“I’ve just been talking to the widow of a friend of yours,” Cardozo said. “Delia Malloy.”
A silence came across the line. Then Zawac said, “I hope you told her how very sorry I was to learn about her husband.”
“I couldn’t vouch for how sorry you felt,” Cardozo said. “Delia tells me you had Carl wear a wire into my task force.”
Zawac didn’t deny it.
“Mrs. Malloy is willing to testify in an independent probe of IAD tactics. Unless you’d care to tell me why you wired Carl. Who you were giving the information to?”
“Lieutenant, we’re discussing extremely sensitive issues. This is not a secure phone. I’m not about to comment.”
“Then let me ask you this. How did Xenia Delancey know we were unsealing a Family Court file?”
“I can’t comment.”
“In that case, Captain, I hope you have good health coverage, because your ass is in the frying pan.”
CARDOZO CAME DOWN THE PRECINCT STEPS
. The light in Sixty-sixth Street had softened. On the rooftops and in the windows of upper stories the sun cast a late-afternoon glow.
He was heading east when a woman’s voice called to him. “Vince—could I ask you a favor?”
He turned. A white stretch limo had slowed at the curb, and Senator Nancy Guardella was leaning out of the open passenger door. He didn’t answer, but his face must have said it for him.
“I know you hate my guts,” Nancy Guardella said. “And I don’t blame you, but just do me one favor: Ride with me—give me a chance to tell my side of the story.”
Cardozo slid into the coolness of the backseat.
“Leo,” Senator Guardella told the back of her driver’s head, “drive around a little.”
The limo eased into the east-bound traffic. Nancy Guardella pressed the remote and raised the glass partition between the seats. “I just had a talk with Larry Zawac.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Vince, these things happen. I chair a complex agency that handles complex problems that there are no magic, simple solutions for. I wish to hell there were. I wish I could snap my fingers, wave a magic wand, and solve the drug crisis without bending a single law.”
The limo stopped for the Lexington Avenue light. Sunlight reflected off an Absolut vodka bottle sitting on the fully stocked bar.
“We both know that’s wishful thinking,” Nancy Guardella said. “To get the goods on the drug cartel, to get a charge that holds up in an American court, we have to allow the drug cartel to operate. It’s called entrapment. It’s a dirty word, and it’s a dirty way of solving a dirty problem. But if you know a clean way, Vince, I wish you’d let me know.”
Cardozo brought his eyes up slowly. There was a beat where he could have answered, and he let it go by.
Nancy Guardella’s teeth came down on her lower lip. “Nan Shane had infiltrated the Salvador drug cartel. For three years she was handing us terrific intelligence.”
Cardozo said nothing. He just sat, counting the karats on the fingers and arms and ears and neck of the junior senator from New York.
After a moment Nancy Guardella’s gaze flicked away from his. She sighed. “Last March twenty-seventh, we had a screw-up. A New York City undercover drug cop busted Nan Shane for possession with intent to sell. Robert Q. O’Rourke. A sweet kid, but not the brightest man ever born.”
Cardozo’s mind played with two dates: On March twenty-sixth, the magazines went on sale from which Society Sam clipped his words and partial words and single letters. They stayed on sale seven days. On March twenty-seventh, Nan Shane was busted and became a liability to her masters in the drug trade.
“He was new to the job,” Nancy Guardella said. “He was new to the Upper East Side beat. And someone forgot to clue him in that Nan was one of ours.” Her voice took on an edge like a chisel digging into blackboard. “And I wish I knew who that someone was so I could gut his pension.”
Nancy Guardella leaned toward the bar and tonged ice into two highball glasses.
“From what our intelligence arm has been able to put together, an order came down from the directorate of the Salvador cartel: Nan Shane is a liability, she’s been busted, eliminate her.”
Nancy Guardella filled the glasses with mineral water.
“The cartel sent a hit man to take out Shane. His name was Rick Martinez, and he turned out to be a psycho.” She added a wedge of lime to each glass. “That part of the story you already know. Not only did Rick Martinez kill Nan Shane, on his own he took the lives of five innocent men and women.” She handed Cardozo a glass. The glass had a United States Senate shield etched into it.
“Why did you want a wire in my task force?” he said.
“We couldn’t risk your investigation blowing the Achilles Foot sting. I’m sorry, Vince. What it comes down to, is federal versus local. We had to protect ourselves. You may not be in agreement, but that’s the way it is.”
