“I’m not the man to ask about pubic lice, Lou. It’s outside my competence.”
“After five weeks of this home remedy Sam’s got to have a very raw groin. I’d frankly expect him to be too sensitive to allow himself to be fellated.”
“Who knows. Maybe he’s got nerves of steel.”
“I’m surprised whole blood isn’t showing up in the victims’ saliva. But what the hell, tomorrow is always another day.”
Cardozo’s stomach felt hollow at the thought. “Please, Lou, don’t remind me.”
“Oh, Vince. He started on a new box of Saffire Shabbes candles.”
Cardozo broke the connection and dialed Dan Hippolito’s number.
“Make it official for me, Dan—did Sam kill Braidy?”
“Same knife, same pattern of cuts. It’s Sam, all right.”
CARDOZO WENT TO THE LITTLE PANTRY off the squad room to get himself some coffee. The pot was almost empty, which meant someone in the squad had been shirking: it was the responsibility of the detective who took the last cup to start another pot.
There were no fresh filters in the cabinet, so Cardozo opened the Mr. Coffee and lifted out the used filter and emptied the wet grounds into the wastepaper basket.
He reinserted the filter, careful not to rip it, and searched the cabinet till he found the can of ground coffee. He tapped a flow into the used filter and then took the pot to the men’s room to get water.
The air smelled of overkill levels of camphor and ammonia. A uniformed black cop had planted himself beside the urinals. He was staring hard at the ceiling, whistling atonally, and his right hand was swinging a nightstick from its leather thong. His left hand was cuffed to a small, Middle Eastern-looking man in a sweat-stained khaki nylon shirt who was taking a leak.
Carl Malloy was sitting on the ledge by the raised window, smoking a cigarette and staring moodily at the cinderblock wall across the alley. “Heard you were doing computer work over at Dick Braidy’s apartment,” he said.
Cardozo crossed to the sink and turned on the hot water so it ran hard into the pot. “Laurie Bonasera did the work. I did the watching.”
Malloy slid down from the ledge and came over to the sink. He stared at himself in the mirror and adjusted a graying forelock. “So how is she with a computer?”
Cardozo managed to blast the inside of the pot free of most of this year’s cooked-on residue, but he wasn’t sure about last year’s. “Bonasera’s a miracle worker with a computer.”
“Yeah. She’s great.” Malloy gave a laugh and froze a smile. “So what did you two talk about for two hours?”
Cardozo decided the pot was as clean as it was going to get. He filled it with water from the cold faucet. “Files and directories and default commands.” He sensed that something alien and odd was passing through the space between him and Malloy. “How’s Delia?”
Delia, for the last twenty-one years, had been Mrs. Carl Malloy. In that time she had borne him a son and a daughter.
The answer came in a manic blast. “Great, great. Delia’s just great.”
“Glad to hear it.” Cardozo snapped a paper towel down from the holder and carefully wiped the bottom of the coffeepot dry. “Be sure to tell her and the kids hello for me, will you?”
IT WAS A SETTING Leigh had expected to live the rest of her life in, to die in.
She saw the tall glass in her right hand; she saw her arms, with their gold-and-diamond bracelets, lying on the armrests of the overstuffed chair in Waldo’s library. She saw the skirt of her silk dress, and she saw that it exactly matched her gray suede pumps, resting on the cozy little needlepoint footrest.
She saw Waldo on the sofa facing her. After tonight, she thought, I’ll never be part of this picture again.
“There’s something we’ve got to discuss,” she said.
“Oh, yes?” he said in his best interested voice. He turned a page of The New Yorker.
“I don’t know how to say this.”
Waldo sat there like a tree, earnest. Wanting to make it clear he was willing to listen for the next thirty seconds to whatever she had to say.
“I don’t know how to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway.” She smiled. This smile for hire, she thought. “And I hope you’ll understand I’m saying it with love and friendship and respect.”
