There she was, carefully centered on the page, standing with melancholy elegance in hunting clothes outside a French chateau. There she was, dashing in a low-cut, jeweled evening dress across a mobbed sidewalk into the Academy Awards, a valiant smile making tiny lines in her face. There she was, curtseying to the Queen of England and looking as if she wished she had something to grip for support; and there in the front of the crowd, holding a miniature camera, was Dick Braidy.
Cardozo looked for some sign that Braidy had loved Baker or that she had loved him, that their marriage had been anything more than the fleeting intersection of two publicity campaigns. He didn’t see it.
The thirteenth and last album held an almost helter-skelter collection of faded, crumbling snapshots and clippings. Many had come loose from their white corner moorings.
Cardozo considered a barefoot six-year-old girl with pigtails and smudged cheeks, fists clenching the skirt of her checkered dress. She stood beside a ramshackle porch, staring with torn-boyish defiance into the camera.
Good God, Cardozo realized. It was a childhood snapshot of Assistant Deputy Commissioner Bridget Braidy.
And here was a boy of eight or so, in patched knickers, hugging a Labrador. Cardozo recognized Dick Braidy—superstar gossip-to-be.
A snapshot of Bridget’s first communion. She was standing outside the church, wearing a clean white dress, and her face was scrubbed.
Dick’s first communion—same church. A white jacket, dark trousers, dark necktie, shined shoes.
On and on the collection went: prayer cards, Mass cards, funeral announcements, obituaries of Braidys clipped from small-town newspapers, the yellowed title page of a Baltimore Catechism, ripped from its binding, that bore the successive inscriptions John Patrick Braidy, Phillip Michael Braidy, Benedict O’Houlihan Braidy.
Page after page of the same four grim faces—mother and father and the two kids—gathered around picnic tables, dining tables, Christmas trees, Model-T’s, wood shacks in the country, brick-and-concrete shacks in the city.
As Cardozo turned the pages he felt Braidy’s wistfulness and a yearning almost too deep to give voice to: It was as though the people in these photos spoke to him in tones low, flat, and weary: Get rich! Get famous! Above all, get out!
In the next room the printer finally stopped clattering.
Laurie stood in the doorway, holding a twenty-eight-page accordion-fold list of dates and times. “The nearest he’s got to May sixth six years ago is May seventh, ten-forty A.M.”
“Let’s give it a try,” Cardozo said.
Laurie sat down at the terminal, cleared the screen, and punched in an instruction. The message One Moment Please flashed, and ten seconds later a page of amber print scrolled up the screen.
“He’s got a title on this,” she said, leaning forward in the seat. “‘Society Goes to Emergency.’”
“That’s it.”
“Want to print it?”
“Please.”
Four minutes later Cardozo sat on Dick Braidy’s bird-chintz sofa, comparing the printout of “Socialites” with the version published in Fanfare Magazine. With a red Magic Marker he drew wavy lines alongside passages that had been cut from the magazine version. He found four.
At the nurse’s window—which is made, ominously, of steel-mesh-reinforced safety glass—Dizey exchanges a few to-the-point words with the triage nurse, whose grim face would have been at home on Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities.
“My name is Dizey Duke. My friends and I are with Oona Aldrich, who is an annual benefactor of this hospital. Mrs. Aldrich is choking and requires immediate attention.”
Madame Defarge snaps to. She makes one phone call, and seconds later the duty doctor opens a door and invites our party into Emergency.
Three pages later:
In the most crowded corridor of the Emergency Room, a frail, malnourished-looking dusky-skinned young woman lies feverish on a gurney. Sweat has matted her thin cotton dress to her body, and the sheet wrapped around her stomach and legs is becoming blood-soaked.
And on the next-to-last page:
Chairs are in short supply, but miraculously three are conjured up for our group. A cheerful young nurse who has the face of a fashion model offers us coffee.
“You’d better watch those pearls,” the nurse advises Dizey, referring to her two-strand necklace. “Security isn’t what it should be in here—we’re having a lot of thefts.” The nurse adds, “None of us feel safe wearing any jewelry here anymore.”
