She decided MasterCard was her best bet—she couldn’t recall having used it lately.
With a small, courtly bow the waiter took the card.
“Why the hell,” Kristi Blackwell was saying, “should I dress down, just because bag ladies have no style sense?”
“Overdressing might be an incitement,” Tori said.
“An incitement to whom?” Wystan Blackwell said.
“To people who can’t even afford rags.”
“People who can’t afford rags in this city,” he said, “in this day and age, don’t exist.” Three weeks ago he had been installed as East Coast vice president of the country’s largest talent agency. His vice-presidential qualifications, so far as Tori could see, were two: a booming British public-school accent, and a gray goatee. He had begun taking himself very seriously. “The homeless,” he said, “are largely a creation of
The Village Voice
.”
“And just because they look horrible,” Kristi Blackwell said, “why must the rest of us? My friends get a kick out of my clothes. My husband gets a kick out of my clothes—don’t you, darling. Christ, my
doorman
gets a kick out of my clothes. My clothes make this city a better environment, and so do the clothes of every New York woman who has the taste and dedication to buy couture originals. We’re not just dressing ourselves—we’re dressing the city. And I’m damned tired of being accused of selfishness.”
The maître d’ brought Tori’s charge card back to the table. “I’m sorry, madam, but the bank has declined your card.”
“How annoying.” Tori engineered the stress of a smile over her cheekbones. “Oh, well, that happens—it looks like a case of corporate overstretch.”
He did not join in her smile. He did not even make the attempt.
“Did they say how close to the credit limit I was charged?”
“Madam, they simply said
declined
.”
“Okay, let’s have a look at where we are.” Tori waved a merry hand to the others. “Just a little mix-up. Everybody, please have some more coffee or order a liqueur.”
“I’d like a double Courvoisier,” Wystan said. “With a dash of bitters.”
Tori pushed her glasses down as far as they would go without falling off her nose. She examined the bill with its scrawl of illegible detail.
What was not illegible was the total: one thousand four hundred sixty-four dollars.
That couldn’t be right
, she thought. They’d all had that consommé of white truffle in stock of unborn veal and then some pheasant, some duck, some salmon, and somewhere during the evening, in some salad or on some vegetable or other, she remembered alphabet pieces of fresh Dutch yellow and red peppers.
And dessert, of course, and wine …
The wine, she realized. The two bottles of Chateau Margaux ’85 and the two of Clos de Vougeot ’83. Nine hundred dollars for four bottles.
“Okay,” Tori said in her brightest, most can-do voice, “you’ll have to divide the bill.” She opened her purse and took out her Discover card, her Visa, her American Express. “Between them they’ll cover it. Just keep juggling.”
The maître d’s face became a blank wall of refusal. “I cannot do that, madam.”
“Darling,” Kristi Blackwell called over from her side of the table, “are we still having trouble?”
“It’s all under control,” Tori said.
Kristi Blackwell opened her purse. She took out her American Express card.
“No, Kristi,” Tori said. “Please. You’re a guest.”
“Next time.” Kristi handed the card to the maître d’. “These mix-ups can take forever. I’ve really got to get home. I hate being out late with that killer on the loose.”
“Thank you, madam.” The maître d’ bowed to Kristi Blackwell and took the card away.
TORI WAS TRYING TO READ
the new issue of
Fanfare
when she heard the front door slam. Her ear followed Zack’s steps up the stairs.
When she looked across the bedroom, he was standing there with his jacket slung over his shoulder and his shirt unbuttoned. She slapped down the magazine. “You and I had a dinner date tonight.”
Zack’s face expressed apology only in that it expressed nothing. “I’m sorry. I got sidetracked.”
“You were inexcusably rude not only to me but to two of your friends.” She stood, tightening the sash of her nightgown. “
Your
friends, not mine.”
He gave a vague shrug. “They’ll handle it.”
“I was stuck for fifteen hundred dollars, plus tip, and the restaurant turned down my charge card.”
He swayed a little. “You look like you handled it.”
“Maybe it’s macho to be casual out there in your world of deals and bullshit, but not in our relationship.”