“When did you know Society Sam was the cartel’s hit man?”
“When he killed our operative.”
“But Nan Shane was killed three weeks
after
you sent the wire in.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you meant when did I have
personal
knowledge. Our intelligence arm knew earlier.”
“May I see the intelligence reports?”
She smiled at Cardozo, shaking her head. “Vince, if I showed you those reports, I could be sent to a federal penitentiary for revealing government secrets. You’re going to have to take my word for it, and take my word that we have the situation under control.”
“Would you mind telling me why you backed Jim Delancey for early parole? Or is that a classified federal secret too?”
Her eyes flicked up. She pulled in a deep breath. “Complicated problem, Vince. Xenia Delancey commands a lot of sympathy—and press. She’s the biological mother of a son gone bad and she’s pleading for a second chance for her boy—and she’s one of my constituents. I studied the record and I was struck by the strides Jim Delancey had made. I felt it was in the interests of justice, and rehabilitation, and freeing up valuable jail space to parole him. Does that answer your question?”
“You tell me.”
Nancy Guardella smiled as though he’d said,
Yes
,
thank you.
“You can stop the car,” Cardozo said. “I’ll get out here.”
THE JEU DE PAUME AT LE CERCLE
sparkled with the movement of cocktail dresses and Italian suits. Two hundred of the most important mouths in Manhattan feasted on a buffet that included grilled gulf shrimp with pumpkin-ginger chutney, roast partridge mousse with onion marmalade, and Roederer Cristal champagne.
In the southwest corner of the room Zack Morrow kissed Gabrielle MacAdam Morrow, and then Gabrielle kissed Zack. They were the worst-matched couple Kristi Blackwell had ever seen.
“Is the angle okay?” Zack shouted.
The photographer kept snapping away, darting lithely around them, stooping and dipping down on one knee and crouching and stretching with his Minolta pressed to one eye. “You’re perfect!” he called. “Keep going, don’t worry about me!”
He had a light Austrian accent. His name was Wolfgang Neuhaus and he had a dueling scar and in America he photographed exclusively for
Fanfare.
“You heard the gentleman,” Kristi heard Gabrielle whisper. A sickeningly arch,
faux
-baby whisper. “Keep going.”
Zack stood there smiling at his fat bride, looking very much the man in love, impeccably groomed in his tailored summer-weight Armani. The subtle pinstripes in the deep charcoal harmonized perfectly with the gray beginning to glint in his dark, softly waved hair.
Gabrielle, on the other hand, was wearing wide-wale burgundy corduroy trousers and a tie-dyed linen jacket and big, hippie-looking flea-market jewelry. She’d made no attempt to hide her weight or her age, no attempt to pass as glamorous.
Kristi wondered if that look and that attitude was the wave of the future. She shuddered to think of the impact on advertising revenue.
“Gabrielle,” she sang out, “what a great idea to have your reception in the midafternoon—just when working people really need a lift.”
“It’s exactly what the working world needs,” Zack said. “Some good food, some good chitchat, some good drink—and we’ll all be ourselves again.”
“I don’t want to be myself again
ever
!” Kristi said. “I want to live like this for the rest of my life!”
At that instant the part of Kristi Blackwell that always stood guard registered something. In all the bustle and movement she was aware of someone standing motionless against one of the decorative columns just to her right.
She turned her head, just a little. She recognized Lieutenant Vincent Cardozo, wearing chinos and a sport jacket, watching her.
She made a quick gesture of suddenly remembering something. “Would you guys excuse me for just a minute? A certain friend of mine will
murder
me if I don’t tell her you’re serving wild-mushroom-and-baby-leek millefeuille. Who’s got a quarter?”
“You do, honeychile.” Zack dropped a coin into her hand.
Kristi pried her way through socialites throwing attitude and rich would-be’s posing big. She smiled at a few, frowned at more than a few, and for the most part affected her trademark tunnel vision.
Tunnel vision got her as far as the door. Arriving guests formed a glittering traffic jam. She pushed through them.
The door of the Jeu de Paume at Le Cercle did not lead to Le Cercle itself. It led to the lobby of an old remodeled hotel. Le Cercle stood on the far side of the lobby, and the Jeu de Paume was attached to it in no way except by name and by Kristi’s publicizing. Her magazine had plugged the windowless, renovated utility room so relentlessly that it was now
the
spot for private parties away from home.
