Deadly Rich (60 page)

“Lunch.”

They touched cheeks one last time. Leigh stepped into the corridor and pressed the elevator button. Behind her she heard Sorry’s two locks snap back into place.

In the shaftway gears hummed.

Leigh studied the corridor. There were only four doors: the elevator, the stairs, Sorry’s studio, and another apartment with ten days’ worth of
New York Times
piled up on the doormat.

The elevator came. She stepped in and pushed the button for the ground floor.

The door closed. The elevator dropped smoothly. On fourteen it stopped again.

A young man stepped on. He was flawlessly dressed, like a male model, in a double-breasted navy-blue blazer, pale pink shirt, regimental tie. He glanced automatically at Leigh, didn’t seem to see her.

Her heart contracted. It was Jim Delancey.

He faced the front of the car and pressed the button for
one.
The door closed and the elevator began dropping again. He didn’t turn around. There was no more than three feet of space between them.

The elevator stopped on eleven. A blond woman in designer jeans and a batik blouse got on. She glanced at her fellow passengers. It was an automatic checking-out-the-danger New York glance:
Are you muggers
,
or can I safely ignore you
?

The woman pressed the button for
six
and stepped back to let the door close. After a moment she turned her head and looked over at Leigh.

Leigh read embarrassment and indecision on the woman’s face.

On six the elevator door opened. The sounds of a party in progress rolled down the corridor: voices and laughter and Bobby Short singing Cole Porter.

The woman held the door. She looked again at Leigh, this time with a kind of guileless amiability, like a child. “Excuse me, aren’t you Leigh Baker?”

“Why, no.” Leigh’s voice felt tight and too high in her throat. From the edge of her vision she watched Delancey. He showed no reaction. “People ask me all the time—but my eyes aren’t her color.”

“I could have sworn,” the woman said. She got off and let the door close.

Leigh stepped to the side of the elevator, as far from Delancey as the cabin allowed. He turned his head slightly, showing her a half profile. He was smiling.

She tried to push down her terror, tried to concentrate on the panel where blinking lights counted out the descending floors.

Five … four …

Delancey let his blazer drop open. Metal glinted.

Leigh felt the strength sliding out of her knees.
Dear God, no.

It took her a moment to realize the glinting thing was only the clip on his suspender. He was wearing regimental-striped suspenders that matched his tie. He snapped the right suspender.

She gave an involuntary start.

Delancey’s expression stayed cool and indifferent. His thumb hooked the suspender again, pulled it out till it was as taut as a bowstring. Then released it.

Even though she knew the snap was coming she gave a start. She couldn’t control her reaction.

He snapped the suspender again. And again.

She wanted to scream.

The elevator slowed to a stop at street level. The door opened. Delancey was nearer the door, but he made no move to get out. Nor did he make any move to let her pass.

She pulled in a deep breath. “Excuse me.”

For just an instant they were facing each other. The tiny black pupils of his eyes jabbed like needle points.
Lady
, the look said,
I am going to get you.

She pushed past him into the lobby.

Jasmin Hakim was waiting on one of the sofas. Her long dark hair and pale, ivory-skinned face could have been taken from a Victorian cameo.
She looks so much like Nita
, Leigh thought.

The girl looked at Leigh as she passed.

“Jimmy,” Leigh heard her say. “I missed you.”

“Me too,” she heard Delancey say.

A knot twisted in Leigh’s stomach. She hurried into the street.

Sunday, June 16

L
EIGH KNOCKED ON THE
open door. “Am I interrupting?”

Vince Cardozo was sitting in his shirtsleeves, frowning at a photograph. He looked up and turned the photograph over. “Please,” he said, rising, “come in and interrupt.”

He moved a stack of documents from a chair to the floor.

She sat. “I’m sorry I bothered you yesterday.”

“You didn’t bother me. I’m sorry I was grumpy.”

“You weren’t grumpy.”

“I guess that establishes that we both have perfect manners.” He was watching her with an odd sort of half smile, and she couldn’t tell if he was glad to see her or not. “Coffee?” he offered.

“I can only stay a minute.”

“Fake sugar and fake milk, right?”

While he was out of the cubicle she turned over the photograph he had been studying. She recognized Gloria Spahn’s corpse. She winced and laid the photo back on the desk, facedown.

Cardozo came back. He closed the door. She accepted a styrofoam cup. She sipped. “Not bad,” she said. “Better than last time.”

