“That was very considerate of you.”
“The guard, naturally, told me when you had tea with your detective. He told me when you spent the night with your detective.”
It was Leigh’s turn to be surprised. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”
“Jealous? No more than you. Concerned? How could I not be concerned when the guard told me what you did at Oona’s memorial.”
She stared a moment at the face staring back at her. It was like being pinned in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
“Do I need to refresh your memory?” Waldo said. “You had a little contretemps with Dizey. And if you try to leave me, if you even think of subjecting me to that humiliation, I’ll see to it that Cardozo learns what really happened on the terrace that evening.”
A spike of panic ran up her spine. She stared at this gray-haired, WASPy, aging gentleman in his elegantly cut gray suit, with the look in his eyes she was not certain she had ever really decoded. “You selfish bastard,” she said. “All you’ve ever wanted me for is to look famous and keep you company.”
“And you’re very good at it.”
“We’re not even lovers anymore.”
He shrugged. “The public likes to think we are.”
“You mean
you
like the public to think we are. Well, what the hell is so sacred about your public image that it gives you the right to violate my life?”
“My dear, I have exactly the same right to violate another person’s life as you do.”
“I didn’t lay a hand on Dizey.”
“I’m sure your lieutenant will want to draw his own conclusions.”
Something shifted in the perspective around her. She rose to her feet, and suddenly she was standing in a zone of strangeness. “Then so be it.”
“He won’t be happy when he finds out. Whatever else he is, he is a cop. And an honest one; they tell me.”
“I’ll just have to take that chance.”
“
ANYONE HOME
?” Cardozo called out.
“Me.” Terri was sprawled on the living room rug, reading a book by the light of the MTV music video exploding across the TV screen. She reached up a hand and waved.
“Aren’t you going to kill your eyes that way?”
“Leigh phoned,” she said.
Cardozo crossed to the TV and turned down the volume. “What did she say?”
Terri turned a page. “She said thanks and she has some hard thinking to do and she won’t be coming back.”
Cardozo felt a sudden deflation. “What does that mean, thanks and she has some hard thinking to do and she won’t be coming back?”
Terri turned and saw the look on his face. She got to her feet and came to him. “Dad, if the two of you aren’t going to sleep in your bedroom, it
is
kind of a small apartment.”
Cardozo dropped heavily onto the sofa.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Terri said.
He didn’t answer.
She sat beside him and looked at him. “Or is it?”
He felt embarrassed and he tried to concentrate on the music video, on kids in bright-colored clothes diving off cliffs.
“Wow,” Terri said. “That’s great.”
“What’s great?”
She was grinning at him happily. “You’re in love.”
Wednesday, June 19
M
ALLOY STOPPED IN FRONT
of the column of mailboxes numbered 108. They ran floor to ceiling. He had to relax his knees just a little, and stoop before he could see into the boxes in the E row.
The window of 108-E showed him three envelopes still undisturbed, still lying diagonally across the box.
It had been boring enough tailing Delancey, he thought, but at least Delancey had
moved.
Tailing a mailbox was the pits.
He straightened up and turned.
Two girls in jeans and
Yo-quiero-la-Habana
T-shirts were standing at the counter, giggling in Spanish, not noticing him.
He pushed open the glass door and stepped again into the steambath of West Forty-eighth Street. He stepped around a mumbling knot of crackheads. They’d been there all afternoon, never moving from that spot, handing dirty dollar bills and crack vials back and forth, about as inconspicuous as a lighthouse.
He watched them laughing and grinning and swaying and moving as if it were all a dance, as if all of life were just a question of feeling the beat and putting your foot in the right place at the right time.
A Cuban-Chinese
bodega-
deli across the street caught his eye. He went in. The little old lady at the counter wore a peasant-style scarf and with her bright eyes distinct as new blooms on a tough old trunk, she looked like a 350-year-old bonsai.
He pointed to the pot gurgling on the coffee machine.
The old woman placed a styrofoam cup of coffee on the counter. She slid a sugar dispenser and a pint carton of milk toward him.
He put a dollar bill on the counter.
The old woman shook her head and pushed it back.