Waldo laid down his magazine. He struck that attitude of listening that passed for caring.
“I have to leave you, Waldo.”
The silence in the room was suddenly flat and harsh. He stared at her, and he had an honestly bewildered look on his face.
“Could I ask you one question?” His voice sounded drawn back and clogged, as though he had to clear his throat. “Just tell me why.”
“Because I can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep going through the motions.”
He sat with an expression of wanting intensely to understand. “Is that all it is to you?”
“That’s all it is to either of us.”
“No. What we’ve got is worth something to me. It’s worth a great deal to me.”
“I’m grateful you feel that way, Waldo. And I’m sorry that I don’t. And I’m still leaving you.”
“Is it because you feel I’ve neglected you?”
“Neglect isn’t the problem. We’ve neglected each other from the beginning.”
“Is it because I’ve had affairs? You know those women have never meant anything to me.”
She thought of all the time she and Waldo had been together, and all the waste they’d made of it, all the memories they would never have—the evening walks they’d never taken, the meals they’d never cooked for each other, the confidences they’d never shared. “I’m not jealous, Waldo. I’ve been annoyed but never jealous.”
“Is it because you’re in love with your detective?”
“I’m not in love with anyone. Not yet.”
“Then you don’t need to leave.”
“But I do and I’m going to.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t permit it.”
There was that half tick of an instant where she realized intellectually what she’d heard, but her mind refused to believe it. “I beg your pardon?”
“You’re not going to leave me.”
He said it with an offhand sort of coolness that enraged her. “And just how do you propose to prevent me?”
“You don’t seem to realize how very much I care for you. How very much concern I feel for you. I’ve had you guarded since the first Society Sam note.”
“That was very considerate of you.”
“The guard, naturally, told me when you had tea with your detective. He told me when you spent the night with your detective.”
It was Leigh’s turn to be surprised. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”
“Jealous? No more than you. Concerned? How could I not be concerned when the guard told me what you did at Oona’s memorial.”
She stared a moment at the face staring back at her. It was like being pinned in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
“Do I need to refresh your memory?” Waldo said. “You had a little contretemps with Dizey. And if you try to leave me, if you even think of subjecting me to that humiliation, I’ll see to it that Cardozo learns what really happened on the terrace that evening.”
A spike of panic ran up her spine. She stared at this gray-haired, WASPy, aging gentleman in his elegantly cut gray suit, with the look in his eyes she was not certain she had ever really decoded. “You selfish bastard,” she said. “All you’ve ever wanted me for is to look famous and keep you company.”
“And you’re very good at it.”
“We’re not even lovers anymore.”
He shrugged. “The public likes to think we are.”
“You mean you like the public to think we are. Well, what the hell is so sacred about your public image that it gives you the right to violate my life?”
“My dear, I have exactly the same right to violate another person’s life a
s you do.”
“I didn’t lay a hand on Dizey.”
“I’m sure your lieutenant will want to draw his own conclusions.”
Something shifted in the perspective around her. She rose to her feet, and suddenly she was standing in a zone of strangeness. “Then so be it.”
“He won’t be happy when he finds out. Whatever else he is, he is a cop. And an honest one; they tell me.”
“I’ll just have to take that chance.”
“ANYONE HOME?” Cardozo called out.
“Me.” Terri was sprawled on the living room rug, reading a book by the light of the MTV music video exploding across the TV screen. She reached up a hand and waved.
“Aren’t you going to kill your eyes that way?”
“Leigh phoned,” she said.
Cardozo crossed to the TV and turned down the volume. “What did she say?”
Terri turned a page. “She said thanks and she has some hard thinking to do and she won’t be coming back.”
Cardozo felt a sudden deflation. “What does that mean, thanks and she has some hard thinking to do and she won’t be coming back?”
Terri turned and saw the look on his face. She got to her feet and came to him. “Dad, if the two of you aren’t going to sleep in your bedroom, it is kind of a small apartment.”