In fact, I subsequently learned from a lawyer for Lexington Hospital that the free-wheeling chaos around the Emergency Room this very night was later to result in a law suit against the hospital.
Both drafts ended jauntily:
Thirty-five minutes later the doctor pronounces Oona able to breathe again without assistance.
“That’s news to me,” quips Oona. “If I’m breathing so well, why is my face still green?”
“Blue, darling,” interjects Avalon, “your face is blue.”
“I hope that’s a step up from green,” says Oona.
“You’ll be pink in no time,” the doctor promises.
But Braidy’s original continued with a sort of postscript:
Oona, who learned Spanish as a frequent child visitor to Ernest Hemingway’s home outside Havana, the legendary Finca Vigia, pauses and chats with Señorita in the gurney as though the two of them were oldest of chums.
Oona turns to the doctor. “I hope you realize that this young lady is having a baby,” she informs him.
“Omigod,” cries the doctor, blushing a shade that can only be called redder-than-red, “is that what embarazada means?”
Cardozo laid the sheets down on the sofa beside him. He stood, stretched, and tried to put his impressions together.
The way the magazine had edited the piece, no one but Oona ever got inside Emergency; everything in the article took place in the waiting room outside.
But in Braidy’s draft everything after the triage nurse took place inside the Emergency Room. Visitors’ chairs were set up in a crowded corridor. A woman lay on a gurney bleeding while the doctor who should have been tending her chatted up the celebrities, and nurses brought coffee and stopped by to get autographs.
And—most interesting of all—someone had sued the hospital because of conditions in the Emergency Room that night.
“It’s getting pretty late,” Laurie said, “Do you need me for anything else?”
Cardozo started. He had forgotten she was there. “No, thanks. I think I’ve got it all.”
She stood shifting weight self-consciously, playing with her wedding ring. “My husband’s expecting me to cook dinner.”
“Better not keep him waiting. Thanks for your help. I appreciate it.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.” Cardozo crouched down to open a cabinet beneath one of the bookcases. Inside, he found a large cardboard box with a delivery ticket from d’Agostino’s.
Down the hallway he heard Laurie close the front door behind her.
He opened the box. Overpacked papers sprang out like a Jack-in-the-box. The top-most layers were social notes, mostly thank-you’s penned on crested folds of pastel stationery. There was a press kit from a firm of publicists—Robbie Danzig and Associates—that contained a glossy, smiling photo of Braidy, impeccable in a blazer and regimental tie. An accompanying biography—for immediate release!—suggested by omission that he’d been born in Hollywood.
There were dozens of letters from Danzig—Dick, here is list of names and brand-names to mention favorably in your writing. And another: Dick, I can get you on the Today Show, but you must have hard, fresh, inside dish on Nita’s murder.
Cardozo kept digging.
He found pages recording dinner-party politics: who sat where, who switched place cards. There were profiles of outer-circuit celebrities: the caterer of the moment, the society whore of the moment, the insider-novelist of the m
oment.
Then there were what seemed to be proposals for magazine articles:
Does New York really need two Jeanie Vanderbilts?
The enduring glamour of Madonna—she’s cheap, she’s trashy, she’s divine.
Dinner with Oscar and Annette de la Renta is a peak experience.
Cardozo had to smile when he came across a page that stated, Annie MacAdam’s parties are tax deductions, full of people that gossip columnists like to call glittery and swank. Annie has claimed successfully in tax court that the only way to sell an eight-million-dollar apartment is to get eighty “marvelous people” drunk at a “perfect dinner.”
A page that began Ronald ditched Geraldine, called her a lousy lay at the dinner Mitzi Astor gave for Raquel Welch’s book carried the red-inked notation: Who let that story out of the cage? On another page the red ink remarked, The market in glamour would crash if this got published, and Cardozo concluded that the red felt-tip belonged to Braidy’s editor, Kristi Blackwell.
