Deadly Rich (27 page)

Richards gave him a look. “Yeah. Right.”

“W
HAT ABOUT GIVING SOME SPACE
to the other side of the story?” Nancy Guardella said.

“I wasn’t aware,” Zack Morrow said, “that we were giving space to either side.”

They were coming to the end of their lunch at Le Cercle. Lunch, today, had been on Senator Guardella. She loved lunch at Le Cercle. She loved the cuisine and the pointedly snooty staff and the celebrities who fought for the right to crowd the sumptuous red plush banquettes. She loved the fact that reservations for lunch required phoning two weeks ahead, and the fact that she could get in on forty-five-minutes’ notice.

“Come on,” she said. “Dizey Duke is openly crusading to lynch the boy.”

Zack Morrow lowered his eyes. “I have no input into Dizey’s column.”

A scowl slowly flattened Nancy Guardella’s face. “You publish her.”

“If I altered just one of her columns,” Zack said, “censored just one word, she’d have the right to leave me. And I can’t afford the circulation drop.”

“Dizey
Duke
? She’s not
that
powerful.”

“If she’s not that powerful,” Tori Sandberg said, “why do you care what she writes?”

Nancy Guardella lifted her cappuccino and sipped. “Principle. Innocent till proven guilty. Ever hear of it?”

Tori set her lips in a thin line of impatience. “That principle binds the law. Not the press.”

“And as a U.S. senator,” Nancy Guardella said, “it binds me. It binds me to stand up for you, Tori, and for you, Zack, which is easy because I love you both. And it binds me to stand up for people nobody loves, like Jim Delancey. He’s getting a raw deal in the media.”

Tori drew in a long breath. “He got a pretty soft deal from the justice system. Maybe he’s earned a raw deal in the media.”

In Nancy Guardella’s eyes was a mingled expression of sadness and indignation. “Tori, don’t you believe in fairness for all? Or do you just believe in fairness for some of the people?”

“I hope I believe in fairness for all.”

Senator Guardella gave Tori Sandberg a slow glance. Just a glance. “If you truly believe in fairness, you’ll have
Matrix Magazine
interview Xenia Delancey. She’s a great subject. She’s a mother, she’s fighting for her kid, she’s battling public opinion. Women will identify.”

Tori’s eyes betrayed a moment’s unguarded shock. “Sorry. She’s the wrong mother for me, and he’s the wrong kid. I’m too good a friend of Leigh Baker’s, and too many bad things have happened between her and Jim Delancey.”

“That’s
history
,” Nancy Guardella said.

Tori shook her head. “Leigh feels they’re still happening.”

“Oh?”

“She thinks Delancey is making harassing phone calls.”

A glaze of pure annoyance came over Nancy Guardella’s face. “The kid is out of prison by the skin of his teeth. He’s not going to risk his freedom just to needle Leigh Baker.”

Tori smiled coolly. “Unless he’s unbalanced.”

Nancy Guardella’s face was rigid. She gripped the armrests of her chair and was up on her feet. “Would you both excuse me a moment?”

She moved past tables of socialites and celebrities, spraying air kisses and eye contact, striding just quickly enough that waiters and table-hoppers got out of her way. She crossed the restaurant to the table where Kristi Blackwell, pale and slim in one of Gloria Spahn’s raspberry sheaths, was having lunch with her husband. Today her husband looked sober.

Nancy Guardella thrust out a hand. Thirty carats flashed. Kristi looked up, quickly found a smile, and took the hand.

“One of my constituents has an interesting problem.” Nancy Guardella took the unoccupied chair. “
Fanfare
might consider doing a piece.”

Kristi speared a chunk of lobster, dipped it in green mayonnaise, and raised it to her mouth. “All ears.”

“She’s a working mother. Her son was convicted of a felony. He served his time and he’s out of prison. But he’s being set up by the press and the police to close an unrelated murder case.”

Silence. Eye contact. Kristi Blackwell smiled.

“Nice try, Nancy, but I’m not going to touch Jim Delancey
or
the Society Sam killings. We have a three-week press lag, and we stay away from current cases. They’re much too volatile.”

Nancy Guardella raised her eyes toward Kristi. “You didn’t stay away from the Nita Kohler killing.”

“That was different. The case was going to trial and the issues were clear.”

