VC04 - Jury Double (33 page)

“Not that I recall.”

“He might have had a kid with him.” Cardozo showed her the snapshot.

She shook her head.

“Would you do me a favor?” Cardozo handed her a photocopy of the drawing with the caption
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN
? and his precinct phone. “Could you put this up on your bulletin board?”

Cardozo stood in the supermarket parking lot, gazing out at the low suburban sprawl and the belt of green woods beyond. An airplane swept past overhead, jets drilling the sky.

Cars cruised, looking for spaces near the supermarket.

A second parking lot, just beyond the hedge, was empty except for two cars. A woman in short shorts was loading packages into a red Datsun. The other car, a blue ’94 Pontiac, was parked at the far end of the lot. Late afternoon sun reflected from the rolled-up windows, making it seem as if someone were tossing lit matches in the backseat.

Cardozo crossed the empty lot. Sun-softened tarmac sucked at his shoes.

The Pontiac had a Jersey license, 12F73, and there was a little
Philmar’s Car Rental
plate in the corner. Cardozo bent down at the driver’s window.

He could see that there was only half a steering wheel. At first he thought it might be an innovative design touch, but then he saw the jagged splinters of plastic where the wheel had been shattered.

Four bulging brown paper bags had been placed on the backseat. A yellow fluid oozed from one of them.

He took a thin plastic glove from his pocket and tried the door handle. The door was unlocked. A hot stench of rancid meat and spoiled milk exploded into the air. There was something else in the sickening mix, a faint metallic note.

He climbed into the backseat and poked through the paper bags, face angled away from the fumes. The groceries—what survived of them—matched Catch Talbot’s itemized receipt.

THIRTY-TWO

5:10 P.M.

D
OTSON ELIHU TURNED AND
took three slow, full-weighted steps toward the witness box. “Ms. Lopez, would you call yourself a good mother? A natural mother?”

“I hope so.”

“After what you claim Dr. Lyle did to your little girl … it would be natural for you to hate him. What are your feelings toward him?”

“I hate him.”

“And do you want to see Dr. Lyle in prison?”

“If he did that to a child of yours, wouldn’t you want him in prison too?”

“Isn’t it a fact that you want to put Dr. Lyle in jail so badly, that you’d give the testimony you have today, regardless of truth or falsity?”

“My testimony is the truth.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.
Isn’t it a fact that you have a motive to lie to this court
?”

“I’m not lying.”

“That’s not the question. Listen closely.
Escuchame bien
. Do you not, as the mother of Lisa Lopez, have a motive to lie to
this court
?
No tiene usted motivo para
—”

“I speak English and I have no reason to lie to this court.”

“Really?” Dotson Elihu smiled. “No further questions.”

Tess diAngeli beamed a smile of reassurance. “Ms. Lopez, have you lied today on the witness stand?”

“No.”

Peter Connolly nodded grimly as Mark Wells slid into the booth at the back of the coffee shop. “You may have run into a guy by the name of Joey La Plata?”

“Not that I can recall,” Mark said.

“The doorman in Kyra Talbot’s building? He says Kyra was spooked all last week. From Tuesday on she shut herself in the apartment. Friday she went a little loopy—Joey’s words—and fired her au pair girl. She paid Joey to pick up Toby and bring him back from school. She kept asking if anyone followed them.”

“
Followed
them?”

Connolly nodded. “Joey said no, but Kyra was worried. So he helped get the bags into a taxi, and Kyra and the kid took off.”

“Where’d they go?”

“According to the taxi sheets, they went to 118 East 81st.”

Mark frowned. “Her sister’s apartment.”

“No one answers the intercom. The answering machine picks up but it doesn’t take messages. The trail’s dead.”

Mark started at the word. “Dead?”

“Last Friday Kyra bought two one-way tickets for the Saturday night flight to Paris. But she never used them.”

Mark stared. “My God.”

“At this point, Mr. Wells, I think you need the police, not me.”

In the jury room, Donna Scomoda seized Anne’s arm. “Can you believe Elihu? Is he a Nazi or is he a Nazi?”

“The way he treated that poor Lopez woman!” Thelma del Rio said.

“He was certainly rude to her,” Anne said. “But a trial isn’t a tea party. And he made some points.”