He came to a wad of word-processed sheets that had been paper-clipped together with a headline and subheading torn from a slick-papered magazine: “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte”: Fanfare Magazine takes you inside the gritty, glittering world of a murdered girl.
Intrigued by the quantity of red X’s and cross-outs on the pages, Cardozo leafed through them. On the third page the red pen had underlined: Among her friends Nita numbered dozens of society and show-business celebrities that you and I only dream about. It had written in the margin, Enlarge on this, s.v.p.
It dawned on Cardozo that this was Braidy’s article on the murder of his ex-wife’s daughter.
His eye slowed at red brackets around a quote: “I think somebody ought to be doing what I’m doing, caring for these people,” Nita was fond of saying. “So I’m doing it.”
In the margin came the bold red query: Do our readers honestly need to know the day-by-day boreena details of a socialite spending her summer vacation playing Lady Bountiful at a coke ’n crack detox? We just had a piece on Covenant House, and nobody believes these joints are legit anymore. Huge red X’s crossed out enormous chunks of the next dozen pages.
Cardozo felt a stab of empathy for Braidy: he had obviously believed in this piece and tried to give it some depth, but his editor had cut everything but the glitz.
On the final page the marginal exclamation FAB! caught Cardozo’s eye. Red arrows pointed to red brackets around three lines of text: Hours after Nita’s death hit the wires, calls were pouring in, along with notes, flowers, and condolences from the likes of Andy Warhol, Joan Bennett, and Bette Davis.
The pen wanted to know, Can we get reprint rights to Davis or Warhol condolences?
There was a click. In the zone of emptiness behind Cardozo something moved. He turned. Beyond the windows twilight was rapidly fading to the deep purple of a Manhattan summer night. The apartment had grown dark.
“Laurie?” he called. “Forget something?”
A woman’s voice spoke from the shadow. “No … it’s me. The doorman let me in.”
He switched on a lamp,
Leigh Baker pulled back, blinking in the sudden light. “Do you mind my being here?” She took an unsteady step into the room. “I wanted to see the place one last time—and say goodbye.”
She looked the way a woman looks when she’s stopped giving a damn: hair disheveled, face furrowed, mascara clotted. The clothes could have been something that had fallen on her when she’d opened a closet and walked in with her eyes shut.
“What’s happened to you?” he said.
“I guess I’m hysterical.”
He could smell Scotch hanging like a vapor in the air in front of her.
“Come on.” He took her gently by the elbow. “Let’s get you home.”
She pulled away. “No. I have to show you something.”
He followed her into the bedroom. The bed was still unmade, and Cardozo was surprised to see that Dick Braidy had slept in a hospital bed with buttons and cranks for raising and lowering it in sections, and bird-and-flower-print covers for disguising the steel-barred head and footboard.
Over the chest of drawers a mirror with an elaborately carved frame loomed like something from a stage set, more for self-congratulation, he sensed, than simple self-acceptance. Two dozen invitations, most of them engraved, had been stuffed into the frame.
Leigh Baker went to the bookcase. Starting at the top shelf, she ran her finger along the bindings. She was searching for something, and the search seemed to be giving her trouble.
There was a thump. She hadn’t quite lowered herself and she hadn’t quite collapsed, but somehow she had ended up sitting on the floor. She squinted at the bottom shelf, pulled out two books and punched them back, and finally held out a small leather-bound volume.
He helped her back to her feet.
Her hands were now in rapid motion, sifting through pages. “Here.”
She handed him the book. He recognized Nita Kohler’s diary and the page that ended sex to end all sex.
“I’ve already seen this.”
“No, you haven’t. Dick was the only one who saw it. Turn the page.”
Cardozo turned the page. Is there anything else that really matters in this life?
For Cardozo, the moment had a glassy, slowed-down quality.
“You see?” she said. “We were both wrong. It’s not a five-word coincidence—it’s a nine-word coincidence.”
He turned back and counted the words: sex to end all sex is there anything else.
