“With his head shaved.” Cardozo lifted the radio mike. “Attention all units, suspect Martinez wearing red T-shirt, approaching pedestrian path.”
Martinez reached the path and turned. He walked past the bench, slowed, turned around. He stared at the woman sitting there in the green jacket.
“Think the woman’s his contact?” Malloy said.
Cardozo frowned. “The man on the phone said meet me, not her.”
Martinez doubled back to the bench. He sat half a bench-length from the woman. She glanced at him and reangled her Mylar umbrella to ward off eye contact.
Cardozo spoke into the mike. “Martinez is seated on bench.”
“Either these two are playing it supercool,” Malloy said, “or they really don’t know each other.”
“I get the feeling she doesn’t intend to know him,” Cardozo said.
After a moment Martinez glanced again at the woman.
“He’s wondering if she’s the contact,” Malloy said.
Martinez looked at his watch. He leaned toward the woman and said something. The umbrella shifted and the woman gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding sneer.
“And now he knows she’s not,” Cardozo said.
“His contact’s almost fifteen minutes late.”
“Give him another five minutes.”
Three minutes passed and Martinez rose from the bench. He stood a moment in indecision, and then he began ambling down the path into the park.
Cardozo grabbed the radio mike. “Martinez is heading east on pedestrian path toward Sheep Meadow.”
Malloy slid out of the car and started after Martinez. At the sound of the car door slamming, Martinez glanced back. He saw Malloy and broke into a run.
Cardozo shoved the mike back into its dashboard bracket. His feet slammed the floor, and he was up and out of the car in one thrust.
Both Martinez and Malloy had vanished. He sprinted up the path. It branched two ways.
He checked right, checked left. His eye caught Martinez’s red T-shirt flashing through the foliage to the right.
The next sixty seconds seemed to happen on the other side of a plate-glass wall.
A rising hill brought Cardozo to an open meadow.
Martinez was forty yards ahead, running.
Parallel to the path, in the bushes, something was moving and it was Malloy, leaping out and punching the air. Compacted steel flashed in his hand.
It was as though Malloy had lost control of his body, as though it had become something that was not an overweight middle-aged cop’s body.
In a crackle of raw acceleration Martinez became a smudge of speed cutting through misty drizzle.
It amazed Cardozo that Malloy had the swiftness. He was actually closing the gap between himself and the red T-shirt.
And then Cardozo heard the gunshot and the warning: “Stop! Police!”
No, that wasn’t right. My mind reversed it, Cardozo thought. First the warning. Then the gunshot.
Cardozo broke into a run.
Time became a liquid rush, and Malloy and Martinez became two particles caught in the whirlpool. Martinez was darting in and around the bushes, but there was a drag on his movements. Swerving around a tree, he went into a skid and then he was down, kneecaps kissing mud.
Malloy approached, taut and ready, service revolver drawn.
“Police!” Cardozo could hear him shouting. “Police! Surrender your weapon! Give yourself up!”
Something flashed between them, and Cardozo heard the second shot.
Martinez was on the ground, writhing, kicking, and then he was still.
When Cardozo reached them, Malloy was still shouting at Martinez to drop his gun. Cardozo raised a hand, palm out, signaling Malloy to holster the gun, back off.
Martinez was lying in a fetal curl on his side. His arms were locked tight around the part of his chest that was coming to pieces. He was gasping, pulling in air through a gaping mouth. He had eyes the color of wind, and he had that look that meant nerves and brain cells were going off-line fast.
Cardozo crouched down on one knee. He spoke gently: “Martinez—can you hear me?”
Martinez’s sweat had activated his cologne. A dense sweetness like church incense rose from his body.
“Me entiendes?” Cardozo said.
For one brief instant Martinez’s eyes looked directly into Cardozo’s. His throat was going like a scared pigeon’s, pushing out air.
Cardozo leaned his ear down. He could make out whispered, disconnected syllables.
“Maria … mother … Dios … ruega … sotros …”
Either Martinez was trying to squeeze in a quick Hail Mary before he slipped across, or he was sinking into bilingual delirium.