“Points?” Gloria Weston groaned. “Give me a break.”

Mark Wells strode into his Central Park West lobby, high-fived the Puerto Rican doorman, and collected his mail. Riding up to his tenth-floor apartment, he reviewed the day’s assortment of bills, junk mail, and magazines he’d never subscribed to.

There was only one letter in the lot. The stationery was heavy, dove-gray. The envelope had been addressed by hand; large, looping handwriting. Female. Confident. Kyra’s.

He turned the envelope over and studied the flap. A return address was simply, elegantly engraved:
Apt. 11-E, 118 East 81st Street, New York, NY 10021.
He recognized Anne Bingham’s address.

He let himself into the apartment, tossed the junk mail onto the hall table, and ripped the gray envelope open.

Friday. My dearest Mark, by the time you read this you will have been worrying where on earth I am.

The phone rang at eight on the dot. He was waiting. “Hello?”

“Mark, it’s Anne.” She spoke softly. Water was running in the background. “Have you heard anything about Toby or Kyra?”

“He didn’t show up at school. But I’ve had a note from Kyra. Let me read it to you:
‘My dearest Mark, By the time you read this, you will have been worrying where on earth I am. Toby and I will be in Paris, at the Hotel France et Choiseul till we can find an apartment
—’”

“Paris? Why on earth would she—”

“I’ve been concerned how much Toby misses his father. It’s natural in a boy his age. But he idealizes Catch, and has no idea of the kind of man his father really is. I’ve shielded him from that.

“‘Toby and I have been having problems, and I honestly believe in his present state he would choose to live with his father. And Catch would turn him against me. I couldn’t bear to lose Toby.

“‘Forgive me for not confiding in you sooner, but I knew what you would say. I’ve decided I’ve no alternative but to take matters into my own hands. I hope one day you’ll understand and forgive
—
your loving Kyra.’”

A
silence passed.

“I can’t believe it,” Anne said. “When’s the note dated?”

“Friday. Postmarked Saturday
A.M.
It could have been mailed Friday and picked up Saturday. It’s written on stationery with your address.”

“That’s the Tiffany stationery she gave me last Christmas. It matches hers.”

“How did she get hold of yours?”

“I gave her the key to my apartment so she could water the plants. But if she’s in Paris …”

“She’s not. She didn’t use her plane tickets. I phoned the France and Choiseul to double-check. She and Toby were due Sunday morning, but they haven’t showed up. Anne—I’m worried.”

“Do you suppose she could still be at my place?”

“I just phoned, but the answering machine is on the blink.”

Anne covered the mouthpiece and called something, then whispered: “Gotta go. My roommate wants the bathroom. Talk to you tomorrow, same time.”

Mark poured himself a Chivas on the rocks and phoned Lieutenant Cardozo’s number.

“Cardozo.”

“It’s Mark Wells. We have to talk.”

Cardozo laid the note down on Mark Wells’s coffee table. “You’re sure this is Kyra Talbot’s handwriting?”

“It sure would fool me.” Mark Wells leaned forward and added a generous splash of Scotch to his drink. He offered to pour a shot into Cardozo’s diet Pepsi.

Cardozo shook his head. He took Kyra Talbot’s other notes from his pocket. He smoothed out the Mylar and compared. The verticals in the Mademoiselle notes were more slashing, as though they had been written under pressure. The loops in the Mark Wells note were loopier, lazy little works of art. The stationery was the same in all three notes.

“Why would she use her sister’s stationery? Where would she get it?”

“She has a key to her sister’s apartment.”

Cardozo reflected. “You wouldn’t happen to have any samples of Anne Bingham’s handwriting, would you?”

Wells hesitated. “It’s sort of personal. …” He pushed himself out of the chair and wobbled to the bookcase. He returned with an
Oxford Book of English Verse
. “The flyleaf.”

Cardozo opened the book.

Mark—

Love, a twilight of the heart, eludes a little time’s deceit

—Anne

The most obvious difference between the writing in the notes and in the book was that Anne Bingham was left-handed.

“What’s the quote from?”

“I don’t know.” Wells shook his head. “I searched, but it’s not in the book.”

Catch Talbot pushed wearily through the West 13th Street entrance of St. Vincent’s Hospital. Merciless fluorescent light gave red plastic benches and Formica counters the look of a fast-food joint.