“But you didn’t come here for our famous coffee.” Cardozo dropped back into his seat.

“I saw Jim Delancey yesterday.”

Vince Cardozo’s face seemed to crumple. “Yesterday.”

She nodded. “I was standing closer to him than you and I are now. The expression on his face told me everything.” Her voice began edging up. “Vince, it’s him. He’s the one.”

For a moment Vince Cardozo didn’t speak or react in any way. “Where did this happen?”

“In the elevator in his building.”

“What were you doing there?”

“You said he was home the night Gloria was killed. I was afraid … you weren’t going to watch him anymore.”

“So you decided to help me out and keep an eye on him?”

Even with the door shut noise poured in from the squad room. The consensus in there seemed to be, Why talk when you can yell. Telephones were jangling. Someone was slamming through metal cabinet drawers, and each slam was like thunder.

“Delancey has a breaking-and-entering record.” Leigh sat forward in the metal chair. “He’s broken into dozens of girls’ apartments. He’s stolen valuables and pawned them. You must know that—it all came out in the trial.”

Cardozo’s eyes flicked up. “Excuse me. We seem to be talking different time frames. I’m discussing now, not four years ago.”

“So am I. Sorella Chappell has a studio in Jim Delancey’s building. It connects to the building next door. She wasn’t home Thursday night. He could have broken into her apartment and gone out through the other building.”

Cardozo watched her levelly. He sighed.

“
That’s how he did it
! Why can’t you believe me? I’m not crazy and I’m not lying to you!”

“But you do hate Jim Delancey.”

She didn’t bother to deny it. “You don’t have to take my word for it—go look at the apartment.”

Cardozo picked up his pen. “What’s the apartment number?”

“Sixteen. Sorella Chappell. You have a man guarding her right now. At least you say you do.”

TWO MINUTES AFTER LEIGH BAKER
had gone there was another knock on Cardozo’s door. He turned.

Ellie Siegel stood in the doorway. She had a smile like a twirling lariat. “And how’s Miss Silver Screen?”

“Ellie, I’m sorry. I’m going to have to take back two of the men I gave you.”

“Indian-giver. Why?”

“Looks like Delancey’s in the running again. We may have to put back the round-the-clock tail.”

Monday, June 17

T
ORI STEPPED OUT OF
the cab. The shadow that hovered behind the glass-paneled door leapt forward. The door swung inward.

“Good morning, Chuck.” She zipped past the doorman into the air-conditioned lobby.

“G’morning, Miss Sandberg,” he called out behind her. “Are you back?”

Not breaking stride, she pondered the implications of that particular greeting. Had Zack told the staff, she’d moved out? “That’s right, Chuck. I’m back.”

Her forefinger, riding through space two feet ahead of her, connected with the elevator button. The door opened. Inside the mahogany-paneled cabin the air smelled sweet, for fresh anemones had been placed in the decorative wall brackets. She pressed the button for
eighteen.

As the elevator rose she gave herself a last-minute look-over in the little mirror. She saw dark circles under her eyes and a smile that did not disguise a thing. Not the best face for greeting your sexist-capitalist lunk of a lover and telling him,
Surprise, darling
,
I’ve thought it over and I’m back.

She opened her compact and did a quick cover-up.

The elevator door opened. She stepped into the little foyer outside the apartment.

She was gripped by an upsurge of affection for the Regency table and the Jasper Johns signed litho hanging above it, for the peach-upholstered banquette that matched the stripes in the hand-blocked wallpaper.

She took the door key out of her purse.

Until eleven forty-eight that morning everything in her life was solid and brick-simple. But something funny happened on the way to eleven forty-nine.

The lock gave a click of refusal. The key wouldn’t turn clockwise. It wouldn’t turn counterclockwise.

She couldn’t believe that her fingers and wrist had forgotten how to turn
this
key in
this
lock. Something here felt like the essence of totally off.

She examined the other four keys on her chain. She tried each of them in turn. None of them would so much as slide into the lock.

It came to her that she could die of old age trying to get one of these keys to do what obviously none of them were going to. Zack had changed the lock. She had to smile.
What a petulant little boy
!

She leaned an ear against the door. A phone was ringing inside the apartment. She heard the fast slaps of the Guatemalan maid’s sandals, one side of a muffled conversation.

She pushed the doorbell. She fixed an agreeable, relaxed expression securely in place.