Across the meadow an ambulance careened down the jogging path. Even at this distance Cardozo could hear the siren blipping get-out-of-my-way screeches.
Cop cars were cutting across the turf.
Martinez was very quiet now. His eyes had a dreamily surrendering gaze. Cardozo sensed he was in bad shape, getting rapidly worse.
Two cop cars arrived and then the ambulance. Three paramedics lifted Martinez onto a stretcher.
“Whose gun?”
A cop was standing there holding a ballpoint pen through the trigger guard of a small black revolver.
“Where’d you find that?” Cardozo said.
The cop kicked dead leaves. “Right here.”
Malloy’s face was shocked, pale. He nodded toward the ambulance. “It was his.”
RICK MARTINEZ DIED at three-ten that afternoon in the Emergency Room of Saint Agnes Hospital.
A half hour later, when Cardozo returned to the precinct, there was hardly any activity in the detective squad room. Malloy sat at one of the old-junk typewriters, hunting for the keys to fill in a departmental report. He looked exhausted.
Captain Lawrence Zawac from Internal Affairs was standing beside him, reading over his shoulder.
“What’s happening?” Cardozo said.
“Sergeant Malloy is telling me about the shooting,” Zawac said.
Cardozo noticed that the typing on the form already ran down half the page.
“What are you telling him, Carl?”
“Just how it happened.” Malloy had the face of a man saying hello to mortality a few decades earlier than he’d ever expected.
Cardozo glanced at Zawac. “Is this official?”
Zawac had a smug, secret look. “Call it friendly.”
“Maybe you should talk to a lawyer,” Cardozo told Malloy.
“We’ve discussed that option,” Zawac said, “and Sergeant Malloy has decided to go another route.”
The scar that cut Zawac’s upper lip in two seemed far redder than Cardozo remembered. It showed clearly through his dark mustache. His eyes were gloating.
“Another route?” Cardozo said. “Well, whatever you’re doing, make it fast. We have to get down to Martinez’s apartment.”
“Vince,” Malloy said, “I have to—” He stopped and made a new start. “I’m going to turn over my gun till the hearing.”
“Okay, you’ll turn over your gun.” Cardozo was sure Zawac had fed Malloy some kind of IAD hype, and Malloy had bought into it. But he shrugged as though it didn’t matter. His object now was simply to get Malloy alone. “Where does the rule book say you need a gun to search an apartment anyway?”
Zawac shifted weight. The change of position had the effect of placing him between Cardozo and Malloy.
“Sergeant Malloy will be staying at the precinct,” Zawac said.
Cardozo sensed something dangerous now: Malloy was smiling, but the smile was crazed and wrong. Cardozo read panic in the eyes, the kind where the panicky person was literally blocking out the signals reality was sending him.
“Sorry,” Cardozo said, “Malloy doesn’t sit at the precinct on my task force’s time.”
“Sergeant Malloy is off the task force.”
“I take orders from the top—not from lef
t field.” Cardozo held out a hand. “Show me the paper on this.”
“If you want to see paper, Lieutenant, I guarantee I can arrange for you to see paper.”
“Show me the order, or Malloy’s walking out this door with me.”
Silence, eye contact.
“Carl, come on,” Cardozo said.
Malloy just sat there. There was something missing in him. He looked hurt, beaten, not quite understanding what life was suddenly about or where the next blow was going to fall from.
Malloy said, “Vince—let it go.”
“Look, Carl, even if IAD has persuaded you to give up your rights, they haven’t persuaded me to give up mine. I’m ordering you back to work.”
“I’m resigning from the task force.”
“What the hell are you doing, Carl? If you play scapegoat now, the hyenas are going to go for you. They’re already smelling dead meat.”
“I’ve thought it over and this is the way I have to handle it, Vince. I’m sorry.”
“SOMETHING THE MATTER with the ice cream?” Malloy asked.
Laurie Bonasera shook her head.