He flashed that she didn’t want to take money from a cop. Which meant, among other things, that he must be pretty obvious.
I’m not going to go through this again.
He left the money on the counter and ambled toward the window. He studied the hand that was holding the coffee. The hand was trembling badly. Either his blood sugar had dipped or vodka wasn’t the greatest lunch for a working cop.
His free hand took a little plastic prescription bottle out of his pocket. His fingers worked the top off and a rainbow of pills spilled into his palm. He jiggled his hand till two black pills separated from the others.
The two black pills went into his mouth. He chased them with a slug of coffee. The lady narc who had sold him the pills swore they didn’t show up in urine tests, but you had to drink coffee—lots of it.
He glanced toward the window. Traffic was crawling around Con Ed-generated potholes and the firebombed carcass of a green Honda Accord. Even with the door of the
bodega
shut and the air conditioner rattling in the transom, he could hear horns blaring at the pushcarts that sold paper cups of shaved ice and syrup.
Pedestrians were jaywalking as though they were exercising a constitutional right. Wherever Malloy looked he saw people breaking one law or another: peddling stolen goods, making drug deals, getting high, dancing to the beat and yowl of Latino boom boxes, dozing, cruising for sex—and none of it seemed to be a big deal to anyone.
It made Carl Malloy wonder if his existence made any difference at all, if he had any power to influence the movement of the smallest molecule in the universe. Sometimes he felt too old, too hot, too tired for this kind of work. Sometimes he wished he could just walk away from it.
At that instant he registered something out there in the street. A woman heading down the sidewalk had caught his eye. Maybe twenty-four years old. Five feet ten. Black, with the body of an anorectic, swiveling through the crowd. She was wearing a man’s black shirt and black slacks and a wide black belt studded with colored stones that marked the exact moment in each step when her weight shifted from one hip to the other. She had long, slightly waved hair and she was wearing huge dark glasses.
She slowed at a newsstand and bought a paper.
Now she was walking past the maildrop. Two storefronts beyond Mailsafe she stopped. She turned, doubled back, caught the door of Mailsafe just as the two giggling Spanish girls were coming out, and walked right in.
Malloy could see her through the window. She was standing by the counter, and she was going through her newspaper, pulling out unwanted pages and dropping them into the wastebasket.
Now she was crossing to the mailboxes. Little glints of metal and glass sparkled off the wall of locks. She went toward the 108 column. Her body blocked Malloy’s view.
Her hand stretched out. He could see her wrist twisting, engaging the whole arm, and then the hand reappeared, and it was holding three envelopes.
Malloy gulped his coffee and was out the door in two strides, halfway across the street in the next three, and then he was at the door to Mailsafe.
She was coming toward him. She made eye contact and smiled. He realized he was holding the door. She glided into the street.
He scooted over to 108-E. He ducked down just far enough to see up the tunnel.
The box was empty.
He spun around. At first he thought he’d lost her, and then he saw her, at the edge of the window—heading west.
THE PHONE RANG.
Cardozo lifted the receiver and even before it reached his ear he could hear music and screaming. The music was a heavy-metal derivative of mariachi. The screaming was Carl Malloy.
“I staked the box out, a woman came. She looked kind of like the Identi-Kit drawing of Tamany Dillworth.”
“What do you mean, kind of?”
“Vince, those are lousy drawings. I followed her to Four-fifty-seven West Forty-ninth. I checked the mailboxes and there’s a Martinez in 3-F. I’m calling from a pay phone right across from the building. She’s upstairs now.”
“I’ll be right down.”
A HOT BREEZE WAS GUSTING IN
from the Hudson as Cardozo hurried west on Forty-ninth Street.
Malloy was waiting on the corner of the five hundred block. He was the only man within five square blocks wearing a jacket, and Cardozo realized they must both be pathetically easy to tag as cops.
“End of the block,” Malloy said.
“Has she come out yet?”
“Not yet.”
The building was a standard, decomposing 1890s six-story tenement. They climbed the stoop. The outer door was held open by a little eye-and-hook latch in the baseboard.
Cardozo glanced at the mailboxes. The name
Martinez
had been penciled on a piece of brown paper and shoved into the slot of Box 3-F. A flyer from a Japanese restaurant had been folded and wedged through one of the decorative perforations.
