Deadly Rich (54 page)

There was a silence, as though a message had to blip back from a satellite, and then the in-taken breath of recognition. “I know who you are. You have gall. You have nerve, phoning me.”

“Get Jim Delancey out of your apartment, or get yourself out. Don’t let him trap you alone.”

“You’re a meddling, psychotic, injustice collector!”

“For God’s sake, just get out of there!”

Something struck the phone booth. It had the weight of a hurled motorcycle, bursting up and out in one explosive, metal-crumpling movement.

Leigh whirled halfway around.

Someone grabbed her from behind. A hand clamped over her mouth. A forearm locked over her throat.

“Don’t scream,” a man’s voice warned.

The smell of sweat on a leather watchband flooded her nostrils. She couldn’t pull air into her lungs. She looked down and saw metal glint in his hand.

“Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”

Her knees snapped. Gripping tightly, pulling her out onto the pavement, her attacker slowly bent her backward.

AT TEN TWENTY-TWO
, on Seventy-second Street near the East River, Patrolman Dan Rivera of the Twenty-second Precinct noticed a phone booth with a smashed glass panel that had not been smashed twenty minutes earlier.

He slowed his blue-and-white cruiser.

A phone receiver twirled at the end of a cord. The pavement around the booth was covered with shards of broken glass, as though a mad philanthropist had scattered a bucket of oversized diamonds.

Patrolman Rivera pulled up to the curb, idled the motor, and stepped out of his cruiser.

He crouched down by the pavement. He played the beam of his flashlight over the glass, looking for blood.

Two feet away, in the gutter, he found a woman’s shoe.

“
HELLO. WALDO CARNEGIE SPEAKING
.” Waldo Carnegie apparently was one of those men who were so rich that they could afford to answer their own phone.

“Mr. Carnegie, I’m sorry to disturb you.” Cardozo’s heart was thumping double-time in his chest, and his palms were sweating so hard that he had to grip the phone with both hands.
I’ll kill Society Sam
, he was thinking.
I will personally hunt that bastard down and execute him on the spot if he touched her.
“This is Lieutenant Vince Cardozo at the Twenty-second Precinct. I don’t want to alarm you, but there may have been … an unfortunate incident. Would you happen to know what kind of shoes Miss Baker was wearing tonight?”

“Shoes?”

“By any chance, were they pale gray alligator pumps?”
Let them be green
, he was thinking.
Please, God, let them be moccasins. Running shoes. Anything but gray alligator pumps.

“Hold on. Leigh darling, were you wearing pale gray alligator pumps tonight?” In the distance a woman’s voice said something. Carnegie came back on the line. “Yes, she was, but she lost one of them.”

It was as though a hand squeezing Cardozo’s heart had suddenly let go and he could draw breath again. But instead of relief, he felt rage sweeping in like a black tide. “You mean she’s there?”

“Yes. She’s right here.”

TWELVE MINUTES LATER,
in the third-floor drawing room of the Carnegie town house, Cardozo listened to Leigh Baker describe the attack.

“I must have passed out for a minute.” She spoke quietly, in a voice bled of all expression. Sitting there on the sofa, she seemed small and touching and scared, undeserving of his or anyone’s anger.

“And he let you go,” Cardozo said. It was part statement, part wondering.

“When I came to, he wasn’t there.”

“How did you get home?”

“I only had one shoe, so I took the first cab I could find.”

“The attacker left you your money?”

She nodded.

“Why didn’t you phone the police?” She bit her lip: “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

On his sofa across the room Waldo Carnegie laid down the new issue of
Forbes
and looked up. “No.
I’m
sorry,” he said. “
I
wasn’t thinking.”

Leigh Baker and Waldo Carnegie glanced at each other across the ten-foot gap between sofas. There was gratitude in Leigh Baker’s eyes and for one irrational moment Cardozo was jealous.

Be grateful to me
, he wanted to shout,
not to him. I’m the one
w
ho worries about you. I’m the one who almost had the heart attack. He’s the one who sits around in patent leather slippers and a smoking jacket, feeling smug and hiring guards to do his worrying.

“The important thing,” Waldo Carnegie said, “is that Leigh is safe and sound.”

Cardozo found himself gazing at her. He could feel her avoiding his eyes. She looked disheveled, maybe a little mauled, but nothing you’d go to the Emergency Room about. There were no visible bruises or cuts, and that struck Cardozo as curious.

