Deadly Rich (26 page)

“How do you explain that?”

“You don’t have to be an astrophysicist. The killer didn’t climax. But the hairs tell us he sure tried. Maybe he couldn’t get hot for the guy. Maybe he’s come-shy on a public thoroughfare.”

“
YOU’RE NOT BALANCING
the bar,” Dick Braidy’s trainer prodded.

“I’m
trying
to balance it!” Dick Braidy grunted.

“Look in the mirror. The mirror’s your friend.” The trainer’s name was Bruce McGee. He had curly hair and a terrific build and he owned the gym. He was rumored to train Tom Cruise and Cher and Prince Wally of Yugoslavia, which was why Dick Braidy had insisted on working out with him personally.

“That mirror,” Dick Braidy said, “is no friend of mine.” The truth was that when he attempted the behind-the-neck military press, the mirror showed him a thickened neck with veins standing out, a vanished chin, and cheeks that had grown extra cheeks. It was that very reflection that had driven him to the gym.

He squeezed both eyes shut and, at the same moment, hands gripping the steel bar behind his head, he pushed up. It was like lifting the lid of your own coffin. Hopeless. A weight clattered loose and then gravity kicked in and the bar tipped insanely to the left.

Bruce caught the bar. “When the reps get hard is when you’ve got to keep a tight grip. Just like life.”

Dick Braidy’s eyes snapped open. “Bruce, please. No lectures on life today.”

Bruce placed a hand on Dick Braidy’s shoulder. “What’s rattling you, fella? You’re all keyed up.”

“How can I not be keyed up? Horrible things are happening in this city.”

“Get over it, fella. Shit’s coming down all the time.” Beneath the blue T-shirt stenciled with the gym’s logo, Bodies-PLUS!, Bruce’s chest rose and fell with slow, effortless regularity. “Use the anger. Adrenaline’s your friend. Turn it into reps. We want to get you as lean as Paul Newman.”

Dick Braidy braced one hand against the pec deck, catching his breath. “Speaking of Paul Newman, is it true that he—”

“Got a treat for you.” Bruce smiled mysteriously. “Ten-pound lateral dumbbell raises.”

The lateral raises were not a treat. Neither were the reverse-grip pull-downs or the abdominal routine that followed.

By the end of his workout Dick Braidy felt like a tin shack buckling in a Georgia heat wave. He stood on trembling knees, toweling sweat off his face, trying to catch his breath. “How many lateral raises can Paul Newman do?” he asked.

“Uh-uh, we don’t discuss clients.” Bruce wagged a finger. He leaned close and whispered. “Three sets of thirty.” He gave Dick Braidy a slap on the bottom. “See you Thursday.”

Muscles beginning to throb now, Dick Braidy retrieved his clothes from the locker and found a free changing room.

In the mirror, dimly, he could see the beginning of something: In three months at the gym he’d cut his weight from two twenty-nine to one ninety-seven, his waist from thirty-eight inches to thirty-seven.

Just the other day he’d walked up the three flights of stairs from the Fifty-second Street entrance of the Four Seasons to the Grill Room, and he hadn’t even been out of breath when he reached the maître d’s desk. Not bad for a sixty-year-old six-feet-two chubby who hadn’t exercised in twenty years.

“Hey, you’re looking good.”

Dick Braidy turned at the sound of the voice with its faint foreign accent. The boy who washed towels and cleaned up around the gym stood smiling in the half-opened doorway. He was a new employee—Dick Braidy had seen him around for three weeks or so. Towel boys never lasted long at Bodies-PLUS.

The boy flexed a bicep. “Getting hard, right?”

Dick Braidy felt a glow. “Me? Come on, I’m an old wreck.”

The boy shook his head. His dark eyes were grave. “No, man, you’re changing, I can see it.”

“Really?” Dick Braidy glanced again at his reflection, pleased. “Maybe I’m a
little
tighter.”

“You’re going to look great, man. People are going to think you’re shooting steroids. You should enter the over-forty middleweight triathlon.”

Does he really think I’m only over forty
? Dick Braidy wondered. He laughed. “Me a middleweight? When did you last have your eyes checked?”

The boy tapped a forefinger to his left temple. “I eat a dozen carrots a day. I have twenty-twenty vision and I can see in the dark.”

“You’re in the wrong field,” Dick Braidy said. “You should be in diplomacy.”

“See you,” the boy said.

