Deadly Rich

by Edward Stewart

CARDOZO RETURNED to the squad room. “Laurie,” he said.

  She turned in her chair to look at him, but her fingers kept dancing over the keyboard of her computer.

  “I’m not going to mention anything about Carl,” he said, “and I hope you won’t either.”

  Her eyes flicked back to the screen. The silence rising from her had the smell of acute embarrassment. The computer suddenly let out a single, chicken-pitched squawk, and she jumped.

  A message flashed at the top of the screen: Name your file immediately and press Save or you will lose your data. Below the message the word file appeared, followed by a colon and a blank space.

  For Cardozo it was as though the light in the squad room had changed, as though the surrounding area had dimmed out and a white spot had focused on that screen.

  Laurie sat silent, unreacting, staring at the message. It was a moment before she tapped a message into the keys. On the screen, in the space beside the word file, the word file appeared a second time. Laurie pressed the Save button and the screen cleared.

  “What did you just do?” Cardozo said.

  “I forgot to name the file. The computer won’t store unnamed files longer than three thousand bytes, and I was about to lose it, so I named it file.”

  At that instant a doorway swung open in Cardozo’s mind and he reached back through it with his memory. “You said Dick Braidy’s computer automatically named his files.”

  She nodded. “The backups are named with the date and time he created them.”

  “Then if we could locate the backup of one of his articles, the name would tell us when he wrote the article.”

  She was staring at him with a puzzled look. It took an instant before she found a smile for him. “That’s right.”

  A knot of excitement was forming inside Cardozo’s stomach. “Could you come with me right now?”

  Her voice took on an edge of wariness. “Where to?”

  “Dick Braidy’s apartment.”

  CARDOZO CROSSED TO THE WINDOW of Dick Braidy’s workroom and flicked a switch. A soft purr rose from the air conditioner.

  Laurie Bonasera was hanging back at the door.

  “It’s okay.” Cardozo lifted the dust cover from Dick Braidy’s PC. “We’re not breaking any law.”

  She dropped her purse on a chair. “What are we looking for?”

  “The backup of an article called ‘Pavane pour une Infante Défunte.’”

  She came around the desk and switched the computer on. Her hands hardly seemed to touch the keyboard. Page after page of data scrolled past. Frowning, squinting, she watched the shifting, glittering maze of eye-killingly tiny print.

  Cardozo waited with a sort of willed calm. Forty-five minutes passed.

  Laurie suddenly sat forward in the chair. “I’ve got something called ‘Pavane for Nita Kohler,’ dated June ninth, eight forty-two A.M.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Want me to print it?”

  “Please.”

  IT WAS ALMOST TWO in the afternoon when Cardozo and Laurie Bonasera returned to the no-parking stretch on East Seventy-sixth Street where he’d left his car. The sun pressed down like the lid on a baking pan, and the air had the choking thickness of a fire in a pizza shop.

  Cardozo unlocked the passenger door. He was broadsided by a stench of cooked leatherette riding a wave of stale heat. “Better let it cool a minute before you get in,” he told Laurie.

  He went around and unlocked the driver’s door. As he swung it open the side-view mirror caught a reflection of Carl Malloy sauntering across the street.

  “Hi, Vince,” Malloy said. His cheekbones were ridged in sweat and the hollows of his eyes were tunnels. He walked around the front of the car. “Hi, Laurie.”

  Laurie Bonasera folded her arms in front of her. For just an instant she closed her eyes and Cardozo could sense there was a squall in the space behind them.

  “Sick and tired of me popping up all over the place?” Malloy grinned.

  Laurie stood there, constructing a weary half smile. “Carl, this isn’t a good time.”

  “You’re always saying it’s not a good time.”

  “I really can’t talk now. I’m working.”

  They stared at each other. The space between them vibrated with a skittering energy.

  Cardozo had a feeling that in four weeks these two had developed a lifetime’s history of not getting along.

  Carl Malloy turned. “How is she, Vince—as good the second time around as the first?”

  “Laurie knows her way around a computer.” Cardozo slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “Can we give you a lift anywhere, Carl?”