He ran it through his mind.
The attacker had her, and he let her go.
Why would he have done that? Had she fought him off? Had someone else come along and surprised him?

“Did you get a look at him?” Cardozo said.

She shook her head. “It was too sudden.”

“Did you hear his voice?”

She took a swallow of her diet Pepsi and put her snifter down on the coffee table. She was thoughtful. “He told me not to scream.”

“Did he have a Hispanic accent?”

“Not remotely.”

“Did you notice anything distinctive about the voice?”

“Yes—I’ve heard it before.”

“Do you remember where?”

“A week ago. In the elevator at Jefferson Storage.”

“Lieutenant,” Waldo Carnegie said, “it’s obvious that this man has been stalking Leigh.”

“We’ve been keeping a guard on Miss Baker,” Cardozo said, “and we haven’t seen him.”

“You weren’t guarding her tonight,” Waldo Carnegie said.

“The cop had car trouble,” Cardozo said. In fact, there was a possibility that the car had been sabotaged. While Leigh Baker had been nursing a coffee in the shop across the street from Archibald’s, her guard had gone for a cup of coffee himself and had left the car unguarded. But Cardozo wasn’t going to mention that. “He lost her.”

“The police are underpaid and overworked,” Waldo Carnegie said. “Maybe we should consider hiring a private guard again.”

“That’s your right,” Cardozo said. “It might not be a bad idea, especially if Miss Baker intends to keep striking out on her own.”

“I beg your pardon?” Waldo Carnegie said.

“Miss Baker was following Jim Delancey tonight—weren’t you, Miss Baker?”

Waldo Carnegie rose from his sofa. He crossed to the sofa where Leigh Baker was sitting and took her hand. “Is that true, dear?”

Leigh Baker looked down at her lap. “I wanted to warn his girlfriend.”

“We
are
aware of Jim Delancey’s movements,” Cardozo said.

“Not aware enough,” Leigh Baker said.

“Darling,” Waldo Carnegie said, “I understand your concern, and I’m sure Lieutenant Cardozo does too, but you mustn’t complicate the work of the police. You don’t want to become a contributory factor to the problem, do you?”

“I don’t want Jim Delancey to kill again.”

Waldo Carnegie bent and kissed the top of her head. When he turned to Cardozo, the smile on his face was that of a proud possessor. “What are we going to do with our little girl, Lieutenant—hold her in protective custody?”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary.” Cardozo rose. “Good night.”

Leigh Baker’s eyes met his. He saw panic in them that she didn’t even know was there. It would hit her in an hour, he reflected. She’d sleep with the light on tonight. He wanted to reach out and hold her and protect her. He tried to tell her all that with his eyes.

“I’m glad you’re safe, Miss Baker.”

“
DID DELANCEY COME OUT
of the building anytime tonight?” Cardozo was sitting at his desk. The switchboard had patched his phone through to the radio car.

“I haven’t seen him so far.” Carl Malloy had to shout over radio interference. His voice could have been coming by satellite from a Middle East war zone. “Not since he went into the girl’s apartment at nine-thirty.”

“Is there a service entrance?”

“Yes, there’s a service entrance.”

“Can you see it?”

“From where I’m parked now? No.”

“Can you see the phone booth?”

“From where I’m parked now there’s a truck in the way.”

“So he could have come out the service entrance?”

“It’s possible, but to get from the service entrance to that phone booth, he’d have had to cross Seventy-second, and I would have seen him.”

Wednesday, June 12

“T
HIS IS WHAT KILLED
Oona and Avalon and Nan Shane.” Sam Richards reached one hand into a Brooks Brothers shopping bag and brought out what looked like a thin mirror with a long handle.

Since ventilation in task-force headquarters was nonexistent, the door had to be kept half open. Sounds and cigarette smoke drifted in from the squad room. Cardozo waved a hand to shoo away a nebula layering the air in front of his face.

As Richards held the thing up, Cardozo could see it wasn’t a mirror at all: It was a ten-inch knife.

