Deadly Rich

by Edward Stewart

  A hallway stretched to the right, toward the street, and at the end of it light flecks leapt fitfully. In another moment Cardozo saw that a tiny current of air was stirring one of the blackout shades that had been drawn in the windows.

  Cardozo nodded Malloy into the apartment. He motioned Malloy to check the back room.

  Cardozo crept soundlessly to the front room. He saw that it was small, sparsely furnished, and deserted. He flicked the kitchen light switch.

  In the sudden light of the naked sixty-watt bulb, the world of Rick Martinez and Society Sam began disclosing itself. A poster of Rambo shouldering an automatic rifle had been taped to the side of the refrigerator. A pack of Saffire-brand Shabbes candles sat on the drainboard. A half-dozen plates and pans had been stacked unscraped in the sink. Cockroaches had free run of the place. The floor had been overlaid with black-and-white linoleum tiles, and in places open chancres of wood showed through.

  In the front room foam-rubber stuffing was leaking out of a foldout sofa-bed. Dumbbells and barbells had been parked against the window wall, with weight-lifting plates stacked beside them. Between the windows, in the space where another homemaker might have placed a picture or maybe a crucifix, Martinez had hung a brown leather weight-lifting belt. Sweat had mottled it darkly.

  A bookcase held three books and a potted plant that looked like a seriously endangered species. A scruffy little stuffed bear sat on top of a new-looking Sony tape deck. The bear wore a cheap rosary around its neck and a wool cap with stitching that spelled Rick’s Christmas Bear. Cassette tapes had been piled chaotically on the bottom shelf. Cardozo crouched down to read the titles: there were albums by the Grateful Dead and Iron Maiden and Kiss and Devil Dolls, and there was one called Charles Manson’s Greatest Hits.

  Malloy reappeared. “She’s not in back.”

  “She’s not up here.” Cardozo studied two pieces of unopened mail lying on the air conditioner. A hand-written aerogram from Colombia was addressed to Mr. Ricardo Martinez, c/o Malsaf, Box 108-E, 412 West 48th Street. A stapled, mimeographed flyer from a Pentecostal church in Brooklyn was addressed to Rick Martinez, Box 108-E, 412 West 48th Street. “You said there was a third piece of mail.”

  “There was,” Malloy said. “But I don’t see it.”

  Cardozo held the aerogram up to the light. He could make out two layers of tiny, spidery handwriting, and the signature, tu mama.

  “You have to look what he’s got in back,” Malloy said. “You’re not going to believe it.”

  “Says who?”

  In the back room a box spring and mattress had been stacked on the bare floor. Beyond the mattress a cork bulletin board had been fastened to an artist’s easel. Eleven front pages of the New York Tribune were displayed: one for each of Society Sam’s killings, except Dizey Duke, and one for each of his letters.

  In the center of the bulletin board Martinez had placed the Identi-Kit drawing of the male Hispanic. In red Magic Marker he had drawn a five-pointed king’s crown on the head.

  Cardozo walked to the bathroom. There was no light switch. He moved a hand through the dark and connected with a cord. He pulled and a naked light bulb went on over the sink. Forty watts’ worth of ash-gray light spilled over the grungy tiles and stained plumbing.

  On the sink a plastic oral syringe had been placed plunger end-up in an unwashed tumbler. Beside it a shot glass held what looked like a dozen beard hairs.

  Cardozo opened the medicine cabinet. A capless bottle of pink-ribbed amphetamine tablets tipped. He caught it before it could clatter into the sink. Dozens of bottles of Squibb and Geigy and Sandoz pharmaceuticals, all labeled in Spanish, clogged the shelves. There was enough stockpiled to macerate the brains of a regiment of Rick Martinezes.

  A phone and answering machine sat on the floor beside the toilet. No light blinked on the machine. Apparently no messages had come in since Martinez had last replayed them. Cardozo crouched and pressed Rewind, and then Play.

  There was a beep, a hang up, another beep, another hang up, a third beep, and a man’s voice.