“See you.” Dick Braidy closed the door and slid the bolt. Feeling just a little pleased with himself, he had himself a long, slow-motion shower and shampoo. He dried himself, gave his hair a quick once-over with the hairdryer provided by Bodies-PLUS, slipped back into his street clothes.

As he crossed the entrance vestibule, his journalist’s eye scanned the Bodies-PLUS bulletin board. Four square feet of corkboard overflowed with ads for Bodies-PLUS vitamin supplements and unpasteurized, caffeine-free bee pollen.

Two New York Police Department flyers had been push-pinned to the bottom of the board. Both were sketches, apparently drawn by the same robot—one of a full-lipped, pouting black woman, the other of a generic male Hispanic. Both carried the same text:
WANTED FOR QUESTIONING IN CONNECTION WITH HOMICIDE
. With a start Dick Braidy realized that the male was the same Identi-Kit that Lieutenant Cardozo had showed him that afternoon.

Such an ordinary face
, Dick Braidy thought.
You see a hundred a day of them.
Suppressing a shudder, he hurried into the hallway and pressed the elevator button.

Wednesday, May 22

“T
ELL ME.” LOU STEIN’S
face was ruddy above a cotton work shirt. “Why is it the stuff you find in a Park Avenue trash basket looks exactly the same as the stuff you find in a Times Square trash basket? Same newspapers, same hot-dog wrappers, same condoms, same unidentifiable objects.”

“I guess,” Cardozo said, “all neighborhoods are trashy in the same way.”

They were standing in Lou’s lab, gloved, reviewing the contents of the trash basket from the southwest corner of Sixty-seventh and Park. Lou’s gloved fingers smoothed a newspaper clipping down on the steel tabletop. He nudged his glasses lower on his nose and read aloud: “
Talk of
le tout
Park Avenue
is
the scrumptious dinner Annie MacAdam is serving
chez elle
tonight. Annie’s eight-room duplex
—”

“Thanks, Lou, I know it by heart.”

“This column was clipped,” Lou said, “not torn.” His tweezers tapped the faintly jagged edge of the paper. “In fact, the serrations on this column are compatible with the serrations on the first column.”

“Only compatible? Don’t they match?”

“Let’s be grateful for what we’ve got. They don’t
not
match. The same rinky-dink, loose-screwed, two-inch five-and-dime scissors could have cut them both out. And look what else the tooth fairy brought.” Lou was holding up a three-inch length of white candle, a half inch in diameter, with a blackened wick. “This is a Saffire-brand
Shabbes
—and it’s a kissing cousin of the candle we found in Oona Aldrich’s changing room. Available in any New York supermarket. Not only the same brand, the same box. Saffire
Shabbes
comes in cardboard packs. Whoever stacked them on the shelf dented this box. There’s a groove running along the underside of candle one.” Lou held up another candle. “There’s a groove on the underside of candle two.” He held up the two candles together. “They’re the same groove. And, dollars to doughnuts, it’ll be on the underside of candle three.”

“I appreciate your optimism. How long did candle two burn?”

“A little under two minutes. That’s lab conditions.”

“Was the candle put out, or did it go out by itself?”

“Impossible to determine.” Lou peeled off his gloves and moved to the desk. He picked up a lab report. “Bad news from Lifeways Lab. They haven’t been able to recover usable DNA from the semen and hair in Oona Aldrich’s mouth.”

“How do the hair samples from Avalon Gardner’s mouth match up with the Aldrich hairs?”

“Our equipment’s a little behind state-of-the-art, but my microscope says they’re identical.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER
, Cardozo stood just inside the entrance of the Dominion Club.

“A
what
?” the porter said.

“A small candle,” Cardozo repeated patiently.

The porter pulled back his head and bulged his eyes. “Christ, no. People don’t use candles on the street.”

Two minutes later the doorman at the co-op across the street shook his head.

“No, I didn’t see any candle.”

MARTY WILKES,
the psychologist, frowned at the photographs that had been paper-clipped to Avalon Gardner’s autopsy report. “Have you been able to establish the sequence of these cuts?”

“The first two cuts are to the throat,” Cardozo said. “Then there’s a series of horizontal slashes descending across the abdomen and then punctures over the liver.” He sat clicking the push-button of his ballpoint pen. “What we’re not sure of is whether he has sex first or kills them first. If he has sex first, what’s to keep the victim from screaming? Or fighting him off? Or getting away?”