The lobby housed three phone booths, and they were the old-fashioned wooden kind with accordion-fold doors.
Kristi attempted to make her phone call.
The phone in the first booth had no dial tone.
The second had no dial.
The third took her quarter, and her call went through with more crackles and squeaks than a shortwave radio in peak sun-spot season.
“Maslow and Maslow,” a woman’s harried voice answered.
“Langford Jennings, please.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jennings is in conference.”
“Put me through. This is Kristi Blackwell and it’s an emergency.”
Kristi’s lawyer picked up with a clatter. “This had better be important. And brief.”
“The police want to know who I gave the ‘Pavane’ outtakes to.”
“Why do they want to know?”
“Because the outtakes were used to forge the Nita Kohler diary.”
Whoever had last used the phone booth had doused himself in nose-boggling quantities of Chanel’s Pour Monsieur. Kristi eased the door open a generous crack, hoping to get a little ventilation going.
“Did you give evidence in the trial of Kohler’s murderer?” her lawyer said.
“No.”
“Did you depose as to the authenticity of the diary?”
“I never—” Kristi’s voice suddenly broke off. She could see the revolving street door from the booth, and three people had just walked into the lobby.
Kristi had nothing against blacks and Hispanics, but
these
blacks and Hispanics were clearly street people. The woman was carrying at least five rag-stuffed D’Agostino bags under each arm. The man was carrying a television set. The leopard-skirted drag queen was stuffing coke rocks into a crack pipe.
“Then you’re in the clear,” her lawyer said.
“But what do I tell the police?”
“The truth.”
“The
truth
?”
“Forging of evidence is a felony. Dissociate yourself from the forger.”
“Dissociate?” Kristi tried to focus her mind on the conversation, but she could not believe what she was seeing.
The lone guard in the lobby, a gray, crunched husk of a man, sat in a folding chair, eyes half shut beneath a chauffeur-style cap with
Le Cercle
stitched in gold script across its brim. He held a styrofoam cup of coffee in his lap, and he gazed at it, never once lifting it to his lips. His manner was one of jittery resignation, and he was scrupulously not noticing anything going on around him.
The bag woman had pulled a brand-new-looking ghetto-blaster from one of her bags. The drag queen passed her the crack pipe.
“Kristi, what the hell is that noise?”
The bag woman had found a rap station.
“I don’t believe what’s happening,” Kristi said, “I don’t
believe
it!” She didn’t believe it either when the man with the TV stepped into the booth next to hers and began urinating. “Excuse me,” she cried, “I’ve got to get out of here.”
She slammed down the receiver and practically jumped from the booth. She hit the lobby floor skidding, barely managed to regain her balance. When she saw the squish of dog shit coating her right Ferragamo green lizard half heel, she heard her own voice break into a sob. “I don’t believe this!”
And then she remembered that dogs don’t shit in phone booths.
She found a statueless niche in the wall where she could rest her derriere. She took a small packet of Kleenex from her purse, took off her shoe, and began cleaning the sole.
Lieutenant Cardozo sauntered into the lobby. “Well, well, a lady in distress.”
“I see you’re as good as your word, Lieutenant. You said forty-eight hours, and here you are.” She smiled as if she had been looking for him all over the party, as though they had been friends for years and it was delightful having this chance to chat with him privately. “I take it you’ve spoken with the district attorney about me?”
Cardozo smiled. “I take it you’ve spoken with your lawyer about the ‘Pavane’ outtakes?”
“My lawyer says I’ve committed no crime.”
“Dick Braidy’s computer dated his backup files. The date on ‘Pavane’ is June eleventh—five months
before
the Kohler diary was introduced as evidence. Which means Braidy couldn’t have stolen from the diary. The diary writer stole Braidy’s outtakes. So the question is—who gave the diary writer the outtakes, and who wrote the diary?”
Kristi wished that the woman with the boom box would turn that rap music down. “Lieutenant, when I arrived in this country from England, I had no working papers. The government gave me a green card with the understanding that from time to time I’d help them. They asked me to cut ‘Pavane’ and give them the outtakes. There was nothing more to it than that, so please don’t treat me as though I’d sold atom bomb plans to the Soviet Union.”