  “Hi, Rick, how are you doing? I’m phoning Tuesday, June eighteenth. Thanks for completing the pickup yesterday. You have one more pickup scheduled, the timing and the merchandise are up to you. Have fun. I’ll meet you Thursday, June twentieth, two P.M., on the path at West Seventy-first, just inside the park. Look for me on the bench. See you then.”

  Malloy stood in the bathroom doorway. “I hope one more pickup doesn’t mean what it sounds like.”

  THE FIRST THING that Cardozo noticed about 229 West Eighty-first Street was that the front door and the windows in all six stories had been covered over with steel plates. The second thing was that smoke had streaked most of the brick facade pitch-black.

  A man was spraying down the sidewalk in front of the twelve-story white-brick apartment building next door. He averted his hose so that Cardozo could walk by.

  Cardozo didn’t walk by.

  “Can I help you?” the man asked. The tone of voice was more a challenge than an offer.

  “I’m looking for a young woman by the name of Tamany Dillworth.” Cardozo double-checked the address she had given him. She could not have printed the numbers more clearly or decisively. “She said she lived at 229.”

  “Maybe two weeks ago,” the man said. “Before the crack factory in the basement exploded and burned the building down.”

  SIXTY-FOUR

  AS CARDOZO LET HIMSELF INTO his apartment, he saw Leigh Baker rising from the sofa and his heart skipped a half-dozen beats in a row.

  “Terri let me in,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. I need to talk to you.”

  “Of course I don’t mind.” He dropped his keys into the bowl on the hall table. “Where’s Terri?”

  “She said she was going to a movie. I think she really just wanted to leave us alone.”

  He came into the living room. He crossed to her. “Terri likes you. So do I.”

  They kissed and she drew back.

  “Can I get you anything?” he offered.

  “I’m okay, thanks.”

  “Just give me a minute.” He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, thought seriously about shaving, decided he was crazy, and went to his bedroom to put on a clean shirt. He went into the kitchen and got the ice tray from the refrigerator and banged it against the sink.

  “Hey,” he called. “Would you have any way of getting hold of Tamany Dillworth’s address?”

  “Possibly. Why?”

  “Her old address burned down.” He dropped three cubes into a glass and filled it with ginger ale. “And she’s picking up mail for Rick Martinez.”

  “Should I know who Rick Martinez is?”

  He came back into the living room. “You met him in Marsh and Bonner’s.”

  She was seated on the old flowered sofa. The standing lamp threw a circle of light around her. “The man with the boom box?”

  Cardozo nodded. “He was married to a woman called Isolda Martinez. She died in the Emergency Room the night those socialites went partying. Rick Martinez blamed them. And it looks like he killed them.”

  Leigh Baker was silent for a moment, thinking. “I was so certain it was Jim Delancey. How could I have been so certain and so wrong?”

  “It’s happened to me more than once.” Cardozo sat on the sofa close to her. “Where did you go? I missed you.”

  “I’m sorry. I missed you too. But I had to be by myself. I had to make some decisions.”

  He could feel her trying to hold a smile and not coming anywhere near managing.

  A dry swallow rode down her throat. “They say you can’t get clean and sober without getting honest. They say you’re as sick as your secrets. If you hold back even a single lie, that lie will keep pulling you back down into drugs and liquor.”

  “Who’s this they?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Experts.”

  “There are too many experts in this world.”

 
; “And too many lies in my life. I keep getting twisted around and winding up at the same wall. So maybe I should tell the truth, for a change.”

  “Are you asking for my advice or my ears?”

  “Your ears. Maybe your shoulder in a while.”

  “My shoulder’s not planning to go anywhere.”

  Her eyes were anxious, tired. “The letter that was sent to the newspaper after Dizey died—it was a lie.”

  He released her hand. “Lie is a strange word.”

  “It’s the right word.”

  “To lie, you have to say something. That letter was gibberish. It didn’t say anything.”

  “Yes, it did. It said he killed her. And he didn’t.”

  He set his glass down on the side table. “How do you know?”

  “I’m still doing it.” She shook her head. “I’m still lying. I don’t know how to stop. The reason I’m here isn’t to be honest or stay sober—it’s because Waldo knows and he’s about to blast it to you and the world.” She gazed over at him. “Unless he’s told you already.”