“Look,” he said, “today has not exactly been my day at the beach. Whatever argument you’ve got your heart set on, I’m not up for it. So could you please minimize this hyper thing you do?”
“The hell I’ll minimize! I waited five hours for you to show up, wondering if you’d been hit by a truck, wondering if some tenant activist had sent you a letter bomb. Wondering if Society Sam had decided to carve you up. You could have phoned.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“A relationship has
rules
.”
“Rules are for games. I don’t play games.”
“I was raised with the old-fashioned notion that we keep the commitments we make.”
“Why the hell can’t you just accept that you’re pissed off and give me the silent treatment?”
“Because I am not a bimbo who’s going to resort to bimbo tactics.”
“Bimbo tactics might work a little better than yours.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means the wee hours of the morning are turning into the wee-wee hours, so excuse me.”
He didn’t use their bathroom. He stumbled into the hall and she heard the toilet flush in the guest bathroom. When he stumbled back, he was in his undershirt, with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“I thought you’d stopped smoking,” Tori said. “We promised each other.”
“That was three years ago. Three years is long enough to keep a promise.”
She stared at him. His eyes were red, his face puffy. “You’re drunk, and you’ve been doing coke.”
“Can I level with you? I’m drunk, I’ve been doing coke.”
She watched him stumble over a footstool and fall. The can of beer sent a foaming arc across the Oriental rug.
Christ
, she thought.
This is the man I want to marry
?
She rose and moved to the window. She stood staring out at night silhouettes of the beautifully maintained co-ops of Park Avenue.
“I’ve accepted a lot about our relationship,” she said. “I accept that we don’t agree politically. Within limits I accept your womanizing. But I cannot accept your publicly humiliating me in front of people I have to work with.”
He sat on the floor blinking his eyes. “My head is killing me.”
“How serious are you about Gloria Spahn?”
“This discussion is killing me.”
She turned. “If you don’t give me a straight answer, Zack, I swear, I’m going to—”
“You’re going to what?”
For a moment she stood perfectly still, staring at the man in front of her. She had a complicated sense that they were both playing roles, and they both knew it. “I’m going to leave you.”
“Okay.”
She couldn’t believe he’d said it. She saw something goofy in his face.
It’s the booze talking
, she told herself.
It’s the coke.
But she could see in his eyes that whether he meant it or not, he wasn’t going to back down.
For that instant she was flailing in her mind, trying to persuade herself that she wasn’t choking to death. She realized that if ever there was a time that called for faith in herself, it was this instant, right now.
“You’ve got it,” she said. It took her two minutes to throw on a dress and another five to toss some things into a suitcase.
All the while he sat there, swaying a little on the edge of the bed, watching her with that slightly daffy look.
“I’ll send for the rest,” she said.
ZACK HEARD THE FRONT DOOR CLOSE
. Just a closing, not even a slam. As though, even at the end, she had it all under control, didn’t care.
A silence slipped by and sank in.
Zack pulled himself to the bed. He turned off the light. He listened as though, if he listened hard enough, the dark could tell him a secret.
And then he pulled a pillow to his body and curled around it and began crying.
Friday, June 14
C
ARDOZO SHOWED HIS SHIELD.
“In the stairwell.” The super breathed out a plume of gray smoke. “Fourth floor. You can take the elevator.”
“Thanks,” Cardozo said. “I’ll walk.” After all, the dead woman obviously hadn’t taken the elevator.
The air in the stairwell was damp and uncomfortably warm. As he climbed it got warmer, and a smell like unwashed towels grew stronger.
He stopped to wipe the sweat away from his eyes. Only six-thirty in the morning, and he felt himself perspiring, his undershirt already beginning to stick to his skin.
Overhead on each landing, a naked hundred-watt bulb glowed like a tired moon. Behind the wall he could hear something whirring and dropping inside the elevator shaft.
As he climbed up the half flight to the fourth-story landing, a flashbulb went off. The police photographer rose from a crouch. There was a whirring as film automatically rolled forward to the next exposure. The photographer found a smile for Cardozo. “Starting work early today, hey, Lieutenant?”
“No earlier than you,” Cardozo said.