  For a moment Carl Malloy didn’t move or say anything. And then he looked at Laurie, and he very slowly arched one eyebrow. His breath came out in a long sigh. His hand dropped toward his right hip.

  The bullet hit her like a fist, whipping her head around to the left, taking the eye. She spun and staggered backward into the hood of the Toyota. Her body lost its balance and crumpled down onto the sidewalk.

  Malloy strolled over to where she lay, taking his time, as though nothing from the outside world was going to hurry him or bother him ever again.

  Cardozo leapt out of the car. He drew his revolver. “Drop your gun, Carl. Drop it.”

  It was as though Carl Malloy hadn’t heard, as though Cardozo hadn’t even spoken.

  Carl Malloy seemed to be looking away, listening to the traffic-and-boom-box music of New York that was floating down the street.

  Then he raised his revolver a second time and fired a bullet into his mouth.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  ELECTRONIC CHIMES DING-DONGED THE opening notes of

  “Home Sweet Home,” and Cardozo wished he were anywhere but here. The door opened.

  “Hi, Vince.” Delia Malloy was smiling, but she didn’t look good. She still had the bright green eyes and dark wavy hair he remembered from Christmas two years ago, but they didn’t add up to the same woman. She’d put on weight. Her cheeks had lost their color. “You should’ve phoned before you came all this way. Carl’s not home yet.”

  There was a beat where Cardozo should have answered, and he missed it. She looked at his face and frowned, reading something there.

  “Carl’s hurt?” she said.

  Cardozo didn’t answer.

  Delia Malloy took a stumbling step backward from the doorway. “Oh, Christ.” Her teeth bit down hard on her lip.

  Cardozo felt a tightening in his throat and chest. “Delia, I’m sorry.”

  She flung herself against him, and he could feel her fingers digging through his jacket into his back. Her brown hair was soft in his face, with faint streaks of gray, and a just-shampooed sweetness hovered around it. He could feel a spasm in her breathing, as if she was barely managing to hold back tears. “Maybe you should sit down,” he said after a moment.

  “Come in, Vince, come in.” Delia’s wedding ring glinted as she pushed hair back from her face. “Maybe we should both sit down.”

  Lace curtains in the Malloys’ living room softened the light to a pale glow, and in the window you could see the sun blinking off the windows of the two-family houses across the street.

  “I appreciate your coming,” Delia said. “I’m glad it was you that told me.” Delia sighed. “I’m going to have a drink. You feel like a drink?”

  “Sure,” Cardozo said.

  There was a built-in bar and Delia searched the cabinet.

  She was wearing a plain brown house dress now, and Cardozo remembered how great she had looked dressed up for the commissioner’s retirement dinner two years ago.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Delia said. “I forgot to go to the liquor store. We’re out of everything but rye. How about a shot of rye?”

  Cardozo didn’t think she’d forgotten anything. He had a hunch her husband had finished off every other bottle.

  “I don’t drink single shots,” Cardozo said.

 
Delia tonged ice into two highball glasses and filled them and came across the room and handed Cardozo his glass. The glass had an NYPD shield etched into it.

  Delia sat on the edge of the chair facing him. “So tell me.”

  “You really want it now?”

  “I want it now. While I’m still in shock.”

  He told her. There wasn’t any way he could soften it or leave the Bonasera girl out of it. Delia didn’t flinch during the telling. She didn’t strike him as all that surprised either.

  “I don’t want you to take what I’m about to say as an insult, Vince. Promise you won’t.”

  “Of course I won’t.”

  “Carl never really wanted to be a cop.” She looked up apologetically. “It was just his luck to come from a cop family. His father was a cop, his grandfather was a cop, his great-grandfather was a cop. So there was no question what Carl was going to do with his life. And he was a good cop, wouldn’t you say? Until … lately?”

  “He was good. That’s why I picked him for my team.”

  “I’m glad you did that. He valued your opinion, Vince.” She broke off and shook her head slowly. “He’d have been happier if he’d bucked his old man. You know what he wanted in his heart to be? What he could have been professionally? He could have made furniture professionally.”