Malloy shaded his eyes and peered through the glass-paneled door into the empty vestibule. He gave the door a little push. Like the outer door it was unlocked. No slumlord in this neighborhood would lock a front door unless he wanted to replace it every time housebreakers knocked it down.
Cooking fumes and oil-saturated smoke ripened the air of the hallway.
They started up the stairs, Malloy first. The steps tilted and several were beginning to come loose. The fluorescent tube in the ceiling flickered, creating the optical illusion that the steps were rising and falling.
On the third floor landing a cat came out of the shadow. It pressed against Cardozo’s leg. He petted the animal and felt ribs. The cat arched its back and let out a good shrill street meow.
“Hey, kitty,” Cardozo whispered, “where does Martinez live?”
The cat went straight to the door of 3-F.
Malloy leaned an ear against the door. He beckoned Cardozo. Dead silence pressed on the other side of the panel.
Overhead there was a sudden clatter of sandals slapping against steps. Cardozo and Malloy pressed themselves into the shadow. The sandals were heading rapidly up the stairs, not down. At the top of the stairwell a roof door slid open and thumped shut.
Malloy gave the door handle of 3-F a try. He took out his wallet and removed his Visa card. He slid the card into the crack between the door and the jamb. He jimmied it back and forth till there was a soft click. The door swung inward.
Cardozo drew his gun and edged around Malloy and flattened himself against the inner wall of the apartment. It took a moment to blink the darkness out of his eyes. The air was sweltering, sticky—worse than the hallway, with a thick stench of fried food.
His eyes began adjusting, and impressions started to form. He could make out a lattice of light and shade falling across the surfaces of a stove, a sink, a refrigerator.
A hallway stretched to the right, toward the street, and at the end of it light flecks leapt fitfully. In another moment Cardozo saw that a tiny current of air was stirring one of the blackout shades that had been drawn in the windows.
Cardozo nodded Malloy into the apartment. He motioned Malloy to check the back room.
Cardozo crept soundlessly to the front room. He saw that it was small, sparsely furnished, and deserted. He flicked the kitchen light switch.
In the sudden light of the naked sixty-watt bulb, the world of Rick Martinez and Society Sam began disclosing itself. A poster of Rambo shouldering an automatic rifle had been taped to the side of the refrigerator. A pack of Saffire-brand
Shabbes
candles sat on the drainboard. A half-dozen plates and pans had been stacked unscraped in the sink. Cockroaches had free run of the place. The floor had been overlaid with black-and-white linoleum tiles, and in places open chancres of wood showed through.
In the front room foam-rubber stuffing was leaking out of a foldout sofa-bed. Dumbbells and barbells had been parked against the window wall, with weight-lifting plates stacked beside them. Between the windows, in the space where another homemaker might have placed a picture or maybe a crucifix, Martinez had hung a brown leather weight-lifting belt. Sweat had mottled it darkly.
A bookcase held three books and a potted plant that looked like a seriously endangered species. A scruffy little stuffed bear sat on top of a new-looking Sony tape deck. The bear wore a cheap rosary around its neck and a wool cap with stitching that spelled
Rick’s Christmas Bear.
Cassette tapes had been piled chaotically on the bottom shelf. Cardozo crouched down to read the titles: there were albums by the Grateful Dead and Iron Maiden and Kiss and Devil Dolls, and there was one called
Charles Manson’s Greatest Hits.
Malloy reappeared. “She’s not in back.”
“She’s not up here.” Cardozo studied two pieces of unopened mail lying on the air conditioner. A hand-written aerogram from Colombia was addressed to Mr. Ricardo Martinez, c/o Malsaf, Box 108-E, 412 West 48th Street. A stapled, mimeographed flyer from a Pentecostal church in Brooklyn was addressed to Rick Martinez, Box 108-E, 412 West 48th Street. “You said there was a third piece of mail.”
“There was,” Malloy said. “But I don’t see it.”
Cardozo held the aerogram up to the light. He could make out two layers of tiny, spidery handwriting, and the signature,
tu mama.