“You’re right.” A stop light flashed in his mind. You could make a coincidence out of five words, but you’d have a hard time doing it with nine.
“That poor, lonely, harmless, sweet, silly guy.” She was playing with a vase of dried flowers that stood neatly centered on an inlaid mahogany chess table. “He was so proud when Architectural Digest photographed this place. They had to use a wide-angle lens to make it look larger.” She turned suddenly. “Do I sound hysterical to you?”
“Not especially.”
“Funny. I sound hysterical to me.”
He held out his hand. “Say good-bye and let’s go.”
Riding down in the elevator, she studied her reflection in the mirror. She shook her head sorrowfully. “Not looking good.”
Cardozo held the elevator door on the ground floor. He offered his arm.
The doorman opened the street door for them and touched a finger to the brim of his cap. A chorus of shouts rose and a mob of reporters came at them in a wave.
“Hey, Leigh, how are you taking it?”
“Did you see the body?”
Dusk disintegrated into retina-ripping explosions of flashbulbs. A reporter’s microphone slammed Leigh on the shoulder. “Do you have a statement?”
“Cut it out!” Cardozo shouted. “Leave the lady alone!” Brandishing his police shield at them, he pulled her through the crowd to his parked Honda.
Inside the car Leigh drew in a shuddering breath and seemed to forget to let it out. “I guess I’m news again. Sorry.”
Cardozo steered the car into west-bound traffic. “Where to? Waldo’s place?”
“No.”
“Have you got a place of your own?”
“I can’t go there, it’s sublet.”
“Do you want to go to a hotel?”
“Vince—can I talk to you about something that’s bothering me?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve spent the whole day drunk. I don’t want to be alone, and I don’t want to be with Waldo. If I don’t have some kind of a private, gentle moment, I have a scary premonition that this bender’s going to last a long, long time. Would it be asking too much for you to take me to your place?”
“You wouldn’t have much chance for a private moment at my place. I’m a family man. A single parent. I live with my teenage daughter.”
She looked at him. He could have sworn her gaze was suddenly sober.
“Do you and Terri have a
sofa?”
He was surprised she remembered his daughter’s name. “Doesn’t everybody have a sofa?”
“Okay, I’m sorry.” She pulled a Kleenex from her purse and bunched it to her nose and sniffled. “It was a dumb, pushy idea. Drop me off at any hotel that takes American Express.”
The choice was to keep heading west and drop her at a hotel, or turn south on Lexington and take her to his place. There was no exact instant when he was aware of making up his mind. Lexington was coming up, and then it was there in front of him, and then he signaled a left-hand turn.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s not such a dumb idea.”
SIXTY
CARDOZO SWUNG THE APARTMENT DOOR open. “Anyone home?”
“Me,” Terri called from the living room.
“We have a houseguest.”
“You’re joking.” Terri came into the hallway. She saw Leigh and the smile fell off her face.
Cardozo made introductions.
“Sorry to bust in on you,” Leigh said. “Your dad’s being a Good Samaritan.”
“And rescuing you from those cruddy reporters.” Terri made a face.
“More from myself, I’m afraid.”
“How did you know about the reporters?” Cardozo said.
“They had a news break on TV just a minute ago. You both looked great.” Terri’s glance went curiously from Cardozo to Leigh and then, shrewd now, back to her father. “Anyone need anything to drink?”
“How about two gallons of black coffee?” Leigh said.
“Settle for one?”
“I’d settle for a cup.”
“I’ll make the coffee,” Cardozo said. “You two get acquainted, and when I come back, I hope one of you will explain the other to me.”
Terri put a hand on her hip and stared at him. “Ha ha.”
“Seriously,” he said.
Two minutes later Terri joined him in the kitchen. “Hold the coffee. She fell asleep on the sofa.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.” Terri came and hugged him. “I wish I’d taped you on TV.”
“Come on, give me a break. All I did was walk a famous lady through a hostile crowd so she could have her breakdown in private.”
Deadly Rich Page 50