Wystan Blackwell gazed out of bloodshot eyes at Senator Guardella. His expression was slack and bored and sour. “I should think Kristi’s readers have had more than enough of Jim Delancey for one lifetime.”

Nancy Guardella gave Wystan Blackwell a look, and the look said,
Stay out of this.
“Doesn’t anyone in this city care that the cops and the press are walking all over the boy’s rights?”

“If it turns out he’s guilty again,” Kristi Blackwell said, “people will want to know why they didn’t walk over his rights a lot harder and a lot sooner.”

LEIGH CAME BACK
from the half-day’s shooting in a good mood. Afternoon sun reflected off the town houses across the garden, and her bedroom walls glowed like a sky full of pale pink kites. She dropped her pocketbook and her jacket on the bed. Something cooed softly, and it took her a moment to realize that the telephone was ringing.

By the time she reached the receiver, the answering machine had clicked on.

She shouted over the outgoing message. “Just a minute, let me kill this thing.”

She pushed buttons and finally got her recorded voice to shut up. “Hello?” she said.

No answer.

“Hello?”

She heard something—it wasn’t quite breathing and it wasn’t quite knocking. It wasn’t quite anything she’d ever heard on a telephone before.

“Who is this?”

The breathing-knocking went on.

“Same to you.” She slammed the receiver down.

Now she was angry.

She stripped down to her underwear. She spread a towel on the rug and pushed herself through a half hour of stretching exercises. It was a punishing ritual performed for reasons that only her body knew. When she’d had enough and her nerves had calmed down, she took a twenty-minute shower.

And then she spread two bath towels on the bed and lay down and shut her eyes.

A long while later, in her dream, a man’s voice was telling her that a receiver seemed to be off the hook. “Please check your extensions.”

She opened her eyes and sat up. The voice didn’t stop.

She looked at the phone and saw that the receiver had landed crooked. The green light on the answering machine was still lit, which meant the machine was still recording.

She replaced the receiver, correctly this time. The voice stopped. She pressed buttons and finally brought the answering machine to a halt. The tape had recorded practically to the end, and it took almost ten minutes to rewind it.

She pressed the Replay button. For the next forty-five minutes she gave the machine her undivided attention.

“
HAVE YOU SEEN MY APARTMENT
since I enlarged it?” Sorry Chappell said. Her name was actually Sorella, but since she was one of the giddiest people in New York, the nickname Sorry—so amusingly wrong for a rich, plump, brassy blond—had stuck. “No, I haven’t,” Leigh said.

“I knocked a hole into the building next door.” As one of New York’s top interior designers, Sorry was famous for the holes she had knocked into Manhattan’s most prestigious co-ops. “You’ve got to come look. Now, have you been to any good auctions lately?”

Leigh shook her head. “None.”

They had met for dessert in the garden of a new French bakery on East Eighty-first. Leigh had suggested meeting, Sorry had suggested dessert.

“I’ve been haunting the estate sales at Sotheby’s,” Sorry said, “hoping some dark ruby parures will come up—
something
for late-afternoon wear.”

“But you always look wonderful in late afternoon.”

Sorry lifted a small amount of
sorbet de poire
to her mouth. “I’ve lost eight pounds and it’s time to look better than wonderful. You, by the way, look smashing. You’re the only woman I know who can bring off that
dégagée
look.”

“You mean I should spend more time in front of my mirror?”

“Quite the opposite. Reckless is you, darling.”

Leigh supposed Sorry was referring to the crème brûlée she had ordered and already finished.

“Have you been getting strange phone calls?” Leigh said.

Sorry offered an uncertain smile. “Now, that’s an interesting question. How strange is strange?”

“Hang ups, breathing … threats.”

“None that I recall. Should I have been?”

“Have you noticed anyone following you?”

“I think IRS may have a man following me.”

“Are you sure he’s IRS?”

“No. I’m not even sure he’s following me.”

“Where have you seen him?”

“At Cartier’s four times. He watches what I buy and then he whispers to the salespeople. Doesn’t that sound like IRS to you?”

“What does he look like?”

“Heavy. Poor taste in clothes. He has thinning black hair and he combs it over his bald spot.”

“It doesn’t sound like—” Leigh was going to say
Jim Delancey
, and then she thought,
There’s no sense alarming Sorry.
“Like the person I’m thinking of.”

