored a bull’s-eye in the bulge of his gut.

  And another.

  And another.

  Blood whooshed out of Dick Braidy with the hot stench of rust. An overpoweringly stale smell like the inside of an old car filled his nostrils.

  A million red-hot perforations went through him at once:

  “Why?” he moaned. “Why?”

  Beyond the stinging, sinking horizon of his awareness, the blade arced up and down through warm, quiet air.

  CARDOZO CAUGHT HIS PHONE on the second ring. “Cardozo.”

  “Lieutenant, it’s John Ferrara.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “Benedict Braidy’s been killed.”

  THE FLOOR OF THE CHANGING ROOM looked as if someone had spilled a two-gallon tureen of Manhattan clam chowder.

  Dick Braidy lay on his back in the middle of the spill, his legs spread. One sneakered foot rested almost casually on the built-in wooden bench. His arms were clutched to his chest, folding the shower curtain to wounds that had gashed through his once-green Lacoste shirt and his still-blue nylon jogging shorts.

  His head rested on the step of the shower stall. His eyes were still open, still huge. Standing in the doorway of the changing room, Cardozo met their silent surprise with his own wondering gaze.

  “The way we put it together,” Detective John Ferrara was saying, “Braidy left the gym floor in the middle of his workout and came back here.”

  Cardozo sniffed. The air held a sweetly brackish smell of sweat, heavily overlaid with floral room deodorizer. “Why? What did he come back here for?”

  “He was looking for weight-lifting gloves.”

  “Why didn’t you come with him?”

  “He didn’t tell me he was leaving the floor.” It had been Ferrara’s assignment to guard Dick Braidy from eight till four today. His pale brown eyes betrayed shock and guilt, as though his own negligence had thrust Dick Braidy into the path of the killer’s blade. “I was out front watching the main door. For just that little stretch of time I didn’t have him in my sight.”

  It had been Braidy’s responsibility to tell his guard where he was going; it had been his guard’s responsibility not to need to be told.

  A police photographer was taking pictures, and Cardozo stepped back to give him room. A shower was running in a far cubicle with the soft, melancholy sound of rain.

  “Who found Braidy?”

  “I did.”

  Cardozo turned. At first glance he thought the young woman had had a bad hockey accident, but then he saw that it was just white rubber wraps hugging her kneecaps.

  “Bobo Bidwell,” she said pleasantly. She had straight black hair cut long, like a schoolgirl’s, and her nose ended in a perky little upturn.

  “How’d you happen to find him?”

  “I’d finished my workout and I needed to shower and change. I was waiting here for a room, and Rick came whipping out of changing room five, so I assumed it was empty.”

  “Who’s Rick?” Cardozo said.

  “Rick Martinez,” Detective Ferrara said. “The kid that does janitorial work.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Martinez was through the front door before I even heard Miss Bidwell holler. By the time I secured the crime scene and backup arrived, he was long gone.”

  Cardozo stepped aside as two orderlies from the medical examiner’s office maneuvered their narrow stretcher past him. Inside the changing room, a brisk, redheaded young man was raking a flashlight beam beneath the bench.

  Cardozo watched the slow dance of exploring light.

  The young man pulled a small wastebasket from under the bench that appeared to have rolled or been kicked there. He shook the basket empty over a sheet of clear plastic. Soap wrappings and tissue paper floated down. A newspaper clipping hovered for an instant, like a paper glider. A three-inch cylinder of white wax plopped to the floor.

  Cardozo felt a cold hand grip his intestine. “Who runs this place?”

  Detective Ferrara led him down a corridor past the gym floor and rapped on the half-open door of a softly lit office.

  A curly-haired young man was sitting behind the desk, looking worried. He was wearing a T-shirt with the message Sexy and Dangerous, and he had the mashed face of a former boxer.

  Detective Ferrara made introductions. “Lieutenant Vince Cardozo, Bruce McGee.”

  Bruce rose to shake Cardozo’s hand.

  “Tell me about Martinez,” Cardozo said.

  “I don’t know a hell of a lot.” Bruce seemed to be suffering an overload of nervous energy that had nowhere to go except into fingertips nattering on the edge of his desk. “He’s been working here six weeks. Quiet guy. Never talked much, never bothered anyone, never seem to get bothered.”