  Cardozo shook his head.

  She pulled in a slow breath and let it out in a sigh. “I was on the terrace when Dizey went over the wall.”

  Suddenly Cardozo’s stomach felt like eight miles of dead intestine. “Did you push her?”

  “Everything but. I called her a thief and I threw my drink in her face. She accused me of drinking again.”

  “Were you drinking?”

  “I was very drunk and paranoiacally defensive.”

  “Paranoiacally defensive about what?”

  “I was afraid she’d publish an item saying I’d fallen off the wagon.”

  “Had she done anything like that before?”

  “Every damned time.”

  “Okay, so maybe you wanted to kill her. But you didn’t. Wanting isn’t criminal. What you did wasn’t planned. It wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t intentional. Keeping silent wasn’t breaking the law.” Why am I talking so fast? he wondered. Who am I trying to convince? “You weren’t withholding evidence of a crime. It wasn’t as though by keeping silent you implicated an innocent person.”

  “Maybe not this time.” She stared down at her hands. “But there’s something else. When I saw Dizey fall, when I saw how easily a person could go over that wall—I realized Nita could have died the same way.” She swallowed. “And Delancey could have been innocent.”

  “Jim Delancey got his rights, which was more than he gave your daughter. Granted, he wasn’t judged by a wolfpack of his peers, but at least it was a jury. Besides, you saw him push her.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I didn’t see him push her.”

  “But you testified under oath—”

  “I lied.” She stood. She wheeled around. “I would have told the truth. I was ready to, I was going to—but they produced that diary—and people were believing it.”

  “But why did you have to lie? Why you?”

  “I honestly thought I was doing the right thing. That diary was such an obvious forgery—he had to be guilty. Why would an innocent man forge proof?”

  “How do you know he forged it?”

  “I don’t know how I knew anything. I was drunk, I was drugged, I was convinced I had to take some kind of action.” She spoke in a bitter, bottomed-out voice. “I give great performances drunk. My movies didn’t get lousy till I sobered up.”

  “I don’t want to believe this.” He couldn’t think over the clatter of dominos falling in his head. He stared at her. He felt remote from her and could not overcome the feeling. Either this is the most naive person I’ve ever met, he thought, or the most cunning.

  “Vince,” she said quietly, “I made a choice, it was the wrong choice. I’ve been living with the consequences, and it hasn’t been the most entertaining company.”

  He felt strong in the wrong way and weak in the wrong way. “Unfortunately someone else had to live with the consequences too.”

  Her gaze fastened on him, grim and pleading. “I didn’t realize it was a cop’s job to judge people. I thought that was why we have juries.”

  He stood. He wasn’t sure what he was doing or why. “This cop judges people. That’s how he stays alive.”

  “You mean you’re disappointed that I don’t fit into your glamorous little picture of me.”

  “It wasn’t even your life at stake.” His voice felt tight in his throat.

  “But I had to make Nita’s life mean something.”

  “Even God couldn’t have done that. Her life was over. The returns were in.”

  “You’re sober and you think like a sober person, and I’m an alcoholic and I was thinking like one.”

  “Three cheers for AA, three cheers for the disease model of alcoholism. But I don’t buy the disease model of irresponsibility. It’s a cop-out.” He moved toward the window. Once he got there he just stared out over the roofs. “You didn’t even lie to me straight out, like an honest liar. You let me lie to myself.”

  “I did what I thought I had to.”

  “Everything you said, everything you didn’t say, everything you let me believe—it was all because you were scared of me. Am I right?”

  “Yes.” She said it in a voice that was barely audible.

  “You could have told me straight out about Dizey. It was a natural New York death. Drunks fall off terraces all the time in this city.”

  “I was afraid.”

  Sunset lit the water towers and church spires like a pinball machine. This was one of the last areas in Manhattan where the steeples were still higher than the apartment buildings.

  “You couldn’t even take the chance of trusting me?”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  Cardozo shook his head. “You can go to bed with someone and not be sure if you trust them? What were you doing, faking? Giving another great performance?”