As he approached the reception desk, a gray-haired woman scowled over the counter at him.

“I’m looking for an eleven-year-old male burn victim. He was transferred yesterday from St. Andrea in Newark.”

“Name?”

“Toby Talbot.”

She studied the computer monitor and shook her head. “I show no Toby Talbot.”

“Then he may be listed as unidentified.”

“Are you sure Kyra Talbot is still sequestered?” Cardozo was standing at a pay phone on Amsterdam Avenue, a finger to one ear to block the siren of a fire truck. “Because she wrote a note to her lawyer, dated Friday, saying she was leaving for Paris Saturday. The postmark was New York 10021, Saturday
A.M.
”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” Tess diAngeli sounded dead tired. “She could have had someone else mail it for her.”

“Funny kind of note to write her lawyer if she didn’t intend to go through with it.”

“She obviously has a flair for fiction.”

“Maybe a little less of a flair than you think. Have you ever heard of a phone-block defeater with I.D.-redirection capacity?”

“No.”

“It bypasses call-blocking and it can defeat caller I.D. Last week a man using Catch Talbot’s stolen charge card bought one from an espionage shop called the Spook Boutique.”

“What does that prove?”

“Proves Kyra Talbot could have gotten a phone threat.”

“Vince, she admits she invented that call.”

“Her lawyer says she was telling the truth when she reported the call. He says she changed her story because she’s afraid of losing her son.”

“Then her lawyer’s full of bull-bleep.”

“The man using Talbot’s charge cards bears an uncanny resemblance to the man who took Toby Talbot from the École Française. And
that
man bears an uncanny resemblance to your star witness.”

“Vince, you’re giving me the same old smoke and mirrors.”

“It’s a little more solid than that. The
real
Catch Talbot defended Mickey Williams in a Seattle lawsuit. They’re friends.”

A beat of silence. And then, defensive: “So?”

“So Mickey has seen Talbot’s charge cards. And he knows who Talbot’s ex-wife is and who his son is and where Toby goes to school.”

“I haven’t got time or energy for this. Good night.”

There was a click and a dial tone.
Running scared
, Cardozo thought. He dropped another quarter into the slot and dialed Anne Bingham’s number. Her answering machine picked up.

“Hi. You’ve reached the office of Ding-a-ling Music, Anne Bingham, CEO. If you’d care to leave a message at the beep, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. That’s a promise. Thanks.”

But instead of a single beep, there were a dozen or so.

“Miss Bingham,” he began.

A click interrupted him, followed by a dial tone.

“Damn!” He realized what must have happened: Anne Bingham hadn’t picked up her messages, with the result that sometime since he’d last phoned, her message tape had filled up and the machine automatically disconnected any further callers.

The doorman was leaning against the brick wall of 118 East 81st, smoking the tail end of a cigarette.

Cardozo flipped open his shield case. “I’m trying to get hold of Anne Bingham.”

“Haven’t seen her since last Saturday.”

“Do me a favor.” Cardozo took a business card and a fresh twenty from his wallet and tucked them into the doorman’s breast pocket. “Contact me the minute she shows up.”

Clutching his visitor’s pass, Catch Talbot stepped off the elevator and looked for the nurses’ station. He smelled burnt coffee and ethyl alcohol. A candy-striper shot out of the service door. Her cart broadsided him. Fruit and candies and canned juice and gifts spilled to the floor.

“Sorry.” He crouched and helped her rearrange her pyramid.

“My fault.” She smiled. “Paperback books on the bottom, dolls on top.”

He handed her a stuffed baby dinosaur. “I’m looking for the nurses’ station.”

She pointed. “Right down there.”

He stepped around a Latino family holding a clutch of silver balloons. A young nurse shaking down thermometers glanced over at him. Her eyes breathed a careful fog of apathy.

“Hi.” He forced a smile. “I’m looking for an unidentified burn victim? Eleven-year-old boy?”

“A kid was transferred from Newark yesterday. Caucasian.”

“That’s the one. Could I see him? He may be my son.”

The way the nurse was looking at him, he felt like wax under a blowtorch.

“They shouldn’t have sent you up here,” she said. “He died this morning. Never regained consciousness.”