  “You must have interviewed him when you hired him.”

  “It was basically a handshake interview for a menial position.”

  “What exactly was Rick’s job?”

  Bruce shrugged. “Keeping the gym clean, seeing that the soap and towels w
ere stocked.”

  “How long has he worked here?”

  “Since April thirtieth.”

  “What’s his home address?”

  “Haven’t got it.”

  “Where did you send his paychecks?”

  “I paid him in cash.”

  “Do you have a home phone for him?”

  “Rick doesn’t have a phone. It’s the standard undocumented-alien hard-luck story. He just arrived here from Salvador.”

  “How’d you and Rick happen to find each other?”

  “I advertised in a body-building magazine.” Bruce pulled a magazine out of a rack.

  The magazine was called Bodybuilding for You. On the cover it showed an overmuscled, overtanned man and woman posing in workout unitards. Inside were ads for vitamin supplements and workout machines, articles touting the supplements and machines, and personal ads broken down by city.

  “Can you describe Rick for me?”

  “Settle for a photograph?”

  Bruce handed Cardozo a folded, four-page newsletter—Bodies-PLUS Gazette. Page one featured a group photo captioned “Your Staff.”

  Bruce’s forefinger pointed to a smiling, dark-haired, dark-eyed young man holding a stack of clean towels.

  “That answers one question,” Cardozo said. “Why nobody recognized him from the Identi-Kit. I wouldn’t have recognized him either.”

  “That thing out on the bulletin board?” Bruce said. “That’s meant to be Rick?”

  “That was the intention.” Cardozo sighed. “Did anyone here know Rick personally?”

  Bruce scratched the scalp just above his right ear. “Rick didn’t talk too much to the staff or the clients. The guy he seemed friendliest with was Dick Braidy. That’s not going to help you much.”

  “No one else?”

  “I did see one of the clients talking to him once. A young girl. Francoise Ford.”

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE we’re talking about the same Rick.” Francoise Ford couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old. She had short blond hair and flawless skin and pale blue eyes that, at the moment, expressed shock and disbelief. “He seemed so gentle. Almost vulnerable.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  They were sitting in a small study in the Ford apartment. Young Miss Ford reached a hand out and gave the globe of the world an absentminded spin.

  “We got used to seeing each other around the gym, and we’d say hi. Then one night the owner was picking on him, and I felt sorry for him. I invited him to dinner. We talked.”

  “Did he tell you anything about himself?”

  “He said he was from El Salvador. He said his parents had been killed by government soldiers. He said he was here illegally.”

  “Did he tell you where he lived?”

  She shook her head. “We didn’t exchange addresses or phone numbers. He did say if I wanted to see his hometown, all I had to do was go to Avenue D. I don’t know if he meant he lived there.”

  “You only saw him outside the gym that one time?”

  “That’s the only time.” She was thoughtful. “He came here once though. My stepmother was giving a party. He brought me some flowers. I didn’t even get to see him. But I still have the note.”

  She left the room and returned with a small florist’s card. The message had been written in large ballpoint letters: Love, Bob De Niro.

  “Why Love, Bob De Niro?”

  “It was a joke on my stepmother.”

  “I’d like to keep this.”

  For just an instant she seemed sad. “Okay. You can keep it.”

  “What night was the party?”

  “Last Thursday.”

  FIFTY-NINE

  “THE ARTICLE’S CALLED ‘SOCIALITES in Emergency,’” Cardozo said. “We’re looking for any drafts he may have hiding in there.”

  Neat and darkly pretty and silent, Laurie Bonasera was seated in front of Benedict Braidy’s computer, punching commands into the keyboard. She had spent a quarter hour at the same C prompt on the terminal, digging for some combination of keys that would snap the data free of the hard disk and bring it up on the screen.

  “I’m not getting any files named socialite or social anything,” she said. “You don’t happen to know if Braidy had some system for naming his files?”

  “All I know is, he handled that computer the way a Jersey driver handles a car in Manhattan. He told me he was always losing files.”

  Laurie shook her head. “He was obviously doing a lot wrong. Either he didn’t know how or he didn’t want to bother to create directories. All his files are in the root directory.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything to me—I’m not computer-literate.”