  “I’m trying to be honest. Help me.”

  He just stood there, hurting, waiting for something inside his head to happen and point him to the next moment. He heard her say his name.

  “Vince. For the part that was fake—I’m sorry. But it wasn’t all fake.”

  He turned around and she was standing there.

  “I’m sorry too,” he said. “The idea that you could want me was just so … it made me feel so terrific. Like a kid. Like the first time I went to the movies. All your men felt that way, didn’t they? Proves I’m a star-struck nitwit like the whole rest of the world.”

  She looked at him. He had the feeling she was searching for something in his eyes, and it wasn’t there anymore.

  “I won’t stay,” she said.

  He watched her go. A moment later he heard the front door shut.

  “LEIGH BAKER SAYS she made a mistake,” Cardozo said. “She didn’t see you push Nita.”

  Jim Delancey, neat and trim in his baggy linen trousers and red Reeboks, didn’t answer.

  “That gives you grounds for a retrial,” Cardozo said. “Without her testimony the state has no case.”

  They were standing just outside the kitchen door of Archibald’s. East Seventy-fourth Street was dark.

  “I’m not going to discuss it,” Jim Delancey said.

  “If you didn’t kill Nita Kohler, what the hell can’t you discuss?”

  Jim Delancey drew in a breath and his I-love-Archibald’s T-shirt swelled beneath his I-love-Archibald’s apron. “There’s a trial record. Read it. I’ve said everything I have to say.”

  “Jim, look at me. I’m not wearing a wire.” Cardozo opened his jacket, pulled up his shirt, showed that the only thing attached to his skin was skin. “There’s no court stenographer here. You’re not going on the record.”

  Delancey stood there tight-lipped, leaning against the hood of a burgundy-colored Rolls.

  “Weren’t you high the night Nita died?” Cardozo said.

  “I’m not going to discuss it.”

  “Wasn’t Nita high?”

  “I’m not going to discuss
it.”

  “Why didn’t you plead drug intoxication as a defense?”

  Down the block, lobbies spilled light under numbered awnings. A breeze rocked the saplings that had been newly planted along the pavement. Reflections of streetlights glinted off the hoods of slow-passing taxis and limos.

  “Where did Nita’s diary come from?” Cardozo said.

  Delancey’s fingertips chattered on his knee.

  “Who forged it?”

  Delancey’s heavy shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.

  “Who paid for your defense?”

  Delancey exhaled, setting his fingers into a steeple. A twilight flow of resignation rippled out from him, and Cardozo was baffled by it.

  “Why didn’t you tell us where you were when Oona Aldrich was killed?”

  A muscle jumped just above Delancey’s jaw. “I did tell you.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us the truth? You had a witness on your side. Why didn’t you use him?”

  The screen door slammed open, and a Korean in a New York Mets cap leaned out to dump a thirty-gallon trash bag of kitchen scraps into a garbage can.

  “Are you charging me?” Jim Delancey said.

  Cardozo waited for the Korean to go back inside. “There doesn’t seem to be much left to charge you with.”

  “Then I don’t have to answer.”

  RICK SAUNTERED WEST on Forty-eighth.

  At first he didn’t pay any particular attention to the ’87 green Celica parked outside Ming Lee’s all-night Chinese restaurant. But as he walked past, a taxi happened to be turning and its headlights swept the Celica. Rick glanced sideways and he saw a man sitting in the front seat. A heavy-set man gnawing on a hero sandwich.

  I wouldn’t mind eating a hero right now, Rick thought. Genoa salami and provolone and red peppers—

  The thought stopped right there, bumped by a second thought: You couldn’t buy a hero at Ming Lee’s. You couldn’t buy a hero within five blocks of Ming Lee’s. So how come that guy’s eating a sandwich that he had to have brought from at least five blocks away?

  Rick slowed at the window of a darkened bodega. He pretended to be studying the cerveza posters, but he placed himself so he could see the reflection of the Celica. A U-Haul van made a turn and the headlights caught the windshield of the Celica.