  She tapped her finger on the mahogany coffee table with hinged oval borders that separated their two chairs.

  “Look at this table. He made.it himself.”

  “He made it?” Cardozo found it hard to believe that a man who kept as messy a desk as Carl Malloy could have shaped a piece of wood so perfectly. His hand went out and touched the cool, faultless glow of the finish. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Doesn’t seem like Carl, hey? He loved beautiful things. He loved to make them down in his workshop in the cellar.”

  “I didn’t know he had a workshop in the cellar.”

  “Oh, sure, it was his mania. Design, inlays, carving, finishing—he could make wood sit up and dance.” A sigh came out of her. “He could have had his own furniture business. He could have supported a family. People on Park Avenue pay fifteen hundred for a coffee table this good. But Carl just didn’t want to let his old man down.”

  “Was he depressed?” Cardozo said.

  “You mean why did he do it?” There was just a hint of hesitation before Delia’s next breath. “Some people can kill another person and walk away from it. Carl wasn’t that kind of guy. Taking a life was serious to him. Even killing that serial killer—he was miserable over it. Once he pulled the trigger on the girl, it was foregone. He had to kill himself.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No.”

  “Know about her?”

  “I was getting a feeling. He was staying out late at work—a lot. Bringing me presents for no reason. Only there’s always a reason, right? When two plus two starts coming out six, I can generally figure out what the x in the equation is. And this last month, things were coming out six most of the time. But Vince—I don’t understand why he killed that girl.”

  “Maybe he thought he loved her. Maybe he thought he couldn’t have her and maybe it made him desperate.”

  Delia’s gaze didn’t move away. “Do you think he loved her?”

  “I think one day he looked around him and saw he was farther along the road than he’d realized. Time was running out and he was trapped. If that’s love, then he loved her.”

  “Did he feel trapped?”

  “Same job every day.”

  “You mean same wife every day.”

  “I don’t mean that, Delia. It was between him and himself. It was the way he chose to see things.”

  Delia nodded. “I saw he was exploring. Trying new ways of dressing, new ways of cutting his hair, going to the gym, dieting—when he wasn’t looking, he was getting ready to look. It was bound to happen that he’d meet somebody. And you know, for a long time … we weren’t lovers the way we used to be. There always seemed to be something in the way. His hours. My headaches. His headaches.”

  “But there must have been something there. You two must have wanted to stay together.”

  A silence hovered.

  Delia finally answered with a shrug. “My point of view? I loved him. His point of view? I guess he didn’t want to let me down. He hated letting people down. That’s the one thing he could not do and be at peace with himself. He was decent to the core. Saying he was a bad man is absolutely untrue.”

  “No one is saying Carl was a bad man.”

  Her eyes stayed on Cardozo, tough now, almost accusing. “They’ve been saying it, Vince, and you’ve heard them saying it. But if any of you knew how hard he tried, how long he held on, long after anyone else would have cracked … If you knew the half of it, you’d give him a medal.”

  Nothing moved in the room except the sunlight glinting off the edge of the coffee table.

  “Okay,” Delia said, “he did a lot of things I don’t know about, and he probably did a lot of things even you don’t know about. He had women, he played around, he went to the races, he drank too much. And when he turned on the TV he watched too much. Big deal.”

  She was sinking into her feelings now, and the silence was heavy with all the things she needed to say.

  “In the end, it’s funny, but once he got all that out of his system I think he would have stayed home. He would have kept tinkering around in the cellar. He was a homebody, deep down. Because for Carl the bottom line was to live life with a little decency and dignity. And IAD took that away from him. Over a plate of ice cream.”

  Delia’s voice was glacial with controlled fury.

  “Carl’s problem was, he wasn’t a big enough crook. Be a big enough crook and no one can touch you. Look at all the mayor’s appointees. Look at the senators and congressmen and state reps. They shove public money into their pockets and drive to the bank in a stretch limo that’s paid for by taxes. They take millions and Carl took two dollars’ worth of dessert. Even Jack the Ripper gets a second chance nowadays. But not a cop. Not Carl Malloy. Toward the end he had to fight for everything—even for the chance to fight.”

