Deadly Rich (34 page)

Wednesday, May 29

T
HE DESK CLERK HANDED
Malloy the key. “Room 607. You know where it is.”

Malloy could feel Laurie hanging back. He put an arm around her, husband-and-wife style. They crossed the lobby.

It was a typical midrange Upper East Side hotel. The red plush on the sofas and chairs had developed shining patches, but no one had tossed cigarette butts on the fake Oriental rug. The sound of a live piano spilled out from the little bar just off the lobby. There was a burst of laughter with just an edge of happy-hour drunkenness.

“They serve tea in the bar,” Malloy mentioned.

“Oh, yes?” Laurie’s voice was trying to be perky and interested, and Malloy could detect the trying. “That would be nice,” she said. “Maybe some other time.”

When they stepped into the elevator, a man in a business suit and an elderly bellboy were already waiting. The bellboy threw them a glance that was cool but humorous.

Malloy figured that this was at most a two-bellboy hotel—so the old guy had to know who was checked in and who was not, and he’d spotted them for a pair of nots.

“Floor, please,” the bellboy said.

“We’ll be going to six,” Malloy said.

The elevator stopped on four, and the bellboy—balancing two bags—held the door for the man in the business suit.

Twenty seconds later Malloy and Laurie stepped out on six.

“Down here,” Malloy said.

She followed him.

Malloy unlocked 607, flicked on the light, stood back. It was a little room with a double bed and faded print curtains and blond furniture and the big dead eye of a TV. The air smelled faintly stuffy.

Malloy crossed to the window and flicked on the air conditioner.

Laurie looked around the room. He tried to see it from her point of view. The ashtrays sparkled, the surfaces shone. The napped pattern on the bedspread had worn down a little, but the spread was clean and pulled tight and the four pillows made inviting bulges.

“Do you want the bathroom first?” She sounded nervous.

He wanted to reach out and hug her and say,
Relax, it’s okay. Ten thousand women do this every day in Manhattan.

“You go ahead,” he said.

“It’ll only take me a minute.”

She took her purse with her. A moment later Malloy heard water running.

He took off his jacket, hung it over a chair. He laid his gun on the chair and his holster beside it.

He took his wallet out of the jacket and snapped open the catch on the change compartment. He poured three dimes and three black pills into his hand.

For Carl Malloy’s money, the greatest thing, the only thing the drug culture ever did to benefit mankind was to invent sex drugs. To think a single pill could strip all the distractions from your mind, stop all the whining tapes, turn every millimeter of your skin into a receiving station.

A miracle.

He placed one of the pills on his tongue. It began to dissolve like a patch test. He tasted salt at the sides of his tongue and sour at the rear and bitter in a stripe down the middle. He swallowed.

Then he figured,
What the hell, let’s celebrate
, and he popped a second pill.

He stood there listening to the air conditioner. It was making sounds like an electronic synthesizer, singing melodies that weren’t quite melodies, saying words that weren’t quite words.

A sudden dryness covered his mouth.

He recognized the pill kicking in. He could feel little flashes in his chest.

This is going to be good
, he thought.

He unhooked the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign from the doorknob, opened the corridor door and hung it on the outer knob, slid the bolt.

The room seemed way too bright. He pulled the curtain across the view of the street. He shut off all the lights except the lamp by the bed, and he set that one to dim.

He pulled back the bedspread.

A patch of darning on the sheet hem leapt out at him like a fist.

He blinked, drew in a slow, deep breath and told himself,
Take it easy. They probably darn the sheets even at the Plaza.

He sat down in the chair and undid his shoes.

Now he could recognize the song of the air conditioner. It caught at his throat, sent a trembling along his spine. “Love Me Tender,” the old Elvis Presley ballad, but richer, truer than Elvis, because now it was half memory.

He had stripped down to his socks and shorts when the bathroom door opened.

A woman was standing there in her half slip, the light behind her.

“The bathroom’s all yours,” Laurie’s voice said.

It seemed a long time ago, a forgotten moment in the very remote past that she had gone into that bathroom.

“I don’t need it,” he said.

He saw her hesitate, then draw her hesitation back into herself.

“Okay,” she said.