Cardozo dropped heavily onto the sofa.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Terri said.
He didn’t answer.
She sat beside him and looked at him. “Or is it?”
He felt embarrassed and he tried to concentrate on the music video, on kids in bright-colored clothes diving off cliffs.
“Wow,” Terri said. “That’s great.”
“What’s great?”
She was grinning at him happily. “You’re in love.”
SIXTY-THREE
Wednesday, June 19
MALLOY STOPPED IN FRONT of the column of mailboxes numbered 108. They ran floor to ceiling. He had to relax his knees just a little, and stoop before he could see into the boxes in the E row.
The window of 108-E showed him three envelopes still undisturbed, still lying diagonally across the box.
It had been boring enough tailing Delancey, he thought, but at least Delancey had moved. Tailing a mailbox was the pits.
He straightened up and turned.
Two girls in jeans and Yo-quiero-la-Habana T-shirts were standing at the counter, giggling in Spanish, not noticing him.
He pushed open the glass door and stepped again into the steambath of West Forty-eighth Street. He stepped around a mumbling knot of crackheads. They’d been there all afternoon, never moving from that spot, handing dirty dollar bills and crack vials back and forth, about as inconspicuous as a lighthouse.
He watched them laughing and grinning and swaying and moving as if it were all a dance, as if all of life were just a question of feeling the beat and putting your foot in the right place at the right time.
A Cuban-Chinese bodega-deli across the street caught his eye. He went in. The little old lady at the counter wore a peasant-style scarf and with her bright eyes distinct as new blooms on a tough old trunk, she looked like a 350-year-old bonsai.
He pointed to the pot gurgling on the coffee machine.
The old woman placed a styrofoam cup of coffee on the counter. She slid a sugar dispenser and a pint carton of milk toward him.
He put a dollar bill on the counter.
The old woman shook her head and pushed it back.
He flashed that she didn’t want to take money from a cop. Which meant, among other things, that he must be pretty obvious.
I’m not going to go through this again. He left the money on the counter and ambled toward the window. He studied the hand that was holding the coffee. The hand was trembling badly. Either his blood sugar had dipped or vodka wasn’t the greatest lunch for a working cop.
His free hand took a little plastic prescription bottle out of his pocket. His fingers worked the top off and a rainbow of pills spilled into his palm. He jiggled his hand till two black pills separated from the others.
The two black pills went into his mouth. He chased them with a slug of coffee. The lady narc who had sold him the pills swore they didn’t show up in urine tests, but you had to drink coffee—lots of it.
He glanced toward the window. Traffic was crawling around Con Ed-generated potholes and the firebombed carcass of a green Honda Accord. Even with the door of the bodega shut and the air conditioner rattling in the transom, he could hear horns blaring at the pushcarts that sold paper cups of shaved ice and syrup.
Pedestrians were jaywalking as though they were exercising a constitutional right. Wherever Malloy looked he saw people breaking one law or another: peddling stolen goods, making drug deals, getting high, dancing to the beat and yowl of Latino boom boxes, dozing, cruising for sex—and none of it seemed to be a big deal to anyone.
It made Carl Malloy wonder if his existence made any difference at all, if he had any power to influence the movement of the smallest molecule in the universe. Sometimes he felt too old, too hot, too tired for this kind of work. Sometimes he wished he could just walk away from it.
At that instant he registered something out there in the street. A woman heading down the sidewalk had caught his eye. Maybe twenty-four years old. Five feet ten. Black, with the body of an anorectic, swiveling through the crowd. She was wearing a man’s black shirt and black slacks and a wide black belt studded with colored stones that marked the exact moment in each step when her weight shifted from one hip to the other. She had long, slightly waved hair and she was wearing huge dark glasses.
She slowed at a newsstand and bought a paper.
Now she was walking past the maildrop. Two storefronts beyond Mailsafe she stopped. She turned, doubled back, caught the door of Mailsafe just as the two giggling Spanish girls were coming out, and walked right in.