  Delia got up and brought the bottle from the bar.

  “I could kill that Braidy bitch. And as for IAD, don’t even talk to me about IAD.”

  “But Delia,” Cardozo said, “IAD dropped the charge.”

  “Sure, they dropped it and made him wear a wire.”

  Cardozo brought his eyes up slowly. “Carl was wearing a wire?”

  Delia Malloy didn’t answer. It was as if for once in the life of this cop’s wife there was an instant of power she could savor. And then she nodded. “Carl was going crazy, he felt he was Judas sitting there in task-force meetings with that wire. Why the hell did IAD need a recording? It wasn’t as though you guys were talking about skimming a shipment of coke.”

  “Who in IAD wired him?”

  “Zawac. He gave Carl a choice: get busted for corruption, lose his job, his pension because of two plates of ice cream—or wear the wire.”

  “Why the hell would Zawac want a wire in Society Sam task-force meetings?”

  “Who asks why when it’s IAD? They had Carl cold. Bridget Braidy saw him accept the free ice cream. Zawac wanted a wire in the Society Sam task force and Carl fell into his lap and Zawac got his wire.”

  CARDOZO STEPPED INTO THE CUBICLE. He closed the door. He searched his desktop and found last July’s police-department roster. He looked up Internal Affairs Division, ISB in the index, and he found Captain Lawrence Zawac on page four. He punched the number into his phone. A flunky answered. Cardozo had no trouble mustering his nastiest voice, and his nastiest voice did the trick. The flunky put him through.

  “I’ve just been talking to the widow of a friend of yours,” Cardozo said. “Delia Malloy.”

  A silence came across the line. Then Zawac said, “I hope you told her how very sorry I was to learn about her husband.”

  “I couldn’t vouch for how
sorry you felt,” Cardozo said. “Delia tells me you had Carl wear a wire into my task force.”

  Zawac didn’t deny it.

  “Mrs. Malloy is willing to testify in an independent probe of IAD tactics. Unless you’d care to tell me why you wired Carl. Who you were giving the information to?”

  “Lieutenant, we’re discussing extremely sensitive issues. This is not a secure phone. I’m not about to comment.”

  “Then let me ask you this. How did Xenia Delancey know we were unsealing a Family Court file?”

  “I can’t comment.”

  “In that case, Captain, I hope you have good health coverage, because your ass is in the frying pan.”

  CARDOZO CAME DOWN THE PRECINCT STEPS. The light in Sixty-sixth Street had softened. On the rooftops and in the windows of upper stories the sun cast a late-afternoon glow.

  He was heading east when a woman’s voice called to him. “Vince—could I ask you a favor?”

  He turned. A white stretch limo had slowed at the curb, and Senator Nancy Guardella was leaning out of the open passenger door. He didn’t answer, but his face must have said it for him.

  “I know you hate my guts,” Nancy Guardella said. “And I don’t blame you, but just do me one favor: Ride with me—give me a chance to tell my side of the story.”

  Cardozo slid into the coolness of the backseat.

  “Leo,” Senator Guardella told the back of her driver’s head, “drive around a little.”

  The limo eased into the east-bound traffic. Nancy Guardella pressed the remote and raised the glass partition between the seats. “I just had a talk with Larry Zawac.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Vince, these things happen. I chair a complex agency that handles complex problems that there are no magic, simple solutions for. I wish to hell there were. I wish I could snap my fingers, wave a magic wand, and solve the drug crisis without bending a single law.”

  The limo stopped for the Lexington Avenue light. Sunlight reflected off an Absolut vodka bottle sitting on the fully stocked bar.

  “We both know that’s wishful thinking,” Nancy Guardella said. “To get the goods on the drug cartel, to get a charge that holds up in an American court, we have to allow the drug cartel to operate. It’s called entrapment. It’s a dirty word, and it’s a dirty way of solving a dirty problem. But if you know a clean way, Vince, I wish you’d let me know.”