They were at a table by the back wall of the ice-cream shop. She was eating peach, and just for a change, he was trying boysenberry. He could feel that something was off between them.
“What’s the matter, then?” he said.
She shrugged. “I guess I just don’t feel comfortable being watched.”
“Who’s watching you?”
She was wearing a yellow-and-white-striped cotton dress, and her hair was curling around her face. “It’s you they’ve got their eye on.”
“Who’s they?”
“Everyone.”
“Well, everyone’s not here. You’re oversensitive.”
“I have to trust my instincts. They’re all I’ve got.”
“Did your instincts tell you not to talk to me? Because you haven’t spoken to me in two days. You haven’t even looked at me.”
“I’m looking at you now.”
“Like you wish I wasn’t here.”
“Like I wish I wasn’t here.”
He lost a heartbeat. “What are you telling me? You don’t want to be with me?”
She picked at her peach ice cream as though she’d lost an earring in it. “How do you expect me to feel? Carl, you killed a man.”
A moment slipped mutely by. He felt slack and empty. “I killed a killer in the line of duty, and unless you’re working for Internal Affairs, don’t you think that subject can maybe wait?”
“It happens to be on my mind.”
“He killed six people, and now he’s not going to kill another six. It’s done and I did it and I’m not sorry. What’s the matter, you want me to be sorry?”
She was watching him with firm-jawed thoughtfulness. “No, that’s not what I want.”
“Because I’m a decent guy. I am.”
“I know you’re a decent guy.”
Carl Malloy had always had the belief that someday he would meet someone who would make his life okay. When he met his wife, he’d thought it was going to happen, but his life had never become okay with Delia. Since then he’d believed that one day he’d meet someone else who’d make his life okay.
He stared at Laurie Bonasera and he had a flash, a running sensation his last chance was slipping away from him. “Then when can I see you again?”
It was as though breathing was an effort for her. “We have to be careful till you’re cleared.”
He felt his dreams getting snipped smaller and smaller. “Cleared—what am I, some kind of criminal?”
“You’re married,” she said. “I’m married.”
“We’re working for the New York Police Department, not the archdiocese.”
“They’re still going to look into every detail of your life. We don’t need to make the situation worse.”
He could feel a darkness settling over him like a layer of ash from a nuclear accident. “Fuck situations. I’m not a marriage license, I’m not a gold shield—I’m a person and I need to know that I exist, that I still matter to someone.”
She took a long, careful look at him. “You are a master manipulator.”
“Where did that come from? What do I say to that, thank you?”
“The less said the better. This conversation is running downhill.” She got up from the table. “Let’s get out of here.”
He reached out and took her wrist. She looked down at his hand and he let go.
“I’m sorry.” He felt horribly apart from her. “I love you.” He waited for something magical. He waited for her to say she loved him too.
After a moment she sighed. “I know.”
He followed her to the front of the shop. He didn’t know how long he could go on feeling this sense of waste about what was happening in his life.
The old Korean woman who owned the business was standing guard behind the cash register. She recognized Malloy, and when he put down a five-dollar bill, she smiled, shook her head emphatically, and pushed the money back to him.
Malloy thanked her and tucked the five back into his wallet.
Laurie’s jaw dropped. “Are you crazy?”
“It’s just ice cream,” Malloy said.
“Just ice cream is what practically got you busted from the force. You can’t afford to cut corners anymore.”
Everything that had built up inside him chose that moment to explode. “Get off my ass!” he cried.
He could see she had to clamp down to keep from shouting right back at him.
“I don’t believe this,” she said. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe me.”
She slapped down five singles for the ice cream.
She turned to face him, and he could feel her hating him.
“My fucking treat, okay, Malloy? Okay, just this once? The bimbo pays?”
She pushed through the door and turned north on Lexington, and she was gone.
SIXTY-SIX
Friday, June 21
THERE WAS A KNOCK and Cardozo looked up.
“Zip code eleven-four-two-one is Ninety-seventh Street, Jamaica, Queens.” One tanned arm outstretched, Ellie Siegel was leaning against the doorframe.