“Is there any sign that either victim was gagged?”

“None.”

“Then he wounds them first.”

“And has sex with a dying person?”

“Or a dead person. It could be a payback.”

“For what?”

“I’ll hazard a guess. As a child he was forced to have oral sex with an adult. And he feared for his life. Possibly this person was a woman, but the overwhelming probability is that it was a man.”

Cardozo aimed a glance toward the desktop computer. “This is your database talking?”

Wilkes nodded. “According to BSU files, over eighty percent of serial killers were abused as children.”

“Tell me if this is in your files.” Cardozo sat forward in his chair. “Both times there’s been body tissue missing.”

Wilkes was silent. His arms crossed in front of his chest, erecting a tight little wall. “Are we talking body parts? Fingers? Nipples?”

“He’s ripped off tissue around the cuts.”

“How much tissue?”

“Just enough so you can’t suture the wounds back together.”

Wilkes nodded, somber. Behind him, the Levolors in the window had been angled to filter the late-afternoon sun down to a soft shimmer. “Look, it’s repulsive, but it’s not uncommon. The sex instinct in children is oral—you see male infants having erections at their mother’s breast. For the infant, biting, chewing, even eating and devouring are sexualized. And this is the instinctual level where the serial killer is fixated.”

“You’re saying he’s eating the tissue?”

“Maybe not on the spot, but there are instances in the database.”

“And he has an orgasm while he eats it?”

“Very possibly.”

Cardozo rose and moved to the window. He stood with his back to Marty Wilkes. “Let’s say Delancey killed Oona in a rage. And now to cover up he’s creating the appearance of a serial killing. Would he—could he go this far?”

“You’re coming back to an old question. If a man kills to create the appearance of serial killing, is he a serial killer?”

Cardozo turned. “Well—is he?”

“Once he goes random he fits the definition.”

“Would you say Avalon Gardner was selected randomly?”

“Random within the parameters. So far I see two critical marks in the killer’s choice of victim. He’s violating upper-class sanctums. And he’s going for women.”

Cardozo stared a moment at the face staring back at him. “Avalon Gardner was a man.”

Wilkes conceded as much with a nod. “A man dressed in such a way that he could be mistaken for a woman.”

“And you think the killer mistook him?”

“I believe so. Serial killing, overwhelmingly, is something men do to women.”

Cardozo frowned. “I don’t see Avalon as random. He’s linked to Oona. They knew each other. They used to socialize.”

“The killer is aiming at a small social class—the extremely conspicuous, self-publicizing people who monopolize the New York gossip columns. The link you’re seeing may be one he’s completely unaware of.”

For a moment neither of them spoke.

“And,” Wilkes said, “he may not be Jim Delancey. He could be the man with the boom box. Or someone you don’t even have a lead to yet. But let’s say he’s the boom-box man. According to your witnesses the youngest this man could be is eighteen. So, figure that he could have been assaulted as young as six years of age—we’re looking into cases at least twelve years old. And let’s make a statistically based cutoff, our killer is under thirty, so we’re looking no further back than twenty-four years.”

Cardozo’s eye went to the Harvard Med School diploma on the wall.

“There’s a sixty-percent probability that he’s illegitimate. Most of these fellows never had a decent relationship with any father figure, never knew their real father, and one way or another were rejected by their mothers. What I recommend you do, Vince, is search the records. Look for an illegitimate Caucasian Catholic Hispanic who was raised by a female relative and sexually assaulted by an older male relative.”

Cardozo grimaced at the thought of sifting through twelve years of uncomputerized records. “Marty, how long is he going to give us before the next killing?”

“The second was eleven days after the first, so he’s on a minimax cycle. If he keeps to the statistical mainstream, no sooner than next Thursday would be a good guess.”

CARDOZO DIDN’T SEE
Sam Richards in the squad room.

He went to the TV room. Richards was standing by the coffee maker, waiting for the coffee to finish dripping through.

“Sam, how are you coming with the gyms and sports outlets?”

“Just about wound up. There’s a gym on Staten Island I want to visit, and there are two near the Path station in Newark.”

“When you get back from Newark, could you go down to Family Court on Lafayette?”

Richards looked at Cardozo with frank curiosity.

“I’d like you to look at the records from twenty-four to twelve years back,” Cardozo said. “Pull any cases of Catholic Hispanic boys sexually assaulted by an older male relative.”