The door opened and the maid, with one fist raised to her mouth, was staring at Tori in white-knuckled disbelief.

“I’m not a ghost, Josefina.” Tori entered the apartment. She let its familiarity flow around her. “Did Mr. Morrow change the lock?”

Josefina nodded.

“Wait till I talk to that idiot. Where is he?”

Josefina just stood there, twisting a dust rag in both hands. “They went to TriBeCa.”

“
They,
Josefina? Who’s
they
?”

The maid burst into tears. She pointed to the copy of that morning’s
Trib
that lay on the hall table. “Society page,” she said, sobbing.

Tori opened the paper. A photo leapt up at her. She felt as though a revolver had been fired inside her brain. The picture showed a grinning Zack with both arms around a grinning Gabrielle MacAdam.

Beneath the picture, Dick Braidy’s gossip column burbled:

The ultraprivate ceremony takes place this morning at ten sharp at Robert De Niro’s ultra-in and ultra-now TriBeCa Grill. It is all very hush-hush and very spur-of-the-moment, but the buzz is Hizzoner the Mayor and the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs will serve as witnesses. The newlyweds will host a little reception Friday for 200 close friends at the Jeu de Paume at Le Cercle.

But all is not unalloyed merriment in Gotham’s fair city. For, as Gilbert and Sullivan so presciently remarked a century ago …

WHEN CARDOZO OPENED
the door, the air in his cubicle was the temperature of a car that had been parked all day in the sun with the windows up.

He punched a button on the air conditioner, and the compressor labored to life, pulling down the wattage in the desk lamp, kicking out a cycle of gasps and clanks.

He sat at his desk and looked through his phone messages. Three were from relatives of homicide victims whose cases were still, technically, on-going, and these would be calls for hand-holding and reassurance.

The fourth was a Chinese restaurant flyer with an order-out number; on the back, in Monteleone’s handwriting, were the words:

11:20
A.M
. Cassandra called, says Hi.

Cardozo frowned. He didn’t know any Cassandra. The message had obviously come to the wrong extension. He crumpled it and tossed it into the wastebasket.

He let his eye roam across the paper that had piled up on his desk: white and pink and yellow color-coded flash reports, interim orders, multiple orders.

He reached for the freshest-looking mound. Most of it was interdepartmental b.s.—clearance needed on an order to print flyers, notice of triplicate missing on a form, mayor’s office for films wanting a lieutenant to vet a script.

Ellie Siegel knocked on the door. “Have you read Benedict Braidy’s column?”

“Not today. Am I missing something?”

“Very definitely.” She handed him that morning’s
Trib
, folded open to “Dick Sez.”

“Enjoy.”

“Thanks, Ellie.” Cardozo leaned back in his swivel chair and read the paragraphs that Ellie had circled in red:

But all is not unalloyed merriment in Gotham’s fair city. For, as Gilbert and Sullivan so presciently remarked a century ago, things are seldom what they seem. Case in point:

Kristi Blackwell, editor of
Fanfare Magazine
, has long presented herself as a crusader. But in fact she is a hired gun, peddling slick disinformation. Query: in whose employ is our fair lady of the terrible swift red pencil?

To cite only the most flagrant abuses, Blackwell has published:

(1) an article falsely attributing the paternity of Jean Seberg’s still-born child to a leader of the Black Panthers. The article, printed as a favor to the FBI, triggered Miss Seberg’s suicide.

(2) an article alleging that socialite-suicide Anne Woodward was already married at the time of her marriage to William Woodward. The charge was false, as Truman Capote, who had first launched it, confessed on his deathbed. Kristi Blackwell detested the Woodwards for blackballing her from the co-op at 820 Fifth Avenue.

(3) an article maintaining the existence of a second syringe in the 1987 Thoroughbred-doping scandal that cost Rex Imperator his Triple Crown.

(4) an article detailing Princess Caroline of Monaco’s alleged inhumane treatment of palace animals; a leak from the office of an ambitious Monegasque prosecutor (and financial partner of Ms. Blackwell), the article was intended to bolster his political career and was never substantiated.

(5) For reasons known only to her baroque brain, Blackwell heavily cut my article “Socialites in Emergency,” suppressing all mention of a lawsuit against Lexington Hospital.

(6) Most painful of all to me personally, Blackwell published an article that served as the basis for forged evidence in the trial of my daughter’s murderer. I will discuss this case in detail in tomorrow’s column.