He lobbed a smile up at her. “Tell me more.”
She came in and sat down in the empty chair. “The worst neighborhood Sam ever picked to mail a letter from. If you’re not packing heat, you’re underdressed.”
“Then you were dressed right.”
“Barely. All I had was a dinky service revolver. The natives are carrying Uzis.”
She laid the Xerox of Society Sam’s sixth note down on the desk. Jumbled typefaces formed seven more or less horizontal, more or less parallel lines across the page.
CAN THE CUT JUDGE THE CUTTER
PAPER THE SCISSORS
I WILL NOT JOIN YOUR MAKE BELIEVE
WEEP NO TEARS FOR CUT UP CUT OUTS
WHEN WILL DOLLS LEARN
PAPER YOU WERE TO PAPER YOU RETURN
KISSES, SOCIETY SAM
“When did he mail it?” Cardozo said.
“With a P.M. 18 June postmark the latest it could have been mailed was noon Tuesday—but the postmaster says pickups have been running late. Gangs have been shooting the trucks with rock salt.”
“Rock salt?”
Ellie nodded. “He says it could have been mailed before the weekend.”
Cardozo handed her a Xerox of the note Society Sam had sent after Dizey’s death. “Does it seem to you Dizey’s note got reversed with Dick Braidy’s?”
“Because Dizey’s says Dick be quick and Braidy’s talks about paper and paper dolls?” Ellie’s expression said she wasn’t buying it. “Braidy was a journalist too, paper could refer to him.”
“But Dizey’s name wasn’t Dick.” Cardozo held a pencil chop-stick-fashion between two fingers and rat-a-tatted on the edge of the desk. “Sam’s pattern was to leave a society column published the morning before a killing. There was no clipping when Dizey went
off the roof.”
“No candle either,” Ellie reminded him.
He nodded. “But this was the column Dizey published that morning.” He handed her a newspaper clipping. The photograph showed an ex-cleaning woman and now-socialite by the name of Olga Ford. Her hair had been clipped like a hedge imitating an animal. A silver net kept it from running away. Her Slovenian eyes seemed to gloat, I am the ladder to greatness.
Ellie read aloud, her voice carefully suspending all judgment. “Tonight Mrs. Gavin Hay (Olga to you, kid) Ford, the newest power widow around town, is hostessing an event at her East 78th Street duplex. Friends of Oona Aldrich, whose memorial is being held tonight, are understandably in no mood to go. Mrs. F. has warned those who accepted the ill-timed invite to be prepared for a mystery guest. The event is sure to shake up society’s notion of acceptable chic, because megabucks like Olga’s spell megaswank, and Olga is not about to let anyone forget it.”
“According to his engagement calendar,” Cardozo said, “Dick Braidy went to that dinner. According to last Friday’s New York Post, the First Lady was also there.”
“Got it,” Ellie said. “The mystery guest. How much do you suppose Olga had to contribute to the President’s reelection committee?”
“Only her accountant and the IRS have the answer to that.” Cardozo took a half rotation in his swivel chair. “According to Mrs. Ford’s stepdaughter, Rick Martinez, a.k.a. Society Sam, delivered a bunch of flowers to that party with this note.” Cardozo laid the little note on the desk.
Ellie scowled. “Love, Bob De Niro?”
“The girl says it was meant to be a goof on the stepmother. But I wonder if it wasn’t Rick’s way of getting into the party. Because here’s what I’m thinking: Rick, alias Sam, was aiming for Braidy the night Dizey died. But Braidy was at a dinner party where the surprise guest turned out to be the First Lady; Surprise guest meant surprise security. Sam’s bouquet got through the security, but Sam couldn’t. He missed his hit.”
“If Sam was at Olga’s, who killed Dizey?”
“No one. Dizey was on the still-to-be-hit list, but she died ahead of time—and accidentally.”
“Then why did Sam mail the wrong note?”
Cardozo sat listening to the faint chug-a-lug of the air conditioner. “You know something, Ellie? I haven’t got the answer to that one.”
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