He peeled off his socks, tucked them into his shoes, stood in his bare feet and shorts.

She looked at him, her head a little to one side, an odd half-questioning smile on her mouth.

His eyes took a long swig of her. The scent of her perfume floated toward him. His cock was beginning to bloat in his drawers.

God bless those pills. Should I offer her one
? he wondered. No. Too early in the relationship. Might shock her.

“Hey,” he said, “know something?” He moved toward her. “I missed you.”

AFTERWARD HE RAISED HIMSELF
on one elbow and studied her.

She was lying on her back, motionless. Her head with its pale, soft face lay back on the pillow.

He put his fingertip on her wrist.

She jerked away. “Huh?”

“You were so quiet.”

She gazed at him with something in her eyes. He wasn’t sure what it was, what it meant. He took her hand and kissed each of the small, clear-polished nails.

“You’re different now,” she said.

“How am I now?”

“Gentle.”

He sensed a shyness in her, a wanting. “Wasn’t I gentle before?”

“You were like someone else.”

“You carried me away, that’s why.”

“It was like you didn’t know it was me.”

The lovemaking was a blank in his mind. He couldn’t remember what he’d done, what he’d said. Had he been too rough? Talked dirty?

There was bafflement on her face, and an awful feeling inside him that maybe he’d shocked this sweet kid.

Words for her like
shy
and
sweet
and
trusting
started coming into his mind, and words for himself like
stupid
and
selfish.

He got out of bed and dressed.

Silently she began putting on her clothes.

Thursday, May 30

W
HEN MALLOY CAME BACK
to the squad room, Laurie Bonasera was still not at her desk, and the computer screen was dark.

He glanced over to where Sergeant Goldberg was sitting at his desk, propped on an elbow over a cup of coffee and a racing form.

“Anyone seen Laurie?”

Goldberg looked up. “She phoned in sick.”

“What’s she got?”

“How the hell do I know?”

Malloy went to his desk. He dropped into the chair and let his long legs stretch out into the aisle. He picked up the phone and dialed Laurie’s number.

She answered and he said, “Hi.”

“Who’s this?”

“Me.”

“Oh—hi.”

He had an instant recall for all her tones of voice, and this was a new one. “You’re sick?” he asked.

“Just a little temperature.”

“Think you’ll be well tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“Feel better,” he said.

The line went dead in his hand. He let sixty seconds go by before he dialed Laurie’s number again.

“Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me again. Look, I’m in the field today. Why I’m calling is because I’ll be in your neighborhood. If you’re not feeling well, if you need anything …”

For a moment she didn’t say anything, and he felt he was flying over nowhere without an engine and without a parachute.

“That’s sweet of you, but you’ve got enough to do.”

“No, no, I don’t have enough to do.”

“Thanks, Carl, but I really don’t need anything.”

He wanted to see her face. He couldn’t decode her voice without the face. It was like trying to touch her through a metal wall.

“Because if you’re not feeling well,” he said, “it could be this summer flu that a lot of the guys in the precinct are catching. You probably picked it up here. You should rest, take it easy. I could run any errands you need.”

“I really don’t need anything.”

His heart began going like an electric bass drum kicking out a fast dance pattern. “If you want me to just stop by …”

“No, that wouldn’t be such a great idea.”

Sweat began inching down Malloy’s face. What the hell was she telling him,
My world, and get the hell out of it
?

“Carl, there’s someone at the door. I gotta run.”

“Okay,” he said, but the phone was already dead.

He sat in a silence of his own, looking down, not believing she could actually have ended the conversation two times in a row like that, not even a good-bye.

Two minutes later Malloy was in the street, heading east under an oatmeal sky sprigged with blue.

A gray-and-white heat hovered over the pavement, and by the time he reached Bruno’s Ca d’Oro Bar and Grill on Sixty-third and Second Avenue, it was a relief to find that the air-conditioning was going full blast.

He slid into a corner booth. The waitress came immediately to take his order.

“Double vodka on the rocks, please.”

“Anything to eat, sir?”

“Just the vodka.”

DIZEY DUKE PRESSED A FINGER
, for the third time, against the doorbell of Oona Aldrich’s town house.