  “It’s as though he were putting all the numbers in his phone book under the letter A. He’s got a thousand files in the root directory on an eighty-meg hard disk, and that’s way beyond what the disk-operating system can cope with. Added to which …”

  Laurie’s shoulders moved forward beneath her blue cotton print blouse. She squinted a moment at the information on the screen.

  “Let’s run check-disk and just see.”

  Her hands moved like a pianist’s, fingers tapping a command into the keyboard. “I have a hunch he forgot to save files.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “After he wrote something he left it on the screen and turned the power off. Anything on the screen when you close down is lost. What he should have done was press the Save key.”

  “So how did he save things?”

  “He didn’t always save them on the disk. He printed them out. He was way underutilizing his system.”

  Judging by the sounds the computer had started making, something was snapping and bursting inside. Then there was silence, and a series of amber characters floated up from the bottom of the screen.

  “He’s got over three hundred lost files,” Laurie said. “Plus a quarter of his disk space is broken chains.”

  “What’s a broken chain?”

  “The program writes on the nearest available space, which may be anywhere on the disk. Files wind up hopping all over the place. The program can’t track them. What started happening was, each new file went into the space of the last file he lost, but if the new file was shorter than the lost file, a little of the old file was left on the disk. So there’s a little bit of everything he ever wrote still on the disk.”

  “Then maybe we can find some of ‘Socialites in Emergency.’”

  “I asked the computer very politely if it had any kind of socialites in its directory. It doesn’t.”

  The computer made a sound like seeds jumping inside a maraca.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Laurie said. “This is strange. He’s got one subdirectory.”

  “Why’s that strange?”

  “If he could make one, he could have made a dozen and saved his files—and his sanity.”

  A river of amber print flowed across the screen.

  Laurie pushed two keys and the river widened into a screen-filling ocean.

  She did not speak. She sat frowning at the screen. A strand of wavy dark hair fell over her forehead, and she let it lie there. She kept pushing the key with the downward-pointing arrow, and each time the glowing amber print edged upward a line at a time.

  “He couldn’t have made this directory himself. It’s got to be a default command.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s something the computer’s programmed to do unless you specifically tell it not to. This directory is too neat to be his. Whoever installed the computer put this command in. What I think it is—and this would make sense with the kind of computer operator he was—it’s a backup command. It automatically saves the files before he can lose them. But it saves them under a different name, because you can’t have two files with the same name.”

  “What name does it use?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out …”

  The fingers began moving again, at fir
st doubtfully and then picking up confidence till they were jumping over the keys.

  And then three columns of print froze on the screen.

  “Joseph, Mary, and Mickey Mouse.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  There was a strained look on her face. “The name of the backup is the date and hour and minute the file was created.”

  “The file we’re looking for would have been written six years ago, shortly after May sixth.”

  She sent information with rapid, clicking fingers into the keyboard. A moment later a new directory of files came up on the screen.

  “Hey! It’s going to work!” She pushed a button and the printer clattered to life.

  Cardozo strolled into the living room. He felt he was standing on the carefully constructed stage set of someone else’s life.

  Silver-framed photographs artfully scattered on tabletops pictured Benedict Braidy and various members in good standing of the international jet set. The lowest shelf of the bookcase held a set of untitled leather-bound albums.

  Cardozo crouched down and opened one. He turned through page after page of photos of society and entertainment and finance celebrities. Celebrities walking, dancing, eating. Celebrities swimming, goofing for the camera, kissing. Twelve volumes of celebrities of the last thirty years.

  There was a nagging wrongness about the photos. The makeup was too heavy, the expressions exaggerated, every mood was stretched to a grimace and held for the camera. He didn’t see in these people’s faces what he saw in the faces of his co-workers or most of the people in the streets of New York—the simple daily pleasure in living.

  And he didn’t see Benedict Braidy. Except in one photo—taken in the apartment, where Judy Garland was offering a poorly rolled joint to Ava Gardner, and there, half of him dimly visible in the mirror, Benedict Braidy was holding a camera.

  And it dawned on Cardozo. Braidy wasn’t in the pictures, because he’d taken them all. Here was a man who had never been present for his own life, who had always stood behind a lens, clicking away like a tourist, never quite believing any of it was real, needing photographic proof that he had been part of it, that he had lived Technicolor friendships with the celebrities of his time.

  Cardozo came to the photographs of Leigh Baker.