A light had been set up on a tripod, as if this were a movie. A thousand watts beamed down on the dead woman. She lay on her back, sprawled diagonally across the landing. Her legs were splayed out, and one of her shoes was missing.
“Why’d she take the stairs?” Cardozo said.
“The super found two
New York Posts
jammed in the elevator doors,” Lou Stein said. He had hung the jacket of his summer-weight suit over the banister. From a crouched position he was playing the beam of his high-intensity flashlight over the ridges and valleys of the landing and the steps below.
Cardozo studied Gloria Spahn’s face, and she seemed to study his. She had a baffled look, and it occurred to him that she was trying her damnedest to bring him into focus.
“Did she wear contacts?”
The assistant M.E. had assumed a half-lotus position beside the dead woman. She was working with tweezers and her upper-body movements were easy and unrushed. She nodded. She had a low-pitched, extremely cultivated voice. “And she lost one of them.”
“It’s over here.” Lou Stein flicked the beam of his flashlight toward the wall. The missing lens sparkled like a drop of glycerine.
“Be sure to bag that,” Cardozo reminded the redheaded man from the crime-scene truck. The redheaded man was busy tagging items from the dead woman’s spilled purse, and he gave a barely perceptible nod.
Cardozo’s gaze went back to Gloria. Spattered blood had mottled her blouse like a rotten pear. His eye traced the punctures where the blade had entered, the rips where it had pulled.
“Yeah,” the M.E. said, noticing his attention. “Beautiful material, isn’t it?”
The skirt was no longer exactly clothing, and it wasn’t yet exactly garbage. It was an assemblage of scrap and beads and blood-soaked fiber, and it had the frightening look of something that had been shoved through a threshing machine.
Cardozo sniffed. His nostrils took in the metallic residue of blood and the petroleum residue of the chemicals that had been used to lift the stains from the floor. He also smelled decay and a faint odor of fecal matter.
“That’s her,” the assistant M.E. said. “She shit her panties.”
“Hey, Vince.” Lou Stein was shining his light along one of the steps. There were gray rings where a track shoe had left an imprint in a spill of white. “Candle wax.”
“What about the clipping?” Cardozo said. “Anyone find a newspaper clipping anywhere?”
ONE BY ONE
Cardozo angled the Polaroids of Gloria Spahn under the cone of fluorescence that flickered from his desk lamp. His left hand rapped a ballpoint pen against the lamp. He took a swallow of coffee. The taste was supermarket generic, but his nerves craved the kick.
The phone rang. He snatched up the receiver before a second ring could jangle his nerves. “Vince Cardozo.”
“Vince, it’s Walter Vanderflood here. Wanted you to know I haven’t forgotten our little chat. Am I calling too early?”
“Hell, no. I’ve been up since quarter of six.”
“What the hell were you doing at that hour, jogging?”
“Nothing so healthy, I’m afraid. Just doing my job.”
“Sounds like an awful job.”
“It can be.”
“I had dinner at the Union Club last night.”
Good for you, Walter.
Cardozo sat tapping his pen, waiting for the punch line.
How was the filet mignon
?
“I ran into Charley Benziger. Do you know him? Big, athletic fellow, affiliated with Morgan Stanley. He also serves on the Dutchess County parole board, which is why I’m calling. He wasn’t at the meeting where they considered Jim Delancey’s application. He was down in the Bahamas, taking a little time off to recover from surgery—poor guy had triple bypass.”
“Poor guy.”
And why are you telling me about him
?
“But he did get briefed on how the board voted in his absence, and one of the board members told him the most extraordinary thing. Apparently Senator Nancy Guardella brought ungodly pressure to make sure Delancey got parole.”
“Senator
Guardella
?” Cardozo reached behind him and swung the cubicle door closed, shutting out a little of the clanging, banging world. “Is Guardella a member of the parole board?”
“Christ, no. The woman’s not a member of anything accept those clubs in Congress. But she’s on the House Energy Committee, and two directors of Dutchess Light and Power do happen to serve on the parole board. Now, please don’t quote me, but she agreed not to block an energy excise-tax rollback,
provided
Delancey got parole. You know, everything I hear about that woman convinces me I was right to vote against her in the last election.”