This time, finally, Gabrielle MacAdam opened the door. She was wearing a one-size-fits-all checkered wraparound sari. She was out of breath and her face looked flushed. “Sorry. I was upstairs. It’s a big house.”

“Yeah. They built it that way.” Dizey had never been able to view Gabrielle as anything but an ugly duckling of thirty-something summers who hadn’t inherited her mother’s swan genes and who would never develop the willpower to control her weight or the know-how to take her appearance up-market.

“I think it might be better,” Gabrielle said, “to put the main buffet and bar in the living room.”

“Maybe.” Dizey didn’t remember the house all that clearly. She had agreed to help plan the cocktail-party segment of Oona’s memorial, but she wanted to refresh her memory before she committed herself.

They rode in the two-person elevator up to the living room. The day had cleared, and midafternoon brightness slanted through the flowered drapes. The caterer’s men were hosing down the terrace, and a breeze from the open French windows set the two chandeliers in motion. Crystal prisms jingled cheerfully and scattered rainbows.

The house had seen a lot of New York history, Dizey reflected. Six years ago it had belonged to Leigh Baker, and Jim Delancey had thrown Nita Kohler off that very terrace. Five years ago Oona Aldrich had taken possession and thrown the longest uninterrupted string of hit parties Manhattan had seen since the Eisenhower years.

And now Oona Aldrich had passed from the land of the living, and Annie MacAdam was trying to sell the old house in the worst housing market of the entire twentieth century.

“I thought the bar could go right here.” Gabrielle indicated the space in front of the French windows.

“That’s great, if you want to make sure no one gets to the terrace.” Dizey walked slowly to the fireplace.
Bar could go here
, she thought. She walked to the opposite wall of bright photo-realist oil paintings of trees and hills.
Could go here.
She sat on the sofa that matched the curtains, on the chairs that matched the sofa, on the bench at the Baldwin grand piano. She rippled out a chorus of “The Eyes of Texas Are upon You.”

“Ouch,” she said. “Did you call the tuner?”

Gabrielle’s face turned an even deeper shade of red. “I forgot.”

Figures
, Dizey figured.

“Maybe I can get a tuner from the
Village Voice
listings,” Gabrielle said. “They come on short notice.”

“Forget it.” Dizey crossed to the wall of bookshelves. Her eye noted books in French, books in Latin. Books printed in 1592. Books printed last year. She opened a French edition of Proust and saw that the leaves had not even been cut. Who the hell had Oona Aldrich thought she was fooling?

“The bar can go here,” Dizey said. “This wall.”

“In front of the books?”

“No one’s going to want to read. Take my word for it. Not tonight.”

“But the books are so—they’re so beautiful.”

“So’s a well-stocked bar.”

“There are well-stocked bars in every town house in Manhattan,” Gabrielle said. “But there isn’t a collection of first editions like these.”

How did Annie MacAdam conceive this moron
? Dizey wondered.
She must have had help from a state trooper.
“Sweetie, people are going to be depressed as hell. Some of them may even want to get drunk. So let’s put the bar where they can see it and get to it without breaking their necks or causing traffic jams.”

“All right.” Gabrielle took a vellum-bound book from the shelf. “But Goethe’s
Faust
will go somewhere else, out of champagne-cork range.”

“That’s a great idea.”

Gabrielle stepped through a doorway into a bedroom decorated in muted tones of brown and red. Her eyes searched for a safe place for
Faust.
There was a small canopied bed and behind it a wall full of eighteenth-century botany prints. A silk-upholstered gilt beechwood chair faced a dressing table with delicately bent legs. A triptych mirror shimmered from a painted frame of clouds and cherubs and roses.

She opened a closet door. A smell of cedar drifted out. She touched the dress bags and could feel that there was nothing in them. She stood on tiptoes and slid
Faust
onto the empty shelf.

“
THIS GAL NOT ONLY
had
class
de la
class, she
was
class
de la
class.” Dick Braidy, the only man in the room in evening clothes, was addressing his audience in his most just-between-thee-and-me tale-spinner’s voice. “There was no occasion when Oona Mellon Aldrich did
not
shine.”