“In other words someone’s phoning you, and breathing, and hanging up, and threatening you. And following you. And he’s better-looking than my man in Carrier’s.”

“What about Fenny?” Fenny Gurdon was Sorry’s partner in the interior-design firm of Gurdon-Chappell, and like Sorry, he had testified at the trial for Nita’s character.

Sorry licked her spoon clean. “You know Fenny doesn’t follow women.”

“Is he
being
followed?”

“Not that he’s mentioned to me. But he’s at the shop this afternoon. He’d love to see you. Why don’t you go ask him?”

LEIGH SHADED HER EYES
and peered through the Madison Avenue window of Gurdon-Chappell Interiors. She saw antiques, but no Gurdon. No customers either. She pushed the buzzer.

Twenty seconds later the shop door swung open, and she stepped inside. Crystal chandeliers threw elegantly fractured light.

“Leigh—love!”

An enormous white-haired man materialized from the depth of the store, rushing toward her down the Biedermeier-cluttered aisle. They met: first their hands, then his lips and her angled cheek.

“Fennie, there’s something I’ve got to ask you, and I hope it won’t seem strange.”

She caught the stillness and expectancy in his eyes. He thought she was here to buy something.

“In this business, love,” he said, “no request is strange. And nine times out of ten, in this shop, the answer’s yes.”

Keeping her hand in his, he led her to an enormous leather-topped desk at the rear of the gallery. They sat. She picked up an embroidered velvet bell cord and began drawing it through her fingers.

He waited.

Her eye roamed a wall of marble mantelpieces, standing suits of armor, carved canopied beds. “Fennie—have you been getting phone calls?”

“I should hope so!”

“Odd phone calls. Hang ups. Silences. Breathing.”

“Good Lord, love, what
are
we talking—phone sex?”

“No. I’m serious, Fennie. Something is going on. It’s been going on ever since they paroled the Delancey boy.”

Fennie Gurdon drew back in his chair. “I’m not exactly understanding the question, love.”

“Lately have you had any feeling that someone’s watching you?”

“Watching me?”

“Following you?”

“Should I have had?”

“I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

“I’m not exactly a household name to the broader public. As far as sex appeal goes, I’m a distinctly minority taste. Why should anyone bother with me?”

“To learn your movements. To know where you go when and what times you’re apt to be alone.”

The patchouli-scented face remained cool, practically deadpan. “Sad to say, no such attention has been lavished on me, love. Don’t I wish. But I’m not a celebrity like you.”

“It’s not a fan, Fennie.”

Fennie lifted the bell cord from her fingers. “This person seems to be making you terribly unhappy, love. Is there anything I can do?”

“Just be careful. Please.” Leigh got to her feet.

Fennie rose at the same time. “I’ll try, love, but you know your old Fennie—some things are easier said than done.”

LEIGH BAKER STARED
at the marsala-marinated strawberries heaped in a parfait cup, doused and dripping with
zabaione.
She felt an almost obscene craving for sweets; she recognized it as a transposed longing for alcohol, brought on by stress.
No
, she made up her mind.
I’m not going to.

She tore her eyes from the color photograph and closed the book of Italian desserts and replaced it on the shelf.

Most of the other customers in the shop were women. But one man standing at the biography section with his back toward her was wearing a raincoat.
Odd to be wearing a raincoat
, she thought.
It’s a sunny day.

She swung the shop door open and stepped out on Madison.

Steam pipes under the street had exploded. A Con Ed crew was working to repair the thirty-foot crater. Boys on roller skates glided through the jammed traffic, handing out restaurant flyers to stalled drivers. An ambulance was trying to get through and its siren was wailing at top decibel.

Garbage cans waiting on the curb for collection had narrowed the sidewalk to a single lane. A homeless man had picked that exact spot to spread out a bed of newspapers and fall asleep.

Leigh walked around him. He was unshaved and he’d fouled his trousers and he had open sores on his arm. She felt disgust and then she felt ashamed of her disgust and guilty that she had a home, even if it wasn’t her own. She took a ten-dollar bill from her purse and bent down to slip it into his shirt pocket.

She felt like a sentimental fool. She glanced around her to see if anyone had noticed her impulsive little gesture.