Malloy could see her through the window. She was standing by the counter, and she was going through her newspaper, pulling out unwanted pages and dropping them into the wastebasket.
Now she was crossing to the mailboxes. Little glints of metal and glass sparkled off the wall of locks. She went toward the 108 column. Her body blocked Malloy’s view.
Her hand stretched out. He could see her wrist twisting, engaging the whole arm, and then the hand reappeared, and it was holding three envelopes.
Malloy gulped his coffee and was out the door in two strides, halfway across the street in the next three, and then he was at the door to Mailsafe.
She was coming toward him. She made eye contact and smiled. He realized he was holding the door. She glided into the street.
He scooted over to 108-E. He ducked down just far enough to see up the tunnel.
The box was empty.
He spun around. At first he thought he’d lost her, and then he saw her, at the edge of the window—heading west.
THE PHONE RANG.
Cardozo lifted the receiver and even before it reached his ear he could hear music and screaming. The music was a heavy-metal derivative of mariachi. The screaming was Carl Malloy.
“I staked the box out, a woman came. She looked kind of like the Identi-Kit drawing of Tamany Dillworth.”
“What do you mean, kind of?”
“Vince, those are lousy drawings. I followed her to Four-fifty-seven West Forty-ninth. I checked the mailboxes and there’s a Martinez in 3-F. I’m calling from a pay phone right across from the building. She’s upstairs now.”
“I’ll be right down.”
A HOT BREEZE WAS GUSTING IN from the Hudson as Cardozo hurried west on Forty-ninth Street.
Malloy was waiting on the corner of the five hundred block. He was the only man within five square blocks wearing a jacket, and Cardozo realized they must both be pathetically easy to tag as cops.
“End of the block,” Malloy said.
“Has she come out yet?”
“Not yet.”
The building was a standard,
decomposing 1890s six-story tenement. They climbed the stoop. The outer door was held open by a little eye-and-hook latch in the baseboard.
Cardozo glanced at the mailboxes. The name Martinez had been penciled on a piece of brown paper and shoved into the slot of Box 3-F. A flyer from a Japanese restaurant had been folded and wedged through one of the decorative perforations.
Malloy shaded his eyes and peered through the glass-paneled door into the empty vestibule. He gave the door a little push. Like the outer door it was unlocked. No slumlord in this neighborhood would lock a front door unless he wanted to replace it every time housebreakers knocked it down.
Cooking fumes and oil-saturated smoke ripened the air of the hallway.
They started up the stairs, Malloy first. The steps tilted and several were beginning to come loose. The fluorescent tube in the ceiling flickered, creating the optical illusion that the steps were rising and falling.
On the third floor landing a cat came out of the shadow. It pressed against Cardozo’s leg. He petted the animal and felt ribs. The cat arched its back and let out a good shrill street meow.
“Hey, kitty,” Cardozo whispered, “where does Martinez live?”
The cat went straight to the door of 3-F.
Malloy leaned an ear against the door. He beckoned Cardozo. Dead silence pressed on the other side of the panel.
Overhead there was a sudden clatter of sandals slapping against steps. Cardozo and Malloy pressed themselves into the shadow. The sandals were heading rapidly up the stairs, not down. At the top of the stairwell a roof door slid open and thumped shut.
Malloy gave the door handle of 3-F a try. He took out his wallet and removed his Visa card. He slid the card into the crack between the door and the jamb. He jimmied it back and forth till there was a soft click. The door swung inward.
Cardozo drew his gun and edged around Malloy and flattened himself against the inner wall of the apartment. It took a moment to blink the darkness out of his eyes. The air was sweltering, sticky—worse than the hallway, with a thick stench of fried food.
His eyes began adjusting, and impressions started to form. He could make out a lattice of light and shade falling across the surfaces of a stove, a sink, a refrigerator.
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