“It’s called a Darby knife,” Sam Richards said. “The patented feature is the three-sided blade. It makes a triangular incision. When you’re cut by a Darby, you stay cut. Salmaggi Blades of Worcester, Mass, manufactured about thirty thousand till the army stopped ordering them in 1979. The Darwin Darby estate controls the patent, and they’ve granted no license since.” He leaned forward and handed the knife to Cardozo, rubber handle first.

Cardozo frowned. At the base where the blade joined the handle, it had three edges and three sides. They tapered out to a deadly-looking point. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It’s weighted, so watch it. It has a will of its own.”

Cardozo held the knife out horizontally above the floor. He could feel it, almost a living thing, a thinking thing, wanting not just to drop but to tip.

He released it.

The blade tipped forward and down, plunging in an arc like an Olympic high-diver. It hit linoleum point-first with the sound of a thump on a bass drum. It also hit with what must have been a thirty-pound-per-square-inch force.

A shock rippled up through the room. A wave rocked the coffee in Cardozo’s cup. Sunk a half inch deep into the floor, the knife vibrated, sending out a tone like a plucked harp string.

It took Cardozo both hands and three grunts to work the blade loose. “Sharp little baby.” He laid the knife down carefully on his desktop.

“I’m offended,” Ellie said. “There’s enough sadism and torture in the world without the American government jumping into the act.”

“Write to your congressman,” Greg Monteleone said.

DICK BRAIDY STARED
at the lunch menu. “What are you having, hon?”

“Sole
véronique
,” Leigh Baker said.

“I suppose I’ll have the same.” Dick Braidy sighed.

“And for vegetable,
madame
?” the waiter said.

“Whatever.” Leigh Baker closed her menu and handed the gold-tooled Florentine leather binder back into the waiter’s outstretched palm.

“
Et pour m’sieur
?”

“Well …” Dick Braidy prolonged the syllable, taking his time scanning the veggies
du jour.
“
Pommes vapeur.
” He snapped the menu shut. “
And
a wastebasket.”

“A
wastebasket, m’sieur
?”

“
With
the appetizer.”

The wastebasket arrived before the appetizer. A busboy carried it across the crowded restaurant and set it on the floor beside the table. It was molded cedar, with a Stubbs horse print decoupaged around it. It had come from the maître d’s little peachwood standing desk by the front door.

“I know I promised to give back the diary today,” Dick Braidy said. “But I’d like to keep it a little longer.”

“Keep it as long as you need,” Leigh said.

A manila envelope from
Fanfare Magazine
lay midway between Dick Braidy’s champagne glass and Leigh Baker’s glass of diet Pepsi. He pulled a smaller envelope out of it. He opened the smaller envelope and frowned for a microinstant at a printed invitation. He ripped the invitation into halves and tossed the halves into the wastebasket.

“This is the first time I’ve really had a chance to look at the diary,” he said. “The only parts I’d ever read before are the pages the newspapers published.”

“And now that you’ve seen it complete, what do you make of it?”

“I’m revolted. Disgusted. Outraged.”

The tables and banquettes around them were crowded with designer-dressed society women and designer-dressed wannabee society women and their Lauren-and Armani-suited walkers. The air was feverish with clinking silver and tinkling wineglasses and a hundred simultaneous caffeine-rushed conversations.

“I want to stand up on a roof,” Dick Braidy said, “and shout
fraud … fake
…
forgery
!”

“I did that and no one believed me.”

He pulled a postcard from the
Fanfare
envelope, glanced at the photo of the Pope, and tossed it into the wastebasket. “But darling—you didn’t have a roof to stand on.”

“And do you have one?”

He pulled out yet another invitation, sighed, and sailed it into the wastebasket. “Absolutely. If the evidence warrants it.”

“What evidence is that?”

“Now, you’ve got to promise. What I’m about to tell you, you’ll keep under your hat. The forgers left tracks in the diary. They stole. I’ve never in my life seen such a brazen, undisguised act of appropriation.”

“What did they steal?”

“Practically every word.”

“Who from?”

“From me.”

“You’re joking.”

Dick Braidy ripped up his last rejected invitation of the day’s mail. By now the wastebasket was full of postcards, letters, solicitations, announcements, all ripped neatly in half. His foot pushed it toward the busboy.

“You can take this away,” Dick Braidy told the busboy. He leaned closer to Leigh and spoke in a lowered voice. “I wish I
were
joking. But I’ve been over the pages, and it couldn’t be clearer.”